Archive for the ‘Historical Gleanings’ category

Tretower Court and Tower: An Appreciation – and the Heraldry of the Vaughan Family

April 15th, 2024

Reduced to farm buildings, then left to wrack and ruin, the once-grand Tretower Court, in the Usk Valley, was saved for the nation in 1934 and is now in the safe hands of Cadw. The house has been beautifully restored and is presented to visitors with outstanding flair and imagination.

The two long ranges of Tretower Court, an attractive mixture of stone and timber-framing, were constructed in the mid-fifteenth century by Sir Roger Vaughan. It was either Sir Roger or his son, Sir Thomas, who added the battlemented curtain wall and gatehouse (with its huge wooden doors) to create the full courtyard plan of today.

The charm of Tretower, apart from the tranquil courtyard, is that the north range is virtually unaltered. The apartments on its upper floor are still accessed through a wooden side gallery. The west range, attached to it at a right angle, probably looked rather similar, but has acquired the elegant, late seventeenth-century façade that is the first thing one sees through the entrance arch.

The interior is unchanged, however, with the kitchen and service rooms at one end and Roger Vaughan’s private quarters at the other. The centrally-placed great hall, with its large fireplace on the west wall, is open still to its gloriously timbered roof. The timbers have been dendro-dated to 1455-6.

It was in this setting that Roger maintained ‘a court of royal style, the maintenance of a hundred men’. The wine flowed at his banquets and the itinerant ‘poets of the nobility’ were always on hand to sing his praises. Cadw have restored these rooms ‘as faithfully as possible, with new partitions, and plaster applied to the walls as appropriate’ (David M. Robinson, Tretower Court and Castle, Cadw, 2018, p.14). They have also filled them with replica furniture and fittings.

However well researched, such an approach is often deplored by purists, but for me, the result is very pleasing. There are hangings of say in the blue and red stripes of the Brigade of Guards, two trestle tables with benches arranged lengthwise for the retainers and, raised on a dais at the far end, a third table facing them which was for the lord and his family.

Covered with white table cloths, these are arrayed with glass- and pewter-ware and trenchers (slices of inferior bread that served as plates) that are less convincing. (They look like off-cuts from a breeze-block.) There are a dresser and a ‘cup board’ at the screen-end. With the aid of these props, it is quite easy to imagine the feasting and carousing that went on in this room.

Best of all is a painted cloth behind the high table, specially commissioned by Cadw, that depicts incidents from the Vaughan family history. On the extreme left we see Sir Roger’s father, Roger Vaughan of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, and his maternal grandfather, Dafydd Gam (‘the one-eyed’), at the Battle of Agincourt, where both men perished. Dafydd has been suggested as Shakespeare’s model for Fluellen in Henry V. As a prominent opponent of Owain Glyndŵr, he is anathema to Welsh nationalists, but his family had served their English overlords for generations, and would never have regarded themselves as traitors.

Sir Roger’s mother, Dafydd Gam’s daughter Gwladus Dhu, was remarried to Sir William ap Thomas, whose first wife, a Bloet, had been the heiress to both Raglan and Tretower. Known as ‘y marchog glas o Went’ (the blue knight of Gwent), Sir William was chief steward to the lord of Usk – the English Duke of York – and a member of his military council. From 1432 he had begun the transformation of Raglan, raising the present South Gate and Great Tower, which was surely painted. The court poet Guto’r Glyn refers to this five-storey moated fortress, accessible only by a drawbridge, as the ‘Yellow Tower of Gwent’.

Presided over by the remarkable Gwladus, the whole family, including young Roger, had taken up residence in these spacious quarters. When Gwladus died in 1454, her funeral was attended by 3,000 mourners, for she had been ‘the strength and support of Gwentland and the land of Brychan’. The court poet Lewis Glyn Cothi refers to her as ‘y seren o Efenni’ (the star of Abergavenny), though elsewhere she is sun-like, a ‘pavilion of light’. They were a close and united family. Roger was particularly attached to his younger half-brother, William Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke, who on succeeding his father in 1445, settled Roger at Tretower as his castellan.

The motte-and-bailey castle of the Picards and Bloets stood in flat meadowland. The old shell keep had been gutted in the mid-thirteenth century and a great round ‘tower’ (from which Tretower is named) had been raised within. The polygonal outer walls of the shell keep had been retained, however, to form an impressive outer defence. Tretower Court is the comfortable modern residence that Roger built in the purlieus, some 200 yards from the castle walls.

As committed Yorkists, the Vaughans and the Herberts had often to strap on their plate armour and march to war. The next scene on the painted hanging is of Roger at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross (1461), but it omits the gruesome aftermath, for Roger is said to have led old Sir Owain Tudor to his execution at Hereford. Sir Owain’s head was placed on the market cross, where ‘a madde woman kembyd hys here and wysche a way the blode of hys face’. (James Gairdner, The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, Camden Society, 1876, p.211.) Roger was knighted in 1465, an event that is also depicted on the hanging, acquired great estates including Merthyr Tydfil, and is said to have built the ‘royal palace’ at Cardiff. In a final scene we see him with William Herbert at the Siege of Harlech (1468).

After the victory at Tewkesbury in 1471, Roger was charged by King Edward with the pursuit of Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford, but himself falling into Jasper’s hands, was summarily executed at Chepstow. He could hardly have expected mercy from Owain’s son, but the court poets were incensed. Calling on the family to avenge him, they ‘cursed Jasper’s marrow for this wicked deed … May [we] see the traitor’s skullbone/Used in Tretower to tune the harpstring,’ they sang.

The patronage of poets endured under Roger’s son, Sir Thomas, who was unstintingly eulogised by Lewis Glyn Cothi and others, both for his courage in arms and for his liberal hospitality. Though a supporter of Richard III, he was luke-warm in the months before Bosworth, earning himself a general pardon from Henry VII.

His descendants never ascended in rank, but lived the relatively obscure lives of minor gentry, occasionally filling the office of High Sheriff, until in 1783 Charles Vaughan sold Tretower to a local farmer. By the 1850s it had been entirely given over to agricultural purposes, and the roof of the north range was on the point of collapse.

The Boy’s Head and the Snake

The figures on the hanging are always identifiable by their heraldry, which Cadw have put to excellent use at Tretower. Dafydd Gam, Roger Vaughan and William Herbert all wear armorial surcoats. Dafydd bears Argent three cocks gules, William Herbert Per pale azure and gules, three lions rampant argent. As for Roger, his coat of arms is the distinctive Sable three boys’ heads, couped at the neck proper, a snake about the neck of each one Vert – or so it appears here. The arms of Vaughan were inconsistently blazoned among the various branches. The tinctures vary and sometimes a chevron argent appears between the heads. (Michael Siddons ed., Visitations by the Heralds in Wales, Harleian Society, New Series XIV, London, 1996, pp.43, 54, 90; Burke’s General Armory.)

According to A.C. Fox-Davies (A Complete Guide to Heraldry, London, 1929, p.169), ‘The boy’s head will seldom be found as a charge except in Welsh coats, of which the arms of Vaughan and Price are examples’. To this list I would add the Watkins of Cwrt Robert in Tregear, Monmouthshire. Their ancestor, Lewis ap Gwatkyn of Painscastle, a contemporary and perhaps near relation of Roger of Tretower, is described by Lewis Glyn Cothi as a scion of the Vaughans of Bredwardine. (See http://www.rupertwilloughby.co.uk/gleanings/upper-house-painscastle-radnorshire-a-court-fit-for-king-arthur/.)

But why the snake? It commemorates their supposed descent from Moreiddig Warwyn (‘white neck’), and thence from Drymbenog ap Maenarch, lord of Brycheiniog. Legend has it that Moreiddig emerged from the womb with a viper entwined around his neck, a sure sign of his princely birth. In reality it may have been the umbilical cord, rather than a viper, that was so entwined. Moreiddig was also the fychan or ‘second born’ son. The surname Fychan, adopted by his descendants, was subsequently anglicised as Vaughan.

I particularly loved the projections that were automatically triggered in one of the old storerooms of the north range, an animated viper appearing from behind a row of shields to give an account of the house and family; or it was an almost tangible Lewis Glyn Cothi and a cast of animals, explaining their connection with the Mabinogion (an edition of which is on sale in the Tretower shop). My young son was enchanted, and so were the many other young visitors, who joyfully scaled the ramparts and coursed through the empty rooms in their unending games of hide and seek.

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Posted in Castles!, Historical Gleanings

Jakob Duwall, a Scots Mercenary in the Thirty Years War: his Descent from the MacDougalls of Makerstoun and his Posterity in Sweden and Russia

January 16th, 2023

Jakob Duwall, alias MacDougall, by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl

It was the ultimate indignity for an old soldier. On 1 October 1633, Major-General Jakob Duwall, Commander-in-Chief of Swedish troops in Silesia, had been defeated and captured at the Battle of Steinau. In the aftermath of the battle, his opponent Wallenstein, one of the most terrible generals of a terrible war, was reluctant to storm the fortress-city of Glögau, so set up a gallows in clear sight of its main gates. Duwall was brought forward and a noose was placed around his neck. A soldier never knows where or when he will die, but death can come at any moment, and must be faced with resignation and fortitude. Luckily for Duwall, the garrison hurriedly threw open the gates.

