History – fact or fiction? By Mary Hoffman

 

Most of us in this group, since it started in 2011, have been writers of historical fiction. We’ve had “straight” historians, like John Guy, as guests and some of our number, like Clare Mulley have written non-fiction, Some people do both – and it can be quite confusing.



Take Alison Weir, for example. She, who has also been a guest on The History Girls blog, is a prolific writer on historical subjects such as the Wars of the Roses, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry Vlll and the Boleyn sisters. But she also writes novels about some of the same characters, notably her Six Tudor Queens sequence about Henry’s notorious marriages.



So how do they differ, since they inevitably share the same events and characters? I’ve had an opportunity to compare two books that cover some of the same period to see how a novelist chooses to write about the same plots that appear in a historian’s account of the identical events. The novelist is Alison Weir herself, in her new novel, published last May by Headline, Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose. The non-fiction writer is Michèle Schindler, whose De la Pole Father and Son: the Duke, the Earl and the Struggle for Power, was published by Amberley last December.



So, two books about Plantagenet history and those famous roses, partly invented by Shakespeare, who was more a writer of fiction than he was a historian. Elizabeth of York was the daughter of Edward lV and his wife, Elizabeth Wydeville and was destined to become the wife of Henry Vll and Queen of England, uniting the houses of York and Lancaster. Weir’s novel about her is the first in a trilogy.



John de la Pole did not feature in a play by Shakespeare, although his father did. But it’s not that father and son combo Schindler writes about. That was William, the duke of Suffolk who stood proxy for Henry Vl at his wedding to Margaret of Anjou. No, it is John who inherited his murdered father’s title and married another Elizabeth, not Edward iV’s daughter but his sister. Are you muddled enough yet? John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, became Elizabeth of York’s uncle when he married her aunt.



The titles don’t really help: Weir’s doesn’t sound like a novel, although “The Last White Rose” does. Schindler’s might have been “The de la Pole dynasty,” since it begins with William, goes on to John and ends with John Junior, who was Richard lll’s named heir. Those de la Poles continued to be a thorn in the side of Henry Tudor for many years.



But if we look at 1470, we can see how different a novel is from a work of history. In this year, the Earl of Warwick (the “kingmaker”), conspired with George, Duke of Clarence to overthrow Edward lV, with a long-term view of putting George on the throne. In the short term, they made do with releasing the previous king, Henry Vl, from the Tower of London and parading him through the streets as the true king. Edward had fled to Burgundy with his younger brother Richard and Queen Elizabeth, heavily pregnant, had sought sanctuary with her mother and daughters in Westminster. 

Elizabeth Wydeville

 
These events come 130 pages in to Schindler’s book and are described thus: “This must have been a tense time for John and Elizabeth. Since the party seeking exile in Burgundy included two of Elizabeth’s brothers, she must have been very worried about their fate…[T]hey would have learnt that Edward’s heavily pregnant wife, Elizabeth Woodville [sic], and their three daughters had fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, that Elizabeth gave birth to a son shortly afterwards and that Henry Vl had been released from confinement in the Tower after five long years and reinstalled on the throne.”

This paragraph in the de la Pole book summarises twenty pages and more of the opening chapter of Weir’s novel, where the reader is thrust in medias res, as the princess Elizabeth and her sisters are bundled into a wherry and taken down the river, where they are warmly welcomed by the Abbot and given shelter. The long-awaited son and heir is born at the beginning of the second chapter.

But, since Elizabeth is only rising five, a lot of the history that has gone before can by explained to her by her grandmother and Weir can take the reader through recent events by this device, which she does very skilfully.

The elder Suffolk is barely mentioned in Weir’s novel, unsurprisingly since Schindler tells us how he kept himself out of politics and was not often at court. But there are occasional references in the novel to “Aunt Suffolk and her son Lincoln” and the younger John assumes an ever more important role. He was the Earl of Lincoln and would have inherited his father’s title if he had not come to a sticky end. 

Coat of Arms of John, 2nd Duke of Suffolk

 

One thing that emerges both from the history book and the novel is the sheer number of children born to noble and royal women and the number of babies and children lost. John Senior and his wife Elizabeth, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, had thirteen children. Elizabeth of York’s parents had ten together and Elizabeth Wydevile had already had two sons by her first husband, Lord Grey.

What the novelist does is show you that a factual history can’t (and mustn’t): the emotions stirred by every birth and death. Even, or perhaps especially, the loss of an older child, is a cause for great grief. Here is Weir describing the death of Elizabeth’s closest sister, Mary, at fifteen:

“Elizabeth slept in her chair that night. She woke to find Mother rocking a corpse in her arms, keening softly, her cheeks streaked with tears. She burst out wailing.

Father came running, summoned by the doctor. He folded Elizabeth in his arms and held her tightly. ‘She is with God now. You must be glad for her.’ His voice broke, and he turned to the bed. ‘Our sweet angel is at peace, Beth.’ He embraced both the Queen and his lost child, then gave way to the most piteous weeping.”

There are many such losses described in the novel - siblings, infants, young adults - and it is touching to read in the Autor’s Note that Weir herself lost a son in 2020, which must have informed her accounts of royal grief.

Back to John Junior, Earl of Lincoln, who in 1480 married Margaret FitzAlan, a union arranged by the King, Edward lV. His wife was much younger than his eighteen years and they did not live together. Indeed his marriage doesn’t seem to have affected the Earl’s life at all and his star was rising at court. He played a part in the baptism ceremony for Bridget, the youngest child of the King and Queen. 

Edward lV

 

Then came the shock of the unexpected death of the King in 1483. “The King’s eyes had closed. His face looked grey; his lips were blue. Gradually, his rasping breath slowed – and then there was silence.” Or, as Schindler succinctly puts it, “Edward’s death was sudden and shocking.” He was forty-one.

John Junior was chief mourner at the King’s funeral and soon came out in support of his uncle Richard of Gloucester as the new king. One of the new king’s closest friends, Francis Lovell, had been John’s foster brother and they were both part of the new court.

Elizabeth of York, however, was back in sanctuary at Westminster with her mother and siblings. In Weir’s novel, Richard is referred to as “the Usurper” and Elizabeth is stunned that her kindly “Uncle Gloucester” could have behaved so badly towards her family. 

 

So we come to the most crucial events in Richard’s brief reign: the disappearance of “the Princes in the Tower” and Richard’s plan to marry his niece. The princes, Edward’s heir and his younger brother, the Duke of York, were kept in the Tower of London while, in justification of his seizing the throne, Richard claimed they were bastards, as King Edward had made an earlier, secret, marriage, before wedding Elizabeth Wydeville.

Weir’s novel is divided into sections: Princess, Bastard, Queen and Matriarch, the second section set during her uncle’s reign. Her mother is convinced that Richard has had her sons murdered and is prostrate with grief. Their old life has disappeared and everything is uncertain.

In Schindler’s book, John Junior “chose to remain loyal to his uncle,” as did his parents. In Weir’s novel, Elizabeth embraces all the different theories that have been put forward about the princes’ fate, beginning by sharing her mother’s belief. Then, when she has returned to court, Richard convinces her that the boys were put to death on the orders of Buckingham and he knew nothing about it.

Later, after Richard’s death, she suspects that her husband to be, Henry Tudor, or his mother might have been responsible for removing such strong claimants to the throne, smoothing the way for his accession. Towards the end of the novel, she hears evidence from relatives of Sir James Tyrell that he commissioned two named thugs to carry out Richard’s orders.

When Richard’s heir, the Prince of Wales, dies in 1484 he makes John Junior his heir. John is heir presumptive anyway, as the oldest son of Richard’s older sister Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. (He is also the eldest living grandson of Richard Duke of York).

Soon after their son died, Anne Neville, the King’s wife, also succumbed, probably to tuberculosis. But before she died, rumours were flying around that Richard planned to marry his own niece, Elizabeth of York.

This is a major plotline in Weir’s novel. Quite apart from what seems to us like incest and the need for a Papal dispensation, how could Elizabeth even consider marrying the man who usurped her young brother’s throne and probably killed him and his younger brother? And yet the historical Elizabeth did write a letter to the Duke of Norfolk to advance her marriage to the king, vowing she was “his in heart and in thoughts, in [body] and in all.” 

Elizabeth of York

 

Weir’s explanation is reasonably convincing: Richard had been a favourite uncle when he was Duke of Gloucester and Elizabeth couldn’t rid herself of the idea that he was kind and loving. He had explained away the absence of her brothers by blaming Buckingham and he implied in his proposal to her that his wife, her cousin Anne Neville, knowing she was dying, had virtually blessed the match, encouraging him to take another wife, one young and healthy, to give him more heirs. It works, more or less.

Schindler barely mentions this part of the story, dismissing it as rumour. And anyway, in January 1485, Richard let it be known he was pursuing a marriage with a Portuguese princess. Shortly after Anne’s funeral he made a public announcement that he had never intended to marry his niece. It looks remarkably as if he had flown a kite and been deterred by the negative public reaction. 

Richard 111

 

Richard was famously defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field and Henry Tudor claimed the throne by might and right. His claim was pretty tenuous, as, with the deaths of the princes and the impossibility of the young Earl of Warwick inheriting, since his father Clarence had been attainted as a traitor, the rightful heir was Elizabeth of York. Weir is excellent on this angle, with Elizabeth wanting to reign jointly with Henry and not just to strengthen his claim by their marriage. And marry him she did, though her coronation was put off for some years.

And what of John de la Pole, Richard’s heir presumptive as long as the Yorks were excluded by the parliament ruling that they were illegitimate? Although the new king imprisoned several Yorkists, he seems, as Schindler informs us to have taken rather a shine to John Jnr and given him positions at court. His trust soon proved misplaced, as Lincoln and his foster brother Francis Lovell were fiercely loyal to the dead Richard and were plotting Henry’s overthrow.

Some embryonic rebellions fizzled out but then the opportunity came with the claims of Lambert Simnel. Simnel was a Pretender from Ireland, who claimed to be the young Earl of Warwick. The problem was that Warwick was still imprisoned in the Tower. But the boy had been so well coached that Henry suspected another Yorkist was behind the plot and his eye fell on John Junior. 

Henry Vll

 

Indeed, Weir does not buy Schindler’s notion that Henry found Lincoln trustworthy: “He means to be king, Bessy. I have suspected it all along.” Lincoln had fled to Burgundy under protection of the Duchess, Margaret, Elizabeth’s aunt, who seems to have been convinced by Simnel’s imposture. Simnel was crowned in Dublin as “King Edward” and Lincoln and Lovell’s forces joined and fought the king’s army at Stoke in June 1487.

It was to be fatal for Lincoln, who died fighting bravely, thwarting Henry of the chance to have him executed. The king took no revenge on John Senior but when he died and his son Edmund inherited the dukedom, Henry took back all John Junior’s possessions. Edmund was so short of funds that Henry demoted him from Duke to Earl and turned the whole family against him.

First Elizabeth John’s widow and then her sons Edmund and Richard fled to the Duchess of Burgundy. The unfortunate William was imprisoned in the Tower where he stayed till his death in 1539. Both his brothers continued to make attempts on the English thrones until their deaths. 

Both books are handsomely produced, especially Alison Weir’s novel and both have the family trees, which are so essential to histories and, increasingly, to Historical novels. I think there is room for both for anyone as obsessed with the Plantagenets as I am.

'Putting it on Ice the English Way' by Karen Maitland

'Scheherazade and Shahryar'
Artist: Marie-Elenor Godefroid (1778-1849)

When I was a little girl, I was enchanted by the idea of someone reclining on silken cushions on a hot sultry evening, sipping iced sherbet. I think image must have come from Scheherazade and the 'The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights'. But it was only as an adult, I wondered how Scheherazade would have got ice to put in her fruit cocktails on those hot Arabian nights, centuries before fridge-freezer was invented.

A bizarre legend says the 16^th century Mughal emperor Babur, who was very fond of iced sherbet, used to send his servants to the mountains of the Himalayas to hack off a chunk of ice or snow, every time he fancied a glass, but this must have caused quite a delay in the drinks service. Ice clearly needed to be stored.

The simplest technique was to take ice or compacted snow from mountains or from frozen lakes and store in underground to preserve it through the summer. In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great, on his campaigns, had pits dug and covered with vegetation to keep ice through the heat of summer in order to preserve food.

Entrance to Icehouse, Brantwood
Photo: Peter James

Down through the centuries, ice harvested in winter was stored in natural caves, or in deep underground cisterns and tunnels beneath towns, which had often been dug by earlier civilisations for water or shelter. But this meant that the ice was frequently stored some distance from where it was needed, a great disadvantage on a hot summer’s day. So, by the 17^th century in Europe, purpose-built ice-houses were in use for wealthier houses.

The oldest known ice-house in England that still exists is in Felbech Hall, Norfolk built around 1633. It is reached via a tunnel and is 28ft deep. But England’s climate was unsettled and since it had its own mini-ice-age beginning in first decades of the 17^th century when the Thames regularly froze for weeks, the construction of ice-houses didn’t become widespread until after the Civil War.

The first ones were circular pits dug into some shady spot in the grounds of a manor house or palace, with thickly thatched roof, a wooden floor with holes to drain off the water, and the narrowest-possible door near the top, which was insulated with straw. This style was a direct import from the continent. 

Icehouse at Battle Abbey
Photo: Nilfanion

The English quickly evolved their own version consisting of brick-lined, conical pits which could store ice for up to two years. Many refinements were added including vermin grids and air-traps in the drains helping to keep damp air out in order to slow the melting.

But the biggest problem the English had was where to get the ice to store in them. We don’t have snow-capped mountains close at hand and even our winters don’t regularly produce thick blocks of ice on lakes or falls of deep snow. The answer lay in bowling greens and shallow ponds.

Interior of Ickworth Icehouse
Photo: Bob Jones

In medieval and Tudor times, abbeys and great houses had a series of ponds, usually created by diverting a natural stream, in which fresh fish were fattened to feed the huge households. Often villages too had their own medieval fish ponds. By digging out new shallow ponds and connecting them to the old fish ponds or streams by sluice gates, it meant that if the temperature was likely to drop over-night, these ‘freezing pools’ could be flooded and, because they were very shallow, ice would form on them where it wouldn’t in deeper water.

In the morning, the thin sheet of ice was collected, smashed into tiny grit-like pieces, poured down into the ice-house from an opening above and pounded to compact it.  A film of water might be spread over it to ensure it formed a solid block.

'The Bowling Green and Octagon Pond'
Circa 1700's. Artist Unknown
Hartweel House, Buckinghamshire
National Trust

Many great houses had a bowling green or a croquet lawn surrounded by little grassy dyke to keep the balls in play, and these too were often deliberately flooded in winter, if a frost was expected, to make ice.

By the eighteenth century, ice was being transported by barges all over England having been harvested from the marshes where again it formed easily in shallow bog pools, even when the weather was not cold enough to freeze lakes. But the ice, having been made from fishpond water or marshes was too dirty to be put directly into drinks or food. It could only be used to chill containers of food or bottles. The English had to wait until clean ice could be imported from abroad before it could actually be added to their drinks.

Ice Cutting on the St. Lawerence River
Montreal, Quebec
Photo Alexander Henderson, circa 1870

The first import from Norway proved a bit of a disaster, since by the time customs had decided ice was ‘dry goods’ they were left with nothing but a warehouse full of water.  But by 1830, 150 tons of imported ice was stored beneath the Haymarket in London, collected by steam-driven cutters from lakes in Scandinavia or the Great Lakes of America, brought over by ship and transported round England by barge.

The American lawman, Bat Masterson, (1853-1921) once said, ‘We all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in summer. The poor get it in winter.’ But finally, that was changing – people could buy clean ice cheaply for their kitchens and in time, cooks in even in modest households could attempt Mrs Beeton’s famous ice creams and lemon-ice recipes.

As for sipping iced sherbet while reclining on silken cushions – it’s still on my bucket list!

Ice Formation Edge of pond
Photo: ThomasLendt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LUCY BOSTON: An artist in everything she did. Edited by Victor Watson. By Adèle Geras

Victor Watson (see photo at the end of this piece)  was for many years  an academic at Homerton College, Cambridge and an expert on children's books. He edited The Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP 2001). He was Chairman of Seven Stories during its development and eventual opening in 2005 as the National Centre for Children's Books. He has written novels for children and a novel for adults called Time After Time. I ought to say that he and his wife Judy are friends of mine and  I have visited their house  and admired their beautiful garden. I only mention this because Lucy Boston, the subject of the book I'm writing about here, was also a passionate gardener  and many visitors to the  Manor House in Hemingford Grey go precisely to see the beautiful garden Lucy Boston created. I have written about it on this blog. http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2012/06/manor-hemingford-grey-by-adele-geras.html

   

    

This collection of essays has many Japanese contributors because Japanese academics had put together a book of essays about Boston and many of their pieces are translated here.  In  Japan, Lucy Boston is a much -loved and much- studied writer. Many Japanese visitors come to England and visit the Manor, paying tribute to her not only as a writer but also as a patchworker, a poet, an artist, and a gardener.  The book is very well-titled. Victor himself has written an essay on her Green Knowe books and another on her other fiction, as well as an introduction.

    

Diana Boston, Lucy's daughter in law and the devoted chatelaine of the Manor,  has written about the patchworks, Lucy's garden and about Lucy as an artist. When you visit Hemingford Grey, Diana is the one who shows you the patchworks which lie spread out on a bed and can be seen one by one. Last time I visited, Diana asked me to put on the white gloves (to protect the fabric) and help her fold back each quilt so that other visitors could see their full beauty. I"ve never forgotten that day. 

Hemingford Grey  is perhaps the oldest inhabited house in England.  If you visit as a reader of the Green Knowe books, you will find many objects and places you will recognise from the novels. Victor's work in bringing us these essays is cause for rejoicing.  It will help enormously in encouraging new readers, new fans to Boston's works, and hopefully enthuse a whole new generation of fans. 

There's a piece by Jill Paton Walsh at the end of this book which is very moving and personal. She was a good friend of Lucy Boston's and she wonders whether the novels will be enjoyed at a time which is on the surface so very different from the days when the Green Knowe books  first appeared.  Tik Tok, the metaverse, AI bots and the like are the prevailing background to reading today, but I am quite sure there must be those people still who would greatly appreciate the haunting prose and wonderful narratives of these novels. They were only published as children's books because their author insisted on her son's beautiful illustrations being part of the whole. The Japanese, of course, are quite relaxed about adults reading illustrated stories and they are also perfectly accustomed to ghosts....it's no wonder that Lucy Boston is still being studied there. I hope very much that this lovely volume brings new readers to the work and new visitors to Hemingford Grey. Victor Watson has put together a collection that's both enjoyable to read and beautiful to look at. Lucy Boston would definitely have approved. 

No amount of Wright's Coal Tar -- a trip to the Museum of Brands Sheena Wilkinson

I’ve spent the last few months in the 1930s. It’s a grim place in many ways, with the rise of the political far right; poverty and deprivation, and the displacement of millions as people are forced from their homes by political or economic cruelty. Part of the grimness is not how alien these issues are to us today, but how depressingly familiar. 

the reason for my immersion in all things 1930s

But the books I have been writing and editing, though firmly grounded in political reality, have been essentially upbeat in their tone. Yes, there’s fascism, but also bias-cut frocks and black-and-white matinées. My three historical novels for children (Name upon Name, Star by Star and Hope against Hope, Little Island 2015-2020) dealt with Politics with a capital P, as they looked at various aspects of Irish history a century ago. In Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau (HarperCollins Ireland, 2 March 2023, and its unnamed-work-in-progress sequel) the focus is much more domestic. And that’s what took me to the wonderful Museum of Brands in London a couple of weeks ago: an afternoon’s immersion in 200 years of packaging, with particular attention to the 1930s. The museum’s permanent display is based on the extensive Robert Opie collection.

