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Rochester

Medway 350, Day 4

12/06/2017 by J D Davies

Inevitably and naturally, Sunday was the day for a little more solemnity; certainly rather more solemnity than that provided by the hijacker of yesterday’s post, the scurrilous shade of Samuel Pepys himself.

Above all, the day featured a service at Rochester Cathedral to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. For those of you who don’t know Rochester, it’s not the grandest cathedral in the British Isles. In architectural terms, indeed, it’s not in the same league as the likes of, say, Wells, Lincoln or Ely, and suffers from a bit too much input from George Gilbert Scott. It’s also literally overshadowed by the immediately adjacent castle, the keep of which still towers over it, and which was the scene of one of the most remarkable and brutal sieges in the entire history of warfare – brilliantly described by my author chum Angus Donald in his The Death of Robin Hood, and rather less brilliantly in the ludicrous film Ironclad.

But Rochester Cathedral makes up in spades for all of this by the sheer weight of history contained within its ancient walls. It’s the second oldest cathedral in the British Isles, and Christian worship has taken place continuously there since 604 AD, which isn’t just ‘older than the USA’, the usual barb that we historically smug (or, alternatively, overburdened) Brits deploy against our cousins across the pond. but significantly older than England itself, too. Dickens knew it well, and based several scenes in its environs. (Indeed, the weekend also coincided with Rochester’s annual Dickens festival, which meant that several of those attending the service were in splendid Victorian garb.) The cathedral also has many connections with my own field of interest – in 1673, the French Huguenot admiral, des Rabesnières, was buried there after being killed while leading his fleet’s rear division in the Battle of Solebay, while a slab in the nave commemorates Captain Christopher Fogge, who died in command of the Third Rate Rupert in 1708, and other naval memorials, including the ship’s bell of a previous HMS Kent, can be found throughout the building.

This, then, was the setting for the service, which also marked the formal ‘seating’ of the new Mayor of Medway in his designated place in the cathedral quire. At first, I thought that doubling up the mayoral installation and the Medway commemoration was a bit inappropriate, but as the service unfolded, it became clear – to me, at least – that it was anything but. For one thing, the frankly ludicrous mayoral garb, complete with red robes, chain, and tricorn hat (not to mention the mace and its bearer, a kind of Kentish version of Black Rod) gave the proceedings an air of history that no amount of modern-day naval dress uniform and ‘men in suits’ (or even ‘women in crinoline’) could possibly provide, while the fact that the Mayor of Medway is also, for goodness sake, ‘Governor of Rochester Castle and Admiral of the River’, presumably in succession to the former Mayors of Rochester, and has been exercising the right to be installed in the cathedral since 1448, gave the whole proceedings a sense of historical continuity that stretched back a long way before the Dutch attack. Anthems with music composed by Daniel Purcell, the less famous brother of Henry, gave another sense of the seventeenth century, as did the entire order of service – the key elements, and most of the words, of the Anglican evensong service would have been very familiar to those who tried to defend Chatham in 1667, although they might well have baulked at the notion of the Old Testament lesson being read by the Dutch ambassador.

Today, though, it’s back home, to normality; or, in other words, there’s a lawn in Bedfordshire that needs mowing. Part of me wishes I could be back in Medway next weekend for its ‘Medway in Flames’ event, a spectacular show promised for Saturday evening. Instead, I’ll be in Portsmouth, attending, and presenting a report at, the AGM of the Society for Nautical Research.

***

Cockham Wood fort

Finally, though, and by way of a slight – but by no means complete – digression, I thought I’d mention two more naval history ‘memorials’, of very different kinds, that I visited during my stay in Medway. One is Cockham Wood Fort, a direct consequence of the Dutch attack – built in 1669, it was one of several new fortifications built along the river to ensure that such a disaster could never occur again. But the relentless power of several centuries of tides has very nearly done for it; large chunks of fallen brickwork lie in front of the surviving structure of the lower battery, and it seems probable that a few more decades will completely obliterate the remains of the fort.

The other memorial is the huge memorial to the men of the Royal Navy’s Chatham Division who were killed during both World Wars. Identical in pattern to the memorials at Portsmouth and Plymouth, this one stands in a very different location, high on the hill overlooking Chatham and Rochester. While this makes it much more prominent than either of its siblings, the distance from built-up, and thus more easily policed, areas means that it has been a target for vandals, to the extent that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission now only opens it between 8.30 and 5.00 – and when I went there, it wasn’t open at all. In one sense, this wasn’t a major issue for me, as I’d visited it before, but the principle of having to restrict access to such a hugely important part of Britain’s naval heritage is a depressing comment on some of the worst traits of modern society.

This much I know, though: every single name inscribed on the Chatham memorial is worth a thousand or more of the vacuous pondlife who find it entertaining to deface it.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Chatham, Cockham Wood fort, Medway 350, Rochester

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: the Prince of Transylvania

01/02/2016 by J D Davies

Time for another in my (very) occasional series of oddities and little-known tales that I’ve stumbled across during the course of my research. Actually, though, this was one that I came across during my teaching career, my ‘day job’ for thirty or so years. Back in 1987, I took up a new post at Bedford Modern School, and was casting around for a quick way of teaching some very bright sixth formers about the perils and pitfalls of primary sources. Fortuitously, the History department possessed a new-fangled piece of high technology called a ‘VHS recorder’, and just a few months after I started at the school, the BBC broadcast a programme which fitted my bill perfectly, so I recorded it and then used it at the beginning of the A-level course for many years. In those days, the historical documentary series Timewatch didn’t present hour long programmes on a single theme, as it does today. Instead, it covered three different stories within its hour, a format that made it much easier for it to present quirky and lesser-known recesses of history; arguably, the tendency towards ‘big’ stories suitable for the longer slot (and, indeed, for the themed series of three one-hour documentaries that now seem to be in vogue) means that the history which makes it onto our TV screens these days is much narrower in focus, and tends to recycle the same old supposedly ‘important’ themes. For example, even leaving aside such obvious, hackneyed old staples as the Tudors and the Nazis, Lucy Worsley’s recent series on the Romanovs was, by my reckoning, at least the third major series on the history of Russia on mainstream British TV during the last fifteen years or so. Within that same period, how many series have there been on the histories of, say, China, Japan, Brazil, and even India?

But enough of the rant, as that’s not the point I’m making here. The particular programme that I’m talking about included a twenty-minute tale narrated by Gabriel Ronay, a journalist and freelance historian. This began in October 1661, with the burial in Rochester Cathedral of one ‘Cossuma Albertus’, a ‘Prince of Transylvania’, who had been brutally murdered on the main coast road at Gad’s Hill, of Shakespearean fame, a notorious haunt of highwaymen and brigands. The Prince, it seemed, had been received at the court of the recently restored Charles II, where he was treated with honour. A contemporary account of the murder told a shocking tale:

Cossuma Albertus, a Prince of Transylvania, in the dominions of the King of Poland, being worsted by the German forces, and compelled to seek for relief came to our gracious King Charles II. for succour, from whom it is said he found a kind reception and a sufficient maintenance.

On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 15, 1661, this Prince Cossuma was approaching Rochester in his chariot, attended by his coachman and footboy, when within a mile of Strood…the vehicle stuck fast in the mire; whereupon the Prince resolved to sleep in the coach, pulling off his coat and wrapping it about him to keep himself warm. Being fast asleep, his coachman, Isaac Jacob, a Jew, about midnight takes the Prince’s hanger from under his head, and stabs him to the heart; and calling to his aid his companion, whose name was Casimirus Karsagi, they both completed the tragedy by dragging him out of the carriage, cutting off his head and throwing the mutilated remains into a ditch near at hand. The Prince was dressed in scarlet breeches, his stockings were laced with gold lace, with pearl-colour silk hose under them. The two men having possessed themselves of a large sum of money which the Prince had about with me, drawing a piece of timber, that I am confident one man could easily have carried upon his back. I made the horses be taken away, and a man or two to take the lumber away with their hands.

The burial entry for the 'Prince' in the Rochester Cathedral register
The burial entry for the ‘Prince’ in the Rochester Cathedral register

But Ronay then began to unpick the story in a way that brought home to my students (I hope!) the dangers of relying on single interpretations of events, and the need constantly to interrogate one’s sources. For instance, a copy of one of the pamphlets giving a sensationalist account of the murder contained a contemporary, handwritten marginal note, to the effect ”tis said he was a cheat, and no prince’. Other sources, filmed in such varied locations as the round reading room of the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and the George in Southwark, the most authentic surviving seventeenth-century hostelry in London, began to build up a very different story. In Charles II’s day, of course, Transylvania didn’t have the vampiric connotations it would later acquire, thanks to the likes of Bram Stoker and Christopher Lee. Instead, it had an overwhelmingly positive image: the Transylvanians were Protestants, holding the borders against both the Ottomans and the Catholic Habsburgs, and their ruler Bethlen Gabor had been one of the great Protestant heroes of the Thirty Years War. But the Transylvanians had been defeated, and many of them had been forced into exile, where they had become objects of sympathy – and of charity, too.

Rochester Cathedral
Rochester Cathedral, with the River Medway and Chatham Dockyard beyond

And there was the rub. ‘Cossuma Albertus’ wasn’t a prince at all, and wasn’t Transylvanian. His first name is probably a phonetic misspelling of ‘Casimir’, and he was almost certainly an impoverished Polish minor nobleman, who had adopted his cover story in order to con the gullible at Charles II’s court – including the King himself. There were also suggestions that he had another income stream as a French spy, no less, and was in the Rochester area to gather intelligence about the warships at Chatham dockyard. The story that he had been slaughtered at Gad’s Hill by his own coachmen unravelled, too; the ‘coachmen’ were his accomplices in the scam, and the murder seems to have been the result of a falling out over the proceeds. The killers were subsequently hanged at Maidstone. Ronay’s account ended with film of Rochester Cathedral, and the words of the published account of ‘the Prince’s’ burial:

His body being brought to the parish of Strood, was accompanied from thence to the West door of the Cathedral Church of Rochester by the Prebendaries of the said church in their formalities, with the gentry and commonality of the said city and places adjacent, with torches before them. Near the cathedral they were met by the choir, who sung Te Deum before them; when divine service was ended, the choir went before the body to the grave (which was made in the body of the church) singing Nunc Dimittis. Thousands of people flockt to this cathedral, amongst whom many gave large commendations of the Dean and Chapter, who bestowed so honorable an interment on a stranger at their own proper costs and charges.

And there he lies to this day: a conman who gulled the King of England, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral, and, very nearly, the historical record. But not quite.

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized Tagged With: King Charles II, Rochester, Transylvania

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