by Gareth Rubin
The visit passed off successfully. Henry suspected nothing; as the whole thing had happened so swiftly, there had been no antecedent anxiety. Elizabeth had been brought up in such dread of her father that he had not, at the rare intervals of his seeing her, been accustomed to any affectionate effusiveness on her part; and in his hurried visit he had no time for baseless conjecture.
Then came the natural nemesis of such a deception. As the dead could not be brought back to life those who by now must have been in the secret did not and could not dare to make disclosure. Moreover the difficulties and dangers to one and all involved would of necessity grow with each day that passed. Willy nilly they must go on. Fortunately for the safety of their heads circumstances favoured them. The secret was, up to now, hidden in a remote village high up on the side of the Cotswold Hills. Steep declivities guarded it from casual intrusion, and there was no trade beyond that occasional traffic necessary for a small agricultural community. The whole country as far as the eye could see was either royal domain or individual property owned or held by persons attached to the dynasty by blood or interest. Facilities of intercommunication were few and slow; and above all uncertain and therefore not to be relied on.
This then was the beginning of the tradition which has existed locally ever since. In such districts change is slow, and what has been may well be taken, unless there be something to the contrary, for what is. The isolation of the hamlet in the Cotswolds where the little princess lived for a time – and is supposed to have died – is almost best exemplified by the fact that though the momentous secret has existed for between three and four centuries, no whisper of it has reached the great world without its confines. Not though the original subject of it was the very centre of the wildest and longest battle which has ever taken place since the world began – polemical, dynastic, educational, international, commercial.
According to Stoker, this all happened in 1543 or 1544. As part of his proof, he points to rumours from the time that Elizabeth could not have children. In April 1559, when Elizabeth was 25, the Count de Feria wrote: ‘If my spies do not lie, which I believe they do not, for a certain reason which they have recently given me, I understand that she [Elizabeth] will not bear children.’
She was also, apparently, far too clever to be female. Elizabeth’s tutor, Roger Ascham, wrote a letter to John Sturmius, rector of the Protestant University of Strasbourg, in 1550, saying: ‘The constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endued with a masculine power of application.’
All pretty convincing, although it does seem odd that Henry – distant father though he might have been – could not spot that his daughter was now a son. Still, that was the belief in Bisley.
The story may have begun in the nineteenth century when the Reverend Thomas Keble told his family that during building work at Overcourt the body of a young girl wearing Elizabethan dress was found in a stone coffin. He said he had realised who she must have been and secretly reburied her to prevent the house becoming a dreary shrine. Keble was, presumably, a lunatic.
THAT’S WHAT HAMLET WAS TALKING ABOUT – THE SLOW SUICIDE OF ELIZABETH I, 1603
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.
– Hamlet to Yorick’s skull
In March 1603 Elizabeth was about to gasp her last breath but she remained stubborn to the end and refused to take to her deathbed. At least we think it was her – she also utterly refused to remove her white make-up, which was so thick it could have been the Bishop of Oxford under there.
The fashion during the Renaissance was for ladies to wear thick white paint to hide the pock-marks from disease, as well as the inevitable toll of time and life in the sixteenth century – Elizabeth was especially keen as it hid the legacy of smallpox which she carried.*
When the expired Elizabeth’s make-up was finally chiselled away, the woman underneath looked as though she had been dead for some time, primarily because she had always used the most popular make-up of the day: Venetian ceruse. Venetian ceruse was chic, but it was also made of white lead and so was highly toxic when applied to the skin, with a habit of burning away the face. Of course, this didn’t put the fashionable ladies of the day off their favourite beauty product, which they slapped on their faces, bosoms and necks like second-rate plasterers in a rush to finish the job. Washing wasn’t a big deal in the sixteenth century, and often the ladies would go to bed with the day’s make-up still on, and then, rather than remove it in the morning, simply throw on another layer, adding more and more of the stuff until their faces contained more lead than the Roman plumbing network.
One monk at the time wrote that the compound ‘wears them out and makes them old before their time, and destroys the teeth, while they seem to be wearing a mask all the year through’. Another commentator said the constant layering left women ‘ugly, enormous and abominable’.
The lead was also slowly killing them. And, when they started using cosmetics based on mercury sublimate to ‘improve’ their skin, they just made things worse, causing their gums to recede, teeth to fall out and flesh to melt away.
Venetian ceruse was popular enough in the white version alone, but when other colours came onto the market demand boomed. One doctor wrote: ‘There are many who have so betard their faces with these mixtures and slubber-sauces that they have made their faces of a thousand colour: that is to say, some as yellow as the marigold, others a dark green, others blunket colour, others of a deep red died in the wool. Thus the use of this ceruse, besides the rotting of the teeth and the unsavoury breath which it causes, does turn fair creatures into infernal Furies.’
