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Best of British: Why the Young Need to Know About the Korean War

November 29th, 2024

The modern tendency is to vilify every aspect of British involvement overseas, as if no British official, merchant or missionary ever did an ounce of good in any foreign land. This perspective is often peddled by those with little or no historical expertise, and credulously received by those with even less. For example, very few young people, in my experience, have the faintest idea why Trafalgar Square is so named, let alone why the battle was such a significant event. How then are they qualified to pre-judge the entirety of British history?

Even fewer people have any knowledge of the major war that was fought in Korea from 1950 to 1953. This, I would argue, was an instance of the British at their very best.

A Canadian soldier wins hearts and minds in South Korea

First, it is important to understand that neither the British government, nor most of the soldiers, sailors and airmen involved, had any desire to be there. The unprovoked invasion of South Korea by North Korea, encouraged by the Soviet Union, was a direct challenge to world order. In the absence of the Soviet representative, who was boycotting its proceedings, it was unanimously condemned by the United Nations Security Council, which called upon the world to oppose it by force.

Most nations were in no position to help, though there were some surprising contributions from poorer countries, including Thailand, Turkey and the Philippines. As for the British, they had impoverished and exhausted themselves fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan and were already locked in a struggle against communism, in Malaya.

Yet in those days we were not a people inclined to shirk our responsibilities. Attlee’s Labour government, supported by M.P.s on the left of his party like Michael Foot, had learnt the lessons of pre-war appeasement. Despite the enormous cost, the British unhesitatingly offered the services of their Strategic Reserve.

This was in the era of compulsory National Service. However, as conscripts under 19 could not be sent to war, it was necessary to recall several thousand reservists to the colours. Those who signed up for service in the Second World War had committed themselves to a further five years in the reserve. In numerous cases, that time had yet to expire. For men who had already ‘done their bit’ and had now settled into civilian life, the arrival of call-up papers came as a very nasty shock. Far from being greedy Imperialists, they were most unwillingly involved in the affairs of a country of which they had barely heard.

Fortunately, the reservists were posted to historic regiments like the Glosters, the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, each with a proud tradition and a core of long-service regulars, who passed on a sense of pride to the newcomers. It would soon be proved that, despite their grumbling, the reservists would rise magnificently to the challenge.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the U.N. forces were drawn from the American army of occupation in Japan, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Undermined by ‘democratisation’, these soldiers were an indisciplined, often cowardly rabble. With little real work to do in Japan, they were physically unfit, dangerously under-trained, pampered and, above all, poorly led. The North Koreans, on the other hand, and their allies who subsequently poured in from China, were brutal, fanatical, apt to charge in suicidal human waves, and took no prisoners.

Not surprisingly, the Americans had been driven back, in humiliating disorder, to the very south of the peninsula and had dug themselves in along the Naktong river, from which there could be no further retreat.

Major Kenneth Muir

At this point, before the arrival of the Strategic Reserve, the Americans had begged the British to provide immediate support. Thus it was that the 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, along with the 1st Middlesex Regiment, had been urgently dispatched to Korea from the garrison at Hong Kong. The ‘bearing and evident discipline’ of the new arrivals, who disembarked at the southern port of Pusan on 28 August 1950, had done wonders for American morale. ‘The sight of the Argylls on the march, each rifle company headed by its piper, never failed to excite comment, as did the way in which even junior N.C.O.s were able to control the fire of their rifle sections, in contrast to the prodigal expenditure of ammunition by their allies.’

They were, of course, immediately thrown into action on the Naktong Perimeter. In the course of their advance, the Argylls, in a desperate action on ‘Hill 283’, had suffered sixty casualties to American ‘friendly fire’. With wounded comrades still on the hill, the battalion’s fantastically brave second-in-command, Major Kenneth Muir, had invoked the pride of the regiment and had rallied his men for a counter-attack, for which he was to be posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

MacArthur’s ‘decisive counter-stroke’ in October, which had driven the enemy back to the 38th Parallel (the frontier) and far beyond, had provoked the Chinese to enter the war in strength. Demoralised, inept and cowardly, the Americans had again been forced to retreat in great disorder, abandoning most of their equipment along the way. Only the British seemed to keep their nerve and hold their heads high, the Argylls a model of good discipline as they marched south, each company led by its piper.

Lieutenant-Colonel Kingsley Foster

Clearly they impressed the Americans, but how were the British regarded by the Koreans themselves? This was a people who had every right to view foreigners with deep suspicion, having been brutally suppressed by the Japanese for a generation. Their men had been forced into slavery, their women exploited as ‘comfort girls’.

With their country collapsing all around them, the older and less fit members of the Korean National Guard were assigned an ancillary role with the foreign infantry battalions, not to fight, but to lug their heavy equipment and ammunition over hill and valley, usually on their backs. With characteristic resignation, they performed wonderful service without complaint.

The British treated their porters like gentlemen. When first delivered of his batch, Lieutenant-Colonel Kingsley Foster, commanding the 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, addressed them through an interpreter. ‘He told them of the traditions of his regiment, in which his father had served before him, and of the high expectations he had of the porters. They responded warmly, assuring him of their loyalty; before long a delegation approached him, asking him to stand for the presidency of their country, in which case they promised that all his battalion’s porters would vote for him.’

Major Dawney Bancroft

The British not only impressed the South Koreans, whom they had selflessly undertaken to defend, and the Americans, showing them how to conduct themselves in war; they also earned the grudging respect of the enemy.

At the Battle of the Imjin River, for example, in early April 1951, they fought like lions, despite being vastly outnumbered. Colonel Foster was killed during the withdrawal, having had a premonition of his own death. Most of the ‘Glorious Glosters’ were either killed or captured. But the Brigade’s heroic stand on the Imjin had exhausted the Chinese, who are estimated to have lost 10,000 men, and had prevented them from re-taking Seoul.

The opinions of the average communist soldier are generally unrecorded, but his favourable impression of the British was tellingly revealed in any unlikely setting, the prisoner-of-war camp on Koje-do, an island off Pusan.

Under American administration, this camp was a disgrace, a dumping-ground for all their lowest-calibre personnel. Though under-staffed, it was dangerously overcrowded. The North Korean People’s Army had, in effect, taken control, even infiltrating commissars into the camp. These were men who had allowed themselves to be captured, their task being to dispose of any prisoner who was less than devoted to Kim Il-sung. The most barbarous executions were carried out, usually by hanging the guilty man from the ridge pole of a tent by his testicles, or by placing a water hose in his mouth until he drowned.

Meanwhile, communist flags were freely displayed, and military drills carried out. Incredibly, the Americans even allowed metal-working within the camp, where there was almost unrestricted movement. The workshops were unsupervised and, not surprisingly, turned out a vast supply of lethal weapons. The prisoners also received a generous ration of petrol for their stoves, ideal for the manufacture of Molotov cocktails. The compounds were virtual no-go areas to the guards.

When the American commandant foolishly went in he was, of course, taken hostage. Though an assault force gathered outside, he could only be extricated in return for his written ‘confession’ and various other concessions.

In the aftermath of this victory for the communists, it was decided to bring in troops from other U.N. contingents, Confident of their professionalism, the new American commandant specifically requested a British detachment. Hence the arrival, on 25 May 1952, of ‘B’ Company, The 1st King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry. It was a fine old regiment, originally skirmishers, whose members were experienced combat soldiers and well trained in riot control.

The officer commanding ‘B’ Company, Major Dawney Bancroft, was horrified by what he found. ‘All U.S. troops,’ he later wrote, ‘were apt to regard the P.O.W.s as cattle, and treated them as such. They were offensive in speech and manner towards the prisoners, and handled them, including cripples who had been badly wounded, extremely roughly. When witnessing this tendency, I asked both officers and men if they expected similar treatment to be meted out to their P.O.W.s in North Korea. Their reply was invariably: “Well, these people are savages”; and on one occasion: “Congress has never ratified the Geneva Convention anyway”.’

Bancroft’s own approach was as humane as it was effective. Assigned to Compound 66, a nest of hard-liners, he had no intention of trying to control it from outside. Each morning, his men would march into the enclosure in ‘quick time’, all faultlessly turned out, and raise the Union Jack. This would be lowered again in the evening, a bugler sounding the calls. The prisoners were agog, watching these ceremonies from the lines, and warmly applauding them after the first day.

Soon afterwards, Bancroft ordered a search of the buildings, uncovering sufficient weapons and equipment to support a mass escape, and much evidence of tunnelling. He then learnt from two terrified prisoners that their senior officer, who had lost face as a result of the search, had ordered that any future incursions into the compound should be resisted to the point of death. The Shropshires went in regardless, and carried out a complete search of the compound.

While this was going on, a sick N.K.P.A. officer was marched out of the gate to an American Army ambulance, in which he was to be evacuated. The Korean driver peremptorily tore off his hat and insignia, in contravention of the Geneva Convention, before pitching him into the vehicle. In full view of the prisoners, Bancroft immediately ordered the driver to pick up the man’s hat and rank badges and restore them to him. A message was thrown over the fence that evening. In future the inmates ‘would comply with the orders of the English gentlemen’.

The whole camp was now seething with discontent, and on 10 June a pitched battle was fought with the Americans. The hard-liners mercilessly speared any dissidents who sought to escape. But Bancroft was not about to loosen his grip. To contain Compound 66, he arranged the election of prisoners’ leaders by secret ballot. They would be answerable for any future misbehaviour. Having them stand in a corner for twelve hours, without food or water, would cause them almost unbearable loss of face. In response to the raising of communist flags, he ordered his men to throw in tear-gas grenades, which soon solved that problem.

Now in command of a larger area, Enclosure 3, Bancroft provided his charges with recreational facilities and a delivery of mail, the first in months. They were told that ‘henceforth they were expected to observe the same disciplinary standards as the Shropshires. This produced remarkable results as the prisoners felt that if they fell short of British army standards they would lose face; within days all British officers were being saluted when inside the compounds and prisoners stood to attention when addressed by even a junior British N.C.O. Senior N.C.O.s as well as officers were addressed as “sir”. A large audience turned out every day to watch and applaud the colours ceremony, and every single person stood to attention in the compound when Bancroft entered. There was a notable atmosphere of good humour in Enclosure 3; very soon, a sergeant was left in charge for much of the time, enjoying the full co-operation of the inmates. Within a few days, all the Shropshires were moving freely and unarmed among the prisoners.’

Such was the mood that, on 6 July, the British and the North Koreans competed with each other in a ‘Sports Day’. The prisoners loudly cheered as Bancroft took his place, and relished the new games that they had been taught by the British, especially ‘tug-of-war’. An American engineer, asked for the loan of a bulldozer with which to build a soccer pitch, demurred. ‘Hell, Major, Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ ‘Well, it bloody well would have been if I’d been there,’ replied Bancroft, who got his machinery, and the enthusiastic support of the American sappers.

