The last report from the holiday reading is on Nelson’s Women, by Tom Pocock (Andre Deutsch, London, 1999).

It left me musing on – aside from how abominably he treated his wife Fanny – how often professional women pop up in the apparently oddest places and times, yet somehow this is never acknowledged.

The Admiral’s last sitting for a portait was joint one, for the miniaturist Robert Bowyer and Catherine Andras, who modelled in wax. (p. 215.) After Trafalgar, she produced a full-size figure of Nelson that stood in Westminster Abbey, dressed in one of his uniforms.(p. 225.)

Also, how so many women had the most dramatic lives, but left so little record. In 1803 Nelson spoke for Edward Despard at his trial for treason over a plot to kill the King and take over the government the year before.

“All Nelson was able to do for his old friend was to have his sentence of death commuted from one of hanging, drawing and quartering to hanging and decapitation after death. But he was able to recommend some financial help for Despard’s black wife, who had accompanied him from the Caribbean. After Nelson spoke of the case to Lord Minto, the latter noted, ‘Mrs Despard, he says, was violently in love with her husband. Lord Nelson solicited a pension, or some provision for her, and the Government was well disposed to grant it.'” (p. 196-7)
What a life that must have been.

I had an interesting morning yesterday the Institute of Historical Research’s “The Great Plague of London: experiences and explanations”. Yes, I know I have odd ideas of entertainment.

Lots of good stuff, but I was particularly taken with a paper from Dr Patrick Wallis of the LSE on “doctoring the plague”, which explored attitudes to what physicians should do when the dreaded disease struck. What they actually mostly did was ran away, and, he indicated most people thought this was perfectly reasonable, particularly since this was what almost all of their patients, those who were wealthy enough to pay them, did.

e.g., he presented James Balmford, vicar of St Olave’s Southwark: “As for Phisitions, I onely propound this question: Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty to shift for themselves, & (as they thinke) for their lives, in regard they are no publicke persons and live (not by common stipend, but) by what they can get.” The vicar came down on the second side.
This from A Short Dialogue Concerning the Plagues Infection (London 1603)

Although Dr Wallis pointed out that the good vicar himself was under something of a cloud in the subject. He stayed in town, but refused to visit dying plague victims.

… was something I knew disgracefully little about, so also on my holiday reading list – the culturally relevant bit – was Christopher Hibbert’s The French Revolution. It is striking how many women appear in prominent roles, good and bad.

On what is called “The day of the market-women”:

On the morning of 5 October huge crowds of women gathered in the central markets and in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine shouting for bread … They were mostly poissardes, fishwives, working women, prostitutes and market stall holders, but among them were several quite smartly dressed bourgeoises who appeared as angry as the rest. Together they marches towards the Place de Greve … stormed up the steps of the Hotel de Ville. The guards were disarmed and their weapons handed to men who had now joined the demonstration … Persuaded that their best hope was to petition the King, they then set off for Versailles under the not entirely willing leadership of that self-proclaimed hero of the taking of the Bastille, Stanislas Maillard, who evidently considered it undignified to command such motley female troops. (p. 97)

There is of course also the horrific parts of the story. Don’t read the following if sensitive to such things!
During the September massacres that preceded the execution of the King …

“One prisoner who did not escape the assassins’ blades was Marie Gredeler, a young woman who kept an umbrella and walking-stick depository in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. Charged with having mutilated her lover, she was herself mutilated, her breasts were cut off, her feet were nailed to the ground and a bonfire was set alight between her spreadeagled legs.” (p. 174)

A reminder that there’s nothing particularly unique about, say, the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda.

(References from the Penguin edition of 1982)

A couple more snippets from Sentimental Murder:

“The readers of Ann Sheldon’s Memoirs must have felt that in London procurers were everywhere. Sheldon met her first bawd when a Mrs Horsham, a very respectable-looking woman, engaged her in polite conversation on a bench in St James’s Park. She als became friendly with the fruit-seller who worked in the lobby of the House of Commons, and took fees from MPs in return for girls’ names and addresses. …. In later years she turned bawd herself. … She worked for Lord Grosvenor … but was shocked by his taste for low life. She brought him poor girls from Westminster Bridge covered in vermin and was astonished at the medley of mistresses that filled his house: ‘the garret was inhabited by pea-pickers – the first floor by a woman of elegance, – the parlour by women servants, – and the kitchen by a negro wench.'” (p.98)

The St James’s Chronicle’s view of Martha Ray, the “kept woman”.

Her person was very fine, her face agreeable, and she had every Accomplishment that could adorn a woman, particularly those of Singing, and Playing most exquisitely on the Harpsichord. She was also highly respected by all those who knew her, especially att the Servants, and her death is most sincerely regretted in the Family. p. 52.

(Interesting that the servants’ view was regarded as important.)

Also on my holiday reading list was John Brewer’s Sentimental Murder, HarperCollins, 2004, an account of the treatment through the centuries of the story of the killing in 1779 of Martha Ray, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, by a clergyman with whom she had apparently had only casual social contact, James Hackman.

It was an enjoyable, informative read, although not, it seems to me, quite so astonishingly original as some of the reviews, particularly the Observer’s, suggested. It does, however, draw together a wide range of sources in an analytical way.

(That reminds me of one final lovely line from Richard Vinen – “Historians are fond of complimenting each other on their ‘mastery of the sources’ (as if ‘the sources’ were a rebellious tribe on the North-West Frontier).” p. 642.)

One thing that is striking in reading Sentimental Murder is how often the same debates come around again and again.

“One critic of the ‘new journalism’ complained to the Morning Post:

The Political Controvery at the beginning of the Present reign [George III’s], taught printers to feel their Power: we then first find Personal Abuse, unrestrained, stalk abroad, and boldly attacked by Name the most respectable Characters. Your brethren were not idle in taking the hint: from that Period we find a material change in the stile of every News-Paper; every Public Man became an object of their attention; and many a sixpence has a Patriot earned, by Paragraphs, which a few years before, would have brought the Printer unpitied to the Pillory.” p. 42

Vinen also has a lovely line in anecdote. A few examples:
Talking about the start of the 20th century: “In Germany, and especially in Prussia, … a tough police force, composed largely of former army sergeants, enforced a ferocious penal code; in Berlin, even the length of hatpins was regulated by law.” p. 45

In the Great War, “During a single night in the Carpathian mountains, a Croat regiment lost 1,800 men to hypothermia.” p. 56.

And the one that really got me thinking about the dangers of “family” campaigners: “… the natalist policies of the Vichy government. Subsidies were given to women with children and better child-care facilities were provided, while penalties for abortion were tightened. In 1943, a woman was guillotined for having carried out an abortion.” p. 149 (There no footnote on that one; anyone know any more about the case?)

Finally an interesting conclusion about WWI:
“It was the ‘primitive’ peasant populations of eastern Europe who behaved most rationally — they deserted, allowed themselves to be taken prisoner or mutined. The fact that the war proved so long and so destructive was the result of the ‘sophistication’ of western European societies.” p. 54.