Renowned as a brave warrior and skilled tactician, Duwall had become complacent in his old age, or perhaps was distracted by his personal affairs. His wife Anna, captured with all her baggage during a sudden attack, had died in April of that year, and he had been prevented from overseeing her burial. The Swedish Chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, characterises him as a rapacious risk-taker and dipsomaniac, traits that he, for one, was prepared to forgive in a soldier. To the Elector of Saxony he seemed ‘ein ruhmrediger Mann, der sich mehr verratut, als er auf Gott sich verlassen’ (a boastful man who has greater faith in himself than in God). Stubborn, quarrelsome and permanently tight, Duwall had allowed his 2,000 soldiers, all of whom were billeted on the unwilling local population, to loot and burn as they pleased, and relations with his Saxon allies were under severe strain.

The isolated Swedes were thus entrenching themselves at Steinau, when the implacable Wallenstein suddenly fell upon them. Far from rising to the occasion, Duwall was so drunk that he could barely speak. He was to be Wallenstein’s prisoner for several weeks, playing the part of a drunken sot with great conviction. However, something of his old nimbleness remained, and on 13 November, he gave his captors the slip. Thereafter he sent a flurry of letters here and there, demanding a court martial to clear his name and pleading for funds with which to reorganise his army. The strain of all this was considerable, and Duwall, still in Silesia, died of drink on 9 May 1634,within months of the assassination of Wallenstein.

Jakob Duwall had been born some 45 years before in Prentzlau, Altmark, and his real name was MacDougall, which has always been pronounced and is now usually spelt ‘MacDowall’. He and his father, rechristened ‘Albrekt’, along with his uncle Robert and his three German-speaking brothers, Mauritz, Tobias and Axel, were among the tens of thousands of Scotsmen and women who flooded northern Europe in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries, in search of their fortunes or of adventure. From Holland to Denmark, from Germany to Poland, they included students, merchants, craftsmen and swarms of peddlars, many of whom settled in these countries and flourished. In the mid-1500s, even the Provost of Elsinore was a Scot. What fun Shakespeare could have had with that information! As a result, Scottish ancestry is widespread among the Poles, many of whom have polonised Scottish names. Chalmers was transformed into Czarmas, Cochrane into Czochran, Forsyth into Forseit etc. It is even suggested that Lech Wałęsa, the Polish national hero of recent times, was truly a Wallace.

In Russia and Scandinavia, the demand was not for peddlars but for mercenaries, and thousands of warlike Scotsmen were eager to oblige. Thus ‘Albrekt’ MacDougall had migrated to Sweden with his German second wife, Elsa von Bredau, and their children in 1594. He was Sheriff for Orby by 1615 and a Captain in Baron Gustav Horn’s Savolaks Regiment by 1625. ‘Albrekt’ was a more familiar version of his real name which is not recorded, though ‘Uchtred’, a favourite forename of earlier MacDougalls, is a possible candidate.

Foreign soldiers had been raised in the 1590s to fight the Russians and the Poles with whom the Swedes were almost constantly at war. Albrekt’s three boys all entered military service when of age, Jakob first seeing action against the Poles as an eighteen-year-old musketeer. By the time of the Thirty Years War, when the military registers indicate around 25,000 Scots in Scandinavian service, all three brothers were colonels of regiments. Jakob, whom Chancellor Oxenstierna flatteringly described as ‘en redelig Sveriges invohnere’ (a true citizen of Sweden), was promoted to major-general in 1632.

Questions of nationality were of less importance than the issue of nobility. Oxenstierna’s law of 1634, the Instrument of Government, made noble birth, or ennoblement, a condition for all public commissions or office, and particularly for membership of the newly-incorporated Riddarhuset, or ‘House of Knights’, of the Riksdag. Jakob Duwall’s brother Mauritz was duly admitted in recognition not only of his father’s faithful service, but also because ‘Jakob Forbes and Johan Oxenstierna, who travelled in Scotland, testified that they had heard nothing but that the Dougalls were a noble family’.

Later generations sought more detailed proof to secure their privileges. Jakob Duwall was ennobled posthumously in 1674, allowing his sons to enjoy the title of ‘Friherre’, but his first cousin William (son of Albrekt’s younger brother Robert) had left two sons, Gustav and William, who had no desire to be thought of as commoners. It seems that the latter made a special journey to Scotland, ‘in the name of and on behalf of his brother’, in order to obtain information about their ancestry. It is questionable whether young William knew any English, let alone Scots, but he contrived to meet the right people and to ask the right questions. Three old men in their eighties were interviewed, including one Thomas MacDougall of Stodrig. All three had known Robert MacDougall and his parents in Scotland, in the years before his emigration to Sweden.

MacDougall of Makerstoun

Introduced to other cousins who could vouch for their respective antecedents, William was given a clear account of the previous five generations of his family. He learnt that his grandfather Robert, who ‘crossed over into foreign parts’ some 60 years before (c.1596), and indeed Robert’s elder brother ‘Albrekt’, were the sons of Patrick MacDougall, younger brother of James MacDougall of Makerstoun, by his wife Margaret, daughter of George Nisbet of that Ilk. Both the MacDougalls and the Nisbets were border lairds (Makerstoun is high on the Tweed, near Kelso) and were connected to some of the most historic families in Scotland. According to the evidence collected by William, Robert’s great-grandparents included Andrew MacDougall of Makerstoun, Margaret Scott of Buccleuch, Walter Ker of Cessford, Patrick Nisbet of that Ilk, Margaret Douglas of Longniddry and Cuthbert Cranstoun of Thirlestane Mains. They are like a roll-call from one of Scott’s novels.

Scott of Buccleuch

Each was indeed noble according to the Scots definition, which ascribes nobility to all persons bearing a coat of arms. A patent of arms from the Lyon Court (which regulates heraldry in Scotland) is, even today, considered a diploma of nobility. William had garnered the testimonials of some highly creditable witnesses, such as the guardian to the then Countess of Buccleuch, who would have had unhindered access to the family records; likewise William Cranstoun of that Ilk and Adam, the son of Alexander Nisbet of that Ilk. William’s gleanings are thus a valuable primary source, especially when corroborated or augmented by evidence from elsewhere.

The next step was to present the accumulated testimonials to some respectable body for authentication. It was and is the practice in Scotland to have one’s antecedents set forth in Letters Patent known as a diploma stematis or ‘birthbrief’, and quite usual in the seventeenth century to obtain them not from Lyon Court but ‘from local Town Councils (where the proof was less exacting than Lord Lyon’s), but these were usually for the consideration of the patriciate of foreign cities’. William wisely chose the baillies of the Provost and Corporation of Edinburgh, whose pronouncements were sure to carry weight even in Sweden.

Nisbet of that Ilk

Examining just such a birthbrief from 1669, that of one Walter Innes, issued by the City of Aberdeen, Sir Thomas Innes of Learney, himself Lord Lyon, deplored the prominence given in the document to the royal arms, those of the city being entirely absent. One hopes the baillies of Edinburgh were less impudent, but an illustration of the royal arms would no doubt have added gravitas to the resulting document. Helpfully translated into Latin, the birthbrief was signed and sealed by their clerk, William Thomson, on 6 March 1656. Having thus concluded his business in Scotland, William MacDougall returned triumphantly to Sweden and the Letters Patent were in due course registered in the State Archives in Stockholm, where a transcript can still be read today.

Cranstoun of that Ilk

The chronology suggests that Margaret Scott of Buccleuch who is mentioned above was the sister of ‘Wicked Wat’, a notable riever, who was murdered on Edinburgh High Street in 1504, in a feud with the Ker family of which his own mother was a member. The Kers, from whom the MacDougalls had a double descent, are thought to have originated at Criel-sur-Mer in Normandy, a name which in old documents is rendered ‘Ker’ (house). The pronunciation of the name is problematic. According to Admiral Mark Kerr, ‘In Scotland the name rhymes with care. Since many of the family have come to England the pronunciation in this country rhymes with car, which we have entirely submitted to’. Through the Scotts and the Kers, the MacDougalls had a double dose of Scottish royal blood: the Scotts were descended, through his grandson William ‘the Red Douglas’, 2nd Earl of Angus, from the sad, ineffectual King Robert III, baptised as John Stewart, who died of grief in 1406; and the Kers from his ambitious brother Robert, Duke of Albany, who ruled for him and for his son as Regent until his own death in 1420.

Lorentz Creutz, troll-finder general, by David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (National Museum, Sweden)

The blood royal of Scotland was thus transmitted to Jakob Duwall’s living descendants who are through the female line, the last male, Fridof Duwall, having died unmarried in 1923. Jakob’s daughter Elsa, for example, married Lorentz, Friherre Creutz (1615 – 1676), a civil servant who in 1669 served on the infamous troll commission in Mora, which in a wave of hysteria interrogated sixty suspects and executed thirteen alleged witches and one man by decapitation, their corpses being burnt at the stake. Bizarrely, without ever having previously put to sea, Creutz was then appointed Admiral-General of the Navy, and perished when his top-heavy flagship, the mighty Kronan, capsized in the middle of a battle.

Their son Lorentz, Friherre Creutz, was Director of Mines in Finland, married to Ebba Maria Fleming, a descendant of King Gustav Vasa’s favourite Erik Fleming. They were succeeded by Claus, a captain of dragoons, married to the daughter of the distinguished general, Bleckert Wachtmeister af Björkö, who led the Swedish right wing to victory at Narva in 1700. Amongst their descendants, through a daughter Ebba who married the Friherre Lybecker, were the Knorrings, a branch of whom settled in Russia in the early 1800s. The fascinating Friherrinan Nadezhda Ivanovna Knorring (1826 – 1895), Dumas fils’s ‘green-eyed siren’, is described by Tolstoy as having ‘driven many men out of their minds’. The author of this memorial is her descendant.

To judge from their portraits, Duwall and his line were a series of grim-visaged individuals, all armed to the teeth and poised to confound the Catholics by wreaking havoc on various fields of war. Belying the contemporary image of the Swedes as peace-loving, blond-haired egalitarians, these men are dark and brooding, evidently preoccupied with their battles and sieges, their swashbuckling adventures and their acts of reckless heroism, not to mention their coffers. Yet it was on the achievements of such men that modern Sweden was built.

As for Makerstoun, a property of the MacDougalls since 1374, where the tower-house of 1590 partially survives, it eventually passed through an heiress to Major-General Sir Thomas MacDougall-Brisbane of that Ilk (1773 – 1860), soldier, colonial administrator and astronomer, who has lent his name both to the third largest city in Australia and to a crater on the moon.

[Based on Riksarkivets ämnessamlingar. Personhistoria, SE/RA/756/756.1/D/I/D 27 a. A photograph of this document (in which ‘of that Ilk’ translates prosaically as ‘de eodem’) can be viewed on the Riksarkivet website – https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/A0069586_00149#?c=&m=&s=&cv=148&xywh=-309%2C-692%2C8822%2C5164. Being an office copy it is not, of course, illuminated. A translation is available on the University of St Andrews SSNE database – https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/ssne/item.php?id=8347. On birthbriefs, see Innes of Learney, Scots Heraldry, pp.99-100, and ‘Further Note on the Birthbrief of Walter Innes’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, LXXXI (1947), pp.114-18. See also the complementary accounts of Duwall on the Swedish Riksarkivet website, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=17733, and on https://www.adelsvapen.com/genealogi/Duwall_nr_64, as well as in T.A. Fischer, The Scots in Sweden (Edinburgh, 1907), Part II, passim; Christopher Smout, ‘The Culture of Migration: Scots as Europeans, 1500 – 1800’, History Workshop Journal, 1995, No.40, pp.108-17; and http://www.mapascotland.org/story-of-the-map/did-you-know/#:~:text=%E2%80%A6that%20some%20Polish%20surnames%20are,%2C%20Machayskis%2C%20Machlajds%20and%20Makolroy.]

Robert III, King of Sciots, and his wife Annabella Drummond, wearing their coats of arms on the Forman Armorial, 1562

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Posted in Historical Gleanings

Faith and Fresh Air: Medieval Reading’s Response to an Epidemic

June 9th, 2020

Sometime in the twelfth century, perhaps soon after the consecration by Thomas Becket of the Abbey Church, a terrible plague fell upon Reading. Young and old alike, anyone vulnerable to the bite of an infected flea in an age where everyone was permanently flea-bitten, succumbed like wheat before the scythe to this terrifying disease.

All normal commerce was suspended. The townsfolk kept to their houses, their anxiety almost unbearable. When a sufferer exhibited the first symptoms of the disease – a headache to start with, then debilitating chills and fever – it was like the delivery of a death sentence.

People very occasionally recovered, but most would suffer appallingly for a week, until, sapped of all their strength, death brought the release for which they must, by then, have craved. Nauseous, aching all over, they shrank with anguished cries from the light, the brightness being more than they could stand. Then came the swellings, usually after a couple of days, agonising, hard swellings that sometimes grew to the size of an orange, on the neck, arms, inner thighs, swellings that were soon black in their vileness and bursting with pus and blood. Yet this was not the most excruciating phase of the disease, for then they started to bleed internally, and to leak blood from every orifice. Sufferers already stank of death by the time they expired, with their helpless husbands, wives, parents or children looking on in horror and wondering when their own turn would come. They was nothing they could do, other than wait to load the battered, unrecognisable corpses onto the carts that came to carry away the dead.

The poor and afflicted would usually have turned to the monks of the Abbey for succour, but the infirmary there was already packed with their own people. Thirteen Reading monks perished from the disease in the course of that year. Their only hope was in prayer, for a strong wind that would blow away the foulness in the air, yet it seemed to the monks that God was punishing them for their sins and that they needed to persuade Him of their merit.

In a great act of faith, the monks of Reading Abbey, who had complete authority over the town, resolved at length on a course of decisive action. A decree was issued to all the able-bodied townsfolk. Rather than wait to put out their dead, they were told to lay out their sick relatives on litters in the streets. Fearful of leaving their homes, they were told nonetheless to assemble in the vast Abbey church for a service. A fast was proclaimed, and special litanies were sung in front of the congregation. The monks then led a solemn and orderly procession through the streets, holding aloft their most sacred relic, the hand of St James the Greater, and invoking him before God as their protector.

It was subsequently affirmed that a miracle was worked that day, that the sick lying on their litters, having once caught sight of the bejewelled reliquary containing the hand, were cured of their affliction. It was as if the Lord had been appeased in that hour and had instantly allayed the grief of His people, who returned joyfully to their homes, to be free of the epidemic for many years to come.

In the decades since the founding of the Abbey by Henry I, who had entrusted this prized relic to its care, a number of miraculous cures had been credited to the saint. There had been a catalogue of incidents in the mid-1150s. A knight called Mauger Malcuvenant had been restored to life by drops of water in which the holy reliquary had been dipped; a woman from Earley, a nearby village, had been cured of her dropsy after praying in the Abbey church; and a man from Barking had, after keeping vigil there overnight, miraculously regained the power of speech. The lifting of the Reading plague was St James’s most dramatic intervention to date, greatly enhancing his reputation as a miracle-worker and, as a centre of pilgrimage, that of the Abbey, where he was believed to be a living presence.

The Becket Casket in the V & A is contemporary with the events described above

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

A MacGregor Miscellany: The Real Rob Roy

March 30th, 2020

Scottish Highlanders differed from Lowlanders in that they routinely carried arms, and indeed were militarised from birth. They used to say in the Highlands: ‘When a male is born they put a sword or a knife in his hand’. They were further distinguished by their language (most spoke only Gaelic); their dress (shirt, plaid, stockings, brogues and bonnets); and their modest dwellings, generally of unmortared stone, with turf roofs. Even the mighty Lochiel, chief of Clan Cameron, lived until 1746 in a wooden house with two stone gable ends (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, pp.15-16).

Baby girls were not given arms at birth but a spindle to grasp. To the great convenience of genealogists, married women retained their maiden names. Thus the baptismal records of my ancestors Alexander McEwen and Catherine Campbell reveal that their mothers were MacGregors, where no other trace of them exists.

They were a tough breed, adept at negotiating the mountainous terrain. It has been pointed out that Rob Roy MacGregor would have made the nine-mile journey from Glengyle, where he was born, to Inverlochlarig Beg in Balquhidder, where he died, on foot. Today it is a 49-mile journey by road (David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy, Edinburgh, 2004, pp.1-4, 12, 34).

Rose Bonheur, ‘Highland Raid’ (1860)

The tradition in the family is that my ancestors were ‘caterans’ or cattle-raiders. This was by no means a shameful secret, as cattle-raiding was a way of life until the eighteenth century and was not considered a crime like murder or stealing money. They generally spoke of cattle having been ‘lifted’ rather ‘stolen’.

Though men of many other clans were involved at one time or another, raids were almost invariably blamed on the men of Clan Gregor, who were thought of as a race of cattle thieves. The defiant, marginalised MacGregors, described in 1745 as ‘a hardy, rough people, but noted for pilfering’, had been forced into such activity for their survival and, intensely proud of their lineage, regarded it as an occupation worthy of them as gentlemen.

Both the raiders and their victims complied with a well-established code. Only one or two cattle would be ‘lifted’ at a time, and the drovers were usually unmolested, their trade being vital to the Highland economy. Some farmers would tether a few cattle in places from which they could be easily ‘lifted’, for to cause trouble to the raiders was ‘against the rules of Highland politicks. Amongst these people a quarrel is easily begun but not forgott for many generations’.

Other tenants employed ‘watchers’ to keep guard, paying for them by means of a levy known as ‘blackmail’. The raiders themselves often took on the role, in effect being paid to protect the cattle by not stealing them (Stevenson, pp.7-9, 32, 110, 117).

This genuinely old tartan, worn by the Earl of Wemyss in a portrait of 1740, was later ascribed to Rob Roy to help market it

The father of Rob Roy, Donald Glas (‘the Pale’) MacGregor of Glengyle, who died in 1693, was a professional organiser of watches, earning his living by blackmail. Strictly speaking, Donald was ‘in’, rather than ‘of’ Glengyle, as the holding was not a feudal barony; but as de facto chief of the clan – in default of any strong leadership from the rightful claimant, Gregor MacGregor ‘in Stucharoy’ – he was felt to merit the distinction. Rob Roy was to follow him into the ‘profession’ and used to send his wife Mary out on horseback to collect the blackmail, clad in laced riding cloths and accompanied by a couple of bodyguards. They were described as ‘unwelcome visitants’.

Rob Roy’s sons carried on the family tradition and also turned their hand to horse-theft. On one occasion a woman whom they had robbed of her horses went bravely to confront Rob at his house in Balquhidder and was handsomely compensated by the old rogue, who liked to pose as a Robin Hood figure (Stevenson, pp.11-13, 196, 215).

The theft of sheep, however, was for some reason frowned upon. As an Englishman, Edmund Burt, observed in the 1720s, ‘the Highlander thinks it less shameful to steal a hundred cattle than one single sheep, for a sheep-stealer is infamous even among them’ (Stevenson, p.7). Desperate men would no doubt steal anything.

John Ramsay of Ochertyre says Rob was ‘a gentleman by birth, in a clan where every man, however poor, finds no difficulty in making out a long and honourable pedigree’ (Stevenson, p.269). During the centuries of persecution, the MacGregors clung doggedly to their name. As the law was often loosely enforced, many even dared to use it in official contexts, though it would have been unwise to include it on deeds of any import as they would have had no legal validity.

Most unhelpfully for genealogists, MacGregors tended to switch their legal pseudonyms at will, often as a mark of allegiance to their latest protector. Rob Roy originally called himself Campbell, but became a Drummond when their chief, the (Jacobite) Duke of Perth, dealt favourably with him. To flatter him further, he became a rather insincere Catholic (Stevenson, pp.22, 34, 214, 243).

In 1745 the MacGregors were said to be ‘dispersed through the Duke of Perth’s estate’, which included a considerable part of Perthshire. It is perhaps significant that Stobhall, the ancestral seat of the Drummonds, is a mere bend in the Tay from Kinclaven, where my McEwens were settled. It is conceivable that we descend from the branch of the MacGregor chiefly line calling themselves ‘MacEwin’. Documented in her two-volume Clan Gregor by the family historian, Amelia MacGregor of MacGregor, until the seventeenth century, these ‘MacEwins’ are said to have ‘disappeared without trace’.

The Highlanders were greatly attached to their traditional burial-places. The Balquhidder MacGregors favoured the island of Inchailloch on Loch Lomond. Bodies used to be carried over the pass still known as Bealach nam Corp (Stevenson, p.12). The Macnab chiefs were likewise buried on an island, similarly picturesque, that of Inchbuie in the River Dochart. The Macnab in the late eighteenth-century used his possession of ‘the most beautiful burying-ground in the world’ as a chat-up line. It failed to procure him a wife, though he managed to beget thirty-two bastards and it was rumoured that several lasses in the district got ‘the bad disorder’ from him (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, p.14).

Reluctant Jacobites

Highland funerals were occasions for great gatherings and involved the traditional coronach or ‘keening’ when the assembled women wailed their lament. This would be followed by a ‘compleat narration of the descent of the dead person’. As Rob Roy’s body was carried to his grave, the pipers struck up the haunting MacCrimmon’s Lament (Stevenson, pp.220-1). As late as 1879, the funeral procession for Sir Malcolm MacGregor of MacGregor at Balquhidder was several miles long. A drunken wake would traditionally ensue (Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans, p.15).

It is not surprising that the persecuted MacGregors lived permanently on the qui vive. Iain Moncreiffe wrote that his MacGregor cousins ‘taught me as a boy to eat the old staple diet porridge standing up, ready to run for it lest they be raided by Campbells’ (Lord of the Dance, p.194). Others hold that porridge should be eaten standing up in any case, merely out of respect for the dish.

Ancestors of mine would have been ‘out’ in the Fifteen and the Forty-Five. The MacGregors were said in 1711 to be dispersed over a wide area, but ready on their ‘watchword’ to assemble and follow their chief. The Pretender offered the promise of restoring their name. MacGregors who refused to join the rising in 1715 were threatened with death. There were many reluctant recruits, from all clans, in the Jacobite rebellions.

Rob Roy, his nephew Glengyle and MacGregor of Balhaldie led their forces south and launched an expedition to capture the boats on Loch Lomond, but were thwarted by the Royal Navy. The MacGregors under the slippery Rob Roy stood aloof at Sheriffmuir, as if ready to switch sides, and thus contributed to the Jacobite defeat. In January 1716 Glengyle led 134 MacGregors into Fife in quest of forage. For a few weeks they occupied Falkland Palace, which Cromwell had left half-derelict, with Rob serving as deputy governor (Stevenson, pp.74, 102-4, 110, 118-19).

The Real Rob Roy

Liam Neeson: not the real Rob Roy

Rob Roy had less to lose than most in these ventures, as he was already an outlaw. Having by his early thirties built up a successful, and entirely legitimate cattle-dealing business, he had been faced by 1711 with bankruptcy. In an attempt to recover his finances, he had defrauded his customers, including the powerful Duke of Montrose, his overlord for Glengyle. Protected by the rival Clan Campbell, Rob was able to escape justice and live openly in their country, first at Auch, then at Brackley, with forty or fifty men, including a personal piper, in his service (Stevenson, pp.33-44, 62-3). The MacGregors, incidentally, are described as a leading piping family, with many individual tunes to their name (https://www.musicscotland.com/cd/Clan-Gregor-Collection-Book.html).

A vengeful Montrose has ever since been represented as the villain of Rob Roy’s story. In the 1995 film, Rob Roy, which gullible viewers may mistake for a factual account, he is played with sneering relish by John Hurt. But the betrayal of trust had been Rob’s, and the real Montrose was far from being an oppressive landlord, many having ‘tenures of kindness’ on his lands. He appears to have been a gentle, courteous man, much like his descendant, the present duke, who still lives on Lomond-side. Yet Rob set out purposefully to humiliate his former patron, even stealing 32 of his best cows in a raid on Buchanan Castle in 1717, and returning later to steal his grain. By the 1720s Rob Roy’s daring exploits had made him a legend throughout Scotland (Stevenson, pp.53-6, 154-6, 184).

James Graham, First Duke of Montrose: not the John Hurt caricature

Rob Roy is described as a huge, hairy redhead, with such long arms that he could tie his garters without stooping, like a human orang-utan. If so he would have been noticeably deformed, the account being clearly an exaggeration. Sources agree that he was remarkably affable and ‘jolly’, a most beguiling individual, with an aversion to gratuitous violence. In 1725 he prevailed upon General Wade to procure him the King’s pardon, and was cheerfully prepared to betray his fellow Jacobites for money (Stevenson, pp.53, 199, 203, 230).

Rob’s intelligence led to the arrest of James Stirling of Keir who was one of the Pretender’s leading agents in Scotland, a blatant act of treachery which his admirers have chosen to ignore. Aged nearly sixty, he supplemented his income with the proceeds of cattle raids. Many of the best stories about him are garbled or unverified. He is said to have made his famous ‘leap’ over the Leuchars Burn in full spate at Peterculter, but the entire story – immortalised in the 1953 Disney version of his life – was probably an invention for the benefit of tourists. He died of an injury sustained in a duel – the details are uncertain – at Inverlochlarig Beg on 28 December 1734 (Stevenson, pp.206-8, 219). An unprincipled rogue, he at least had charm and a degree of humanity, which is more than could be said for his psychopathic sons, one of whom was hanged for rape and murder.

In The Braes of Balquhidder (1914), F. Watson summed up Rob with refreshing common sense: ‘it must be admitted that he was not overly scrupulous nor truthful, and the long and the short of it is that it is wiser not to look for public school ideas in a Highland cateran’ (quoted in Stevenson, p.286). My considerable debt to another wise and indefatigable author, David Stevenson, for his brilliant biography of Rob Roy, will be evident from the many citations above.

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Rob Roy, the Children of the Mist and the Outlaw in Me: Were the McEwens of Little Dunkeld and Kinclaven really MacGregors?

November 27th, 2019

An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745, by David Morier

My paternal grandmother, though born and brought up in Hong Kong, was a Highland Scot, a McEwen from East Perthshire. We wear McEwen regalia on the rare occasions that demand it, such as my brother’s appearance as a pageboy at our aunt’s wedding, when he was bedecked in natty trews in the Hunting McEwen tartan. A few family traditions were preserved, such as patronage of McEwen’s of Perth, a very old-fashioned department store in John Street (now sadly defunct), and an unhistorical obsession with orthography (never McEwan with an ‘a’). From ‘Grandpa McEwen’ we seem also to have inherited great height. My father stood at 6’4, my son at 6’3, myself at 6’2.

I also vividly remember from childhood my great-aunt Anne’s account of a meeting with her maiden aunt in Scotland. It must have taken place in 1939. On hearing that Anne was engaged to a ‘Sassenach’, Aunt Kate stiffened. ‘Then you’re nae niece of mine.’ Anne persisted, politely enquiring what their ancestors had been. Kate’s reply was equally forthright. ‘Why, cattle-stealers of course!’ She must have had a soft heart, as she was later to leave some fine linen to my grandmother and instructed that a ‘kilt pin’ should be provided for her half-English daughter (my aunt still has it: a silver thistle with an amethyst flower).

Richard Todd as Rob Roy. Somehow I acquired this handsomely-bound, already vintage book as a child, presumably after seeing the film. My father later met the dashing Todd and described him as ‘knee-high to a grasshopper’.

I lapped up Aunt Anne’s story, as I was already developing a passion for Scottish clan history. Aged no more than six, I had been taken to the cinema to see the 1953 Disney film, Rob Roy (hardly the ‘latest release’, but nobody minded in those days). There is a thrilling scene in which Rob Roy, played by Richard Todd, evades English troops by leaping across a waterfall. That scene in particular, along with the outlandish outfits and the claymores, had sparked in me a romantic fascination. It was to be fuelled in the ensuing years by D.K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron, John Prebble’s Culloden and the writings of Iain Moncreiffe.

Aunt Kate’s memory of family brigandage, activity that must have been relatively recent (three generations is the usual reckoning), had also left me enchanted and intrigued. What is the truth of it? I now know that Kate’s father, my great-great-grandfather John McEwen (1842 – 1910), farmed at Muirhead in Kinclaven, where he was the tenant of Major-General Richardson Robertson of Tullybelton and Ballathie. The family were keen churchgoers and appeared to be perfectly respectable.

Muirhead is marked on old maps but has since been demolished. It was said to have consisted of ‘four farm steadings with a few acres of land attached to each’. Apart from the grand Ballathie House, the parish of Kinclaven was made up of a church and manse and a scattering of similar homesteads. It occupied an isolated loop in the River Tay (there was no bridge in those days), but fortunate guests at Ballathie were treated to the finest autumn salmon fishing in Scotland.

John, who settled at Muirhead on his marriage to Ann Duncan Gardiner, the daughter of the house, had been born further up the Tay at a place called Ballinreich, the steading in the parish of Little Dunkeld that had been farmed by his father Alexander, as it had also been by his maternal grandfather, John Fisher.

Baptised at neighbouring Dull on 12 September 1808, Alexander was the younger son of Donald McEwen of Aberfeldy and his wife Elizabeth (or Elspet) Anderson, who were married at Dull in 1800. With Donald, who may have been born in the immediate aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, the line disappointingly fizzles out.

On this truncated family tree, a name stands out, that of MacGregor, that does indeed launch us into an authentic world of brigandage. John Fisher’s wife, Catherine Campbell, who married from Achtar in Fortingall in 1798, was the daughter of a certain Elizabeth MacGregor. The implication, which I would never have guessed, is that the real Rob Roy, my boyhood hero, most celebrated of all the MacGregors, was a putative kinsman!

Scottish clans are dynastic, extended families in the most literal sense (with a few strays adopted here and there). Clan Gregor was one of the proudest. Their Gaelic motto, S’rioghal mo dhream, means ‘royal is my blood’. They are believed to descend from the hereditary Abbots of Glendochart, who were always men of Celtic royal race. MacGregors maintain that they were of the line of Alpin, King of Argyll, who died in 841. In honour of him, the chief is known as An t’Ailpeanach.

The name-father of the clan was, however, a fourteenth-century Gregor ‘of the Golden Bridles’. Generations of his line held their beleaguered lands in Glenstrae by the sword, an inconvenience to the neighbouring Clan Campbell. In 1519, the powerful, canny Campbells contrived to establish their own nominee, a cadet who was ‘not righteous heir’, as Chief. The head of the dispossessed line, Duncan MacGregor of Ardchoille, was forced to lead his loyal clansmen into the hills, where he became an outlaw. The years of freebooting, raids and murderous mayhem began, many of the family being hanged or meeting other violent ends. Holed up in their fastnesses, braving the snows and ravening wolves, they were like the fictional Doones on Exmoor.

A document of c.1587 refers to them as ‘the House and Gang of Gregor MacIain’, but the landless Gregarach had acquired a far more romantic name. They were called ‘the Children of the Mist’, although the Gaelic might equally translate as ‘the Fog Folk’ or, some say, ‘Sons of the Wolf’. Soon, even the usurping chiefs were implicated in the brigandage, to the extent that in 1603, after a murderous attack on the Colquhouns, ‘the whole Clan Gregor were outlawed and the Name of MacGregor proscribed on pain of death’. The edict of James VI, declaring the name to be ‘altogidder abolisheed’, was confirmed by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1617.

In the early days of their outlawry the Gregarach were regularly pursued by blood-hounds, the fearful conn dubh, until the last of these was shot by their chieftain in 1624. The place (near Lochearnhead) is still called Meall a Mhadaidh, the Hill of the Wild Dog, and the long-barrelled ‘Fuzee’ or gun that he used has been passed down to the present chief. Recalcitrant MacGregors, if caught, could expect immediate execution. Their wives would be stripped bare, branded and whipped through the streets, then packed off to the American colonies as indentured slaves, along with their children.

There was a brief reprieve between 1661 and 1693, when the persecution resumed. Absurdly loyal to the wrong-but-romantic House of Stuart, they fought for James II at Killiecrankie, turning out again for the ‘Old Pretender’ in 1715 and for the ‘Young Pretender’ in 1745. Indeed it was Major Evan MacGregor, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s aide-de-camp, who fired the first shot at Prestonpans. Twenty-two MacGregors were wounded that day and one killed, for which Prince Charlie regaled the whole clan to dinner that evening, the officers sitting with him at a table set ‘upon the middle of the field’. In 1746, the Gregarach were fighting in Sutherland and missed the slaughter at Culloden, marching home past Finlairg Castle with colours flying and heads held high. It was reported with great satisfaction that the garrison, a regiment of militia recruited from the bullying Clan Campbell, ‘durst not move more than pussies’.

The outlawed Gregarach had been obliged to conceal their identity behind assumed or imposed names, including such oddities as ‘Beachly,’ ‘Landless’, ‘Telford’ and ‘Skinner’. Their chieftains called themselves Murray. Some branches were to keep these adopted names permanently, like the one calling itself Stewart, from which the Marquesses of Londonderry (including the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh) are thought to descend. Others fled abroad. The then chieftain’s brother, James, emigrated to America, only to be scalped by angry Indians. There was even a line of martial ‘Greigs’ who became ennobled in Russia.

‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, born at Glengyle in 1671, used the alias of Campbell, his mother’s name. Heavily romanticised by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Rob Roy (though he makes only fleeting appearances), not to mention Disney, he was, in reality, a fearsome and rather enthusiastic brigand (and a fine swordsman with abnormally long arms), who once led a terrifying raid on Dumbarton, though he was pardoned in time for a peaceful death at Balquhidder in 1734. ‘Don’t Mister me nor Campbell me!’ Scott has him say. ‘My foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor!’

The persecution of the MacGregors came to an end in 1774, their legal status restored. General Sir John Murray was at last recognised as the ‘righteous chief’, MacGregor of MacGregor. Though they had been reduced for long years to the status of cattle thieves, the pride of the clan was undiminished. The chief petitioner had been a certain Captain Gregor Drummond, nicknamed Boidheach, ‘the beautiful’, a MacGregor of the chiefly line who, like all his family, had been obliged to live under a pseudonym. In 1743, King George II had commanded that three soldiers of the Black Watch be sent to St James’s for review. The then Private Drummond had been one of the men selected. The story is told that the soldiers gave perfect satisfaction to His Majesty, who handed them each a guinea. These ‘they gave to the porter at the palace gate as they passed out,’ thinking that the King ‘had mistaken their character and condition in their own country.’ S’rioghal mo dhream!

The MacGregor woman from whom I descend was born in the period of persecution. It has been said of the MacGregors that ‘they are perhaps the only clan who can be reasonably certain that all who bear the surname are genuine scions of the ancient chiefly blood, although some branches have never yet resumed it.’ The Clan Gregor Society publishes a list of the known aliases which, remarkably, includes ‘Campbell’, ‘Fisher’ and ‘MacEwin’, three of the names that figure on my ‘tree’. Who more likely to marry an outlaw than a fellow outlaw? Might Donald McEwen and his neighbour John Fisher at Little Dunkeld have themselves been MacGregors who had, for the sake of convenience, retained their aliases, yet proudly passed on the cattle-raiding memory to their children and grandchildren?

The McEwen tartan that we wear is a variant of the Campbell one. The MacEwens of Otter, on Loch Fyne, had themselves been dispossessed by the Campbell chief in the fifteenth century. The chiefly line long ago disappeared without trace. The clan badge is that of the McEwens of Bardrochat in distant Ayrshire, who, as Moncreiffe concedes, ‘may have taken their name from a completely different Ewen’. An end to such nonsense! The wearing of tartan and Highland dress was banned for civilians in Scotland after the ’45. After the lifting of that prohibition in 1782, they were somewhat artificially revived. The tartans and Highland dress of today are mostly nineteenth-century inventions. Yet the red-and-black check design known as ‘Rob Roy’s Tartan’ – the lumberjack tartan – is one of the oldest and most appealing. Henceforth I shall proudly bear the tartan and badge of MacGregor – trusting that Aunt Kate would not disapprove.

[Iain Moncreiffe and David Hicks, The Highland Clans (London, 1967), especially pp.19, 30, 99-100, 209-11; James D. Scarlett, The Tartans of the Scottish Clans (Glasgow and London, 1975); Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage, II (London, 2003), article ‘MacGregor of MacGregor’; http://www.clangregor.com/membership/sept-family-names/. Information on the McEwens of Muirhead from scotlandsplaces.gov.uk includes The Perthshire Ordnance Survey Name Books, 1859-62, Perthshire Vol.40, Communion Roll for Kinclaven, 1880-2 and Kinclaven Kirk o’ the Muir Parish Records. The relevant Census Returns and records of baptism and marriage are available on scotlandspeople.gov.uk.]

Detail from John Frederick’s Lewis’s A Frank Encampment, one of my favourite pictures. It depicts the then Lord Castlereagh on his Oriental tour of 1842. He is the image of the unruffled English gentleman, able to retain his composure and comforts in the most unpromising conditions. In fact his ancestry was mainly Irish and Scottish. The family’s prospects had improved considerably when they adopted the name ‘Stewart’ in place of ‘MacGregor’.

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Au hasard, Balthazar! The Château des Baux de Provence and its Lords – Ancestors of Elizabeth Wydvill

November 7th, 2019

The proud and fractious lords of Les Baux were named for the eagle’s nest, the great yellow castle on a precipice – or ‘balc’ in the local speech – from which they reigned.

The donjon

Before the end of the twelfth century, an alternative story was proposed, thought up by some ingenious clerk or minstrel: that ‘Baux’ derived from Balthazar (Bautezar in Provençal), one of the three magi or wise men, whose son, they said, had come out of Ethiopia to settle in those parts and was the founder of their line. The arms of the family are thus gules, a comet with sixteen rays argent, representing the very star that had guided the magi on their journey ‘from the east’. In their war-cry, ‘à l’asard Bautezar’ (to chance, Balthazar), they succinctly proclaimed their sanctified ancestry along with the recklessness of their ambition.

The castrum Balcius is first cited in a charter of 981, when the head of the family, Pons, held the office of ‘vicomes’; whilst their line can be traced back to a Germanic-sounding Count Liebulfe – no Ethiopian he! – who was born in the late 700s. Sovereign lords for a spell, minting their own coins, the Les Baux came to rule over 79 dependencies, ranging from Vaccarès in the Camargue to the principality of Orange. Yet that was not enough. They must also contest the countship of Provence, to which, admittedly, they had a sound claim; but years of bitter conflict with the rival House of Toulouse ended with their utter defeat in 1162, the ravaging of their lands and the razing of their Château des Baux. Au hasard, Balthazar! Everything chanced on the roll of the dice.

A spectral ruin, like an abandoned city of troglodytes

The castle rose again, and was occupied by the family till 1426. In 1632, on the orders of the king, it was comprehensively slighted by the application of gunpowder. The remaining habitable parts were destroyed in 1793, the hateful charters burnt. Hewn out of the very rock, Les Baux is now a spectral ruin, like an abandoned city of troglodytes. The dressed stone that fronted each range of buildings has been removed, exposing their cave-like interiors. There is barely a single room with its four walls intact.

Military headquarters and court, this was once a throbbing community, with its capacious stables, stores and refectories (‘tinels’), and subsidiary residences for important vassals. Searching for any recognisable feature, one notices stonework up above resembling a giant honeycomb: a pigeonnier of course, for all these people must be fed. There were fishponds, too, and a windmill, and the castle supported a large hunting establishment. The plains below were not the neat vineyards of today but were forested for deer, a vast sporting ground.

The walkways on the ramparts are picturesquely worn and weathered. The narrow, slippery staircase that leads to La Tour Sarrasine is dissected by a deep gutter, an attempt to channel the torrents of rainwater. Best preserved are the service rooms cut deep into the rock below the donjon. The blackened fireplace in the kitchen and the empty bread ovens are powerfully evocative of the former life here.

The ruins of Les Baux are difficult to read but one can make most sense of the donjon, which is relatively well preserved. This thirteenth-century reconstruction of its damaged predecessor is a simple, but very grand and rather elegant two-storied structure. It has only a few small windows and was poorly insulated. The huge fireplaces of which we see traces would have been very necessary to raise the temperature and control the humidity in winter. Beam holes mark the position of the floors. There were reception rooms at ground level, and fifteen chambers above, with names like the chambre de la Tour (that of the Lady Alix des Baux in 1426), the chambre de la Rose and the chambre du Pape (after Pope Clement VII, who used to visit from Avignon).

A reconstruction of the castle in the twelfth century

Despite the sumptuous tapestries on every wall (mentioned in an inventory for Lady Alix), these rooms were sparsely furnished (the odd coffer and trestle table) and rather forbidding. They would, however, have been crowded with people and there was always the softening presence of troubadours – Raimbaut d’Orange in the twelfth century, Paulet de Marseille in the thirteenth. Think of the stamping of feet to their estampidas or dancing songs, the endless gallantries, the rapt attention to their tales of unhappy love in the uvularising Provençal.

Perched vertiginously on its rock – one shudders to think of prisoners being thrown to their deaths in 1394 – Les Baux is beautiful but unnerving, an expression of brutal feudalism. Its prideful lords were driven by their greed and ambition, launching pointless wars that destroyed countless innocent lives. Like most of their kind, they were lovers of strife, and of the spectacle of strife.

The arms of Les Baux - the Star of Bethlehem

Marguerite des Baux, Grandmother of Elizabeth Wydvill

Their ambitions thwarted in Provence, the Les Baux sought a new destiny in Italy. Barral des Baux (patron of the troubadour Raimbaut d’Orange) took the cross and enlisted with Charles of Anjou in 1252. His younger son Raimond led the cavalry charge at Benevento in 1266, the battle that won the kingdom of Sicily for Charles. Barral was appointed Grand Justiciar; his elder son, Bertrand, Count of Avellino. Bertrand’s descendant Alix was the last of the line to reside at Les Baux, where she died in 1426, in the chambre de la Tour.

Their cousin, another Bertrand, also shared in the spoils, becoming duke of Andria, a fair city on the coast of Apulia. Bertrand’s son François, Duke of Andria, married Sueva, daughter of Niccolo Orsini, Count of Nola, in 1381. The Orsini were a Roman senatorial family whose line can be traced back to the tenth century; as Scott Fitzgerald described them (Tender is the Night, Book II, Chap.XXII), ‘they’re the ones who got possession of the temples and palaces after Rome went to pieces and preyed on the people’. They picked up some interesting connections along the way. Sueva Orsini’s mother, Jeanne de Sabran, was the great-grand-niece of St Thomas Aquinas; her grandmother, Anastasia, the daughter of Simon de Montfort’s exiled son Guy.

François des Baux (who died in 1422, aged over ninety) had a son by Sueva, Guillaume, who succeeded as Duke of Andria and was also the designated heir to his cousin Alix des Baux, last of the senior line. Louis III of Anjou, Count of Provence, refused, however, to honour the terms of her will, seizing the territory for himself and finally severing the troublesome House of Les Baux from their ancestral home.

The dragon-eyed Elizabeth Wydvill, queen of Edward IV

The couple also had a daughter, Marguerite, who married Pierre de Luxembourg, Count of St Pol. Marguerite’s daughter, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, contracted an illustrious first marriage with John of England, Duke of Bedford, which was childless. Her second marriage was to someone far beneath her, an aberrant love-match with one of the old duke’s retainers. Sir Richard Wydvill was an obscure Northamptonshire knight, though he was later created Earl Rivers and appointed a Garter knight. Those honours would not have come his way but for the even-more-scandalous marriage, in secret, of the beautiful, dragon-eyed Elizabeth Wydvill, Sir Richard’s daughter by Jacquetta, with King Edward IV of England. From Elizabeth, her brother and her sisters (who all quartered the arms of Les Baux) there are numerous lines of descent to the modern day.

The noblest families of southern Italy and Sicily invariably descend from the companions of Charles of Anjou, like those of Corbera and Falconeri in Lampedusa’s Leopard. The ‘del Balzo’ line subsists in several branches in Italy to this day, still holding ducal rank, but far removed from the precipice in Provence for which they are named.

[Paul Pontus, Les Baux (Paris, 1971); Famille des Baux at http://jean.gallian.free.fr/comm2/fam_fich/b/baux.htm; Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers (Cambridge, 1982), pp.73-6, 84); Lt.Col. W.H. Turton, The Plantagenet Ancestry, pp.228-9.]

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Le Duche d’Uzès: Remembering Proust in a Ducal Fortress

September 6th, 2019

Le Duche d’Uzès: ducal abode in the middle of a city

When Proust was travelling ‘the Guermantes Way’ in the 1890s, charming the aristocratic hostesses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and frequenting their salons and soirées, one of the families he encountered was that of Crussol d’Uzès. The duc d’Uzès (creation 1565) was the second most senior duke in France, only a short head behind the duc de La Trémoïlle (1563). That line died out in 1933, so the duc d’Uzès has since been France’s premier duke and peer.

Ducal carpet in the salon

The Crussols had been intimates of the royal family since at least the fourteenth century, the holders of high office and active on many a campaign. Their motto, indeed, is Ferro non auro, ‘By steel, not gold’. Louis XVIII once expressed his surprise that none of them had ever been a Marshal of France. ‘Sire,’ replied the duke, ‘nous nous faisons tuer avant (we always seem to get ourselves killed beforehand).’

The first part of the family name recalls their long-abandoned stronghold in the Rhône valley, opposite Valence, while the second marks their lordship of Uzès, an ancient city in Occitania. They also maintained an hôtel in the rue Montmartre, for these places are in the deep south, far indeed from Paris and the court. ‘Uzès!’ said André Malraux, General de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture and a friend of the family, ‘but that’s even further away than China!’

Inside the courtyard

The dominant member of the family in Proust’s time was the ‘Grande Duchesse’ (born Anne de Rochechouart de Mortemart), a talented sculptress who contributed the figure of Saint Hubert to Sacré Coeur, a yachtswoman, a feminist and a fanatical rider-to-hounds; also the first woman in France to hold a driving licence (1889) and the first to receive a fine for speeding (1893), after her Delahaye had topped 15km per hour in the Bois de Boulogne. Whilst admiring this formidable lady for her varied achievements, Proust was unable to detect in her any of the famed ‘Mortemart wit’. She was, however, the granddaughter and sole heiress of the Veuve Cliquot, and thus introduced an intoxicating and enriching dose of bourgeois blood to the Crussol line.

Determined that her son Jacques should avoid a more flagrant mésalliance – he ‘became infatuated with the cocotte Émilienne d’Alençon, who was exhibiting a troupe of performing white rabbits – though nobody had eyes for the rabbits’ – she packed him off to Africa, where he died of enteric fever in 1893. The last straw had been Émilienne’s disporting herself in public with the family jewels. The episode made an impression on Proust, for in his Recherche it apparently ‘suggested Saint-Loup’s exile to Morocco as punishment for his extravagant gifts to Rachel’. (George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, I, New York 1959, pp.163-4; http://www.uzes.com/.)

The dining-room

Though it is usual to pronounce the final ’s’ in Uzès, Proust discovered that the gratin had their own rendering of this and other famous names, whether from long tradition or as a way of enhancing their exclusivity. In Sodome et Gomorrhe (Bouquin edition II, Paris 1987, p.665), the snobbish outsider, Mme de Cambremer, is disconcerted to hear an acquaintance speak of ‘ma tante d’Uzai’ and of ‘mon onk de Rouan’, not immediately recognising the famous names that she herself pronounced ‘Uzès’ and ‘Rohan’. The very next day, when a friend refers to a bust of the duchesse d’Uzès, Mme de Cambremer is delighted to correct her. ‘Vous pourriez au moins prononcer comme il faut (you could at least pronounce it correctly),’ she says haughtily: ‘Mame d’Uzai.’

The snobbery that Proust encountered in the Faubourg – and documented in his novels – was breathtaking. The present duke, however, is a man of the people. I am reliably informed that the taxi that conveys him from Nîmes airport for his monthly visits to Uzès is instructed to call first at McDonald’s restaurant, whose ‘drive-thru’ facility is conveniently located on the edge of the modern city.

The Duché d’Uzès: An Appreciation

His modest address in the Place du Duché, Uzès, hardly prepares one for the grand residence of France’s premier duke and peer. Approaching through a narrow side street, one glimpses a turret on a tall building ahead, a fluttering banner, an elaborate escutcheon worked into the brown tiles of a steep roof. Emerging into the Place, one is suddenly confronted by a full-blown castle in the middle of the historic city, one that, most unusually, is occupied by its original family as it has been for a thousand years.

The three elements to the castle are instantly laid bare in the main courtyard that is accessed through a door from the Place. The oldest and most prominent of these is La Tour Bermond, a massive square keep, fifty metres high, named for the lord of Uzès who built it in the twelfth century.

Then there are the fourteenth-century ramparts, projecting from one side of the keep, which were added by lord Robert after his elevation to vicomte in 1328. Robert’s apartments, the so-called ‘vicomté’, which are built into these ramparts, are disguised behind a nineteenth-century façade, though with a tall hexagonal turret at one end.

Simone d’Uzès: prized heiress

Finally, another medieval range that projected from the keep was aggrandised in fine Renaissance style by the Crussols, for Charles de Crussol, Grand Pantryman of France, had in 1486 married Simone d’Uzès, the prized heiress to Bermond and Robert’s line. Their grandson, Antoine, became the first duc d’Uzès in 1565. An associate of the sinister Catherine de’ Medici and a trimmer, renouncing his Protestantism in timely fashion in 1572, Antoine employed a sensitive and learned architect on his renovated apartments, ‘le Duché’, the striking façade of which features Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns in layers for each floor.

His father Charles had already paved the way with the splendid vaulted staircase of c.1515, quite taxing to any but the nimble, that now leads to these rooms. The first of them is a hallway containing two exceptional treasures, laid out on cushions: a helmet from the time of Joan of Arc, in excellent condition; and – a great curiosity – a lamp said to be a relic from the Crusades, lords of Uzès having participated, as vassals of the Counts of Toulouse, in the Fourth and probably also the First Crusades. It seems to me very rare that a family should preserve any artefact of so early a date.

Crussols in ruffs and lace gaze down from the walls (including the Grand Pantryman Louis with his trim beard, last of the family from whom I myself am directly descended). The room is simply furnished, even austere, as is fitting in a living fortress: ‘In our halls is hung armoury of the invincible knights of old,’ as Wordsworth puts it. The theme is continued in an adjoining vestibule, where there are portraits of more recent Crussols, including a full-length one of the present duke, a sleek and elegant figure in a dinner jacket, his arms casually folded.

Louis de Crussol, Grand Pantryman and Governor of the Dauphine (died 1473)

These rooms lead to a grand ‘state’ room, a Wedgwood-blue salon with a lot of white-and-blue porcelain and Louis Quinze chairs with red and gold covers. Despite the warm colours, there is a coldness to rooms of such conventional formality, and the modest fireplace tucked into one corner would hardly have raised the temperature. I was struck, however, by the elaborate carpet commissioned by the present duke that bears his achievement of arms, with its multiple quarterings, which, indeed, is ubiquitous throughout the castle; and was tempted by the glimpse of a more intimate room beyond, all in red, into which one is not invited.

Instead, one is steered through a long, cool passage into one of the many bedrooms that lead off it – the ‘Yellow Room’, with its memories of ‘la Grande Duchesse’ – and the dining-room, where an immaculate Aubusson tapestry is framed by hunting trophies (hers, probably). A large, fifteenth-century triptych depicting members of the royal house hangs nonchalantly above a sideboard, on which a portrait of that precious commodity, Simone d’Uzès, has been propped – a happy-looking girl with rosy cheeks and a hint of a smile. The fifteenth-century chapel beyond was refurbished in 1838 and includes a colourful wall-painting of the family’s heraldry.

There is only a small, formal garden at the back of the Duché. The park, watered by the river Alzon, is across the city, outside the walls, and is a public amenity.

The charming and expertly trained guides at le Duché, looking like matelots in their white denims and T-shirts, are as well-versed in heraldry and genealogy as any Guermantes. Le Duché is a carefully managed stage-set, a romantic anachronism, yet is perfectly pitched at anyone, like me, who thrills in Grand Pantrymen and crusader lamps.

Crusader lamp

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Posted in Castles!, Historical Gleanings

A Dickensian Landmark in London: The Site of Fagin’s Lair on Saffron Hill

March 14th, 2019

The border between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell is seamless and invisible but one is instantly aware of passing from a genteel quarter into a raffish one. I ventured in that direction last week on a particular quest: to discover one of London’s great literary landmarks, the site of Fagin’s lair. In Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, begun in 1837, the squalid apartment of the ‘pleasant old gentleman, and his hopeful pupils’, is located with precision on Saffron Hill.

Oliver, a bemused and exhausted runaway, has joined up with the Artful Dodger on the Great North Road. That highway, known at the London end as ‘Liverpool Road’, is bordered here by market gardens, by open fields and by the cattle lairs that the drovers use on their way to Smithfield Market. The turnpike by which the boys enter London is hard by the Angel at Islington, an old coaching inn that had been entirely rebuilt in 1819. It is approaching midnight as the pair proceed along St John Street into Clerkenwell, then, by way of Exmouth Street and Coppice Row, to the prettily-named Saffron Hill, ‘along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels’.

Descending into the pit: Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell

This had once been a country lane through the Bishop of Ely’s estate, where saffron was grown, but since the late seventeenth century it had been developed into an overcrowded and impoverished residential area, a ‘rookery’. Oliver ‘could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either side of the way as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. the street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside. The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place were the public-houses, and in them, the lowest orders of Irish (who are generally the lowest orders of anything) were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in the filth; and from several of the doorways, great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, upon no very well-disposed or harmless errands.

‘Oliver was just considering whether he hadn’t better run away, when they reached the bottom of the hill: his conductor, catching him by the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field-lane, and, drawing him into the passage, closed it behind them.’ [Book I, Chapter 8.]

Field Lane was an alley at the south end of Saffron Hill that connected it to Holborn Hill. The name has since disappeared from the map. Dickens knew it well and hardly exaggerates the wretchedness of the place. Peter Cunningham, author of a Hand-book of London, 1850, describes Saffron Hill as a ‘squalid neighbourhood between HOLBORN and CLERKENWELL densely inhabited by poor people and thieves … The clergymen of St Andrew’s, Holborn, (the parish in which the purlieu lies), have been obliged, when visiting it, to be accompanied by policemen in plain clothes.’ Hepworth Dixon in The London Prisons, also published in 1850, writes that Field Lane ‘is narrow enough for [one] to reach across from house to house, and the buildings so lofty that a very bright sun is required to send light to the surface … The stench is awful. Along the middle of the lane runs a gutter, into which every sort of poisonous liquid is poured.’ A foreign observer, Flora Tristan, describes it in 1842 as ‘a little alley … too narrow for vehicles to use,’ where ‘there is absolutely nothing to be seen but dealers in second-hand silk handkerchiefs.’ Intrepid enough to visit at night, she adds: ‘There is a bustle of activity in the street as prostitutes, children, and rogues of every age and condition come to sell their handkerchiefs’ (London Journal, p.175). These had been stolen, of course, by the likes of Fagin’s crew, and the saleswomen, invariably ‘daughters of Israel’, were ‘fences’. Dixon was incensed by their attempts ‘to seduce you into the purchase of the very handkerchief which you had in your pocket at the entrance’ (The London Prisons, pp.227-8).

There is a palpably villainous and mournful air to Saffron Hill, which is still oppressively enclosed by tall buildings. The street is paved now, the original houses have all gone, and the River Fleet, a filthy open sewer that ran along its east side, is covered over; but there is a paucity here both of smart offices and of trendy warehouse developments, as if it is still a demoralised place, forsaken by the world and left to its ghosts.

The One Tun: not recommended by Charles Dickens

Descending the hill, one passes The One Tun (rebuilt in 1875, over the original cellars), which is claimed, not unreasonably, as the model of the ‘low public-house, situate in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill,’ that Bill Sikes frequents with his dog. It is described as ’a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light burnt all day in the winter-time, and where no ray of sun ever shone in the summer’.

The best editions of Oliver Twist are those accompanied by George Cruikshanks’s original illustrations, where the impoverished, under-nourished boys always appear like old men. Cruikshanks’s illustration of the pub, headed ‘Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends’, shows a doorway festooned with misspelt notices: ‘To be drunk on the premises’; ‘Licensed to sel Beerly Retail’; ‘Fine Ale 3d pr. pot’.

As for Fagin’s dwelling, it was ‘a very dirty place; but the rooms upstairs had great high wooden mantel-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the ceilings, which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were ornamented in various ways; from all of which tokens Oliver concluded that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome, dismal and dreary as it looked now.’ [Book I, Chapter 18.]

At this end of Saffron Hill, one feels trapped and cornered, as if one has descended into a pit. A steep flight of steps leads up into the street beyond and the relief of sunlight and fresh air, or what passes for it in this part of London. Literary pilgrims in search of the authentic Dickensian atmosphere will not be disappointed.

Longman's former premises on Saffron Hill: gloomy enough for Fagin

Footnote. Halfway down Saffron Hill were the premises of Longman & Co., the publishers, from 1887 – too late to have inspired Fagin’s lair, but the dirty curtains and the piles of rubbish outside evoke Dickensian squalor.

http://atinaitaly.com/charles-dickens-clerkenwell-london/ and http://writingcities.com/2015/02/13/field-lane-and-larceny-then-and-now/

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The View from the Cuttings

Lieutenant John Loftus Otway Mansergh, Royal Warwickshires, killed in action at the Battle of Loos

November 12th, 2018

Royal_Warwickshire_Regiment_Cap_Badge.jpg (419Ã464)

My family emerged relatively unscathed from the Great War. My grandfathers were too young to serve, my great-grandfathers too old, apart from one, Major Cyril Mumby, who survived the war, despite being severely wounded on the Western Front.

The war was, literally, a shattering experience for Cyril and was to alter the course of his life, but the same could also be said of his sister, Isabel (born in 1882).

The Mumbys were well-heeled mineral-water manufacturers, whose life before 1914 had been extremely easy and pleasant. Isabel had been adequately educated at a boarding-school in Bournemouth before embarking on a life of obvious idleness, as befitted an affluent young lady. The family regularly holidayed at Montreux, the intensely social, intensely romantic resort on Lake Leman, where, partying among Europe’s fashionable elite, Cyril met and fell in love with his future wife, a young French girl called Nicole de Faletans.

On another family holiday at Montreux in the late 1890s, Isabel had met a good-looking young man, fresh from Haileybury College, called Loftus Mansergh. His father was a major in the Warwickshires, and the Manserghs were a prominent and wealthy Anglo-Irish family. A newspaper cutting refers to a ‘Mr Mansergh’ who appeared as a Hussar at the Annual International Ball at the Kursaal, Montreux’s casino, in January 1899. It may have been around this time that he encountered Isabel.

Commissioned in December 1899 into the Royal Irish Regiment, Loftus had served in the Boer War until 1902. He had kept in touch with Isabel, sending her photographs of himself at bivouacs on the weld, which she pasted into her album. Later he had proposed to her and been accepted.

With no intention of forming a connection with trade (even if holders of a Royal Warrant), his stuffy parents had refused their consent. He had headed off to Africa instead, serving as an Assistant District Commissioner in Kenya. Isabel had eventually settled with her mother and sister at Udimore Cottage, Otterbourne (near Winchester), resigned to spinsterhood.

However, on Loftus’s return to England in May 1914, he had renewed his proposal. With a hastily-procured licence, the couple had been married at Otterbourne. A daughter, Elisabeth, was born nine months later, in April 1915.

Loftus had been recalled as a lieutenant in June 1914. On 4 August, he went out with the 2nd Battalion of the Warwickshires to France. Before embarking he had telephoned his sister-in-law, Nicole, and asked her to dine with him, as Isabel was too upset to see him off. He was killed in action at the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915. No remains were ever recovered.

Condemned to a long widowhood, Isabel died at Otterbourne in 1959. At this hundredth anniversary of the Armistice, these memories of Cyril, Isabel and Loftus have been foremost in my mind.

Easter Island or Isle of Wight? The Luccombe Chine Head

September 9th, 2018

The small museum at Newport Roman Villa includes something quite remarkable, a carved, near life-sized stone head that is every bit as powerful, mysterious and evocative as any of the Easter Island heads – and considerably older too, as it is thought to date from the late Iron Age or early Roman period. The head was discovered at Luccombe Chine, one of the prettiest places on the Island, but otherwise is entirely inscrutable.

Easter Island head in the British Museum ...

... and in situ (photo courtesy of Arthur Willoughby)

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Posted in Historical Gleanings, The Isle of Wight

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