The Undaunted Eliza Roper, Dowager Lady Vaux of Harrowden

by Linda Root

(C) R.Neil Marshman, re Wikimedia, Creative Commons

When the Gunpowder Treason unraveled in 1605, although the initial action took place in the cellars beneath the Houses of Parliament, the drama played out in the English Midlands, which was where it all had started. The names we associate with the historical event belong to men like Catesby and Percy, and of course, the scapegoat Guido Fawkes. Among the most fascinating of the principals in the story were aristocratic women of recusant families, not the least of which was Eliza Roper, known to history as the Dowager Lady Vaux.

Some earlier historians have mistakenly conjectured the Vaux women of Harrowden were related to Guy (aka Guido) Fawkes, but that is not true; they were far more prominent in Midland society than the soldier caught red-handed in the cellar below the House of Lords. The confusion comes in the pronunciation of the name Vaux, which rhymes with Fawkes, and therefore sounds like 'vox'. Also, the well-known recusant Anne Vaux's Italianate cursive displayed 'V's that look very much like 'f's, just as Elizabeth Tudor's written 's' appears as an 'f.' The speculation that aristocratic Anne had taken Fawkes's name is utterly absurd. Almost everyone living in the Midlands knew Anne Vaux. She would not have given Guido Fawkes a second glance.

Roper Tomb Effigy-Elizabeth
and one of her sisters, PD

While Anne Vaux's association with the Jesuit Superior Henry Garnet made her a suspect in the events of November 1605, she was not the only female Vaux of Great Harrowden Hall, who became a suspect in the conspiracy. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth, the self-styled Dowager Lady Vaux, was of equal mettle and perhaps, even greater complicity. In today's language, she would be described as an 'amazing piece of work.' Courage, defiance, loyalty to those who shared her views and religious zeal were among her attributes. She was also surprisingly rich, considering the frequency with which both her father Sir John Roper, Baron Teynham; her father-in-law Lord Henry Vaux; and her husband  George were imprisoned and fined for their recusancy.

One of many Midlands coaching inns where mass was said,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (pubic domain)

Midland England was not exclusively a Catholic enclave, but an area of old wealth and considerable splendor. The landed gentry and titled nobles tended to get along with their neighbors, regardless of their religions. Even after King James disappointed Midland Catholics after his ascension by failing to remove restrictions on the celebration of Mass, he did not consider well-behaved Catholic land barons as hostiles. In August 1603, three short months before the Gunpowder was set to ignite, the king visited Harrowden Hall for a hunt. While there is no evidence to support the conjecture, one wonders who else might have been hiding in the house while he was there. The handsome English Jesuit John Gerard had lived there off and on for a large part of six years, retreating into one of Harrowden's several hidey holes when strangers visited, but more often, living openly under one of his several aliases. He is said to have been especially well-received by Lady Vaux's female friends.

During the months preceding November 5, 1605, the vast estates of Harrowden were managed by the Dowager Lady Vaux, Eliza Roper. While her sisters-in-law Eleanore Brokesby and Anne Vaux are better known because of their link to the Jesuit Superior, the martyred Father Henry Garnet and their possible involvement in the English Jesuit mission, Eliza Roper was just as bold in her championship of the flamboyant young Jesuit Father John Gerard, and equally willing to take life-threatening risks.

Father John Gerard, Wikimedia (Public Domain Art)

Eliza R, as she often signed her name, was a daughter of Sir John Roper, First Baron Teynham, and his wife Elizabeth Parke, aristocrats living in Kent. However, her marriage to George Vaux, the second oldest son of Lord Vaux of Harrowden was not contracted between the families. It is said that on the day of their marriage, George’s older brother died, although that is probably off by a month of more. But because of his defiance of the protocol of sixteenth-century marriages of children of the titled, he forfeited his claim to the barony to his younger brother Ambrose.  Elizabeth Tudor was not the only one offended by the marriage.  Lord Vaux was quoted commenting on his daughter-in-law's 'creditless carriage when she went for a maiden.'

In addition to a dowry of 1,500 pounds and 400 pounds worth of clothes and jewels, Eliza brought her strong-willed ways to Harrowden and soon was in command of the mansion and everyone who lived there. Her in-laws moved to their smaller manor house at Irthlingborough, which some writers assert was at Eliza’s insistence. The couple had six children, and Eliza treated her brother-in-law Ambrose as if he were the seventh. Other family members reported he was entirely under her thumb. When her husband George reconciled with his father in 1594, Ambrose cheerfully ceded his claim to the barony back to his brother.

The following year, George Vaux died suddenly, and his father, Lord Vaux, died shortly after that. The title to the barony passed to George and Eliza’s young son Edward, who at the time of his father and grandfather's deaths was a ward of the Queen. His mother sued for his guardianship and won. According to both the Jesuit Priest John Gerard and Eliza’s son, Eliza was devastated by her husband’s death and kept to her room for more than a year. For at least four more years, she rarely ventured into the areas of the house George had occupied before his death. Although the title to the barony had never been conferred on George, Eliza styled herself as the Dowager Lady Vaux, and no one contradicted her. Those who did apparently did not fare well.

Even though the Ropers of Kent and the Vauxes of Great Harrowden were known recusants, their transgressions were often overlooked. The Vaux Barony had been a statutory creation, to the First Baron Vaux, Nicholas, for his personal loyalty and military service to Henry VII. Thus, the Lords Vaux and their families escaped the harsher punishment meted out to many known recusants. The family history of giving sanctuary to hunted priests was treated lightly they openly supported the cause of the martyred Jesuit, Edmund Campion. Apparently they had come under the religious and political sway of  Sir Thomas Tresham, whose son Francis became a familiar name to those who are students of the Gunpowder Treason.

The Gunpower Conspirators, Wikimedia Commons

In the years before her husband’s sudden death, George Vaux's association with militant recusant Tresham could no longer be overlooked. Both he and Tresham were imprisoned as Non-Conformists and heavily fined. Some sources indicate the family was on the brink of financial ruin. Eliza must have been an astute money manager, because before the ascension of James VI to the English throne as James I, she was a real estate magnate of considerable acumen, with farms and properties in the Midlands and residential properties scattered about metropolitan London, most with hidey holes designed by the Jesuit craftsman-turned-Jesuit-priest, the martyred Jesuit, Saint Nicholas Owens.

Tresham disliked Eliza and considered her a negative influence on his wife. Apparently she had also filed a lawsuit against him for embezzling funds of her father-in-law. Much of the negative information about her character comes from him. To the contrary, information found in the journals of Jesuit historians takes a different view. Not long after George's death, she converted Great Harrowden Hall into a makeshift Jesuit college, aiming to educate the sons of recusants until they were old enough to leave England for Cardinal Allen's Jesuit College in Douai. Many Catholic sources consider her a heroine of the counter-Reformation.

In the year in which she recovered the guardianship of her son, Eliza moved the flamboyant priest, Father John Gerard, into her household. Many Catholic sources say she vowed never to remarry and devoted the remainder of her life to the restoration of the Catholic Religion in England. Other sources indicate that for at least the next decade, the focus of her devotion was directed to serving and protecting the dashing John Gerard, who spent most of the next ten years living in her house and acting as her confessor. But those were not his only duties. Gerard was also at the forefront of the Jesuit mission to England. When his presence was needed in London, Eliza often followed and provided the funding and the room and board required to advance his cause. Gerard was known as getting on well with aristocratic ladies, but unlike his Superior Father Henry Garnet's relationship with Eliza's more famous sister Anne Vaux whose mutual devotion subjected them to slander, the relationship between Eliza and Gerard was free of sexual innuendo. While he may have behaved like a gentleman, he was not humble. His memoirs are sprinkled with accounts of how easily he converted members of the fair sex who visited at Harrowden.

Great Harrowden Hall in modern times,  a prestigious golf club
Wikimedia, (C) R.Neil Marshman, Creative Commons.

Eliza's brush with life imprisonment or possible death came at the hands of one of her neighbors, Lady Anne Markham, a Catholic double agent in the service of the Earl of Salisbury, Robert Cecil. When Cecil decided to subvert the Gunpowder Treason to serve his own designs and use it to rid England of its Jesuits. Lady Markham offered to lead Cecil's Watchers to Father Gerard. Because of his aristocratic background and his high profile, he had joined Father Garnet on Cecil's 'Hit List.' On November 12, Lady Markham and a band of Cecil's men arrived at Harrowden House with a warrant for Father Gerard's arrest in hand, but after a thorough search, he was not found. Nevertheless, on November 15, while the search was still in progress, the Dowager Lady Vaux was herded off to London to face Salisbury's tribunal. Additional suspicion had fallen upon her based on language in a letter she had written to a cousin who was also being investigated by Cecil's henchmen. It and Lady Markham's assertions were enough to haul Eliza before Cecil's interrogators, but not enough to convict her of anything more than insolence. When at least one among them, probably her family friend Northampton, urged her to give up Gerard, her response was, in essence, that she did not know Gerard or where he might be hiding, and if she did, she would not tell them, an outright bold-faced lie. Then she is quoted as saying, "I would rather die first."  In spite of strong circumstantial evidence that she had knowledge of the plot and often harbored priests, she was never charged.

Rather than going to the Tower like her sister-in-law Anne Vaux, she was placed under house arrest in the home of Sir William Swinnerton, a local alderman, and the king's wine steward. By early 1606, she was generally unsupervised although probably watched. She remained in London overseeing her properties and enterprises without interference. From the autumn of 1605 to May 1606, at least two of her London houses were leased to a charming, tall and handsome English aristocratic gentleman, visiting London under one of the several aliases he used. His true name, of course, was John Gerard.

On May 3, 1606, the same day as Father Henry Garnet's execution, Gerard, dressed in Spanish livery and disguised as a footman, was smuggled onto a ship of Hapsburg diplomats heading home to the Spanish Netherlands after having visited the Court of James I, to congratulate him for having thwarted the Gunpowder Conspirators. Eliza Roper had participated in the arrangements and given him more than a thousand florins as spending money for the trip.

The  Westminster Gatehouse, Wikimedia, Public Domain

Eliza Roper, Dowager Lady Vaux, never saw John Gerard again, but it was not her last arrest. In 1611, she spent time in the notorious Westminster Gatehouse, and the following year was sentenced to life imprisonment and housed at Newgate, but within months, she was back on the family estate in the Midlands. She is known to have established a second school on the premises for aristocratic English boys who wished to follow in the footsteps of Father John Gerard and the other Jesuits she had harbored.

In his memoirs, Gerard refers to her fondly but never names her, and he insulates her from any wrongdoing in the Gunpowder Treason. There is no record of where she is buried or when she died, but records show her living into the reign of Charles I.

Sources include but are not limited to The Advent, citing Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden and Jessie Childs, God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, as well as the books seen above, including Biography of a Hidden Priest, and God's Secret Agents.

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Historical novelist Linda Root left a position as a senior prosecutor and Supervising Deputy District Attorney anticipating a career writing True Crime Fiction. She began by compiling a Murder Book, seeking to convict Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots, of her husband Lord Darnley’s murder. Instead of the book she planned, her research inspired her to write a novel. The First Marie and the Queen of Scots, first published in 2011. Since then, she has written The Last Knight and the Queen of Scots, and four stand-alone books in the series The Legacy of the Queen of Scots, with more to come. They are 1) Unknown Princess ( formerly The Midwife's Secret; 2) The Last Knight’s Daughter,(formerly the Other Daughter); 3) 1603 The Queen’s Revenge, 4: In the Shadow of the Gallows; and an adult historical fantasy, The Green Woman, written as J.D.Root. Visit her Author’s Page on Amazon for a complete list.

Pinkie and Blue Boy ~ A Matched Set?

by Debra Brown

Pinkie
58 1/4 x 40 1/4 in. (148 x 102.2 cm.)
Oil on CanvasThe Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The Blue Boy
70 5/8 x 48 3/4 in. (179.4 x 123.8 cm.)
Oil on Canvas The Huntington Library,
Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Pinkie hangs opposite The Blue Boy in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, USA. Seeing copies from time to time as I drifted through life, I imagined they were a matched set--perhaps siblings or cousins. Did you?

In fact, they were painted about 24 years apart by two different artists. How lovely for us that Pinkie turns to our right and the Boy to the left, and hanging together they make a wondrous, harmonious pairing.

Titled Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie by the museum, the eleven year old girl's portrait was done by Thomas Lawrence in 1794. The portrait has atmosphere and motion with the storm blowing her gown and ribbons to the left.

Detail of  Pinkie, picture reversed

Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, called Pinkie or Pinkey by her family, was born on 22 March 1783, in Little River, St. James, Jamaica. Hersey Barrett, a maternal ancestor, had arrived in Jamaica with Oliver Cromwell's forces in 1655. The family became wealthy landowners, slave owners, and exporters of sugar cane and rum.

By 1789 Sarah's father, Charles Moulton, had left his family. She and her siblings were raised by her mother and the Barrett family. Sarah and two brothers sailed to England in 1792 to continue their educations. Sarah attended Mrs Fenwick's school at Flint House, Greenwich, as did other children from Jamaican colonial families.

