"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

St Valentine's day: Love and death for the Merry Monarch, Charles II

Pierre Mignard painted this flattering portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Charles II's French Catholic mistress, in 1682 in Paris; some years later he became Louis XIV's first painter.
The distinctive blue sleeves may have been from a studio prop, and the negro child, the coral, nautilus shell, and the pearls all contrast with Louise's pearly skin, and also hint at the "vanitas" of earthly love.

Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth,   Perre Mignard, 1682

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Charles II had many mistresses - or "Valentines",  over the years, most famously English-born Nell Gwyn, and it was her rival Louise de Keroualle she was referring to, in her famous quip "I am the Protestant whore!" during a period of anti-Catholic demonstrations.

There were constant rumours that the King himself was a closet Catholic, and almost certainly died as such on 6th February 1685.   It was to avoid such anti-Catholic disturbances that Charles II was quietly buried between eight and nine at night on St Valentine's Day, 14th February 1685, as John Evelyn recounts:

"the King was [this night] very obscurely buried in a vault under Hen: 7th Chapell in Westminster, without any manner of pomp, and soone forgotten after all this vainity, & the face of the whole Court exceedingly changed into a more solemn and moral behaviour: The new King affecting neither Prophanesse, nor bouffonry:  All the Greate Officers broke their white-Staves on the Grave &c: according to form:"  Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. De Beer

Henry VII's Chapel, © Westminster Abbey

Evelyn's friend, Samuel Pepys, whose Diary tells us so much about Charles II and his Court in the 1660s,  also records Valentine's Day merrymaking, a mixture or romance, sex, and 'bouffonry'.  It was the custom for groups of friends to draw lots for their Valentines for the forthcoming year, and give their ladies gifts. John Locke writes to his Oxford valentine in 1659: "I have an overflow of happiness and honour in being yours though a Lottery made me soe, and you have given no small proofs of an excellent and obliging nature in accepting such a trifle from the hand of fortune. "

You were also expected to take as your Valentine the first person of the opposite sex whom you saw that morning:
"14. St.  Valentine. 
This morning comes betimes Dicke Pen[n] to be my wife's valentine, and came to our bedside.  By the same token I had him brought to my side, thinking to have made him kiss me, but he perceived me and would not. So went to his Valentine -- a notable, stout, witty boy.  I up, about business; and opening the door, there was Bagwell's wife, with whom I talked afterwards and she had the confidence to say she came with a hope to be time enough to be my Valentine, and so endeed she did -- but my oath preserved me from losing any time with her."  Samuel Pepys, Diary 1665

In May 1660, Pepys sailed with Edward Lord Montague to the Hague, part of the  convoy to bring King Charles and his brother James back to England, where Pepys was presented to the King, his brother James, Duke of York and their sister Mary, the Princess Royal.  Before this, Charles and his attendants in exile had been living in penury, " in a sad, poor condition for clothes and money…their clothes not being worth 40s., the best of them".

Here is Charles as Prince of Wales with his siblings in happier times, with on the left in the painting Princess Mary, whose son would reign as William III, and Charles' brother James, still in long skirts, who would succeed Charles as King James II, in February 1685.

The five eldest children of Charles I,  copy after Anthony Van Dyck 1637

© National Portrait Gallery

23rd February, 1633

Yesterday I was distracted by a lost phone and completely missed Samuel Pepys' birthday.  His family came from Cambridgeshire, but he was born in Salisbury Court, just beside St. Bride's.  Known as the printers' church, and where Wynkyn de Worde is buried, the church Pepys knew from childhood was burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666, and the famous church we see today, with its wedding cake spire, was built by Wren in 1672. (see www.stbrides.com)

St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London

© photo Nick Weall

Although Pepys could be pompous, promiscuous, selfish and pleasure-loving,  he was also brave, far-sighted, enquiring and extremely hard-working.  Many of his birthdays were ordinary working days, ("up early and to the office,") but in February1662 it was --

"Lord's day.  My cold being increased, I stayed at home all day, pleasing myself with my dining-room, now graced with pictures, and reading of Dr. Fullers worthys.  So I spent the day; and at night comes Sir. W. Pen and supped and talked with me.  This day, by God's mercy I am 29 years of age, and in very good health and like to live and get an estate; and if I have a heart to be contented, I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world - for which God be praised. So to prayers and bed."

In the last year of his Diary, 1669,  on 23rd February he works at the office all morning, and later takes his wife and the maids to see Westminster Abbey (it was Shrove Tuesday): " and there did show them all the tombs very finely…; and here we did see, by very perticular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands.  And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen."

We can respect his ambition for self-improvement, but it his great zest for life which springs from the pages of his Diary.

Quotations from The Shorter Pepys, © R. Latham and W. Matthews, and Magdalene College, Cambridge

A town and country life for Constable

"My wife is at Hampstead, and both she and the infant are doing well.  I am endeavouring to secure a permanent small house there, and have put the upper part of this house into an upholsterer's hands to let, made my painting room warm and comfortable and have become an inhabitant of my parlours.  I am three miles from door to door, and can have a message in an hour.  I shall be more out of the way of idle caller, and above all, see nature, and unite a town and country life, and to all these things I hope to add a plan of economy…"

Letter to John Fisher, from  Charlotte Street,  November 28th 1826


" …This house is to my wife's heart's content; it is situated on an eminence… and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend.  The dome of St. Paul's in the air seems to realise Michael Angelo's words on seeing the Pantheon: 'I will build such a thing in the sky.'  We see the woods and lofty grounds of the East Saxons to the north-east.   …I have painted one of my best pictures here."

Letter to John Fisher, from  Well Walk, Hampstead,  Aug 26th 1827

Memoirs of the Life of John Constable  C.R. Leslie

Miching Mallecho Esquire

...when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopl'd marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, --

Dedication to Peter Bell the Third by Miching Mallecho Esquire, 1819  Percy Bysshe Shelley

[Waterloo Bridge was opened in June 1817 - see John Constable's painting]