Now and Then

Then: what Nathaniel saw

Now: it has changed a bit, I agree.

The discrepancy between these two images is not due to Nathaniel's bad drawing skills: the fountain apparently did look different back then.  It had clearly been in the wars, in every sense. According to Nathaniel, when he saw it you couldn't even tell what those four fragmented, beaten-up Cupids were meant to be riding on.

Looking at the modern photo we can see the basin and central column rising from it aren't much altered, but the Cupids and their dolphins(?) have been heavily restored, and there has clearly been a significant rebuild at the top.  Even in Nathaniel's day, when the little statue surmounting the fountain was so damaged the Christ child had vanished altogether, there was  a visible difference in colour between the lower part of the fountain and the upper: so it seems the lower part is much older. The original design is perhaps impossible to guess.  Would an earlier age have chosen to place the vaguely erotic symbols of Cupids and Melusines beneath a statue of the Virgin?   I can't say.  Anyway, as Nathaniel described it:

"This little antique monument charms, by the quaint symmetry of its design and proportions, and perhaps even by the terribly mutilated state of the four fragments of Cupids, which, riding on the necks of the same number of animals so maltreated as to render impossible the discovery of their race, form projecting angles, and support the basin on their shoulders. Four mermaids, holding up their tails, so as not to interfere with the operations of the Cupids, ornament the sides of the basin, which are provided with small apertures for the escape of the water; the top being covered by a flat circular stone, carved around its edge. This stone,—a small, elegantly shaped pedestal, which surmounts it,—and the other portions already described, are nearly black, probably from antiquity; but on the pedestal stands a little marble virgin, as white as snow. This antique figure harmonises by its mutilation with the rest, although injured in a smaller degree; and at the same time adds to the charm of the whole, by the contrast of its dazzling whiteness with the dark mass on which it is supported. The whole is balanced on the capital of a pillar, of a most original form, which appears immediately above the surface of a sheet of water enclosed in a large octagonal basin."

"Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant shit to me"

Heroes! We all have them. Personal and national heroes, men who mirror to us the qualities we most envy, the ones we fervently wish we had ourselves.  But heroism is like taffeta, it is not the same in all lights. A man devoutly admired by one group can be an object of passionate scorn, or even downright hate, to another.  Through Nathaniel's eyes we are about to meet the greatest hero of Christian Spain - El Cid.

"The hero is represented in the most extraordinary of attitudes: the head is thrown back, and the face turned towards one side; the legs in a sort of studied posture; a drawn sword is in the right hand, the point somewhat raised. The general expression is that of a comic actor attempting an attitude of mock-heroic impertinence; and is probably the result of an unattained object in the mind of the artist, of producing that of fearless independence."

This is Nathaniel's damning verdict on an oil painting of El Cid that once hung in the Ayuntamiento - not a very good one it seems.  It was presumably put there by those who genuinely wished to honour the great man whose bones rested amongst them.   But Nathaniel has no time for this picture.  To him it's an artistic failure, rubbish.

Only, is it just the picture he has no time for?  Really he is not just dissing whatever poor provincial artist attempted the likeness of Spain's great preserver: inevitably, by association, he is ridiculing the hero himself. 

El Cid statue in the centre of modern Burgos

This is an unpopular viewpoint, at least in the west.  The statue above was put up only sixty years ago, a mere six years before Hollywood canonised El Cid in the person of Charlton Heston. Like the film, it aims to show El Cid as the magnificent champion of Christian Spain against the Moors, and that is still very much how he is seen by many in Spain today.  But we soon learn that, for Nathaniel, El Cid's hero status is overblown, ambiguous,  untrustworthy - undeserved.

"For those who are satisfied with the orthodox histories of the monks, he is without defects—a simple unsophisticated demi-god. But there have been Mahometan historians of Spain. These are universally acknowledged to have treated of all that concerned themselves with complete accuracy and impartiality; and, when this happens, it should seem to be the best criterion, in the absence of other proof, of their faithful delineation of others' portraits."

The icon of one group will often be the hate figure of another.  I am sensing something significant about Nathaniel, which is that he loves Spain so much not for its triumphant Christian past, but for its lost Moorish civilization. His derogatory attitude to El Cid is the litmus test which proves something profound about him.

Deep, deep  down,  Nathaniel Armstrong Wells Esq. of Piercefield, Monmouthshire, wishes the Africans had won.

NATHANIEL ARMSTRONG WELLS (1806 -1846)

Travel writer. Gentleman. Aesthete.  

Son and heir to the High Sheriff of Monmouthshire. 

- And, unusually for a wealthy Victorian gentleman, also black.
 

Nathaniel Armstrong Wells had the great good luck to be born to wealth and privilege - born into the heart of the English Regency.  He was luckier still in having a cultivated and intelligent mind, and in adult life brought it to bear on the societies of at least three European nations – his own, and those of France and Spain. Some of what he thought and felt he put into a book, The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain. This blog is an exploration of that book.

 

I call him black, but Wells would have been known in his own time as a 'quadroon': somebody with three-quarters European and a quarter African heritage.  In the binary world of racism however percentages tend not to matter.  Wells was visibly not 'white', and what was not white could only therefore be black.  So: black, clever, and privileged, but growing up in a 19th century Britain wedded to the idea of hierarchy - of rich over poor, of white over black, British over foreign.  This message, even when it wasn't being flatly stated out loud, was always in the background hum of the culture.  Was Wells deaf to it?  Most of his countrymen absorbed it untroubled: it was not in their interest to question it.  Did he? Or did he choose to be selectively deaf, to revel in his privileges of rank while pretending not to apply to himself the frequent slights against people of colour?

Let's find out.  Join me as, armed only with the entire internet, we explore this dead man's mind. 

THE WELLS FAMILY OF PIERCEFIELD

First, something of his background. Nathaniel Armstrong Wells was born in 1806, the year the slave trade was outlawed, but was over thirty when slavery itself was finally banned throughout the empire (1838).  Black people in Britain were never slaves in the same way as those in the colonies, but tended to be at least in service. Very much against the run of the odds, how did a black man get to be a wealthy gentleman? How did Nathaniel's father come to own the most splendid estate in Monmouthshire?

Slavery was at the root of both their privilege and colour.  Nathaniel's grandfather, a Welsh gentleman called William Wells, made a fortune in the West Indies: but his grandmother was an enslaved woman called Juggy.  When William Wells died he had several living children (by different mothers) to provide for, and he did: but all the others were girls. And if you remember your Austen, girls tended to be granted modest bequests, while the lion's share of a family fortune invariably went to the eldest son. 

William's only surviving son was Juggy's boy, our Nathaniel's father, who though island-born was despatched to England for his education.  After he completed that, and spent an elegantly idle season or two in London and Bath, he married Miss Harriet Este, daughter of one of the King's Chaplains. Time to begin a family, and also put his great fortune to work by buying an estate. He chose Piercefield, in his father's native Wales, in a land where he had ancestral ties.  Simply by being Piercefield's owner he went straight to the top of the county's hierarchy, eventually becoming a magistrate, High Sheriff, then Deputy Lieutenant.  It was all a very predictable path for a man of his wealth, but always there was the unexpected twist of his colour:  

"Mr Wells is a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro."  

That was the surprised diary entry made by the landscape artist Joseph Farington, after he had sought and got permission from the owner to visit Piercefield's famously-beautiful grounds. Despite their position and their riches, the Wells family were always liable to be dogged by that kind of response.