Sarah's grandmother in Jamaica, Judith Barrett, wrote to a niece living in Richmond, Surrey, to commission a portrait of her 'dear little Pinkey'. We can be grateful, for Sarah died the following year. The painting was displayed in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1795 which opened the day after her burial. It remained in the family until 1910, at one time a possession of her brother Edward, the father of the poetess and writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was sold for 74,000 guineas in 1926, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction at that date.

Thomas Lawrence, painter-in-ordinary to George III, was charging 160 guineas for a full length portrait at the time, though we do not know the amount Sarah's grandmother paid for Pinkie.

Thought to be perhaps Thomas Gainsborough's (1727–1788) most famous work, The Blue Boy is possibly a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant who owned property in the City of London and Ipswich, Suffolk. Gainsborough was working in Ipswich in the 1750s, and the Buttall family may have met him there. The artist shared a love of music and formed a friendship with the young Jonathan whom he asked to be present at his funeral.

In 1768 Jonathan inherited his father's business and was considered "an immensely rich man," but in 1796 bankruptcy forced him to auction off much property including The Blue Boy and other paintings by Gainsborough. Buttall married Mary Jump on March 31, 1798, but no children are mentioned in his will. He died in 1805 from spasms at his house on Oxford Street.

The painting is certainly a study in 17th-Century apparel and regarded as homage to Anthony van Dyck. It was bought from Buttall by the politician John Nesbitt and then came to be in the collections of the portrait painter John Hoppner followed by the Earl Grosvenor and his descendants, the dealer Joseph Duveen and finally, causing a public outcry in Britain, the American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington.

Before heading to California, the painting was put on display briefly at the National Gallery and viewed by 90,000 people. The Gallery's director, Charles Holmes, wrote on the back, "Au Revoir, C.H.".

So, was it typical in those days, as today, for girls to wear pink and boys to wear blue? Actually, author Tom Williams says no. He writes that in 1918, the advice given to American parents was:

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

While girls obviously wore pink as in the painting above, boys would wear pink coats as a pale imitation of Redcoat uniforms. I think it also interests Americans that British baby boys wear christening gowns. That of litte Prince George is a copy of the one made for Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Vicky. It seems fashion matters can vary for the genders from time to time and place to place.


Bibliography

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Kate Retford
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/93084

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkie_(painting)

The Huntington
http://emuseum.huntington.org/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:353

The Huntington
http://emuseum.huntington.org/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/0?t:state:flow=2cc0f75b-bcf8-4c37-bfc4-20f24d7e41d5

The Huntington
http://emuseum.huntington.org/view/people/asitem/Objects$0040244/1?t:state:flow=74eac449-b05c-4b66-81cc-32931e8733d6

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Boy

Writing About Writing
http://thewhiterajah.blogspot.com/2014/04/pink-for-girl.html

Images
Wikimedia - Public Domain

ABCGallery.com
http://www.abcgallery.com/L/lawrence/lawrence64.html

Discover Los Angeles
http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/ten-masterpieces-you-wouldnt-expect-find-los-angeles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Debra Brown cut her teeth on the Bookhouse Books which created a nagging longing to live in a land of castles and wear flowing gowns and headdresses. Though life was busy and full, she eventually became able to do so vicariously through the characters of her books.

Her first published novel, The Companion of Lady Holmeshire (World Castle Publishing, 2011), is set in early Victorian England. Emma, a former servant girl, was chosen as companion to The Countess of Holmeshire and dragged along into polite society where she was sure to receive a rude reception.

Debra's beloved work-in-progress, For the Skylark, is on the back burner but simmering slowly. She runs the English Historical Fiction Authors blog and is an author and co-editor of Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (Madison Street Publishing, 2013) which will soon be released as an audiobook. Please watch for Volume Two of Castles, Customs, and Kings in the September 2015.

Amazon
This post is an EHFA Editor's choice. It was first published on November 4, 2014.

A Whiff of Swedish Sin

by Anna Belfrage

Back in the 1960s, Sweden – and in particular its women – acquired a reputation for being somewhat over-generous with their sexual favours. Nothing new under the sun, if you ask me, and today’s post will hopefully prove my point by introducing you to two very handsome Swedish counts, their utterly ravishing sister, and the younger count’s one and only love – who unfortunately happened to be married elsewhere. Swedish sin? I see some of you frown, wondering just how this can play a role in British history. Bear with me…

The 17^th century was one of huge Swedish expansion – for a while. With more lands at their disposal, Swedish nobles took the opportunity of wiping the oh, so boring dust of their homeland from under their feet and instead set out to explore what Europe had to offer. As polyglot back then as Swedes are now – for the same reason: no one but us speaks Swedish – these my distant countrymen established themselves in many of the smaller European courts – with a preference for all those very small principalities that made up present day Germany.

Aurora - in a blonde wig

One such Swedish family in happy exile was the von Köningsmarcks. The father, Kurt Christoffer, was the son of a decorated Swedish Field Marshal. The mother, Maria Christina von Wrangel, was of impeccable Swedish lineage, and the children, Carl Johan, Aurora, Amalia and Philip Christoffer, were all four drop-dead gorgeous. For Aurora, this would offer a heady if short career as preferred mistress to the future Augustus I of Poland. Being possessed not only of astoundingly good looks but also of brains, Aurora was wise enough not to cling when Augustus tired of her. Instead, she had him set her up for life as the princess-abbess of a nice little convent – this came with the perk of a solid income and a princely title and, apparently, little in the way of religious obligations.

Maurice de Saxe

I would say that the best thing that came out of Aurora’s illicit affair with Augustus was their stunningly handsome son, Maurice de Saxe, a future Marshal of France. And seeing as Augustus had presence rather than beauty, we must assume this was all due to the Köningsmarck genes. Maybe in this portrait of Maurice we get an inkling of what his maternal uncles, Carl Johan and Philip Christoffer, may have looked like.

Pretty Elizabeth Percy

The eldest of the Köningsmarck siblings, Carl Johan, led an adventurous life which included being a Maltese Knight, fighting the Ottomans, and lion hunting in Africa. At some point, he fell head-over-heels in love with the pretty and very young English noblewoman Elizabeth Percy, and so determined was he to wed her (and, I am sad to say, get his hands on her money) that he arranged for her husband, a certain Thomas Thynne, to be murdered in February of 1682. Thynne had been out partying with the Duke of Monmouth (yes, that Duke of Monmouth) and was shot dead in his carriage by three Swedish men acting upon Carl Johan’s orders. The three Swedes were duly hanged, but having offered invaluable services to England in Morocco some years earlier, Carl Johan was instead invited to a private audience with Charles II and then allowed to escape the country. He then went on to create yet another scandal when he enticed another English lady to run away with him to Venice disguised as his page. Those Swedes, hey?

