A WANT OF KINDNESS by Joanne Limburg. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

Who comes into  your mind when when you hear the word Queen? The first Elizabeth? Victoria? Our present queen? Cleopatra? Mary, Queen of Scots? Marie Antoinette? Catherine the Great? I am willing to bet that until quite recently, not one person in ten thousand will have thought first of Queen Anne, who reigned between 1702 and 1714.

Today, however, the extraordinary movie, The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos,  has ensured that Anne's name will be the one  people think of at once. They will have, probably forever, the image of the wonderful Olivia Colman, whose performance in the film, whatever your opinion of it was, is generally agreed to be superb.

Here is a link to an article on this blog written by Joanne Limburg, the writer of a very good book on Anne, called A Want of Kindness.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-want-of-kindness-by-joanne-limberg.html


 I heartily recommend that readers pause here to read what Joanne had to say about her own novel, before going on to read my opinions. 

Above is an image of Foxes's Book of Martyrs, a book which Anne knew well. One of the things that Limburg's book illustrates and emphasises throughout is the importance of religion to the young woman who would become Queen. She was a staunch Protestant and Foxe's Book of Martyrs was part of the landscape of her childhood. The book begins with the young Anne taking part in a performance, dressed up, and dancing about in the glare of the lights; not being able to see properly, slightly uncomfortable in her costume. We have the sense at once of how shy she is, how much she likes her food, how fond she is of the company of her friends, and how much affection she has. Her sister Mary, her ladies of the bedchamber and the whole court is a world in which she moves with not exactly grace, but the kind of graceful duty which is sincere and uncomplaining.

 Once her beloved sister leaves to marry Prince William of Orange, Anne is much more isolated. She is very sick with smallpox when the time comes for Mary to travel, and misses saying goodbye to her. This, a sadness that she bears with great fortitude, sets a pattern for the series of tragedies that will beset her. Her children die, either in utero or shortly after they are born. In one searing section,  her beloved daughter, Anne, dies from smallpox and that section of the book is hard to read. Fascinating details of medical procedures and of every other aspect of a woman's life are given liberally and this is one of the main things I like about the book. Limburg does not shrink from describing things and we are aware of exactly what places are like. How's  this for a description of the frozen river?

"..there is a street running all the way across the Thames from Temple Steps to Southwark; it is named Temple Street and is considered a great wonder. Along it and around it, a continual fair has risen up; there are shops selling all manner of commodities from wine and roast beef to plate and earthenware; there are coffee houses, where you might sit down by a charcoal fire and have a dish of coffee, chocolate or tea." 

We are mostly in Anne's head, and we know what her opinion is of the people she meets. Throughout the narrative there are glimpses of a sharpness under the mild exterior. When  someone she's not too fond of suggests taking the waters in Bath, for instance, Anne answers that she's perfectly happy with taking the waters in  Tunbridge Wells. 

The letters that appear in the text are mostly real, as the author tells us in her article above. I have to admit that though they look wonderful in their italic font, these sections of the book were quite hard to read, but worth it for the content. I also thought that publishers Atlantic missed a trick with the cover. It's very understated: plain, and beautifully lettered but not the sort of cover to make anyone rush to pick it up. Maybe there will now be a reissue with a more glamorous and striking cover image. It would be wonderful if lots of people were led to this book because I'm sure they'd enjoy it. It is simply and elegantly written and unpicks a  very complicated period in religion and politics with great clarity. 

As ever with my reviews, I send the writer I'm discussing a series of questions. Here they are, together with Joanne's answers. 


AG: Please tell us a little about yourself and how who you are has led to your interest in Anne. Did you, for instance, study the history of this period as a student?

JL: No, I haven't studied history formally since A level. I did a philosophy degree, then an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, and eventually a PhD in Creative Writing, but no history. I started writing poetry in my twenties, published a couple of collections in my thirties, and then my first prose book, the memoir The Woman  Who Thought Too Much, at the beginning of my forties. I never thought of myself as a novelist, let alone a historical one. I first came across Anne some years ago when I watched a Channel 4 documentary on obstetrics in royal history. They talked about her many maternal losses, and - I think- said that the modern view was that her pattern of  pregnancy loss was consistent with Hughes Syndrome, which is a blood-clotting disorder. A few years on, I had a miscarriage myself and then a successful pregnancy, and I was trying to explore the subject matter through short stories. The women I was writing about were contemporary - thinly-veiled versions of me, really - and then I remembered Anne's sad history. I thought about writing a short story, but I didn't know how to approach a historical subject in such a short form, so I shelved the idea.

AG: What did you feel the story gained from being written as a novel? I ask this because you could have chosen to write a straight history.

JL: Well, I hit 'send' on the manuscript of The Woman Who Thought Too Much and, quite unexpectedly, the first thing that came into my head was Anne's untold story. At first, I was still thinking in terms of pregnancy loss, and I meant to approach the subject through non-fiction, using Anne as a way to explore women's experience, and how pregnancy loss has been viewed and managed. I bought the first of many books about Anne, and then realised two things: that there was a lot more to her story than pregnancy loss, and that in order to explore what really interested me, which was how she experienced and understood her life in the years she was trying to have babies, which were the less documented years, before she was Queen. I wold have to fill in the many gaps - in other words, I would have to write a novel. There were some great biographies of Anne out there, and the world didn't need another at that point - certainly not from a non-historian like me - but I wanted to honour her experience. It's fiction that does that.

AG: Why do you think Anne (until The Favourite) is so little known by the vast majority of the public? Is it because she's not routinely studied in school?

JL: I think that's part of it. While I was writing the book, I used to joke about a history timeline I saw on a primary school wall, where it looked as if the only purpose of the 17th and 18th centuries was to prevent the Tudors and Victorians from colliding. The two better-know queens regnant are part of our national mythology. Anne isn't. I think it's partly a simple matter of her not being sexy or charismatic: she was poorly-educated, sickly, overweight and shy, to the point where in some situations she was virtually mute. There's also the fact that her posthumous image, as unintelligent, small-minded and dependent on others, was constructed by her ex-best friend, Sarah Churchill. Sarah wanted to cement her own reputation and that of her husband the Duke of Marlborough, so in her memoirs she emphasised Anne's dependence on the two of them and squashed any idea  that Anne might have had a thought of her own worth thinking. If you look at the conventional history of the UK (which became the UK during Anne's reign), it moves swiftly from William III to the  next male monarch George I, by way of victories of another man, the Duke of Marlborough. Elizabeth is remembered as half politically strong man (stomach of a King and all that) and half sexually charismatic woman. Anne was neither so history hasn't known what to do with her.

AG: Can you tell us something of your method of working?

JL: For the novel that became A Want of Kindness, I did a lot of research- so much research, probably too much research. I even went to the British Library and read Anne's letters to Sarah. I decided to end the novel after the death of Anne's last child, and before her ascension to the throne, as I realised it had a kind of tragic story arc to it: Anne betrayed her father by siding with her sister Mary and Mary's husband William during the Glorious Revolution, and I had a sense that she saw the loss of her children as some sort of biblical punishment. As a poet, I'm used to writing in short bursts, so I made a timeline, and then hung lots of short pieces of writing along the timeline.  And I varied the form of the short pieces: some had more narrative, some had straight exposition, (although this was always done from Anne's point of view as if she was discovering it herself), some were first person pieces in which Anne addressed God during her private prayers. I tried to reconstruct a version of Anne's voice for these using her many surviving letters; there were a few other short documents pasted straight in  too. It was a fiction-non-fiction collage. I just decided that I would use whatever best moved the story forward and told the reader what they needed to know at that point. 

AG: What are you writing now?

JL: I'm working on a non-fiction book called Letters to my Weird Sisters. I'm writing to women in the past who were different or difficult females, who might now, as I do, have a diagnosis of autism; it's part biography, part autobiography, part essay on what makes a non-conforming woman. I'm a weird writer and I like my weird forms. That said, I may pick up on  Anne's story. The  Favourite is only one possible version.



A short biography: Joanne Limburg is a writer and lecturer in Creative Writing. As well as her novel, A Want of Kindness, she has published two non-fiction books, one book of poetry for children, and three for adults. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son, and teaches Creative Writing at De  Montfort University, Leicester.

BONES

The last few days have been skeleton-heavy. Royal tombs and dinosaur bones have marked my over-enthusiastic start to the school holidays, which has left us all exhausted.

First was a trip to Windsor Castle, which, I am ashamed to admit, I have never visited. Fascinating, but so busy! I should be delighted that so many people are interested in our Royal story. But the visit was marred by the sense of being on an historical conveyor belt, with bored teens ticking off the Van Dycks and the codpieces. Besides, going with a hyperactive two year old was always going to take the sheen off things. I remember little about the State Rooms beyond my own plaintive shrieking: "Don't touch the armour! Don't sit on that chair! Don't go under rope. Do not go under..  Ok. Come back from under the rope. Please?"

One moment stands out. Traipsing through St George's Chapel, hemmed in like a disgruntled herring, I happened to look down at my feet.

And there was this:

In a Vault

Beneath this marble slab

Are deposited the remains 

of 

Jane Seymour Queen of Henry V111

1537

King Henry V11

1547

King Charles 1

1648

and

An Infant child of Queen Anne

I have blogged before about the shivering breath of history - those moments in modern life when we feel the past rising. I am reminded of The Subtle Knife - the Philip Pullman novel in which the knife of the title has the power to slice between worlds.

Bones are a powerful subtle knife. A plain marble slab, and beneath it, the bones of some of the greatest protagonists in our island story - and the tiny skeleton of a stillborn baby who could have been monarch. As my three healthy, beyond-exuberant kids skipped over the slab, I thought of Queen Anne and her 17 pregnancies and no surviving children.

Did she find comfort in the thought of her child's tiny bones lying with Henry and Charles the Martyr? 

As writers of historical fiction, we wield our own subtle knives. We put the flesh on bones. Joanne Limburg's A Want of Kindness, did a wonderful job of recreating Anne, in all her plump, pregnant vacuity. 

Jane Seymour is a bit of an enigma - a footnote in Tudor history, a successful Royal womb. Even Hilary Mantel can't quite capture her - she's eclipsed by her Boleyn nemesis in Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies.

According to the sources, Henry V111 asked to be buried alongside Jane - the mother of his longed for son. She was in a temporary, plain tomb, Henry's will stipulated that they would both be rehomed in a magnificent new tomb - one he claimed as his own, but was actually started by Cardinal Wolsley. It was never completed, and Henry, that lover of pomp and magnificence, remains in his plain and unadorned tomb.

I cannot find any references to why Henry's will was never completed; does anyone know? Please comment if so. Was the failure to complete the tomb an accidental oversight during the political turmoil that followed? Or a deliberate snub by his unloved daughter Elizabeth, to her father and the wife who took her mother's crown? 

Charles 1 body presented a problem for the Commonwealth. The civil wars' victors understood religious symbolism. What could be more powerful to the King's Catholic-sympathising followers than a martyr's relics? And yet the regicides were not Republicans as we would later come to understand the term. Charles' bones deserved respect. He was shuffled quietly into Henry's temporary tomb - after the Commonwealth had sold off pieces of Henry's unfinished grand tomb to fill its depleted coffers. The thinking was that Windsor Castle's relative distance from London would limit the number of Royalist worshippers at Charles' bones.

(Incidentally, the date on the slab in the Chapel implies Charles died in 1648 - this is due to the old method of dating the turn of the numerical year on 25 March.)

Here's another question - why do we venerate the bones of dead protagonists in the history play? Why did my atheist self quiver in the presence of the remains? Why did I pause and feel a sense of awe at the resonating presence of Jane and Henry, Charles and the nameless progeny of Anne?

Is it the God gene, pushing me towards the mystical? Is there a catholicism bred in the bone from my Irish relic-worshipping ancestors?

My head believes that when we die, our self dies with us. Skeletons are empty of all the things that make up a life - love and blood and laughter. They are meaningless in themselves. So why does the thing that I cannot quite call a soul answer to the call of the bones?

Antonia Senior is the author of Treason's Daughter, a novel of the English Civil War and The Winter Isles, a novel of Somerled, the first Lord of the Isles. 

