I was in search of someone else when I stumbled across Lucian Freud in Highgate West. There had been a storm the night before and the flat-topped grave was still wet, with a mix of early autumn leaves ripped from their trees and plastered to its surface, some already a yellowed gold while others retained the vigorous green of mid-summer. But it was the surface of the grave itself which arrested my attention and held me entranced, for beneath the leaves it seemed suffused with a lambent radiance, a lustrous turquoise glow.
It was, no doubt, a trick of the spectrum, a refraction of the autumn sunlight caught in the damp surface of the stone, or a malfunction in my eye to brain co-ordination. When I returned later the surface of the grave was a uniform grey and so it appeared in my photographs, but for a fleeting time I had been bewitched, mesmerized by the glowing colour.
It was felicitous that such a phenomenon offered itself at Freud’s grave for his paintings have a magical luminosity. His early works are surreal depictions of people, animals and wilting house plants often in strange juxtaposition, and his description of cyclamen as divas,
They die in such a dramatic way. It’s as if they fill and run over. They crash down; their stems turn to jelly, and their veins harden.*
reveals a mastery of words as well as paint.
The later portraits must rank amongst the greatest of the twentieth century. The figures in his paintings emerge from sombre backgrounds of muted interiors, bare floorboards, stained mattresses, and the heaped sheets which he bought from rag and bone sellers to wipe his brushes after each stroke.
Against these stark, inhospitable backgrounds his often-naked figures burst from the canvas. Their flesh is impastoed, textured, highly coloured, vibrant, and disturbing. These unsentimental portraits are of his friends: the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the benefits supervisor Sue Tilley; his fellow painters: Bacon and Auerbach; and his family: wives, children, and lovers. Nothing is romanticised and when relationships deteriorated this was mirrored in the paintings, which, as he repeatedly claimed, were all autobiographical,
Everything is autobiographical, and everything is a portrait.*
My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings.*
The subject matter is autobiographical. It is all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement really.*
But his biographers have supplemented Lucian Freud’s painterly autobiography, and if the manipulation of light playing on his grave seemed appropriate, the wording on the stone seemed odd. Beloved Father and Grandfather?
This does not sound like Freud whose failings as a father are well documented. He acknowledged fourteen children, others have estimated more, but did not live with any of them. His son David McAdam Freud described the absent and distant Lucian with wry understatement as “hardly father material.” Frank Paul states that the longest time he ever spent with his father was when he sat for his portrait. The portraits of his daughters while classed as affectionate by some critics are considered intrusive and inappropriate by others. When his daughter Annie would not let her own daughter sit for Large Interior, London 11 (After Watteau) Freud’s response was spiteful and ugly.
His personal relations do not make Freud any less talented an artist. The arguments about great art versus morally problematic artists are well rehearsed. Without defending the indefensible, it may be possible to separate the art from the artist. Moreover, Freud’s personal failings were petty and selfish, not evil, he was not a Gaugin or an Eric Gill. Yet when I reflected upon the strangely unconvincing epitaph, I liked his paintings a little less.
*Quotations from William Feaver, Lucian Freud: Life into Art, Tate Publishing 2002.
See also Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, Vintage Publishing, 2013
I used to smile when I passed the grave of Sarah Fletcher in Dorchester Abbey.
First there was the singular rubric, accompanied by an exclamation mark, clamouring for attention: “Reader!” In the mid nineteenth century exclamation marks were commonly known as Shriekmarks or Screamers, and that is how they always appear to me. Worse, as F Scott Fitzgerald suggested, they can sound like people laughing at their own jokes, though that is surely not the case here.
Next came the hyperbole, typical of eighteenth and nineteenth century epitaphs, enumerating the lady’s unqualified virtues:
A Young Lady, whose artless Beauty,
Innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners,
Once obtained her the Love and
Esteem of all who knew her.
But it was always the next sentence, making Sarah sound like an absurd antagonist in a Jane Austen novel, which amused me most:
But when Nerves were too delicately spun to
Bear the rude Shakes and Joltings
Which we meet with in this transitory
World, Nature gave way: She sunk
And died a Martyr to Excessive
Sensibility.
But when I learned Sarah’s pitiable story, I was ashamed of my heartless mockery. Sarah had discovered that following a series of infidelities, her husband Captain Fletcher, was planning a bigamous marriage to an heiress. With impressive resolution she arrived at the church in time to stop the ceremony; the heiress returned to her parents and Captain Fletcher to his ship. Unhappily, Sarah’s fortitude then deserted her, and she hanged herself from the curtain rail of her four-poster bed.
I want to tell her: Sarah, he wasn’t worth it, why didn’t you just walk away? But of course, that was not an option for women in 1799. The Married Women’s Property Act did not pass into law until almost a century later in 1882. Until then marriage made husbands and wives one person under the law, and that was not a romantic union. For it meant that any property or other assets the wife brought to the marriage were surrendered to the husband, anything she subsequently acquired in the form of income or belongings was legally his. She could not own anything in her own right or even jointly.
And effectively there was no divorce, for until 1857 the latter could only be obtained through a personal act of Parliament. This prohibitively complex and costly procedure was made even more difficult for women who had to provide evidence of grounds in addition to those of adultery. In 1857 there were only four divorces in the whole country, and they were all requested by men.
If she had broken away from him Captain Fletcher could have left Sarah destitute. And given his conduct there is no reason to believe that he would have acted otherwise.
Yet it was surprising to find Sarah buried in the Abbey, for another brutal law of the day prohibited the burial in consecrated ground of those who had killed themselves. Bodies of suicides were usually buried at a crossroads, commonly with a stake driven through the heart. Not until 1882 was it legal to hold a Christian service for anyone who had taken their own life.
Sarah’s body was able to be buried in the abbey church only because at the inquest,
“the derangement of her mind appearing very evident…the jury…found the verdict – Lunacy.” *
Sarah was not responsible for her actions. We cannot know if that verdict was motivated by a compassionate desire to allow her a church burial, but the words on the grave now make sense as a delicate euphemism.
It is not clear who was responsible for placing the stone and deciding the wording. Perhaps her parents, for Sarah was only twenty-nine years old, and they could still have been alive. If she chose not to return to their home, the possibility arises that she killed herself not because she feared impoverishment, but because she still loved the errant Captain Fletcher. The tragedy is no less either way.
It is strange, in the circumstances, that Captain Fletcher is named on the grave. I suspect it was a bleak attempt by the family to conceal the suicide, the lunacy verdict, and the sorry circumstances which prompted both, beneath a veneer of respectability and normality.
Unable to share in the hope expressed in the final lines on the stone, that “her Soul meet that Peace in Heaven which this Earth denied her,” I no longer smile when I pass her grave.
Sussex was the first county that I ever visited in the south of England. In the mid-sixties the south was still a quite different place from the north. True, we did not think of ourselves as northerners in my home county of Cheshire. Surrounded though we were by The North, The Midlands, Wales, and Liverpool, we perceived Cheshire as a misplaced bit of the home counties. Heavy industry, serious pollution, abandoned bombsites, and slum dwellings were the preserve of other, more stereotypically northern counties. Cheshire was dairy farming, the determined gentility of Knutsford and Wilmslow, and well-heeled housewives shopping in the Chester Rows.
Nonetheless a singular difference was apparent to me on that first trip south. Everything was cleaner and smarter, lighter and brighter, the air was fresher, the people were better dressed, the shops more elegant. There was an air of confidence, a swagger of prosperity and modernity. It was as though the sun had come out at the end of a bleak winter or a light had been switched on in a dark room.
In Chichester, the white limestone of the Cathedral contrasted with the dark red sandstone of the Chester I knew. There was an exciting scattering of coffee shops with real coffee; at home, the height of sophistication was a frothy coffee in a Perspex cup at a Wimpy bar. In Brighton, The Lanes burst with colour: greengrocers with Mediterranean fruits and vegetables which had not yet reached us in the north, vied with clothes shops with outrageously coloured and styled fashions.
Today the contrast is less apparent, and conceivably my memory exaggerates the erstwhile difference. I was doubtless influenced by an unusually sunny August, and by meetings with poised and stylish French children on English home holidays.
Nonetheless I still have a great affection for Sussex, not only for memories of a youthful, golden summer, but because it really is a very pretty county. I am particularly fond of Bosham with its the elegant houses, magnificent harbour, spectacular tidal range, and picturesque Anglo-Saxon church.
Of course, Holy Trinity church is surrounded by a picture book perfect churchyard, a gentle paradise of flowers, birdsong, and ancient stones. And there, despite the unhappy story attached to it, rests one of my favourite graves. Although the grave dates from 1759, the carved script, in a charming mixture of calligraphy, is still clear. Perhaps that lack of pollution and the milder southern climate which I noted on my first visit, combined with high quality engraving, has ensured its longevity.
The stone bears witness to the memory of Thomas Barrow, who was master of a sloop called the Two Brothers. It records his tragic misfortune:
In Memory of
Thomas, Son of Richard and Ann
Barrow, Master of the sloop Two
Brothers who by the Breaking of the
Horse fell into the Sea and Drown’d.
October the 13th 1759 Aged 23 years
Having little knowledge of things maritime, the reference to the horse confused me until I discovered that a horse is an additional footrope hung at the extreme end of the yardarm where the main rope is too tight to stand on. The shorter rope hangs down low enough for sailors to stand on while they are furling the outermost edges of the sails. It is usually thinner and more unstable than the other ropes, and as it is necessary to step off the main footrope to get on to it, it is usually the preserve of more experienced sailors like Thomas. *
Above a rough sea and pounded by storms from the north, the horse broke, and poor Thomas fell to his death. A bittersweet little carving illustrates the tragedy. In the centre is the sloop, below the rumbustious waves, and above a winged putti with distended cheeks representing the north wind. A tiny figure is clearly visible falling from the broken horse.
Below a dramatic yet poignant verse proclaims,
Tho Boreas’s Storms and Neptune’s waves
have toss’d me to and fro
Yet I at length by God’s decree
am harboured here below
Where at an Anchor here I lay
with many of our Fleet
Yet once again I shall set Sail
my saviour Christ to meet.”
And who reading his story could fail to wish that Thomas might “once again set sail”?
*If this is as unclear to you as it was to me, search for “Flemish horse(rigging)” on https://en.wikipedia.org where there is not only a helpful photograph and a diagram, but an explanation that all footropes were once known as “horses”, with this, the most dangerous one, known as a Flemish horse because the latter were considered the most unruly of equines.
Myles Hobart was the Member of Parliament for Marlow in Buckinghamshire for a very short time:1628-29.
I love seventeenth century history, not least because at this time the English language reached its apogee, so that every Act of Parliament, every Petition and Protest, is couched in the most eloquent and elegant English, as much a work of lucid literature, as a dry document. But in the seventeenth century the business of Parliament never was dull or mundane. On the contrary, acts of high drama were leading slowly but inexorably to the demise of absolute monarchy and the genesis of a Parliamentary democracy. Myles Hobart had a walk on part in one such drama.
Charles I, like his father, had an elevated view of his status as God’s chosen appointee. He ran an extravagant household, had a bloated army…and expected other people to pay for his amusements. In 1626 Parliament refused to grant the taxes he sought. Charles promptly dissolved Parliament and raised money through forced loans, imprisoning without trial those who refused him. Billeting his soldiers in private homes, he obliged people to feed, clothe and accommodate them.
But as increasing numbers of people faced prison rather than “lending” him money, he was compelled to call another Parliament in 1628. The Members were ready for him. Edward Coke had drawn up the Petition of Right confirming that there should be no taxation without Parliamentary consent, no imprisonment without trial, and no forced quartering of soldiers in private houses. As a condition of their voting taxes Parliament demanded the King’s formal assent to the Petition.
Charles attempted to fob them off with a verbal consent. The Parliamentarians were not impressed; they sought written guarantees:
Not that I distrust the King but that I cannot take his trust but in a Parliamentary way,
observed Edward Coke wryly.
Charles then tried to add a proviso stating that the terms of the Petition prevailed through his grace, and not as of right, hoping through this expedient that in future disputes the Petition would have no force of law. But Parliament was packed with men who had legal training, they knew the power of words, and they stood firm. Reluctantly Charles gave his formal assent to the Petition in June 1628.
But he then prorogued parliament, and had the Petition of Right rewritten so that it could only be enforced “according to the laws and customs of the realm,” a loose phrase which he could interpret to suit himself. He proceeded to collect the indirect taxes of Tunnage and Poundage* without seeking authorisation and to prosecute merchants who refused to pay.
When Parliament reconvened in January 1629 and took issue with this illegal levy, the Members anticipated that another adjournment would presage a dissolution. As they expected, in March, on instructions from the King, the Speaker rose to announce an adjournment. Immediately Denzil Holles and Benjamin Valentine pushed him back into his chair and held him down ** while a furious debate ensued as angry members defied the king and his supporters in the House. John Eliot thundered,
Mr. Speaker there never was the like of this done in the House…It is the fundamental liberty of this House that we have ever used to adjourn ourselves.
When the King sent his messenger, the ludicrously named Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, to order Parliament to disperse, Myles Hobart had his moment of glory: he locked the door and pocketed the key leaving an impotent Black Rod standing outside. John Eliot then read out the declaration which he had prepared. After condemning Charles’ actions, he sought and secured assent for the Three Resolutions anathematising anyone levying or paying Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament, or promoting Popery or Arminianism (the religious groups supporting the king). Anyone breaching the Resolutions was declared
a capital enemy of the Kingdom and Commonwealth…betrayer of the liberties of England and an enemy of the state.
In short, such people would be guilty of treason. Having completed their business, the Members then voted for their own adjournment.
Charles’ response was swift. Nine of the leading protagonists, including John Eliot and Myles Hobart were arrested and imprisoned in the Tower.
Some few vipers that did cast the mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes,
spat Charles, inaccurately, for a majority in the House were firmly behind Eliot. As the MPs had foreseen Charles then dissolved Parliament. He ruled as an autocratic, absolute ruler for eleven years raising money by royal prerogative…but he was to get his comeuppance in 1649.
Meanwhile Eliot died in prison. Myles Hobart was released in 1631 but was fatally injured a year later when his carriage overturned on Holborn Hill.
He was buried in All Saints Parish Church, Marlow, where a monument, situated too high up for comfortable viewing, features a bust of Hobart resting on a cushion. An admonitory homily references his youth; he was only thirty-four when he died,
Wryte not a daye this spectacle thee charms,
Death from thy byrth doth claspe thee in her armes.
Youthful as he, thou mayest be, yet he’s gonne
And thou must followe, no man knows how soone
Learn this of hym, prepared thou be to dye
Then shalt thou lyve, though through mortality.”
Memorial, Myles Hobart, All Saints Parish Church, Marlow
An admonitory homily
The cause of his death is not spelled out but illustrated by the charming carving of a runaway coach.
The runaway coach
I was disappointed that despite the monument having been erected by vote of Parliament in 1647 there was no reference to the day Hobart locked Black Rod out of the Commons. But I sent him a silent word of thanks for his theatrical contribution to the long fight for Parliamentary democracy.
*If you have forgotten your school history, Tunnage and Poundage were respectively the indirect taxes charged on each tun of wine imported and on other goods imported or exported as determined by weight.
**There is a wonderful painting of the incident by Andrew Garrick Gow in the Parliamentary Art Collection see https://artuk.org >discover>artworks>House of Commons 1628-29, Speaker Finch held by Holles and Valentine.
Against the east side of the church of Saint John in Frome, where bushes encroach onto the graveyard, I noticed a strange, shabby, neglected tomb. It was covered by a stone canopy abutting the church wall, and visible only through windows cut into two sides the stone. Even this view was partially obscured by iron bars painted the functional shade of blue favoured by municipal authorities in the vicinity of public swimming baths and water features. Peering through I discerned cracked tiles crudely decorated with bishops’ mitres. More thick iron bars straddled the tiles like a cage, marking the shape of the tomb beneath. On top of the cage lay a bishop’s crozier and mitre, also of metal, crudely fabricated and coated with peeling paint. Soil debris, bird droppings, and weeds growing through the tiles completed the picture of decrepitude.
A stone canopy abutting the church wall
Iron bars a functional shade of blue
More bars mark the shape of the tomb beneath
A mitre and a crozier
Decrepitude
The remains of Anglican bishops are generally cosseted in their cathedrals, so this scruffy outlier came as a surprise.
On the far side of the tomb, I found an inscription:
May the here interred Thomas, Bp of Bath and Wells,
and uncanonically deprived for not transferring
his allegiance, have a perfect consummation of blisse
both of body and soul
-of which God keep me always mindful.
(Bishop Ken’s epitaph ordered by himself.)
I liked the rolling language of his phrases although the conflation looked grammatically suspect. Even more, I was intrigued by the resentment which Bishop Ken carried to his scruffy grave, as he recalled an unforgiven slight arising from his own principled stand. I hoped for an amusing tale of strife and discordancy amongst the episcopacy, perhaps a scandal or a schism.
In the Bishops’ Palace beside Wells Cathedral there was little sign that there had ever been any drama. In the long gallery Bishop Ken’s sizeable portrait occupied a prominent position amongst others who had held office in Bath and Wells.
Bishop Ken’s portrait in the long gallery of the Bishops’ Palace, Wells
The written guides described the occupant of the diocese from 1685-1688 in anodyne language: a Bishop of simple lifestyle, a supporter of unspecified worthy causes, showing compassion for the needy by regularly inviting twelve poor parishioners to share his Sunday lunch,* and an enthusiastic hymn writer.**
His first brush with authority had come in 1687 when James II issued The Declaration of Indulgence. The Declaration suspended laws enforcing conformity to the Church of England: it allowed people to worship as they saw fit and ended the requirement to take communion in the Anglican Church in order to obtain public office. Seven bishops, including Ken, refused to proclaim The Declaration. They were sent to the Tower and charged with seditious libel. Marches and riots in the City made it clear that they enjoyed widespread support. They were subsequently acquitted.
The Declaration, ostensibly proclaiming religious tolerance, was a crude political tactic. James had no interest in religious pluralism. Since he had succeeded his brother in 1685, he had pursued a policy of promoting Catholics, from whom his chief supporters were drawn. The inclusion of Dissenters in the Declaration was a transparent attempt to win their support in a political alliance against Anglican Parliamentarians.
For James had shown no compunction in persecuting Dissenters. The Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland had refused to take the Oath of Supremacy reasoning that no mortal king but only Jesus Christ could be head of the church. They refused to pray for the king or attend their parish churches. Instead, they held open air meetings at field conventicles. For this they had been excluded from all public offices and fined. On coming to power James had instigated new penal laws passed by the Scottish Parliament under pressure from him, subjecting both Covenanter preachers and their hearers to the death penalty and the subsequent confiscation of their property. Suspects were brutally tortured to extract confessions.
The Declaration of Indulgence was just the latest in a series of attempts by James to re-establish a monarchy unchecked by Parliament. To this end he had been appointing his own supporters to the highest offices at court, in the church, and in the universities. Lords Lieutenant vetted potential members of Parliament to pack the chamber with loyalists. Local government was purged to produce a docile electoral machinery. James enlarged the standing army using his dispensing power to appoint his Catholic supporters to command regiments. He demanded that Parliament vote large sums of money to maintain these forces. When the members refused, he prorogued Parliament.
James had embarked on an arbitrary rule, suspending Habeas Corpus, introducing a centralised, autocratic, militarised state. He sought a ruling from the law courts that he had the power to dispense with Acts of Parliament, and when judges questioned this undermining of the rule of law, they were dismissed.
It was clear then that the Declaration of Indulgence was a cynical ploy to wrest power from any future Parliament by packing it with the King’s own supporters, facilitating his exercise of absolute power, reviving the Divine Right of Kings as God’s appointees to rule as they saw fit. Any tolerance would be dependent on the King’s capricious decision making. It was ascendancy, not toleration which James sought.
But it was not any legitimate objection to autocratic power and arbitrary rule which motivated Ken and his fellow bishops; indeed, Ken upheld the Divine Right and had backed the King against Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685. Far more likely it was the well-founded fear that their own privileges would be eroded which prompted their opposition.
Neither side emerges with credit from this spat, both struggling to ensure that in their own interests their preferred religious faction had control of the government. And certainly, neither the bishops nor the king questioned the dubious legitimacy of any theocratic influence on the legislature.
But this crude attempt to buy the support of the Dissenters irrevocably undermined any remaining credibility which James may have had. On the very day that the Bishops were acquitted, the Immortal Seven (six nobles and a bishop) wrote to William of Orange inviting him to England and suggesting that he bring a small army with him. As William landed at Torbay, James fled, throwing the Great Seal, used by monarchs to signify assent to state documents, into the Thames as he went.
If he thought that disposing of the latter would incapacitate any alternative government, James was wrong. He was considered to have abdicated and Parliament invited William and Mary to take the throne. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was imminent.
And it was at this point that Bishop Ken had his second altercation with the establishment. Since he believed in the Divine Right of Kings and had sworn allegiance to James, Ken reasoned that it would be breaking his oath if he swore allegiance to William while James was still alive. So, he became one of six Bishops, known as the non-jurors, who refused to swear allegiance to the new king and were subsequently removed from office. Once again, I suspect, he may have been influenced by a desire to protect his Anglican privileges, this time against a Calvinist threat.
Ken’s friend Lord Weymouth provided him with a home and an annuity at Longleat- whose grandeur eclipses that of any Bishops’ Palace – for the next twenty years. In 1703 Queen Anne invited Ken to resume his bishopric; but even though both James and William were now dead he refused, though he did accept the £200 pension which Anne offered.
Longleat, whose grandeur eclipses that of any Bishops’ Palace
Before his own death in 1711 he had requested to be buried in the nearest parish church “within my diocese,” and written his epitaph. So, there he is in St. John’s churchyard, Frome: a man of integrity and principle, or a conservative with narrow views and a petulant, querulous disposition, depending on your point of view.
And the Glorious Revolution? There was no overthrow of the status quo, no fundamental change in the class system. William himself had an ulterior motive, seeking an alliance against French expansion which he considered a threat to the independence of the Netherlands. Certainly, the subsequent Bill of Rights (1689) heralded a degree of Parliamentary democracy, with the powers of a constitutional monarch limited by Parliamentary sovereignty. Absolute monarchy and any concept of the Divine Right of Kings was superseded by the notion of a social contract between rulers and ruled. It became illegal for any monarch to suspend the law or to make royal appointments, to levy taxes or to maintain a standing army in time of peace without the consent of Parliament. Elections were to be free, the life of Parliaments and the interval between Parliaments to be limited. An independent judiciary, freedom of press and speech, and greater religious toleration were written into law. At the very least it was an improvement, and no one had to die for it. Further steps towards democracy followed slowly over the centuries, and sometimes people did die for them. Yet well into the twenty-first century we still tolerate the anomaly of an unelected head of state and an unelected second chamber where twenty-six Anglican bishops still have an automatic right to sit and vote.***
**********
*He shared his lunch with the poor but unlike Dom Helder Camara he never questioned the origins of their poverty. “When I gave food to the poor they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor have no food, they called me a Communist,” Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian Prelate, in Essential Writings edited by McDonough, 2009.
**Those of us who attended school in the sixties when a provision of the 1944 Education Act still made a daily act of worship mandatory can recall Awake My soul and with the Sun and Praise God from whom all Blessings Flow from morning assemblies.
***Republic is committed to the abolition of the monarchy, its replacement with an elected head of state, and a more democratic political system. For details of activities and events see https://www.republic.org.uk
