Thursday, May 31, 2018
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Marcus Livius Drusus
(born c. 124 BC—died 91 BC), son of the tribune of 122 BC by the same name; as tribune in 91, Drusus made the last nonviolent civilian attempt to reform the government of republican Rome. Drusus began by proposing colonial and agrarian reform bills. He attempted to resolve the tensions between the senatorial order (the political class) and the equestrian order, or knights (the commercial class).
As tribune in 123–122, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus had given the right of collecting taxes to the knights and had made them the source of jurors on standing criminal courts. In 92 an honest senator, Publius Rutilius Rufus, was convicted of corruption in governing his province when in fact he had tried to control equestrian rapacity in tax collecting. Drusus came forward, as “patron of the Senate,” with a solution. Three hundred knights were to be raised to the Senate, and in the future jurors for standing criminal courts would be selected from this enlarged Senate. By this scheme, the wealthiest of the knights would become senators and the rest would lose control of the courts. Although supported by the distinguished senator Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, Drusus’s proposal did not satisfy extremists of either order, nor did it please those who stood to gain by the conflict between them, such as the general Gaius Marius.
Opposition from all sides increased when Drusus pushed for the enfranchisement of Rome’s Italian allies. The Senate declared his legislation invalid on technical grounds. Disturbances involving Drusus’s supporters among the allies increased, and the reformer was murdered. His assassin was never discovered. The immediate consequence of his murder was the Social War (91–87), the revolt of the Italian allies.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Walks with Walser
January 2, 1944
"Shall we pay our respects to Hölderlin today?" I ask. Robert replies: "Hölderlin? What a delightful idea! Hopefully we won't get as soaked as I did last Sunday afternoon, when a veritable deluge poured down on me. I returned to the asylum like the lousiest tramp." Today, too, despite the cold, he has brought neither overcoat nor umbrella. He looks rather raffish in his worn-out yellow-checked suit, gentian blue shirt, red-striped tie, and rolled-up trousers.
We strike out briskly on the lightly snow-covered street that leads to Goßau; a white weasel shoots past, burrows a bit in the snow and peeks curiously up at us, ears perked. We speak first of the bombing of German cities. I remark that I find it disgraceful to wage war in the interior of a country, against women, children, and sick people, regardless of what nation is doing it. The fact that Hitler's people bombed London does not entitle the Allies to employ the same inhumane tactics. Robert counters fiercely, saying that I judge the situation subjectively, and too sentimentally. Anyone who is threatened the way the Britons are must turn to the most ruthless realpolitik. Hitler's Huns deserve no better. Every nation, in merely deciding to exist, becomes brutally egotistical; in this even Christianity has to take a back seat. I: "Did the civilized peoples fight back when the Italians went at the Abyssinians with bomber squadrons?" —Robert: "Allow me the observation that the Abyssinians wouldn't have fallen into that position had they resisted the temptations of civilization and had remained loyal to tradition. It's a matter of loyalty to tradition, always and everywhere!"
With pleasure Robert shows me the beautiful old part of the village of Goßau. Most of the people are in church. It is very quiet: only a few sledding children and interned Poles in their yellow-green uniforms. We hike onward, now and then meeting a farmer's sleigh, the horse's harness jingling; the snow often comes to our knees. A farmhand shouldering a dung fork comes out of a stable. I call out: "Mornin'!" He doesn't answer, which prompts Robert to remark: "He's probably jealous that he's not out for a stroll like us!" In Arnegg we knock at the door of a tavern. But it remains deathly silent. Two hours later we are in Hauptwil, where Hölderlin was tutor to the Gonzenbach family around 1800. There is a baroque-style bourgeois house with a sundial containing the motto:
Work and wake, long as it's light,
For I don't tell the hours of the night.
Across from it lies the Zum Leuen inn. We get excellent coffee and sharp Tilsit cheese. Robert asks me: "Don't you think that the proprietress comes from southern Germany? I suspect it from her dialect. Perhaps Hölderlin brought Württembergians here with him." We stop in front of the ample patrician house of the Gonzenbach family, who settled here at the beginning of the seventeenth century and grew rich in the canvas business, admiring the little tower through which the street passes, and the Venetian balconies, the quiet courtyard, the peaceful facade of the stately home with its double staircase and weathervane. The estate is now occupied by a school of home economics run by a charitable society, but Robert finds that the house has kept its painting-like quality, its grand and dreamy feel. I: "Shall we look at the Hölderlin plaque they put up last year?" Robert waves off this idea: "No, no, let us not bother with such placard nonsense! How repugnant are things that make a show of reverence. And by the way, Hölderlin's was only one of many human fates to play out here. A famous person must not cause one to forget the unfamous."
We stand gawking for a good quarter of an hour, and as we turn on a side street toward the wooded hill that separates Hauptwil from Bischofszell, we ask an elderly man who is shoveling snow in front of his house whether there are any remaining descendants of the estate's former owners. He looks at us through his right eye—the left is blind—and answers: "Yes, there's one. But he's nearly deaf and has gone a bit soft," and after a bit he adds, "People don't deserve such a splendid house, now, when they're dropping bombs on everything." I say: "Perhaps they'll improve, gradually..." The man: "Them, improve?" I: "Perhaps they'll be forced to improve!" He: "Indeed. That could be. We can only hope!" and Robert nods.
It's now close to noon. During the hike I finally tell to Robert (it has been on the tip of my tongue for a while but I wanted to wait for a psychologically opportune moment, so as not to upset him) that his sister Lisa, who lies fatally ill in a Bern hospital, had expressed the wish that he and I might come and visit her one last time. He refuses immediately: "Eh, more of this to-do! I neither may nor wish to travel to Bern again, after being thrown out, so to speak. It's a point of honor. I have been staked down in Herisau and I have my daily duties here, which I do not wish to neglect. Only not to attract attention, not to disturb the order of the asylum! That I cannot allow myself... Anyway: sentimental requests leave me cold. Am I not also sick? Do I not also need my rest? In such cases it is best to remain all on one's own. Nor did I want it otherwise when I was admitted to the hospital. In such situations simple people like us must behave as quietly as possible. And now I'm supposed to 'trot off' with you to Bern, of all things? I would embarrass myself in front of you! We'd stand there like two idiots with poor Lisa, maybe we'd even make her cry. No, no, as fond as I am of her, we mustn't give in to such feminine fripperies! It is for us simply to take walks together, don't you think?" I: "But things are bad with Lisa, very bad. Perhaps you'll never see her again...!" Robert: "Well then by God, we'll never see each other again. Such is human fate. I too will have to die alone one day. I'm sorry about Lisa, of course. She was a wonderful sister to me. But her sense of family borders on the pathological, the immature." Later: "We Walsers are all so excessively fragile and hung up on family ties. Haven't you ever noticed: childless couples—and we Walsers are all childless—usually remain somewhat childlike themselves. A person (at least a healthy one) grows up when he cares about other people. Cares give his life depth. Childlessness in our family is a typical symptom of overrefinement, which is also expressed, among other ways, in maximum sensitivity." We eat at a butcher shop in Bischoffszell, after taking in the grandiose town hall. A miniature Christmas tree still stands in the dining room. There is meat soup, veal in mushroom cream sauce, peas, a kind ofpommes frites, salad, and fruit compote. Accompanying it, the spirited red Nußbaumer wine of the region. We are served by the proprietor's very pregnant wife. Robert tells me that a sergeant from the unit that he served in, now a bookkeeper in Basel, had sent him cheroots for Christmas. How could he have known the address? They had heard nothing from each other for decades. But the little package had awakened many memories. And then on New Year's Day a farmer from Glarus in his ward had sung old folk songs, including a romantic courtly ballad from the middle ages. Robert had however withdrawn as much as possible from the actual communal Christmas festivities, and from the church service; it was too much activity for him.
Train ride from Bischofszell to Gossau, where we feast on sweets in a pastry shop. I tell Robert about reading Erich Eyck's three-volume work on Bismarck, which contains the remark, concerning the year 1852: Bismarck wanted to destroy the big cities with their revolutionary inhabitants wholesale. I tell him that I am increasingly of the opinion that Bismarck was a forerunner of Hitler's people: a cynical pettifogger and, when it suited him, a brutal power politician and warmonger. Admittedly, Bismarck was a hundred times more clever and cultivated than the Nazis. Robert agrees and says that Mussolini strikes him as an Italian version of Count Bismarck. National socialism really began with Frederick the Great.
Robert asks me if I would mind if we take a path through the meadows from Gossau to Herisau to cool our wine-fogged heads. I agree. We trudge through deep snow toward a wooded area on a hill; between sturdy blackish trees we stumble upon the stone that marks the border between the Cantons of Appenzell Outer Rhodes and St. Gallen. Robert brushes it tenderly and asks twice: "Was this not a nice day?" In Herisau we still have an hour and a half until my train leaves. We dither about whether to go to the station restaurant. I suggest we go up to the village instead. Robert agrees gladly. We decide on the pub Drei Könige in the old part of town. There is only one waitress, who sits writing a letter. It's cozy: warm and dim. Robert feels well taken care of, and his face looks refreshed and alive. He drinks three "large darks," one after another, and smokes the sergeant's cheroots. He talks for almost an hour of Bern: "Yes, I lived there for nearly eight years, until I was hauled off to Waldau, where I stayed three and a half years and even wrote a bit at first—not much, just enough to continue to serve my clientele: in the Bern years that included above all theBerliner Tageblatt, which paid princely sums, and the Prager Tageblatt, which paid poorly. But they took everything of mine, and that trust was worth more to me than the better honoraria I got from the Swiss newspapers, whose editors often grumbled about my pieces. In Biel I wrote mainly for various magazines. You see, every time I went to a new city, I forgot my past and adapted completely to the new milieu. In Bern I had to fight hard, for years. At my age it's no small thing to forge a new home for oneself. I came to Bern as poor as a church mouse, since the few thousand marcs I had put away in a bank went straight down the drain thanks to inflation. Yes, I lived quite alone, and changed lodgings often. Surely over a dozen times. Sometimes the places were truly shabby. My most frequent companions were waitresses and the daughter of a Jewish publisher, as well as the librarian Hans Bloesch and sometimes the writer A. F., who was completely shameless. I should have socked him. I made a tremendous effort to get back on my feet and to hunt down pretty bits of inspiration. But I also let a lot of alcohol flow down my gullet, which meant that here and there I soon found myself unwelcome." I: "Oh, did you go on some real benders?" Robert: "Certainly! The majority of what I took in as honoraria I washed down again in alcohol. What one won't do when lonely! Over the weekends or at holidays I would sometimes go to my sister's in Bellelay; but other than that I rarely saw my family."
I ask Robert whether it is true that in Berlin he burned the unpublished manuscripts of three novels. "That is quite possible. In those days I was hell-bent on writing novels. But I came to understand that I had set my heart on a form that was too expansive for my talents. So I withdrew into the snail shell of short stories and feuilletons... By the way: It is up to the author alone to decide which literary genre he should turn himself to. Perhaps he writes such novels only so that he can finally have enough air to breathe. It is quite irrelevant whether the rest of the world says yes or no. If one wins, one must also be able to lose... If I could start over, I would do my best to eliminate subjectivity, and write for the good of the people. I gave myself too much liberty. One must not try to sidestep the people. The terrible beauty of Green Henry stands before me as an example."
"In Herisau," Robert adds, "I stopped writing. What for? My world was shattered by the Nazis. The newspapers I wrote for are gone; their editors have been chased away or are dead. And so I've become practically a fossil."
Three remarks: "Human reason awakens only in poverty."
"Writers of genius foretell world history like prophets."
"Dependence has something good-natured about it; independence inspires enmity."
On the way to the train station I tell him that on New Year's Day I saw a French farce in Zürich. The infidelity motif of Parisian boulevard authors, now long pat, came off as rather clunky in German, however. Robert: "I'm sick to death of this motif. But perhaps the infidelity is there to keep the women awake. Otherwise they would get sleepy." During the conversation we pass a child pulling a sled, who looks at us with big eyes. Robert asks me: "Did you see his eyes? It's as if he guessed our mischievous mood!"
As we part he says: "Until next time—if we survive that long!" I: "Are you in doubt? We may both live to be ancient." Robert: "Hopefully... and we'll still have many beautiful times together. Beauty usually offers itself to those who seek it."
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Friday, May 25, 2018
Satire VII
[Translated by G. G. Ramsay]
Learning and Letters Unprofitable
On Caesar alone hang all the hopes and prospects of the learned; he alone in these days of ours has cast a favouring glance upon the sorrowing Muses----at a time when poets of name and fame thought of hiring baths at Gabii, or bakehouses in Rome, while others felt no shame in becoming public criers, and starving Clio herself, bidding adieu to the vales of Aganippe,1 was flitting to the auction rooms. For if you see no prospect of earning a groat within the Muses' grove, you had better put up with Machaera's 2 name and profits and join in the battle of the sale-room, selling to the crowd winejars, tripods, book-cases and cupboards----the Alcithoe of Paccius, the Thebes or the Tereus 3 of Faustus! How much better that than to say before a judge "I saw" what you did not see! Leave that to the Knights of Asia,4 of Bithynia and Cappadocia----gentry that were imported bare-footed 5 from New Gaul!
But from this day forth no man who weaves the tuneful web of song and has bitten Apollo's laurel will be compelled to endure toil unworthy of his craft. To your task, young men! Your Prince is looking around and goading you on, seeking objects for his favour. If you expect patronage from any other quarter, and in that hope are filling up the parchment of your saffron tablet, you had better order faggots at once, Telesinus, and present your productions to the spouse 6 of Venus; or else put away your tomes, and let bookworms bore holes in them where they lie. Break your pen, poor wretch; destroy the battles that have robbed you of your sleep----you that are inditing lofty strains in a tiny garret, that you may come forth worthy of a scraggy bust 7 wreathed with ivy! No hope have you beyond that; your rich miser has now learnt only to admire, only to commend the eloquent, just as boys admire the bird of Juno.8 Meantime the years flow by that could have endured the sea, the helmet, or the spade; the soul becomes wearied, and an eloquent but penniless old age curses itself and its own Terpsichore! 9
And now learn the devices by which the patron for whose favour you desert the temples of the Muses and Apollo seeks to avoid spending anything on you. He writes verses of his own; yielding the palm to none but Homer----and that only because of his thousand years. If the sweets of fame fire you to give a recitation, he puts at your disposal a tumbledown house in some distant quarter, the door of which is closely barred like the gate of a beleaguered city. He knows how to supply you Avith freedmen to sit at the end of the rows, and how to distribute about the room the stalwart voices of his retainers: but none of your great men will give you as much as will pay for the benches, or for the tiers of seats resting on hired beams, or for the chairs in the front rows which will have to be returned when done with. Yet for all that, we poets stick to our task; we go on drawing furrows in the thin soil, and turning up the shore with unprofitable plough. For if you would give it up, the itch for writing and making a name holds you fast as with a noose, and becomes inveterate in your distempered brain.
But your real poet, who has a vein of genius all his own----one who spins no hackneyed lays, and whose pieces are struck from no common mint----such an one as I cannot point to, and only feel----is the product of a soul free from care, that knows no bitterness, that loves the woodlands, and is fitted to drink at the Muses' spring. For how can unhappy Poverty sing songs in the Pierian cave and grasp the thyrsus when it is short of cash, which the body has need of both by night and day? Horace's stomach was well filled when he shouted his cry of Evoe! Where can genius find a place except in a heart stirred by song alone, that shuts out every thought but one, and is swept along by the lords of Cirrha and of Nysa! 10 It needs a lofty soul, not one that is dismayed at the cost of a coverlet, to have visions of chariots and horses and Gods' faces, or to tell with what a mien the Fury confounded the Rutulian 11: had Virgil possessed no slave, and no decent roof over his head, all the snakes would have fallen from the Fury's hair; no dread note would have boomed from her voiceless trumpet. Do we expect Rubrenus Lappa to be as great in the buskin as the ancients, when his Atreus has to be pawned for his cloak and crockery? Numitor, poor man, has nothing to give to a needy friend, though he is rich enough to send presents to his mistress, and he had enough, too, to buy a tamed lion that needed masses of meat for his keep. It costs less, no doubt, to keep a lion than a poet; the poet's belly is more capacious!
Lucan,12 indeed, reclining amid the statues of his gardens, may be content with fame; but what will ever so much glory bring in to Serranus, or to the starving Saleius, if it be glory only? When Statius 13 has gladdened the city by promising a day, people flock to hear his pleasing voice and his loved Thebais; so charmed are their souls by his sweetness, with such rapture does the multitude listen to him. But when his verses have brought down the house, poor Statius will starve if he does not sell his virgin Agave to Paris 14: for it is Paris who appoints men to military commands; it is Paris who puts the golden ring round the poet's finger after six months of service.15 You can get from a stage-player what no great man will give you: why frequent the spacious antechambers of the Bareae or the Camerini? It is Pelopea 4 that appoints our Prefects, and Philomela 16 our Tribunes! Yet you need not begrudge the bard who gains his living from the play-house: who nowadays will be a Maecenas 17 to you, a Proculeius, or a Fabius? who another Cotta, or a second Lentulus? Genius in those days met with its due reward; many then found their profit in pale cheeks and in abjuring potations all through December.18
And is your labour more remunerative, ye writers of history? More time, more oil, is wasted here; regardless of all limit, the pages run up to thousands; the pile of paper is ever mounting to your ruin. So ordains the vast array of facts, and the rules of the craft. But what harvest will you gather, what fruit, from the tilling of your land? Who will give to an historian as much as he gives to the man who reads out the news?
"O but historians are a lazy crew, that delight in lounging and the shade." Tell me then what do pleaders get for their services in the courts, and for those huge bundles of papers which they bring with them? They talk big enough, especially if a creditor 19 of their own happens to be listening: or if, more urgent still, they get poked in the ribs by one who has brought a huge ledger to claim a doubtful debt. Then indeed do their capacious bellows pant forth prodigious lies! Then are their breasts be-slobbered! 20 and yet, if you want to discover their real gains, you may put on one side the fortunes of a hundred lawyers, on the other that of a single jockey of the Red! 21 The great men are seated; you rise, a pale-faced Ajax,22 to declaim before a bumpkin judge in a case of contested liberty. Strain your lungs, poor fool, until they burst, that when exhausted by your labours some green palm-branches may be put up to adorn your garret.23 What fee will your voice bring in? A dried-up ham 24; a jar of sprats; some veteran onions which would serve as rations for a Moor, or five flagons of wine that has sailed down the Tiber.25 If you have pled on four occasions, and been lucky enough to get a gold piece, a bit of it, as part of the compact, will go to the attorney. Aemilius will get the maximum legal fee,26 though he did not plead so well as we did; but then he has a bronze chariot in his forecourt, with four stately steeds, and an effigy of himself, seated on a gallant charger, brandishing from afar a bending spear, and practising for battle with one eye closed. That is how Pedo 27 becomes bankrupt, and how Matho 27 fails; and such will be the end of Tongilius, who frequents the baths with a huge oil-flask of rhinoceros horn, and disturbs the bathers with a mob of dirty retainers. His Maedian bearers are weighed down by the long poles of his litter as he passes through the Forum on his way to buy slaves or plate, agate vases or country houses; for that foreign robe of his, with its Tyrian purple, gains him credit. These gentlemen get profit out of this display; the purple or the violet robe brings practice to a lawyer; it pays him to live with a racket and an appearance beyond his means, and wasteful Rome sets no limits to extravagance.
Trust in eloquence, indeed? Why, no one would give Cicero himself two hundred pence nowadays unless a huge ring were blazing on his finger. The first thing that a litigant looks to is, Have you eight slaves and a dozen retainers? Have you a litter to wait on you, and gowned citizens to walk before you? That is why Paulus used to hire a sardonyx ring; that is why he earned a higher fee than Gallus or Basilus. When is eloquence ever found beneath a shabby coat? When does Basilus get the chance of producing in court a weeping mother? Who would listen to him, however well he spoke? Better go to Gaul or to Africa,28 that nursing mother of lawyers, if you would make a living by your tongue!
Or do you teach rhetoric? O Vettius! what iron bowels must you have when your troop of scholars slays 29 the cruel tyrant: when each in turn stands up, and repeats what he has just been conning in his seat, reciting the self-same things in the self-same verses! Served up again and again, the cabbage is the death of the unhappy master! What complexion 30should be put on the case; within what category it falls; what is the crucial point; what hits will be made on the other side----these are things which everyone wants to know, but for which no one is willing to pay. "Pay indeed? Why, what have I learnt?" asks the scholar. It is the teacher's fault, of course, that the Arcadian youth feels no flutter in his left breast when he dins his "dire Hannibal" into my unfortunate head on every sixth day of the week, whatever be the question which he is pondering: whether he should make straight for the city from the field of Cannae, or whether, after the rain and thunder, he should lead around his cohorts, all dripping after the storm. Name any sum you please and you shall have it: what would I give 31 that the lad's father might listen to him as often as I do! So cry half-a-dozen or more of our sophists 32 in one breath, entering upon real lawsuits 33 of their own, abandoning "The Ravisher" and forgetting all about "The Poisoner" or "The wicked and thankless Husband," or the drugs that restore sight to the chronic blind.
And so, if my counsel goes for anything, I would advise the man who comes down from his rhetorical shade to fight for a sum that would buy a trumpery corn-ticket 34----for that's the most handsome fee he will ever get----to present himself with a discharge,35 and enter upon some other walk of life. If you ask what fees Chrysogonus and Pollio 36 get for teaching music to the sons of our great men, you will tear up the Rhetoric of Theodorus.37
Your great man will spend six hundred thousand sesterces upon his baths, and something more on the colonnade in which he is to drive on rainy days. What? Is he to wait for a clear sky, and bespatter his horses with fresh mud? How much better to drive where their hoofs will remain bright and spotless! Elsewhere let a banqueting hall arise, supported on lofty pillars of African marble, to catch the winter sun. And cost the house what it may, there will come a man to arrange the courses skilfully, and the man who makes up the tasty dishes. Amidst expenditure such as this two thousand sesterces will be enough, and more than enough, for Quintilian: there is nothing on which a father will not spend more money than on his son. "How then," you ask, "does Quintilian possess those vast domains?" Pass by cases of rare good fortune: the lucky man 38 is both beautiful and brave, he is wise and noble and high-born; he sews on to his black shoe the crescent of the Senator. He is a great orator too, a good javelin-man, and if he chance to have caught a cold, he sings divinely. For it makes all the difference by what stars you are welcomed when you utter your first cry, and are still red from your mother's womb. If Fortune so choose, you will become a Consul from being a rhetor; if again she so wills, you will become a rhetor from being a Consul.
What of Ventidius 39 and Tullius? 40 What made their fortunes but the stars and the wondrous potency of secret Fate? The Fates will give kingdoms to a slave, and triumphs to a captive! Nevertheless that fortunate man is rare----rarer than a white crow. Many have repented them of the Professor's vain and unprofitable chair; witness the ends of Thrasymachus 41 and Secundus Carrinas.41 Him too didst thou see in poverty on whom thou, O Athens, hadst nothing better to bestow than a cup of cold hemlock! 42 Grant, O Gods, that the earth may lie soft and light upon the shades of our forefathers: may the sweet-scented crocus and a perpetual spring-time bloom over their ashes; who deemed that the teacher should hold the place of a revered parent! Achilles trembled for fear of the rod when already of full age, singing songs in his native hills; nor would he then have dared to laugh at the tail of his musical instructor.43 But Rufus and the rest are cudgelled each by his own pupils----that Rufus 44 whom they have so often styled "the Allobrogian Cicero."
Who pours into the lap of Celadus, or of the learned Palaemon,45 as much as their grammatical labours deserve? And yet, small as the fee is----and it is smaller than the rhetor's wage----the pupil's unfeeling 46 attendant nibbles off a bit of it for himself; so too does the steward. But never mind, Palaemon; suffer some diminution of your wage, like the hawker who sells rags and white Gallic blankets for winter wear, if only it do not go for nothing that you have sat from early dawn in a hole which no blacksmith would put up with, no workman who teaches how to card wool with slanting tool: that it do not go for nothing to have snuffed up the odour of as many lamps as you had scholars in your class thumbing a discoloured Horace or a begrimed Virgil.
But it is seldom that the fee can be recovered without a judgment of the Court. And yet be sure, ye parents, to impose the strictest laws upon the teacher: he must never be at fault in his grammar; he must know all history, and have all the authorities at his finger-tips. If asked a chance question on his way to the baths, or to the establishment of Phoebus,47 he must at once tell you who was the nurse of Anchises, what was the name and birth-place of Anchemolus' 48 step-mother, to what age Acestes lived, how many flagons of Sicilian wine he presented to the Trojans.49 Require of him that he shall mould the young minds as a man moulds a face out of wax with his thumb; insist that he shall be a father to the whole brood, so that they shall play no nasty game, and do no nasty trick----no easy matter to watch the hands and sparkling eyes of so many youngsters! "See to all this," you say, "and then, when the year comes round, receive the golden piece which the mob demands for a winning jockey."
1. An inspiring spring on Mt. Helicon, sacred to the Muses.
2. Apparently an auctioneer. 3. Apparently names of tragedies. 4. Easterns originally imported as slaves, who had risen to be equites.5. i. e. as slaves from Galatia. 6. Vulcan. 7. The busts of poets were wreathed with ivy (doctarum hederae praemia frontium, Hor. Od. i. i. 29). 8. i.e. the peacock. 9. Properly the Muse of Dancing; used here, like Clio above, for poetry in general. 10. Apollo and Dionysus. 11. Turnus. See Virg. Aen. viii. 445-450. 12. The famous author of the Pharsalia. M. Annaeus Lucanus, A.D. 39-65. 13. P. Papinius Statius, author of the Thebais, circ. A. D. 61-96. 14. Paris, a famous pantomimic dancer. There were two of the name; one a favourite of Nero, executed by him as a rival, A.D. 67; the other a favourite of Domitian, also executed, A.D. 87. See Introduction. 15. The commanding officers of a Legion (tribuni) became equites after serving for six months. Claudius instituted the practice of making honorary appointments, without service, so as to bestow the title of eques on his favourites. 16. Names of pantomime plays. 17. A noble patron of letters, especially of Horace; for Proculeius, see Hor. Od. II. ii. 5. Paulus Fabius Maximus was the patron of Ovid; Cotta is panegyrised by Ovid, Epp. ex P. ii. viii.; P. Lentulus Spinther helped to recall Cicero from banishment. 18. In reference to the festive season of the Saturnalia. 19. The creditor is one to whom the advocate owes money, and before whom he wishes to make a good appearance; the acrior illo is a litigant whom the advocate hopes to secure as a client. 20. Spitting or slobbering on the breast was considered lucky, to obviate the evil results of boasting. 21. Lacerta is apparently the name of a charioteer. 22. Alluding to the contest between Ajax and Achilles for the arms of Achilles. 23. The advocate who had won a case would have his stair decorated. 24. Lawyers received presents in kind from their country clients. 25. i.e. poor wine; like the vile Sabinum of Hor. Od. i. xx. 1. 26. Aemilius was a noble; the Lex Cincia (B.C. 204) placed a limit upon lawyers' fees. 27. These men are ruined by imitating the extravagance of their betters. 28. Flourishing schools of rhetoric were established under the early Empire in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. 29. i. e. in a rhetorical exercise. 30. For the meaning of color, see note on vi. 280. 31. The English idiom would be " What would I not give." 32. i.e. teachers, especially of rhetoric. 33. The rhetor goes to law to recover his fees. 34. A ticket for the gratuitous distributions of corn. 35. A retiring gladiator received a wooden sword (rudis) as a token of discharge. 36. Chrysogonus was a singer (vi. 74), Pollio a player on the cithara (vi. 387). 37. A famous rhetorician at Rhodes. 38. Juvenal sarcastically assigns to the lucky man all the qualities which the Stoics attributed to the sapiens. See Hor. Epp. i. i. 106-108. Juvenal probably had an eye to that passage. 39. P. Ventidius Bassus rose from nothing to be consul B.C. 43; he triumphed over the Parthians. 40. Cicero. 41. Both rhetoricians. Carrinas was banished by Caligula, and apparently hanged himself. 42. The reference must surely be to Socrates ; though illum would have been more appropriate than hunc.43. Achilles was instructed in the lyre by the Centaur Chiron. 44. Rufus was apparently an Allobrogian. The Allobroges occupied the country between the Rhone and the Isere. 45. Q. Remmius Palaemon, a famous Roman grammarian in the time of Tiberius and Caligula. 46. Acoenonoetus is one of those Greek terms whose use Juvenal wishes to ridicule. The Scholiast explains it as communi sensu carens. See Mayor. 47. Probably a private bathing establishment. 48. A warrior slain by Pallas. Virg. Aen, x. 389. 49. Aen. v. 73 ff. |
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Murnane - Border Districts
Although he is not well-known outside his native Australia, Gerald Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of that country’s most original and distinctive writers. According to Murnane, his recently completed work of fiction, Border Districts, will be his last. These are its opening pages.
Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.
I got some of my schooling from a certain order of religious brothers, a band of men who dressed each in a black soutane with a bib of white celluloid at his throat. I learned by chance last year, and fifty years since I last saw anyone wearing such a thing, that the white bib was called a rabat and was a symbol of chastity. Among the few books that I brought here from the capital city is a large dictionary, but the word rabat is not listed in it. The word may well be French, given that the order of brothers was founded in France. In this remote district, I am even less inclined than I was in the suburbs of the capital city to seek out some or another obscure fact; here, near the border, I am even more inclined than of old to accept as well-founded any supposition likely to complete a pattern in my mind and then to go on writing until I learn the meaning for me of such an image as that of the white patch which appeared just now against a black ground at the edge of my mind and will not be easily dislodged.
The school where the brothers taught was built in the grounds of what had been a two-story mansion of yellow sandstone in a street lined with plane trees in an inner eastern suburb of the capital city. The mansion itself had been converted into the brothers’ residence. On the ground floor of the former mansion, one of the rooms overlooking the return veranda was the chapel, which was used by the brothers for their daily Mass and prayers but was available also to us, their students.
In the language of that place and time, a student who called at the chapel for a few minutes was said to be paying a visit. The object of his visitation was said to be Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament or, more commonly, the Blessed Sacrament. We boys were urged by teachers and priests to pay frequent visits to the Blessed Sacrament. It was implied that the personage denoted by that phrase would feel aggrieved or lonely if visitors were lacking. My class once heard from a religious brother one of a sort of story that was often told in order to promote our religious zeal. A non-Catholic of goodwill had asked a priest to explain the teachings of the Church in the matter of the Blessed Sacrament. The priest then explained how every disk of consecrated bread in every tabernacle in every Catholic church or chapel, even though it appeared to be mere bread, was in substance the body of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. The inquirer of goodwill then declared that if only he were able to believe this, he would spend every free moment in some or another Catholic church or chapel, in the presence of the divine manifestation.
In our school magazine every year, in his annual report to parents, our principal wrote at length about what he called the religious formation of us boys. In every classroom, the first period of every day was given over to Christian Doctrine, or religion, as we more often called it. Students recited aloud together a short prayer before every period of the daily timetable. I believed that most of my classmates took their religion seriously, but I seldom heard any boy make any mention, outside the classroom, of anything to do with that religion. The chapel was out of sight of the playground, and so I was never aware of how many of my classmates paid visits there. However, I went through several periods of religious fervor during my school days, and during each such period I paid several visits daily to the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes I saw one or another of my classmates in the chapel, kneeling as I knelt with head bowed or eyes fixed on the locked tabernacle, within which, and out of our sight, was the gold-plated ciborium filled with the white wafers that we thought of as the Blessed Sacrament. I was never satisfied with my attempts to pray or to contemplate, and I often wondered what exactly was taking place in the mind of my devout-seeming classmate. I would have liked to ask him what he seemed to see while he prayed; how he envisaged the divine or canonized personages that he addressed in his mind, and much else. Sometimes, by chance, a classmate and I would leave the chapel at the same time and would walk together along the return veranda and then through the brothers’ garden towards the playground, but for me to have questioned the boy then about his devotions would have been hardly less disturbing than if I had made him an indecent proposition.
In the quiet street where I now live is a tiny church that I pass every weekday morning on my walk to the shops and the post office. The church belongs to one of the Protestant denominations that I pitied as a schoolboy on account of the drabness of their services, which consisted, I supposed, of mere hymns and sermons and none of the splendid rituals enacted in my own church. Whenever I pass, the grass around my neighborhood church is always neatly mown but the church itself is closed and deserted. I must have passed countless Protestant churches in suburbs or in country towns and scarcely glanced at them, and yet I can never pass the nearby church without my thoughts being led in surprising directions.
I have always believed myself to be indifferent to architecture. I hardly know what a gable is or a nave or a vault or a vestry. I would describe my neighborhood church as a symmetrical building comprising three parts: a porch, a main part, and, at the furthest end from the street, a third part surely reserved for the minister before and after services. The walls are of stone painted—or is the correct term rendered?—a uniform creamy white. I am so unobservant of such details that I cannot recall, here at my desk, whether the pitched roofs of the porch and the main part are of slate or of steel. The rear part has an almost flat steel roof. The windows aren’t of much interest to me, except for the two rectangular windows of clear glass, each with a drawn blind behind it, in the rear wall of the minister’s room. The main part of the church has six small windows, three on each side. The glass in each of these windows is translucent. If I could inspect it from close at hand, the glass might well seem no different from the sort that I learned to call as a child frosted and saw often in bathroom windows. The glass in the six windows is by no means colorless, but I have not yet identified the shade or tint that distinguishes it. On some mornings when I pass, the glass in question seems an unexceptional gray green or, perhaps, gray blue. Once, however, when I happened to pass the church in the late afternoon, and when I looked over my shoulder at a window on the shaded, southeastern side of the building, I saw the glass there colored not directly by the setting sun but by a light that I was prevented from seeing: the glow within the locked church where the rays from the west had already been modified by the three windows on the side further from me. Even if I could have devised a name for the wavering richness that I saw then in that simple pane, I would have had to set about devising soon afterwards a different name for the subtly different tint in each of its two neighboring panes, where the already muted light from one and the same sunset had been separately refracted. The porch has one window, which looks towards the street. This is the window that mostly takes my notice as I pass and may well have been the cause of my setting out to write these pages. The glass in this window is what I have always called stained glass and almost certainly comprises a representation of something—a pattern of leaves and stems and petals perhaps. I prefer not to draw attention to myself when I walk in the township, and I have not yet been bold enough to stop and stare at the porch window. I am unsure not only of what is depicted there but even of the colors of the different zones of glass, although I suppose they are red and green and yellow and blue or most of those. The outer door of the church is always closed when I pass, and the door from the porch to the church is surely also closed. Since the tinted window faces northeast, the near side of the glass is always in bright daylight while the far side is opposed only to the subdued light of the enclosed porch. Anyone looking from my well-lit vantage point can only guess at the colors of the glass and the details of what they depict.
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites
In June 1745, Charles Edward Stuart (b1720) had one key aim: regaining the thrones his grandfather, the Roman Catholic convert James VII of Scotland and II of England and Ireland, had lost in 1688–90 to his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange (who reigned as William III). This ‘glorious’ revolution had confirmed a Protestant succession, in a predominantly Protestant Great Britain, which, from 1714, was embodied in the Hanoverian dynasty.
Following George I’s accession, several risings in support of the exiled Stuarts occurred, most notably in the years 1715 and 1719. By this stage, on the death of James VII and II in 1701, the chief claimant (or ‘old pretender’) was his only legitimate son (and father of Charles) James Francis Edward (b1688). A French invasion of Britain in support of the Stuarts in early 1744 had been abandoned, mainly due to severe weather, leaving Charles, who had arrived in France to lead the invasion, kicking his heels in Paris.
Losing patience with the lack of commitment for another invasion attempt by his chief supporter and cousin, Louis XV, and with the greater part of the British Army fighting in Flanders against the French, Charles secretly gathered together arms and a modest war chest and set sail from Brittany, landing a small party at Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides on 23 July 1745.
His audacious – or reckless – plan was to gain a foothold in the western Highlands, rally support en route south, meet up with a French invasion force at London and remove the Hanoverian ‘usurper’ George II (reigned 1727–60). And with luck and the element of surprise on his side, for a time it proved almost as straightforward as that.
George II. (Photo by Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)
After raising the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August – the official beginning of the rebellion – the small Jacobite army marched south-east towards the Scottish capital. Edinburgh surrendered on 17 September and four days later Charles achieved an unexpected and resounding victory against Sir John Cope and his British army troops at Prestonpans. The key to their success was the Highland charge: a fast and furious manoeuvre that regular troops had little or no experience of.
At the beginning of November the Jacobite army entered England, taking Carlisle after a short, bloodless siege. Having marched through Lancashire gathering further support, by 4 December the Jacobite army, now numbering around 6,000 men and boys, entered Derby, some 120 miles from London. But rather than push on to his ultimate prize, at a council of war the prince was completely outnumbered by his predominantly Scottish commanders and, to his utter dismay, the Jacobite army returned to Scotland. However, the rebellion was far from over. Between January and March 1746, with his army almost doubled in size, Charles and his men secured another victory against the British Army at Falkirk, this time led by General Henry Hawley, and then seized Inverness – the capital of the Highlands. But Charles was in desperate need of money to feed and maintain his troops.
On 24 March the Royal Navy captured a French ship carrying the money destined for the Jacobite army. Its loss was a disaster. With dwindling funds and a British army hard on his heels – a well-fed and now tactically prepared force commanded by George II’s son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland – Charles resolved to fight sooner rather than later, once again against the advice of his Scottish commanders.
The defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden on 16 April 1746, the last battle fought on the British mainland, led to the rolling out of a new British government policy: the attempted extinction of core Stuart support in the Highlands via the systematic dismantling of the ancient social and military culture of the Highland clans, regardless of whether they had joined the rebellion. The wearing of Highland garb, particularly tartan plaid, was banned, and the semi-feudal bond of military service, coupled with the power of the chiefs over their clans, removed.
William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, leads the British army at the battle of Culloden in Scotland, 16 April 1746 – a British victory over the Jacobites. An engraving by T Bakewell. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Understandably the British government wanted to stamp out any potential of another rebellion occurring, but the uncompromisingly ruthless and often violent manner in which this was achieved, including the destruction of property and livelihood, executions and transportation, swiftly turned the joy at the rebellion’s termination into sympathy for the rebels and, soon after, disaffection towards the government. The Duke of Cumberland’s enthusiastic leadership in this process won him the soubriquet ‘the butcher’. However, the pacification of the Highlands and the channelling of Highland military prowess into the British Army largely removed any potential for a future rising in the area.
Charles, meanwhile, had left the field, believing his swift return to France would hurry the long-promised French battalions he needed to resurrect the campaign. Others, however, believed he had abandoned his troops to their terrible fate and even abandoned the Stuart cause in order to save his own skin. In the event, Charles spent five months as a fugitive in the western Highlands and islands with Cumberland’s men in relentless pursuit. He eventually escaped to France, with the selfless assistance of the heroic Flora MacDonald, and died in Rome in 1788 by all accounts a drink-befuddled and bitter man. But his legendary alter ego, the ‘Highland laddie’, lived on.
Here are 10 things you might not know about him and the Jacobites…
1) The term Jacobite comes from the Latin for James (ie James VII and II) ‘Jacobus’
‘Jacobite’ is not to be confused with ‘Jacobean’, which refers to James Stuart’s rule in England as James I. (Jacobean is also often used to describe a style of art, architecture and theatre.) Nor is Jacobite to be mistaken for ‘Jacobin’, the radical political group formed during the French Revolution.
As it was treason even to make contact with the exiled Stuarts, let alone visit them, Jacobites established an intricate set of symbols, coded phrases and rituals. For example, the white rose was a symbol of James Francis Edward (his birthday, 10 June, was ‘white rose day’) and after the birth of his sons, Charles (1720) and Henry (1725), the single rose is often represented with two buds. Such symbols were used on items including fans, glassware and snuff boxes, and can also be seen in Jacobite portraiture.
The toast to “The little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat” was a reference to William III’s death from injuries sustained during a riding accident. It is said his horse stumbled on a molehill. Perhaps the most famous toast, though, is to “The king over the water”, by raising your glass and then passing it over a bowl of water.
Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, c17th century, (1909). After a painting attributed to the school of Alexis Simon Belle (1674-1734) From The Connoisseur, Vol XXIII by Otto Limited, London, 1909. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)
2) Jacobites weren’t all Roman Catholics
The ‘senior’ Stuart branch – the male heirs of James VII and II – were Roman Catholic, but many Jacobites were Protestant, whether ‘high church’ Anglican, Episcopalian, nonjuring or dissenting.
Whatever their religion, Jacobites considered the exiled Stuarts the true British and Irish monarchs – most believed by divine right – and therefore they could not be removed, as they would see it, at the ‘whim’ of parliaments. Among the Scottish Jacobite army commanders of the 1745 rebellion, James Drummond, Duke of Perth, and his brother Lord John Drummond, were both Scottish Catholics raised in France. But other commanders, such as Lieutenant-General Lord George Murray and the Life Guards commander David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, were Protestant.
It is true that religious minorities like British Catholics could expect greater tolerance under a Catholic monarch, but few displayed any interest in joining Charles’s campaign. The most eminent English Catholics, the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, attended court at St James’s Palace at the height of the threatened advance to London in November 1745, in order to publically demonstrate their support for King George.
3) Jacobites weren’t all Scottish
It is true that many members of the Stuart court in exile were Scottish – certainly by 1745 – but there were Irish and English exiles too. It is also true that Scottish Jacobites, whether in exile or not, felt an inherent loyalty to the ancient Stuart – prior to Mary Queen of Scots ‘Stewart’ – kings of Scotland. The dynasty was founded in Scotland in 1371, inheriting the English crown via James I in 1603.
In addition, many Scottish Jacobites saw the return of the Stuarts as the welcome catalyst for the dismantling of the Acts of Union between Scotland and England (creating the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707). Yet the one thing that united all Jacobites was not their nationality or the breaking up of the Union, but, as previously stated, their desire to see the return of the Stuarts to the British and Irish thrones.
The articles of the union of the parliaments of England and Scotland are presented to Queen Anne at court on behalf of Scotland, 1707. Engraving after original work by Sir Geoffrey Kneller. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Jacobites came from all parts of the British Isles and Ireland, and in exile formed a very international network. During the 1745 uprising, Charles’s small inner circle of chief confidants included two Irishmen, his former tutor in Rome, Sir Thomas Sheridan, and the Jacobite army’s adjutant general (senior administrative officer) and quarter-master general (senior supplies officer), Colonel John William O’Sullivan. Their influence over the prince rankled with some of the Scottish commanders, such as Lords George and Elcho, as the Scotsmen believed they, the Irish, had little to lose but their lives.
The expectation of a rising of the English and Welsh Jacobites was one of the key reasons why Charles ventured so far into England, believing he could reach London on a wave of residual pro-Stuart feeling and with the armed support of thousands of local recruits. Indeed, supported by a French invasion, the only hope of success in regaining all the Stuarts’ former territories lay in a significant local English rising.
4) Charles Edward Stuart spoke English with a British accent
Charles was born and raised in Rome to a Polish mother and a father of mixed European heritage, including Italian and French as well as British, which has led to the assumption that the prince spoke English with some form of foreign accent. In Peter Watkins’ BBC docudrama Culloden (1964), for example, the prince, played by Olivier Espitalier-Noel, speaks with a sort of French/trans-European accent. Lord Elcho’s oft-quoted jibe as the prince left the field at Culloden – “There you go for a damned cowardly Italian”– has fuelled this particular interpretation, although this jibe was likely a later embellishment.
Although Charles’s father, James Francis Edward, left Britain when he was six-months-old and spent his youth in exile in France (in St Germain-en-Laye, near Paris) he was surrounded by British and Irish courtiers. Indeed, his main role model, his father James VII and II, born at St James’s Palace, London and a mature 55-year-old in 1688, would have obviously spoken English with an English accent.
Eyewitnesses during the 1745 uprising described Charles as speaking “the English or broad Scots very well”. One observer, the Edinburgh schoolmaster Andrew Henderson, stated that Charles’s “speech was sly, but very intelligible; his Dialect was more upon the English than the Scottish Accent, seem’d to me pretty like that of the Irish, some of whom I had known”. “Sly” here means soft or low.
5) The Jacobite troops at Culloden were not all Highlanders
The misconception that the Jacobite army was comprised solely of Highlanders is supported, in part, by the imposing memorial cairn on the battlefield itself, which states: “The graves of the gallant Highlanders who fought for Scotland & Prince Charlie are marked by the names of their clans.”
Lowlanders and English alike spoke of the ‘Highlanders’ and the ‘Highland army’, and certainly focused their attention on the sizable Highland element within the Jacobite army as Charles and his men marched through their towns and countryside. Furthermore, in the early stages of the campaign the Jacobite army could have been described as ‘Highland’, as the thousand or so men gathered around the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan came predominantly from the Cameron and MacDonald clans.
But by the time the army had occupied Edinburgh for almost six weeks, the composition had changed. It now included many Lowland gentlemen, such as Lord Elcho, and Lowland tradesmen. A month later, by the time the Jacobite troops had crossed into England and reached Derby, it was compositionally a very different army to that at Glenfinnan. It now included, along with Lowlanders, an English regiment of about 300 men, known as the Manchester regiment. Fast-forward less than six months, at the battle of Culloden (16 April 1746) about two-thirds of Charles’s troops could be termed Highland Gaels, but there were also Lowlanders, Irishmen, Frenchmen and some Englishmen.
6) The ‘Skye Boat Song’ isn’t entirely Gaelic
One of the most famous stories concerning the prince’s five months as a fugitive is his escape by sea, dressed as a maid ‘Betty Burke’, accompanied by Flora MacDonald. Many of us will know the wistful ‘Skye Boat Song’ and its promise of “the lad that’s born to be king” as he is rowed away to Skye from whence, like King Arthur before him, he “will come again”.
Its form is a traditional Gaelic rowing song or iorram and the tune is believed to derive from the Gaelic song Cuachan nan Craobh or ‘The Cuckoo in the Grove’. But the lyrics, establishing the association with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 rebellion, were actually written by an Englishman named Sir Harold Edwin Boulton (1859–1935) of Copped Hall, Totteridge, Hertfordshire, and first published in 1884. Sir Harold, a keen collector and publisher of traditional British songs, also wrote the English words to a well-known traditional Welsh lullaby, ‘All Through the Night’.
In 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the post-Culloden adventure, Kidnapped (1886), wrote his own version of the ‘Skye Boat Song’ with the first line “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone”. In recent years Stevenson’s version (with modifications) has been made famous by the TV series Outlander.
Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, c1890. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
7) The battle of Culloden did not end the Jacobite cause
Yes, Culloden was a devastating defeat – the Jacobite army’s first of the entire nine-month campaign – but several thousand men, some of whom had not been present at the battle, gathered at Ruthven 30 miles to the south, and many were willing to continue the fight. But a lack of supplies and, in the short-term, a failure of leadership from both Lord George Murray and Charles, put paid to any thought of a final stand, or a ‘guerrilla’-type campaign.
Certainly, the Duke of Cumberland believed that another battle could occur in the months following Culloden. The various acts introduced after the battle, in particular the Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act of 1746, in concert with the pacification of the Highlands, made another rising in this region extremely unlikely [the act abolished the traditional judicial rights afforded to a Scottish clan chief]. But the British government and army commanders alike believed that with Charles in France agitating for troops and money to renew his campaign, and while France was still at war with Britain (in Flanders), the Jacobite threat was very much alive.
It was the peace between Great Britain and France in 1748 that ended the 1745 rebellion, by the terms of which Charles was forcibly removed from French territory. But it is not widely known that the prince, still in his twenties, made a secret visit to London in 1750 to stimulate another rising in England, which later became known as the Elibank plot, during which, it is believed, he converted to the Church of England.
In reality, what completely put to bed any hope of a Stuart restoration was the removal of support by France. France had continued to toy with the idea of an invasion of Britain – as ever, a means of destabilising the British state, her trade and her colonial interests – during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), until major defeats in 1759, including the battle of Quiberon Bay, meant abandoning any such attempt. Charles’s behaviour in the face of yet another crushing disappointment, in particular his drunkenness, disgusted the French and eventually he and his cause were abandoned for good.
This was followed, in turn, by the papacy. On the death of his father in 1766, Pope Clement XIII did not recognise Charles as the Jacobite king Charles III, de jure king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the peaceful accession of a third king George, in 1760, suggested that as an active, political cause, Jacobitism, along with its fundamental aim of a Stuart restoration, was effectively dead.
8) Charles Edward Stuart was not the last of the Stuart claimants
On Charles’s death in 1788, his brother, Henry Benedict, became the Jacobite Henry IX of England and I of Scotland. But, as a Roman Catholic cardinal, it was with him that the direct, legitimate line ended on his death in 1807. By this time the beleaguered cardinal, who had witnessed the French Revolution (and lost the financial support of his Bourbon cousin in the process) had begun receiving an annual pension of £4,000 from George III – yes, from the very Hanoverian monarch or, in Jacobite terminology ‘usurper’, that his father and brother had fought so hard, and at such great cost, to remove from the British throne. Henry, unlike his father and brother, did not press his claim.
However, the current official Jacobite claimant, according to the Royal Stuart Society, is Franz von Bayern (b1933) of the House of Wittelsbach, a prince of Bavaria, as his name suggests, and the great-grandson of the last king of Bavaria, Ludwig III. Franz von Bayern – or, as Jacobites would call him, Francis II – became the Jacobite de jure king in 1996, and is descended from the youngest daughter of Charles I (Princess Henrietta-Anne) via the House of Savoy and the House of Este. He has no intention of pressing his claim.
King Ludwig III of Bavaria, c1910. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
9) It’s claimed that Bonnie Prince Charlie has a direct descendant alive today
It is claimed that there are direct descendants of Charles Edward Stuart alive today. Therefore, potentially, in the 21st century there are at least two ‘pretenders’ (from the French ‘prétendant’ or claimant) to choose from. It is well known that Charles had an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany (b1753), by his mistress Clementina Walkinshaw. After many desperate years with an increasingly drunken and abusive partner, Clementina left Charles, accompanied by their young daughter. Charles initially refused to recognise Charlotte, who spent years in convents in France, and, it is believed, produced, in turn, three illegitimate children via her relationship with Ferdinand de Rohan, archbishop of Bordeaux.
In the meantime, Charles had married (in 1772) Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, but the marriage was a disaster and was childless. In 1784, a lonely Charles legitimised his daughter Charlotte, who left her children (or so the story goes) with her mother in order to nurse Charles through his final years. Charles eventually died of a stroke in 1788 and his daughter died less than two years later.
Charlotte’s children remained unknown to history until the mid-20th century, when research undertaken by the Jacobite historians and siblings Alasdair and Henrietta Tayler apparently revealed the existence of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandchildren: Marie Victoire Adelaide (b1779), Charlotte Maximilienne Amélie (b1780) and Charles Edward (b1784).
A biography of the self-styled Count Roehanstart (Rohan Stuart, aka Roehenstart) by George Sherburn (published in 1960), based on the subject’s private papers, sets out the extraordinary life of Charles’s secret grandson, who is buried at Dunkeld Cathedral. As Roehanstart had no children, nor, it was believed, did his sisters, there the Stuart direct (albeit illegitimate) line may have ended. But a new claimant, in the guise of Peter Pininski, has recently emerged. He claims to be the descendant of Charlotte’s eldest daughter (see the 2002 book The Stuarts’ Last Secret: The Missing Heirs of Bonnie Prince Charlie). The mystery continues.
10) Bonnie Prince Charlie is buried in Rome
Charles died at the Palazzo del Re, located on the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli in Rome, the building where he had been born. The palazzo still exists on the north side of the square and just to the north-east of the forum. Sadly Charles’s birth and death in this building is not acknowledged.
Charles was originally buried at Frascati Cathedral (his brother was cardinal-bishop of Frascati) but was eventually reburied (excepting his heart, which is still at Frascati) in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, alongside his brother and father. A modest but elegant marble monument by Antonio Canova, funded, in part, by George IV and unveiled in the south aisle of the main church in 1819, marks the final resting place of the ‘old pretender’ and his sons.
Following George I’s accession, several risings in support of the exiled Stuarts occurred, most notably in the years 1715 and 1719. By this stage, on the death of James VII and II in 1701, the chief claimant (or ‘old pretender’) was his only legitimate son (and father of Charles) James Francis Edward (b1688). A French invasion of Britain in support of the Stuarts in early 1744 had been abandoned, mainly due to severe weather, leaving Charles, who had arrived in France to lead the invasion, kicking his heels in Paris.
Losing patience with the lack of commitment for another invasion attempt by his chief supporter and cousin, Louis XV, and with the greater part of the British Army fighting in Flanders against the French, Charles secretly gathered together arms and a modest war chest and set sail from Brittany, landing a small party at Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides on 23 July 1745.
His audacious – or reckless – plan was to gain a foothold in the western Highlands, rally support en route south, meet up with a French invasion force at London and remove the Hanoverian ‘usurper’ George II (reigned 1727–60). And with luck and the element of surprise on his side, for a time it proved almost as straightforward as that.
George II. (Photo by Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)
After raising the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August – the official beginning of the rebellion – the small Jacobite army marched south-east towards the Scottish capital. Edinburgh surrendered on 17 September and four days later Charles achieved an unexpected and resounding victory against Sir John Cope and his British army troops at Prestonpans. The key to their success was the Highland charge: a fast and furious manoeuvre that regular troops had little or no experience of.
At the beginning of November the Jacobite army entered England, taking Carlisle after a short, bloodless siege. Having marched through Lancashire gathering further support, by 4 December the Jacobite army, now numbering around 6,000 men and boys, entered Derby, some 120 miles from London. But rather than push on to his ultimate prize, at a council of war the prince was completely outnumbered by his predominantly Scottish commanders and, to his utter dismay, the Jacobite army returned to Scotland. However, the rebellion was far from over. Between January and March 1746, with his army almost doubled in size, Charles and his men secured another victory against the British Army at Falkirk, this time led by General Henry Hawley, and then seized Inverness – the capital of the Highlands. But Charles was in desperate need of money to feed and maintain his troops.
On 24 March the Royal Navy captured a French ship carrying the money destined for the Jacobite army. Its loss was a disaster. With dwindling funds and a British army hard on his heels – a well-fed and now tactically prepared force commanded by George II’s son, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland – Charles resolved to fight sooner rather than later, once again against the advice of his Scottish commanders.
The defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden on 16 April 1746, the last battle fought on the British mainland, led to the rolling out of a new British government policy: the attempted extinction of core Stuart support in the Highlands via the systematic dismantling of the ancient social and military culture of the Highland clans, regardless of whether they had joined the rebellion. The wearing of Highland garb, particularly tartan plaid, was banned, and the semi-feudal bond of military service, coupled with the power of the chiefs over their clans, removed.
William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, leads the British army at the battle of Culloden in Scotland, 16 April 1746 – a British victory over the Jacobites. An engraving by T Bakewell. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Understandably the British government wanted to stamp out any potential of another rebellion occurring, but the uncompromisingly ruthless and often violent manner in which this was achieved, including the destruction of property and livelihood, executions and transportation, swiftly turned the joy at the rebellion’s termination into sympathy for the rebels and, soon after, disaffection towards the government. The Duke of Cumberland’s enthusiastic leadership in this process won him the soubriquet ‘the butcher’. However, the pacification of the Highlands and the channelling of Highland military prowess into the British Army largely removed any potential for a future rising in the area.
Charles, meanwhile, had left the field, believing his swift return to France would hurry the long-promised French battalions he needed to resurrect the campaign. Others, however, believed he had abandoned his troops to their terrible fate and even abandoned the Stuart cause in order to save his own skin. In the event, Charles spent five months as a fugitive in the western Highlands and islands with Cumberland’s men in relentless pursuit. He eventually escaped to France, with the selfless assistance of the heroic Flora MacDonald, and died in Rome in 1788 by all accounts a drink-befuddled and bitter man. But his legendary alter ego, the ‘Highland laddie’, lived on.
Here are 10 things you might not know about him and the Jacobites…
1) The term Jacobite comes from the Latin for James (ie James VII and II) ‘Jacobus’
‘Jacobite’ is not to be confused with ‘Jacobean’, which refers to James Stuart’s rule in England as James I. (Jacobean is also often used to describe a style of art, architecture and theatre.) Nor is Jacobite to be mistaken for ‘Jacobin’, the radical political group formed during the French Revolution.
As it was treason even to make contact with the exiled Stuarts, let alone visit them, Jacobites established an intricate set of symbols, coded phrases and rituals. For example, the white rose was a symbol of James Francis Edward (his birthday, 10 June, was ‘white rose day’) and after the birth of his sons, Charles (1720) and Henry (1725), the single rose is often represented with two buds. Such symbols were used on items including fans, glassware and snuff boxes, and can also be seen in Jacobite portraiture.
The toast to “The little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat” was a reference to William III’s death from injuries sustained during a riding accident. It is said his horse stumbled on a molehill. Perhaps the most famous toast, though, is to “The king over the water”, by raising your glass and then passing it over a bowl of water.
Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, c17th century, (1909). After a painting attributed to the school of Alexis Simon Belle (1674-1734) From The Connoisseur, Vol XXIII by Otto Limited, London, 1909. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)
2) Jacobites weren’t all Roman Catholics
The ‘senior’ Stuart branch – the male heirs of James VII and II – were Roman Catholic, but many Jacobites were Protestant, whether ‘high church’ Anglican, Episcopalian, nonjuring or dissenting.
Whatever their religion, Jacobites considered the exiled Stuarts the true British and Irish monarchs – most believed by divine right – and therefore they could not be removed, as they would see it, at the ‘whim’ of parliaments. Among the Scottish Jacobite army commanders of the 1745 rebellion, James Drummond, Duke of Perth, and his brother Lord John Drummond, were both Scottish Catholics raised in France. But other commanders, such as Lieutenant-General Lord George Murray and the Life Guards commander David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, were Protestant.
It is true that religious minorities like British Catholics could expect greater tolerance under a Catholic monarch, but few displayed any interest in joining Charles’s campaign. The most eminent English Catholics, the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, attended court at St James’s Palace at the height of the threatened advance to London in November 1745, in order to publically demonstrate their support for King George.
3) Jacobites weren’t all Scottish
It is true that many members of the Stuart court in exile were Scottish – certainly by 1745 – but there were Irish and English exiles too. It is also true that Scottish Jacobites, whether in exile or not, felt an inherent loyalty to the ancient Stuart – prior to Mary Queen of Scots ‘Stewart’ – kings of Scotland. The dynasty was founded in Scotland in 1371, inheriting the English crown via James I in 1603.
In addition, many Scottish Jacobites saw the return of the Stuarts as the welcome catalyst for the dismantling of the Acts of Union between Scotland and England (creating the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707). Yet the one thing that united all Jacobites was not their nationality or the breaking up of the Union, but, as previously stated, their desire to see the return of the Stuarts to the British and Irish thrones.
The articles of the union of the parliaments of England and Scotland are presented to Queen Anne at court on behalf of Scotland, 1707. Engraving after original work by Sir Geoffrey Kneller. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Jacobites came from all parts of the British Isles and Ireland, and in exile formed a very international network. During the 1745 uprising, Charles’s small inner circle of chief confidants included two Irishmen, his former tutor in Rome, Sir Thomas Sheridan, and the Jacobite army’s adjutant general (senior administrative officer) and quarter-master general (senior supplies officer), Colonel John William O’Sullivan. Their influence over the prince rankled with some of the Scottish commanders, such as Lords George and Elcho, as the Scotsmen believed they, the Irish, had little to lose but their lives.
The expectation of a rising of the English and Welsh Jacobites was one of the key reasons why Charles ventured so far into England, believing he could reach London on a wave of residual pro-Stuart feeling and with the armed support of thousands of local recruits. Indeed, supported by a French invasion, the only hope of success in regaining all the Stuarts’ former territories lay in a significant local English rising.
4) Charles Edward Stuart spoke English with a British accent
Charles was born and raised in Rome to a Polish mother and a father of mixed European heritage, including Italian and French as well as British, which has led to the assumption that the prince spoke English with some form of foreign accent. In Peter Watkins’ BBC docudrama Culloden (1964), for example, the prince, played by Olivier Espitalier-Noel, speaks with a sort of French/trans-European accent. Lord Elcho’s oft-quoted jibe as the prince left the field at Culloden – “There you go for a damned cowardly Italian”– has fuelled this particular interpretation, although this jibe was likely a later embellishment.
Although Charles’s father, James Francis Edward, left Britain when he was six-months-old and spent his youth in exile in France (in St Germain-en-Laye, near Paris) he was surrounded by British and Irish courtiers. Indeed, his main role model, his father James VII and II, born at St James’s Palace, London and a mature 55-year-old in 1688, would have obviously spoken English with an English accent.
Eyewitnesses during the 1745 uprising described Charles as speaking “the English or broad Scots very well”. One observer, the Edinburgh schoolmaster Andrew Henderson, stated that Charles’s “speech was sly, but very intelligible; his Dialect was more upon the English than the Scottish Accent, seem’d to me pretty like that of the Irish, some of whom I had known”. “Sly” here means soft or low.
5) The Jacobite troops at Culloden were not all Highlanders
The misconception that the Jacobite army was comprised solely of Highlanders is supported, in part, by the imposing memorial cairn on the battlefield itself, which states: “The graves of the gallant Highlanders who fought for Scotland & Prince Charlie are marked by the names of their clans.”
Lowlanders and English alike spoke of the ‘Highlanders’ and the ‘Highland army’, and certainly focused their attention on the sizable Highland element within the Jacobite army as Charles and his men marched through their towns and countryside. Furthermore, in the early stages of the campaign the Jacobite army could have been described as ‘Highland’, as the thousand or so men gathered around the Stuart standard at Glenfinnan came predominantly from the Cameron and MacDonald clans.
But by the time the army had occupied Edinburgh for almost six weeks, the composition had changed. It now included many Lowland gentlemen, such as Lord Elcho, and Lowland tradesmen. A month later, by the time the Jacobite troops had crossed into England and reached Derby, it was compositionally a very different army to that at Glenfinnan. It now included, along with Lowlanders, an English regiment of about 300 men, known as the Manchester regiment. Fast-forward less than six months, at the battle of Culloden (16 April 1746) about two-thirds of Charles’s troops could be termed Highland Gaels, but there were also Lowlanders, Irishmen, Frenchmen and some Englishmen.
6) The ‘Skye Boat Song’ isn’t entirely Gaelic
One of the most famous stories concerning the prince’s five months as a fugitive is his escape by sea, dressed as a maid ‘Betty Burke’, accompanied by Flora MacDonald. Many of us will know the wistful ‘Skye Boat Song’ and its promise of “the lad that’s born to be king” as he is rowed away to Skye from whence, like King Arthur before him, he “will come again”.
Its form is a traditional Gaelic rowing song or iorram and the tune is believed to derive from the Gaelic song Cuachan nan Craobh or ‘The Cuckoo in the Grove’. But the lyrics, establishing the association with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 rebellion, were actually written by an Englishman named Sir Harold Edwin Boulton (1859–1935) of Copped Hall, Totteridge, Hertfordshire, and first published in 1884. Sir Harold, a keen collector and publisher of traditional British songs, also wrote the English words to a well-known traditional Welsh lullaby, ‘All Through the Night’.
In 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the post-Culloden adventure, Kidnapped (1886), wrote his own version of the ‘Skye Boat Song’ with the first line “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone”. In recent years Stevenson’s version (with modifications) has been made famous by the TV series Outlander.
Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, c1890. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
7) The battle of Culloden did not end the Jacobite cause
Yes, Culloden was a devastating defeat – the Jacobite army’s first of the entire nine-month campaign – but several thousand men, some of whom had not been present at the battle, gathered at Ruthven 30 miles to the south, and many were willing to continue the fight. But a lack of supplies and, in the short-term, a failure of leadership from both Lord George Murray and Charles, put paid to any thought of a final stand, or a ‘guerrilla’-type campaign.
Certainly, the Duke of Cumberland believed that another battle could occur in the months following Culloden. The various acts introduced after the battle, in particular the Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act of 1746, in concert with the pacification of the Highlands, made another rising in this region extremely unlikely [the act abolished the traditional judicial rights afforded to a Scottish clan chief]. But the British government and army commanders alike believed that with Charles in France agitating for troops and money to renew his campaign, and while France was still at war with Britain (in Flanders), the Jacobite threat was very much alive.
It was the peace between Great Britain and France in 1748 that ended the 1745 rebellion, by the terms of which Charles was forcibly removed from French territory. But it is not widely known that the prince, still in his twenties, made a secret visit to London in 1750 to stimulate another rising in England, which later became known as the Elibank plot, during which, it is believed, he converted to the Church of England.
In reality, what completely put to bed any hope of a Stuart restoration was the removal of support by France. France had continued to toy with the idea of an invasion of Britain – as ever, a means of destabilising the British state, her trade and her colonial interests – during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), until major defeats in 1759, including the battle of Quiberon Bay, meant abandoning any such attempt. Charles’s behaviour in the face of yet another crushing disappointment, in particular his drunkenness, disgusted the French and eventually he and his cause were abandoned for good.
This was followed, in turn, by the papacy. On the death of his father in 1766, Pope Clement XIII did not recognise Charles as the Jacobite king Charles III, de jure king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the peaceful accession of a third king George, in 1760, suggested that as an active, political cause, Jacobitism, along with its fundamental aim of a Stuart restoration, was effectively dead.
8) Charles Edward Stuart was not the last of the Stuart claimants
On Charles’s death in 1788, his brother, Henry Benedict, became the Jacobite Henry IX of England and I of Scotland. But, as a Roman Catholic cardinal, it was with him that the direct, legitimate line ended on his death in 1807. By this time the beleaguered cardinal, who had witnessed the French Revolution (and lost the financial support of his Bourbon cousin in the process) had begun receiving an annual pension of £4,000 from George III – yes, from the very Hanoverian monarch or, in Jacobite terminology ‘usurper’, that his father and brother had fought so hard, and at such great cost, to remove from the British throne. Henry, unlike his father and brother, did not press his claim.
However, the current official Jacobite claimant, according to the Royal Stuart Society, is Franz von Bayern (b1933) of the House of Wittelsbach, a prince of Bavaria, as his name suggests, and the great-grandson of the last king of Bavaria, Ludwig III. Franz von Bayern – or, as Jacobites would call him, Francis II – became the Jacobite de jure king in 1996, and is descended from the youngest daughter of Charles I (Princess Henrietta-Anne) via the House of Savoy and the House of Este. He has no intention of pressing his claim.
King Ludwig III of Bavaria, c1910. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
9) It’s claimed that Bonnie Prince Charlie has a direct descendant alive today
It is claimed that there are direct descendants of Charles Edward Stuart alive today. Therefore, potentially, in the 21st century there are at least two ‘pretenders’ (from the French ‘prétendant’ or claimant) to choose from. It is well known that Charles had an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany (b1753), by his mistress Clementina Walkinshaw. After many desperate years with an increasingly drunken and abusive partner, Clementina left Charles, accompanied by their young daughter. Charles initially refused to recognise Charlotte, who spent years in convents in France, and, it is believed, produced, in turn, three illegitimate children via her relationship with Ferdinand de Rohan, archbishop of Bordeaux.
In the meantime, Charles had married (in 1772) Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, but the marriage was a disaster and was childless. In 1784, a lonely Charles legitimised his daughter Charlotte, who left her children (or so the story goes) with her mother in order to nurse Charles through his final years. Charles eventually died of a stroke in 1788 and his daughter died less than two years later.
Charlotte’s children remained unknown to history until the mid-20th century, when research undertaken by the Jacobite historians and siblings Alasdair and Henrietta Tayler apparently revealed the existence of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandchildren: Marie Victoire Adelaide (b1779), Charlotte Maximilienne Amélie (b1780) and Charles Edward (b1784).
A biography of the self-styled Count Roehanstart (Rohan Stuart, aka Roehenstart) by George Sherburn (published in 1960), based on the subject’s private papers, sets out the extraordinary life of Charles’s secret grandson, who is buried at Dunkeld Cathedral. As Roehanstart had no children, nor, it was believed, did his sisters, there the Stuart direct (albeit illegitimate) line may have ended. But a new claimant, in the guise of Peter Pininski, has recently emerged. He claims to be the descendant of Charlotte’s eldest daughter (see the 2002 book The Stuarts’ Last Secret: The Missing Heirs of Bonnie Prince Charlie). The mystery continues.
10) Bonnie Prince Charlie is buried in Rome
Charles died at the Palazzo del Re, located on the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli in Rome, the building where he had been born. The palazzo still exists on the north side of the square and just to the north-east of the forum. Sadly Charles’s birth and death in this building is not acknowledged.
Charles was originally buried at Frascati Cathedral (his brother was cardinal-bishop of Frascati) but was eventually reburied (excepting his heart, which is still at Frascati) in the crypt of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, alongside his brother and father. A modest but elegant marble monument by Antonio Canova, funded, in part, by George IV and unveiled in the south aisle of the main church in 1819, marks the final resting place of the ‘old pretender’ and his sons.
Monday, May 21, 2018
Dhauwurd Wurrong: The Creation of Budj Bim
At the start of the Yakinitj, bolitabolita Creator Beings were sent by the Prenheal to muyuban the different features that cross the mirring. The Creator Beings were of giant form and first arrived at a secret sacred location in the Stony Rises country just to the kuurreen of Kerup. Kerup is also known by some clans as Koon Doon.
These bolitabolita Creator Beings took the shape of maara and became the kaiap of a long line of Law maara who had special spiritual and ceremonial powers and responsibilities. The Gunditjmara believe that the escendants of these bolitabolita maara continue to perform their special duties through generations.
Ngathangan paleeya of the original Law maara moved to other parts of the mirring, to the laahlaar kuurn, and the kameetngunnang. The bolitabolita Law maara crouched down and his giant koong transformed to muyuban the peaks of Tappoc and Budj Bim.
When Budj Bim erupted molten lava and kuulorr some 30,000 years ago, he Gunditjmara witnessed the Creator Being reveal himself in the mirring. The scoria stones are his tun gatt.
Told by John Lovett – Gunditjmara
Translated by Vicki Couzens
Further Information
Dhauwurd wurrong word list
bolitabolita four, fourth
Budj Bim high head Mt Eccles
kaiap one/first
kameetngunnang west
Kerup/Koon Doon Lake Condah
koong body
kuulorr stone
kuurreen south
laahlaar kuurn north
maara men
mirring land/country
muyuban make
ngathangan paleeya three
Prenheal Great Creator Spirit
Tappoc Mt Napier
tun gatt teeth
Yakinitj Dreaming
Sounds of Dhauwurd wurrong
a/aa as in car
ai as in eye
e as in bed
ee as in feet
oo/uu as in foot
u as in but
b/p as in big/pig
k as in kick
l as in like
m as in milk
n as in nail
ng as in sing
r as in road
nh the middle of the tongue at the back of the teeth while making an ‘n’ sound
t as in tea
dj/tj as in church
Sunday, May 20, 2018
Snow in Midsummer
Prologue
Dou Duanyun, a young maiden from Chuzhou (楚州; present-day Huai'an District, Huai'an, Jiangsu), is sold to the Cai family as a child bride because her father, Dou Tianzhang, owed people a lot of money and could not repay his debts. She is renamed 'Dou E'.
Act 1
Dou E's husband died two years after their marriage, leaving behind Dou E and her mother-in-law to depend on each other. Dou E and her mother-in-law are bullied by Sai Lu Yi, an unscrupulous physician. Sai Lu Yi almost kills Dou's mother-in-law by strangling her. Dou E and her mother-in-law are saved by the hooligan Zhang Lü'er and his father. Zhang pretends to offer them "protection" and moves into their house against their will, and then tries to force Dou E to marry him but she refuses.
Dou E's husband died two years after their marriage, leaving behind Dou E and her mother-in-law to depend on each other. Dou E and her mother-in-law are bullied by Sai Lu Yi, an unscrupulous physician. Sai Lu Yi almost kills Dou's mother-in-law by strangling her. Dou E and her mother-in-law are saved by the hooligan Zhang Lü'er and his father. Zhang pretends to offer them "protection" and moves into their house against their will, and then tries to force Dou E to marry him but she refuses.
Act 2
Dou E's mother-in-law has a sudden craving for soup. Zhang Lü'er plots to murder Dou E's mother-in-law so that he can seize Dou E for himself after the older woman dies. He blackmails Sai Lu Yi for poison by threatening to report the physician to the authorities for his earlier attempt to murder Dou E's mother-in-law. He puts the poison in the soup and hopes that Dou E's mother-in-law will drink it and die. However, Zhang's father drinks the soup instead and dies from poisoning. Zhang Lü'er then frames Dou E for murdering his father.
Dou E is arrested and brought before the prefecture governor, Tao Wu, who subjects her to various tortures to force her to confess to the crime. Dou E does not want her mother-in-law to be implicated so she admits to the murder. Tao Wu sentences her to death by beheading.
Dou E's mother-in-law has a sudden craving for soup. Zhang Lü'er plots to murder Dou E's mother-in-law so that he can seize Dou E for himself after the older woman dies. He blackmails Sai Lu Yi for poison by threatening to report the physician to the authorities for his earlier attempt to murder Dou E's mother-in-law. He puts the poison in the soup and hopes that Dou E's mother-in-law will drink it and die. However, Zhang's father drinks the soup instead and dies from poisoning. Zhang Lü'er then frames Dou E for murdering his father.
Dou E is arrested and brought before the prefecture governor, Tao Wu, who subjects her to various tortures to force her to confess to the crime. Dou E does not want her mother-in-law to be implicated so she admits to the murder. Tao Wu sentences her to death by beheading.
Act 3
Dou E is brought to the execution ground. Before her execution, she swears that her innocence will be proven if the following three events occur after she dies:
Her blood will spill on her clothes but will not drip onto the ground.
There will be heavy snowfall in the sixth lunar month (in the midst of summer) and the thick snow will cover her dead body.
Chuzhou will experience a drought for three years.
The three events happened after Dou E's death.
Act 4
Three years later, Dou E's ghost appears before her father, Dou Tianzhang, who has become a lianfangshi (廉訪使; a senior government official) in the Anhui and Jiangsu region, and tells him all her grievances. Dou Tianzhang orders a reinvestigation of the case and the truth finally comes to light. Dou E is posthumously proclaimed innocent while the guilty parties receive their due punishments: Sai Lu Yi is exiled to a distant land; Tao Wu is dismissed and barred from entering office again; Zhang Lü'er is given the death penalty.
Dou E also wishes that her father can allow her mother-in-law to live with him, and that he will help to take care of her mother-in-law. Dou E's father agrees. The play ends here.
Dou E is brought to the execution ground. Before her execution, she swears that her innocence will be proven if the following three events occur after she dies:
Her blood will spill on her clothes but will not drip onto the ground.
There will be heavy snowfall in the sixth lunar month (in the midst of summer) and the thick snow will cover her dead body.
Chuzhou will experience a drought for three years.
The three events happened after Dou E's death.
Act 4
Three years later, Dou E's ghost appears before her father, Dou Tianzhang, who has become a lianfangshi (廉訪使; a senior government official) in the Anhui and Jiangsu region, and tells him all her grievances. Dou Tianzhang orders a reinvestigation of the case and the truth finally comes to light. Dou E is posthumously proclaimed innocent while the guilty parties receive their due punishments: Sai Lu Yi is exiled to a distant land; Tao Wu is dismissed and barred from entering office again; Zhang Lü'er is given the death penalty.
Dou E also wishes that her father can allow her mother-in-law to live with him, and that he will help to take care of her mother-in-law. Dou E's father agrees. The play ends here.