 "Passionate, wonderful, windswept writing," Manda Scott

 "Senior's fresh, forceful writing breathes new life and relevance into the most destructive dangerous era in English History," The Times

A Want of Kindness by Joanne Limberg

Photo credit: Chris Hadley

Our July guest is Joanne Limberg, talking about her début novel, A Want of Kindness, about Queen Anne.

Joanne Limburg began her writing career as a poet, publishing two collections with Bloodaxe Books. She has also published a memoir, The Woman Who Thought Too Much and a book of poems for children, called Bookside Down. A Want of Kindness is her first novel, and is published by Atlantic Books. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.
www.joannelimburg.net


At the centre of my novel, A Want of Kindness, are a series of extraordinary letters – real letters – which Anne sent to her sister Mary, Princess of Orange. They were written in the years leading up to the Prince of Orange’s invasion in November 1688, and the subsequent deposition of the sisters’ Catholic father, King James II, events which the winning side were quick to call the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Anne would be on that winning, Protestant, side, and her letters show her to have taken as active a role in events as her circumstances allowed. Using a postal network of sympathetic ‘safe hands’, she was able to send her sister intelligence as to Catholic goings-on in the royal household – Latin Grace at meals and other such – to her – abominations. She could confirm that the King and her step-mother, the Queen, were most certainly under the influence of Jesuit priests, that the Earl and Countess of Sunderland had flattered their way into royal favour and that Sunderland in particular was encouraging her father the King in all his Catholic, tyrannical, most un-English excesses. In doing so, she was able to reassure her sister – and, in the process, herself – that England, its Church and its Liberties were indeed threatened and that, therefore, the momentous act they were contemplating would be entirely justified.

Anne’s most significant pieces of intelligence concerned the Queen and the progress of her pregnancy. For the Catholic Queen, or so it was claimed, was pregnant by the Catholic King. And if the child turned out to be a boy, then the Catholic succession would be assured, and, from the point of view of the fiercely Protestant Anne, England’s undoing – and her own –would be complete. She and Mary would be displaced from the succession.

Anne’s gender meant that many avenues of power and influence were closed to her. She could not wield a sword. She could not hold office. She could not make speeches to the Privy Council or to Parliament and was unable to attend Privy Council meetings. It would not have occurred to either her father or his ministers to consult her on any matters of policy. She could not take Holy Orders and preach either for or against him. Nevertheless, she was the highest-ranking Anglican in England, standing in for the King in the Royal Chapel, providing a royal presence in his Catholic absence; also, as a Princess at Court, she was often in attendance on the Queen when she dressed in the morning. She could, if she wished, vouch for two very crucial things: the King’s good intentions towards the Anglican Church and the genuineness of the Queen’s pregnancy. If she did, she would strengthen the King and Queen’s position significantly; if she did not – or even appeared not to – she would just as surely undermine it.

So, what did Anne do? Despite the fact that she sometimes put on the Queen’s shift herself and must – I am certain – have seen her pregnant belly with her own eyes, she was quite determined not to believe them. She told Mary that what she had seen was unconvincing, and, having done so, left London to take the waters at Bath – a place far more distant than her usual summer watering-place at Tonbridge – thus making it most unlikely that she would be with the Queen when he presence as witness would have been most useful to the King – that is to say, at the birth. After the baby was born, in her artfully-contrived absence, she was instrumental in spreading the now-notorious rumour that an imposter baby – the child of a Catholic brick-layer – was brought into the royal birthing chamber in a warming-pan, to take the place of what was either a stillborn or non-existent prince. She avoided attendance at Court, using her own supposed pregnancy as an excuse, but made sure that she could be seen at various Anglican houses of worship, avidly listening to sermons against the King’s religion.

The bedchamber in which the baby prince was born - or not

By the end of that Summer, Anne knew that the Prince of Orange was going to sail to England, and that she had to be prepared for what might happen. She had a staircase built at the back of her lodgings, providing her with a direct route from her privy chamber to the grounds of St James’s Park, and, once she had received word that her husband defected from the King on the battle-field, she descended it at the dead-of-night and fled London under the protection of Bishop Compton, one of the King’s most prominent opponents. After her father’s defeat, she returned to London and made her first public appearance, bedecked in Orange ribbons.

