Yes But It's Still A Tomb

We're still indoors, in that shadowy vaulted room, enthusing over the tomb of King Juan II of Castile and his wife.

"It is impossible to conceive a work more elaborate than the details of the costumes of the King and Queen. The imitation of lace and embroidery, the exquisite delicacy of the hands and features, the infinitely minute carving of the pillows,"

"the architectural railing by which the two statues are separated, the groups of sporting lions and dogs placed against the foot-boards, and the statues of the four Evangelists, seated at the four points of the star which face the cardinal points of the compass,—all these attract first the attention as they occupy the surface; but they are nothing to the profusion of ornament lavished on the sides. The chisel of the artist has followed each retreating and advancing angle of the star, filling the innermost recesses with life and movement. It would be endless to enter into a detailed enumeration of all this. It is composed of lions and lionesses, panthers, dogs,—crouching, lying, sitting, rampant, and standing; of saints, male and female, and personifications of the cardinal virtues... Were there no other object of interest at Burgos, this tomb would well repay the traveller for a halt of a few days, and a country walk."

Yes, well I'm trying to like it. But it’s still a tomb. Here is a photo held by Cornell University Library, which was taken about twenty years after Nathaniel's visit.

Wonderful workmanship I grant you, but still - it's a fancy box for two dead bodies.

The close-up image above, by the way, is by Ecelan and is taken, with permission, from Wikimedia.

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. 

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.

In my end is my beginning.

So, starting from the end.  This is a copy of Nathaniel's burial record, taken from the net.  And there's something mightily depressing about seeing it in black and white.  Obviously, since he was born in 1806, I was never going to contact him on facebook, but... this is sad.  And why is this much-travelled man being buried in Edgbaston of all places?  And why do they appear to have his age wrong in the burial record - oh but that's minor, clerical errors happen all the time. But why in Edgbaston?

A mystery put aside for another day.  Let's go back gratefully to Nathaniel still alive and receiving impressions and transferring them onto paper, for long-term storage and the ultimate pleasure of people not alive when he was breathing that Pyrenean air.

He's travelling through Basque country to Burgos, ancient capital of Castile. And it's quite...small.

"The extent of Burgos bears a very inadequate proportion to the idea formed of it by strangers, derived from its former importance and renown. It is composed of five or six narrow streets, winding round the back of an irregularly shaped colonnaded plaza. The whole occupies a narrow space, comprised between the river Arlançon, and the almost circular hill of scarcely a mile in circumference, (on which stands the citadel) and covers altogether about double the extent of Windsor Castle."

 He adds that the medieval town has "received a sort of modern facing, consisting of a row of regularly built white houses, which turn their backs to the Plaza, and front the river"

Perhaps those "regularly built" modern houses of his are now bijou holiday lets, renting on the strength of their cute antiquity?  Maybe they've vanished under concrete.  A quick visit via the net to modern Burgos (...aaargh my god it's huge!! No, no it's not: but bigger, yes, obviously bigger.  Has an airport and everything.  Still looks a great place for a tourist though, and still possesses all those creamy white historic buildings and some narrow medievally streets.)

He gets a little prickly about the small size of his Burgos.  We must not patronise it, we Brits, despite its surprising, ah, compactness to our Victorian eyes, which are more used to the great suburban sprawl of London or Brum, or Edgbaston.  But you couldn't build cities as neatly as this in Britain though because of all the rain...:

"The dimensions of this, and many other Spanish towns, must not be adopted as a base for estimating their amount of population. Irun, at the frontier of France, stands on a little hill, the surface of which would scarcely suffice for a country-house, with its surrounding offices and gardens: it contains, nevertheless, four or five thousand inhabitants, and comprises a good-sized market-place and handsome town-hall, besides several streets. Nor does this close packing render the Spanish towns less healthy than our straggling cities, planned with a view to circulation and purity of atmosphere...The humidity of the atmosphere in England would be the principal obstacle to cleanliness and salubrity, had the towns a more compact mode of construction; whilst in Spain, on the contrary, this system is advantageous as a protection against the excessive power of the summer sun, which would render our wide streets—bordered by houses too low to afford complete shade—not only almost impassable, but uninhabitable."


Okay.  Small is not only beautiful in Spain, but also populous, dry, well-planned, hygienic and shady.  Because it's Spain, and we love Spain.

Which brings us to Nathaniel's first attempt to render a picturesque antiquity visually, the Arco de Santa Maria.  What do you think of him as an artist?

Coping with Victorian prose

You can find Well's entire book online where I found it, at Project Gutenberg. A warning, though. Wells was a Victorian, so he wrote Victorian prose.  It can be daunting, especially if you strike something like this in the opening sentence:

"The author of the following letters is aware that his publication would have possessed greater utility, had the architectural descriptions been more minute. He ventures to hope, however, that this imperfection may be in some measure balanced by the more extended sphere opened to whatever information it may contain."

All he means is, he knows he hasn't written the Ultimate Guide to Spanish Architecture, because though that might have been very, very useful for a few architecture fans, this way at least his book will reach a wider audience.

Don't be intimidated by his prose. It's only English.

He warns us that, while not a primer on Spanish architecture, his book is also not some titillating account drooling over 'exotic' Spain. It does not contain Men In Pointy Hoods Doing Weird Catholic Stuff. Instead he claims to stick to honest facts:"...it was his wish to paint what he saw as he saw it."  But without being dull, because even though avoiding deliberate romantic invention he hopes "to enliven it by the introduction of any incidents worthy of notice which came under his observation".

He explains his book is based on letters he sent during two separate journeys to Spain made three years apart, and admits to a change made in the chronological sequence to shape his volume better.

The explanatory Preface is over, and we're into Letter I.

This is addressed to a lady, 'Mrs C-----r', and he is writing to her from the Rue de Richelieu, the most fashionable street in Paris (I told you the Wells family was rich).  From his remarks to her we can build up a picture of what sort of lady Mrs C-----r is.  She attends balls: between quadrilles she makes sparkling conversation with her partners, who have all been to smart places like Biarritz: and she is certainly no blue-stocking, as she blithely admits she knows nothing at all about Spain :  "You professed also, with a modesty always becoming to talent and worth, a complete ignorance respecting Spain...Indeed, the ignorance you profess with some exaggeration, is more or less general in our country."

- So Mrs C----r too is British?

"Spain has been unnoticed and unknown—laid on the shelf with the Arabian Nights—considered a sort of fabulous country, which it would be charming to know, but with which there would never be a chance of forming an acquaintance; and you have contented yourself with a sort of general information respecting it, derived from a few romances and poems...with the addition of some confused visions, in which autos-da-fé and dungeons contrast in a rather gloomy background with laughing majas, whirling their castagnettes to the soft cadences of guitars..."  

(Bullseye, Nathaniel. Women in frilly frocks doing stampy dancing, and the Inquisition lurking in the background. This remained the basic British idea of Spain until the day of the cheap package holiday arrived.)

He reflects with mock-solemnity on how wrong it would be for him to deliberately fool her about this unknown country, because there is absolutely no chance she will ever go there herself to check.  Spain is hot.  Mrs C-----r doesn't do heat.  She nearly had a meltdown recently during a brief spell of warmish weather in Normandy, remember? The time when she was staying in that old wood-panelled chateau, and insisted he shout his conversation to her from a different room entirely because it was so hot she couldn't bear to have any other living being in the same chamber. She even banned her pet dog: "...your favourite of favourites, Caliph, repulsed and uncaressed, hung his silken ears, as he solemnly retreated to coil himself on a distant rug..."

At this point it crosses my suspicious mind that 'Mrs C-----r' may be a literary fiction.  Is Nathaniel just inventing her to provide an excuse for his decision to publish a book about Spain?  To impress us that he is not writing for cash, god forbid, or for personal prestige because, oh no no, he is an English Gentleman Amateur! he wouldn't care about such things.  He is writing to amuse this charming, bored lady stretched on her chaise-longue amid the fatiguing Parisian heat.  He is her Knight Errant, adventuring to Spain for the pleasure of his capricious dame. So he would not dream of boring her (or us) with long, confusing lists of kings called Juan. Instead he is giving her a virtual tour of Spain c. 1842. He can do the same for us.

No, actually I do believe she exists, with her draughty chateau, her shared enthusiasm for Gothic monuments and aversion to heat.  So: he has recently been keeping company with a quadrille-loving but languorous British lady who can afford the rent of a Louis XIV house in or near Caen; she has at least one upmarket pet, the adored Caliph (probably a spaniel - the silken ears give it away); and apparently she and Nathaniel have been enjoying not only the summer "season of insects and al-fresco suppers" together, but "the autumnal equinox" too, complete with its roaring fires and roaring draughts. Cosy.

I notice there doesn't seem to be any Mr C-----r  mentioned.

Not Mrs C-----r, but from the same period.

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.