#St. Edward's Chair | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

princessanneftw · 11 months

Text

The Princess Royal interview: ‘I’m not sure that rewilding at scale is necessarily a good idea’

With conservation close to her heart, HRH explains what’s needed to save animals under threat and how the monarchy plays its part

By Jessamy Calkin for The Telegraph

Inside St James’s Palace there is a bit of a flutter about the weather. Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal has several engagements today, and things are not looking good; due to wind, the helicopter might not be able to land at the designated sites, which will make travelling times to and from events longer.

The staff are waiting to be informed by the police, who are in touch with the helicopter pilot. HRH, as everyone seems to call her, has not yet been told.

She has a lot to fit in: directly after our interview, she is off to a meeting about Gordonstoun school, in London, by car, then by helicopter to give a speech at an English Rural Housing Association conference in Bedfordshire, followed by a visit to the Aircraft Research Association, where she will unveil a plaque, then back to St James’s Palace to change for evensong at The King’s Chapel of the Savoy, where she will be reading the lesson for the Royal Victorian Order.

Her day will finish at about nine, when she will be able to eat. Quite often she has a dinner engagement as well. Next week she is going to Mumbai for four days.

Not for nothing is she known as the hardest-working royal. She is involved with more than 300 charities, organisations and military regiments, and last year carried out 200-plus engagements – more than any other member of the Royal family.

Her first official engagement was at the age of 18; shortly afterwards, in 1970, she became president of Save the Children – a position that led to her being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize – and her work with that charity continues to this day.

Early on, her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, advised her to pick the charities she was interested in – and her interests have multiplied.

But one charity that is particularly close to her heart is the Whitley Fund for Nature, which is why I’m here. Started by Edward Whitley OBE as the Whitley Awards, WFN is now celebrating its 30th anniversary, and the Princess has been a patron for 24 years.

The annual ceremony takes place at the Royal Geographical Society in London and is colloquially known as the Green Oscars; WFN distributes grants totalling around £500,000 to worthy international winners.

So far, £20 million has been awarded to 200 conservationists across 80 countries. And the Princess has never missed a single ceremony, presenting the awards and delivering heartfelt speeches.

HRH is quite probably the most respected member of the Royal family. Her lack of pomp and ceremony and the low-key dedication with which she carries out her duties is much admired. There is no whingeing. She refused titles for her children, Peter and Zara.

She is well known for her dry sense of humour. She is an exceptionally accomplished horsewoman and in 1976 became the first member of the Royal family to compete in the Olympics; she had won Sports Personality of the Year five years earlier. She famously resisted an attempted kidnap in 1974.

She has also become an inadvertent style icon, often rewearing outfits she first wore decades ago, which is both charmingly thrifty and impressive in that she can still fit into them, and she seldom buys anything that is not made in the UK.

She recently made a good-natured appearance on her son-in-law Mike Tindall’s podcast The Good, the Bad & the Rugby and she seems like an all-round good egg.

She has both gravitas and spirit – there was some very moving footage of her accompanying her mother’s coffin on the long journey from Balmoral to Westminster Abbey.

Back in St James’s Palace, Charles, her private secretary, is arranging the chairs, anticipating where she might like to sit. HRH arrives in a striking bright-green suit over a striped silky shirt and heads smartly for a different chair than the one offered.

How did she first get involved with Whitley? ‘That’s entirely Edward’s fault,’ she says in her crisp voice. ‘But the common denominator is Gerald Durrell.’

The Princess grew up reading Durrell’s books and became patron of his zoo in Jersey, part of what is now the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, in 1972. ‘He very kindly asked me to become involved in the zoo – as it was then – in Jersey, and Edward [later became] one of Durrell’s trustees.

‘He and I had similar beliefs in what Gerald was doing. Apart from the fact that Gerald wrote very good books, during his travels he seemed to understand better than most the impact on the populations in which animals lived and the relationship between them and their animals.

‘Being told you have to save this, that and the other is all very well but have you been there? Have you ever tried living in that environment to find out what that means to them? Because the fundamental point is that unless the conservation comes from the local area, it won’t be sustained.’

No one is going to save an animal just because they’re told to. ‘You’ve got to work out how the animals are going to survive with the people who live there, who will be the ones who make sure that it works.’

What was Durrell like? ‘Every bit as entertaining as you would think. His humour but also his understanding of the relative importance of things in other people’s lives was absolutely fascinating – and he was spot on.’

Durrell said he felt ‘sympathy for the small and ugly; since I’m big and ugly I try to preserve the little ones’. He was an expert on captive breeding, with a view to releasing into the wild, and he tended to select animals that were close to extinction, or those that could best be helped, or just ones that were not very charismatic.

‘Yes, not the sexy ones,’ says the Princess. ‘Or the obvious ones. His approach was very holistic. He understood the impact of habitat – not just on one species but how all of the things that lived in that habitat related to each other and that you couldn’t replicate that instantly somewhere else – it was very specific to an area.’

Gerald Durrell died in January 1995, of septicaemia. He was an alcoholic and had successfully received a liver transplant but died of complications it gave rise to. ‘He told me that there was no point doing a transplant because his old liver had got used to being fed all the things he’d been given to eat and drink in order to make deals as he went round the world,’ the Princess says, smiling.

Durrell’s legacy is long. One of his innovations was to establish training for conservationists from around the world. The first trainee went on to become the first director of the National Parks and Conservation Service in Mauritius, and thousands of students from 151 countries have since attended the centre, whose graduates became known as Gerald Durrell’s Army.

This became the title of a book by Edward Whitley, who travelled round the world to assess the progress of some of the trainees and the animals they were conserving – such as the largest eagle in the world in the Philippines and Alaotran gentle lemurs in Madagascar.

To launch the book in 1992, Whitley was invited to give a talk at the Royal Geographical Society, and he asked the Princess to come along. It was at the book launch that he decided to set up the charity.

‘I sat down with Nigel Winser, who was the deputy director of the RGS and a long-time friend, and we designed what became the Whitley Awards on the back of a napkin,’ he tells me. In 1999, Whitley asked the Princess to become a patron. By then, ‘Attenborough was already on board, which encouraged her to think it wasn’t a fly-by-night organisation which would crash and burn’.

The awards focus on community-based conservation projects around the world. In order to qualify, each project has to be up and running – it cannot be a pipe dream. Initially there was only one award; this year there were six – of £40,000 each in project funding – plus a Gold Award of £100,000, given each year to a past winner in recognition of their outstanding contribution to conservation.

‘The reason WFN is so effective,’ says Alastair Fothergill, whose company Silverback made the acclaimed TV nature series Wild Isles, and who like Attenborough is a WFN ambassador, ‘is because its grants are awarded at the very cutting edge of conservation, where relatively modest funds can go a long way. Over the years, the fund has kickstarted the careers of many pioneers who have become leading lights in conservation.’

This year’s projects included safeguarding seabird nesting sites in Mexico; establishing ‘lion guards’ promoting coexistence in Cameroon; and protecting pangolins in Nepal, lemurs in Madagascar, freshwater fish in Lake Victoria and saiga antelope in west Kazakhstan. Each one heavily involves local communities.

In addition, WFN provides continuation funding for award-winners. To mark the 25th anniversary of Whitley, Kate Humble, also an ambassador, and Attenborough hosted an event at the Natural History Museum to help raise £1 million for continuation funding.

‘It was the first really big fundraiser we had,’ says Humble. ‘And one of the donors underwrote the entire cost of the event – so everything raised went into the continuation fund.’

The RGS ceremonies are joyous events. In addition to being presented with their award by the Princess Royal, each winner has a short film made of their work, narrated by Attenborough, screened at the event. ‘I’ve been going for 20 years,’ says Humble, ‘and every year I’m blown away by the winners – what they’ve overcome, what they’ve achieved.

‘You hear so much bad news, and you think, you know what? The world can be OK because people out there are doing this stuff – it’s demonstrable, it’s scientifically rigorous and it’s working. [It’s] an incredibly uplifting and inspiring evening.

‘And every year I watch Princess Anne speak and she never sounds like she’s reading someone else’s words. She cares deeply about what this charity does and what these people who win the awards have achieved – she is not a figurehead just trotting out nice words and providing a photo op. She could run the charity, she knows it so well and cares about it so deeply.

‘I’m not anti-royal,’ says Humble, ‘but neither am I someone who would go and wave a Union Jack. But when I see her I think, frankly you’re worth whatever it is we pay.’

HRH talks with fluency and knowledge on every subject. ‘She’s like a sponge – it’s unbelievable the information that’s stored in her brain,’ said her daughter Zara in an interview for ITV’s Anne: The Princess Royal at 70. ‘It’s quite annoying as well.’

She needs to know a lot because she works with a diverse range of charities, taking in early years, healthcare, microfinance and animal welfare. Promoting collaboration between charities is key. ‘I do a lot of that,’ she says now. ‘I have meetings bringing them together which they all seem to enjoy, though sometimes it’s a bit illogical.

‘Knitting together all the international NGOs is important, but we need to look slightly outside the box – can we do this better, are there ways of helping people to be more sustainable?’

The Princess does occasionally discuss conservation with the King, she says, but she won’t say if they always agree. And her grandchildren? How does she teach them about conservation? (She has five, four girls and a boy.)

‘I don’t see so much of them but making the point that they live in an area which they shouldn’t take for granted is important I think; both my children are aware of that.’

Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, where the Princess and her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, live in an 18th-century manor with 730 acres of parkland, has some beautiful trees – ‘the ones that survive – quite a lot don’t, we live on Cotswold brash which is not popular with plants; but having said that we have beeches.

‘You’ve just got to live with what’s there and make sure it doesn’t get overwhelmed. I’m not sure that rewilding at scale is necessarily a good idea – it probably is in corners, but if you’re not careful you rewild all the wrong things because they are just the things that are more successful at growing.

‘My biggest row at home is ragwort. Lots of people think that ragwort is absolutely brilliant because butterflies love it, but it’s not good for the horses [it is toxic]. I would say don’t take all the ragwort out, just where the horses are – but it’s quite a delicate balance.’

There are, she says, ‘quite a lot of horses at home, but they’re other people’s as well’. She rides whenever she can. ‘It’s a very good place to observe nature from.’

The Princess supports several horse-related charities, and became patron of Riding for the Disabled in 1971, and president in 1985. ‘It was just becoming a national body when I was invited to become a patron – at that stage I knew nothing about disability but the concept that ponies or horses could make a difference was obviously interesting and I knew about them. No matter what the disability was, the answer was, if they’d like to ride, we’ll give it a go. The commonality of the experience was important.’

Essential things for running a charity, she says, are evaluation and thinking of the long term. She cites the influence of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children, ‘who constantly evaluated programmes to see if they were making a difference, whether they were doing the right things and whether people were invested’.

And it’s important to keep projects focused and manageable. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that scale is the thing that defeats any good idea, because it can get to a size where people can’t cope.’

She has spoken in the past about the huge value of long-term commitment, in terms of the constitutional monarchy as well as in charity work. ‘Seeing things in the long term is a challenge,’ she says now, ‘but maybe part of our [value] – as a family – is long-term continuity, because the long-term view is quite hard to come by. And I think we can do that.’

May I ask what she might have done as a profession in another life? HRH laughs and looks vaguely impatient. ‘You can ask but I’ve no idea.’ Does she ever think about that?

‘Not really, and it’s way too late to have those concerns – in a way the fortunate part of my life has been the broad spectrum, to see so much. Not having a very specific interest has been a bonus, I suppose. We all have ways of doing things and with Whitley it is the practical aspects of what they do, and how to support them [that has been my focus].’

Edward Whitley, a member of the wealthy Greenall Whitley brewing family, set up Whitley Asset Management in 2002, alongside its finance director Louise Rettie, to serve a small number of clients. But there had always been animals in his life – his great-grandfather founded a small charity called the Whitley Animal Protection Trust; his great-great-uncle Herbert was an eccentric animal breeder who started Paignton Zoo.

In Edward’s office is a stuffed cockatoo that belonged to Herbert and a photograph of Mary, his favourite chimpanzee. Mary was famous for riding around on her tricycle and walking the dogs, or taking visitors by the hand and leading them round the zoo.

Edward studied English at Oxford then went into banking, joining NM Rothschild & Sons in 1983. He left in 1990 to write: Gerald Durrell’s Army came out in 1992 and he also co-wrote Rogue Trader, the autobiography of disgraced banker Nick Leeson, and worked with Richard Branson on his memoir.

Whitley is a tall, gentle man who doesn’t like talking about himself but is full of unbridled enthusiasm for WFN, and in particular its royal patron. ‘She transformed the charity – we never would have had the success we’ve had without her involvement. She saw what was possible and really helped us to achieve it, and she inspires the winners to do more. The winners are always pretty amazed at how she cross-examines them and cuts to the chase so quickly when she meets them.

‘She has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, and a phenomenal memory, and she is also very funny… And think of her father and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award – she’s seen what a lifetime of work can achieve.’

In her speech at the Whitley Awards earlier this year, the Princess Royal cited her father, Gerald Durrell and Edward Whitley as the inspirations for her work with WFN. Among winners and their communities, she said, ‘it’s the global ambition to truly make a difference that has been astonishing’.

The awards, she continued, are for ‘the people on the ground, they’re the sharp end… It’s all very well to be here and understand what we think are the challenges, and want to make a difference, but when you meet the people who are actually out front and can turn that into a reality, it’s a real inspiration.’

Over the years, she has visited some of the winners’ projects, when her charity work takes her to those countries, ‘but not as many as I would like’, she says. In Uganda, for example, she met Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who was working on improving hygiene in local communities after viruses had spread to gorillas she was managing in Bwindi national park. And in 1997, before she became a WFN patron, she travelled in a boat up the Amazon to see pink dolphins.

‘She was in Colombia for Save the Children and she asked the British embassy to include a visit to the Amazon in her trip – she was very interested in the dolphins,’ says Dr Fernando Trujillo, who went on to win an award in 2007.

‘The British embassy contacted me as an expert on rivers and dolphins. I was a little bit intimidated, and it was raining and I was worried we wouldn’t see any dolphins, but in the end we counted 32 – and she was so excited, every time she saw one she would jump up and down with excitement, and then rein herself in as if she suddenly remembered she was a princess. I could see her love for the environment was very genuine. From that day she was my favourite royal person.’

Another winner, Pablo Bordino, whose picture with HRH had been in the paper in Buenos Aires was flying back to Argentina. One of the flight attendants recognised him and when he arrived at the airport there was a television crew waiting to meet him. It raised the profile of his NGO - which protected marine life and habitats in Argentina - enormously and enabled him to generate further funding. ‘That’s the effect HRH has,’ says Whitley. ‘You can’t quantify it.’

Several award-winners went to the Princess’s 60th-birthday celebrations, including Claudio Padua, a successful businessman from Rio who gave it all up to pursue conservation, training at Durrell in Jersey and moving to a forest in Brazil with his wife, Suzana, and three children.

HRH had been to see them at their headquarters outside São Paulo and had taken an interest in their efforts to conserve the black lion tamarin, a monkey. They had no idea her visit would be such an ordeal, with all the security arrangements. ‘We had a call to ask what kind of security we had,’ says Claudio. ‘I said, “I have an old dog, that’s all.”’

‘She turned up with a security detail and entourage,’ Suzana adds. ‘They wanted to go into the forest to see the monkeys in our Land Rover and her security team asked, “Has this car been checked?” I said it hadn’t and they became very nervous but she ignored them and just got in anyway.’

Years later, the Paduas were invited to Buckingham Palace for her 60th. ‘It was a beautiful opportunity for us,’ says Suzana, ‘and as she came down the stairs she spotted us and said, “Oh how nice to see you. How are the monkeys?”’

The Whitley Fund for Nature is hosting a #PeopleforPlanet biodiversity summit on 6 and 7 November at London’s Royal Institution, where members of the public can hear live from Whitley Gold Award-winning conservationists from Africa, Central and South America, and Asia

#a new anneterview!#I love that she seems to remember everything and everyone #the part about her jumping up and down when she saw the dolphins #what a mood #princess anne #princess royal #british royal family #brf #newspapers #anned i quote

93 notes · View notes

ohtobeleah · 2 years

Note

This whole situation has me far too stressed out to live my life normally. All I do is worry about Fe and Dot. I NEED AN UPDATE!

I used my entire day to write this so please 🙏 keep the engagement going. Masterlist is linked here

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Jake thought he was going crazy. As he laid over the covers of his bed, far too hot to be under the heavy duvet, Jake thought he was going crazy.

“The fuck is that?” He groaned to himself as he turned on his side, taking quick notice of the time that read on his old school analog alarm clock. It was nearing two in the morning and he had yet to be taken hostage by the three melatonin gummies he’d drugged himself with a few hours prior.

Jake flung his legs over the side of his bed, pushing up and off with a groan before padding over to his window to investigate what the incessant pestering noise was knocking against his ajar window.

“You’ve got to be shitting me—“ Jake sighed to himself as he opened his window, hanging half his body out as he reached down to grab your outstretched and awaiting hand. “Jesus Y/n it’s two in the morning?”

“I need a place to crash—“ It wasn’t until Jake saw your face properly in the dim light of his room as he pulled you up and into his room through the window that he caught sight of the bloodied nose you had. The swollen eye and split that cut across your bottom lip. Recognising the shock that had swiped across Jake's face, you beat him to the question that was about to leave his mouth. “Before you ask, you should see the other guy.” It honestly wasn’t that deep of an issue.

“What do you mean other guy?” Jake asked as he assessed the damage, swiping the pad of his thumb across your lip as he held your face in the palms of his hands. Holding you still as you stood before him. “What have you been getting yourself into.” You tossed up if you should just tell the truth or fabricate some elaborate story, but the longer you made Jake wait for a reply, you settled for the truth.

“Ethan Callahan called you a pussy bitch so I broke his nose.” You smiled through bloodied teeth, chuckling slightly as Jake's eyes widened in shock horror. “I run a ten minute mile Seresin but it’s just not quick enough to outrun Lucas Callahan when he's chasing you down the stairs.”

“Jesus Christ Y/n what are you doing hanging around the Callahan’s for?” Jake hissed, still assessing the damage that looked more superficial than anything else. The Callahans were old money, rich in oil. Far more well off than the Seresins were and Jake couldn't stand them or their family. Their sister though, well she was a real looker.

“I was with Ethan—“ Your voice sounded ever so soft as you explained your whereabouts and extracurricular activities to your best friend. “Until he said you were a pussy and instead of being under him I was over him real quick.” You teased. “Cracked his nose and his bitching work up his dickhead brother who had no problem smacking me around a little.” Jake tried not to roll his eyes, he knew you were antagonistic but you didn’t deserve to be hit by a guy twice your size.

“Ethan Callahan is a college senior at St Edwards.” Jake smirked, pulling you close so he could kiss your forehead while his hand held the back of your head still. “You’re a freshman at Concordia—“

“Yeah but I fuck like a sophomore.” Was all you said back. Missing the warmth Jake's hands brought to your bloodied face when he let go to grab the towel hanging off the back of his desk chair, squeezing water into the material from the water bottle that sat on his night stand before pressing it to your eye. “Thanks—“

“Stay away from the Callahans, they’re bad news—“ Jake just shook his head in defeat. “And I don’t wanna know about your sex life either—“ He squinted at the thought, a bad image if there ever was one. “I’ve been called worse things than a Pussy—you don’t have to jump to my defence every time someone has something unkind to say.” Jake sighed, he hated seeing you like this. “But Lucas is lucky I don’t break his neck for doing this to you.”

“Please—you couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a boat Jake.” As soon as you insulted him, Jake was pressing the towel he held against your eye into you a little more. “Ow! Fuck alright alright—“ You whined out playfully. “It was just a date, after he turned out to be a dickhead though there’s not going to be another one that’s for sure.”

You were in this weird transition phase of your life. You were at a crossroads so to speak, killing time at Concordia on a scholarship you’d managed to get your hands on after pulling your thumb out just in time. Jake was there to keep you on the straight and narrow, he always had been—but that didn’t mean you didn’t try your luck at corrupting him from time to time. Succeeding plenty, failing some.

You were waiting for your Naval Academy Application to be approved, as was Jake Seresin—but instead of college he took a gap year. Earning a living working at the local loading dock until his papers were approved.

“If it’s a date you’re looking for I know a guy.” Jake should have stopped talking then and there, but he didn’t. He kept going. “He’s just some guy I played football with in senior year.”

“God it’s not Alex Ryan is it?” You groaned, squinting as Jake took the towel away from your eye. Deciding you needed to sit down to save the bout of dizziness starting to set in from the head rush.

“Jaidyn Dolan—he’s a decent guy, should keep you entertained long enough to keep you out of trouble, if I’m lucky.” Jake watched as you sat on the corner of his bed—hesitant to make yourselves at home because his mother was down stairs and she couldn’t stand the sight of you. Hence the not so graceful way you scaled up the side of Jake Seresin house, using the pipe that ran up the side near his window. You knew why she didn't like you, but that fact didn't make it any easier of a pill to swallow. Especially since she’d been the closest thing you ever had to a mother.

“Please, don't pretend that you didn’t get an erection the second I told you I defended your honour.” You knew you were right as Jake moved a hand to cover his boxer brief clad erection that was as noticeable as ever.

“Oh I did, and I’m gonna be pitching a fucking tent for the rest of the night thinking about how you decked Ethan Callahan.” Jake laughed, watching as you crawled into his bed. The only place you felt safe enough to actually rest. “Still doesn’t mean it was worth it.”

Jake crawled into his bed behind you, like he’d done effortlessly time and time before. He loved you so much. But not the way everyone thought he loved you. It wasn’t just surface level the way Jake Seresin loved you. He loved you on a deeper level. Fiercely and protectively and you loved him back just as fiercely and just as tenderly.

“Nah, fuck that—“ You mumbled, feeling Jake pull you tight and pull you close as his chin dropped into the groove your shoulder and neck. “You’re worth it—“ Correcting Jake, you let yourself close your eyes and relax. “You’re my best friend, I’d do just about anything to protect you, including but not limited to smacking a dickhead for calling you a pussy.”

There was silence for a moment as you and Jake listened to the seconds ticking by from the analog clock sitting on Jake’s bedside table. He questioned for a few minutes if he really wanted to set you up with his highschool pal. But he just wanted you to be happy. You deserved to be happy, you didn’t deserve the Ethan and Lucas Callahans of the world.

“Did you want me to set up something with Jaidyn?” Jake asked as he felt your body softening against his, knowing that you’d be gone before he woke up when the sun started to creep into his room. “Can text him tomorrow and organise a meet cute if you want.” Jakes met with silence, for a while he thinks you’ve already succumbed to the chokehold that his bed brings, that his warmth holds, that you’ve finally given in and gone to sleep after not being able to sleep in your dorm.

“If he’s someone you think I should meet.” You mumbled back. “Can’t imagine it would be the worst thing in the world.”

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Jaidyn was a gambler. He had been all his life. He started out betting on football matches, fixing scores and rigging games. He bet on horses and cars and as soon as he could step foot inside one he spent hundreds at casinos if given the chance. He was an addict, addicted to adrenaline, the rush of endorphins. Constantly looking for his next hit. He got that rush from alcohol, from flying F-18’s, from hitting you until he broke you. Jaidyn never intended to become what he had—a monster, a man who prayed on the fear he inflicted on you. But it was his favourite drug of all.

Jaidyn’s favourite thing to bet on was you. He’d make bets with himself and his buddies that knew how he was to see just how much you could handle. He hadn’t managed to kill you yet after all these years but he damn well knew he’d been close. Especially that one time when he’d given you alcohol poisoning. He lost the bet that night when he’d come home to an empty AirBnB. And if there was something that set a gambler off more than anything it was losing a bet they for sure thought they were going to win.

“I'm off boys—“ Jaidyn shoved his flight suit into his locker as Fanboy and Payback stood idly by, not wanting to start up a conversation with the guy who everyone knew was bad news. “See you both when I’m looking at ya.” Payback couldn’t not ask though, before he knew how to stop himself he was asking, coping a hand to the chest from Fanboy who just side eyed him for engaging. They’d been told not to engage!

“Where you heading man?” Jaidyn just smirked to himself, oh how he loved winning. And won he had. “Little before five o’clock, must be something important to earn yourself an early mark?”

“Im off to see a sweet little lady—“ Was all he said. Cryptic enough to have both Fanboy and Payback frowning, yet not deep enough to have them stumbling over their own two feet to notify someone. “See you boys tomorrow.” As casually as ever, Jaidyn left the locker room. Making his way down the hall and chuckling a right to make his way to the Janitor’s closet he’d left you in hours ago. Laughing to himself when he’d realised he’d gotten away with murder. Deciding he’d wasted enough time—heading out towards the car park to collect his little girl.

But not before he’d managed to cut Bradley Bradshaw's throttle cable. He wasn’t going anywhere without knowing the fact that the next flight Rooster took?

would be his last.

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Hours. Hours upon hours had passed you by. That’s what it felt like anyway when you came to. Groaning as the sudden onset of swollen muscles and aching joints overcame you.

The sun had moved. There was barely any natural sunlight shining through the janitor's closet as you laid in a heap on the floor amongst random objects that had fallen off the shelves you’d been slammed into. Disinfectant, mop heads, rolls of black and white garbage bags, multicoloured buckets of different kinds of chemicals.

All you could do was cry. There was nothing left for you to do as the idea of Jaidyn setting out to do exactly what he’d told you he would eventually do overwhelmed your mind. He was gonna take your little girl away from you, no matter how hard you tried or what you did to keep him away, he inevitably won. Exactly like he told you he would.

Jake didn’t mean to lie. You knew that much, but Jaidyn Dolan was a dangerous dangerous man with no moral compass—you should have run when you had the chance. You should have taken Odette and left North Island behind. But now here you were—beaten half to death in the place of your employment, lying on the floor of a janitor's closet tied and bound. You didn’t want to die here. Not like this, not with any shred of dignity left.

So, with all the strength you could muster and with all the might you had—you pushed yourself up onto your knees, whaled out as you stretched and felt your rips pressing into your lungs. Squinting away the tears you were tired of spilling before you shimmied your way over to the door. Allowing yourself to catch your pained breath as you sat against it. Using all the strength you had left to do the only thing you could think of to grab someone, anyone’s attention that might be waking by.

You sat and cried and banged your head against the door of the janitor’s closet. From the hallway. All that could be heard every few seconds was a faint thud. Barely audible, but it was there.

A faint but steady and determined thud.

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

“I've got one more hop, then I'm finished–'' Jake was exhausted, between actually trying to get some work done and yelling at his Admiral to pull his thumb out, Jake had spent the better half of his day searching for where you might have gone. With every hour that passed, with every second that went by in the blink of an eye, Jake's worry had begun to skyrocket to highest uncharted. “You still haven't heard from her?” Jake asked as he met back up with Bradley in your hanger, still as untouched as it had been from the moment you had come running out of it with Bob earlier that same day.

“I thought maybe she was just avoiding me.” Bradley sighed as he looked around your hanger, focusing on all the pictures that you had pinned up on your cork board. “At the risk of sounding like an eighth grader, she dumped me.” Bradley's lip twitched as he spoke that fact into existence. His eyes never left the photo of the two of you embracing one another at the Hard Deck as he spoke. His mind was running a thousand miles an hour as to where you could be. “She could have left? Gone and got Dot?” For the least logical explanation, it was still the most believable. “I mean if she was still on base Hangman, we would have caught up with her by now.”

“I'm gonna ring her again.” Jake grumbles out, he's been trying your phone periodically throughout the day ever since you left Admiral Simpsons office. Each text was left unresponded to yet delivered. Every call was met with your voicemail. Unbeknownst to Jake, Jaidyn had taken your phone and thrown it in the garbage. “I'm starting to think she’d just vanished off the face of the earth. Before Jake was able to press on your contact, a stupid photo of you with two cheese puffs shoved up your nose from highschool, there's a caller ID flashing across his screen that he isn't sure if he should answer right this second in the midst of what feels like a missing persons case. “Uh–” Jake's lips curled upright into a smirk that Bradley hardly caught before theses a hume spreading across his cheeks, bashfully. “I should probably take this.”

“Who's Amilia?” Bradley leaned over to investigate what, or more appropriately, who, had Jake suddenly looking like a kid who's just had his cheeks pinched too hard by his grandma.

“The girl from the station–” Is all Jake is explaining before he's swiping his thumb across his screen and holding his phone up to his ear, watching as Braldey rolls his eyes. Of course even in the middle of an impending crisis, Jake Seresin is still picking up.

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Amilia Fisher was lost. She felt like she was going nowhere in her life. She had spiralled so deep into an existential crisis she didn’t know how to pull herself out of it. A Personal Trainer turned Personal Tragedy.

Most days were good, some were mediocre at best—and others? Well, some days she couldn’t find the energy to pull herself up and out of bed. Which quite frankly sucked ass because when people look at you like you had your head screwed on straight and knew all the answers to all their burning questions, it’s hard to accept the reality staring at you in the mirror.

She’d been sucked in and spat out by an industry that thrived off insecurities and eating disorders disguised as clean eating meal plans that don’t inherently cause unhealthy relationships with food—but gave you all the means to develop those tendencies yourself.

She was lost, but as she sat in the carpark of her nephews day care centre, Amilia collected herself with a deep inhale and a prolonged exhale. In through the nose and out through the mouth.

“She’ll be right.” Amilia mumbled to herself as she unclipped her seatbelt, stepping out of her sister's car she’d been borrowing while playing baby driver. Her sister Chelsea had married some Naval Aviator who she’d met while travelling the states on a solo trip a few years back. They were young and in love and although a few years had passed they were still happily married and very much in love. Reuben was good people. That much she knew, and while Amilia tried to hold her life together she decided a sea change (Or entire career change in another country) would help fight off the ever looming threat of war that raged between her critical thinking skills and her intrusive thoughts.

Amilia Fisher had the emotional integrity of a limp noodle at the crossroads point she’d reached in her life. The last thing she needed while she was just trying to pick her nephew Chase up, was to run into the very man she’d seen in the car park earlier that same day—instigating an altercation for reasons she knew nothing about.

“Hi, my name’s Jaidyn?” The man who stood before her told the receptionist at Sunny Side who he was. “I’m here for my little girl? Odette.” Amilia swore time slowed down as she quickly turned on her heels, knowing that whoever this man was he shouldn’t have been back at the daycare.

“Uh—okay, fuck, okay.” Amilia knew it was probably just a little crazy to care, but she just had a feeling this wasn’t good. That something was wrong. Maternal instincts be damned, anyone with two eyes and a heartbeat could see something was up. So with a small amount of reluctance and a whole lot of self doubt—Amilia pressed on the contact that had been freshly added to her contact list that morning.

Hangman

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

“Miss Fisher–” Jake smiles for what feels like the first time since he met Amilia that morning. Fuck, it had been a long day at this point hadnt it. “To what do I owe this incredibly unexpected call?” Fighting off the egre to flirt back, Amilia bit her bottom lip and reminded herself that this wasnt a selfish call, she could be selfish later and selfish with Jake she wanted to be because fuck–getting her rocks off with a Naval Aviator might just be what she needed to feel alive again. “Amilia?”

“I could be wrong, so please just forget I ever called if I am but the guy who you beat the shit out of is here picking up a little girl named Odette and I just wanted you to know in case he wasn't meant to be here.” Bradley sees all the colour in Jake's face immediately drain and he knows something’s wrong.

“Wait, hold on, what do you mean?” It's like his brain won't process what Amilia is trying to tell him. “You’re at Sunny Side?”

“Yeah, I'm picking up my nephew, that guy is in at reception now–said he was there to pick up his little girl?” Jake feels his heart stop, he can't breathe. “Jake?”

“I need you to do me a favour.” Jake Seresin wasn't a beggar, but he was about to drop to his knees and plead with Amilia to run an intervention. “Please don't let him leave with her.”

“What do you want me to do?” Amilia asks as she watches one of the early educators walk through the doors into the day care to go collect Odette. Time was ticking, she had to think fast.

“Whatever you can, Amilia, look–” Jakes still looking at Bradley who is putting bits and pieces of the puzzle together just by what he can hear. “I know you don't know me but I need you to keep him there until I can get there.” Jakes met with silence as Amilia looked over to the car she recognised from that same morning, tossing up the options her borderline manic mind was thinking could work. “Amilia?”

“I'm on it.” Amilia shakes herself out of a trance-like state. She's committed to her next move, racing back to her sister's car to pop the boot and rummage through the craziest survival kit she’s ever seen. Making a mental note to see if her sister needed a psych evaluation too or if she just thoroughly enjoyed camping a little too much. “Just, get here before I get arrested.”

When Jake hung up his phone all he could see was red. His heart rate was beyond fast, his hands were clammy and he swore for a moment he might actually be having a heart attack as he held two fingers up to his neck to check his pulse.

“He's gone for Dot hasn't he.” Bradley knows the answer, he didn't even need to ask. But he did regardless and when Jake nodded in response with tears welling in his eyes, Bradley knew they were racing against time. “Fe–”

“Would you want us to put Dot first, Rooster– without question.” Jake cuts Bradley off before he can finish his sentence. “Odette comes first, end of story.” Bradley can't find it in himself to stop looking for you though, he knows if Dot is still in daycare then you've been here this entire time.

“You go.” Bradley could practically hear your SOS as he stood in the silence of your workshop with Jake. Your brother, the closest thing you had to family. Bradley would send out an army to find you, but he’d be leading the troops. “You go get Dot, I'll stay here and keep looking.” Jake groaned, he couldn't think straight, to him his mind was misconstruing the fact Bradley wanted to stay meant he didn't care enough.

“Yeah–” Scoffing, Jake shook his head. “Right, I get it, not your daughter, not your problem right?” There was no beating around the bush when it came to the fact tensions were at an all time high. “Great man, nah dont fucking sweat it ill take care of it.” But that didn't mean Bradley was going to take that, not when he'd stuck by you thought all of this.

“I'm not gonna leave Y/n behind.” Rooster shot back, it was far too quick of a retaliation for Jake to not realise that that thought must have been prevalent in Bradley's mind. He'd just been waiting for a moment to throw it in his face. Jake just took the hit, he turned on his heels and took a few strides before Bradley dug the knife a little deeper, watching as Jake paused to soak up the blow he knew was true. He knew every word Bradley spoke was true, he’d left you behind before and he was about to do it again–only this time he knew you’d want him to. You'd want him to make sure Odette didn't end up with the monster that was Jaidyn. So he took it, he could take it, Jake deserved the title of deserter, because he was one. But he’d be damned if Jaidyn was going to get a hold of Dot. Knowing the lengths you’d go to to protect her yourself.

“I'll leave that to you man.”

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Jake held your hand the entire time you were in active labour. He was with you from the very beginning all the way through till the moment Odette Dolan let out her first cries into the universe. As you sat bound and bloodied, thumping your head against the door of the janitor's closet, your mind had begun to wonder. Although you knew that there was a chance here that someone would find you after it was too late, you also knew in that case that Jake would be the most fearsome protector of your little girl if something were to happen to you. He was her godfather, her guardian if something happened to you. You’d made sure of that when you realised how deep you were woven into your mess with Jaidyn. How dangerous and how much effort it was going to take to break free.

“Bringing life into this world's like bringing a grain of sand to the beach but— the thing is Fe, that your little girl's like ten point five grams of you and him love.” Jake cooed as he sat beside you, pushing your hair from your sweat covered forehead as you held your daughter to your chest for the first time. “She’s perfect.” As if the memory of when you’d given birth to Odette was playing out like a rolodex being flipped through, you closed your eyes and mumbled out from behind the makeshift gag shoved in your mouth. Remembering what you’d told Jake as you laid with Dot for the first time. Taking in all she was and who she’d grow up to be.

“I’d die for her.”

“Everything from your past is passed on.” Jake spoke softly, tracing his index finger over her back. “It survives, it's alive in your daughter.” Everything that made you, you, made Odette her. “You ever think there's a link when we pass on? She might pass on five and a quarter.” Day dreaming of that memory free as a bird, you were just trying to focus when the scenery blurs. You collapsed to the floor, rendered unconscious from the pain flooding your body.

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Bradley was kicking himself as he searched around the graveyard. A nickname they’d all given to the section of the tarmac that they used to harbour old fighter jets that were decommissioned for various reasons. It’s where the old F-14 Maverick had stolen to get him and Rooster the hell out of dodge ended up—until it found its new home in one of your bays, you’d been restoring it back to its once pristine condition. Admiral Simpson was quite eager to see what magic you could work.

“Where the fuck are you Fe?” Rooster sighed to himself as he looked around, kicking himself for what he’d said to Jake. He didn’t mean it. Jake was just doing what he thought you’d want him to do, what he knew you’d want him to do. But someone had to be there for you for once in your fucking life. Someone had to put you first, above anyone else.

“Come on Y/n, you’ve gotta be around here somewhere—“ He was growing desperate. So desperate in fact that his heart ached in his chest. Something was fucking wrong here. “Fuck this.” Bradley hissed when he realised you weren't pulling organs from old super hornets for part transplants. Deciding he needed to tell Cyclone that you’d been missing for the better half of the day and that something needed to be done to find you.

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~**~

The more Admiral Simpson sat on the events that transpired in his office earlier, the more he caught himself wondering if he’d done the wrong thing. He was just following protocol when he’d asked for evidence more than he said she said. He couldn’t castrate a member of the US Navy on the basis of accusation.

What he could do however, was do what he’d promised he would and check out the footage that Lieutenant Floyd mentioned would have been taken from your hanger.

“Okay—“ Beau sighed as he sat down at his desk. “Let’s see what we’re working with here.” He mumbled to himself as he brought his coffee cup up to his lips, logging into Net2 to comb through the list of security cameras on base.

Clicking through the squares, there was nothing unusual happening in real time that caught Admiral Simpson's attention, just being a little noisy before he went back through the logs cost him though as he clicked next in the visible camera listings that appeared on his screen.

“Oh my god.” Admiral Simpson spat the sip of coffee he’d just taken all over himself as he came across the live feed of the janitor's closet camera that sat in the top right hand corner of his screen. Clicking on it, it enlarged the view he saw of you. Laying tied and unconscious on the floor. “Oh my god—“ He was up in seconds, racing out of his office as face as he could, running into Bradley Bradshaw who was just about to knock on the Admirals office door and beg him to help him in his search for you.

“Sir—“

“Bradshaw—“

“I need your help looking for Fe, she’s missing.” Bradley explained, he’d never felt so defeated. “I’m worried—“

“I know where she is.” Cyclone replied, nodding frantically as he physically turned Rooster on his heels and shoved him down the hall. “Go, go! Janitors closet down the hall to the right.” Bradley tried his best to catch up with what was going on—but even felt like it was moving a thousand miles an hour and he was frozen in place. “Saw her on the goddamn camera when I went to look back at the hanger footage from earlier.” Cyclone couldn’t believe what was happening, he felt responsible for this especially, he should have taken Rooster and Hangmans desperation as enough evidence to pull Jaidyn up.

But he didn’t and that was on him.

Bradley had never moved so quickly before in his life. The second Admiral Simpson opened the closet door and he saw you? He felt an unimaginable amount of rage rushing through his veins.

“Y/n!” Bradley gasped as he pushed past Cyclone and dropped to his knees, pulling you up into his lap. “Baby I’m here, hey I’m here darling oh my god I’m so sorry—hey, hey?”

“I’ll get Cindy from the infirmary to—“ Admiral Simpson didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence as he stood there and watched Bradley cradle you in his arms.

“YOUSONOFABITCH—'' It all came out as one word as Rooster let his rage run wild, aiming it directly at Beau Simpson who just stood there shell shocked. He was a three star Admiral, he’d seen a lot. But this? This was by far the worst thing he’d bore witness to. “She sat right in front of you! You saw she was in trouble and you let him walk out of your office scott fucking free!”

“Lieutenant—“

“Don’t lieutenant me!” Bradley spat. “LOOK AT HER! Look at what he did to her!” As Bradley’s rage consumed every morsel of his being, your eyelids twitched as you stirred back to reality. “This!? Is on you—Sir, you could have prevented this but you didn’t. do. enough!!”

“MMM!” Too incoherent and too dazed to register it was Bradley holding you, you started thrashing around in his grip, trying to protect yourself from whatever blow was about to come your way. “MMM—MMM!!” All Bradley's attention was drawn back to you as he held you tighter, his heart sank into his stomach when he heard your screams turn to painful sobs.

“I’m here, hey it’s me, I’m here, I got you.” Bradley cried with you, he couldn’t keep it in, couldn’t be as strong as you needed him to be because seeing you like this shattered his heart beyond repair. “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere baby, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry I’m so sorry—�� Rooster tried his best to peel the duct tape from your mouth without hurting you, but he knew it was best to rip the Band-Aid off so it was over with fast. “I’m sorry—“ He cried one more time before ripping it from your mouth, pulling the fabric soaked in saliva and blood from your mouth as you screamed as loud as you could.

It broke Roosters heart.

“Y/n, I’ve got you.”

“Jaidyns gonna take Dot.” It was so hard to hear you cry the way you were crying as Braldey worked to untie your hands from behind your back. He headed the way the bracket he had given you made a hash indent from from the pressure.

“Jakes on it.” Is all Bradley cooed as he caught his own tears falling from his face down onto yours. “Jakes on it, he’s gone to grab her.”

“He made me authorise him as a pick up—“ It came out through painful cries as Braldey just held you and rocked you as tight as he could. “Said he’d kill me.”

“I’m never letting you out of my sight again, you hear me?” Rooster kissed the top of your head as you both sat on the ground of the janitor’s closet. Cyclone had made good on his word and gone to the infirmary. “Never letting you go baby, you don’t deserve this, you don’t deserve this at all.”

“I need to get to my daughter.” You replied, sitting up as Bradley helped up, reaching down to untie your ankles with a groan as your ribs caved in against your lungs. “Aahh!!—“

“I need to get you to a hospital Fe, you’re hurt, bad.”

“No.” You mumbled, trying to stand although every attempt you stumbled back and fell back into Bradley's chest. “No, I'm fine, I just need to get to Dot.” The way you couldn't stop for a second to really process what had happened had Rooster frowning, you needed medical attention, you were hurt, bad, and there could be things wrong he couldn't see. Internal bleeding was one thing on his mind. “I need to get to my baby.”

“Hey Y/n?” You weren't listening as Rooster tried to break through to you. “Darling, listen to me alright?” He begged, reaching out to touch the side of your face as gently as he could to turn your head to look at him. Noticing how broken your eyes looked through the swelling. “What Dot needs is for you to be alright, and for you to be alright I need to take you to a hospital to get checked out.” Your bottom lip quivered as you shook your head. Kneeling between Roosters legs as he sat on the ground before you. “Baby you gotta put yourself first this time, you've done all you can here.”

“I was banging my head on the door trying to make enough noise.” Deflecting from the question, you explained that although you wanted to give up, you didn't. “I didn't just give up, I’m not weak–”

“I would never think you're weak Y/n, you’re the strongest person I know.” It was hard to see you like this, so broken and fragile, flinching at every move Bradleey made. He understood though, you had always been a stray, now more so than ever before. Memories of your past with Jaidyn plagued your mind every time you blinked. You could hear him screaming at you inside your own head, trying to drown out all the kind, meaningful praises Bradley spoke into existence. “You are not weak, you did whatever you could to protect your daughter Y/n.”

Bradley helped you stand, listening to every groan and every sob that escaped your mouth as he did so, knowing he needed to get you up so he could at least carry you out. But as you stood and turned into him, wrapping your arms around his torso before burying your swollen, bloodied and bruised face into his shoulder, Bradley thought his heart couldn't break any more than it already had. But then you spoke again and broke his heart even more.

“I didn't do enough though–”

***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~***~

Tags: @a-serene-place-to-be @lilyevanswhore @thescarletknight2014 @blindedbythelightt @averyhotchner @emma8895eb @blairfox04 @caitsymichelle13 @oxxolovemelikeyoudooxxo @teacupsandtopgun @aemondssiut @feltonswifesworld87 @akalei349 @notjustsomeblonde @americaarse @avaleineandafryingpan @phoenix1388 @xoxabs88xox @je-suis-prest-rachel @pono-pura-vida @rosiahills22 @starset21 @anarchyrising @caidi-paris @starkleila @criticalroleobssedperson @enchantingdreamergothprune @flrboyd

#terms of endearment// bradley bradshaw #terms of endearment #terms of endearment// jake seresin #bradley bradshaw #rooster bradshaw imagine #bradley bradshaw x female reader #bradley bradshaw x y/n #bradley rooster bradshaw #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradleybradshaw #bradley 'rooster' bradshaw #bradley bradshaw imagine #bradley bradshaw fic #bradley x reader

291 notes · View notes

duchesssoflennox · 4 months

Text

"Whispers of Love Amidst Mourning: The Intimate Union of Princess Alice and Prince Ludwig"🥀💗🖤

When that ill-fated year of 1861 came and the first misfortune for British royal family was the death of the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, Prince Albert asked his Daughter Princess Alice to console her poor mother.

Then he himself felt so bad, suffering from stomach pains, and after he fell ill, Alice surrounded him with care and attention. But the prince still hoped to take part in the upcoming family holiday. After all, Alice now had a fiancé.💍🖇💗

The task of finding her future husband was once assigned to Her Older Sister Vicky, who had recently become the wife of the heir to the Prussian throne, actively got down to business.

The first candidate she selected was the Prince of Orange, the future king of Holland. The prospect of becoming a Dutch queen looked very tempting, but Princess Alice didn't like the proposed gentleman with lemon-yellow teeth.🤮🤢 The next contenders were two Hessian princes, Ludwig and Heinrich, who were invited to Windsor under the pretext of visiting the famous Ascot races.😍

The Princess immediately took a liking to the eldest of them, Ludwig, a pleasant and modest young man with a handsome appearance and while some of the spectators carefully watched the horses and riders fighting for the Royal Cup, and others assessed the outfits of the society ladies with no less interest, Alice and Ludwig cast meaningful glances at each other.

Before leaving, the prince asked Alice for a photograph as a souvenir, and she willingly gave it, trying with all her might to express her interest... Albert liked Ludwig too. Queen Victoria hesitated for some time. Still, the Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt was a real backwater even by the standards of patchwork Germany.

But the German prince was so charming, so pleasant. He blushed so sweetly at every mention of Alice that the queen Victoria finally ceased to doubt the future happiness of her daughter.

Soon, together with her husband, Alice went to Coburg, Prince Albert’s homeland, stopping on the way to Darmstadt, where the princess was able to see and communicate with Ludwig again. The following spring, the young people got engaged. The plans were almost dashed by Albert's death on December 14, 1861... But Queen Victoria became unshakable in everything that concerned the wishes of her dear husband, and there was no question of postponing the marriage ceremony.

On July 1, Alice and Ludwig appeared before the altar erected in the banquet hall of Osborne House. There was nothing in the celebration that resembled the wedding of a royal daughter.

Alice remembered how her sister Vicky got married four years ago - a cortege of thirty carriages, seventeen representatives of the ruling houses of Germany, a luxurious ball in the Bikingham courtyard, where she pranced and sparkled, a whole thousand invited guests, a solemn service in St. James's Church, a rich dowry... Yeah, she was deprived of all this, but happiness lies in something completely different.

The bridesmaids struggled to put on a semblance of smiles... Heavy sighs were periodically heard from all sides... The Queen appeared in a black widow's outfit and almost immediately sank into a chair... She couldn't stand...

Next to her were her two sons, Edward, Prince of Wales, who tried to remain calm, and Alfred, who could not hold back his tears during the entire ceremony...💔💔💔🖤🖤🖤 "POOR AFFIE"

Alice entered arm in arm with her Paternal Uncle, Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, who acted as father of the bride... The embarrassed groom was afraid to look up. The altar was located under a large painting by F. Winterhalter depicting the royal family.

On the canvas at the feet of the happy parents, Victoria and Albert, their four children romped and played. An irrevocable past... The spiritual chants finally broke the queen’s self-control, and she burst into loud sobs.

Queen Victoria would later say that the day of this strange ceremony, which was more reminiscent of a funeral than a wedding, became one of the saddest in her life. However, neither she nor anyone else present could imagine what a truly ominous omen those gloomy circumstances would turn out to be for the fate of Alice and her offspring.💔

The “celebratory” dinner took place in the presence of only the newlyweds, the Queen and her youngest daughter Beatrice.

Ludwig received the highest English honor, the Order of the Garter.

Alice received as a gift from her mother a Bible, a gold bracelet with diamonds and pearls, and a dowry of 30 thousand pounds, hard-won through the Prime Minister.💎

In the evening she said that, having become Ludwig’s wife, she felt proud and happy.

“It’s like a dagger stabbed into my heart,” Queen Victoria comments on these words in a letter to her eldest daughter Vicky.😑

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon, which lasted only a week, nearby, on the same Isle of Wight, after which they went to Darmstadt, the capital of a small German duchy, where from now on they were to build a family life.

From the very border of Germany they were warmly greeted by local residents, and the meeting arranged in Darmstadt exceeded all expectations - Alice had never seen such enthusiasm and such cordiality addressed to her. Then everyday life began, dramatically changing the picture. Ludwig returned to military service, and his wife began to settle into her new surroundings. She soon noticed that, despite the initial delight, the residents of Darmstadt were very wary of her.

In her new homeland, Alice immediately became a stranger.

Englishwoman! Those around her showed distrust of the princess from such a distant, unusual and incomprehensible country, sometimes they grumbled and distorted her strange name in every possible way.

The tension was aggravated by the fact that persistent demands came from London to create suitable living conditions for the queen’s daughter.

But Ludwig's uncle, Grand Duke Ludwig III, did not have sufficient funds for such expenses.

And his nephew settled with his wife in the old parental home, in the mansion of Prince Charles.

Uncomfortable and overlooking a noisy street, it wasn't at suitable for creating a family “nest,” and Alice was very glad to leave on the eve of her first birth to England under the pretext of participating in the wedding of her older brother, the Prince of Wales.🤍

There, at Windsor Castle, on April 5, 1863, her daughter was born, named Victoria, in honor of her crowned grandmother... The girl was born on Easter Sunday, which added joy and gave hope for the final completion of all the recent sorrows that darkened the beginning of Alice’s independent life.✨️✨️✨️

Now the question of their own home for the young ducal family has become especially acute. Alice had no choice but to sacrifice almost her entire dowry for the construction of a new palace in Darmstadt, the construction of which would take two years. The project was based on the princess’s favorite castle in Osborne, the home of her happy childhood, the home of her bright memories. In the meantime, the addition of the family became the reason for the forced gift from the Grand Duke. Ludwig III gave his nephew Kranichstein one of his hunting houses six kilometers from the city.

Alice will rebuild the modest estate, loudly called a castle, to her own taste, ultimately obtaining a long-awaited corner for a quiet family life. From now on, the young Duke’s family will spend the warm season here. The house was just being settled when the owners had to receive guests of the highest level...🌺

Russian Emperor Alexander II came to Darmstadt with his wife and younger children. This was not surprising - Empress Maria Alexandrovna was a born Hessian princess and often visited her homeland. Ludwig III and Prince Charles were her siblings, whom she was always glad to meet...

This time, the Empress decided to visit her nephew Ludwig to get to know his own family, for which the Royal Family went to Kranichstein, where a real fuss arose in connection with this.

Princess Alice, who always remembered that she was the daughter of the Queen of England, didn't want to lose face and worked with all her might.❤️‍🔥

From the words of her husband, who visited Moscow for the coronation of Alexander II, she knew about the unheard-of luxury that surrounded the Russian Tsar and about the strictest etiquette imphis presence.❤️🇷🇺

There was a lot to worry about, but to the surprise of the hosts, the distinguished guests turned out to be nice and kind people... Instead of stiffness, they showed kindness and ease; instead of Asian barbarism, they showed great intelligence and subtle taste.

And how charming their children are! Smart, well-mannered. especially admired Grand Duke Sergei, in whom even little Victoria felt something good and attractive. She constantly smiled at this boy, asked to see him and did not want to part with him.

It's said that Alice, who was then in the last months of a new pregnancy, let Little Grand Duke Sergei listen to how the heart of the expected child was beating inside her. A touching story💗💗💗 and the Grand Duke in such an unusual way “met” (who would have thought!) with his future wife even before her birth!💗💗💗

#princess alice #prince Ludwig

18 notes · View notes

inky-duchess · 1 month

Note

Who makes the thrones (like the actual chairs), and is it typical for royalty to have new ones made or to keep the same ones as their ancestors?

Usually carpenters or masons with a royal warrants and seals of approval. Typically, one throne is used for coronations so that one is reused and kept throughout generations as symbols of power - St Edward's Chair, the Silver Throne, the Iron Throne. But less important thrones such as those in palaces can be remade to the whim of new monarchs, especially if the throne is an awkward fit.

#ask answered

12 notes · View notes

thepastisalreadywritten · 2 years

Text

The Coronation Chair: Anatomy of a Medieval throne

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II prompted the first comprehensive archaeological study of the Medieval throne on which British monarchs are crowned.

It has been battered and vandalised over the ages, but unpicking this majestic artefact’s evolution shed new light on both its original form and that of the enigmatic Stone of Scone, as Warwick Rodwell reveals.

10 August 2013

The Coronation Chair has been illustrated and described since the 14th century, and is renowned the world over.

For hundreds of years, this piece of Medieval furniture has played a seminal role in the anointing and crowning of English monarchs.

It was last used at the coronation of HM The Queen on 2 June 1953, the Diamond Jubilee of which was celebrated this year.

To mark the occasion in 2010-2012, the Chair underwent a long-overdue programme of cleaning, conservation and redisplay in Westminster Abbey.

Concurrently, a detailed archaeological study was carried out and the Chair was comprehensively recorded for the first time.

The project led to a radically new understanding of its construction and decoration, and of its relationship to the Stone of Scone, which was embodied in its seat.

Spoils of war

The origins of the Chair are well known. Indeed, the documentation accompanying its manufacture in the 1290s is still preserved.

Following Edward I’s victory over the Scots in 1296, state documents and items of regalia were surrendered and taken to London as spoils of war.

One of those items was a ceremonial block of sandstone upon which Scottish kings had hitherto been inaugurated at Scone Abbey in Perthshire, the last being John Balliol in 1292.

The Coronation Chair and Stone of Scone.

Constructed in the 1290s on the orders of Edward I, this famous throne recently received its first comprehensive archaeological study.

The results emphasise how the current form of the Stone of Scone can only be understood alongside the evolution of the chair that held it.

Edward I treated the Stone of Scone as a relic and presented it, along with the Scottish crown and sceptre, to the shrine of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey on 18 June 1297.

He ordered the construction of a great gilt-bronze chair to incorporate the Stone as its seat.

The chair was cast but was scrapped before it was finished and a new one made of oak, thereby reducing its weight from three-quarters of a ton to one-quarter.

St Edward’s Chair, as it is properly known (‘Coronation Chair’ is a relatively recent naming), was designed as a liturgical furnishing that would stand close to the shrine altar, where it served as a seat for priests officiating at masses.

Opinion is divided as to when the Chair was first used in the coronation ritual, but it was no later than 1399, when Henry IV was crowned.

A manuscript illustration of the coronation of Edward II in 1308, however, shows the king seated in what is almost certainly the Coronation Chair.

It is an extraordinary fact that, like a surprising number of artefacts and structures of first-rank importance, the Coronation Chair had never been systematically studied and recorded until now.

John Carter’s sketches of 1767 provided the basis for all known drawings but neither he nor any other antiquary recorded how the Chair was constructed or unravelled the vicissitudes of its later history.

Like most ancient artefacts of complex construction, it has undergone fundamental alterations as well as suffered deterioration over the centuries.

In fact, very little has been written about the Chair at all, as opposed to the Stone that it encapsulated.

The Chair has been the subject of a dozen books, scores of articles, Parliamentary debates, a commercial film, theft, hoaxes, and much political posturing.

Myths and misdirection

The Stone has accrued a huge mythology, but that is wholly of Medieval or later invention, as Nick Aitchison demonstrated in his study Scotland’s Stone of Destiny (2000).

The block is made of Lower Old Red Sandstone and has a geological signature that confirms it derives from the Scone Formation.

It did not originate in Egypt, Ireland or the west of Scotland, as the Romantic tales would have led us to believe.

Indeed, the Stone’s spurious biblical connection (as ‘Jacob’s Pillow’ – the stone on which, according to the Book of Genesis, the sleeping Jacob had a vision) was already being ridiculed in 1600 by William Camden.

Much of the Stone’s pseudo-history is of even more recent invention.

The first archaeologically objective study of the Stone took place in 1996, when it was removed from the Coronation Chair and sent to Edinburgh Castle, where it currently resides on loan from the Crown.

Under the direction of David Breeze and Richard Welander, Historic Scotland carried out a detailed examination, the findings of which were published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: The Stone of Destiny: artefact and icon (2003).

The Stone’s intimate relationship to the Chair has never been explored, however, resulting in the wholly unwarranted assumption by past commentators that the physical features exhibited by the block today relate to its pre-1296 history in Scotland.

This in turn has given rise to the invention of historical scenarios to explain these features.

Some writers have pronounced the block to be a Roman building stone or part of a pagan altar; others have claimed a Bronze Age or Pictish ancestry.

The iron links and rings that are attached to the two ends of the block have given rise to much comment, as well as claims that they were inserted for the purpose of carrying the Stone from site to site in Scotland, or alternatively for transporting it to London.

Finally, there are the conspiracy theorists who would have us believe that the Stone is fake.

These contentions can be refuted without exception. When we study the Chair and the Stone as archaeological artefacts, not just individually but jointly, and marry the findings with reliable historical evidence, a clear picture emerges.

The most fundamental misapprehension is that the Stone (as we see it today) was brought from Scone and placed in a made-to-measure compartment under the seat of the Chair, and that it simply sat there for the next 700 years.

In reality, the Chair and the Stone were made for one another, and both have been subjected to significant change over the centuries.

Made for each other

There is no basis for casting doubt on the authenticity of the Stone of Scone, or for claiming it as a Roman ashlar or a Pictish symbol-stone.

The upper and lower faces are natural bedding planes and are untooled, although the former is well worn through its prolonged use as a seat.

The four vertical edges were all crisply dressed in 1297 to create a close-fitting, rectangular seat for the new Chair.

One of the revelations of the 2010 study was the fact that the Coronation Chair did not have a wooden seat-board until the 16th or 17th century: the Stone itself was the seat.

The Chair frame is made of oak and comprises four corner-posts, and a series of moulded horizontal rails.

The sides of the Chair have upswept arms, which were originally decorated with carved lions.

The joints are mortised-and-tenoned but are inherently weak. The frame gets its structural strength from the lining of thick planks.

Below seat level, the sides are pierced by large quatrefoils – that is, four partially overlapping circles creating a shape akin to a stylised four-leaf clover – each of which originally had a painted heraldic shield at its centre.

By the 1820s, the shields had all been lost, and the quatrefoil grille at the front had gone too.

The gang that stole the Stone in 1950 also smashed the front rail and further weakened the frame. A replacement grille has now been fitted to restore its structural strength.

The Stone of Scone rested in this compartment and could be glimpsed on all sides; its top was fully exposed.

William Lethaby’s 1906 reconstruction of the gilt figure of a king in the back of the Chair. He is depicted seated on a low throne, with his feet resting on a lion. Only the lower part of this image survives today.

Externally, the sides and back of the Chair were carved and moulded with Gothic arcades.

The corner-posts too were embellished with blind, pointed – lancet – arches, and surmounted by pinnacles from which decorative foliage or ‘crockets’ sprouted.

No timber was originally visible, though, as the surfaces were entirely covered with decoratively punched gilding and pseudo-enamels.

There were also many pieces of coloured glass inlaid into the carved decoration. These inserts would have carried painted and gilded motifs, similar to those found in profusion on the altarpiece of Henry III known as the Westminster Retable (c. 1270).

Internally, the Chair was uncarved but was covered with gold leaf. It bore finely punched decoration - showing birds, animals, vegetation, and Gothic motifs.

Dominating the centre of the back was the seated figure of a king with his feet resting on a lion, almost certainly Edward the Confessor.

It was the work of Walter of Durham, principal painter to the court of Edward I. Unfortunately, most of this impressive display has been lost over time.

A detail of the punch-decorated gilding surviving inside the Chair’s left arm, showing birds amid vegetation.

The conservation programme of 2010-2012 was undertaken by Marie Louise Sauerberg, then of the Hamilton Kerr Institute, but now Westminster Abbey’s Senior Conservator.

Her work was key to unlocking the history of the Chair’s decoration, particularly by demonstrating that the all-over gilded appearance was primary.

In the 1950s, it had been suggested that the Chair was initially white in colour, emulating King Solomon’s ivory throne.

Royal pride

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Coronation Chair today is the gilt plinth on which it is raised, comprising four magnificent lions with Oriental features.

These were fitted in 1727 by the royal furniture-maker for the coronation of George II and replaced an earlier plinth, which also incorporated lions.

That plinth may have been made in 1509 for the coronation of Henry VIII.

Since both lion-plinths were fixed to the Chair frame, the Stone could only be inserted into the seat compartment from above, but this was not the original arrangement.

Walter of Durham’s exquisite gilt decoration would have been wrecked by manhandling a close-fitting, 3-cwt block of sandstone through the seat compartment.

Every time the Chair was required for a coronation, it had to be taken from the Confessor’s chapel through a narrow doorway, carried down steps, and repositioned in the Abbey.

Four operations were involved in extricating and replacing the Stone.

Almost certainly, the original plinth was a separate construction that rested on the floor. The Stone was placed on it and the Chair lowered over that.

Iron links and rings are attached to the ends of the Stone by staples set into lead plugs.

Various theories about their date and purpose have been advanced, all based on the assumption that they were used for lifting or carrying.

But nobody seems to have noticed that their fixing points are below the Stone’s centre-of-gravity, which means that it would instantly rotate when lifted.

Also, the links are not long enough for the rings to clear the top of the Stone, making it impossible to thread a carrying-pole of adequate diameter through them.

It is now clear that the ironwork was attached to the block in c. 1324-1327, on the instruction of Abbot Curtlyngton, expressly for the purpose of chaining it to the floor of the chapel.

At the time, he was under pressure from Edward III to relinquish the Stone so that it could be used as a bargaining counter with the Scots.

The abbot refused and the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker tells us that ‘the stone was now fixed by iron chains to the floor of Westminster Abbey under the royal throne’.

Since enforced removal of an object gifted to a shrine would have constituted sacrilege, the king backed down.

The 13th-century marble and glass mosaic pavement in the Shrine chapel has been meticulously recorded by David Neal.

During his work, we noticed that a square area to the south of the altar, where the mass priest’s seat would have stood, had been destroyed.

Almost certainly, this marks the place where the pavement was broken through in the 1320s to embed anchors in the floor for the chains that secured the Stone.

When the Chair was fitted with the first of the lion plinths, a new means of manoeuvring the Stone in and out of the seat compartment had to be found: the only route was from above.

The iron fittings were now pressed into service as lifting devices. Channels were crudely cut into the ends of the Stone so that the links could stand up, rather than hang down, and ropes could be passed through the rings.

The tendency for the unbalanced Stone to rotate was largely mitigated by the links being constrained in channels.

It was a clumsy compromise but it worked, albeit inflicting damage on the gilded interior of the Chair, as the Stone was hauled in and out.

The institutional history of Westminster Abbey in the two decades following its dissolution in 1540 is complex, but remarkably, the shrine of St Edward and the royal tombs survived.

The later 16th century saw a fashion for attaching historical labels (tabulae) to features around the Abbey, including the shrine, tombs and St Edward’s Chair.

These were generally painted either directly on the object or on a board, but in the case of the Chair, it seems that there was initially an intention to insert an inscribed brass plate in the upper face of the Stone.

The rectangular outline for the plate was roughly chiselled. The matrix was never fully cut and the project aborted. A painted label on a board was provided instead.

The change of plan most likely resulted from a decision to fit a timber seat-board over the Stone that had two further consequences.

First, battens had to be fitted to the sides of the Chair to support the seat-board, thereby reducing the size of the Stone compartment opening.

The block had to be shortened, and both ends were cut back by c. 15mm.

Second, the iron rings projected above the top of the Stone, obstructing the fixing of the seat.

To solve this problem, housings were hacked into the top of the Stone, allowing the rings to lie flat.

13th-century survival

Since the late 16th century, travellers and antiquaries have written accounts of the Chair, from which we learn that it suffered casual abuse until Queen Victoria came to the throne.

All the glass inserts were prised out, scores of slices were removed from the frame with pocket-knives and taken as souvenirs, names and initials were liberally carved in the wood, and the shields were stolen from the quatrefoils, exposing the sides of the Stone, which was then scraped with knives to acquire samples of its dust.

Three shallow scoops scored into the front edge result from this activity.

In the 18th century, when the second lion-plinth and new seat-board were fitted, further modifications to both the Chair and Stone occurred.

Although the latter had been shortened, the iron staples to which the rings were attached projected awkwardly, gouging the sides of the Chair every time the Stone was moved.

To ease this, the crowns of the staples were filed down. Something even more barbaric happened between 1727 and 1821: the lower edges of the Stone were broken away with nine hammer-blows.

There is no obvious explanation for this – perhaps the pieces were sold as souvenirs.

Even in more recent times, the Chair has suffered periodically.

In 1887, the Office of Works painted it brown for the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

A public outcry ensued and great damage was done to the gilt decoration when trying to remove the paint.

In 1914, Suffragettes attached a home-made bomb to one of the Chair’s pinnacles, causing more damage.

In 1939-1945, the Chair was stored in the crypt of Gloucester Cathedral, where it narrowly escaped destruction by an infestation of dry rot.

Finally, as well as vandalising the Chair, the gang that stole the Stone in 1950 dropped it and broke it.

Given this long and varied history, it is perhaps remarkable that the Chair survives at all.

Yet our study makes it clear that, despite having fallen victim to neglect, politics and the whims of fashion, St Edward’s Chair and the Stone of Scone – in the form we know it today – are two components of a single artefact, made in the 1290s.

They have an integrated physical history, and shared archaeology: one cannot be understood without the other.

#Coronation Chair #St Edward's Chair #King Edward's Chair #Stone of Scone #Coronation Stone #King Edward I #British History #British Royal Family #Queen Victoria #Queen Elizabeth II #medieval throne #Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria (1887)#Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II (2012)

52 notes · View notes

46ten · 5 months

Text

Rethinking the narrative of Hamilton as a poor child held back by illegitimacy

We’ve outgrown a number of the myths that Chernow invents or embellishes from Flexner and Miranda ran with, but AH as a humble child in the West Indies, struggling with poverty and the stigma of illegitimacy seems to persist, no matter the lack of initial evidence for that narrative and the excellent scholarship over the past 10 years or so that flips it on its head.

AH’s maternal grandfather was very wealthy; Rachel Faucette’s inherited wealth was what supposedly attracted John Lavien.

James Hamilton (b 1725 or so) was notably not wealthy. Though a “gentleman” from a respected Scottish family, as a younger son he went to make his way as a merchant at the Caribbean, and pretty much failed at every business venture, as far as we know. In 1765, he was hired to settle a matter in St. Croix, and at some point Rachel and their two kids, James and Alexander, either joined him or made their way there independently. It’s not at all clear that James “abandoned” the family or what happened - it seems just as likely that Rachel, perhaps realizing that their sons’ best options were getting involved in trade, decided to stay where she had an extended wealthy family who could also support her as a merchant/shopkeeper. AH started working really young (he’s 9 if you believe the 1757 birthdate), which was a pretty fantastic way to gain knowledge and experience, especially if his parents realized - and they likely did - that he was intellectually gifted.

Upon the death of his mother, who owned 5 enslaved persons, had silverware and leather chairs and a decent collection of books - definitely middle-class-ish - AH initially goes to live with his uncle and cousin, who were the two wealthiest people on St. Croix. As mentioned above, he was also already working as a clerk, ascending to what can best be described as the business manager by the time he leaves for NY, earning a pretty tidy sum as a single-man - he was likely upper-middle class. [A brief note: at no point does Edward Stevens or Thomas Yard, his brother-in-law, state that AH or his brother ever lived with the Stevens family. That conjecture comes more than a century later sourced to a census of the Stevens family that they had two male servants around the ages AH and his brother would have been. But I think if AH lived with the Stevens family, that would have come up well before the 1920s.] His first cousin provides him with what Newton calculates as 196 pounds sterling at that time, when the average British and American worker made somewhere between 10-15 pounds sterling PER YEAR. AH arrives in the colonies and lives with either the comfortably middle-class (Mulligan) or the wealthy elite (Elias Boudinot and William Livingston) before beginning his studies at King’s/Columbia College. There’s also no note about any difficulty in him getting into Elizabethtown Academy or King’s - no one was holding it over his head that he was a bastard.

So the facts of AH’s life 1768-1779 don’t really seem to be what’s shaping the narrative. Instead, it seems to me that two things are interfering with the interpretation:

1. AH’s 1769 letter to Edward Stevens in which he gripes “I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk or the like” which makes him seem somehow downtrodden in poverty. But there’s no evidence that that was the case, or that AH wasn’t just annoyed by being a clerk and thought a different job - or a war - would better employ his talents/allow for greater study for him to become a leisurely gentleman.

AH may have started working for Beekman and Cruger as early as 1766, at the age of 9-12 years old, perhaps having previously worked in his mother’s store. JCH writes:

The little leisure which he could command from his mercantile duties was devoted to study; his knowledge of mathematics was enlarged; he became fond of chemistry; and although his proficiency in it was small, he often urged it as a pursuit well adapted to excite curiosity and create new combination of thought.

Among the books to which he had access, he preferred those which treat of some branch of ethic. His favorite authors were Pope and Plutarch....

He often also, at this time, exercised himself in composition on moral topics, to which he afterwards occasionally resorted as a relaxation from the arduous labours of his professional life; and thus, by his varied studies, his mind became rich in materials awaiting his call. The Life of Alexander Hamilton

Although AH wrote to Edward Stevens in 1769 that "I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk or the like,” and Nathaniel Pendleton would later write that Hamilton “conceived so strong an aversion to [clerkship] as to be induced to abandon altogether the pursuits of commerce”, according to JCH, his father also felt his time as a clerk was very important:

This occupation was the source of great and lasting benefit to him; he felt himself amply rewarded for his labours by the method and facility which it imparted to him; and amid his various engagements in after years adverted to it as the most useful part of his education. The Life of Alexander Hamilton, my emphasis.

Other biographers have speculated that AH’s time as a clerk was probably critical for his understanding of commerce and finance and to the development of both his leadership and writing skills.

JCH also writes:

With a strong propensity to literature, he early became a lover of books, and the time which other youth employ in classical learning, was by him devoted to miscellaneous reading, happily directed by the advice of Doctor Knox, a respectable Presbyterian divine, who, delighted with the unfolding of his mind, took a deep interest in his welfare. The Life of Alexander Hamilton

This role for Knox is doubtful; Rev. Hugh Knox first visited St. Croix Sept/Oct 1771, and did not come to reside there until May 1772, only a few months before AH would leave for NY.

2. AH, in 1779-1780, certainly is sensitive to his lack of advancement in the army while others with less ability/experience advance thanks to nepotism. He doesn’t have the family connections, true, but he’s far from the only person frustrated by the way appointments are handed out - James Monroe also left the army because he couldn’t get a command.

And at no point does AH’s illegitimacy ever seem to hold him back - in fact, up until he made a number of political enemies, no one seemed to care. Illegitimacy was not at all uncommon, particularly in the West Indies; Newton offers up another example of a couple pretending to be married. There’s no record whatsoever that AH was ever taunted about being a bastard as a child, adolescent, or young man (the first recorded innuendos about it actually date from the late 1780s - he’s 30 or older). Likewise with the loss of his mother - a lot of children were orphans. These were just not life details that put him outside any veneer of respectability.

He’s able to rise to the level of aide-de-camp for Washington and married into a wealthy Dutch-American patrician family with, based on the lack of comments on his birth, not even a shrug. JCH does note that marrying into the Schuyler family was one of the most important events of his father’s life, but one never gets the impression from AH’s own writing that he thought they were inherently superior to him - no, this was the class of people whom he had always belonged with and rubbed shoulders with.

And perhaps other than the times he was in school, I’m 90% comfortable stating he almost always had servants - while living with his parents, his mother alone, his cousin, as a clerk, in the colonial American households, and then perhaps with a brief break while studying, he also had at least one servant in the colonial Army and for the rest of his life.

Hamilton’s St Croix education

More about Hamilton’s Faucett relations with links to Newton’s discussions

A summary of the amounts Anne Mitchell (and Peter Lavien) provided to AH.

#Hamilton was not like us and I wish that narrative would die #For many reasons #he's not relatable

12 notes · View notes

scotianostra · 4 months

Text

On May 29th 1546 Cardinal Beaton, Lord High Chancellor of Scotland, was murdered.

On the morning of that day when the gates of St. Andrews opened, ten or twelve men entered with the throng of workmen, these were no ordinary men, they had murder in mind, and revenge for the death of their friend the Protestant martyr, George Wishart, who had been executed on the orders of Beaton two months before.

Leading the first group was the noble, Kircaldy of Grange. While Kircaldy diverted the attention of the porter, another man, Norman Leslie led in a second contingent.

Finally, another Fife noble, John Leslie arrived with four men. Something about them alarmed the porter. He tried to raise the drawbridge, but the conspirators snatched away his keys and threw him into the moat.

Thinking that an army must be close behind, the repairmen fled. The conspirators then hustled fifty other people out of the castle. Cardinal Beaton stuck his head out a window and asked what the commotion was about. Someone shouted that Norman Leslie had taken his castle. This frightened the cardinal. The two had recently fallen out. But many others had reason to dislike the cardinal. His enemies said he had forged a will for the late King James, overthrown Scottish liberties, and tortured and murdered Protestants.

When Leslie ordered the cardinal to open his door, Beaton refused. But when the assassins prepared to burn him out, Beaton pleaded for a promise that they not kill him and when it was given, opened the door. Sitting in a chair, he protested, “I am a priest, I am a priest; you will not slay me.”

John Leslie struck him twice with his dagger, followed by Peter Carmichael. James Melville, seeing that they were acting in fury, reminded them that the judgment of God should be dealt out soberly. Rebuking Beaton for his wicked life and especially for the murder of Wishart, he ran him through twice with a sword. Beaton died saying again, “Fie, fie, I am a priest, all is lost.”

John Knox joined the murderers soon afterward, seeking protection. He was a hunted man, known as a close associate of George Wishart. The murderers urged him to become their chaplain and he agreed. The men took refuge in the cardinal’s stronghold. They were besieged in the Castle by the governor of Scotland, Regent Arran. On 11 March 1547 Norman and his colleagues, Henry Balnaves, James Kirkcaldy of Grange, and Alexander Whitelaw of Newgrange witnessed a pledge made by Patrick Gray, 4th Lord Gray to Edward VI.

The lairds in the castle, sometimes called the Castilians, were summoned to answer for the murder, and, failing to do so, were on 30 July 1547 denounced as rebels. On the same day the castle was surrendered to the French, and a condition having been made that the lives of all within it should be spared, its principal defenders were carried captives to France.

#scotland #scottish #history #assasination #religious figure #The Scottish Reformation

7 notes · View notes

littlemuoi · 1 year

Text

My 30 years protecting the Queen: dry humour, heartfelt gifts and travelling the world by Hugo Daniel (September 17th 2022)

Taking in the beauty of a misty Scottish moor amid the bustle of a Balmoral grouse shoot, the royal protection officer Dick Griffin turned to check on his charge, the Queen, only to get the shock of his life.

It was September 1995 and, at first glance, the then 69-year-old monarch had disappeared. As he searched anxiously through the thick fog, he finally caught sight of her — lying flat on the ground, a dead grouse beside her.

“Because it was so foggy we couldn’t see [that the grouse had] hit her in the chest,” Griffin said. “You can imagine the velocity of something like that falling down to the ground — it just flattened her completely. So I had to get her up and discreetly brush all the feathers and plumes away from her. She was shaken up and badly bruised.”

The equerry who had shot the bird was understandably embarrassed. “But then [they] saw the funny side of it, because the Queen saw the funny side of it. She said, ‘What an odd thing to happen’.”

Griffin, 71, shared his memories of more than 30 years as a protection officer for the royal family over a cup of coffee in a Pret a Manger near Buckingham Palace. His son, Gareth, 42, is a uniformed firearms officer and was on duty at the palace when the Queen’s coffin arrived there on Tuesday evening.

Since her death, a news clip from the Platinum Jubilee has re-emerged in which Griffin revealed how, during a walk on the Balmoral estate, the Queen posed for a photo with two American tourists who did not recognise her.

He said he was glad the story had been a “comfort” to people, with many reposting it and calling it their “favourite Queen story”. He described her as a “remarkable, caring, wonderful person”.

Griffin, who had been due to have lunch with the Queen next month, will attend the smaller, more personal committal service at Windsor Castle’s St George’s Chapel tomorrow after the funeral at Westminster Abbey. He says all seven police officers who worked for the monarch have been invited.

Griffin now gives talks about his career to raise money for the Kent, Surrey and Sussex air ambulance.

His three decades with the royals began in 1982 as part of a team that reorganised palace security after Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom. After that, he was assigned to act as Prince Edward’s protection officer at Cambridge University from 1983 to 1986. He worked on assignment for Prince Philip for 13 years until 1999 and then for the Queen until he retired in 2013.

He travelled with the Queen and Prince Philip to 161 countries. “Often you were in the car with them, just chatting away. She would ask about my family and all my marathon running. Once I went to South Africa to do the Comrades marathon, which is 55 miles, and you had a chip on your shoe so people could follow you at home. She got one of her footmen in front of a computer for ten hours to follow me, to see how I was getting on. The footman wasn’t too impressed.”

When Griffin’s running club in Bromley, southeast London, held a party to celebrate his 100th marathon, the Queen marked the occasion with a letter, showing her wry sense of humour. In it, she jokes: “We are delighted that your employers allow you sufficient time to train for, and take part in, such events.”

At his first meeting with the Queen and Prince Philip in 1983 at Windsor Castle, a week before he went to Cambridge with Edward, the couple were keen to learn about the background of the man who would be guarding their youngest child.

“We were sitting on lovely chairs and the staff were giving us coffee and the Queen said to me, ‘Can you tell Philip and me what you used to do before you came to royalty protection?’

“It was probably a question I’d prefer they’d not asked, because my job for the past six years had been [at Scotland Yard’s obscene publications branch policing] prostitution, the brothels, the sex shops and pornographic cinemas.

“The Queen said, ‘Good gracious, Mr Griffin. What on earth does Edward need a police officer with your qualifications for?’ and, before I could answer, Prince Philip said, ‘I don’t know. But they can have some wonderful parties at Cambridge.’

“That was my first experience of Prince Philip and his one-liners.”

The next time Griffin met the Queen, he remembers her sitting on the floor of the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle to watch a private performance of a play that Edward and friends had originally performed at Cambridge, in which Griffin had a cameo role.

The roof was leaking. “Water was landing on top of the Queen’s head. She was all dressed up, having just come from dinner. Several members of the household offered her a seat, but she said ‘that’s not necessary’ and sat on the floor in the aisle and put a programme over her head to keep dry.

“That was one of my first impressions of the Queen, and I just thought, ‘What an amazing lady.’”

Griffin’s three-decade career as protection officer spanned security threats ranging from the IRA to Isis.

“Of course with Islamic terrorism and suicide bombers, we had to really ramp things up,” he said. “But nothing fazed the Queen and Prince Philip. We’d try to encourage them sometimes not to be so open on walkabouts, but nothing would change her.”

He was in the car with the Queen on the day two months after 9/11 when an American Airlines flight crashed in Queens, New York. It would turn out to be an accident, but there were fears at first that it was terrorism-related.

“I was bringing the Queen back from Windsor Castle and my mobile phone rang and it was my son. I spoke to Gareth and he said there might be another terrorist attack.

“I told the Queen, and then, five minutes later, Tony Blair rings up to brief the Queen, and I always remember her saying, ‘Yes, prime minister, I know. My policeman’s son has just phoned to tell me.’”

In 2005 Griffin’s first grandchild, Joshua, was born and the Queen insisted on meeting him.

“She said to me in the car one day, ‘For the last nine months, all you’ve talked about is how excited you are about being a grandfather, and now your grandson has been born, you haven’t even bothered to introduce me.’ So I had to arrange a date and time so the Queen could have a cuddle. She was thrilled.”

He saw her love for her own grandchildren, too. For Christmas in 2010, Griffin and the other protection officers decided to give the Queen a wind-up clockwork duck that played music and laid an egg every 30 seconds, something they had found at a flea market on a recent state visit to the United Arab Emirates.

“My wife wrapped it up all beautifully with ribbons and gave it to the equerry to present it to the Queen on Christmas Day. We got this beautiful letter from the Queen saying how much she enjoyed it and Edward’s son, James, had so much fun playing with it.”

In the letter, the Queen wrote: “To the PPOs, many thanks for the unusual Christmas present from you all. It certainly livened things up and little James’s face was a picture when the duck laid her eggs! Thanks for making us laugh.”

When Griffin retired, in 2013, the Queen gave him the best gift of all. She had paid for him to have a retirement party in the state department at the palace, with 200 guests, and at eight o’clock she joined the party, with Prince Philip and the Earl of Wessex.

“That was the biggest present she could give me,” he said.

#brf #royal anecdote #i laughed and cried a little bit while reading this #got a bit emotional there #missing them #queen elizabeth ii #prince philip #prince edward #duke of edinburgh #ed #james #richard “dick” griffin series #james earl of wessex

69 notes · View notes