I imagine big brother Carl Johan had quite the influence on Philip Christoffer. Alternatively, our Philip was an entirely different creature, which is why when he met a certain Sophia Dorothea of Celle in 1681, he fell in love. At the time, Philip Christoffer would have been around sixteen and Sophia Dorothea was a mere fifteen. They flirted mildly, and Philip Christoffer went on to do his tour of Europe. No such tour for Sophia Dorothea. Instead in November of 1682 she was wed to Georg Ludwig of Hanover, a young man six years or so her senior. In due course, Georg Ludwig was to become George I of Great Britain.

Georg Ludwig in his younger days

This was an unhappy marriage from day one. Georg’s mother – Sophia of the Palatine, granddaughter of James I& VI and the lady through which Georg Ludwig would eventually claim the British throne – despised her little daughter-in-law for being born on the wrong side of the blanket (Sophia Dorothea was the legitimised offspring of her father’s union with his long-time mistress) and as to Georg, he was just as unenthusiastic.

However, Sophia Dorothea came with a nice annual income, and she was pretty enough not to require Georg to squish his eyes shut when doing his duty in the marital bed, so soon enough there was a little son, Georg Augustus. Some years later, there was a daughter, but by then the marriage was more or less dead, with Georg entertaining himself elsewhere, primarily with Melusine von der Schulenburg, his long-time mistress to whom he would remain devoted throughout his life.

Sophia Dorothea

As to Sophia Dorothea, her interactions with her husband mostly took the forms of arguments – at times physical – with him complaining about everything she did, how she talked, how she ate, how she carried herself…Add to this the humiliation of having her husband’s mistress at close quarters, and one imagines Sophia Dorothea’s life was not exactly a rose garden. No wonder she was ripe for the wooing when in 1688 Philip Christoffer von Köningsmarck reappeared in her life, as dashing as she remembered him, but by now an experienced man of the world.

The Hanover court did not only consist of pig-headed (as per his mother in one of her exasperated moments) Georg Ludwig. He had brothers and sisters, and Sophia Dorothea was not entirely without friends – even less so when Philip Christoffer began to frequent the court, a boon companion to Georg Ludwig’s younger brothers. Over the coming two years, Sophia Dorothea and Philip Christoffer met regularly – almost daily – but at this point nothing indicates this was anything but a sweet romance, a young woman starved for affection flirting with a handsome admirer.

Still, the infatuation was noted. Not that Georg Ludwig gave a fig about what his wife might be doing, but he wasn’t about to have her openly mooning over some fresh-faced Swedish count. So I dare say it was with something akin to relief that the Hanoverian court waved bye-bye to Philip Christoffer as he rode off to fight in a campaign on the Peloponnesus.

Philip Christoffer

However, Philip Christoffer returned. And this time – at least to judge from the correspondence between Philip Christoffer and Sophia Dorothea – innocent love flamed into passion. The ignored princess bloomed, and soon enough “everyone” knew she was entertaining Philip Christoffer more intimately than she should. As a pre-emptive measure, Philip Christoffer was therefore exiled from Hanover.

Georg Ludwig, huge hypocrite that he was, was utterly incensed. The unloving couple fought like cats and dogs, she shrieking at him that who was he to come and wag a moral finger at her, what with his mistresses with whom he openly cavorted, while he yelled that it was different, he was a man, and by God, she’d best be a dutiful wife, or else… (Okay, okay, some artistic license here. After all, I wasn’t there) Apparently, Georg Ludwig did not shy from physical violence and had to be dragged off when he attempted to strangle her.

Whatever the case, Sophia Dorothea was becoming desperate – and afraid. Philip Christoffer agreed, and so the two lovers came up with a drastic solution: she would flee the Hanoverian court and they would live happily ever after, poor but together. An escape plan was formulated and in early July of 1694, Philip Christoffer dared a visit to his lady love so as to go over the final details of their plan. They spent some hours closeted in her rooms, and under cover of the dark Philip Christoffer slipped away, shrouded in a heavy brown cloak. And that, dear people, is the last time anyone saw the love-sick count.

The Hanoverian court went into a frenzy covering all tracks that could potentially lay the blame for Philip Christoffer’s disappearance – or should that be murder? – at their door. Georg Ludwig immediately initiated divorce proceedings against his wife, citing her “abandonment” of him as the reason rather than his own repeated infidelities.

Sophia Dorothea with her children, around
the time she was banished.

In 1694, Sophia Dorothea was forcibly removed from her home and her children and effectively imprisoned at the picturesque castle of Ahlden. While given the run of the manorial gardens, her movements elsewhere were severely restricted, as was access to her person. She was never to see her children again, remaining an isolated prisoner living off her memories until her death thirty-three years later.

In 1714, Georg Ludwig succeeded to the British crown as George I. His new subjects wanted not only a king but also a queen – and neither of their new king’s mistresses made much of an impression, one being nicknamed “The Maypole” the other “The Elephant”. Prospective wives turned him down, and so – or so the story goes – someone was desperate enough to approach Sophia Dorothea and ask her if she would consider coming over to England. Her purported response was as follows: “If I truly deserve to be punished as I have been these last two decades, then I am not worthy of being your queen. If I am innocent, then your king is not worthy of being my husband.” Nice and ambiguous, one could say…

In 1726, Sophia Dorothea fell seriously ill. In her death-throes she cursed her erstwhile husband, prophesising that it would not be long before they met before the throne of God, and then they’d see… She died in November of 1726, and George forbade any signs of mourning in Hanover or England, was mightily irritated when his daughter in Prussia hanged her halls in black. In keeping with his character, he therefore ordered that his former wife be buried “somewhere in the castle garden” with none of the funeral honours a lady of her rank deserved. 

Ahlden as per an engraving from the mid 17th century

The weather, however, conspired against him, making it impossible to dig a grave, and so Sophia Dorothea’s coffined remains were packed off to the cellars to wait for spring. By then, George had relented, and the mother of his heir was properly – if discreetly – buried in Celle, her home.

In 1727, George died, some say as a consequence of his mistreated wife’s curse. While there is a pleasing symmetry to that, I find it hard to believe. Whatever the case, his treatment of Sophia Dorothea had permanently soured his relationship with his son, further compounded by how cruelly George separated his grandchildren from their parents. Not, all in all, a nice man, in my opinion. Nope, not at all.

So what happened to our young dashing count? Was he bought off with gold? Did he perhaps stumble down a staircase and break his neck? Or was he, in fact, murdered on George I’s orders? We will never know, not for sure. However, it is said that during World War II, the old Hanoverian castle was badly hit by bombs. During the clearing up, a sealed closet was discovered, in which were found bones – and fragments of a heavy brown cloak... Murder, I say. Murder most foul.

The 300 odd letters between Sophia Dorothea and her Swedish count still survive and can be found in Lund’s University library. Written in code, they display a couple headily in love, just as headily attracted to each other. However, Sophia Dorothea always maintained that she had not, in fact, crossed the dividing line between wanting to bed her handsome lover and actually doing so. Personally, in view of what came after, I hope they did, but once again, we will never know.

All images from Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain  

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Anna Belfrage is the successful author of eight published books, all of them part of The Graham Saga. Set in 17th century Scotland, Virginia and Maryland, this is the story of Matthew Graham and his wife, Alex Lind - two people who should never have met, not when she was born three centuries after him.

Presently, Anna is hard at work with The King’s Greatest Enemy, a series set in the 1320s featuring Adam de Guirande, his wife Kit, and their adventures and misfortunes in connection with Roger Mortimer’s rise to power. The first instalment, In the Shadow of the Storm, was published on November 1, 2015. 

For more information about Anna and her books, please visit her website. If not on her website, Anna can mostly be found on her blog.

Order! Order! - Cromwell loses it, and dissolves Parliament

by Deborah Swift

'Depart I say, and in the name of God, go!'

On this day - 20th April  - 1653, Cromwell had finally had enough of Parliament and dismissed them all. So incensed was he, that he returned with a band of armed musketeers who were ordered to clear the chamber. Later, a notice was posted by an amused citizen, it read; 'This house is to be let; now unfurnished.'

It was the moment Cromwell arguably became a dictator, and undisputed ruler of England.

Cromwell dissolves the Rump Parliament

The Parliament that was sitting at the time was known as the 'Rump' - the rump being the back end of an animal, in other words the remnants. The remnants in this case were those Members of Parliament who in 1648 had not been purged from the Long Parliament. This was known as Pride's Purge, after Colonel Pride who carried out the orders to remove or arrest members hostile to the idea of Charles I being tried for high treason.

This left a core of about two hundred members -  a determined body of men who ignored the vote of the small number of peers still sitting in the Lords, and eventually pushed through an Act which would enable the judiciary to sentence the King to death for treason. Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1649.

Afterwards the Rump passed Acts abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords and declared England a 'Commonwealth'. 

Most of the members of the Rump were Puritans, who wanted to restrict what they regarded as dissenters - the more extreme sects such as Quakers or Ranters. To stop these groups from preaching, they formed a Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, which issued licenses to preach, so that Parliament would have more control over the religious activities of the people. During this time the Rump Parliament also introduced the Adultery Act in 1650, which imposed the death penalty for adultery. These measures of restrictive law-giving were designed to replace the role previously held by church (Anglican or Catholic) morality, but merely made for an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. The general malaise was not helped by the fact that when civil unrest was finally ended in 1651, confiscated Royalist estates were broken up and the proceeds spent by the new government, something that did nothing to heal the wounds of the recent Civil Wars.

The misdeeds of the Rump Parliament were popularly represented on these playing cards, The Knavery of the Rump, first published in 1679. The cards are a wonderful visual insight into the times, showing the people of London about their daily tasks. Click on the link to take you to a page with more information.

http://www.wopc.co.uk/uk/margary/knavery

So why was Cromwell so angry with Parliament? The Rump was only intended as an interim measure, so perhaps he thought it had outlived its usefulness. It is uncertain, but it also appears from the few records we have, that their deliberations over policy had taken too long - the event is recounted by Thomas Salmon in 1723 in his Chronological Historian:

[Cromwell] commanded the Speaker to leave the Chair, and told them they had sat long enough, unless they had done more good, crying out, 

"You are no longer a Parliament, I say you are no Parliament". 

He told Sir Henry Vane he was a Jugler [sic]; Henry Martin and Sir Peter Wentworth, that they were Whoremasters; Thomas Chaloner, he was a Drunkard; and Allen the Goldsmith that he cheated the Publick: Then he bid one of his Soldiers take away that Fool's Bauble, the mace, and Thomas Harrison pulled the Speaker of the Chair; and in short Cromwell having turned them all out of the House, lock'd up the Doors and returned to Whitehall.

It appears Cromwell had really lost his temper!

A month after these events, realizing that governing alone put him in a rather awkward position, and on the advice of the Army, Cromwell sent a request to the recognized churches in every county, asking for nominations for a new Parliament. This new government was nicknamed the tongue-in-cheek "Assembly of Saints" or Barebones' Parliament (named after Barebones, one of its members).

Find out more about my novels set in this period on my website www.deborahswift.com

Goodreads Giveaway Shadow on the Highway

Goodreads Giveaway Spirit of the Highway

Chat to me on Goodreads this Thursday as part of the Virtual Historical Fiction Festival.

Links:
BCW Project
British Parliament Website
Stuart England by Blair Worden
Early Modern England - J A Sharpe
The English Civil War - Maurice Ashley

The "great shaft of Cornehill" and the Origins of English Puritanism

By Mark Patton.

The Church of Saint Andrew Undershaft, at the heart of the City of London, is one of very few churches in the city to have survived both the Great Fire of 1666, and the Blitz of the Second World War. The current building dates back to 1532, but there has been a church on the site, dedicated to Saint Andrew, since the Twelfth Century. To what, however, does the word "Undershaft" refer? Certainly not the tower of Saint Mary Axe (otherwise known as "The Gherkin") which now looms over it.

The Church of Saint Andrew Undershaft. Photo: Elisa.rolle (licensed under CCA)

We find a clue in the work of no less a writer than Geoffrey Chaucer:

"Right well aloft, and high ye beare your heade,
The weather cocke, with flying, as ye would kill,
When ye be stuffed, bet of wine than brede,
Then looke ye, when your wombe doth fill,
As ye would beare the great shaft of Cornehill,
Lorde, so merrily crowdeth than your croke,
That all the streete may heare your body cloke."

The "shaft" in question, was a may-pole, erected each year in the street opposite Saint Andrew's Church, and was presumably taller than the church tower, hence the church was to be found "under the shaft."

Dancing around the may-pole, from Isaiah Thomas, "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book," 1767 (image is in the Public Domain).

Mayday in England, by Otto von Reinsberg-Duringsfeld, 1863 (image is in the Public Domain).

The Sixteenth Century chronicler, John Stow (who, incidentally, lies buried in the church, where he worshipped), tells us that:

"This shaft was not raised at any time since evil May-day (so called of an insurrection made by apprentices and other young persons against aliens in the year 1517); but the said shaft was laid along over the doors, and under the pentises of one row of houses and alley gate, called of the shaft Shaft Alley ... in the Ward of Lime Street. It was there, I say, hung on iron hooks many years, till the third of King Edward VI [1547], that one Sir Stephen, Curate of Saint Katherine's Christ Church [Creechurch], preaching at Saint Paul's Cross, said that this shaft was made an idol, by naming the church of Saint Andrew with the addition of "under that shaft."

Sermon preached from Saint Paul's Cross, 1614, by John Gipkyn, Society Of Antiquaries (image is in the Public Domain).

"I have oft-time seen this man," Stow continues, "forsaking the pulpit of his said parish church, preach out of a high elm tree in the midst of the churchyard, and then entering the church, forsaking the altar, to have sung his high mass in English upon a tomb of the dead towards the north. I heard his sermon at Paul's Cross, and I saw the effect that followed ... Thus was the idol, as he termed it, mangled, and after burned."

The curate in question seems to have been implicated in a "commotion of the commons in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and other shires," and, betrayed by a man about to be executed at Aldgate, "left the city, and was never heard of since."

Sir Stephen's actions (we need not assume that he was either a knight or a baronet - the title was used in a purely honorific sense for churchmen) are remarkably similar to acts of iconoclasm undertaken a hundred years later by people described as "Puritans" (the word was most often used as a term of reproach by others - the iconoclasts typically thought of themselves as Presbyterians, Evangelicals, Baptists or Anabaptists).

In 1547, the Protestant Reformation was well established in England, but, for an increasing vocal minority, taking their inspiration from the French Huguenots, and from John Knox's Church of Scotland, it had not gone nearly far enough. For these English Calvinists, Archbishop Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer still had a whiff of "Popery" about it, a view reinforced by the hierarchy of Anglican bishops, and the use of church vestments.

Popular caricature of Calvinists, c 1650 (image is in the Public Domain).

The word "Puritan" seems not yet to have existed, but it, perhaps, needed to be invented. It appears first to have been used in 1565. In 1572, the Anglican Archbishop, John Whitgift, wrote contemptuously:

"This name Puritane is very aptely given to these men, not bicause they be pure no more than were the Heretikes called Cathari, but bicause they think them selues to be mundiores ceteris, more pure than others, as Cathari did, and separate them selues from all other Churches and congregations as spotted and defyled."

Shakespeare uses the word in Twelfth Night (1601-1602), the servant, Maria, referring to the pompous steward, Malvolio, as "a kind of puritan." The riotous knight, Sir Toby Belch, has previously rebuked Malvolio: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" We might almost see this as the first literary confrontation between characters recognisable (in terms yet to be coined) as a "cavalier" and a "round-head" (the latter, another term used mainly as a reproach).

Twelfth Nigh, the First Folio Edition (image is in the Public Domain).

One unintended consequence of the Reformation, as churchmen were newly free to marry, was that an ecclesiastical career became a far more attractive option for the younger sons of the aristocracy and gentry, who did not stand to inherit. Since many "benefices" were in the gift of wealthy families, a young churchman fresh out of Oxford or Cambridge, might accumulate several of them, to very considerable financial advantage. Such a churchman, if he had one "living" in Kent, another in Essex, and another in London, had few incentives to spend time amid the noise and filth of the city, with the effect that many city parishes found themselves in the "care" of an absentee priest. The city vestries did not lack money, so many hired "lecturers" or preachers, and the men who came forward, typically from much more humble backgrounds, the graduates of grammar schools, rather than universities, were often the fundamentalist Presbyterians, Baptists, Anabaptists and Evangelicals, whose fiery iconoclastic sermons would soon be ringing out across the city louder than the peal of Bow Bells.

Sir Stephen's destruction of the "great shaft of Cornehill" was a presage of things to come, and I have the sense that both John Stow and William Shakespeare had at least some notion that this might be the case.

Mark Patton blogs regularly on aspects of history and historical fiction at http://mark-patton.blogspot.co.uk. His novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon.

Giveaway: For King and Country by Charlene Newcomb

To celebrate publication of For King and Country, Charlene Newcomb is having a giveaway for a Kindle or epub version of the book. For King and Country will be published on Amazon on May 2, 2016. To see more information about the book, please click HERE.

This Giveaway ends at midnight Pacific Standard Time on April 24, 2016.

To enter the drawing, comment below on this page and be sure to leave your contact details. Good luck!

The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity: the building of Gibraltar's Protestant church

by Jacqueline Reiter

When I visited Gibraltar last year for some research, one of the buildings on my list of "things to see" was the Protestant Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. I mostly wanted to say hi to Sir George Don, the Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar during the time I was researching (he's buried there). It's also a mighty pretty building in its own right.

Monument to Sir George Don

Fortunately, the history of the building cropped up fairly regularly in my research over the next few days. The lack of a large Protestant church until the 1830s reflects Gibraltar's cosmopolitan background. British, Genoese, Jews, Spaniards, Catholics, and Protestants all rubbed shoulders in Gibraltar's hot, narrow streets and alleys. The Protestant contingent of the town was very small, about 13%, limited mostly to the British soldiery and some of the British mercantile families.[1]

There had been a Catholic cathedral in Gibraltar since before the British arrival in 1704, and the Jews had had a synagogue since 1724, but the Protestants had nothing of their own. The more prosperous townspeople had the opportunity to join the Governor for divine worship in his private chapel attached to his official residence. Even so, if they and all the highest-ranking military officers showed up at the same time, the place was a bit of a squeeze. 

The Governor's Chapel (on the right)

In 1820 the leading Protestant citizens appealed to Don, who laid their request for a Protestant church before the Colonial Secretary.

The Colonial Office expressed interest, and the proposal went as far as drawing up an elaborate financial estimate of £5000, but the minute the Treasury officials saw this figure they panicked (this, you must realise, in the straitened post-Napoleonic period of strict government-sponsored financial retrenchment). The petition was filed at the back of a drawer somewhere and forgotten about for eighteen months.

Fast-forward to 1822. Don, the Lieutenant-Governor, handed the active superintendence of Gibraltar over in November 1821 to the actual Governor, the Earl of Chatham. Chatham was well-connected and influential, and the Protestants thought he might just pull a few strings for them.

They were not wrong. Chatham was a keen proponent of Christian morality in the garrison under his command. He forbade trading, drinking and gambling on Sundays and personally chaired Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge meetings. Sponsoring a Protestant church was right up his street.

He wrote to Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, in July 1822 proposing a solution to the problem of cost. Chatham knew of an old, derelict Barrack Office-owned storehouse in Gibraltar known as "White Cloister". Land in Gibraltar was precious and expensive, because it all belonged to the Crown and was, therefore, transferable generally only by leasehold, with express permission from Whitehall. Chatham thought selling "White Cloister" would produce more than enough money both to build a new barrack store and provide the missing £5000 for a church, if it were built "without all the Ornaments proposed in the former plan".[1]

After receiving Bathurst's go-ahead in October, Chatham conferred with the Chief Engineer, Robert Pilkington, on a plan that would be practical, aesthetically pleasing, and (above all) cheap. Pilkington drew up several plans which he laid before the Governor. The design Chatham selected was, as Pilkington observed, "a feature of Building familiar to the Eye in this Country, yet ... obtaining the required Accommodation, and for a limited Sum of Money": a low, square building in a "Moorish style" for 1300 people, with separate entrances at each end for civil and military worshippers.[2]

Interior of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity

The proposal was sent to the Colonial Office in February 1823, and laid before the Treasury in May. Possibly it took this long because Chatham, in a moment of typical absent-mindedness, forgot to send the plan along with the estimate.[3] Meanwhile, the sale of the White Cloisters went through and produced an even larger sum than Chatham had hoped. All that was needed now was final approval to build, and Chatham was confident enough to inform the important Protestants in the garrison that they would soon be able to start building.

He had spoken too soon. In March 1824, in response to the deafening silence from Whitehall, Chatham reminded Bathurst that "His Majesty's Protestant Subjects in this Garrison have been most anxiously waiting for the final decision on the subject of the Church which I was authorised to give them hopes would be granted them".[4]

This dispatch (received on 8 April) nearly gave the Treasury officials a heart attack. Faced with the need to make a final call, the Treasury suddenly remembered all sorts of obstacles. It had now been fourteen months since Pilkington had drawn up his plan: a new plan would now be needed, preferably on a more pared-down scale, because a church for 1300 people was surely too big for a population that was predominantly Catholic and Jewish. Faced with the prospect of paying an annual stipend to a government-appointed clergyman, the Treasury declared the best solution would be to add galleries to the existing chapel attached to the Governor's residence, and withheld their permission to commence building.[5]

Chatham was not impressed with this unexpected back-pedalling. Further correspondence ensued in which Chatham pointed out, in increasingly clipped language, that White Cloisters had produced enough money to make the Treasury's financial fears unwarranted. In February 1825 the Treasury Board caved in and, on 22 February, informed Chatham "that there no longer exists any difficulty in carrying His Majesty's Gracious Intentions ... into effect".[6]

Building on what would become the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity began in June 1825. One of the last things Lord Chatham did before returning to England was to lay the foundation stone. Invitations to the foundation ceremony were issued on 30 May to the prominent merchants and citizens of the town.[7] 

Copy of the invitation to the foundation ceremony for the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity (Gibraltar National Archives, Local Correspondence 1818-29)

On 1 June Chatham and Don marched out with the military and civilian authorities to the spot where the church was to be built, through a lane of troops composed of the Welsh Fusiliers and the 64th Regiment of Foot. Two brass plates, one with Chatham's name and one bearing Don's, were affixed to the foundation stone. A box containing coins and a Coronation Medal was laid beneath it.

"His Excellency went through the customary ceremony of using the trowel and mallet," the Gibraltar Chronicle reported, "and the whole concluded with prayers suited to the occasion".[8]

The cathedral was completed in 1832, a lasting monument to Don and Chatham's period of active partnership – and a slap in the face of government penny-pinching.

References

[1] Marc Alexander, Gibraltar: conquered by no enemy (London, 2008)

[1] Chatham to Lord Bathurst, 26 July 1822, Gibraltar National Archives Military Secretary's Office 1819-27

[2] Robert Pilkington to Chatham, 8 February 1823, National Archives CO 91/80

[3] "The Plan did not accompany the Dispatch": pencilled note on Chatham's 14 February dispatch to Lord Bathurst, National Archives CO 91/80

[4] Chatham to Lord Bathurst, 17 March 1824, National Archives CO 91/81

[5] Treasury minute, 13 April 1824, National Archives CO 91/82

[6] George Harrison to Chatham, 22 February 1825, Gibraltar National Archives Dispatches to Gibraltar 1825

[7] Gibraltar National Archives, Local Correspondence 1818-29

[8] Gibraltar Chronicle, 1 June 1825

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jacqueline Reiter has a Phd in 18th century political history. She is currently working on the first ever biography of John Pitt, 2nd Earl of Chatham. "The Late Lord" will be published by Pen & Sword Books in January 2017. When she finds time she blogs about her historical discoveries at http://alwayswantedtobeareiter.wordpress.com/, and can be found on Twitter as https://twitter.com/latelordchatham.

"Stone walls do not a prison make": The Infamous Westminster Gate-House

By Nancy Bilyeau

This post is an EHFA Editor's choice. It was first published on December 28, 2013

In 1663, in the flush of the Restoration, a woman named Mary Carleton went on trial for bigamy. Born in Canterbury of humble parents, she’d married a shoemaker and given birth to two children before disappearing to Cologne. There she had a torrid affair with a nobleman, turning down his offer of marriage but keeping his rich gifts and some money besides. She then returned to England, claiming to be an orphaned German princess and marrying one John Carleton. A discovered letter betrayed her first marriage and she was arrested.

Bigamist and impersonator Mary Carleton, 1663
© National Portrait Gallery, London, licensed under CCA.

Mary’s colorful life—she was acquitted of bigamy after a spirited defense and went on to marry, steal from, and abandon a string of new husbands before being transported to Jamaica and, finally, hanged for theft in 1673—is not, however, the focus of this post. It is her place of incarceration before going on trial, a strange prison within a very short distance of Westminster Abbey where men and women had been held for three centuries before Mary’s celebrated trial, captured in the book The Arraignment, Tryal and Examination of Mary Moders, Otherwise Stedman, Now Carleton, (styled, the German Princess) At the Sessions House in the Old Bayly, Being Brought Prisoner from the Gate-House Westminster, for Having Two Husbands.

The Tower of London holds claim to being the prison of greatest tragic renown, where queens were feted and beheaded and Jesuit priests screamed on the rack. But the Westminster Gate-House has many stories to tell too, holding errant clerks, religious dissidents, poets and legendary Englishmen such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Samuel Pepys before imprisoning a great many miserable, anonymous debtors.

In a description of the Gate-House Prison written in 1768, it "is situated near the west end of the abbey, entering into Tuttle Street, and the Almery...it is the chief prison for the City of Westminster liberties, not only for debt, but treason, theft and other criminal matters."

In the beginning, the prison was more connected to Westminster Abbey, which makes sense. Some say it was a powerful abbot who transformed the gatehouse into a prison, but documents point to William Warfield, the cellarer of Westminster Abbey. In 1370 he arranged for the gatehouse’s upper storey to house a jail.

But why?

By the time of the reign of Edward III, Westminster was in full medieval throttle. William Rufus' majestic Great Hall, where Parliament met and kings sat on marble thrones, was raised near the spectacular Westminster Abbey, founded by Edward the Confessor in 1065.

Westminster Abbey today.
Image by ChrisO, licensed under CCA.

In Walter Thornbury's Old and New London (1878), he speculates about the preeminence in Plantagenet times of Westminster Abbey and the importance of even the "butler," who was most probably this same William Warfield: "A magnificent apex to a royal palace, the abbey church was surrounded by its own greater and lesser sanctuaries and almonries; its bell towers (the principal one 72 feet 6 inches square, with walls 20 feet thick), chapels, gatehouses, boundary walls, and a train of other buildings, of which we can at the present day scarcely form an idea. In addition to all the land around it, extending from the Thames to Oxford Street, the Abbey possessed 97 towns and villages, 17 hamlets and 216 manors. Its officers fed hundreds of persons daily, and one of its priests (not the abbott) entertained at this pavilion the king and queen, with so large a party, that seven hundred dishes did not suffice for the first table, and even the abbey butler, in the reign of Edward III, rebuilt at his own expense the stately gatehouse which gave entrance to Tothill Street."

Tudor-era historian John Stow wrote that the eastern part of the north gate was used as the bishop of London's prison for "clarks convict." So was it originally an ecclesiastical prison? That's contradicted by another report that during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, rioters set the Westminster prisoners free. It's difficult to picture the peasant rebels fired up to liberate errant clerks. But in 1596, a Southwark preacher confined in the Gate-House did write an abject letter to Lord Burghley "for keeping Wednesday a fast, and transferring the observation of it unto Thursday." Hardly a violent felon.

Another Tudor troublemaker, Giles Wigginton, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, was twice confined in the Gate-House, once for refusing to swear he was not the author of The Marprelate Tracts, pamphlets attacking the kingdom's traditional Anglican leaders. While imprisoned in the 1590s, Wigginton was joined by other fiery Puritans, such as William Hacket, who claimed to be the messiah, called for the removal of Elizabeth I, and on the way to his execution insulted the clergyman determined to comfort him.

A 16th century prisoner of opposite views was Nicholas Vaux, a chorister of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, imprisoned for "propagating the Romish religion." He died in the Gate-House "of cold and hunger" in 1571.

Sir Walter Ralegh

The first "celebrity" prisoner of the Westminster Gate-House was Sir Walter Ralegh. After a lengthy imprisonment in the Tower of London under James I, he was released to lead a disastrous expedition to Venezuela to find gold. But on his return to England, he was re-imprisoned in the Gate-House, perhaps because he was to be executed in the Old Palace Yard in Westminster.

Tradition has it that Ralegh wrote this poem shortly before he met his end on Oct. 29, 1618:

Verses Found in His Bible in the Gate House at Westminster 

"Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust."

 On the scaffold, Ralegh was shown the ax that would soon decapitate him and said, "This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries." Ralegh was buried in St. Margaret's Church nearby, and never moved.

Richard Lovelace

The next poet adventurer to be held at Westminster--but not, fortunately, beheaded--was Richard Lovelace, a wealthy knight's son who at the age of 13 became a "gentleman wayter extraordinary" to King Charles I. In his twenties, Lovelace was arrested for destroying a pro-parliamentary petition. During his several months' stay in the Gate-House, he is believed to have written his most famous poem:

To Althea, From Prison 

"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
and in my soul am free,
angels alone that soar above,
enjoy such liberty."

Ruined by his undaunted support of the royalist cause, Lovelace died in poverty in 1658, two years before the restoration of the monarchy in Charles II.

In the late 17th century, the two most famous prisoners were condemned to the Gate-House.

Jeffrey Hudson and the Queen,
by Anthony van Dyck

The first was court dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson. He was presented to Queen Henrietta Maria as a surprise when he was a child 18 inches tall: he emerged from a pie, dressed in armor. Hudson became a cherished member of the royal household and eventually traveled with the Queen to French exile. At some point, Hudson tired of insults about his size; responding to a taunt from the queen's master of horse, he entered a duel and shot his opponent in the head. He then fled France. Sometime later, Hudson was on a boat seized by Barbary pirates and it took him many years to escape and make his way to England. But this was now the time of Titus Oates, and Hudson was arrested for being a "Roman Catholick." He died in 1682, two years after being released from the Gate-House.

The last illustrious prisoner was the erudite Samuel Pepys, jailed in 1690. A longtime civil servant, wit and bibliophile, he kept a diary that is one of the leading records of the Restoration, the Anglo-Dutch War, the Great Plague and the Great Fire. A correspondent of Newton's, he also wrote about his personal problems--bladder problems, fights with his wife, squalid extramarital affairs--and his love of wine and theater. But he too fell afoul of anti-Catholic paranoia. He was suspected of being a Jacobite in secret contact with the exiled James II; because of his poor health, he was given bail.

In the 18th century, the occupants of the Westminster Gate-House were almost all debtors. In 1769, this article was published about the grim conditions to be found in Westminster:

"The Gate-House, near Westminster Abbey, is the jail whereunto those poor wretches, who cannot pay their small debts, are committed, for forty days, unless they do what is all too often impossible; namely, pay the debt sooner. Add to this, that these prisoners have no other maintenance but what they derive from charity...for strange as it is, yet true it is, that there is no provision by law for the subsistence of prisoners in this jail..."

The Gate-House in its final dreary decades.

Charity for the prisoners was obtained by way of a box hanging from a pole forty feet long, let down by a chain, to those who wished to give. Even more incredibly, "gin and other spirits" were allowed into the Westminster Gate-House as freely as at the "public houses." The prison keeper or under keeper would go to the window and shout into the street, "Jackass! Jackass!" so that an employee of a public house would come to receive orders.

In the year 1776, as the question of freedom was raging across the ocean, the Westminster Gate-House also was liberated. The prison was closed, some say after a public campaign by the author Samuel Johnson who said "a building so offensive ought to be pulled down."

Dr. Johnson died eight years later and was buried at Westminster Abbey.

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Nancy Bilyeau is the author of a trilogy of mysteries set in the 16th century: The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry, for sale in North America, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain.

The Crown was an Oprah pick: "The real draw of this suspenseful novel is its juicy blend of murder, lust, conspiracy and betrayal."

The Chalice won the RT Reviewers Award for Best Historical Mystery. The Tapestry was released in paperback in March 2016.

For more information, please visit Nancy's website at http://www.nancybilyeau.com/