SWEETHEART ABBEY

Early in my novel, ‘Elizabeth’s Daughter’, I use Sweetheart Abbey as the setting for Elizabeth’s burial. I was surprised recently when I  was offered a rather sarcastic comment by an editor about the name I ‘chose’ for the abbey. I agree that perhaps not many people have  heard of it, but in fact it is a real Abbey, named by its founders, the Cistercian monks, in 1273. It’s proper name is St Mary the Virgin of Sweetheart .

Sweetheart Abbey is in New Abbey, so called so as to distinguish it from the ‘old’ abbey at Dundrennan.

Actually, it was given the rather unlikely and non-religious title of ‘Sweetheart’ because  Lady Dervorgilla [Dervorguilla] founded the Abbey in honour of her husband, Lord John Balliol, who died in battle 1268. {The 750 year old Balliol College in Oxford was founded by this Lord Balliol as an act of penance – apparently he offended a bishop – but its future  was secured by his wife.}

 Lady Dervogilla had her husband’s heart embalmed and preserved in an ivory casket. She had this casket buried with her in the Abbey when she died in 1289.

Lady Dervogilla is probably not really here anymore

 

Like many Catholic monasteries  it suffered the vicissitudes of wars. The Abbey was attacked by the English before it was even finished during the Wars of Independence between Scotland and England. The battles, at one point, were between Edward 1 of England and John 1 of Scotland  (the sweethearts’ son).  Then, of course, much of the Abbey was destroyed during the Reformation.  After the Annexation Act of 1587, the Abbey’s Abbot Gilbert eventually lost his fight to stay and practice his faith and had to flee to France after his Popish books, copes, chalices, pictures, images and other such Popish trash  was found. All but the books were publicly burned. [www.historic-scotland.gov.uk.]

Eventually a lot of the local stone used to build the Abbey was carried away by villagers who were building their homes nearby.



View from the graveyard

I may have been too hasty in condemning that editor who wanted to question me for employing such a unbelievable name for my church. While I was looking for evidence for  the few Catholic churches in Scotland in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I did read references to this Abbey. I now have to ‘fess’ up to the truth. I didn’t know it was so close to Dumfries. Initially, my Scottish setting was in Dumfries for two reasons. It is close to the English border and its first Catholic Church, St. Andrews, was built in 1815 so it worked well for my context.

While I couldn’t see any references to a graveyard at St. Andrews, I dismissed that as inconsequential. That is, until I went to Dumfries and a helpful librarian at Ewart Library told me that, in fact, St. Andrews didn’t have a graveyard.  Catholics were not allowed to be buried in their own church. Instead, they had to be buried at the Church of Scotland’s St. Michaels. It has a very large graveyard still and, at the time my novel is set, there was a special section set aside for the burial of Catholics. Wow, I thought! What a treasure of information I could use – in one sentence at least.

In almost the next breath the librarian then casually mentioned that Catholics could be buried at Sweetheart Abbey, which was nearby! I drove to New Abbey pronto and, sure enough, there stands the imposing and beautiful ruins of ‘my’ Abbey.  After a long and contemplative stroll through the graveyard I walked through the Church’s once sacred ruins. The enthusiastic custodian told me that only Catholics who lived within one and half square kilometres of the Abbey could be buried there. Out went St. Andrews and Dumfries. Instead, I moved my setting about five miles south to New Abbey. I mean, who wouldn’t use this setting when they genuinely had the excuse? Isn't it beautiful?

 

Inside those imposing ruins

Reading Pickwick Papers

PICKWICK PAPERS

An unusual post, I know, but I was privileged to attend Kate Forsyth’s conference, for aspiring writers of historical fiction, in the Cotswolds last September. One of the many valuable suggestions she made was that we read novels that were published in our  historical era. My MS  is set in 1833 and a young Charles Dickens published Pickwick Papers in serial form from 1836 – 1837. While I have now finished my own manuscript, which I thought I had researched fairly comprehensively, I still learnt a lot from reading this novel.

There are the  characters and plots  and language  (eg. an inn called ‘Eatanswill’!) that we immediately recognise as typifying the great master, and while I have thoroughly enjoyed some of his many epic novels, I can’t admit to finding this particular specimen a page-turner. There is no single narrative that threads through it, rather Dickens weaves in a  series of stories. These include caricatures of rascals and villains, a widowed landlady who sues the eponymous protagonist for breach of promise, as well as a couple of delightful ghost stories. I’m sure ‘A Christmas Carol’ was conceived  here.

I read a free copy on my iPad which shows that in total reading time, it took me 24 hours and 31 minutes and it is 994 pages long, so it is a commitment.

Samuel Pickwick is a compassionate, intelligent, chivalrous, retired bachelor which may go some way to explaining his landlady’s, Mrs Bardle, dreams of a marriage proposal.

Sam Weller

 While the retired Mr. Pickwick is no fool, Sam, his devoted servant,  with his ‘streets smarts’, certainly saves the day many times. Sam’s loyalty takes him so far that he has himself imprisoned with Mr Pickwick, whose pride forces him to choose the Fleet over paying the costs of compensating Mrs Bardle for her disappointed hopes and successful lawsuit; her case is argued by Dickens archetypal, rapacious lawyers .

I wanted to share with you some of ‘Samivel’s’ wisdom. He copies the style of his fond father’s proverbs to illustrate his point continually throughout the novel and I soon found myself  eagerly anticipating  them.

i.                     ‘…I only assisted natur, ma’am; as the doctor said to the boy’s mother, after he’d bled him to death.

ii.                   ‘If you know’d who was near, sir, I raythe think you’d change your note; as the hawk remarked to himself with a cheerful laugh, ven he heered the robin-redbreast a –singin’ round the corner.

And I can’t resist this gem from other characters.

iii.                  ‘They appeared in the form of a copious review of a work on Chinese metaphysics, Sir…He CRAMMED for it …in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’

                  ‘Indeed!’ said Mr Pickwick: ‘I was not aware that that valuable work contained            any              information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’

‘He read for metaphysics under the letter M. and for China under the letter C. and combined his information, Sir.’

or

iv.                  ‘I have heard of a Glasgow man and a Dundee man drinking against each other for fifteen hours at a sitting. They were both suffocated at the same moment, but with this trifling exception, they were not a bit the worse for it.’

 It was good advice, Kate!  

In my novel I changed ‘my weapon of choice’ for my highwaymen from ‘flintlocks’ to ‘blunderbusses’ as further research revealed they were more commonly used by thieves. I am toying with the notion of changing ‘butt’ - as in the butt of a rifle - to ‘stock’ but I’m still considering this change. 

I was surprised to learn that Mr Pickwick changes his carriage horses after only nineteen miles into his journey. Dickens' used many clichés that I now know where popular in this era, he described sword fights and fisticuffs and wedding ceremonies and I am certainly better informed about the name of the liquor consumed in that era.

 

Not all the troubles were between Protestants and Catholics

Despite what I have written in the past about the Catholic Relief Act, there were a handful of influential and established Catholic families who remained in England at this time. They used their influence and their money, accompanied by a very deep faith, to keep the Church alive, almost literally at times. These families included the Howards and Fitzalans (Earls of Arundel), and the Talbots (Dukes of Shrewsbury).

 It took a few decades for lay and religious Catholics to trust the realities of the freedoms gradually won in the various Catholic Relief Acts. It also took time to establish and build new churches, schools and even congregations. And convents! They really weren’t any convents since the Reformation. I did find the Church of St. Aloysius in Somers Town, London, though and the Convent of St. Aloysius was founded in 1830 by the French noblewoman and widow, Sister Marie Madeliene de Bonault d’Houet. She, with a devoted band of French and English women, established schools for both well off and poor English Catholic children.



Sister Marie Madeliene

To return to the  valuable and valued supporters of the Catholic Church, they had a rather vehement rupture with their clergy when Catholicism was legalised.

Those families who had loyally supported the Catholic Church during the dark years of persecutions felt, perhaps justifiably, that they were owed. They were also concerned, as good Englishmen and women, that their loyalty to the king would be compromised by Rome now that Catholicism in England was legal. Of course, added to this was the fact that, after the Reformation, it was their unwavering adherence to their faith and their support of the clergy, often at grave risks to themselves and certainly at great expense, was the added  notion that without the support of these noblemen there would have been barely a skeleton of a Catholic Church left to free.

Obviously this dispute caused the clergy a lot of distress. However, they couldn’t budge. Now they could come out into the open and take charge of the Church as well as make {clerical} appointments as they saw fit. They wouldn’t defer to those who had supported them for so long, despite their threats to withdraw their support now.

As I have said, there were very few convents or nuns before the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 and it took a while for this to change. Until then the Catholic church in England was called a Mission, the priests were chaplains or rectors. They were not allowed to wear vestments and in fact were very wary of ever wearing any garments that distinguished them as Catholic chaplains or rectors. They certainly didn’t wear the ‘Roman collar’. They were also not allowed to preach their sermons in English – in England! I would imagine that this would be to prohibit anything seen as instructive, even subversive,  to the uneducated parishioners.

Of course, many chaplains/rectors did preach their sermons in English. At this time the practise of Catholicism was easier if one attended a chapel attached to an Embassy, of which there were quite a few in London at this time. Otherwise, in fact Catholics were not supposed to worship in London at all so Masses were held secretly in houses and meeting rooms. If there were Catholic churches they were very plain and very unobtrusive. And there really wasn’t anything inside them that could be considered idolatrous.

I will return to the subject again when I discuss some of my thoughts on what contributed to the relaxing of the laws against the practice of Catholicism in England, especially before the first Catholic Relief Act of 1778.

THE WILD GIRL

Kate Forsyth

If historical fiction is one avenue for us to access historical fact then “The Wild Girl” is more than up to the task. Besides the tiny little details stirred in like sugar in your tea, such as the war between the British and Americans more than thirty years after America won independence from the British and some of England’s history under George 111, it is the unveiling of the pertinent details of the experiences of the people of Hessen-Cassel, Germany, in early 19^th century which is really fascinating. Dortchen Wild’s family and the Grimm family’s story reflect the experiences of their little kingdom beginning with the escape of their Kurfurst, the occupation by the despotic Jerome Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars, occupation by the Russians, back to the French and then, after Waterloo, the Kurfhurst’s return.

All of this is wonderfully described but it is the love story between Dortchen and Wilhelm which has been so beautifully told and imagined in ‘The Wild Girl’. This is truly gorgeous, turn the page stuff with lovely little snippets of the tales Dortchen told Wilhelm and which went to make up some of the Grimms Brothers  Fairy Tales we grew up with. Like Wilhelm, Forsyth believes that the truth has to be exposed and it is her portrayal of some ugly experiences as the cause of the barriers between Dortchen and Wilhelm that kept me reading well into the night and picking it up again a mere few hours later.  

 

 

Like the early versions of fairy tales, this is not a children’s book. It is simultaneously a gripping, gritty, beautiful and fascinating story about the lives of people who really lived and loved and lost and I urge you to read it.

 

 

 

 

Therese Noble

My mother and her mental illness.

When I was nineteen I was hospitalised in the Blue Mountains Hospital with rheumatic fever. Really!! Fortunately, unlike Robbie Burns, I survived. While I was hospitalised my aunty Mary visited me. She put a parcel on my bed. It was the first instalment of her collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I have been hooked ever since.

How did I contract rheumatic fever, I don’t hear you asking? Let me tell you anyway. A few months before I was in hospital, my father was contacted by his mother. My grandmother told him that she had been contacted by Social Services to say that my mother was trying to get in touch with her three daughters.  At that stage we were, I think,  18, 16 and 12. She hadn’t seen us for ten years!! All those promises my father made to his young daughters to see their mother regularly after he had left her in a mental institution in Brisbane were not fulfilled.

Now she was in Austinmer in the New South Wales South Coast. My sisters and I caught the train from Katoomba to Central Station and then from there to Austinmer. I wore a thick woollen suit, I already had a sore throat and we arrived in Austinmer in the pouring rain.

We walked through the rain to her boarding house. It was a very emotional occasion but I don’t remember much about the first time we saw her a few months earlier for what seemed like the first time. I remember that she really didn’t know who we were even when we were standing right in front of her. On that first occasion my aunty Mary was with us and she assured our mother that we were her daughters.  We were nervous and anxious but not nearly as much as she was. My mother doesn’t cry often but  she cried that day.

When the three of us arrived on this particular occasion in May she was at the front door where she had obviously being watching vigilantly, very much hoping that the weather had not prevented us from coming.  Having only a room in a boarding house didn’t give her much scope to cook for us as she would have liked, to welcome us into a home, but I remember that she did have a home-made cake so she must have been allowed to use the kitchen. I  remember that her landlady was very kind to her.

My mother awakens a degree of kindness towards her in nearly everyone who meets her. I don’t think I’ve met a person who doesn’t like her.  Lord knows, as any of you who live with a mentally ill person knows, she wasn’t, isn’t, always easy to cope with.

My mother’s story, briefly, is that she and her two younger brothers were removed from their parent’s care in Broken Hill. They were taken to a foster home in Guildford, Sydney. My mother was twelve and was considered too old to be fostered while both of her brothers were taken by good families. She told me something of her anguish at losing them because she was their older sister and she felt responsible for them. It was a real wrench and , of course, she was to be left all alone.

 Mum’s schizophrenia was well and truly apparent by the time she married my father when she was 23. One of her brothers, Billy, was mentally challenged. That’s all I know. The other one, Ken,  became an accountant and lived in Melbourne. Unfortunately, he appears to have completely wiped his older sister from his life.  He knows she married my father, and our family name is rather uncommon, but he has never made the slightest attempt to find her. Perhaps there is a good reason. She has asked me to trace him and I have tried a couple of times but her family name is not all that unusual. I didn’t like to disappoint her but  I haven’t met with any success.

 

Back to the rheumatic fever. Because I was in that thick woollen suit all day, and believe me it was soaking wet , and I had a sore throat, when I returned home from Austinmer to Woodford I was already  sick. The trip took place on a Saturday. By Monday morning I felt as if I had being run over by a steam roller. I had a raging temperature and every bone in my body just ached. If it wasn’t for the pain I would have thought I was paralysed because I couldn’t move. Nor could I imagine what could possibly have happened to me overnight to occasion such pain. A trip to the doctor, a throat swap (of a throat so sore I could barely open my mouth) and a blood test and I was in hospital for the next five weeks, not allowed out of my bed, and visited by interns from Sydney to pock and prod at this patient with rheumatic fever at the ripe old age of 19 – which is apparently quite old to be contracting this illness so there is no sarcasm here.

The Elizabeth of my novel is modelled on my mother, who is at heart  kind and generous and accepting and patient. She is intelligent, well-read and she recites whole passages that interest her by heart. She is fanatical about good health, exercise, good food. I have not lived with her since I was seven years of age and anything I know of these things I learned before then.

 

 

The Sound of Music

The Lady of the Lake

I make quite a few references to music, mostly classical given the period – 1833. This is rather cheeky of me because I am definitely not a musician of any description. It is all research. I refer to Schubert (1797-1828), Mozart (1756-1791), both Austrian (notice Schubert was even younger than Mozart when he died), Beethoven (1770-1827) and the Englishman,  John Gay and his ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (1683-1732). I have my protagonist as a accomplished pianist. For any pianists out there, is Ave Maria a particularly difficult piece to play? Hannah attends a recital of Chopin’s music at Drury Lane but it is not by the genius himself. He did visit London but well before and after my dates.

Franz Schubert wrote the score to the beautiful Ave Maria in 1825. It was inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s poem, ‘The Lady of the Lake’.  My heroine, Hannah, is Scottish and so I couldn’t resist some references to her countrymen’s great writers, even if there are a few degrees of separation. 

 See the following information from 'SongFacts' for more information.

The original words of Ave Maria (Hail Mary) were in English, being part of a poem called The Lady of the Lake, written in 1810 by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The poem drew on the romance of the legend regarding the 5th century British leader King Arthur, but transferred it to Scott's native Scotland. In 1825 during a holiday in Upper Austria, the composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) set to music a prayer from the poem using a German translation by Adam Storck. Scored for piano and voice, it was first published in 1826 as "D839 Op 52 no 6." Schubert called his piece "Ellens dritter Gesang" (Ellen's third song) and it was written as a prayer to the Virgin Mary from a frightened girl, Ellen Douglas, who had been forced into hiding.

The song cycle proved to be one of Schubert's most financially successful works, the Austrian composer being paid by his publisher 20 pounds sterling, a sizable sum for a musical work in the 1820s. Though not written for liturgical services, the music proved to be inspirational to listeners, particularly Roman Catholics, and a Latin text was substituted to make it suitable for use in church. It is today most widely known in its Latin "Ave Maria" form.

I have always loved the music of Ave Maria but I mostly listen to just the score. I have not been able to find a better rendition that that of the Chinese pianist, Lang Lang, available on YouTube. I challenge you not to be moved.

I even took the resolution of my love story into the music room where my protagonist is playing Beetoven's Fur Elise. It some sections played with only one hand, which is handy (no pun intended). No spoilers though.

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE WORLD OF HORSE RACING.

SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE WORLD OF HORSE RACING.

Is there any animal more magnificent than a thoroughbred? What is its worth to its owners,  those who see these noble creatures as nothing more than a ticket to a fortune?

We may feel frustrated, jaded, cheated in our 21^st century world. We know that history repeats itself. There can be no comfort in the fact that we did not invent the idea of cheating, doping, squeezing, switching horses. 

Double dealing was, rather, par for the course (I know, I’m sorry about the terrible pun). As a matter of fact, the ruling classes, that comparatively small band known as the landed gentry in 18^th and 19^th century Britain, did more than turn a blind eye to cheating, they practised it rampantly.  Even the royal princes were in on the game and these ruling classes, who are setting the example for the working classes, should take pride in the vigour with which these lessons were learned. Mind you, they didn’t exactly welcome the competition or the ..ah.. new atmosphere that now pervaded this sport of kings, but I’m not here to write about that.

My manuscript Elizabeth’s Daughter is set in 1833 and my protagonist, Hannah, is the daughter of a successful breeder of thoroughbreds. Nicholas Foulkes’ Gentlemen and Blackguards describes horse racing during this era in captivating detail and so I decided to research the winner of the 1833 Derby, run at Epsom.  I was absolutely delighted with what I found.

Dangerous - Wikipedia

The winner of the 1833 Derby was a colt named ‘Dangerous’.  Dangerous’s owner, Mr Isaac Sadler,  went to some trouble to ensure that  Dangerous won. This was not unusual behaviour. The colt’s form before the Derby was nothing spectacular, running seconds or un-placed in previous races. Despite this, Sadler felt confident enough to bet heavily on his own horse, which was also a late entry, on odds of 30-1. Obviously  very few others shared his optimism.

 Sadler then not only collected the prize money but, as apparently his bet was large, considerable winnings as well.

One way of cheating at a race is to enter a four year in a three year old event. The Derby Cup is for three year olds. A four year old of course has more stamina and this is a particularly gruelling race. It is suspected that Dangerous was a four year old when he won. [The History of the Derby Stakes by Roger Mortimer.] One way of telling the difference is to check the teeth. Horses teeth are not fully grown until they are four years old and so checking a horse’s age by looking in its mouths is a simple matter if such a check takes place.

As far as Elizabeth’s Daughter  is concerned that is the end. However, in fact the story for Dangerous didn’t end there. He had won this race by a length after running the one and a half miles of the steep track. Before the race his jockey (in those days called ‘riding groom), Jem Chapple, noticed that Dangerous was lame and after the race he was lame again. Dangerous never recovered from that race. However, only Isaac Sadler, and presumably Chapple, knew this and because of Dangerous’s convincing win no owners wanted to run their horses against him again. Consequently he was given what is called a walk-over and Sadler collected the prize money for the next two races - at Stockbridge and Winchester. Shortly afterwards Dangerous was sold overseas.

Fortunes were won and lost on gambling of all sorts. Quoting from Foulkes's fascinating and erudite book  Lord F….. lost a vast fortune and was forced to raise almost £1 million (today £120,000,000). Foulkes is far from citing an isolated incident. He goes on to reference that it was common for the wealthy classes of the 1820s to bet between £5,000 and £6,000 on one race. This is in an era where he also references an estimate that in the 1860s £1 is the equivalent to £120 in the late 1990s!