Montaigne’s Tower

Tags

Essays, folk wisdom, Montaigne, Montaigne's Tower, Philosophy

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart  All Rights Reserved

He who fears he shall suffer already suffers what he fears: Michel de

Montaigne

or, as my granny used to admonish:  If ye fear a fear, it’ll come

upon you.

I doubt she had read Montaigne, but folk wisdom is

watered-down philosophy and not always diluted!

Blissfully Unaware

Tags

blissfully unaware, lack of empathy, own agenda, self-absorbed, unobservant

Some people just don’t notice what is going on around them.

Photo by Candia Dixon-Stuart

Collage

Tags

archetypes, collage, myths, Poetry, prayer, self, transitional state

Regret

Regret: cud-chewing

when you don’t have the stomach

for endless rumination.

Chew the fat; not the cud.

What’s done is done,

so you would be better placed

to concentrate on

management of the future,

though control is limited.

To realise that

need not be fatalistic.

Take life by the horns

and responsibility

for your deeds – not the whole world’s.

Mr Brocklehurst’s Catechism

Tags

catechism, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Mr Brocklehurst, orphanage, Paradise, Pharisee

I have always liked this dialogue from ‘Jane Eyre’

but I have put it into metre and expanded it a little.

 

Where do the wicked go when their death knell

has been tolled, you insignificant child?

Good sir, I believe that they go to Hell.

Describe this place reserved for those not mild,

nor meek.

Sir, it is a pit full of fire.

Should you like to fall into such a place?

(Then you would not join the Heavenly choir.)

I hope to reach Paradise, by God’s grace.

So, how might you avoid a dark decree?

I must try to keep in the best of health;

I must not listen to a Pharisee,

nor to those who slavishly amass wealth.

In short, I must take care never to die.

My God is Truth and yours, Sir, is a Lie.

The Equivocation of the Fiend

Tags

Assizes, Colchester, Dame Alice Lisle, Ellingham, equivocation, Habeas Corpus, John Hickes, Judge Jeffreys, Kings Bench, Lord Chancellor, Machiavelli, Monmouth Rebellion, Moyles Court, Nelthorpe, oysters, Ringwood, The Eclipse, Tower, Wapping, Whigs, Winchester Castle

 

 

THE EQUIVOCATION OF THE FIEND

Maybe a writ of Habeas Corpus will liberate me from my confinement

and then I can steal away from this loathsome Tower and gain passage

abroad, but there is no Court competent to assist me in this wise and now

I am fast losing strength.  I am supposed to be thankful for the protection

I have, while the country demands that a retrospective Act of Attainder

should result in my condemnation for multitudinous murders.

The wheel has come full circle.  A mob had congregated outside my

house in Duke Street and mocked the bills which announced the sale of

my property.  Women screamed, offering me their garters, so that I should

hang myself thereby and men raged, advising me to cut my own throat.

I glugged another bottle of brandy to shut out their clamour.

However, I seemed to have one remaining friend – someone who knew of

my predilection for Colchester oysters.  A barrel had been left for me at

the Tower and I burst its bands eagerly.  Inside there was naught but

shells and a halter.  I apprehended its hint. The delivery youth jeered:

“Canst tell how an oyster makes its shell?”

He is not so dim as he looks.

Imagine! Chief Justice of the King’s Bench at thirty five and Lord

Chancellor before my fortieth birthday.  I followed orders and to this

attribute my rapid promotion and even more sudden declension.

I had another birthday recently and there was none to exercise common

charity towards me, or to share a celebration. I stand accused of a

lack of the milk of human kindness.

I will never be permitted to forget the trial of Dame Alice Lisle. In

contrast, she was deemed to have shown exemplary, even saintly,

compassion and hospitality towards distressed fugitives, but there was

considerably more to the case than was imputed.

I was compared unfavourably to Nero, Satan, Cain and Judas, but I only

sent Whigs to Heaven. It was common practice to lash rogues with the

tongue and, after all, I had cross-examined some of the deepest-dyed

criminals in the land. Their weeping and cries for mercy only served as

an irritant, much like the grit in an oyster shell, but without any valuable

outcome.

How difficult it was to extract the truth from Presbyterian liars! I grew

adept at sniffing one out at forty miles. (Hence the posy of herbs that I

was wont to hold to my nostrils.)  Severities may be properly used, I

believe, in common with Machiavelli.  Particularly in times of threat t

national security.

Yes, Dame Alice, I turned a deaf ear to your pleas and you could not hear

the foreman’s delivery of the verdict, by virtue of your three score years

and ten’s consequent infirmity.

A witch, I thought, whose husband had been a regicide and now the old

crone was denying knowledge of the nature of the indictments against

John Hickes and Nelthorpe, initially denying their presence in her house,

Moyles Court. Subsequently she pleaded that she had understood Hickes’

offence to be merely illegal preaching. She stressed that she had no

sympathy with the Monmouth rebellion, but I persuaded the jury to re-

consider their verdict and, on the third occasion, she was pronounced

guilty, and rightly so, for the Law recognises no distinction between

principals and accessories to treason.

“Let the old witch burn,” I ranted, “and let it be this very afternoon.”

The interfering Winchester clergy made an appeal to me on account of

her age and sex and they gained a respite. Our sovereign commuted

the sentence to beheading, out of his merciful bounteousness.

Now the populace desire that I should share her fate. I am eclipsed – ha!-

a play on the title of the marketplace inn where she spent her final night,

before walking out of the first storey window, onto the scaffold. They

said it should be ever after “The Eclipse,” as it drew all attention from its

neighbouring public house : “The Rising Sunne.”

Barter gave us the information. She had entertained, concealed,

comforted and maintained the fugitive rebels. The Devil had inspired her

to quibble, as do all witches. Equivocation is the nature of the Fiend and

all his subjects. I have oftimes heard his voice in the courtrooms and the

serpent-tongued dame tried to move me by a reminder that she had bred a

brat to fight for James, but if she had been my own mother, I should have

found her guilty, notwithstanding her prevarication that she was being charged

with sheltering Hickes before he was convicted of treason. She stated that

subsequent evidence should not be admitted, since it had not been available.

Very clever: but anyone who harbours a traitor is as guilty as any who bears

arms, I believed, and I hold fast to the same conviction to this day.

“Nay, peace thou monster, shame unto thy sex,

Thou fiend in likeness of a human creature

See thyself, devil!

Proper deformity shows not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman.

Shut your mouth, dame,

Or with this paper shall I stople it.”

The reference was lost on most in court.  Fools pity  villains who

are punished.  Know this: that men are as the time is; to be tender-

minded does not become a sword.

It is more than three years since that fateful day in August in the Great

Hall of Winchester Castle.  Some say that a lady in grey haunts the inn

and that a driverless coach has been seen in the grounds of the Dame’s

Ringwood estate, drawn by headless horses and containing her phantom.

What is that nonsense to me? Her head and body were given up to her

family, for burial at Ellingham, and now the Whigs have all but canonised

her, raving about judicial murder.

Yet, when I attempted to escape from this hell-hole, no one would shelter

me in a cupboard, nor a malthouse, and I was discovered at Wapping and

my disguise removed. No port is free to me; no place that unusual

vigilance will not not attend my taking. So, here I lie, and suffer the

agony of passing these stones: a pain as sharp as the gravel of her drive,

or an oyster’s grit.

Yet I still resort to my brandy. I am bound upon my own wheel of fire.

My reins are rubbed with sulphurous flames. The gods are just and of

our pleasant vices… I waken to hear myself cry in the night and then a

distant rumble of carriage wheels approaches, or is it a more horrific

apocalyptic explosion? Who is it that dare tell me who I am?

“What is that wailing?” I shout to the guard.

“It is the cry of women, my good lord,” he replies through the grille, most

caustically. “Come here, most learned justicer.” And then he laughs,

showing black tombstones in place of teeth.

“I have almost forgot the taste of fears. I have supp’d full of horrors,” I

remark, before I remember the context. How malicious is my fortune that

I must repent to be just.

Equivocation – the only means of survival. She was more skilled in its

employ than I.

 

(The grave of Judge Jeffreys was bombed by German aircraft during the War and his remains scattered.  The grave of Alice Lisle can still be visited in Ellingham churchyard.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright Notice

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Candia Dixon Stuart and candiacomesclean.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Recent Posts

• Tyntesfield
• Let Them Eat Cake
• Our Daily Bread
• Oxford Man Matches Milieu
• Dryad’s Saddle/ Pheasant’s Back

Follow Blog via Email

Click to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 1,345 other followers

Mansplaining Quennet

Tags

euphemism, Father of Lies, generic, mansplaining, quennet, rhetoric, smokescreen

Females also guilty – should be ‘Mankindsplaining!’ (New generic?)

 

Hot air   forked tongues   terminal inexactitudes

filthy whitewash

tranparent smokescreens   inexcusable excuses   unmitigated untruths

hollow rants

iniquitous insinuations  criminal understatements  overblown rhetoric

smooth sham

Father of Lies

sweeping evasions

Master of Deceit

euphemistic gloss

hyperbolic tirades

Hath God said?

rash incitements

hollow rhetoric   smooth tongues  transparent excuses

iniquitous inexactitudes

The Forgiveness Window

Tags

betrayer, crucifixion, discernment, Dorset Museum, forgiveness, glass engraving, Judas, Laurence Whistler, Moreton Church, salvation, thirteenth disciple, thirty pieces silver

More or less, a re-blog, but an apt one.

 

A contribution to the debate as to the ultimate salvation of the

betrayer.

Laurence Whistler created an engraved pane for

Moreton Church, Dorset, UK, in addition to other replacements

for glass destroyed in wartime.

It was rejected and was stored at Dorchester Museum for years,

until after Whistler’s death.  Now it is in position, in spite of its

challenging depiction.

(Judas tree)

Whistler himself had written to The Independent in 1994, from Watlington

in Oxfordshire, after experiencing the rejection of his offer of this 13th pane.

It would only have been visible from the exterior of the church.  It showed

Judas being pulled into Heaven by the rope around his neck.  Some people

are as resistant as that to salvation, I suppose.  Anyway, he commented

that three minutes of agonising strangulation was not to be compared to

the extended suffering of crucifixion.

 

THE FORGIVENESS WINDOW

 

This was to have been a thirteenth blind pane,

seen only from the outside of the church:

replacement for its bombshell-slivered glass.

Judas, the betrayer, hangs from a tree.

His grasp relaxes and thirty pieces

of silver metamorphose into a

c

a

t

a

r

a

c

t

of flowers.

Discernment can come from outside the Church.

Inside some, coin-lidded, opt for cataracts.

Most see through glass darkly; few face to face.

There are several images of the pane which you can access

through Google etc.  Until I visit again and take my own photo,

I cannot reproduce them as they have copyright on them.

The Words Not Spoken

Tags

asphyxiation, Dali, escapologist, lip-reading, Surrealist art, unspoken words

(Dali at 1936 Exhibition of Surrealist Art; Photo- Scottish

National Gallery Art)

 

 

I still re-visit that moment in dreams…

You walked back towards me, your ear inclined.

The car window wouldn’t wind down in time.

We accelerated and you were gone.

 

You’ll never know what I was going to say;

you try to read my lips, but always fail.

I mouthed key phrases incoherently,

like an escapologist in a tank,

 

or Dali inside his diver’s helmet,

suffering a slow asphyxiation.

The impatient driver should take some blame,

but he will not carry it to his grave.

 

In the morning, no sound comes from my throat

and I keep slapping the air with flat palms.

Grumpy Version

Tags

Gainsborough, pencil drawing

Maybe I am just used to observing modern teens.  My version of the

previous drawing is much edgier!