Note the biscuit tin from the exact year

I’ve always loved material culture. Even as a child, I loved reading as much about the minutiae of everyday objects as about huge historical events – more, probably. It’s one reason why I always loved Noel Streatfeild: her emphasis, in books like Ballet Shoes, on what they wore, and how much things cost, was endlessly fascinating to me. Having said that, I’ve always been suspicious of what I call the product placement type of historical fiction – you know what I mean: too many brand names at the expense of a genuine feel for the period. If characters speak with 21st century accents and voice 21st century opinions, no amount of Wright’s Coal Tar soap is going to wash that out.

But there’s nothing like looking at the chocolate bars and shampoo bottles and dress patterns that your heroines would have been familiar with. Luckily the museum was quiet that afternoon because I kept exclaiming at things I recognised. Sometimes this was the visual memory of a childhood sweet, or a biscuit tin the same as the one Gran kept her buttons in. More often I was excited to see evidence of the brands and labels that I had mentioned in the text but wasn’t personally acquainted with. For example, my heroine April offers to wash some curtains in Reckitts Blue – a product I knew from my reading of 1930s fiction would bring them up nice and white, but which I’d never actually seen in the flesh until then. And there it was, reassuringly promising to do just that.

As always I was surprised at both the longevity of some of my favourite brands, and the disappearance of others. My 1930s characters could have joined me in a bar of Aero, but I can only imagine what grapefruit filled chocolate tastes like – and I don’t think I’d have given them a bar, because for the reader to start thinking, Gosh: grapefruit chocolate, how odd. I wonder what tastes like? might well have plucked their interest out of the story.

grapefruit chocolate, anyone?

And maybe that’s key to using brands and products: of course it’s important to be accurate – my browser history is full of questions like When were tampons invented? and What breakfast cereals were popular in 1934? – but that needs to be balanced by not distracting the reader. After all, in a book set in 2023, I wouldn’t even mention brands unless perhaps as an economic signifier. One of my favourite displays was the 1930s chemist’s shop. I could imagine my characters choosing a shampoo, or trying to find a patent recipe for period pains. And although they don’t make their own clothes, the range of 1930s dress patterns helped me to imagine their frocks and cardigans.

some frocks for Martha and April 

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau will be published on 2 March. It’s my first novel for adults, and I absolutely loved writing it. I hope the little domestic details will charm the readers as much as they charmed the writer. And at the launch, I’ll be serving little boxes of traditional toffees. And yes, they did have Mackintosh’s in 1934.

(all photos taken at the Museum of Brands, 31 January 2023)

https://www.sheenawilkinson.com/

Wheel Fiddle by Joan Lennon

Elders playing a two-person organistrum

Santiago de Compostela, Spain

12th century

(wiki commons)

What has more than 90 moving parts, was once the instrument of choice in churches, in its earliest version needed two people to play* and has been making music for over 1000 years?

It's the hurdy-gurdy. Aka the wheel fiddle, symphonia, organistrum, vielle a roue, zanfona. Its music is made by a rosined wooden wheel turned by a crank moving against melody strings, plus drone strings and a buzzing bridge or 'dog'**.

Illustration of two symphonia from the Canticles of Holy Mary

during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile El Sabio (1221-1284)

(wiki commons)

Are you reading or writing medieval historical fiction? Would you like a sound track? Try these (though there is a certain irony in the ones where there's an organ accompaniment ...):

Though the organ as we know it took over as the instrument of ecclesiastical music, the hurdy-gurdy remained popular in the secular world. Once you start looking you see it illustrated everywhere - Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Jacquet, Millais - not all on wiki commons, so sadly I can't show them here, but keep an eye out. It even makes a brief appearance on the film The Polar Express.

The Hurdy-Gurdy Player

by Anne Claude de Caylus 1737

(wiki commons)

For a modern take on the hurdy-gurdy, here is a beautifully creative work by Guilhem Desq called Le chateau magique:

I couldn't resist leaving you with this version of the Game of Thrones theme played on hurdy-gurdy:

* The history of instruments that need more than one person to play them is a fascinatingly odd one, and includes 'the courting dulcimer' from the Southern States of the US in the 1850s. A protective mama was reassured by the sound of the music from the next room because the dulcimer required four hands to play, so the courting couple could be left alone without fear of hanky-panky taking place.

I'm also quite fond of the two person octobass, but that's a story for another day.

** It's called a dog because (to someone, not me) the noise it makes sounds like barking.

Joan Lennon website

HAMILTON'S TREASURES ... by Susan Stokes-Chapman

Thankfully the ship rests in the shallows. He has not used this apparatus before and will not venture any deeper than he must. Twenty feet below the surface. No danger there, he tells himself. And he knows exactly where to look. Under careful instruction the object he seeks was safely hidden within the starboard bow, away from the other shipments tightly packed in the hold, but the ship broke apart in the storm; he hopes his luck stays true, that the crate has not strayed too far along the seabed, that no one else has managed to retrieve it ... ~ Extract from: Pandora

In the harsh winter of 1798, the Royal Navy’s formidable warship, HMS Colossus, met a tragic fate off the treacherous coast of the Scilly Isles, succumbing to a fierce and unforgiving storm. Hidden deep within its hull was the prized collection of Greek antiquities belonging to the British diplomat William Hamilton. With Napoleon’s forces poised to invade Naples, Hamilton had wisely chosen to send his treasured artifacts back to England for safekeeping. Yet, in a cruel twist of fate, these invaluable relics were lost beneath the waves, swallowed by the very sea meant to protect them.

William Hamilton harboured a profound passion for Greek vases, amassing an impressive collection during his 35 years residing in Naples. Serving as British Ambassador to King Ferdinand from 1764 to 1799, Hamilton’s official duties provided the perfect backdrop for his intellectual and cultural pursuits to flourish. He became deeply engrossed in antiquities, acquiring Greek vases from private collectors, sponsoring archaeological excavations, and even opening ancient tombs. What began as a scholarly interest quickly blossomed into a full-fledged obsession; by 1766, he had amassed a remarkable collection of over two hundred individual pieces.

For his own scholarly satisfaction — and perhaps to share his passion with the wider world — in 1766–67 Hamilton published a lavish four-volume set of engravings showcasing his treasures, entitled Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton, His Britannick Maiesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the Court of Naples.

Hamilton’s first collection of antiquities was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for the substantial sum of £8,410, where many of the pieces remain on display today. Among them is the celebrated red-figure volute crater famously known as the 'Hamilton Vase'. Yet, scarcely had he parted with this treasured assemblage — perhaps with some seller’s remorse — before Hamilton resumed his collecting with renewed zeal. He went on to publish a second catalogue, titled Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases Mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship Discovered in Sepulchres in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies but Chiefly in the Neighbourhood of Naples During the Course of the Years MDCCLXXXIX and MDCCLXXXX.

What makes this particular collection especially poignant is that it was among these very vases, immortalised in the engravings, that were tragically lost aboard HMS Colossus.

He was, understandably, devastated. In a letter he wrote to his nephew Charles Greville in 1799, he said of his vases 

“they had better be in Paris than at the bottom of the sea; have you no good news of them? they were excellently packed up, & the cases will not easily go to pieces, & the sea water will not hurt the vases. All the cream of my collection were in those eight cases on board the Colossus, & I can't bear to look at some remaining cases here in which I know there are only black vases without figures.”

Regrettably, only a handful of items from Hamilton’s lost collection were recovered during his lifetime. It was not until 1974 that a dedicated recovery team succeeded in raising some of the salvaged fragments from the depths. These damaged yet invaluable pieces now reside within the British Museum’s esteemed collection.

Despite this tragic loss, William Hamilton’s legacy endures. His meticulously published volumes became essential references for artists and craftsmen, notably influencing figures like Josiah Wedgwood. One of Wedgwood’s most celebrated creations is his exquisite reproduction of the famed ‘Portland Vase,’ pictured below—a testament to the lasting impact of Hamilton’s passion for antiquity.

~~~~~~

My debut novel Pandora opens with the recovery of an ancient vase from the shipwreck of HMS Colossus, and features William Hamilton quite prominently as a key character. To read all about it you can order by clicking the image below:

www.susanstokeschapman.com

Instagram: @SStokesChapman

Discovering Lost Culture, by Gillian Polack

 

Lost culture is exciting. How can something be exciting when we have lost it? Most times when we talk about loss, it’s in terms of the events that caused the loss. The political pressure, the murders – dire events that add up to big cultural losses. Yet, when a culture is lost because of irrepressible cruelty, it leaves traces. For years, I’ve been watching for such traces, to see how much we can know when remnants of a population have been forced away from their homes and when their lives have to be rebuilt from scratch. I don’t want to hear about horror. I want to find out what we can know about what was destroyed. I don’t look for the names of people: I want to know how they lived.

The first and most obvious relic is, in many cases, linguistic. I was just reading a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century Yiddish in Europe. It traced loan words from cultural areas such as food. Those loan words matched with a bunch of trade records and showed that there was a dynamic and strong Jewish butchers’ industry in the Polish-Lithuanain Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. These days most of the surviving descendants are in the US and may not even eat kosher, but some of the Yiddish has snuck into US English and so, in parts of the US, there is a memory of a life that people once led.

Other records come from the persecutors themselves. The records of the Inquisition have vast repositories of cultural information about Spanish Jews. They used it to technically prove that people were reverting to Judaism or had not dropped Judaism. While conversion to Christianity is by a claim of faith, the Inquisition demanded complete cultural change. Those who held religious power in the empire of Spain was key to maintained that Jews were impure and that impurity carried down the line to children and to children’s children so people with Jewish ancestry had to be watched forever in case they shifted back to their ancestral religion.

The “convert, leave or die” ultimatum in Spain in 1492 left a lot of people, then, having to forsake family traditions and local customs. It was not safe to wash and wear nice clothes of Friday, or to send for sweets made by your favourite Jewish confectioner, or even to eat salad on Saturday afternoons. It was possible to be burned alive if any of these small things informed the Inquisition that you were secretly Jewish. Because the Inquisition documented their research into what they regarded as lapsed converts, we know more about everyday life before 1492 as well as after it.

Another hidden aspect of culture is what happens when a whole cultural/religious group is suddenly missing: local culture changes to fill the biggest and most gaping holes. For example, in some places where Jews were sent into exile or mass murdered, the remaining Christian population would suddenly eat more pork. Why? I assume because it proved they were not Jewish and were therefore safe. Big cultural shifts have reasons. This is only one of them, but it’s a deeply-distressing one.

Let me finish on a less distressing note. Superstitions. Some superstitions are folk beliefs that have walked alongside popular culture and religious culture for a while. Others are what’s left when the framework and history for that belief or action is lost. I can imagine that, when we all have flying cars, people will still look both ways before crossing the road, because a hundred years of watching for regular cars instilled a habit so strong we mostly don’t notice we’re doing it.

What look like irregularities in a contemporary culture can tell us a lot about where that culture has been, historically. It’s not the core of my research right now. It’s something I keep an eye on. A lot of the lost elements of culture are the aspects that will bring a novel to life for readers. Understanding how they fit together and create living spaces for real people in our past also helps us write history into fiction more accurately. 

 

Someone sent me to a story the other day because they knew I was interested in alternate Jewish history (because my most recent novel, The Green Children Help Out, has superheroes and alternate Jewish history) and that story rested all of its research on Christian views of history. The concept was a terrific one: what would happen if the relationship between Christianity and Judaism were inverted, with Christianity the minor religion. Making Judaism more Christian both culturally and religiously meant the story didn’t even come close to exploring the concept. The major players were changed, but the everyday culture was not.

It’ll be a while before I can write a novel using these historical explorations, unless I want to follow the path of the story I so dislike. Before I can bring my imagination to play and tell stories based upon hidden and lost history, I need to find as much as I can about the hidden and lost histories. It’s a marvellously fun trail, but the research is happening now. Old and trusty studies aren’t nearly as useful as conferences and conversations with those doing the research.