But the older Elizabeth got, the more she slapped on the slap. And, as she did so, her ladies-in-waiting followed suit. They even experimented with a few new methods for making themselves look ill and tried consuming potions mixed from coal dust, candles and ash. Instead of that fashionably ‘chalky’ look they craved, they tended to turn green. Washing in their own urine was rumoured to aid ladies’ skin, so many a bath was run with an unusual tint to the water. It was also a time of mixed blessings for ravens, as eating their flesh was rumoured to produce just the desired effect – but only if the bird had been fed for 40 days on hard-boiled eggs.
UP IN FLAMES – THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, 1666
As the year 1666 began, people in the English capital were getting pretty jumpy. The coming twelvemonth, they all pointed out, would feature the number of the beast: 666. It could well be Judgment Day when thousands would burn for their sins. In fact, a number did burn, but mostly because a baker named Thomas Farriner forgot to extinguish his oven at night.
In fact, the cockneys nearly made it through the year without being incinerated – it wasn’t until just after midnight on Sunday, 2 September when things took a fiery turn. That night, Farriner, a baker working in Pudding Lane, left his oven alight. Around 2am he and his family were woken by flames, and managed to climb from their upper storey to the house next door.
As the fire grew, the authorities were alerted and the local firemen said the only thing to do was to demolish the adjoining wooden houses to work as a firebreak, or the entire city could burn. The Farriners’ neighbours, however, were none too happy at the idea of having their homes pulled down or – more likely – blown up with gunpowder. They refused and the only man in London with the authority to order the destruction of their homes was sent for. He was Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor of London. He turned up, looked terrified, but didn’t fancy taking an unpopular decision, so instead stated that no one was in any danger, famously declaring, ‘Pish! A woman could piss it out!’ before turning tail and leaving. Some time in the next couple of days as the city burned down around his ears, he nobly ran for the countryside.
At that time around 80,000 people lived in the City of London.* By the time the fire was extinguished on 5 September, 70,000 of them were homeless. Despite this, the death toll was surprisi
ngly low – only a handful were officially recorded, although that might be down to the fact that most were poor people who no one bothered to set down in ink. However, 87 churches, a lot of other historic buildings and St Paul’s Cathedral also went up in flames. St Paul’s was especially unlucky to come a cropper – its stone walls would probably have fended off the flames had it not been for the fact that it was undergoing restoration at the time and was surrounded by wooden scaffolding, which acted as tinder, melting the lead on the roof. Courtier, diarist and keen gardener John Evelyn recorded the scene: ‘The stones of Paul’s flew like grenados the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’
As tends to happen in these cases, scapegoats were sought. The Catholics had a tough time of it, being blamed for deliberately starting the fire – a theory supported by the false confession of a French watchmaker who claimed he had started the fire on the orders of the Pope. He was hanged for the crime only for the authorities to later discover that he had arrived in London two days after the fire had started. This did not, however, dampen the anti-Catholic feelings.
After three days of devastation, the city picked itself up. Many of the homeless were resettled outside of London and the churches were rebuilt – some by that most famous British architect Christopher Wren. And the legacy of the fire was streets rebuilt wider, safer, and with improved sanitation, and houses made of stone, not wood. The fire also roasted a lot of rats, perhaps putting paid to the Plague, which had cut a swathe through the city the previous year.
A BAD SHOT – CLIVE OF INDIA FAILS TO KILL HIMSELF, 1744
History is littered with tales of people shooting themselves and messing it up. French revolutionary leader Robespierre shot himself and missed – merely blasting off his own jaw. Robert Clive, known as Clive of India, who went on to secure Britain’s rule in that country, didn’t even get that far. In 1744 he was 19 and had been in India for only a few weeks, yet the belief that it was all too much for him and mounting debts had driven him to suicide. Placing a revolver to his temple, he pulled the trigger. But the gun misfired and no bullet appeared. Although he tried again, once more nothing happened.
‘It appears I am destined for something. I will live,’ he announced. Just how a number of generations of Indians felt about what he was destined for is open to question, but he ended up as governor of Bengal with a personal fortune worth perhaps £5bn in today’s prices. He also did it in double-quick time, retiring at the age of 42, before finally succeeding in killing himself at 49, when he stabbed himself to death with a penknife.
Perhaps his live-fast-die-young devil-take-the-hindmost attitude could have been predicted when, as a boy, he was expelled from three schools and was once discovered attempting to set up a protection racket in his home town, threatening the shopkeepers that if they didn’t pay him off he would have his friends break their windows.
Clive was succeeded by six children and one giant tortoise. His pet, named Adwaita (Sanskrit for ‘the one and only’), lived until Thursday, 23 March 2006 in the Calcutta Zoo where he had resided – perhaps happily, who knows? – since the 1870s. Adwaita was never known to have mated and therefore was succeeded by no offspring. He liked to eat wheat bran, carrots, lettuce and grass.
TOO MUCH EXPLOSIVE – THE FENIANS CONDEMN ONE OF THEIR OWN TO SWING, 1867
Contrary to much misconception (and a fair amount of outright propaganda), the Irish Potato Famine generated a lot of sympathy among the British population. Much of it disappeared, however, when the Irish nationalists inadvertently blew up a chunk of London, making one of their own innocent supporters the last man to be publicly hanged in England.
