The Artist Still Known As Tom Conway

Tom Conway, the Bert Jansch of Norwich

https://soundcloud.com/gaz29-1/a-lynn-carol

Hear him doing the BJ version of 'In The Bleak Midwinter' too- probably on a Norwich pavement!

'Turnip' Townshend - the original EDP feature

 

pic reproduced courtesy of Poppyland publishing, Cromer, Norfolk 

A bit of a first for my blog readers here. My EDP Weekend feature on Turnip Townshend (25 October 2014) had to be adapted because of the lack of an available picture of the great man. It became ' Humble crop was a turnip for the history books' with turnip pics to match. You, dear blogger, can have both this revised feature and - feature first below - the original, focused more closely on dear old Charles. Plus the photos they might have used, given world enough and time...

Viscount (‘Turnip’) Charles Townshend of Raynham –a Farmer for All Seasons

Raynham Hall, Norfolk 

Ever wondered if you are in the wrong job?

If British foreign secretary Viscount Townshend of Raynham (1674-1738) – the Lord Lieutenant and effective political leader of Norfolk – hadn’t by 1729, he should have done. His credentials came from the Tony Hancock School of Careers Advice.

First, unlike Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole of Houghton, his ‘noisy’ neighbour, Townshend was a famously poor public speaker. “Inelegant in his language’… ‘often perplexed in his arguments’ was the verdict of a peer who’d endured his longwinded speeches to the Upper Chamber since 1701.

Second –by his own admission to Walpole - he displayed “fits of spleen for which you have so often laughed at me” that made him “impatient of contradiction…impetuous… and overbearing.” Lord Hervey was less kind - “a slave to his passions…rash in his undertakings, violent in his proceedings, haughty in his carriage, brutal in his expression and cruel in his disposition.” Apoplexy would be the literal death of him in 1738.

Third, he made bad decisions and stuck to them.

Walpole needed a foreign policy that secured peace, prosperity and low taxes for the Hanoverian settlement, taking the wind out of Jacobite sails and restoring a fiscal confidence shattered by the South Sea Bubble scandal. Walpole tried to keep Townshend, then in Hanover with George I, on message: “My politics are to keep free from all engagements as long as we possibly can…I wish to God we may at least for a little time remain neutral and look on, if all the rest of Europe does the same thing.”

Instead, Townshend, more Hanoverian courtier than British statesman, schemed for aggressive war alliances with traditional enemies.

Fourth, he didn’t do subterfuge.  “If there be a place in the world where faction and intrigue are natural and in fashion, it is (the court of Hanover) which makes it no easy task for a stranger to behave himself inoffensively….”

Not the best choice of diplomat for one of the trickier moments of European history.

Townshend-and-Walpole were the Britain-leading West Norfolk dream team of 1722, double-heading a landslide Whig administration.  By 1727, to Townshend’s fury, this had become Walpole-and-Townshend and by 1729 was ending in a heated exchange about the way Walpole was managing the House of Commons. Walpole thundered “there is no man’s sincerity I doubt as much as your lordship’s!” whereupon Townshend – with his usual sincerity - seized his burly brother-in-law by the collar and both men went for their swords. Only the intervention of friends prevented an affray.

So ended a career that began so brightly in the reign of Queen Anne when Townshend was a member of the commission concocting the Act of Union with Scotland (1707). Highland Scotland supported the Stuart line of succession: James ‘III’ (The Pretender) Anne’s closest heir, but Catholic. England and Scotland had shared one monarch since 1603 but separate parliaments. Some Scots even favoured reverting to two kingdoms.

Townshend was promoted after the deal so presumably took credit for the Act’s buying off Presbyterian opposition to bishops and its creation of a free trade market between the countries. The Act gave Scotland access to Britain’s overseas colonies (Scotland’s traditional trade lines to France and Holland were in decline or war-ruin). The continuation of an independent Scottish legal system was conceded; Presbyterian rights guaranteed and reduced rates of taxation (because of Scottish poverty) added to the economic inducements – which included a degree of bribery. The Scottish Parliament was history – sold (to London-based Scottish aristocrats) ‘for English gold’ - until 1997.

Raynham Hall - pic reproduced courtesy of Poppyland publishing, Cromer, Norfolk 

But ‘Turnip’ Townshend was an undisputed world-leader in the scientific revolution of eighteenth century agriculture, to which he devoted his spare time, and ‘retirement’ (1730-1738.) It was a revolution led by rich landowners, farming large estates in Norfolk, especially ones underwritten by political influence and incomes outside farming. Like Coke of Holkham, Townshend inherited an estate totally unencumbered by debt and could afford to risk experiments, his successes then emulated by progressive but capital-inhibited yeomen farmers.

Position gave his experiments authority. Happily married to Walpole’s sister Dorothy and leading the family ‘firm’ of Townshend and Walpole as a recent Knight of the Garter, he began transforming Raynham Hall, lake, gardens and park at the height of his political power in 1724-5, His fashionable good taste, informed by long political sojourns in Holland, are reflected in the quiet elegance of the new entrance hall and grand saloon.

It was the age of growing literacy, ‘improvement’ culture and agricultural text books; of falling grain prices and a 13 per cent rise in the value of cattle; of greater incentives to improve pasture and find better winter feed. Scientific farming was incompatible with the primitive open field farming still being practised across half the country and with the small-scale yeomen farming that had replaced it in some areas.

Enclosures were back in vogue and this time not with the Elizabethan object of turning arable land into sheep pasture but of transforming communally cultivated, open fields –including the strips of Townshend’s smaller tenant units – into large compact farms on which the new and more scientific mixed farming could thrive. Waste (and common) land was enclosed, hedged and made effective.

England went Dutch. Dutch meadow grasses like clover and sainfoin and fodder crops were imported; Dutch immigrants grew turnips and carrots in small enclosed English fields; Dutch textbooks were translated into English; Norfolk farmers sent their sons to Holland to learn the new methods. Traditional East Anglian ties with Holland (windmills, drainage) all helped this.

But what really put the ‘turnip’ in Townshend and transformed the eighteenth century farm was using turnips – which still only made up 9% of the cropped land by 1720 - as a break crop between two cereal plantings.

Fed to livestock on the land, turnips caused it to be manured at the same time, doubly more productive than leaving it fallow. Along with clover and artificial grasses this rotation yielded nutritious pasture and a good hay crop. Stock could be improved in quality, increased in number and used to fertilise the soil all at the same time.

The ‘Norfolk Four Course Rotation’ - cereal-turnips-cereal-grasses - in a four year cycle was internationally celebrated. The Norfolk farmcart was the vanguard of the world.

Classical designs for farmyards were made; a ‘philosophy of improvement’ informed the placement of house in relation to farm buildings; the size of the barn; its number of doors, whether the facings of such utilities should be brick or otherwise.

The Norfolk system, according to Arthur Young in 1771, combined turnips, rotation, rationalised buildings, enclosure, the use of marl or clay to improve soil, the creation of large farms and the granting of long leases by landlords to change the farmer into an improving landowner. Turnip Townshend’s leases typically included conditions prescribing these. And he was doing it all decades before Arthur Young proclaimed it.

As early as 1704, Townshend was instructing his estate manager to oversee hedging, marling and selective breeding of the best stock – cattle as well as sheep – among his tenants and already engaged in ‘Enlightened’ farm-building and hedging.

By 1738 Townshend’s reputation as an improving landowner – with hedged fields “of a proper size for farms between 300 and 800 acres…square, well-disposed in relation to the home stall, the roads and the soil” - and his encouragement of turnip-growing -was proverbial throughout Europe. “He certainly practised the turnip culture on such an extent and with such success that he was copied by all his neighbours,” approved Young. By 1787, Norfolk was being described as ‘the cradle of the Agricultural Revolution.’

All this increased Townshend’s income by £900 per annum –a football transfer fee nowadays - and the total rental of the Raynham estate doubled between 1701 and 1756.

He transformed his Norfolk landscape from sheep-roamed heaths and commons into the hedged fields, compact farms and ‘classical’ architecture still recognisable today. Inspired by his Cambridge education, Grand Tour and a mind broadened by travel and government posts abroad, he rebuilt and re-landscaped the countryside.

Jonathon Swift could be contrasting the relative value of Townshend’s two careers when he writes in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’: “whoever can make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”

For more see the English Model Farm (Windgatherer Press) and ‘Turnip’ Townshend: Statesman and Farmer (Poppyland Publishing) by Susanna Wade Martins. For Gareth’s EDP Weekend features and playscripts on Norfolk notables see www.garethcalway.co.uk/ blog.

And here's how that feature was published in EDP Weekend on Saturday Oct 25.

It was the crop that propelled Norfolk from a farming backwater to the envy of a nation - and brought huge wealth back to the county. GARETH CALWAY and TREVOR HEATON tell the story of the humble turnip, and the not-so-humble man who saw its golden potential...

Imagine if foreign secretary Philip Hammond were on a state visit to Germany, and while travelling around spotted an unusual crop growing in a field.

“Stop the car!” he tells his driver, and rushes out to find out more. Fired up with enthusiasm, he sprints back home to his Surrey constituency and persuades local farmers to grow this wonder plant. They do, and become very rich. And they all live happily ever after...

Sounds unlikely? But that’s just about what happened three centuries ago. And it was a Norfolk politician who spotted that there was ‘gold’ in them thar fields.

His name? Well, you’re probably ahead of us here: Viscount Townshend of Raynham (1674-1738)... better known to history as ‘Turnip’ Townshend.

But agriculture was only Townshend’s second career. As Lord Lieutenant and effective leader of Norfolk, he had - with his brother-in-law Sir Robert Walpole - been rising up the greasy pole of national politics for years, eventually reaching the giddy heights of foreign secretary.

It’s fair to say, though, that he was soon out-paced (and out-smarted) by his far-wilier in-law, who famously went on to be Britain’s first prime minister.

It didn’t help that as a politician he had four big drawbacks. First, unlike his ‘noisy’ neighbour Walpole of Houghton, Townshend was a famously poor public speaker. “Inelegant in his language”… “perplexed in his arguments” as one peer who’d endured his long-winded speeches to the Upper Chamber since 1701 put it.

Second – by his own admission to Walpole - he displayed “fits of spleen for which you have so often laughed at me” that made him “impatient of contradiction…impetuous… and overbearing.” Or, in Lord Hervey’s judgement, “a slave to his passions…rash in his undertakings, violent in his proceedings, haughty in his carriage, brutal in his expression and cruel in his disposition.” In the end, apoplexy would be the literal death of him in 1738.

Third, he made bad decisions and stuck to them.
Walpole needed a foreign policy that secured peace, prosperity and low taxes, taking the wind out of Jacobite sails and restoring a financial confidence shattered by the South Sea Bubble scandal. Walpole tried to keep Townshend, then in Hanover with George I, on message: “I wish to God we may at least for a little time remain neutral and look on, if all the rest of Europe does the same thing.”

Instead, Townshend, more Hanoverian courtier than British statesman, schemed for aggressive war alliances with traditional enemies.

Fourth, he was too blunt for subterfuge. “If there be a place in the world where faction and intrigue are natural and in fashion, it is (the court of Hanover) which makes it no easy task for a stranger to behave himself inoffensively….” So not the best choice of diplomat for one of the trickier moments of European history.

Townshend-and-Walpole was the Britain-leading Norfolk dream team of 1722. But by 1727, to Townshend’s fury, this had become Walpole-and-Townshend and by 1729 was ending in a heated exchange about the way Walpole was managing the House of Commons.

Walpole thundered: “There is no man’s sincerity I doubt as much as your lordship’s!” whereupon Townshend very sincerely seized his burly brother-in-law by the collar and both men went for their swords. Only the intervention of friends prevented an affray. And that was the end of Townshend’s political career.

No, it was not politics that was to secure Townshend’s place in history, but a humble root crop. Turnips, (Brassica rapa subsp. rapa), helped make the Norfolk landowner an undisputed world-leader in his second career: the scientific revolution of agriculture, to which he devoted his spare time, and eight years of retirement until his death.

It was a revolution led by rich landowners, farming large estates in Norfolk, especially ones underwritten by political influence and incomes outside farming. Like Coke of Holkham, Townshend inherited a debt-free estate and could afford to risk experiments, his successes then emulated by progressive if not quite so wealthy yeomen farmers.

Position gave his experiments authority. Happily married to Walpole’s sister Dorothy and leading the family ‘firm’ of Townshend and Walpole as a recent Knight of the Garter, he began transforming Raynham Hall, lake, gardens and park at the height of his political power in 1724-5. His fashionable good taste, informed by long political sojourns in Holland, are reflected in the quiet elegance of the new entrance hall and grand saloon.

It was the age of growing literacy, ‘improvement’ culture and agricultural text books; of falling grain prices and a 13 per cent rise in the value of cattle; of greater incentives to improve pasture and find better winter feed. Scientific farming was incompatible with the medieval open field farming still being practised across half the country and even with the small-scale yeomen farming that had replaced it in some areas.

Enclosures were back in vogue, transforming communally cultivated open fields – including the strips of Townshend’s smaller tenant units – into large compact farms on which the new and more scientific mixed farming could thrive. Waste (and common) land was enclosed, hedged and made effective.

England went Dutch. Dutch meadow grasses - like clover and sainfoin - and fodder crops were imported; Dutch immigrants grew turnips and carrots in small enclosed English fields; Dutch textbooks were translated into English; Norfolk farmers sent their sons to Holland to learn the new methods. Traditional East Anglian ties with Holland (windmills, drainage) all helped this.

But what really put the ‘turnip’ in Townshend and transformed the farms was using the crop – which still only made up 9pc of the cropped land by 1720 - as a break crop between two cereal plantings. Before he spotted its potential, turnips were something that only interested gardeners - something grown in pots or in gardens to top-up the family larder.

But when Townshend accompanied George I on a visit to his Hanoverian lands, he noticed how this ‘valuable root’ was being used to enrich the soil, a soil which reminded him of his own Norfolk estate.

So on his return to England, he urged his tenants to grow it in a similar way. As Nathaniel Kent later wrote: “The experiment succeeded, and by degrees, is gradually spread over this county, and in the course of time, to other parts of England, though their cultivation is by no means so general as it continues here.”

Kent’s 1796 account continued: “A good acre of turnips in Norfolk will produce between thirty and forty cart loads, as heavy as three horses can draw; and an acre will fat a Scotch bullock, from forty to fifty stone, or eight sheep.

“But the advantage of this crop does not end here, for it generally leaves the land so clean, and in such fine condition, that almost insures a good crop of barley and a kind plant of clover; and the clover is a most excellent preparative for wheat, so that in the subsequent advantages, the value of the turnip can hardly be estimated.”

Fed to livestock on the land, they caused it to be manured at the same time, doubly more productive than leaving it fallow. Along with clover and artificial grasses this rotation yielded nutritious pasture and a good hay crop. Stock could be improved in quality, increased in number and used to fertilise the soil simultaneously.

It was a win-win-win situation. The ‘Norfolk Four Course Rotation’ - cereal-turnips-cereal-grasses in a four-year cycle - was internationally celebrated. The Norfolk farmcart became the vanguard of the world, and money poured into estates to improve farmyards, farm buildings - and, of course, the big houses.

The Norfolk system, according to Arthur Young in 1771, combined turnips, rotation, rationalised buildings, enclosure, the use of marl or clay to improve soil, the creation of large farms and the granting of long leases by landlords to change the farmer into an improving landowner. And Townshend was doing it all decades before Young proclaimed it.

As early as 1704, Townshend was instructing his estate manager to oversee hedging, marling and selective breeding of the best stock – cattle as well as sheep – among his tenants and already engaged in ‘Enlightened’ farm-building.

By the time of his death Townshend’s reputation as an improving landowner – with hedged fields “of a proper size for farms between 300 and 800 acres… square, well-disposed in relation to the home stall, the roads and the soil” - and his encouragement of turnip-growing - was proverbial throughout Europe. “He certainly practised the turnip culture on such an extent and with such success that he was copied by all his neighbours,” approved Young.

By 1787, Norfolk was being described as “the cradle of the Agricultural Revolution.” All this increased Townshend’s income by £900 per annum – equivalent to a football transfer fee nowadays - and the total rental of the Raynham estate doubled between 1701 and 1756.

He transformed his Norfolk landscape from sheep-roamed heaths and commons into the hedged fields, compact farms and ‘classical’ architecture still recognisable today. Inspired by his Cambridge education, Grand Tour and a mind broadened by travel and government posts abroad, he rebuilt and re-landscaped the countryside.

Jonathan Swift could well be contrasting the relative value of Townshend’s two careers when he writes in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever can make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”

What did the Townshends do for us? Bring Norfolk farms back to levels of prosperity not seen since the Middle Age wool boom, that’s what.

And it was all down to a Royal visit, a Norfolk politician... and a turnip.

For more see the English Model Farm (Windgatherer Press) and ‘Turnip’ Townshend: Statesman and Farmer (Poppyland Publishing) by Susanna Wade Martins. For Gareth’s EDP Weekend features and playscripts on Norfolk notables see www.garethcalway.co.uk/ blog.

The crop that built a county It’s hard to overstate the importance of turnips to Norfolk. If our medieval wealth was based on wool, then our 18th-century equivalent was heavily indebted to the crop and its associated innovations.

A 1796 report on Norfolk farming by Nathaniel Kent to the Board of Agriculture waxes lyrical about its impact. But it was not an easy crop. Kent wrote how it was ‘teasing and precarious crop, and admits of no certain rules to ensure absolute success’.

And Kent warned that he had recently met an Hanoverian nobleman, Count Hardenberg, who had told him that the crop of turnips had now declined in his home country, ‘which is a matter of surprise’. Kent urged Norfolk farmers to avoid similar problems by growing potatoes or vetch in their place every now and then.

The biggest enemies of turnips were the black canker caterpillar. Kent recommended filling the fields with ducks (which loved to eat them) or follow the Yorkshire farmers in employing women (at 5-8 shillings an acre) and children (at 3d or 4d each per acre) to pick them off the crops by hand.

The Siege of Lynn and Cromwell's Talking Head Autumn Tour 2014

CROMWELL'S COMING HOME!!

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Hello Mum! Pic by Tony Rafferty

 

That headline was originally for the Huntingdon leg of the tour but it occurred to me that as I was en route to Wales down the A14 with all the stuff in the Astra tour bus, I could add a gig at the Maridon Theatre, Penygarn, for my mum. Which I did. At this, Mum was a high octane revelation in the audience participation lead role of triangle caller under her stage name of Fanny (it was my dad's choice of stage name) and three generations of Calways and their partners helped me bring the show alive in Wales. Cromwell's original family name of Williams and his little publicised Welsh antecedents - included in the Cromwell coat of arms - all came to the fore here. And so, on its 14th public performance, this autumn tour of 4 dates ended.

THE CROMWELL MUSEUM, HUNTINGDON!

'Cromwell's Talking Head' at the All Saints Church, Huntingdon the town of Cromwell's birth and education up to Cambridge. The 50 strong audience included members and executives of the Cromwell Society and the chair of the trustees of the Cromwell Museum : no pressure there then. Pic by John Goldsmith.

'Cromwell's Talking Head' (hear a  full radio production here) came home to  The Oliver Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon (performed in nearby All Saint's Church) on October 24. 7.30.  Elegantly sandwiched between two sets of veteran period musicians Spirit of the Ayre's ravishing  Cromwell-related airs, I sent the show out onto the hallowed air through a field of blinding theatrical light at the great and good of Huntingdon. (The cannonball provided gravitas passing from hand to audience hand.) A splinter of light from the vision Cromwell had of his future mission in 1630 perhaps? The vote of thanks was a work of art in itself.  The gentleman who introduced me lived in the house associated with the Huntingdon lecture responsible for its enduring legacy of witch hunting via the annual lecture against witches heard, but not believed, by Cromwell as referenced in Christopher Hill's classic study  'God's Englishman'. It felt good to be at the heart of Cromwell's England.

Shockingly, the only Cromwell Museum in existence * has had its funding withdrawn (effective from 2016) - this performance was a protest against that. Unless you think Charles III is likely to equal Cromwell's achievements in building Parliamentary democracy or national prestige (the greatest between Agincourt and Trafalgar) maybe think about funding this rather than some of the other relics that pass for our national heritage?

*Oliver Cromwell House in Ely, the show's HQ,  is not a museum as it contains no artefacts - with the invincible exception of the house itself and its unique historic site in the Cathedral city centre.


It was a night to remember at BINHAM LOCAL HISTORY GROUP, NORFOLK on Oct 23.

 Gareth showing the Binham audience the Siege of Lynn cannonball presented on the night by Veronica Lane

 

Hosted by Penny Alford who runs the BLHG - ably assisted by David Frost chair of the PDC and Geoff the excellent soundman/ Priory warden this is a lovely group of interested people. It's said you should never go back (I did a show called From The Bronze Age to the Ballad Age at Binham in July 2012) - well I have and in Binham it's even better the second time. At the start of the evening, I was also presented by a 350 year old cannonball from the Siege of Lynn to take on my tour with me by Veronica Lane, an item which belonged to her late husband Nic Lane who found it on his farm near Lynn, and that doesn't happen every gig. I regard myself as a steward - not a Stuart - of this highly appreciated - and appallingly heavy - weapon of mass destruction - and when I finally hang up my Cromwell tour or in 2043, the four hundredth anniversary of the siege (whichever is earlier) I will present it to Marriott's Warehouse Trust an an exhibit. (It flew over the very room inn which it would be placed.) Meanwhile, I will be displaying it around the country. It's going abroad - to Royalist Wales - very soon.     

  
Tom arrived in a sports car and shabby chic slippers to premiere our Binham ballads          

At Binham, the local angle was provided by Norwich composer/ guitar virtuoso Tom Conway who premiered our ballads about Binham Priory and the nearby Bronze Age barrow. (the site now graced with an archaeological information board abut the legend and the history.) I hope to post these splendid folk ballads online on sound cloud in due course. The lyrics are already here
See poster below for details.
 



Gareth voicing the two severed heads:

Cromwell's had an unusually large brain; Charles Stuart's just a royally big head

 
All Binham pictures by ace rock photographer Al Pulford. Al also helped with the best post-performance celebration (in the Chequers) since the last time the Familiars met Gaz and Maz in post-show celebration at Oliver Cromwell House in Ely on Apr 24 - six months to the (next) day.

 

Audience reviews of Binham - see comments at end of this post.

MARRIOTT WAREHOUSE TRUST'S FIRST SELL OUT SHOW!

 

A Lynn Double header

 

 

Out of this head: a dramatic monologue 'Cromwell's Talking Head'

- the horrible but true history of Old Noll's posthumously severed head

 

Dr Paul Richards - whose 'passion and common touch shines through everything he writes' (EDP) - described how besieged Lynn was a place of fishermen and merchants rather than holy warriors or politicals. The dissidents had mostly left Lynn for the New World in the 1630s, he explained.

 

And a splendid time was had by all under sunny September skies; rather different from the cannon fire of a September 3 in 1643. It was a very hot evening in that historic roof-space for the sell out crowd of 69, the biggest of the tour exceeding both Binham and Huntingdon by 19 heads, not counting the two on the pole, the biggest of all my Cromwell tour dates with the exception of the Ely Folk Festival. Dr Paul's erudite, scholarly chat focused on the people and the local economy and something else beyond - a sheer love of Lynn and its uniqueness as a port - and I've since pinched some key points to my touring lecture. It was very well received. Like him, I then stood in the 1643 firing line and voiced the conflict as Cromwell and Charles went into their severed double header.  If the chuckles and glowing reviews are anything to go by, this too was very well received. Read 2 reviews here.

The next engagement for Paul and I is A Hanse Christ Mess, our Christmas show on St Nicholas's Day Dec 6 in the Hamburg Suite at Hanse House. £5 and includes a mince pie and mulled wine. Book early!

The Cromwell tour poster with all the details

 

 

Original Press Release

 

Double Header: The Siege of Lynn by Dr Paul Richards and Cromwell’s Talking Head by Gareth Calway

Sep 3 Marriott’s Warehouse Upstairs, South Quay, King’s Lynn

September 3 was the date of the three decisive military victories of Cromwell’s life (1649, 1650 and 1651) and his own final victory over life (as he would see it)- his death in 1658.  And long before all this, in 1643, it was the day he arrived with a bang of cannon shot at the Siege of Lynn, a siege that arguably decided the course of the English Civil War. An eighteen pound cannonball interrupted divine service smashing through a window and clearing worshippers out of St Margaret’s Church on Sunday September 3.

Gareth Calway’s tour of Cromwell’s Talking Head has been successfully entertaining audiences at folk festivals (like Ely in 2013) and storytelling venues all over East Anglia since it began its bi-annual residency at Oliver Cromwell House in Ely in 2011. In it, Cromwell’s severed head tells the true but horrible history of the Great Roundhead’s afterlife – including his posthumous hanging and beheading for ‘treason’ at the Restoration in 1661 and eventual secret burial three centuries later in Cambridge University – and also of his radical life. The radio production was described as ‘a triumph of narration and verbal colouring.’ Last winter, Gareth added a separate talk about the Siege of Lynn for local audiences and for its King’s Lynn premiere this spot has been handed to Lynn’s very own historian, Dr Paul Richards.

Dr Richards has recently published ‘King’s Lynn In Pictures’ ‘Paul’s passion and common touch shines through everything he writes’ (Trevor Heaton) the only English-authored chapter in ‘Hanse und Stadt’ a German history of the Hanseatic League (Lynn was a key member) and author of the town’s only modern history survey ‘King’s Lynn’ a complete history, packed full of information, intriguing anecdote and informed analysis. For once the term ‘expert’ may be used modestly. Dr Richards is a town guide on luminaries from Margery Kempe to Walpole to Burney; on its historic buildings, waterfront and pubs and can hold an audience entranced on any period or aspect of the town’s colourful past. This chance to hear him describe the besieged port’s month at the front line of English history in September 1643 should not be missed.

The double event takes place at 7.30 pm on September 3 in Marriott’s Warehouse Upstairs, (squeaky floor recently corrected!) at a bargain basement price of £5. Refreshments including wine- for donations only – will be provided during the interval.

Tickets are available in advance at the Custom House. It may be advisable to book early! Calway’s Cromwell tour continues solo to Binham History Group (Oct 23) and The Oliver Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon (Oct 24)

.

Double reviews of our Cromwell/Siege of Lynn double header Sep 3 2014!!

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"September 3rd. On the banks of West Lynn stood an army of vengeful Parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell. Cannons fired over the Great Ouse…

 

Exactly 371 years later, a sell-out crowd gathered at Marriott’s Warehouse. The Siege of Lynn and the Civil War were revived by eminent historian Dr Paul Richards and the writer and raconteur Gareth Calway.

 

Dr Richards delivered a talk on the Siege, with various fascinating diversions. He set out a compelling case that Lynn’s politics were influenced more by mercantile interests than spiritual convictions.

 

Part 2, presented by Gareth Calway, starred Cromwell’s decapitated head. In this amusing monologue, fact was stranger, and more macabre, than fiction. We were treated to more puns than we could count (eyes rolled, not unlike the heads!). This consummate performance was a novel way to present the past.

The evening’s entertainment was fit for a King - or a Lord Protector!"  Helen Thirkettle

 

 

 

Need a second opinion?

 

Read this alternative review on the Lynn News website

here. Lots of other readers have!

Norfolk gals

Norfolk is a very understated region. She has unsung heroes and many of these are women. Here, hand on heart and shooting from the male hip, is my homage to some of them. Each character has a scene and then the cast does the chorus as in a Greek play.

 

read my EDP cover feature on Boudicca here

Note: Ickeni (Iceni) is a Norfolk dialect word meaning 'awkward, troublesome, unmanageable' - as in difficult horse.
Looking for a classroom activity on Boudicca? Try this, Warrior Queens

A breezy general introduction to Mother Julian of Norwich and her sister mystic Margery Kempe of Lynn, written for the EDP Weekend pullout, may be read here.

A full length musical playscript and newspaper features on Margery and her times - including her sister mystic Mother Julian of Norwich and her parish priest the Lollard martyr William Sawtrey - may be read here.  Read some general context about the Hanseatic age in Lynn here. 

Hear Anne (Boleyn) in dialogue with Tom (Sir Thomas Wyatt)'s verse here  and read the full Tom and Harry script here

An EDP Weekend feature on Charles and especially Fanny Burney may be read here.

Author's Note: Some say you can only tell your own story - I've been telling my wife mine for 35 years and I'm sure she still finds it as fascinating as I do. But these stories are much more interesting (and besides what are we but our imaginings, dreams, heroes, sense of history, fascinations etc etc?)
 

Norfolk gals

A five woman show (with musical accompaniment) 

The Antagonist Sallies - ie male fall guys - should be played as trouser roles by the gals themselves. (Women will have much more fun playing these than men.) We know who wears the tights in this house.
 

(enter the cast in a tragic chorus of Iceni ghosts)

We're the restless ghosts in the winds and rains,

Funneling the valleys, sweeping the plains,
Inlets and warrens that run underground,
Unbridled pathways, unquiet streams,
Haunted hidden corners of rootless sound,
Hives of Iceni, dead and unqueened,
By bronzebreasted redcrests violently weaned
We're the baby who wails for her dead mother's breast.

We are dead keening women, whispering grass,

The breath in the lilac and bluebells, the blast

Through the pale yellow oak leaves, hawthorns

And nettles. And that shout, queen of warriors,

From your victory chariot with your triumphant

Horsemen around you! And that salt chill of a winter's

Reprisals that blighted twice twenty summers.

We're the mother who wails for her new baby's death.

 

We are the cries in the corn, the harrowings hooted

Under moons of hunger, in the squeals of the hunted,

The creaking of geese through night-forest fears,

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The unresting dunes and the moaning wave-break,

We're the memory that's cankered two thousand years

Of Celtic blood with an unhealing ache,

We're the oracles lost in the noise diggers make.

We're the dead daughters wailing for the end of the world...

Boudicca emerges from the Chorus:
 

Boudicca is a punk shocker


Allow me to introduce to myself.-

Queen Victoria, of Icenia

The matriarchal Britons called me buddug, Boudicca, VICTORY.

The patriarchal Romans called me mad.

Aunt Sally: (Roman historian)

‘She was huge of frame, terrifying of aspect, with piercing eyes and a harsh voice, a great mass of red hair hanging down to below her waist’

Boudicca:
–the very picture of the Cleopatra dysfunctional woman in power, the Medusa Head of State.

In AD 60, on the death of my husband, King Prasutagas, (lash) I am dispossessed, flogged, my nobles enslaved, my women sold, my daughters... plucked and plundered...by Procurator Decianus Catus.

Provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus – later recalled to Rome for excessive bloodlust – quite a feat on the front line of empire - is absent in North Wales, slaughtering druids and desecrating the Oak Groves of Mona. Doing his bit for the environment.

when suddenly, out of the blue, the sky falls in and the forests erupt again through the nice tiled floors of Colchester.

My hazel-wattled people are in revolt. The Eastern half of Britain rises with me.

Iceni Chorus:

Kick over the wall cuz governors can fall

How can you refuse it?

Let fury have the hour anger can be power

You know that you can use it

 Boudicca:
 

I ‘redeveloped’ the Rome Counties. I burned down Colchester, a London left tactically undefended  - on the Provincial Governor’s orders- and the old Catavellauni capital of St Albans.

My army got larger with every victory.

Procurator Decianus Catus, flogging off the forests, garden-grabbing the graves, making a killing in the City (lash) finds himself staring at the end of civitas as he knew it. Norfolk, the guardsvan of Roman history, ploughing my fleet pony and wickerwork chariot through the heart of London.
 

(sings, with punk Chorus)

There’s no future in your Roman dream

Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes

Your soapless baths and your manly steam

The Iceni queen bee is making free

With your city.


Boudicca:

He flees to Gaul, his smacked Roman backside smarting with the humiliation.

Now, as a summer dawn paints the ripening Iceni corn a battle-blood red,

I turn my attention to Provincial Governor Suetonius Paulinus…. (drum)

This seasoned professional soldier, marching hotfoot from his rout of Welsh tribes in the West, concentrates his army at a place never really identified but possibly near Fenny Stratford on Watling Street.

Despite my eloquent passion for annihilating every last Roman in Britain,

some of the tribes I had united beneath me now went home with their war loot, thinking enough had been done.

Tacitus, reporting me in the Latin of my conquerors 100 years later, gives me this speech.

‘We British are used to women commanders in war.

I speak to you not as an aristocrat but as a woman of the people.

A woman of yourselves.

Think how many of you there are, and why we are fighting.

Then you will win the battle, or die.

That is what I, a woman, plan to do – let the men live in slavery if they want.’

 

Suetonius chose a position in a narrow defile, protected from behind by forest

Sure that there would be no cover for ambushes.

Yah!

(drum, sings with punk Chorus)

Boudicca Boudicca

There is no safe European home.

This is no vestal valium Rome.

Boudicca Boudicca (drum)

Aunt Sally (Suetonius):

‘Pay no attention to the noise and empty threats these savages make.

There are more women than soldiers in their ranks.

They are not warlike and they are badly armed.

The battledress is a birthday suit, pudenda covered only by woad. The infamous blood streaks in the lime bleached hair, ha...the juice of rowan berries.

When they see the weapons and courage of troops,

They will turn and run.

Keep the ranks. Throw your javelins. Strike with your shield bosses.

Then drive on.

After the second javelin,

Close ranks for the testudo.

[Chorus TESTUDO! ]

A giant... sword-jabbing... tortoise... formation,

A 6 deep, 4 square human armoured vehicle

Defensive and offensive,

Tightly shielded on all sides.

The nearest the Romans could get to a tank.

And our ‘tactics’?

Chorus: Heads and dugs will rock and roll (x3)…and Roman dudes will bleed.

Boudicca:

My warriors, the customary male hordes swollen with raging women

Swarmed into the vice of the defile

And up towards that butcher’s yard of javelin volleys,

Every volley adding dead or javelin-struck Britons

To the labours of the lines behind

Maybe after they’d slithered through the first half dozen

Dead and writhing the passion for vengeance faded.

Then that Roman tank rolled forward and tin opened

The whole helpless throng of us against our wagon line.

The kids stopped watching Mam and Dad win the final dream victory

And became the meat in the sandwich of the final bloody screaming defeat.

All I had room left to do was chariot charge my own people….
 

Silence

Boudicca: (joined by Chorus on the refrain)

I am history, not myth, but remember

History is written by the victor

And I neither wrote nor won

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Rome had to win or risk the Empire,

Britain had to win or simply expire,

And with it the Western horizon,

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Procurator Decianus Catus

Spoke down his nose, spoke down his anus,

 (Aunt Sally) "The Emperor claims the dead king's kingdom"

(Chorus) No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

(Aunt Sally) "Our Roman matrons have a place too

In a civilised home: I could offer you

A place in mine: dresses, baths, decorum."

(Chorus)No freedom, no future, no fun.


Boudicca:

I danced to the wardrums, warhooves, hornwhine,

Exhorting, as Romans were drilled into line,

My race to fling back the squares of London

(No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Now my rebels hole up, where home is none,

On roots thin as hope and a dream of Britain

Hunted through nettles and thorns, their soles stung:

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

My hard core Iceni's last stand and fall

Is the longest, fiercest, stubbornest of all

But is crushed - like flint - in The Battle of Thornham.

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

Death-and-glory queens, country dragons:

(Become) Whores of fashion in Camolodunum,

In Roman roses our own scent gone.

No freedom, no future, no fun.

 

‘My salts that I sowed in the Squareheads' wounds

Return in a wash that will sour our lands.

I loosen my tongue on its poison:

I loosen my tongue on its freedom’

 

Because they could not find me, bury me, kill me

chain me to their story,

Drag my defeat through the streets of Rome.

That is why I can be your moon-white goddess walking between Celtic daughters in Cardiff,

Why I can ride that moving, oak-gracious

There-and-not-there at the heart of Government,

Iron coach to nowhere the Victorians invented for me in Whitehall, getting every single detail wrong and the spirit absolutely right

The mother of Britain giving the mother of battles

to the frontier cowboys of Nero.

Why I must have a statue here

in the heart of Icenia:

The maddened mother making a chariot stand

on the stolen innocence of her children,

The matriarch martyr dying for her people,

The great British rebel with a cause,

A Norfolk hero-tale, a wild, turning North Sea tide,

A woman

who

would

not

lie

down.


Chorus: ( the North Sea)

                                                                        (strophe) I am the sea

                                                                        and its deep sullen anger

                                                                        is my anger

                                                                        and its grey endless spaces

                                                                        are my spaces

                                                                        and its icy depths

                                                                        are mine

                                                                        I am the coast

                                                                        and its sticky glitter

                                                                        its sludge and seawrack

                                                                        its holiday oasis of bright blue and yello

                                                                        its seagulls and shallows

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                       (antistrophe)  O but I am the sea

                                                                        and its monstrous swell

                                                                        its elephant surges

                                                                        its charge and retreat

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and its blind destruction       

                                                                        its timless sculptures

                                                                        are in my gift

                                                                        and its welling compassion

                                                                        is mine

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and its rocks and rivers

                                                                        its wrecks and reelings

                                                                        its sharks and cockles

                                                                        are mine

 

                                                                        (epode) I am the whale

                                                                        that’s devouring the world

                                                                        I am the gull

                                                                        with wings of icecap

                                                                        I am the nimbus

                                                                        dissolving in thunder

                                                                        I am cold as death

                                                                        and quick as the morning

                                                                        blind as surf

                                                                        sharp-eyed as salt

                                                                        I am Neptune and Necros

                                                                        driftwood and bedrock

               

                                                                        I am every drop

                                                                        on its boundless adventure

                                                                        across Illusion

                                                                        I am the sea

                                                                        and my jeweled infinities

                                                                        are in each ripple

                                                                        and my boundless whims

                                                                        are in each droplet

                                                                        and my fathomless urges

                                                                        are in your blood.

The late 14C anchoress Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (another Aunt Sally) emerge from the Chorus

Nut Job in a Nutshell. Ye Page 3 interviews Mother Julian of Norwich.

AS:

Well, Julie-

Julian:

Julian.

AS:

Julian. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Julian:

Now-here. 

AS:

Why the bloke’s name? You after a bishopric?

Julian:

Anchoresses don’t need names. St Julian’s is the name of my home-church.

AS:

So you get in here a lot, yeah?

Julian:

I’m in here all the time. We’ve kind of grown together.

AS: 

Nice. Like flint and mortar?

Julian:

Like ship and anchor.

AS:

So are you going all the way with Norwich or are you looking for a move?

Julian:

I’m not going anywhere.

AS: 

Do you have a life? - I mean outside of church?

Julian: 

I never leave this cell.  And no-one’s allowed in.

AS:

Except a doctor of course?

Julian:

No-one. I am beyond the grave already.

AS:

So how did you get into all this ‘Death and Dis-after Dante’ stuff? And how old were you?

Julian:

Thirty and a half. I opened Death’s door and saw Christ’s blood trickling down from my Last Rite crucifix under the crown of thorns hot and fresh and right plenteously... like the drops of water that fall off the house’s eaves after a great shower of rain-

AS:

Can we nail it down to an exact place?

Julian:

Norwich but not. Nazareth but not. Nowhere.

AS:

Norwich. Can we nail it down to an exact time?

Julian: 

Eternity.

AS:

3 pm.

Julian

May 8 1373.

AS:

May 11 1373. And you had this… double vision?

Julian:

Sixteen visions.

AS:

In one day? Jesus! Will you be having any others?

Julian: 

God knows.

AS: 

The same God who wanted you walled you up against the church with the burial service read over you?! Dead to the world!

Julian:

But attached to it. My visions weren’t just for me but for everyone.

AS:

So what do you do with yourself in there all day?

Julian: 

Give counsel to visitors through this aperture. Meditate on the meaning of my visions. Write my book Revelations of Divine Love.

AS:

So what does Divine Love feel like? Nice?

Julian:

(patiently) Like a thorn in God’s side.

AS:

Which side?

Julian: 

(pats left side) His female side.

AS:

Nice. And has God’s female side got a message for Page 3?

Julian: 

God said not, Thou shalt not be travailed, dis-eased

Tempested, just not be overcome. I saw Him

Shew into my mind a nut. And perceived

This is the reason we are not at ease

Of heart and soul, that we seek in this thing

That is so little, where no rest is in,

Its Maker, Who is very rest….Yet we

May run to Him (and all shall be well)

As a frightened child to its mother and he will lead us

By his open side to his blessed breast,

Bearing us on the Cross, giving birth to us,

The Father truly our Mother in Christ Jesus,

And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

AS:

Can we get a picture of the breast?       


CHORUS RE-ENTER:

          Somewhere mellow between

 

                               the end of the overblown blackberries

 

                                         and

 

                               the start of the harvested leaves

 

          fused flies

 

                     on clinical sills

 

                               hint at bleached sun

 

                                         and 

 

          in the hedges

 

                               thistle winds to come.  

 

To eyes trained on histrionic heights,

 

                 this stubborn serenity,

 

                     these mediaeval colours

 

                     are

 

          endlessly reassuring:

 

a great grey blanket billowing unbroken from the North Pole,   

 

                     wild chords of geese in its folds;

 

                               the flinty, dependable noun

 

          behind mists of adjectives

      Margery Kempe  emerges from Chorus, the housewife-visionary of early 15C Bishop's Lynn. 'Mother Julian' plays the Aunt Sally role of Priest.

Margery of Lynn

Margery: It was not just my firstborn that issued from my womb. Hell followed after. Devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire, pawing at me, hauling me about both night and day. Until I saw Jesus. I said to Our Lady- Blessed are the breasts that Jesus sucked! And Our Lady smiled, Yes.

Priest: Which is precisely while you’ll never be a proper visionary like Mother Julian of Norwich. A maiden doesn’t labour the vagina, pontificate to the pontificates; put a pussy among the patriarchs. She has a wall around her; sits peacefully behind it, serves her community; counsels, comforts; follows doctrine-

Margery: Julian’s Jesus was a woman! He ‘gives suck as a mother to her young’ – ‘bears us on the Cross’. She doesn’t even believe in evil. Or the Trinity!

Priest:  (at Margery) Heresy!

Margery: You’re calling Julian of Norwich a heretic?!

Priest: No, you for saying so. (vexed) It doesn’t sound like heresy when Julian says it.

Margery: I didn’t say it. I’m -

Priest: A steeple-stalker, a Bishop botherer! A monk manqué in a housewife’s body.  Seeing Jesus in a marriage bed. Hearing the Holy Ghost in a common or garden robin. A heretic.

Margery: What?! I live for Orthodoxy, (weeping at the thought of this) the Crucifix, Images of Holiness, Pilgrimage, the Seven Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Orders, Unction and… (she’s forgotten one)

Priest: (supplying it) Marriage. (vexed) And you make orthodoxy roar like heresy.

Margery: (weeps)

Priest: And your holy roaring is the devil!

Priest reverts to a woman and joins with Margery in singing:

Margery:       The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

I bend my will to holy men

Confessors, clerks and seers

Yet drown their prayers and sermons in

A Noah’s Flood of tears-

I take Christ to my marriage bed

As chaste as any maiden

A love-struck Mary Magdalene

Face to face with heaven

And kiss him sweetly on the mouth

His head and darling feet,

And wash away my sins with tears

That heaven and earth should meet.

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell.

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

I weep at every sacrament,

At every human sin,

At holy nails and blood and Cross

And lepers’ suffering.

I cry more loud than heart, or ear,

Can bear, at such a loss:

My Holy Husband, Son and Ghost,

In agony on the Cross.

Though York’s Archbishop damn my tears

As Lollard-work or Devil’s

The anchoress of Norwich says

‘They do the work of angels.

‘The Devil has no power where

Contrition and compassion

Weep humbly from a homely heart

In agonies of passion.’

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell…

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

 

Each babe in arms this creature sees

Is Christ the child to me

And every handsome man in Rome,

Is Jesus on the tree.

God sails my soul to Holy Lands

Through world and priestly storm

And tunes the bellows in my ear

Into a robin’s song.

And if your Table hates my noise,

I’ll pray or dine alone

Where Mother Mary homely says

 ‘Sweet, make yourself at home.

 

‘Lend Martha there a hand to sweep

The hearth and tend the vine

And give my baby Jesus suck

And serve this bread and wine.

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

For long ago I sinned a sin

That’s never been confessed,

-Except to God - a Lollard sin

To hold it in my breast.

And though unworldly now I seem

And lost in visions quite

I brewed, had fourteen babes, before

I dressed in virgin white.

And cut a dash through Bishop’s Lynn

Proud daughter of its Mayor,

My cloaks with modish tippets slashed,

And gold pipes in my hair

Till hearing heaven’s Song of Songs

I shunned the gutter’s ooze

‘And though you rule me, husband, priest,

A single life I choose.’ 
 

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 
 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear.

You chambered me, then ceased, and now

You fall and break your head

Where gossips say my separate life

Is leaving you for dead.
 

How fallen is the flesh I wed

And bred with, kissed and urged

That now discharges old man waste

So flesh by flesh is purged

Yet flesh of flesh, I wife and nurse

The once-young parts I craved

With hands more faithful than my youth’s

Temptations had depraved.
 

And every pilgrim step I trudged

From wedlock’s grave mundane

And churchman’s plot, was heaven-winged

By doves that sang God’s name...

This Book I weep in blood

Up from the heart’s deep well

Would drown the earth in heaven tears

And church the tongues of hell- 

The Prick of Love is in my heart,

A bellows in my ear

And love enflames another part

They cannot see or hear. (exeunt) 

Re-enter fourth actor as Anne Boleyn
 

Anne Boleyn of Blickling Hall

ANNE               (in her pomp as queen of the hive ) The queen bee must provide an heir to the colony in earnest and lead the dance of the hive in the game of courtly love.  Like the king, I flirt with everyone but in earnest I am faithful. (darker, privately). Unlike the King.

Pause
 

ANNE               How quickly it changes. God blessed Jane Seymour with a son and killed her with Tudor surgery 12 days later.   Four short months ago, Henry and I wore yellow to celebrate Catherine’s death and he stroked my pregnant belly. And waking beside him the next day, the terrible truth dawned: with Catherine gone, he no longer needed me. (holds empty womb) Then my last best hope miscarried.   When he came to me at Easter, he was already gone. At the May jousts, as I Queened it for the third and last time, six gentlemen and pages were arrested for plots against the king and carnal knowledge of me. Including you, Tom, Esquire of the Body and master of mine long before Henry knew it. They will let you go, after watching me die: you have Cromwell as your pillar. They wracked confessions from the others. Yesterday, on the scaffold, my brother Rochford, also accused of being my lover,  said: “From my mishap learn not to set your thoughts upon the vanities of the world, and least of all upon the flatteries of the court. The higher we rise, the harder we fall.” Keep your head down, Tom, lest you lose it.

Music

Anne.................All six of my ‘lovers’ died confessing their sins, though not the ‘sin’ they were executed for.  Here today, dead tomorrow, I swore on the sacrament, that I am pure. Shall I die without justice? I asked and the lieutenant said the poorest suggest the king hath, hath justice. And I laughed. A dying old Lady of the  bedchamber whom I never meant to offend, Lady Wingfield, called me a whore on her deathbed. She told our young love story, Tom, as if it were happening now.  Blame the Duke of Suffolk, my sworn enemy, for your arrest: the Wingfield family are his clients.  I am 29, too young to die, guilty of nothing but youth. I indulged ‘pastime in the queen’s chamber’ giggled at tales of the king’s impotence. Henry said I was unfaithful with a hundred men and this last six no worse than the rest. Truer than he meant.
 

Music

ANNE               Why would Henry kill six adulterers to destroy me when one would do? That was the Seymours, annihilating the competition. Jane Seymour – by refusing him hers - had his lips; her faction his ears. I felt his jousting fall deep in my heart. It cost me the baby. A boy. The court flew from my weakness. I refused to smile on Henry’s affairs.  She showed ‘gentleness’ in this, I ‘cursedness’ – like Catherine. Bad move. They say Henry never spared a man his fury or a woman his lust. And that his hand pulled the strings of the English Reformation. But I know his hand.  It lures, ignores, manipulates, leads, abandons.

Pause. She is thinking of Henry leaving her.

ANNE                It’s his other hand you’ve got to watch, the one stroking a pregnant belly. The world he imagined he made real:  plots everywhere, the strong to his side, or his bed, the weak to the scaffold.  The only defence is to counter-attack first, like Thomas Cromwell. We Boleyns  were too slow. I watched my brother hanged, drawn and quartered, spilling the guts he’d shown before.  This morning, I will ‘be beheaded or burned at the king’s pleasure.’ All the pleasure I once gave Henry’s body has won me this mercy: a blade instead of the flames. The king never had my heart, he says, and he will have my clever head on its stiff Protestant neck for it, while Norfolk my accuser blooms like a rose in June, all the offices, grants and honours in the world vouchsafed  by that one failsafe: royal favour. Tom, you had my fickle heart once and kissed my neck like you meant it, praising its yielding softness. Pray for that softness now.

(Music: a minstrel sings) 

 

I stole to the door of Blickling Hall

On the nineteenth night of May

And met the ghost of Anne Boleyn

Shining bright as day.

Six headless horses drew her coach

A headless coachman drove,

‘Give them their head!’ she laughed, then turned

On me her look of love.

‘Oh lordly, learnéd, manly face

Where force and beauty meet

Oh sport, debate and war with me:

Renaissance man complete.

I sought you once, who later flew,

I stalked you in your chamber

With night gown slipping from my arms

Before my lips spelled danger.

How like you this? I whispered then

And kissed you wild and free

As blood-red roses, soft and sweet,

Before the King took me.

I lost my head for the rose of the world

And the rose withered on the thorn,

A hunted hind whose fickle heart

Died for the loudest horn.’

 

Her white hands stole around my neck,

I screamed with stolen breath

‘O save me from this dreadful witch

And a fate much worse than Death!’

Her Lutheran brow as bright as the moon

A smile like the blossom of May

Her hair raven-black but her lovely head

Twisted the other way.

Her neck of worm-picked bones was ringed

With a bloody royal band

Engraved ‘I am Caesar’s’ in diamonds chaste,

And King’s gold on her hand.

‘I am wild to hold, though I seem so tame,

More fair than mortals can say

And I sold my heart for a worldly crown

And I’ll take your breath away.’

‘I am not your True Thomas!’ I cried in dread.

And her witch face turned away

‘Ah! You’ve named the angel who guards my grave

I can no longer stay.

I lost my head for the rose of the world

And the rose withered on the thorn

A hunted hind whose fickle heart

Spiked the largest horn.

Enter fifth actor as Fanny Burney.

Fanny Burney

'I remember well that, when I was preparing....I had such an idea I should undergo an examination and I was fearful of some wry question that might discountenance me, that I learnt nearly the whole common prayer book by heart! - Besides reading the Bible quite through three times! I was so indefatigable, I rose to nothing else; and never went to rest while I could procure light for my labours. … (and) after all this hard work - the fat clumsy stumpy worthy Bishop of Norwich clapt his hand upon my head, and off it, as fast as he possibly could, and never made a single interrogatory, nor uttered a single doubt or demur upon my fitness or unfitness for his blessing.' …

 

‘I offered some few words in favour of my poor abused town the land of my nativity - of the world’s happiness – we discoursed a little time and Hetty suddenly cried out ‘Hush hush, Mama’s in the next room. If she hears us we two will be whipt. And Fanny will have a sugar plumb’ ‘Aye cried Maria tis her defending Lynn which makes Mama (Fanny’s stepmother, Mrs Allen, Lynn born and bred) so fond.’  

                                                                           

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

The high-spirited teenage girl

‘Confirmed’ by a stumpy

Fathead Bishop of Norwich

Holy as Humpty Dumpty,

 

Loved her ‘poor abused town,

The land of her nativity’

With a sugar plumb tongue

That would flay the great city:

 

This child of Lynn St Margaret’s

Vicarage garden cabin

Is grandmother to the Novel

Received from Jane Austen.

 

This shy ‘little’ Burney,

Turned the gentlemen pale,

Johnson called her a ‘toadling’

With poison in her tale.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

From Toads in the Halls

Of her riverside Lynn -

Harpies amid the harpsichords -

To High Society and Sin

 

Up the Ladder of Charlotte’s Robes

And those Blue Stocking works,

Joshing the Georgians with Johnstons,

Garricks, Montagus and… Burkes

 

Of bad manners and bad hearts,

Of a King completely mad,

Her tongue lashing down

Between the ingénue and cad.

 

This sly ‘little’ lady

‘Pretending to know nothing’

Cracked a whip of a tale

And each with a sting.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

Her arms so much more gentle

Than Madame Guillotine

Love-Napoleoned by a General

Of the Ancien Regime,

 

Her eye and ear much sharper,

Her well-cut stories fit

Of the innocent youthful Eve

Blessed with beauty and wit

 

Falling through Society

And aching adversity

To Higher Degrees of Love

At the Heart’s University

 

While her creator took tea

With the gossip and the coquette

And endured the small talk

And the paralysing etiquette.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

 

And when a ‘dreadful’ French blade

Plunged into her breast’s

Unaesthetised arteries,

Veins, nerves and flesh

 

And sent the balls of her eyes

Into white cheeks indented

And blood-sprayed Napoleon’s surgeon

As she courteously fainted

 

And they – needlessly - told her

‘Madame, do not restrain

The cries’ the twenty minute scream,

The described indescribable pain….

 

There, where Shelley’s monster genre

Ran out of breath,

Her irony in the soul survived

The romantic death.

 

Let’s have a line for the Lynn literati,

Poetry was born here – and autobiography

But who’s that shy creature with Geoffrey and Margery?

It’s Charles Burney’s novel-bearing little daughter Fanny!

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