Liberty Poles and Trees by Miranda Miller

    Liberty poles sprouted all over Europe after the French Revolution. Until I found this watercolour by Goethe of the Liberty pole at the border of the Republic of Mainz in 1793, I was unable to visualise them. In their need to replace the religious and monarchical symbols they had just destroyed, the revolutionaries needed to find new symbols to inspire people. So they erected a tall wooden pole, usually a flagstaff, which is also of course related to a maypole as a traditional and rather obviously phallic symbol of fertility and celebration. A Phrygian cap was hung on the top of the pole and, in this example, there is also a tricolour ribbon.

   The Phrygian cap (in French, le bonnet Phrygian), was a soft, brimless, conical hat. It is sometimes called the red cap (le bonnet rouge) or liberty cap (bonnet de la Liberté). Its link with Phrygia in Minor Asia seems to be that Phrygia was a source of slaves who, if they were freed, wore their traditional headgear again. During the Roman Empire the Phrygian cap (in Latin, pileus) was worn on festive occasions such as the Saturnalia, and by former slaves who had been emancipated by their master and whose descendants were therefore considered citizens of the Empire. Immediately after the assassination of Julius Caesar the plotters went to meet a crowd of Romans at the Forum where they brandished a pole with a pileus on top of it to symbolize the liberation of the Roman people from the tyranny of Caesar. During the Enlightenment these Phrygian caps became a symbol of liberty.

   The French took this useful symbol directly from the American revolutionaries, who were inspired by the Liberty Tree, a famous elm tree that stood in Boston near Boston Common, In 1765, colonists in Boston staged the first act of defiance against the British government at the tree in the years before the American Revolution. As trees took years to grow Liberty poles were often erected in town squares in the years before and during the American Revolution. Tom Paine wrote a widely distributed poem in honour of these trees:

For freemen like brothers agree

With one spirit endued

They one friendship pursued

And their temple was liberty tree.

Liberty trees and poles were often destroyed by British authorities and then defiantly replanted.


   In the following decades Arbres de la Liberté became an international symbol of the French Revolution, the first being planted in 1790 by the pastor of a Vienne village. When General Berthier marched on Rome 1798 he established the short-lived Roman Republic, known by many Italians as La Repubblica per Ridere or the Ridiculous Republic. When the Pope protested he was deposed and taken to Valence where he died the following year, at 81. A liberty pole topped with a cap of liberty was planted in the Forum.

   Members of the Assemblies of Paris were obliged to wear a Liberty cap, which replaced the royal fleur-de-lis as a national symbol. However, Napoleon is said to have detested the Phrygian cap and after he proclaimed himself First Consul for Life the capped figure of Liberty was replaced by the less revolutionary helmeted Minerva. Liberty caps were then removed from all public monuments but reappeared as a potent symbol of rebellion during the Hundred Days in 1815, when Napoleon escaped from Elba, marched on Paris and seemed likely to seize power from Louis XV111.

   Of course one person’s liberty is another’s slavery; people suspected of being aristocrats or counter revolutionaries were often hanged on Liberty poles and trees. James Gillray, who has been called the father of the political cartoon, started as a radical but later supported Pitt’s reactionary government. In 1797 Canning arranged for Gillray to receive regular payments from the government as a reward for his attacks on the Whigs (William Cobbett claimed that Gillray had been granted a pension of £200 a year). In this brilliant satirical etching he shows us The Tree of Liberty, with the Devil Tempting John Bull.
   A serpent with the head of Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whigs, is wound around a tree (an oak, naturally). At the tip of the serpent’s tail, coiled round the upper branches, is a large cap of 'Liberté', decorated with tricolour cockade and ribbons. Serpent Fox is holding out a rotten apple inscribed 'Reform' to John Bull, who wears the Windsor uniform of blue coat with red collar and cuffs. The pockets of his coat and waistcoat bulge with round golden apples.

   Diabolical Fox hisses, "nice Apple, Johnny! - nice Apple". Doughty reactionary John Bull replies: "Very nice N'apple indeed! - but my Pokets are all full of Pippins from off t'other Tree: & besides, I hates Medlars, they're so domn'd rotten! that I'se afraid they'll gie me the Guts-ach for all their vine looks!"

   The trunk of the tree is labelled 'Opposition' and its roots are: 'Envy', 'Ambition', 'Disappointment'. The main branches are 'Rights of Man' and 'Profligacy'. Each rotten apple or medlar has an inscription: 'Democracy.', 'Treason.', 'Slavery.', 'Atheism.', 'Blasphemy.', 'Plunder.', 'Murder.', 'Whig Club', 'Impiety', 'Revolution', 'Conspiracy', 'Corresponding Society', 'Deism', 'Age of Reason' (Paine's deistic book).In the background (right) is an oak in full leaf: its trunk is 'Justice', the roots 'Commons', 'King', 'Lords', the branches 'Laws' and 'Religion'. From it hangs a crown surrounded by 'pippins', some inscribed 'Freedom', 'Happiness', 'Security'. In another dazzling Gillray print, Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion, Gillray shows William Pitt, the Prime Minister, tied to a liberty pole while Charles Fox flogs him. French troops march down St James’s Street and the palace is on fire.

   Liberty poles resurfaced In 1945, following the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation, when one was erected on Dam Square in Amsterdam. Marianne, the feminine representation of the French Republic, is sometimes shown wearing a Phrygian, or Liberty, cap, which has now become a rather chic pixie beret. Do any of you know of any more recent examples of liberty poles or trees?


                                                                 
                                                                

Fanny Burney by Miranda Miller

    I’m so glad to have finally read some of the work of this extraordinary women. The daughter of the musicologist Dr Charles Burney, whose amanuensis she was, she daringly wrote an epistolary novel, Evelina, in her twenties. She published it anonymously, without her father’s knowledge, and when it became known that she was the author she became famous. Hester Thrale, David Garrick and Dr Johnson, (who infamously remarked that "Public practice of any art, and staring in men's faces, is very indelicate in a female"), were amongst her admirers. Like so many novels of the period, the plot hangs on illegitimacy, honour, chastity and now seems fairly conventional: Evelina’s virtue is rewarded as it turns out she is, after all, the legitimate daughter of a rich man and therefore deserves her Lord. At the time the novel was considered remarkable for its originality and wit. Evelina’s embarrassing grandmother, Madame Duval, is a satirical portrait of the stepmother Fanny and her sisters hated.






    Jane Austen read Fanny Burney’s novels and was influenced by her. Near the end of Cecilia, her second novel: “The whole of this unfortunate business," said Dr Lyster, "has been the result of pride and prejudice.” She wrote more novels and also plays, one of which, The Woman Hater, was first performed in 2007 at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond. During her lifetime her father and other friends constantly feared that her work would cause offence or make her appear unladylike.

   Queen Charlotte offered her the post of "Keeper of the Robes", with a salary of £200 per annum. Fanny hoped that the improved social status and income might allow her greater freedom to write but, although she became fond of the queen and princesses, her role at court was exhausting and tedious and left her little time to write. After five years she asked her father, who was then the organist at Chelsea Hospital, to help to release from the post.

   Fanny’s own later adventures were, I found, more gripping and moving than her novels and her own love story was far less conventional than her heroines’. Her journals, written in a lively style punctuated by those eighteenth century dashes that are like bolts of energy, are very readable. In her late thirties she married a French refugee, Monsieur, later General, Alexandre d’Arblay, a Catholic. He was considered so unsuitable that her father refused to attend the wedding.

   D'Arblay was offered service with Buonaparte’s government in France, and in 1802 Fanny and her son Alexander followed him to Paris. She refers to them, endearingly, as My Alexanders. They expected to be in France for a year but due to the outbreak of war between France and England they had to stay for ten years and she desperately missed her family.

   She wrote a terrifying account of her mastectomy in 1811. She was conscious throughout as there were of course no anaesthetics then: “I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision – & I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still? so excruciating was the agony.” Being squeamish, I must admit I could hardly bear to read this. Despite this ordeal she lived until the then ripe old age of 87.

   For me, the most fascinating part of her journals is her account (some of it written many years after the events) of the atmosphere before and after the Battle of Waterloo. Thackeray drew on these pages when he wrote Vanity Fair.

   Fanny describes, wonderfully, the confusion in Brussels, the heartbreaking sight of so many maimed and dying soldiers, the wild rumours and the general conviction that Napoleon was invincible. On the day of the battle, in central Brussels, she heard ” a Howl, violent, loud, affrighting and issuing from many voices. I ran to the window, & saw (the street) suddenly filling with a rushing populace, pouring in from all its avenues, & hurrying on, rapidly, & yet in a scrambling manner, as if unconscious in what direction; while Women with Children in their arms, or clinging to their cloathes, ran screaming out of doors...that the French were come!”

   I was riveted by her description of her journey to join her wounded husband, who had been fighting to defend Louis XV111 and lay, dangerously ill, in Trèves (now Trier) in Germany. Fanny, in her sixties, left Brussels, without a new passport and almost without money, as soon as she heard that Alexandre was wounded. Her intrepid journey by stage coach took five days and at each town she had to show her French passport and get it signed by an official.

   In Cologne she stayed with a French family and summed up the timeless suffering of ordinary people in a time of war: “Death, Misfortune and Opression had all laid their Iron hands: they had lost their Sons, while, forcibly, fighting for a Usurpation which they adhorred; they had lost their property by emigration; & they had been treated with equal hardness by the Revolutionists because they were suspected of lack of loyalty, & by the Royalists because their Children had served in the armies of the Revolutionist.”

   In Coblentz she feared missing the weekly diligence that left at 4 in the morning and desperately ran around in the middle of the night trying to wake up the Prussian official whose permission she needed to continue her journey. As always, name dropping worked wonders: “”I had no sooner pronounced this name, than my new associate, giving me gaily a nod, seized my passport, &, opening the door without waiting for leave, carried it to the Bedside....& again, in a few minutes, my benevolent new friend came to me with his triumphant success. I blest him!”

   Finally: “Oh Alexander! What a meeting of exquisite felicity! - to Both-”

The Royal Free Hospital by Miranda Miller

   This hideous 1970s concrete building has loomed over Hampstead Heath for as long as I can remember. Last month I spent a lot of time in it, visiting my daughter and her new babies, and started to wonder about its curious name.

   In 1828 William Marsden, a young surgeon from Yorkshire, found an 18-year-old girl dying on the steps of St Andrew's church Holborn because she couldn’t afford admission to a hospital. The only way for the poor to obtain free treatment was to be personally recommended by someone who subscribed to that hospital. She had been refused admission to three hospitals because she had no subscriber's letter, so Marsden cared for her himself until she died two days later.

   This experience touched Marsden so deeply that he decided to open a hospital that would be free to all: “no ticket or recommendation from a subscriber is necessary to be provided …poverty and disease alone are the wretched qualifications.” He set up a small dispensary, which soon expanded and provided thirty beds, at 16 Greville Street, Hatton Garden. At first it was called the London General Institution for the Gratuitous Cure of Malignant Diseases but the name was soon changed to the London Free Hospital.

   In 1832 "King Cholera" arrived in England for the first time and killed about 6,500 people in London. It was thought to be spread by a "miasma” or bad smell in the atmosphere, a theory supported by leading figures in public health, including Edwin Chadwick and Florence Nightingale. “Thus did the fatal disease rise like a demon bent on destruction; it took its course, not heeding mountain, sea nor clime; death was its object, man its victim, and the uttermost ends of the world its destination; wherever its cold hand was extended - the people died .... Death struggled with time itself, and gnawed the moments that separated him from his victim. “  

   The London Free Hospital was the only London hospital to treat victims of the cholera epidemic, as other voluntary hospitals in London refused to admit patients with infectious diseases. Five years later, when the new young Queen Victoria became patron of the hospital, she changed its name to the Royal Free Hospital in recognition of this courageous policy. A few years later the hospital moved to larger premises, the former barracks of the Light Horse Volunteers in Gray’s Inn Road.

   Marsden’s beloved wife, Betsy-Ann, died of cancer and Marsden resolved to research the causes of cancer, classify tumours and find new treatments. In 1851 he set up another small establishment in Cannon Row, Westminster. At first this consisted only of a dispensary where palliative drugs were prescribed but it gave Marsden the opportunity to study and research the disease. It grew into the Brompton Cancer Hospital, now the Royal Marsden Hospital, on the Fulham Road. It was remarkable because it was the first purely cancer hospital in the world and because patients were treated for free.

Marsden campaigned passionately to change medicine and the medical establishment resented him. He attacked quack doctors and said many patients had “fallen into the hands of ignorant and needy empirics who drug them with pugnacious medicines so long as their money will hold out and then discard them, often in a worse state then at the start”. His enemies were delighted when it turned out that his apothecary and one of his surgeons at the Royal Free Hospital were selling Frank’s Specific Solutions, a quack remedy for VD. Both were sacked but there was an embarrassing scandal.

   In the 1870s the Royal Free became a teaching hospital. The School of Nursing was started and in 1895 it became the first hospital to appoint a female almoner, forerunner of the modern social worker, whose job it was to care for the non-clinical needs of patients. Female medical students had access to clinical practice on its wards. Astonishingly, the Royal Free was the only hospital ( apart from a short period during the First World War ) to accept female medical students before 1947.  The Royal Free also became the first hospital in England to have an obstetrics and gynaecology unit and by 1934 the mortality rate in the maternity wards was 2.8 per 1,000, the lowest in London.

    During the Second World War the hospital was bombed. In 1942 William Beveridge’s report recommended that “Medical treatment covering all requirements will be provided for all citizens by a national health service.” On the inception of the National Health Service in 1948, the Royal Free joined with several smaller hospitals including the Children's Hospital Hampstead, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital, the North-Western Hospital, Hampstead General Hospital and the London Fever Hospital in Liverpool Road to form the Royal Free Group.


   The Gray’s Inn Road site was too cramped and it was decided that there were too many teaching hospitals in central London. Plans to replace the Royal Free Hospital with a new building on the site of the Hampstead Fever Hospital in Lawn Road were drawn up and the present incarnation of the Royal Free Hospital was officially opened by the Queen in 1978, a hundred and fifty years after Marsden found that girl dying in a doorway.

We all love our NHS, perhaps even more so now that it is menaced by politicians who don’t think anything ought to be free.

Triplets by Miranda Miller

   I’ve just become the grandmother of Adam, Felix and Laurence. Twins run in our family but these are the first triplets. It’s still rare - only two hundred a year are born in the UK - and in ancient times it must have seemed miraculous.

   In Greek mythology the three Oneroi, often represented as triplets, were immortals born by parthenogenisis (so much less bother). These three dark winged spirits (daimones) flew out each night like bats from their cave in Erebos, the land of eternal darkness beyond the rising sun. A nightmare was melas oneiros (black dream). As with all myths there are many versions but in most stories Morpheus was their leader, who appeared in the dreams of kings in the guise of a man bearing messages from the gods. Icelos, or Phobetor, was the god of nightmares, generally about animals or monsters, and Phantasos, who appeared in dreams as a woman, was the god of fantastical or prophetic dreams.

   

According to Roman legend, the Horatii, seen here in a painting by David, were triplets who defended Rome against Alba Longa , a rival city in the Alban hills. The two cities decided to settle their dispute with a duel : the Horatii triplets fought against the triplets from Alba Longa, the Curiatii. After two of the Horatii were killed the third brother, Publius Horatius, pretended to flee. When the Curiatii pursued him Horatius turned and attacked them, killing all three.

    Horatius's  sister, Horatia, was overcome with grief because she had been engaged to one of the Curiatii, and she wept when she realised her brother had killed her beloved. At this point the legend becomes decidedly unsympathetic: seeing her tears, Horatius stabbed her, declaiming: "So
perish any Roman woman who mourns the enemy." Horatius was sentenced to die for murdering his sister but successfully appealed to the people to spare his life. Some classicists believe that this story was invented to explain the origin of the Roman tradition by which condemned prisoners could appeal to the public to avoid a death sentence.

   The Yoruba people in Nigeria have the highest rate of twins in the world (three sets of twins in every nineteen births). They attribute this to their consumption of a particular type of yam. In Yoruba religion it is thought that, about two generations after death, every human soul has a chance to return to earth in the body of a newborn, usually within the same family. Twins and triplets have always been considered magical and, in ancient times, the Yoruba used to reject and even sacrifice them but nowadays their birth is celebrated by the whole community and they are brought up less strictly than other children. These triplets are wearing traditional Yoruba clothes.

    In the Yoruba Oyo kingdom there was a tradition that when a couple had triplets, the Oba, or ruler of the town, had to give the newborn babies everything he was adorned with when he was told of their birth. According to the Nigerian Tribune Newspaper Company, in June 2009 the wife of the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Olayiwola Adeyemi III, gave birth to triplets. Her husband gave her a new car and twelve cows, ten bags of yam flour, twenty-five bags of rice, chickens and fish were lavished on the triplets’ christening feast.

   There’s a very successful Spanish series of children’s books, later adapted as TV cartoons, called The Triplets (Les tres bessones), by Roser Capdevila, whose own triplets were born in 1969. Whenever the three sisters annoy the Bored Witch, the fat 700-year-old witch who is their babysitter, she punishes them by sending them off to have adventures in various famous stories, including Frankenstein and The Phantom of the Opera, but always returns them safely to their own world.

   Lots of scope for bedtime stories there, not to mention the Three Graces, Furies, Mothers, Fates, Bears, Billy Goats Gruff, Little Pigs, Stooges, Musketeers....

October Competition

Competitions are open to UK residents only, we're afraid.

To win one of five copies of The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd by Miranda Miller, our October guest, just give an answer to the following question in the Comments below:

"Which historical character can you imagine visiting 21st century England, and what would she or he think of us?"

Closing date 7th November

Writing the Bedlam Trilogy by Miranda Miller

Our guest this month is Miranda Miller. This what she says about herself:

Miranda Miller has published seven novels, a book of short stories about Saudi Arabia and a book of interviews with homeless women. Hilary Mantel has said of her novels, "Miller's intricate fictions are lit by the dark flickerof a strong and original imagination." She has just published 'The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd,' (Peter Owen), Part Two of her Bedlam Trilogy. She lives in North London with her husband, a musician, and has a daughter and two stepchildren. She is a Royal Literary Fund
fellow at the Courtauld Institute. 

Over to Miranda: One morning about twelve years ago I was lying in bed, half awake, when I saw the image of a young woman in Victorian mourning clothes crossing a busy modern road. I wrote two more novels before this persistent young woman became the heroine of Nina in Utopia (Peter Owen 2010).

Nina visits our London and, being a tourist, gets it all wrong: she thinks we live in a Utopia, where all are equal and the evils of money and violence and war have been conquered.  Nina sees "a wonderful city where men and women live quite freely and without lies and hypocrisy."  "Everywhere we went he paid with his visiting card. I saw many others go to a hole in the wall near the restaurant where we sat and take bundles of money from it! So I think there has been some great Chartist revolution and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has opened her coffers to all."

When she returns to her own time and tells her husband she has seen this wonderful future and shows him drawings she has done of our London, he, understandably, thinks she is mad and has her confined to Bedlam.

Now at this point I thought I was writing a Gothic novel and that conditions in a mental asylum in 1853 would be horrific. Then I started to do research and discovered that at that time a remarkable man, Dr Charles Hood, had become Resident Physician at the Royal Bethlem Hospital and had carried out a number of reforms. One of the patients in the Criminal Lunatic wing at the back of the hospital was Richard Dadd, a painter who has always interested me. He became a minor character in Nina in Utopia and when I finished writing that novel I was still fascinated by him, so I decided to give him a novel of his own.

Peter Owen agreed to publish The Bedlam Trilogy, about the links between art and madness. Part Two, The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd, has just been published and I am half-way through Part Three, King of the Vast.

Richard Dadd was a promising young painter of twenty-six when he murdered his father and was confined to the Royal Bethlem Hospital, and later Broadmoor, for the rest of his life. With the encouragement of the doctors he continued to work and his most famous painting, the Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, is in Tate Britain. In these two novels I try to explore his inner life and his relationship with his doctors. Richard Dadd's long years of incarceration were not lost. Heroically, he continued to produce mysterious and beautiful work. As attitudes to mental illness have changed his reputation, and his prices, have soared.

In my novel Richard Dadd visits Tate Britain and tries to steal his own painting before being thrown out into  frightening darkness. "There are figures slumped in doorways asleep under piles of bedding.  I am tempted to join them, but it is so cold that I'm afraid I won't wake up again.  I have no bedding, no friends, nothing to eat or drink. Nobody going nowhere with nothing. The longest night I've ever known and the loneliest."
 

Richard Dadd

Most historical novels ask what we think of them, those long dead people. In these three novels I try to imagine what they would think of us, and each of the three main characters has some vision of our London.

  Miranda's website