On 13 December 1867 a number of Irish Fenians were residing in London’s Clerkenwell prison. Their friends on the outside decided to get them out and believed brute strength as opposed to finesse was the way to do it. So they loaded a cart with explosives, pushed it to the wall of the prison and lit the fuse. The plan was to blow a hole in the wall to let their colleagues escape. The result was the demolition of the entire wall as well as a row of houses on the other side of the road, killing 12 people. It turned out the gang had got their sums wrong on the amount of explosive needed.
The public, who had been concerned for the welfare of the Irish people, rapidly changed direction and wanted a good number of them hanged for the crime. At the time, Karl Marx accurately summed up the atmosphere: ‘The London masses, who have shown great sympathy towards Ireland, will be made wild and driven into the arms of a reactionary government. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of Fenian emissaries.’
The strength of pro-Fenian feeling that had existed up until then is demonstrated by the fact that, the day before the explosion, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, had banned all political meetings due to the number attending weekly Fenian marches. The day after the explosion, things were very different. Now people were out on the streets, demanding Irish blood be spilled.
Sensing the building anger, the police decided they needed a suspect – and pronto. They had drafted in 50,000 special constables to deal with the ensuing unrest, but had no idea how long they could keep a lid on things if the public didn’t have some taste of vengeance. But, ever efficient, they quickly found a candidate for the rope: one Michael Barrett.
Barrett was an Irish Fenian, formerly living in Glasgow, who had once been arrested for firing a gun. There were strong suspicions surrounding him and he was charged with the murder of one of the victims of the bombing. During the subsequent trial, he produced witnesses that he was in Scotland at the time but the prosecution had a witness who said Barrett had confessed to him – one Patrick Mullany, who was probably paid for the testimony, his price being a ticket to Australia.
Montagu Williams, one of the lawyers during the trial, described Barrett when the jury declared him guilty: ‘I must confess I felt great commiseration … the frank, open expression on his face. A less murderous countenance than Barrett’s I have not seen. Good humour was latent in his every feature and he took the greatest interest in the proceedings.’
Less emotional souls might point out that it was not surprising given that Barrett was about to be executed owing to the proceedings and that ‘good humour’ in his face was not a strong legal argument for his innocence.
For his part, Barrett was allowed some final words in the court: ‘I am far from denying, nor will the force of my circumstances compel me to deny, my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer. If my life were 10 times dearer than it is and I could by any means redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life I would willingly and gladly do so.’
This probably didn’t help his case and he was hanged at Newgate on 26 May 1868. The Times reported: ‘Yesterday morning in the presence of a vast concourse of spectators, Michael Barrett, the author of the Clerkenwell Explosion, was hanged in front of Newgate. In its circumstances there was very little to distinguish this from ordinary executions. The crowd was greater, perhaps, and better behaved; still from the peculiar atrocity of the crime for which Barrett suffered, and from the fact of its being probably the last public execution in England, it deserves more than usual notice.’
Public sympathy for the Irish cause had evaporated. The crowd, numbering around 2,000, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ as Barrett dropped.
PROMISE TO BE GOOD? – RELEASING JOHN DEVOY, 1869
John Devoy was another Irish Fenian. Incensed by the British government’s response to the Potato Famine – which was largely to ignore it – he had dedicated his life to recruiting others to the cause. His most audacious scheme had been to infiltrate Irish regiments in the British Army in order to foment discontent and persuade some of the soldiers to secretly swear allegiance to Irish independence, which, he claimed, would be brought a
bout by an invasion of Irishmen from America.
This plan was not quite as far-fetched as it sounds. The Irish population of the United States was substantial – mostly because the Potato Famine had brought about mass emigration from the starving island. By 1851 around a million people had made it across the Atlantic and the American Fenian Brotherhood, a brother group to Devoy’s Irish Republican Brotherhood (forerunners of the IRA), had raised $200,000 – worth about £10m today – for the cause. More importantly, it had recruited many veterans of the American Civil War to fight. The group claimed to have 30,000 fighting men ready for the invasion, which was planned for late 1865, but poor organisation and squabbling in the ranks meant it kept being put off and eventually the organisation collapsed.
Unluckily for Devoy, his role as a spy in the British camp might have gained him a number of supporters – he claimed to have ‘converted’ 7,000 – but it also gained him a place in Millbank prison at the age of 27. His prospects were grim in the gaol where he was due to spend the next 20 years of his life. But then the British government made an astonishing mistake. Instead of keeping Devoy in solitary confinement until he was too old to fight, they told him he had a choice: he could either stay in prison for two decades performing hard labour, or he could go to America. All he had to do was promise not to return and that he wouldn’t immediately rejoin the Fenians and start organising another insurrection in Ireland. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he chose the latter option. And so did four other members of Devoy’s group who seemed equally surprised by the kind offer.