Isabella of Angoulême, Queen of England

 

Isabella was born around 1187 at Angoulême in south-west France, the only daughter of the Count of Angoulême. She was about 12 or 13 years old when she was spotted by King John of England, who had only just come to the throne and was already married. He fell madly in love with her and divorced his first wife so that he could marry Isabella, which he did in the year 1200.

They were to have five children, but the marriage could hardly be described as a happy one, due mainly to John’s spiteful and jealous character. Once, when he thought that Isabella was having an affair, he arranged for the man to be hanged and for his corpse to be suspended over Isabella’s bed.

When King John died in 1216, the new king, who reigned as Henry III, was only nine years old. Isabella was keen to secure Henry’s title and lost no time in having Henry crowned, and this was done in Gloucester Cathedral. There was no actual crown to hand, so Isabella used one of her own gold collars as a substitute.

Isabella had no desire to stay in England so she returned to Angoulême and married her real childhood sweetheart. This was a much happier marriage than her first, and she bore her new husband six sons and five daughters.

Isabella was later accused of conspiring to poison the King of France, a charge that was almost certainly false. She sought sanctuary at Fauntevrault Abbey, where she lived in hiding for the last two years of her life, dying in 1246.

Years later, her son King Henry III visited the Abbey and was shocked to find that his mother had been buried in the open cemetery. He ordered that her remains be reburied inside the Abbey, where a suitably respectful effigy was later supplied.

© John Welford

Isabella of Valois, Queen of England

 

Isabella of Valois, the second Queen of King Richard II of England, was born in 1389. She was not yet eight years old when she was sent to England to marry Richard. It was a marriage in name only, as one might expect with somebody this young, and was engineered purely as a peace-making deal between England and France.

In 1399 King Richard was deposed and disappeared, Isabella having no idea whether he was alive or dead. A new King appeared, calling himself Henry IV, and Isabella was moved out of Windsor Castle to a new home at Sunninghill.

Enemies of the new King Henry plotted to overthrow him and persuaded Isabella to accompany an army of rebels, but at Cirencester the plot fell apart, the ringleaders were beheaded and Isabella was packed off back to London under lock and key.

Henry then had the bright idea that his son and heir, Prince Hal, would be the perfect match for Isabella. They were, after all, the same age – just 11 years old. But Isabella had a mind of her own and refused to have anything to do with it. She now knew that Richard must be dead, and promptly went into mourning, having nothing whatever to do with the new regime.

Henry had no choice but to send her back to France. When she was 16 she married Charles, Duke of Orleans, but was only 20 years old when she died in childbirth.

Six years later, in 1415, the former Prince Hal, now King Henry V, triumphed at the Battle of Agincourt, one consequence of which was that Henry married the French Princess Catherine, who was Isabella’s sister, and Charles, Isabella’s widower, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for the next quarter of a century.

 © John Welford

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche: a much misunderstood philosopher

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher who has been regarded as providing intellectual support to anti-Semitism and Nazism. However, a close reading of his works does little to support this view. The blame for his views being misinterpreted lies very largely with his sister Elizabeth, who edited his work and used it as backing for her own beliefs, which were blatantly in favour of Germany’s National Socialists. When she died in 1935, Adolf Hitler attended her funeral.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a small town in Saxony which was then part of Prussia. The son of a Protestant minister, he became a professor at the University of Basel but had to retire after only ten years due to ill health. He then wandered across Europe, devoting himself to writing and trying to recover his health. In 1889 he suffered a complete relapse into insanity, dying in 1900 at the age of 55.

Shortly after his death, his writings were edited and published by his sister under the title “The Will to Power”, but there is plenty of evidence to show alterations to his original texts, which has done much to mar the reception of Nietzsche’s thought ever since.

Nietzsche’s writings are varied and cover diverse topics, but he is most renowned for his concept of “the will to power”. He saw that the fundamental driving force of the individual is expressed in the need to dominate and control the external forces operating upon him. He seeks the power to be master of his own destiny.

The frustration of this urge, according to Nietzsche, is responsible for the existence of various moral systems and religious institutions, all of which attempt to bind and subdue the will. This view made Nietzsche particularly hostile to Christianity, which he termed a “slave morality”.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw the will to power as something to be pursued and affirmed, and not to be resisted. However, he did not advocate the dominance of the strong over the weak, nor suggest that mastery of the will to power belongs to some special elite by virtue of birth. The absence of such statements in his work make clear that the Nazis were entirely wrong in their interpretation of his philosophy.

What Nietzsche actually said was that strength is necessary to the evolutionary progress of the human being. But strength, as he understood it, was not constituted in physical but in psychological force. The strong are those who are more complete as human beings because they have learnt to control their passions and have channelled the will to power into a creative force.

Nietzsche used the term “superman”, but his concept had more to do with Aristotle’s notion of a man of virtue than of the Aryan superhero of Nazi philosophy.

Nietzsche’s moral philosophy did not advocate “master morality”, although he clearly believed that being a master was better than being a slave. The point about being strong was that one was then in a position to help the weak, and that was the duty of the man of virtue. Helping the weak was not to be done from a sense of pity, but as a result of the natural urge to have power over one’s own development.

It has to be hoped that in future Nietzsche’s reputation will depend on what he actually wrote rather than on what others may have supposed he did.

© John Welford

Charles Peace: 19th century burglar and murderer

Charles Peace was a notorious 19^th century murderer. He was once described as ‘the greatest and most naturally gifted criminal England has produced’. 

He was born in Sheffield in 1832, the son of an animal trainer. A childhood accident led to him wearing a false arm with a hook at the end of it. He also became a master of disguise as well as a burglar.

In 1876, while burgling a house near Manchester, he shot and killed a policeman who surprised him. Two brothers were arrested for the murder and sent for trial. Peace attended the trial, with a view to ensuring that his involvement was not suspected, and was relieved when one of the brothers, William Habron, was sentenced to death.

Peace did have a legitimate occupation, that of a picture framer, which he carried out at his home in Sheffield. He became friendly with a civil engineer named Arthur Dyson and his wife Katherine. Despite being married himself, Peace became enamoured of Mrs Dyson, who at first encouraged him in his pursuit of her. However, Katherine Dyson eventually thought that Peace was becoming too insistent and tried to break off the attachment.

The Dysons moved to a different part of Sheffield, but Peace continued to bother her. One night, Mrs Dyson discovered Peace in her back yard armed with a revolver and screamed loudly. Her husband chased Peace down the road but Peace turned and fired at him with fatal consequences.

Peace escaped to London where he rented a villa in Peckham. He adopted a new persona, taking the name John Ward, and turned his attention to inventing scientific instruments. At least, this was what he did during the day – at night he continued his old habit of burgling houses. During one such escapade in Blackheath he shot at and wounded a policeman but that did not stop him from being captured.

His true identity as Charles Peace became known and, having been sentenced to life imprisonment for wounding the policeman, he was then sent to Sheffield to stand trial for killing Arthur Dyson. During the train journey he was able to jump from the train in a bid to escape but was injured as he did so and was soon recaptured.

At his murder trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution he confessed to the killing of the policeman at Manchester for which the Habron brothers had been found guilty. Fortunately, William Habron’s sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment and he was duly released and pardoned, receiving £1000 in compensation.

© John Welford

Jonathan Wild: 18th century criminal and thief-taker

 

Jonathan Wild was a particularly nasty piece of work, operating on both sides of the law in early 18^th-century London. He was responsible for sending many fellow criminals to the gallows until eventually he overreached himself and suffered the same fate.

