Oh No, Poe - low blow you know

                             Captain Thomas Brown became interested in the study of natural history when his regiment was quartered in Manchester, and after a failed business venture in a flax mill (which burned down before Brown had insured it), he began to write books on nature to earn a living, before returning to Manchester where he became curator of the Manchester Museum. Other than his published works, little is known about Brown – 

“It is curious how rarely any contemporary reference is found to these books. The same remark applies to their author. Captain Brown's history is so imperfectly known that it would be difficult to string together any running story. He is not referred to in the Dictionary of National Biography, and this not merely by oversight.” 

‘The Conchological Writings Of Captain Thomas Brown’ - C D Sherborn, in Proceedings Of The Malacological Society Of London, Vol. VI. 1904—1905. p.360. 

Thomas Brown The Conchologist's Text-Book 1833

In 1833, Brown published The Conchologist’s Text-Book, a work which, as Brown acknowledges on his title-page, is ‘embracing’ the arrangements of Lamarck and Linnaeus. That term ‘embracing’ is a nicety, meaning, in effect, ‘borrowing without asking’, or more bluntly, ‘stealing’. In what little information about Brown is available, even his most sympathetic biographers describe his ornithological works as ‘piracy’. 

Thomas Wyatt A Manual of Conchology 1838

Which is ironic, as in 1838 Thomas Wyatt published an American book A Manual of Conchology, which is a blatant paraphrasing of Brown’s book. Consider these two entries, taken at random. Brown described the Prickly Ranella thus: - 

“Ovate, depressed, with acute, short, distinct, muricated tubercles; fawn-coloured; varices lateral, with elongated spines; beak sulcated ; outer lip internally crenated. Two inches and an eighth long. Inhabits the Indian ocean.”  

Brown The Prickly Ranella - Ibid. 1833

Wyatt describes the same species thus: - 

“Species of which the varices have elongated spines; beak sulcated; outer lip internally crenated ; acute, short, distinct muricated tubercles; fawn coloured.” 

Wyatt The Prickly Ranella Ibid. 1838

The same words in a different order – a copypasta job, as we would call it today. To be fair to Wyatt, he does include descriptions of the soft parts of the creatures, and not just the shells, which makes this a work on malacology rather than conchology. 

But the skull-duggery doesn’t end there. The following year, Wyatt ‘wrote’ another book about shells, but in order to circumvent the copyright held by his original publishers (Harper and Brothers), his new publishers (Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell) brought in a literary celebrity to write the introduction and to translate the French passages from Cuvier. The book was not published under Wyatt’s name, but used the name of this celeb – Edgar Allan Poe. That’s right, the same Edgar Allan Poe who wrote The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Murders in the Rue Morgue. 

The eminent conchologist Edgar Allan Poe

 

Now, the ‘official version’ is that Poe’s name was used to popularise the work The Conchologist’s First Book, which was a cheaper ‘school’ version selling for $1.50, as opposed to the $8 price of Wyatt’s larger volume. 

It was an ‘edited’ and ‘condensed’ version, written for a wider readership. What that readership wasn’t told was that quite a lot of this ‘new’ edition was not just Brown paraphrased, it was Brown copied word for word. Here are two examples from the Parts of Shells sections in both books, the first is from Brown and the second is from ‘Poe’. 

Brown - Operculum Ibid.

Poe - Operculum Ibid.

Can you see the difference? No, neither can I. Take a look at the ‘Glossary’ presented in the three books. The first is Brown’s, the second is from ‘Wyatt’, the third from ‘Poe’. 

Brown - Glossary - Ibid.

Wyatt - Glossary - Ibid.

Poe - Glossary - Ibid.

Not convinced? Here is a plate from Brown, and one from Poe. 

Brown - Plate One - Ibid.

Poe - Plate One - Ibid.

Edgar Allan Poe was paid a flat fee of $50 for his ‘work’ on the book, which sold out within two weeks and is the only book by him to go into a second edition during his lifetime, (another reprint, in 1845, did not feature Poe’s name). When word did get out, Poe came over all litigious. He had written ‘in conjunction with’ Wyatt and Professor McMurtrie (another conchologist, and friend of Poe), 

“…my name being put to the work, as best known and most likely to aid its circulation. I wrote the Preface and Introduction, and translated from Cuvier, the accounts of the animals, etc. All School-books are necessarily made in a similar way … This charge is infamous, and I shall prosecute for it, as soon as I settle my accounts with the 'Mirror.”

Poe 'lawyers up'.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote an excellent essay Poe’s Greatest Hit, in which he defended Poe, arguing that Poe’s editing improved Wyatt’s rather technical text, added some necessary taxonomic distinctions and was responsible for popularising science for an American audience. Much as I respect the late Professor Gould, I’d say that this is polishing the proverbial, and leave the last word to Wilson Mizner, “If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from many, it's research.”

The English Way of Death

                     An idiosyncratic take on the Danse Macabre was presented by William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson, in their collaborative The English Dance of Death (1815-16). 

Title Page

Combe was born in 1741, of dubious parentage, and was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he failed to take a degree as in 1762 he received a £2000 bequest from a London Alderman who may, or may not, have been his father. In a prodigious display of extravagance, he dissipated his fortune in short order and lived thereafter as, variously, a soldier, a cook and a waiter. In 1771, he moved to London and began work as a hack writer, writing to order for little money. 

The Diaboliad - Combe 1777

During this time he published The Diaboliad and The Diabo-Lady, a pair of vicious political satires dedicated to ‘The Worst Man in His Majesty’s Dominions’, which proved very popular and ran to numerous editions. He wrote political propaganda for the Pitt government and edited many works by other writers, before he began to publish poetry under pseudonym of Doctor Syntax. Much of his later life was spent in the King’s Bench Prison, a debtor’s prison at Southwark, from where he continued to write. A collaboration with Thomas Rowlandson, the artist, led to The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812), which proved so successful that two more ‘Tours’ followed – In Search of Consolation and In Search of a Wife, which were then published together in one volume. 

Rowlandson - Vauxhall Gardens

Rowlandson was a little younger than Combe and, like him, was accustomed to poverty and profligacy (he was said to sit at the gaming-table for thirty-six hours at a stretch). He, too, had inherited a small fortune (£7,000), which was gone in next to no time, and made a reputation on his engraving of Vauxhall Gardens, the popular London pleasure garden, which brought in illustrative work from Ackermann, the art publisher, (including some that you would not want your wife or your servants to see). 

Frontispiece

In 1815-16, Ackermann published The English Dance of Death, which places the skeletal figure of Death in a very English social setting, with verses by Combe and accompanying engravings by Rowlandson. The religious overtones of, say, Holbein’s earlier version is replaced with the secular world of the early nineteenth century. There are clerics represented, but there is no religiosity in their settings, they are merely a part of the larger community. 

Rowlandson - Death and Time

The whole cycle begins with a dialogue between Death and Time and the first divine to appear is the portly Bishop who is the last character of the first volume. 

Rowlandson - The Bishop

The lay figures from earlier cycles make their appearances, but in thoroughly English settings and with typically English humour. A comparison of Holbein's and Rowlandson's work shows this to effect: -

Holbein - Old Woman

Unlike Holbein’s depiction on the Old Woman as a bent, pitiful crone, Rowlandson’s Old Woman is a spitting, scrawny shrew, dragged raving out into the night as her henpecked husband bids her a fond farewell, as the maidservant, Molly, looks on behind him.

Rowlandson - The Virago

“Farewell, (he cried) my dearest dear!

As I no more shall see you here,

To my fond wish it may be given,

That we shall meet again in Heaven;

And since your daily clamours cease,

On earth I hope to live in peace.

DEATH, far away, my cares hath carried.

‘Molly', to-morrow we'll be married.”

Holbein - The Apothecary

The Apothecary is represented in the guise of a Quack Doctor, hawking his potions to a line of patient patients, as Death grinds out his slow poisons behind a curtain.

Rowlandson - The Quack Doctor

“See how his Visage he disposes,

As his hands measure out the doses;

While his round paunch most truly tells,

He never takes the Drugs he sells.”

Holbein - The Drunkard

The Drunkard becomes the English Sot, dead drunk and carried away in a wheelbarrow, as his carousing companions carry on their roistering and boozing in the thatched tavern behind.

Rowlandson - The Sot

“Some die with hemp around their gullets,

And some from balls and some from bullets:

But 'Twas the fate of poor JACK MARROW,

To breathe his last on a Wheel-barrow.”

Holbein - The Lady

The Lady is there too, with her finery and feathers, and Death attends her as a fawning suitor, in periwig and tail coat.

Rowlandson - The Coquette

“Lady, you now must quit your home,

For the cool grotto of a tomb.

Be not dismay'd ; my gallant dart

Will ease the flutt'rings of your heart.

He grinn'd a smile - the jav'lin flies

When Betty screams - and Flavia dies.”

Holbein - The Ship at Sea

And for a maritime nation, there is peril on the Sea. Death comes as the lifeboat founders, and those within all come to grief.

Rowlandson - The Sailors

“They see Death sitting at the Helm;

And, as the mountain seas o'erwhelm,

Amid the Storm's tremendous roar,

One shriek they give and all is o'er.”

Holbein - The Soldier

All is not slapstick and japery, however. There are some poignant plates – none more so than the Soldier. Here he is a raw recruit, marching off to the beat of the recruiting sergeant’s drum but failing to see that the sergeant is Death. He dreams of martial glory, over the hills and far away, and he leaves his love with a tender kiss and a squeeze of her hand – but she knows better.

Rowlandson - The Recruit

“The Sexton says he knows you well,

And 'tis an idle tale you tell:

That your recruits are always slain,

And never see their homes again.”

Holbein - The Child

The Child is taken, in its cot as his drunken wet-nurse slumbers in a chair. His mother, who has left the babe behind while she goes out gadding on the town, returns home to find her offspring dead.

Rowlandson - The Child

“Death rocks the Cradle, as you see,

And sings his mortal Lullaby.

No shrieks, no cries will now its slumbers break;

The Infant sleeps, ah, never to awake!”

It is all very, very English – by turns sentimental, disrespectful, bawdy, eccentric, self-aware, educated and fond of corny puns. The Last Stage anyone?

Rowlandson - The Last Stage

Dancing in the Dark

Considereth this, ye folkes that been wyse,

And it emprinteth in your memoriall,

Like thensample which that at Parise

I fonde depict ones vppon a wal

John Lydgate Prologue - The Daunce of Machabree c.1426

                       Saints Innocents Cemetery (Cimetière des Saints-Innocents) was the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris, originally a site of individual tombs, but when the demand for burials inside the city exceeded the space available in the cemetery, mass grave pits, each holding about 1,500 bodies, became the normal means of internment. Charnel houses were built around the cemetery walls, in which the bones of the dead were stacked. 

Saints Innocents Cemetery c.1550

On the south side back wall, in an arcade below the charniers, was painted one of the earliest pictorial depictions of the Dance of Death (danse macabre). It depicted a chain of thirty figures, from Pope and Emperor down to the humbler members of society, linked hand in hand, the living with the dead, a stately dance with Death mocking the sinners as he summons them to their graves. John Lydgate, the English monk and poet, was in Paris in 1426, just as the mural was being completed, and on his return home to Bury St Edmunds he published an interpretation of the text that accompanied the French painting. 

Death and the Pope - John Lydgate The Daunce of Machabree 

This obviously made quite an impression, for in 1430 the town clerk John Carpenter (a close friend of Lord Mayor Richard ‘Dick’ Whittington) commissioned ‘at great expense’ a series of painting of the Dance of Death to be accompanied by Lydgate’s poem and placed in the cloister of old St Paul’s Cathedral (these were painted on wood panels rather than onto the cloister walls – they were destroyed when the cloister was demolished in 1549, on the orders of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset). The fashion for the Dance programme, often known as Daunce of Poulys [Dance of (St) Paul’s], spread throughout the land. It is thought that this popularity was a reaction to the various famines, blights and plagues that ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages, with the prospect of an unexpected death was an ever-present fact of life. These warnings of the transience and fragility of mortality, memento mori, served as a reminder that death might come at any time, and that one should always be prepared to, quite literally, meet one’s maker. The danse was also a reminder that death was no respecter of rank, occasion or circumstance, and would come to all in time, whether Pope, Emperor, King, man, woman or child. 

Hans Holbein - Les Simulachres Lyon 1538

Developments in woodblock printing and the invention of Gutenberg’s press made the theme a popular subject for graphic artists, and the series produced by Hans Holbein the Younger in the 1520s is perhaps the finest example of the genre, (with the 1538 volume published in Lyons under the title Les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort, autant elegamment pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginees perhaps the finest of all). 

Hans Holbein - Dagger handle and hilt

Holbein also made a beautiful dagger handle and hilt of the same design. Each of Holbien’s images is a miniature masterpiece, perfectly composed and executed, managing to imbue each tableau with emotion, wit and individuality. The skeleton Death comes for each of his victims, sometimes expected, more often not, sometimes with a musical instrument to charm them away, sometimes simply leading them quietly to their fate, sometimes wrestling them violently to their end. Holbein uses his skill to highlight each individual portrayed, with immense detail and elaboration in the pictures of the Pope, Emperor and King adding majestic dignity to their situation, and in contrast simpler, stripped down outdoor settings for the more human stories. Each picture tells its own story, but Holbein’s intent is not moralistic or didactic; there is humour and satire, but it does not detract from or dominate the overall message – that Death is inevitable, and all are equal in the grave. Death, accompanied by devils, slips a comforting arm around the Pope. He wrests the crown from the head of the Emperor and points the Empress to her pit; he plucks a Preacher from his pulpit, and manhandles a miserable Monk away from his moneybox. 

Some of my favourites are:  

Han Holbein - The Nun

The Nun, who kneels before her altar, clutching her rosary beads, but turns away from her prayers to smile demurely at her lover, who sits on her bed and plucks at a lute. This youth is clad in the fashion of the day, with his slashed doublet and hose, and soft hat, and accompanies himself as he sings his love song to the distracted nun. Her cell is richly decorated, with heavy curtains hanging around the bed, glazed windows and an elaborate altarpiece with carved finials, small devotional statues and a pair of candlesticks (wax candles were a luxury). The couple have not seen Death’s overturned hourglass lying on the floor in the corner, nor do they see Death himself, disguised as an old woman, delicately extending his hand to snuff out the candle (and the life) of the nun. 

Hans Holbein - The Child

The Child; in a tumbledown hovel a mother stirs at the family mess steaming on the fire set in the floor. There are holes in the walls and the roof, and bare, rough beams in what looks more like a byre than a home, (contrast this to the riches of the nun). Death is leading an infant out through the doorway by its pudgy hand, almost with a spring in his step. The child looks back, stretching out an arm to its mother in what could be mistaken for a good-bye wave. She has not had time to stop stirring the pot, but raises her hand to her brow in anguish. In a magnificent economy of line, Holbein delineates her pain and incomprehension in all its stark intensity. 

Hans Holbein - The Old Man

The Old Man; inside the cemetery walls, an ancient man shambles towards an open grave, leaning heavily on his stick on one hand and supported on the other by a skeletal dulcimer-playing Death. The hour-glass stands on the cemetery wall, upright; its sands have finally run through. This is not an unexpected taking, time has runs its true and measured course. The Old Man turns his bowed head towards Death, almost in thankful recognition, and Death, delicately holding his arm, inclines a skull almost in tender pity. Death comes to all; sometimes, as with the Child, in untimely haste - sometimes, as here, in his own good time.

Just as an aside, when it was decided that the Saints Innocents Cemetery was full, in the 1760s, it was decided to move the bones of the dead into the disused mines below Paris – the famous catacombs. When the mass graves were opened, they were found to contain not bones but tons and tons of fat. Bodies need oxygen to decompose, but starved of it, the soft tissues and the very bones themselves will eventually turn into margaric acid. The grave pits were up to 60 feet deep and full of the stuff. It was turned over to the fat boilers and chandlers, who converted it into soap and candles! The inhabitants of Paris who had primarily buried their ancestors were now presented with a second chance to cremate them, in a weird sort of a way.

More dancing with Death tomorrow.

Nae Skinking Ware

                       When Robert Burns bought a mare, he called her Jenny Geddes, in honour of the stool-casting Edinburgh virago. He described his horse as his ‘Pegasean Pride’ in his poem ‘Epistle To Hugh Parker’, and, in a letter to James Smith dated June 30^th 1787, as ‘…one of the Rosinante family,’ (Rosinante was Don Quixote’s mount). Burns is the polar opposite of Edmund Spenser in my personal pantheon of heroes. I started off hating him, viewing him, as Jeremy Paxman once described him, as the ‘King of Sentimental Doggerel’, what with his pony-tail, free-masonry and philandering (…an estimated thirteen children by four different women) – all shortbread and tartan - but the more I read, the more I liked him. Robert (never, ever Rabbie. He did call himself variously Robin, Rab, Rab Mossgiel, Rab the Rhymer, Robert and in his formal letters he often signed them Robt. All that Rabbie nonsense is one of the reasons I didn’t like him – I was so pleased to discover it is a modern affectation); Robert Burns was born into poverty in Ayrshire, Scotland, in 1759. 

Robert Burns

What little education he had was largely from his father, and much of his youth was spent as a farm labourer,  which later led to the sentimentalising Edinburgh literati to describe him as a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, but Burns was pragmatic about the prospects of fame and fortune–  

“' When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,' you will bear me witness, that when my bubble of fame was at the highest, I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful resolve.”  

(Letter to Mrs Dunlop, January 15^th 1787).  

'When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,' is a quotation from William Shenstone’s Elegy VII (He Describes His Vision to an Acquaintance); Shenstone was one of the earliest influences on Burns’s poetry, and remained one of his favourites throughout his life; he was also, by the way, the first person to use the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ in writing, 

“I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money”. 

Shenstone 1741 in Works  Vol. 3 (1791) Let. xxii.  

Shenstone - Works Vol 3 (1791) Letter xxii

Floccinaucinihilipilification is the longest, non-technical word in English (it is one letter longer than antidisestablishmentarianism) and means – ‘the act or habit of describing or regarding something as unimportant, of having no value or being worthless.’ 

One of Burns’s best known works, due in part to its being recited at every Burns Night Supper worldwide, is To a Haggis.  

“Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face. 

Great chieftain 0' the puddin-race! 

Aboon them a' ye tak your place,  - painch, tripe, or thairm: 

Weel are ye wordy o' a grace  - as lang's my arm." 

The Scots comedian Fred MacAulay told the story on QI that a friend of his had the poem translated into German for a Burns Night Supper there, and when the poem was translated back, the line ‘Great Chieftain of the Pudding Race’ was rendered as ‘Mighty Führer of the sausage people!’ 

Haggis

The first recorded recipe in English for Haggis comes from Lancashire and not, as you may expect, Scotland. From about 1430, the Liber Cure Cocorum is written in Middle English in the dialect of North-West Lancashire, and the recipes are presented in verse form (possibly as a mnemonic device, to help the cook remember them).  The recipe for Hagese (Haggis) reads: -

The heart of sheep, the kidneys you take,

Through the bowel naught you shall forsake,

In the turbulence made, and boiled well,

Hack all together with good parsley,

Hyssop, savory, you shall take then,

And suet of sheep take in, I teach,

With powder of pepper and eggs [a] good quantity,

And seethe it well and serve it then,

Look it is salted for good men.

In winter time when herbs been good,

Take powder of them I know indeed,

As savory, mint and thyme, quite good,

Hyssop and sage I know by the Rood.

A slightly later (c.1450) recipe reads: -

xxv. Hagws of a schepe.—Take þe Roppis with þe talour, & parboyle hem; þan hakke hem smal; grynd pepir, & Safroun, & brede, & Ʒolkys of Eyroun, & Raw kreme or swete Mylke: do al to-gederys, & do in þe grete wombe of þe Schepe, þat is, the mawe; & þan seþe hym an serue forth ynne.

Haggis of a sheep. Take the ropes [intestines] and the tallow [fat, suet] and parboil then, then hack [chop] them small; grind pepper and saffron and bread and yolks of eggs and raw cream or sweet milk: do all together, and do [put] in the great womb of the sheep, that is the maw [stomach] and then seeth [boil] them and serve forth at once.

Hagws of a schepe c. 1450

A pudding made from the pluck (heart, liver and lungs) of an animal was nothing new however. The Romans made them from the innards of pigs, although the pluck was finely minced and mixed with fruit before being stuffed into the intestines. 

Homer Odyssey Book XX

In Book XX of the Odyssey, Homer describes Odysseus as being in a tumultuous state like a ‘… paunch filled with fat and blood, ready to be cooked quickly, he rolled hither and thither.’ Which may be haggis or may be black pudding.

Tonight's tea...

Casting the Stools

                      There are times in history when a seemingly insignificant incident can result in momentous consequences. The heir presumptive to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a passion for trophy hunting – in his diaries he records over 300,000 kills – but when he himself was shot, in Sarajevo on June 28^th 1914, it was the catalyst that sparked the First World War. A seemingly more trivial incident also resulted in a war that also caused countless deaths, including that of the King of England - a woman threw a stool at a bishop. 

A Woman throwing a Stool at a Bishop

We need a little back-story. When King James I of England (and VI of Scotland) died in 1625, he bequeathed his throne, and an unshakeable belief in the Divine Right of Kings, to his son, Charles. Although he had been born in Scotland, Charles’s Scottish coronation did not take place until 1633. It did not go well. Many Scottish divines felt that the form of the ceremony, using the full Anglican liturgy, was tainted with a little too much Romanist Popery. Their fears were confirmed when Charles continued his father’s policy of Episcopalianism in Scotland (i.e. Church authority imposed by Bishops), rather than their favoured system of Presbyterianism (i.e. without Bishops). Charles had appointed William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury, a man noted for his antipathy to Puritanism and his preference for High Church practices. Laud oversaw a revision of Edward V’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which was introduced to the Scottish Church as the prescribed liturgy in 1637, at St Giles Church, Edinburgh. 

Title Page - The Book of Common Prayer

On Sunday July 23^rd, the Dean of Edinburgh, James Hannay, stood before the congregation with the book open in front of him. The male members of this congregation had taken their places in the pews of the church, the women, as was the custom, were seated in the aisles on stools they had brought with them. There were murmurs and dissatisfaction in the air as Hannay began to read from the new prayer book. Suddenly, a street-market seller, Jenny Geddes, stood up and shouted, “De’il gie you colic the wame o’ ye, fause thief; daur ye say mass in my lug," (The Devil give you cramps in your belly, false thief; dare you say mass in my ear), and as she did she snatched up her fald (folding) (or maybe a ‘cuttie’ or three-legged) stool and hurled it at the head of Hannay. 

Riots in the Church

The rest of the congregation erupted in tumult; bibles, sticks, stones and more stools were thrown at the ministers. The Bishop of Edinburgh took to the pulpit and called for calm, but the riot continued until the Provost’s officers managed to clear the mob from the church. Hannay returned to the pulpit and resumed the service, but the crowds outside continued to shout their disapproval, stoned the church and broke its windows, and threatened to break down the doors. As the clerics left the church, a jeering crowd followed them, shouting, “Pull them down! A pope—a pope! Anti-Christ—Anti-Christ.” Rioting spread throughout the city – the Earl of Roxborough, who had the Bishop in his carriage, was pelted with stones and narrowly escaped with his life. The Provost and the magistrates were besieged in the City Chambers, but managed to negotiate a truce with the crowds, and a committee, known as the Tables, was appointed to negotiate with the Privy Council. 

King Charles I, in his typically imperious manner, rejected calls for the withdrawal of the Anglican Liturgy in Scotland, which sparked further riots throughout Scotland and caused a revitalization of the National Covenant there. The Covenanters were Presbyterians who rejected any attempts to alter their form of religion and worship, and a great gathering at Greyfriars Kirkyard in 1638 signed and distributed copies of the Covenant across Scotland. An army was raised to oppose the King’s wishes by force, and Charles, in turn, marched some 20,000 men north to counter it, in what were called the 'Bishops’ Wars'. 

The Reasons for the Church of Scotland's refusal 1744

They met at Berwick in 1639, where there were minor skirmishes until a compromise was reached, and the matters referred back to a General Assembly and the Scottish Parliament. The following year, Charles reconvened the so-called Short Parliament in England, with a view to raising more money and men, but the Commons sought to redress previous grievances first, leading Charles to reject their calls and dissolve the Parliament once again. Further warfare with the Scots was unsuccessful, as the Crown lost Northumberland and County Durham to them, and Charles was again, cap in hand, forced to re-call Parliament. This Long Parliament also opposed the King, this opposition eventually leading to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (which included the English Civil War). 

The 'Westminster' Directory - which replaced The Book of Common Prayer

Oliver Cromwell would become Lord Protector of England during the Commonwealth, and both Charles I and Archbishop Laud would be beheaded on charges of treason. Jenny Geddes’s ‘Casting of the Stool’ can be said to be the opening shot of those Wars – a woman throwing a stool at a bishop led to the death of a King.