HENRY VERRALL (1713-1794) AND THE SEEDS OF STARBUCKS

The Verralls of Lewes in Sussex are a respectable old family. In time they became doctors and solicitors, but they began (at least so far back as I’ve been able to trace them) as shopkeepers and innkeepers. For at least two generations in the eighteenth century they kept the White Hart Inn in the town and in around 1734 Richard Verrall, a son of the White Hart landlord, was invited by the local toff the Duke of Newcastle to set up a coffee house.

The White Hart Inn, Lewes

Coffee houses arrived in Britain in 1650. Charles II  considered them "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers" and they were hugely popular. When the New Coffee House opened in Lewes, there were about 550  coffee shops in London alone, many affiliated to a particular profession or political persuasion. The Duke of Newcastle set Richard Verrall up in business in order to give the Sussex town’s Whigs a meeting place and talking shop. As one French visitor to London put it, coffeehouses, "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government," were the "seats of English liberty."

When Richard died young only eight years later, his brother Henry (my great aunt’s 3x great grandfather!) took over the running of it. Henry kept the coffee house for over 40 years, and must have been at the centre of the town’s gossip and political debate, hosting the radical movers and shakers of the day in his shop. One such radical was a certain Tom Paine, an excise officer from Norfolk who was posted to Lewes in 1768.

Tom Paine’s house in Lewes, 1768-1774

Thomas Paine involved himself in local politics, and also campaigned for a pay-rise for his fellow excise officers – he himself had to pad out his income by running a tobacco shop in Lewes. Henry certainly knew him, and it is reported that one day, after a game of bowls, they repaired to the White Hart for a bowl of punch. As the drink flowed Verrall quipped, in reference to Frederick II of Prussia (with whom Britain had been allied during the recent Seven Years’ War), “the King of Prussia was the best fellow in the world for a King, he had so much of the Devil in him.” Paine apparently subsequently reflected that “if it were necessary for a King to have so much of the Devil in him, Kings might be very well dispensed with.”

Memorial plaque on the wall of the White Hart Inn, Lewes

In 1774 Paine was sacked from his job in Excise and met Benjamin Franklin in London, who suggested he emigrate to British colonial North America. There he became known as the father of the American revolution because of the radical ideas he published in a pamphlet called “Common Sense” in 1776. He returned to Britain in 1787, and in 1791, on the eve of the French revolution, published his masterpiece, “The Rights of Man.”

A descendent of Henry’s (the writer Edward Verrall Lucas, not me!) was thus able to claim that Thomas Paine, the driving force behind the two greatest political events of the age, had been inspired by a casual remark over punch in the pub by Henry Verrall. Although that may be a little unlikely, it does seem a distinct possibility that Paine’s ideas were honed in the talking shop that was Verrall’s New Coffee House in Lewes. 

DEBORAH CASTLE (1816-1902) AND THE SWEDISH NIGHTINGALE

What better way to celebrate my fiftieth post on this blog than with a song!

Deborah Castle was my 3x great aunt. Her brother Charles was travelling widely through Europe in the autumn of 1847. He left Deborah a list of addresses and she wrote to him frequently with news of family and events in and around their home in Bristol.

Her news regularly included recent or forthcoming public entertainments. There was the Weymouth Regatta for example, at which “there were a great many about, chiefly as you may suppose of the lower orders.” She went to a concert by a singer called Phillips, “a very thin attendance hardly enough I should think to cover his expenses.”

Deborah's letter of 19th September 1847 to Charles,

sealed with wax and written in two directions to save paper 

- surprisingly easy to read (although you may disagree)

When Charles reached Milan in October 1847 he got Deborah’s news that

“Jenny Lind is coming here [Bristol] to sing at the theatre for one night, and one in Bath. The prices are raised 5/- gallery and various prices up to 25/- boxes. Whether the theatre will fill at such a figure I rather doubt, as so many have now heard her. We talk of going. Michael [brother of Deborah and Charles] protests against giving so much but I think it will end in our going with Miss Adams who is in want of a chaperone.”

Jenny Lind (1820-1887):
(left) as Alice in the opera Robert Le Diable by Meyerbeer (ceramic figurine c1847)

(right) in a portrait by Eduard Magnus now in Stockholm (painted 1862)

Jenny Lind, known as the Swedish Nightingale, had been famous in Europe for nine years before she made her English debut in the presence of Queen Victoria at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, in an opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer. It was 4^th May 1847, only four months before Deborah wrote to Charles, and Lind spent most of the rest of the year touring the provinces of Britain and Ireland.

