The Brimstone Butterfly

Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.

2012-01-11T06:10:00.000Z

Flitting to and from the ancient market town of Kingstonupon Thames every fortnight, the Brimstone Butterflywill often alight upon the venerable 1650s wooden staircase, which once adornedthe Crown Inn. It lacks the stately splendour of the King’s Staircase at Hampton Court, made for King William III four decadeslater, but it possesses a singular rustic charm. I believe it has yielded upmost of its secrets to me, the latest being the initials FoD, which had beencarved into one of the handrails. They look to have been done at a much laterdate than the others though and somewhat furtively to boot.

On my last visit to KingstonI also had a chance to go into the upper council chamber inside the 19^th century Guildhall. A guildhall has stood on this site since the reign ofElizabeth I and its size and shape follows a pattern which can be found up anddown England.The panelled wooden doors are rather impressive and the cornicing an eleganttouch. I was disappointed not to find animposing fireplace set within the council chamber. The chimney piece is stillthere so it would have been graced with an open fireplace at one stage. All I found was a workman eating hissandwiches on a small set of stairs. He kindly allowed me to take pictures ofthe room whilst he munched away.

Kingston oncehad a myriad of public houses and it struck me that other facades with carvedwooden bunches of grapes might well have served as inns in previous centuries.It is very difficult for the uninitiated such as me to always work out which facadesare authentic and which have been remodelled in the 20^th century. SoI will simply reproduce some of the more striking facades which took my fancy.

Kingston datesback to Anglo Saxon era. Indeed, it was once so central to Anglo Saxon lifethat seven kings held their coronations in what is now the modern market place,before being carried into the nearby All Saints church to be anointed with holyoil and crowned king. Edward the Elder was the first Anglo Saxon king to becrowned here in 902. He was the grandson of the legendary King Alfred theGreat, who was not so great when it came to baking cakes. According totradition, Alfred managed to burn some cakes a woman has asked him to watchover whist she busied herself elsewhere. I managed to decapitate and burnseveral gingerbread men and women I made over the weekend using a 19th centuryFlemish mould of musicians and a Delia Smith recipe, so I shall forbearcriticising my regal counterpart.

When the Normansinvaded Englandin 1066 they preferred to choose Londonas their capital leaving the Anglo Saxon church in Kingstonto fall into a steady decline. It was to be another 50 years or so before the AngloSaxon church was finally replaced with a much larger one by Gilbert the Norman,Sheriff of Surrey, in 1120. Gilbert also established the priory at Merton,which was later to become one of the greatest ecclesiastical buildings inmedieval England.One of its most famous former students was Thomas a Beckett, who later becameArchbishop of Canterbury. Henry VIII had Merton Priory pulled down in the 1538and had much of its masonry carted off to help build his new palace of Nonesuch, which was itself laterdemolished in the late 17^th century by the avaricious Barbara Palmer.The latter was one of King Charles II’s mistresses and persuaded her royallover to hand the palace over to her so she could pull it down and sell off thedemolition material as part of her wages of sin. Poor Gilbert the Norman did not have muchsuccess with his churches and little can be seen of his original church atKingston as major changes were again made to the structure in the 15^thand 16^th centuries.

Inside the church I came across a number of intriguingmemorials and monuments.

A granite slab denoted the grave of William Cleave, theAlderman who had died in 1667 and left money for an almshouse and land tomaintain 12 poor people of the parish “for ever.” The almshouses survive oninto the 21^st century and very charming they are too.

In August last year I had come across some later almshousebequeathed by Henry Bridges in 1720 innearby Thames Ditton. I had had to change trains and platforms at the railwaystation and seen the almshouses from afar and decided to investigatefurther. As at William Cleave’s almshousesthe fortunate occupants were given their own front door. The same was not truefor the denizens of Sir Robert Geffrye’s almshouses at Shoreditch, now better known as the Geffrye Museum.

Despite being grander in scale than William Cleave’salmshouses at Kingston, Sir RobertGeoffrye’s house offered the occupants only their own room, albeit large, asopposed to a small terraced house.

Sir Robert and William also have anotherconnection beyond almshouses which I chanced upon on a recent visit. A monumenton the wall revealed that Sir Robert’s daughter Sarah, by his wife Temperance,was buried near William Cleave.

There are several medieval monuments which have survived hecenturies including the brass effigies of Robert Skerne and his wife Joanna, who both look like a more upmarket version of my unbaked gingerbread men and women..Joanna looks rather fetching in her long draped gown, cloak and elaborate headdress. Her claim to fame was that she was the daughter of Edward III through hismistress Alice Ferrers. Like Barbara Palmer in the 17^th century, Alicewas determined to make the most of being the king’s mistress and milk him forall she could, not that she had to try too hard. Edward III was exceedinglygenerous to Alice who became his mistress at the age of 15 in 1363, whilst still serving as alady in waiting to his queen, Phillippa. On the latter’s death, Edward becameeven more prodigious in his generosity, endowing Alice with yet more land aswell as his late wife’s jewels. Now that he was a widower Edward openlyacknowledged Alice as his mistressand had her dress in cloth of gold so she could be presented to the Court inthe guise of The Lady of the Sun. Edward’s behaviour make Alicemany enemies at court. They seized their chance on the king’s death to have herput on trial for corruption and subsequently banished from England.She forfeited her land in the process. In time the resilient Alicereturned to her native country and endeavoured to get back herproperty. She died at 53 making her the same age at the Brimstone Butterfly,although the latter has never knowingly had an affair with a king nor worncloth of gold, although her 19^th century wedding kimono, thehighlight of her tour of her bedchamber, does have gold thread woven throughit.

Another brass memorial has fared less well. In the 20th century some shameless thief stole the figure of the kneeling lady's husband as well as the family coat of arms.

I felt a tad sorry for Sir Anthony Benn who died in 1618.You go to all that trouble to have a splendid tomb with a terracotta life sizeand life like effigy placed on top of it, then someone in the 21^st centuryruins the entire effect by placing a red plastic swing bin next to it. I couldfind out very little about Sir Anthony other than he had been a Recorder ofKingston and London and that hewrote a manuscript called “Advice to Amabella” his daughter in 1615. Themanuscript now resides in the State Library of Victoria and I would dearly love toknow what he counseled. Perhaps it contains the 17^th century version ofthe Vulcan salute: Live long and Prosper. Dying in her nineties after having marriedtwo Earls in succession, Amabella certainly lived up to the Vulcan saying.

In his third edition of his work “Survey of London”published in 1618 John Stowe dedicates his book to Sir Anthony Benn amongstothers. A century later in 1720 JohnStrype used John Stowe’s book as the starting point for his own great work onLondon :A survey of the Cities of London and Westminster In the latter SirRobert Geffrye’s almshouses are referred to thus:

“large Extent and Capacity, and well endowed: A great Sum ofMoney being left for that Purpose to the Company of Ironmongers of London, bySir Robert Jefferies, Kt. and Alderman. It hath two Wings, and Rooms below andabove, very fair and beautifully built. It may contain between forty and fiftyInhabitants, who may be either Men or Women: And have each six Pound per Ann.allowed them; and Gowns every two Years. There is a Chapel in the middle of theBuilding, fronting the Highway; and a Chaplain, who hath a Salary and Chamberallotted him: He is to read Prayers twice a Day, and to preach a Sermon everySunday. The Building is not yet quite finished; nor the Court Yard levelled”.

I was rather put off the memorial to Henry Davidson when Ilater discovered he had made his money from sugar and slaves even if he didleave a widow called Elizabeth Caroline, whose death is recorded on the bas relief Grecian urn..

But I was charmed bythe statue of Theodosia Louisa,Countess of Liverpool, reclining in her chair and in deep though, her daintyfoot peeking out from beneath her long skirts. Louisa had been the wife of the BritishPrime Minister and according to the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1829 she had beeninterred at Hawksebury in 1821 following her death at the age of 54 ( only oneyear older than Alice Ferrers) so whyher monument ended up at Kingston I do not know. However, I did admire theinscription that proclaimed she had “kept herself unspotted from the world” asindeed has the Brimstone Butterfly.

As well as the stonecountess the church boasts fragments of a Saxon stone cross from the original10^th century church. Outside can be seen a reinstated fragment of the original Saxon wall.

Thus ends theBrimstone Butterfly’s perambulation around Kingston’s All Saints Church in the year of our Lord2012.

Post Script

On the subject ofchurches, for the past couple of Christmases the Brimstone Butterfly has spentpart of Christmas Day in the company of the celebrated Romantic poet, SamuelTaylor Coleridge and his family. Or rather, she has sat in a pew by hisgravestone in the central aisle of St Michael’s Church Highgate. The poet spenthis latter years as the house guest of his doctor who owned a fine residenceclose by the church. In fact, the good doctor added a special wing for hisillustrious guest to live in. The 20^th century playwright JBPriestley also lived in the house. It is now lived in by a supermodel and giventhe tendency of modern publishers to pay them huge sums to put pen to paper or atleast allow their name to appear above another’s actual scribbling, she will nodoubt add to the house’s great literary heritage in the fullness of time.

A king's, an earl's and a pauper's library.

2012-01-07T23:26:00.007Z

Over the past couple of weeks the Brimstone Butterfly has flitted between three very different libraries.

Being in close proximity to my beloved Kenwood House I could not resist paying a visit to the 18^th century mansion designed by Robert Adam and I am very glad that I did so too. Rather like me Kenwood House is beginning to fall apart at the edges. Unlike me, it is undergoing a comprehensive renovation to restore it to its former glory.

Work has started on the service block and only the Brewery House restaurant, the scene of my encounter with a former Spice Girl and erstwhile neighbour, was open, the rest of the block being shrouded in scaffolding. The photographs above were taken in 2010. I realised I had inadvertently taken a picture of a rotting pillar. It aptly demonstrates why Kenwood House was so in need of major restoration. Unfortunately the main house itself is scheduled to close for renovation in April 2012 and not reopen until September 2013, a veritable life time away for the bereft Brimstone Butterfly.

Other parts of the house are currently closed including the upper gallery containing both the intriguing Suffolk Collection of 17^th century portraits and the rather temperamental resident ghost. But I was able to view the other paintings on display including works by Rembrandt and Vermeer and the rather touching double portrait of the 19^th century dandy Beau Brummell as a small child with his brother. The portrait if the Beau is rather sad if one knows how his life ended: as a raving lunatic in a French asylum, the fastidious man of fashion reduced by the ravages of syphilis to a doubly incontinent shadow of his former self. One of the “new” books on display recently at my local library was Ian Kelly’s excellent biography of Beau Brummell, which I first mentioned on here in April 2010.

Last year, I visited Syon House which, like Kenwood House, had also been designed by Robert Adam. The elegant Dining Room at Syon is graced with a screen of Corinthian columns at either end, placed behind apsidal recesses. (The latter simply describes a semi-dome like effect). The Dining Room was finished in 1763. Robert Adam added similar Corinthian screens and apsidal recesses to the Earl of Mansfield’s Library at Kenwood a few years later. However, whereas the Dining Room at Syon has a gold and cream colour scheme, the Library at Kenwood used a much more colourful palette. In addition, it included wall paintings based on those found at Pompeii. By contrast the wall paintings of Ancient Rome at Syon are monochromatic.

To my great disappointment I could only step a few paces into the Earl’s library the rest of my way being roped off, whereas in the past I have been able to venture right inside. Consequently, I had to make to make do with taking a photograph of my reflection in one of the ornate gilt wall mirrors designed by Robert Adam, as I stood outside.

It was also from this terrace that the famous portrait of the enigmatic Dido Belle and her cousin, Elizabeth Murray was painted. In 2010 the weather was so bad at Christmas visitors were not allowed to step out onto the terrace. This year I was able to do so and took a photograph of the mock stone bridge, seen in the distance in the double portrait. The bridge is a mere facade and cannot be traversed. Before I left Kenwood House I made my way to my favourite room: the shop with its cream ceramic stove and elegant and cosy proportions. And thus I bid adieu to my beloved Kenwood House for what

will seem like forever.

It has been a while since I last made my way to the King’s Library within the British Museum. This originally formed the nucleus of the British Library and consisted of a large collection of books once owned by King George III. The Library played an even more important part in my personal history as it was the first place I worked at after graduating. I always found walking through the empty gallery first thing in the morning uplifting, the more so if it were sunny outside and light flooded through the windows of the elegant room built in 1827, with its graceful ornate plasterwork, granite columns and gilded balcony.

To get to my office, I had to unlock a concealed door in one of the bookcases. If I left the office in the afternoon before the public galleries had closed, I would wait until I could hear voices close by and then cause a minor stir by suddenly stepping out. The British Library has long since decamped to a purpose built building and to my mind rather ugly building by St Pancras station, the latter recently restored to its Victorian splendour. On a previous visit the King’s Library had been denuded of most of its books. Now it hosts a collection of exhibits from the British Museum. I had popped into the museum after an appointment elsewhere and so had little time to linger to establish the general theme before the building closed for the day. But I was determined to see if I could find the concealed door which had provided me with so much merriment all those years ago. It was still there. I refrained from ringing the bell to see if anyone answered as I wanted to visit the Reading Room.

Many a night was spent by me in the past doing overtime in the famous round Reading Room. The 1957 classic horror film, The Night of the Demon, filmed a key sequence here. Whenever I see this chilling depiction of devil worship, violent death and general mayhem on late night television it instantly brings back fond memories of my time in the British Library. Unfortunately I could not gain access to the Reading Room’s interior as it was hosting an exhibition. In my era, the exterior of the Reading Room could not be seen by the general public. Now the courtyard has been covered over with a glass roof and the refaced Reading Room exterior can be seen in all its magnificence.

The Pauper’s Library is of course my own local one at Wimbledon. In the IT room there is a series of naive paintings produced by students at the Wimbledon School of Art in the 1950s. They depict scenes of a bucolic and fanciful English country life but bear little resemblance to Wimbledon itself in the latter half of the 20th century. The paintings were meant for the children’s library but have remained behind as the children’s section has been moved elsewhere. Their loss is my gain. I rather think I would have been drummed out of the building if I had been seen taking a lot of pictures in the vicinity of small children. Luckily there were just adults huddled over their pcs. Even so, I had to be circumspect lest any complain that I was disturbing them or start to think I was trying to capture images of their computer screens.The paintings possess a singular charm and although might not be quite in keeping with the Georgian grandeur of Kenwood House or the King's Library in the British Museum, I am sure they have delighted many a little prince and princess over the years.

In other words a Happy New Year from the Brimstone Butterfly!

2011-12-31T19:57:00.002Z

Gëzuar vitin e ri

عام سعيد

urte berri on

новым годам

честита нова година

šťastný nový rok

Onnellista uutta vuotta

שנה טובה

Шинэ жилийн баярын мэнд хvргэе

wênd na kô-d yuum-songo

سال نو مبارک

feliz año Nuevo

สวัสดีปีใหม่

blwyddyn newydd dda

Happy New Year!

The Brimstone Butterfly’s Hampton Court: The Kyngs beestes

2011-12-26T19:21:00.015Z

One of the most iconic images at Hampton Court is that of the heraldic beasts adorning the bridge across the moat.

Before encountering them the modern visitor passes under the Western gates built in the 1730s by William Kent, who also designed the Queen’s Staircase within the palace. The lion and the unicorn represent England and Scotland respectively following the union of the two countries earlier in the 18^th century. Although Henry coveted Scotland his plans to annex it came to naught. Alongside the heraldic beasts of Great Britain are the trophies of arms which have become such a familiar sight on my jaunts to various stately homes.

Henry’s stone bridge across the moat was hidden for several hundred years after the moat itself was filled in the 1690s when William III was embarking on his extensive programme to remodel the Tudor palace. To add insult to injury the Georgians rebuilt Henry’s gatehouse much to its detriment according to William Page, who edited A History of the County of Middlesex in 1911. He complained: The gateway to which it leads was largely rebuilt in 1773, losing greatly in dignity and interest thereby. The old gatehouse, of which several drawings exist, the most accurate being some measured drawings by Kent made about forty years before its rebuilding, was of five stories, and much taller than the present building. Instead of a single arch in the middle it had two arches, a large one for carriages and a small one for foot passengers, opening into the gate hall, and the large arch was in consequence not on the centre line of the gatehouse. This affected the oriel window over it, which, being set over the arch, was likewise not in the middle of the elevation.”

By the early 20^th century efforts were begun to restore the bridge to some semblance of how it would have looked in Henry’s time. First, the moat was cleared out in 1909 and then work was begun on repairing the stone bridge and reinstating the heraldic beasts that had once lined it. The Edwardians were greatly helped in their endeavours by the survival of the meticulous Tudor accounts for the original building work.
The stone bridge had been built by Henry VIII in 1536. It was the same year and indeed very week that the incurable romantic beheaded one wife, Anne Boleyn, and became betrothed to her former lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, the next day.

Henry had marked the coronation of Anne as Queen by having lead cupolas and ornate weather vanes placed on the turrets of the White Tower at the Tower of London. For Jane he added her heraldic beasts to his own along the stone bridge at Hampton Court.

Of the original heraldic beasts that lined the bridge only one is known to have survived and very battered it looks too. It turned up in an unnamed pub garden and was for a while on display earlier this year outside the buttery by the Great Hall.

The current royal beasts on the bridge look far too spic and span for stone ornaments that have braved a century of inclement English weather which suggests they have been restored in recent years.
The beasts are helpfully paired with brass name plates at the base identifying what they represent. Of all the beasts the only one I could not identify without its nameplate was the mythical yale, which is apparently an antelope like creature with a lion’s tail and horns that can swivel in any direction. I wonder if Henry’s horns could likewise swivel in any direction when Katherine Howard later made a cuckold of him. The Yale of Beaufort harks back to the King’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. The latter was something of a mythical creature herself. The formidable Margaret had her first and only child at the age of 13, who, through force of arms, later became king of England as Henry VII. Margaret went on to have another three marriages before dying in her late sixties having seen her only son crowned and confident that the Tudor dynasty was secure in the shape of her strapping young grandson, the future Henry VIII.

The crowned lion of England displays Henry’s arms impaled with those of Jane Seymour. In reality Jane was never crowned queen as she died shortly after giving birth to Henry’s son and heir, Edward. Of all Henry’s queens only his first two, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, were crowned. All Henry’s brides knew there was the distinct possibility that, crowned or not, they might end up taking a central role at that other state ceremony unique to Henry’s queens, namely a public execution.

In the Middle Ages, greyhounds were the prized hunting dogs of royalty. Consequently they are often depicted in the tapestries of the period. In the heraldic tradition greyhounds represented courage, vigilance and loyalty. I have always had a fondness for greyhounds ever since I found myself looking after the late Ellie, a rescued greyhound, from time to time.

A panther holds aloft a shield with the wings of the Seymour family emblazoned upon it. According to Patrick Baty in his work “The King’s beasts” the panther has flames emerging from its mouth to indicate its fragrant breath. It could also be seen as a metaphor for the fate of Jane’s two brothers and what happened to those who, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun. Thanks to their sister’s marriage and the birth of a Tudor son and heir, the Seymour brothers enjoyed an unprecedented rise at court with Thomas becoming Lord High Admiral and Edward Lord Protector. It was Edward who built the splendid Tudor mansion at Syon. But like Icarus before them, their hubris led to their early deaths, both on charges of high treason and both during the reign of their nephew. Jane Seymour’s son showed little hesitation in signing the death warrants of his mother’s brothers.

The dragon symbolises Wales and the Tudor’s claim to be descended from an ancient line of Welsh kings.

Jane Seymour’s unicorn bears her coat of arms. Like her family’s heraldic beast, Jane’s panther has flames emerging from its mouth indicating a fragrant breath. Whether Jane had sweet breath herself something surely stank to the high heaven about a woman who would coolly step into the shoes of her dead predecessor, the day after the latter’s execution.

The other crowned lion displays Jane’s personal device featuring a castle and portcullis.

The Bull of Clarence holds the Tudor Rose the emblem symbolising the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster following the end of the War of the Roses.

Patrick Baty was commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces to envision the heraldic beasts on the stone bridge in colour. The heraldic beasts on display in the newly created Tudor privy gardens within the Chapel Court show what a riot of colour the Tudors indulged in. As part of the recent celebrations for the 500^th anniversary of Henry VIII’s coronation the painted and gilded oak heraldic creatures perched on chevron coloured posts and bound by golden chains were commissioned for Chapel courtyard overlooked by Henry’s former privy council chambers. The so-called ‘Kyngs beestes’ were inspired by the painting in the Haunted Gallery of the King’s Family. Alongside the Greyhound of Richmond, the Beaufort Yale, the Bull of Clarence, the Lion of England and the Tudor Dragon are other emblems of Henry’s family including a stag and falcon.

Above the doors in the Great Hall leading to the Great watching Chamber stand the Lion of England and the Tudor Red Dragon as well as greyhounds.

Another greyhound can be on the rooftop bearing aloft a weathervane.

A Lion of England features as a finial to an oak staircase close by the Great Hall. But for all these mythical creatures decorating Hampton Court, Tudor courtiers were all too aware of the real monster lurking within their midst, whose very look could signal sudden death and whose proclivity for cruelty was not tempered by filial or marital ties. That blood thristy monster in human form was of course Henry VIII.

The Lady of shallots.

2011-12-13T15:02:00.000Z

Winter brings out the recluse in me. I am like a bear who wants to return to her dark cave and simply go to sleep. Fortunately I usually have to venture out onto the big wide world at least once a week before I can slink back to the safety of my lair. I never was a summer person and have a preference for the night, meaning I try whenever possible to leave the house under the shadow of darkness. Sadly I no longer have gardening to keep me busy. I lost interest in the communal gardens after a property maintenance company waltzed off with a number of my mature plants and vegetables on the pretence they thought they belonged to another flat. Even though I challenged them, the company in question supported their member of staff’s blatant lies over my protests and refused to compensate me. Now the garden has been taken over by someone else and very smart it is beginning to look too. She has removed the hideous bunkers left by a former freeholder when they carried out building work on their own flat. In its place she, or rather a gardener she called in, has created new flower beds and shaped the lawn. She has had my permission to add my remaining mature plants to her own. With more space and a prominent position in the sun I am sure they will continue to flourish. She has also planted a row of bamboo to soften the fencing at the back. The front garden is beginning to recapture something of its Victorian glory.

I have kept my outdoor herb garden growing sage, rosemary, lemon thyme, mint, bay, French tarragon, parsley, chives, oregano amongst other herbs as well as Swiss chard, wild garlic and sorrel. I managed to grow loganberries, gooseberries and strawberries but not in any great quantities. My efforts at growing tomatoes indoors were not as successful as in previous years where I had sufficient to make several bottles of green and red tomato chutney using a Nigel Slater recipe. My indoor cucumber suddenly died on me having looked so promising. I grew my chilli peppers for as long as possible indoors and then chopped them up and placed the pieces in an ice cube tray before freezing. I add ice cubes to my cooking as required. These peppers have a real kick to them.

Last year I grew fennel and chamomile to make herbal teas. I have found that I only need a very small amount of my dried fennel to flavour the water. When I first tried using as much as I would for commercially grown herbs it proved a disaster: the flavour was far too pungent. I rather like the idea of drinking tea from my plantation even if said plantation was in fact a terracotta planter. My dog rose produced a large quantity of rosehips but I never got around to using them. Ditto the lavender. I was always loath to harvest the lavender when it was in flower as it seems to be a particular favourite with the bees in the vicinity.

My tea rose bush produced a single fragrant red rose. I had to constantly rescue the bush from being strangled by the neighbouring buddleja. I had taken a fancy to the latter because of its heady scent and its noted ability to attract butterflies. I discovered too late that it is an invasive plant and as common and as tenacious as weeds in the vicinity. I even found it growing down inside one of our drainpipes.

Dining out is no longer an option for me. However I do allow my friends to treat me from time to time such as on my recent birthday. In August I was able to acquire a free discount card which enabled the holder to a 50% reduction on food at specified restaurants. I therefore went with Mandip to Livebait in Covent Garden, an upmarket fish restaurant, reasoning that with a 50% reduction Mandip would effectively only be paying for her own meal. The Eagle took me back there for my birthday last month. Afterwards we had coffee and cakes at Maison Bertaux, a patisserie that has been operating from the same premises in Soho since the 19^th century. Unlike other patisseries, Maison Bertaux is not part of a chain and bakes its delicious cakes and pastries on the premises. It is expensive but worth every penny for a connoisseur of gateaux like me.

The Partridge and I went on to Maison Bertaux after we had been to a Chinese restaurant in Soho, again to celebrate my birthday. Our favourite restaurant, which we were wont to frequent over the years, has gone so we were obliged to settle on another one at random. We both felt that Chinatown itself seems to have lost some indefinable quality. There are still excellent restaurants there but I would only go on the personal recommendation of my Chinese friends or else in their company. I feel sure they tell the waiters in Mandarin: This is the only Chinese I know. Please pretend for my friend’s benefit that I am fluent in the language and just give us the standard meal as she won’t be any the wiser.

On our way to Livebait in Covent Garden the Eagle and I passed Rules, Londons’s oldest restaurant. Dating back to the late 18^th century Rules has been a firm favourite with the literary and artistic world for centuries. It is, or perhaps I should use the past tense, was one of my favourite restaurants. What I loved about it, apart from the wonderful atmosphere, delicious food sourced from their country estate and polite and attentive service, was that I could dine in there on my own or with friends and always be treated with equal consideration. Too often the single dinner is regarded as something of a pariah. If my fortunes ever changed for the better I would take my friends along to Rules for a celebratory meal.

I cannot afford fine dining in restaurants but I can still hand bake speciality breads and cakes for friends in lieu of wine or chocolates when I visit them for supper or if they dine at Brimstone Butterfly Towers. Baking and cooking remain one of my constant pleasures in life, although for the first time ever I have deliberately run down my larder and emptied my freezer and fridge after I discovered it was so cold that a carton of cream remained unaffected by being in my handbag in the hall for several days. The Eagle is always urging me to think of ways to turn my hobby into a means of earning money. In the past she offered to set me up in a tea shop or send me over to Tuscany to train in a friend’s restaurant. So long as I have a mortgage such things must remain mere day dreams.

Both the Eagle and Mandip have bought new houses recently and are actively engaged in the horrendous task of renovating them. As well as her London town house the Eagle has a villa in Tuscany. She offered to pay my airfares if I would cook for her and her partner over Christmas whilst they carry out some additional renovations there too. I have had to turn down her invitation, having a prior engagement in Highgate at the Partridge’s ancestral home. The Partridge very delicately told me that I must not think of buying her family presents but if I wanted to make some comestibles they would be greatly appreciated. I should be able to rustle up both having some presents I did not get around to handing out last year. I may be poor in monetary terms but I have always been rich in friends. I hope they realise how much I have always appreciated them.

The Brimstone Butterfly's Tower of London:The White Tower

2011-12-11T00:25:00.002Z

A number of months ago the Brimstone Butterfly found herself with time to spare after a meeting near the Embankment in London. Having my historic royal palaces membership card on me, I decided to wander along the riverside to the Tower of London. I was dressed in a smart suit and equally smart but very uncomfortable shoes. Fortunately, I had had the foresight to take along some plimsolls to slip into once out of sight of the offices I had just been in.

Writing in the guise of the Brimstone Butterfly has made me more aware of my surroundings. Thus, it was that I noticed that the cast iron and timber slatted benches along the Embankment had terminal arm brackets in the form of kneeling camels. I must have sat down on these benches on numerous occasions in the past, such as when I went to the Middle Temple, yet I had never ever noticed this charming decorative feature. The benches were designed by Lewis and G F Vulliamy in the 1870s. Further along the Embankment the terminals are in the form of sphinxes in honour of Cleopatra’s Needle; the ancient Egyptian obelisk placed by the Thames.

I had long admired the Dolphin lamps on their limestone pedestals. They are mid-nineteenth century in origin and like the benches have been listed and therefore given protected status.

Blackfriars' Bridge

Decorative feature Blackfriars' Bridge

Blackfriars Bridge is a vision in pink and dates from the 1870s. It serves as both a foot and road bridge. In the Victorian era and right up until the first few decades of the 20^th century, pink was considered a robustly masculine colour. Consequently, baby boys wore pink and their sisters the more feminine and dainty blue.

I was quite smug when I came across the cannons that had given Cannon Street railway station its name. I felt less smug when I discovered that Cannon was actually a corruption of Candelwrichstrete, in honour of the candle making trade that had flourished here in the Middle Ages.

Though intrigued, I did not have time to find out why the statues of a girl and a man were placed within a gated passageway.

The Monument designed by Sir Christopher Wren commemorates the Great Fire of London, which supposedly started in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane in 1666. Until recently it had been closed to undergo a major renovation and very smart it looks too, especially now its flame top has been burnished with over 30,000 leaves of gold. I have climbed the 311 steps to the summit in the past but not for a good many years. I prefer climbing spiral staircases if there is no-one else around fearing I will trip and descend to the bottom as if on a particularly tortuous helter-skelter. Lord knows I puffed and panted my way to the top of the Elizabethan spiral staircase at Eastbury Manor House and that was but a fraction of the height.

The marine imagery of the Dolphin street lamps was echoed in the gilded fish cavorting over the rooftop of a Victorian building near the Tower.

Mammals rather than fish were the theme of a special exhibition within the Tower and along its curtain wall. Wild animals were kept as part of the Royal menagerie from the 13^th to the 19^th centuries. They included lions, polar bears and elephants. The gifted artist Kendra Haste was commissioned to made sculptors of some of these animals out of mesh.

Three mesh lions guarded the medieval ruins of the aptly named Lion Tower.

The Norwegian “white bear” is portrayed shackled by a leg iron. However, its captors regularly unshackled the bear and placed it on a long rope so that it could dive for fish in the Thames.

As I walked towards the bear I passed under a gateway which bore various ancient inscriptions. These would not have been carved by prisoners but by visitors or bored guards. For some reason one in particular caught my eye. It bore the legend “fry Clovell, Bristoll 1577”. The first part of Clovell’s name was indistinct. Nonetheless there was sufficient detail for me to subsequently discover a great deal about Master Clovell. In their scholarly work: “Tudor wills proved in Bristol, 1546-1603” by Sheila Lang and Margaret McGregor, the authors reveal that Humphrey was a goldsmith and one of the executors and “loving friends” of Thomas Masson, a baker who died in Bristol in 1599. Official documents also show that in April 1586 Clovell supplied the city of Bristol with barrels of gunpowder. They were used as part of the civic entertainment put on for Queen Elizabeth’s perennial favourite Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, and his brother Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Warwick. The receipt books state: “Item paide to Humphrey Clovell for ij. barrells of Gonnpowder wayinge neete two hundred one h quarterne and xvij pounde. at xij d. per li. mounttes to xiij li. ix s. and for xxviij pounde of matche.”

The Beauchamp Tower

Incidentally, the Dudley family left their own inscriptions on the interior walls of various buildings within the Tower of London including the Beauchamp Tower. Unlike Clovell’s their carvings bear witness to the catastrophe that befell the Dudleys in 1553 when 5 of the brothers, including Robert and Ambrose, their father and their sister-in-law were all imprisoned in the Tower. They faced capital charges of high treason for their involvement in the plan to usurp Mary I and offer the crown to Lady Jane Grey, the young wife of their brother Guildford. Both Guildford and Jane were later executed; he on Tower Hill and she within the walls of the Tower on the green. It was during his imprisonment that Robert Dudley first forged a deep friendship with his fellow prisoner and the future Queen Elizabeth I. It was a friendship that was to last until his death.

In his work “Bristol” Mark Cartwright Pilkinton describes Clovell as both a goldsmith and with premises in Wine Street, Bristol. In 1598 Clovell was involved in a lawsuit with Nicolas Woolfe, who owned the Wine Street playhouse. 14 years later Humphrey Clovells was paid by the council for "powder, gildinge the sworde and mace”. 1612 was an important year in terms of local civic ceremonials. On 4^th May Anne of Denmark, wife of King James I, came a-calling and Bristol was determined to impress her. Anne came to Bristol having taken the spa waters at nearby Bath, in the futile hope of curing her debilitating dropsy. The mayor, wearing his ceremonial chain of office, and the councillors tricked out in their scarlet robes, all rode on horseback. Behind them walked "the chief masters of the several trades, with their hood". The procession made its way to Lawford’s Gate where an oration was made to the queen, after which she was presented with “a rich embroidered purse of gold.” Humphrey Clovell must have been bursting with pride when Bristol’s trained militia stood to attention on either side of Wine Street, the very street where he lived, in their fine hats, coloured feathers and white doublets to loyally salute the queen as she drove past in her carriage. They then hurried to the quayside to fire off volleys from their guns in her honour, probaly using gunpowder supplied by Clovell.

Clovell was very much the proud Bristolian, given that he carved both his name and city on the Tower walls. Providing that he died in Bristol or had his will proven there, it would not take much effort to discover his ultimate fate. The same cannot be said for the Princes in the Tower, the young children of Edward IV. The eldest son, Edward V, was proclaimed king on his father’s death in 1483. Along with his younger brother Richard, Edward was taken to the Tower to await his coronation, at which point the children vanished. It was not until the reign of Charles II in 1674, that human bones were found beneath the stairs of the White Tower. Four years later the bones were placed in a marble casket designed by Sir Christopher Wren and brought to Westminster Abbey, where they were interred. At the memorial service Charles II declared: ”It is right and meet that we commend the bones of these young princes to a place of final rest. Their fates at the order of Richard III grieves us, and though almost two centuries have passed, the vile deeds of that villain shall ne'er be forgotten”. In 1933 George V allowed the bones to be examined for a second time, from which it was concluded that the bones were those of two children, whose likely ages were consistent with what is known about the princes. As I climbed up the external stairs to the modern entrance of the White Tower, a plaque commemorated the discovery of the bones in 1674. Unfortunately I was not able to get a take a clear image of the text.

The White Tower is why the Tower of London is referred to in the singular and not the plural. Building work on the stone tower was started by William the Conqueror within extant Roman walls, remnants of which can be seen in front of it today. It is now a world heritage site. Henry VIII added the cupolas and the weather vanes to the 4 turrets as part of the refurbishments he ordered in advance of Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533. It was customary for royalty to reside within the Tower prior to their crowning at Westminster Abbey. Henry also had a range of timber apartments built for Anne for that very purpose. These are not to be confused with the extant timber framed Queen’s House by Tower Green. It was a cruel irony that Anne was brought back to these same apartments three years later as a prisoner on trial for her life. Not surprisingly, subsequent queens showed a marked reluctance to be housed within the ill fated apartments and they were eventually demolished.

View from the White Tower looking across towards the Bloody Tower

From the steps of the White Tower I could see across to where the legendary ravens were kept. Nearby was the Bloody Tower in which, according to legend, the boy-king Edward V and his younger brother were murdered. Walter Raleigh spent the final years of his life a prisoner here. The ground floor has now been staged as it might have been in his day.

Inside the White Tower is a collection of armour including a rather fetching steel skirt edged with the initials of Henry VIII and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, which must have made the king look every inch the iron maiden. There are also other suits of armour known to have belonged to Henry including one sporting a very prominent codpiece. I wonder if it was the same iron codpiece that had become quite worn after generations of women cleaners in the Tower had given it a hasty polish as a fertility symbol. They obviously did not know their history if they regarded Henry VIII as being in any shape or form a fertility god. Henry’s changing physical shape is captured by his suits of armour which range from those of an athletic Renaissance prince to the morbidly obese prematurely aged man. Henry had been transformed from Sir Lancelot to Sir Eats-a-lot.

Unlike King Henry his namesake Prince Henry Stuart, the eldest son of King James I, never fought on the battlefield. But in 1607 when he was 13 he was presented with a suit of field armour etched with battle scenes from the Classical world. I wonder of his tutor, the builder of Charlton House, ever saw his pupil wearing it.

King Henry VIII’s own son, Edward VI would have been around the same age as Prince Henry when he too had a suit of armour made for him at Greenwich in 1550.

Effigy of King Charles II

With the Restoration of Charles II it was thought expedient to remind visitors to the Tower of England’s royal past with the so called Line of Kings. Wooden effigies of past monarchs were mounted on model horses and clothed in armour. The horses are still on display but the fragile effigies, which look like a veritable Rogue's Gallery, are now protected behind glass. The only effigy I was able to identify with any certainty was that of Charles II. It would have ill behoved the original 17th century sculptors to get that one wrong, given that he had commissioned the exhibits.

For one part of an interactive exhibit, I got the chance to test my strength as an archer pulling the string of a bow. As to how I fared, let’s just say the English army at Agincourt might not have enjoyed such a celebrated victory if their archers' skill had been on a par with my own.

Also in the White Tower were the uniform, swords and gun owned by the Duke of Wellington when he became Governor of the Tower in 1826. Unfortunately for Black Jack the raven, he lacked the Iron Duke’s iron constitution and died of fright when the cannons were set off to celebrate Wellington's installation. Black Jack’s stuffed corpse can now be seen at Kensington Palace.

Near the White Tower’s deep medieval well was a plaque bearing the royal coat of arms. On a table stood a gilded winged lion, the emblem of Venice. It was taken from the Venetian fortress on Corfu by the British navy in 1809.

In contrast to its violent past, I chanced upon a delightful feature along part of the curtain wall. In windows from which soldiers would once have fired arrows and artillery, someone with a wry sense of humour, had placed a selection of dolls, including Beefeaters and most incongruous of all, a Victorian miss in a fur trimmed velvet coat and bonnet.

Kensington Palace: Return to the Enchanted Palace

2011-12-04T01:50:00.012Z

Kensington Palace is being extensively renovated. In the interim it is the venue for an interactive exhibition called “The Enchanted Palace”. On my one and only previous visit I found myself having to vacate the palace in a hurry owing to a security alert. A few weeks ago, I took the opportunity to return.

Signs of renovation work were very much in evidence. By the ornate gilded gates, once surrounded by a sea of floral tributes for Diana, fabric had been strung along poles to mimic hedging, a less than subtle ruse to conceal evidence of the building work from view.

Close by the sunken gardens is the Orangery designed by Sir Christopher Wren and commissioned by Queen Anne. As well as housing her collection of exotic plants over the winter months, the queen used the Orangery to host supper parties. Now it serves as a café and wedding venue. Unfortunately, I could not afford to treat myself to coffee and cakes there. She who once dined like a prince now sups like a pauper.

The rooms off the Entrance Hall were used by soldiers guarding the monarch. One door frame bears the legend: “Solds room no 2, 7 men”. The other: “Solds room no 3, 23 men”. Above the fireplace in a glass case was Black Jack, one of the legendary ravens kept at the Tower of London. Poor Jack died of fright when cannons were fired to celebrate the arrival of the Duke of Wellington as the new Constable of the Tower in 1852.

A slogan has been painted on the hall walls encouraging visitors to find the 7 princesses, whose stories provide the theme for the Enchanted Palace.

As I walked along a corridor a woman’s pre-recorded voice repeatedly asked “Can you find me?” Rather eerily the voice reminded me of my late friend, Ruth. In contrast to my previous visit, the walls of the corridor had been painted a vivid blue and flowers hung from the branch barring the way up the stairs.

In the Room of Royal Sorrows glass vials had been crammed onto a table to symbolise the tears shed by Queen Mary and her sister, Queen Anne, at their repeated failure to bear healthy children. The headless mannequin, dressed in jeans and a top by the designer Aminaka Wilmont and suspended above the bed, had been removed. Instead, a white ball gown donated by Bruce Oldfield, one of Princess Diana’s favourite couturiers, had been placed by the mirror.

In a small panelled room, a portrait of Katherine Elliot by John Riley looks down from the chimneypiece. Katherine had been a nurse to James II and a woman of the bedchamber to both his daughters. For the purpose of the exhibition Katherine had been designated a housekeeper and a file on the table was regularly updated during the day with any “problems” the actors had encountered regarding the housekeeping. Perhaps that is what I had observed the actors typing in the King’s Gallery on my previous visit. Modern white plates on the table were decorated with images of fish and ale to reflect the fact that the Stuarts had used this closet as a private dining room, where fish and beer were firm favourites. It was in this very room that I had been mistaken for a ghost by a Spanish visitor, as she opened the emergency exit.

The next closet was equally small. For the exhibition it was called the Room of the Quarrel after a tempestuous row between Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill that destroyed their friendship forever. Sarah, the chatelaine of Marlborough House and wife of the Duke of Marlborough, had been a childhood friend of Anne. Unfortunately the volatile Sarah was not known for her tact or for keeping either her temper under control or her tongue in check. She had developed the habit of behaving in an imperious manner towards the vulnerable Queen. Eventually Sarah went too far and neither her tears nor her tantrums could persuade Anne to resume their friendship.

I retraced my steps to enter King George I’s Privy Chamber and what would later have been Queen Caroline’s Drawing Room. Gone was the glorious collection of Phillip Treacy hats, which I had so admired. They had been replaced by a light show. The Privy Chamber was at the heart of the former Nottingham House, which King William III had bought from Daniel Finch, the 2^nd Earl of Nottingham, in 1689. Wren was commissioned by William to transform the Jacobean house into Kensington Palace. Daniel Finch’s daughter Elizabeth, by his second marriage, later went to live at Kenwood House after she married its owner, William Murray. Being prejudiced in such matters I much prefer Robert Adams’ glorious Kenwood House to Wren’s austere Kensington Palace. Unlike in the Kings’Apartments at Hampton Court there was insufficient light in the Privy Chamber for me to be able to examine the tapestries hanging on its walls in any real detail.

Grinling Gibbons produced the carvings of fruit, garlands, birds and flowers decorating the chimneypiece in the Presence Chamber. Much as I admired the stunning carvings of wheat sheaves in the Eating Room at Hampton Court, the wooden putti at Kensington made me shudder, looking more like dead babies than lively pagan infants. This, it transpired was deliberate as Gibbons wished to reflect the inherent sorrow of Queen Mary’s early death at Kensington. Perhaps in honour of his beloved Mary, King William III chose to die at Kensington Palace. He had sustained a mortal injury when he had fallen off his horse at Hampton Court. Instead of remaining at Hampton Court William insisted he be moved to Kensington. Queen Anne also died at the palace whereas her successor, George I, died whilst on a visit to his native Hanover. George II was the last ruling monarch to live and eventually die at the palace. It seems following the demise of Queen Caroline the now widowed king left the palace half empty as Horace Walpole explained in a letter he wrote in 1749 to his namesake Sir Horace Mann. Walpole, who built his gothic masterpiece at Strawberry Hill, was prompted to write after a fire had broken out in Lady Yarmouth’s grace and favour apartment. He wrote: “Kensington Palace had like to have made an article the other night; it was on fire: my Lady Yarmouth has an ague, and is forced to keep a constant fire in her room against the damps. When my Lady Suffolk lived in that apartment, the floor produced a constant crop of mushrooms. Though there are so many vacant chambers, the King hoards all he can, and has locked up half the palace since the Queen's death.’

It was impossible for me to get a clear photograph of the ceiling in the double height Presence Chamber as flash photography was strictly forbidden. The decorative scheme reminded me of the Etruscan Room at Osterley. The central medallion depicted the sun-god Apollo riding in his chariot drawn by a white horse across the heavens. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine of December 1821, Kent based the scheme for the ceiling on paintings from Herculaneum.

Kensington Palace. King's Grand Staircase May 2010

The King’s Grand Staircase built in black and white marble was designed by Sir Christopher Wren. As the blinds had been pulled down across the three Venetian windows, the hall was in semi-darkness. Moreover, we were no longer allowed to walk part way down the marble steps to examine the dress on display more closely. Vivienne Westwood’s mid 18^th century style ballgown had been replaced by another one from her collection, more in keeping with the styles favoured by the Regency princess it represented. The popular Princess Charlotte, only child of George IV, had died in childbirth in 1817 plunging the nation into mourning. Lighting gives the impression that the princess is being shadowed by Death as she flees down the stairs. In a closet by the staircase gallery, words painted on a mirror advise the viewer to turn back. On the other side of the open door is part of a 19^th century London newspaper chronicling the princess’s state funeral.

The lack of light made it impossible for me to capture anew the murals on the walls painted by William Kent. The success of his work at Kensington Palace led to Kent being commissioned to paint the walls and ceiling of the Queen’s Staircase at Hampton Court. At the latter he repeated his vision of a trompe-l'œil dome with the Order of the Garter as the centrepiece he first displayed in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace. Jean Tijou crafted the ironwork balustrades both for the King’s Staircase at Kensington and at Hampton Court.

Ranged in niches around the Cupola room were gilded statues of Ceres, Diana, Apollo, Juno, Mercury and Bacchus. Even as early as the 1720s George Vertue, the English engraver and antiquary, was expressing a similar sentiment to my own when he complained that the “gilt antique statues in marble niches is too incongruous to be tolerated in the presence age.” There were also busts of Caligula, Nero, Claudius, Marcus (et tu) Brutus, Lucius Verus, Septimus Severus. The latter, with the exception of Marcus Brutus were all Roman Emperors. Marcus took part in the assassination of the very first emperor, Julius Caesar. Alongside these busts were 2 unidentified Roman emperors, which must represent the ultimate posthumous humiliation for their respective reigns.

From the replica 18^th century chandeliers hung parts of a giant mechanical clock to represent the exhibition’s theme of Time for this room.

Over the mantelpiece was a marble bas relief of a Roman marriage by Michael Rysbrack, who designed the stunning sculptures for the chimney pieces at Clandon Park.

The centrepiece of the ceiling in the King’s Great Drawing Room depicts the story of Jupiter and Semele, whose story was hitherto unknown to me. According to the myth, the god Jupiter fell madly in love with the mortal Semele and she became pregnant by him. When Jupiter’s wife Hera discovered the affair, she disguised herself as an old crone and made Semele doubt that Zeus was indeed her lover. Semele insisted that Zeus assume his god like form to prove his divinity. Zeus conceded to Semele’s request but knew she would be destroyed by the heat from his thunderbolts. The foetus of their son, Dionysus, only survived incineration because his father sewed him into his own thigh.

The Drawing Room contained a bust by the Flemish sculptor John van Nost of what is thought to be one of William III’s black slaves..

It also had an ornate marble fireplace decorated with garlands of carved acorns and a representation of Medusa.

I have no idea what function the chamber styled the Room of Dancing Princesses originally served. Diana’s ballgown had been changed since I last visited the palace and not for the better in my opinion. The glass case representing Princess Margaret displayed the tiara she wore at her wedding to Anthony Armstrong Jones. Her portrait had been placed above the fireplace. I am the woman in the faux fur hat, clutching a bag containing my 19^th century Japanese silk wedding kimono. Earlier in the day I had sold my 1920s black and white Cantonese shawl to a keen collector in nearby Holland Park. Hence my presence at the Palace Alas, the recession has forced the sale of exhibits from my museum to save the Brimstone Butterfly from the workhouse.

On the mantlepiece I discovered a copy of a fascinating letter from Princess Margaret. She lamented that the press treated princesses “as if we were unreal figures from Dynasty with nothing better to think about (than fashion). They criticise us if the same thing is worn twice but also criticise us if too much money appears to be spent. It’s hard to get it right.” Some things have not changed much since the 1980s.

The Room of the Sleeping Princess contained a bed heaped with mattresses as if for the princess and the pea in the fairytale. It was in this room that Princess Victoria was informed that she was now queen, following the death of her uncle William IV. Other rooms were displayed as Victoria’s royal nursery. There were models of a dolls’ house in the shape of Kensington Palace and a greenhouse containing a doll trapped inside. I assume the latter signifies the hothouse environment the young Victoria was exposed to by her domineering mother, the widowed Duchess of Kent, and Sir John Conroy, who appears to have exercised a malign influence over Victoria’s mother. Some suspected him of being her lover. There have also been suggestions that Conroy was Victoria’s real father. She proved to be a carrier for the genetic condition haemophilia, which rapidly spread through the royal houses of Europe as her children married into them. The condition, which predominantly affects males, had been unknown in the royal family prior to Victoria’s birth. The devious Conroy and her mother schemed to get Victoria to sign a document that would have made her mother Regent until Victoria was 21, if she had succeeded to the throne before her 18^th birthday. Victoria refused to sign the paper. Even if she had done so I cannot imagine that the Establishment of the period would have allowed the Duchess and Conroy to enforce it.

Unlike the Stuart sisters Mary and Anne, Queen Victoria was extremely fecund. The carved gilt wood cradle on rockers and lined with red silk was used by 5 of her children. Apparently the cradle is embellished with the royal coat of arms, one at either end.

The King’s Galley is 94 feet long by 21 feet wide. The coved ceiling was also painted by William Kent in 1725 and represents 7 scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. The decorative work surrounding the panels was added by his Spanish assistant, one Francisco de Valentia. Poor de Valentia’s contribution might have remained unknown were it not for the fact that in more recent times his name was found on the back of one of the canvasses.

On the chimneypiece is an anemometer or wind dial dating from 1694 and set within a map of the 4 continents of the world: Australia had yet to be discovered when the map was drawn up. In the 19^th century the Duchess of Kent incurred the wrath of William IV when he discovered that his tiresome sister-in-law had turned the King’s Gallery into 3 rooms for herself and her daughter, the future Queen Victoria. This was a direct flouting of royal protocol which did not allow anyone other than the monarch to live in the king’s state chambers. Such was William IV’s hatred of the Duchess it was said he clung desperately to life simply to ensure Victoria was of age when she succeeded him to the throne in 1837. Becoming queen gave Victoria the chance to flee the stifling atmosphere of a household dominated by her mother and Conroy. Too many unhappy memories of her childhood at Kensington made Victoria resolve to leave it behind forever.

Off the King’s Gallery is a room staged to represent the lair so to speak of Wild Peter, the 18^th century feral child, who George I had brought to Court from Germany. Peter’s striking portrait can be seen on the wall of the Grand Staircase. Such was his fame that Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe wrote a pamphlet about him called: Mere Nature Delineated. Defoe did not for a moment believe the fanciful story that Peter had been raised by wolves. But he did regard it as a great act of compassion on George I’s part to take the boy in and was intrigued by whether the child’s intellect could be developed: an early 18^th century study into nature versus nurture. One of the actresses at the Enchanted Palace warned me that Wild Peter might take a fancy to my faux fur hat. Unlike my encounters with costumed guides at Hampton Court, I was not sufficiently gemmed up on the subject and thought she meant he would mistake me for an animal and attack me. “I have an excellent right hook” I declared stoutly, rendering the actress momentarily speechless, no doubt thinking Peter was not the only Wild One in the vicinity.

The final room was the Queen’s Gallery. All 7 princesses were shown on television screens as period music for their respective eras was played on a loop. The princesses were in chronological order: Mary and Anne, the last Stuart rulers, Queen Caroline of Ansbach whose rooms I had explored at Hampton Court, Princess Charlotte who died in childbirth, Queen Victoria, Princess Margaret and Princess Diana. The latter two were sister and daughter-in-law respectively of our current queen. It was too dark to be able to take photos in the Gallery. I was surprised that the barrel vaulted ceiling was unadorned. In a similar vein the Queen’s Staircase were somewhat Spartan, sporting wooden panelling rather than an elaborate painted decorative scheme. The stairs led out of the palace and into the night.

It will be interesting to see the interior and exterior of Kensington Palace once the renovation work is complete. William and Mary had planned to demolish the entire Tudor palace at Hampton Court palace save for the Great Hall and replace them with wings designed by Wren. Daniel Defoe had been much taken with these changes at Hampton Court Palace. In his "Journey from London to the Land's End" published in 1724 he wrote approvingly: " King William fixed upon Hampton Court, and it was in his reign that Hampton Court put on new clothes, and, being dressed gay and glorious, made the figure we now see it in". Defoe and I are not of one mind on the matter. Judging by Kensington Palace, Hampton Court would be a far duller place today if the Stuarts had had the means to tear down the oldTudor palace in its entirety. Kensington Palace is just a tad too staid for my liking and I can’t imagine it ever capturing my imagination the way Hampton Court has never ceased to do. Nonetheless, it is well worth a visit.

Kensington Palace

Leonora Christina

2011-11-28T00:31:00.001Z

For the Brimstone Butterfly writing a post often becomes something of a personal voyage of discovery. Thus, it was that a simple description of King William III’s apartments at Hampton Court Palace led me to the extraordinary story of Leonora-Christina, the daughter of Christian IV of Denmark. The latter’s portrait hangs in the Eating Room, Christian IV being the brother of William’s maternal great grandmother.

Christian IV of Denmark

Having divorced his second wife, Kristen Munk for her alleged adultery, Christian IV married off their 15 year old daughter Leonora in 1637 to Count Corfits Ulfeldt, one of his leading ministers of state. As the child of a morganatic marriage Leonora had no claim to the throne. But as Christian IV’s favourite she had been treated as the de facto first lady of Denmark following her mother’s banishment to her country estates and her own marriage. It was a situation that fuelled the overweening ambition of her husband. As the Danish monarchy of the period was an elective one, Ulfeldt all but ruled Denmark on his own between the death of Leonora‘s father and the election of Leonora’s half brother, Frederick to the throne. This represented the zenith of the couple’s power and prestige making their subsequent fall from grace the more spectacular by comparison. Leonora almost immediately found herself at odds with the new queen, Sophie-Amalie and was reluctant to relinquish her former precedence within the Danish court. The two women indulged in petty rivalries culminating in Leonora, accidentally or otherwise, breaking the crown Sophie Amalie was supposed to wear at her coronation. The resulting animosity between the two women was life long and had dire consequences for Leonora.

The first indication for the Count and Leonora that their fortunes were on the wane was when they charged with plotting to kill the new king. The accusations came from no less a person that Ulfeldt’s own mistress, Dina Vinhofvers, who claimed to have overheard the couple conspiring together. Dina later retracted her confession but it was too late to safe her from execution. It is perhaps to King Fredrick’s credit that he did not seek to take advantage of what later transpired to be a conspiracy against the Ulfeldts, although later he might well have wished he had not been quite so even handed.

Following the execution of his mistress, the count decided to leave Denmark with his wife and family before further attempts were made to discredit them. The family eventually ended up at the Swedish royal court. Sweden and Denmark had long been mortal enemies but that did not stop Ulfeldt from betraying the Danish cause by taking an active role in the Swedish invasion of his native land, even to extent of partially funding it. The Swedes rewarded him with titles but this did not seem to be enough for the Machiavellian Ulfeldt. Later, he was accused by the Swedes of betraying them in turn and imprisoned. The count managed to evade captivity yet again and took the curious decision to flee to Denmark. Not surprisingly his earlier treachery had not been forgotten and he was promptly imprisoned. Leonora chose to join him, having already shared his privations when they had been fugitives on the run and had even dressed as a man for weeks on end, the better to elude capture. A year later in 1661 the couple were released from jail in return for paying a punitive fine that saw them lose virtually all their property. This was deemed an insufficient punishment by the Count’s enemies who wanted him returned to prison. Still meddling in political intrigues the count tried to persuade the Holy Roman Emperor to invade Denmark. Far from being convinced as to the merits of such a plan, the Emperor told the Danish king of Ulfeldt’s latest act of treachery.

In 1663 Leonora’s husband tried to persuade her to set sail for England and raise money for their beleagued family. In her memoirs she claims she “raised obstacles, and showed him plainly that she should obtain nothing; that she should only be at great expense. She had examples before her which showed her that the King of England would never pay her husband.” Ulfeldt remained adamant He was convinced that her kinsman, King Charles II, would honour the loan her husband had given him when Charles had been in exile on the Continent. King Charles was legendary for his affairs with women. Unfortunately his gallantry did not extend to his Danish cousin once removed. Having expressly invited her to Court, Charles secretly arranged for the Governor at Dover to imprison her at Dover Castle when she tried to return to her husband. It was claimed that she did not have permission to leave England. In reality Charles believed Leonora’s captivity would force her husband out of hiding in a bid to rescue her. Charles had hoped to ensnare both Leonora and her husband. In so doing he would appease the Danish authorities with whom he had signed a treaty, arranged ironically by Ulfeldt, and Charles would also have seen his debt to the Count cancelled if the couple were state prisoners. When Ulfeldt failed to rise to the bait, Charles callously handed over his cousin to her enemies. Back in Denmark the Danish State, being unable to wreck their vengeance on her husband, punished Leonora in his stead and imprisoned her without trial within the notorious Blue Tower at Copenhagen’s Castle. Leonora endured years locked up in a grim rat infested and flea ridden prison cell. She later described her terrible plight in her memoirs. Although her pitiful conditions were somewhat alleviated after a number of years she was 63 before she was finally released, having spent 21 years of life confined within the cramped and squalid Blue Tower. After she had set sail on her ill-fated journey to England Leonora had never seen her husband again. The man whose treachery had caused so much heartache for Leonora and her children, whom she had followed without question into ruin and imprisonment, had died whilst still on the run a year after King Charles II had handed his wife over to the Danes.

A 19th century painting of Leonora in the Blue Tower by Kristian Zahrtmann.

Leonora’s memoirs chronicling her tribulations were published posthumously in the 19^th century to great critical acclaim and she became something of a legend in her native Denmark. Kristian Zahrtmann was one of a number of Danish artists who were subsequently inspired by Leonoara's poignant story. In Zahrtmann's case he produced a series of painting based on key events in Leonora's life. An English translation of Leonora’s memoirs by F. E. Bunnètt was first published in London 1872. Coincidentally, within days of my starting this post, an e-book of Bunnett’s translation was released on Project Gutenberg on 24^th November 2011.

Queen Sophie-Amalie

In her memoirs Leonora makes it clear that she believed her old enemy Queen Sophie-Amalie was the main reason why she had endured such terrible conditions for so long. After her husband and Leonora’s half brother, King Frederick, had died Sophie Amalie continued her vendetta despite her own son and his new queen being disposed to treat Leonora more favourably, Leonora wrote:

“My most gracious hereditary King was gracious enough several times in former years to intercede for me with his royal mother, through the high ministers of the State. Her answer at that time was very hard; she would entitle them “traitors”' and, “as good as I was, and would point them to the door. All the favours which the King s majesty showed me — the outer apartment, the large window, the money to dispose of for annoyed the Queen Dowager extremely; and she made the Kings majesty feel her displeasure in the most painful manner”.

When Sophie-Amalie discovered that Leonora had a clavicordium (a musical instrument consisting of 38 keys and 7 strings of equal length) she went straight to the king to order its removal. When the prison governor went to take if from off of Leonora she protested that she had bought it with money the king had given her and therefore if he wanted to confiscate it he needed to reimburse her first. After some hesitation the governor put the instrument down and left. Leonora claimed that the prison governor later admitted that the king had laughed when he was told what had happened and agreed that he had indeed given Leonora permission to spend the money as she had wished. It took the death of the Queen Dowager before Leonora would finally be freed

On May 18^th 1685 Leonora was released. She wrote in her memoirs that the prison governor, whom she had not seen for 2 years, came to say goodbye. Accompanied by her niece Leonora left the Blue Tower for the last time. It seemed many Danes came to witness the release of a prisoner whose plight had become legendary. Leonora wrote:

“Her Majesty the Queen thought to see me as I came out, and was standing on her balcony, but it was rather dark; moreover I had a black veil over my face. The palace-square, as far as the bridge and further, was full of people, so that we could scarcely press through to the coach. The time of my imprisonment was twenty-one years nine months, and eleven days”.

Leonora was given a pension from the new king to enable her to live out of the rest of her life with a small establishment at Maribo, a former island monastery of the Bridgettine Order. This was the same monastic order in whose suppressed abbey at Syon Katherine Howard had been imprisoned a century earlier in England.

Queen Christina of Sweden painted by Sébastien_Bourdon

A film was made about Leonora Christina’s life in 1933. It was overshadowed by Greta Garbo’s own Hollywood film, released in the same year, in which Garbo played the eponymous Swedish Queen Christina In her memoirs Leonora, writing in the third person, relates how Queen Christina, already well acquainted with Ulfeldt, had sought the fugitive couple out:

“In the spring they again made a voyage to Stockholm, at the desire of Queen Chr.... This good Queen, who liked intrigue, tried to excite jealousy and to make people jealous, but she did not succeed. They were in Sweden until after the abdication of the Queen, and the wedding and coronation of King Charles and Queen Hedevig, which was in the year 1654.“

The transvestite Queen Christina must have been intrigued by the Danish Leonora’s own adventures across Europe whilst dressed as a man.

In the 1990s the American born Danish composer, Andy Pape, based his chamber opera “Leonora Christina” on her life. Perhaps the strangest memorial to Leonora, the wife of a Dane who had betrayed his country so emphatically to the Swedes, is a modern ferryboat named after her. Launched earlier this year in 2011, the Leonora Christina carries passengers and cars between those former enemy nations, Sweden and Denmark. The opera, the ferry and the release of the e-book all suggest that there is a resurgence of interest in the Danish Leonora Christina, whose personal history rivals that of more celebrated Tudor queens such as Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey for sheer drama and personal tragedy.

The Brimstone Butterfly’s Hampton Court: The King’s Apartments

2011-11-26T22:42:00.007Z

The fire which swept through Hampton Court on Easter Monday in 1986 proved both a tremendous challenge and an unexpected opportunity for the curators faced with the daunting task of restoration. The fire started in Lady Daphne Gale’s grace and favour apartment within the Baroque wing of the palace. As King William III’s state apartments were directly below the conflagration they sustained the worst damage. Rather than restore the King’s Apartments to how they looked immediately prior to the fire, the curators decided to present the sequence of rooms as William would have known them. The curators’ task was made easier by the fact the royal archives contained detailed bills presented by the craftsmen who had first worked on Wren’s palace. The archives also contained comprehensive inventories of the tapestries and paintings at Hampton Court at the end of the 17^th century.

Having first started work on Hampton Court in 1689, William lost all interest in the scheme following his wife’s early death. Ironically, it was a major fire within another royal residence that inspired William to resume his building project in earnest. The Palace of Whitehall had been left in ruins after a fire broke out in 1698. Only the Jacobean Banqueting House escaped the flames. Daniel Defoe was much taken with the changes made at Hampton Court Palace. In his "Journey from London to the Land's End" published in 1724 he wrote approvingly: King William fixed upon Hampton Court, and it was in his reign that Hampton Court put on new clothes, and, being dressed gay and glorious, made the figure we now see it in.

At the top of the King’s Staircase the first room in the processional route is the Guards’ Chamber. The walls are decorated with 2,871 pieces of armour, drums, pikes, muskets, powder horn, swords, knives and other items drawn from a 17^th century armoury. This singular collection of weaponry is arranged in patterns devised by a certain John Harris in 1699.

The Guards’ Chambers leads into the Presence Chamber. One hundred years ago “A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 2.” described the Presence Chamber as “one of the most stately of Wren's rooms, which remains practically the same as it was then. The original canopy of crimson damask is still fixed to the wall, with its rich embroidery of silver and gold somewhat dimmed by time.” I was able to decipher alongside William's crowned initials the symbol for England, a rose, worked in silver and gold thread along the front of the canopy. There was also a harp for Ireland and a thistle for Scotland. The warder pointed out that the fourth symbol was a Fleur de Lys. Intriguingly, a century and a half after England had lost Calais, its last possession in France, the English monarch still laid symbolic claim to the throne across the Channel.

Two large tapestries, originally made for Henry VIII, grace the walls facing the windows. They were retrieved from storage in Windsor Castle, where they had long languished. The archives revealed they had been displayed at Hampton Court during the 17^th century. One tapestry depicts the 12 Labours of Hercules. Amongst the 12 Labours Hercules is shown killing the half-giant and equally naked Antaeus by holding him aloft and crushing him to death in a bear hug. Not being blessed with a classical education I was initially bemused as to what was going on, the more so as I mistook Antaeus death agonies for a look of pure ecstasy.

Facing the throne is a large equestrian portrait of King William by Sir Godfrey Kneller. William does not cut quite as dashing a figure on horseback as Kneller's painting of Mohammed bin Hadou, the Moroccan ambassador at the court of Charles II, which I first saw at Chiswick House.The painting of the king is titled: “William III landing at Torbay in 1697. Neptune stands near to William, whilst the latter’s ships, carrying the soldiers who would help him defeat his father-in-law King James II, appear in the background. A goddess holding a cornucopia brimming over with fruit and wheat kneels at his feet and offers William an olive branch. Just as on the Antonio Verrio staircase, the clear allusion was that William’s reign would herald in an era of peace and prosperity.

The Presence Chamber has two copper braziers and two Delft tulip holders near the fireplace. I believe the latter are decorated with an image of King William on the base but the warder was not so certain. We did agree that the painting above the fireplace was of James Hamilton. The son of a Protestant minister, Hamilton had worked as an agent for King James during the reign of Elizabeth I and had proved himself to be both a loyal and able courtier. According to the warder, Hamilton’s portrait above the fireplace signalled to visitors that loyalty and hard work on behalf of the crown would be rewarded. This was not a viewpoint shared by Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey who had originally built Hampton Court Palace. As he lay dying at Leicester, en route to imprisonment and probable execution at the Tower of London, Wolsey was alleged to have made the bitter comment: “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs”.

Christian IV of Denmark

Several Mortlake Tapestries based on the Raphael Cartoons in the Cartoon Gallery are hung in the next room. Delicate carvings of sheaves of wheat above the fireplace by the celebrated Grinling Gibbons hint that the chamber was once the Eating Room. A portrait of King Christian IV of Denmark, William’s maternal great uncle, is set into the chimney piece. Christian was known to be a connoisseur of good food and bad women. The former can be attested to by the gargantuan size of his stomach. It is pure coincidence but somewhat apposite that he wears the Order of the Elephant around his neck. Christian’s fondness for women is evident from his complicated love life. His first wife bore him 7 children before she died. Having dallied with the odd mistress or two, Christian entered into a morganatic marriage with the teenage Kirsten Munk. Her canny mother insisted that Christian agree to the marriage if he wanted to bed her daughter. Christian had a further 12 children by Kirsten. Later, having accused Kirsten of an affair, the king divorced her and banished his former wife to her estates in the country. The king then entered in a relationship with one of Kirsten’s former servants, Vibeke Kruse, by whom he had yet more offspring. Kirsten Munk’s life had certain parallels with that of Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the wife of King George I. But it was Kirsten’s daughter, Leonora Christina, who suffered far harsher treatment than was metered out to either of the two other women. I became so engrossed in the strange tale of Leonora Christina that I decided to write a separate post about her, more of which anon.

A portrait of another ill fated member of a European royal family hangs above the white marble fireplace in the next room: this time being of King Charles I. The unfortunate king was imprisoned in the palace during the English Civil War. His children were held in nearby Syon House and were allowed to visit him from time to time. William III used this room as his Privy Chamber, hence his chair of state. One of the tapestries illustrates the martyrdom of St Stephen. I have no idea what the subjects of the other tapestry is though I assume it is Biblical in origin.

More prosaically, two marble topped pier tables and torchères have been placed against the mirrors by the windows as they would have been in the past, the better to reflect light into a room made gloomy by the dark panelled walls. In a similar fashion the plain sanded pine floors help to reflect as much light as possible.

A Mortlake Tapestry woven from Raphael’s Cartoon of St Paul preaching in Athens can be partially seen by the red damask bed in the State Bedchamber. It took me a while to identify it. Afterwards, when I compared the tapestry with a picture I had taken of a copy of the respective Raphael Cartoon at the Old Royal Naval College, it dawned on me that the tapestry had been deliberately hung back to front, no doubt on the grounds of conservation. A portrait of William’s late queen, Mary, looks down from the chimney-piece. The painted ceiling features a charming if pagan allegory of night and day, with Night riding a crescent moon and Day springing from the sun.

As part of court protocol, William would formally go to bed and rise in the morning from his red damask four poster bed. It was deemed a singular honour to be present at such ceremonies. In reality, William slept in the adjacent and much smaller yellow bedchamber. The yellow silk damask was specially woven in recent years to match fragments from the original bed hangings. It used to be said that William would give certain Dutchmen, who he was particularly close to, the right to sleep in the beds in his absence but that is yet another one of those intriguing vignettes that is no longer related. The stacked shelves above the fireplace display vases from Mary’s private collection. There was another delightful painting on the ceiling: this time of a sleeping Mars with his head in the lap of Venus.

I can’t say I was very taken with William’s closet with its crimson damask wall hangings. I did find a jib door though, which seemed to lead to his dark closet. I had always thought it strange that William would have been obliged to slip out onto the cold stone stairs in his nightgown to get to his velvet close stool, but it seems he would have used this door instead. I almost got into trouble trying to photograph the other side of this jib door from within the dark closet as my hand set off the alarm. Hoping they would attribute the alarm to the gaggle of school children, I guiltily beat a hasty retreat down the stairs. As I looked up I saw that the dark closet had once had glazed windows to allow light to stream in from the hall.

At the bottoms of the stairs I came across the snug little sitting room set aside for visitors to rest their weary limbs. I had often made use of in the past until I went up in the world as a member and had full rein of an entire former grace and favour apartment.

It seems William III was essentially a private man, so private in fact that the curators at Hampton

Court are not sure how this sequence of chambers would have been presented in his lifetime or their respective purpose. Consequently, I shall forbear from describing each room and simply highlight certain features.

It is though that the room shown above would have been William’s bedchamber as the middle door leads to a dark closet. One of these rooms had a special set of locks which meant that the doors could only be locked from the inside, affording the secretive William even more privacy when he wanted it.

The carvings on either side of the painting depict various musical instruments including violins and recorders, which would suggest this had been a music room.

What could be more appropriate than for a Prince of Orange, as William had been before becoming King of England, than that he should have his own orangery. I was always more fascinated by the fossils in the marble flooring than the statues. Thanks to my jaunts around stately homes, I am able to identify the Venus de Medici, the statue with the dolphin, at ten paces as well as Cleopatra being bitten by an asp.

I particularly liked the fact that from this closet you could catch a glimpse of an interior chamber. Up to this point, the procession of rooms was beginning to remind me of the Geffrye Museum rather than the private apartments of a king.

William would have had a portrait of his mother, the English born Princes Mary, on display out of affection and to emphasis his English roots and therefore strengthen his claim to the throne which he had won though a force of arms. The portrait of the young girl in a blue dress would have been painted during the Princess’ childhood in England.

The final room in the sequence is William’s private dining room. Normally there are more pictures of comely young women on display. Just as Anne Hyde had commissioned the Windsor Beauties in the Communication Gallery so her daughter, Queen Mary II, persuaded Sir Godfrey Kneller to paint a selection of the acknowledged beauties from her own court. It seems the pictures have been moved elsewhere in the palace in anticipation of a new exhibition to be held next year.

As the apartments were now all but empty I fell into conversation with Richard, the warder on duty. He explained that the palace had recently been used for location scenes for an upcoming film called “Jack the Giant Killer,” starring Ewan McGregor. It was based on the traditional fairytale Apparently, Fountain Court was turned into a medieval fair for the day. Richard also mentioned the BBC production of “Little Dorrit”, where the courtyards around the Tudor Kitchens served as the Marshalsea Prison. Exterior and interior scenes for this same production were also filmed at Chenies Manor House. I said how much I had admired the ironwork summerhouse prop which the BBC had left behind in the gardens at Chenies. We both smiled when we recalled “To Kill a King” which was partly set at Hampton Court. The lanky Rupert Everett was physically miscast as Charles I. The latter suffered from polio as a child and consequently only grew to around 5 foot 4. Rupert Everett is 6 feet 4 and as such a giant compared to Charles. I suppose Everett and McGregor could have joined forces and made a film called: Jack: To kill a giant king. Alas, King William’s life has never been deemed of sufficient interest to merit a film in its own right, other than one made for BBC North Ireland television in 2008. Even demolishing half of their palace could not dim the memory of the Tudors.

The Brimstone Butterfly's Hampton Court: The King's Staircase

2011-11-14T22:11:00.004Z

In 1677 when Princess Mary, the daughter of the future James II of England, was informed she was to be married she did not know which was worse: being forced to leave the lively Restoration Court for staid Holland or marrying William of Orange, a man blessed with neither height, unlike her uncle King Charles II, or good looks. However, although he did not cut a heroic figure in the flesh, William more than acquitted himself ably on the battlefields of Europe. Mary’s sullen resentment at the match eventually turned to a sincere affection for both her new homeland and her spouse. When they were invited back to England to jointly take the throne from off of Mary’s Catholic father, she was more than happy to concede the greater share of sovereign power to him.

Arnold Joost van Keppel

For his part William seemed to have grown fond of his wife, the more so when she died of smallpox in 1694. He had only ever had one acknowledged mistress, Elizabeth Villiers, during his marriage and she was dismissed upon his wife’s death. Rumour had it that her place was taken by the much younger Dutchman Arnold Joost van Keppel, who William created the 1st Earl of Albemarle. If that were true then young Arnold was merely paving the way for his descendants to become embroiled in ribald gossip regarding their closeness to certain members of the royal family: one descendant, Alice Keppel, was an acknowledged mistress of King Edward VII, whilst her great granddaughter caused an even bigger scandal in the latter part of the 20^th century when she became the third person in the late Diana Spencer’s “crowded” marriage to the Prince of Wales.

Even knowing something of William’s personal history I would never have been able to decipher the allegories contained on the King’s Staircase at Hampton Court Palace without a crib sheet. William commissioned Jean Tijou, a French Huguenot and master blacksmith, to make the ornate iron balustrades. Tijou had accompanied William and his wife Mary to England when they seized the throne.

I had unwittingly come across more examples of Tijou’s work when I walked passed the gilded screens separating the Privy Gardens at Hampton Court from the tow path.

Antonio Verrio

The artist who painted the frescoes on the ceiling and walls was Antonio Verrio. He also painted the ceiling roundel depicting the classical myth of Ganymede and the Eagle within the Queen’s Closet at Ham House. Not being a Classical scholar I needed to peek at the notes in Ham House to establish what the imagery represented. I would have been completely stymied by what precisely is represented in the paintings around the King’s Staircase.

It seems William III is shown as Alexander the Great, which must mean he is the figure in the golden armour. If so he is depicted hovering above lesser mortals in the guise of Roman generals. The latter represent his enemies, the Roman Catholic rulers of the time. William was a staunch Protestant which was why he had been offered the throne of the Catholic King James.

Elsewhere the gods are feasting. This allegory represents the abundance of food and the absence of war that William’s reign has heralded in.

I am now very familiar with the various grisaille (monochrome or near monochrome) figures and motifs of war which decorated the lower parts of the walls, having encountered them at Syon House, Marlborough House, Knole and elsewhere.

The frescoes are somewhat ridiculous but if you ignore the bellicose nature of them they are rather jolly and a great deal more fun than the average set of adverts plastered along escalators.

The Brimstone Butterfly's Hampton Court: The Royal Mews

2011-11-13T17:13:00.009Z

On Wednesday the Brimstone Butterfly became an unofficial writer-in-residence at Hampton Court. On a whim I decided to try and write an entire piece for my blog, or at least start one, from within the palace itself. Thus, this post is brought to you from the Member’s Room at Hampton Court Palace.

In September, as I took the bus from Hampton Court to York House in Twickenham, I was fascinated to see a two storey red brick range of Tudor buildings facing Hampton Court Green. Its sheer scale and proximity to Hampton Court made it clear it must be connected to the palace. Until that month I had been completely unaware of its existence as it is separated from the gated palace complex by a main road which crosses the river. In the Tudor era and for most of the Stuart there was no bridge spanning the Thames at this point. To cross the river people had to make use of ferries.

En route to the mysterious building I passed the respective former homes of Sir Christopher Wren, who had demolished so much of the Tudor Palace to build the Baroque wings, and of Sir Michael Faraday, the eminent scientist.

A large notice pinned to the wall revealed that the Tudor range was occupied by the Horse Rangers Association. To give myself a legitimate excuse to explore further I decided on the spur of the moment as it were to become a member of the Rangers, although I hadn’t a clue as to what a ranger was. As I drew closer, an unmistakable odour revealed the building to be a working mews with stabling for horses. The signs forbidding parents from entering the stables was further evidence that it was a riding school. I no longer wished to become a Horse Ranger but a devoted mother, who only wanted the very best for her imaginary child including riding lessons at this historic building.

I walked around the side of the mews and came across a riding ring with a solitary horse in it. One of the assistants was sitting on a bench playing with her Labrador. She asked if she could help me. In response to my question she confirmed that it was a children’s riding school but there was a long waiting list. How old was my child? About 8 I said and then, realising that most mothers would have a more precise idea of their child’s age, added that my enquiries were on behalf of a friend. The assistant said I could go up to the office and add the child’s name to their waiting list if I cared to. I decided to leave all the paperwork to my imaginary child’s imaginary parents.

Having ascertained that the large arch at the other end of the range led to private accommodation, I decided to take a peek into the cobbled courtyard beyond. These buildings and the riding school were first built as stabling for the palace in the early 16^th century and were substantially extended in the 1570s by Elizabeth I. They continue to be used as a royal mews today. Indeed, royal horses are put out to grass here in the summer months when they are not required for ceremonial duties in London.

After my little detour, I made my way back along the road to the palace. The main gateway was closed for building works so I entered through the arched entrance leading to the Tudor Kitchens, exchanging pleasantries with the warder on duty who recognised me. Hordes of small school children were in front of me and another contingent were coming up fast behind so I beat a hasty retreat for the Queen’s Staircase near the Member’s Room.

The Queen’s Staircase was designed for Caroline of Ansbach by William Kent, who also designed the Duke of CumberlandSuite and Chiswick House. As at Chiswick, William Kent was inspired by the art and architecture of Ancient Rome. The ceiling of the Queen’s Staircase has a trompe l’oeil dome with an order of the Garter Star at its centre. A vast classical painting dominated one wall, the theme of which completely eluded me. Various grisaille (monochrome or near monochrome) figures and ornament were featured elsewhere. The way to the Queen’s State Apartments was closed as they are undergoing extensive renovation and are not expected to re-open again until Easter 2012.

Inside the Members’ Room an elderly lady called Winifred came to the front door just as I stepped through it.

“I see you’ve managed to open it, “she said.

It is rather tricky and given that many members are on the more mature side, not very forgiving for those of failing eyesight and reduced dexterity like my good self. Winifred has been a volunteer at the palace for over 8 years, when the scheme first started. As part of her duties, she had arranged to escort a visually impaired visitor around the palace. To enhance their experience visually impaired visitors receive a special commentary and are allowed to touch certain objects selected by the curators in advance. For conservation reasons these objects are not normally allowed to be handled by the general public or even the volunteers. Shortly after Winifred left the doorbell sounded, a further reminder that the double storey space with its own internal staircase had once been a grace and favour apartment. I toyed with the idea of pretending that I was not in. Finally, as I made my way to the entrance hall a red coated warder let two woman members in. Earlier I had noticed that the door to the chamber above the gateway arch upstairs was open again and I was anxious to be left on my own and to my own devices. Who would rid me of these turbulent visitors? Fortunately they did not stay long.

After they left I threw caution to the winds and ventured upstairs to the training room where I photographed the glorious arched mullioned windows. From these very windows in his private quarters, Henry VIII would have had been able to blow kisses to Anne Boleyn across the way in her own sumptuous apartments above her eponymous gateway. It also afforded him a splendid view of his astronomical clock whose designer, Nicolas Kratzer, had been so gallant to me in the Communication Gallery a week or so earlier. I returned downstairs to the dining room just as Winifred reappeared. It seems her visitor never arrived.

Henry VIII's Bayne Tower at Hampton Court

I packed up my laptop and made my way to the King William Apartments. En route I was told by some volunteers that the colonnade went past Henry VIII’s Bayne Tower. Though truncated and extensively remodelled since Henry’s time, this would have housed other rooms in his private apartments including a strong room and a bathroom, which boasted plumbed in running hot and cold water. The water was heated up in a nearby boiler and the cold water tap fed with spring water piped into Hampton Court from Coombe Hills several miles away, a feature Cardinal Wolsey had installed when he first built the palace. I used to pass by the remnants of Cardinal Wolsey’s Conduit houses in Coombe Hills on a daily basis when I worked in Kingston. A television documentary revealed that the spring water captured within there is as sweet today as it ever was. Nowadays, the Bayne Tower provides private accommodation for a senior member of the palace staff and for the actors who play Henry VIII. What a perk of the job to stay in Henry’s actual private apartments!

Lady Frances Grey and Dame Sybil Penn

Two Tudor Ladies were seated on a bench near the Bayne Tower. They were Dame Sybill Penn in black and Lady Frances Grey in red, the latter being the niece of Henry VIII by his sister and Charles Brandon. We fell into conversation. Having determined that there was a vacancy for the post of queen following the fall of Katherine Howard, the two court ladies said I had best be quick if I wished to set my cap at the king because rumour had it that his fancy had settled upon the Lady Latimer, better known to posterity as Katherine Parr. Rather than an apartment the actresses playing Henry’s wives are provided with a revolving door.

I mentioned that I had seen Dame Sybil’s old haunts when I visited Apartment 39 in September and was sorry to hear that she had died of smallpox whilst nursing Queen Elizabeth I. The actress playing Dame Sybil said she was not sure whether it was Sybil or another royal servant who had sacrificed her life for the Queen’s. Moreover, there was a certain mystery as to her true origins as an extant letter mentioned a different surname and the coat of arms on the memorial plaque in the church where she is buried were those of the Hampden family. Sybil it transpires was closely related to John Hampden the famous 17^th century parliamentarian. Such was John Hampden’s renown that towns have been named after him in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine. The John Hampden Society newsletter number 62 for Spring 2010 states that Sybil died on 6^th November 1562 after having nursed Queen Elizabeth I, who had been stricken with smallpox. From the same newspaper I learned that Sybil married a David Penn. As loyal servants to the Tudors the couple had been granted confiscated monastic lands at the Dissolution. Her brother Richard Hampden had also prospered being appointed Clerk of the Royal Kitchens during Elizabeth’s reign. Consequently he would have been well acquainted with both the Tudor Kitchens and the Privy Kitchens at Hampton Court Palace.

I then addressed the lady in red, the Lady Grey. (Somewhat confusingly Dame Sybil achieved posthumous fame as the lady in grey, the epithet given to what is thought to be her ghost). Lady Frances explained that she was the mother of Lady Jane Grey. I realised later that she was also the mother of the equally unfortunate Katherine Grey, whose portrait I had seen at Syon House. The latter ended her days in much the same way as Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the ill-fated wife of George I. Both died whilst under permanent house arrest, having not been allowed to see their own children in years. In Katherine Grey’s case, Queen Elizabeth was furious when her fecund second cousin and possible heir had married in secret. Katherine’s proximity to the throne was such that the English Ambassador in Madrid, Sir Thomas Challoner, had written to Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Cecil advising him of a plot to marry Katherine off to the king of Spain’s son. Challoner’s letter states:

"King Philip (of Spain) is so jealous of the anticipated power of France, by the alliance of young Francis the Dauphin with the Queen of Scotland, and her claim to the crown of England that he positively contemplates stealing Lady Catherine Grey out of the realm, and marrying her to his son, Don Carlos, or some other member of his family, and setting up her title against that of Mary Stuart, as the true heiress of England. Lady Catherine will probably be glad to go, being most uncomfortably situated in the English Court with the Queen, who cannot well abide the sight of her……so she lives as it were in great despair. She has spoken very arrogant and unseemly words in the hearing of the Queen and others standing by. Hence it is thought that she could be enticed away if some trusty person were to speak with her."

The Spanish marriage plot was thwarted and afterwards Lady Katherine took the reckless decision to elope with Edward Seymour. Lady Frances did not live long enough to see Katherine imprisoned for life by Queen Elizabeth. It might have proved one sorrow too many following the executions of her sixteen year old daughter Jane and Jane’s father for high treason, following their abortive attempt to claim the throne for Jane and usurp Mary Tudor. As if to show that she harboured no further dynastic ambitions, Frances married her Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes. His far lower social standing meant that their children could never aspire to the throne. In her affair with Stokes, Frances was following the example of her royal mistress. The court was scandalised by Queen Elizabeth's enduring relationship with her own Master of the Horse Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and brother-in-law to the late Lady Jane Grey. I have since discovered a third woman to add to the triumvirate of prominent Tudor ladies dallying with the master of the horse. Though I was fully acquainted with the histories of Lady Frances Grey’s daughters Katherine and Jane, I knew little about the third daughter, Mary.

Lady Mary Grey

Mary had been born with what we would need regard as a curvature of the spine making her one of the smallest people at the Tudor court. Never was the saying opposites attract truer than in Mary’s choice of husband. In 1564 the diminutive Mary made her way to the Watergate at Westminster to marry in secret the 6 foot 8 Sergeant Porter and Deputy Master of the Horse, Thomas Keyes. It is hard to say whether Elizabeth was more scandalised by the fact that yet another Grey sister and potential heir to the throne had eloped or the fact that Mary, like her mother Frances in 1555, had married so far beneath her. Perhaps in emulating her mother Mary had hoped that her misalliance was a clear signal she had no dynastic ambitions. A third reason for Elizabeth ‘s anger could have been simple jealousy in that Mary was free to marry her deputy Master of the Horse whereas Elizabeth was unable to wed her actual Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley. Whatever the reason, Mary was immediately placed under house arrest when the marriage was discovered. One of her jailors was Thomas Gresham, the original builder of Osterley Park where Mary was confined from time to time. Neither Gresham nor his wife appreciated Mary’s presence. Indeed Gresham wrote to Cecil lamenting that Mary was his own wife’s “" bondiage and harte sorrow."

Lady Mary was finally released from house arrest in 1572 after the death of Thomas Keyes in jail. Mary had failed to secure the Queen’s permission to take care of Thomas’s orphaned children by his first marriage but in time she was allowed back at court. On New Year's Day 1577, for example, she is recorded as having been at Hampton Court Palace where she presented the queen with " four dozen buttons of gold, in each of them a seed pearl, and two pairs of sweet [i. e. perfumed] gloves." She received in turn “a silver cup and cover, weighing eighteen ounces.” The meticulous royal household accounts for 1576 record Mary’s gift of a gold cup for the Queen when Mary attended the Christmas revels at Hampton Court.

On 28^th April 1578 Lady Mary Grey, the last of Lady Frances Grey’s children, died. But the centuries have wrought a final ironic twist to the story of Lady Frances. Her daughter, Lady Jane Grey ruled a mere 9 days, the shortest reign in English history. Next year a direct descendant of Lady Frances Grey’s, through her daughter Katherine, will celebrate her diamond jubilee making her reign the second longest in English history.

Happy Birthday Mandip , Caro and Bram Stoker!

2011-11-08T16:23:00.000Z

Mandip and I share a birthday with Bram Stoker. I wonder if that makes us the Brides of Dracula by default. Anyway, here are a few fireworks we set off by the lakeside at Brimstone Butterfly Towers to celebrate our joint birthday along with a picture of some of the dancing girls and boys we hired to entertain us.

Doing porridge.

2011-11-07T20:55:00.003Z

As an adult I have always lived in a tiny space, though not through choice but necessity. Whenever visitors first came into the bedsit I used to rent they would invariably declare it to be “cosy.” In short, it was extremely small but it suited me and it was all I could afford at the time. The lack of space was more than compensated for in my eyes by the views over a mature Edwardian garden. I must admit I got a shock when I moved into the bedsit in the November, a month after I had originally viewed it. Instead of fairies at the bottom of the garden, the now bare branches of the trees revealed a railway track. However that was what had saved the garden from redevelopment and I quickly got used to the sound of trains going past.

I later moved into the servants’ garret at Brimstone Butterfly Towers. A flat had been carved out of a Victorian bedroom and a box room. Again, I have views over mature trees so were it not for the sound of traffic coming from the street below I could fancy myself to be in the countryside. Perhaps visiting stately homes is my way of living vicariously. But cramped though it is, my flat is a virtual palace compared to the prison cell I went to visit recently.

Having just had an interview at an organisation which tackled alcohol abuse, I was sorely tempted to drown my sorrows if I had but a liking for hard liquor. Fortunately, neither drink nor illicit drugs have ever appealed to me so I decided to get high on endorphins instead and walk to Waterloo station as it was such a fine autumnal afternoon. Out of a sense of nostalgia I decided to pop into the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. It used to have a café where my mother and I would indulge in the occasional cake and coffee. She was a psychotherapist attached to St Thomas hospital across the Thames, so it was an ideal meeting point for us when I was working in central London. Incidentally, St Thomas is near the Houses of Parliament. It has been claimed that the real reason why it has often been spared the kind of draconian cuts imposed on other hospitals is its convenient location for MPs taken ill within Parliament.

The café I knew had long since gone as indeed had my mother. Through the floor to ceiling windows I could see there was an art exhibition being held in the area where we used to sit to eat our meal. Curious I went inside to take a closer look. The exhibition displayed artwork by prisoners from across the UK. In addition, there was a life size replica of a prison cell complete with two actors playing the role of prisoners, something I think they had performed in real life too. The idea was that they would spend hours banged up in their cell whilst they were viewed on a live video stream. Visitors could also enter the cell and chat to them about prison life or talk to them through barred windows at the other end of the cell. The installation called gotojail has been set up by Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) which, according to their website was established in 1999 "to develop innovative, arts-based approaches to working with prisoners and staff within U.K. prisons."

One of the women on duty asked if I would be interested in entering the cell. I said I was too shy to but before I knew it she was propelling me up to the door of the cell and introducing me to Paddy and his cell companion, a much younger black guy whose name I failed to catch owing to my partial deafness. I perched on the edge of the lower bunk bed with Prisoner 2 whilst Paddy sat in a small blue plastic chair. The cell consisted of two bunk beds and a desk with a space for a single chair underneath it. On top of the desk prisoners could place personal items like bottles of soft drinks and a radio. It seems they would have been provided with a kettle to allow them to make hot drinks at night.

I used to share a bunk bed as a child. I had a routine where I would climb up to my bunk from the base of the bed and then roll head over heels on my mattress to my pillow. I was shocked at how little space there was above the adult prisoner’s head in the top bunk. The whole cell was cramped and prisoners could find themselves locked up for hours on end in it during the day as well as overnight. In retrospect it was probably the size of my former bedsit.

I was curious to know how it was determined who should share a cell with whom. Paddy said the officers tried to take into account similarities and if you found you really were not getting on with your companion you could make a request to be moved.

Long term prisoners who behaved themselves could expect to be moved into their own cell over time. In the interim, if one member of the cell misbehaved it would have adverse consequences for his cell mate. Thus, if misconduct led to a prisoner being deprived of television privileges, it would automatically mean that his cell mate was not able to have one either.

My poor hearing meant it took a while before I realised that the cacophony I heard was not coming from the public areas outside the mock cell but from a soundtrack being played into the cell. According to Paddy and his friend it was a realistic representation of the kind of noise to be heard in the average prison during the day. That alone would have driven me mad.

But the worst aspect of the cell for me was the stainless steel toilet by the cell door. Part of the desk formed a low wall providing a modicum of privacy but the loo did not even have a lid. Paddy explained that prison etiquette dictated that prisoners endeavoured not to do their “number twos” in the cell, only to urinate. During the day they could make use of communal lavatories elsewhere in the prison block. I could see that rule quickly going to pot if one of the prisoners fell ill with an upset stomach. Paddy said that at least in this cell the loo was in a corner. He had been in cells in which the loo was by the head of the beds, a revolting thought for someone as fastidious as me.

I asked about temperatures within the cell. Prisoner 2 explained sometimes it could be too hot and at other times too cold. I can well imagine the prisoners would swelter in such a tiny cell in the heat of the summer.

I had only been in the cell for a relatively short time and asked Paddy and his friend how they adapted to returning to their own homes and suddenly having so much space and a separate loo! Paddy said it could be quite strange and somewhat disorientating at first.

At that point, seeing other people hovering by the door I thanked them both for chatting with me. It was sobering to reflect later that I had spent half an hour banged up doing bird. That was a ninth of what actress Lindsay Lohan had to endure when she was slung into jail for 4 and a half hours only a few weeks later. In such charming company as Paddy’s and his cellmate’s I am sure I could have managed as much porridge as La Lohan.

http://www.rideout.org.uk/index.aspx
http://gotojail.info/about.aspx

The Brimstone Butterfly's Hampton Court: The Georgian Rooms

2011-11-07T16:46:00.003Z

Last month the laws of succession were changed enabling the first born of the British monarch to inherit the throne, regardless of sex. How very different the course of English history might have been if these rules had been in place in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Mary Tudor would have come to the throne before her brother, Prince Edward, and might have been young enough to have given birth to a healthy child instead of having two phantom pregnancies. With a Catholic heir she would have crushed the fledgling Protestant Reformation in England completely. In this parallel universe, if the Tudor children had still failed to have issue of their own then the throne would have passed to James I of England. His eldest son, Prince Henry predeceased his father. His second child, Elizabeth of Bohemia would have succeeded to the throne instead of her younger brother Charles. As it was, by a quirk of fate, Elizabeth of Bohemia’s youngest daughter Sophia found herself heir to the English throne in extreme old age but she died only a matter of weeks before the last of the Stuart monarchs, Queen Anne. Consequently, it was Sophia’s son George who became king in 1717. Of Sophia herself, I shall always remember her description of her first encounter with her aunt Henrietta-Maria, wife of the ill-fated Charles I. Sophia was shocked at how different Henrietta looked in real life compared to her exceedingly flattering portraits. Far from being the beauty the official paintings suggested, Henrietta-Maria was, according to Sophia, "a little woman with long, lean arms, crooked shoulders, and teeth protruding from her mouth like guns from a fort."

When it came to dysfunctional royal families the Tudors set the standard in the 16^th century with Henry VIII beheading wives and threatening dire consequences for his eldest daughter Mary if she continued to refuse to accept her parents’ divorce and the break with the Church of Rome. After Henry VIII’s death, matters were far from cordial between Henry’s children. The Stuart queens, Mary and Anne, helped depose their father King James II in the late 17^th century and subsequently quarrelled bitterly amongst themselves.

Sophia Dorothea of Celle

The Hanoverians were at each other’s throats throughout the following century. It started with George I. Like Henry VIII his behaviour as a husband left a lot to be desired. He married the hapless Sophia Dorothea of Celle for her fortune. George showed neither affection nor respect for his wife. Once Sophia Dorothea had produced a son and daughter, her husband sought a mistress whom he publicly flaunted in Sophia Dorothea’s face. She responded by taking a lover of her own with horrific consequences. Her lover was brutally murdered on her husband’s orders. George then divorced Sophia Dorothea on the grounds that she had abandoned him. With the connivance of her father, George had his former wife placed under house arrest in a remote castle where she remained until her death, over 3 decades later. She never saw her family or her children again. Unluckily for her, she died a few weeks before her former husband. Had she lived longer it seems highly likely that her eldest son, now King of England in his own right, would have freed her from her lonely exile.

When George I succeeded to the British throne, he took his by now adult son, also called George and his daughter-in-law, Caroline of Ansbach, with him to their new country. But George major never really took to England and spent a great deal of his reign back in his native Hanover, eventually dying there on one such visit. His son took the opportunity to make political capital from his father’s prolonged absences. The ill will between them had not been helped by King George’s callous treatment of Sophia Dorothea back in Germany. Matters were exacerbated by an open quarrel which led to the younger George being banished from court along with his wife, whilst their children remained under the control of the king. The King’s Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole whose portrait can be seen in the Duke of Cumberland Suite, strove to reconcile father and son. With rebellions being raised on behalf of the exiled Stuart son of James II, it was not the time for the Hanoverians to be feuding amongst themselves.

History repeated itself with George II and his eldest son Frederick to the extent that whilst his younger brother, Prince William the Duke of Cumberland, was furnished with a superb suite of rooms at Hampton Court Palace, Frederick was eventually banished from court altogether. Unlike his father, Frederick was at least spared being separated from his own children. Frederick died before becoming king leaving his son George as the presumptive heir. When George III became king the Hanoverian tradition of feuding monarch and eldest son continued on for yet another generation.

The Georgian Rooms at Hampton Court Palace were refurbished in the mid 1990s and have been staged as they might have been when George II and his queen, Caroline of Ansbach, were last living there in 1737. It was a tumultuous year for the Royal Family and a significant one for the palace. Frederick had rowed with his father after he left the court with his pregnant wife so that she could give birth elsewhere, a serious breach of protocol King George never forgave. The Queen died several months later without being reconciled with her son. For both these reasons, King George became less enamoured with Hampton Court and thereafter only returned to the palace with a much reduced entourage. His grandson, George III, never developed a taste for Hampton Court Palace and eschewed living there in favour of other royal residences such as Windsor Castle and Kew Palace. As a result Hampton Court Palace became home to a multitude of grace and favour apartments and ceased to serve as a royal court.

To reach Queen Caroline’s apartments you must pass from the Communication Gallery with its bevy of Windsor Beauties through a small ante chamber displaying three large scale paintings: two were of Hampton Court during the early 18^th century and one of Louis XIV’s troops crossing a river on their way to a battle against the Dutch.

The Cartoon Gallery is a somewhat austere room designed to house the sequence of Raphael Cartoons installed in here in 1698. The Cartoons were part of an original set of 10 commissioned by Pope Leo X from Raphael as designs for tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. King Charles I had later bought the Cartoons with the idea of having his own tapestries made from them at the works he had established at Mortlake. Fortunately for England Oliver Cromwell decided not to flog them off with the rest of the executed King Charles’ extensive art collection. Today the Cartoons at Hampton Court are 17^th century copies. I saw other copies at Knole and at Trinity College Greenwich. The original Raphael Cartoons were loaned to the Victoria and Albert museum by Queen Victoria in 1865 and are still on display there today. I can’t say I am too fond of religious paintings as a genre but these cartoons are growing on me, probably because I have seen them quite a few times over the past year or so at different locations.

In contrast to the Raphael Cartoons the marble fireplace has a very pagan theme of Venus being pulled along in her chariot by swans and putti. Decorating the sides of the Cartoon immediately above the fireplace are carvings by Grinling Gibbons. Surrounded by such imposing paintings, King William III used this gallery for meetings of his Privy Council. Perhaps it was fortunate that his Cartoons were later replaced by copies. A warder on duty showed me a photograph of the terrible devastation that had wrought in this chamber alone by the fire of 1986.

At the far end of the Cartoon Gallery is a small closet with a fireplace. It has a high stool enabling the warders on duty to keep a beady eye on goings-on in the Gallery whilst not actually being in it. I imagine the Cartoon Gallery gets very cold in the winter even when the warders have exchanged their lightweight summer coats for a thick woollen red coat.

The Queen’s Private Drawing Room has been staged as if Queen Caroline and her friends are about to be served tea, coffee or chocolate. Three card tables, with scooped out hollows to hold counters and coins, have been set out. Above the grey marble fireplace are three rows of blue and white china vases displayed on shelves in the chimney piece. Various paintings have been arranged against the red figured silk wall hangings.

The next room in sequence is the royal bedroom. It has a special mechanism on the door to enable it to be locked from the bedside by the royal couple should the need arise to afford them some precious privacy. The stunning Flying Tester or Angel Bed of around 1730 originally came from Raynham Hall in Norfolk. It underwent a comprehensive renovation and restoration of the woodwork and upholstery before being placed in the Georgian Rooms. George III’s own far plainer red damask travelling bed, now in the Duke of Cumberland’s Suite, used to be displayed in here instead. The other remarkable feature about this room is the tapestries. I don’t know whether Queen Caroline was overly fond of sailors but she certainly had a strong partiality for the depiction of sea battles. The tapestries on display were all chosen by her.

Caroline’s bathroom is hidden behind a reconstruction of the early 18^th century wooden partition which once stood here. It provided a screen for the modest queen, as the windows overlook Fountain Court. The queen would bathe in her wooden bathtub dressed in a muslin gown and sitting on a special seat. Hot water could be fetched from the kitchens and coldwater from a water tank nearby and brought into the bathroom by the doors at the back of the room. In front of the partition is a dressing table with a silver gilt toilet set. To remove temptation the toilet set is under glass. Every time I come into the bathroom I detect a distinctly old fashioned perfume which is said to be Caroline’s. When I spoke to two female warders on duty recently one had come across the perfume and the other, to her evident relief, had never encountered it. To date there has been no logical explanation for the mysterious aroma, said to follow people around, a phenomenon I can also attest to personally.

Next to the bathroom is a rather charming closet, where the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting could repair to until summoned by their royal mistress. One of these ladies-in-waiting, Henrietta Howard, not only assiduously served Caroline but was also the personal body servant so to speak of Caroline’s husband being his acknowledged mistress. Caroline was well aware that the English born Henrietta first became George’s mistress back in Hanover. Far from being appalled Caroline encouraged the relationship to the extent that she did her best to try and dissuade Henrietta from retiring from the English court in the 1720s. Caroline knew that royal kings and princes were almost obliged to keep a mistress, even when their hearts weren't really in it, as was the case with the Dutch King William III. Furthermore, Caroline found Henrietta more amenable than most, the more so since she had little interest in meddling in politics. But Henrietta was adamant. George had pensioned her off leaving her sufficient money to build herself the elegant Marble Hill House where she could be mistress of her own household.

In the Queen’s Private Dining Room Caroline once again gave expression to her love of sea battles through her choice of 6 paintings by the Flemish artist Willem van de Velde. His name sounded familiar and I realised I had first came across his work at the Queen’s House in Greenwich where he had once been granted a studio by royal command.

The little Sideboard Room next to the dining room has a marble sink in which glasses could be washed. As I sat on a window seat listening to the ticking of the clock, Del the warder recognised me from earlier visits. As we chatted he said I knew so much about Hampton Court I should train the warders in the history of the palace. I replied that a lot of what I knew had been gleaned from staff like him. It was he, for example, who had explained that the warders first started dressing in their red coats in April 2009, to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne. Del also explained how they had a red winter and a red summer weight coat. Before the introduction of the latter they had worn dark coats and top hats. It seems a special hat, rather like a Beefeater’s, had been designed to be worn with Henry’s red coats, but had been quietly dropped for looking faintly ridiculous.

The final room in the sequence is the Queen’s Oratory or prayer room, the dome of which was designed for Queen Mary II by Sir Christopher Wren in the late 17^th century.

A rather steep flight of stone stairs leads out into the arcade around Fountain Court. The flights of stairs and the skylight are extremely elegant but must have proved a nightmare for the likes of the elderly Mrs Baily in her grace and favour apartment to negotiate.

The Georgian Rooms are fascinating in their own right, but for me, the characters that inhabited them lack the drama and passion of their Tudor counterparts. Perhaps the realisation that they could never really compete with the memory of the flamboyant Tudors was the real reason why the Hanoverians quietly packed their bags and left Hampton Court Palace for ever. Their loss is our gain. By turning Hampton Court into grace and favour apartments, the structural integrity of the palace was maintained, allowing it to be transformed back into a royal court centuries later, to the great delight of the multitude flocking there today and above all to the eternal delight of the Brimstone Butterfly herself. .

Hurray for Bollywood!

2011-11-06T16:43:00.001Z

The Indie short that my friend and I made earlier in the year has continued to enjoy success at art house film festivals around the world. Last month it was shown simultaneous in Mumbai, India and in Cornwall, England. This was as a result of a joint collaboration between film curators in the two countries. A similar scheme means that our presence at a film festival in Germany will lead to it being shown in Mexico. The joint English/Indian video art screenings took place in late October at The Exchange, Princes Street, Penzance and at Clark House Mumbai. Cristóbal Catalán directed the film I appeared in. We have been told that our film has received a very favourable reception whenever it has been shown. I am not surprised as it has usually had to beat off stiff competition to be screened in the first place and of course there is the added bonus of me appearing in a steel-boned figured silk corset, as well as special appearances by my 1910 veiled hat for lovers of vintage millinery. It has garnered an impressive amount of festival credits for a short Indie film, especially as it was done in a hurry to meet a deadline imposed by the Dutch arts festival which originally commissioned it way back in March of this year. So now the Brimstone Butterfly can add international film actress to her CV along with broadsheet journalist, television concert pianist and radio broadcaster. Only a tiresome pedant would point out that I have but a single credit for each.

The Square Eyes 4 Mumbai Programme featured the following artists from England:

Fred McVittie, 'Look At Modern Art'

Anna Sadler, 'Mine',

Anne Haycock, 'Face to Face',

Daniela Palimariu, 'Breakfast On Red Table'

Rebecca Ballard, 'Miss Smith',

Mary Fletcher, 'Art Notes',

Ken Turner, 'Derrida the Truth in Painting & Van Gogh's Painting',

Fred Mc Vittie, 'Rabbit Meat',

Laura Phillips, 'Beacon For John Cabot Tower (Semaphore Line)',

Ian Whitford, '18/11/09 5:46pm',

Cristobal Catalan, 'Tour(scape)',

Charlotte Jackman, 'The Daily Fiction',

Fred Mc Vittie, 'Balls Deep',

The following artists participated from Mumbai, India:

N. Pushpamala, 'Indian Lady',

Rupali Patil, 'Homage to the Honey Bee',

Baptist Cohelo, 'If it Would Only End',

Shakuntala Kulkarni, 'Is this just a game III',

Shakuntala Kulkarni, Is It Just a Game IV',

Aditi Joshi, 'untitled',

Sharmila Samant, 'Dilemma',

Prabhakar Pachpute, 'Tears of the Unknown',

Tushar Joag, 'Jataka Trilogy',

Vasudha Thozhur, nighwalkscape,

Justin Ponmany, 'Circuit Video'.

The Brimstone Butterfly's Hampton Court: The Windsor Beauties (Revised)

2011-10-30T21:01:00.006Z

The Communication Gallery at Hampton Court Palace was so named because it linked the King's and Queen’s apartments. The walls are lined with dark oak timber panelling with an egg and dart motif and there is an equally plain grey marble fireplace in the centre. On display is a sequence of nine portraits of Restoration women known as the Windsor Beauties and all painted by Sir Peter Lely.

Anne Hyde, Duchess of York

The title “beauties” is a somewhat flexible term. given that the central portrait above the fireplace is of the Duchess of York, Anne Hyde. She was the wife of the then Duke of York and heir apparent. Samuel Pepys did not consider her a beauty. Indeed he wrote in his diary on the 20^th April 1661:

“So back to the Cockpitt, and there, by the favour of one Mr. Bowman, he and I got in, and there saw the King and Duke of York and his Duchess (which is a plain woman, and like her mother, my Lady Chancellor).”

But then Samuel Pepys always had a very low opinion of Anne Hyde, thinking it ridiculous that the Duke should marry a woman he had made pregnant even if she was the daughter of Edward Hyde, the Lord Chancellor. Beauty or otherwise Anne had commissioned the paintings and it is her portrait that takes pride of place above the fireplace.

Margaret Brook, Lady Denham

Margaret Brook, Lady Denham was married to a man twice her age but determined to make her own way at Court and in Restoration England the way to social advancement for a pretty young woman, whether married or no, was to catch the eye of the king or his brother. Having seen her attempts to set her cap at King Charles II thwarted by the machinations of the king’s principal mistress Barbara Palmer, Margaret turned her attention to his brother, the Duke of York. By June 1666 Pepys was writing in his diary: " the Duke of York is wholly given up to his new mistress, my Lady Denham, going at noonday with all his gentlemen to visit her in Scotland Yard; she declaring that she will not be his mistress, as Mrs. Price, to go up and down the Privy-stairs, but will be owned publicly; and so she is.” The affair ended in tragedy with the sudden death of Margaret. She believed she had been poisoned and insisted before she died that an autopsy should be carried out. No trace of poison was found but it did not allay public suspicion that her husband Sir John Denham had murdered her with a poisoned cup of cocoa at the behest of the jealous Duchess of York, an early example of death by chocolate. The poet Andrew Marvell wrote couplets on the supposed murder in his poem "Last Instructions to a Painter", written in September 1667:

“What frosts to fruit, what arsenic to the rat,

What to fair Denham, mortal chocolate.”

Frances Brook, Lady Whitmore

According to Clare Jerrold in her informative book published in 1911 “The Fair Ladies of Hampton Court” Frances Brook, Lady Whitmore “possessed heavily marked features, thick eyebrows, a long, rather ugly nose, well-formed but large mouth, and dark hair.” Unlike her sister, or perhaps even because of her ill-fated sister Margaret Brook, Frances went on to marry two men, first Sir Thomas Whitmore and then Mathew Harvey and lead a life of quiet domesticity away from the hurly burly of court life.

Jane Mrs Myddelton

The Count de Gramont claimed that Jane Mrs Myddelton (no relation to a certain Pippa or Catherine) " was fair, well made and delicate, in manner somewhat precise and affected, giving herself indolent, languishing airs, and extremely anxious to pass as a wit. She wearied by trying to explain sentiments which she did not understand, and she bored while trying to entertain." His tart comment can be attributed to the fact that he had failed to make Mrs Myddleton his mistress, a goal many men at the Restoration court aspired to. On 3^rd October 1665 Samuel Pepys hears that although Jane Myddelton might be as pretty as a picture she is somewhat less pleasing to certain other senses: “the fine Mrs. Middleton is noted for carrying about her body a continued sour base smell, that is very offensive, especially if she be a little hot. “

Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond

Frances Stuart, the Duchess of Richmond was another young woman celebrated for her beauty at the Restoration Court. Unlike many others, Frances did not seek to immediately capitalise on it by becoming some man’s mistress even if that man was Charles II. Despite his ardent pursuit of her she preferred to defend her honour by eloping with the young Duke of Richmond. Alas, virtue was to be her only reward. She succumbed to small pox which destroyed her legendary beauty leading Samuel Pepys to lament on 30^th March 1668: “Here I did see Mrs. Stewart’s picture as when a young maid, and now just done before her having the smallpox: and it would make a man weep to see what she was then, and what she is like to be, by people’s discourse, now.” In time the Duke and Duchess of Richmond were allowed to return to court. It seemed Frances was far from happy in her marriage and allowed the king those kindnesses she had hitherto withheld from him. In one famous episode the king rowed to her marital home, Somerset House, after midnight and finding the gates closed, clambered over the garden wall so he could see her. La Belle Stuart, as she was styled, was immortalised as the seated figure of Britannia on two gold medals of the period. Her life-size wax effigy in her robes for the coronation of Queen Anne can still be seen at Westminster Abbey today, near that of her erstwhile lover King Charles II.

Elizabeth Hamilton, Comtesse de Gramont

Before La Belle Stuart was La Belle Hamilton. Possessed of an uncommon beauty Elizabeth Hamilton she was not alas possessed of an uncommon fortune. Consequently many a sprig of the nobility who might have married her considered it an impediment too far. She ended up as the wife of the Frenchman the Chevalier de Gramont. In the Chevalier’s memoirs, penned by Elizabeth’s brother Anthony, he wrote of his wife: " She had the finest shape, the loveliest neck, and the most beautiful arms in the world ; she was majestic and graceful in all her movements ; and she was the original after which all the ladies copied in their taste and air of dress. Her forehead was open, white, and smooth ; her hair was well set, and fell with ease into that natural order which it is so difficult to imitate ; her complexion was possessed of a certain freshness, not to be equalled by borrowed colours ; her eyes were not large, but they were lively, and capable of expressing whatever she pleased ; her mouth was full of graces, and her contour uncommonly perfect : nor was her nose, which was small, delicate, and turned up, the least ornament of so lovely a face.” So besotted was the Chevalier with his young wife that he heroically remained constant to her for the best part of a year. They appear to have had a long and happy marriage together, mostly spent in his native France.

Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland

Elizabeth Wriothesley, Countess of Northumberland was half sister to Rachel, Lady Russell. The latter had become the chatelaine of Chenies Manor House upon her marriage to William Russell, Earl of Bedford. The latter found himself embroiled in the Rye House Plot and was later beheaded. His ghost is said to roam the grounds of Chenies. Elizabeth Wriothesley went on to become chatelaine of the even grander Syon House but she was not destined to spend many years there. Early in their marriage her husband whisked her off to Paris in 1669 where he dumped her, whilst he himself set off on the Grand Tour. It seems the jealous Earl was concerned that his wife’s beauty had caught the fancy of King Charles II and his brother and he wanted her removed from all temptation. The Earl’s sudden death in 1670 left Elizabeth free to return to England and remarry, this time to the Duke of Montagu.

Henrietta Boyle, Countess of Rochester

Henrietta Boyle, Countess of Rochester was the daughter of the Richard Boyle, 1^st Earl of Burlington, whose namesake went on to build the stunning Chiswick House. She married Lawrence Hyde the son of the Earl of Clarendon and brother-in-law to the future James II. The Earl of Clarendon suffered a calamitous reversal of political fortune and was forced to flee into exile rather than face impeachment in England. The Stuart royal family did not seem to bear any ill will towards Clarendon’s sons for the sins of the father and Lawrence went on to serve stints as a foreign ambassador. He even managed to maintain a position at court when his brother-in-law, King James, was ousted and was replaced on the throne by Queen Mary and her husband William of Orange. This was an act of singular political dexterity for he had openly spoken out against their being made joint rulers in James’ stead. According to the celebrated 19^th century historian and politician Thomas Macaulay, Lawrence Hyde “had excellent parts, which had been improved by parliamentary and diplomatic experience; but the infirmities of his temper detracted much from the effective strength of his abilities. Negotiator and courtier as he was, he never learnt the art of governing or of concealing his emotions. When prosperous, he was insolent and boastful; when he sustained a check, his undisguised mortification doubled the triumph of his enemies: very slight provocations sufficed to kindle his anger; and when he was angry he said bitter things which he forgot as soon as he was pacified, but which others remembered many years. He drank deep, and when was in a rage—and he very often was in a rage—he swore like a porter.” I saw a painting of Lawrence Hyde in the Suffolk exhibition of Stuart portraits at Kenwood House. Sadly the paintings are no longer available to be viewed by the general public, owing to the shortage of staff to man the exhibition galleries.

Anne Digby, Countess of Sunderland

Henrietta Boyle, Lady Rochester passed into history with nary a blemish to her name. Given the prominence of her father-in-law and her husband at the Stuart Court, if there had been any gossip to spread about her it would somehow have found its way into the diaries of the time. By contrast the character of Lady Anne Digby, the Countess of Sunderland, was torn to shreds by the then Princess Anne. In a letter to her sister, Princess Mary of Orange, in 1687 Anne wrote of Lady Sunderland: “She is a flattering, dissembling, false woman ; but she has so fawning and endearing a way, that she will deceive anybody at first, and it is not possible to find out all her ways in a little time. Then she has had her gallants, though may be not so many as some ladies here, and with all these good qualities she is a constant church woman ; so that to outward appearance, one would take her for a saint, and, to hear her talk, you would think she is a very good Protestant, but she is as much the one as the other, for it is certain that her lord does nothing without her." Anne added later:” Sure there never was a couple so well matched as she and her husband ; for as she is throughout in all her actions the greatest jade that ever was, so is he the subtlest workingest villain that is on the face of the earth."

The following year the Catholic King James was ousted from the throne by his daughter Princess Mary and her Protestant husband William of Orange. Anne Digby’s husband had served under James II and she had been a lady of the bedchamber to his second queen, Mary of Modena. Indeed, Anne Digby had been one of two ladies of the bedchamber who later bore witness to whether Mary of Modena had given birth to a legitimate living male heir or whether a notorious substitution had been made by way of a warming pan. (The bed in which this was supposed to have happened is on display at Kensington Palace. Instead of a warming pan it was embellished with a half suspended headless mannequin dressed in jeans and had been styled by the designer Aminaka Wilmonts as part of the Enchanted Palace exhibition). Rather fortuitously the Earl of Sunderland fell out with James II and been dismissed shortly before the king was dethroned. The Sunderlands went into self-imposed exile in Holland. Sunderland later returned to England and managed to ingratiate himself into William of Orange’s good books when the latter was proclaimed King of England. By some miracle Lady Sunderland was also able to worm her way into Princess Anne’s good graces and became her lady-in-waiting despite being “the greatest jade there ever was” when Anne became queen in turn,

There were more paintings of the Windsor Beauties produced than are currently on display. This is expected to be remedied next year when a special exhibition will be held. But there is yet another beauty whose name must be added to the collection and that is of the Brimstone Butterfly herself. My name was added by no less a personage than the man who had designed the great astronomical clock for Henry VIII in the 1540s. Last week,as the Brimstone Butterfly sat on a window seat in the Communication Gallery talking to a red coated warder, a man dressed in Tudor costume unexpectedly stepped through the door that led to the King's Staircase. I asked the warder who the "gentleman" was. The Tudor courtier said he was not there but then relented and said he was the Bavarian Nicolas Kratzer, who had designed the astronomical the clock in the palace. With a flourish he proclaimed me to be the 9^th beauty in the room. He then had to admit that he wasn't sure how many portraits there were in all which, for a famous mathematician, was somewhat embarrassing. Still it's the thought that counts and he is one horologist I will always have time for. It is good to know that I still have it even though I now attract the more mature gentlemen: 500 years older than me to be precise.

The Brimstone Butterfly's Hampton Court: The Duke of Cumberland Suite (Revised October 2011)

2011-10-25T21:20:00.006+01:00

It is one of those frustrating paradoxes of the 21^st century that the authorities try their hardest to wean people off using their private cars, but then make travel at weekends in London on public transport an absolute nightmare. Sheer logistics obliged me to postpone a return visit to Osterley Park and House and make my way to Hampton Court Palace instead. My personal interest in English history reaches a crescendo under the Tudors and all but fizzles out after King Charles II. As a consequence, I rarely pay more than a cursory visit to the parts of the palace rebuilt by William III in the closing years of the 17^th century. However, at the weekend I decided I would explore more thoroughly those areas I had hitherto neglected.

Before my perambulations around the Georgian Rooms I went into the Members’ Room. The foot of the staircase was roped off and the door on the upper floor firmly closed. Fortunately, I had taken advantage of an earlier visit to explore both. On this occasion I could hear a group of women talking loudly in the dining room. Some poor soul was the subject of a prolonged session of character assassination. I went into the kitchen, endeavouring to make as much noise as possible to signal my presence but they seemed oblivious to the fact they could be overheard, at which point I decided to leave.

The sequence of Georgian Rooms start with the Cumberland Suite, which is located immediately above the Member’s Room and occupies the same space which constituted Henry VIII’s private apartments. The staircase to these rooms also leads to the Silver Stick Gallery on the third floor. It was on this upper storey that Jane Seymour died days after giving birth to Henry’s son and heir, Prince Edward. It is said that her ghost has been seen descending this staircase and making its way out into the courtyard in search of her only child. As regular readers will have long surmised, I have little time for Mistress Jane Seymour being a Lady Anne Boleyn woman to the core.

The Duke of Cumberland was a younger son and favourite child of King George II and his wife, Queen Caroline, and in 1734 had yet to go down in history as the infamous Butcher of Culloden for the savage way he suppressed the Jacobite uprising of 1746. The royal couple had become estranged from their eldest son and heir, Frederick. When Frederick’s grandfather, King George I, inherited the throne he insisted that his own son and daughter-in-law should accompany him to England but that their eldest son Frederick should remain behind at the royal court of Hanover. Incidentally, also in the royal baggage was one Henrietta Howard, King George II’s mistress and the future builder of Marble Hill House. Frederick was well into his twenties when his grandfather died and his father came to the throne. There was very little love lost between the new Prince of Wales and the reigning monarch, which was why he ended up being banished from court and setting up home at Kew Palace whilst his parents commissioned William Kent, who had also worked on Chiswick House, to design a sumptuous suite of rooms for their younger teenage son. In 1734 young Prince William proudly took up residence.

The first room through the processional route is the double height Presence Chamber. It has the most elaborate of all the plaster ceilings, very reminiscent of the kind found in Jacobean ceilings such as in the Grand Salon at Charlton House. The walls have been painted a sage cream and the plasterwork picked out in gold leaf. The wall by the windows contained a jib door. As I speculated what lay beyond a warder fortuitously opened it. It seems little more than a dilapidated closet although it is possible that it leads into a Tudor staircase tower. On the wall opposite had been placed a marble topped side table with a highly ornate wooden frame carved with garlands of flowers and fruit. The portrait above it was of Sir Robert Walpole, known to posterity as the first British Prime Minister and as the father of Horace Walpole, who built Strawberry Hill Villa.

A small passageway led to the Duke’s Bedchamber. En route I passed by the concealed Tudor spiral staircase which Henry VIII’s pages had used to fetch and carry garments for their royal master from the Wardrobe on the ground floor. I persuaded the warder to let me go inside yet again.

I then asked him about the adjacent mystery room which was in a state of disrepair and not open to the public. He very kindly led me into this chamber and explained that it had been the Duke’s study but that now it was used to store foodstuffs when catered events were held in the apartments. As with the bedroom and the Presence Chamber the study looked out across Clock Court through Tudor style stone mullioned windows. I say Tudor style because the sash windows added by the Georgians were replaced with Tudor windows by the Victorians. The wooden shutters by contrast looked to be Georgian.

The.Duke’s bed would have stood in the purpose built alcove. Nowadays, one of his father’s red damask travelling beds has been placed there. It is simpler than other state beds with their elaborate canopies and plumes of feathers as it needed to be readily dismantled so that it could conveyed around the country with ease. On either side of the alcove was a closet: one known as the light on the right and the other the dark on the left. The latter was where the Prince’s close stool was kept. The other served as a dressing room. The same warder who had shown me the spiral staircase and the study took me into the windowless dark closet (save for the a small oval window high up in an inner wall) so that I could see an extant Tudor door. It must have been used by Henry VIII at one stage, though in his younger days as it was not very wide and certainly not king sized. The warder said that no-one today was quite sure where it led to. Some thought to a void, others to the Painted Hall. There was not the budget to carry out a scientific survey to find out one way or the other. Simply forcing it open was not an option if there was the possibility of wall paintings on the other side. As we stepped back into the bedchamber a female warder teased her colleague for taking women into the closet. The plain white marble fireplace with its green marble pillars had a simple egg and dart motif which was repeated in the shutters at the windows. There were a number of paintings on display against the dark green damask wall hangings including a Caravaggio of a boy peeling fruit, and “A Sibyl” by Orazio Gentileschi. The latter had produced the ceiling paintings for the Great Hall in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, which had later been cu down and placed in the Blenheim Saloon at MarlboroughHouse. Another painting depicted the family of the first Duke of Buckingham. The Duke had been a favourite of both King James I and his son Charles I. He was far from being a favourite with Parliament, who tried to have him impeached. Charles I saved Buckingham by dissolving Parliament but the king could not protect his friend from a successful assassination attempt in 1628 a year after the family portrait had been commissioned.

The Prince’s Withdrawing Room, the walls of which were hung with a red silk damask, had the grandest marble fireplace of all. It was decorated with carved grapes, pears, Grecian urns and garlands of flowers. In the Duke’s day he would have been provided with the only armchair in the room. Everyone else would have used stools to emphasize their more lowly status. More paintings lined the walls including a self-portrait of Artemisia Gentileschi, the talented daughter of Orazio. I once tried to overlay an image of the Partridge’s mother on to that of Artemisia for a Christmas card. The angle of Artemisia’s head in the painting proved too problematic to replicate successfully and I abandoned the idea.

I was rather pleased I had made the effort to explore the first of the Georgian Rooms in more detail. Had I not done so I might never have discovered the extant Tudor door. I shall return to the subject of the Georgian Rooms anon.

Apartment 39 Hampton Court. September 2011 (Revised)

2011-10-16T21:24:00.013+01:00

To make the most of Open House London the Brimstone Butterfly had to plan her weekend with all the rigour of a military campaign. Consequently, I realised that with judicious planning I could cram in a trip to Hampton Court Palace along with a visit to York House and still have time to make a repeat journey to the elegant 18^th century Marble Hill House.

I arrived at Hampton Court just moments before the start of one of the timed tours. To allow as many people as possible to view this normally private part of the palace, the tours were at double quick time. There was little chance to linger and so my impressions are perhaps briefer than usual. Apartment 39 is located on the south-west wing of the West Front of Hampton Court Palace. Having its own separate entrance we did not need to pass under the main gateway to gain access. Instead, we went through a small iron gate and walked around the side of the building to a secluded private garden. The latter was dominated by a mature false Acacia tree festooned with mistletoe. Having viewed the tree from a distance in the past, I had always thought there were birds’ nests hanging from its branches, which shows the paucity of my knowledge regarding all things botanical.

We were told by the guide that this part of the palace was built in 1536, the year of Anne Boleyn’s death. I am not sure if she would ever have seen it. Mind you, given that the Great House of Ease, a communal lavatory was also sited here, it was unlikely to have been on Anne Boleyn’s list of places to see before she died. The two storey House of Ease was designed to accommodate 28 men at a single sitting as it were. The Guards in the Great Watching Chamber had their own garderobe in a small room off the main one. When I went to the palace in June there was a pictorial representation of what it would have looked like complete with its own door, affording a degree of privacy which seems at odds with the Great House of Ease, which eschewed such signs of modesty. The wooden seat of the garderobe would have been built over a shaft directly above a brick vault, which some poor soul had to empty on a regular basis, along with the night soil from all the garderobes. By contrast the contents of the House of Ease emptied directly into the moat around the palace. The moat in turn was part of the tidal waters of the Thames. The garderobe in the Great Watching Chamber was later converted into a fireplace. In one of the present day Ladies can be seen through glass a section of the extant Tudor drainage system. A more fanciful suggestion, as was claimed at Chenies Manor House, is that these drains were secret passageways. Or perhaps the two theories could be combined into a Tudor version of the Shawshank Redemption.

In subsequent centuries the new Tudor lodgings became the Lady Housekeeper’s apartments. There were five post-holders in all: starting with Mrs. Elizabeth Mostyn, then Mrs Mary Keete,Lady Anne Cecil, Lady Elizabeth Seymour and finally Lady Emily Montague. They were all drawn from the upper echelons of the aristocracy. As well as being given one of the largest grace and favour apartments in the palace they received a very generous stipend In return their duties consisted of little more than showing visitors around the palace, from whom they would receive an additional sizable tip for their trouble. On the death of the last post-holder, Lady Emily Montague in April 1838, Queen Victoria ended such a lucrative sinecure when she created the post of Superintendent of the Palace, available to men only. However, that did not signal the end to the tradition of the grace and favour apartments at Hampton Court. It was a practice that had been observed for centuries and indeed is still carried on today. Sovereigns had always arranged for senior courtiers and royal favourites to be granted accommodation close by them at court. The real difference at Hampton Court Palace was that the practice continued long after the monarchs had ceased to live there, following the accession to the throne of George III in 1760. Not surprisingly, there was always a huge demand for such apartments.

There are still various reminders dotted around the palace of the lucky residents who managed to secure a place, from the pump in Clock Court to the name plates on one wall. In the Tudor Kitchens part of an upper floor is still in place from when the chamber was converted into Grace and Favour apartments. Until very recently there were grace and favour apartments within the main palace itself. There might even be a few left today, although the current policy has been not to grant further tenancies whenever apartments fall vacant. This has enabled more of the palace to be opened up to the wider general public.

When I looked through my photographs for the nameplates on the walls at Hampton Court Palace. I became curious to see if I could discover more about those particular residents. Audrey, Mrs Kingsley Foster, it transpired was the widow of Lt Col Kingsley Osbern Nugent Foster, DSO, OBE. Her husband had been a career soldier and commanded the 7^th Manchester Regiment when it invaded Holland at Wallacheren. The Dutch people later awarded him the Order of the Golden Lion for his efforts in freeing their country. After the war rather than take a desk job he gave up his appointment as a full Colonel so that he could command a regiment again on active service. He was killed in action in Korea in 1951.On his death Audrey had been granted a grace and favour apartment in the palace.

Lady Peake’s husband, like Mrs Kingsley Foster, was the widow of a much decorated war hero although Sir Charles Brinsley Pemberton Peake had been on active service during World War One. Afterwards he entered the diplomatic service and became an ambassador in Belgrade and Athens. He died on April 11^th 1958 and his widow moved into Hampton Court in 1960. In the months following her husband’s death Catherine Peake was writing travel articles for the Glasgow Herald but I have yet to discover if she contributed the occasional article or wrote on a more permanent basis.

Mrs H H Baily was the widow of another army office, Brigadier Michael Henry Hamilton Baily. Elizabeth Helena Baily’s husband died in 1950 and she moved into Hampton Court in 1954. There are lifts around the palace today but when Mrs Baily first moved in she had to climb 86 steps to get to her own front door. When she was in her 70s Mrs Baily found herself caught in the fire which had engulfed the Wren wing of Hampton Court Palace on Easter Monday 1986. It had been caused by a naked flame in her neighbour’s, Lady Gale’s, apartment. At the time of the fire, Lady Daphne Gale was the 86 year old widow of General Richard Gale, once the deputy supreme commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization military forces. According to the Los Angeles Times “the local member of Parliament, Conservative Toby Jessel, explained that she was incapable of taking care of herself and "used candles in order to obtain light." Lady Gale had died in the resulting conflagration but Mrs Baily had been rescued, like me, in her dressing gown and was escorted to safety by a fireman. When I sought to discover more about the fire I came across an account of it in the New York Times. At first I was flabbergasted that only £10,000 of damage had been caused although 40 rooms had been damaged by fire and water. I also thought it strange that the fire had been started by an oil lamp when I had always been led to believe it was a candle. Then I realised the article was dated 20^th November 1886, almost a hundred years before the fire which Mrs Baily was caught up in. The New York Times article also mentioned that another fire had broken out on December 14^th 1882 when £30,000 of damage had been inflicted. Again the fire had started in the private apartments. Little wonder that the current curators are keen to see the grace and favour apartments kept to a minimum. In my posts I have only referred to those residents at Hampton Court whose former apartments I have visited or else whose nameplates I have come across. To help me in my initial researches I have made use of a comprehensive handbook of former residents of the grace and favour apartments written by Sarah E Parker on behalf of Historic Royal Palaces..

There are some people who are singularly ungrateful. Princess Frederica Sophia Maria Henrietta Amelia Theresa, daughter of the King of Hanover, and her husband, Baron Luitbert Alexander George Lionel Alphonse Freiherr von Pawel Rammingen, were two such people. Having been granted the former Lady Housekeeper’s Lodgings in 1880 they were forever complaining that it was not big enough for their needs or perhaps to cram in their joint names by the doorbell. Frederica’s cousin, Queen Victoria, finally agreed that they could have more space if they in turn allowed the stables and coach house at the back to be redeveloped into two storey accommodation. It seemed to do the trick and stopped their complaints.

Viscount Wolseley

The next tenant of note, if only because of the changes wrought to Apartment 39 as a consequence, was Viscount Garnet Joseph Wolseley and his wife Louisa. Wolseley was one of the leading army officers of his age. He took a keen interest in earlier soldiers of distinction such as the Duke of Marlborough (whose London house I had visited the day before) to the extent of writing a biography on the hero of Bleinheim. A grateful nation had paid for the monumental Bleinheim Palace to be built for the Duke. Lady Wolseley had more modest ambitions to commemorate her late husband, following his death in1913. She gained approval to turn Apartment 39 into a shrine dedicated to Wolseley’s memory. Thus, she arranged for a new marble floor to be laid in the entrance hall which incorporated her husband’s family crest. On an upper floor she had his initials, coronet, baton of office and oak wreaths worked into a plaster ceiling. But it was on the ground floor that her memorial reached its zenith. She transformed a turret room into an oratory, which listed her husband’s most eminent military campaigns as well as the decorations he had received. I came across an interesting snippet from the Newfoundland and St John’s Evening Telegram for 29^th November 1906 explaining just why the general and his good lady had landed up at Hampton Court. The article states:

“Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, the hero of Tel-el-Kebir and a hundred other fights, whom a grateful country rewarded with $275,000 and a peerage, is now in such dire straits for money that he is compelled to sell his magnificent collection of ancient arms and armour. The collection, which includes some fine English armour from the times of James I and Cromwell, besides many savage weapons which Lord Wolseley collected in the Sudan, Egypt and South Africa, will be sold at a London auction room this month. Being a soldier and not a financier, Lord Wolseley had lost steadily in reckless commercial enterprises with which he has occupied himself since vacating his position as commander-in-chief. Mortgages have been piled upon his country house Glynde in Sussex and he has been compelled to accept the king’s (George V) grant of apartments at Hampton Court Palace, which is a kind of royal almshouse.”

The Brimstone Butterfly has not occupied herself with reckless commercial enterprises. Nevertheless, I only wish I too could wind up in such a royal almshouse. I fear tis the workhouse for me.

Lady Maude, the widow of another general, moved into Apartment 39 in 1920. Some enlarged sepia images of her servants at Hampton Court were on display as we toured the apartment. Having been expressly forbidden to photograph indoors, the only images of the interior I could obtain came from the photocopied fact sheet handed out at the beginning. As a result the quality is rather poor.

Having walked along the lawn in front of the bay windows, we turned the corner by the former stables that had been converted into additional staff accommodation to pacify the demanding Princess Frederica of Hanover.

We then passed through a door into a staff kitchenette. Some sepia images of Lady Maude’s servants were displayed on a counter. From the kitchenette we stepped out into a small inner courtyard.

Now enclosed behind glass, one side originally offered cover for staff as they moved between the different parts of the building. We were shown a modern manhole between the cobblestones. In Tudor times the waste drained straight into the moat and was then washed out into the tidal river. One of the visitors pompously told me we were not allowed to take pictures indoors. I pointed out that we were not allowed to take pictures of the interior of the house but at that precise moment we were standing outside in the courtyard. Later, the woman had the grace to apologise and said she had got just got fed up with the way so many Americans flouted the rules on photography.

On our way to the Linenfold Room we saw the Victorian bathroom complete with an extant Victorian lavatory. The blue and white porcelain toilet bowl encased in a wooden box and with a handle to the side was similar to the one at Ham House and also the one next to Queen Victoria's bedroom at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

The Linenfold room was named after the Tudor style panelling which dates from the 19^th century and includes sliding shutters at the stone mullioned windows. The room contained a large arched alcove and a Tudor style fireplace, lined with 19^th blue and white Delft tiles. Once a drawing room the chamber is now used as a training room for palace staff.

From this room we took the Tudor spiral staircase in one of the turret towers to the first floor.

Here were the first signs of Lady Louisa’s memorial to her husband in the low plaster ceiling decorated with his initials, baton of office and coronet. It seems she sought to commemorate her own residence in the apartment by having Tudor roses adorning the plaster ceilings of one of the rooms. The walls of the two rooms, now turned into one, were painted a light yellow. The marble fireplace with its inlaid tiles added to the overall charm of the two former chambers. The guide pointed out the ornate cast iron radiators at the side of the room.

We then passed through to the CEO’s office. It contained a large table with dining chairs plus two sofas and an armchair by the fireplace. The walls were decorated with green and white roundels of flowers. It was these roundels that I had glimpsed in the past as I walked along the towpath at the side of the palace. The desk placed in front of the large bay windows looked out over the lawns and the false Acacia tree. I preferred the marble fireplaces in the other rooms and found this one with its overmantle and mirror too ornate for my tastes. Amongst the pictures on display, all drawn from the Royal Collection, was one of Queen Victoria as a young girl.

A smaller office had pictures of more obscure 19^th century European royalty. From this office we assembled on the landing of the hallway designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It was here that we learned about one of the most famous former and apparently current residents of Apartment 39. On the landing were two locked doors. Behind them were former bedchambers which were now used as offices. From the 19^th century onwards ghostly incidents have been attributed to this part of the palace. The current Lord Birdwood recalls sleeping in them as a child and described them as being ‘thoroughly infested’ with the supernatural and that he had witnessed ‘actively unpleasant’ events there. In the 19^th century Lady Emily Ponsonby recalled how a female visitor had talked to a housemaid only to see the woman disappear before her very eyes. The Lady in Grey is thought to be the shade of Dame Sybil Penn. She had acted as the dry nurse to Henry VIII’s son Prince Edward and helped care for Henry’s youngest daughter, Queen Elizabeth, when she fell ill with smallpox. Unfortunately Sybil caught the disease herself and died. Elizabeth no doubt arranged for the splendid tomb to be built for Dame Sybil in nearby Hampton church. In the 1820s her tomb was damaged and that was when she began to be seen around the palace. A guide told me that current staff insisted that they still saw Dame Sybil even today. The others in the group seemed alarmed at the news and were keen to descend the staircases lest Dame Sybil dropped by. I was sorely disappointed that she didn’t.

We passed down the staircase and into the Board Room. This contained the famous oratory dedicated to Viscount Wolseley in a converted turret room. I thought it had a very pre-Raphaelite feel to it. But it did seem odd to place such a memorial it in an apartment, which would go on to be lived in by other families.

From the Board Room we went back into the Sir Christopher Wren hall with the marble floor unlaid with the family emblem of Viscount Wolseley. That constituted the end of our brief tour of Apartment 39 other than to step back into the inner courtyard.

This time I had the chance to ask what the hooks had been used for and to take pictures with impunity. It seems they were bell wires to summon servants. I was told that similar bell wires can still be found beneath the floorboards of Brimstone Butterfly Towers.

At Apartment 39 the covered passageway, lined with flagstones. led out of the building to the balcony above the drained moat and the steps leading down to the lawn in front of the palace.

Although it was a brief tour, I am glad that I got the chance to view in person one of the most impressive of all the grace and favour apartments at Hampton Court Palace. For that I have once again to thank the good offices of Open House London 2011. Long may they continue with their splendid and inspiring work!

Dido Elizabeth Belle: Kenwood and Beyond

2011-10-14T20:46:00.076+01:00

The Brimstone Butterfly’s post about Dido Elizabeth Belle dating from December 2009 has proved to be a perennial favourite. Intrigued by the interest it occasioned, I have delved further into Dido’s story and have drawn some rather different conclusions to the one’s I first entertained. Given time, I might change my mind yet again as Dido Elizabeth Belle remains teasingly enigmatic.

I earlier speculated as to whether Dido had been left cowering in Kenwood House, along with the rest of the Mansfield household, when an unsuccessful attempt was made to storm the place by the Gordon Rioters in 1780. The rioters, incensed at Parliamentary legislation which sought to reduce the punitive laws affecting Catholics, were bent on attacking the mansion of Lord Mansfield, Dido’s great uncle and the Lord Chief Justice of England.The rioters’ plans were thwarted by the quick thinking of the landlord of the Spaniard’s Inn, a still extant Elizabethan inn, in London's Highgate. The landlord persuaded the mob to avail themselves of ale or two at his hostelry sited but a short distance from Kenwood House. Whilst they quenched their thirst, the landlord secretly had word sent to the army, who were able to round-up the rioters before they could continue on their way.

More recently I discovered that Gordon rioters had also targeted Lord Mansfield‘s London townhouse with far more catastrophic results. In his memoirs Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who wrote so scathingly about William V of Orange, published an eye witness account of the attack on Lord Mansfield’s Bloomsbury home in 1780.

"I was personally present at many of the most tremendous effects of the popular fury on the memorable 7th of June, the night on which it attained its highest point. About nine o'clock on that evening, accompanied by three other gentlemen, who, as well as myself, were alarmed at the accounts brought in every moment of the outrages committed, and of the still greater acts of violence meditated, as soon as darkness should favour and facilitate their further progress, we set out from Portland Place, in order to view the scene. Having got into a hackney-coach, we drove to Bloomsbury Square, attracted to that spot by a rumour, generally spread, that Lord Mansfield's residence, situate at the north-east, was either already burnt, or destined for destruction. Hart Street and Great Russell Street presented each to the view, as we passed, large fires composed of furniture taken from the houses of magistrates, or other obnoxious individuals. Quitting the coach, we crossed the square, and had scarcely got under the wall of Bedford House, when we heard the door of Lord Mansfield's house burst open with violence. In a few minutes, all the contents of the apartments being precipitated from the windows, were piled up and wrapt in flames. A file of foot-soldiers arriving, drew up near the blazing pile, but without either attempting to quench the fire or to impede the mob, who were, indeed, far too numerous to admit of their being dispersed, or even intimidated, by a small detachment of infantry. The populace remained masters, while we, after surveying the spectacle for a short time, moved on into Holborn.”

Wraxall's description of the forces of law and order standing helplessly by as Londoners rioted and burned down buildings has uncanny parallels with recent events in the capital during the summer of 2011. It was whilst I was reading Sir Nathaniel Wraxall’s account in his memoirs of the rioting in 18^th century Bloomsbury that I came across his amusing anecdote about Dido’s contemporary, Charles, 11^th Duke of Norfolk, who lived in St James’ Square. According to Wraxall the Duke was guilty of "carrying his neglect of his person so far that his servants were accustomed to avail themselves of his fits of intoxication for the purpose of washing him, and to strip him as they would a corpse in order to perform the necessary ablutions. Nor did he change his linen more frequently than he washed himself. One day he complained to Dudley North that he was a martyr to the rheumatism, and had ineffectually tried every remedy for its relief. 'Pray, my lord,' was North's reply, 'did you ever try a clean shirt?'"

Aside from these tumultuous events arising from her great uncle’s position as Lord Chief Justice, Dido generally enjoyed a settled life within the Mansfield household. She had received an education that equipped her to act as Lord Mansfield’s amanuensis on at least one occasion. A letter Mansfield dictated to her and which she transcribed into her neat script survives today and was displayed at the exhibition on Slavery and Justice a few years back. According to the London Chronicle of 1788 Dido was also able to acquit herself well in company being possessed of all the requisite social graces expected of a young lady in 18^thcentury English polite society.

Sir John Lindsay father of Dido Elizabeth Belle

The paper claimed in an obituary about her father, Admiral Sir John Lindsay, that Dido‘s “amiable disposition and accomplishments have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants.” There was one man who Dido singularly failed to impress with either her disposition or her looks. It is his account of their only encounter which has been seen as providing a definitive insight into Dido’s life at Kenwood. Yet I now believe it would be unsafe to regard Thomas Hutchinson’s words as being anything other than those of a highly partisan observer, who contemptuously dismisses Dido as a “Black.”

Hutchinson had first been invited to Kenwood on Sunday 17^th July 1774, some 6 weeks or so after he had been forced into political exile from America. The following day he was proudly writing to his friend Chief Justice Oliver about his visit and described the estate as “a most elegant place and the entertainment as elegant.” It must have been some small consolation to Hutchinson that he got to hobnob with the great and the good in England after the humiliation of his own home across the Atlantic being stormed by an angry mob before being burnt to the ground. Hutchinson and his family barely escaped with their lives, an experience the Mansfields would later endure themselves.

On August 29^th 1779 Hutchinson was still in political exile. He would never return to America and within the year he would be dead. Perhaps his relative old age and bitterness occasioned his poisonous attitude towards Lord Mansfield’s charismatic ward, Dido Belle, or perhaps he was simply an oafish bore.

Of Lord Mansfield himself Hutchinson wrote gushingly in his diary that he at “74 or 5, has all the vivacity of 50. He gave me a particular acct. of his releasing two Blacks from slavery, since his being Chief Justice.” Hutchinson was equally admiring of the elderly Lady Mansfield who had “the powers of her mind still firm, without marks of decay.” He contrasted Lady Mansfield’s simple and becoming dress with that of her contemporary, whom he had seen at court,. Lady Say. He had observed the latter’s “head as high dressed as the young Duchesses etc. What a carricature she looked like! How pleasing, because natural, Lady Mansfield’s appearance”.

Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray on the terrace at Kenwood with the bridge in the background

The view from the Terrace at Kenwood towards the mock bridge. December 2010

Hutchinson then fixed his malign gaze towards Dido:

“A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel — pert enough. I knew her history before, but My Lord mentioned it again. Sir John Lindsay having taken her mother prisoner in a Spanish vessel, brought her to England where she was delivered of this girl, of which she was then with child, and which was taken care of by Lord M., and has been educated by his family. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her — I dare say not criminal. A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship bro’t by a Black for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter being asked what judgement his Ldship would give? “No doubt” he answered “He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.” She is a sort of Superintendant over the dairy, poultry yard, etc, which we visited. And she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said”

Hutchinson’s description of Dido as being neither handsome nor genteel is not borne out by her portrait showing her large expressive eyes and captivating smile nor by the London Chronicle of 1788 enthusing over her “ amiable disposition and accomplishments.” Incidentally, the London Chronicle is believed to have been the first newspaper in Europe to publish the full text of the United States Declaration of Independence in August 1776, by which time Hutchinson's political career in America had turned to ashes and he was reduced to being an increasingly irrelevant commentator on American affairs on behalf of the British Government.

The fact that the former Governor of Massachusetts ’ comments regarding Dido are so churlish in the extreme, made me wonder whether Dido’s time in his company was deliberately kept to a minimum by her great uncle, who had known Hutchinson long enough by then to get the full measure of the man. Perhaps Dido was tactfully kept from dining with the others on that one occasion when Hutchinson was present. Lord Mansfield made Dido write letters to his friends on his behalf when he was ill and to refer to the fact that the letters were in her hand. Her presence within the bosom of the Mansfield family was therefore no secret in high society given that the London Chronicle also recognised her as being Sir John Lindsay’s natural daughter and lauded her character and charm. Moreover, being a “natural” daughter and a poor relative to boot, regardless of her skin colour, is it really surprising that Dido would have wished to make herself as agreeable as possible to the family which had taken her in. Furthermore, Hutchinson contradicts himself .On the one hand he describes Dido as being at Lord Mansfield’s beck and call and on the other he repeats a plantation owner’s gossip that she held the entire Mansfield family under her sway. It also seems strange that the London Chronicle was fully aware of who Dido’s father was but not Hutchinson. Admittedly Hutchinson did not live long enough to be aware of the provisions of Sir John Lindsay’s will in which he left £1,000 to be shared between “John and Elizabeth Lindsay, my reputed son and daughter.’ There is some dispute as to whether Elizabeth Lindsay was in fact Dido Elizabeth Belle, given that historians have yet to identify who exactly Lindsay’s son John was.

As a young woman Dido was paid a handsome allowance and given the post of superintendent of the dairy and poultry yard at Kenwood. I took photographs of the dairy last year not realising Dido’s link with the pretty white-washed buildings. The present interiors lacked the original fittings to be found at Ham House. The décor of the latter owes more to highly sentimental 18^th century notions of pastoral life than what would be actually be found in the average dairy. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Syon House where the model dairy was placed next to the more prosaic and functional working dairy. There was nothing intrinsically demeaning about Dido’s role as the superintendent. Her title proves that the actual day-to-day work was carried out by underlings. At Syon House the Duke of Northumberland and his guests were content to watch a dairymaid going about her business. Across the Channel, at le Hameau de la reine, a rustic retreat was created for the French royal family in the parkland at Versailles. Marie-Antoinette and her ladies-in-waiting would play at being dairymaids in the exquisite dairy, in which even the milk was poured into dainty porcelain milk churns embossed with the Queen’s monogram and produced by Sèvres, the royal porcelain manufacturers.

In England, Marie Antoinette's contemporary Queen Charlotte was given a thatched cottage in the grounds of Kew Palace as a wedding present from her husband King George III. The cottage was a glorified summer house, allowing the royal family to have picnics or take tea there (all prepared by servants using the kitchen below) and pretend, if only for a short while, that they too were leading a simple country life. The royal rustic ideal was somewhat undermined by the paddock full of kangaroos they kept just outside the cottage, not a sight usually encountered in the English countryside of the period.

When her childhood companion and cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, married George Finch Hatton in 1785. Dido remained behind at Kenwood to care for her ailing great uncle. Incidentally, Elizabeth’s son and heir, the 10^th Earl of Winchilsea, achieved notoriety when he was challenged by the Duke of Wellington, then the Prime Minister, to one of the last duels in England. The Duke had been stung to the quick by certain comments Finch-Hatton had made regarding the Duke’s support of Catholic Emancipation. The duel took place in Battersea Fields (now part of present day South London) in 1829. The Duke missed his target. He claimed it was deliberate but he was known for being a far better military strategist than shot. His rival fired into the air, probably deciding that it might be a blot too far on his family escutcheon to kill the victor of Waterloo. Finch-Hatton’s apology to the Duke for his former conduct, backed-up by a letter his seconds thoughtfully produced and to which Finch-Hatton had already signed his name, was accepted by Wellington and both departed the scene unscathed. Another of Elizabeth’s descendants was Denys Finch Hatton, immortalised by Robert Redford in the film “Out of Africa”.

18th century print of St George's Hanover Square London

In March 1793 Lord Mansfield died at Kenwood. Later that same year Dido married under the name Elizabeth Belle. Perhaps her choice of name reflected a desire to create a new life for herself as a respectable middle class matron far away from the public gaze, instead of continuing her former existence as the exotic protégé of the Lord Chief Justice and as such known far beyond the confines of her Mansfield family home. Research by the professional genealogist Sarah Minney revealed that on 5 December 1793 she married John Davinier, a Frenchman and a Gentleman’s Steward at St George's, Hanover Square in London. It is a church with which I am well acquainted having attended several recitals given there by a choir the Partridge was once a member of.

The Steward's Room on ground floor of two storey brick building at end of colonnade

I do wonder how Dido and Davinier met. Was it at Kenwood? A former Steward's Room there now serves as a café. Although the estate offices were built after Dido's time, a steward would have been required to handle Lord Mansfield's extensive affairs at Kenwood in the capacity of an estate manager. Did such business bring John Davinier to the house? Dido married him within months of Lord Manfield's death. According to the accounts of the time, she had proved indispensable to Mansfield in his final years. Consequently, ties of affection and duty might well have made it all but impossible for Dido to leave Kenwood for a married life whilst he was still alive. Mansfield's death left her free in more senses than one. Despite Dido having been raised in his household from infancy, Lord Mansfield was taking no chances and had stipulated in his will that “I assert to Dido her freedom” lest any seek to enslave her on account of her black mother. Legacies from her great uncle, great aunt and and her father meant she brought a dowry to the marriage. That, combined with the money her husband earned as Gentleman's Steward meant they could afford to live in their own house, staffed by a number of servants. Her position in her new home was unassailable. Dido could now call upon others "every minute for this thing and that" and be shown "the greatest attention to everything" she said.

The Daviniers went on to have at least three children, including twin brothers Charles and John and a third sibling William Thomas. Dido’s last known descendant was Harold Davinier. Ironically, the latter died under the apartheid regime of 1970s South Africa. He was classified as white and therefore, unlike his bewitching ancestress, would no doubt have passed muster with the boorish Thomas Hutchinson. The 18^th century Daviniers set up home in a house in Ranelagh Street, now known as Ebury Street, in London’s Pimlico. Dido’s neighbours in the 1790s included at number 12 Charles Wilkin, the English miniature painter and engraver. Ranelagh, later Ebury Street, has always attracted a rather Bohemian set from the Victorian Poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson to Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Other celebrated writers have included George Moore and actors such as Dame Edith Evans and Michael Caine. Exiled from her beloved Knole, Vita Sackville West and her husband also set up home here. Unfortunately, Dido’s own house did not survive redevelopment in later decades.

It is again thanks to the sterling efforts of Sarah Minney that we know that Dido died in July 1804 around the age of 43. (The exhibition on her life at Kenwood had stated that she had been baptised in 1761). Her funeral was held at St George's, the same church in which she had married and in which her children had been baptised. Her earthly remains were buried at St George's Fields near the present day Bayswater Road. The graves were all exhumed and the remains reburied elsewhere in the 1960s when the graveyard was redeveloped. Consequently, Dido has no known grave, unlike her father, Sir John Lindsay, and her great uncle, Lord Mansfield, both of whom were interred in Westminster Abbey. Yet Dido has achieved a posthumous fame that has eclipsed that of her father. Indeed, there is a certain pleasing symmetry that in 1788, Sir John Lindsay ‘s obituary drew attention to the fact that he was both an Admiral of the Red and Dido’s father and today, over two hundred years later, place his name into a search engine and those are still deemed the two key fact about his life.