Regular readers will know that I spend a lot of time at Marble Hill House where Henrietta Howard lived from 1734 until her death in 1767. Marble Hill became the centre of a circle of some of the leading writers of the day, including Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay, who wrote the Beggars’ Opera.
John Gay’s portrait hangs in Marble Hill alongside a painting of King George II and one of the Duchess of Queensbury.
A tale of political mischief-making links the three paintings and a musical that I went to see last week.
Following the success of The Beggar’s Opera in 1728, John Gay wrote a sequel, Polly. However, Walpole, the prime minister, was scandalised by the satirical attacks on him in The Beggar’s Opera and persuaded the Lord Chamberlain to ban Polly as a filthy and libellous work. Gay responded by having the play published by subscription in 1729, an exercise that proved very popular.
Of course, subscribing to the play was a way of expressing disapproval of the Prime Minister.
The Duchess of Queensbury (a close friend of Henrietta Howard) was a member of the Court and no fan of Walpole. She also had a wicked sense of humour. She approached the king (who had appointed Walpole) and asked him to subscribe. George (who was not terribly bright) did so.
When Queen Caroline (the brains of the outfit) found out, she was furious. The Duchess was exiled from the court. She doesn’t seem to have cared. She moved into a house just across the river from Marble Hill and she and Henrietta Howard remained great friends.
All this took place about 60 years before we first meet James Burke fighting in the West Indies (in Burke in the Land of Silver). In many ways, the world of Henrietta Howard was very different from the world of James Burke but anyone with an interest in the Long 18th Century (yes. historians really call it that) might well enjoy James Burke. Why not give him a go?
In Burke and the Pimpernel Affair, Burke visits the Empress Josephine at her home at Malmaison. Until I started researching the story, I had no idea that Malmaison still existed and is a short bus ride from the centre of Paris. Back then, I couldn’t go to see it because of covid. Fortunately, there is an excellent virtual tour available online but I really wanted to see the place for myself and last month I was finally able to visit.
It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored to show what it was like when Josephine lived there.
This was her bedroom and the bed where she died in May 1814. It’s rather splendid.
She actually had another, more liveable, bedroom for regular use but this one (designed in 1812 and restored by Napoleon III) was her “formal” bedroom. I wish I had seen it before I wrote the book because I’ve created an imaginary bedroom on the ground floor and this one would have been much more fun.
Visiting Malmaison gives you a strong idea of what Josephine was like. I enjoyed the billiards room.
Billiards rooms always seem a very masculine place (often explicitly so in English stately homes) but the billiards room at Malmaison was just across the hall from the dining room and apparently Josphine enjoyed a game of billiards after dinner.
Although Malmaison was her personal property, Napoleon spent a lot of time there and clearly had a hand in a lot of the décor. There is a recurring tent motif, with walls covered in fabric. The Emperor wanted to feel that he was out campaigning even when he was quietly at home with his wife. This was particularly obvious in the council chamber where he would often meet with his ministers.
Napoleon was a voracious reader — he even had a travelling library in the coach he took on campaign — and leading off the council chamber was a large library with a hidden staircase that led directly to his first floor apartment.
There are an awful lot paintings of Josephine on display in Malmaison. I notice her feet peeking out from under some of her dresses. I think she might have been especially proud of her feet which, judging from some shoes on display, were particularly small and narrow.
She was fond of shoes, buying an immense number. She spent out on dresses, too, though probably not very many like this one.
Josephine is buried with her children in a church nearby.
It’s such a shame that Ridley Scott’s terrible film of Napoleon’s life did not make more of Josephine. At one point, Napoleon appointed her Regent of France and she seems to have been a remarkable woman. It was a great pleasure to visit her home.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
If you want to explore more of the places Burke visited in the book, have a look at last week’s blog post: In Paris with James Burke.
I really enjoyed writing Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. It’s a straightforward spy story with more than a nod to Baroness Orczy’s hero, freeing French prisoners from Paris gaols.
Much of the story revolves round the Conciergerie which was the main prison during the Terror and which still housed prisoners under Napoleon. I’d often seen the building from outside without knowing what it was and I looked forward to visiting it while I was working on the book. Then came covid and visits to Paris were postponed indefinitely. Even when the city was open to tourists again, buildings like the Conciergerie remained closed and my research all had to be done online. Now I have finally made it over to France to see the places I had written about. It was great fun!
This is the Conciergerie.
It used to combine court buildings and a prison. The courts are still there but most of the cells have been lost in the extensive remodelling the place went through in the 19th century. Some remain as museum pieces.
The palace complex (the Conciergerie was originally a royal palace) includes the chapel of Sainte Chapelle. At the time Burke was there, it was used as a library. Now it has been restored as an astonishingly beautiful church.
The main entrance to the building was up a grand flight of steps which a wounded Burke flees down after the escape has not entirely gone to plan. Here it is.
Sadly, there was no car waiting to whisk him away.
It was lovely to visit the real site of Burke’s fictitious adventures. I went to Malmaison as well, but that will have to wait till next week.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
It’s late in the day to be posting my Friday offering, but I’ve got an excuse. This was earlier today.
It’s been an exciting few days, following in Burke’s footsteps from Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. There’ll be a long post about it next week, but right now I’m tired and off to bed. Enjoy your weekend!
Last week Tales of Empire was available free on Amazon. I hope you got a copy. If you didn’t, it will set you back a whole 99p this week.
I’m never sure about whether free promotions really boost sales of books, but in this case book sales aren’t the important thing. After all, at 99p the four authors whose stories make up Tales of Empire are never going to become rich. (If we are ever all in the same place, our profits might buy the coffees.) The whole reason for producing Tales of Empire was introduce new writers in the hope that you will go on to read their books.
My contribution, The Tiger Hunt, is a spin-off story from the world of The White Rajah and I hope that it will make you want to learn more about James Brooke and his life as the White Rajah.
He was a fascinating man: a merchant-adventurer who bought a ship, ostensibly to trade in the South China Seas but really in the hope of extending British influence in an area dominated by the Dutch. He extended British influence even more than he had planned, involving himself so thoroughly in the politics of the local Malay rulers that he ended up ruling his own country: Sarawak in Borneo.
It’s a tale of adventure with battles and plots and midnight raids, but it’s also a more serious story about colonialism and how, even when seeking to do the best for the natives he thought of as “his people” the sudden intervention of Europeans from an alien culture had some unhappy unintended consequences.
James Brooke did an enormous amount of good in Sarawak and even today some people look back on the time of the White Rajahs as a Golden Age. But when his rule was threatened he could be utterly ruthless.
Evil white colonialist or a good man who spent most of his life (and practically all of his fortune) building a peaceful and prosperous society where there had been little but poverty and war?
I’m biased: I think Brooke was a hero, albeit a flawed one. However, I have tried to be even-handed in the telling of his story. The story is told from the point of view of Brooke’s interpreter, John Williamson, who is also the narrator of The Tiger Hunt He is caught up in the events but still sees them as, to an extent, an outsider. He is so shocked by the massacre that he leaves Brooke and Sarawak, convinced that what had happened was wrong.
I hope that you might read the book and make your own decision. It’s available on Kindle for just £3.99. Click HERE for the Amazon site. You can also buy it in paperback.