She was at the height of her powers. A year earlier, Mendelssohn had written the soprano part in his new oratorio Elijah with her in mind, including the high F sharp for which she was famous. Mendelssohn fell in love with Lind (as Hans Christian Andersen had done four years earlier). There are persistent rumours that they had an affair, and that in 1847 Mendelssohn asked her to elope with him to America. She didn’t go, but she was so devastated by his untimely death that November that she was unable to sing Elijah for a year afterwards. When she finally tackled it, it was to raise funds for a Mendelssohn Scholarship (of which a young Arthur Sullivan, later of Gilbert & Sullivan fame, was the first recipient).

PT Barnum brought all hs showbiz razzmatazz

to the promotion of Jenny Lind in America

(cartoon of her first concert there, 1850)

The great showman PT Barnum finally persuaded her to go to America, where she gave 93 concerts between 1850 and 1852. She made $250,000, much of it for charity; Barnum made $500,000. She returned to England however, retiring and settling in Malvern where she died in 1887.

I do hope that Deborah, Michael, Charles and Miss Adams bit the bullet and paid the extortionate ticket price. They could afford it. Jenny Lind would never again be as confident and care-free as she was in that summer and autumn of 1847, royally applauded by kings and queens, universally admired by the public, and passionately adored by Mendelssohn. Although the Bristol concert was to be given in 1848, after Mendelssohn’s death, it would have been a pity to pass the once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear the nightingale sing.

The Victoria Rooms, Bristol,

in which Jenny Lind sang in 1848,

had been opened only six years earlier

SIR JOHN BOWRING (1792-1872) AND BRITAIN’S FIRST DECIMAL COIN

I wish I had some record of the reaction of Deborah Castle’s family, her brothers and sisters, to her marriage at the age of 44 to Sir John Bowring. I know that Sir John’s family, in his case his children, were not pleased that she was replacing their mother in his affections and in their family home.

From Deborah’s point of view she was at last free to marry following the death three years earlier of her mother, whose lifelong companion she had resigned herself to being. She was 24 years younger than Sir John, whose first wife had died two years earlier. He was certainly in need of a friendly face, having just returned from a disastrous last public appointment as governor of Hong Kong (see my post about his launching the Second Opium War!).

Sir John and Lady Bowring,

photographed by Disdéri Eugène, 1864

Starting a war was not the best way to round off an illustrious career. Sir John had made his mark in many arenas – as a politician, linguist, iron magnate, hymn-writer, you name it. One of his last acts as an MP, just before his posting to Hong Kong, was to lay the foundations for Britain’s decimal currency.

The chain of events began with the fire which burnt down the old Palace of Westminster in 1834. When it was thought that the nation’s standard weights and measures had been lost in the blaze (the standard yardstick and so on) a new Royal Commission for Weights and Measures was set up. Its report in 1842 – how slowly things move in British politics! – went beyond its terms of reference in arguing the advantages of a decimal system of currency as well as of weight, volume, distance and so on.

The destruction of the Palace of Westminster

(JM Turner, 1834)

A second commission was deemed necessary, to confirm the findings of the first, which it did after only a year in 1843. A mere four years after that Sir John Bowring, a leading supporter of decimalisation, argued a proposal for it in the House of Commons.

Younger readers may not know the full extent of the madness that was Britain’s old currency: there were twenty shillings in a pound, although until 1816 the largest coin was not the pound but the guinea, worth twenty-ONE shillings. Twelve pennies made up each shilling and there were four farthings in each penny, 960 farthings to the pound. This was in the days when a farthing could still buy something and a pound was an unimaginably large sum of money for most people.

Other coins over the years included the crown (worth five shillings), the half-crown (worth two shillings and sixpence), the shilling, the sixpence, the threepence (pronounced thruppence or threppence), the penny and the halfpenny (pronounced hayp-knee). From 1816 there was for a while a coin worth one pound, called a sovereign.

British small change circa 1970

As Sir John said in 1847, “Great Britain stands alone with her complicated and entangled system, so unintelligible to foreigners, and often so embarrassing to her own subjects.” He suggested a pound divided into 100 new units called Victorias, with ten Victorias making an intermediate unit called a Queen. (He also suggested retaining and revaluing the smaller coins: the farthing would become 1/1000^th of a pound instead of 1/960^th, the ha’penny 1/500^th and the penny 1/250^th, to ease the transition for the public.)

Although it was a mathematical nightmare, the old currency was much easier to work with in common fractions: 240 pennies can be divided by two, three, four, five, six, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, twenty and twenty-four and still leave a whole number of pennies, unlike 100 cents, centimes, centesimi, Victorias or anything else.

The principle objection to decimalisation in Britain however was not the maths but the fact that Britain’s major enemies of the past 50 years, France and America, had gone decimal with the franc and the dollar. Doing what they had done would never do! Instead the government decided to take a little time to consider the idea, and as a holding measure agreed to Sir John’s suggestion of a new coin worth one tenth of a pound (two shillings) to be called not the Queen but the florin. (Bowring later said he had wanted it to be called the dime.)

The Godless Florin of 1849,
"one tenth of a pound"

The “little time” the government took to decide in favour of full decimalisation was in fact 124 years, for most of which we lived with the madness of two almost equally valuable coins, the florin worth two shillings and the half crown worth two and a half shillings. Bowring’s florin survived the 1971 changeover to become the “ten new pence piece,” which was shrunk to its present 10p size in the bicentenary of his birth, 1992.

It is lucky to have survived at all. The first florins, appearing at last in 1849, became known as the godless florins. The design omitted the usual Latin phrase Dei Gracia Fidei Defensor” “By the grace of God, Defender of the Faith.” Queen Victoria and the general public were outraged, especially when it became known that the Master of the Mint was a Catholic. The coin was blamed for everything from economic misery to plague and pestilence, and quickly (1851, quick by British standards, at least) redesigned.

 I'm delighted to add in August 2014 that a new biography of Sir John Bowring has just been published. "Free Trade's First Missionary" is written by Sir John's descendent Philip Bowring and deals with his time in Europe and Asia. Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, said of the new book: "This scholarly and very readable biography, written by one of Asia's most distinguished journalists, shows how free trade became part of Hong Kong's DNA." It's published by Hong Kong University Press and is available on Amazon as a real book and also in a Kindle edition. (And this blog is acknowledged in the introduction!)

WILLIAM HENRY CASTLE (1810-1865) AND THE TREATMENT OF HIS SPINE

Doctor Thomas Baynton’s report:

“Master Wm. Castle, son of Thomas Castle, esq. of Portlandsquare, Bristol, when about a year old, was observed to have lost his health, and it was discovered that he could not move his legs as well as he had been accustomed to do. On examining the spine I discovered that four of the lower dorsal vertebrae were in a diseased and protruded state, and that great pain was occasioned by moderate compression, either of the bones or contiguous soft parts. Absolute rest on a hair mattress was strictly enjoined; the muriate of lime, in appropriate doses, directed, and the constant care of a confidential servant ensured. The advantages resulting from those means were soon apparent; they continued progressively to increase till the cure was accomplished. At the end of the tenth month he was allowed to roll and play on a carpet; in a short time after he got on hit feet without assistance, and has continued in perfect health from that time to the present. The curve is entirely removed.”

A Visit to the Doctor

(18^th century engraving)

Young master William was my great great grandfather. Doctor Baynton published this review of the boy’s case in his 1813 bestseller, “An Account of a Successful Method of Treating Diseases of the Spine. With Observations, and Cases in Illustration.” It was the sequel to his publishing debut of 1797, “A Descriptive Account of a New Method of treating Old Ulcers of the Legs,” which sold so well that it ran to a second edition, “enlarged, corrected and considerably improved,” in 1799.

Baynton’s Big Idea, when it came to treating spinal disorders, was complete and horizontal rest for anything up to 18 months on a sort of very firm hospital bed of his own design.

Draining a patient

(18^th century engraving)

Although his ten months of treatment must have seemed an eternity for the one-year old boy, William was lucky, in a way. By 1811 Baynton had altogether dispensed with the still-widespread 18^th century practice of “draining” a patient, a procedure which had hitherto been applied to all manner of ailments.

“Draining” was nothing more than blood-letting. Blood was drawn off into a measuring bowl in specific amounts depending on the condition being treated. It could be taken from the arm as in the above illustration, but was often collected direct from the affected area. Heated glass cups were placed on the skin. The resulting vacuum drew the blood to the surface in a dome of flesh, from which the blood could more easily be let. “Cupping” was even then a centuries-old procedure which, although largely discredited now, is still sometimes practiced today in alternative therapies.

Cupping-glasses (left) and a measure-marked blood-bowl

from the late 18^th century

I’m not qualified to work out from Baynton’s description what exactly was wrong with William. Muriate of Lime (calcium chloride) was used as a cooling poultice to reduce inflammation, I think. But obviously – because here I am writing about him – my great great grandfather survived.

Baynton was described in 1830 by one biographer as “not backward in cherishing the idea that he had outstripped all his brethren in professional attainments. I never was in his company without hearing him relate some Wonderful Wonder in rescuing some patient from the jaws of death.” He had such a low opinion of his medical brethren’s abilities that in 1820 he refused treatment for a urinary infection, from which as a result he died at the age of 59. But it must be noted that his Big Idea for the treatment of ulcers – dressing them instead of deliberately keeping them open – was still in use as Baynton’s Method 200 years after he devised it.

JOHN THOMAS ADOLPHUS COOPER (1836-1897) AND HIS MANY TURKISH GONGS

It remains a family mystery why Adolphe Cooper, son of a prosperous Irish gentleman farmer should take a job laying submarine telegraph cables in the Eastern Mediterranean. Mind you, his father didn’t do much actual farming either, having spent much of his youth yachting around Europe. Adolphe was born in Brussels, the youngest of three brothers, all of whom opted for more modern sources of income. Austin, the eldest, was a railway manager in County Roscommon (the landlocked one north of Co. Galway); Sam became a chemical manufacturer in Peckham, South London. And for Adolphe, telegraph engineering was just the start. 

John Thomas Adolphus Cooper (1836-1897)

Finding himself the regional manager for the Levant Telegraph Company in Smyrna at the age of 23, Adolphe made the most of being an Englishman abroad. Five years later he married his Italian wife in Monastir, Tunisia, and his children were born in Salonika (present-day Thessaloniki in Greece) and Scutari (Shkoder in Albania). All these places were at that time still part of the Ottoman Empire.

Britain was held in high regard by Ottomans, having fought with the Empire against Russia in the Crimean War of 1853. Adolphe’s career advanced easily in the service of a regime eager to modernise its infrastructure; he was Superintendent of the Ottoman Government Telegraph Station in Salonika, and in Skutari he acted as the local Imperial Commissioner of the Ottoman Railway.

He survived massive political upheaval in the Empire in 1876, which saw one military coup, two regime changes and an attempt at constitutional reform. In fact the emerging new leader, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, greatly favoured Adolphe Cooper, who became his Chief Telegraph Engineer and Surveyor. The Sultan promoted him to “Imperial Commander of Roumelian Railways” (roughly speaking, Roumelia stretched from Albania to Bulgaria) and also made him responsible at some point for “the irrigation of the whole of Asia Minor south of Konya” (Konya is a city in southern central present-day Turkey).

I must say this seems quite a stretch of territory and professional responsibility for one man, however British he may have been. But Adolphe’s contribution to the modernisation of the Ottoman Empire cannot be disputed, based on the number of awards showered on him by the Sultan and others. These included:

in 1876, the Order of the Medjidie (4^th Class) from the Sultan

in 1879, a Diploma of Honour from the Red Cross (for services to sick and injured Ottoman soldiers), not illustrated here!

in 1884, a Knighthood of the Order of Pius IX from Pope Leo XIII

in 1897, the Order of the Osmanieh from the Sultan

and in 1897, the People’s Order for Civil Service (Commander’s Cross 3^rd Class) from King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (for being Inspector of the Eastern Railways in Odrin – Edirne in present day Turkey), 2nd Class version shown here

Adolphe's grandfather and my 4x great grandfather were brothers, so I'd be the first to admit this is a fairly tenuous ancestral connection. But who'd pass up the chance to enjoy all those gongs?

The picture of JTA Cooper and some of the information in this article comes from Butterhill and Beyond, a history of the Coopers by R Austin-Cooper.

RICHARD FRANK SALTER (1921-1944) AND THE HELL SHIP

I wrote a while back about David Castle who died at Tobruk during the Second World War. He grew up with his cousin Dick, who also served and also died. Dick was the youngest of three boys, the apple of his mother’s eye; in looking through his family photo albums you can see the sudden change in his mother’s face from pre-war happiness to sorrow. She died of a heart attack only six years after Dick.

Dick had been planning to go to Agricultural College. His older brothers had followed the family path to university studies, and rather looked down on their baby brother's less academic aspirations. But I think Dick was lucky – his brothers having fulfilled family expectations, he was free to do something different, something he really wanted to do. (Maybe I’m just projecting!)

Aircraftman 1^st Class RF Salter (1921-1944)
on leave at the family home, Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, 1941

Anyway, the war came along and instead Dick signed up with the RAF. He served as Aircraftman 1st Class with 62 Squadron and was posted to Singapore, where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese when the island fell in February 1942. For the next two years he was (I believe) put to work in a series of Japanese POW labour camps, in the sort of conditions portrayed in the film “Bridge Over The River Kwai” about the building of the Burma railway.

SS Junyō Maru

In September 1944 he was on board the unmarked SS Junyo Maru, a ship carrying English, Dutch, Australian and American prisoners along with enslaved Javanese workers. The Japanese were transporting them to begin work on the Pakanbaru-Muara Railway in Sumatra. Prisoners and slaves were packed onto the ship like sardines; extra between-decks of bamboo were installed to maximise the ship’s capacity, and in some areas there was standing room only. Conditions were as bad as on the notorious sailing ships which transported African slaves 150 years earlier, and these Japanese ships were known as hell-ships.

HMS Tradewind

At 5.30pm on the evening of 18^th September 1944, the Junyo Maru was sunk by two torpedoes from the British submarine HMS Tradewind. Those on deck stood some chance of survival; those below decks virtually none. Dick, as a survivor reported, was sick and weak, and going blind from malnutrition, and was almost certainly below.

4th June 2000 above the wreck of the SS Junyō Maru

Of the 6500 captives crammed into that ship, 5620 (including Dick Salter) died in the sinking. It was one of the three worst maritime losses of life in the Second World War. Many of the recaptured 880 survivors perished later while working on the Sumatra Railway. Most of those who died were Javanese; of the western victims the majority were Dutch, and on 4th June 2000 a flotilla of Dutch, Belgian and Indonesian ships laid wreathes above the wreck.

War memorial in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire
(photographed in 2008)

Dick is also remembered

 in the Far East Prisoners of War Pavilion

in the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire

MARGARET DE GAUDRION MERRIFIELD VERRALL (1857-1916) AND THE COMMON CAUSE OF HUMANITY

The one thing that everyone knows about my great great aunt Margaret (if they’ve heard of her at all) is that she received the psychic cross-correspondences. It’s an extraordinary story, and was the subject of my earlier post on her.

But I know that her grandchildren and great grandchildren regret that such a one-sided picture is always painted of her (and of her daughter and son-in-law who were best known for similar reasons). It's too easy in researching one's family tree to pounce on the "good stories" and forget that these are real people, and that they are other people's ancestors as well. I am guilty as charged, and would like to make some small amends with the following obituary of her which gives a much more rounded impression of her than I had before I found it this morning online.

In Memoriam.

MRS VERRALL.

Our “common cause,” writes a correspondent, has lost a wise and steadfast supporter in Mrs Verrall, whose death, after some months of suffering, took place at her Cambridge home on July 2^nd. Both she and her brilliant husband, Professor Verrall, who died in 1912, had done much to help women to realise their powers, and to give of their best, unhampered by artificial restrictions. Mrs Verrall (formerly Miss Margaret De Gaudrion Merrifield) was one of the early students of Newnham College, where she worked with success for the Classical Tripos and where she afterwards held the post of classical lecturer and tutor. She was a remarkably able teacher, for her own brain was clear as well as powerful, and she knew how to make a subject clear to those she addressed. She was also a good speaker, but she preferred the life of the study to that of the platform and committee room, although her political interests (which were, in general, on the side of the Liberal party) were deep and keen. Her work as a scholar included the translation of the text of Pausanias for “The Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens,” brought out by herself and Miss Jane Harrison, and she arranged for publication of her late husband’s lectures on Dryden. As a member of the Society for Psychical Research, she gave much of her time and thought to the investigation of mental and physical phenomena in some of their many mysterious and as yet uncomprehended forms.

At the simple funeral service, conducted at St. Giles’s Church, Cambridge, on the 5^th inst., by the Rev M.A. Bayfield, rector of Hertingfordbury, the members of Newnham College, including Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, the former Principal, Mrs. B.A. Clough and Miss Jane Harrison walked in procession behind the coffin, which was preceded by the nearest relatives, Mrs. W.H. Salter (Mrs. Verrall’s only daughter) with Mr. Salter, and Miss F. de G. Merrifield (sister) being the chief mourners. The kindness shown by Mrs. Verrall as Hon. Secretary of the Belgian University Committee in Cambridge was recognised by the attendance of some of the leading Belgian professors and their wives, and beside a wreath from Newnham College was one inscribed “Le corps professorial Belge reconnaissant.”

The obituary appeared on p.181 of the newspaper “The Common Cause of Humanity,” the organ of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, on 14^th  July 1916.

JOHN SADLEIR (c1510-aft1544) AND THE SIEGE OF BOULOGNE

This is about as far back as I go – John Sadleir was my 11x great grandfather, and understandably details of his life are a bit sketchy. I know his year of birth (approximately) and the names of his older brother and his father (Ralph and Henry of Hackney respectively). That’s about it really. Oh, and he commanded a company of men at the Siege of Boulogne in 1544. Even here it’s a little vague – there were two sieges of the French town that year.

France was supporting Scotland in a war with England, so England joined forces with Spain to attack France. It was literally an unholy alliance – Henry VIII of England had just broken away from the Church of Rome, dissolving all the English monasteries and inventing the Church of England with himself at its head. Spain and France, both devoutly Catholic countries, were natural allies; and Spain’s king was also the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V,

players in the campaign season of 1544

But war is a pragmatic business, and Spain could see huge political and economic advantages in attacking and weakening France. In any case France’s king, Francis I, had made an earlier and even more unholy pact with the Ottoman Turks (who were Muslims) to attack Spain; and one can well imagine, ringing up and down the diplomatic corridors of the time, the pained cries of “well he started it!”

Henry VIII’s commitment to the joint Anglo-Spanish advance on Paris was less than whole-hearted. Of a promised 40,000 men he sent about 16,000. The English army landed at Calais in early 1544, reached Boulogne on 19^th July, and never really got much further.

At Boulogne, bombardment quickly won England the lower town, and the upper town fell by September to fiercer fighting. The town castle itself held out bravely until it was mined by English engineers; on 18^th September the surviving 1600 Frenchmen of the original defensive force of 4000 surrendered. Henry VIII entered the town in triumph preceded by  the Lord Marquis Dorset carrying a naked sword, while trumpeters lined the town walls like a scene from Hollywood.

The First Siege of Boulogne

(detail from an engraving by Samuel Hieronymous Grimm)

This is probably the siege that John Sadleir was involved in. Henry returned to England and left orders for the town’s defence by the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk – who promptly disobeyed the king. They left a garrison of 4000 men in Boulogne and headed back towards England with the rest of the English Army.

Meanwhile, France and Spain had overcome their differences and made a Peace Treaty together. Now both the English garrison at Boulogne and the English army at Calais were trapped and heavily outnumbered by the combined Catholic forces. The French set about retaking Boulogne and after a successful surprise attack on 9^th October they very nearly did. Unfortunately the undisciplined French troops began prematurely looting and celebrating, thereby blowing their chances of victory. Instead, they settled in for the rather longer Second Siege of Boulogne.

For the next six years, England held on precariously in both Calais and Boulogne. Neither Henry nor Francis could muster the military forces required to resolve the situation decisively, and in the end an Anglo-French treaty in 1550 allowed France to buy Boulogne back.

Henry, who died in 1547, spent his declining years waiting for a French counter-attack and invasion which never happened. Instead, the Scots took advantage of his distraction by Europe to intensify their irritating border raids on northern England. And six years after his death his daughter Mary I (Bloody Mary) returned England to the Catholic Church which he had so defiantly left twenty years earlier.

Bloody Mary Tudor

burnt 280 Protestants at the stake

including five bishops

John Sadleir was a bit of an under-achiever compared to his brother Ralph, a major statesman and key political figure under four monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. Ralph should have a whole blog to himself, but no doubt I’ll return to him here from time to time in the future!