Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (57 page)

Believe me, general, adopt sentiments more moderate, and that man will not be your enemy, who shall tell you that Asia is not a theatre made for your glory. This letter is a little revenge that I give myself.

Napoleon was beaten.

He cut his losses and on 20 May began the retreat to Egypt with his exhausted and ill troops, over a third of his original force either dead or disabled. Although he claimed victory when he returned to Cairo, by the end of August, he had abandoned his troops in Egypt, hurried back to France alone, proclaiming his venture a success, taking charge of the army, and before long, the nation.

In 1808, he ordered the demolition of the Temple prison—he said, because it had become a place of Royalist pilgrimage as both Louis XVI and Louis XVII had been held there. Others maintained it was so that Smith’s prophecy could never come true and he would never be incarcerated there.

Madness in Their Method: Water Therapy in Georgian and Regency Times

by Lucinda Brant

U
sing water to treat illness, known today as hydrotherapy, is a practice dating back to Ancient Egypt. Greek and Roman historians also mention the use of water in the treatment of muscle fatigue, hydrophobia, and fever. Using water therapy as a psychiatric tool is attributed to Jean Baptiste Van Helmont’s massive medical tome the
Ortus Medicinae
published in 1643 and translated into English by John Chandler in 1662.

Van Helmont advocated water immersion therapy in the treatment of mental illness. The patient was fully immersed in cold water until the point of unconsciousness and thus at the point at which the patient could drown, because he believed near death immersion in cold water could “kill the mad idea” which caused mental derangement.

Naturally, this was a very dangerous technique and never became widespread. However, Van Helmont’s staunch belief in using water as a treatment for mental illness was taken up by various medical institutions and practitioners across Europe so that by the 18th century, the “water-cure” in its various forms became one of a number of standard treatments used by physicians and insane asylums when dealing with all manner of psychiatric conditions.

The two main types of water cure were the
douche
or cold shower and the
balneum
or bath. The douche required cold water be poured over the patient’s head or sprayed at the patient’s body to cool the heat of madness if insane or rouse the depressed if suffering from melancholia. The bath was used to calm overwrought nerves and to encourage sleep.

In the early years of this type of therapy, most cures were performed out of doors near a source of water—the sea or a pond. This allowed for public viewing. However, as asylums, both public and private, became more widespread in the 18th century, water cures were moved indoors. Inside and away from the public eye and an immediate source of water, institutions and their practitioners developed inventive ways and a wide variety of apparatuses to deliver water therapy to the mad and melancholic.

There were cold shower rooms, bath boxes that shut patients in, shower contraptions that delivered water at intervals via a system of pulleys and levers, dunking devices that immersed patients at regular intervals into small ponds as the device rotated and turned on giant cogs, and there was the simple ladder and bucket method that involved the patient sitting in a wooden barrel while behind a screen attendants ran up and down ladders with buckets of water that they poured onto the patient’s head from a great height.

And then there was “the chair”. Benjamin Rush wrote in a letter:

I have contrived a chair and introduced it to our
[Pennsylvania]
Hospital to assist in curing madness. It binds and confines every part of the body. By keeping the trunk erect, it lessens the impetus of blood toward the brain. By preventing the muscles from acting, it reduces the force and frequency of the pulse, and by the position of the head and feet favors the easy application of cold water or ice to the former and warm water to the latter. Its effects have been truly delightful to me. It acts as a sedative to the tongue and temper as well as to the blood vessels. In 24, 12, six, and in some cases in four hours, the most refractory patients have been composed. I have called it a Tranquillizer.

This water therapy was used by some physicians as a means of treating married women who had become “mildly distracted” and had opted out of their marital responsibilities (i.e. didn’t want to have sex with their husband). One such practitioner who used the method to sadistic effect was Patrick Blair.

Blair had his female patients blindfolded, stripped, and strapped to a bathing chair. The woman was then subjected to 30 minutes of water being sprayed directly into her face. When the woman refused to agree to return to the marital bed, Blair went one step further and repeated the treatment for 60 minutes, then 90 minutes, and when she promised obedience Blair allowed her to sleep.

