'Never to see the like again in this world' - Pepys and the Coronation

by Deborah Swift

I've spent the last three years writing a trilogy about three different women that feature in Pepys' Diary. Now that rather epic journey has come to an end, and I'm leaving Pepys' Diary behind for research in pastures new.

Someone asked me which was my favourite episode in the diary, and the one that stands out for me is the Coronation of Charles II.

'it is impossible to relate the glory of this day'

So says Pepys, never one to be lost for words, and his fly-on-the-wall response to this massive overturning of national events fascinates me. The re-establishment of Charles II as a constitutional monarch changed the country from what amounted to a republic, back to a monarchy-led state with many immediate and long term effects. In these days of entrenched views on Brexit, we can see that populations can, and do, change their minds.

Pepys, who was initially brought up with Puritan leanings, was so taken up by the return of the exiled prince that he couldn't wait to be part of this sudden turn-around and even went over to the Hague to greet the prince and the fleet.

There were a few awkwardnesses though - in the transition from Cromwell's Parliament to the restitution of the monarchy, the old order had to be repealed and the new reinforced. Thus the ships in the fleet that had been named after Parliament victories, such as The Naseby had to be rapidly re-named The Royall Charles.

Whilst journeying back from the Hague, Pepys is treated to the prince's own version of his escape from Worcester. Many of our pubs retain the names 'The Royal Oak' (commemorating his escape from Worcester), and 'The King's Head',  from this era where the celebration of the monarchy was at its height. Pepys's later relationship with the King must have been cemented by the fact he made this extra effort to meet and greet him on his return.

On the day of the Coronation Parade, Pepys is up at the crack of dawn and putting on his new coat for the occasion -

Up early and made myself as fine as I could, and put on my velvet coat, the first day that I put it on, though made half a year ago.

 It seemed no expense had been spared for the procession through London,

The streets all gravelled, and the houses hung with carpets before them...
So glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome with it.

The Coronation Cavalcade passed through four specially constructed arches (see picture at the bottom of the post). The designs can be seen here and include titles for the arches like ' Garden of Plenty', 'Temple of Concord' and ''Return of the Monarchy'. That must have been a rush for the masons responsible!

Pepys got up at 4am the next day for the actual Coronation, and found himself a good view from a scaffold at the north end of Westminster Abbey. He had to wait until 11am to see Charles arrive.

And a great pleasure it was to see the Abbey raised in the middle, all covered with red, and a throne (that is a chair) and footstool on the top of it; and all the officers of all kinds, so much as the very fidlers, in red vests.

Unfortunately the crucial moment was lost to Pepys,

the King passed through all the ceremonies of the Coronacon, which to my great grief I and most in the Abbey could not see. The crown being put upon his head, a great shout begun, and he came forth to the throne

Afterwards silver commemorative medals were thrown to the congregation, but Pepys was unable to catch one. Pepys then has to go out to take a pee, but resumes his description of the outside of the Abbey, in which he says he saw '10,000 people, with the ground covered with blue cloth; and scaffolds all the way.' In a city of 40,000, that is a pretty good turn-out.

At one point in the feast afterwards, the King's Champion is brought out, 'all in armour on horseback, with his spear and targett carried before him' and a proclamation made:

And a Herald proclaims “That if any dare deny Charles Stewart to be lawful King of England, here was a Champion that would fight with him;” and with these words, the Champion flings down his gauntlet, and all this he do three times in his going up towards the King’s table.

Charles must have had quite a jittery moment then as he waited with baited breath to see if there would be any objection to him becoming King. But nobody objected, and no doubt the King's Champion was somewhat relieved also.

Once the day's events were over, ' it fell a-raining and thundering and lightening as I have not seen it do for some years' and Pepys tells us that the people set great store by this as an omen from above, though he himself dismisses the idea as 'a foolery to take too much notice of such things.'

Without Pepys's vibrant description, so much detail would have been lost to us. A picture doesn't give you the reaction of the people, and this is what is so appealing about Pepys's descriptions and opinions.

