The pond is now awaiting plants and water feature. The raised veggie bed has been planted – at this rate the garden is soon going to look immaculate.
Any way, today’s post is about rhubarb. Apparently it’s a bit of a new comer being only about two centuries old on our plates before that it was used as a drug with purgative qualities – which means than my ancestral rhubarb must be fairly close to the first flowering of rhubarb as a pudding rather than a useful asset for any physician. Each generation on my mother’s side of the family is issued with a crown of rhubarb when they set up home for themselves. My rhubarb has come with me wherever I’ve lived- a crown divided and carefully replanted in a new location. I know for sure that it originated from my great-grandfather’s garden – an unusual piece of family history but there you go.
I should note that the Romans thought that anyone who ate rhubarb was a barbarian – not sure where or why that idea came about but it’s a thought to toy with next time you tuck into your crumble.
Chinese rhubarb has its first mention in 2700 BC where it was listed as a drug. It seems to have travelled to Europe during the fourteenth century – it’s description as East Indian rhubarb describes the route it travelled by. And yes it does bring Marco Polo into the equation. Someone once sent Thomas Cromwell – Henry VIII’s Putney minister- a rhubarb seed as a valuable gift. In 1542 rhubarb was worth ten times the value of cinnamon and four times the value of saffron. Apparently physicians wanted dramatic effects so that their patients knew they were getting value for money – think we’ll move swiftly on from that particular image.
In 1653 China opened its borders with Russia and the Russians began to trade in rhubarb – it all sounds very exotic doesn’t it? In 1704 the Russians listed rhubarb as something that they had the trading monopoly on. It was heavily regulated. By the 1860s the bottom had dropped out of the market.
The culture of rhubarb as a plant rather than imported as a drug began in Padua. It arrived in England in it’s plant form as a seed during the reign of Charles I and was cultivated from root division from 1777 onwards. As well it might have been because for part of the seventeenth century it was more expensive than opium. Cultivation gradually extended across the country – most famously to the rhubarb triangle of Yorkshire, thanks in part to the development of cookery during the Georgian period.
And now the sun has come out for the first time today and my garden is looking nicely hydrated. I’ve just got a path to put in using rescued edging stones and an Alnwick rose to move to somewhere that it will be happier – but who would have thought so many historic people could have been lurking in a rhubarb bed.
Prior, Mary. (2009) Rhubarbaria. Prospect Books
In January the Scots handed King Charles I over to the English. He had surrendered to the Scots int he hope that they would treat him better than the English and as a strategy for sowing political disharmony amongst his enemies. The Scots sold him to the English for £40,000.
Many army officers and soldiers were unhappy about the fact that Parliament would even consider negotiating with the king. It was one of the causal factors that led to the Putney Debates. The so-called “Grandees” who had negotiated with the king were seen as having failed the Parliamentarian cause. By August five radical cavalry regiments had elected agitators to state their views. One of their demands was for universal male suffrage, i.e. a levelling. The Grandees, Cromwell amongst them, invited the radicals to debate their demands – resulting in the Putney Debates which started on the 28th October and lasted for three days.
The Book of Sport was issued initially by James I. It identified the need to go to church in the morning and enjoy yourself in the afternoon. Charles I reissued it in 1633. The Norton Anthology of English Literature states that Charles probably republished the text in response to William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix.
Most of Charles I’s problems with Parliament during the first years of his reign stemmed from financial difficulties. Sir Thomas Crewe, the speaker at Charle’s first parliament, was delighted not only that Parliament had been summoned but that Charles expressed the desire to regain the Palatinate.
Henrietta Maria became a mother for the first time in 1629. She had been married for four years but had been only pregnant for six months when she went into labour. The Greenwich midwife was summoned. Upon discovering who it was and that the baby was breech she promptly fainted and had to be removed from the bedchamber, unlike Charles who insisted on staying and resolved to save his wife rather than his unborn child when asked saying, “He could have other children, please God.” The baby was born alive but having been hastily baptised died and was buried with all ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Henrietta went on to have nine more children of whom six survived infancy. The five eldest are pictured above in the portrait after Van Dyck.
On the 29th May 1630 Henrietta gave birth to another baby boy in St James’ Palace. Like his short-lived brother he was called Charles. The baby was baptised into the Anglican church – another flouting of the marriage treaty. In truth, as Whittaker points out, this was not actually the case. Whether Henrietta Maria’s children would be raised Protestant or Catholic had been left deliberately vague. The treaty only said that they would be in their mother’s care until the age of thirteen.
James was the Duke of York from birth and after the death of his elder brother became King James II. And yes, he’s the pretty child in the dress with the red jacket between Mary and Charles. He married Anne Hyde, who was Protestant, when she became pregnant. His daughters Mary (who married her cousin William III of Orange) and Anne would rule in their turn after James was deposed in 1688 following the birth a male heir James Francis Edward who became History’s Old Pretender. When Anne Hyde died James, who was a Catholic, took a Catholic bride, Mary of Modena. The birth of James Francis Edward who would undoubtedly be raised a Catholic proved too much for the English gentry and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 followed. For more about Mary and the problems that led to the Glorious Revolution click 
Elizabeth died in Carisbrook Castle in 1650. I have posted about her short life before. Click 
Henry, who was the Duke of Gloucester died in 1660 from smallpox. After 1649 he was a potential heir to the throne. Prior to his execution Charles I explained to Henry, who was just eight years old, that he must not let Parliament crown him as the kingdom belonged to his brother Charles. After the execution of Charles I it was suggested that the two children, Elizabeth and Henry, should be allowed to join their sister Mary in Holland but instead of this they were put into the custody of the Earl of Leicester at Penshurst in Kent. From there the pair were sent to the Isle of White. Elizabeth did not want to go, her health was failing. She died on 8 September 1650. After the death of Elizabeth there was talk that Henry would be allowed to join his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia – the Winter Queen- but nothing came of it. In the end Henry petitioned the Council of State himself. Cromwell agreed to release Henry into the care of his sister Mary. From Holland he journeyed to Paris. Unfortunately by then Henry was very Protestant and fell out with his mother who was very Catholic. He became a successful career soldier joining his brother James in France’s military campaigns.
Minette who had been born in Exeter on 16th June 1644 married Philip of Bourbon, the Duc d’Orleans having been taken from England to France in 1646. She and her mother lived in exile in the Louvre and she was raised a Catholic. Minette’s marriage caused some raised eyebrows as Philip was a bisexual and there were also suggestions that Minette’s first child Marie was not fathered by Philip who had his own share of sexual scandals. On her death bed she would say that she had never been unfaithful to the Duke. The Duke, however, had become increasingly jealous of Minette’s admirers and imported his own lover into the familial home. Minette had a series of still born children, her mother died and relations with her husband deteriorated still further. Small wonder that Minette turned to art collecting, gardening and engineering diplomacy between England and France. Both Charles II and Louis XIV trusted her knowledge and her skills which she used to help facilitate the secret Treaty of Dover in 1670. She died the same year on 30th June believing that she had been poisoned.
Henrietta Maria has undoubtedly had a bad press in English History – in the past she has either been fitted into the pattern of she-wolf or interfering wife. And yet prior to arrival in England in 1625 and in the weeks afterwards she was praised for her youth and her beauty. Her arrival was, after all, the beginning of an Anglo-French partnership. Not that every was wildly happy about a French Catholic becoming queen.
Charles came to believe that her household was keeping her too French and too intransigent. In part her relationship with her confessors did have that effect and whilst there were few English women in her household she had no need to speak the language – indeed I imagine that girls around the country were being tutored in French in the hopes that they might get a place in her household. Charles came most of all, it would appear, to blame Jeanne St George. Madame St George or Mamie as she was known had been with Henrietta since the princess was a child. She had unintentionally caused a diplomatic incident when Charles and Buckingham insisted on travelling in Henrietta’s coach to Canterbury from Dover along with Buckingham’s mother and wife. There had been no space for Mamie which was a serious breach of French etiquette. The whole affair was repeated when the royal couple fled the plague that summer. Buckingham was offended at the suggestion that his family should not travel with the queen.
Henrietta Maria was fifteen when she married King Charles I – she didn’t speak any English. When she set sail for her new home Marie de Medici, gave her a letter to keep with her. It was a manual for how a good queen and Catholic should behave. Essentially she was to ensure protocol was maintained, not displease her husband and labour ensure he became a good Catholic in order to care most effectively for her new subjects.
Charles I believed in the Divine Right of Kings – that is to say the absolute power of the monarch based on the so-called Great Chain of Being which essentially placed the king at the top of the food chain, next only to God – who had, after all, placed the king in the position and everyone else in their allotted place as well. The concept of Divine Right was written about by James I of England VI of Scotland in a book entitled The True Law of Free Monarchies in 1598 (before he became King of England). In the book James who clearly saw himself as something of a political theorist stated:
Sir John was born in 1577 to a Norfolk family with a colourful pedigree – the Heveninghams claimed to be descended from one of the men who guarded Christ’s tomb. More realistically they originated from Suffolk.
Heveningham died in 1633. He was succeeded by his son William who was returned to Parliament in 1640. He served on the committee of the Eastern Association during the English Civil War so was in all respects a parliament man until it came to signing the death warrant of Charles I – which he refused to do in his capacity of commissioner to the high court. Despite this William did agree the execution of the king in his role as member of parliament which was sufficient to make him a regicide.
Walter Erle is the second of the five knights who found themselves incarcerated in 1627. There were only four men in Dorset who didn’t pay the forced loan demanded by Charles I in order to pay for his wars against the Spanish and the French. The other three were Sir John Strangeways, William Savidge and a man called Tregonwell. All four were arrested but none were put on trial as Charles I did not want the controversy of a judge disagreeing with his right to arrest people because they refused to lend him money. Savidge was sent to Clerkenwell Prison whilst the other three, inclusion Erle, were sent to the Fleet Prison.