Bancroft was a short, tidy man with a neat moustache and a limp, acquired in the war, that was affectionately imitated by the prisoners. When it was announced that the Shropshires were leaving, a deputation of senior officers appealed for them to stay. They were ‘prepared to behave for the British troops, who treated them as humans in accordance with the Geneva Convention, but would not guarantee their conduct for anyone else’.

Readers may wonder whether the modern-day hegemony of the Americans and Chinese is to be preferred to that of the British, exemplified by men like Muir, Foster and Bancroft. Now we are abused by the whole world and our assets are for sale to the highest bidder, even if the citizen of a hostile power. The Korean War held back the advance of communism (a good thing, unless one’s idea of heaven on earth is the Orwellian regime of the Kim family), and was a triumph for South Korea, now a strong, prosperous and liberated country; but it was a disaster for us. Not only were we firmly subordinated to the Americans, but the costs of our involvement, so soon after the Second World War, were positively ruinous. ‘Within a year of the outbreak of the Korean War Britain’s modest surplus of £307 million in 1950 had plunged to a deficit of £369 million and thereafter continued downwards.’ The dream of post-war recovery ‘evaporated in the light of harsh economic reality and the Conservatives who came to power in 1951 found they could do little to arrest the descent into a permanent state of debt’. What reparations will the world offer us for our sacrifice?

[Rupert Willoughby has researched the Korean War for his latest book, Mountain Gunner: The Wartime Adventures of Tony Fowle, Royal Artillery, 1939 – 1952. Quotations are from Michael Hickey, The Korean War: The West Confronts Communism, 1950 – 1953 (London, 1999), pp.171 (Foster), 353-7 (Bancroft) and 358-9 (the economic deficit); and from Max Hastings, The Korean War (London, 1987), p.385 (Bancroft’s report on conditions in the camp).]

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Basileios Basileus: A Review of ‘Theosis’ by Jonathan Harris

July 7th, 2024

 

In tenth-century Byzantium, among the nobility, there seemed to be two types of men. The first was sybaritic, relishing the splendour and luxuries of Constantinople. The second, provincial in his outlook, was the stern, often ascetic warrior. There seemed to be no meeting between the two, and it was to be the cause of increasing friction in the politics of the Empire.

The young co-Emperors, Basil II and Constantine VIII, both ‘born in the purple’, seemed to be of the first type. According to the philosopher Michael Psellos, who knew them well, Basil was dissolute and voluptuous, a dedicated party-goer and chaser of women. As for Constantine, he enjoyed all the ceremonial posturing, but avoided politics and would always rather be swimming or hunting.

Succeeding their father as infants in 963, the brothers had never needed to concern themselves with affairs of state, for their mother Theophano, the scheming daughter of a publican, had swiftly remarried.

The ‘happy’ bridegroom was the very archetype of the warrior-aristocrat. Nikephoros Phokas, chillingly nicknamed ‘the White Death of the Saracens’, had already trounced the Arabs in Crete and Syria. Duly crowned as co-Emperor (for the boys, being purple-born, could not be deposed), Phokas was an aspiring monk, but had a keen sense of duty, and was of the ‘right stuff’ for an effective ruler. Admittedly, he lacked personal charm and was physically repulsive, being short, hairy and unwashed. He looked, and smelt, like Rasputin.

Basileios Basileus (The Emperor Basil): in his cut-price purple robe, pitiless in passing judgment

Inevitably, the sexy Theophano soon tired of him. Luckily for her, he had taken a vow of chastity, preferring to sleep on the hard floor of his chamber. One night, she let her handsome new lover into the chamber, and Phokas was brutally murdered where he lay. The guilty man was Phokas’s own nephew, John Tzimiskes.

When the church vetoed his union with Theophano, a sham marriage with her sister-in-law, Theodora, did the trick. Theodora was released from her nunnery for the purpose, and it was Theophano’s turn to be exiled. Her abandoned boys were the hapless observers of these events.

As gifted a general as Phokas, the Emperor Tzimiskes campaigned relentlessly against the Arabs. In 975 he led his armies into Palestine, and came within a whisker of taking Jerusalem. Returning to Constantinople the following year, he died very suddenly en route. Was it typhoid that killed him, or was he poisoned, as some said, by a political rival?

If so, the likely culprit was the parakoimomenos Basil Lekapenos, the official so named for his privilege of ‘sleeping near’ the emperor. The parakoimomenos was Basil and Constantine’s great-uncle, being the Nothos or ‘Bastard’ (by a Scythian slave) of their great-grandfather, Romanos I. However, unlike Phokas and Tzimiskes, the Nothos was legally barred from becoming emperor, for he was a eunuch. He had been castrated probably in infancy but perhaps in adulthood after the death of his father.

The brothers resumed their function as stiff mannikins in the endless rituals of the court, while the Nothos governed wisely and well, though not without accumulating vast personal wealth and estates. Can he have been a true castrato, beardless and long-limbed, with a uniquely high-pitched voice? In that case, he would have cut an extraordinary figure. His personal authority must have been considerable, for it was only in 985, when he was twenty-seven, that Basil II at last took control of his own destiny.

Revealing unexpected mettle, Basil the cypher, the idle sybarite, suddenly emerged from the shadows, declaring that the policies of the Nothos, the only father-figure he had known, were no longer ‘according to our wish’. The Nothos was stripped of his office and of all his possessions, and deported. Constantine was content to let his elder brother take charge. For the remaining forty years of his life, Basil was to rule alone. He never married, and died in 1025, having been emperor for 62 years.

Jonathan Harris is Professor of Byzantine History at Royal Holloway College and the author of a number of extremely readable and original books, including The Lost World of Byzantium. No one is better versed in the drama of Basil’s early life. Unfortunately our best source, Psellos, fails to explain Basil’s sudden change in character. His childhood experiences would have left him deeply insecure, guarded and suspicious, but also open to manipulation. But was it a single act of betrayal, or a series of them, that caused him to depose and humiliate the Nothos?

For Harris, this puzzle could only be resolved through fiction. The pandemic was his opportunity to work on the novel that he had been itching to write. Theosis is an historical reconstruction in the tradition of Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius the God, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy. It is an utter triumph.

The book is largely set in the claustrophobic world of the Great Palace at Constantinople, a city within a city, which is wonderfully evoked. Since that palace has largely vanished, Harris relies heavily on descriptions in the famous Book of Ceremonies, but one of his most successful reconstructions is almost entirely invented, proof of the writer’s superior skills as a novelist. In Harris’s imagination, the Portico of the Golden Hand, named for the hand from a gigantic statue of Constantine that was displayed there, has a columned portico with staircases at either end, and is where the young Basil, a lonely child, likes to run around. The fatherly Nothos instructs him in the symbolism of the statue.

Key to the plot of the novel is Basil’s romantic attraction to a school-fellow,  Demetrius Spondyles, one of a number of fictional characters who are deftly drawn. Though Spondyles is ‘endearingly artless’, it is hard to understand his appeal, or to reconcile Basil’s secret passion for this boy with his reputation as a ladies’ man. In a series of ingenious twists, Harris explains all.

Perpetuating a myth: depictions of the Battle of Kleidion and its aftermath, from the Synopsis Chronike of Constantine Manasses (12th century)

He is particularly good on the dichotomy between the sybarites and the hard men. Basil’s forbidding step-father, Nikephoros Phokas, is a man of limited conversation. ‘Antioch is ours’, or even ‘Ha!’, might be the extent of it. His relatives are ‘ghastly’, ‘low provincials from Cappadocia’, while Theophano, betraying her humble origins, refers to him as that ‘Anatolian shit’. Ironically, Basil is himself remembered as a man of few words, and his first-person narration is perhaps more fluent than one would expect. The urbane Psellos says he spoke like a peasant, and that there was no elegance and little coherence in his writing – although, admittedly, Psellos probably thought that of everyone’s conversation and writing, other than his own.

Psellos’s Basil could laugh loudly on occasion, but generally ran on a short fuse. He was decisive and commanding. Once his mind was made up, he would brook no further discussion. He came to despise the luxury and ceremonial of the court, and made little effort to look the part, scorning all the usual imperial ornaments such as diadems and rings. Even his robe, being not of the brightest purple, seemed to be a cut-price version. Without being obviously pious, he was characterised in maturity by the same self-denying puritanism as the Emperor Phokas, who had dedicated his life to the waging of ‘holy’ war.

Having broken away from the court, Basil had embarked on years of bitter campaigning, which left him, in Harris’s words, with ‘dead eyes’, like a shark’s. Occasionally, the novelist takes us away from the palace and into the field of action. In a particularly enjoyable episode, Basil unleashes a new secret weapon, his Russian (or actually Viking) auxiliaries, under the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev. The price for Vladimir’s support is unprecedented, the hand of Basil’s purple-born sister Anna, whom Basil has never liked. Poor Anna! The envoys with whom he negotiates have ‘hairy arms like joints of meat that protruded from their sleeveless leather jerkins and long plaited hair which they had apparently smeared with rancid butter’. It is the Russians’ turn to be bemused when the Byzantines begin their pre-battle rituals, which include catcalling and ‘mooning’ the enemy.

Basil’s single-mindedness earned him a grim reputation which he has never lived down. He defeated not only his domestic enemies, but the Fatimids at Aleppo (995). After years of campaigning in the Balkans, often wintering with his troops, he famously prevailed over the Bulgars in 1014. He is alleged to have blinded no fewer than 14,000 prisoners after the Battle of Kleidion, and to have sent them home in batches of a hundred, each guided by a man with one eye. That improbable story, and Basil’s famous sobriquet, Boulgaroktonos or the ‘Bulgar-slayer’, were concocted by a later generation. But Harris has him hanging enemies without a qualm, or even feeding them to his lions: ‘Perhaps he had sacrificed all human emotions in some devilish pact on the altar of supreme power’.

It is hard to believe that Basil ever achieved his theosis. The word means, literally, ‘deification’, and refers to the transfixing ecstasy of union with God, to which all Christians should aspire. However, Harris’s Basil is a most compelling individual and a good deal more sympathetic than is commonly supposed.

I read most of this book in a single sitting, and cannot recommend it too highly.

Theosis is published in paperback by Trivent (Budapest, Oct 2023). For further background, see Jonathan Harris, ‘The Change in Basil’, Argo: A Hellenic Review, Issue 19 (Spring/Summer 2024), pp.30-31.

My earlier blog on Nikephoros Phokas can be found here: http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/byzantine-genealogy/nikephoros-phokas-white-death-of-the-saracens-the-siege-of-chandax-and-the-foundation-of-the-greatest-lavra-on-mount-athos/.

