'Inigo Jones - Inventor of the Glitter Ball' by Karen Maitland

Inigo Jones (1573-16520
Artist: William Hogarth (1697-1764)
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Today, we mainly remember Inigo Jones as an architect, but he actually got his first shot at designing a building, a shopping-mall – the New Exchange on the Strand, for Secretary of State and arch spy-master, Robert Cecil – after coming to prominence as a designer of costumes, scenery and special effects for the grand royal masques staged for James I and his Danish wife, Queen Anne. And the special effects Jones created for the stage were remarkable. 

Inigo Jones was born to a Welsh clothmaker in Smithfield in London in 1573. He travelled to the Court of King Christian of Denmark in the retinue of the Earl of Rutland and it seems likely that Queen Anne was introduced to Jones through her brother, Christian. Jones was first employed to design the sets and costumes for a masque for her in back in England in 1604, alongside the controversial playwright, Ben Jonson, with whom he had a creative but stormy relationship. 

Scene of Witches from 'The Masque of Queens'
By Ben Jonson
Artist: Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
Yale Center for British Art

Royal masques were elaborate allegorical plays incorporating music and dances, staged to celebrate anniversaries and events such as Twelfth Night. The queen and her ladies took part, posing in classical costume or riding on the backs of mechanical animals, while professional actors spoke their lines, though the actors often got too drunk in the ‘green-room’ to remember them. But Jones’ audiences and royal patrons demanded that each masque should be even more spectacular than the last. 

The stage Jones devised for the first royal masque was four feet above the ground, forty-foot square and could be wheeled into place. Hand-operated machinery below the stage allowed the mechanical creatures to move. A curtain painted with landscapes, dropped to the floor to reveal a fairy court or the sea made to roll onto the shore by raising and lowering painted cloths. Actors appeared to be ride through the waves on giant sea-horse or shells carried by sea monsters.

Masque Costume - 'A Star'
by Inigo Jones

Using only candle flames, oiled cloth, coloured glass and prisms, Jones managed to create lighting effects that could suggest a nocturnal glade with twinkling stars, or a blazing desert with a scorching sun. He would make the audience gasp by suddenly switching from white moonlight to brilliantly-coloured torchlights. He sometimes had lights in glass cases lowered from the ceiling that moved around above the stage to distract the audience from scenery and prop changes 

He produced clouds that moved across a sky and fake trees which half sank into the stage before opening their branches to reveal the performers. He devised mechanical monsters, which appeared to move on their own and designed the most extravagant, often transparent costumes, some of which were worn by Queen Anne and her ladies. A Venetian ambassador attending a performance of ‘Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue’ in January 1618, was shocked to observe that several of the ladies’ costumes left them bare breasted.

Masque Costume
'A page like a Fire Spirit'
by Inigo Jones

By 1611, Jones had introduced side wings - scenery that poked out from the sides of the stage and were angled to create the illusion of perspective, as well as places of concealment for the actors. He also introduced shutters that slid in from both sides and closed together, and could be drawn in and out to reveal different scenes. 

From medieval times, English audiences had been accustomed to gods and angels being lowered down from the ceiling onto the stage, but Jones managed to produce chariots, clouds and giant birds on which actors could appear to fly right across the stage.

On one occasion, Jones had a specially mixed perfume puffed across the audience at a key moment – the original smelly-vision – and he even invented the glitter ball: a large, revolving, silver ball decorated with gold that hung above the dancers, sending sparks of light darting round the set. 

The cost for staging the masques varied enormously from an extravagant £3,000 in 1609, to around £719 two years later. Perhaps some costumes and devices had been recycled. Certainly, Queen Anne raided the vast numbers of sumptuous gowns left by Queen Elizabeth for fabrics, jewels and embroidered panels to decorate costumes for herself and her ladies. 

Inigo Jones and Ben Johnson were well paid for their efforts. For their work on one of the masques, each received £40 in fees, but not as much as the instructor who schooled the ladies-in-waiting in their dances for the same masque, who was paid £50 – about two and half times the annual salary of a skilled tradesman. But given the drunken antics of the court ladies and their outrageous flirting, perhaps the poor dance tutor had earned it.

