Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  Mary Delany, Artist and Personality

  by Lauren Gilbert

  Born Mary Granville on 14 May 1700 in Wiltshire, England, Mary was the daughter of a Tory aristocratic family who were supporters of the Stuart crown. From the age of eight, she lived with her aunt and uncle, Lord and Lady Stanley, who were close to the court. Lady Stanley had hopes of Mary’s becoming a Maid of Honor and educated her accordingly. Lady Stanley brought Mary into close contact with court circles. Unfortunately, the death of Queen Anne in 1714 ended those hopes with the introduction of the Hanoverian line with King George I.

  Skilled in painting, needlework, and other crafts and an ardent music lover (she became acquainted with Handel through Lady Stanley), Mary was an accomplished young woman when she went to live with her uncle Lord Landsdowne at Longleat. She was described by Edmund Burke as “a woman of fashion for all the ages.”

  Lord Landsdowne was an intimate friend of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Because of her parents’ financial straits and Lord Landsdowne’s political aspirations, at the age of seventeen, Mary was forced to marry Alexander Pendarves, who was 60 years old and a member of Parliament.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pendarves moved to London in 1721, where Mary was able to renew her friendships at court and in society. Unfortunately, the marriage, which had not been good to start with, deteriorated as Mr. Pendarves became a heavy drinker and very jealous of attention paid to his young wife. He died in 1724, leaving Mary a young widow with only a few hundred pounds per year on which to live and no home of her own.

  But Mary’s widowhood actually brought her a greater freedom of movement than she could have had as either an unmarried or a married woman. She was able to socialize, attend concerts, and basically please herself. She lived with her aunt, Lady Stanley, again, as well as with other friends, particularly Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. She travelled to Ireland, where she became acquainted with Dr. Patric Delany, an Anglican pastor.

  She hoped for an appointment to the royal household, which did not come to pass, but became a close and loyal friend of the royal family. She was unsatisfied with choices available to women; she was against marriage as a necessity, and felt that marriage should be a matter of choice only. She engaged in a massive correspondence writing about her interests. She also had a relationship with Lord Baltimore, which ended in 1730, after she came to feel he was trifling with her affections.

  In 1743, Mary married Dr. Delany, whose wife had died, and lived with him for the next 25 years in Dublin, where her focus was on gardening and her botanical interests, shell art, needlework, gilding, and many other crafts, and she continued her voluminous correspondence. Sadly, Mr. Delany died in 1768 and with his death, Mary lost interest in her other pastimes. Then in 1771, she combined her interest in botany and crafts by creating what she called “paper mosaicks”. These were extremely intricate, detailed, and botanically accurate pictures of plants and flowers, made of tiny pieces of paper cut and pasted in layers.

  In these later years of her life, Mary had a house near Queen’s Lodge at Windsor, given to her by King George III and Queen Charlotte who also visited her there, and she spent at least half the year with the Duchess of Portland. Her eyesight failed in 1782 and she died in 1788.

  She left ten albums of her mosaics, Hortus Siccus, which ultimately went to the British Museum in 1897. Although she was a woman of parts, noted for her botanical knowledge and artistic abilities in many areas, her wit, and her charm, ultimately it is her paper mosaics which have kept her fame alive.

  Sources

  British Museum. “Mary Delaney (Biographical Details).” http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=127351.

  Cariati, Christine. “Flora Delanica: Art and Botany in Mrs. Delany’s ‘paper mosaicks.’” Venetian Red, December 4, 2009.

  http://venetianred.net/2009/12/04/flora-delanica-art-and-botany-in-mrs-delanys-paper-mosaicks/.

  Paston, George. Mrs. Delany (Mary Granville) A Memoir. London: Grant Richards, 1900. Via Internet Archive http://archive.org/details/mrsdelanymarygra00past.