By the evening bonfires are burning all over the city to bathe it in an orange glow, and Pepys is dead drunk, so much so that he says, 'if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning. Only when I waked I found myself wet with my spewing. Thus did the day end with joy every where.'

You can find the diary entry here: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1661/04/

All pictures from Wikipedia unless linked.

Find my books www.deborahswift.com

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Building Power by Catherine Hokin

I've been having a lot of conversations recently about research, not just how much writers need to do but what type. Whatever the downsides of the web with its never-ending news feeds and all-too distracting social media, we are incredibly lucky to live in a time of such easy access to information. Like most of us I spent a lot of time buried in books but I can also be regularly found lost in articles and images on the internet and I'm beginning to think I couldn't survive without Pinterest. When you can, however, there's no substitute for getting out into the places you write about and letting your senses do the thinking. To this end I've spent a fair bit of time lately wandering the corridors of power, past and present, and one of my biggest takeaways? I really am rather small or, to put it another way, the architects of power did their job very well.

 Westminster Hall's Hammer Beam Roof Commissioned 1393

Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress and to intimidate. (The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic).

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Westminster Hall, the starting point for my recent let's-get-away-from-the-desk meanderings. As most people are aware, very little of the medieval palace survives, most of the complex having been destroyed in the 1834 fire. Remarkably, however, given the fires, floods, bombs and death-watch beetles which had other ideas, the hammer beam roof commissioned by Richard II in 1393 remains intact. The hall itself was begun in 1097 but it was Richard who had the Norman pillars removed and the wooden arch (the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe) installed. It spans 60 feet and was incredibly dangerous to construct as the great beams, which together weigh over 600 tons, had to be hoisted to a height of over 90 feet. Crane up and you can see the carved angels and tracery work that was started but not finished and crane up again and there is Richard's white hart badge still edging the walls. It is a vast space, still filled with scuttling people clutching papers and quite a contrast to the labyrinth of corridors and tiny chambers that make up the back stage of the Palace - I was lucky enough to get that tour too - although that also retains a medieval feel, all shadowy corners and plots.

 Medieval shield painted onto the nave wall

I did even more craning up when I crossed the road to Westminster Abbey where you need an eagle eye to spot the fragments of medieval paintings and shields hidden among the main church's monuments. As you come in, and along the nave, there are a series of carved sheilds of arms, dating from 1245 and 1272 and commemorating the church's aristocratic benefactors, including Fulk Fitzwarren, William Ferrars, Earl of Derby, Roger de Mowbray and Hugo de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The shields are easy to miss among the huge marble sculptures now filling the walls and there is nothing on the audio tour about them but the guides are a happy fount of knowledge. As you continue round the Abbey, the medieval touches become easier to spot, culminating in the series of paintings of the Apocalypse in the Chapter House which date from 1375-1404 with a wonderful set of lower friezes from about a century later filled with amazing birds and animals. And you go past England's oldest door, from 1050, to get to it - it's like being given a never-ending box of chocolates.

 Richard 11

The Abbey is, of course, best known as the burial place of England's monarchs and the number, and beauty, of the tombs is quite overwhelming. For me, however, the most fascinating of the Abbey's monuments comes at the end - presented almost as an after-thought The huge portrait of Richard II is contemporary, commissioned by the King, and was painted in the 1390s by Andre Beauneveu. Restored and reframed in the nineteenth century, its vivid greens, crimsons and golds look freshly done and even the loss of some of the gilt work does not detract from the power it is meant to evoke. And power is what this painting is all about. Richard was devoted to Westminster Abbey and to St Edward the Confessor and he rebuilt the northern entrance and some bays of the nave but this painting was not simply an addition to the Abbey's riches - it was a reminder to an unruly London where power really lay. Like the Palace of Westminster, it is impossible not to feel tiny when you enter the Abbey and overawed. Add to that the hidden nature of much of the church's ceremonies during this period, performed behind the rood screen, and your insignificance grows. Standing next to the painting under the soaring ceiling and imagining it on display at the far end of the nave with Richard seated below it on an elevated throne, demanding his new title of Majesty, says everything you need to know about power and tyranny. It is impossible not to shiver.

 Citta Sul Mare, Sassetta

So Scotland to London and back home again and another group of buildings pointing to the heavens and shouting look up and fear me. Fourteenth century Tuscany was riven with politically charged violence and raids as city states, and their competing families, fought to control each other. One of the impacts of this can be seen in the ruined towers which still dot the landscape. These were used as homes and warehouses and were a very visible stamp of authority - the higher the tower, the more powerful the family. Built either from white albarese stone or reddish brick, they had crenellated tops, small Romanesque windows, narrow porticoes and - when a family built a number close together as they often did - holes to support movable connecting bridges. Stretching up to 180 feet, each floor had one room and floors were reached by winding stairs set into the walls or ladders. At the height of the building craze (pun intended), there were over 200 in Florence and Lucca and perhaps as many as 100 in Siena (the inspiration behind the contemporary Sassetta painting) and San Gimignano where the most preserved examples remain. And the sizes changed - as towers were seized they could be reduced or heightened depending on the message the new owner wished to transmit, a moving picture which puts me rather in mind of the opening of Game of Thrones.

 Tower of Hallbar & Me

The WIP will get me to Tuscany but, in the meantime, we have our own version of the Tuscan towers in Scotland, one of which, the Tower of Hallbar, is on my doorstep. Built between the fourteenth and sixteenth century, these tower house castles have some differences (including more elaboration) but largely follow the Tuscan pattern. Hallbar (which is privately owned and can now be rented) is 5 storeys high, has walls up to 1.6m thick and is very narrow. Each level originally had a single room, with a winding stair, built into the walls, wrapping around and linking the floors. At the basement level was a low-vaulted cellar. If you've any doubts about the scale of these things, that's me feeling very dwarfed by the door.

Nowadays we often associated high rises with the damage caused to working class communities or the horror of Grenfell. The new builds dominating our skylines, however, are increasingly once more becoming the preserve of the wealthy - we are again looking up at temples to power and greed but perhaps our shivering needs a different aspect. London's 95 storey Shard, owned by the Qatari royal family and the city's tallest building at 390.7m, currently has 10 of its multiple million pound apartments lying empty and is the target of protesters infuriated by such wasted space in a country in the grip of a housing crisis. The spectre of ghost towers - high rise homes built for the wealthy but standing empty - is becoming a real issue in the capital. The Observer newspaper recently revealed that builders are currently constructing towers in London containing 7,749 homes priced between £1m and £10m, and have planning rights to build another 18,712 high-end apartments and townhouses, despite concern over the number already standing half-empty and the lack of affordable housing. In 2016-2017 only 6,432 affordable homes were built.

When we look up now at the works of the mighty, it really is hard not to despair.

The Heart of Westminster Abbey? Poets' Corner and Writing Women by Fay Bound Alberti

Westminster Abbey 

In October I had the opportunity to visit Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, before the doors opened and the tourists poured in. I was recording with the Rev. Giles Fraser, who was presenting a series of programmes on Radio 4 about the heart. Giles had recently undergone major heart surgery, and it had got him thinking about all aspects of the heart in history and culture. Other guests included Rowan Williams and Susie Orbach, and I had the pleasure of talking about the heart in science and medicine and history. You can listen to the programme here.

It was extraordinary to be in the Abbey when it was virtually empty, save for the occasional hum of a vacuum cleaner. We visited Poets' Corner, the name traditionally given to the South Transept of Westminster Abbey because of the high number of poets, playwrights and writers buried and commemorated there. The first poet to be interred in Poets' Corner was Geoffrey Chaucer, and the site has become famous for the number of romantic poets, interred or commemorated there.

In my interview, I talked about the meanings of the heart as a romantic organ, still connected to authenticity, truth and emotion, even though we now place emotions in the mind. And the ways in which we still regard ourselves as driven by heartfelt feelings, even though the tyranny of neuroscience insists the brain is first. I wrote a book about the 'two hearts' that exist, the poetic and the medical, and you can find out about that here.

Writing women are lacking at Poets' Corner - a problem I have written about here. The photos below (permitted by a kind security guard), show the commemoration of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Shakespeare, amongst a wall of marble white men. We stopped for a time at the plaque to Shelley, because his mythology, as a radical, a poet and a Romantic, is so bound up in his heart.

Adele Geras and Anna Mazzola have both written in this blog about Shelley - whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre and kept, it is said, by his wife in a silken cloth for many years before being buried with their son after Mary Shelley's death. There is no memorial to Mary Shelley, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, though she was a successful writer in her own right, best known for her novel, Frankenstein.

Shelley's plaque, visible top right 

Of the few women who did make the cut, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1851) is an interesting case because she, like many Romantic and Victorian writers, suffered with heart complaints, in addition to believing that the heart was the centre of emotions, the self and even the soul.

Born in Durham, Elizabeth was a successful poet, having written since the age of six years old. Like many early feminists, she was a social reformer and campaigner against the slave trade, and an avid admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems (1844) brought the poet great success, and attracted the attention of the poet Robert Browning, with whom she eloped, much to her family's displeasure, despite the fact that she was then 40 years old, Elizabeth suffered from numerous ailments, including spinal problems, lung problems and heart trouble.

The nineteenth century was a time when scientific medicine identified many different kinds of heart defect, and Barrett Browning was not alone in suffering from heart complaints. She discussed her cardiac trouble with her friends, including the feminist writer and early sociologist Harriet Martineau, who also believed that she suffered from a heart defect. I have suggested in another article that it was better to be diagnosed with a cardiac complaint than with the gynaecological condition that seems to have caused Martineau's debilitating symptoms.

Besides the shame Martineau felt at her 'women's troubles' being openly discussed, there was something rather prestigious in her day about having a weak heart: it was the mark of a sensitive and creative soul in an age where the heart was still seen as the emotion centre; only with the birth of Cardiology in the early twentieth century was heart disease principally associated with poor living, fatty food and too much stress. Unfortunately, Martineau is not memorialised anywhere in the country, let alone at Poets' Corner, despite her remarkable contemporary influence.

And what of Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Despite periods of intense ill health, Elizabeth lived happily with Robert in Italy, though she was disinherited by her family. They had one son, called Pen. Elizabeth died in 1861, apparently in her husband's arms. Her family refused to allow her remains to be buried with Robert, when he died in 1889 and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Her name, however, is inscribed on the base of her husband's headstone.

I will leave you with Barrett Browning's poem, 'My heart and I', which seems remarkably apposite, given the subject of the heart, and because she had suffered for so many years before her death.

ENOUGH! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's inscription at the foot of her husband's stone. 

I won't be posting until the new year now, so I wish you all much love and happiness and heartfelt feelings over the festive period. You can visit my website and find out more about my writing and research here.

London History with Grandchildren by Janie Hampton

Isambard Kingdom Brunel 

Last week I was tasked with grand-child care during the half-term holiday. Ben, 9, Desdemona, 7, my co-grandparent and I decided to go on a history outing to London. We began at Paddington station to admire the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 –1859) and discusshis extraordinary ability to design not only innovative railway stations but also bridges, canals, viaducts, docks, steam ships and trains.
Then by double-decker bus via Marble Arch, formerly the royal entrance to Buckingham Palace, and then after it was moved next to Hyde Park, a police station until 1968. This was also the site of the Tyburn gallows where from the 12th century, public executions took place, the last one a highwayman called John Austin in 1783. Swerving round behind Buckingham Palace we peered over the wall and wondered why the Queen needed such a big garden.
Ben and Desdemona wanted to see their great x 5 grandfather, immortalized in Westminster Abbey. But entry to the 13th century abbey is expensive unless you attend a service. So during Holy Communion we admired the extraordinary Gothic architecture (‘All built without machines!’ said Ben), and whispered about the many coronations held here ever since William I on Christmas Day in 1066. We found our ancestor beside his friend the slave abolitionist, William Wilberforce (1759 –1833), watching over the audio-guide stall. Thomas Fowell Buxton MP (1786-1845) fought to abolish capital punishment (unsuccessful), reform prisons (some improvement), and founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (now the RSPCA). I hope his several hundred living descendants are still inspired by the inscription: ‘Endued with a vigorous and capacious mind, of dauntless courage and untiring energy.. he devoted his powers to the good of Man. In Parliament he laboured for the liberation of the Hottentots in southern Africa, and above all, for the emancipation of eight hundred thousand slaves in the British Dominions. The energies of his mind were afterwards concentrated on a great attempt to extinguish the slave trade in Africa…’ The white marble monument was paid for by friends, colleagues and ‘many thousands of the African race’. (see Your last paper five pound note  History Girl)

Thomas Fowell Buxton meets one of his many
great great great great great grandsons in
Westminster Abbey

Walking through Parliament Square we saw the statue of Winston Churchill (1874 –1965), recently adorned with a Mohican hair cut made from green turf. ‘Why?’ asked Ben, which prompted a discussion on dissension, demonstrations and the right to protest. The statue of Oliver Cromwell guarding the Palace of Westminster led on to republicanism, and why Britain reverted to a monarchy after his rule. Once in the Houses of Parliament, we entered the huge 11th century Westminster Hall. Here we met Andrea our tour guide who told us the hall had been improved with a timber hammer-beam roof back in 1393, and is still the largest in Northern Europe. She led us on the route that the Queen takes once a year for the State Opening of Parliament. From the Sovereign’s Entrance at the base of the Victoria Tower, we saw the scratches on the Royal Staircase where the swords and spurs of troopers of the Household Cavalry have worn holes in the stone; and the tiny lift that, now she is 90, the Queen uses (though the stairs are still freshly carpeted each time.)

Andrea and history students in Westminster Hall

Andrea kept the tone and content just right for children. Between the Queen’s Robing Room and the House of Lords, we stood on the spot under which Guy Fawkes had hidden 36 barrels of gunpowder in 1605, and almost blew up King James I, all the peers and members of parliament. We saw where Guy Fawkes was tried (roughly where Nelson Mandela, a more peaceful political opponent, gave a speech three hundred years later) but Andrea didn’t give the gory details of his execution (hanged, drawn and then quartered.) In the Members Lobby we saw the doorway damaged by a bomb during World War Two; the statues of six previous prime ministers; and the pigeon hole of Prime Minister Theresa May, arranged democratically in alphabetical order and no larger than those of the other 650 Members of Parliament. Neither the House of Commons nor Lords were sitting, so we could go inside and stand beside (but not sit on) the MPs’ and peers’ leather benches.

After lunch in the vaulted Jubilee café, we crossed over Westminster Bridge (1862) and embarked on a Thames Clipper for a 45-minute history of river-side London. As it zig-zagged back and forth across the river, the twin-hulled catamaran cut through the incoming tide. After the Tate Modern, we shot under Waterloo Bridge (1945 - mainly built by women), London Bridge (first built by the Romans), and spotted the 13th century “Entry to the Traitor’s Gate” below the 11th C Tower of London. Passing under 19th C Tower Bridge we could see the underside of people walking across the glass walkway. Desdemona watched the skyline carefully, ‘Look there’s St Paul’s Cathedral! And do you see how the old and the new buildings are all muddled up?’ We talked about the 1941 blitz, dockers and shipping. We passed wharfs and warehouses now converted into apartments, including the fascinating home of History Girl Michelle Lovric. But as the waves grew and clouds descended, I feared the next stage of our journey would be a foggy white-out.

Entrance to the Tower of London 

Crossing the Greenwich Meridian Line prompted an unscientific explanation of the difference between that imaginary vertical line, and the horizontal equator. As we disembarked on the south side of the Thames, the storm departed and the skies cleared. We clambered into a glass-sided Emirates cable car which shot up from Greenwich Peninsula and crossed high above the river to the Royal Docks. The view was amazing, with a golden sunset behind Hampton Court, and opposite, a rainbow landing somewhere in the Anglo-Saxon wool depot of Woolwich. ‘Look, there’s the Thames Barrier,’ said Ben. ‘And there’s an airport,’ said Desdemona as a small plane flew over us. Grandfather pointed out the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf far below us. The cable car too, was historical, as it was paid for by the European Union in 2013 – and they won’t be doing that again in Britain any time soon. We returned from Royal Victoria on the Docklands Light Railway, which gave us a high level view of Billingsgate Market and East India docks. A walk over Tower Hill took us to the underground and back to Paddington.

Paddington Bear from Peru reminds young travellers about the importance of generosity to migrants

This grandmother was delighted when Ben told his parents it was his ‘Best ever day out in London.’ I don’t think they even noticed how much history they’d learned along the way.

Our Route:
Number 36 bus from Paddington to Buckingham Palace
Number 148 bus to Parliament Square
WestminsterAbbey
Houseof Parliament tour
ThamesClipper
Emirate Thames CableCar
DocklandsLight Railway
London Underground- Tower Hill to Charing Cross.
No 15 bus Trafalgar Square via Piccadilly and Oxford Circus, to Paddington.

'The Great Crypt Robbery' by Karen Maitland

On 8th July every year, until the draining of the fens in the 1700's, the common land around a hamlet called Brothertoft, near Boston, on the Lincolnshire Fens would be invade by several hundred people and thousands of sheep all converging for the annual Drift Toft Fair. The sheep from all the tofts scattered across the area were driven to the week-long fair by the Fen-Reeves to sell to the merchants, farmers and butchers of Boston and the south.

For the week of the fair, people were housed in 30 large boothies erected to shelter them and they were fed by the locals who earned a good income from selling them ale and food. Aside from the serious business of selling sheep, evenings were spent in a riot of drinking, dancing and matchmaking, for it was not often the isolated fenlanders had a chance to meet up and enjoy themselves.

But where there are crowds there are criminals and the Drift Toft Fair became notorious for the crime of comassing, when cut-purses took advantage of crowds and men sleeping off drinking-bouts to slip purses and other valuables into their own sacks.

It is often said today that if punishment for theft was tougher it would discourage such crime. But it is hard to imagine tougher penalties for theft than those imposed in the Middle Ages where even minor robbery could be punished by flogging, branding, mutilation, and execution. These sentences seemed to do little deter to career criminals in the Middle Ages, presumably because they did not believe they would be caught or if they were wealthy thought they could bribe their way out of trouble. Many thieves protected themselves with amulets such the hand-of-glory – a mummified hand of an executed man - that they believed could open any lock and would send all those in the house to be robbed into a deep sleep if a burning candle of human corpse fat was set in the fingers.

Many people in the Middle Ages stole from desperation, but that certainly wasn’t true of all. One of the most audacious robberies took place in 1303 when Richard Pundlicott a merchant dealing in butter, cheese and wool confessed to having tunnelled into the crypt of Westminster Abbey where Edward I stored the royal treasure. Richard claims to have disguised the entrance to the tunnel with quick-growing hemp so he could work for months undisturbed.

He stole goods to the value of £100,000 which it took him two days to remove and was so great a haul, he had to bury some of it St Margaret’s churchyard. After spending two days getting drunk with some friends in a house that was in the grounds of Fleet prison. Richard and his companions returned to raid the treasury again. It was only when the gold and silver items found their way onto the London market, that the thefts from the abbey were discovered.

But many suggested that the tunnel was pure fabrication to cover up the guilt of the monks involved in the robbery and in particular Adam of Warfield who was the Sacrist of the Abbey. The walls of the crypt were 13ft thick and since Richard was a regular drinking companion of Adam, he could easily have simply let him into the crypt. Adam, the Sacrist, along with several of the abbey’s monks were found to have some of the loot stashed in their rooms. Many claim that it was scarist himself who masterminded the theft.

A commission of investigation was setup and Richard Pundlicott, Adam of Warfield and several other monks and laymen were found guilty. Adam and the monks claimed benefit of clergy to avoid being hanged. Richard tried to do the same, but he was not so lucky and was hanged along with five other laymen. So was Richard a daring robber or merely the fall-guy for a cleverer man? History’s jury is still out on that one.

Inspiration and Sadness

by Marie-Louise Jensen

The History Girls' visit to Aphra Behn's tomb the week before last was a deeply moving experience. I hadn't quite anticipated how emotional I would find it. But to stand there and see her epitaph in the great Abbey itself brought it home to me just how revered she was in her own lifetime to merit such a prestigious resting place.

We were there to celebrate the launch of Daughters of Time, but I'm writing about that separately on the 19th March on Serendipity Reviews. What I wanted to muse upon today is why and how Aphra Behn has come to be so largely forgotten in the literary canon?

At school I was taught that the first 'real' novels in the English language were Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders and we duly read and discussed them. Our (female) English teacher didn't mention Mrs Behn's Oroonoko to us nor any of the other earlier candidates to this title. We certainly didn't read Oroonoko.

Neither did we read anything by her on our A-level exam syllabus. Not by her nor any other works by a woman.
Is there any reason why Mrs Behn's works have been excluded from the works that are studied or that do the rounds on those dreadful lists of '100 books you should have read'?
Her plays were of the Restoration era and it's fair to say that few of her contemporaries have made it onto such lists either - be they male or female. But then many were so trivial, that they scarcely merit inclusion. Not so Aphra Behn's plays. The Rover, for example, which I refer to in The Girl in the Mask, deals with complex issues of love, marriage, prostitution. That is to say the position of women in society. Surely an enduringly important theme? Oh...maybe not when white, middle-class men are selecting exam texts.
And Oroonoko? Why was that less worthy of our attention as a class of eager 17 year old students (mainly girls) than Moll Flanders? That decision cannot possibly have been based on a lack of important themes. Oroonoko examines the issue of slavery while Moll Flanders is largely an entertaining romp, and a male view of a woman if I ever saw one.

I can only assume that Behn's work had been so thoroughly forgotten and buried under the groaning weight of male scholarship by then that my English teacher didn't even know about her. Or that with her too, she was sticking firmly to the notion that 'the boys wouldn't like her'. That was her reasoning behind choosing ten out of ten books by men and she told me so quite openly when I begged to study Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte as a lightening of the load of Milton, Lawrence, Auden, Muir, Dickens, Chaucer etc. (It was exactly the same at university where I was honestly told there were no books worth reading by women in German).

How much good it would have done our self-esteem to have read Aphra Behn at school - and other books by women too - and to be able to look up to women pioneering in and excelling at writing centuries before we were born. And how I would like to think things had changed since my far-off school days, but I'm certain that they haven't changed one bit.
How do I know? Because when I offer author visits to schools with my 'girl' books, I'm almost invariably told thank you, but no, the boys in the school wouldn't be interested.
We have a long, long way still to go.
I feel deeply concerned for the girls out there. I really hope lots of them find Daughters of Time and discover that there have been women writers, women warriors, powerful queens, leaders, devotees, campaigners and thinkers throughout history, no matter what anyone tells them. And I hope many more women visit Aphra Behn's tomb in future and understand the trail that she blazed for us.

The historical personage I love best, by K. M. Grant

The tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey

It was a wonderfully humane idea, created from the inhumanity of war: the Unknown Soldier, or the Unknown Warrior, whose bones are buried in national monuments throughout the world. He or she is always nameless but clearly identifiable, and is easily my favourite historical figure. This is not because, as a novelist, the concept of an unknown soldier is so rich with possibilities. Certainly, that’s true. The Unknown Soldier can be the hero of a story of conflict from any time or place. But the real, irresistible pull of the Unknown Soldier is that he or she was just like you or me. In a way, it's our own tomb, had we been called on to sacrifice our lives for a greater good. In this way, it's much more moving than the great statues of war heroes. Most of us are not heroes. We are like the Unknown Soldier - caught up in events beyond our control.

But like all good memorials, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier serves a very practical purpose too. For families whose loved ones have been killed in the service of their country, the tomb is public recognition of their loss. For those with no body to bury, the tomb is the place to mourn their husband, wife or child. The mourners tell their own story as they stand by the tomb, and their story merges with the stories of others to create something huge and powerful - not in a political sense, but in the sense of something shared. If you visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you and the other visitors are one.

I think of our Unknown Soldier as male. This isn't because I don’t recognise that women are also soldiers: it's because the bones were buried just after the First World War (Armistice Day 1920) when only men served in the front line. But the man may not be British, since although an attempt was made to identify the bones of a British soldier for the Westminster Abbey tomb, and of a French soldier for the French equivalent, extricating bones from the great mush of the trenches was not an exact business. No nation can never be completely sure that 'their' bones are 'theirs’. This is an interesting notion: does the Tomb pay homage to dead soldiers, or our dead soldiers? I think of the Westminster Abbey tomb housing a British soldier. Yet such is the power of the concept of the Unknown Soldier that I feel no less moved when visiting the Arc de Triomphe or the Kremlin.

The story of the idea of honouring an unknown soldier, and how the idea spread, is well told on Wikipedia, so I won’t repeat it here, only to say that Lord Curzon of Kedleston, a controversial figure worthy of a modern biography, organised the return of the British Unknown Soldier’s remains with imaginative dignity. The guests of honour at the interment were women who had lost their husbands and all their sons. Such a little word 'all'. Yet imagine the weight of grief in the Abbey on that day. I don’t expect, at that moment, these bereaved women were much comforted by the medieval crusader’s sword, chosen by the king from the royal collection, fixed to the coffin lid. I expect the inscription on the iron shield - ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War from 1914-1918 for King and Country’ - was washed in tears.

For future generations, however, the symbolism accompanying the coffin is wonderful. Through the crusading sword, one unknown soldier greets the other from across the centuries, and the word ‘warrior’, chosen above ‘soldier’, harks back further, to heroic times of myth and fable. Yet this soldier is real. Whether a young aristocrat from Eton or a ‘Pal’ from the Gorbals, he was a mother’s son turned into cannon-fodder.

The symbolism doesn't stop there. Placing the tomb bang in the middle of the western end of the nave of Westminster Abbey means that everybody, whether tourist or royal bride, has to walk round it. Thus does the Unknown Warrior, whether Tom, Dick, Harry, Harry’s horse, the carrier pigeon, the wife left coping at home, the girlfriend in the munitions factory, the man or woman in the unsung corps that has no fancy uniform, the Military Wife or Mililtary Husband, make his quiet presence felt every single day.

If everything we’ve created in the world was destroyed, I’d like the Unknown Soldier rather than any artefact to remain. I think it would show aliens arriving to take over the planet that although man was aggressive and destructive, he was capable of emotional greatness, and when he decided to be emotionally great, he did it pretty well.

BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY 
OF A BRITISH WARRIOR
 UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK
 BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG
THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND 
AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY
11 NOV: 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF 
HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V
 HIS MINISTERS OF STATE 
THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES
 AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION
THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY
 MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT 
WAR OF 1914 - 1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT 
MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF
 FOR GOD 
FOR KING AND COUNTRY 
FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE 
FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND 
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD
THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE 
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD
 HIS HOUSE