My 19th-century “blogger” Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today being the historian, exploring changing accounts of the practice of the monarch “curing the sick” over time.
She describes discussing analysis of the whys and wherefores with her brother – although later members of the family have a very gentry “‘huntin’ and fishin’ and shootin'” reputation, this generation was definitely hooked into the intellectual currents.
One for the booklist: My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile, reviewed this morning in the Guardian.
By the time Henrietta was in her 30s her gilded life had lost its shine. In 1727 she married Robert Knight, the son of the chief cashier of the infamous South Sea Company. Robert was pompous and vulgar, and Henrietta suddenly found herself in the company of men who talked only of money instead of poetry, gardens or art. She found companionship with a young poet, though she insisted that “the passion was platonick”. When the scandal broke in 1736, her furious husband sent her to his Warwickshire estate, Barrells, to “moulder and die”. Virtually imprisoned, she was not to see London, her two children or most of her friends for many years. Gardening helped her to keep her sanity, and My Darling Heriott reminds us of the unrivalled therapeutic value of nature, muddied fingers and the sprouting of seedlings.
John Friend, a gentleman commoner at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, died of a fever in March 1673. His father, Nathaniel, after arranging his funeral, returned home “on his cousin’s advice” to tell his wife:
“I came neare home mine owne care and sorrow redoubled in relation to my poore wide and how I should acquaint her with soe heavy a Providence, I therefore called upon the Widdow Margaret Holliser acquainting her with my poore sonnes death and entreated her to goe to our house before and by discourse a little prepare my wife for it which shee honestly did, supposing to her the worst, I in the meantime lingered and about a quarter of an houre after (which was neare 9 at night). I came in bringing both to my wife and to my father the heaviest tidings that ever brought them in my life.”
His wife understandably took it “exceeding heavily”, “the presence and company of my loving Neighbour stood us in good stead.”
I can’t but wonder how recent a widow Margaret Holliser was. Did she not suffer too from her close involvement in the tragic scene, so like one she had herself endured?
(Quoted in A. Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006, p. 33.)
I’ve visited the site before, but A Vision of Britain, which collects data by region for the past couple of hundred years, has come along in leaps and bounds. I’ve just been looking at the London borough of Camden.
Some facts, some surprising:
* in 1951 45 per cent of households didn’t have their own WC
* Population density was highest in 1900, dipped to its lowest this century in about 1980, and then started to rise again.
* In 2001 more than 45 per cent of Camden residents (percentage of adults presumpably) had university degrees (which must I suspect be among the highest in the country).
You can do the same calculations for any area of the UK on the site.
I’ve never quite understood why everyone gets so excited about Mary Queen of Scots. (Well I do – sex, murder, death all involving an attractive woman, but it is one of those stories explored and told so many times I find it hard to raise an interest.)
But in case she is your cup of tea – it is worth saying that the only known painting of her as Queen has gone on display today at the National Portrait Gallery.
(I might even pop in to visit her…)
… now I’ve got good cause:
“in 1776 James Boswell was still trying to persuade his father to disinherit all his female relatives, on the grounds that “our species is transmitted through males only, the females being all along no more than a Nidus, or nurse, as Mother Earth is to plants of every sort”. (p; 101)
(Williams, C.D. “Another self in the case”: gender, marriage and the individual in Augustan literature,” in Porter, R. (ed) Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Routledge, London, 1997.)
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