… is the title of the exhibition on George III and Queen Charlotte at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace.

I visited this afternoon, as promised earlier, but was serious disappointed. There is nothing on George’s interest in scientific instruments, beyond clocks and barometers, and only one small case on the Queen’s patronage of botany and “women’s” crafts. There is an awful lot of ordinary to bad royal portraiture and really ugly silver and china, however.

And the £7.50 entry charge is seriously expensive for what only amounts to three rooms, even if there is Molton Brown handwash in the loos. I’m not surprised that the staff often outnumber the visitors. (It must be losing a mint!)

But there were a couple of highlights:

* an astronomical clock of 1765 that was in the octagon library (which from a print looked very like a miniature round reading room) that also told the time at 30 places around the world (although displayed so you couldn’t see all four sides!)

*a nice portrait of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, (of which there was unfortunately not a postcard) to go with the collection of papercut cut-outs, a couple done by her, others by Princess Elizabeth and the sewing kit the Queen gave her.

Overall it seems Queen Charlotte was a promoter of botany, particularly for women (nothing wrong with that), needlework and obscure crafts such as the paper cutting. e.g. some really hideous gilded chairs were upholstered with embroidery by “the pupils of Mrs Phoebe Wright’s school”. The value that was placed on these was shown by the fact that the collection of Mrs Delany’s papercuts was dispersed (read thrown out) after the Queen’s death.

… to plug my story in today’s Independent about the forthcoming Sudan exhibition at the British Museum … and it is going to be well worth visiting. I’d never thought of Sudan as a crossroads before, but it was where Africa and the culture of the Med met and mixed.
(The story will only be free to view for about a week: sorry.)

As I say when working in the British Museum Englightenment Gallery, King George III of England is most famous for going mad and “losing America”, but he did have his positive side.

He was a keen scholar and the British Library has an enormous amount to thank him for. The King’s library “really began” with the purchase of 30,000 items from the collection of George Thomason (which will be familiar to anyone who has used the rare books room in the British Library.)

The next major addition was the library of Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice. “It was asserted in Venetian saloni that it was in order to get his hands upon the Consul’s collection that John Murray, the unscrupulous English Resident of Venice, induced his sister to marry Smith when that by then ‘curious old man’ was over eighty.”

The books were housed in four separate libraries in Buckingham House (then better known as the Queen’s House), all of which could be entered only through the king’s bedchamber: curious, when you think that he always regarded it as a national resource and scholars, even those of whom he disapproved, were welcome to use it.

King George allowed £1,500 a year to add to his collection, although purchases frequently went over budget, even though he directed that his agents never bid against “a scholar, a professor, or any person of moderate means who desired a particular book for his own use”. The library eventually totalled more than 65,000 books and 450 manuscripts.

The king was particularly well read in history, being apparently keen on Gibbon, David Hume and Bishop Burnet.

There’s now an exhibition about this at Buckingham Palace, in fact writing this has just reminded me that I meant to go to so it, and there’s no time like the present …. expect a report later.

This account based mostly on George II: A Personal History, C. Hibbert, Penguin, 1998, pp. 58-62.

Odd, isn’t it, how the abuse, by contemporaries and historians, of prominent women always seems to follow certain paths. Queens are, when they come from lesser backgrounds always originally prostitutes (or the worst sort, of course) e.g. Justinian’s empress Theodora, and when in power are said to follow all sorts of deviant sexual practices, e.g. Catherine the Great, to be mad for luxury (Cleopatra and the asses’ milk) and be utterly tyrannical (pretty well all of them).

Scholarly women are by contrast dismissed as slightly, or more than slightly, mad, masculine or plain ugly in their appearance, and hopelessly overarching in their intellectual ambitions.

I first heard of Egalantine Lady Wallace, the sister of the duchess of Gordon, from a rather fun piece of popular history The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale, J. Bondeson, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2001.

She was presented, as usual, as “an eccentric playwright and poetess”, “a boisterous hoyden in her youth, and a woman of violent temper in her maturer years”.
Lady Wallace wrote a play, The Ton, that caused a riot in the theatre when staged in 1790.

This is usually dismissed as a result of its poor quality, but the story seems to have been more complicated, as this website explains.

The picture presented is strikingly like that applied to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

Warning – not a post for the squeamish …

Maupassant: “one day he had painted a false chancre on his penis and paraded thus in front of his mistress, whom he then raped to make her think that he had given her a dose of the pox.”

Of course he did really have syphilis, although he didn’t realise it, until March 1877, when he wrote to a friend, Robert Pinochon: “

For five weeks I have been taking four centigrammes of mercury and 35 centigrammes of potassium iodide a day, and I feel very well on it. Soon mercury will be my staple diet. My hair is beginning to grow again … the hair on my arse is sprouting … I’ve got the pox! at last! the real thing! not the contemplible clap, no the ecclesiastical crystalline, not the bourgeois coxcombs or the leguminous cauliflowers – no – no, the great pox, the one which Francis I died of. … I don’t have to worry about catching it any more, and I screw the street whores and trollops, and afterwards I say to them ‘I’ve got the pox’. They are afraid and I just laugh.”

It’s a reminder of the hatred many men through the ages have felt for women. (Sorry to be depressing; got a cold and feeling rather miserable!)

From C. Quetel (Trans. J. Braddock and B. Pike) History of Syphilis, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1990, p. 129-30.)

You might think it is odd reading material (academic remainders again), but although my Camden Historical Society book on Leather Lane (on which I live – London EC1) manages not to mention it, the lane was best known from the 17th to the 19th century for its mercury baths, run, at the time the infamous John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, was treated there, by one Madam Fourcard. (That’s from C. Goldsworthy, The Satyr, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001, p. 129 – a not very good biography.)

From the only edition of the Lady’s Journal (October 1693):

“Women may apply themselves to the Liberal Arts and Sciences. … Their Forehead is generally high, rais’d and broad, which is the usual token of an ingenious and inventive person.”

Time to look in the mirror ….

from, R. Iliffe and F. Wilmouth, “Astronomy and the domestic sphere: Margaret Flamsteed and Caroline Herschel as Assistant-Astronomers,’ in Women, Science and Medicine 1500-1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society (L. and S. Hutton ed), Sutton, 1997, p. 242.