Love, Letters and Spies

Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein otherwise known simply as Metternich was probably the greatest diplomat of the nineteenth century. As well as being a towering intellectual he seems to have been a very physical man, if not on the field of battle then in the bedchamber. In her book, Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris, 1785-1857, Judith Lissauer Cromwell describes him as, “witty and charming, above average height, slim and graceful, “the Adonis of the Drawing Room.” A man with, "fair hair, an aquiline nose, a well shaped mouth, a high forehead and piercing blue eyes."


He served as the Austrian Empire's Foreign Minister from 1809 and Chancellor from 1821 and was responsible for what historians call ‘The Concert of Europe.” This was not a forerunner of the Eurovision Song contest but a concert in the sense of an arrangement of something by mutual agreement or coordination and the thing he was in charge of arranging was the restoration of Europe to its state before the French Revolution after the defeat of Napoleon. He managed what is called 'The Congress System' from 1814 until the liberal revolutions of 1848 finally forced his resignation. But it is not his achievements as a statesman or his politics I am interested in today, it is achievements as a husband, lover, and as one of the most prolific love letter writers in history.



Metternich had three wives, obviously not all at the same time although one suspects he might have managed that if he had had the opportunity he rarely had only one bed to go to at a time. With his first wife, Princess Eleonore von Kaunitz (m. 1795–1825) he had 10 children, with his second wife, Baroness Antoinette Leykam (m. 1827–29) he had one child; and with his third wife, Countess Melanie Zichy-Ferraris (m. 1831–54) he had another five. You would think that was more than enough for any man but Metternich did not stop there. He managed to squeeze in another child with his mistress Katharina Bagration. Princess Marie-Clementine, was born on 29 September 1810 in Vienna and to save face was promptly adopted into the Bagration family in Russia.

Katharina Bagration,
La chatte blanche

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Metternich had two mistresses in tow. His long standing mistress the widow Katharina Bagration and his new love interest the Duchess of Sagan.

Both women ran a pro-Russian, anti-Napoleonic salons in the city mainly financed by the Tsar and in the case of Bagration by her besotted but estranged husband until he died from his wounds at the battle of Borodino in 1812. Bagration was known as le bel ange nu "the beautiful nude angel" because she wore low cut dresses with bare shoulders, and la chatte blanche "the white cat" for her white Indian muslin dresses that clung seductively to her body and her wily intelligence. Her influence on the politicians and statesmen who frequented her salon was significant and Napoleon is said to have considered her a formidable opponent.

But by 1815 Bagration's charms were becoming less beguiling to Metternich. The new woman in his life, Katharina Friederike Wilhelmine Benigna, Princess of Courland, Duchess of Sagan (1781-1839) a German noblewoman from what is today part of Latvia was taking over his affections and attention.

There was intense rivalry between the women who were living in separate wings of the Palm Palace in Vienna in 1815, both the paid guests and informers of Tsar Alexander. This state of affairs was a complication even the greatest diplomat in Europe found hard to manage. "What a detestable complication your residence is in Vienna," he wrote Sagan but he was not going to give up Sagan. He had been infatuated with her since 1813 and besides she was useful. Over the years he had built up a network of female informants or 'spies' who had been his lovers like Caroline Bonaparte, now Queen of Naples and Laure Junot the wife of the French General and Bagration and Sagan would be no different in the end.

Katharina Friederike Wilhelmine Benigna,
Princess of Courland,
Duchess of Sagan
(1781-1839).

Sagan had been perusing Metternich since 1804 when the ambitious young widow's family moved to Berlin so that she inveigle herself into his affections but he did not fall under her spell then so she remarried only to divorce her new husband a year later saying, "I am ruining myself with husbands." When their affair began it was intense and Sagan demanded that Metternich divorce his wife and marry her if he wanted to continue. Her demands were brushed aside but the affair continued. He While he was in her thrall he wrote Sagan over 600 letters. The letters which were read by the Austrian Secret Police who rightly suspected Sagan of being a Russian spy at the time were lost and remained hidden until 1949. Reading the letters more than 100 years later it is easy to see that Sagan mimicked her lover's prose, they reflected his opinions back to him, confirmed his conceits and his image as peacemaker and conqueror. In short she pandered to his enormous ego and he loved it and her much to the Tsar's delight. In the summer of 1814 the pair fell out. She wrote, "Everything has so completely changed between us that it is not at all astonishing that our thoughts and our sentiments agree on anything. I am beginning to believe that we never really known each other. We were both perusing a phantom.” The break up was acrimonious with Metternich saying as he took to the baths at Baden that they were, " to arm his skin," against her."

Three years later, Metternich began another affair with Princess Dorothea von Lieven (1785 – 1857). Dorothea was a Baltic German noblewoman and wife of Prince Khristofor Andreyevich Lieven, Russian ambassador to London from 1812 to 1834. It seems Metternich had a penchant for aristocratic women from the Baltic, she was the third in succession of Baltic lovers. Cromwell describes Dorothea as a, “tall and slender woman, distinguished rather than beautiful, with strikingly proud bearing.

Princess Dorothea von Lieven
(1785 – 1857)

Doroethea was not an instant success in London and was considered cold and snobbish by London Society. She had a long and elegant neck that earned her the nickname, “the swan” and by those who disliked her, “the giraffe. But her reputation did not bother her she was not after friendship she was after power much like her predecessors Sagan and Bagration and she used her intelligence, charisma, and social skills to make herself a leader of London's politically infused society. She cultivated friendships with the foremost diplomats of the day. Not only did she become Metternich’s lover she was also reputed to have had an affair with Lord Palmerston, although there is no firm proof of this and she was a close friend of Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh and Lord Grey.

The introduction of the waltz at Almack's

Her hard work paid off and she became a leader of London society; invitations to her home were the most sought after. She was the first foreigner to be elected a patroness of Almack's, London's most exclusive social club, where she introduced the scandalous dance, the waltz to England, when the Tsar Alexander came to London in 1818. It was during that visit the two great lovers first met. They took an instant dislike to one another. She thought he was cold and intimidating and far too self- important. He dismissed her as just a pretty woman travelling in the Tsar’s wake and treated her with complete indifference.

However, at a party hosted by the Dutch Ambassador on 22nd October at Aix-La-Chappelle that year, they found themselves sitting next to each other and she played him for all he was worth drawing him out with questions on his favourite subject; Napoleon; and by indulging his ego and listening to his every word she won him over. The next day she found herself alone in a carriage with the Prince and as they chatted, they found that they had much in common. They were both disappointed in the people they were married to, they hated getting up early in the morning, they  liked the same paintings, the same novels and literature, the same style of furniture – in fact they were kindred spirits. A few days later, their notorious liaison began with Dorothea concealing her identity by wearing a long cloak and veil in order to enter the Prince’s apartment incognito.

Congress at Aix la Chapelle, 1818

In Metternich Dorothea had found her equal, he was a man she could love wholeheartedly, who could satisfy her physically, emotionally and intellectually. She wrote, “Good God! My love, I know how to rejoice in so few things, do you understand what makes me feel true happiness, it is you, only you! My Clement, if you cease to love me what will become of me?  ... My dear friend promise to love me as much as I love you; our lives are pledged in this promise.”

In Dorothea Metternich had met the woman of his dreams, she could match his intellect and his passion. She could speak and write in four languages and her wit and intelligence were as sharp as his. He wrote, “My happiness today is you. Your soul is full of common sense your heart is full of warmth ... You are as a woman what I am as a man.” “Why are your letters so like mine? Why do you write me almost the same words I have written to you, and you have the air of knowing them whilst my letter is still in my room? Will such perfect identity of our beings be so complete that the same thought only finds the same expression in each of us, when a word, a single phrase will succeed in expressing what we feel? .... I could write volumes, I could repeat to you a hundred times in one page that I love you.”

Their heated, clandestine, affair soon succumbed to the requirements state. They continued their liaison mainly in letters continuing their physical relationship whenever their paths crossed. Metternich described writing to Dorothea as like speaking to her, or chatting to her as if she were in the room with him because she was ‘in him.’ “You are my last thought before I go to sleep at night and first thought when I awaken,” he wrote.

The pair were tortured by their affair not only because of their separation but also because they both knew that they were married to others and that they could never be together. Dorothea was well aware of Metternich's reputation with women and called his fidelity to her into question on occasion. In the early years of the affair he chastised her for such thoughts but of course the inevitable happened and she broke off their relationship in 1826 when she found out that he traded her in for a younger woman.

Towards the end of her life Dorothea burned Metternich’s letters afraid that their intimacy would shock her family and ruin their reputations but she copied sections of his letters into her notebook. In one letter, that survived because it was copied by the French Secret Service, Dorothea writes about a dream she had when she was staying at Lord and Lady Jersey’s house one summer evening. She wrote; “We spoke a great deal, and for fear we would be heard, you took me on your lap so that you could speak to me more quietly; my dear Clement, I heard your heart beating, I felt it under my hand so strongly that I woke up, and it was my own heart reacting to yours. Mr God, my love, how it still beats at this moment .... will my dream ever become a reality?”

Lady Jersey,
Patroness at Almack's

Metternich occupied her imagination from 1818 to the beginning of 1826. By the end she was disillusioned; references to him in letters written after that date, are cold and spiteful and it seems that time did not heal her broken heart. She had nothing good to say about him or his third wife when she saw him in Brighton in 1849 describing him as "slow and tedious" and his wife as "stout and well-mannered." By then she was the wife in all but name of the French politician Guizot and living in Paris. It was said that even though she was a widow by then she refused to marry Guizot as she would have to give up her title of ‘Serene Highness’ something the proud and regal woman was never going to do. Like her former lover she was ancien regime through and through.

Dorothea Lieven died peacefully at her home, 2 rue Saint-Florentin, Paris, aged 71, on 27 January 1857, with Guizot and Paul Lieven, one of her two surviving sons, beside her. She was buried, according to her wish, at the Lieven family estate, Mežotne (near Jelgava) next to her two young sons who had died in St. Petersburg. She is a recurring minor figure in many historical novels about the period, notably those of Georgette Heyer. Heyer generally portrays her as a haughty, formidable, and unapproachable leader of society, but in The Grand Sophy she is described as "clever and amusing", and there is a passing reference in that book to her role in political intrigues.

Metternich died in Vienna two years later on 11 June 1859, aged 86. He was the last great figure of his generation; almost everyone of note in Vienna came to pay tribute at his funeral but in the foreign press his death went virtually unnoticed. Of course 'the coachman of Europe' is the topic of much historical discourse. His reactionary political views held sway in Europe for the best part of 35 years and his love affairs were a source of fascination and intrigue throughout the courts of Europe.

Sources:
Dorothea Lieven: A Russian Princess in London and Paris, 1785-1857 By Judith Lissauer Cromwell
The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics After Napoleon By Brian E. Vick
1815: The Roads to Waterloo By Gregor Dallas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemens_von_Metternich
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2015-01-28-sluga-en.html

Love Letters - The Separation of War

The British Army Postal Service delivered around 2 billion letters during the First World War. In 1917 alone, over 19,000 mailbags crossed the English Channel each day, transporting letters and parcels to British troops on the Western Front. 

An indication of how important love was to the men on the Front Line can be seen by the sheer volume of post in the two weeks before Valentine's Day in 1916 when 49,000 bags of letters were distributed by the military postal service.

Indeed my husband's grandmother was one of those people delivering the post. She was Doris Seaton-Leadam, the daughter of a wealthy timber importer who lived in Knightsbridge. We know her job was to distribute the post and that she got job because she could drive; her father had taught her to drive before the war.

We do not have an image of Doris Seaton-Leadam
but this is what she might have looked like.

Examples of the letters Doris was distributing are held in the National Archive as well as at the Imperial War Museum. 

This particularly moving one, and was sent to William Crawford, a Scottish-born soldier who served in the Household Calvary by a young woman called Hetty in Chester. She signs her letters with kisses, and shares her news of cold winters, quiet Christmases and her love for him. She even wrote him a poem: 

'Here's love to the dove that flies above/ and may it not lose a feather
If I can't have the lad I love, I'll do without forever.'

He died of wounds from shellfire on February 5 1918.

Two unknown Cavalry Officers
collecting mistletoe during the Great War.

The video clip below shows Benedict Cumberbatch reading a letter form the end of the Second World War. It is from a man called Chris Barker to his love Bessie Moore dated 29 January 1945. The reading is part of publisher Canongate's Letters Live project.

In September 1943, Chris Barker was serving as a signalman in North Africa when he decided to brighten the long days of war by writing to old friends. One of these was Bessie Moore, a former work colleague. The unexpected warmth of Bessie's reply changed their lives forever. Crossing continents and years, their funny, affectionate and intensely personal letters are a remarkable portrait of a love played out against the backdrop of the Second World War. Above all, their story is a stirring example of the power of letters to transform ordinary lives. 

The performance with given with thanks to Simon Garfield, author of My Dear Bessie, and Bernard, Peter and Irena Barker





For more information see:
http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/letters-to-loved-ones
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3444499/First-World-War-love-letters-reveal-passion-soldiers-sweethearts.html
http://letterslive.com/

Do the French Write the Best Love Letters?

Here are three examples of love letters written by three of France's greatest literary figures - Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The French have a reputation as great lovers. Do these letters confirm that view or refute it, in your opinion?

From 1846 to 1854, Flaubert had a relationship with the poet Louise Colet; his letters to her survive. One of them is reproduced below. Flaubert never married and according to his biographer Émile Faguet, his affair with Louise Colet was his only serious romance. Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding "le mot juste" ("the right word"), which he considered as the key means to achieve quality in literary art. Does he find 'le mot juste' in this letter dated 1846?

“I will cover you with love when next I see you, with caresses, with ecstasy. I want to gorge yu [sic] with all the joys of the flesh, so that you faint and die. I want you to be amazed by me, and to confess to yourself that you had never even dreamed of such transports… When you are old, I want you to recall those few hours, I want your dry bones to quiver with joy when you think of them.”

Louise had an interesting love life too. In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris. When the couple arrived in Paris, Colet began to submit her work for approval and publication and soon won a two-thousand-franc prize from the Académie française, the first of four prizes won from the Académie. Like many women of note she ran a salon that was frequented by many of the city's litrary crowd including Victor Hugo. In 1840 she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity of the child. Later she became the paramour of Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, and Abel Villemain. After her husband died, she supported herself and her daughter with her writing.


Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) had torrid love life. He fell in love with a woman called Mme. Berny, she was 46 and he was 23. He called her “la Dilecta,” and her creative and intellectual influence on Balzac was profound. When the two split up in 1832, he entered a troubled relationship with the Marquise de Castries on the rebound. The letter below was written to Countess Ewelina Haska, a married Polish noblewoman to whom he came to refer to as “The Foreigner.” They embarked upon an intense correspondence, which quickly escalated into a passionate bond, which lasted seventeen years. The two vowed to marry once Ewelina’s husband died. Though the Count passed away in 1842, Balzac’s poor finances prevented the couple from marrying. In March of 1850, when he was already fatally ill, the two finally married. That was just five months before he died.

"MY BELOVED ANGEL,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be — very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment say to myself, ‘Come, I am going there!’ Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not a life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I feel foolish and happy as soon as I let myself think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were here. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself ‘She is mine!’ Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!"

This missive from the 24 year old Jean-Paul Sartre to a 21 year old Simone de Beauvoir dates to the spring of 1929, and can be found in Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone De Beauvoir, 1926-1939  at the dawn of their romance, shortly before he proposed marriage, which Simone turned down; instead, the two embarked on their famous lifelong open relationship.

My dear little girl
For a long time I’ve been wanting to write to you in the evening after one of those outings with friends that I will soon be describing in “A Defeat,” the kind when the world is ours. I wanted to bring you my conqueror’s joy and lay it at your feet, as they did in the Age of the Sun King. And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself. This happens much more often than I admit to you, but seldom when I’m writing to you. Try to understand me: I love you while paying attention to external things. At Toulouse I simply loved you. Tonight I love you on a spring evening. I love you with the window open. You are mine, and things are mine, and my love alters the things around me and the things around me alter my love......

I love you with all my heart and soul.

Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics. Her most famous work, The Second Sex remains to this day one of the foundational texts in philosophy, feminism, and women's studies.The main thesis of The Second Sex revolves around the idea that woman has been held in a relationship of long-standing oppression to man through her relegation to being man's "Other." In agreement with Hegelian and Sartrean philosophy, Beauvoir finds that the self needs otherness in order to define itself as a subject; the category of the otherness, therefore, is necessary in the constitution of the self as a self. It seems that Jean-Paul remained her 'other' for the rest of her life.

Love Letters 3 - The Begging Letter

In the now famous words of Cheap Trick, "I Want You to Want Me," is a common refrain in many a love letter.

The song only reached number 29 in the UK Charts in 1979 but  was used in the 1999 hit romcom, 10 Things I Hate About You. In the story, new student Cameron (Gordon-Levitt) is smitten with Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) and, in order to get around her father's strict rules on dating, attempts to get "bad boy" Patrick (Heath Ledger) to date Bianca's ill-tempered sister, Kat (Julia Stiles). 

Written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, it is a modern version of William Shakespeare's comedy The Taming of the Shrew. The song plays to a montage of Ledger pursuing Stiles as he tries to persuade Kat (Stiles) to go to the prom with him and of course they fall in love with each other in the end.

It seems that Kings too were not above a bit of begging when cupid’s arrow hits its mark. Henry VIII’s State Papers contain a letter he wrote to his then mistress Anne Boleyn who was residing in Hever Castle in 1527.

The lovestruck Henry VIII wrote:

“I beg to know expressly your intention touching the love between us.

Necessity compels me to obtain this answer, having been more than a year wounded by the dart of love, and not yet sure whether I shall fail or find a place in your affection, ........

But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me). I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only.

I beseech you to give an entire answer to this my rude letter, that I may know on what and how far I may depend.....

Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain yours, H. R.”

Anne was playing a longer game than Henry imagined at the time, determined to be his wife not just his mistress. She keeps him on tenterhooks, torturing his heart for as long as she can being tardy with her replies. Of course, she gets her way but things did not turn out exactly as she had planned!

What should you say in a love letter?

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétius
by Louis-Michel van Loo.

In 1779 Benjamin Franklin, when serving as the U.S. envoy to France, fell in love with Anne Catherine Helvétius, the widow of the Swiss-French philosopher, Claude-Adrien Helvétius. 

Nicknamed "Minette", she maintained a renowned salon in Paris using her dead husband’s accumulated wealth and among its habitués were France’s leading politicians, philosophers, writers and artists.

 In courting her attention, he sent her many letters expressing his love, admiration, and passion. 

In one, he claimed that he had dream that their dead spouses had married in heaven and that they should avenge their union by doing the same on earth! 

In another passionate plea, he wrote:

 “If that Lady likes to pass her Days with him, he in turn would like to pass his Nights with her; and as he has already given her many of his days…she appears ungrateful never to have given him a single one of her nights.”

Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago comes on strong when he writes to Lara saying; 

“Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.”

I think you'll agree that's powerful stuff but how would you feel if you got a letter like that? Would it please you or make you run a mile? I think I'd make a run for it. So what should you write to your love? Well if want to woo your love successfully science has some tips for you.

Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg’s theory of love, suggests that the ideal love letter should include the following components—intimacy, passion, and commitment. 

To test this hypothesis Donelson Forsyth and Kelli Taylor constructed a number of letters and asked people what they thought of them.

They discovered that, when it comes to love letters, commitment conquered all.

The letter that proclaimed, “I know we will be happy together for the rest of our lives” and “I couldn’t imagine a world without you in it,” was rated much higher, in terms of expressing love, than one that made no mention of commitment. 

Adding language that spoke of closeness and caring increased the letter’s good impression with readers, but it was commitment that left readers feeling loved and in love.

As to expressing passion in a letter; frisky letters, which went on for too long about the sender’s sexual passions, were viewed generally negatively by both genders; perhaps because they were more about lust than love. 

They also discovered that a message of commitment need not be delivered in a traditional love letter or a card; a simple email will do which is lucky as so many of us have lost the art of putting pen to paper. 

However, research shows that people think that letters are more trustworthy, and a hand written letter shows effort and care too. 

Therefore, if you want your love letter to get results you need to write it yourself, show your commitment to the relationship and put it in an envelope. Call me old fashioned but a bunch of flowers wouldn’t go amiss either.

For more see:

https://spsptalks.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-science-of-relationships/

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

The letter writer's tools

Pietro Antonio Conte Rotari -
A Young Woman reading a Love Letter

Of course, there would be no love letters without pens, ink and that luscious bright-red blob of sealing wax for the heroine of the story to crack open at her dressing table.

A good goose quill was the letter writer’s standard kit until the invention of the metal dip nib pen in the 1820s. 

These quills glided beautifully over the soft handmade paper made from rags allowing the writer to let their feelings and emotions flow from their hearts through their pens onto the paper. 

Woman writing a letter, Pietro Antonio Rotari
(1707-1762)

Some lovers wrote of ecstasy, distraction, and excitement while others described their love as a nightmare, saying they are unable to cope with the absence of their beloved.

According to the People's Magazine: An Illustrated Miscellany for Family Reading, 1867, quills were usually about 10 inches long and a mature goose could provide about 20 feathers a year from which pens could be made. 

Many of the feathers were imported from Russia and at the height of the trade some 6,000,000 a year were being manufactured in Britain with a man able to make up to 800 a day. This was even as the metal dip nib was being sold. 

It seems that writers loved their quills.

Penning a Letter by George Goodwin Kilburne

The ink people used varied, some made their own using old recipes, some simply mixed a little water and soot while others bought expensive India Ink made from a type of fine soot, known as lampblack that was combined with water. India ink was sold in bottles and was a mainstay of writers for much of the previous two centuries.

A classical intaglio.

Seals have been used for security since the time of the Ancient Egyptians; the Ancient Egyptians made theirs of mud and rolled them with an engraved stone with the pharaoh’s name on it. The Romans made beautiful intaglios, craved stones often set in rings with the owner’s unique symbol. By the Middle Ages seals were appearing on legal documents. 

A golden papal bull.

Perhaps the most famous seals were the papal bulls or ‘bulla’ which carried the metal seal (bulla), which was usually made of lead, but on very solemn occasions was made of gold. In the 18th century, the lead bulla was replaced with a red ink stamp of Saints Peter and Paul with the reigning Pope's name encircling the picture, although missives of historic importance, e.g. the bull of Pope John XXIII convoking the Second Vatican Council, are still sealed with the traditional lead seal.

Ordinary folk however used wax. By the Middle Ages, the make-up of the sealing wax was typically beeswax and 'Venice turpentine', a greenish-yellow resinous extracted from Larch trees. The brilliant red colour comes from the addition of expensive vermilion made from the mineral cinnabar. From the 16th century onwards, other ingredients were added like shellac to give the wax a glossy shine. By the mid nineteenth century a variety of colours were available including gold using the addition of mica, green, blue, black and white.

A Mulready Wrapper c. 1840

The use of sealing wax diminished with the introduction of the gummed envelope but that took much longer than you might think. By the early years of Queen Victoria's reign the Mulready envelope had appeared in England, it was a prepaid postal wrapper and forerunner of the modern envelope. 

Edwin Hill and Warren De La Rue were granted the first British patent for an envelope-making machine in 1845. These envelopes were not what we think of as an envelope today. They were made from a lozenge (or rhombus)-shaped sheet of paper, three edges were pasted together but there was no gummed opening, sealing wax was still required to close it. The envelope we know today did not appear until nearly 50 years later.

Love Letters - The Paper

This month’s theme is Love Letters, but before you can write a letter, you need paper.

As England moved into the 18^th Century most of the paper being used was French, German or Dutch. There were a few paper mills dotted around the kingdom and one in Edinburgh by the mid century and of course, all the paper had to be made by hand.

In 1709 Britain invited Europeans to settle in its American colonies but German arrivals at London were far greater than shipping could take so some returned to Germany but others were relocated, mainly in Ireland but others stayed in England. One such was a man called Isaac Tipps who decided to settle on the Isle of Wight in Hampshire. He is recorded as a paper maker when he married Christian Rutter in 1711. It turned out that the Isle of Wight was not a particularly good location and the mill enjoyed only a brief life but local historians think that it provided coarse wrapping paper for local trades.

Whatever its quality paper is a fibrous mat made by mixing fibres with water, colour or bleach to make a suspension, when the water is drained away the fibres are pressed and dried to make a flexible bonded sheet. Any fibres will do, plant fibres were first used by the Ancient Egyptians to make papyrus but by the middle ages the European paper industry was based on the shredding of rags or other waste textile material. The rags were sorted and cut by women then boiled in open tanks using wood ash as a source of alkali to break the fibres down. The resulting grey slush was sorted and washed to shallow tanks or stone troughs to clean it then hammered with iron shod stamping hammers, similar to the type used for fulling cloth. The longer the fibres were hammered the finer the resulting paper.

Sorting the rags

Hammering the fibres

Making the sheets

Hanging the sheets to dry

As the 18^th century progressed the production and use of paper in Britain gradually increased as higher rates of duty reduced imports. The British paper industry was able to rise to the challenge with the help of the introduction of a rag- machine known as a ‘Hollander’, invented in Netherlands sometime before 1670; it replaced the stamping mills that had previously been used for the breaking down of the rags and beating of the pulp. 

John Baskerville, Printer

The second was the creation of a woven mould John Baskerville, a Birmingham printer, who is more widely known for his Bakerville typeface these days than his printing. He wanted to improve the quality of his printing so he collaborated with James Whatman the Elder and developed a woven wire fabric to strain the fibres on, thus producing the first woven paper in 1757.

John Dickinson, Papermaker

The transition from hanging each separate sheet out to dry to creating a continuous roll began in 1809 when John Dickinson patented a machine where a wire-cloth covered cylinder revolved in the pulp suspension. The water drained away through the centre of the cylinder and a continuous layer of pulp was laid onto a felt covered roller (later replaced by a continuous felt passing round a roller) so that the sheets could be made to any length and cut to any size. Backed by George Longman, whose family controlled the Longman publishing firm, he established a number of paper mills in the south of England taking advantage of water for power and canals for transportation of his wears. Dickinson brands are still available today - Basildon Bond and Black and Red accounts books.

Production was further enhanced in 1821 when T B Crompton patented a method of drying the paper continuously; using a woven fabric to hold the sheet against steam heated drying cylinders.

In 1850, Dickenson’s  company started mechanical envelope manufacturing, with gummed envelopes for the first time and they pioneered the production of window envelopes in 1929.

In America, Thomas Gilpin opened a mill in Brandywine, Maryland using the cylinder paper machine in 1817. This was the first machine paper mill in the US. This mill operated from 1809 to 1828.

Today paper is still made by hand for specialist purposes and as lovely gift wrapping.

For further information see:

http://paper.lib.uiowa.edu/european.php

http://www.peacepaperproject.org/dardhunter.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baskerville

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dickinson_Stationery

http://www.iwhistory.org.uk/papermill/

Love Letter 4 - Young Hearts

Voltaire to Olympe Dunover

Written in 1713 while in prison in the Hague.

Voltaire (1694-1778), the French philosopher and author is one of my hero Sinclair's favourite authors. He takes Candide to India with him and loses it when the ship goes down but once he's established himself in Tooley Street he's quick to buy himself another copy. 

Aged just 17, Voltaire was incarcerated because Olympe's mother and the French ambassador disapproved of their relationship. Such was the power of French aristocrats before the Revolution. 

Shortly after he wrote this letter, he managed to escape by climbing out of the window.

"I am a prisoner here in the name of the King; they can take my life, but not the love that I feel for you. Yes, my adorable mistress, to-night I shall see you, and if I had to put my head on the block to do it.

For heaven’s sake, do not speak to me in such disastrous terms as you write; you must live and be cautious; beware of madame your mother as of your worst enemy. What do I say? Beware of everybody; trust no one; keep yourself in readiness, as soon as the moon is visible; I shall leave the hotel incognito, take a carriage or a chaise, we shall drive like the wind to Sheveningen; I shall take paper and ink with me; we shall write our letters.

If you love me, reassure yourself; and call all your strength and presence of mind to your aid; do not let your mother notice anything, try to have your pictures, and be assured that the menace of the greatest tortures will not prevent me to serve you. No, nothing has the power to part me from you; our love is based upon virtue, and will last as long as our lives. Adieu, there is nothing that I will not brave for your sake; you deserve much more than that. Adieu, my dear heart!"

Arout

(Voltaire)

Love Letters

Like my hero Sinclair, the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) studied to become doctor but unlike Sinclair’s his heart was not really in it. . Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne are among the most famous love letters ever written. As next-door neighbours, they exchanged numerous short notes, and occasionally more passionate letters.

Keats trained as an apothecary at Guy's Hospital from 1815 to 1816 and attended lectures on the principles and practice of surgery by the famous surgeon Sir Astley Cooper who also makes a brief appearance in my novel. In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician, and surgeon.

Poet and surgeon John Keats

Keats's desire to become a poet led him to abandon medicine soon after he completed his training. In his 'Ode to a Nightingale' recalls his experience of caring for the dying:

The weariness, the fever and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows spectre-thin, and dies.

Ironically, it was his medical training that made him such a good carer for his brother Tom when he died from tuberculosis. In giving that care Keats became infected with the disease himself; there was no inoculation at the time, the now well-know BCG vaccine was first used in humans in 1921. Infection for Keats meant certain death but not before, he fell in love and wrote some of the world’s greatest poetry and love letters. Here is one of them.

“25 College Street, London

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else – The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you again[s]t the unpromising morning of my Life – My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love – You note came in just here – I cannot be happier away from you – ‘T is richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet – You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more – the pain would be too great – My Love is selfish – I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever

John Keats

Fanny, John Keat's great love

For more see:

http://englishhistory.net/keats/letters/love-letter-to-fanny-brawne-13-october-1819/

Outlander's Clair Fraser has jumped from second world war nurse, to eighteenth century healer cum witch to surgeon and that's what's great about fiction but the real story of female doctors, in Britain at least, is one of profound struggle and individual persistence. 

When Charlotte Leadam, in my up coming novel Sinclair, a story based on the real Leadam family who lived and worked as apothecary surgeons in Tooley Street from the late 18th century to the mid nineteenth century, inherits her husband's apothecary shop she was not allowed to run the shop on her own account - only men were allowed to be licensed as apothecaries.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 – 1917) was the first woman in Britain who qualified as a physician and surgeon and she did this when in 1865, she finally obtained a licence (LSA) from the Society of Apothecaries.

Garrett's life's work was opening the medical profession to women. She started her quest by working as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital, In 1860 she attempted to enrol in the hospital's Medical School. She was not accepted but was allowed to attend private tuition in Latin, Greek and materia medica with the hospital's apothecary, while continuing her work as a nurse.

She employed a tutor to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. Eventually she was allowed into the dissecting room and the chemistry lectures.

Gradually, Garrett became an unwelcome presence among the male students, who in 1861 presented a memorial to the school against her admittance as a fellow student, despite the support she enjoyed from the administration.

She was obliged to leave the Middlesex Hospital but she did so with an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica.

Garrett then applied to several medical schools, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and the Royal College of Surgeons, all of which refused her admittance.

Having privately obtained a certificate in anatomy and physiology and in 1862, she was finally admitted by the Society of Apothecaries who, as a condition of their charter, could not legally exclude her on account of her sex.

She continued her battle to qualify by studying privately with various professors, including some at the University of St Andrews, the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and the London Hospital Medical School.

She co-founded the first hospital staffed by women, was the first female dean of a British medical school, the first female doctor of medicine in France.

She was the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, she was the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain.

Pictures: 1. Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) in Outlander Season Two Finale "Dragonfly in Amber"
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson