The Last Days of Richard III and the Fate of His DNA (26 page)

At that time, Alice's brother, Arthur Edward Vansittart Strettell
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was living in rooms facing the British Museum, though he would later leave England for the United States
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Alice stayed in a boarding house near Arthur's lodgings, and soon after her arrival in London she met her future husband. This was in 1873 and ‘I had but lately arrived from Italy'. Joseph William Comyns Carr was then aged 24, and of Irish extraction, though at that time he had never yet visited his homeland. Henry Irving, would later describe Joe as ‘the wittiest man in England'.
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Joseph and Alice were married in December 1873, in Dresden, where Alice's father had taken a temporary chaplaincy. The civil ceremony took place in the hotel and, in Alice's words, they were then ‘finished off' by her father in the local English Church. The young couple settled in Bloomsbury. They ‘were at the center of what they termed the “Bohemian World” (vis-à-vis the “Social World”) which had begun to gravitate to London's Bloomsbury District'.
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Alice later remembered:

the beautiful Adams room where Burne-Jones had once painted and that Whistler had not long left. [Here] a light rap fell on the door and a voice loved by us all called out: ‘Anybody at home?' as the radiant face of Ellen Terry peeped merrily in upon us.
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Alice was to be very close to Ellen for the rest of her life. As Ellen later recalled, Alice designed her stage costumes for many years:

As Katherine [of Aragon, in Shakespeare's Henry VIII] she wanted me to wear steely silver and bronzy gold, but all the brocades had such insignificant designs. … At last Mrs Carr found a black satin which on the right side was timorously and feebly patterned with a meandering rose and thistle. On the wrong side it was a sheet of silver – just the right steely silver because it was the wrong side! Mrs Carr then started on another quest for gold that should be as right as that silver. She found it at last in some gold-lace antimaccassars at Whiteley's! From these base materials she and Mrs Nettleship constructed a magnificent queenly dress. Its only fault was that it was heavy.
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Alice also designed the very famous costume, sewn all over with the irridescent wing cases of beetles, which Ellen wore in the role of Lady MacBeth: a dress which figures in the well-known portrait of Ellen by John Singer Sargent.
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John Singer Sargent was also a friend of Alice and Joe, and has left us both a pencil sketch and a painting of Alice, together with portraits of her sister and of one of her nieces. In fact Joseph and Alice had many friends among the artists then resident in London, and in the world of the London theatre. These included Sir Authur Sullivan, Oscar Wilde, and the artists Edward Burne-Jones, and Laurence Alma Tadema. The couple also had a number of American friends, with the result that several members of their family eventually visited the United States. In the 1870s they met the wealthy General William Jackson Palmer, founder of Colorado Springs, and his family. Subsequently Alice's brother, Arthur Strettell, her daughter, Dolly, and sister and brother-in-law, Alma and ‘Peter' Harrison all stayed at Glen Eyrie as guests of the Palmers. The Comyns Carrs also frequently stayed at Ightham Mote, a medieval manor house with Ricardian connections, ‘which our American friends, General and Mrs. Palmer had made their English home'.
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Alice's younger sister, Alma Gertrude Vansittart Strettell was born in Italy. She grew up with linguistic and literary interests and later published several books:
Spanish and Italian Folk Songs
, London 1887;
Legends from River and Mountain
, co-written with Carmen Sylva, London 1896, and
The Bard of Dimbovitsa
, translated by Alma, and Carmen Sylva, London 1914. ‘Carmen Sylva' was the
nom de plume
of Alma's friend, Elisabeth von Wied, the then Queen of Romania.
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Alma collected Balkan folk music, and had many artistic friends including the painter John Singer Sargent (who painted two portraits of Alma) and the composer Elgar. Her eventual husband, ‘Peter' Harrison, was also a painter, though a minor one.

Alma was younger than Alice, who described her as being of a light and merry disposition. Having Alice as her older sister undoubtedly helped to bring Alma out. Alice and her husband went on a visit to Paris, where Alice recalled ‘cheerful meals in the humblest of restaurants … my sister, Mrs. Harrison – then Alma Strettell – was bidden as being of our party'.
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In the 1880s, while she was still unmarried, Alma paid her first visit to the United States, where she stayed at Glen Eyrie, the Colorado Springs ‘castle' of General and Mrs Palmer. Alma married Laurence Alexander (‘Peter') Harrison at King's Langley on 18 December 1890. The marriage was solemnised by Alma's father, the vicar of King's Langley. ‘Peter' Harrison, a tall, slim man, was a portrait painter and landscape artist, though he described himself on the marriage certificate simply as ‘gentleman'. In fact Peter rarely exhibited paintings, though he was a member of the ‘Chelsea set' and joined the
New English Art Club
in 1904. Although Peter had mistresses, and the couple were sometimes apart (as in May 1903, when he visited General Palmer at Colorado Springs, where he painted several extant studies),
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in general the marriage seems to have been a success.

Alma died at Chelsea in 1939, leaving to her three children not only money but also pearl and diamond necklaces and tiaras, and further treasures, including an impressive collection of paintings by Sargent and others. Her property included a diamond ring which she had inherited from her mother, Laura, and a silver sugar sifter which had been a present to her from John Singer Sargent. The water-colour sketch of herself by Sargent, she left to her younger daughter, Sylvia, and her Sargent portrait in oils, to her son, Nicholas. Nicholas also received a landscape painting of Colorado by his father. Alma is still well known in certain literary circles, and has a website devoted to her on the internet. She left one son and two daughters. Her younger daughter, Sylvia, died unmarried. Through her elder daughter, Margaret, Alma does have living descendants – but they do not carry her mtDNA.

Like her cousin, Dolly Comyns Carr, Margaret (also known to her family as Meg or Margot) had an interest in music, which she studied under Percy Grainger (1882–1961, Australian-born pianist and composer). In about 1913 Margaret Harrison became engaged to Percy. However, her parents reportedly broke off this engagement (possibly because they were aware of Grainger's taste for flagellation), and they sent Margaret to America to get her away. There, on 7 March 1916, Margaret married a fellow Christian Scientist, Ames Nowell (b. 30 December 1892 in Newton, Mass). They had one son: Lawrence Ames Nowell. Later Margaret had a second son, Leonard Nowell, but his real father was Percy Grainger. In 1933 Margaret and Ames Nowell divorced, and in 1934 Margaret married her second husband, in London. He was Francis W. (‘John') Bacon-Armstrong, but they had no children. After the Second World War they emigrated to South Africa where John died in about 1952. Margaret then moved to Colorado to be near her son. She was married a third time, to Arthur Porter, in about 1956. She died in Carmel, CA in 1979. Margaret inherited her Christian Scientist religion from her mother, Alma.

Alice and Joe Comyns Carr had three children: Philip Alfred Vansittart Comyns Carr, Arthur Strettell Comyns Carr, and Dorothy Comyns Carr (known as ‘Dolly'). Naturally, all of Alice's children inherited her mitochondrial DNA; the DNA of Richard III and his siblings; but only her daughter Dolly had the possibility of passing this on to future generations. Given the background in which she was brought up, ‘it is not surprising that Dolly Carr had artistic ambitions'.
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By the time she visited Glen Eyrie in 1902–03, she had exhibited in several galleries in London and had sold a few of her paintings. Dolly was urbane and well-educated. She had traveled on the Continent and spoke French. … she had a generous heart and was a charming companion and delightful guest during her extended stay at the stately Palmer residence' in Colorado Springs.
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Dolly's impressions of America in the first years of the twentieth century are fascinating. She noticed of course that everything, including the country itself, seemed very big. ‘At the turn of the century, New York was already the second largest city in the world, with a largely immigrant population of over 3,000,000.' Dolly pronounced the Brooklyn Bridge ‘enormous', and declared the Hudson ‘the biggest thing in rivers I have seen'. After leaving New York she found herself travelling westwards across the prairie. Dolly very much enjoyed General Palmer's hospitality at Glen Eyrie. She continued to paint while she was there, joined later by her artist uncle, ‘Peter' Harrison.

Sadly, Dolly's artistic ambitions were not ultimately to be crowned with success. After returning to England, Dolly Carr continued to pursue her vocation as a painter (oils and watercolors) of flowers and landscapes. Her work was exhibited occasionally in London, but, despite some modest success, she did not achieve prominence as a professional artist. She remained unmarried and without children. On 10 May 1918, only a few days before her 40th birthday, she committed suicide near her home in Bedford. The coroner's report reads: ‘Drowned herself in a certain pond whilst temporarily insane.'
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This must have been an enormous shock and a great tragedy for Dolly's family. Her father was already dead, but her mother was then still living. However, Alice makes no reference whatsoever to her daughter's suicide in her later published writings about her family. Alice herself died in 1927, a year before her old friend, Dame Ellen Terry.
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Unfortunately, neither she not her sister Alma seemed destined to pass on Richard III's mtDNA into the twenty-first century. The family line which was destined to preserve that mtDNA into the second millennium was that of Laura Vansittart Neale (Strettell)'s elder sister, Charlotte, and the descendant who made that mtDNA available for research was Charlotte Vansittart Neale's great granddaughter, Joy Brown (Ibsen).

Joy Ibsen was born in London, England, on 25 May 1926, the third child (and only daughter) of Muriel Charlotte Folliott Stokes and her husband, Orlando Moray Brown. The couple had married just after the end of the Great War:

By 1919, when my parents met, there were not many young men left in England and I suspect that my parents' marriage that year was a hasty grasping at happiness after the horrors of 1914–18. At any rate, it was not a success. He was thirty-nine, she was thirty-five, and anxious to have children. … [My father] was to spend the next twenty years working as a mining engineer in Chile and Bolivia, living in fairly primitive places which seemed to suit him. His wife would join him briefly before returning to England for the birth of her children. After I was born she never returned. But he continued to live abroad for most of his life.
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Joy's two older brothers were Kenneth Patrick Brown (born 29 March 1920) and Patrick Hugh Brown (born 19 March 1924). Both of them shared with Joy and their mother the mitochondrial DNA of Anne of York and her family, but of course, being male, they could not pass it on.

Joy's birth was registered under the name Muriel Joyce Brown, but she preferred to reverse the order of her names, and to shorten ‘Joyce' to ‘Joy'. One of her godmothers was her grandmother's first cousin, Alma Strettell (Mrs Harrison). ‘I have no memory of her but I recall my mother talking about “Aunt Alma”. I think there is a slight resemblance between the two'.
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Joy and her brothers were brought up by their mother in Sussex and Shropshire, where her eldest brother, Ken, attended Shrewsbury School. Ken also recalls staying with his godfather, Arthur Comyns Carr,
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in London in 1936 or 1937.

Although her father was absent, Joy recalls that ‘my grandfather, Allen Gardiner Folliott Stokes … was very dear to me as a child.'
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Stokes, who died in 1939,
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was the author of a number of books,
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and a great lover of Cornwall, which he knew intimately. ‘He was a friend of the writer C. Ranger-Gull who dedicated his novel
Portalone
(1904) to him [saying]: “it was owing to him that I made knowledge of the wildest and most untrodden parts of Cornwall”.'
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Joy's mother, Muriel, suffered from asthma and rheumatoid arthritis and in 1937 the family moved to Nassau, Bahamas, and in 1945 to Canada, where Joy attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating with a BA in English and history:

My eldest brother embarked on a long career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal, London (England) and Ottowa. My other brother, Patrick, has had a varied career and lives in retirement in British Columbia. I wanted a career in journalism but at that time women were not welcome in daily newspaper newsrooms. Having mastered typing and shorthand I got my foot in the door of a western Canadian newspaper as secretary to the editor, a crusty ex-alcoholic (and crackerjack newspaperman). That newsroom was a great place for a young, aspiring writer. Some very good journalists worked there (I was to marry one of them later) as well as some odd characters! The pressure of daily deadlines was exciting, especially when I graduated to writing features or reviews. I learned a lot here. After one and a half years I moved on to an eastern paper as a reporter in the Women's Department, leaving that job for a two-year stint as Women's Editor at a small daily.
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Joy and Norm Ibsen were married in May 1956. ‘We ended up in London, Ontario, where we still live. Norm has had a thirty-eight-year career at the London Free Press and is now retired. After producing three children I became a freelance writer, contributing articles to magazines and newspapers, and reviewing books'.
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As for Joy's mother, Muriel Charlotte Folliot Brown lived in a number of places including London, Ontario. She died in London, Ontario, on 25 May 1961 at the age of 77. Her husband died in 1965.