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

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  He was a naval officer, yes, of great daring and flamboyance—his raids on the French coast are the stuff of legend. (He and Nelson were rivals.) But he was also a fine intelligence agent and in 1798, he was incarcerated in the high-security Temple Prison in Paris (running his spy ring from his cell there) at exactly the time Napoleon was gaining permission from the Directory for his Egyptian expedition.

  On a panel of wood in his cell, Smith inscribed this, by Rousseau:

  Fortune’s wheel makes strange revolutions, it must be confessed; but for the term revolution to be applicable, the turn of the wheel must be complete. You are today as high as you can be. Very well. I envy not your good fortune, for mine is better still. I am as low in the career of ambition as a man can well descend; so that, let this capricious dame, fortune, turn her wheel ever so little—I must necessarily mount, for the same reason you must descend.

  But Smith then made it personal for Bonaparte, and wrote:

  I make not this remark to cause you any uneasiness, but rather to bring you that consolation which I shall feel when you are arrived at the same point where I now am—yes! at the same point where I now am. You will inhabit this same prison—why not as well as I? I no more thought of such a thing, than you do at present, before I was actually shut up in it.

  On 24 April 1798, Smith escaped, courtesy of a daring raid by French Royalists.

  Once free, he returned to Britain, and was dispatched to Constantinople in October 1798 (his brother was ambassador there), given command of the 80 gun battleship, Tigre, and full powers to command the effort against Napoleon in the Levant. Sultan Selim, in response to the incursion into his territory, had declared war on France. He also admired Smith very much and put him in charge of the sea and land forces being assembled for the purpose of driving the French out of the Levant.

  So, fast-forward to January 1799.

  Bonaparte and his French troops have conquered, so to speak, Egypt. He has set up a government to suit himself. He has robbed the place of as many antiquities and treasures as he can manage. He’s ordered the slaughter of the Al-Azhar mosque and neighbourhood in response to their insurrection against him. The place is under martial law.

  His troops have been decimated by disease and dehydration. He has no transport to get his men back home. Clearly it’s now time to swing into action up the east coast of the Mediterranean to take Constantinople and/or open up an overland route to India. Preferably both.

  Up the coast the 13,000 French troops march, across the Sinai desert with little food and less water.

  First stop Jaffa. Which they storm and take in an orgy of slaughter, killing civilians and soldiers alike, at the beginning of March. Once in control, the French provision themselves, but they also come into contact with bubonic plague (again).

  Nevertheless, from there, they march up around the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, arriving at Haifa on 17 March from which the citadel of Acre—long fought over during the Crusades—is visible by telescope.

  And across that stretch of blue water, Napoleon sees something he had not planned on: British battleships and Turkish gunboats in the harbour. (Their total control of the sea-lanes also meant his transport ships carrying all his heavy siege guns were seized and he was wholly deprived of news from home or from base-camp in Egypt.)

  Yet still, determined to fulfill his destiny as the new Alexander (yes, he really did believe that!), Napoleon presses on, and on 18 March, the French take up their position before the walls of Acre.

  The citadel at Acre is built on a promontory, with only one side facing land—the rest surrounded by water—and possessing a very neat little harbour.

  Now the Governor of Acre had for the past 25 years been Pasha el-Djezzar. (Djezzar translates as either Butcher or Cutter—a soubriquet more than earned by his treatment of his enemies.) He had certainly talked big, and threatened all manner of savagery against the French when they were in Egypt, but he was rather inclined to abandon Acre once the chips were down. Smith talked him into staying on.

  With one of the Royalist spies who had rescued him from the Temple—an engineer who had shared a desk with Napoleon at school, Louis-Edmond Phelippeaux—Smith and Djezzar had reinforced the walls and land-facing towers.

  Still, under the constant battery of guns, the French dug their trenches and opened siege on 28 March with their field guns. They also sent an army officer under a flag of truce to demand surrender, but Djezzar threw him into prison.

  When a breach was opened in the walls of one of the towers, the French were not only repulsed but also ran into a dry moat and found their scaling ladders were too short; hence they retreated under fire. Within days, they were running out of ammunition, so Napoleon offered rewards for cannonballs.

  Djezzar offered a bounty for enemy heads.

  By early April, the French had launched another assault which had failed, but more worryingly, the sappers had dug their trenches almost to the walls and were attempting to mine one of the towers.

  A sortie by the British drove them off, but by mid-April they were back driving the mine under the tower. On the 24th, the mine was blown, but they’d miscalculated the position and only the front wall of the tower’s lower storey had collapsed. French troops stormed the breach, but again were driven back.

  Meanwhile, the Turks were sending reinforcements both by land and sea, and Napoleon had to dash off to scatter the reinforcements in a series of skirmishes and battles, most notably the Battle of Mount Tabor. There is no doubt that here, the French fought bravely against overwhelming (but rather disorganised) odds.

  Another mine had now been dug under the same tower (which they called the Cursed Tower). Yet again, the tower only partially collapsed and the storming French troops were pelted with rocks and grenades and finally repelled with powder kegs filled with burning mixtures of gunpowder and sulpher—they’re known as stink pots, these missiles, for the clouds of acrid smoke they give off.

