J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

King Charles I

Art

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Time for some culture, although I can’t help thinking of a quote I first came across when teaching Mussolini’s Italy to schoolchildren some 30 years ago: ‘when I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my gun,’ said, yes, Mussolini’s Minister of Culture. Seriously, though, this is a particularly good time to be a lover of all things seventeenth century. London currently has two superb art exhibitions with a linked theme, Charles I: King and Collector at the Royal Academy, and Charles II: Art and Power at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, and last week, we went to see them both, the former in the morning, the latter in the afternoon. The former is definitely the main event – nothing less than a re-assembling in one building of a substantial part of the great art collection of King Charles I, sold and dispersed after the king’s execution in 1649. To prepare ourselves, we’d dutifully watched the BBC’s excellent documentary, which showed the great artworks being moved from the Louvre and elsewhere, accompanied by insightful commentary from such noted art critics as, umm, Tony Adams. (On the same principle, I look forward to the next Match of the Day carrying Tracey Emin’s views on Jose Mourinho’s deployment of holding midfielders.)

The Royal Academy exhibition contains an outstanding cross-section of Charles I’s taste. There’s the monumental – the nine panels of Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar have a room to themselves, as do four vast Mortlake tapestries, brought over from France. There’s the intimate, including a substantial collection of miniatures. There’s plenty of Renaissance religious art, although sadly, I can’t look at a lot of this genre without being reminded of Allo Allo‘s running gag about ‘The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies’. There’s a substantial amount of Rubens. Above all, though, there are Van Dycks galore, and for me, they were easily worth the ticket cost on their own. Now, I have to declare a particular personal interest in Van Dyck, quite apart from rating him as a pretty decent dauber: he married Mary Ruthven, heiress of the notorious Earls of Gowrie who were the subject of my book Blood of Kings (now out of print, alas), and thanks to their only child Justina, born eight days before her father died, the Stepney baronets of my hometown of Llanelli, whose history I’ve been writing for many years, became the only legitimate descendants of the great artist. And what Van Dycks the exhibition has on display! There’s the famous portrait of Charles I in three positions; the so-called ‘Great Peece’, a truly vast work which turns the minute Charles and Henrietta Maria into giants; and the knockout centrepiece of the exhibition, three of the greatest Van Dycks of all (Charles I at the Hunt, Charles I with M de St Antoine and the Equestrian Portrait of Charles I) assembled in the same space and looking across at each other, something that would never have happened even when the artist was alive. These works were very familiar – for one thing, they’d all ended up at one time or another as the cover art for History textbooks when I was teaching the period to A-level students! But to see them at their full scale, and complimenting each other, was a sensational experience, allowing all sorts of comparisons to be made. For example, as Wendy, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed, remarked, it’s curious that the king actually looks more powerful and autocratic in what seems to be the most informal of the three settings, ‘Charles I at the Hunt’, than in the two vast equestrian portraits where he’s in full armour.

My personal favourite in the exhibition, though? This one – ‘The Children of Charles II’, partly because of the poignancy of the eventual fates of both several of the children and of their family as a whole during the turmoil that was soon to engulf them, partly because of that dog.

‘Look, this picture is all about me, right? Not these kids. Especially not the one in the red- I mean, what does he think he looks like? And if he sticks his hand over my face again, he’s mincemeat. Literally. Tony Adams can talk about the symbolism of divine right authority all he likes.’

And so, after lunch, a stroll across Green Park in winter sunshine, skirting the crowds outside Buck House (royal standard flying, so HM in residence), and then into the Queen’s Gallery. This is a much smaller space than the Royal Academy, and the exhibition is much more modest in scale and ambition, with only a very few pieces of really great art from the Royal Collection on display. Paradoxically, though, it had rather more of direct interest to me, which can be summed up simply as ‘lots of naval stuff’. Moreover, unlike the RA, the Queen’s Gallery both permits photography and is much less crowded, so it’s possible to get really close to the pictures, take closeups of detail, etc etc. So here, in no particular order, are a few of my own photos of my personal highlights. But don’t take my word for it: if you’re at all able to get to That London, go yourselves!

Charles II, in one of his more modest moments
A detail from a remarkably detailed plan of Tangier under English rule, showing the great breakwater or ‘mole’ built at vast expense to shelter Charles II’s warships
A detail from ‘The Lord Mayor’s Water Procession on the Thames’, 1683, showing the royal family watching from Whitehall Palace
‘Sir Robert Holmes, his bonfire’ of 1666, aka ‘The English Fury’, painted by Willem van de Velde the elder; the event which provides the backdrop to the opening chapters of the sixth Quinton novel, ‘Death’s Bright Angel’

The highlight for me, though, was Antonio Verrio’s staggering The Sea Triumph of Charles II, from the Royal Collection. I talk about this in my new non-fiction book Kings of the Sea:

Verrio…was also responsible for The Sea Triumph of Charles II, in which Charles, attired as a Roman emperor and attended by his fleet, is driven through the waters by Neptune and four sea horses. Victory presents the king with a plumed helmet, while Envy (the Dutch or French, perhaps?) is struck by lightning. A fleet of British warships lies at anchor, while Minerva and Juno look on approvingly. The whole is adorned with the legend ‘imperium oceano famam qui terminet astris’ (‘whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies alone shall bound’). In short, The Sea Triumph was emphatically not a modest and understated piece of domestic art.

I’d seen the Sea Triumph before, in the Pepys exhibition at the National Maritime Museum a couple of years ago, but the NMM didn’t allow photography. Three cheers, then, for the much more enlightened policy of Her Majesty and those responsible for her art collection, which means that I can leave you with what has to be pretty much the most utterly bonkers piece of naval art ever conceived! Enjoy.

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!