Ragged Schools

were charitable organisations dedicated to the free education of destitute children in 19th-century Britain. The schools were developed in working-class districts and intended for society’s most impoverished youngsters who, it was argued, were often excluded from Sunday School education because of their unkempt appearance and often challenging behaviour. After a few such schools were set up in the early 19th century by individual reformers, the London Ragged School Union was established in April 1844 to combine resources in the city, providing free education, food, clothing, lodging, and other home missionary services for poor children. Although the Union did not extend beyond London, its publications and pamphlets helped spread ragged school ideals across the country before they were phased out by the final decades of the 19th century.

Working in the poorest districts, teachers (often local working people) initially utilised stables, lofts, and railway arches for their classes. The majority were voluntary teachers, although a small number were employed. There was an emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic, and study of the Bible, and the curriculum expanded into industrial and commercial subjects in many schools. It is estimated that between 1844 and 1881, about 300,000 children went through just the ragged schools in London alone.

The Ragged School Museum in the East End of London, housed in buildings previously occupied by Thomas John Barnardo, shows how a ragged school would have looked. It provides an idea of the working of a ragged school, although Thomas Barnardo’s institution differed considerably in practice and philosophy from the schools accountable to the London Ragged School Union.

Several schools claim to have pioneered truly free education for impoverished children. They began from the late 18th century onwards but were initially few and far between, only being set up where someone was concerned enough to want to help local disadvantaged children towards a better life,

In the late 18th century, Thomas Cranfield offered free education for poor children in London. Although a tailor by trade, his educational background had included studies at a Sunday school on Kingsland Road, Hackney and in 1798, he established a free children’s day school on Kent Street near London Bridge. By his death in 1838, he had established 19 free schools offering opportunities and services daily, nightly, and Sundays for children and infants living in the lower-income areas of London.

John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker, also provided significant inspiration for the movement. When he was 12, his father arranged for him to be apprenticed as a shipwright. Three years later, he fell into a dry dock and was crippled for life after damaging his thigh. Unable to continue as a shipwright, he became a shoemaker and, by 1803, had a shop on St Mary Street, Portsmouth. In 1818, Pounds, known as “the crippled cobbler”, began teaching poor children without charging fees. He actively recruited them to his school, spending time on the streets and quays of Portsmouth, making contact, and even bribing them to attend with the offer of baked potatoes. He taught them reading, writing, and arithmetic, and his reputation as a teacher grew; he soon had more than 40 students attending his lessons. He also gave classes in cooking, carpentry, and shoemaking. Pounds, who died in 1839, quickly became a figurehead for the later ragged schools movement, his ethos being used as an inspiration.

In 1840, Sheriff William Watson established an industrial school in Aberdeen, Scotland to educate, train and feed the vagrant boys of the town. In contrast to the earlier efforts of Pounds and Cranfield, however, Watson used compulsion to increase attendance. Frustrated by the number of youngsters who committed petty crimes and faced him in court, he used his position as a law official to arrest vagrant boys and enrol them in the school rather than send them to prison. His Industrial Feeding School opened to provide reading, writing, and arithmetic, as Watson believed that gaining these skills would help them rise above the lowest level of society. It was not confined to the ‘three R’s’, however, as the scholars also received instruction on geology. Three meals a day were provided, and they were taught valuable trades such as shoemaking and printing. A school for girls followed in 1843, and a mixed school in 1845, and from there, the movement spread to Dundee and other parts of Scotland.

On Sunday, 7 November 1841, the Field Lane ragged school began in Clerkenwell, London., and it was the secretary of the school, S. R. Starey, who first applied the term ‘ragged’ to the institutions in an advert he submitted to The Times seeking public support. Historians have debated how connected the movement was between England and Scotland. E.A.G. Clark argued that ‘the London and Scottish schools had little in common except their name’ More recently, Laura Mair has demonstrated that literature, philosophy, and passionate individuals were shared between schools. She writes that ‘schools forged significant links across cities and countries that disregarded physical distance

In Edinburgh, the first example was the Vennel Ragged School (aka New Greyfriars School) created by Rev William Robertson, the minister of the nearby New Greyfriars Church, in 1846 on the ground on the north-west corner of George Heriot’s School. The unassuming Robertson was, however, eclipsed by the self-promoting Rev Thomas Guthrie, who created a parallel Ragged School on Mound Place, off Castlehill in April 1847. Guthrie placed himself at the forefront of the movement in Scotland but was certainly not alone in his aims. His ‘Plea for Ragged Schools’, published in March 1847 to garner the public’s support for a school in the city, laid out his indisputable arguments that proved highly influential. Guthrie was first introduced to ragged schools in 1841 while acting as the Parish Minister of St. John’s Church in Edinburgh. On a visit to Anstruther in Fife, he saw a picture of John Pounds in Portsmouth and felt inspired and humbled by the cobbler’s work.

In 1840, the London City Mission used the term “ragged” in its Annual Report to describe its establishment of five schools for 570 children. The report stated that the schools had been formed exclusively for children “raggedly clothed”, meaning children in worn-out clothes who rarely had shoes and did not own sufficient clothing suitable to attend any other school. By 1844, there were at least 20 free schools for the poor, maintained through the generosity of community philanthropists, the volunteers working with their local churches, and the organisational support of the London City Mission. During this time, it was suggested that it would be beneficial to establish an official organisation or society to share resources and promote their common cause.

Then, in April 1844, the London Ragged School Union was founded during a meeting of four men to pray for the city’s poor children. Starey, the secretary of Field Lane school, was present along with Locke, Moutlon, and Morrison, and they formed a steering committee to address the social welfare needs of the community. On 11 April 1844, at 17 Ampton Street off London’s Grays Inn Road, they facilitated a public meeting to determine local interest, research feasibility, and establish structure. This was the birth of the London Ragged School Union. Mr Locke called for more help in keeping the schools open. Many petitions for funding and grants were made to Parliament to assist with educational reform. He asked the government to give more thought to preventing crime, rather than punishing the wrongdoers and said the latter course only made the young criminals worse. Several people volunteered and offered their time, skills, and talents as educators and administrators of the ragged schools. These included significant social reformers whose broad ranging concerns included education, animal welfare, public health and  In 1844, Lord Shaftesbury became the London Ragged School Union president. He used his knowledge of the schools and refuges and his understanding of low-income families’ living conditions to pursue legislation changes. He served as the president for 39 years, and in 1944 the Union adopted the name “Shaftesbury Society” in his honour until, in 2007, the Society was merged with John Grooms, taking the new charity name of Livability. Shaftesbury maintained his commitment to the Ragged Schools and educational reform until he died in 1885.                    

In 1844, Lord Shaftesbury became the London Ragged School Union president. He used his knowledge of the schools and refuges and his understanding of low-income families’ living conditions to pursue legislation changes. He served as the president for 39 years, and in 1944 the Union adopted the name “Shaftesbury Society” in his honour until, in 2007, the Society was merged with John Grooms, taking the new charity name of Livability. Shaftesbury maintained his commitment to the Ragged Schools and educational reform until he died in 1885.

In 1843, Charles Dickens began his association with the schools and visited the Field Lane, (now Farringdon Road), Ragged School. He was appalled by the conditions yet moved toward reform. The experience inspired him to write A Christmas Carol. While he initially intended to write a pamphlet on the plight of poor children, he realised that a dramatic story would have more impact.

Dickens continued to support the schools, donating funds on various occasions. He donated funds along with a water trough at one point, stating it was “so the boys may wash and for a supervisor”! (from a letter to Field Lane). He later wrote about the school and his experience in Household Words. In 1837, he used the street called Field Lane as a setting for Fagin’s den in his classic novel Oliver Twist. Charles Spurgeon and the Metropolitan Tabernacle were also supporters. In May 1875’s Sword and Trowel Spurgeon recorded:

A most interesting and enthusiastic meeting was held in the Lecture Hall of the Metropolitan Tabernacle on Wednesday, the 17th ult., in connection with Richmond Street Ragged and Sunday Schools. After tea, at which about six hundred persons sat down, Mr. Olney took the Chair, and the public meeting was addressed by Dr. Barnardo, J. M. Murphy, and W. Alderson, Mr. Curtis, of the Ragged School Union, and the superintendents, Messrs. Burr and Northcroft. Mr. J. T. Dunn gave a brief sketch of the rise and progress of this good work. The friends heartily responded to an earnest appeal for help to build new schools, and contributed £128 17s. ld. It is proposed to raise another £100 by 23rd of June. The friends have thus raised in a few months over £350, which, with Mr. Spurgeon’s promise of £150, makes £500. At least £300 more is required.

There was a massive growth in the number of schools, teachers, and students. By 1851, the number of educators would grow to around 1,600 persons. By 1867, some 226 Sunday Ragged Schools, 204 day schools, and 207 evening schools provided a free education for about 26,000 students. However, the schools relied heavily on volunteers and continually faced problems finding and keeping staff. Women played an important role as volunteer teachers. A newspaper report on the progress of the schools announced that ‘the most valuable teachers in ragged schools are those of the female sex’.

The ragged school movement became respectable, even fashionable, attracting the attention of many wealthy philanthropists. Wealthy individuals such as Angela Burdett-Coutts gave large sums of money to the London Ragged School Union. This helped to establish 350 ragged schools by the time the Elementary Education Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict. c. 75) was passed. As Eager (1953) explains, “Shaftesbury not only threw into the movement his great and growing influence; he gave what had been a Nonconformist undertaking, the cachet of his Tory churchmanship – an important factor at a time when even broad-minded (Anglican) churchmen thought that Nonconformists should be fairly credited with good intentions, but that cooperation (with them) was undesirable”.The ragged schools’ success definitively demonstrated a demand for education among people experiencing poverty. In response, England and Wales established school boards to administer elementary schools. However, education was still not free of fees. After 1870, public funding began to be provided for elementary education among working people.