 

 

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The Vaughans of Bredwardine and Tretower, the Red Book of Hergest and Lady Hawkins’ School

April 23rd, 2024

When the bards rose to sing their verses at Tretower, Roger Vaughan’s noisy retainers would have fallen silent. Drinking and warmongering were not the only pursuits there; literature and song were appreciated too.

On 4 March 1464, at Dryslwyn, near Carmarthen, Roger was instrumental in the defeat of the Lancastrian uprising in south Wales. Amongst the vanquished rebels was Hopcyn ap Rhys ap Hopcyn, whose forfeited estates were duly assigned to Roger. Hopcyn came from a highly cultured family and is likely to have owned many fine books. Among them was a volume that is considered one of the most important of all Welsh manuscripts.

The Llyfr Coch Hergest, or Red Book of Hergest (Jesus College MS 111, now on deposit at the Bodleian), is a compendium of classic Welsh texts. A large and weighty tome, it was written shortly after 1382, on vellum, and bound in red leather. It contains geographical, medical and historical texts (including a Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth), collections of poetry, and all eleven tales of the Mabinogion corpus, for which it is the primary source.

A page from the Red Book

One of the three scribes who worked on the Red Book, Hywel Fychan, is known to have been employed by Hopcyn ap Tomas of Ynysforgan, Swansea, who was a notable patron of the bards in south Wales and a well-known collector of manuscripts. In 1403, Hopcyn was even consulted by Owain Glyndŵr as a ‘Maister of Brut’, or interpreter of old bardic prophecies.

It was probably this Hopcyn who commissioned the Red Book. It contains five awdlau or odes in his honour and two other texts that are addressed to his son. Hopcyn ap Thomas was the grandfather of the defeated rebel, Hopcyn ap Rhys ap Hopcyn, hence its coming into the possession of the Vaughans at Tretower.(1)

In the years that followed, the contents of the Red Book were hungrily devoured by the itinerant bards who frequented Tretower. Among them was Lewis Glyn Cothi, who added a couple of odes of his own, honouring Sir Roger’s son, Sir Thomas, and his grandsons. Ironically, Lewis was a supporter of the Lancastrians (whose triumph he lived to witness), but this ‘did not prevent him from singing to patrons who supported the Yorkists, and few poets broadcast eulogy so widely over Wales as he did’.(2)

Even the Yorkists among them were Welshmen at heart. In his praise poem to Roger Vaughan’s half-brother, William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke (1468), Guto’r Glyn (who eventually went blind, like Homer) urges him to rule fairly and favour the Welsh. His poem ends with the lines:

‘Make all one from the Conwy to the Neath.

If England and her dukes are angered,

Wales will come to your need.’(3)

An admiring bard, perhaps Lewis Glyn Cothi, must have taken the Red Book from Tretower to Hergest Court, at Kington in Herefordshire. Sir Roger Vaughan had perhaps made a gift of it to his elder brother, another Thomas, who was the lord of Hergest (called ‘Herast’ by Lewis, which is closer to the original Welsh, ‘deep glen’; otherwise pronounced ‘Hargest’, as Herbert was pronounced ‘Harbert’) and had made his seat there. Both the Red Book and the bardic tradition were preserved at Hergest for at least three generations.

A fortified medieval manor-house, contained within a moat, Hergest Court had been the property of the Clanvowe family, who completed the east wing in 1267. That structure is two storeys high and built of stone. The walls are three feet thick.

Tretower matches Hergest in its courtyard layout and fashionable timber-framing.

Thomas, however, had expanded Hergest into a court house that was at least as impressive as Tretower. Lewis, indeed, compares it to the Moorish palace at Alhambra, for it consisted of ‘eight strong buildings or fortresses’, each with its own ‘refectory and good stock of wine’. As Tretower also had accommodation for more than one household, the brothers must have striven to match each other in the splendour of their new homes. As at Tretower, too, the upper floor of Thomas’s north wing was fashionably timber-framed. The timbers there have been dendro-dated to 1452.(4)

In 1469, Thomas Vaughan, aged 69, once again marched out, with his kinsmen and retainers, in the Yorkist cause. He fought a brave fight at the Battle of Banbury, but was overwhelmed and beheaded. Lewis Glyn Cothi and Guto’r Glyn both wrote unctuous eulogies. Thomas’s widow, Ellen Gethin ‘the Terrible’, survived him, however, as did the bardic tradition at Hergest, under his son Watkin and his grandsons James and Roger.(5)

The already impressive library of the Vaughans was augmented by 362 volumes from the Cistercian Abbey near Neath, dissolved in 1539, which the last of the monks entrusted to their safe hands. By 1562, however, the Red Book, at least, had been sold or given away, for it was then in the possession of Sir Henry Sidney, President of the Council of Wales and the Marches, at Ludlow Castle. His son was Sir Philip Sidney, who may have leafed through it while on holiday from Shrewsbury.

Having passed through various hands, the Red Book was donated in 1701 to Jesus College, Oxford, the Welshmen’s college.(6) The original manuscript can now be viewed online, and translations of the Mabinogion (a collection of rattling good yarns) are readily available, not least in the shop at Tretower. As a mythology for Wales, the Red Book of Hergest surely inspired Tolkein’s ‘Red Book of Westmarch’. Also bound in a red cover, the work not of Welsh bards but of hobbits, this was the source of Bilbo and Frodo’s tales in his legendarium.(7)

Hergest Court Described

Hergest Court ‘stands like some bold veteran grey in arms, on the northern bank of the river Arrow, in a fertile vale or glen, and is a sight well calculated to rouse thoughts of by-gone times’.

The male line of the Vaughans of Hergest died out in 1706. The estate went to Frances, daughter of John, whose husband, William Gwyn Vaughan of Trebarried, was a distant cousin, descended from a bastard of Sir Roger of Tretower. Their granddaughter, Roach Vaughan, took the estate into the family of the Harleys, earls of Oxford. No longer of use to them, Hergest Court was abandoned in the mid-1700s. It was largely dismantled, what remained being reduced to ‘a common farm-house’.

For that reason, it has never been modernised. ‘Over the kitchen fire-place is a very large transom stone – and in various parts of the house are some fine specimens of old English wainscoting.’ The solar on the upper floor survives, with another huge fireplace, stone seating and heraldic stained-glass windows. There is an adjacent ‘ladies’ room’. But the whole upper floor is empty of life today. In 2018 it was described as ‘an attic full of old clutter’.

The extensive farmyard is still ‘ornamented by a few old arches in the Norman style’. The Vaughans were recusants (the adjacent stone stable or granary is their former chapel) and keen swimmers (a deep pool in the River Arrow is said to have been reserved for the ladies of the house). Owned by the Banks family since 1912, it is the most remote and romantic of houses, and its literary history is thrilling.(8)

Lady Hawkins’ School

Ellie Goulding

Charles Vaughan of Hergest, son of the James mentioned above, served as M.P. for Radnorshire in 1553, and his daughter Margaret was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth. In 1591 she married the recently-widowed Sir John Hawkins. As a merchant and the captain of his own fleet of ships, Sir John had amassed a great fortune. He later served as Treasurer of the Navy and was the commander of one of the squadrons that defeated the Spanish Armada. He is infamous, however, as a promoter of the trade in African slaves.

When Lady Hawkins died in 1619, she left £800 for the endowment of a ‘free school’ in her native Kington. Lady Hawkins’ School is now a ‘comprehensive’, occupying  modern buildings at Kington, but her (rather forbidding) portrait hangs in the entrance hall and her marital arms on a lozenge, Hawkins impaled with Vaughan, are the badge of the school.

Lady Hawkins’ School now agonises about its connection, however tenuous, with the slave trade.(9) But Sir John was a ‘product of his age, which accepted slaving with an easy mind’. He was unashamed to adopt an enslaved man as his crest. Contemporaries were more shocked by Margaret’s tightfistedness, for she refused to ransom her stepson, Richard, from Spanish captivity, in which he languished for eight years.(10)

The continued existence of the school proves that good things may come from bad. Former pupils include the singer Ellie Goulding, who described it as ‘happy and supportive’,(11) and the actress Jessica Raine. The advice of John F. Kennedy is pertinent: ‘We will be just in our time. This is all we can do. We must be just today.’(12)

 

(1) Griffith Williams, ‘Hopcyn ap Thomas’ in Dictionary of Welsh Biography; TEI Header for Oxford Jesus College MS. 111 (The Red Book of Hergest), https://www.rhyddiaithganoloesol.caerdydd.ac.uk/en/tei-header.php?ms=Jesus111.

(2) Evan Jones, ‘Lewis Glyn Cothi’ in Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

(3) Ifor Williams, ‘Guto’r Glyn’ in Dictionary of Welsh Biography; https://parallel.cymru/poets/.

(4) D.W.H. Miles, The Tree-Ring Dating of Hergest Court, Centre for Archaeology Report 13, English Heritage, 2001.

(5) Evan Jones, ‘Vaughan Family of Hergest’ in Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

(6) The Welsh word ‘Llyfr’, incidentally, is a word borrowed directly from the Latin (liber = book) during the period of the Roman occupation. (https://welearnwelsh.com/words/15-welsh-words-french-latin/.

(7) See Mark T. Hooker, ‘The Feigned-manuscript Topos’, Tolkienian mathomium: a collection of articles on J. R. R. Tolkien and his legendarium, Llyfrawr, 2006, pp. 176–177.

(8) The History of Kington, by a Member of the Mechanic’s Institute of Kington (Kington, 1845), pp.216-24; Residents of Hergest Court, a Talk by Allan Lloyd’, and Karen Blake, ‘Hergest Court 7th June 2018’, Leintwardine History Society, https://leintwardinehs.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/residents-of-hergest-court-a-talk-by-allan-lloyd/ and https://leintwardinehs.wordpress.com/hergest-court-7th-june-2018/.

(9) Nic Dinsdale, Sir John Hawkins, Elizabethan Explorer and Privateer (Kington, 2003), and ‘A School with a Slaving Past’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/articles/2007/03/01/abolition_lady_hawkins_feature.shtml‘

(10) Basil Morgan, ‘Sir John Hawkins’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

(11) Hereford Times, 14 May 2019.

(12) Quoted in A.C. Cairns, Citizens Plus (Vancouver, 2000), p.52.

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Tretower Court and Tower: An Appreciation – and the Heraldry of the Vaughan Family

April 15th, 2024

Reduced to farm buildings, then left to wrack and ruin, the once-grand Tretower Court, in the Usk Valley, was saved for the nation in 1934 and is now in the safe hands of Cadw. The house has been beautifully restored and is presented to visitors with outstanding flair and imagination.

The two long ranges of Tretower Court, an attractive mixture of stone and timber-framing, were constructed in the mid-fifteenth century by Sir Roger Vaughan. It was either Sir Roger or his son, Sir Thomas, who added the battlemented curtain wall and gatehouse (with its huge wooden doors) to create the full courtyard plan of today.

The charm of Tretower, apart from the tranquil courtyard, is that the north range is virtually unaltered. The apartments on its upper floor are still accessed through a wooden side gallery. The west range, attached to it at a right angle, probably looked rather similar, but has acquired the elegant, late seventeenth-century façade that is the first thing one sees through the entrance arch.

The interior is unchanged, however, with the kitchen and service rooms at one end and Roger Vaughan’s private quarters at the other. The centrally-placed great hall, with its large fireplace on the west wall, is open still to its gloriously timbered roof. The timbers have been dendro-dated to 1455-6.

It was in this setting that Roger maintained ‘a court of royal style, the maintenance of a hundred men’. The wine flowed at his banquets and the itinerant ‘poets of the nobility’ were always on hand to sing his praises. Cadw have restored these rooms ‘as faithfully as possible, with new partitions, and plaster applied to the walls as appropriate’ (David M. Robinson, Tretower Court and Castle, Cadw, 2018, p.14). They have also filled them with replica furniture and fittings.

However well researched, such an approach is often deplored by purists, but for me, the result is very pleasing. There are hangings of say in the blue and red stripes of the Brigade of Guards, two trestle tables with benches arranged lengthwise for the retainers and, raised on a dais at the far end, a third table facing them which was for the lord and his family.

Covered with white table cloths, these are arrayed with glass- and pewter-ware and trenchers (slices of inferior bread that served as plates) that are less convincing. (They look like off-cuts from a breeze-block.) There are a dresser and a ‘cup board’ at the screen-end. With the aid of these props, it is quite easy to imagine the feasting and carousing that went on in this room.

Best of all is a painted cloth behind the high table, specially commissioned by Cadw, that depicts incidents from the Vaughan family history. On the extreme left we see Sir Roger’s father, Roger Vaughan of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, and his maternal grandfather, Dafydd Gam (‘the one-eyed’), at the Battle of Agincourt, where both men perished. Dafydd has been suggested as Shakespeare’s model for Fluellen in Henry V. As a prominent opponent of Owain Glyndŵr, he is anathema to Welsh nationalists, but his family had served their English overlords for generations, and would never have regarded themselves as traitors.

Sir Roger’s mother, Dafydd Gam’s daughter Gwladus Dhu, was remarried to Sir William ap Thomas, whose first wife, a Bloet, had been the heiress to both Raglan and Tretower. Known as ‘y marchog glas o Went’ (the blue knight of Gwent), Sir William was chief steward to the lord of Usk – the English Duke of York – and a member of his military council. From 1432 he had begun the transformation of Raglan, raising the present South Gate and Great Tower, which was surely painted. The court poet Guto’r Glyn refers to this five-storey moated fortress, accessible only by a drawbridge, as the ‘Yellow Tower of Gwent’.

Presided over by the remarkable Gwladus, the whole family, including young Roger, had taken up residence in these spacious quarters. When Gwladus died in 1454, her funeral was attended by 3,000 mourners, for she had been ‘the strength and support of Gwentland and the land of Brychan’. The court poet Lewis Glyn Cothi refers to her as ‘y seren o Efenni’ (the star of Abergavenny), though elsewhere she is sun-like, a ‘pavilion of light’. They were a close and united family. Roger was particularly attached to his younger half-brother, William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke, who on succeeding his father in 1445, settled Roger at Tretower as his castellan.

The motte-and-bailey castle of the Picards and Bloets stood in flat meadowland. The old shell keep had been gutted in the mid-thirteenth century and a great round ‘tower’ (from which Tretower is named) had been raised within. The polygonal outer walls of the shell keep had been retained, however, to form an impressive outer defence. Tretower Court is the comfortable modern residence that Roger built in the purlieus, some 200 yards from the castle walls.

As committed Yorkists, the Vaughans and the Herberts had often to strap on their plate armour and march to war. The next scene on the painted hanging is of Roger at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross (1461), but it omits the gruesome aftermath, for Roger is said to have led old Sir Owain Tudor to his execution at Hereford. Sir Owain’s head was placed on the market cross, where ‘a madde woman kembyd hys here and wysche a way the blode of hys face’. (James Gairdner, The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, Camden Society, 1876, p.211.) Roger was knighted in 1465, an event that is also depicted on the hanging, acquired great estates including Merthyr Tydfil, and is said to have built the ‘royal palace’ at Cardiff. In a final scene we see him with William Herbert at the Siege of Harlech (1468).

After the victory at Tewkesbury in 1471, Roger was charged by King Edward with the pursuit of Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, but himself falling into Jasper’s hands, was summarily executed at Chepstow. He could hardly have expected mercy from Owain’s son, but the court poets were incensed. Calling on the family to avenge him, they ‘cursed Jasper’s marrow for this wicked deed … May [we] see the traitor’s skullbone/Used in Tretower to tune the harpstring,’ they sang.

The patronage of poets endured under Roger’s son, Sir Thomas, who was unstintingly eulogised by Lewis Glyn Cothi and others, both for his courage in arms and for his liberal hospitality. Though a supporter of Richard III, he was luke-warm in the months before Bosworth, earning himself a general pardon from Henry VII.

His descendants never ascended in rank, but lived the relatively obscure lives of minor gentry, occasionally filling the office of High Sheriff, until in 1783 Charles Vaughan sold Tretower to a local farmer. By the 1850s it had been entirely given over to agricultural purposes, and the roof of the north range was on the point of collapse.

The Boy’s Head and the Snake

The figures on the hanging are always identifiable by their heraldry, which Cadw have put to excellent use at Tretower. Dafydd Gam, Roger Vaughan and William Herbert all wear armorial surcoats. Dafydd bears Argent three cocks gules, William Herbert Per pale azure and gules, three lions rampant argent. As for Roger, his coat of arms is the distinctive Sable three boys’ heads, couped at the neck proper, a snake about the neck of each one Vert – or so it appears here. The arms of Vaughan were inconsistently blazoned among the various branches. The tinctures vary and sometimes a chevron argent appears between the heads. (Michael Siddons ed., Visitations by the Heralds in Wales, Harleian Society, New Series XIV, London, 1996, pp.43, 54, 90; Burke’s General Armory.)

According to A.C. Fox-Davies (A Complete Guide to Heraldry, London, 1929, p.169), ‘The boy’s head will seldom be found as a charge except in Welsh coats, of which the arms of Vaughan and Price are examples’. To this list I would add the Watkins of Cwrt Robert in Tregear, Monmouthshire. Their ancestor, Lewis ap Gwatkyn of Painscastle, a contemporary and perhaps near relation of Roger of Tretower, is described by Lewis Glyn Cothi as a scion of the Vaughans of Bredwardine. (See http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/gleanings/upper-house-painscastle-radnorshire-a-court-fit-for-king-arthur/.)

But why the snake? It commemorates their supposed descent from Moreiddig Warwyn (‘white neck’), and thence from Drymbenog ap Maenarch, lord of Brycheiniog. Legend has it that Moreiddig emerged from the womb with a viper entwined around his neck, a sure sign of his princely birth. In reality it may have been the umbilical cord, rather than a viper, that was so entwined. Moreiddig was also the fychan or ‘second born’ son. The surname Fychan, adopted by his descendants, was subsequently anglicised as Vaughan.

I particularly loved the projections that were automatically triggered in one of the old storerooms of the north range, an animated viper appearing from behind a row of shields to give an account of the house and family; or it was an almost tangible Lewis Glyn Cothi and a cast of animals, explaining their connection with the Mabinogion (an edition of which is on sale in the Tretower shop). My young son was enchanted, and so were the many other young visitors, who joyfully scaled the ramparts and coursed through the empty rooms in their unending games of hide and seek.

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Faith and Fresh Air: Medieval Reading’s Response to an Epidemic

June 9th, 2020

Sometime in the twelfth century, perhaps soon after the consecration by Thomas Becket of the Abbey Church, a terrible plague fell upon Reading. Young and old alike, anyone vulnerable to the bite of an infected flea in an age where everyone was permanently flea-bitten, succumbed like wheat before the scythe to this terrifying disease.

All normal commerce was suspended. The townsfolk kept to their houses, their anxiety almost unbearable. When a sufferer exhibited the first symptoms of the disease – a headache to start with, then debilitating chills and fever – it was like the delivery of a death sentence.

People very occasionally recovered, but most would suffer appallingly for a week, until, sapped of all their strength, death brought the release for which they must, by then, have craved. Nauseous, aching all over, they shrank with anguished cries from the light, the brightness being more than they could stand. Then came the swellings, usually after a couple of days, agonising, hard swellings that sometimes grew to the size of an orange, on the neck, arms, inner thighs, swellings that were soon black in their vileness and bursting with pus and blood. Yet this was not the most excruciating phase of the disease, for then they started to bleed internally, and to leak blood from every orifice. Sufferers already stank of death by the time they expired, with their helpless husbands, wives, parents or children looking on in horror and wondering when their own turn would come. They was nothing they could do, other than wait to load the battered, unrecognisable corpses onto the carts that came to carry away the dead.

The poor and afflicted would usually have turned to the monks of the Abbey for succour, but the infirmary there was already packed with their own people. Thirteen Reading monks perished from the disease in the course of that year. Their only hope was in prayer, for a strong wind that would blow away the foulness in the air, yet it seemed to the monks that God was punishing them for their sins and that they needed to persuade Him of their merit.

In a great act of faith, the monks of Reading Abbey, who had complete authority over the town, resolved at length on a course of decisive action. A decree was issued to all the able-bodied townsfolk. Rather than wait to put out their dead, they were told to lay out their sick relatives on litters in the streets. Fearful of leaving their homes, they were told nonetheless to assemble in the vast Abbey church for a service. A fast was proclaimed, and special litanies were sung in front of the congregation. The monks then led a solemn and orderly procession through the streets, holding aloft their most sacred relic, the hand of St James the Greater, and invoking him before God as their protector.

It was subsequently affirmed that a miracle was worked that day, that the sick lying on their litters, having once caught sight of the bejewelled reliquary containing the hand, were cured of their affliction. It was as if the Lord had been appeased in that hour and had instantly allayed the grief of His people, who returned joyfully to their homes, to be free of the epidemic for many years to come.

In the decades since the founding of the Abbey by Henry I, who had entrusted this prized relic to its care, a number of miraculous cures had been credited to the saint. There had been a catalogue of incidents in the mid-1150s. A knight called Mauger Malcuvenant had been restored to life by drops of water in which the holy reliquary had been dipped; a woman from Earley, a nearby village, had been cured of her dropsy after praying in the Abbey church; and a man from Barking had, after keeping vigil there overnight, miraculously regained the power of speech. The lifting of the Reading plague was St James’s most dramatic intervention to date, greatly enhancing his reputation as a miracle-worker and, as a centre of pilgrimage, that of the Abbey, where he was believed to be a living presence.

The Becket Casket in the V & A is contemporary with the events described above

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

A MacGregor Miscellany: The Real Rob Roy

March 30th, 2020

Scottish Highlanders differed from Lowlanders in that they routinely carried arms, and indeed were militarised from birth. They used to say in the Highlands: ‘When a male is born they put a sword or a knife in his hand’. They were further distinguished by their language (most spoke only Gaelic); their dress (shirt, plaid, stockings, brogues and bonnets); and their modest dwellings, generally of unmortared stone, with turf roofs. Even the mighty Lochiel, chief of Clan Cameron, lived until 1746 in a wooden house with two stone gable ends (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, pp.15-16).

Baby girls were not given arms at birth but a spindle to grasp. To the great convenience of genealogists, married women retained their maiden names. Thus the baptismal records of my ancestors Alexander McEwen and Catherine Campbell reveal that their mothers were MacGregors, where no other trace of them exists.

They were a tough breed, adept at negotiating the mountainous terrain. It has been pointed out that Rob Roy MacGregor would have made the nine-mile journey from Glengyle, where he was born, to Inverlochlarig Beg in Balquhidder, where he died, on foot. Today it is a 49-mile journey by road (David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy, Edinburgh, 2004, pp.1-4, 12, 34).

Rose Bonheur, ‘Highland Raid’ (1860)

The tradition in the family is that my ancestors were ‘caterans’ or cattle-raiders. This was by no means a shameful secret, as cattle-raiding was a way of life until the eighteenth century and was not considered a crime like murder or stealing money. They generally spoke of cattle having been ‘lifted’ rather ‘stolen’.

Though men of many other clans were involved at one time or another, raids were almost invariably blamed on the men of Clan Gregor, who were thought of as a race of cattle thieves. The defiant, marginalised MacGregors, described in 1745 as ‘a hardy, rough people, but noted for pilfering’, had been forced into such activity for their survival and, intensely proud of their lineage, regarded it as an occupation worthy of them as gentlemen.

Both the raiders and their victims complied with a well-established code. Only one or two cattle would be ‘lifted’ at a time, and the drovers were usually unmolested, their trade being vital to the Highland economy. Some farmers would tether a few cattle in places from which they could be easily ‘lifted’, for to cause trouble to the raiders was ‘against the rules of Highland politicks. Amongst these people a quarrel is easily begun but not forgott for many generations’.

Other tenants employed ‘watchers’ to keep guard, paying for them by means of a levy known as ‘blackmail’. The raiders themselves often took on the role, in effect being paid to protect the cattle by not stealing them (Stevenson, pp.7-9, 32, 110, 117).

This genuinely old tartan, worn by the Earl of Wemyss in a portrait of 1740, was later ascribed to Rob Roy to help market it

The father of Rob Roy, Donald Glas (‘the Pale’) MacGregor of Glengyle, who died in 1693, was a professional organiser of watches, earning his living by blackmail. Strictly speaking, Donald was ‘in’, rather than ‘of’ Glengyle, as the holding was not a feudal barony; but as de facto chief of the clan – in default of any strong leadership from the rightful claimant, Gregor MacGregor ‘in Stucharoy’ – he was felt to merit the distinction. Rob Roy was to follow him into the ‘profession’ and used to send his wife Mary out on horseback to collect the blackmail, clad in laced riding cloths and accompanied by a couple of bodyguards. They were described as ‘unwelcome visitants’.

Rob Roy’s sons carried on the family tradition and also turned their hand to horse-theft. On one occasion a woman whom they had robbed of her horses went bravely to confront Rob at his house in Balquhidder and was handsomely compensated by the old rogue, who liked to pose as a Robin Hood figure (Stevenson, pp.11-13, 196, 215).

The theft of sheep, however, was for some reason frowned upon. As an Englishman, Edmund Burt, observed in the 1720s, ‘the Highlander thinks it less shameful to steal a hundred cattle than one single sheep, for a sheep-stealer is infamous even among them’ (Stevenson, p.7). Desperate men would no doubt steal anything.

John Ramsay of Ochertyre says Rob was ‘a gentleman by birth, in a clan where every man, however poor, finds no difficulty in making out a long and honourable pedigree’ (Stevenson, p.269). During the centuries of persecution, the MacGregors clung doggedly to their name. As the law was often loosely enforced, many even dared to use it in official contexts, though it would have been unwise to include it on deeds of any import as they would have had no legal validity.

Most unhelpfully for genealogists, MacGregors tended to switch their legal pseudonyms at will, often as a mark of allegiance to their latest protector. Rob Roy originally called himself Campbell, but became a Drummond when their chief, the (Jacobite) Duke of Perth, dealt favourably with him. To flatter him further, he became a rather insincere Catholic (Stevenson, pp.22, 34, 214, 243).

In 1745 the MacGregors were said to be ‘dispersed through the Duke of Perth’s estate’, which included a considerable part of Perthshire. It is perhaps significant that Stobhall, the ancestral seat of the Drummonds, is a mere bend in the Tay from Kinclaven, where my McEwens were settled. It is conceivable that we descend from the branch of the MacGregor chiefly line calling themselves ‘MacEwin’. Documented in her two-volume Clan Gregor by the family historian, Amelia MacGregor of MacGregor, until the seventeenth century, these ‘MacEwins’ are said to have ‘disappeared without trace’.

The Highlanders were greatly attached to their traditional burial-places. The Balquhidder MacGregors favoured the island of Inchailloch on Loch Lomond. Bodies used to be carried over the pass still known as Bealach nam Corp (Stevenson, p.12). The Macnab chiefs were likewise buried on an island, similarly picturesque, that of Inchbuie in the River Dochart. The Macnab in the late eighteenth-century used his possession of ‘the most beautiful burying-ground in the world’ as a chat-up line. It failed to procure him a wife, though he managed to beget thirty-two bastards and it was rumoured that several lasses in the district got ‘the bad disorder’ from him (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, p.14).

Reluctant Jacobites

Highland funerals were occasions for great gatherings and involved the traditional coronach or ‘keening’ when the assembled women wailed their lament. This would be followed by a ‘compleat narration of the descent of the dead person’. As Rob Roy’s body was carried to his grave, the pipers struck up the haunting MacCrimmon’s Lament (Stevenson, pp.220-1). As late as 1879, the funeral procession for Sir Malcolm MacGregor of MacGregor at Balquhidder was several miles long. A drunken wake would traditionally ensue (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, p.15).

It is not surprising that the persecuted MacGregors lived permanently on the qui vive. Iain Moncreiffe wrote that his MacGregor cousins ‘taught me as a boy to eat the old staple diet porridge standing up, ready to run for it lest they be raided by Campbells’ (Lord of the Dance, p.194). Others hold that porridge should be eaten standing up in any case, merely out of respect for the dish.

Ancestors of mine would have been ‘out’ in the Fifteen and the Forty-Five. The MacGregors were said in 1711 to be dispersed over a wide area, but ready on their ‘watchword’ to assemble and follow their chief. The Pretender offered the promise of restoring their name. MacGregors who refused to join the rising in 1715 were threatened with death. There were many reluctant recruits, from all clans, in the Jacobite rebellions.

Rob Roy, his nephew Glengyle and MacGregor of Balhaldie led their forces south and launched an expedition to capture the boats on Loch Lomond, but were thwarted by the Royal Navy. The MacGregors under the slippery Rob Roy stood aloof at Sheriffmuir, as if ready to switch sides, and thus contributed to the Jacobite defeat. In January 1716 Glengyle led 134 MacGregors into Fife in quest of forage. For a few weeks they occupied Falkland Palace, which Cromwell had left half-derelict, with Rob serving as deputy governor (Stevenson, pp.74, 102-4, 110, 118-19).

The Real Rob Roy

Liam Neeson: not the real Rob Roy

Rob Roy had less to lose than most in these ventures, as he was already an outlaw. Having by his early thirties built up a successful, and entirely legitimate cattle-dealing business, he had been faced by 1711 with bankruptcy. In an attempt to recover his finances, he had defrauded his customers, including the powerful Duke of Montrose, his overlord for Glengyle. Protected by the rival Clan Campbell, Rob was able to escape justice and live openly in their country, first at Auch, then at Brackley, with forty or fifty men, including a personal piper, in his service (Stevenson, pp.33-44, 62-3). The MacGregors, incidentally, are described as a leading piping family, with many individual tunes to their name (https://www.musicscotland.com/cd/Clan-Gregor-Collection-Book.html).

A vengeful Montrose has ever since been represented as the villain of Rob Roy’s story. In the 1995 film, Rob Roy, which gullible viewers may mistake for a factual account, he is played with sneering relish by John Hurt. But the betrayal of trust had been Rob’s, and the real Montrose was far from being an oppressive landlord, many having ‘tenures of kindness’ on his lands. He appears to have been a gentle, courteous man, much like his descendant, the present duke, who still lives on Lomond-side. Yet Rob set out purposefully to humiliate his former patron, even stealing 32 of his best cows in a raid on Buchanan Castle in 1717, and returning later to steal his grain. By the 1720s Rob Roy’s daring exploits had made him a legend throughout Scotland (Stevenson, pp.53-6, 154-6, 184).

James Graham, First Duke of Montrose: not the John Hurt caricature

Rob Roy is described as a huge, hairy redhead, with such long arms that he could tie his garters without stooping, like a human orang-utan. If so he would have been noticeably deformed, the account being clearly an exaggeration. Sources agree that he was remarkably affable and ‘jolly’, a most beguiling individual, with an aversion to gratuitous violence. In 1725 he prevailed upon General Wade to procure him the King’s pardon, and was cheerfully prepared to betray his fellow Jacobites for money (Stevenson, pp.53, 199, 203, 230).

Rob’s intelligence led to the arrest of James Stirling of Keir who was one of the Pretender’s leading agents in Scotland, a blatant act of treachery which his admirers have chosen to ignore. Aged nearly sixty, he supplemented his income with the proceeds of cattle raids. Many of the best stories about him are garbled or unverified. He is said to have made his famous ‘leap’ over the Leuchars Burn in full spate at Peterculter, but the entire story – immortalised in the 1953 Disney version of his life – was probably an invention for the benefit of tourists. He died of an injury sustained in a duel – the details are uncertain – at Inverlochlarig Beg on 28 December 1734 (Stevenson, pp.206-8, 219). An unprincipled rogue, he at least had charm and a degree of humanity, which is more than could be said for his psychopathic sons, one of whom was hanged for rape and murder.

