Текст книги "Glimpses of Britain. Reader"

Dark depressions of lady with the lamp

By Nigel Hawkes

Florence Nightingale may have suffered from manic depression, according to an American psychiatrist.

The posthumous diagnosis explains why the founder of modern nursing was subject to periods of ferocious and productive energy and spells of extreme self-doubt.

Professor Kathy Wisner, an expert in mood disorders from the University of Pittsburgh, told a conference that such abrupt shifts characterised an illness psychiatriasts call bipolar disorder – more commonly known as manic depression.

“Florence heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes in her teens and early 20s: symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” Professor Wisner said.

She cited the diary and letters that Nightingale wrote throughout her life as evidence for the diagnosis.

“Why, oh my God, can I not be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people and told that the conversation of all of these clever men ought to be enough for me,” Nightingale wrote in one letter. “Why am I starving, desperate and diseased on it?”

But at almost the same time, she was capable of high exultation. “This is the life,” she later wrote. “Now I know what it’s like to live and love life, and I will be really sorry to leave life. I wish for no other earth, no other world, but this.”

Nightingale’s health has long been the suject of biographical speculation. When she returned from the war in the Crimea she became an invalid, spending much of the next ten years in bed.

Her symptoms have often been attributed to brucellosis, contracted from drinking un-pasteurised milk. “She may well have contracted the infection in the Crimean War,” Professor Wisner said.

Speaking at a conference at the University of Marlyland, she added: “But that illness alone does not account for her severe mood swings, or the fact that she would be so incredibly productive and so sick at the same time. “In her teens and early 20s, Nightingale heard voices and experienced a number of severe depressive episodes, symptoms consistent with the onset of bipolar disorder,” Professor Wisner said.

Although she lived to the age of 90, Nightingale was more or less an invalid for the last 50 of them. When she was 60 her mother died, leaving her in a state of nervous collapse, too ill with palpitations, insomnia, headaches and depression even to attend her funeral.

Yet through much of this long illness she wrote reports and books, established the first modern nursing school, and was one of the first to apply statistical methods to public health. “The manic periods of bipolar disorder allow for extreme productivity, creativity and insight that go beyond what would normally be possible,” Professor Wisner said.

Nightingale gained her reputation during the Crimean War when she was appointed to oversee the introduction of female nurses into military hospitals in Turkey in 1854. Once there, Nightingale found that unsanitary conditions were claiming more lives than the battlefield, and campaigned to improve hygiene and nutrition. The death rate fell and when she returned to Britain, Nightingale was hailed as a national heroine.

Longfellow named her the Lady with the Lamp, and her fame and success transformed nursing into a respectable profession for women.

Lesley Hall, of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, in London, described the diagnosis as an interesting theory. But she said that no one really knew what Nightingale suffered from: “I think retrospectively diagnosing distinguished Victorian invalids is a positive parlour game.”

Grandchildren cash in on legacies their parents don’t need

The Times, Monday, February 3, 2003

By Alexandra Frean

Inherited wealth is increasingly skipping a generation and going straight from the estates of older people to their grandchildren, according to the first detailed analysis of inheritance in Britain.

An estimated Ј4 billion of assets a year are left by grandparents to younger people to enable them to buy their first home or pay off student debts because their own parents are already comfortably off.

Michael Willmott, of the Future Foundation and author of the study, said that it was also clear from the findings that, despite fears of a pensions crisis, a significant minority of people are “over-saving” – accumulating large amounts of wealth that they have no intention of spending on themselves. He predicts that the value of inherited wealth will continue to rise, despite increasing life expectancy forcing more people to eat into their savings before they die.

The findings throw important new light on Britain’s wealth base and are likely to inform the debate on pension provision and financial planning for an ageing population. Mr Willmott said: “People living longer means quite naturally that inheritance often goes to those who are already financially independent – many being in their forties, fifties and sixties – thus making little fundamental difference to their life-styles. Much of this inheritance goes into savings or reducing debt, but some is skipping a generation and going to younger people who really need a helping hand getting a secure start in life.”

Death dues

+ Inheritance tax (IHT) is payable only at 40 per cent on estates valued at more than £250,000.

+ Anything left to a spouse is free of tax.

+ IHT can be cut by making gifts in the seven years before death.

+ Some gifts are exempt: wedding gifts up to £5,000 to your children or those they marry; wedding gifts up to £2,500 to each grandchild; wedding gifts up to £1,000 to anyone else; other gifts up to £3,000, plus any unused balance of the £3,000 from the previous tax year, any gift up to £250 in any tax year to any number of people.

Although the Inland Revenue collects figures on the value of estates for inheritance tax purposes, until now there has been no analysis of where this money goes and how it might affect people’s lives.

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey of 10,000 individuals in 5,500 households, the study, commissioned by the International Longevity Centre UK, found that one in 40 Britons receives an inheritance every year. The total after tax is Ј31 billion.

The average estate leaves Ј90,000 net of tax and the average amount received by each individual is Ј17,500, suggesting that, on average, people share out their bequests between five people. Some 10 per cent of beneficiaries receive Ј50,000 or more. A further 30 per cent receive Ј10,000 or more, enough to make a down-payment on a home or pay off a sizeable chunk of a mortgage.

Although the most likely recipients are those aged 45 to 59, Mr Willmott also found that 30 per cent of inherited wealth goes to people under 45, with the under-30s getting 7 per cent. In any one year, about 17,000 people under 30 could be receiving more than Ј20,000, the report found. Some 48 per cent of inherited wealth comes in the form of property.

The report also found that as many as 15 per cent of people aged 45 and over were saving not only for their retirement, but specifically so that they could leave money to future generations. Among people in managerial jobs, the figure rose to 25 per cent. Given these levels of savings and with growing numbers of people now having occupational and private pensions and a housing shortage set to boost house prices still further in the long term, Mr Willmott said that there was every reason to believe that the value of inherited wealth would continue to rise and that “generation skipping” would continue.

“Despite longer lives suggesting longer retirement and a greater running down of savings, it is quite possible that total inheritance in future years might increase in real terms with the number of larger estates increasing too,” Mr Willmott said.

Tony Mudd, of the wealth management group St James’s Place, which specialises in estate planning, said that there had been a steady increase over the past ten years in clients seeking to leave part or all of their estate to their grandchildren either in a trust or as an outright bequest. This was partly because their own middle-aged children did not need the money, but also for tax reasons.

Queen versus queen

by Simon Schama

The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, November 4, 2000

After Mary’s escape from Lochleven Castle in 1568, there was only one way back, and it was a route she must have had deep anxieties about: a return to Scotland via England. Mary undoubtedly knew that Elizabeth’s disgust with the murder of Darnley was exceeded only by her horror of rebellion and abdications under duress, and she extrapolated from that the notion that Elizabeth would be prepared to help her, militarily if necessary, recover her throne.

So, when she planned a flight across the border, Mary thought of it as merely a temporary refuge, pending a triumphal return. Had she known that her stay in England would last 19 years, she would surely have avoided the passage across the Solway Firth.

But there she was, a bedraggled, dead-tired figure, the famous auburn tresses cropped for disguise, sitting in an open boat, hunched up against the wind, her eyes fixed on the disappearing shoreline of Scotland. At her back was the little Cumbrian fishing port of Workington and her cousin Elizabeth’s kingdom. Halfway across, she was said to have had a sudden premonition that she should have fled to France, not England, that she might never see Scotland again.

Mary’s abrupt appearance in England threw Elizabeth’s government into turmoil. It was one thing to have made cousinly noises, sympathising with her plight and condemning rebellion; it was quite another to know what to do about it, especially since the new regent of Scotland, the Earl of Moray, was, of course, a committed Protestant.

William Cecil, the powerful Secretary of State, perhaps hoped that Mary’s presence would have the effect of at last concentrating his procrastinating queen’s mind on her future, which was also the country’s. Elizabeth was not getting any younger – she was 55 when Mary fled to England. If she would not discuss marriage, surely she had a duty to provide for the succession, particularly as Mary had the greater claim and others might create an alternative court somewhere up there near the border.

Elizabeth was deeply torn. Her strong sense of princely obligation disposed her to help Mary, but she still suspected Mary’s complicity in the murder of Darnley, and her grip on realpolitik told her that she had no interest at all in replacing a friendly, grateful Protestant regime in Scotland with a Catholic queen, who probably would open up the country to the French once again. As usual, when conflicting matters of state arose, Elizabeth did nothing.

When her personal appeals for a meeting with Elizabeth went unheeded, Mary was puzzled, assuming that her letters had been intercepted. But when Elizabeth’s chosen messenger, Sir Francis Knollys, explained that Mary would not be received at court until her case had been thoroughly examined and her conduct exonerated, Mary began to understand that she was a captive not a guest. But the more she raved, the deafer Elizabeth became to her entreaties.

By October, 1568, when the commission of inquiry opened at York, most of Elizabeth’s council were hoping that Moray would present such a damning case against Mary that her cause would be doomed. He did just that, bringing an incriminating casket of letters, perhaps forged, perhaps not, written by Mary to Bothwell before Darnley’s death, urging him to kill her husband.

As she would for the rest of her life, Mary disdained to answer any charge of wrongdoing or even to accept the jurisdiction of an English court to try the conduct of a queen of Scotland. She had a point. But she could be under no illusion that she was anything except a prisoner. She was shuttled from house to house under the guard of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Mary was always watched, for she had become, as both Cecil and Francis Walsingham (who succeeded Cecil as Secretary of State) insisted, Elizabeth’s most dangerous security problem.

Indeed, Mary did become a magnet for conspiracy. The most dangerous was a plan to spring her from prison and marry her to the premier peer of the realm, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk was officially a Protestant but a Catholic at heart, and he and his fellow plotters might well have imagined that marriage to Mary was a way to bind up the wounds of religious schism and seal all the old divisions – between English and Scots, Protestant and Catholic, north and south – at a stroke. Elizabeth did not see it this way. Norfolk went to the Tower in October, 1569.

In the north and west, where Catholicism had not only not been uprooted but was flourishing on the resentments of the great dynasties, Mary Stuart was not just a successor to Elizabeth, she was a replacement. A month after Norfolk went to the Tower, the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland led a rebellion that swept through the north and reconsecrated Durham Cathedral for Rome. The rebels believed that if they could sit tight through the winter, Spanish help would arrive in the spring.

But Elizabeth’s government now understood the gravity of the situation and that another act of the English wars of religion was being played out. In the nick of time, Mary was moved from Tutbury, where a flying squad of northerners was coming to get her, and taken instead to the massively defended Coventry.

After some initial chaos, a formidable, overwhelmingly southern army of 12,000 men was mobilised, adding more to its numbers once it reached the north. The rebellion was brutally crushed, the earls fleeing over the border to Scotland.

For the most passionately Catholic, however, 1570 brought a terrible dilemma. In that year, with poor timing, the Pope, Pius V, published a bull excommunicating Elizabeth and calling on the faithful to rise up and depose their heretic queen, lethally if necessary. The Catholics of England now had a choice of betrayals: their Church or their monarch.

Some, inevitably, chose the latter. In 1571, a plot organised by the Florentine banker Roberto Ridolfi was discovered. Its aim had been to liberate Mary through the combined force of an uprising in England and a Spanish army of invasion, sent from the Netherlands. Elizabeth was to be killed and Mary enthroned in her place. Yet, despite parliament demonising the queen of the Scots as “the monstrous and huge dragon and mass of the earth”, Elizabeth was unwilling to have Mary attainted or even, at that stage, removed from the line of succession.

By the mid-1580s, under the watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary had been leading the life of a country gentlewoman, permitted to keep a decent, if not extensive, household. Physically, she had deteriorated, the slender beauty thickening. But she had never become reconciled to her captivity, nor had she ever forgiven Elizabeth.

Horrified when her son James made a treaty with England that repudiated his own mother, Mary signed her own rights of succession over to the King of Spain. This only confirmed Walsingham in his pessimistic view that, with a native-born heir to the throne no longer a possibility, the mere existence of Mary Stuart was a dagger pointed at the heart of Elizabeth.

So he designed an elaborate entrapment to take care of the matter. In December, 1585, without telling Cecil, Walsingham made an important change in the conditions of Mary’s captivity. She and her household were suddenly packed up and sent to Chartley House, near Sheffield, and provided with a new and much harsher jailer, the puritanical Amyas Paulet, who made no attempt to hide his intense distaste for his prisoner. At Chartley, the conditions of her confinement could be minutely monitored. Imagine Mary’s happiness when she discovered that a new and ingenious method had been devised by parties working on her behalf to smuggle letters to and from her agent in Paris and to her latest sworn avenger and champion, the wealthy London merchant, Anthony Babington.

The coded letters were put in a watertight pouch and slipped through the bung hole of beer casks delivered and removed from Chartley. What Mary did not know was that it was Walsingham who had thought this up and whose cipher clerks were busy decoding her messages hours after they had been sent. The entire Chartley regime had been rigged as a set-up designed to nail Mary once and for all.

Nail her it did. Babington obligingly supplied Mary with details of his plot: the six gentlemen who would murder Elizabeth; how she would be freed; the expected invasion and rising. On July 19,1586, Mary replied, encouraging the plotters (but putting her own liberation at the top of their priorities).

In Westminster, Elizabeth suddenly became inexplicably distraught, imagining the assassin’s knife behind every shadow and curtain. She fell deathly ill. At Chartley, however, Mary felt the skies lighten; her liberty and vindication were close. On August 11,1586, Paulet suggested she go for a ride. From a distance Mary saw a small group of riders approach. This was it, she must have imagined: deliverance. Instead, it was the warrant for her arrest. Babington and his fellow-plotters had been arrested and, under torture, had confessed. Elizabeth was ecstatic. Hanging and live disembowelment, she told Cecil, was not good enough for traitors as evil as the Babington plotters.

There was just one more stop, one more castle in the tragic career of the wandering Mary, Queen of Scots: Fotheringhay, the great Yorkist pile in Northamptonshire where Richard III had been born.

There, faced with the endgame, Mary drew on some inner resource that seemed to raise her above the squalid charades of power. Asked to own up to her crimes, Mary stood on her sovereignty. To Paulet’s hectoring demand that she confess, she replied:

“As a sinner, I am truly conscious of having often offended my Creator. I beg him to forgive me. But as Queen and sovereign, I am aware of no fault or offence for which I have to render account to anyone here below.”

Her second tactic was to lie her head off, denying all knowledge of the Babington plot until, that is, she was shown the letters to him bearing her signature. But Walsingham had overreached himself by adding forged statements to the genuine article, thus allowing Mary to accuse him of having set up the entire conspiracy. This was, after all, not far from the truth, and she was even closer to the mark when she reminded her interrogators on the Privy Council that she had come to England freely and in response to a promise of aid against her enemies in Scotland. “I was at once imprisoned,” she added bluntly.

Elizabeth didn’t exactly see it that way. She wrote to Mary as if the Queen of the Scots had been an ungrateful house-guest who, instead of writing thank-you notes for the hospitality, had made off with the towels. Mary “had planned in divers ways and manners to take my life and ruin my kingdom by the shedding of blood. I never proceeded so hastily against you. On the contrary I have maintained you and preserved your life with the same care which I use for myself.”

The formal trial began in the great hall of Fotheringhay on October 15,1586. Mary proved such an adroit defender of her actions that the trial was adjourned and resumed in London without her. Ten days later, the commission passed swiftly to her conviction. But when Parliament petitioned Elizabeth for a speedy execution, she rediscovered her old, deep horror of the axe at the neck of those she felt and knew were kin.

For three months, Elizabeth agonised but on February 1, 1587, she finally signed the death warrant and asked her private secretary, William Davison, to attach the Great Seal of England and take it to Walsingham. The execution, she insisted, had to be done away from the public gaze, at Fotheringhay itself.

If Elizabeth dreaded the publicity, Mary revelled in her coming martyrdom: a sacrifice for the truth and endurance of the eternal Church. So when Mary was informed by a weeping Scottish courtier that she would be executed the following morning, February 8, she told him to be joyful: “For the end of Mary Stuart’s troubles is now done… Carry this message from me and tell my friends that I died like a true Scottish woman and a true French woman.”

The incredible performance was played right to the end. Harangued by Richard Fletcher, the Dean of Peterborough, she turned her back on him, rejecting his invitation to join his prayers. “Mr Dean, I am settled in the ancient Roman Catholic religion and mind to spend my blood in defence of it.” Undeterred, Fletcher walked round to the other side of the scaffold and continued to berate Mary.

When, finally, she undressed for the executioner, her black gown fell away to reveal a petticoat of blood-red crimson: the stain of the martyr. Her eyes were tied with a white silk cloth, embroidered in gold, and she lay with such stillness that it disturbed the executioner. His first blow cut deep into her head. She was heard to cry “sweet Jesus” before the second blow severed all but a hanging tendon so the executioner was forced to use his axe like a hacksaw.

By the time Elizabeth died, in March 1603, she might well have been one of the few for whom the idea of “Britain” had some real meaning. For by remaining unmarried she had brought about a momentous union: that of Scotland and England, not yet in one kingdom but in one person – James, the child of Mary Stuart.