Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (45 page)

Switzer examined costs and expenses; he proposed that the designs be more rural and natural and relaxed, that garden walls were an unnecessary expense, etc. In short, Switzer proposed the landscape movement which would transform the gardens of England.

But garden taste—the same as everything else—is never the work of a single individual. There are always many other motives and forces which contribute in some proportion or other to the evolving result. And several other significant influences must be cited here, all of which come into play to a greater or lesser extent over the next century.

The first, perhaps, is the rise in popularity of the Grand Tour. The 18th century was the century when “taste” mattered, when demonstrating one’s qualifications as a gentleman meant being a collector or connoisseur—of books, of art, of music, of gardens. And where did one acquire the polish that gave that aristocratic and classically educated sheen? Italy, of course.

So off troop our young Englishmen of the era, with their tutors, to Italy. Where they study the paintings of Renaissance masters, the glories of classical antiquity in Rome, the elegance of Tuscan gardens, the refinements of Venetian music? Well, yes and no.

If one believes the pious letters they wrote home, then yes. If one reads the despairing accounts of their tutors and their Italian hosts and their letters to each other, then the view leans a little more heavily towards Carnivale, carousing, and wenching with their fellow Englishmen. And in their last weeks picking up a few “souvenirs” in the form of lesser Italian artists—often copies of 17th century Italian landscapes—which, yes, do present the soon-to-be idealised vision of Nature is Art.

Yet Englishmen abroad rarely behave as do Englishmen at home.

So the 18th century Englishmen—without a centralised, all-powerful royal court in which to play politics and power, such as was at Versailles—created their own recreational playgrounds.

The play is still about power, prestige, and status, but here it’s married to a cultivated aesthetic as well as to forestry, farming, economy, and sport—riding, shooting, fishing, hunting—a gentleman’s concerns and country pursuits, whether he is a Whig grandee or a gentry landowner of the Tory persuasion.

And the acquisition of land (and more land), with all the rights, privileges, and status it conferred, gives these landholders the scope to create these gardens which still hold the visitor rapt. Whether for the
nouveaux riches
—the titans of commerce such as Henry Hoare who was buying his way into the landowning gentry and created Stourhead—or for the greatest of all Whig aristocrats, like the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, these gardens become a expression of a unified landed class based on “good taste”, political power, and economics.

Thus, as the eighteenth century progressed, influenced by their experiences of the Grand Tour, by writers such as Pope and Walpole, and by visiting other gardens, England’s landed classes began to favour a less formal and more naturalistic approach to landscape design. In developing the uniquely English concept of the landscape garden, William Kent, Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown, and the other great landscape architects of the period were responding to a complex assortment of social and aesthetic ideals among their clients.

As well as the integration of forestry, farming, and sport into the landscape, the ambition was in many respects to create an almost “natural” appearance, where trees, water, open grassland, and carefully placed structures (bridges, temples, and monuments were popular) created a carefully balanced microcosm of the English countryside.

Capability Brown is widely regarded as the most influential figure in eighteenth-century landscape design. Born in Northumberland in 1716, he moved south in 1739 and worked as an assistant to William Kent at Stowe, before embarking on what arguably became the greatest career in the history of landscape design.

Brown was more hands-on than Kent; he would always make a personal visit to a new client’s estate, evaluating the constraints and opportunities it presented, before sending an assistant to undertake a detailed survey. His remarkable achievement was his ability to bring common ideals and design principles to bear on the specific topography, geology, and prevailing climate of a client’s estate.

Above all, there is a sense of effortlessness in Brown’s designs, a sense that the park and garden have grown organically out of their surroundings, requiring little or no human intervention or management (though the opposite was, of course, the case).

And it is in these respects that the “new” landscape movement grows out of the mediaeval and Tudor deer park which was the archetypal symbol of status. Even at this late period, venison is still proscribed on the open market; it is still a sign of favour or wealth.

The creation of the “ha ha” in the late 17th century made it possible to have the expansive views—how to wow your guests, who believed, as you did, that
“a gentleman should own his view”
—without having the deer or cattle coming right up to the Dining Room windows.

It must be said that the concept that a gentleman should own his view, deeply engrained in the psyche of England’s landed classes, sometimes led to surprising results. At Wallington in Northumberland, the seat of the Trevelyan family, the main public road passes relatively close to the house, but was sunk to a depth of several feet so that it was invisible from the house!

Likewise, the effortlessness that typefies Brown’s landscapes finds a parallel in his architecture, particularly at Claremont in Surrey, where his mansion sits atop its hill in splendid isolation, with no visible tradesmen’s entrance to spoil the view on any side. (The tradesmen’s entrance is in fact through a tunnel, the entrance to which is concealed in a stand of trees to the north-east of the building.)

And to this day, in many people’s eyes, these gardens, landscapes, and houses still encapsulate all that is quintessentially and timelessly English. They stand as a record of our social history; they record the ideals of landowners, great and small, through a period of quiet yet profound social and economic evolution—each estate its own ensample of Shakespeare’s vision of “this scept’red isle”.

Doggett’s Coat and Badge: The World’s Oldest Rowing Race

by Gillian Bagwell

D
oggett’s Coat and Badge is both the name of and prize for the oldest rowing ra
ce in the world, which has been held in London every year since 1715. It is believed to be the oldest continually staged annual sporting event in the world and has a colorful and unlikely history.

Thomas Doggett, an Irish actor and comedian, was born in Dublin in about 1640, and made his first stage appearance in London in 1691 as Nincompoop in Thomas D’Urfey’s
Love for Money
. He became popular, and when Thomas Betterton opened the new theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1695 with William Congreve’s comedy
Love for Love
, Doggett delighted the crowds playing Ben, a role the playwright had written for him.

While he continued a successful acting career, Doggett also became one of the managers of the Theatre Royal Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which is another London institution with a very long history. It’s where Nell Gwynn got her start selling oranges when the first theatre opened in 1663, before she began acting.

Doggett lived in Chelsea, and since the river was a principal way to get about London in those days, he was a frequent patron of the Thames watermen. There is a story, apparently apocryphal, that one day Doggett fell into the water and that a waterman rescued him from drowning.

In any case, he had a fondness for the watermen, and in 1715 he set up a contest in which watermen raced the four miles between the Swan Pub near London Bridge and the Swan Pub in Chelsea, rowing the four-seated wherries in which they regularly carried passengers. Watermen had been authorized by the crown since 1510, and were members of a company, which regulated the trade. They wore a uniform—a red coat with a silver badge, and the prize for Doggett’s race was such a cap and badge.

Doggett was
“a great Whig in politics”
and an ardent Hanoverian, and the race was held on August 1 to commemorate the date of George I’s accession to the English throne the previous year. The badge given to the winner featured the word “Liberty” and the horse representing the House of Hanover.

Incidentally, George I was the son of Sophie of Hanover, the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia and granddaughter of James I. He succeeded because Charles II had no legitimate heirs and was succeeded by his Catholic brother James II, who was ousted in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband and cousin William of Orange. When they had both died, Mary’s sister Anne came to the throne. Sophie would have succeeded her, but died only months before Anne did. Charles II had at one point wanted to marry his cousin Sophie. It’s too bad he didn’t as it would likely have averted the succession crisis, the Jacobite uprisings, and the destruction of Scotland. But I digress….

Doggett organized the race each year until 1721, the year that he died, and his will provided:

for procuring yearly on the first day of August forever…Five Pounds for a Badge of Silver weighing about Twelve Ounces and representing Liberty to be given to be rowed for by Six Young Watermen according to my Custom, Eighteen Shillings for Cloath for a Livery whereon the said Badge is to be put…all which I would have to be continued yearly forever in Commemoration of His Majesty King Georges happy Accession to the Brittish Throne.

The Fishmongers’ Company has set the regulations since 1769, and there have been some changes since Doggett’s day, when the race helped attract trade for the Watermen. The contestants originally battled against the outgoing tide, but since 1873 they have rowed with the incoming tide.

The original wherries, which took about two hours to row from London to Chelsea, were succeeded by various other craft. Now the race is held on a Friday in late July, and the contestants use contemporary single racing sculls and complete the course from London Bridge to Cadogan Pier in Chelsea in about thirty minutes. The record, set by Bobby Prentice in 1973, was 23 minutes and 22 seconds.

Originally, only professional watermen could compete, but since 1950 amateurs have been allowed to take part, though they do not accept monetary prizes. Claire Burran was the first woman to compete, in 1992. Modern contestants all receive a miniature of the silver badge, and the Fishmongers’ Company still hands out the prize money to the winners and the competing rowing clubs.

Sources and Further Reading

Ackroyd, Peter.
Thames: The Biography
. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

Parish Register. “Watermen and Lightermen.” Docklands Ancestors Ltd.
http://www.parishregister.com/watermen_and_lightermen.html
.

Weinreb, Ben, et al.
The London Encyclopaedia
. UK: MacMillan, 1983.

The Original Jack the Lad: Jack Sheppard, 1702-1724

by Mike Rendell

H
ad you been around in London on 16 November 1724, there is a one in four chance that you would have bee
n in the procession (some two hundred thousand strong) wending its way in a carnival atmosphere towards Tyburn Hill where the empty gallows were being prepared for a hanging. One in four, because the crowd represented at least a quarter of the capital’s population at the time, and they were all there to “honour” one man: the diminutive Jack Sheppard.

Daniel Defoe is presumed to have been hard at work scribbling the final touches to a biography which was on sale “hot from the press” by the time of the execution. And the twenty-two-year-old Jack, his cart escorted by uniformed guards, paused long enough at the City of Oxford Tavern in Oxford Street to sink a pint of sack (sherry), no doubt bemoaning the fact that one of his prison guards had discovered a pen-knife secreted about his person and thereby scotched his chance of escape. And escaping was what Jack was good at, and why the crowds had turned out in their thousands.

There is a series of three scenes engraved by George Cruikshank in 1839, over a hundred years after Sheppard died, to illustrate the serialised novel
Jack Sheppard
, by William Harrison Ainsworth. For there was no doubt that the baby-faced Jack Sheppard was a thief and was getting his just rewards from a legal system designed to protect the wealthy. But over and over again, he had thwarted justice with his daring escapes, and no doubt the throng wanted to see if he could pull off the final escape, the big one, from Death itself. There was to be no such luck, and the lad finally went to meet his Maker that day nearly three centuries ago.

Sheppard had been born in 1702 into abject poverty in the deprived area of Spitalfields. His father died when he was young and his mother had little choice but to send him to the workhouse when he was six years old. Jack was lucky—eventually he was placed with a draper on The Strand called William Kneebone as a shop-boy. Kneebone took the lad under his wing, taught him the rudiments of reading and writing, and encouraged him to become apprenticed as a carpenter (a seven year indenture, which was signed in 1717 when Jack was fifteen). His master was Owen Wood whose premises were in Covent Garden.

All went well for five years—Jack was an exemplary pupil who showed every aptitude for carpentry and hard work. Then, well, he went off the rails.

Maybe it was too many visits to The Black Lion off Drury Lane; maybe it was the blandishments of the young whore, Elizabeth Lyon (otherwise known as Edgeworth Bess), whom he met there; or maybe it was the company he fell into while frequenting the establishment, and in particular the notorious Joseph “Blueskin” Blake or the duplicitous Jonathan Wild (who styled himself the Thief-Taker General, though in reality he was a thief himself, but one who turned in his acquaintances whenever it was opportune to do so).

Whatever the reason, the fact was young master Jack turned himself to a life of petty crime, and soon there was no way back. For a while it was pilfering, helping himself to odds and ends from people’s houses while on carpentry errands. But by 1723 he had jacked in his apprenticeship and set up home with Mistress Bess.

Naturally she wanted to be spoiled rotten; naturally she was not content with the proceeds of minor shop lifting; she wanted Jack to show her the good life. He turned to burglary (an offence which carried the death penalty). Mistress Bess was arrested after they moved to Piccadilly from Fulham; Jack broke in to the jail and rescued her!

Jack and his brother Tom, aided by Bess, embarked on a series of robberies until Tom got caught. The previous year he had also been apprehended (and suffered the painful penalty of being branded on the hand). This time he shopped his brother Jack to save his own skin, and a warrant for Jack’s arrest was issued.

Knowing this, and anxious to get his hands on the forty pounds offered as a bounty, Jonathan Wild betrayed Jack to the constables, and he was arrested and locked up in the very prison from which he had rescued Elizabeth. Within hours of his incarceration he had cut a hole in the ceiling (leg irons notwithstanding), climbed onto the roof, and dropped down to join a crowd who had gathered when news of his escape became known. Diverting attention by announcing that he could
“see someone on the roof over there”,
he calmly shuffled off in the opposite direction….

In May 1724, Jack was arrested for a second time—caught while in the act of lifting a pocket-watch from a gentleman in what is now Leicester Square, and was taken off to Clerkenwell prison, where he was locked up with his mistress. A few days passed while Jack, active with a file, cut through the manacles which chained them both and then removed one of the iron bars on the prison window. He lowered himself and his buxom Bess down to the street on a knotted bed-sheet (no mean feat given his lack of stature) and off they went into the darkness.

Things escalated—they tried their hand at highway robbery and burglary, stooping so low as to break into the home of his old employer and helper, William Kneebone, but the greedy Jonathan Wild was closing the trap. He found Elizabeth Lyon, plied her with alcohol to loosen her tongue, and by this means established where Jack was staying.

Again he was arrested, again he was sent to prison—this time to the notorious Newgate, and guess what, he escaped from there as well!

On 30 August a warrant for his death was being brought to the prison from Windsor—but by the time it arrived it was discovered that Jack had escaped. Aided and abetted by Bess, he had removed one of the window bars, dressed in female clothing brought into the prison by his accomplice, and made good his escape via boat up the river to Westminster.

By now he was renowned for his escapades. He was every Cockney’s hero, Jack the Lad, whom no bars could hold. After all, he hadn’t killed anyone, he was the ultimate cheeky chappy who always got away from the law in the nick of time. Added to that, he was good looking in a baby-faced sort of way, young, strong, and very agile. This was the stuff of which legends would be made….