J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Welsh history

The Power of the Internet

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A very quick update, particularly for anybody who follows this blog but isn’t on Facebook.

We’re just coming up to the one week anniversary of the ‘Save Carmarthenshire Archives’ campaign going live online, and we’ve just chalked up a remarkable milestone – 1,000 ‘likes’ on the Facebook page! This, and the hugely supportive comments both there and on this blog (including some from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand), really demonstrates the tremendous strength of feeling about this issue, and sends out a very powerful message to Carmarthenshire County Council. The campaign is also front page news in the current ‘hard copy’ issue of The Carmarthenshire Herald. So thank you, all!

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Unless something unexpected happens, I don’t anticipate blogging about the archives issue for the next 2-3 weeks, partly because of other commitments, partly because I’m now waiting for replies to correspondence and FoI requests. However, I do expect to be able to post some news about developments with my books during that period, so the next post or two will probably be about matters seventeenth century and naval!

The Photocopier of Doom

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In the near future, I promise to start blogging again about matters other than the situation at Carmarthenshire Archives, the subject of my last two posts and of a remarkable and gratifying response from individuals and online communities around the world. But while I’m waiting for responses to the letters I’ve sent to the Keeper of Public Records and the Director of CyMal, and to the Freedom of Information requests I’m about to lodge with Carmarthenshire County Council, I thought I’d raise a side issue that’s been placed in sharp focus by the discovery of mould among these valuable papers and the subsequent closure of the county record office: namely, the sheer, blinkered folly, in this day and age, of a repository housing original documents banning researchers from taking their own digital photographs.

For new followers, I should point out that this is something I’ve blogged about before. Here’s what I wrote on the subject in September 2012:

One reader…responded to last week’s post by rightly denouncing the British Library’s perverse camera ban. Now, the BL is one thing, and has always been a law unto itself when it comes to implementing policies that are beyond human ken, but quite another set of criteria apply to, say, Blandshire Record Office. I really cannot see any justification in this day and age for not permitting the use of digital cameras, given how much time this saves readers. Arguments suggesting that their use somehow affects the preservation of the documents are surely just barking: the idea that cameras destroyed whatever they were being pointed at, or captured the souls of the subjects in the picture, were conclusively debunked in the early days of the medium. Moreover, if you have a digital record of a document you’re unlikely to need to order it up again – not so if you need to spend about three days transcribing it or if you need to come back to it at some future point, so surely the use of digital cameras can only be good for the long-term preservation of archives. One Welsh archivist suggested to me that small offices like hers need the income from photocopying, but I really don’t see how that income stacks up against the amount of time staff spend photocopying documents when they could be doing other things (like…umm…helping readers). Besides, surely a reasonable daily charge for a camera permit – say, £5 – might even bring in a larger income than photocopying?

(Of course, I should have added that record offices would still have a significant income from photocopying anyway, namely from orders from those who can’t visit them in person; after all, digital photography of documents is an option available only to those who can actually get there.)

Things have changed since I wrote that post, nearly three years ago: even the British Library, for so long the Jurassic Park of archive repositories, recently started to permit photography (although, true to form, it’s managed to find excuses to declare huge swathes of its collections ineligible). But they hadn’t changed at Carmarthen in those far off heady days before the discovery of mould. There, all copying still had to go through the archivists, who would disappear into the back room, operate a photocopier that seemed to have come out of the Ark, and return in due course with copies that varied in quality from the passable to the illegible. Sometimes, they didn’t even return in due course, depending on the size of the backlog, and one had to pick up one’s copies the next day (or have them posted, if you were only in for one day and happened to live 250 miles away). At the time, this all seemed rather quaint, if somewhat annoying. Now, it appears simply tragic.

To illustrate my point, let me suggest a couple of worst case, ‘9/11’ style scenarios, one real and one hypothetical.

First, any historian who works on pre-20th century Irish history is hamstrung by the fact that, in 1922, the Irish Public Record Office in Dublin’s Four Courts building was destroyed by fire as a result of fighting during the Irish civil war. The vast majority of documents relating to the government of Ireland through a thousand years of history simply went up in flames. (A similar problem bedevils my friends who work on Dutch naval history: most of their records were destroyed by fire in 1844.)

Fortunately, of course, there’s very little chance of civil war breaking out anywhere in the British Isles these days, no matter how heated divisions in Scotland might get from time to time. But let’s consider a very different hypothesis.

The rather ugly building at Kew that houses the National Archives of England and Wales is directly beneath one of the approach flight paths to Heathrow Airport. Very large aircraft fly low, directly over the nation’s most important repository, literally every couple of minutes or so.