  At last, the replacement siege guns which Napoleon had requested sent overland arrived at the end of the month. Though it took them six days to set them up, Smith was expecting defeat and wrote to tell the Admiralty so.

  On 7 May the newly installed French siege guns began pounding away, and it seemed an end was inevitable.

  But again, British seapower came to the rescue and that evening, ships carrying supplies and reinforcements arrived.

  Napoleon, seeing this, and never a patient man, stepped up the bombardment, and French troops finally occupied the the second storey of the Cursed Tower. But not for long.

  In the morning, Smith himself led a party of Marine reinforcements and took back the breach, holding it until more reinforcements arrived. (This act of heroism shamed Pasha Djezzar, and he ordered his own troops to stand and fight, which they did with rather frightening gusto.)

  Meanwhile, Napoleon had been busy spreading propaganda—he was a master of it. And he’d had printed two sets of pamphlets, one for Christians and one for Muslims. For the benefit of the Christians, he claimed he was the natural successor of those great men, the Crusaders, and a defender of Christian faith. To the Muslims, he declared that he had already destroyed the power of the pope in Rome and the Knights of St. John in Malta and that he was the true defender of Islam.

  Smith got hold of these. And ordered them distributed amongst the opposite factions of those for whom they were intended. Local goodwill dried up to parching.

  He also had bundles of leaflets dropped into the French trenches offering on behalf of the Sultan a free passage out of Syria for any soldiers wise enough to lay down their arms.

  Napoleon was incandescent, and wrote, “Smith is a crazy young man....”

  Having survived the latest assaults and secure in the knowledge that the garrison was reinforced and supplied, Smith sat back (if you can call it that) and watched with en
joyment as the effects of his propaganda war took hold. The French position was now untenable.

  Still, Napoleon was determined to have one more go—he’d never been defeated before—and on 10 May, in the full glare of a sweltering Middle Eastern sun, the final French assault was launched. Though Napoleon wanted to lead it himself, he was persuaded not to. General Kleber led the assault, while Smith led the defence.

  The French were beaten to a standstill and Kleber ordered a retreat.

  And Smith, cheeky as ever, wrote to Napoleon:

  General, I am acquainted with the dispositions that for some days past you have been making to raise the siege; the preparations in hand to carry off your wounded, and to leave none behind you, do you great credit. This last word ought not to escape my mouth—I, who ought not to love you, to say nothing more: but the circumstances remind me to wish that you would reflect on the instability of human affairs.

  In fact, could you have thought that a poor prisoner in the cell of the Temple prison—that an unfortunate for whom you refused, for a single moment, to give yourself any concern, being at the same time able to render him a signal service, since you were then all-powerful—could you have thought, I say, that this same man would have become your antagonist, and have compelled you, in the midst of the sands of Syria, to raise the siege of a miserable, almost defenceless town? Such events, you must admit, exceed all human calculations.

  Believe me, general, adopt sentiments more moderate, and that man will not be your enemy, who shall tell you that Asia is not a theatre made for your glory. This letter is a little revenge that I give myself.

  Napoleon was beaten.

  He cut his losses and on 20 May began the retreat to Egypt with his exhausted and ill troops, over a third of his original force either dead or disabled. Although he claimed victory when he returned to Cairo, by the end of August, he had abandoned his troops in Egypt, hurried back to France alone, proclaiming his venture a success, taking charge of the army, and before long, the nation.

  In 1808, he ordered the demolition of the Temple prison—he said, because it had become a place of Royalist pilgrimage as both Louis XVI and Louis XVII had been held there. Others maintained it was so that Smith’s prophecy could never come true and he would never be incarcerated there.

  Madness in Their Method: Water Therapy in Georgian and Regency Times

  by Lucinda Brant

  Using water to treat illness, known today as hydrotherapy, is a practice dating back to Ancient Egypt. Greek and Roman historians also mention the use of water in the treatment of muscle fatigue, hydrophobia, and fever. Using water therapy as a psychiatric tool is attributed to Jean Baptiste Van Helmont’s massive medical tome the Ortus Medicinae published in 1643 and translated into English by John Chandler in 1662.

  Van Helmont advocated water immersion therapy in the treatment of mental illness. The patient was fully immersed in cold water until the point of unconsciousness and thus at the point at which the patient could drown, because he believed near death immersion in cold water could “kill the mad idea” which caused mental derangement.

  Naturally, this was a very dangerous technique and never became widespread. However, Van Helmont’s staunch belief in using water as a treatment for mental illness was taken up by various medical institutions and practitioners across Europe so that by the 18th century, the “water-cure” in its various forms became one of a number of standard treatments used by physicians and insane asylums when dealing with all manner of psychiatric conditions.

  The two main types of water cure were the douche or cold shower and the balneum or bath. The douche required cold water be poured over the patient’s head or sprayed at the patient’s body to cool the heat of madness if insane or rouse the depressed if suffering from melancholia. The bath was used to calm overwrought nerves and to encourage sleep.

  In the early years of this type of therapy, most cures were performed out of doors near a source of water—the sea or a pond. This allowed for public viewing. However, as asylums, both public and private, became more widespread in the 18th century, water cures were moved indoors. Inside and away from the public eye and an immediate source of water, institutions and their practitioners developed inventive ways and a wide variety of apparatuses to deliver water therapy to the mad and melancholic.

  There were cold shower rooms, bath boxes that shut patients in, shower contraptions that delivered water at intervals via a system of pulleys and levers, dunking devices that immersed patients at regular intervals into small ponds as the device rotated and turned on giant cogs, and there was the simple ladder and bucket method that involved the patient sitting in a wooden barrel while behind a screen attendants ran up and down ladders with buckets of water that they poured onto the patient’s head from a great height.

  And then there was “the chair”. Benjamin Rush wrote in a letter:

  I have contrived a chair and introduced it to our [Pennsylvania] Hospital to assist in curing madness. It binds and confines every part of the body. By keeping the trunk erect, it lessens the impetus of blood toward the brain. By preventing the muscles from acting, it reduces the force and frequency of the pulse, and by the position of the head and feet favors the easy application of cold water or ice to the former and warm water to the latter. Its effects have been truly delightful to me. It acts as a sedative to the tongue and temper as well as to the blood vessels. In 24, 12, six, and in some cases in four hours, the most refractory patients have been composed. I have called it a Tranquillizer.

  This water therapy was used by some physicians as a means of treating married women who had become “mildly distracted” and had opted out of their marital responsibilities (i.e. didn’t want to have sex with their husband). One such practitioner who used the method to sadistic effect was Patrick Blair.

  Blair had his female patients blindfolded, stripped, and strapped to a bathing chair. The woman was then subjected to 30 minutes of water being sprayed directly into her face. When the woman refused to agree to return to the marital bed, Blair went one step further and repeated the treatment for 60 minutes, then 90 minutes, and when she promised obedience Blair allowed her to sleep.

  Yet, the next day, sensing the woman was “sullen” and probably had only agreed because of the treatment, he again had her strapped to the chair and subjected to the treatment at intervals over the next two days. Finally, exhausted after such physical and mental torture, the woman succumbed and agreed to become a “loving and obedient and dutiful wife forever thereafter”. To make certain she did, Blair visited her at her home a month later and was happy to report “everything was in good order”.

  Patrick Blair is the model for Sir Titus Foley in my novel Autumn Duchess, a dandified and well-respected physician whose medical forte is treating females for melancholia.

  When Antonia, Dowager Duchess of Roxton, is seen to be excessively melancholy and is still wearing mourning three years after the death of the Duke, her loving son is at his wits’ end, and he instructs Sir Titus to treat his mother, little realizing that part of his treatment is the use of water therapy.

  Thankfully, Blair’s sadistic treatment of his female patients was not the norm. Yet, most physicians, indeed most people in the 18th and early 19th centuries, viewed water therapy in its various forms as an acceptable means of coercing, treating, and hopefully curing patients with various mental, melancholic, and recalcitrant afflictions.

  By the mid-18th century water therapy had become a standard treatment in the “mad doctor” medical bag. Yet, in this Age of Enlightenment, when many people came to view the shackling of the mad as inhumane, there were those physicians who advocated the use of water therapy not only as a cure but as a more humane means of coercion, thus doing away with the need for physical restraints. Thus water therapy was not only used on the mad and those suffering from depression, it was used by some physicians in the good-n
atured belief that it would persuade patients who had veered from the path of what society viewed as “normal” behavior to “get back on track”.

  Sources

  “Annual Report to the Friends (July 2005-June 2006).” The Institute for the History of Psychiatry. Cornell University, New York.

  Porter, Dorothy and Roy Porter. Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-century England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.

  Porter, Roy. Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine. London: Allen Lane, 2002.

  Rush, Benjamin. The Letters of Benjamin Rush: 1761-1792. Edited by Lyman Henry Butterfield. Princeton University Press, 1951.

  Scull, Andrew. Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

  Stourhead: Painting with Nature

  by M.M. Bennetts

  Stourhead. Home to the famous Hoare family—bankers to Catherine of Braganza, Vanbrugh, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen.

  Along with Wilton and Longleat, it is one of the great houses—surrounded by gardens, of course—of south Wiltshire. And it has been a must-see destination for garden visitors for over two centuries.

  In 1717, Henry Hoare, the son of the man who’d founded Hoare’s Bank, bought Stourton Manor and promptly had the crumbling half-derelict mediaeval-Tudor pile pulled down.

  Then, with Colen Campbell (champion of the newest thing in architecture) as his architect, he set about rebuilding a new Palladian villa, which he would call Stourhead, on an adjacent site. Yet, unlike so many of their contemporaries who sought land-owning respectability and the political power that came with it, the Hoares did not disengage from the business which had made the family rich. Rather the family continued on doing that which they did very well—banking and making money...even as they turned their excess profits into land and Parliamentary influence.