In The Braes of Balquhidder (1914), F. Watson summed up Rob with refreshing common sense: ‘it must be admitted that he was not overly scrupulous nor truthful, and the long and the short of it is that it is wiser not to look for public school ideas in a Highland cateran’ (quoted in Stevenson, p.286). My considerable debt to another wise and indefatigable author, David Stevenson, for his brilliant biography of Rob Roy, will be evident from the many citations above.

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Posted in Historical Gleanings

Rob Roy, the Children of the Mist and the Outlaw in Me: Were the McEwens of Little Dunkeld and Kinclaven really MacGregors?

November 27th, 2019

An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745, by David Morier

My paternal grandmother, though born and brought up in Hong Kong, was a Highland Scot, a McEwen from East Perthshire. We wear McEwen regalia on the rare occasions that demand it, such as my brother’s appearance as a pageboy at our aunt’s wedding, when he was bedecked in natty trews in the Hunting McEwen tartan. A few family traditions were preserved, such as patronage of McEwen’s of Perth, a very old-fashioned department store in John Street (now sadly defunct), and an unhistorical obsession with orthography (never McEwan with an ‘a’). From ‘Grandpa McEwen’ we seem also to have inherited great height. My father stood at 6’4, my son at 6’3, myself at 6’2.

I also vividly remember from childhood my great-aunt Anne’s account of a meeting with her maiden aunt in Scotland. It must have taken place in 1939. On hearing that Anne was engaged to a ‘Sassenach’, Aunt Kate stiffened. ‘Then you’re nae niece of mine.’ Anne persisted, politely enquiring what their ancestors had been. Kate’s reply was equally forthright. ‘Why, cattle-stealers of course!’ She must have had a soft heart, as she was later to leave some fine linen to my grandmother and instructed that a ‘kilt pin’ should be provided for her half-English daughter (my aunt still has it: a silver thistle with an amethyst flower).

Richard Todd as Rob Roy. Somehow I acquired this handsomely-bound, already vintage book as a child, presumably after seeing the film. My father later met the dashing Todd and described him as ‘knee-high to a grasshopper’.

I lapped up Aunt Anne’s story, as I was already developing a passion for Scottish clan history. Aged no more than six, I had been taken to the cinema to see the 1953 Disney film, Rob Roy (hardly the ‘latest release’, but nobody minded in those days). There is a thrilling scene in which Rob Roy, played by Richard Todd, evades English troops by leaping across a waterfall. That scene in particular, along with the outlandish outfits and the claymores, had sparked in me a romantic fascination. It was to be fuelled in the ensuing years by D.K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron, John Prebble’s Culloden and the writings of Iain Moncreiffe.

Aunt Kate’s memory of family brigandage, activity that must have been relatively recent (three generations is the usual reckoning), had also left me enchanted and intrigued. What is the truth of it? I now know that Kate’s father, my great-great-grandfather John McEwen (1842 – 1910), farmed at Muirhead in Kinclaven, where he was the tenant of Major-General Richardson Robertson of Tullybelton and Ballathie. The family were keen churchgoers and appeared to be perfectly respectable.

Muirhead is marked on old maps but has since been demolished. It was said to have consisted of ‘four farm steadings with a few acres of land attached to each’. Apart from the grand Ballathie House, the parish of Kinclaven was made up of a church and manse and a scattering of similar homesteads. It occupied an isolated loop in the River Tay (there was no bridge in those days), but fortunate guests at Ballathie were treated to the finest autumn salmon fishing in Scotland.

John, who settled at Muirhead on his marriage to Ann Duncan Gardiner, the daughter of the house, had been born further up the Tay at a place called Ballinreich, the steading in the parish of Little Dunkeld that had been farmed by his father Alexander, as it had also been by his maternal grandfather, John Fisher.

Baptised at neighbouring Dull on 12 September 1808, Alexander was the younger son of Donald McEwen of Aberfeldy and his wife Elizabeth (or Elspet) Anderson, who were married at Dull in 1800. With Donald, who may have been born in the immediate aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, the line disappointingly fizzles out.

On this truncated family tree, a name stands out, that of MacGregor, that does indeed launch us into an authentic world of brigandage. John Fisher’s wife, Catherine Campbell, who married from Achtar in Fortingall in 1798, was the daughter of a certain Elizabeth MacGregor.  The implication, which I would never have guessed, is that the real Rob Roy, my boyhood hero, most celebrated of all the MacGregors, was a putative kinsman!

Scottish clans are dynastic, extended families in the most literal sense (with a few strays adopted here and there). Clan Gregor was one of the proudest. Their Gaelic motto, S’rioghal mo dhream, means ‘royal is my blood’. They are believed to descend from the hereditary Abbots of Glendochart, who were always men of Celtic royal race. MacGregors maintain that they were of the line of Alpin, King of Argyll, who died in 841. In honour of him, the chief is known as An t’Ailpeanach.

The name-father of the clan was, however, a fourteenth-century Gregor ‘of the Golden Bridles’. Generations of his line held their beleaguered lands in Glenstrae by the sword, an inconvenience to the neighbouring Clan Campbell. In 1519, the powerful, canny Campbells contrived to establish their own nominee, a cadet who was ‘not righteous heir’, as Chief. The head of the dispossessed line, Duncan MacGregor of Ardchoille, was forced to lead his loyal clansmen into the hills, where he became an outlaw. The years of freebooting, raids and murderous mayhem began, many of the family being hanged or meeting other violent ends. Holed up in their fastnesses, braving the snows and ravening wolves, they were like the fictional Doones on Exmoor.

A document of c.1587 refers to them as ‘the House and Gang of Gregor MacIain’, but the landless Gregarach had acquired a far more romantic name. They were called ‘the Children of the Mist’, although the Gaelic might equally translate as ‘the Fog Folk’ or, some say, ‘Sons of the Wolf’. Soon, even the usurping chiefs were implicated in the brigandage, to the extent that in 1603, after a murderous attack on the Colquhouns, ‘the whole Clan Gregor were outlawed and the Name of MacGregor proscribed on pain of death’. The edict of James VI, declaring the name to be ‘altogidder abolisheed’, was confirmed by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1617.

In the early days of their outlawry the Gregarach were regularly pursued by blood-hounds, the fearful conn dubh, until the last of these was shot by their chieftain in 1624. The place (near Lochearnhead) is still called Meall a Mhadaidh, the Hill of the Wild Dog, and the long-barrelled ‘Fuzee’ or gun that he used has been passed down to the present chief. Recalcitrant MacGregors, if caught, could expect immediate execution. Their wives would be stripped bare, branded and whipped through the streets, then packed off to the American colonies as indentured slaves, along with their children.

There was a brief reprieve between 1661 and 1693, when the persecution resumed. Absurdly loyal to the wrong-but-romantic House of Stuart, they fought for James II at Killiecrankie, turning out again for the ‘Old Pretender’ in 1715 and for the ‘Young Pretender’ in 1745. Indeed it was Major Evan MacGregor, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s aide-de-camp, who fired the first shot at Prestonpans. Twenty-two MacGregors were wounded that day and one killed, for which Prince Charlie regaled the whole clan to dinner that evening, the officers sitting with him at a table set ‘upon the middle of the field’. In 1746, the Gregarach were fighting in Sutherland and missed the slaughter at Culloden, marching home past Finlairg Castle with colours flying and heads held high. It was reported with great satisfaction that the garrison, a regiment of militia recruited from the bullying Clan Campbell, ‘durst not move more than pussies’.

The outlawed Gregarach had been obliged to conceal their identity behind assumed or imposed names, including such oddities as ‘Beachly,’ ‘Landless’, ‘Telford’ and ‘Skinner’. Their chieftains called themselves Murray. Some branches were to keep these adopted names permanently, like the one calling itself Stewart, from which the Marquesses of Londonderry (including the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh) are thought to descend. Others fled abroad. The then chieftain’s brother, James, emigrated to America, only to be scalped by angry Indians. There was even a line of martial ‘Greigs’ who became ennobled in Russia.

‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, born at Glengyle in 1671, used the alias of Campbell, his mother’s name. Heavily romanticised by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Rob Roy (though he makes only fleeting appearances), not to mention Disney, he was, in reality, a fearsome and rather enthusiastic brigand (and a fine swordsman with abnormally long arms), who once led a terrifying raid on Dumbarton, though he was pardoned in time for a peaceful death at Balquhidder in 1734. ‘Don’t Mister me nor Campbell me!’ Scott has him say. ‘My foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor!’

The persecution of the MacGregors came to an end in 1774, their legal status restored. General Sir John Murray was at last recognised as the ‘righteous chief’, MacGregor of MacGregor. Though they had been reduced for long years to the status of cattle thieves, the pride of the clan was undiminished. The chief petitioner had been a certain Captain Gregor Drummond, nicknamed Boidheach, ‘the beautiful’, a MacGregor of the chiefly line who, like all his family, had been obliged to live under a pseudonym. In 1743, King George II had commanded that three soldiers of the Black Watch be sent to St James’s for review. The then Private Drummond had been one of the men selected. The story is told that the soldiers gave perfect satisfaction to His Majesty, who handed them each a guinea. These ‘they gave to the porter at the palace gate as they passed out,’ thinking that the King ‘had mistaken their character and condition in their own country.’ S’rioghal mo dhream!

The MacGregor woman from whom I descend was born in the period of persecution. It has been said of the MacGregors that ‘they are perhaps the only clan who can be reasonably certain that all who bear the surname are genuine scions of the ancient chiefly blood, although some branches have never yet resumed it.’ The Clan Gregor Society publishes a list of the known aliases which, remarkably, includes ‘Campbell’, ‘Fisher’ and ‘MacEwin’, three of the names that figure on my ‘tree’. Who more likely to marry an outlaw than a fellow outlaw? Might Donald McEwen and his neighbour John Fisher at Little Dunkeld have themselves been MacGregors who had, for the sake of convenience, retained their aliases, yet proudly passed on the cattle-raiding memory to their children and grandchildren?

The McEwen tartan that we wear is a variant of the Campbell one. The MacEwens of Otter, on Loch Fyne, had themselves been dispossessed by the Campbell chief in the fifteenth century. The chiefly line long ago disappeared without trace. The clan badge is that of the McEwens of Bardrochat in distant Ayrshire, who, as Moncreiffe concedes, ‘may have taken their name from a completely different Ewen’. An end to such nonsense! The wearing of tartan and Highland dress was banned for civilians in Scotland after the ’45. After the lifting of that prohibition in 1782, they were somewhat artificially revived. The tartans and Highland dress of today are mostly nineteenth-century inventions. Yet the red-and-black check design known as ‘Rob Roy’s Tartan’ – the lumberjack tartan – is one of the oldest and most appealing. Henceforth I shall proudly bear the tartan and badge of MacGregor – trusting that Aunt Kate would not disapprove.