Yet, the next day, sensing the woman was “sullen” and probably had only agreed because of the treatment, he again had her strapped to the chair and subjected to the treatment at intervals over the next two days. Finally, exhausted after such physical and mental torture, the woman succumbed and agreed to become a
“loving and obedient and dutiful wife forever thereafter”
. To make certain she did, Blair visited her at her home a month later and was happy to report “
everything was in good order
”.

Patrick Blair is the model for Sir Titus Foley in my novel
Autumn Duchess
, a dandified and well-respected physician whose medical forte is treating females for melancholia.

When Antonia, Dowager Duchess of Roxton, is seen to be excessively melancholy and is still wearing mourning three years after the death of the Duke, her loving son is at his wits’ end, and he instructs Sir Titus to treat his mother, little realizing that part of his treatment is the use of water therapy.

Thankfully, Blair’s sadistic treatment of his female patients was not the norm. Yet, most physicians, indeed most people in the 18th and early 19th centuries, viewed water therapy in its various forms as an acceptable means of coercing, treating, and hopefully curing patients with various mental, melancholic, and recalcitrant afflictions.

By the mid-18th century water therapy had become a standard treatment in the “mad doctor” medical bag. Yet, in this Age of Enlightenment, when many people came to view the shackling of the mad as inhumane, there were those physicians who advocated the use of water therapy not only as a cure but as a more humane means of coercion, thus doing away with the need for physical restraints. Thus water therapy was not only used on the mad and those suffering from depression, it was used by some physicians in the good-natured belief that it would persuade patients who had veered from the path of what society viewed as “normal” behavior to “get back on track”.

Sources

“Annual Report to the Friends (July 2005-June 2006).”
The Institute for the History of Psychiatry
. Cornell University, New York.

Porter, Dorothy and Roy Porter.
Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-century England
. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Porter, Roy.
Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine
. London: Allen Lane, 2002.

Rush, Benjamin.
The Letters of Benjamin Rush
:
1761-1792.
Edited by Lyman Henry Butterfield. Princeton University Press, 1951.

Scull, Andrew.
Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Stourhead: Painting with Nature

by M.M. Bennetts

S
tourhead. Home to the famous Hoare family—bankers to Catherine of Braganza, Vanbrugh, Lord Byron, and Jane Austen.

Along with Wilton and Longleat, it is one of the great houses—surrounded by gardens, of course—of south Wiltshire. And it has been a must-see destination for garden visitors for over two centuries.

In 1717, Henry Hoare, the son of the man who’d founded Hoare’s Bank, bought Stourton Manor and promptly had the crumbling half-derelict mediaeval-Tudor pile pulled down.

Then, with Colen Campbell (champion of the newest thing in architecture) as his architect, he set about rebuilding a new Palladian villa, which he would call Stourhead, on an adjacent site. Yet, unlike so many of their contemporaries who sought land-owning respectability and the political power that came with it, the Hoares did not disengage from the business which had made the family rich. Rather the family continued on doing that which they did very well—banking and making money...even as they turned their excess profits into land and Parliamentary influence.

Upon the first Henry Hoare’s death in 1725, his son, also called Henry, completed the work of house-building.

And it was he who, until his death in 1785, made the house and garden what it is today. Well-travelled and well-read—he was travelling and/or living on the Continent until 1738. It wasn’t until 1741 that he finally made his home at Stourhead.

After the death of his wife in 1743, and even as he continued to work on the house and purchase paintings and sculptures for it, he began work on the garden—but again, unlike his contemporaries, he didn’t hire a master gardener like Capability Brown.

No, Hoare did it himself.

And basing his work on the idealised landscapes he loved by Claude Lorrain, Poussin and especially Gaspar Dughet, Hoare made his garden by painting with nature.
“The greens should be ranged together in large masses,”
he wrote,
“as the shades are in painting: to contrast the dark masses with the light ones, and to relieve each dark mass itself with little sprinklings of lighter greens here and there.”

He had the vast lake that is such a striking feature still today created in 1754 by damming a small stream. (For the trivia seekers among you, the lake is the source of the River Stour—one of five rivers in England so named—which flows through Wiltshire and Dorset, reaching the English Channel at Christchurch. In at least one early map of Dorset, it is shown as the River Stower, as it is pronounced to this day. Stourton, on the other hand, is pronounced “Sterton”.)

Writing of the garden in 1755, Hoare said:

Whether at pleasure or business, let us be in earnest, and ever active to be outdone or exceeded by none, that is the way to thrive.... What is there in creation
[at Stourhead]
...those are the fruits of industry and application to business, and show what great things may be done by it, the envy of the indolent, who have no claim to Temples, Grottos, Bridges, Rocks, Exotick Pines and Ice in Summer.

Like many of his class, Hoare sought to illustrate his classical education and erudition through classical references and allusions in his building and the decoration of the garden. So he had a Pantheon built that same year based on the Pantheon in Rome, and the whole trip around the lake—it feels like a good two to three miles up and downhill—was based on the journey of the classical hero, Aeneas.

Within a few years, the garden was renowned, not only for Henry Flitcroft’s temples around the lake, but for the wide range of plants which had been gathered from around the world and coaxed into growing in this very English landscape.

Indeed, visiting Stourhead became such a late 18th century craze among polite society (similar to visiting Derbyshire and Chatsworth) that Hoare had an hotel built, the Spread Eagle, only a few hundred yards from his gatehouse. Though when Mrs. Libby Powys—a prolific garden visitor and arbiter of garden taste—came for a visit in 1776, she found the inn full....

Over the years, the house was expanded—notably by Henry Hoare’s grandson, Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838) who became a noted county historian and an omnivore of a collector. It was he who had built the two side wings—the one to house his library and the other to house his Picture Gallery. It was he also who employed the younger Chippendale to make furnishings for the two new wings and invited a young unknown watercolourist, J.M.W. Turner, down to Wiltshire to paint.

Today, the house and gardens too have seen many changes. The house was gutted by fire in 1902—though because it was slow to spread, the furnishings and paintings from the ground floor were able to be rescued. And within months, it was being rebuilt.

More distressing still to the then owner, the 6th Baronet, Henry Hugh Hoare, was the death of his only son in 1917, while he was serving in Palestine. Thus, by 1938, Hoare had decided to give the house and gardens to the National Trust, and in 1946, he did so.

And thus Stourhead, the great visitor attraction of the eighteenth century, came full circle. The Spread Eagle now serves excellent pub lunches; Hoare’s estate workers’ cottages now provide holiday lets. And the landscape garden designed by a banker, now moulded timelessly into Wiltshire’s landscape, continues to paint with nature as season gives way to season.

The Pursuit of the Picturesque

by M.M. Bennetts

E
h? The picturesque? What’s that twaddle, you say? Let me explain....

The Oxford English Dictionary
defines picturesque as
“like or having the elements of a picture; fit to be the subject of a striking or effective picture; possessing pleasing or interesting qualities of form and colour (but not implying the highest beauty or sublimity): said of landscapes, buildings....”

Furthermore, the OED tells us that the word didn’t enter the English language until 1703 (which is quite late). But by the mid-18th century, the picturesque was well on its way to being all the rage, and the concept would hold British society rapt until well into the 1830s...which is a very long time for matters of taste and style.

The whole concept can be traced—sort of—to the Italian landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Nicolas Poussin—these same painters who were so influential in formulating the ideal of English Landscape Gardening. Yet these painters and their works also wholly engaged the imaginations of two 18th century British poets, James Thomson (1700-1748) and John Dyer (1699-1757).

It may seem hard to believe, but before these two, poetry just wasn’t about nature. It didn’t extol the beauties of nature, and the idea of poetically rendering the sights, scents, or colours of the natural world—well, you can just forget that.

But these two changed all that—these men were landscape painters in verse, displaying all the delights of sunrises and sunsets and panoramic views as much as if they’d been daubing oils on canvas.

And this change in poetic emphasis and vision played into the 18th century Enlightenment ideal of the purity and goodness of the natural world as extolled by authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Which in turn fed into the nascent Romantic movement and the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge Taylor.

Hence nature, once just there and untameable, was now viewed as if it might be an infinite sequence of subjects that would make up “
a striking or effective picture
” with paint, poetry, or in the case of the landscape gardeners, plants and “picturesque” ruins.

Here’s Wordsworth’s offering from
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
(written July 1798).

...Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose