Burned at the Stake?

Tags

Anne Boleyn, Demonology, Elizabeth Sawyer, Janet Horne, King James I, Scotland

It is tempting to dream of being magically transported into the past. Not, of course, to be Anne Boleyn, kneeling on the scaffold awaiting the sword-swipe of that French headsman, but as an ordinary woman in 16th, 17th or 18th century England. To be able to experience the exotic scents and foul stinks; the sounds and sights; the extravagantly dressed nobility; their elaborate wigs, fine horses and splendid carriages.

Yet might such a dream turn into a nightmare?

I read recently that King James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England in 1603) published a book in 1597 entitled Demonology, setting down how to identify and convict witches. Hundreds of suspected women were subsequently imprisoned and tortured until they confessed. A thumbscrew might be tightened until the pain was sufficient to elicit the required admission of guilt. If this failed to work, trial by water involved being placed on a ducking-stool and lowered below the water line of a pond or river. When completely submerged, if an accused woman sank, she was deemed innocent (too bad if she was by then dead from drowning); if she floated, she was guilty and would be dealt with accordingly. For those found guilty, punishments ranged (if she was lucky) from a severe beating, to time spent in the pillory or the stocks, or up to a year in jail being fed only on bread and water. For cases deemed serious, the penalty was a horrendous death.

The initial identification involved a number of damning pointers: being female, being from the lower echelons of society, being no longer young, or behaving occasionally in an eccentric manner. Having a brown patch somewhere on their skin (tough luck if you had age-spots on your hands), or a superfluous nipple, was deemed highly suspicious. As was being childless. Owning a black cat or a besom broom was considered a significant pointer to being in league with the Devil.

Woe betide you if your neighbour disliked you and their well happened to dry up, their chickens died, or their cow failed to produce milk. Evil arts might be suspected and fingers pointed in your direction.

In England, more than 2,500 women were executed for witchcraft and in 1621 a crowd of up to 30,000 watched Elizabeth Sawyer hang for the presumed crime at Tyburn. North of the border, in 1727, Janet Horne became the last so-called witch burned alive in Scotland.

In the light of all this, as a working-class female past the first flush of youth, with stepchildren but no offspring of her own, I no longer fancy travelling back in time. Especially as I frequently read books aloud to my all-black cat. Mutter to myself while editing on my computer. Sing carols loudly while driving my car. In the summer. And – perhaps most damning – own a rather splendid besom broom.

An Old Book Revisited

Tags

Elizabeth Woodville, Henry VII, Josephine Tey, Philippa Langley, Richard III, Sir James Tyrrel, The Daughter of Time

I read The Daughter of Time as a teenager and it fueled a lifelong fascination with history and an interest in Shakespeare’s misshapen king. It also led me to read a number of weighty tomes about Richard III and the House of York and, this August, to visit Leicester to see their new Richard III Visitor Centre. Our trip included attending some lectures about the finding of Richard’s remains and on our return home sent me onto the internet to hunt out a second-hand copy of Josephine Tey’s novel.

Read today, the book’s language, with two stereotypical nurses and descriptions of hospital visitors allowed to smoke beside the beds of patients, sounds dated. Yet the story – of a bored and bed-bound detective conducting a cold case examination into the case against Richard – still grips. I found it as impossible to put down as I did all those years ago. My husband is currently devouring it with equal enthusiasm.

With both the book and our August trip fresh in our minds, we recently went to see the film – The Last King – about the amateur historian Philipa Langley’s struggle to persuade archaeologists to dig up a Leicester Social Services Car Park. There were things in the film that jarred and I questioned the indulgence of having the shade of Richard III appearing at Ms Langley’s shoulder – a fanciful invention of the makers of the film. It was also somewhat harsh to the professionals involved in the exercise. Yet one cannot deny that the finding of Richard’s skeleton was due to the dogged persistence of an amateur about whom the professionals were at times dismissive. The archaeologist in charge of the dig, Dr Richard Buckley, when the project was finally agreed and funded, said he expected no more than to establish the location of the Greyfriars church. Were they to find any trace of Richard, he pronounced, he “would eat his hat”. (My earlier post on this subject, on September 3rd, The King in the Car Park, mentions his subsequent consumption of a hat-shaped cake)

I heartily recommend The Daughter of Time to anyone who enjoys a good detective story. The book might even give you a different perspective on Shakespeare’s portrait of the King whom Philippa Langley feels was maligned. Josephine Tey’s novel also raises fascinating questions about what happened after Bosworth. Why, for example, did Henry VII deprive the strong-willed Queen Dowager, Elizabeth Woodville, of an honoured place at his Court? Instead, eighteen months after his accession, he stripped his mother-in-law of everything she owned and ordered her into a Bermondsey nunnery for the rest of her life. Could there have been a need to keep her quiet? And why did it take him so long to question Sir James Tyrrel about the alleged murder of his wife’s young brothers? Why not publish his damning confession when Tyrrel was beheaded, without trial, some twenty years later? A confession which has never subsequently seen the light of day?

We will probably never know the truth of what happened, unless perhaps another Philippa Langley happens along. But both book and film remind us that fact can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

If members of Ninevoices ask me nicely, I will certainly lend them my copy of The Daughter of Time...

The King in the Carpark

Tags

Bosworth Field, Craniofacial Identification, Dr Richard Buckley, Fotheringhay, Horace Walpole, Jane Austen, Josephine Tey, Julian Humphrys, Princes in the Tower, Richard III, Richardians, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, The Daughter of Time, The Wars of the Roses, Tudors, Winston Churchill

The Richard III Society commissioned Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the University of Dundee, to reconstruct the King’s features. The result was this face, looking younger and less careworn than the traditional portraits. Someone who looks calm, determined and thoughtful. But was he also a murderer?

Towards the end of August, my husband and I finally took a trip originally booked just before the Covid crisis. This was an organised three-day tour centered around the discovery of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car park and included one lecture by medieval historian Julian Humphrys, on The Wars of the Roses, plus another by the archaeologist heading the dig, Dr Richard Buckley, entitled: ‘The King Under the Carpark – Greyfrirs, Leicester and the Search for Richard III. It also included guided visits to the impressive Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester, to the Bosworth battlefield, and to the site of Fotheringhay, where Richard was born. It was a fascinating experience.

Richard is one of England’s most notorious kings and his death at Bosworth in 1485 – the last English king to die in battle – heralded not only the start of the Tudor dynasty but a still-continuing dispute about whether he had murdered the two young princes in the Tower.

Hundreds of words have been written on the subject, from those of Sir Thomas More, to Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the life and Reign of Richard III, to Josephine Tey’s novel, The Daughter of Time, where a modern police officer undertakes a ‘cold case’ investigation into Richard’s alleged crimes. As someone interested in character and motivation I, too, have struggled to understand how a deeply pious man – apparently devoted to his older brother, Edward, and entrusted by him with the safeguarding of his sons after his death, could change in the space of months into a child murderer.

Despite having what we now know to be scoliosis, that Richard was both a brave man and a skilled fighter is never questioned. From his teens onward, he was in the forefront of three significant battles and at Bosworth charged Henry Tudor’s position, brought down his standard bearer and killed the six-foot-eight John Cheyne standing between him and the man taking arms against him. Had his horse not been brought down, he might have triumphed.

Richard was respected in the North and forward-thinking in laws he introduced. He refused monetary gifts when making his royal progress, saying he would prefer to have the people’s love. Although he had two acknowledged illegitimate children, he was not a womaniser like his brother Edward, to whom he had shown nothing but loyalty and devotion throughout his life. So why did things change after Edward’s death?

Some questions, like the whereabouts of Richard’s grave, have at least been answered. Others, like the fate of the two princes, remain a mystery. There is evidence that Richard was far from the villain painted by Shakespeare and that ‘facts’ to his detriment provided by Sir Thomas More are questionable. Yet it is also true that Richard seized the throne for himself shortly after his brother’s death and that his two nephews went missing while under his protection. But were they murdered? And, if so, by whom? One imagines that Henry VII would have made strenuous efforts to find out what happened to those boys (his wife’s brothers, after all) and would have relished the opportunity to provide proof not only of Richard’s guilt, but of his unfitness to be England’s king. Perhaps none could be found. Had the boys still lived, of course, they would have been an embarrassment to Henry and provided Yorkist sympathisers with a rallying point. Perhaps at least one of them survived, but needed to lead a discreet existence out of the public eye..

I would like to think the truth will one day come out. Until then, like Jane Austen and Winston Churchill, we must all agree to disagree.

Please note that I am a writer, rather than a historian, and the above ramblings are largely my own…

Christmas book presents

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A Glass of Blessings, Barbara Pym, Boris Johnson, British Library Crime Classics, Calamity in Kent, Death in Fancy Dress, Death Makes a Prophet, Excellent Women, How Novels Work, John Mullan, Marital harmony, Mystery in White, National Coal Board, Rumpole of the Bailey, The 12.30 from Croydon, The Division Bell Mystery, The Sussex Downs Murder, Whisky, William Hague, William Pitt the Younger

How do you make sure you get the books you want for Christmas?  Asking for a friend.

The friend in question has a birthday in December, so this is something that looms large for him at this time of year.  He is known to like detective novels, especially from the Golden Age, so if things are just left to chance there is the risk that he will get any number of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series that he already has.  How many copies of Death in Fancy Dress and The Sussex Downs Murder can his bookshelf stock, when what he’d actually like is The Division Bell Mystery or The 12.30 from Croydon?

One answer is to drop hints.  But not everyone has a good ear for hints, or takes the further hint to pass these hints on to other potential donors.  This form of chain letter can easily get broken, or turn into a game of Chinese Whispers, in which what started life as William Hague’s biography of Pitt the Younger materialises under the Christmas tree as the National Coal Board’s Yearbook for 1975.

So my friend has adopted the practice of making no bones about it but distributing to his nearest and dearest a list of the presents he would like to see in December.  This list is mostly books, but the words ‘good whisky’ do appear there, as does a box set of the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series.  It is then left to the nearest and dearest to liaise, so that the aforesaid NCB Yearbook doesn’t jostle under the tree on Christmas morning with three copies of How Novels Work by John Mullan.

The list has to be specific.  For example, my friend has recently been introduced to Barbara Pym by a ninevoice, so the list reads, “Any novel by Barbara Pym except A Glass of Blessings or Excellent Women.”  This gets rather strange-looking (and off-putting to anyone getting the list who isn’t in the ‘nearest and dearest’ category) when we get to the aforesaid British Library books: “Any in the series of The British Library Crime Classics: I already have Mystery in White, Calamity in Kent, Death Makes a Prophet … [etc etc]”.

You may say, this prescriptive approach eliminates surprise, and the chance of being given something quite new.  In fact it doesn’t quite work like that.  Present-givers still do make their own decisions, which can prompt the “Why did they think I’d like this?” question.  And this way my friend’s library can get unexpected additions, like a biography of our present Prime Minister last year …

There is a related problem.  Asking for books mean that you get, well, more books.  You may run out of bookshelf space.  I find My friend finds that books he has recently been given have to share floor space with box files, unhung pictures, shoeboxes of what were once thought to be essential photos, and the like.  This can lead to friction in the marital home. 

How do you do it?  What advice should I, er, pass on to my friend?

Books make great presents

Tags

Brexit, British Library Crime Classics, C J Sansom, John Bude, Pitt the Younger, Richard Askwith, Sophie Hannah, Stephen Fry, T H White, William Hague, Zatopek

A great gift haul this birthday and Christmas, my thanks to all the givers and authors!  All encouragement to those of us who like to put the odd word in front of another.

Thanks, guys.

 

‘Prague Spring’

Tags

1968, Alexander Dubcek, Bielefeld, Czechoslovakia, Moody Blues, Prague Spring, Simon Mawer, Warsaw Pact

Topicality, or anniversaries, can give writers real opportunities.

The events of August 1968 are the setting for Prague Spring, the new novel by Simon Mawer. He has written before about Czechoslovakia, as readers of The Glass Room will know, that telling and compelling history of a villa that is remarkably like the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. (See https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/08/15/the-glass-room-revisited/.) He shows the same confidence and attention to detail here.

The novel focuses on two diverse couples whose lives become intertwined in Prague as the political tension mounts, as Warsaw Pact troops are massing on the borders. Two students decide to hitch-hike across Europe: wealthy, Home Counties Ellie (revelling in the role of revolutionary socialist – this is 1968, remember!) and poorer, Sheffield-born James. Their relationship shifts as they find their way across Europe, depending on the opportunities or the hazards that face them. Dubček and “socialism with a human face” have been much in the news, and the toss of a Deutschmark decides that they will go to Prague to see it rather than head south to Italy for the sun.

Meanwhile, at the British Embassy in Prague, Sam Wareham (a fluent Czech- and Russian-speaking First Secretary) has met beautiful Lenka Konečková. She is the daughter of a victim of the show trials in the 1950s, and is someone anxious to enjoy the new freedoms the Prague Spring has brought. With her Sam explores this new optimistic world in ways that might well have been closed to him if he was confined to his usual round of Embassy socials and official trade union visits.

The mixture of this exciting new freedom, and the threats gathering at the frontier, generates a tension that pervades the love lives of these characters and the people they meet and the places they go. We visit a chaotic pop concert given by a ramshackle American pot-smoking pop group the Ides of March, and at classical concerts we are transported by the music of Dvořák and Brahms. We attend an exuberant political meeting; just like the hitchhiking couple, we meet a wide range of folk on the road, we come across an influential Party member, and we see shadowy people in action at the Embassy. Musicians feature quite prominently – as well the Ides of March we meet a famed German cellist, a more famous Russian conductor and his young violinist lover. There is even a cameo appearance by the Moody Blues (as a way of evoking the late 1960s in the minds of those of us who were there, bringing in Nights in White Satin is a masterstroke). Dubček is seen briefly. We visit Café Slavia and are greeted by a shortish man in a leather jacket who we are told later is a playwright … There is a lot of sex (as, I recall, there was in The Glass Room).

Reader, I don’t think I’m really spoiling it if I tell you that the paths of these two couples cross and the Russians do invade. The sense of massive confusion throughout the city when that happens is well described. The Prague Spring is being brutally brought to an end and our protagonists find themselves in the midst of the horror and the chaos.

Simon Mawer has included in the text four short explanatory notes to give some background: on the suspicious death shortly after the Communist coup d’état in 1948 of the Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk; on the Communists’ murder in 1949 of the democrat Milada Horáková; on the Bavarian-Czechoslovak border; and on ‘Ghosts’ – Kafka, Hašek, the Castle itself, and the letter from five members of the Czechoslovak Presidium to Brezhnev asking him to intervene to save the country from counter-revolution.

In August 1968 I was staying with a German family in Bielefeld. I recall their fear that the Russians wouldn’t stop at the Czechoslovak border.   Many readers will have their own memories of what it was actually like to be in Czechoslovakia as they unfolded: for those of us who don’t, Prague Spring is a novel that tries to capture that historic moment.

Published by Little, Brown ISBN 978-1-4087-1114-9

(This piece first appeared in the October/November 2018 issue of the British Czech & Slovak Review, the newsletter of the British Czech & Slovak Association – see http://www.bcsa.co.uk. To hear Simon Mawer talking about this book in a radio interview go to https://www.radio.cz/en/section/books/simon-mawers-prague-spring-a-complex-love-story-amid-the-drama-of-1968.)

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells – and a story of splendid ladies

Tags

Charlotte Bartlett, Disgusted Ladies, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, E M Forster, Tunbridge Wells, Votes for Women

The expression ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ may have entered the English vocabulary in the 1950s onwards as a byword for middle class conservative moral outrage, but this elegant spa town in the south east of England has a habit of regularly cropping up in literature well before that. We find references in Dickens’ Bleak House, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon for a start.

It’s often depicted as the residence of genteel aunts and maiden ladies – a favourite being Charlotte Bartlett in E M Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View: ‘I am used to Tunbridge Wells, where we are all hopelessly behind the times’.

But not all of the good ladies of Tunbridge Wells were like Charlotte Bartlett then, any more than they are now. Just published by Matador is Disgusted Ladies by local author Anne Carwardine. It tells the fascinating story of how the town was home to a series of ordinary yet extraordinary VOTES FOR WOMEN campaigners – remarkable and courageous women who were disgusted for all the right reasons.

Tunbridge Wells in 2018, a hundred years after women were given the right to vote: no longer disgusted but still a town with a distinguished literary presence, past and present…

 

 

 

Cheering up Man Flu – Londonopolis

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Christmas presents, Daphne du Maurier, East India Company, London, Londonopolis, Man Flu, Martin Latham, Rebecca, William II

I’m reading Londonopolis – A Curious History of London at the moment (thanks to my family for a great Christmas present). The author, Martin Latham, says, “You can read this book in any order, or leave it in the lavatory for the occasional reverie.” I can add another good use for it: silent entertainment for a case of Man Flu. It’s written in easy chunks (chronologically ordered), and so can be picked up and put down as fitfully as the suffering patient desires, with no loss of continuity.

It’s amusing and full of interesting oddities. It encouragingly takes on received historical wisdom: eg William Rufus was actually quite a good King (his Westminster Hall is a masterpiece), and the East India Company was in some respects better than the Raj that replaced it in India, and it had enlightened HR policies here at home (thieving employees would merely be publicly whipped through the street rather than be hanged or transported to the colonies). The illustrations are fun. While reading this the invalid won’t be plaintively and feebly calling to his devoted nurse for more lemon tea or more pillows or fewer pillows.

I was reading Daphne du Maurier’s excellent Rebecca (a 2016 Christmas present!), but felt that if I was already feeling sorry for myself that book’s atmosphere of tension and worry was hardly going to help. So Rebecca is on hold. Better something quirky that brings a smile.

There’s a fuller review of Londonopolis on the Turbulent London website, at https://turbulentlondon.com/2016/02/11/book-review-londonopolis-a-curious-history-of-london/.

Nasty germs apart, a Happy New Year to all ninevoices’ readers!

If God Spare My Life…

Tags

Alan Bennett, Anne Bolyn, Brian Moynahan, Henry VIII, John Wycliffe, Sir Thomas More, The English Bible, Thomas Bilney, Tyndale's Burning, Use of Language, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale

 

My husband’s recent re-ordering of our modest library led me to rediscover this powerful book by Brian Moynahan about religious intolerance and the brave man who translated the word of God into English.

Moynahan’s heart-stopping biography of the young Gloucestershire tutor forced to flee England in 1524 in order to safely translate the Bible into English is as much thriller as history. It brims with exhumations, double-agents, whispered confidences, poisoned soup and brutal burnings. There are unfamiliar glimpses of Anne Boleyn alongside the familiar autocratic ones of Henry VIII. Sir Thomas More, sadly, does not come out of it well. Indeed, it is less familiar figures like Thomas Bilney, who show unimaginable heroism. It is not an easy read. There is faith. Hope. But scant charity.

The agents of Tudor England caught up with Tyndale in the end. On the 6th October 1536, in Vilvoorde, just outside Brussels, he was bound to a stake with iron chains, with a noose around his neck. In the brief period he was allowed to pray, Foxe tells us he cried out  in a loud voice: ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.’ He was then strangled and burned, although it is said he was still living as the flames engulfed him. His executioner was instructed to add fuel to the flames until the body was utterly consumed, after which even the ashes were disposed of (probably in the nearby River Zenne) to obliterate any traces that might remain. His words, however, will surely survive as long as we have the English language. His prose has enriched the work of writers from William Shakespeare to Alan Bennett and has lessons even for stumbling novices like myself.

Tyndale’s unique contribution was that he was translating the Bible into English for the first time from the original texts in Greek and Hebrew. Moynahan ‘s biography makes particular mention of his use of verbs: ‘…he wrote at the infancy of the written language [for] it was common for people to read aloud, even when alone; and it is this habit, and Tyndale’s studies in rhetoric at Oxford, that accounts…for the charm and thunder that soar from the English Bible when it is spoken from the lectern.’ [Tyndale uses] ‘verbs where less flowing writers use nouns and adjectives…creating a cadence and sense of immediacy.’

This terrific book is still available, though now only on eBay or through specialist bookshops. It is not the easiest of reads, but it is rich with lessons, not only for those seeking to know how even the ‘boy that driveth the plough‘ came to have first-hand access to the Bible, but for those striving to write prose with a powerful punch.  We must follow Tyndale’s example: short words; short sentences, and, above all, those potent verbs.

This Friday will mark 481 years since Tyndale’s death. What better time to remember a brave and gifted man, and everything we English-speakers owe him.

 

Good King Wenceslas

Tags

Boleslav, Christmas carol, Czech, Drahomira, Good King Wenceslas, J M Neale, Prague, St Ludmila, Svatý Václav

If it’s great to see your work in print, and even to see other people reading it, think what it’s like to have people reciting or even singing what you’ve written 160 years later!  J M Neale would know ….

Good King Wenceslas has long been a part of the British Christmas – at least since J M Neale wrote the carol in 1853. An older man helping his page to carry the firewood and bring food to yonder peasant, leaving miraculously warm footprints in the snow. (Have you ever wondered why yonder peasant, who lives a good league hence, right against the forest fence, needs to come to Prague to look for fuel? Hmm …)

This story is not what comes first to the mind of the Czechs, whose patron saint he is. To them he is St Wenceslas, or Svatý Václav in their language. His statue stands proudly in Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague.

A strong, handsome military leader, riding a great charger and dominating this huge square.

The reality was a little different. First, Wenceslas was not a king, but a Duke. More importantly, he was murdered at the age of 28 so was not the middle-aged uncle-like figure we might imagine.

Wenceslas was born in 907, or to put it in our terms 8 years after the death of Alfred the Great. He was the son of the Duke of Bohemia. Christianity had come to what is now the Czech Republic a generation or so before. His father was raised in a Christian setting, but his mother Drahomíra was the daughter of a pagan tribal chief and though she may have been baptized at the time of her marriage she was still pagan at heart.

In 921, when Wenceslas was thirteen, his father died and he was brought up by his grandmother, Ludmila, who raised him as a Christian. Wenceslas is usually described as very pious and humble, very educated and intelligent.  There was a struggle for control of young Wenceslas between his Christian grandmother Ludmila and his pagan mother Drahomíra. Drahomíra was furious about losing influence on her son and arranged to have her mother-in-law Ludmila strangled.

According to some legends, having regained control of her son, Drahomíra set out to convert him to the old pagan religion. She failed. In 925 Wenceslas assumed government for himself and had Drahomíra exiled.   He founded the first church on the site of the present-day St Vitus’ Cathedral that so beautifully dominates the skyline of Prague.

In England at this time, invasion by the Danes was the main problem. The rulers of Bohemia had to deal both with continuous raids by the Magyars or Hungarians and the forces of the Saxon king Henry the Fowler. To withstand the Saxons, Wenceslas’s father had forged an alliance with the Bavarian duke Arnulf the Bad. (They had glorious names in those days.) Unfortunately, in 929 the Bavarians and the Saxons joined forces, invaded Bohemia and forced Wenceslas to pay tribute. Tradition states that he saw this as preferable to the great bloodshed that would have followed resistance.

A 12^th century source states that “rising every night from his noble bed, with bare feet and only one chamberlain, he went around to God’s churches and gave alms generously to widows, orphans, those in prison and afflicted by every difficulty, so much so that he was considered, not a prince, but the father of all the wretched.” This presumably is the origin of J M Neale’s carol.

We have seen from the antics of Drahomíra and Ludmilla that family life in the ducal household was, er, dysfunctional, as the saying now is. In 935 his younger brother Boleslav plotted to kill Wenceslas. After Boleslav invited Wenceslas to celebrate a religious feast, three of Boleslav’s companions murdered Wenceslas on his way to church. The tradition is that he knocked on the church door for sanctuary but a frightened priest inside denied him entry. I’ve been to the church myself to pay my respects.

Boleslav succeeded him as the Duke of Bohemia. If you look him up on Wikipedia you’ll see he was known as Boleslav the Cruel.

Boleslav expressed much remorse at his brother’s death – as did our Henry II after the murder of Thomas Becket – but that didn’t stop him staying on the throne for the next 37 years. Wenceslas was considered a martyr and a saint immediately after his death, when a cult of Wenceslas grew up in Bohemia (and in England). His chapel in St Vitus’ cathedral in Prague is magnificent. Since 2000, his feast day (September 28) is a public holiday in the Czech Republic. Another reason for the Czechs to like him.

Thanks and well done, JM!

(If there are historical errors in what I’ve written, do point them out!)