The great mistress of yon princely shrine

I am not overjoyed to discover that the latest version of Firefox and Blogger do not seem to get on: I have swapped templates, but none of them make post-titles visible except when you click through to the individual post rather than the blog as a whole; settings to alter type-colours are all defunct. All seems to be well for Internet Explorer, though.

Anyway, on my way to give a talk at the Merchant Taylors’ School this last week, I got lucky and coincided at Hatfield Church with a local historical society, who had one of the churchwardens opening up what would otherwise have been a locked building.

The church features in Simon Jenkins’ indispensable guide to the thousand best churches for its array of family monuments: largely from the Newdigate family, but at the right of the altar is this flamboyant tomb of Milton’s ‘rural queen’, Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby.

This lady’s long, and socially eminent life (1559-1637) had so many literary connections that you could shape an M.A. course or a doctorate about her. Her first husband was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, patron of Nashe and of the Lord Strange’s Men: there’s your Shakespeare connection. Through her second husband, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and her middle and youngest daughters, Frances Egerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1583–1636) and Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (bap. 1587, d. 1633), there were links to John Donne.

But her strongest connections were of course with Milton: she was the focus of compliment in ‘Arcades’ (‘kiss her sacred vesture’s hem’, the masquers are enjoined), and her second daughter, Frances, as Countess of Bridgewater, presided in 1634 over the first performance of ‘Comus’, watching three of her children in the main roles.

But ‘Comus’ brings us to the thought of Anne, the eldest daughter (1580–1647). The tomb of her mother mentions that Anne first married the splendidly named Grey Bridges, Earl of Chandos, and so was Anne Bridges, Lady Chandos, but after his death in 1621 she then in 1624 she made what the ODNB tends to understate as “a disastrous marriage” with Mervin Touchet, second Earl of Castlehaven (1593–1631).

We all know why the tomb does not advertise this second marriage: from the very start of the marriage Lord Castlehaven set about her sexual corruption, and then that of her daughter by her first marriage, the thirteen year old Elizabeth (1614/15–1679), who was married to Castlehaven’s son James in 1628. Castlehaven’s insane hostility to his own heir saw him contrive to have Elizabeth debauched by his servants, so that his son’s heir might be fathered by another man (and so be ‘the spurious seed of a varlet’).

(

(Anne, Frances and Elizabeth, left to right, beneath their mother's bier)

Louis A. Knafla sums up Alice Spencer’s life rather mildly as that of “an independent woman who dedicated her life to bringing up her children and grandchildren, often in tragic circumstances, the countess pursued the cultural life with zest, striving to attain the highest standards of an Elizabethan woman in an age of declining moral values.” On the other hand, writing the ODNB life of Egerton, J. H. Baker writes that his marriage to “the beautiful and wealthy dowager countess of Derby must have seemed a good match …However, she was haughty, profligate, greedy, and ill-tempered, and added greatly to her husband's burdens for the last seventeen years of his life. ‘I thank God I never desired long life’, wrote Egerton in 1610, ‘nor ever had less cause to desire it than since this, my last marriage, for before I was never acquainted with such tempests and storms.’ ”

Leaving aside this disagreement about the Countess’s personality and spending habits, in Hatfield Church, you look at the (yes, rather lavish) final resting place of a very cultured woman whose daughter and grand-daughter were subjected to appalling sexual abuse. I wondered what could be read in the monument, if anything.

The first obvious thing is that Alice is alone. Of her unhappy second marriage there is a mention on a back wall, possible added later by one of the locally swarming Newdigates, for it emphasises Egerton’s connection to that family. But she had long survived him, and there is no side-by-side fiction of their union. In ‘Arcades’, she is more or less represented as a still-surviving version of Queen Elizabeth (‘Mark what radiant state she spreads, / In circle round her shining throne’), and her image here takes the 75 year old female aristocrat back to her prime. I think that her costuming is also ‘historical’: that farthingale cart wheel is very 16^th century. Her hair is worn undressed, copious in length and waves (Milton would have approved). I understand this as the style allowed to the unmarried woman, to the virgin. Queen Elizabeth apparently would appear with her hair down, even in her later years, as an intermittent reminder of her very special status. On the side of the tomb, Elizabeth, Frances, and, poignantly perhaps only to our eyes, Anne, share their mother’s style, each in their arched alcove with streaming hair.

None of this explains the real mystery about the monument: that the baldachin, with its splendid tied-back drapery, looks to have been designed as a canopy for a kneeling effigy. But the Countess lies at full length, her feet projecting out towards the altar, with the arcaded catafalque beneath. I could not see any evidence of two parties to the design having failed to communicate: it rather seems just to have been a design compromise prompted by the proximity of the altar.

The unresolved problem with the design imparts a kind of tension to the structure as a whole, a grand design not quite achieved, the medieval colliding with the baroque. The main source of tension, though, is that regular feature of these composite monuments: the presence of lots of stone that is just that, stone, used architecturally, and stone which has been carved to represent soft and yielding things: skin, hair, cushions, drapery, clothes, ermine. The yielding, represented by the (or as) unyielding. The elderly woman, and her married daughters, either those dynastically triumphant or blighted by a man’s corruption, all as virgins. A devout prone posture which lingers on in a design which really invites the Countess to raise herself at least part way up. The catafalque, with its black drapes and canopy, is like a state bed, with the Countess’s feet jutting towards the altar. I know I am over-reading this, but mutely, it looks as though the lower body seeks its blessing.

The guide does not specify when the monument was so exuberantly re-painted and gilded.

Kannus and quobdas: with the Lapland witches

‘Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd
In secret, riding through the Air she comes
Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon
Eclipses at thir charms…’

‘Then to work,

To work, my pretty Laplands: pinch, here scratch,

Do that within, without we’ll keep the watch…’

From high literature, and from a popular theatre entertainment, two examples of the many references to ‘Lapland witches’ in early modern English literature. These are from Paradise Lost, and The Late Lancashire Witches. I have finally got round to looking at the 1658 translation of Olaus Magnus, and the later, and far more sober account in Johannes Scheffer’s The History of Lapland in its 1674 translation, so as to see what those Lapland ‘witches’ were up to.

My two images, as Scheffer expounds, are actually of the same basic scene. In the 1555 woodcut (the whole splendid array of cuts in the original edition are web-posted here

http://www.avrosys.nu/prints/prints26-olausmagnus.htm )

the shaman (‘magician’, or ‘witch’) lies on his back on the floor. Behind him, a metalworker’s hammer and anvil can be discerned. It has a serpent wrapped round it, or just struck by the hammer, against it is what is meant to be a frog. A woman who is probably meant to be the shaman’s wife presides: Schaffer explains that once a magician has gone into his trance, those accompanying him will not let even a fly or gnat land upon him. The shaman can be understood to be travelling in spirit to another country, and his trance will go on correspondingly longer, according to the distance from which news is sought. He will bring back some small items that validate his having genuinely been elsewhere.

When we turn to the excellent images in Scheffer (and the images in the book are to a very high standard), we have the same kind of séance represented, but in a way a modern anthropologist would applaud. Scheffer was sent from Sweden to report on the Laps, and not come back with any hearsay and old tales. The shaman or witch is shown on the right beating his divinatory ‘kannus’ or ‘drum’ (Olaus Magnus termed it an anvil) with a little hammer of reindeer horn. The rune drum was not played for music, but tapped to set into motion a ‘quobdas’ or ‘arpa’, an ‘index’ – it is translated. This is a ring or other shape of copper or other metal, which moves by the vibrations from one of a selection of starting points on the drum head. For instance, a reading for the success of a hunt would set off with the index placed over the sun symbol. The course it takes (in directions which are themselves significant) leads to it passing over the many images painted in alder bark dye (or blood) on the skin. It is the same principle as the planchette or ouija board. A rightwards vibratory rotation of the ring was a good omen, while from the overall movement of the index, the shaman might deduce which direction game may best be found on a hunt, and from the symbols it crosses as it moves, discover the outcomes of illnesses, and the most acceptable sacrifice to the god who is causing a difficulty. From these observations, action can be taken to promote a cure or some other remedy. Schaffer gives several examples of the symbolic designs: a lateral division will separate off the gods (Thor, Storjanker and their attendants) from the world, with maybe a lesser rank for the Christian God and his son. Other aerial things occupy this celestial upper portion, below are terrestrial things: symbols of different nations, geographical features, various animals, always with a lot of reindeer.

At some point, the shaman, assisted by those chanting around him, entered a trance state. No hallucinogens are mentioned in the text. He then arranged himself face down, with his drum drawn up near his head, while assistants kept up their chant, and looked after his physical body. The early woodcut gets the posture for trance wrong, and literalised the variety of animal names which were apparently given to the moving quobdas: serpent, frog, toad, etc, for it was symbolic of one of a set of animals thought auspicious for divination.

The divinatory instrument and its ancillary equipment was very carefully made and looked after. For the hollowed wood, the root stem of a tree with a right to left spiral up its bark was chosen. The finished item was, when not in use, kept wrapped up in the skin of a loon, and was never to be approached or touched by (particularly) any unmarried woman. To let such a thing happen risked the operator’s health. It would even be carried along paths such women were meant never to take, unless they appeased the rune drum with a gift. Scheffer is frustrated that he has not been able to discover the particular designs and ceremonies for malignant magic: “Impairing mens health, or depriving them of their lives; which is frequently enough practised among them, tho not so publicly as heretofore”. He says that contemporary shamans now considered this the only unlawful use of their magical method; no-one will disclose to him how they operated to hurt or kill.

Scheffer was reporting on a very old, and dying tradition: “In these latter times they do not so frequently practise this, and dare not profess it so publicly as before, being severely prohibited by the King of Sweden”. We can see how witch stereotypes were imposed on the Sami practices: Schaffer says spirit familiars were bequeathed to children, the earlier woodcut is decorated with zoomorphs out of depictions of pacted witches.

Scheffer reports of Lapland that “Diverse of the Inhabitants are almost naturally Magicians”, but like J K Rowling’s ‘squibs’, not all could practise with any success: “The Laplanders do not all agree in the same disposition, so neither do they arrive to the same perfection in this art. For some are so stupid and dull, that howsoever they may seem qualified for other employments, they prove altogether unfit for this.”

“Here it is indeed, where, rather than in America, we have a new World discovered”, says the preface to the 1674 translation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_religion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noaidi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_drum

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sami_drums

Exorcisms and conjuring tricks: Lancashire, c.1650

Seventeenth century Lancashire seems to have been regarded as a reliable source of supernatural follies. Ben Jonson has Satan tell the naïve devil Pug (in The Devil is an Ass) that he might cope adequately with being the diabolic familiar of some Lancashire witch, but street-wise London is out of the question.

I have been looking at Zachary Taylor’s The devil turn'd casuist, or, The cheats of Rome laid open (1696), obviously a late 17^th century text, but it contains an anecdote dated back by the author to the mid-century. It concerns that time-honoured device for high-pressure proselytizing, an exorcism. The Catholic priest conducting the exorcism wanted to put on a good show, and seems to have been willing to help things along a little: it came down to a conjuring trick, with misdirection of the audience, and an accomplice.

Who bungled it:

“Between 30 and 40 years ago I am told there was another Exorcism as this, in the same place, for it is a Nest of Papists. And when the Devil was to go out, he said he would have a living soul with him, which frighted the poor People sadly, and made them Sweat and Sigh, not knowing whom he would have. But the Priest manfully withstood him, and would not suffer him to touch any Soul there. This was a little comfort to them. Then the Devil would have some other living Creature, a Cock or Hen, &. But the Priest thought that too good a Morsel for the Devil, and would not allow it him. In short the Priest would allow him nothing but three broken pieces of a Tobaco-pipe, which he laid upon a Trencher on the Table, and when he went, he was to take them, as a sign of his Departure. When the minute was at hand, the Priest makes a bustle, and cries out now He comes, He comes, He comes, &c. and by this means (which is right Leger-de-main) calls the People’s eyes from off the Trencher to the Demoniack, and an hand came behind over the Table, and catch’d at the pieces of the Pipe, but unluckily got but two, the third slipping off the Trencher, which a Protestant took up. And when the Priest told them that they might know by what they saw that the Devil was gone out. Yes saith the Protestant perhaps he is, but he is better than his word, for he hath left one piece of his pipe behind him, and here it is. This I had from a neighbouring Clergy-man, who is rector of the Parish where the person lived that took up the Pipe, and who had it from his own Mouth.”

The set-up here was to have the fragments of pipe stem seem to have disappeared as evidence of the departure of the exorcised devil. There’s a parallel in the exorcisms reported from 1696. The demoniac is named as Thomas Ashton, a weaver from the parish of Wigan. In his case, the signal of the devil’s departure was that one of the diamond-shaped panes of glass (a ‘quarrel’) in the window would vanish. But the exorcists realise that they have too much attention fixed on the window from the very people they want to convert, the local Protestants. Nor do they seem to have a notion of misdirecting attention at the crucial instant, so they abandon the plan:

“All the People, especially the Protestants cast their eyes upon the Window, and the Quarrel out of which he was to go, and take it with him. But whether the peoples eyes being fixt upon the Quarrel might make them apprehensive, that they would discover the Trick by discerning how the quarrel was conveyed away (for the priests Elbows were often very near it: but whether it was this or something else I know not; but neither the Devil nor the quarrel went.”

This particular exorcism did not run smoothly: the weaver Ashton had been primed with some Latin, but the attempted impressive execration of the devil in the learned tongue faltered when the priest himself forgot the Latin for a toad, and had to be prompted by a spectator, while another Protestant observer, getting drawn in, enthusiastically joined in with speaking to the devil in Latin: he wanted to see the devil’s tongue (actually blackened either by dye or thumb pressure, says Taylor), and cried out ‘Verte ad me’, ‘Turn towards me!’, which Ashton did not understand, and ignored.

The pamphlet runs together various follies of this kind. In this final story, a Mrs Ditchfield is the target for conversion, and the fake demoniac is a maid servant called Alice Pennington, a convert and a willing (if rather giggly and transparent) accomplice. A ‘good understanding Protestant’, William Smith, sets about demonstrating that what seems wonderful in the possessed maid is less remarkable when performed with equal aptitude by himself:

“in a little time they gained upon her (Mrs Ditchfield), and she began to tell Mr Smith of the virtue of the Holy-Water, and what strange effects it wrought on the Demoniack, of which she could desire that he might be a witness; and so to the Maid they went, and she sprinkled Holy-Water in her face, and the Maid spit at her, Oh (saith she) do not you see what a strange power is in the Holy-Water? Yes (saith Mr. Smith) and pray will you try it upon me; and with some persuasions she was prevail’d with to make the Experiment on him, and she flung Holy-Water on his face, and he spit in her face; and she flung again, and he spit again, what do you mean saith she; O what Strange power saith he, is there in this Holy-Water, but Dear Mrs, saith he, do you not plainly see that all this is only to delude and abuse you, I am heartily sorry for you; she made him no reply, for they had now prevail’d upon her.”

(Image from Histoires prodigieuses et memorables, 1598)

A duel on bicycles, 1897

So, there they all were, a 'large party' returning to Paris after a day out cycling, 'all very hilarious' (I think we can assume, better lubricated than their bicycles), 'when two of them quarrelled' (never get anything like that in my club, what, only two of them quarrelled?) 'They decided to settle the dispute with swords on their bicycles' (not a good idea, unless you really are a trick-cyclist). This in the Boulevard Ney.


The combatants lined up fifty yards apart and were then ordered to charge. The account, which might all be embroidery for an audience capable of believing anything about the French, fails to say where they suddenly got swords from - knocked on a few doors, maybe? 'They rode at one another at a furious pace, but overshot the mark and failed to meet. Wheeling quickly round, they returned to the charge, and this time came together with a terrific shock. Both were thrown, whilst the seconds, who were following behind, also on bicycles (it could have been llamas, after all) fell in their turn, and were both injured. Neither of the combatants touched each other with his sword, but in falling one ran his weapon into himself and his opponent injured his leg'.


Plus-four and Norfolk jacket louts, or what?


Illustrated Police News, December 11th 1897.

Senora Paxodol treats herself for injury, Madrid, 1897

Back with the Illustrated Police News (Dec 11th, 1897) and a rather less grim duel in prospect between 'the notorious mistress of Senor Donvaldez and the well known Spanish dancer, Carmen Paxodol'. The former threw a bunch of onions on stage during a performance by the latter. That's not really anything anyone could forgive and forget, and it led to more than tears.

I have included the write-up, as it is priceless, with its 'great laxity of morals is prevalent here' (says our panting correspondent in Madrid) - "duelling, bull-fighting and assassination are by no means uncommon" (sometimes all three at once) alongside this latently pornographic image ("interesting", as the paper puts it) of Senora Paxodol practising (she's the implausible tiny-footed hourglass on the right), which the newspaper claims to have based on a photograph.

Again, one has to suspect publicity-seeking, and that the duel itself (despite Senora Paxodol's stated eagerness to avoid the police) may never have taken place.

The Illustrated Police News is by this date a fruity source for those who might want to seek evidence of the secret lives of late Victorians: adverts for 'Rubber Specialities' ('the Capote Anglaise' is described in one small ad as 'the most wonderful appliance of the 19th Century for Married Ladies only', at a pricy five shillings and sixpence 'complete in box'), 'Spicy Books', imports of French and American 'specialities' for 'those about to marry', and bottled cures for (implicitly) venereal disease. No wonder the illustrations are so dubious.

"Frightful and deadly strife between these two Amazons"

Back with duelling women, and the Illustrated Police News for Saturday 15th March, 1873. This reports from the Figaro for the Thursday before, and provides an account of that rare thing, a fatal 'duel' between women ("the two women agreed to decide their dispute by means of a duel with knives"). I suppose it counts as a duel, rather than a knife-fight, if they actually did agree to meet at some future time rather than fighting spontaneously. The women are not named, but the conflict was over a man called Juglin. One was mortally wounded, the other seriously. Juglin was arrested: "in what way he has offended against the law has not yet been manifest", says the report, which cannot say if he was present, or in any way promoted the duel ("if so, he deserves heavy punishment").

The 'field of honour', such as it was, is specified, and is interesting: it was inside a house at 84, Boulevard de Courcelles. The British scandal-rag's image is thus far accurate, though the special frisson the hypothetical image seems to aim for is of mortal strife breaking out in a prosperous home, with a salon full of respectable folk dithering in horror. The artist has in part made the fight look spontaneous: an opened letter lies on the ground between the combatants. There may be a little more of the suggestion of a pre-arranged duel in the way the two women crouched behind the fighters both hold a bag - are they meant to be seconds, who have had care of the chosen weapons?

"The encounter was marked by an amount of savageness and ferocity rarely met with, and it is surprising that the spectators who were present at so singular and unnatural a conflict should have allowed it to proceed for so long a time", says the newspaper, with teeth-sucking disapproval neatly extended by the suggestion that this is precisely the sort of thing tolerated in France. 'Unnatural' perhaps betrays that the writer thinks duels between men to be allowable.

Other images of women fighting to the death in the same source do depict lower class combatants: they are not automatically promoted to being middle class fashion plates. The modes worn here look very unsuited to the purpose. It is generally fights between frenchwomen that the Illustrated Police News finds to report. There's a carry-over here from earlier wars: the women have acquired Franch revolutionary faces as they fight in clothing one might see in a painting by Tissot.

The Basilisk Eye of the Witch: John Bell, 1697.

I was reminded of John Bell’s ghastly little pamphlet Witch-craft proven, arreign'd, and condemn'd in its professors, professions and marks by diverse pungent, and convincing arguments, excerpted forth of the most authentick authors, divine and humane, ancient and modern. By a Lover of the truth (Glasgow, 1697) while reading P.G. Maxwell-Stuart’s Witch Hunters (2003). The modern scholar cites (p. 98) the case of Margaret Atkin in 1597, who was arrested on suspicion of being a witch, threatened with torture, and confessed. She then offered ‘to detect all of that sort, and to purge the Country of them, so that she might have her life granted’. She claimed that she could do this because ‘they had a secret mark, all of that sort, in their eyes, whereby she could surely tell, how soon she looked upon any whether they were witches or not’. To save herself, she set about judicially murdering other women, being taken from town to town to inform against the local suspects. In Glasgow, backed by a credulous minister, she had yet more innocent women executed, until she exposed her own imposture by declaring the same women guilty one day and (when they were presented to her again in different attire) innocent the next.

Maxwell-Stuart notes blemishes in the eye, or the rare condition of a double pupil as possible ‘marks’ that were notionally looked for: but anyone could see these. I think it’s possible that John Bell gives a full account of what the witch-finder alleged he or she could see.

Bell’s work shows him to have been a die-hard demonologist of the old school. He promises to give “some vive and shrewd Marks, and some unquestionable tokens … by what means, a Witch (in League, and Covenant with the Devil) may be discerned to be so”.

The first is the witch’s mark “the insensible or dead nip of a blea colour”; the second

“that such can by no means be drowned, tho' tyed hand & foot together, & thrown into a River … having renounced Baptism”. Then, inevitably, Sprenger and Kramer’s sadistic allegation is the third: “They cannot weep, not even torture can draw “from them the least tear, though to that end they often distort, throw, and wring their faces, making as tho' they were weeping”.

But it is Bell’s fourth mark which is of interest here:

“The Fourth Mark is, the Basilisk, or Serpentine sight, wherewith they be endued to kill, poison, and destroy, what, and whensoever they please … which sight is in them above all other men and women in the world most remarkable, for while as in the Apple of the Eye there is to be seen in all and every one, the Image of a man … with the head up and the feet down; the quite contrary is to be seen in them, to wit, the feet up, and the head down; God as it were hereby making open show to the World, that He who keepeth His own as the Apple of the eye, taketh no such thought for y^e Slaves of Satan, but suffers the Devil whose Image they bear thus (by inversion) as an external Sign.”

To complete this dismal litany, the fifth mark is that they will not repeat the Lord’s prayer, ten commandments or the creed without “several minckings, eikings, or inversions”, burning salt ‘in the Pipe of a Kye’ [I think he means within the tube of a key] will cause them to urinate if they see the blue flames is the sixth mark, and lastly, that they smell with “a peculiar scent or smell, which is to be found in them, beside all other People in the World, and which neither flows from the nastiness of Clothes, Vermin, or the like, but a contradistinct smell from any such thing … the Devil being in full Possession of their Soul, must needs emit his own scent even that of the Pit.”

The investigator has to notice whether his or her reflection is inverted in the pupil of the true witch’s eye - this seems a suitably ‘secret’ mark to me. You could easily persuade yourself, if you had taken against the accused, that you had seen yourself upside-down. Not could you be cross-checked, as you were looking for this far more metaphysical mark than any blemish in the iris.

My images, though, come from Christina Hole’s work, Witchcraft in England, 1977, which was illustrated by no less than Mervyn Peake 'over twenty years ago', the fly leaf says, for the first edition - it was in 1945:

http://www.mervynpeake.org/bookswritten.html

Peake had just gone through great mental suffering after being on the scene at the liberation of Belsen. Yet his witches are just that, witches rather than victims, sinister figures as darkly imagined as anything in Jacob de Gheyn. Not that you would wish an imagination like Peake's to deny itself. I have looked along a long 'Cooliris' wall of Google images, but didn't see any from this book. he also did illustrations for a book by D K Haynes, Thou shalt not suffer a witch in 1949: it would be interesting to see the best of those.

The Newcastle Witch-pricker, 1649, and other enormities

I got round to looking at the original source for the much-cited account of the authorities in Newcastle-upon-Tyne hiring a Scottish witch-pricker in 1649/1650. It’s in Ralph Gardiner’s Englands grievance discovered, in relation to the coal-trade (1655). Everything makes more sense in the context. Gardiner was very, very angry at the way the town was being run. His cogent objections to the imported witch-pricker appear alongside two other examples of arbitrary, cruel, and illegal local regulations: he follows the witch-finder with an account of a woman being paraded round the streets with an enhanced and augmentedly cruel scold’s bridle on her head, and another shame punishment, this one for drunkards, who had to go through the streets dressed in a barrel.

These tyrannies are just incidental illustrations of how bad things have got: Gardiner’s main quarrel concerns how the coal trade was fixed by the town authorities. Boats arriving to pick up coal were compelled to discharge their ballast (prior to loading coal) at Newcastle itself, and pay a tax on that discharge of ballast at 8 pence a ton. To get to pay this local imposition, ships had to make their way seven or eight miles up the Tyne, a river full of shifting sandbars, bends, and the ballast stones which those who profited by their local tax allowed nevertheless to slip back into the river, where it helped sink yet more ships. Gardiner wants all this reformed by Cromwell, to whom the book is addressed. North Shields, right at the mouth of the Tyne, should become a market town, he says, and the trade be run from there, without all this loss of shipping and lives as people struggle to comply with the local profiteers. (Just how hazardous the whole area was is perhaps captured in his assertion that if purchases of coal were permitted in North Shields, fewer people would run the hazard of falling down snow-concealed mine shafts on their way to Newcastle - when the Tyne is frozen, he means, and not open to river traffic.)

Anyway, here’s the witch-pricker about his appalling trade:

“John Wheeler of London, upon his Oath said, that in or about the years 1649. & 1650. being at Newcastle, heard that the Magistrates had sent two of their Sergeants, namely Thomas Soevel, and Cuthbert Nicholson into Scotland to agree with a Scotch-man, who pretended knowledge to find out Witches by pricking them with pins, to come to Newcastle where he should try such who should be brought to him, and to have twenty shillings a piece for all he could condemn as Witches, and free passage thither and back again.

When the Sergeants had brought the said Witchfinder on horse-back to Town; the Magistrates sent their Bell-man through the Town, ringing his Bell, and crying, All people that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a Witch, they should be sent for and tried by the person appointed.

Thirty women were brought into the Town-hall, and stripped, and then openly had pins thrust into their bodies, and most of them was found guilty, near twenty seven of them by him and set aside.

The said reputed Witch-finder acquainted Lieutenant Colonel Hobson that he knew women, whether they were Witches or no by their looks, and when the said person was searching of a personable, and good-like woman, the said Colonel replied and said, ‘Surely this woman is none, and need not be tried’, but the Scotch-man said she was, for the Town said she was, and therefore he would try her; and presently in sight of all the people laid her body naked to the Waist, with her clothes over her head, by which fright and shame, all her blood contracted into one part of her body, and then he ran a pin into her Thigh, and then suddenly let her coats fall, and then demanded whether she had nothing of his in her body but did not bleed, but she being amazed replied little, then he put his hand up her coats, and pulled out the pin and set her aside as a guilty person, and child of the Devil, and fell to try others whom he made guilty.

Lieutenant Colonel Hobson perceiving the alteration of the foresaid woman, by her blood settling in her right parts, caused that woman to be brought again, and her clothes pulled up to her Thigh, and required the Scot to run the pin into the same place, and then it gushed out of blood, and the said Scot cleared her, and said she was not a child of the Devil.

So soon as he had done, and received his wages, he went into Northumberland to try women there, where he got of some three pound a piece. But Henry Ogle Esq a late Member of Parliament laid hold on him, and required Bond of him to answer the Sessions, but he got away for Scotland, and it was conceived if he had staid he would have made most of the women in the North Witches, for money.

The names of the prisoners that were to be executed, being kept in prison till the Assizes, and then condemned by the Jury being Burgesses were, Matthew Bulmer, Eliz. Anderson, Jane Hunter, Mary Pots, Alice Hume, Elianor Rogerson, Margaret Muffet, Margaret Maddison, Eliz. Brown, Margaret Brown, Jane Copeland, Ann Watson, Elianor Henderson, Elizabeth Dobson, and Katherine Coultor. These poor souls never confessed any thing, but pleaded innocence; And one of them by name Margaret Brown beseeched God that some remarkable sign might be seen at the time of their execution, to evidence their innocency, and as soon as ever she was turned off the Ladder, her blood gushed out upon the people to admiration of the beholders.

John Wheeler, Elianor Lumsdel, and Bartholomew Hodshon, proves the like.

The said Witch-finder was laid hold on in Scotland, cast into prison, indicted, arraigned and condemned for such like villainy exercised in Scotland. And upon the Gallows he confessed he had been the death of above two hundred and twenty women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings a piece, and beseeched forgiveness. And was executed.

The Judgement nor Execution is not in question, nor questioned, being ordinary; But only it being desired to know by what Law the Magistrates of Newcastle could send into another Nation for a mercenary person to try women for Witches, and a Bell-man to cry for them to be brought in, and twenty shillings a piece given him to condemn them?

Query, and by what Law men are hired to give evidence to take away peoples lives, and the convicted estates to come to the Jurors, being extraordinary?

The Lord Protector, commands all Judges, Justices and Witnesses to appear to execute Justice, and give evidence gratis.”

It looks as though the witch-pricker operated via shame and confusion. He exposes the woman’s upper body, apparently then surprises her and all onlookers by running his pin into her thigh, quickly letting her clothes fall so that no-one can tell whether he has actually done so or not. She does not know what has happened: she knows that she hasn’t been pricked, though it looks to everyone as though she had been. She is aggressively asked if she has the pin in her body without bleeding: she probably hasn’t felt anything, as nothing has happened, and she of course is not bleeding. In the simplest sleight-of-hand, the Scot then reaches up her skirts and produces the incriminating pin he has, of course kept in his hand. But here, prejudiced in her favour by her good looks, the Lieutenant-Colonel intervenes, and wants actually to see the operation performed. This time, of course, blood flows.

You will see that Gardiner doesn’t want to get side-tracked into a general argument about the justice of witchcraft charges: he evidently thinks these people were all innocent (he comes up with his own notion of why the good-looking woman failed to feel the pin and bleed) and rightly considers their persecutors to be driven by greed. Here he is on the woman forced round the town wearing the ‘branks’, and the drunkards similarly forced at rope’s end up and down the streets in the barrel:

“John Willis of Ipswich upon his Oath said, that he this Deponent was in Newcastle six months ago, and there he saw one Ann Biulestone drove through the streets by an Officer of the same Corporation, holding a rope in his hand, the other end fastened to an Engine called the Branks, which is like a Crown, it being of Iron, which was muzzled over the head and face, with a great gap or tongue of Iron forced into her mouth, which forced the blood out. And that is the punishment which the Magistrates do inflict upon chiding, and scolding women, and that he hath often seen the like done to others.

He this Deponent further affirms, that he hath seen men drove up and down the streets, with a great Tub or Barrel opened in the sides with a hole in one end, to put through their heads, and so cover their shoulders and bodies down to the small of their legs, and then close the same called the new fashioned Cloak, and so make them march to the view of all beholders; and this is their punishment for Drunkards, or the like.”

Gardiner observes: “These are such practices as are not granted by their Charter Law, and are repugnant to the known Laws of England.” There’s a revealing detail when he goes on to cite the relevant laws: he has a law passed to punish drunkards which he can cite, but though he was a great searcher through statute books, cannot cite a law that decreed the ducking of scolds:

“Drunkards are to pay a Fine of five shillings to the poor, to be paid within one week, or be set in the Stocks six hours, for the second offence, to be bound to the Good Behaviour, 1 K. James 9. 21. 7.

Scoulds are to be Duckt over head and ears into the water in a Ducking-stool.”

Gardiner concludes weightily:

“As Sir Walter Raleigh, being to give a Character of Henry the Eighth, prefaceth his Description with this Introduction, “If all the Pictures and Patterns of a merciless Prince were lost in the World, they might all again be painted to the life out of the Story of that King”. So having given the world an account of the most unchristian, illegal, oppressive practices of the Magistrates of Newcastle upon the people of this Nation … I may safely say of them as that Noble Knight did of that King, If all the Pictures and Patterns of a cruel and merciless people were utterly lost in the world, they might be all painted to the life out of this Narrative, setting out the illegal Oppressions, arbitrary Exactions, barbarous Murders practised and committed by the Magistrates of Newcastle, both on their Neighbours, and the free people of this Nation.”

My illustrations are from Gardiner’s book (two separate images combined into one).

How do we solve a problem like Maria? Duelling nuns, 1869

Back with The Illustrated Police News, August 14th, 1869, and one of their more incredible yarns, a tale of two nuns from a convent near Genoa, who 'carried their animosity to such an extent that naught could pacify them save a duel with pistols. The combatants exchanged shots, but no blood was shed'.

Well, I suppose it is possible: the women involved might not have had any real vocation, but might have been placed in their convent to save a dowry having to be paid, or after an early indiscretion. Anyone might get tetchy in such circumstances. And perhaps you could say that the absence of detail in the story is in a strange way authenticating, for what convent would let details slip of such a scandal?

Anyway, here they are, as envisaged by the busy artist of this scandalous rag. The pistols are, I suppose, disappointing - could they have not gone at it with something more befitting their calling?

At least no-one was hurt. I wonder what they had to do for penance? Endure one another, I suppose.

Women as duellists (1)

I have been away from this blog for a while because my spare time has been spent preparing for whatever contribution I could make to a 'History of Duelling' programme forthcoming (as far away as May 25th) on Radio 4. I re-read edicts, and made myself acquainted with James I and Francis Bacon on the matter, also re-read Sir Edward Herbert's autobiography.

But the producer was also interested in duels between women, and asked me to have a little look for examples. Now the internet reveals a regular set of repeatedly cited all-women duels: the one Ribera depicted in 1636, 'The Duel of Isabella de Carazzi and Diambra de Pottinella' (depicting a duel 80 or more years before), and the 'petticoat duel' of 1792, in Hyde Park, between Mrs Elphinstone and Mrs Braddock, make particular favourites, copied from blog to blog.

The Illustrated Police News, a Victorian tabloid, faithfully covered duels of all kinds: between men, animals, boys, but particularly they liked fighting women. The format of this paper was settled: the title page featured lurid illustrations of the chief stories among the issue's contents, then the three remaining sheets (at least in the early years of the publication, for it expanded later) contained some kind of reportage. The Daily Sport of its day, provenance of some of the stories seems sketchy at best.

The illustrations tend to depict most of their lady duellists as fashion plate stunners: as much embonpoint as sword point. A pornographic intent is not far away, with more than a touch of sadism apparent.

Anyway, here in this engraving Madame Astie de Valsayre is duelling with an American girl, Miss Shelby. They had disagreed about the relative merits of French and American doctors, with the American girl calling the Frenchwomen an idiot. As if to give European doctors (at least) a chance to prove their merit, they agreed to meet and fight it out.

It's apparent that Madame Valsayre was an avid publicity seeker. She had just been thwarted in one attempt to fight a duel against a Madame Pierre, then Miss Shelby came conveniently to hand. The site of the duel was significant: on the field of Waterloo. Unable, as I guess, to find an Englishwoman, Madame Valsayre settled for an Anglophone, and fought for the honour of France.

The engraver here has cleverly represented both the sensational possibility (at first glance, one duellist looks to have been run through) and the less alarming actuality: Miss Shelby was wounded in the arm. At this point, Madame Valsayre accepted her apology, and then subsequently "warmly eulogised the conduct of the fair American", "and holds her up to the admiration and emulation of her sex".

Illustrated Police News, Saturday 10th April, 1886.

Death rather than voluntary self-pollution: Joseph Hall on moral matters

Joseph Hall, 1574-1656, is one of those figures who really might feature more than he does in our sense of late 16^th and early to middle 17^th century literature and culture. Pioneer verse satirist, literary forerunner to Swift’s Gulliver in his Mundus Alter et Idem, writer of Theophrastan characters, and then antagonist of Milton over both the church and divorce, Hall perhaps lived too long, and wrote too much, while undertaking just too many kinds of writing.

I have been looking at his Cases of Conscience (1654), a reprint of his Resolvtions and decisions of divers practicall cases of conscience (1650). It is one of the scores, nearly hundreds of books of casuistry on EEBO, though one of the more readable: it concerns itself with practical examples throughout, rather having the occasional ‘example’ thrown into a long classification of kinds of conscience. Hall is, up to a point, a kind of mid 17^th century A. C. Grayling, trying to arrive at what one might best think about real issues. Of course, Hall was a bishop rather than a philosopher, and completely lacks Grayling’s refreshingly brusque skepticism, so his investigations of moral dilemmas tend to halt abruptly when he has can produce what he thinks is the relevant Bible text. Discussion simply ends there; it’s the word of God, you obey it.

The Cases of Conscience therefore tend to come out as a series of ‘No!’ and ‘No, of course you may not’ answers to dilemmas. Of course you may not commit suicide, of course you cannot divorce and remarry if your marriage has broken down, of course you may not procure an abortion. Hall’s more interesting scruples come as he pursues these easy outcomes into their more difficult possibilities. As suicide is so unthinkable, he does seem to suggest that anyone with a proper conscience ought perhaps to resist at the point of execution: “indeede it may as well be disputed, whether a man condemned to dye by the Axe, may quietly lay downe his head upon the Block; and not, but upon force, yeild to that fatall stroke”. On the other hand, Hall was also a regular worshipper of secular authority in that early modern way, so if you have been condemned to death, and have the chance to escape (and inconsistent as it may seem with Hall’s view of suicide), properly you ought to forgo any such chance:

“I cannot but conclude, that whatsoever nature suggests to a man, to work for his owne life or liberty, when it is forfeited to Justice, yet that it is meet and commendable in a true penitent, when he findes the doome of death or perpetuall durance justly passed upon him, humbly to submit to the sentence; and not entertaine the motions and meanes of a projected evasion: but meekly to stoop unto lawfull authority.”

Abortion is an unthinkable, with no circumstances of mortal danger to the pregnant woman allowing it: “And if you tell me that the life of the mother might thus be preserved, whereas otherwise both she and all the possibilities of further conceptions are utterly lost; I must answer you with that sure and universall rule of the Apostle, That wee may not doe evill that good may come thereon, Rom. 3. 8.” Couldn’t another casuist press the case that a failure to intervene that doomed the pregnant woman was equally an evil, a decision that enforced a death? But Hall is so fixed against abortion that he produces rather approvingly a startling example of the sentiments of Monty Python’s ‘Every sperm is sacred’ song maintained as an absolute principle: Michael Verrinus would rather have died, than masturbated – Hall approves, with the message that as this is a commendable (if rather extreme) reverence for life, then the rest of us ought to be far more reverent about the life of a foetus:

“Upon this ground we know that in a further degree of remotenesse, a voluntary selfe pollution hath ever beene held to have so much guilt in it, as that Angelus Politianus reports it as the high praise of Michael Verrinus, that he would rather dye, than yeild to it: how much more when there is a further progresse made towards the perfection of humane life?”

The thinking here is primitive embryology, that of the homunculus being in the sperm. Nor will Hall make any differentiation between what he calls ‘animated’ and ‘inanimate’ fetuses (we would say ‘viable’ and ‘non-viable’), as some casuists tried to do.

Hall had run into Milton before over the ‘Smectymnuus’ controversy, and here he lets fly at one of Milton’s divorce pamphlets. He can see it was well written (Hall names neither writer nor which title, I suppose it was The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) : he claims that he assumed that it was penned as a defence of an outrageous paradox, then slowly came to the horrified realization that Milton was actually in earnest:

“I have heard too much of, & once saw a licentious Pamphlet thrown abroad in these lawlesse times, in the defence and encouragement of Divorces (not to be sued out, that solemnity needed not, but) to be arbitrarily given by the disliking husband, to his displeasing and unquiet wife; upon this ground principally, that Marriage was instituted for the help and comfort of man; where therefore the match proves such, as that the wife doth but pull downe a side, and by her innate peevishnesse, and either sullen, or pettish and froward disposition brings rather discomfort to her husband, the end of Marriage being hereby frustrate, why should it not, saith he, be in the Husbands power (after some unprevailing means of reclamation attempted) to procure his own peace, by casting off this clog, and to provide for his own peace and contentment in a fitter Match?”

“Woe is me, To what a passe is the world come that a Christian pretending to Reformation, should dare to tender so loose a project to the publique? I must seriously profess when I first did cast my eye upon the front of the book, I supposed some great wit meant to try his skill in the maintenance of this so wild, and improbable a paradox; but ere I could have run over som of those too wel-penned pages, I found the Author was in earnest, and meant seriously to contribute this peece of good councel in way of Reformation to the wise and seasonable care of superiors; I cannot but blush for our age, wherein so bold a motion hath been amongst others, admitted to the light: what will all the Christian Churches through the world, to whose notice those lines shall come, think of our wofull degeneration in these deplored times, that so uncouth a designe should be set on foot amongst us?”

Hall’s opening to this particular discussion shows his typical limitation:

“Whether Marriage lawfully made may admit of any cause of divorce, save only for the violation of the marriage bed, by Fornication or Adulterie. Our Saviour hath so punctually decided the case in his Divine Sermon upon the mount, that I cannot but wonder at the boldnesse of any man, who calls himself a Christian, that dares raise a question after so full and clear a determination from the mouth of truth it self…”

The impression so far is of 17^th century English casuistry as a general laying down of the law, with what the Bible says balanced as nicely as possible with due reverence for the behaviour of secular authority. Just occasionally Hall might have made uncomfortable reading: he is pretty much firmly against colonialist ventures, though once again his Christianity becomes the weak point, the place where qualification enters. He basically feels that Christians have no right to plantation in any country with a native population (the Bermudas, “which were only peopled with Hogs and Deer, and such like bruite cattle”, would be suitable). Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, so Christians should not look to extend their rule, and to invade would be to disrupt local order and authority: “The barbarous people were lords of their owne; and have their Sagamores (he means ‘chiefs’); and orders, and formes of government under which they peaceably live, without the intermedling with other nations. Infidelity cannot forfeit their inheritance to others.”

Hall holds the line against colonisation as a morally justifiable crusade too: “Their Idolatries, and sins against nature are hainous and abhominable and such as for which God of old condemned the seven nations to an utter extirpation; But what Commission have wee for their punishment?” But in the end, the notion of propagating the gospel is too strong for him: “But an higher and more warrantable title, that we may have to deale with these barbarous Infidels, is, for the propagation of Christian Religion; and the promulgation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ amongst these miserable savages.” Even as Hall tries to expound a gentle winning over of the locals as part of this vague ‘dealing’, he slips into imagining ever stronger sanctions if they resist.

Joseph Hall was not a bad man, but his faith vitiated his morality. Christianity lowers the blade of its moral bulldozer, and everything is resolved. Hall wrote a couple of autobiographical pieces, one of which is OBSERVATIONS Of some Specialties of DIVINE PROVIDENCE In the Life of JOS. HALL, BISHOP of NORWICH, printed in The shaking of the olive-tree (1660). Here’s his ominous account of an early success with an effectual prayer against an ‘atheist’:

“Having then fixed my foot at Halsted, I found there a dangerous Opposite to the Success of my Ministry, a witty and bold Atheist, one Mr. Lilly, who by reason of his Travails, and Abilities of Discourse and Behaviour, had so deeply insinuated himself into my Patron, Sir Robert Drury, that there was small hopes (during his entireness) for me to work any good upon that Noble Patron of mine; who by the suggestion of this wicked Detractor was set off from me before he knew me; Hereupon (I confess) finding the obduredness and hopeless condition of that man, I bent my prayers against him, beseeching God daily, that he would be pleased to remove by some means or other, that apparent hindrance of my faithful Labours, who gave me an answer accordingly: For this malicious man going hastily up to London, to exasperate my Patron against me, was then and there swept away by the Pestilence, and never returned to do any farther Mischief; Now the coast was clear before me…"

It would have been interesting to ask Hall whether there was any case of conscience that raised moral difficulty about prayers against one of your fellow humans. If you believed prayer to be effectual, are there any circumstances in which you might pray for the removal, or destruction, of someone who is blocking your progress, and be moral in doing so? Not even at the end of his long life, and after all his labours as casuist, had Hall come to any second thoughts about this episode. Of course he wasn’t being self-seeking: he was saving Sir Robert Drury’s soul!

Two Horatian Odes

Two ‘Horatian Odes’ after Marvell, using his famous, but surprisingly little used metre. Both poems are elegiac, about General Sherman after his death in old age, and Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. This tends to remove the inner tremor of Marvell’s poem, drawn as it is between rejoicing and misgiving at the living and very active Cromwell’s fearsome potential.

The poem by Louise Guiney is, I think, superior. The Stoddard poem is too long, isn’t quite able to overcome its own snobbery, and veers into a deplorable racism. But then maybe Stoddard, uneasy with Abraham Lincoln’s untutored genius, has more of the Marvellian weighing up.

But the interesting thing is that these are two poems in the critical heritage of Marvell, Marvell as the republican who can, like Horace before him, recognise Augustan greatness and allow it scope. Guiney seems deliberately to re-work Marvell’s opening in hers – that pleasingly quirky ‘early-armoured citizen’ is the ‘forward youth’ who rises to the moment, taking the corselet off the wall, ready for the struggle ahead. Guiney liked Sherman’s refusal of high office, and in the stanza beginning ‘Would have nor seat nor bays, nor bring / The Caesar in him to be king’ she is also thinking about Cromwell. In the quatrain from line 17, ‘In whom the Commonwealth withstood / Again the Carolinian blood’, we hover between Sherman’s campaign through Carolina, and the English Civil War.

Marvell perhaps also supplies a model for a certain slipperiness. Sherman’s recourse to, or indeed, invention of total war as he marched his armies through the south turns into the grand, carefully bland praise of ‘To conquer like a friend’, which reminds me of Marvell’s Irish implausibly affirming Cromwell’s praises best.

Guiney subscribes to the Roman model for her hero (‘A simple Roman excellence’), Stoddard has such big ideas (one suspects) about the Romans that Lincoln (‘Common his mind’) doesn’t match up (‘No hero this of Roman mould’). Stoddard’s seems to me a more Victorian poem. It moralises with an explicit reference to the Christian God ‘(God lets bad instruments / Produce the best events)’, which Marvell’s poem avoided doing in such a studied fashion. And this happens at a point where Stoddard has to correct violently after the reflections on John Wilkes Booth (‘Tyrants have fallen by such as thou’) seem to be pulling him far away from his proper theme, as his evident difficulties accepting a hero who was ‘One of the people’ surface and bring him to side for a moment with the assassin. ‘Victorian’ too is the way Stoddard poeticizes that most American of machines for Lincoln’s funeral procession, a wood-burning railway engine, into ‘the awful car!’

Guiney is more enthusiastically republican. She does go in for some of that American obsession with flags, but the sentimental note of the battle flags fading over the tomb worked well in its way.

What I cannot imagine, is Browning or Tennyson producing poems that engage as intelligently with the Marvellian mode. For this, one has to blame Queen Victoria (her existence, and England with its a compromised democracy).


Louise Imogen Guiney, ‘Sherman: An Horatian Ode’

This was the truest man of men,
The early-armored citizen,
Who had, with most of sight,
Most passion for the right;

Who first forecasting treason's scope
Able to sap the Founders' hope,
First to the laic arm
Cried ultimate alarm;

Who bent upon his guns the while
A misconceived and aching smile,
And felt, thro' havoc's part,
A torment of the heart,

Sure, when he cut the moated South
From Shiloh to Savannah's mouth,
Braved grandly to the end,
To conquer like a friend;

In whom the Commonwealth withstood
Again the Carolinian blood,
The beautiful proud line
Beneath an evil sign,

And taught his foes and doubters still
How fatal is a good man's will,
That like a sun or sod
Thinks not itself, but God!

Many the captains of our wrath
Sought thus the pious civic path,
Knowing in what a land
Their destiny was planned,

And after, with a forward sense,
A simple Roman excellence,
Pledge in their spirit bore
That war should be no more.

Thrice Roman he, who saw the shock
(Calm as a weather-wrinkled rock,)
Roll in the Georgian fen;
And steadfast aye as then

In plenitude of old control
That asked, secure of his own soul,
No pardon and no aid,
If clear his way were made,

Would have nor seat nor bays, nor bring
The Cæsar in him to be king,
But with abstracted ear
Rode pleased without a cheer.

Now he declines from peace and age,
And home, his triple heritage,
The last and dearest head
Of all our perfect dead,

O what if sorrow cannot reach
Far in the shallow fords of speech,
But leads us silent round
The sad Missouri ground,

Where on her hero Freedom lays
The scroll and blazon of her praise,
And bids to him belong
Arms trailing, and a song,

And broken flags with ruined dyes
(Bright once in young and dying eyes),
Against the morn to shake
For love's familiar sake?

The blessèd broken flags unfurled
Above a healed and happier world!
There let them droop, and be
His tent of victory;

There, in each year's auguster light,
Lean in, and loose their red and white,
Like apple-blossoms strewn
Upon his burial-stone.

For nothing more, the ages thro',
Can nature or the nation do
For him who helped retrieve
Our life, as we believe,

Save that we also, trooping by
In sound yet of his battle-cry,
Safeguard with general mind
Our pact as brothers kind,

And, ever nearer to our star,
Adore indeed not what we are,
But wise reprovings hold
Thankworthier than gold;

And bear in faith and rapture such
As can eternal issues touch,
Whole from the final field,
Our father Sherman's shield.


Richard Henry Stoddard,
‘ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
A HORATIAN ODE’


Not as when some great Captain falls
In battle, where his Country calls,
Beyond the struggling lines
That push his dread designs

To doom, by some stray ball struck dead:
Or, in the last charge, at the head
Of his determined men,
Who must be victors then.

Nor as when sink the civic great,
The safer pillars of the State,
Whose calm, mature, wise words
Suppress the need of swords.

With no such tears as e'er were shed
Above the noblest of our dead
Do we to-day deplore
The Man that is no more.

Our sorrow hath a wider scope,
Too strange for fear, too vast for hope,
A wonder, blind and dumb,
That waits---what is to come!

Not more astounded had we been
If Madness, that dark night, unseen,
Had in our chambers crept,
And murdered while we slept!

We woke to find a mourning earth,
Our Lares shivered on the hearth,
The roof-tree fallen, all
That could affright, appall!

Such thunderbolts, in other lands,
Have smitten the rod from royal hands,
But spared, with us, till now,
Each laurelled Cæsar's brow.

No Cæsar he whom we lament,
A Man without a precedent,
Sent, it would seem, to do
His work, and perish, too.

Not by the weary cares of State,
The endless tasks, which will not wait,
Which, often done in vain,
Must yet be done again:

Not in the dark, wild tide of war,
Which rose so high, and rolled so far,
Sweeping from sea to sea
In awful anarchy:

Four fateful years of mortal strife,
Which slowly drained the nation's life,
(Yet for each drop that ran
There sprang an armèd man!)

Not then; but when, by measures meet,
By victory, and by defeat,
By courage, patience, skill,
The people's fixed " We will !"

Had pierced, had crushed Rebellion dead,
Without a hand, without a head,
At last, when all was well,
He fell, O how he fell!

The time, the place, the stealing shape,
The coward shot, the swift escape,
The wife, the widow's scream---
It is a hideous Dream!

A dream? What means this pageant, then?
These multitudes of solemn men,
Who speak not when they meet,
But throng the silent street?

The flags half-mast that late so high
Flaunted at each new victory?
(The stars no brightness shed,
But bloody looks the red!)

The black festoons that stretch for miles,
And turn the streets to funeral aisles?
(No house too poor to show
The nation's badge of woe.)

The cannon's sudden, sullen boom,
The bells that toll of death and doom,
The rolling of the drums,
The dreadful car that comes?

Cursed be the hand that fired the shot,
The frenzied brain that hatched the plot,
Thy country's Father slain
Be thee, thou worse than Cain!

Tyrants have fallen by such as thou,
And good hath followed---may it now!
(God lets bad instruments
Produce the best events.)

But he, the man we mourn to-day,
No tyrant was: so mild a sway
In one such weight who bore
Was never known before.

Cool should he be, of balanced powers,
The ruler of a race like ours,
Impatient, headstrong, wild,
The Man to guide the Child.

And this he was, who most unfit
(So hard the sense of God to hit,)
Did seem to fill his place.
With such a homely face,

Such rustic manners, speech uncouth,
(That somehow blundered out the truth,)
Untried, untrained to bear
The more than kingly care.

Ay! And his genius put to scorn
The proudest in the purple born,
Whose wisdom never grew
To what, untaught, he knew,

The People, of whom he was one.
No gentleman, like Washington,
(Whose bones, methinks, make room,
To have him in their tomb!)

A laboring man, with horny hands,
Who swung the axe, who tilled his lands,
Who shrank from nothing new,
But did as poor men do.

One of the People! Born to be
Their curious epitome;
To share yet rise above
Their shifting hate and love.

Common his mind, (it seemed so then,)
His thoughts the thoughts of other men:
Plain were his words, and poor,
But now they will endure!

No hasty fool, of stubborn will,
But prudent, cautious, pliant still;
Who since his work was good
Would do it as he could.

Doubting, was not ashamed to doubt,
And, lacking prescience, went without:
Often appeared to halt,
And was, of course, at fault;

Heard all opinions, nothing loath,
And, loving both sides, angered both:
Was--- not like Justice, blind,
But, watchful, clement, kind.

No hero this of Roman mould,
Nor like our stately sires of old:
Perhaps he was not great,
But he preserved the State!

O honest face, which all men knew!
O tender heart, but known to few!
O wonder of the age,
Cut off by tragic rage!

Peace! Let the long procession come,
For hark, the mournful, muffled drum,
The trumpet's wail afar,
And see, the awful car!

Peace! Let the sad procession go,
While cannon boom and bells toll slow.
And go, thou sacred car,
Bearing our woe afar!

Go, darkly borne, from State to State,
Whose loyal, sorrowing cities wait
To honor all they can
The dust of that good man.

Go, grandly borne, with such a train
As greatest kings might die to gain.
The just, the wise, the brave,
Attend thee to the grave.

And you, the soldiers of our wars,
Bronzed veterans, grim with noble scars,
Salute him once again,
Your late commander---slain!

Yes, let your tears indignant fall,
But leave your muskets on the wall;
Your country needs you now
Beside the forge---the plough.

(When Justice shall unsheathe her brand,
If Mercy may not stay her hand,
Nor would we have it so,
She must direct the blow.)

And you, amid the master-race,
Who seem so strangely out of place,
Know ye who cometh? He
Who hath declared ye free.

Bow while the body passes---nay,
Fall on your knees, and weep, and pray!
Weep, weep---I would ye might---
Your poor black faces white!

And, children, you must come in bands,
With garlands in your little hands,
Of blue and white and red,
To strew before the dead.

So sweetly, sadly, sternly goes
The Fallen to his last repose.
Beneath no mighty dome,
But in his modest home;

The churchyard where his children rest,
The quiet spot that suits him best,
There shall his grave be made,
And there his bones be laid.

And there his countrymen shall come,
With memory proud, with pity dumb,
And strangers far and near,
For many and many a year.

For many a year and many an age,
While History on her ample page
The virtues shall enroll
On that Paternal Soul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Imogen_Guiney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Henry_Stoddard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln