"Looke back at November 23:1658, and be astonish'd "

Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, unknown artist,  c. 1655    Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon

On 23rd November 1658, John Evelyn watched Oliver Cromwell's State Funeral procession.

"To Lond, to visit my Bro: & the next day saw the superb Funerall of the Protectors:  He was carried from Somerset-house in a velvet bed of state drawn by six horses houss'd with the same; The Pall held-up by his new Lords: Oliver lying in Effigie in royal robes,  and Crown'd with a Crown, scepter & Mund, like a King:
The Pendants, & Guidons were carried by the Officers of the Army, The Imperial banners, Atchivements &c by the Heraulds in their Coates, a rich caparizon'd Horse all embroidered over with Gold: a Knight of honour arm'd Cap a Pe & after all his Guards, Souldiers and innumerable mourners:"

Contemporary Plan of the Hearse (see Thomas Burton below*)

Although Cromwell constantly refused the Crown, his State funeral was conducted with all the splendour due a King of England.  He died on September 3rd, probably from septicaemia, and his body was embalmed and taken to Somerset House.    Here it lay in State on public display from mid-October, but this was a carved wood and wax effigy, which may have been in the coffin for the State funeral procession to Westminster Abbey on 23rd November.  The man himself had been buried privately at night in the Abbey on 10th November.

Westminster Abbey, engraving by Pieter van der Aa, 1707

The full State funeral procession numbered many hundreds of nobles, soldiers, Palace and Parliament servants and officials, all with their attendants and train bearers. Some ten separate groups were each preceded by a black plumed horse, with drums, trumpets, musicians and banners.  The procession was led by the Knight Marshall on horseback with gold-tipped truncheon and accompanying riders.  The hearse and pall bearers were led by the Chief Horse of Mourning  (in black velvet and plumes), and followed by the Horse of Honour, in embroidered crimson velvet with plumes of red, yellow and white.*  The whole event cost £60,000, about 7 million in today's money.

Tellingly, Evelyn continues his account:

"In this equipage they proceed to Westminster [with great pomp] &c: but it was the joyfullest funerall that ever I saw, for there was none that Cried, but dogs, which the souldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise; drinking, & taking Tabacco in the streets as they went."

Two years and two months later, after Charles II was restored, Evelyn also saw the reprisals of 30th January 1661, the anniversary of Charles I's death, when the corpses of Cromwell and two other regicides were dragged from their tombs in the Abbey and hanged at Tyburn.

A popular engraving of the scene, 1661

The corpses were  "then buried under that fatal & ignominious Monument, in a deepe pitt:  Thousands of people (who had seene them in all their pride & pompous insults) being spectators: looke back at November 22: 1658, & be astonish'd
--And (fear) God, & honor the King, but meddle not with them who are given to change".

Quotations from The Diary of John Evelyn, E. De Beer,  Clarendon Press, Oxford
* Details of the funeral procession from Thomas Burton's Diary 1658-9, British Library; see www.british-history.ac.uk

The Green Dwarf , a Tale of the Perfect Tense

If you like a dose of Victorian melodrama complete with an "unprincipled villain!", a stalwart Scottish hero and a tender heroine, plus battles, magic and some Gothic terror, I recommend The Green Dwarf.  

The Bard    John Martin, 1817  © Laing Art Gallery

This is a short novelette, written by Charlotte Bronte when she was seventeen, between her Roe Head schooldays and her first post as a teacher there.   Much of it is drawn from her and her siblings' juvenilia, all those tales and adventures inspired by the box of wooden toy soldiers her brother Branwell was given.  Isolated in Haworth parsonage,  Branwell and his sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, created the imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal.   Much of their juvenilia was inspired by their reading of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, the Arabian Nights Entertainment and the visionary landscapes of artist John Martin*, popular through his engravings.

 The Fire Worshippers, battle scene     John Martin (1789-1854)

 For this tale, Charlotte has taken the city of Verdopolis in Africa,  the setting for the "African Olympic Games" and its war with the Ashantee tribe, as the background to the romance between the lovely Lady Emily, her countenance of "a most fascinating but indescribable charm" and her beloved, the painter Mr Leslie.    Her artist hero is in fact the noble Scot, Lord St. Clair, but his humble disguise does not deceive his rival, the handsome but treacherous Colonel Percy, a man with "a spirit of deep, restless villainy".

The plot is convoluted, with several fey characters who are not what they seem, but under cover of darkness Colonel Percy double-crosses the lovers and abducts Lady Emily, to make her his wife. "Behold me, fair lady, and know into whose power you have fallen!"

Drawing of a  fair young lady, by Charlotte Bronte

©  British Library

Emily is all too human a heroine: she repudiates Percy's evil power over her with this stirring riposte:

 "Then here I remain till death or some happier chance relieves me, for not all the tortures that man's ingenuity could devise should ever induce me to marry one whose vices have sunk him so low in the ranks of humanity as yours have, one who openly renounces the dominion of honour, and declares that he has given himself up to the blind guidance of his own departed inclinations."...

but then - somewhat breathless? - she succumbs to Percy's taunts of how her uncle ("her careful and affectionate guardian") will be suffering at her disappearance:

"She leant her head upon her hand and burst into a flood of bitter tears".

Readers of Jane Eyre will note that Lady Emily is left in her gloomy prison to the care of her attendant "the withered hag Bertha".

Much of the story's charm is seventeen year old Charlotte's evident relish in her fantasy drama, larded with adjectives, but with some wonderful descriptions:
here is the Ashantee battle array at daybreak: "It was a gorgeous but terrific spectacle as the first sunbeams flashed on that dusky host, and lit up to fiercer radiance their bright weapons and all the barbarous magnificence of gold and gems in which most of the warriors were attired",

and here the forest at night:  "Darkly and dimly, branch rose above branch, each uplifting a thicker canopy of night like foliage, till not a single ray of light could find an opening by which to direct the belated travellers passing underneath."

Twilight in the Woodlands   John Martin  1850

©  Fitwilliam Museum

Despite the melodrama of plot, characters and language,  like a theatrical MC she firmly takes control and addresses her readers at regular intervals.

Introducing  the African Olympics, which is a pivotal occasion in the narrative,  "It is not my intention to give a full and detailed account of all that took place on that memorable day, I shall merely glance at the transactions which followed and then proceed to topics more nearly connected with my tale."

Further interjections dot the narrative :  "Having given the reader this necessary information I will now proceed with my narrative in a more detailed and less historical style…."With his opportune arrival my reader is already acquainted, … and "I must beg my reader to imagine that a space of six weeks has elapsed before he again beholds my hero…"

These interjections are Charlotte reining in her runaway enthusiasm for the story she is presenting, much like a teacher who has strayed far from the topic, returning to her text.
" It may now be as well to connect the broken thread of my rambling narrative before I proceed further … and now,  having cleared scores, I may trot on unencumbered. "

She herself describes The Green Dwarf as a brief and 'jejune' narrative,  but it is full of spirit and style,  with a clear underlying sense of its unreality, which her readers (originally her siblings)  are invited to share and enjoy.

Charlotte Bronte, 1816-1855,

 probably a posthumous portrait by John H. Thompson (1808-1890), a close friend of Branwell

© Bronte Parsonage Museum 

Extracts from The Green Dwarf  by Charlotte Bronte, 1833,   Hesperus Press 2003

*John Martin appears in the story as the character Edward de Lisle, a successful artist.

" Not so Quiet " - the costs of war (Helen Zenna Smith)

Helen Zenna Smith was a pseudonym for Evadne Price*, journalist and popular children's writer, asked by her publisher to write a spoof of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front  (1929) from a woman's point of view:-  "All Quaint …by Erica Remarks".  Instead, after reading Remarque,  she wrote her searing account of the VAD women ambulance drivers in France, drawing on the real diaries of driver Winifred Constance Young.

A visceral indictment of the young women's physical and mental misery, both on and off duty, engulfed with cold, pain, filth, hunger and fear, relying on the comradeship of fellow drivers to help them survive each day.  These sheltered middle-class girls had to drive out repeatedly to the train station for convoys of wounded men to be loaded into their ambulances, night and day, and then drive around a shattered landscape (often during shelling) to find their numbered hospital stations.

Loading ambulances at Ypres,  Gilbert Rogers 1919

 Crown © Imperial War Museum

She is even more savage on the consequences of war.  She pulls no punches at all.

"Boom-a boom-booma-boom- boommm!
'God I hate those bloody guns', mutters Tosh and this time B.F. is silent.  We stare ahead.  We hate and dread the days following on the guns when they boom without interval. Trainloads of broken human beings: half-mad men pleading to be put out of their misery; torn and bleeding and crazed men pitifully obeying orders like a herd of senseless cattle, dumbly, pitifully straggling in the wrong direction, as senseless as a flock of senseless sheep obeying a senseless leader, herded back into line by the orderly, the kind sheep-dog with a 'Now then, boys, this way. That's the ticket, boys',  instead of a bark; men with faces bleeding through their hasty bandages; men with vacant eyes and mouths hanging foolishly apart dropping saliva and slime; men with minds mercifully gone; men only too sane, eyes horror-filled with blood and pain…"
…..  "Tears tear at my heart...awful tears that rack me, but must not rise to my eyes, for they will freeze on my cheeks and stick my eyelids together until I cannot see to drive.  Even the solace of pitying tears is denied me."

A V.A.D. motor driver   Gilbert Rogers

©  Imperial War Museum

She rages bitterly against those flag-wavers like her mother, writing to her from home safe in Wimbledon Common:

"Committees …committees…committees…. recruiting meetings.  She has seventeen more recruits than Mrs Evans-Mawnington up to date.  My brother Bertie won't be satisfied until he gets to the trenches…she doesn't fancy the idea, but of course she is proud her son wants to fight for the Dear Old Flag.   The cat has had three kittens, three dear fluffy balls of fur …Mons, Wipers and Liege… rather sweet, don't I think?  Mrs Evans-Mawnington is boasting that Roy Evans-Mawnington is on his last leave before going out to the trenches.  Simply awful if  Roy got out there before Bertie.  Darling, I don't know how proud mother is of me and Trix and Bertie.  My three heroes...  so-and-so-and-so ….my affectionate mother, whose little daughter is … Doing her bit."

Menin Gate, Ypres,   Richard Tennant Cooper

© Royal Signals Museum, Blandford

"What is to happen to women like me when the killing is done and peace comes …if it ever comes?  What will they expect of us, these elders who have sent us out to fight?   We sheltered young women who smilingly stumbled from the chintz-covered drawing rooms of the suburbs straight into hell?" 

Extracts from Not So Quiet,  Helen Zenna Smith, 1930

* Evadne Price became a WWII war correspondent in 1943 and was there for the  liberation of the camps and the  Nuremburg trials.

November Labours: Martinmas, killing pigs and swingling flax

Traditonally, November is the month for killing cattle and pigs to preserve their meat,  when there was little fodder to spare for livestock and the main drive was to lay in provisions  to last the household through the harsh winter months.  Many Calendars show pigs, as in the fifteenth century rhyme,
 "At Martinesmasse [11th November] I kylle my swine".
This medieval manuscript decoration shows a labourer with what might be a poleaxe, stunning the pig before it is despatched with the blade.

(Wikimedia commons)

Other Calendar versions for November show pigs still being  herded in the woodlands,  as in this late fifteenth century French calendar, with the zodiac sign of Sagittarius clearly having loosed his arrow below.  And is the young man in the background out to catch a bird?

Heures de la Reine Anne de Bretagne, Paris

© National Library of France

Anne of Brittany (1477-1514) was Queen Consort to two kings of France, Charles VIII and then his succeeding cousin Louis XII. Four surviving  Books of Hours bear her name. By the sixteenth century royal collectors liked their new style printed books to have hand-painted illustrations, and also still commissioned traditional illuminated manuscripts.

For those who did not have to labour, hunting was a source of meat as well as a pastime, and this later Venetian image for November shows a very relaxed young man with his dogs and hunting horn and again with a small bird - sparrow hawk, delicacy or pet?

Month of November,  oil painting, Venice c. 1580

© National Gallery London

And this November image from  the Da Costa Hours  is unusual as it shows an image from textile production - the preparation of flax, an important crop for seed (linseed oil), straw and linen. Flanders, where this painting was done, was a centre for the linen trade. 

Detail from November: Swingling Flax, Da Costa Book of Hours c.1515  Ghent

After being retted, which used water or outside weathering to soften the stalks, the flax was beaten to break up the fibres and separate them from the straw and woody stems.  

This "swingling" was done with a heavy ridged or toothed tool, although probably not in such an artistically neat circle as this. A scutching tool was also used to dress the flax, with a thin edge one side like knife.   The woman in the background is using one.  Finally the fibres would be combed, or "heckled" to remove the last shreds of straw and wood.  

It is clearly a winter occupation as the manuscript pages below are consecutive,  with bare trees and the pigs in the farmyard, and the actual calendar page ends with a fine Sagittarius as the zodiac tailpiece.

November illustration from the Da Costa Book of Hours, Simon Bening, Ghent c. 1515. 

From the coats of arms on the cover,  thought to be made for a wealthy family in Porto, Portugal, and then owned by Don Alvaro da Costa, the King's chamberlain.   © Morgan Library, NYK

From the Da Costa Book of Hours, as above.