[Iain Moncreiffe and David Hicks, The Highland Clans (London, 1967), especially pp.19, 30, 99-100, 209-11; James D. Scarlett, The Tartans of the Scottish Clans (Glasgow and London, 1975); Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, II (London, 2003), article ‘MacGregor of MacGregor’; http://www.clangregor.com/membership/sept-family-names/. Information on the McEwens of Muirhead from scotlandsplaces.gov.uk includes The Perthshire Ordnance Survey Name Books, 1859-62, Perthshire Vol.40, Communion Roll for Kinclaven, 1880-2 and Kinclaven Kirk o’ the Muir Parish Records. The relevant Census Returns and records of baptism and marriage are available on scotlandspeople.gov.uk.]

Detail from John Frederick’s Lewis’s A Frank Encampment, one of my favourite pictures. It depicts the then Lord Castlereagh on his Oriental tour of 1842. He is the image of the unruffled English gentleman, able to retain his composure and comforts in the most unpromising conditions. In fact his ancestry was mainly Irish and Scottish. The family’s prospects had improved considerably when they adopted the name ‘Stewart’ in place of ‘MacGregor’.

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Au hasard, Balthazar! The Château des Baux de Provence and its Lords – Ancestors of Elizabeth Wydvill

November 7th, 2019

The proud and fractious lords of Les Baux were named for the eagle’s nest, the great yellow castle on a precipice – or ‘balc’ in the local speech – from which they reigned.

The donjon

Before the end of the twelfth century, an alternative story was proposed, thought up by some ingenious clerk or minstrel: that ‘Baux’ derived from Balthazar (Bautezar in Provençal), one of the three magi or wise men, whose son, they said, had come out of Ethiopia to settle in those parts and was the founder of their line. The arms of the family are thus gules, a comet with sixteen rays argent, representing the very star that had guided the magi on their journey ‘from the east’. In their war-cry, ‘à l’asard Bautezar’ (to chance, Balthazar), they succinctly proclaimed their sanctified ancestry along with the recklessness of their ambition.

The castrum Balcius is first cited in a charter of 981, when the head of the family, Pons, held the office of ‘vicomes’; whilst their line can be traced back to a Germanic-sounding Count Liebulfe – no Ethiopian he! – who was born in the late 700s. Sovereign lords for a spell, minting their own coins, the Les Baux came to rule over 79 dependencies, ranging from Vaccarès in the Camargue to the principality of Orange. Yet that was not enough. They must also contest the countship of Provence, to which, admittedly, they had a sound claim; but years of bitter conflict with the rival House of Toulouse ended with their utter defeat in 1162, the ravaging of their lands and the razing of their Château des Baux. Au hasard, Balthazar! Everything chanced on the roll of the dice.

A spectral ruin, like an abandoned city of troglodytes

The castle rose again, and was occupied by the family till 1426. In 1632, on the orders of the king, it was comprehensively slighted by the application of gunpowder. The remaining habitable parts were destroyed in 1793, the hateful charters burnt. Hewn out of the very rock, Les Baux is now a spectral ruin, like an abandoned city of troglodytes. The dressed stone that fronted each range of buildings has been removed, exposing their cave-like interiors. There is barely a single room with its four walls intact.

Military headquarters and court, this was once a throbbing community, with its capacious stables, stores and refectories (‘tinels’), and subsidiary residences for important vassals. Searching for any recognisable feature, one notices stonework up above resembling a giant honeycomb: a pigeonnier of course, for all these people must be fed. There were fishponds, too, and a windmill, and the castle supported a large hunting establishment. The plains below were not the neat vineyards of today but were forested for deer, a vast sporting ground.

The walkways on the ramparts are picturesquely worn and weathered. The narrow, slippery staircase that leads to La Tour Sarrasine is dissected by a deep gutter, an attempt to channel the torrents of rainwater. Best preserved are the service rooms cut deep into the rock below the donjon. The blackened fireplace in the kitchen and the empty bread ovens are powerfully evocative of the former life here.

The ruins of Les Baux are difficult to read but one can make most sense of the donjon, which is relatively well preserved. This thirteenth-century reconstruction of its damaged predecessor is a simple, but very grand and rather elegant two-storied structure. It has only a few small windows and was poorly insulated. The huge fireplaces of which we see traces would have been very necessary to raise the temperature and control the humidity in winter. Beam holes mark the position of the floors. There were reception rooms at ground level, and fifteen chambers above, with names like the chambre de la Tour (that of the Lady Alix des Baux in 1426), the chambre de la Rose and the chambre du Pape (after Pope Clement VII, who used to visit from Avignon).

A reconstruction of the castle in the twelfth century

Despite the sumptuous tapestries on every wall (mentioned in an inventory for Lady Alix), these rooms were sparsely furnished (the odd coffer and trestle table) and rather forbidding. They would, however, have been crowded with people and there was always the softening presence of troubadours – Raimbaut d’Orange in the twelfth century, Paulet de Marseille in the thirteenth. Think of the stamping of feet to their estampidas or dancing songs, the endless gallantries, the rapt attention to their tales of unhappy love in the uvularising Provençal.

Perched vertiginously on its rock – one shudders to think of prisoners being thrown to their deaths in 1394 – Les Baux is beautiful but unnerving, an expression of brutal feudalism. Its prideful lords were driven by their greed and ambition, launching pointless wars that destroyed countless innocent lives. Like most of their kind, they were lovers of strife, and of the spectacle of strife.

The arms of Les Baux - the Star of Bethlehem

Marguerite des Baux, Grandmother of Elizabeth Wydvill

Their ambitions thwarted in Provence, the Les Baux sought a new destiny in Italy. Barral des Baux (patron of the troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange) took the cross and enlisted with Charles of Anjou in 1252. His younger son Raimond led the cavalry charge at Benevento in 1266, the battle that won the kingdom of Sicily for Charles. Barral was appointed Grand Justiciar; his elder son, Bertrand, Count of Avellino. Bertrand’s descendant Alix was the last of the line to reside at Les Baux, where she died in 1426, in the chambre de la Tour.

Their cousin, another Bertrand, also shared in the spoils, becoming duke of Andria, a fair city on the coast of Apulia. Bertrand’s son François, Duke of Andria, married Sueva, daughter of Niccolo Orsini, Count of Nola, in 1381. The Orsini were a Roman senatorial family whose line can be traced back to the tenth century; as Scott Fitzgerald described them (Tender is the Night, Book II, Chap.XXII), ‘they’re the ones who got possession of the temples and palaces after Rome went to pieces and preyed on the people’. They picked up some interesting connections along the way. Sueva Orsini’s mother, Jeanne de Sabran, was the great-grand-niece of St Thomas Aquinas; her grandmother, Anastasia, the daughter of Simon de Montfort’s exiled son Guy.

François des Baux (who died in 1422, aged over ninety) had a son by Sueva, Guillaume, who succeeded as Duke of Andria and was also the designated heir to his cousin Alix des Baux, last of the senior line. Louis III of Anjou, Count of Provence, refused, however, to honour the terms of her will, seizing the territory for himself and finally severing the troublesome House of Les Baux from their ancestral home.

The dragon-eyed Elizabeth Wydvill, queen of Edward IV

The couple also had a daughter, Marguerite, who married Pierre de Luxembourg, Count of St Pol. Marguerite’s daughter, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, contracted an illustrious first marriage with John of England, Duke of Bedford, which was childless. Her second marriage was to someone far beneath her, an aberrant love-match with one of the old duke’s retainers. Sir Richard Wydvill was an obscure Northamptonshire knight, though he was later created Earl Rivers and appointed a Garter knight. Those honours would not have come his way but for the even-more-scandalous marriage, in secret, of the beautiful, dragon-eyed Elizabeth Wydvill, Sir Richard’s daughter by Jacquetta, with King Edward IV of England. From Elizabeth, her brother and her sisters (who all quartered the arms of Les Baux) there are numerous lines of descent to the modern day.

The noblest families of southern Italy and Sicily invariably descend from the companions of Charles of Anjou, like those of Corbera and Falconeri in Lampedusa’s Leopard. The ‘del Balzo’ line subsists in several branches in Italy to this day, still holding ducal rank, but far removed from the precipice in Provence for which they are named.

[Paul Pontus, Les Baux (Paris, 1971); Famille des Baux at http://jean.gallian.free.fr/comm2/fam_fich/b/baux.htm; Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1982), pp.73-6, 84); Lt.Col. W.H. Turton, The Plantagenet Ancestry, pp.228-9.]

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Le Duche d’Uzès: Remembering Proust in a Ducal Fortress

September 6th, 2019

Le Duche d’Uzès: ducal abode in the middle of a city

When Proust was travelling ‘the Guermantes Way’ in the 1890s, charming the aristocratic hostesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and frequenting their salons and soirées, one of the families he encountered was that of Crussol d’Uzès. The duc d’Uzès (creation 1565) was the second most senior duke in France, only a short head behind the duc de La Trémoïlle (1563). That line died out in 1933, so the duc d’Uzès has since been France’s premier duke and peer.

Ducal carpet in the salon

The Crussols had been intimates of the royal family since at least the fourteenth century, the holders of high office and active on many a campaign. Their motto, indeed, is Ferro non auro, ‘By steel, not gold’. Louis XVIII once expressed his surprise that none of them had ever been a Marshal of France. ‘Sire,’ replied the duke, ‘nous nous faisons tuer avant (we always seem to get ourselves killed beforehand).’

The first part of the family name recalls their long-abandoned stronghold in the Rhône valley, opposite Valence, while the second marks their lordship of Uzès, an ancient city in Occitania. They also maintained an hôtel in the rue Montmartre, for these places are in the deep south, far indeed from Paris and the court. ‘Uzès!’ said André Malraux, General de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture and a friend of the family, ‘but that’s even further away than China!’

Inside the courtyard

The dominant member of the family in Proust’s time was the ‘Grande Duchesse’ (born Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart), a talented sculptress who contributed the figure of Saint Hubert to Sacré Coeur, a yachtswoman, a feminist and a fanatical rider-to-hounds; also the first woman in France to hold a driving licence (1889) and the first to receive a fine for speeding (1893), after her Delahaye had topped 15km per hour in the Bois de Boulogne. Whilst admiring this formidable lady for her varied achievements, Proust was unable to detect in her any of the famed ‘Mortemart wit’. She was, however, the granddaughter and sole heiress of the Veuve Cliquot, and thus introduced an intoxicating and enriching dose of bourgeois blood to the Crussol line.

Determined that her son Jacques should avoid a more flagrant mésalliance – he ‘became infatuated with the cocotte Émilienne d’Alençon, who was exhibiting a troupe of performing white rabbits – though nobody had eyes for the rabbits’ – she packed him off to Africa, where he died of enteric fever in 1893. The last straw had been Émilienne’s disporting herself in public with the family jewels. The episode made an impression on Proust, for in his Recherche it apparently ‘suggested Saint-Loup’s exile to Morocco as punishment for his extravagant gifts to Rachel’. (George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, I, New York 1959, pp.163-4; http://www.uzes.com/.)

The dining-room

Though it is usual to pronounce the final ’s’ in Uzès, Proust discovered that the gratin had their own rendering of this and other famous names, whether from long tradition or as a way of enhancing their exclusivity. In Sodome et Gomorrhe (Bouquin edition II, Paris 1987, p.665), the snobbish outsider, Mme de Cambremer, is disconcerted to hear an acquaintance speak of ‘ma tante d’Uzai’ and of ‘mon onk de Rouan’, not immediately recognising the famous names that she herself pronounced ‘Uzès’ and ‘Rohan’. The very next day, when a friend refers to a bust of the duchesse d’Uzès, Mme de Cambremer is delighted to correct her. ‘Vous pourriez au moins prononcer comme il faut (you could at least pronounce it correctly),’ she says haughtily: ‘Mame d’Uzai.’

The snobbery that Proust encountered in the Faubourg – and documented in his novels – was breathtaking. The present duke, however, is a man of the people. I am reliably informed that the taxi that conveys him from Nîmes airport for his monthly visits to Uzès is instructed to call first at McDonald’s restaurant, whose ‘drive-thru’ facility is conveniently located on the edge of the modern city.

The Duché d’Uzès: An Appreciation

His modest address in the Place du Duché, Uzès, hardly prepares one for the grand residence of France’s premier duke and peer. Approaching through a narrow side street, one glimpses a turret on a tall building ahead, a fluttering banner, an elaborate escutcheon worked into the brown tiles of a steep roof. Emerging into the Place, one is suddenly confronted by a full-blown castle in the middle of the historic city, one that, most unusually, is occupied by its original family as it has been for a thousand years.

The three elements to the castle are instantly laid bare in the main courtyard that is accessed through a door from the Place. The oldest and most prominent of these is La Tour Bermond, a massive square keep, fifty metres high, named for the lord of Uzès who built it in the twelfth century.

Then there are the fourteenth-century ramparts, projecting from one side of the keep, which were added by lord Robert after his elevation to vicomte in 1328. Robert’s apartments, the so-called ‘vicomté’, which are built into these ramparts, are disguised behind a nineteenth-century façade, though with a tall hexagonal turret at one end.

Simone d’Uzès: prized heiress

Finally, another medieval range that projected from the keep was aggrandised in fine Renaissance style by the Crussols, for Charles de Crussol, Grand Pantryman of France, had in 1486 married Simone d’Uzès, the prized heiress to Bermond and Robert’s line. Their grandson, Antoine, became the first duc d’Uzès in 1565. An associate of the sinister Catherine de’ Medici and a trimmer, renouncing his Protestantism in timely fashion in 1572, Antoine employed a sensitive and learned architect on his renovated apartments, ‘le Duché’, the striking façade of which features Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns in layers for each floor.

His father Charles had already paved the way with the splendid vaulted staircase of c.1515, quite taxing to any but the nimble, that now leads to these rooms. The first of them is a hallway containing two exceptional treasures, laid out on cushions: a helmet from the time of Joan of Arc, in excellent condition; and – a great curiosity – a lamp said to be a relic from the Crusades, lords of Uzès having participated, as vassals of the Counts of Toulouse, in the Fourth and probably also the First Crusades. It seems to me very rare that a family should preserve any artefact of so early a date.

Crussols in ruffs and lace gaze down from the walls (including the Grand Pantryman Louis with his trim beard, last of the family from whom I myself am directly descended). The room is simply furnished, even austere, as is fitting in a living fortress: ‘In our halls is hung armoury of the invincible knights of old,’ as Wordsworth puts it. The theme is continued in an adjoining vestibule, where there are portraits of more recent Crussols, including a full-length one of the present duke, a sleek and elegant figure in a dinner jacket, his arms casually folded.

Louis de Crussol, Grand Pantryman and Governor of the Dauphine (died 1473)

These rooms lead to a grand ‘state’ room, a Wedgwood-blue salon with a lot of white-and-blue porcelain and Louis Quinze chairs with red and gold covers. Despite the warm colours, there is a coldness to rooms of such conventional formality, and the modest fireplace tucked into one corner would hardly have raised the temperature. I was struck, however, by the elaborate carpet commissioned by the present duke that bears his achievement of arms, with its multiple quarterings, which, indeed, is ubiquitous throughout the castle; and was tempted by the glimpse of a more intimate room beyond, all in red, into which one is not invited.

Instead, one is steered through a long, cool passage into one of the many bedrooms that lead off it – the ‘Yellow Room’, with its memories of ‘la Grande Duchesse’ – and the dining-room, where an immaculate Aubusson tapestry is framed by hunting trophies (hers, probably). A large, fifteenth-century triptych depicting members of the royal house hangs nonchalantly above a sideboard, on which a portrait of that precious commodity, Simone d’Uzès, has been propped – a happy-looking girl with rosy cheeks and a hint of a smile. The fifteenth-century chapel beyond was refurbished in 1838 and includes a colourful wall-painting of the family’s heraldry.

There is only a small, formal garden at the back of the Duché. The park, watered by the river Alzon, is across the city, outside the walls, and is a public amenity.

The charming and expertly trained guides at le Duché, looking like matelots in their white denims and T-shirts, are as well-versed in heraldry and genealogy as any Guermantes. Le Duché is a carefully managed stage-set, a romantic anachronism, yet is perfectly pitched at anyone, like me, who thrills in Grand Pantrymen and crusader lamps.

Crusader lamp

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A Dickensian Landmark in London: The Site of Fagin’s Lair on Saffron Hill

March 14th, 2019

The border between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell is seamless and invisible but one is instantly aware of passing from a genteel quarter into a raffish one. I ventured in that direction last week on a particular quest: to discover one of London’s great literary landmarks, the site of Fagin’s lair. In Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, begun in 1837, the squalid apartment of the ‘pleasant old gentleman, and his hopeful pupils’, is located with precision on Saffron Hill.

Oliver, a bemused and exhausted runaway, has joined up with the Artful Dodger on the Great North Road. That highway, known at the London end as ‘Liverpool Road’, is bordered here by market gardens, by open fields and by the cattle lairs that the drovers use on their way to Smithfield Market. The turnpike by which the boys enter London is hard by the Angel at Islington, an old coaching inn that had been entirely rebuilt in 1819. It is approaching midnight as the pair proceed along St John Street into Clerkenwell, then, by way of Exmouth Street and Coppice Row, to the prettily-named Saffron Hill, ‘along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels’.

Descending into the pit: Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell

This had once been a country lane through the Bishop of Ely’s estate, where saffron was grown, but since the late seventeenth century it had been developed into an overcrowded and impoverished residential area, a ‘rookery’. Oliver ‘could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either side of the way as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. the street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place were the public-houses, and in them, the lowest orders of Irish (who are generally the lowest orders of anything) were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in the filth; and from several of the doorways, great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, upon no very well-disposed or harmless errands.

‘Oliver was just considering whether he hadn’t better run away, when they reached the bottom of the hill: his conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field-lane, and, drawing him into the passage, closed it behind them.’ [Book I, Chapter 8.]

Field Lane was an alley at the south end of Saffron Hill that connected it to Holborn Hill. The name has since disappeared from the map. Dickens knew it well and hardly exaggerates the wretchedness of the place. Peter Cunningham, author of a Hand-book of London, 1850, describes Saffron Hill as a ‘squalid neighbourhood between HOLBORN and CLERKENWELL densely inhabited by poor people and thieves … The clergymen of St Andrew’s, Holborn, (the parish in which the purlieu lies), have been obliged, when visiting it, to be accompanied by policemen in plain clothes.’ Hepworth Dixon in The London Prisons, also published in 1850, writes that Field Lane ‘is narrow enough for [one] to reach across from house to house, and the buildings so lofty that a very bright sun is required to send light to the surface … The stench is awful. Along the middle of the lane runs a gutter, into which every sort of poisonous liquid is poured.’ A foreign observer, Flora Tristan, describes it in 1842 as ‘a little alley … too narrow for vehicles to use,’ where ‘there is absolutely nothing to be seen but dealers in second-hand silk handkerchiefs.’ Intrepid enough to visit at night, she adds: ‘There is a bustle of activity in the street as prostitutes, children, and rogues of every age and condition come to sell their handkerchiefs’ (London Journal, p.175). These had been stolen, of course, by the likes of Fagin’s crew, and the saleswomen, invariably ‘daughters of Israel’, were ‘fences’. Dixon was incensed by their attempts ‘to seduce you into the purchase of the very handkerchief which you had in your pocket at the entrance’ (The London Prisons, pp.227-8).

There is a palpably villainous and mournful air to Saffron Hill, which is still oppressively enclosed by tall buildings. The street is paved now, the original houses have all gone, and the River Fleet, a filthy open sewer that ran along its east side, is covered over; but there is a paucity here both of smart offices and of trendy warehouse developments, as if it is still a demoralised place, forsaken by the world and left to its ghosts.

The One Tun: not recommended by Charles Dickens

Descending the hill, one passes The One Tun (rebuilt in 1875, over the original cellars), which is claimed, not unreasonably, as the model of the ‘low public-house, situate in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill,’ that Bill Sikes frequents with his dog. It is described as ’a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light burnt all day in the winter-time, and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer’.

The best editions of Oliver Twist are those accompanied by George Cruikshanks’s original illustrations, where the impoverished, under-nourished boys always appear like old men. Cruikshanks’s illustration of the pub, headed ‘Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends’, shows a doorway festooned with misspelt notices: ‘To be drunk on the premises’; ‘Licensed to sel Beerly Retail’; ‘Fine Ale 3d pr. pot’.

As for Fagin’s dwelling, it was ‘a very dirty place; but the rooms upstairs had great high wooden mantel-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceilings, which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways; from all of which tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome, dismal and dreary as it looked now.’ [Book I, Chapter 18.]

At this end of Saffron Hill, one feels trapped and cornered, as if one has descended into a pit. A steep flight of steps leads up into the street beyond and the relief of sunlight and fresh air, or what passes for it in this part of London. Literary pilgrims  in search of the authentic Dickensian atmosphere will not be disappointed.

Longman's former premises on Saffron Hill: gloomy enough for Fagin

Footnote. Halfway down Saffron Hill were the premises of Longman & Co., the publishers, from 1887 – too late to have inspired Fagin’s lair, but the dirty curtains and the piles of rubbish outside evoke Dickensian squalor.

See also: https://nicklouras.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/see-and-hear-the-river-fleet-at-saffron-hill/

http://atinaitaly.com/charles-dickens-clerkenwell-london/ and http://writingcities.com/2015/02/13/field-lane-and-larceny-then-and-now/

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings