[From Manx Quarterly, #25]
(By W. RALPH HALL CAINE.)
[fpc: William Ralph Hall Caine was brother to Thomas Hall Caine and employed as a publicist for IoM - his historical researches are not generally considered as contributing much to the history of the Island]
From time to time an attempt is made to revive interest in a very stale controversy, viz., the birthplace of St. Patrick. And now a claim is made on behalf of the Isle of Man. A jest in sober earnest !
The whole subject loses its flavour when we remember that there is not one St. Patrick, but several. Wood-Martin, who is an authority on all points relating to pagan Ireland, says that the idea that there was but one St. Patrick is no more than a popular delusion:" There can be little doubt but that there existed two or three Patricks whose lives have been worked into a strange olla drida. (" Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland," 1902; vol. 1, p. 245.)
Other writers suggest there have been five or six St. Patricks. Is it any wonder, then, that magic genius belonging to Mananan, the god, should manifest itself in our legends of Patrick, the saint?
Another attempt is now being made to establish a vague theory, viz., that Myles Standish was as Manx as-St. Patrick ! The fame of Myles Standish rests upon his championship of the Pilgrims established in Massachusetts in 1620; but great though his deeds were, leading up to the firm establishment of the exiles on American soil, an event which in turn developed into the establishment of the United States of America, time would have obscured the Captain's military glory, as it dims all purely military achievements, if his name had not been enshrined in noble verse by Long fellow. Standish's "courtship" of Priscilla, through the medium of Alden, his secretary, as recounted by Longfellow, added that touch of poetic magic or human interest by which immortality is alone gained.
Standish was not a member of the Leyden congregation, but he sailed in the Mayflower, and that fact clearly shews his profound sympathy with the religious convictions of his fellow voyagers.
A London correspondent writes :
I am much amused at the attempt to make Myles Standish a Manxman. The claim suffers from one grave objection at the very outset. The branch of the Standish family with which Myles is linked were all rigid Roman Catholics; on the other hand, the first European hero of the American colony was a relative, no doubt, but distant, and a staunch Puritan.
It is not, however, a subject in which I feel much interest.
The Oft Recurring Explanation.
Those, however, who by long consideration of the subject and a personal examination of all the Standish families' documents that survive either in Lancashire or the Isle of Man are entitled to express an unbiased view, lean to the conclusion that Myles Standish was a natural son. The rule was, in the Isle of Man, for a son, born out of wedlock, to bear his father's name; in England the reverse rule held good. The investigators do not assert this conclusion as established fact; they say that it is not merely possible, but almost probable, though they have nothing but a chain of circumstances to quote in support of their view. It would, for instance, explain a good deal regarding the inheritance of which Myles believed he had been wrongfully disentitled. The courts were not, however touched by any particular qualms of conscience in those days; so that this particular argument does not go for very much. But then we have the law which exists to this day, whereby the regularity, or otherwise, of an obvious and by implication acknowledged matrimonial union cannot be questioned once either of the two parties has passed out of this life. Here was another custom of this Isle that rendered it distinct and apart from the rule of Lancashire. Lastly we have the Protestantism of the soldier who sailed in the Mayflower, as against the Romanism of his assumed progenitor; and when that Protestantism was tinctured with treason to the Church of England, and we remember how the Church narrowly scrutinized all wills and claims in intestacy, we may fairly assume that Myles Standish would be cheated out of his due in the Isle of Man, if by hook, or by crook, the thing could be done.
Grant Allen in his famous book, " The Evolution of the Idea of God," traces the origin of religion to the worship of a deified or etherealized progenitor. Religion is a very primitive instinct. Many of our Manx families settled in Australia, America, and elsewhere are seized with the unfortunate notion of preparing a family tree and worshipping that. I had a call from a stranger from the Antipodes. He was sent hither on such a mission. Having grown in wealth and station, a family pedigree was the one thing wanted to make everybody supremely happy. I warned him of his danger; but it was no use, having come so far he must go on with his investigations. Before he left the Island, I had one further visit. My worst fears had been justified. He had not got past the nineteenth century before an ugly truth had been revealed. The founder of the family fortunes under the Southern Cross had never been married to his Australian wife. The real wife, the Isle of Man wife, had never left the Isle of Man. She was born here, lived here, died here on a date that precluded all possibility of legitimacy so far as children in Australia were concerned. And they in Australia, who held ; their heads so high, and worshipped at the shrine of a godly ancestor, were no more than the offspring of what I was told they would, under the ghostly counsel of the priests, regard as a cruel, wicked, godless irregular union.
I argued from the facts before me that the praiseworthy ancestor had to a great extent justified an extreme step. Brought up on an Island where only the rich can get a divorce (though it should be equally open to the poor man whose home is desolated), he had done the wisest thing from the Commonwealth point of view-he had vanished from sight here and enriched the new land of his adoption.
My efforts, however, to make the best of a bad beginning to the story were largely unavailing. It was a great blow. So Manx ancestor worshippers beware !
Ask not the name of Myles Standish's mother. Let a generous charity leave all such things in the oblivion to which a kindly fate has consigned them; and concentrate on the removal of the cruel laws still upheld by our Bishop and his Church, which give relief to the rich, but withhold it from the poor.
I remember as a boy that the Rev. T. E. Brown was, for a while, touched with the same madness. This supplied the Rev. Hugh Stowell Brown with the text of a delicious story at his expense. " My brother Tom" was tremendously taken with the importance of heredity, and soon was very industriously planning out the family tree. In the pursuit of his inquiries he was led to visit a poor tailor plying his trade in a Border village ! Sad to relate, the tailor was entitled, sure enough, to a place of honour in the Brown family tree The tailor or his petty huckster's shop, or both combined, killed T. E. Brown's interest in the subject of heredity. "At all events, Tom cannot bear to hear the subject of heredity even mentioned now," declared the elder brother, chuckling with great glee as he walked up and down the hearthrug one arm behind his back, the other in full play, to emphasise a good telling point.
Hugh said, " I do not know that I have a drop of Manx blood in my veins." The poet said " I am a Scotsman. . . Some ancient ghost arises within me,' ancestral for that matter, and I can't control it." But there are people in the Isle of Man who pretend to know far better than either, or both. They have quite a respectable genealogical tree for the Browns I Why didn't my Australian friend "fake" a thing on the same scale !
On my last visit to America, I was the guest of people who quite seriously claimed descent from King Alfred of England !"What was wrong with King Arthur?" I asked; " you have a round table ! And King Arthur lived-if he ever did live-a good while in front !"
To chew the absurdly slender grounds upon which a vast superstructure of myth can be erected, I need only show what is the precise basis for the theory that the plays of Shakespeare were probably written by a Manxman, and that certain of them may have been written on Manx soil.
One George Fenner, writing on June 30, 1599, to his agents at Antwerp (and Venice?), said of the then Earl of Derby (William, the sixth Earl, the ruler of Man 1610-1627) that he was " busied only in penning comedies for the common players."
We have no confirmation of the suggestion that this William Stanley waote plays; but the scrap of gossip with which, in Elizabethan days, a commercial letter might be elaborated, was enough for James Greenstreet in the " Genealogist" of 1890. That was the era of the dethronement of Shakespeare in favour of Bacon. But Bacon's tenure of the throne was insecure in the face of such a revelation regarding William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby. In 1907, the myth was revived at Munich; and in 1913, by M. Abel Lefranc, at Paris. Sir Sidney Lee, the great Shakespearian, has explored every feature of it; but nothing has been found calculated to disturb the honour which the who's civilized world pays to the ashes of the great dead lying at Stratford-on-Avon.
Had the tale evolved itself round the person of Ferdinando (born 1559, died 1594), a certain plausibility would have attached itself. The fifth Earl of Derby was as Moore says, " a patron and friend of many poets of the time, and was himself a writer of verses," and he had married into a family always distinguished for its refinements and attachment to learning-the Spencers, of Althorp, Northamptonshire. He was a patron of a company of players of which Shakespeare was a member. But Ferdinando had the misfortune to die twenty or more years too soon for the authorship of all the Shakespearian plays !
If we go searching through the world trying to hook on to any mythical saint, any soldier, or poet, what about one of Napoleon's mistresses, a Manxwoman, about whom I used to hear much from the late Gomer Williams, author of a great work called "Masqueraders," all about men and women who, donning the clothes of the other sex, successfully duped the world? The stories he could tell were past all believing, but for one fact-they were all stories of real life and actual happenings.
[The actual extract regarding Castle Rushen is moved elsewhere]
Capt. T. E. Harrison tells me that at one time guns were actually cast in the Isle of Man, probably at Peel Castle, and that they bore the name of the then Master of Ordnance, one Foyle. Some of these guns (most of which, after the manner of the period, bore inscriptions and dates) were removed by the Duke of Atholl to his Scottish seat; the contents of the Armoury in 1765 at the time of the Revestment.
Useless things in themselves, but of high value in the place from which they were taken as relics of an age that is past. Two guns formerly belonging to Peel Castle are still in the Artillery Museum, Woolwich; but there is not a single member of the House of Keys with enough spirit to agitate and secure their return.
I am led to believe the present Duke of Atholl is not animated by the grasping spirit that distinguished certain of his ancestors if we are to judge by the voluminous records of the inquiry that preceded the final settlement of all claims. He has not visited the Isle of Man since he was a little boy of no understanding; and as he promises himself another visit before ve:v long, I am satisfied that we shall find him sincerely anxious to help us on our way with our new Museum, by the loan-perchance by the gift of a gun or two (that is if there is any example of Manx ordnance at Blair Atholl), a variety of old papers that shed a light upon the domestic life of the Island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a unique collection of Manx coins. In a word, I am convinced that his Grace will do the handsome with such features of his inheritance as possess Manx interest-consistent with the claims of his own House.
Various correspondents ask me fom further details; some are anxious that I should publish examples of the almost unbelievable stories of men and women, donning the clothes of the other sex, successfully duping the world. These stories are all set out in the late Comer Williams' great book, " The Masqueraders," which still awaits publication, and it is not my business to anticipate its issue. I remember many stories of women marrying women; and living happy lives with their wives, without a thought of misgiving clouding the mind of the spouse, until death claimed the " husband," and a life's well-kept secret was revealed Stories, too, of men passing as women for years and years, and every one a chapter of real life.
"According to Lord Rosebery's work," writes one correspondent, " Napoleon, during his exile at St. Helena, was muck enamoured of the daughter of Col. Wilks. This lady was a famous beauty, and afterwards became the Countess Buchan."
But the curious must wait and see.
I am told that this is at Knowsley. Can anyone confirm this as fact? If so, I don't think the present Earl of Derby is the kind of man to haggle over its return. Every trifle of this kind is a great enrichment of our Island, without in the least appreciable degree impoverishing those making restitution.
There is a painting of Charlotte de la Tremouille, Countess of Derby, in the flush of her womanhood, by Vandyke. A reproduction of this interesting work of a master hand ought to find a place in our Manx Museum — when we get one. Rubens painted her at the time of her marriage. This shews us a bright and graceful girl, wearing a bodice of scarlet satin and a hat adorned with white plumes. " She is looking over her shoulder with an arch smile." Miss Mary Catharine Rowsell has written " The Life Story" (London, 1905) of the great lady, but if Miss Rowsell with all her gifts, and they are many, has not the historical equipoise for a reasoned biography of this character, her work must be included in every Manx library. For those who would go further with their investigations, I would recommend " The La Tremoille Family" by Winifred Stephens. Again the biographer errs on the side of over-enthusiasm, and " The (American) Nation" in reviewing the work in its issue of Oct. 15, 1914, pointed out that "the family had not produced any members fit to take their place beside the great country gentlemen of Holker," i.e., the Cavendishes. But many readers will leave the Tremoilles without asking anything more than that afforded in the pages of Sir Walter Scott.
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Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received
The Editor |
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