by Molly Owen | Sep 15, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
The Referendum on Scottish independence brings to mind the fate of a little girl born to forge a much earlier Union.
In 1283, some three hundred years before England and Scotland were joined under a single monarch, a daughter was born to the sea-king of the north, Eirik II of Norway. The little Maid of Norway, as the baby Margaret came to be known, was the only surviving grandchild of the Scottish king, Alexander III.
In Scotland, Alexander set about rectifying the matter at once. Perhaps he did so too hastily, for he died of a fatal accident on horseback, hurrying to the side of his new wife, the young Yolande de Dreux.
(more…)
by Molly Owen | Aug 14, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
Andrew Marvell–some called him the British Aristides
A brilliant poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” was written in the seventeenth century by Andrew Marvell. A friend and supporter of John Milton, Marvell was a deadly fencer and could speak a variety of foreign languages.
Some thought he might be a double agent.
His father was a Calvinist preacher, who drowned while crossing the Humber estuary. Accounts of this tragedy vary exceedingly, as it seems the reverend was accompanied by a young woman who was not his wife. In any case, after the untimely death of his father young Marvell abandoned his studies that were to prepare him for the ministry, and travelled for years on the Continent. Then he began to write poetry, becoming famous for both his brilliant satire and strong disgust of public corruption.
Today he is known for producing forty-six lines of “seductive words with the wit of a courtier and the passion of a lusty lover:”
Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, Lady, were no crime
An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast/But thirty thousand to the rest;
In the Renaissance, a man could happily love the woman over centuries, her delays no obstacles, if time and space allowed. The recipient of such fulsome complimenting is not to be insulted, but charmed by the wit that accompanies it.
Beginning with the stanza that was to later haunt T. S. Eliot, the tone of the poem turns ominous as the lover would hurry his beloved to capitulation. Just think, he writes, of what lies ahead, what will someday embrace you, yea, even down there:
A detail of the Rape of Proserpina sculpture by Bernini in the Galleria Borghese (Licensed under the GFDL by the author Int3gr4te; Released under the GNU Free Documentation License)
But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie /Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found/Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try/That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour to dust,/And into ashes all my lust
The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.
Better to seize the day and make love now — “sporting,” he implores, like “birds of prey:”
Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life.
Andrew Marvell died a poor man in 1678, essentially having lived a life of mystery. A few years after his death his poems were published by an equally mysterious Mary Palmer, a woman who claimed to have been his housekeeper–and his wife. Litigation filed in chancery court attempted to discover the true nature of her marriage but it seems no one could be found answering to her name.
Modern scholars believe Mary Palmer to be a fiction, created by either the publisher or the Marvell’s creditor, to collect on his estate.
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by Molly Owen | Jul 14, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
The Beast. The Thing. What was inhabiting No. 50 Berkeley Square?
Very bad ton, I daresay.
The stories varied, but a dandy had a dashed good notion to test the on-dit that No. 50 harbored a ghost. Full of blue ruin and holding a pistol, he spent the night in one of its rooms only to confront a “jet black shape” that leaped at him. Discharging his pistol, he was found dead with his eyes bulging, expired in the grip of apoplexy. Others say he managed to escape to endure another horrible fate–this Bond Street beau was the Lord Lyttleton who committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairs of Hagley Hall.
Later, two sailors were offered lodging in the house. They too, offered fire against the apparition which appeared to them in the shape of a large man, and one died for his pains. This gave rise to the rumor the house was uninhabitable.
Neighbors in adjacent streets would peer out of their windows, astonished to see others peering back at them from the windows of the uninhabited house:
“He wore a periwig and had a drawn, morose ashen face. The two women thought he
had been to some New Year fancy dress party, because his clothes were centuries
out of date. The man moved away from the window, and Mrs Balfour and her maid
were later shocked to learn from a doctor that they had sighted one of the
ghosts of number 50 Berkeley Square. The doctor told them that number 50 was
currently unoccupied.”
Who was the man in the periwig?
Joan Scott’s father was Major General John Scott, a man wealthy from card play. He instructed his daughters to never marry men with titles. His eldest disobeyed him and became Duchess of Portland. His youngest followed suit, and became Countess of Moray. Of all three, Joan (a viscountess in her own right!) was the only one to follow his wishes and married a politician.
Her husband was George Canning (1770-1827), the Prime Minister of the shortest tenure. He was the son of an actress and as one man famously said, never follow a man who is born of an actress. But this did not deter him. As a member of Pitt’s government, this hard-boiled Tory challenged Lord Castlereagh to a duel and got shot in the thigh for his pains.
He lived at No. 50 Berkeley Square.
He was the most divisive man in government. The Regent refused to meet him in person because he was rumored to have had an affair with the consort Princess Caroline. He reduced his boss Lord Liverpool to tears and managed to force the poor man to apologize for it.
In the end he was reduced to begging prominent Whigs to join his Tory government, including Lord Lansdowne. But he died before he could realize his life’s ambition, in the very same room where the most radical of Whigs had expired, Charles James Fox.
They call him a lost leader. Perhaps he’s been found, in the rage of unfulfilled ambition.
The location is appropriate. It’s now a bookstore.
This post was reposted from Angelyn’s Blog.
by Molly Owen | Jun 14, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
- “Come in, come in,” implored Elizabeth; “and let me shut the window!”
- “She’s me—she’s me—even to the parasol—my green parasol!” cried Lucetta with a wild laugh as she stepped in. She stood motionless for one second—then fell heavily to the floor.
—Thomas Hardy,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
The Skimmington ritual by Rowlandson
Note the items of clothing hoisted above the participants
-
Rumors of a relationship between Lucetta and the mayor of Casterbridge had got round and the former, pregnant with her first child by her husband, had seen an effigy of herself, along with that of her paramour, being paraded in the street below.
SPOILER ALERT: The shame was so great that she died.
The skimmington ritual Hardy describes in his tale from the West Country is a tradition that goes back a long way in rural society. Punctuated by loud, raucous noise, villagers would parade objects identifying those whose behavior was found to be offensive, in a procession designed to humiliate them.
While Lucetta’s shame was due to having an intimate relationship with a married man, many cases showed the skimmington employed to police “domestic” relations; particularly spousal beatings.
The ritual was also called “skimmity riding.” Skimmity is thought to come from the term describing a cheesemaking ladle employed (apart from skimming cheese) by a wife to beat her husband. A husband’s weakness was frowned upon, whether he was being scolded or cuckholded. So, too, was frequent wife-beating, and those riding would beat one another with ladles and spoons in the most “ludicrous processions,” stopping at the offender’s house to make their point.
In Wales the procedure(!) was called the Ceffyl Pren, or wooden horse. The miscreant was paraded around, tied to a wooden frame. Scottish accounts name it “riding the stang,” a plainly uncomfortable means of conveyance for the shamed, particularly when that person was a man.
Riding the Stang —
Regency era engraving by Robert Havell, Sr.
Interesting ditties accompanying the skimmington were recorded for posterity in 1892 by G. F. Northall in his English Folk-Rhymes:
“With a ran-a-dan-dan, at the sight of an old tin can,
For neither your case nor my case do I ride the stange,
Soft Billy Charcoal has been banging his wife Ann,
He bang’d her, he bang’d her, he bang’d her indeed,
He bang’d the poor creature before she stood in need.”
Wife (and husband) beaters everywhere–take heed!
by Molly Owen | May 14, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
Dolly Varden by Frith
Sometimes the name of a character becomes synonymous with things quite removed from the story in which she sprang.
The Dolly Varden was generally known as a type of polonaise: a “petit casaque: that was really a tunic draped only in the back and tight-fitting. The material itself distinguished this polonaise from all others:
“..of chintz or cretonne over bright silk petticoat, either plain, flounced or quilted. Later, for winter, the Dolly Varden may be of fine flannel or cashmere printed in chintz pattern, with black silk, satin or veleveteen petticoat, often quilted or lined with eiderdown.” — English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, Cunnington (1937)
Chintz or cretonne feature strong prints, generally of flowers or other bold patterns–the kind that could easily fall into the “florid” category.
Have you seen my little girl? She doesn’t wear a bonnet.
She’s got a monstrous flip-flop hat with cherry ribbons on it.
She dresses in bed furniture just like a flower garden
A blowin’ and a growin’ and they call it Dolly Varden
— Dolly Varden songsheet, reprinted from Dickensandshowbiz.com
There’s even a crab and fish named after her.
Originally Dolly Varden was a Dickens character in Barnaby Rudge. She was a coquette, very young, the daughter of a doting papa and alluring to most males, from the apprentice Tappertit to Joe, the strapping son of a landlord. In his masterful way, Dickens introduced this character by such a provocative illustration of her clothing, readers were immediately captivated by her looks before she had anything to say:
“..in a smart little cherry-colored mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her head, and on the top of that hood a little straw hat trimmed with cherry-colored ribbons, and worn the merest trifle on one side–just enough, in short, to make it the wickedest and most provoking head-dress that ever malicious milliner devised.” — Barnaby Rudge, Dickens
I’ve never though of milliners as being malicious, nor head dresses being wicked.
The Victorians, greatly concerned with character and characters, instantly knew Dolly Varden by her dress. They were “provoked” enough to take her with them in their daily lives, long after her story ended, and found ways to put her name on most anything that reminded them of her colorful nature.
Barnaby Rudge was never considered among Dickens’ best works, but Dolly Varden is one of his finest characters.
by Molly Owen | Apr 14, 2014 | Angelyn Schmid, Blog
You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate:
reprinted from “Shakespeare’s Restless World: An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects” — an excellent work on the subject by Neil MacGregor
there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them
than in the tongues of the French council,
and they should sooner persuade Henry of England
than a general petition of monarchs.
— Henry V, Shakespeare
This kiss in Act V was “greeted by cheers from an adoring public” in Shakespeare’s time. A high and mighty Princess, born of England’s greatest enemy, submissively capitulates to England’s most beloved king. Her father acknowledged Henry as his heir and the ambition of the Plantagenet dynasty was finally to be fulfilled.
Alas, Henry died from dysentery, leaving a young son in the care of his widow. Henry VI went on to ignominy and the Wars of the Roses. The queen dowager entered into an “amorous” relationship with the Welshman Owen Tudor and bore him children from whom sprang the Tudor dynasty. She died in childbirth and was laid to rest beside her royal husband in Westminster.
But her lips lived on.
“Shrove Tuesday, and here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois;
From the Westminster Abbey collection–the closest thing to touching the history of England
and I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth,
reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birth-day,
thirty-six years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 8, part two, 1669
Pepys had the effrontery of taking his family on a tour of the royal tombs in Westminster, and, ‘by particular favour,” had the corpse of the queen revealed to him. Would he have violated the corpse of any dead person? It seems unlikely. But to take possession of the physical reminder of sovereignty must have seemed altogether too difficult to resist, and he took in his arms the remains of this princess whom Henry V was said to be enamoured of.
It is what Pierre Nora tantalizingly calls “osculation” in his History, Memory, Necrophilia– a fleshly joining together that goes beyond any treaty or religious pronouncement.
A taste of history, as it were.
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