Read Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain Online
Authors: Stephen Halliday
Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain (8 page)
THE TARTAN KILT
The Scottish short or walking kilt (which was developed from a full length cloak) appeared in the 18th century. A letter to the Edinburgh Review in 1785 suggested that it was introduced by an English Quaker called Thomas Rawlinson who supplied the garment to Scottish workers in his charcoal burning enterprise in northern Scotland and liked the garment so much that he wore it himself. In any case it became popular in the Highlands as a comfortable garment that was easy and cheap to make, but following the 1745 uprising led by Bonnie Prince Charlie all forms of Highland dress were banned except for Highland regiments serving in the British army. This ban was lifted in 1782 and the kilt, together with tartans for different clans, was re-introduced to the Lowland Scots when George IV visited Scotland in 1822, a visit whose pageantry was masterminded by Sir Walter Scott as an evocation of Scottish history
.
Mary, Queen of Scots
S
urely no queen led a more tragic life than Mary Stewart (1542–1587), queen of Scots from the age of six days to fifteen years. The name was conventionally spelt ‘Stewart’ until 1603 when her son became king of England and ‘Stuart’ thereafter. First betrothed to Henry VIII’s son, later Edward VI, she moved at the age of 6 to France and married the Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, in 1558. The Dauphin died in 1560 and in 1561 Mary, who had been brought up a Catholic at the French court, returned to Scotland, of which she had no memory from her infancy. There she found a firmly established Presbyterian church led by John Knox who cared neither for Catholics nor powerful women. Mary was descended from Henry VII through her father and in 1565 she married her cousin, Henry Darnley, who also had a claim to the English throne. The marriage was a disaster. It offended Elizabeth I of England who regarded the pair as potential claimants to her throne. Meanwhile Darnley’s dissolute lifestyle caused the marriage to collapse. Darnley was murdered in 1567 by which time Mary had given birth to their son, the future King James. A further unpopular marriage lost her what support she had in Scotland and led to her flight to England where her naïve complicity in plots to replace Elizabeth led to her execution in 1587.
KNOX’S MONSTROUS REGIMENT: HOW NOT TO CURRY FAVOUR WITH A QUEEN
In 1558, the year of Mary Stewart’s marriage to the Dauphin and the first year of the reign of Elizabeth I, the Scottish Calvinist pastor, John Knox, published his pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in which he declared ‘how abominable before God is the Empire or Rule of a wicked woman, yea a traiteresse and bastard’. Knox had good reason to distrust women in authority. After capture by the French, in a conflict promoted by the French regent, Mary of Guise, Knox was made to work as a galley-slave, later escaping and living in England for a while. At the time that he wrote the pamphlet Knox was in Geneva, home of Calvinism. Elizabeth had just ascended the throne and was vulnerable to the claims of Mary Stewart. Moreover she had herself been denounced as a ‘bastard’ during the reign of her father Henry VIII following the execution of her mother Anne Boleyn for adultery. Knox had hoped that the Protestant Elizabeth would recall him from Geneva to a post in the English church. He explained to Elizabeth, ‘I cannot deny the writing of a book against the usurped authority and unjust regiment of women; neither yet am I minded to retreat or call back any principal point or proposition of the same till truth and verity do further appear’. This was Knox’s idea of an apology and it didn’t impress Elizabeth. No recall followed. Knox’s tact, diplomacy and timing were badly deficient
.
Welsh princes: a quarrelsome lot
A
ttempts to create a separate Welsh principality behind Offa’s Dyke were frustrated by a mixture of English ruthlessness and inter-communal wrangling amongst Welsh princes. The first Welsh ruler to style himself Prince of Wales was Daffydd ap Llywelyn in 1244. He was recognized by the Pope and took advantage of the English king Henry III’s quarrels with his nobles, notably Simon de Montfort. After Daffydd’s death in 1246 his nephew, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, married the daughter of Simon de Montfort and came close to establishing a united principality but made the mistake of alienating a number of other Welsh nobles, a number of influential church figures and, above all, Edward I of England who proceeded to invade Wales in 1276, leading to Llywelyn’s death. The last serious attempt to create an independent Welsh nation was made by Owain Glyndwr who took advantage of the weakness of Henry IV of England who had deposed Richard II in 1399. Owain was supported by his kinsmen the Tudor family from Anglesey and further supported by Charles VI of France who was engaged in the Hundred Years’ War with England and welcomed any activity which would inconvenience the English monarch. French support amounted to little and Glyndwr’s rebellion petered out. He refused a pardon by Henry V in 1415 and died shortly afterwards. Within 70 years the Welsh Tudor dynasty were ruling England and there was little incentive for further rebellion.
Beating the Christmas rush at Westminster Abbey
A
fter his victory at the battle of Hastings William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066. Still nervous about the loyalty of his new Anglo-Saxon subjects, William posted a guard of Normans outside the Abbey to keep an eye on the crowd. Inside the abbey the assembled nobles were asked to acclaim the new monarch (as they still do in the coronation ceremony). This they did, loudly, in many dialects. Such was the noise that the Norman guards outside the abbey thought that William was being murdered so, to distract the supposedly treacherous throng, they proceeded to attack the crowd and set fire to nearby buildings. In the words of a Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, most of the nobles and the crowd ‘made for the scene of conflagration, some to fight the flames and many others hoping to find loot for themselves in the general confusion’. The coronation of William as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry shows none of these tumultuous events!
George IV: double-chinned son of a lunatic
A
lthough he did not become king until 1820, George IV had acted as Prince Regent during the latter part of the reign of his father, George III, when the older man had suffered recurrent attacks of porphyria which rendered him mad. Father and son loathed each other, much of this arising from the Prince Regent’s wanton extravagance on palaces, clothes and women. George spent a fortune on Carlton House as his London residence and then had it demolished when he moved to Buckingham Palace. He then spent a further £500,000 on his new home, leaving it an uninhabitable ruin at his death. A further £160,000 was spent on the domed splendour of Brighton Pavilion. In return for Parliament clearing his debts George agreed to marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795 even though he had already contracted an illicit marriage to Anne Fitzherbert, a Roman Catholic. George and Caroline hated each other even more than father and son had done. They separated within a year. George resumed his many liaisons (including his marriage to Anne) and Caroline set off on a tour of Europe, shamelessly pursuing an affair with a young Italian servant. George tried to discredit Caroline by introducing a special Bill to Parliament but this was very unpopular with the public who cheered Caroline’s appearances as they booed the Prince’s. When George IV was crowned in July 1821 he ordered that Caroline be excluded from Westminster Abbey and posted a guard to prevent her gaining entry. She became ill that day and died less than three weeks later. The coronation cost the equivalent of almost £20 million, 25 times as much as his father’s had cost. It failed to make him popular. James Gillray drew a caricature of him as an obese ‘voluptuary under the horrors of digestion’ and when he died in 1830
The Times
wrote: ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? … If he ever had a friend – a devoted friend in any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her never reached us.’
Brighton Pavilion
World’s first appendectomy a success for new king
E
dward VII was almost sixty when he finally succeeded Queen Victoria in 1901, having spent his life in frustrated idleness. His mother seems never to have liked him very much and blamed him for the death of his father, Prince Albert, who had died, probably of typhoid, in 1861. Edward’s appetites for food and women were legendary and when he was measured for his coronation robes his waist measured 48 inches (122cm). After much preparation the coronation was scheduled for 26th June 1902 and coronation medals, mugs and other souvenirs were produced bearing this date. Two days before the event, on 24th June, the king was struck down by appendicitis, a condition which at that time was usually fatal. Medical history was then made when a life-saving operation was performed by Sir Frederick Treves (1853–1923) and Lord Lister (1827–1912), the surgery taking place on a table in Buckingham Palace. Within a day the king was sitting up in bed smoking a cigar and from that time appendectomies became a regular medical procedure. The coronation duly took place six weeks later on 9th August 1902.
THE ELEPHANT MAN, CARBOLIC ACID AND RUBBER GLOVES
Sir Frederick Treves and Lord Lister were two of the most distinguished medical men of the 19th century. Sir Frederick Treves is mostly remembered for showing sympathy to the terribly deformed Joseph Merrick and for finding him a home in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, as featured in the 1980 film The Elephant Man – though Treves’s true distinction lay in his pioneered the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic in operating theatres and thereby reduced the catastrophic mortality rates that had arisen following the introduction of anaesthetics in surgery earlier in the century. Although anaesthetics had eliminated the agonies of the operating table they also allowed surgeons to proceed more slowly, thereby exposing wounds to the dangers of infection for longer periods. In 1865 Lister read of the work of the French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) who had identified living organisms in the atmosphere and realized that these, later known as germs, could cause infection. Lister experimented with carbolic acid sprays in his operating theatres in the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow, and the death rate plunged. His theatre sister suffered from the effects of carbolic acid on her hands and this introduced the use of rubber gloves in the operating theatre
.