  The Peak of Chic. “Mary Delany and Her Paper Mosaicks.” The Peak of Chic: Musings on Stylish Living, September 4, 2008. http://thepeakofchic.blogspot.com/2008/09/mary-delany-and-her-paper-mosaicks.html.

  Port, Andy. “Now Showing: Mary Delany a Force of Nature.” New York Times Magazine Blog. September 29, 2009.

  http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/now-showing-mary-delany-a-force-of-nature/.

  Women and the Garden. “Mary Granville Pendarves Delany 1700-1788.” Women and the Garden, April 28, 2011. http://womenandthegarden.blogspot.com/2011/04/mary-granville-pendarves-delany-1700.html?utm_source=BP_recent.

  The Rise and Rise of the English Landscape Garden

  by M.M. Bennetts

  Throughout the early part of the 17th century, under James I and Charles I, English gardens continued to develop along the lines discussed previously in The Elizabethan Gardening Craze.

  But with the onset of the Civil War in 1642 and the subsequent Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, gardening, such as it had been, ground to a halt for many different reasons. Armies tramping across the countryside, particularly armies of Levellers, aren’t good for the preservation of gardens. Taxes were high and remained very high under Cromwell which meant substantially less disposable income.

  Also, many of the keen gardeners and plantsmen had been Royalists. And they, like the famed garden writer John Evelyn, chose to spend the decade of Cromwell’s rule on the Continent studying gardens, or travelling, often to stay close to Charles II in exile, or further afield, even plant collecting in the Americas.

  Which is not to say that Cromwell’s period in power didn’t have a marked effect on the countryside as a whole. For during the Protectorate, huge swathes of forest, particularly in the Midlands, had been chopped down. As Daniel Defoe wrote of Theobalds, King James’s former palace: “...it has suffered several depredations since that, and in particular in the late Time of Usurpation, when it was stript, both of Game and Timber...” And in the place of pleasure gardens, Cromwell and his advisers encouraged, both on moral and economic grounds, the planting of vast orchards.

  With the Restoration of Charles II, the idea of a pleasure garden was once again permitted. But now, after their experience on the Continent, the large landowners and fashionable gardeners sought to recreate versions of the most splendid garden of their age: Versailles. And this formal style, full of grand canals, classical statuary, fountains, and extensive geometrical beds edged in box, held sway into the early years of the 18th century.

  But vast, formal gardens are very expensive to maintain—they are not only labour intensive, they also take up so much land that might be otherwise profitably employed. And it was the garden writer and designer, Stephen Switzer, who suggested a cheaper alternative in his Ichnografia Rustica, published in 1718. He was writing mainly for the owners of villas—successful businessmen mostly—whose smallish estates were near London.

  His proposal was that one should open up the countryside so that one might enjoy “the extensive charms of Nature, and the voluminous Tracts of a pleasant County...to retreat, and breathe the sweet and fragrant Air of gardens.” He went on to suggest that the garden be “open to all View, to the unbounded Felicities of distant Prospect, and the expansive Volumes of Nature herself.”

  Switzer examined costs and expenses; he proposed that the designs be more rural and natural and relaxed, that garden walls were an unnecessary expense, etc. In short, Switzer proposed the landscape movement which would transform the gardens of England.

  But garden taste—the same as everything else—is never the work of a single individual. There are always many other motives and forces which contribute in some proportion or other to the evolving result. And several other significant influences must be cited here,
all of which come into play to a greater or lesser extent over the next century.

  The first, perhaps, is the rise in popularity of the Grand Tour. The 18th century was the century when “taste” mattered, when demonstrating one’s qualifications as a gentleman meant being a collector or connoisseur—of books, of art, of music, of gardens. And where did one acquire the polish that gave that aristocratic and classically educated sheen? Italy, of course.

  So off troop our young Englishmen of the era, with their tutors, to Italy. Where they study the paintings of Renaissance masters, the glories of classical antiquity in Rome, the elegance of Tuscan gardens, the refinements of Venetian music? Well, yes and no.

  If one believes the pious letters they wrote home, then yes. If one reads the despairing accounts of their tutors and their Italian hosts and their letters to each other, then the view leans a little more heavily towards Carnivale, carousing, and wenching with their fellow Englishmen. And in their last weeks picking up a few “souvenirs” in the form of lesser Italian artists—often copies of 17th century Italian landscapes—which, yes, do present the soon-to-be idealised vision of Nature is Art.

  Yet Englishmen abroad rarely behave as do Englishmen at home.

  So the 18th century Englishmen—without a centralised, all-powerful royal court in which to play politics and power, such as was at Versailles—created their own recreational playgrounds.

  The play is still about power, prestige, and status, but here it’s married to a cultivated aesthetic as well as to forestry, farming, economy, and sport—riding, shooting, fishing, hunting—a gentleman’s concerns and country pursuits, whether he is a Whig grandee or a gentry landowner of the Tory persuasion.

  And the acquisition of land (and more land), with all the rights, privileges, and status it conferred, gives these landholders the scope to create these gardens which still hold the visitor rapt. Whether for the nouveaux riches—the titans of commerce such as Henry Hoare who was buying his way into the landowning gentry and created Stourhead—or for the greatest of all Whig aristocrats, like the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, these gardens become a expression of a unified landed class based on “good taste”, political power, and economics.

  Thus, as the eighteenth century progressed, influenced by their experiences of the Grand Tour, by writers such as Pope and Walpole, and by visiting other gardens, England’s landed classes began to favour a less formal and more naturalistic approach to landscape design. In developing the uniquely English concept of the landscape garden, William Kent, Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown, and the other great landscape architects of the period were responding to a complex assortment of social and aesthetic ideals among their clients.

  As well as the integration of forestry, farming, and sport into the landscape, the ambition was in many respects to create an almost “natural” appearance, where trees, water, open grassland, and carefully placed structures (bridges, temples, and monuments were popular) created a carefully balanced microcosm of the English countryside.

  Capability Brown is widely regarded as the most influential figure in eighteenth-century landscape design. Born in Northumberland in 1716, he moved south in 1739 and worked as an assistant to William Kent at Stowe, before embarking on what arguably became the greatest career in the history of landscape design.

  Brown was more hands-on than Kent; he would always make a personal visit to a new client’s estate, evaluating the constraints and opportunities it presented, before sending an assistant to undertake a detailed survey. His remarkable achievement was his ability to bring common ideals and design principles to bear on the specific topography, geology, and prevailing climate of a client’s estate.

  Above all, there is a sense of effortlessness in Brown’s designs, a sense that the park and garden have grown organically out of their surroundings, requiring little or no human intervention or management (though the opposite was, of course, the case).

  And it is in these respects that the “new” landscape movement grows out of the mediaeval and Tudor deer park which was the archetypal symbol of status. Even at this late period, venison is still proscribed on the open market; it is still a sign of favour or wealth.

  The creation of the “ha ha” in the late 17th century made it possible to have the expansive views—how to wow your guests, who believed, as you did, that “a gentleman should own his view”—without having the deer or cattle coming right up to the Dining Room windows.

  It must be said that the concept that a gentleman should own his view, deeply engrained in the psyche of England’s landed classes, sometimes led to surprising results. At Wallington in Northumberland, the seat of the Trevelyan family, the main public road passes relatively close to the house, but was sunk to a depth of several feet so that it was invisible from the house!

  Likewise, the effortlessness that typefies Brown’s landscapes finds a parallel in his architecture, particularly at Claremont in Surrey, where his mansion sits atop its hill in splendid isolation, with no visible tradesmen’s entrance to spoil the view on any side. (The tradesmen’s entrance is in fact through a tunnel, the entrance to which is concealed in a stand of trees to the north-east of the building.)

  And to this day, in many people’s eyes, these gardens, landscapes, and houses still encapsulate all that is quintessentially and timelessly English. They stand as a record of our social history; they record the ideals of landowners, great and small, through a period of quiet yet profound social and economic evolution—each estate its own ensample of Shakespeare’s vision of “this scept’red isle”.

  Doggett’s Coat and Badge: The World’s Oldest Rowing Race

  by Gillian Bagwell

  Doggett’s Coat and Badge is both the name of and prize for the oldest rowing race in the world, which has been held in London every year since 1715. It is believed to be the oldest continually staged annual sporting event in the world and has a colorful and unlikely history.

  Thomas Doggett, an Irish actor and comedian, was born in Dublin in about 1640, and made his first stage appearance in London in 1691 as Nincompoop in Thomas D’Urfey’s Love for Money. He became popular, and when Thomas Betterton opened the new theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1695 with William Congreve’s comedy Love for Love, Doggett delighted the crowds playing Ben, a role the playwright had written for him.

  While he continued a successful acting career, Doggett also became one of the managers of the Theatre Royal Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which is another London institution with a very long history. It’s where Nell Gwynn got her start selling oranges when the first theatre opened in 1663, before she began acting.

  Doggett lived in Chelsea, and since the river was a principal way to get about London in those days, he was a frequent patron of the Thames watermen. There is a story, apparently apocryphal, that one day Doggett fell into the water and that a waterman rescued him from drowning.

  In any case, he had a fondness for the watermen, and in 1715 he set up a contest in which watermen raced the four miles between the Swan Pub near London Bridge and the Swan Pub in Chelsea, rowing the four-seated wherries in which they regularly carried passengers. Watermen had been authorized by the crown since 1510, and were members of a company, which regulated the trade. They wore a uniform—a red coat with a silver badge, and the prize for Doggett’s race was such a cap and badge.

  Doggett was “a great Whig in politics” and an ardent Hanoverian, and the race was held on August 1 to commemorate the date of George I’s accession to the English throne the previous year. The badge given to the winner featured the word “Liberty” and the horse representing the House of Hanover.

  Incidentally, George I was the son of Sophie of Hanover, the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia and granddaughter of James I. He succeeded because Charles II had no legitimate heirs and was succeeded by his Catholic brother James II, who was ousted in favor of his Protesta
nt daughter Mary and her husband and cousin William of Orange. When they had both died, Mary’s sister Anne came to the throne. Sophie would have succeeded her, but died only months before Anne did. Charles II had at one point wanted to marry his cousin Sophie. It’s too bad he didn’t as it would likely have averted the succession crisis, the Jacobite uprisings, and the destruction of Scotland. But I digress….

  Doggett organized the race each year until 1721, the year that he died, and his will provided:

  for procuring yearly on the first day of August forever…Five Pounds for a Badge of Silver weighing about Twelve Ounces and representing Liberty to be given to be rowed for by Six Young Watermen according to my Custom, Eighteen Shillings for Cloath for a Livery whereon the said Badge is to be put…all which I would have to be continued yearly forever in Commemoration of His Majesty King Georges happy Accession to the Brittish Throne.

  The Fishmongers’ Company has set the regulations since 1769, and there have been some changes since Doggett’s day, when the race helped attract trade for the Watermen. The contestants originally battled against the outgoing tide, but since 1873 they have rowed with the incoming tide.

  The original wherries, which took about two hours to row from London to Chelsea, were succeeded by various other craft. Now the race is held on a Friday in late July, and the contestants use contemporary single racing sculls and complete the course from London Bridge to Cadogan Pier in Chelsea in about thirty minutes. The record, set by Bobby Prentice in 1973, was 23 minutes and 22 seconds.

  Originally, only professional watermen could compete, but since 1950 amateurs have been allowed to take part, though they do not accept monetary prizes. Claire Burran was the first woman to compete, in 1992. Modern contestants all receive a miniature of the silver badge, and the Fishmongers’ Company still hands out the prize money to the winners and the competing rowing clubs.