We Meet A Monk We Do Like

We're still in Burgos, we've done the Cathedral and the tomb of El Cid, we're moving swiftly on to Letter VI, yet more tombs, and especially

The Chartreuse of Miraflores. 

Chartreuse to me means green cocktails: but a bit of rootling around on the net and I learn Chartreuse is called Chartreuse because it was originally a drink made by Carthusian monks - Chartreuse being French for 'Carthusian' -  and the Carthusians are a 'contemplative order'.  This means that they...contemplate. So, to all intents and purposes they stay in their monastery and pray.  They don't go out into the world helping the poor, tending the sick, converting the heathen and generally doing good, and so to a certain mindset - mainly Protestant - they and their ilk are rather a waste of space.  They give the whole idea of being a monk a bad name.

Happier days: Zurbaran's painting of St Bruno in the cartuja

It interests me that there is no trace of this attitude in Nathaniel, despite his having a conventional British upbringing and at least one brother who was an Anglican vicar. Nor is it that he is pro-religious.  On the contrary, I get the feeling he is probably pretty much agnostic. He is certainly oddly calm when reflecting that Christianity is a creed whose time has passed.

All the same, the specifically Catholic aspects of Spanish religion - the processions, the emotion, the incense, celibacy, statues of the Virgin, candles and all, which occasionally had Victorian Brits rolling their eyes to heaven or snorting in outright contempt - don't faze him in the slightest. He takes them as they come.  No doubt had he found the Carthusian monks reeling round the cloisters drunk while pawing the local girls he would have passed a dry comment or two.  But he doesn't find that.  He finds instead a sadly dwindled place. The once-great Chartreuse of Miraflores is now home to only four monks and a single elderly Prior, the head of his order, who in former days presided over the great monastery at Xeres (Jerez). But there has been a revolution in Spain, and those in charge of it have found, like Henry VIII before them, that monasteries yield rich pickings.  Only two or three of these cartujas have been spared, and purely because the monarchy has been spared. Basically, if a monastery contains royal tombs, it survives. 

"The great Chartreuse of Xeres contained probably no such palladium, for it was among the first of the condemned: its lands and buildings were confiscated; and its treasures of art, and all portable riches, dispersed, as likewise its inhabitants, in the direction of all the winds."

What Nathaniel calls 'Xeres de la Frontera' modern Spaniards call Jerez, and its name has entered English via its most famous product, a fortified wine which was even more indispensable to Victorian dining tables than it is to ours - Sherry. Naturally he has to glance at this:

"In England the name of Xeres is only generally known in connection with one of the principal objects of necessity, which furnish the table of the gastronome; but in Andalucia the name of Xeres de la Frontera calls up ideas of a different sort.  It is dear to the wanderer in Spain, whose recollections love to repose on its picturesque position, its sunny skies, its delicious fruits, its amiable and lively population, and lastly on its magnificent monastery, and the treasures of art it contained.  The Prior of that monastery has been removed to the Cartuja of Burgos, where he presides over a community, reduced to four monks, who subsist almost entirely on charity.  This amiable and gentleman-like individual, in whom the monk has in no degree injured the man of the world, - although a large estate, abandoned for the cloister, proved sufficiently the sincerity of his religious professions, - had well deserved a better fate than to be torn in his old age from his warm Andalucian retreat, and transplanted to the rudest spot in the whole Peninsula, placed at an elevation of more than four thousand feet above the level of the Atlantic, and visited up to the middle of June by snow storms."

This likeable old guy, "this innocent victim of reform", is ill. He has only just recovered from one serious attack, and now he is bedridden again.

Reform, we feel, is not a word that carries pleasant associations for Nathaniel. 

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.