Let’s imagine that, for whatever reason, one of them dropped out of the sky, and obliterated the building.

Of course, this would be a catastrophe in all sorts of ways, not least because there would almost certainly be casualties on an unimaginable scale; but as far as the documents held by the National Archives are concerned, it’s probably the case that a very large percentage could be ‘reconstructed’ digitally by appealing to all those researchers who have taken photographs of documents there since TNA implemented its enlightened policy of unrestricted digital photography for non-commercial use. (This would be similar to the ‘crowd-sourced’ reconstructions from digital photographs of priceless artefacts destroyed by the so-called ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria.) I’ve taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of manuscript sources at TNA, while a friend of mine has photographed enormous tracts of classmark ADM106 for the 1670s and 1680s. Every time I go there, scores of researchers are taking literally hundreds of digital photographs. So even if the originals were to be lost to some unforeseeable catastrophe, the most important element of all – the actual contents of very many of the documents – would still survive.

Which brings me back to Carmarthenshire Archives. No matter what the original reasons for its introduction and retention, the ‘no photography’ rule now appears fundamentally misconceived.* Speaking personally, if I’d been able to photograph all of the documents in the Stepney and Gulston collections that I’ve looked at since roughly 1998, then not only might I have been able to finish my book about those families long before now, but I’d be able to make those photographs available to other researchers while the original documents remain inaccessible. If all historians who have worked at the record office within, say, the last 10 years, had taken photographs of what they were working on, then it would have been possible to call on them to pool those photographs for the greater good. And if, as has been rumoured, the Council’s goal in recent years has been to digitise the archives so that they no longer need to produce the originals – why on earth pay people to scan them when there are plenty of researchers around who would be perfectly willing to do it for you, and for free, as an offshoot of their own work? 

Ultimately, then, not permitting photography of documents in an archive is a wrong-headed policy derived solely from short-term thinking, such as the misplaced belief that a cranky old photocopier will supply a cash-strapped record office with just a tiny bit more income.  Those responsible for such resources, and such institutions, surely have to think of worst case scenarios, too: and in this day and age, the worst case is surely very bad indeed, and significantly worse than an outbreak of mould, as my Kew/Heathrow hypothesis suggests.

If you need further proof of this last point: in November 2010, my ‘significant other’ and I took a holiday in a wonderful country in the Middle East, full of friendly and welcoming people, and went to a stunning World Heritage Site, where we both took scores of digital photographs.

Three months later, civil war broke out in that country, and that war is still continuing.

The country was Syria: the World Heritage Site was Palmyra, the lost city in the desert, now under the control of Daesh/’IS’.

And if the worst were to happen there, then our photographs would be at the immediate and unqualified disposal of any organisation attempting to reconstruct what the lost city looked like.

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* In case anyone is wondering…the photographs on the Save Carmarthenshire Archives Facebook page aren’t from the county record office; despite my frustration with their policy, I never stooped to surreptitiously snapping while the archivists weren’t looking. The genealogical document relating to the Stepney baronets is in a private collection, while the photograph, of women workers at the munitions factory in Llanelli during World War I, is part of my own collection. One of them – one in from the right hand side – is my grandmother. 

 

 

Come the Revolution, At Least the Pubs will be Open on Sundays

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In an election week, it’s difficult to maintain my principle of completely excluding politics from this blog. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been interested in politics (and, indeed, taught it for many years): indeed, I suspect I’m also a member of one of the most exclusive clubs in the whole of British politics. There are probably only a few hundred people in the country, at most, who can legitimately claim that the first two votes they ever cast were in referendums – or referenda, if you prefer, as does this proud possessor of a Grade 5 Latin O-level. I turned eighteen in April 1975, and was therefore thrown at once into a bitter battle of profound principle between two great opposing forces, with a truly momentous issue of life-changing proportions at stake: yes, the Welsh Sunday drinking referendum.

(The other referendum I voted in that year was something to do with the Common Market, whatever that was.)

The Sunday drinking votes were one of the great oddities of Welsh life for many years. Because of the powerful influence of the chapels and the temperance movement, an act of 1881 banned drinking in Wales on the sabbath. Or at least, it banned drinking in pubs: working men’s clubs and rugby club bars did a roaring trade on Sundays, while the loophole that towns with livestock markets could permit all-day opening on market day led to the bizarre situation in Carmarthen, which had market days six days a week but where the pub doors remained resolutely closed on a Sunday. Elsewhere, some pubs straddled county borders, so it was legal to drink in one bar on a Sunday but illegal to drink in the other one. From 1961 onwards, each Welsh local authority was permitted to hold a referendum once every seven years to determine whether their area should remain ‘dry’, but this only created more anomalies. For example, in Llanelli, where I grew up, 11.45 or thereabouts on a Sunday morning would see the curious spectacle of a large convoy of cars heading for the Loughor Bridge, about four miles away, which was the Glamorgan border – for Glamorgan had gone ‘wet’ in one of the earlier votes. Thus the pubs in villages like Loughor, Gorseinon and Gowerton, just over the bridge, did a roaring trade from the hordes of thirsty Llanelli-ites pouring through their doors as soon as they opened at noon. And so off I went to the ballot box, put my X in the box, and found myself on the winning side – Llanelli went ‘wet’.

But back to my reasons for making this blog a politics-free zone. For one thing, I don’t want to offend one group of readers by nailing my colours to too many masts. For another, there are many people much better qualified than myself to blog about politics – or at least, who think they are. Above all, though, I learned very early in life that politics is a minefield, and that it was much better to keep my opinions to myself. This was due principally to the influence of my grandfather and his five brothers, who between them included committed supporters of Labour, the Liberals, the Conservatives…another brother was an army sergeant who served on the North-West Frontier in the 1920s and 1930s, and although I never knew him or his politics, I somehow suspect that he wasn’t a Guardian reader…and then there was Uncle Ivor.

Ivor holds forth about the inevitable triumph of the proletariat. Or something.
Ivor holds forth about the inevitable triumph of the proletariat. Or something.

A gregarious, pugnacious character with a liking for the odd glass of Scotch, Ivor was a card-carrying Communist whose name once featured on the front pages of the tabloids: he was one of the Communist members on the national executive of the Electricians’ Union who were indicted for ballot-rigging during one of the great political scandals of the late 1950s and early 1960s.* Unsurprisingly, perhaps, my grandfather and great-uncles tended to steer well clear of political discourse whenever they got together, no doubt learning the lesson from many a blazing row in their younger days – although I well remember Ivor saying to Vincent, the Tory, that ‘come the revolution, you’ll be the first one hanging from the lamppost’. I think he was joking, but you could never be entirely certain with Uncle Ivor.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, I’ve always eschewed party political labels, apart from a brief flirtation at university. The one label I might have been happy with was that of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Country Party, a grouping so amorphous that it’s now seen as more of a ‘persuasion’ than a party, and which based its philosophy on deep-rooted suspicion of whoever was in government at any given time, regardless of which party they came from; let’s face it, during the forty years that I’ve had the franchise, I’d suggest there’s plenty of evidence to support taking a Country Party stance. Unfortunately, though, I grew up in a constituency which had a 20,000-odd majority for one major party, and now live in one that has a 20,000-odd majority for the other, so although I’ll dutifully head up to the polling station on Thursday and exercise my democratic right, I still don’t really have much idea of how someone with Country Party leanings from a Labour/Liberal/Tory/Communist family background should vote in such circumstances. Oh for the joyous days of the 1975 Sunday drinking referendum, when the cause was simple and my vote really mattered…

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* Strangely, there’s very little information available online about this saga – not even a Wikipedia entry, for example. The summary of this thesis provides a basic outline, but otherwise, the most detailed accounts tend to come from a Communist viewpoint. One day, I hope to get a chance to work on the ETU archives at the University of Warwick to see if I can get to the bottom of Ivor’s role in the affair.

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: the Artist’s Daughter

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Sir Anthony van Dyck is rightly regarded as one of the towering figures of European art. However, he had only one legitimate child, Justina, or Justiniana, and tragically, he died just days after his daughter was born, on 1 December 1641. She was baptised on the 9th, the very day of her father’s death, at St Ann’s church, Blackfriars, a few stones of which remain in an alley near St Paul’s Cathedral. Van Dyck’s widow, Justina’s mother, gave her an even more illustrious and tragic bloodline, for Mary Ruthven was the niece of John, third and last Earl of Gowrie, and Alexander, Master of Ruthven, both of whom had been killed on 5 August 1600 in deeply suspicious circumstances and in the presence of James VI, King of Scots, soon to be James I of England. James and his ministers claimed that the Ruthvens had attempted to assassinate the monarch, and used this as the legal justification for the confiscation of their estates; but many believed a diametrically opposite story, one that had James ordering the deliberate destruction of a noble dynasty that had become rather too powerful for his liking.

Mary Ruthven; engraving after the portrait of her by her husband
Mary Ruthven; engraving after the portrait of her by her husband

Mary’s father, Patrick, the rightful Earl of Gowrie, spent nearly twenty years in the Tower of London for no other crime than being the brother of two dead traitors, but following his release, he became a noted medical practitioner and alchemist, as well as a minor figure at the court of King Charles I and his wife, Henrietta Maria. By the late 1630s, his daughter Mary was one of the ladies-in-waiting to the queen. Although she had no fortune to bring to any marriage, her status, high birth, and obvious friendship with the queen made her an attractive proposition for the eligible bachelors who thronged the court. Better still, Mary was undoubtedly very beautiful. That much is certain from her portrait, painted by the man who won the contest for her hand; and few would dispute her new husband’s ability to record a face on canvas.

On the frosty morning of 27 February 1640, Mary Ruthven, aged about 17, married Sir Anthony Van Dyck, aged 40, in Queen Henrietta Maria’s private Catholic chapel at Somerset House. On that day, Patrick Ruthven, ‘of St Martin’s in the Fields’, assigned £120 of his pension to Mary, perhaps in lieu of the dowry that he could not afford. Mary Ruthven had a small dowry all the same; it was provided, not by her father, but by King Charles himself; the days when the Ruthvens had been seen as a threat to the monarchy were long gone, as were the days when the family had been counted among the most loyal adherents of the Presbyterian Kirk. Sir Anthony was a devout Catholic, the queen’s chapel was the only legal Catholic place of worship in England, and the glorious portrait that he painted of his young wife shows her delicately fingering her rosary. At some point Van Dyck also painted a double portrait of himself with his new father-in-law; this was seen at Knole in Kent in about 1785 by Joseph Gulston, who married one of Patrick’s great-great-great-great-granddaughters. Gulston described ‘the Earl of Gowry’: ‘hand very fine, glove on the other. Full front breastplate. Melancholy. Long hair hid and white slash’d habit. Leans on his sword. Green sash, buff apron’. The painting has disappeared long since, as has the extraordinary and unprecedented group painting that Van Dyck made of himself, his new wife, and their closest friends: the King and Queen of Great Britain.

The tiny sutviving fragment of St Ann's church, Blackfriars
The tiny sutviving fragment of St Ann’s church, Blackfriars

When Van Dyck died at his home in Blackfriars, he was surrounded by unsold and unfinished artwork; an inventory of his possessions apparently totalled some £13,000-worth of jewels, paintings, and ‘rich household stuff’. Under the terms of Van Dyck’s will, the infant Justina Mariana became the co-heiress with her mother of Sir Anthony’s very substantial fortune, and in due course, she would also become the heiress of the Ruthvens, Earls of Gowrie.

In July or August 1642, as England and Wales slid inexorably into civil war, Mary Ruthven married again, this time to Sir Richard Pryse of Gogerddan, a few miles outside Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire. When the new Lady Pryse went down to Wales, her inherited wealth caused much Cymric jaw-dropping: she brought with her the likes of a £400 pearl necklace, a rich Arras hanging and a damask bed. But before the end of 1644 Mary, Lady Pryse, formerly Lady Van Dyck, née Ruthven, was dead, aged no more than 21. An orphan at the age of three, Justina was left in the care of her stepfather, miles behind Royalist lines, while most of the fortune to which she was now sole heiress was still in her father’s house in Parliamentarian London. But she still had one person who could speak out for her in the capital: her grandfather. In March 1645 Patrick Ruthven petitioned the House of Lords on behalf of his ‘fatherless and motherless’ granddaughter Justina. He claimed that one Richard Andrews had been removing Van Dyck’s paintings from his house at Blackfriars, under-valuing them to pay off Sir Richard Pryse’s creditors, and then sending them abroad, where he sold them on at huge profits. Other of Pryse’s creditors were simply wandering into the Blackfriars property and taking what they wanted. Ruthven asked the Lords to order a halt to further exports, which they seem to have done, but in February 1647 he had to go back to them, complaining that Andrews had flouted their order and was continuing to send Van Dyck’s possessions abroad.

Gogerddan
Gogerddan

There is evidence suggesting that Sir Richard Pryse was not quite the innocent party in all of this that he initially seems to be. Years later, a former employee of his testified that, although the story of the Blackfriars paintings was correct as far as it went, it was also true that Pryse was systematically siphoning off for his own and his son’s use that part of Van Dyck’s inheritance that he and Lady Mary had managed to get out from London before travel between the capital and Cardiganshire became well-nigh impossible because of the war. The civil war and its aftermath made it virtually impossible to prevent Andrews and Pryse doing what they liked. Patrick probably never saw his grand-daughter again, for she was brought up by her stepfather in Cardiganshire. A witness later testified that Sir Richard Pryse could not have spent very much on her education, ‘for he only gave her diet and clothes as a gentlewoman ordinarily [has] in the country … [but] that she had a maid for most of the time to wait on her’.

 

Portrait believed to be of John Stepney, 4th baronet
Portrait believed to be of John Stepney, 4th baronet

In 1653, aged thirteen, Justina made a superficially unlikely marriage to a relatively obscure Welshman of minor gentry status, namely John Stepney. This was a remarkably illustrious match for Stepney, and in later years it was to give his and Justina’s descendants grounds for believing that they were the rightful heirs to both the lost Ruthven titles and the equally lost fortune of Sir Anthony Dyck. Stepney family tradition held that the romance of John Stepney and Justina Van Dyck was a case of ‘love at first sight’ when John was a student at Christ Church, Oxford. However, the truth must have been rather more prosaic. As noted above, she was effectively brought up by Sir Richard Pryse of Gogerddan, and her availability would thus have been well known to John Stepney’s uncle Charles, who was married to Pryse’s daughter and might well have been the key figure in facilitating the marriage.

Justina was said to be dark-haired, blue-eyed and round-faced. Much of the fabulous inheritance that should have come to her had gone ‘missing’ from her father’s studio in Blackfriars during the confusion of the civil war. Her grandfather Patrick Ruthven, the claimant to the lost earldom of Gowrie, appeared before the House of Lords in March 1645 on behalf of his ‘fatherless and motherless’ granddaughter Justina. He claimed that many of Van Dyck’s paintings had been removed from his house at Blackfriars, under-valuing them to pay off Sir Richard Pryse’s creditors, and then sending them abroad, where they were sold on at huge profits. A temporary embargo on exports was ordered, but this proved ineffective. However, it is possible that Pryse was not quite the innocent party in all of this that he initially seems to be. Years later, a former employee of his testified that, although the story of the Blackfriars paintings was correct as far as it went, it was also true that Pryse was systematically siphoning off for his own and his son’s use that part of Van Dyck’s inheritance that he and Lady Mary had managed to get out from London before travel between the capital and Cardiganshire became well-nigh impossible because of the war.  Patrick probably never saw his grand-daughter again, for she was brought up by her stepfather in Cardiganshire. His intervention on her behalf had been to little avail, although some limited recompense did eventually come the way of Justina and her new Stepney relations. In 1656 the Earl of Northumberland paid John Stepney and his father Thomas, then of Sandy Haven, Pembrokeshire, the sum of £80 to establish that he had been briefly the legal owner of Titian’s great painting, Perseus and Andromeda, which ‘disappeared’ from the collection of Sir Anthony Van Dyck in the 1640s, eventually ending up in Northumberland’s possession rather than passing to his heiress Justina, as Van Dyck’s will had specified. After all of these vicissitudes, perhaps the only item which Justina actually inherited from her father was an item alleged to be his paint box.

Even if it was true that Sir Richard Pryse did not spend very much on Justina’s education, he evidently complied with the wishes of her dead parents in one crucial respect: she was brought up as a Catholic. Indeed, in 1660 she and her husband went through a second, Catholic, marriage ceremony at the St Jakobskirk in Antwerp, subsequently living in her aunt Susanna van Dyck’s house. John Stepney’s conversion, if such it was, was markedly mistimed; the restoration of the monarchy shortly afterwards made it essential that a man in his position should be a Protestant, especially if he wished to hold the offices that would naturally come the way of a future baronet. He seems quickly and quietly to have concealed this inconvenient truth, and duly joined King Charles II’s Horse Guards. Meanwhile Justina became an eminent artist in her own right, giving her aunt Susanna a painting of the Crucifixion by her own hand and being considered important enough for Cornelis de Bie to include her in his study of women painters in Het Gulden Cabinet, published in 1661. In 1662 Justina was granted a pension of £200 per annum by the restored monarchy of King Charles II. This was kept up for the rest of her life, although like so many similar obligations of Charles’s permanently impoverished regime, it was often in arrears – by nearly five years in 1673, by over six in 1684. She also returned to Antwerp in 1665 in order to claim the half share of Susanna’s estate that was left to her, so despite the loss of much of her father’s inheritance, Justina was hardly left in poverty.

St Elli's church, Llanelli: the memorial to Justina's son, Sir Thomas Stepney (which claims, wrongly, that he was descended from King Henry VII)
St Elli’s church, Llanelli: the memorial to Justina’s son, Sir Thomas Stepney (which claims, wrongly, that he was descended from King Henry VII)

John Stepney became the fourth baronet of Prendergast, Pembrokeshire, when his uncle died in 1676. But John did not enjoy the title for very long: he was buried at Kidwelly on 1 July 1681, so the baronetcy devolved to his son Thomas, aged about thirteen. Justina’s life, too, was drawing to its close. She made a second marriage, to Martin de Carbonnel, a French Huguenot, but this was childless. Thus when Justina died in 1688, the bloodline of both Sir Anthony Van Dyck and the Ruthven Earls of Gowrie continued solely in her Stepney descendants, initially through her only son Thomas, the fifth baronet of Prendergast. They became the owners of Llanelly House, a glorious and recently restored Georgian town house, became the friends of princes and prime ministers, and had more than their fair share of scandals and bizarre vicissitudes. Several members of the family believed that they had inherited artistic talent from Sir Anthony van Dyck, although the efforts preserved in their sketchbooks usually suggest otherwise! The family continued to own land in west Wales until 1998, and descendants still live in Cumbria, Scotland and Italy.

 

(Taken from the relevant sections of my book Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’, and the current draft of my unpublished book on the Stepney family of Prendergast and Llanelli. The latter is currently on ‘indefinite hold’, in part due to the disastrous situation at the Carmarthenshire Record Office, the main repository of manuscript material on the family.) 

 

 

The Strange Case of King Charles I’s Hidden ‘Daughter’

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One of the great delights of writing this blog, of having a website, and of being moderately active on Twitter, is that I sometimes gets really interesting feedback from those who follow me. Last week’s post, for example, brought a reply from Steve Mercer of the Grimsby Wargames Society, who are already well advanced in planning a detailed reconstruction of the great Four Days Battle of 1666 – the subject of the fifth Quinton novel, The Battle of All The Ages – to mark the 350th anniversary in June next year. It’s great to hear that, and really appropriate, too, given the strategic importance of the Humber estuary during the Anglo-Dutch wars. Back in October of last year, I also heard from Michael Lowe, who’d picked up on a statement I made in a previous post about Joanna Bridges, a possible illegitimate daughter of King Charles I (and Michael’s direct ancestor). Her story provided the inspiration for one of the storylines in the third novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies, where one of the characters (which is about as spoiler-free as I can make this…) is similarly an illegitimate child of the King. I picked up this idea from Joanna’s story, which forms a very odd footnote in the histories of both the British Civil Wars and my home county, Carmarthenshire. So, somewhat belatedly, here’s the curious tale of Joanna Bridges, Michael’s ancestor.

Famously, Charles I’s attitude to sexual morality was very different to that of his two sons, who racked up the grand total of some sixteen or seventeen illegitimate children between them. But this very much reflected the situation after Charles’ marriage, when he and Queen Henrietta Maria became devoted to each other. His behaviour as Prince of Wales, and in his first years as King, was not necessarily quite so conventional – or, as one of the 19th century sources used for this blog put it, he was led astray ‘under the guidance of the dissipated and licentious [Duke of] Buckingham’. If he really had an illegitimate child, its birth almost certainly took place during a period in the 1620s, probably between c.1622 and c.1627. According to the legend of her paternity, Joanna Bridges was the child of Charles and the Duchess of Lennox, who was then raised ‘in much privacy’ in Wales, growing into a young woman who ‘both in circumstance and disposition…displayed a striking resemblance to her unfortunate father’. The only Bridges family of gentry status in Wales seems to have lived in Radnorshire, and that may have been where Joanna was brought up.

The Duchess of Lennox
The Duchess of Lennox

There is some evidence to support the otherwise very unlikely theory. The thrice-married Frances, Duchess of Lennox, was a prominent member of the circle around Buckingham and Charles when the latter was Prince of Wales; her husband Ludovic, a cousin of the Prince and of his father King James, had actually been the heir to the Scottish throne for some twenty years, and he plays a very prominent part in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’. Although she was in her forties, it’s quite conceivable that the Duchess might have had a ‘Mrs Robinson’ affair with the young Prince, and Pauline Gregg, Charles’ biographer, documents the fact that the latter presented the Duchess with a chain of diamonds valued at over £3000 – although the latter was actually a gift from King James, who also seems to have been a target for the Duchess’ affections. (She had serious ‘form’ when it came to winning much older men – her second husband, forty years her senior, was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, a nephew of Henry VIII’s Queen Jane Seymour.)

Further circumstantial evidence is provided by Joanna’s marriage, at some point in the mid-1650s, to Dr Jeremy Taylor, a prominent Anglican clergyman and religious writer who had served as a chaplain to King Charles I’s court at Oxford. Taylor was in Wales by the beginning of 1645, when he was in Lord Gerard’s force that was defeated at Cardigan Castle, and he then became a schoolteacher at Llanfihangel Aberbythych in the Tywi valley. This was almost immediately adjacent to Golden Grove, the home of the influential Vaughan family and its head, the Earl of Carbery, one of the most prominent Royalists in south Wales. Taylor soon became chaplain to Carbery and remained in west Wales for ten years or thereabouts. This explains his meeting with, and eventual marriage to, Joanna Bridges – she owned a small estate at Mandinam, a little further up the Tywi valley (possibly a telling fact in itself). But the most curious, and telling, connection of all is recounted by Pauline Gregg in her biography of King Charles. Following his defeat by Parliament, Charles was imprisoned at Hampton Court from August to November 1647. Taylor was among those who attended him there, and as Gregg records, ‘Charles gave Taylor a ring with two diamonds and a ruby, a watch, and a few pearls and rubies which ornamented the ebony case in which he kept his bible. There was no reason why he should give these to Taylor unless they were to pass on to Joanna Bridges…’

The couple married at some point between 1652 and 1656, had two children, and moved to Ireland, where Taylor became Bishop of Down and Connor; he died in August 1667. The date of Joanna’s death is unknown, but her eponymous daughter still owned Mandinam in 1707. The house still exists, and now provides holiday accommodation. Perhaps one day I’ll carry out more intensive research into the legend of Joanna Bridges – and of course, that would provide an ideal excuse to go and stay at her former home!

 

Keeping Up with the Joneses

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Just in case anybody didn’t know, I’m [a] Welsh, and [b] an author of naval historical fiction.

Now, the world contains quite a lot of Welsh people. The world also contains a lot of authors of naval historical fiction. But the number of current Welsh authors of NHF, as I’ll call it for the sake of brevity, can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, it’s possible that they can be counted on one finger, but I suspect I’m tempting fate by suggesting that – especially in an age when so many books are self-published exclusively in electronic format that it’s simply impossible to keep up with the origins of who’s written what. Indeed, for all I know there might well be an entire collective of NHF authors somewhere up in the Valleys, having violent arguments about the merits of Forester and O’Brian in the bar of The Admiral and Floozy at Aberflyarff. But assuming this isn’t actually the case, it’s clear that there have never been very many of us. I suppose one could count that outrageous old yarn-spinner Tristan Jones, but I’m not sure if someone who essentially fictionalised much of his own life qualifies. Wikipedia describes Showell Styles as a Welsh author, and he certainly wrote plenty of NHF, including the Midshipman Septimus Quinn series (which I’ve never read), the Lieutenant Michael Fitton books (ditto), and many individual titles including Admiral of England, about Sir Cloudesley Shovell, which does adorn my shelves. But Styles was Birmingham born and bred, so although he became an ‘adopted Welshman’, I’m not sure if he qualifies, either. On a similar basis, Patrick O’Brian lived in Wales – but only for four years, before moving to France because he couldn’t stand the weather.

Don’t worry, this post isn’t turning into a plea from a lonely lost soul for fellow practitioners to identify themselves so we can meet in the Admiral and Floozy to do what all Welsh people do all the time, namely to indulge in close harmony singing of cheery songs about rain and death. (TV and film stereotypes, passim – see the excellent Wales in the Movies channel on You Tube.) All of the foregoing is actually by way of introduction to the curious fact that one of the very first books that could be termed ‘naval historical fiction’ was written by a Welshman, with a Welsh central character – and what a character! The Legend of Captain Jones was written in 1631 by the somewhat unlikely figure of David Lloyd, an Oxford-educated clergyman, born at Llanidloes, who became Dean of Saint Asaph after the Restoration. This story of the mightily exaggerated adventures of a braggart Welsh sea-captain-cum-soldier was first published in 1636, had a second part added to it in the 1640s, and went through several editions thereafter; it seems to have been a popular children’s story after the Restoration, no doubt the Pirates of the Caribbean of its day (although with an infinitely more plausible hero…) To a considerable extent, it lampoons the great seamen, warriors and explorers of Queen Elizabeth’s time – Sir Walter Raleigh even turns up as a character, a la Blackadder – and some scholars have regarded it as a satire on Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame. (See, for example, the article by Alden T Vaughan in The William and Mary Quarterly, 45, 1988.)

Title page of the 1671 edition of The Legend of Captain Jones; Folger Shakespeare Library via Creative Commons
Title page of the 1671 edition of The Legend of Captain Jones; Folger Shakespeare Library via Creative Commons

The full text is freely available online, so I’m not going to quote from it at great length. (As I said to many of my students during my teaching career, ‘No, I’m not going to summarise it for you, go away and read the whole thing’. ‘Aww, sir, but it’ll be so much quicker if you summarise it…’) Although it’s not great poetry by any means, it’s certainly great fun, and actually pretty readable by the standards of some early seventeenth century literature. Try this, for instance:

‘Mongst all those Bluster’ng sirs that I have read

(whose greatest wonder is that they are dead)

there’s not any Knights, nor bold Achiever’s name,

So much as Jones’s in the Book of Fame.

They much of Greece’s Alexander brag,

He’d put ten Alexanders in a Bag.

Eleven fierce Kings, backt with two thousand Louts

Jones with a Ragged Troop beats all to Clouts.

 

Born in (yes, in) a Welsh mountain, Jones goes off to sea at eighteen. Among other exploits, he wrestles a bear, fights a lion, defeats eleven Native American kings and their armies, fights duels, defeats the Spanish (but is captured, made a galley slave, has a personal interview with King Philip II, and is finally ransomed), fights a giant, rejects marriage to the Queen of No-Land, and ends up single-handedly winning Queen Elizabeth’s war against the Irish Earl of Tyrone. At one point he goes back to his native land to recruit men, and the author has a field day at the expense of his countrymen’s foibles, for instance their apocryphal reputations for thieving and drinking, and their obsession with incredibly convoluted patronymics (one of my own ancestors, from exactly this period, is the spectacular Jenkin ap Harry ap Jenkin ap Harry Malephant):

 

 

Jones lost no time, goes in five days to Wales

Shewes his commission, tells them glorious tales;

He need not beat a drum, nor sound his trumpet,

His name’s enough to make these Britons jump at

This brave employment under such a Chief

Whose fame’s reserve enough for their relief.

Perplext he was in choosing his commanders,

For he still fancied best his old Highlanders;

But many worthies of the lower parts,

Offer to him their fortunes and their hearts.

But all respects put by, he inlisteth ten

Of his old gang, all hard bred mountain-men

For his Life-guard, Thomas Da Price a Pew,

Jenkin Da Prichard, Evan David Hugh,

John ap John Jenkin, Richard John dap Reese,

And Tom Dee Bacgh,a fierce Rat at green cheese,

Llewelling Reese ep David Watkin Jenkin,

With Howell Reese ap Robert, and young Philkin, 

These for his guard, his Officers in chief,

Lieutenant Colonel Craddock, a stout thief

With Major Howell ap Howell of Pen Crag

Well known for plundering many cow and nag

Captain Pen Vaare, a branch of Tom John Catty,1

Whose word in’s colours was, YE ROGUES HAVE AT YE.

Griffith ap Reefe ap Howel ap Coh ap Gwilin,

Reese David Shone ap Ruthero ap William,

With many more whose names ’twere long to write,

The rest their acts will get them names in fight.

We must conceive they all were men of fame

For here we see them all men of great name.

Jones with these blades advanceth to the Dale 2

There lines himself and them with noble Ale…

 

[1 – Twm Sion Cati, ‘the Welsh Robin Hood’

2 – Lloyd adds a marginal note here to point out that this is a village on Milford Haven! It would actually have been well known to 16th and 17th audiences as the place where King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty, landed in 1485.]

 

Finally, Jones retires back to Wales, and the staunchly Royalist Lloyd can’t resist a suggestion that if he had been born later, he would easily have won the Civil War for the Cavaliers. But Lloyd’s final epitaph for the larger-than-life hero also has a neat double entendre sting in the tail:

 

Tread softly (mortals) ore the bones

Of the world’s wonder, Captain Jones;

Who told his glorious deeds to many,

But never was believed of any:

Posterity let this suffice,

He swore all’s true, yet here he lyes.

 

So even if Welsh naval historical fiction is a pretty small and exclusive genre, I’m very happy to be in it alongside David Lloyd and his hero. You can forget Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain America – come on, Hollywood, give us a film of Captain Jones!