School boards were public bodies created in boroughs and parishes under the Elementary Education Act 1870  following campaigning by George Dixon, Joseph Chamberlain, and the National Education League for elementary education that was free from Anglican doctrine. Board members were directly elected, not appointed by borough councils or parishes. The demand for ragged schools declined as the school boards were built and funded. The school boards continued in operation for 32 years. They were officially abolished by the Education Act 1902, which replaced them with local education authorities.

Founded in 1990, a Ragged School Museum occupies a group of three canalside buildings on Copperfield Road in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that once housed the largest ragged school in London; the buildings had previously been used by Dr Thomas Barnardo.

Barnardo arrived in London in 1866, planning to train as a doctor and become a missionary in China. In London, he was confronted by a city where disease was rife, poverty and overcrowding endemic, and educational opportunities for the poor nonexistent. He watched helplessly as a cholera epidemic swept through the East End, leaving more than 3,000 Londoners dead and many destitute. He gave up his medical training to pursue his local missionary works and, in 1867, opened his first ragged school where children could gain a free primary education. Ten years later, Barnardo’s Copperfield Road School opened its doors to children, and for the next thirty-one years, it educated tens of thousands of children. It closed in 1908, by which time enough government schools had opened in the area to serve the needs of local families.

The buildings, originally warehouses for goods transported along the Regent’s Canal, then went through various industrial uses until, in the early 1980s, they were threatened with demolition. A group of local people joined together to save them and reclaim their unique heritage. The Ragged School Museum Trust was set up and opened a museum in 1990.

The museum was founded to make the history of the ragged schools and the broader social history of the East End accessible to all. An authentic Victorian classroom has been set up within the original buildings, in which 14,000 children each year experience a school lesson as it would have been taught more than 100 years ago.

SDW

Sources:- Wikipedia, Ragged University.

Police Constable Alfred Smith

He joined the Metropolitan Police in 1902 and, by June 1917, he was serving with the force’s G Division, when, on Wednesday 13th June 1917, he went to the assistance of a group of women during a First World War air raid on London.

Although Police Constable Smith demonstrated genuine bravery, the curiosity of his death is that it appears to have come about as a result of the curiosity of the women and girls whose lives he, undoubtedly, saved.

His widow who gave evidence at his inquest told the City Coroner, Dr Waldo,that her husband had been up all night with pains in his leg. He was not fit to go on duty, but he would do so because he wanted to do his duty.

Around mid-morning on this Wednesday PC Smith was on point duty close to a factory in Central Street, Finsbury, when, high over London, fourteen German Gotha planes began a bombing raid. At first they were invisible to the naked eye, and not until the firing of the guns overhead were the public made aware of their presence. It was the first daylight bombing raid to hit London.

A mixture of panic and curiosity appears to have gripped many as the bombs began to explode around them. Girls from a warehouse, that belonged to Debenham’ s, ran down into the street with excitement and curiosity. Smith got them back, and stood in the porch to prevent them returning and physically restraining them. In doing his duty he thus sacrificed his own life, the coroner found.

He died when a bomb exploded a few feet away from him. But had no visible injuries; dying of shock. The raid killed 162 people in total. Smith had a wife and a three year old son. His widow received automatically a police pension (£88 1s per annum, with an additional allowance of £6 12s per annum for her son) but also had her MP, Allen Baker, working on her behalf. He approached the directors of Debenhams and solicited from them a donation of £100 guineas (£105). A further fund, chaired by Baker, raised almost £472 and some of this was used to pay for the Watts Memorial tablet that is in Postman’s Park, (see below). Smith was buried in Abney Park Cemetery.

Relatives of PC Alfred Smith and serving police officers gathered to pay their respects to the officer to mark the 100th anniversary of the day he died. A memorial service took place alongside the unveiling of a plaque in Central Street led by Camden and Islington’s Police Superintendent and the Senior Chaplain of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Robert Jeffries, PC Smith’s great-nephew, with the plaque.

More than 12,000 votes were cast in the ballot to decide who should receive an Islington People’s Plaque last year.

SDW

Sources:- London Remembers; Symbols and Secrets:, Islington Tribune: London Walking Tours;

image Wiki

Jack Sheppard

was arguably the 18th century’s most notorious robber and thief. His spectacular escapes from various prisons, including two from Newgate, made him the most glamorous rogue in London in the weeks before his dramatic execution.

Jack Sheppard (4 March 1702 – 16 November 1724) was born into a poor family in Spitalfields in London, an area notorious for highwaymen, villains and prostitutes in the early 18th century. He was apprenticed as a carpenter and by 1722, after 5 years of apprenticeship, he was already an accomplished craftsman, with less than a year of his training left.

 Now 20 years old, he was a small man, 5’4″ tall and slightly built. His quick smile, charm and personality apparently made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane, where he fell in with bad company and took up with a prostitute called Elizabeth Lyon, also known as Edgeworth Bess. Joseph Hayne, a button-moulder who owned a shop nearby, also managed a tavern named the Black Lion off Drury Lane, which he encouraged the local apprentices to frequent. The Black Lion was visited by criminals such as Joseph “Blueskin” Blake, Sheppard’s future partner in crime, and self-proclaimed “Thief-Taker General” Jonathan Wild, secretly the boss of a criminal gang which operated across London and later Sheppard’s implacable enemy.

Sheppard threw himself wholeheartedly into this shady underworld of drinking and whoring. Inevitably, his career as a carpenter suffered, and Sheppard took to stealing in order to boost his legitimate income. His first recorded crime was for petty shoplifting in spring 1723.  

Sheppard was first arrested after a burglary he committed with his brother, Tom, and his mistress, Lyon, in Clare Market on 5 February 1724. Tom, also a carpenter, had already been convicted once for stealing tools from his master the previous autumn and burned in the hand. Tom was arrested again on 24 April 1724. Afraid that he would be hanged this time, Tom informed on Jack, and a warrant was issued for Jack’s arrest.

Jonathan Wild was aware of Sheppard’s thefts, as Sheppard had fenced some stolen goods through one of Wild’s men, William Field. Wild asked another of his men, James Sykes (known as “Hell and Fury”) to challenge Sheppard to a game of skittles at Redgate’s public house near Seven Dials. Sykes betrayed Sheppard to a Mr Price, a constable from the parish of St Giles, to gather the usual £40 reward for giving information resulting in the conviction of a felon. The magistrate, Justice Parry, had Sheppard imprisoned overnight on the top floor of St Giles’s Roundhouse pending further questioning, but Sheppard escaped within three hours by breaking through the timber ceiling and lowering himself to the ground with a rope fashioned from bedclothes. Still wearing irons, Sheppard coolly joined the crowd that had been attracted by the sounds of his breaking out. He distracted their attention by pointing to the shadows on the roof and shouting that he could see the escapee, and then swiftly departed.                   

Next he was sent to St Anne’s Roundhouse for pick-pocketing, he was visited there by Bess Lyon who was recognised and also arrested. They were sent together to New Prison in Clerkenwell and were locked in a cell known as The Newgate Ward. The next morning Sheppard filed off his fetters, made a hole in the wall and removed an iron bar and a wooden bar from the window. Tying sheets and blankets together, the pair lowered themselves to the ground, Bess going first. They then climbed over a 22-foot-high wall to make good their escape, quite a feat considering Jack was not a tall man and Bess was quite a large, buxom woman.

Sheppard’s thieving abilities were admired by Jonathan Wild. Wild demanded that Sheppard surrender his stolen goods for Wild to fence, and so take the greater profits, but Sheppard refused. He began to work with Joseph “Blueskin” Blake, and they burgled Sheppard’s former master, William Kneebone, on Sunday 12 July 1724. Wild could not permit Sheppard to continue outside his control and began to seek Sheppard’s arrest. Unfortunately for Sheppard, his fence, William Field, was one of Wild’s men. After Sheppard had a brief foray with Blueskin as highwaymen on the Hampstead Road on Sunday 19 July and Monday 20 July, Field informed on Sheppard to Wild. Wild believed Lyon would know Sheppard’s whereabouts, so he plied her with drinks at a brandy shop near Temple Bar until she betrayed him. Sheppard was arrested a third time at Blueskin’s mother’s brandy shop in Rosemary Lane, (later renamed Royal Mint Street), on 23 July by one of  Wild’s henchman.

Sheppard was imprisoned in Newgate Prison pending his trial at the next Assize of oyer and terminer. He was prosecuted on three charges of theft at the Old Bailey, but was acquitted on the first two due to lack of evidence. Kneebone, Wild and Field gave evidence against him on the third charge, the burglary of Kneebone’s house. He was convicted on 12 August, the case “being plainly prov’d”, and sentenced to death. On Monday 31 August, the death warrant arrived from the court in Windsor setting Friday 4 September as the date for his execution. In Newgate in those days there was a hatch with large iron spikes opening into a dark passage, which led to the condemned cell. Sheppard filed away one of the spikes so that it would easily break off. In the evening two visitors, Bess Lyon and another prostitute, Moll Maggot, came to see him. They distracted the guard whilst he removed the spike, pushed his head and shoulders through the space and with the help of the two women, made his escape. This time his slight frame was to his advantage. He took a coach to Blackfriars Stairs, a boat up the River Thames to the horse ferry in Westminster, near the warehouse where he hid his stolen goods, and completed his escape, was a hatch with large iron spikes opening into a dark passage, which led to the condemned cell. Sheppard filed away one of the spikes so that it would easily break off. In the evening two visitors, Bess Lyon and another prostitute, Moll Maggot, came to see him. They distracted the guard whilst he removed the spike, pushed his head and shoulders through the space and with the help of the two women, made his escape. This time his slight frame was to his advantage. He took a coach to Blackfriars Stairs, a boat up the River Thames to the horse ferry in Westminster, near the warehouse where he hid his stolen goods, and completed his escape.                     

By this time, Sheppard was a hero to a segment of the population, being a cockney, non-violent, handsome and seemingly able to escape punishment for his crimes at will. He spent a few days out of London, visiting a friend’s family in Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire, but was soon back in town. He evaded capture by Wild and his men but was arrested again on 9 September by a posse from Newgate as he hid on Finchley Common, and returned to the condemned cell at Newgate. His fame had increased with each escape, and he was visited in prison by various people. His plans to escape during September were thwarted twice when the guards found files and other tools in his cell, and he was transferred to a strong-room in Newgate known as the “Castle”, put in leg irons, and chained to two metal staples in the floor to prevent further escape attempts. After demonstrating to his gaolers that these measures were insufficient, by showing them how he could use a small nail to unlock the horse padlock at will, he was bound more tightly and handcuffed        

Meanwhile, “Blueskin” Blake was arrested by Wild and his men on Friday                                                       9th October, and Tom, Jack’s brother, was transported for robbery on Saturday 10 October 1724. New court sessions began on Wednesday 14 October, and Blueskin was tried on Thursday 15 October, with Field and Wild again giving evidence. Their accounts were not consistent with the evidence that they gave at Sheppard’s trial, but Blueskin was convicted anyway. Enraged, Blueskin attacked Wild in the courtroom, slashing his throat with a pocket-knife and causing an uproar. Wild was lucky to survive, and his control of his criminal gang was weakened while he recuperated. Taking advantage of the disturbance, which spread to Newgate Prison next door and continued into the night, Sheppard escaped for the fourth time. 

Between the hours of 4pm and 1am on 15th October he succeeded in slipping off his handcuffs and with a crooked nail, picked the padlock securing his chain to the floor. Forcing several locks, he scaled a wall and reached the roof of the prison. Returning to his cell for a blanket, he then used it to slide down the roof and onto a neighbouring roof. Climbing into the house, he went down the stairs and out into the street at around midnight without disturbing the occupants. Escaping through the streets to the north and west, Sheppard hid in a cowshed  near modern Tottenham Court Road). Spotted by the barn’s owner, Sheppard told him that he had escaped from Bridewell Prison, having been imprisoned there for failing to provide for a (nonexistent) bastard son. His leg irons remained in place for several days until he persuaded a passing shoemaker to accept the considerable sum of 20 shillings to bring a blacksmith’s tools and help him remove them, telling him the same tale. His manacles and leg irons were later recovered in the rooms of Kate Cook, one of Sheppard’s mistresses. This escape astonished everyone. Daniel Defoe, working as a journalist, wrote an account for John Applebee, The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard. In his History, Defoe reports the belief in Newgate that the Devil came in person to assist Sheppard’s escape

Sheppard’s final period of liberty lasted just two weeks. He disguised himself as a beggar and returned to the city. He broke into a pawnbroker’s shop in Drury Lane on the night of 29 October 1724, taking a black silk suit, a silver sword, rings, watches, a wig, and other items.^[ He dressed himself as a dandy gentleman and used the proceeds to spend a day and the ensuing evening on the tiles with two mistresses. He was arrested a final time in the early morning on 1 November, totally drunk, “in a handsome suit of Black, with a Diamond Ring  and  a carnelian ring on his Finger, and fine Light Tye Peruke”.-the stolen goods!

This time, Sheppard was placed in the Middle Stone Room, in the centre of Newgate next to the “Castle”, where he could be observed at all times. He was also loaded with 300 pounds of iron weights. He was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors four shillings to see him, and the King’s painter James Thornhill painted his portrait. Several prominent people sent a petition to King George I, begging for his sentence of death to be commuted to transportation. Sheppard came before Mr Justice Powis in the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster Hall on 10 November. He was offered the chance to have his sentence reduced by informing on his associates, but he scorned the offer, and the death sentence was confirmed. The next day, Blueskin was hanged, and Sheppard was moved to the condemned cell.

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was so entranced by Jack Sheppard’s daring escapes that he ghostwrote his autobiography, A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes etc. of John Sheppard, in 1724.

Sheppard was convicted and sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn, ending his short criminal career. He was such a popular rebel hero that the route to his execution was lined by weeping women dressed in white and throwing flowers. However Sheppard had planned one last great escape – from the gallows. In a scheme involving Daniel Defoe and Appleby, his publisher, it was planned that they would retrieve the body after the requisite 15 minutes on the gallows and try to revive him, as in rare cases it was possible to survive a hanging. Unfortunately the crowd were unaware of this plan. They surged forward and pulled on his legs to ensure their hero a swift and less painful death. He was buried that night in the graveyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Sheppard was famous for his daring escapes from prison. So much so, popular plays were written and performed after his death such as John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) when “Macheath” was based on Sheppard.   In 1840 William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel called Jack Sheppard.-. This novel was so popular that the authorities, in case people should be incited to crime, refused to license any plays in London with “Jack Sheppard” in the title for a further forty years.

SDW

Sources :- Historic UK, Wikipedia

image Wikipedia

Essex Street WC2

Essex Street is in the City of Westminster that runs from Milford Lane in the south to Strand in the north. It is joined by Little Essex Street on its western side and Devereux Court on the eastern side. It was laid out by Nicholas Barbon in around 1675 or 1680 and contains a number of listed buildings.

Essex Street was laid out by Nicholas Barbon between 1675 and 1680, on the grounds of the former Essex House which itself stood on the site of the Outer Temple, once owned by the Knights Templar. The highwayman Tom Cox, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1691, was captured in the nearby St Clement Danes churchyard after one of his victims spotted him coming out of his lodgings in Essex Street.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the street was known for its publisher’s offices such as Chapman & Hall and Methuen & Co. (No. 36). Macmillan were at 4 Little Essex Street until 1990. The Roman Catholic journal Merry England, edited by Wilfrid Meynell, was published from 43 Essex Street.

Essex Hall, an office building at numbers 1 to 6, is the headquarters of the British Unitarians. Prior to the Blitz, a chapel and meeting rooms were on the site, continuing the association with the first avowedly Unitarian place of worship in London, dating back to 1774 when Theophilus Lindsey founded the Essex Street Chapel.

The Edgar Wallace is a public house at No. 40, is on the site of the former Essex Head Tavern, where Samuel Johnson and Richard Brocklesby founded the Essex Head Club in 1783.

There are a number of listed buildings in the street. Numbers 11, 14, 19, 34 and 35 are all grade II listed. No. 32 is grade II* listed; California House is grade II listed; and the triumphal gateway at the southern end of the street (c.1676), which once screened it from Essex Wharf and its neighbouring wharfs beyond, is grade II listed. The gateway was damaged by bombing during the Second World War, and after repairs it was incorporated into a 1953 office building that now encloses the southern end of the street, apart from pedestrian access by steps to the southern part of Milford Lane.

Bonnie Prince Charlie after fleeing Scotland in 1746 after his rebellion failed and in exile got together thousands of weapons at Anvers in preparation for an English rising in 1750,and obtained from his father, James, a renewal of his regency. Letters with fake dates were sent to Elisabeth Ferrand which, if intercepted, would mislead espionage. On 2 September he left Luneville, proceeding via Antwerp and Ghent to Ostend, whence he sailed in disguise with John Holker on the 13th, landing in Dover and arriving in London three days later. Charles went to Lady Primrose’s house in Essex Street  and subsequently held a meeting with fifty leading English Jacobites, including the duke of Beaufort, Lord Westmorland, and William King in a house in Pall Mall. They were discouraging. After touring London with a view to a coup, Charles attempted to promote his flagging cause by being received into the Church of England, probably at a service at which the nonjuring bishop Robert Gordon officiated. After a further meeting with King—at which his ‘servant remarked on the extreme likeness between the visitor and the busts of the “Young Pretender” on sale in Red Lion Street’; Charles left London on 22 September, sailing from Dover the next day.

Well known people who lived in the street were :-

Sir Orlando Bridgeman, was an English common law jurist, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1640 to 1642. He supported the Royalist cause in the Civil War.In May 1660, Bridgeman was made Serjeant-at-Law, and two days later Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer. The following week, on 7 June 1660, he was created a Baronet, of Great Lever, in the County of Lancaster. From 1660 to 1668, Bridgeman was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and from 1667 to 1672 Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, resigning because he refused to apply the Great Seal to the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which he regarded as too generous to Catholics. In 1668, he was a member of the New England Company. In his final years, Bridgeman appointed the priest, theologian, and metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne (c. 1637 – 1674) as his private chaplain at Teddington and supported the publication of his writings. Bridgeman died aged 65 in Teddington, Middlesex and was buried there. Bridgeman was highly regarded in his time for his participation in the trial of the regicides of King Charles I in 1660, and also for devising complex legal instruments for the conveyance of estates in land. Following the Great Fire of London he was one of the judges appointed to resolve disputes about property arising from the fire.

Brass Crosby was an English radical lawyer, Member of Parliament and Lord Mayor of London. Born in 1725 he qualified in law and came to London to practise his chosen profession. In 1758 he was elected to the City Council and elected ‘lay’ Sheriff in 1764. In 1765 Crosby was elected an Alderman and in 1768 he was elected as Member of Parliament for Honiton. In 1770 he was elected Lord Mayor of London. Crosby was a supporter of radical politician John Wilkes. In February 1772 he married Mrs Mary Tattersall.

As Lord Mayor (and therefore chief magistrate for the City), one of his first acts was to refuse to enforce Admiralty warrants to press gang Londoners into the Royal Navy, and he ordered constables to be positioned “at all avenues” of the City to prevent the seizure of men.

Crosby engaged in a famous battle with the House of Commons over publishing Parliamentary debates. In 1771 he had brought before him a printer who dared publish reports of Parliamentary proceedings. He released the man but was subsequently ordered to appear before the House to explain his actions. Crosby was committed to the Tower of London, but when brought to trial several judges refused to hear the case and after protests from the public Crosby was released. No further attempts had ever been made to prevent the publication of Parliamentary debates, facilitating the emergence of Hansard.

Crosby died in 1793 at his house in Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, and was buried in Chelsfield Church, near Orpington, Kent, where a monument was erected to his memory. The London Borough of Bromley has now erected a blue plaque to Crosby outside his former home, Court Lodge, in Church Road, Chelsfield. He had married three times, each time to a well-to-do widow, the third of whom had brought him Chelsford manor, but left no surviving children.

Henry Fielding, was an English writer and magistrate. He was born in Sharpham, Somerset, attended Eton College then later the University of Leiden in Holland. He left Leiden in debt and eventually drifted to London to work in the theatre, and was a prolific playwright, becoming one of London’s most popular writers until 1737 when his career was ended by The Licensing Act, which required all plays to be performed only in patent theatres and to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain. Fielding’s sharp satire was one of several reasons the First Minister Wapole pushed through The Act.

Fielding then turned to the law and trained to be a barrister. During this time he continued writing and editing. During his later writing career he produced three novels and is considered, along with Samuel Richardson, a founder of the modern novel. Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews were written in a picaresque style. Amelia, his last novel, was more sombre. He as well published in1743 a work of extended political irony, The Life and Death of the Late Jonathan Wild, the Great – a political satire

In 1749 he was made justice of the peace and magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex where he, and later with his half brother John Fielding, introduced innovations in criminal apprehension, gathering a small band of “thief takers” who were supported with money from the secret service. These men were known as “Mr Fielding’s people”, afterwards nicknamed “the Bow Street runners” (named after the Bow Street house where Fielding lived and held court, which later became Bow Street Magistrate’s Court) and eventually evolved into The Metropolitan Police Force. Henry had suffered from gout and most probably cirrhosis of the liver (he was a very heavy drinker despite his remarkable energy and abilities) from his late 30s and by 1753 was very ill, his health made worse by overwork and long hours in the courtroom. In 1754 he resigned his post as magistrate, which was taken over by his half-brother John Fielding (later Sir John) and journeyed to Lisbon, Portugal to try to recover, but soon thereafter died and is buried in the English Cemetery.

James Savage  was a British architect, based in London. His works included the Richmond Bridge (now the O’Donovan Rossa Bridge) in Dublin, and St Luke’s Church, Chelsea, a pioneering work of the Gothic Revival. He was architect to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, and carried out restoration work at Lincoln Cathedral and St Mary-le-Bow. In 1836 he published a pamphlet in which he attacked the slavish imitation of historical styles.

Savage was born in Hoxton, London, on 10 April 1779. He was educated at a private school in Stockwell and then articled to Daniel Asher Alexander, architect of the London Docks, for whom he worked for several years as clerk of the works. He became a student at the Royal Academy in 1796.

In 1800, he won second prize in a competition for a scheme of improvements to the city of Aberdeen and five years later came first in a competition to rebuild the Ormond Bridge over the Liffey in Dublin, which had been swept away by a storm. Originally named after the Duke of Richmond, it is now known as the O’Donovan Rossa Bridge. In 1815 Savage won a competition to design a river-crossing at Tempsford in Bedfordshire with another three arched bridge.

In 1819, his plans for the new parish church of St Luke’s Church, Chelsea were chosen from among more than 40 submissions. It was an ambitious building, costing £40,000 and designed to accommodate 2,500 people. Savage originally intended the tower to have an open spire, like that of Wren’s St Dunstan-in-the-East, but this was forbidden by the Board of Trade Savage designed several other, less ambitious Gothic churches, and one, St James, Bermondsey, in a Classical style.

He submitted designs for the new London Bridge to a committee of the House of Commons in 1823. He told the committee that he had used the same principles in designing the arches that he had in the vaults of St Luke, Chelsea, where, he said, there had not been “the slightest settlement in any part of the building, nor even a thread opening in any of the joints of the courses to indicate any strain or inequality of pressure.” The committee gave his design a positive reception, but chose one by John Rennie the Younger instead on the casting vote of the chairman.

In 1825, he drew up a plan which he called the “Surrey Quay” for embanking the south bank of the Thames, from London Bridge to Lambeth.

In 1830, Savage became architect to the Society of the Middle Temple for whom he built the Plowden Buildings, and added a clock tower to their hall. In 1840, the society commissioned him to restore the Temple Church. The work was well underway when he was dismissed due to a disagreement with the building committee, leaving the work to be completed by Sydney Smirke and Decimus Burton. His other restoration work included repairs to the belfries of St-Mary-le-Bow, London, and the Broad Tower of Lincoln Cathedral, and considerable alterations to St Mary-at-Hill, London, where he worked in 1827-8, and again at the very end of his life.

Much of Savage’s practice involved arbitration cases and the investigation of architectural and engineering questions in court. Among these was the protracted Custom House case of the Crown v. Peto, in which the defendant Henry Peto attributed his success mainly to Savage’s evidence.

He was a member of the Surveyors’ Club, and, for many years, member and chairman of the Committee of Fine Arts of the Society for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. He was a founder member of the Graphic Society, a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a member of the Architectural Society, and, briefly a fellow of the Institute of British Architects, from which he resigned after a disagreement. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1799 to 1832.

He died on 7 May 1852 and was buried in St, Luke’s, Chelsea.

SDW

Sources Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.,

image Wikipedia

George Jennings

(10 November 1810 – 17 April 1882) was an English sanitary engineer and plumber who invented the first public flush toilets.

Josiah George Jennings was born on 10 November 1810 in Eling, at the edge of the New Forest.  He was the eldest of seven children of Jonas Joseph Jennings and Mary Dimmock

He was educated at the local school run by his uncle-in-law Joshua Withers. At 14, after his father’s death he was apprenticed to his grandfather’s glass and lead merchandising business, before moving to his uncle John Jennings’s plumbing business at Southwick, Southampton. In 1831 he became a plumber with Messrs. Lancelot Burton of Newcastle Street, London where his father had been a foreman before him.He married twice, having four children by his first wife, Mary Ann Gill who died in 1844 (only 31). He remarried Sophia Budd (aged 16) some 14 years later, and had 11 children with her. One of these was Mabel Jennings who married the English organist and composer, Basil Harwood. In 1838, Jennings set up his own business in Paris Street, Lambeth (later moving to Great Charlotte Street, Blackfriars) when he received an inheritance from his grandmother, Anne Jennings.Jennings specialised in designing toilets that were “as perfect a sanitary closet as can be made”. However, he also excelled in public sanitation projects such as the design of the underground ‘public convenience’. The entrances to these were elaborate metal railings and arches lit by lamps, with interiors built of slate and later, of ceramic tiles. A beautiful example of a public convenience from a period a little after Jennings’s death is the Gentleman’s Convenience at Wesley’s Chapel, City Road, London built in 1891, by Thomas Crapper, in a manner Jennings would have liked. Jennings’ own most famous installation was for The Great Exhibition in the Retiring Rooms of The Crystal Palace but does not survive.In 1847 Prince Albert presented George Jennings with the Medal of the Society of Arts for his ‘indiarubber tube taps and tube’ for water supply. By now he was prospering and had also established George Jennings South Western Pottery manufacturing water closets, salt-glaze drainage, sanitary pipes and sanitaryware at Parkstone Pottery in Dorset. Parkstone was the site of several industrial undertakings, the largest being George Jennings South Western Pottery, which had its own steam locomotive, that ran on a private branch line from Parkstone Station.trademarkAt The Great Exhibition at Hyde Park held from 1 May to 15 October 1851, George Jennings installed his Monkey Closets in the Retiring Rooms of The Crystal Palace. These were the first public toilets, and they caused great excitement. During the exhibition, 827,280 visitors paid one penny to use them; for the penny they got a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoe shine..  By the time the exhibition closed over 800,000 visitors had paid more than £2,000 for use of the facilities. And so was born the concept of ‘spending a penny’ to use the loo.When the exhibition finished and moved to Sydenham, the toilets were to be closed down. However, Jennings persuaded the organisers to keep them open, and the toilet went on to earn over £1,000 a year. Jennings said that ‘the civilisation of a people can be measured by their domestic and sanitary appliances’ whilst the objectors had stated that ‘visitors are not coming to the Exhibition merely to wash’!(Thomas Crapper, often mistakenly credited with inventing the flush toilet, was only 14 years old at this point.)]The opening of the first underground convenience at the Royal Exchange designed by George Jennings.was around 1854.During the Crimean War, Jennings headed the sanitary commission sent out by the British Government to improve the condition at Selimiye Barracks hospital at Scutari, Sebastopol at the request of Florence Nightingale.

JIn 1858 Jennings wrote to the Commissioners of Sewers offering to set up public toilets in the City of London. His letter of 1858 gives some impression of the state of the city’s streets at the time: “I think it only right to call attention to the efforts I have made to prevent the defilement of our thoroughfares and to remove those Plague spots that are offensive to the eye, and a reproach to the Metropolis. ”During the 1860s Jennings was most certainly building up an export business. Somewhere between 1866 and 1888 he supplied Khedive of Egypt, Tewfik Pasha with a very elaborate mahogany shower cabinet. He also supplied the Empress Eugenie of France with a magnificent copper bath. He was definitely building up a good reputation and in 1870 supplied the water closet with his patented flushing mechanism in Lord Bute’s Victorian bathroom in the Bute Tower at Cardiff Castle designed by architect William Burges.In 1872 George Jennings supervised the public facilities at the thanksgiving service for the Prince of Wales at St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate his recovery from typhoid. He had been a favourite of the late Prince Consort which was recorded by The Sanitary Record: ‘The Prince Consort greatly encouraged this indefatigable Engineer. In sanitary science he was avant coureur in his day and generation, and was among the first Engineers to practically carry out the theories of the wise men of the time. ‘Sanitas sanitatum’ was Mr Jennings’s motto before Disraeli adopted it as his political maxim (Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas) and he implored a shocked city of London to accept his public lavatories free, on the condition that the… attendants whom he furnished were allowed to make a small charge for the use of the closets and towels.’George Jennings died on 17 April 1882, aged 72. A newspaper reported:“Together with his son George, he drove home in his gig. The horse, of a very restive character and hard in the mouth, whilst crossing over the Albert Bridge, shied andthrew Mr Jennings and his son against a dust cart. Mr Jennings Jnr. escaped with only a shaking, but Mr Jennings’ collar bone was fractured. He was conveyed home and attended by Dr Edmonds and two other physicians. His recovery from the injuries proceeded favourably up until Sunday, when against his doctors’ order, he would get up. On Sunday night a relapse and congestion of the lungs set in, and he expired on Monday evening, about 6 o’clock” He was buried on 23 April at West Norwood Cemetery) and in his will left a fortune of £76,721/7/6d. After his death the family firm continued until 1967 and by 1895 their catalogue listed at least 36 towns where public conveniences had been installed; Paris, Florence, Berlin, Madrid, and Sydney as well as South America and the Far East. They provided water closets to at least 30 railway companies in Britain, and other railways in America, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa. Their hard-bound catalogues were thick books that show a huge variety of water closets, urinals, basins, baths, Turkish baths and, saunas, among many others. At the International Health Exhibition in London in 1884, The Gold Medal was awarded for the Jennings’ Pedestal Vase. In a test, its 2-gallon flush washed down ten apples of average diameter 1 ¼ inches, 1 flat sponge about 4 ½ inches in diameter, plumber’s smudge coated over the pan, and 4 pieces of paper adhering closely to the soiled surface. Jennings also posthumously won for his firm, the Grand Prix at Paris in 1900, for his siphonic pan which had been a major development in lavatory design.  For centuries the streets of England’s towns and cities had been fouled by human waste. By the late Victorian era many local authorities were providing public conveniences. It was routine to find toilets in workplaces, railway stations, parks, shops, pubs, restaurants and an array of other places.  Many public lavatories were built beneath urban streets or public buildings, an idea proposed by George Jennings in 1858. These subterranean lavatories took up minimal space on busy streets and station concourses. They also helped to hide ‘objectionable contrivances’ from the view of sensitive Victorians.The appearance of public toilets undoubtedly helped to improve the cleanliness of our towns and cities. However a large proportion of the population failed to benefit from their proliferation.  The vast majority of the early facilities only served men. One explanation may be that Victorian society believed ‘modest’ women would not wish to be seen entering a public convenience. The lack of provision for women meant that they were often forced to stay close to home. This restriction is known as the ‘urinary leash’. Today some consider it to be a deliberate means of controlling women’s movements and ambitions outside of the home. The dearth of public toilets not only limited leisure activities but also the jobs available to women. A workplace which only had facilities for men was under no obligation to provide toilets for female employees. Moreover, a company could use the lack of such facilities as an excuse for not hiring women.   

19^th century grade 2 listed cast iron Gentlemen’s urinal in Star Yard, Westminster.Finally, thanks to campaigning and the power of commerce the provision of public lavatories began to reflect the changing roles of women in society. In 1889 a grand municipal women’s convenience opened at Piccadilly Circus, in the heart of London’s West End shopping district. The area’s fashionable department stores attracted prosperous middle class women. The authorities and local businesses knew that it made financial sense to keep female shoppers there as long as possible. The longer they stayed the more money they spent.Bit by bit the provision of facilities for women improved. Ladies rooms began to appear in shops, theatres, railway stations and many other places. On Monday 15 March 1926 Hull City Council posted a notice in the local press inviting builders to tender for a new public convenience adjacent to Victoria Pier in Nelson Street. The new loos served both sexes, replacing an earlier ‘men only’ cast-iron urinal.In 2017 Historic England bestowed a Grade II listing on the toilets. This accolade was in recognition of their architectural merit and their role in illustrating the changing social status of women during the 1920s. Another of Hull’s listed loos is in the Market Place. Dating from about 1900 it was built strictly for men. Anyone caught short of late will know that public lavatories are no longer as convenient as they once were. Many have gone altogether, whilst others are frustratingly padlocked awaiting sale or demolition by local authorities. Some have been ingeniously repurposed – converted into flats, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, clubs, art galleries and even beauty salons. In May 2019 The Royal Society for Public Health published a study into the decline of the public toilet. The report, titled ‘Taking the P***’, reveals that since 2010, 700 council run public toilets have closed. It emphasizes how the reduction of public conveniences hits the homeless, disabled, outdoor workers, those with illnesses requiring frequent toilet use and women the hardest. According to the report the ‘urinary leash’ is once again becoming an issue with one in five people stating that a lack of facilities nearby can restrict outings from their homes. Many of the issues highlighted by The Royal Society for Public Health echo those raised during the Victorian era. The debate over our public toilets has seemingly gone full circle. 

SDWSources:-  Wikipedia; Historic UK; Historic England; Royal Society for Public Health. 

James Arthur Woodford

OBE RA (1893–1976) was an English sculptor. His works include sets of bronze doors for the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects and Norwich City Hall; the Queen’s Beasts, originally made for the Coronation in 1953, and later replicated in stone, and the statue of Robin Hood outside Nottingham Castle.

Woodford was born in Nottingham on 25 September 1893. His father was a lace designer, who expected his son to follow him into the trade and was opposed to Woodford pursuing a career as an artist. Notoriously, he even threw his son’s early sculptures across the room.

According to family history he had a garret in the family house where he did his sculpting. The first piece he did was a baby with a tear on its cheek for his mother. Despite his father’s opposition, Woodford had started studying at the Nottingham School of Art, although his education was curtailed when he enlisted in the Sherwood Foresters during the First World War. After the war, he continued his training at the Royal College of Art in London, and was Rome Scholar in 1922–25.

Woodford designed the bronze doors of the 1930s extension of the Liverpool Blind School in Hope Street. The doors were later transferred to the new Blind School when it moved to Wavertree, a suburb of Liverpool.

In 1934 Woodford created a monumental pair of doors for the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects at 66 Portland Place, London. They each weigh one-and-a-half tons, the deep relief designs showing the River Thames and various London buildings. He also made figures on the exterior columns, interior ceiling plaster reliefs depicting the main periods of English architecture and various building trades and crafts, and stone window-pieces depicting building through the ages Four years later he made a set of 18 sculptured roundels for the six bronze doors of Norwich City Hall, depicting the history of the city and manual trades practised there.                                                      

He created the sculpture of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain crops, that sits above the portal of The Corn Exchange, Brighton, and which was installed in 1934.

Woodford did some decorative work for the liner RMS Queen Mary, carving wooden screens and designing bronze uplighters for the cabin class smoking room. Another commission around this time was for the facade of the fashionably decorated Good Intent restaurant in Chelsea, where he carved large wooden reliefs of a mermaid and two seahorses.       

During World War II, Woodford served as a camouflage officer with the Air Ministry. After the war he created a small number of war memorials, most notably for the Court of Honour of the British Medical Association building in Tavistock Square.

For the coronation ceremony of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Woodford made a set of ten plaster sculptures of the Queen’s Beasts, each 6 feet (1.8 m) tall to be placed at the entrance of Westminster Abbey. He went on to make a set of Portland stone replicas which an anonymous donor presented to Kew Gardens in 1956. They now stand on the Palm House Terrace, while the originals were donated to the collection of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, where they remain to this day.

In the 1950s Woodford made a set of reliefs representing the four elements for the Lloyds building in Lime Street in the City of London. They were placed very high up; Arthur Byron in London’s Statues (1981) describes them as “barely visible”. The series of allegorical panels, which were on the southern towers, represent Air, Sea Fire and Land. The representation of water is ringing the famous Lutine Bell, which was rung inside Lloyds of London to announce lost ships. Air is shown with a very art-deco aeroplane, while fire gets the rising phoenix.

In 2008, they were relocated to the party wall of 52 – 54 Lime Street as part of the Willis Building planning conditions and mounted onto a steel frame at street level. However, a few months later they were moved once more to a new location, as part of the construction of what is nicknamed the Scalpel skyscraper, and are once more easy to see again.             

In 1951 he made the group of bronze statues of Robin Hood and his Merry Men that stand near the gates of Nottingham Castle. The group is now Grade II listed as part of the historic setting of the castle. In 1962 he modelled a new version of the royal coat of arms for use on major public buildings such as courts and embassies for the Ministry of Public Buildings; the Times said it was “more shapely than the old design, and displays the Lion and Unicorn with greater vigour”.                                      

He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy on 2 March 1937 and a full Academician on 27 April 1945, and appointed OBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours. He was married and had one son. He moved in the early 1970s from Chiswick, west London to Twickenham, where he died on 8 November 1976.

SDW

Sources Wikipedia; Ian Mansfield, Nottingham Heritage Gateway.

White Kennett

White Kennett (10 August 1660 – 19 December 1728) was an English bishop and antiquarian. He was educated at Westminster School and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where, while an undergraduate, he published several translations of Latin works, including Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly.

Kennett was vicar of Ambrosden, Oxfordshire from 1685 until 1708. During his incumbency he returned to Oxford as tutor and vice-principal of St Edmund Hall, where he gave considerable impetus to the study of antiquities.In1695 he published Parochial Antiquities. In 1700 he became rector of St Botolph’s Aldgate, London, and in 1701 Archdeacon of Huntingdon.

For a eulogistic sermon on the recently deceased William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, Kennett was in 1707 recommended to the deanery of Peterborough. He afterwards joined the Low Church party, strenuously opposed the Sacheverell movement, and in the Bangorian controversy supported with great zeal and considerable bitterness the side of Bishop Hoadly. His intimacy with Charles Trimnell, bishop of Norwich, who was high in favour with George I of Great Britain, secured for him in 1718 the bishopric of Peterborough. He died at Westminster in December 1728. White Kennett Street, near St Botolph, Aldgate, is named after him.

White Kennett was born in the parish of St Mary, Dover, on 10 August 1660, the son of Basil Kennett, M.A., rector of Dymchurch and vicar of Postling, Kent, by his wife Mary, eldest daughter of Thomas White, a wealthy magistrate and master-shipwright of Dover. After receiving a preliminary education at Eltham and Wye College, he was placed at Westminster School “above the curtain”, or in the upper school; but as he was suffering from smallpox at the period of the election of scholars on the foundation, his father recalled him home. After his recovery he spent a year at Bekesbourne, in the family of Mr Tolson, whose three sons he taught “with great content and success”. He was the older brother of Basil Kennett, whose life and career he was considerably to influence.                                                    

He was entered a batteler or semi-commoner of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in June 1678, being placed under the tuition of Andrew Allam. While an undergraduate he began his career as a writer by publishing anonymously, just before the assembling of parliament at Oxford on 21 March 1680–1, A Letter from a Student at Oxford to a Friend in the Country, concerning the approaching Parliament, in vindication of his Majesty, the Church of England, and the University. The Whig party endeavoured to discover the author, with a view to his punishment, but the sudden dissolution of the parliament put an end to the incident.

 On 2 May 1682 Kennett graduated BA. He commenced MA on 22 January 1684, and having taken holy orders he became curate and assistant to Samuel Blackwell, B.D., vicar and schoolmaster of Bicester. Sir William Glynne presented him in September 1685 to the neighbouring vicarage of Ambrosden.

Kennett’s political views were quickly modified by dislike of the ecclesiastical policy of James II. He preached a series of discourses against “popery”, refused to read the Declaration of Indulgence in 1688, and acted with the majority of the clergy in the diocese of Oxford when they rejected an address to the king recommended by Bishop Parker. At the beginning of the Glorious Revolution Kennett wrote  a manuscript treatise, but never printed, offering arguments for taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to William and Mary. Subsequently, Kennett openly supported the cause of the revolution, and thereby exposed himself to much obloquy from his former friends, who called him “Weathercock Kennett”. In January 1689, while shooting at Middleton Stoney, his gun burst and fractured his skull. The operation of trepanning was successfully performed, but he was obliged to wear a large black patch of velvet on his forehead during the remainder of his life.

After a few years’ absence at Ambrosden he returned to Oxford as tutor and vice-principal of St Edmund Hall, and in September 1691 was chosen lecturer of St Martin’s, commonly called Carfax, Oxford. He was also appointed a public lecturer in the schools, and filled the office of pro-proctor for two successive years. He proceeded BD on 5 May 1694. In February 1694–5 he was presented  to the rectory of Shottesbrooke, Berkshire. He was created DD at Oxford on 19 July 1700, and in the same year was presented to the rectory of St Botolph’s Aldgate. He resigned the vicarage of Ambrosden, and did not obtain possession of St Botolph’s without a lawsuit. On 15 February 1701 he was installed in the prebend of Combe and Harnham, in the church of Salisbury. Kennett’s historical and antiquarian researches had meanwhile procured him some reputation.

Kennett was now chaplain to Bishop Gardiner of Lincoln, and on 15 May 1701 became archdeacon of Huntingdon. Thereupon he entered into a controversy with Francis Atterbury about the rights of Convocation, and ably supported Dr Wake and Edmund Gibson in their contention that convocation had few inherent rights with  independent action. On Archbishop Tenison’s recommendation he was appointed in 1701 one of the original members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. In a sermon preached in his parish church of Aldgate on 31 January 1703–4, the fast day for the martyrdom of Charles I, Kennett acknowledged that there had been some errors in his reign, owing to a ‘popish’ queen and a corrupt ministry, whose policy tended in the direction of an absolute tyranny. To correct exaggerated statements made about this sermon, Kennett printed it under the title of A Compassionate Enquiry into the Causes of the Civil War, London (three editions), 1704, 4to. It elicited many angry replies from his high-church opponents.

In 1705 some booksellers undertook a collection of the best works on English history down to the reign of Charles II, and induced Kennett to write a continuation to the time of Queen Anne. Although it appeared anonymously as the third volume of the Compleat History of England, 1706, fol., the author’s name soon became known, and he was exposed to renewed attacks from his Jacobite enemies. A new edition, with corrections, was published in 1719.

His popularity at court was increased by the published denunciations of his views, and he was appointed chaplain in ordinary to her majesty. He was installed in the deanery of Peterborough 21 February 1707–8. A few days previously he had been collated to the prebend of Marston St Laurence, in the church of Lincoln.

A sermon which he preached at the funeral of the first Duke of Devonshire on 5 September 1707, and which laid him open to the charge of encouraging a death bed repentance, was published by Henry Hills, without a dedication, in 1707. To a second edition, published by John Churchill in 1708, with a dedication to William, second duke of Devonshire, was appended Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish.. A new edition of the sermon, with the author’s manuscript corrections, was published by John Nichols in 179.Kennett’s subsequent preferment was naturally connected by his enemies with the strain of adulatory reference to the second duke with which the sermon concludes

In 1707, desiring more leisure for study, he resigned the rectory of St Botolph, Aldgate, and obtained the less remunerative rectory of St Mary Aldermary, London. During this period he published numerous sermons, and his pen was actively engaged in support of his party. He zealously opposed the doctrine of the invalidity of lay baptism, and his answer to Henry Sacheverell’s sermon preached before the lord mayor on 5 November 1709 raised a storm of indignation. In 1710 he was severely censured for not joining in the congratulatory address of the London clergy to the queen, which was drawn up on the accession of the Tories to office after                                                    Sacheverell’s trial. Kennett and others who declined to subscribe it were represented as enemies to the crown and ministry.

Richard Welton, rector of St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel, introduced into an altar-piece in his church a portrait of Kennett to represent Judas Iscariot. It was stated that the rector had caused Kennett’s figure to be substituted for that of Gilbert Burnet at the suggestion of the painter, who feared an action of scandalum magnatum if  Burnet were introduced. Multitudes of people visited the church daily to see the painting, but Henry Compton, bishop of London, soon ordered its removal. For many years afterwards it is said to have ornamented the high altar at St Albans Cathedral.

To advance the interests of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Kennett made a collection of books, charts, maps, and documents, with the intention of composing a History of the Propagation of Christianity in the English-American Colonies, and on the relinquishment of that project he presented his collections to the corporation. He also founded an antiquarian and historical library at Peterborough, and enriched the library of that church with some scarce books. The collection, consisting of about fifteen hundred books and tracts, was placed in a private room at Peterborough.

On 25 July 1713 Kennett was installed prebendary of Farrendon-cum-Balderton at Lincoln. He preached vehemently against the Jacobite rising of 1715, and in the two following years warmly advocated the repeal of the acts against occasional conformity. In the Bangorian controversy he opposed the proceedings of convocation against Bishop Hoadly. By the influence of his friend Dr Charles Trimnell, bishop of Norwich and afterwards of Winchester, he was appointed bishop of Peterborough; he was consecrated at Lambeth on 9 November 1718, and had permission to hold the archdeaconry of Huntingdon and a prebend in Salisbury in commendam. He died ten years later at his house in St James’s Street Westminster, on 19 December 1728. He was buried in Peterborough Cathedral, where a marble monument with a brief Latin inscription was erected to his memory

He married first, on 6 June 1693, Sarah, only daughter of Robert and Mary Carver of Bicester (she died on 2 March 1693–4,); secondly, on 6 June 1695, Sarah, sister of Richard Smith, M.D., of London and Aylesbury (she died in August 1702); thirdly, in 1703, Dorcas, daughter of Thomas Fuller, D.D., rector of Wellinghale, Essex, and widow of Clopton Havers, M.D. (she died 9 July 1743). His second wife bore him a son, White Kennett, rector of Burton-le-Coggles, Lincolnshire, and prebendary of Peterborough, Lincoln, and London, who died on 6 May 1740; and a daughter Sarah, who married John Newman of Shottesbrook, Berkshire, and died on 22 February 1756. Hearne, writing on 26 April 1707, says that Kennett’s ‘present [his third] wife wears the breeches, as his haughty, insolent temper deserves’

His biographer, the Rev. William Newton, admits that his zeal as a whig partisan sometimes carried him to extremes, but he was very charitable, and displayed great moderation in his relations with the dissenters. He is now remembered chiefly as a painstaking and laborious antiquary, especially in the department of ecclesiastical biography. The number of his works both in print and manuscript shows him to have been throughout his life a man of incredible diligence and application. He was always ready to communicate the results of his researches to fellow-students.

Kennett published more than twelve sermons preached on public occasions between 1694 and 1728, and others in support of charity schools or of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (relevant to his sermon of 1712). His addresses to his clergy at Peterborough on his first visitation were issued in 1720.

SDW

Sources:-Wikipedia, D.N.B

Image Wiki

Eleanor of Provence

(c. 1223 – 24/25 June 1291. The site of her grave is unknown, making her the only English queen without a marked grave. Her heart was taken to London where it was buried at the Franciscan priory of Christchurch Greyfriars

She was a Provençal noblewoman who became Queen of England as the wife of King Henry III from 1236 until his death in 1272. She served as regent of England during the absence of her spouse in France in 1253.

Although she was completely devoted to her husband and staunchly defended him against the rebel Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, she was very much hated by the Londoners. This was because she had brought many relatives with her to England in her retinue; these were known as “the Savoyards”, and they were given influential positions in the government and realm. On one occasion, Eleanor’s barge was attacked by angry Londoners who pelted her with stones, mud, pieces of paving, rotten eggs and vegetables.

Eleanor had five children, including the future King Edward I of England. She also was renowned for her cleverness, skill at writing poetry, and as a leader of fashion.

Born in the city of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, she was the second daughter of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Provence (1198–1245) and Beatrice of Savoy (1198–1267), the daughter of Thomas I of Savoy and his wife Margaret of Geneva. She was well educated as a child and developed a strong love of reading, partly due to the influence of her tutor Romée de Villeneuve. Her three sisters also married kings. After her elder sister Margaret married Louis IX of France, their uncle William corresponded with Henry III of England to persuade him to marry Eleanor. Henry sought a dowry of up to twenty thousand silver marks to help offset the dowry he had just paid for his sister Isabella, but Eleanor’s father was able to negotiate this down to no dowry, just a promise to leave her ten thousand marks when he died.

Like her mother, grandmother, and sisters, Eleanor was renowned for her beauty. She was a dark-haired brunette with fine eyes.  On 22 June 1235, Eleanor was betrothed to King Henry III (1207–1272). Eleanor was probably born latest in 1223.

wedding of Eleanor and Henry III depicted by Matthew Paris in the 1250s, showing their age gap; he was 28, she was perhaps 12 or 13.

Eleanor was married to King Henry III at Canterbury Cathedral on 14th January 1236. Henry was then twenty-eight. She had never seen Henry prior to the wedding at Canterbury Cathedral and had never set foot in his kingdom. Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. She was dressed in a shimmering golden dress that fitted tightly at the waist and flared out to wide pleats at her feet. The sleeves were long and lined with ermine. After riding to London the same day where a procession of citizens greeted the bridal pair, Eleanor was crowned queen consort of England in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey which was followed by a magnificent banquet with the entire nobility in full attendance. Her love for her husband grew significantly from 1236 onward.Henry was well pleased with his new wife and the couple became devoted to each other. Eleanor’s three sisters also married kings, the eldest Margaret married Louis IX of France, her sister Sanchia was married to Henry’s younger brother Richard Earl of Cornwall, known as King of the Romans and the youngest, Beatrice married Charles I of Sicily.

Eleanor was a loyal and faithful consort to Henry, but unpopular due the the “Savoyards” and her influence with the King and her unpopularity with the English barons created friction during Henry’s reign. Her uncle William of Savoy became a close advisor of her husband, displacing and displeasing English barons. She was personally responsible for marrying some of her female Savoyard relatives to members of the English aristocracy. One hundred and seventy Savoyards enjoyed English royal patronage.

Eleanor of Provence was a forceful personality, strong-willed and determined with a great deal of common sense that turned this determination to practical use. Henry III clearly appreciated the strength in her character for in his will written before he left for Gascony in 1253, the king left his kingdom and his children, most particularly, his heir, in her care. This was despite the fact that Eleanor and henry supported different factions at times. He never changed this will. Their marriage was remarkable for their mutual fidelity, and their concern for the welfare of their children. Under her influence, the role of queen-consort developed in several areas, especially in the scale of income considered requisite for a queen’s needs and in the manner in which it was managed. She acquired a political authority that was interpreted as interference by contemporary commentators who sowed the seeds of her unpopularity.

Though Eleanor and Henry supported different factions at times, she was made regent of England when her husband left for Gascony in 1253. Eleanor was devoted to her husband’s cause, stoutly contested Simon de Montfort, and raised troops in France for Henry. After rebel barons captured Henry and took over the government in May 1264, Eleanor became the leader of the royalist exiles in France. She raised an invasion force, but her fleet was wrecked at Sluis, Flanders. Nevertheless, the rebels were crushed in August 1265, and Eleanor then returned to England

On 13 July 1263, she was sailing down the Thames when her barge was attacked by citizens of London. Eleanor stoutly hated the Londoners, who returned her hatred; in revenge for their dislike, Eleanor had demanded from the city all the back payments due on the monetary tribute known as queen-gold, by which she received a tenth of all fines which came to the Crown. In addition to the queen-gold, other such fines were levied on the citizens by the Queen on the thinnest of pretexts. In fear for her life as she was pelted with stones, loose pieces of paving, dried mud, rotten eggs and vegetables, Eleanor was rescued by Thomas Fitzthomas, the Mayor of London, and took refuge at the bishop of London’s home.

In 1272, Henry died, and her son Edward, who was 33 years old, became king of England. She remained in England as queen dowager and raised several of her grandchildren: Two of Edward’s children, Henry and Eleanor, as well as Beatrice’s son John of Brittany. When her grandson Henry died in her care in 1274, Eleanor went into mourning and gave orders for his heart to be buried at the priory at Guildford, which she founded in his memory. In January 1275, she expelled the Jews from all of her lands. Eleanor’s two remaining daughters died in 1275, Margaret on 26 February and Beatrice on 24 March.

She retired in 1286 to Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire, eight miles north of Salisbury, where she was visited by her son, King Edward. Two of her granddaughters – Mary of Woodstock (daughter of Edward) and Eleanor of Brittany – were already nuns there, each having entered the priory on reaching the age of seven.

Eleanor died on 24/25 June 1291 at the priory and was buried there. The site of her grave is unknown, making her the only English queen without a marked grave. Her heart was taken to London where it was buried at the Franciscan priory of Greyfriars.

Eleanor was renowned for her learning, cleverness, and skill at writing poetry, as well as her beauty; she was also known as a leader of fashion, continually importing clothes from France. She favoured red silk damask and often wore parti-coloured cottes (a type of tunic), gold or silver girdles into which a dagger was casually thrust, and decorations of gilt quatrefoil. To cover her dark hair, she wore jaunty pillbox caps. Eleanor introduced a new type of wimple to England, which was high, “into which the head receded until the face seemed like a flower in an enveloping spathe”.

She had developed a love for the songs of the troubadours as a child and continued this interest into adulthood. She bought many romantic and historical books that included stories from ancient times to contemporary romances written in the period (13th century).

Eleanor is the protagonist and main character in a number of novels over the years.

Her first son, the future Edward I, was born on the 17th of June, 1239. Her youngest daughter Katherine was deaf and mute from birth, Katherine died aged three on 3 May 1257, after which both Henry and Eleanor were said to be heartbroken, Eleanor becoming sick with grief.Eleanor and Henry had five children together and. Eleanor seems to have been especially devoted to her eldest son, Edward; when he was deathly ill in 1246, she stayed with him at the abbey at Beaulieu in Hampshire for three weeks, long past the time allowed by monastic rules .She personally supervised Edward’s upbringing and education. It was because of her influence that King Henry granted the duchy of Gascony to Edward in 1249.

Her youngest child, Katherine, seems to have had a degenerative disease that rendered her deaf and mute from birth. When the little girl died at the age of three, both her royal parents suffered overwhelming grief. Eleanor possibly had four other sons who also died in childhood, but their existence is in doubt as there is no contemporary record of them.

SDW

Sources Wikipedia; Britannica; English Monarchs .co.uk; Encyclopedia.com; The Freelance History Writer.  image wiki

Anna Maria Garthwaite

Charles Willing of Philadelphia was painted by Robert Feke in 1746 wearing a gown of English silk damask woven to a surviving 1743 design by Anna Maria Garthwaite.

Anna Maria Garthwaite (b. Harston, Leicestershire, c. 14 March 1688 – October 1763) was an English textile designer known for creating vivid floral designs for silk fabrics hand-woven in Spitalfields, London, in the mid-18th century. Garthwaite was acknowledged as one of the premiere English designers of her day. Many of her original designs in watercolours have survived, and silks based on these designs have been identified in portraiture and in costume collections in England and abroad.

Anna Maria Garthwaite was the daughter of the Reverend Ephraim Garthwaite (1647–1719) of Grantham, Lincolnshire, who was rector of nearby Harston, Leicestershire, at the time of her birth, and his wife Rejoyce Hausted. Anna Maria left Grantham to live in York with her twice-widowed sister Mary from 1726 to 1728. They relocated to a house in Princes Street (now Princelet Street) in the silk-weaving district of Spitalfields east of the City of London in 1728.

Spitalfields was the heart of the silk weaving trade in London, it was also home to many French Huguenot weavers who fled from religious persecution in France in the 1680s. These refugees were skilled weavers and their skills and expertise only added to the already established and thriving silk trade in London.

After moving to the area, Anna began to set herself up as silk designer. This is remarkable because not only was she in her forties, but she was unmarried which was very unusual for the time.  Plus, more importantly she had not received any formal training in silk design or had the skills passed on to her from a family member or previous generation.  There were many women employed in the silk trade but hardly any female designers.  Anna’s designs are the only designs by a woman from the era that still survive today.  So rare was it to be a female designer that she used her initials to sign her work so that buyers would not be deterred by the fact that she was a woman in a male dominated trade. 

Anna Maria created over 1000 designs for woven silks there over the next three decades. Some 874 of her original designs in watercolour from the 1720s through 1756 have survived and are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. On many of these items Anna added the date, the name of the weaver who bought it plus the instructions on how it should be weaved. The V&A museum also hold her ledger book which lists all her work and customers.  So, whilst little documentation of her personal life remains, we can still see and learn about her work and achievements. A waistcoat woven to one of Garthwaite’s designs is in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Garthwaite’s work is closely associated with the mid-18th century fashion for flowered woven silks in the Roccoco style, with its new emphasis on asymmetrical structures and sinuous C– and S-curves. She adapted the points rentrés technique developed by the French silk designer Jean Revel in the 1730s for representing near-three-dimensional floral patterns through careful shading, and designed large-scale damasks as well as floral brocades. From 1742–43, Garthwaite’s work—and English silk design in general—diverged from French styles, favouring clusters of smaller naturalistic flowers in bright colours scattered across a (usually) pale ground. The taste for vividly realistic florals reflects the advances in botanical illustration in Britain at this time, and can be contrasted with French silks of the period which show stylised flowers and more harmonious, if unrealistic, colourations.                               .

As previously mentioned, Anna did not receive any formal training. Her brother in law, Vincent Bacon however, who also lived in Spitalfields, was an apothecary. He therefore had access to the Chelsea Physic Garden (next to the Chelsea Hospital and now open to the public). This was one of England’s greatest botanical gardens of the time and it is through her experience and involvement in visiting the Physic Garden that her detailed drawings took on their realistic and natural design. The garden had species from around the world and Anna even designed patterns that grafted two species together and combined a variety of flowers in one design.

Spitalfields silks were widely exported to Northern Europe and especially to Colonial America, which was prohibited from trading directly with France by Britain’s Navigation Acts. The connections established in Colonial America allowed Garthwaite’s silk to be spread and recognized around the globe. Surviving silk skirt panels said to have been owned by Martha Dandridge prior to her marriage to George Washington have been attributed to Garthwaite because the panels, which are housed in the Colonial Williamsburg collection, match one of her extant watercolor designs A gown currently preserved at Colonial Williamsburg was made sometime between 1775 and 1785 with the silk lampas that Garthwaite designed in 1726-28, which was passed down in an American family for around fifty years and reused for three generations before being assembled into the wedding dress that is now in their collection.

Her will dated 1758 was read 24 October 1763, at Princes Street in the parish of Christ Church. She was buried at Christ Church three days later on 27 October 1763 as Anna-Maria Garthwaite aged 75 of Princes Street. 

Garthwaite has been called the “pre-eminent silk designer of her period”. Malachy Postlethwayt (c. 1707–1767) in The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce of 1751 listed Garthwaite as one of three designers who had “introduced the Principles of Painting into the loom.”

A Blue Plaque granted by English Heritage in 1998 marks the house at 2 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, E1, where Garthwaite lived and worked.

SDW

Sources Wikipedia; East End Women’s Museum

King Richard III’s Children

Although King Richard III had only one legitimate son, Edward of Middleham, by his wife Anne Neville, he is known to have had at least two and possibly three illegitimate children.

John of Gloucester

John of Gloucester, otherwise known as John of Pontefract was the natural son of Richard III and was probably born at Pontefract. The identity of John’s mother remains unknown but it has been suggested that she may have Alice Burgh, who was granted an annuity of 20 pounds when Richard, Duke of Gloucester was at Pontefract on 1 March 1474, the grant records that it was made for “certain special causes and considerations.” Another candidate is Katherine Haute.

John was knighted at York on 8 September 1483 in York during the investiture of his half-brother Edward of Middleham as Prince of Wales. He was appointed Captain of Calais by his father on 11 March 1485, in the letter of appointment Richard refers to John as “our dear bastard son” The letter goes on to describe John as having ‘liveliness of mind, activity of body, and inclination to all good customs (which) promise us, by the grace of God, great hope of his good service for the future’.

After the death of King Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485), the new king Henry VII removed John from the position of Captain of Calais, but on 1 March 1486, granted an annual income of 20 pounds ‘to John de Gloucester, bastard, of an annual rent of £20 during the King’s pleasure, issuing out of the revenues of the lordship or manor of Kyngestonlacy, parcel of the duchy of Lancaster, in co. Dorset’. The pretender Perkin Warbeck stated in his confession that when he began his impersonation of Richard, Duke of York, in 1491, “King Richard’s bastard son was in the hands of the king of England.” The seventeenth-century defender of Richard III, George Buck, asserted that around the time of the executions of Warbeck and Edward, Earl of Warwick, in 1499, “there was a base son of King Richard III made away, and secretly, having been kept long before in prison.” Buck did not identify John by name but claimed that he was executed by Henry to prevent him from falling into the hands of certain Irishmen who wished to make him their chief or prince. No other sources mention John being executed. He was never married and left no known children.

Katherine Plantagenet

The identity of the mother of Richard’s daughter, Katherine Plantagenet, has similarly gone unrecorded although it has been suggested that she may have been Katherine Haute, who received an annuity of five pounds from Richard’s estates in East Anglia. Katherine Haute was the wife of James Haute, whose mother Joan Woodville was a cousin of the queen, Elizabeth Woodville. The reason for the annuity is unknown.

After Richard succeeded to the throne Katherine was married to William Herbert, Earl of Huntingdon, (1455-1491) the son of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. On 29th February 1484, Herbert covenanted ‘to take to wife Dame Katherine Plantagenet, daughter to the King, before Michaelmas of that year’. Richard paid for the wedding and granted the couple an annuity of 400 marks from the lordships of Newport, Brecknock, and Hay on March 3, 1484. They probably lived at Raglan Castle, the Herbert family seat in Monmouthshire.

After the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion of 1483 Herbert was appointed to the post of Chief Justice of South Wales, which had previously belonged to Buckingham. When Henry Earl of Richmond landed in south Wales in 1485,

Herbert’s position forced Henry to take a roundabout route into England. It is likely that a Herbert agent first notified Richard III of Henry’s landing. William Herbert. however, is not recorded as having fought for his father-in-law at Bosworth. Katherine  was dead by 25 November 1487 when Herbert attended the coronation of Elizabeth of York described as a widower. The marriage is not thought to have produced any children. She was buried in St James’ Church Garlickhythe London as the Countess of Huntingdon – no reference to whose daughter she was but if there was any monument or tomb of some description for Richard’s daughter it was destroyed by the Great Fire of London. It is possible that she died of sweating sickness which swept London in the autumn of 1485 which explains why there was no permanent monument made for her. A monument that was there may well have been temporary as Herbert himself died on 16 July 1490 aged thirty five. He was buried in Tintern Abbey alongside his first wife – Mary Woodville. , St James Garlickhithe was considered a good place to be buried in the latter part of the fifteenth century.

Richard of Eastwell

Richard of EastwellRichard of Eastwell, a bricklayer of Eastwell, near Ashford in Kent made claims to be a natural son of Richard III. He was said to have been brought up without knowing the identity of his parents but was boarded with a schoolmaster who taught him Latin, a sign of someone being educated according to his status. He was visited four times a year by a mysterious gentleman who paid for his upkeep.

He claimed that when still a young child he was taken to his father’s tent on the night before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, King Richard informed the boy that he was his son and told him to watch the battle from a safe vantage point. The king further told the boy that, if he won, he would acknowledge him as his son. If he lost, he told the boy to forever conceal his identity.

Richard of Eastwell was employed by Sir Thomas Moyle, the lord of the manor at Eastwell, as a gardener and bricklayer, in the rest hour, whilst the others talked and threw dice, the quiet old man would sit apart and read a book. He was given a house on the grounds, a building called “Plantagenet Cottage” still stands on the site and a well in Eastwell Park still bears his name.

The parish records of St. Mary’s Church at Eastwell record that Richard died in 1550 at the age of 81. The entry is not considered a forgery. The register entry reads: “Rychard Plantagenet was buryed on the 22. daye of December, anno ut supra. Ex registro de Eastwell, sub anno 1550.” Heneage’s Memoirs of King Richard III states: Anciently when any person of a noble family was interred at Eastwell, it was the custom to affix a special mark against the name of the deceased in the register of burials. The fact is a significant one, that this aristocratic symbol is prefixed to the name of Richard Plantagenet.

A tomb in the churchyard of the derelict St. Mary’s church bears the inscription: “Reputed to be the tomb of Richard Plantagenet”. The gravestone was added in the nineteenth century.

SDW

Sources:-  English Monarchs.co.uk;  The History Jar; The Ricardian-Christian Steer, image Amazon