Despite James’s unpopularity, there were many who were shocked by the sisters’ behaviour. They were unnatural, ungrateful daughters, who in dishonouring their father, they had broken a Commandment. They were compared to Goneril and Regan, and to Tullia the daughter of the murdered King Servillius Tullius, who ran over her father’s body in her chariot. One poem of the time terms them the ‘Female Parricides’, and accuses the sisters of ‘ambition, folly, insolence and pride.’ Anne’s Victorian biography, Agnes Strickland, agreed, seeing Anne as entirely self-interested.

Anne & Mary and their parents by Peter Lely

P.F William Ryan, writing in the early 1900s, makes his disapproval very clear:
"Nature had apparently implanted in Anne no sense of duty, and art had done nothing to fill the void… It was… after her marriage, when entirely removed from the influence of the gentle Mary of Modena [her step-mother], that malice and envy began to flourish luxuriantly in the young Princess’s bosom. Surrounded by every luxury that her father could provide, his generosity seemed only to inflame the envy, which, with the perfection of art, was concealed by this Royal actress. "[from Queen Anne and her Court, Vol. I, p 84]

Such is Ryan’s disgust at Anne’s shocking character, that I am baffled as to why he chose her as his subject. If I agreed with him, I don’t think I could have stood to write a whole novel about her. His Anne is somewhat one-dimensional, her motives transparent and her actions predictable. But the Anne that emerges from later biographies, from her letters to Mary and to her friend Sarah Marlborough, seems to me to be far more complicated and a good deal more sympathetic. It is true that, if we consider her dealings with her father and step-mother in isolation, she seems two-faced, unkind and devious, but Anne had many other relationships in her life, and in these she behaved very differently.

Anne could be loving and loyal. She was concerned with the health of her husband and children, nursing them herself when they were ill. She was an extraordinarily generous friend, and a considerate mistress to her household. When she eventually became Queen, she would prove to be remarkably conscientious, taking part in all her cabinet’s meetings despite her continuing ill health, and attending Parliament whenever she could. She had her opponents, but unlike many of her predecessors, was not in habit of having them executed. Faced with the choice between prolonging the War of Spanish Succession and accepting a settlement, she chose the latter, being weary of bloodshed and other people’s suffering. It is not hard to see why the Duke of Marlborough described his patroness, simply, as ‘a very good sort of woman’.

Queen Anne Wikimedia Commons

When I looked at Anne’s life, then, the story it suggested to me was one in which a good woman does, knowingly, a bad thing. My sense is that Anne was not lying, precisely, when she said her step-mother’s baby was not her brother. I think she was deceiving herself, entertaining this cognitive dissonance, because she needed him not to be. She did what we are all capable of doing when our conceptions of ourselves and our worlds are put under extreme pressure, and constructed a truth she could live with: an England justly destined for Protestant rule. The thought that God might after all not be on her side, but with the Catholics, was simply too horrific to contemplate – if it were true, then the very ground under her feet would be rendered insecure, and, even worse, she would no longer be able to see believe a good person, on the right side of things. Anne’s moral thinking was not subtle, pragmatic or flexible enough to allow her to lie simply for political expedience’s sake, to make the ends justify the means. So she constructed a story, a false belief, to enable her to live with herself and what she would be doing.

And the story held together as long as it needed to, seeing her through the dangerous adventure of her defection from her father, but, it could not hold much longer. Faced with criticism from inside and outside Court, and their own increasingly uneasy consciences, the sisters would struggle with the consequences of what they had done.

THE KING'S EVIL, by Y S Lee

Hello, HG readers. I’ve been reading Liza Picard’s juicy social history of Restoration London. It is GRIPPING! Until now, I had only a hazy overview of the period, acquired during an undergraduate course on Restoration and Eighteenth Century literature. I loved the course but apart from a few gossipy snippets about Aphra Behn and the Earl of Rochester, I’d shed most of the details.

So when I ran across the phrase “the King’s Evil” in Picard’s book, I tripped over it. The what? “The King’s Evil” is another name for scrofula, a swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck. It’s often associated with tuberculosis. Apparently, the swelling itself is not painful but it is disfiguring and is further associated with fever, chills, and weight loss. 

image via wikipedia

That’s interesting enough, but what has it to do with the king? Apparently, in both France and England, monarchs held ceremonies in which they laid healing hands on those suffering from scrofula. This was called “the royal touch”. It was both a demonstration of their paternal care for the people and an affirmation of their divine right to rule. The ceremonies included prayer and sometimes the gift of a gold coin or ribbon to the sufferer, a talisman of the king’s power.

Here’s an image of Charles II, England’s most enthusiastic practitioner of the royal touch. (This makes perfect sense: Charles II had a lot to prove, as a freshly restored king.) According to Picard, he held weekly ceremonies, kept up the practice when he travelled outside London, and touched about 4500 petitioners in each year of his reign!

Charles II, administering the royal touch

The last English monarch to practise the royal touch was Queen Anne. Her most famous “patient” was the young Samuel Johnson, who contracted scrofula as an infant. His family took him to St James’s Palace in March 1712, when he was two years old. Queen Anne took her healing duty seriously, usually fasting the day before the ceremony. 

Queen Anne, "healing" a subject. Edited: as Leslie Wilson observes in the comments, this can't possibly be Anne unless she's wearing fancy dress. It's Mary I. Apologies!

Predictably (to us), Queen Anne’s touched failed to cure Johnson. He later endured surgery that left him with permanent scars on his face and body.

To our minds, it might seem strange that so many people clamoured for the royal touch. There is a medical reason: scrofula is rarely fatal and often goes into remission on its own. If one’s remission coincides with the king’s touch, one has anecdotal proof that the royal hands can heal. If it doesn’t, one can always try the king again.

Beyond this, I’m fascinated by the royal touch because it’s a vivid reminder of how slowly popular beliefs change. By 1660, we’re well out of the Medieval era. Literary scholars would say that the “Early Modern” period is past, leaving us (presumably) in the modern world. Yet many traces of the Renaissance belief in magic remain. It’s a time when confusing things can be explained by mystery and miracle. The English people believe in astrology, witchcraft, divination – and the healing touch of a divinely appointed king.

Who do you think you are? – a fantasy farewell from Katherine Roberts

I have to admit the idea of tracing my family roots never really excited me, until my dad casually dropped into the family Sunday lunch conversation one day (as you do) that he’s listed as one of the heirs to 77 acres of prime Manhattan real estate, worth approximately 800 billion dollars, and including sites such as Wall Street, Ground Zero (previously the World Trade Center), the Trinity Church, the Woolworths Building, New York University, and Washington Square Park. For those of you who don’t have any Welsh blood and therefore probably have no idea what I'm talking about, I’m referring to the Edwards Millions, now an urban legend and notorious for attracting bounty-hunters keen to get their legal fingers on a piece of this increasingly valuable pie. There are apparently around 5,000 potentially legitimate heirs alive today so the fortune would have to be shared, but that’s still several million dollars each if someone ever manages to make a legitimate claim... and it's a big IF.

The story goes like this.

Back in the 18^th century, a young Welsh pirate named Robert Edwards sailed the high seas, sinking Spanish galleons. Since England was embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession at the time, Queen Anne rewarded him with 77 acres of land on Manhattan Island, New York… then mostly farmland. Robert later became a captain in the Royal Navy and continued to serve his country in a more respectable fashion.  

In 1778, Robert Edwards leased this Manhattan land to brothers John and George Kruger, wardens of the Trinity Church (which had been built on it), for a period of 99 years with the provision that, when the lease expired, the land and its rents should be divided among his lawful heirs. Immediately after signing the lease, however, Robert boarded a ship to England which went down with all passengers and crew and was lost in a storm. His bones and papers relating to the lease lie somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic, and were never recovered.

Fast forward 99 years to 1877, when the lease to the Kruger brothers expired. Robert Edwards was unmarried at the time of his death, so the land should have passed to the descendants of his six brothers and his sister back in Wales… i.e. the children of William, Jacob, Leonard, Joshua, John, Thomas, and Martha Edwards. However, the Trinity Church (having had use of the land and its rents for almost 100 years, during which time its value had soared) proved reluctant to give it up. The Welsh family's attempt to claim their inheritance at the time was half-hearted at best, and the Trinity Church performed a land grab, claiming that the 77 acres were part of land gifted to the church by Queen Anne of England in 1705… although no deed has ever been produced to prove this.

Queen Anne of England

Since the expiry of the lease in 1877, there have been many attempts by groups of Edwards heirs scattered across the world to reclaim their inheritance – some possibly legitimate, others false claims filed by lawyers eager to get their hands on a piece of the increasingly valuable pie. All these claims have been successfully fought off by the Church, and were also hampered by the New York Statute of Limitations which I understand states that any such claim must be made within 15 years of expiry of a lease (1892 in this case). Since the original heirs would presumably have filed their claim for the land within this 15-year period, the main problem seems to lie with the patchy records kept back in the 18^th century and the many different spellings of Edwards/Edwardes, further complicated by the Welsh tradition of using a father’s Christian name as a surname, which gives rise to completely unrelated Edwardses.

To confuse things even further, Robert Edwards seems to have multiple identities. Naval records do prove the identity of Robert Edwards as a captain of that period, but not – understandably – in his original career as a pirate. American legend tells how our dashing hero Robert saved a Native American princess from death and was rewarded with the land by her father the chief… a more politically correct version, I guess, since it’s highly questionable that the Queen of England should own 77 acres of Manhattan in the first place, no matter who she gave it to!

So where does all this leave me?

I believe the Edwards line follows from my Welsh grandmother, Evelyn Edwards, who came from the Valleys, married Henry Cudmore, and after the war lived out her life as a humble shop assistant in Devon. Here is Gran as I like to remember her, surrounded by her beloved budgies:

Evelyn Edwards

Her only child, Derek Cudmore, is my father. This picture was taken about 30 years ago, and I think you can see a bit of Welsh pirate blood in there somewhere! (That’s my mum beside him, who has a bit of Spanish ancestry, so the connection is obviously in their genes.)

My dad Derek Cudmore, Evelyn's son. 

Almost a hundred years of sketchy history and hard-to-trace documentation lies between Gran Edwards and a possible multi-million-dollar fortune. Even if Gran turns out to be a direct descendent of one of the Edwards siblings who apparently inherited the land, I doubt this mystery will be resolved in my lifetime. But that still leaves what I think is a fascinating story.

Robert Edwards’ tragic loss at sea with all his legal papers immediately after he signed the lease to the church is highly coincidental, if not downright suspicious. There was supposed to be a Trust Fund, set up for his heirs, in the Chase Manhattan Bank – which denies all knowledge of this. The resulting century-old struggle to reclaim the money for the Welsh heirs from the powerful (and now extremely wealthy) Trinity Church, with its potential for a rags-to-riches happy ending, would make a great historical novel for an author with romantic fantasy twist… hmm, maybe I should write it one day?

***

Katherine Roberts has some Welsh and Spanish blood, is (possibly) heiress to a multi-million dollar slice of Manhattan Island in New York, and writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers. Her latest series is the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur’s daughter, published by Templar Books in the UK.

She is retiring from the History Girls blog to take up a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, while she works on making her first million the hard way.

You can keep in touch with Katherine and find out more about her books at:

www.katherineroberts.co.uk

www.facebook.com/katherinerobertsbooks

www.twitter.com/AuthorKatherine

Mirror, Mirror... by Eleanor Updale

I've just been sold on eBay.  I went for £99.55 (if you include the postage) which is an enormous relief.  I was scared that no one would bid.  It turns out that I'm worth 2% of Tracey Emin and 22% of Tim Minchin. Astounding.

I was part of an auction of self-portraits organised by the charity Children & the Arts. They sent us all a canvas and some paints and told us to get on with it.  The brief was to do a picture that summed what you did for a living, and that's how I found myself inside my laptop, with the keys spelling out my name.

I can't imagine why anyone would want the picture, and can only thank whichever relative or friend saved me from adding the shame of being unwanted to the embarrassment of painting the picture in the first place. At least some money has gone to a good cause.  And the episode has given me a topic for this month's post, because I want to send you all to see the largest collection of self-portraits I’ve ever come across, which is hidden away in the Vasari Corridor in Florence.

Should any of you have read my book Montmorency and the Assassins, you'll know about the Vasari Corridor.  It's a passageway running  from the Uffizi, across the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti Palace. For more than half a mile it flows alongside, between, round and over all sorts of buildings; finally opening out at the bottom of the Boboli Gardens.  The corridor was built in the mid 16^th century to give the Medici rulers a secure route from one side of the Arno to the other, with a stop along the way for a private booth from which the Grand Duke could observe services in the church of Santa Felicita.

In my book, the corridor is the site of a frantic chase after a 19^th century anarchist.  In real life, it's been severed by Nazi mines, and damaged by a mafia bomb in 1993.  Now, restored, it is full of pictures hardly anyone sees.  The corridor is open on only a few days a year, and you have to book a pricey guided tour to get in, but it’s worth it.  I went there to work out how it fitted in to my story, not knowing about the self-portrait collection it houses. This includes pictures of (and, obviously, by) Rembrandt, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Durer, Van Gogh Corot, Ingres, Delacroix, Andy Warhol and many more. 

It's a funny thing, a self portrait.  Inherently vain  (even - perhaps especially - when intending to depict a humble, tortured soul) and sometimes unintentionally revealing, just as an autobiography or a castaway's choice of Desert Island Discs can be.  Do you go for warts and all, or spruce yourself up?  Do you paint an imaginary country estate in the background, or surround yourself with the trappings of learning? 

What follows is, as Peter Snow would say, Just A Bit of Fun...

For more than a century, artists aiming for a likeness have been able to construct self portraits using photographs as references, but in the days before the camera they must have used mirrors. So I wonder whether, to find out what they really looked like, we should look at mirror-images of their work, because that double flip would show us their faces as they appeared to those around them.

Would it make any difference?  It might.  After all, There is no such thing as a symmetrical face.  If there were, some people we know well might look very different. 

Here’s Charles II as we are used to seeing him:

Although his face looks pretty symmetrical, if both sides were exactly the same, he would either look like this (two right sides) :

Or this (two left sides):

So when an artist paints a self portrait using a mirror, they may be presenting the face they recognise as their own, but it won't be exactly the same face those around them see.  Obviously, the difference won't be as marked as in the examples above, because the two different halves of the face will still be there, but I've chosen a couple of self portraits at random to see whether the artists look any different turned round.

Do we feel any differently about Rembrandt as he saw himself…

Or as others saw him?

I fancy he looks older and sadder in the second picture.

How about Van Gogh?

 

 His self-portrait                                                               Flipped

Here, I think that beady little eye at the back somehow has more prominence in the second image.  Could it be that I read faces left to right (like print) and give more importance to what I see first? So in the Rembrandt picture the wrinkles in the 'big' side of the face (the right side in the first picture) are balanced out by the smaller side, whereas in the second picture, they dominate - not just because that side is bigger, but because I see it first.

And what about the sitters in ‘normal’ portraits? Surely, until very recently their most frequent (sometimes their only) source of self-image must have been the mirror; so when they saw themselves in portraits painted by people looking directly at them, they might have got a surprise (I suppose the nearest thing we have these days is our shock on hearing a recording of our own voice for the first time).

Perhaps, if we want to see what the sitters thought they looked like (rather than what everyone else saw) we should flip over their portraits.  

I can’t help thinking that Queen Anne might have had a higher opinion of her looks than those who saw her in the flesh or only knew her from this portrait.

In the mirror, she looks prettier, and a little more cheerful, at least to my eye:

Maybe that's because I'm seeing her 'good' side first.

Or perhaps I'm fooling myself.

Anyway, it’s been fun to play.  Have a go with some of your favourite historical characters.  And remember, if you happen to be in Florence on one of the rare occasions when  the Vasari Corridor is open, book yourself a place on a tour.

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