He was born in Wolverhampton in 1683 and worked there as a bottle maker. In 1707 he deserted his wife and went to London where he was soon imprisoned for debt for four years. This proved to be a useful introduction to the capital’s underworld. When released, he opened a brothel with his mistress, whom he had met in prison. One of his activities was to act as a prostitute’s associate who picked the client’s pockets while the latter’s attention was otherwise engaged.

For ten years, from 1714 to 1724, he controlled London’s criminals by playing them off one against the one, and against the authorities, in a complicated web of intrigue and influence. He acted as a thief-taker and also as a receiver. He pursued thieves with great tenacity, earning large sums of money under the Parliamentary reward system. However, there was more money to be made by acting as their receiver while continuing to inform on them to the officers at Newgate.

Wild organised the thieves into gangs which he controlled, planning their crimes and then disposing of the proceeds in a highly original way. Instead of fencing the stolen goods, he set up a lost-property office and sold the recovered items back to their original owners who, it seemed, were prepared to pay more for the return of the goods than he would have been able to get from professional receivers.

He instructed his gangs to discover the identities of those they were about to rob so that he could, after a suitable interval, notify the victims that their possessions had been ‘recovered’. He paid his thieves poorly, but kept their loyalty by arranging rigged trials when they were caught and by exacting swift revenge if they double-crossed him.

In 1720 the government was naïve enough to consult him about the rising crime rate. Wild told them that they should increase the rewards for capturing criminals – one of his own sources of profit.

It could not last – Wild’s activities had made him too many enemies. A new Act of Parliament was passed that closed the legal loophole on which Wild had theretofore depended. He was finally charged with receiving ten guineas as a reward for helping a lady to recover some stolen lace, a theft that he himself had organised. The law that brought him low was informally known thereafter as Jonathan Wild’s Act. In his defence he pleaded that he had brought 67 criminals to the gallows.

On the night before his execution, in 1725, he attempted suicide by drinking laudanum but did not succeed. He was therefore in very poor health when he reached the gallows at Tyburn. The executioner was prepared to allow him time to recover his senses but the enraged crowd demanded that the sentence be carried out with no further delay, and this was duly done.

 © John Welford

 

Berengaria, Queen of England and Cyprus

 

Berengaria of Navarre was a Queen of England who never set foot in England as Queen. She was born, in around 1165, in Navarre, was married in Cyprus, lived most of her life in France, where she died in about 1230, and was buried in the abbey she built near Le Mans.

Her husband was King Richard I, known to history as the Lionheart. On the face of it, he might have been a perfect match, given that he was brave, handsome, and the most popular warrior-king in the Christian world. But that was as far as his attraction went. He had no interest in her, being far more concerned about pursuing his Crusade.

Berengaria had been discovered by Richard’s mother, who was convinced that she would make a good wife for her son. She escorted Berengaria to Sicily, where Richard was preparing to journey on his crusade. His route took him via Cyprus, which Richard promptly captured. The marriage took place in Limassol and Berengaria was crowned Queen of England and Cyprus.

After Richard’s campaign in the Holy Land was lost he sent Berengaria off to England, saying that he would travel by land and meet up with her later. However, she never reached England and probably never wanted to.

Richard’s return to England was severely delayed by his being captured by the Duke of Austria and held prisoner for a huge ransom. On his return to England, a whole year later, he decided that he would much prefer to campaign in France, which is where he spent most of the rest of his life. It was years before he and Berengaria were reunited, but they hardly made a happy married couple and no children resulted.

After Richard was killed in 1199 during the siege of a French castle, Berengaria retired to a nunnery and spent the rest of her life helping the poor and caring for abandoned children.

It was only after she was widowed that Berengaria visited England, being a frequent guest of her brother-in-law King John. In 1220 she witnessed the translation of Thomas Beckett’s bones to his new shrine in Canterbury Cathedral.

In 1229 she built an abbey at L’Epau where, under her new name of Juliana, she spent her final days as a nun. This was where she died and where her effigy can be seen in the chapter house today.

© John Welford