Inigo Jones' costume design for
a nymph for'Tethy's Festival'
by Samuel Daniel

But Jones’s royal patrons were to prove his undoing, for when Civil War broke out, Jones was assumed to be a royalist, and forced to flee. He was finally arrested, and lost everything he worked so hard for, sadly dying just three years after the execution of King Charles I.

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For anyone interested in reading more about this remarkable man and his amazing and turbulent life, I thoroughly recommend the fascinating book ‘Inigo – The life of Inigo Jones, Architect of the English Renaissance’ by Michael Leapman, pub. Headline, 2003 

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KJ Maitland’s final novel in her Jacobean quartet, ‘A Plague of Serpents,’ set in the aftermath of the gunpowder plot, will be published in April 2024.

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'Defiant to the End' by Karen Maitland

Remains of the Novices Dormitory in Battle Abbey
Photo: Giogo, Wikimedia Commons

There are many infamous people in history I am thankful I never had to encounter, but some historical characters I would love to have met. One of those is the redoubtable dowager Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague, (1538-1608), mistress of Battle Abbey. Alhough I think, in life, she might have been just as intimidating as the fictional dowager Countess of Grantham, immortalised by Maggie Smith in ‘Downton Abbey’.

For even in her 70th year, Lady Magdalen was still bravely defying King James I and his ministers by hiding Catholic priests disguised as servants in her house and hosting forbidden Masses for as many as 120 people in her secret chapel, right under the noses of the men sent to trap her. She also allowed an underground Catholic printing press to operate from one of her houses. The authorities believed she was using Battle Abbey to smuggle priests into England from Europe and helping fugitives to escape from England. But though the notorious spy-master, Robert Cecil, tried repeatedly, he never managed to bring her to trial.

Mary of England (1516-58)
 & Felipe II of Spain (1527-1598)
Painting - 16th Century
Royal Museums Greenwich

Magdalen Dacre was born at Naworth Castle, Cumbria. At 13 she was sent as gentlewoman to the Countess of Bedford. At 16, she joined Queen Mary’s household, and became the Queen’s great friend and confidante. In 1554, when Mary married Felipe II of Spain, Magdalen was one of the bridesmaids. Magdalen was unusually tall and pretty, but was very religious, spending much time in prayer and wearing a coarse linen smock under her court clothes.

In 1558, Magdalen married widower, Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague. Montague owned three estates, including Cowdray House in East Sussex and Battle Abbey. Magdalen, raised Montague’s twin children from his first marriage, his first wife having died in childbirth, and bore ten children of her own.

In February 1555, her husband went to Rome on Queen Mary’s behalf to try to persuade Pope Julius III to actively back the restoration of Catholicism in England. In 1557, he joined the Privy Council. He was an executor of Queen Mary’s will and chief mourner at her funeral. After Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, Montague publicly denounced proposals to elevate the status of the Protestant religion and was replaced on the Privy Council.

In 1569, Viscount Montague, together with his son-in-law, the Earl of Southampton, and Magdalen’s brother, was implicated in the ‘Rising of the North’, a plot by Catholics to depose Elizabeth, but escaped punishment.

Part of the ruins of Cowdray House
Photo: Simon Burchill, Wikipedia Commons

In 1586, Montague proved his loyalty to Elizabeth as one of the peers who tried Mary, Queen of Scots, King James' mother. In 1588, Montague prepared to defend England against the approaching Spanish Armada, raising a troop of cavalry. 

In August 1591, Elizabeth visited Montague at Cowdray House, where he entertained her lavishly for a week whilst hiding his Catholic priests and servants within the house throughout her visit. But though he was favoured by Elizabeth, he was also kept under close watch, not least because his estates were so close to the coast, where foreign spies could easily come and go.

The 1st Viscount Montague died suddenly in October 1592 and his widow, Magdalen, afterwards lived mainly in Battle Abbey until her death. Battle Abbey was said to contain a subterranean passage through which priests were smuggled into England and it would have been easy for her to move fugitives between her three properties.

Anthony-Maria Browne
2nd Viscount Montague
Circa 1592
Artist: Unknown.
Source: Christie's

Under Elizabeth, Magdalen’s house was searched only twice, and only one of the priests she was hiding was discovered and arrested. But she always refused to aid treasonous plots. However, Guy Fawkes was for short periods in both her husband’s and grandson’s employ, and after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, her grandson, Anthony-Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount of Montague, was arrested because of this association, but released for lack of evidence.

Whereas under Elizabeth, Magdalen’s ‘crimes’ had been largely ignored, King James and spy-master, Robert Cecil, were determined to close down what had come to be known as ‘Little Rome’ and have Lady Magdalen arrested. She drew the particular attention of the notorious pursuivant, Richard Topcliff, who claimed to have discovered a holy well in Battle Abbey grounds to which she led women ‘as if on pilgrimage’. Three men were sent to try to get proof that Lady Magdalen’s servants were priests in disguise, but all three failed. Two she managed to get imprisoned themselves on various charges and the third, Master N. Benet, mysteriously fell into a shallow pit at the end of the town and was killed. This was bizarrely deemed to be ‘suicide’ by the local coroner and Magdalen’s chaplain, Father Richard Smith, records gleefully that as a result Benet ‘was buried like a dog at the roadside’.

In 1607, the Privy Council announced Lady Magdalen should not be sentenced for her refusal to attend Protestant services, because of her age, status and former loyalty to Queen Elizabeth. It was decision which infuriated both Robert Cecil and King James, because ‘age and status’ certainly hadn’t prevented many others being fined, imprisoned or their property confiscated. The influence of a family friend, Lord Buckhurst in the Privy Council probably helped to prevent her from being prosecuted for recusancy in 1607, but after his death, she was left without a protector.

Effigy of Lady Magdalen, 
now in Easebourne Church, Sussex
Source: Tudor Effigies

Lady Magdalen died at Battle Abbey, Sussex on 8th April 1608 at the aged 70. Five priests came to her house the day before to say Masses for her. It wasn’t until after the death of this remarkable woman, that the Privy Council actively pursued and punished her tenants and servants.


Writing as KJ Maitland, her new novel, 'Traitor in the Ice', the 2nd in her Jacobean crime thriller series, is set at Battle Abbey in 1607 when Daniel Pursglove tries to infiltrate Lady Magdalen’s household. 'Traitor in the Ice' is published by Headline, 2022.

The King, his lover and his lover's wife by Elizabeth Fremantle

Our guest for May is Liz Fremantle who used to be a full-time History Girl. Here she talks about her latest novel.

E. C. Fremantle has a BA in English and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck. As Elizabeth Fremantle she is the critically acclaimed author of four Tudor historical novels: Queen’s Gambit, Sisters of Treason, Watch the Lady and The Girl in the Glass Tower and has contributed to various publications, including The Sunday Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The FT and The Wall Street Journal. She lives in London and Norfolk. 
www.elizabethfremantle.com

Author photo: JP Masclet

On New Years’ Day 1606 a couple were married at King James’s court, in an ostentatious ceremony as close to a royal wedding as it was possible to get, without any of the parties actually being royal. The young pair were at the pinnacle of the aristocracy, both from powerful families. He was the Earl of Essex, son of an infamous father who had been executed for his ill-starred rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. She was Lady Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, a family with close historical links to the Tudor throne – Howard women were sought-after brides.

This was no Harry and Megan love match. As was the norm for aristocrats in Early Modern England, it was a dynastic marriage, but unusual in that it was designed to unite two opposing political factions. The Howards had long been a powerful force and were shown great favour by the new King James when he came to the throne. They publically held the same religiously tolerant political position as the King and were keen to strike treaties with old Catholic enemies like Spain. The Essex faction, back in favour having helped James to the English throne, supported a hard-line Protestant agenda and were more inclined to war than ‘jaw’. Consequently, the wedding, as a catalyst for peace between warring parties, heralded an air of optimism and unity in the early Stuart court.

The Earl of Essex

The pair were young, she fourteen and he still thirteen, which was unremarkable for such marriages of the period. But the risks of childbirth for a girl so young were great, so Essex was sent to Europe for a time to be reunited with his wife a few years later. There was little love lost between the couple when they finally came together. But more significantly, during Essex’s absence the power balance at court had shifted and the deep-rooted differences between the Howards and the Essex faction had once more begun to crystallise. The optimism of 1606 was a distant memory by 1612; the Essex faction was losing their influence, so the marriage was no longer serving its purpose and the Howards were keen to extract Frances. They were forming other plans for her.

There was a new star at court. Robert Carr had attracted the attention of the King, who had a penchant for beautiful young men, and had consequently risen to a position of power as the royal favourite. Carr, in the market for a wife, was taken with Frances, and her family saw an opportunity to consolidate their close ties to the King. Their intention was to extract Frances from her marriage with Essex, whose star was on the wane, and hitch her to Carr, whose star was rising. But, even with the backing of the King, who could refuse his favourite nothing, this would not be easy.

Robert Carr, later Earl of Somerset

 In 1613 an annulment was proposed to a church commission. This was audacious, to say the least, given that the couple had lived together for some three years. But annulment was crucial, as divorce meant neither party could remarry in the lifetime of their former spouse. Both parties claimed the marriage hadn’t been consummated. But they were treading a fine line. For Essex to be publically deemed impotent would not only incur ridicule but spoil his future potential in the marriage market.

His friends testified that though he was unable to perform with his wife, he was certainly capable with other women – they had seen it for themselves. One can only imagine the atmosphere in court while the discussion of the young man’s erection took place before the bishops. Frances bore the brunt of the public shaming, being labelled a whore and a witch who had made her husband impotent by nefarious means. She was charged to undergo an inspection, which involved several respectable matrons and midwives all having a prod around her nether regions to see if she remained virgo intacta.

Frances Howard

A scandal of vast proportions blew up with ribald news-sheets having the kind of field day the red-tops have when a footballer beds a woman who is not his wife. It was generally believed that Frances must have been substituted by another, purer, woman for the purposes of hoodwinking the respectable matrons. A contemporary rhyme put it thus: "this dame was inspected but fraud interjected/ A maid of more perfection. "

The church commission deliberated for months and proceedings were further delayed by an old friend of Carr’s, Sir Thomas Overbury, who was vehemently opposed to the plan, threatening to prevent the annulment. He was thrown into the Tower on orders of the King, where he died. Eventually the King, who was keen to see his favourite married for reasons of his own, intervened by appointing two further bishops to push the decision in his favour. The annulment was eventually granted. The favourite, now the Earl of Somerset, was married to Frances Howard by the same bishop who performed her first marriage and in equal splendour. An entire week of court celebrations marked the nuptials.

The new Earl and Countess were riding high with the King’s favour – the ‘it’ couple of the Jacobean court. However, their troubles were only in temporary abeyance. When the Essex crowd saw a way to gain back their influence, the couple were to find themselves in extremely treacherous waters. The ensuing scandal would rock the court to its foundations and come perilously close to the King himself, forming the first dent in the Stuart monarchy, which would topple some two decades later.

It is these murky and murderous events around the glamorous Somersets that formed the basis of my novel The Poison Bed.

Witch Marks and Curses: The Rituals of Protection by Catherine Hokin

In the midst of all the Halloween madness around crazed-clown sightings (surely a PR stunt for the forthcoming Stephen King movie) and poor-taste celebrity costumes, my eye was caught this year by a request from Historic England for help with searching out some rather specialist graffiti. The patterns they are looking for date from between the the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, can be found on both homes and churches and may be marks made by the builders or occupants to deter witches.

 The Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

We are a superstitious lot when it comes to guarding home and hearth.These marks (known as apotropaic from the Greek word for turning evil spirits away) are part of a long tradition of charms and curses stretching across cultures and centuries designed to keep homes and places of religious significance safe. The Japanese ofuda, charms written on paper and blessed at a Shinto shrine, date back to at least the seventeenth century Edo period. A nazar, a blue and white teardrop-shaped amulet, is a common sight outside homes across Turkey and Greece and is a legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Chinese door gods, or menshen, have been displayed on the entrances to temples and homes since the pre-AD Han Dynasty and any self-respecting house in Ancient Egypt would be guarded by the goddess Bast, depicted as a black cat.

 Daisy Wheels in Stratford, Nicholas Molyneau

Apotropaic witch marks seems to be an English phenomenon and Historic England's treasure hunt request is directed particularly at secular buildings: although witch marks have been discovered on homes, these have, to date, been far less catalogued than those discovered at churches. So where do you look and what are you looking for if you decide to try and wean the teenagers of hunting for Pokemon? Witch marks of the type Historic England are hoping to catalogue are usually concentrated around entrance points such as doors, fireplaces and windows which are deemed as vulnerable to malevolent incursions. Marks can be in the shape of pentacles (sometimes lying on top of demons), inter-twined Vs and Ms for the Virgin Mary or, most commonly, compass-drawn hexfoils or 'daisy-wheels'. Whatever the shape, they do appear to share the characteristic of being formed from endless lines: apparently demons follow the lines and then get trapped, a plot device which a lot of films seem to have over-looked. Sites where marks have been found include Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, in roof beams at the Tower of London and carved into the timbers of a room prepared for a visit by King James I (a man obsessed with witches to an unhealthy degree) at Knole House in Kent. 

The scratchings are certainly intriguing although their association with deliberate attempts to ward off evil spirits is not a given: they could simply be marks made by masons to show how and where stones or timbers should be fitted or the product of apprentices learning the geometry needed for their craft. Perhaps, as with many superstitions, they started as one thing and became another. Whatever the truth of these marks, a belief has grown up around them that they exist as a protective measure, a belief it is not hard to understand in the context of communities living in genuine fear of witchcraft and in homes far darker than anything we can imagine in these days of instant light.  

The urge to guard against danger or ill-luck is part of the fabric of our buildings and some superstitions of the past still linger. Few of us, for example, would raise an eyebrow at a horseshoe nailed above a door, even if we no longer believe iron has the power to repel witches. Niels Bohr, the Danish scientist who basically sorted out quantum physics for the rest of us, had one on his house and, when asked if he believed it brought luck allegedly replied: of course not but I have been reliably informed it will bring me luck whether I believe it or not. It's a line of thinking many are probably still happy to follow, although I imagine most would draw the line at a horseshoe rather than employing the full range of charms available to our ancestors.

 Witch Bottle, Portable Antiquities Scheme

A fear of magic implies a belief in its power. While witch marks and horseshoes are visible signs that a house is protected, some of the other methods used were far more secretive, perhaps because they had 'magic' in their creation. Repelling a witch is one thing, to be accused of being one yourself in the doing would be rather unfortunate. The stoppered vessels known as witch bottles for example, which have been discovered bricked inside walls particularly in houses in East Anglia, could be classed as a form of magic fly trap. The bottles were intended to trap the witch who threatened the home-owner and contained mixtures of pins (to catch the evil), red wine (to drown it) and rosemary (to cleanse it away). If the identity of the witch was known, adding a personal touch, such as their urine or finger parings, made the magic doubly strong. Other, perhaps less dangerous, charms included fashioning the lintels over windows and doors from rowan wood and concealing shoes in the rafters and the hearth - this latter superstition apparently stemmed from the story of a priest in the thirteenth century who once trapped the devil in a boot. For the finishing touch, a mummified cat could be placed in the chimney breast - possibly an inversion of witchcraft as it uses the traditional witch's familiar to repel the danger.

Inverted name -  Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

Protection is one thing but sometimes a stronger response to danger was required and charms gave way to curses. Examples of curses, essentially an inversion of magic/evil, have also been found in and around both church and domestic buildings. Curses which may be intended to direct the evil back at its perpetrator rather than merely block it do not need to be complex: witch marks have been discovered which are, apparently deliberately, incomplete, for example with a missing petal. Some curses, however, are very specifically directed: Roman-style curses in which the targeted person's name and the details of the damage to be inflicted have been found on church walls, including at Norwich Cathedral. The writing is corrupted, being inverted with the letters jumbled, hence the assumption that these are curses.

Many of us feel like we are currently living in dark days. Whatever the truth of these marks, and no matter how difficult it is to really 'read' their intentions, they offer a fascinating insight into a world where fear of external dangers was just as real and the need to guard against them perhaps no different to our gated communities and lives lived under the shadow of CCTV. If this has wetted your appetite, Matthew Champion's wonderful book Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England's Churches is a really good read.

Happy hunting...