Miscellaneous monarchy-related topics of interest

The poet Tennyson, the Holy Grail and the royal family

It is a while since many aspects of the Holy Grail were discussed on here.

This was originally posted on the CC forum:

Tennyson was responsible for a revival of interest in the Arthurian legends. Inspired by Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, he retold the stories in his cycle of poems Idylls of the King, one of which is called The Holy Grail. The poems were published in batches over many years.

Tennyson regularly sent Queen Victoria copies of his new collections of verse; she sent a copy of The Holy Grail and Other Poems to her daughter Princess Vicky, although she found these poems bewildering and unclear. Prince Albert wrote to Tennyson asking him to autograph his copy of the first set of the Idylls of the King poems. Prince Albert once made an unexpected visit to Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight and was mainly responsible for making Tennyson Poet Laureate.

Tennyson was a favourite of Queen Victoria’s. He exchanged many letters with her and had several audiences with her. She invited the entire Tennyson family to visit her at Osborne. She tried to console him when his son died.

She found great solace in his poem In Memoriam after the deaths of Prince Albert, John Brown and Benjamin Disraeli:

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson and John of Gaunt

Another post of interest from the old forum:

“The word gaunt in Harry Potter is the name of grandfather of the evil Tom Marvololo Riddle. In German they translate as Tom vorlost Riddle. In German the name Gaunt was the old name if Gent a merdival town in Netherlands.“

Lavendel John of Gaunt was a Plantagenet and the first Duke of Lancaster. He was born in Ghent, hence his name.

The houses of Lancaster, York and Tudor are all descended from John of Gaunt’s 14 children.

Alfred, Lord Tennnyson is said to be descended from Joan Beaufort, who was John of Gaunt’s fourth child and Richard III’s grandmother.

Joan Beaufort had 16 children so she would have a very large number of descendants; it is still an interesting if tenuous connection.

John of Gaunt (left) dining with the King of Portugal (centre) around the year 1386:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson again

Some miscellaneous information about the great poet:

Pigs

Tennyson's guarded sense of privacy was widely known. He spoke forcefully about the ravening curiosity of scholars. Great men, he said angrily, have their private lives ripped open like a pig. He would, he said, as soon kill a pig as write a letter.

Freemason?

Arthur Conan Doyle was a known mason; fellow royal favourite Tennyson is said to have been a mason too, which seems likely, but there is no hard evidence.

A beautiful Victorian book cover for his poems:

Lewis Carroll, Prince Leopold and the Five of Spades

As mentioned earlier, Lewis Carroll, paparazzo and royal stalker, may have failed to get pictures of the most senior royals but he was good friends with the doomed Prince Leopold before his untimely death.

There is a story that when staying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Carroll and the prince threw themselves into a bush to escape the notice of Queen Victoria. This incident may have inspired a very well-known scene in Carroll’s book:

“it is likely that it was Carroll’s experience at Osborne House, when he and the prince hurled themselves into a bush as Queen Victoria’s carriage approached, that led to his amusing description from Alice in Wonderland:

‘At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out ‘The Queen! The Queen!’ and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces.’”

hilliardandcroft.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/a-princess-alice-in-wonderland/#respond

The three gardeners who painted white roses red were the Two, Five and Seven of Spades:

Kate Middleton by Stella Vine

This picture is from 2014:

Five owls at Vauxhall

The apartment buildings that resemble owls at St. George’s Wharf have been mentioned before, but only because of their appearance and because they are close to the new MI6 building and the tower where the helicopter crashed.

Now I am highlighting them because there are five of them:

Empress and Emperors of India

Dr. John Dee may have been the first person to talk about the British Empire, but it did not become a reality until much later. It didn’t last that long either.

Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative Prime Minister, had Queen Victoria proclaimed as Empress of India in 1877. She then created him Earl of Beaconsfield.

Both parties getting their new crowns:



Three successive British monarchs used the imperial title until it was abandoned in 1948 during the reign of George VI.

King George V as Emperor:

The Queen Mother and Ted Hughes

The poet Ted Hughes is part of an extensive web of connections. His friendships with some members of the royal family are just one of the elements that make him a person of interest.

Ted Hughes is known to have been a great friend of Prince Charles; he was also a close friend of the Queen Mother. William Shawcross wrote her official biography, for which he was given full access to her papers. From a review of his book:

"In her eighties, she found a great new friend in Ted Hughes. ‘Queen Elizabeth,’ Shawcross reports, ‘liked that sort of person and she also found his looks – tall, craggy and well built – “very striking”.’

Hughes liked her very much in return. ‘There’s something kept very young,’ he wrote in a letter to his brother, ‘like a young woman. But everybody is so fond of her that she escapes the psychological isolation – for most old people inescapable.’

It would make a wonderful play, the friendship between the playful old lady and the mystical nature poet, but for the time being we’ll have to content ourselves with the account of their friendship secreted within the pages of Shawcross’s massive book.

Ted Hughes was again among the guests at a picnic below Lochnagar. As they listened to the wind in the trees, they had a conversation typical of their friendship. She asked him if he thought trees could communicate with each other. The exchange kept coming back to him and he wrote a poem about the picnic…
It was ‘a wonderful and loving poem’, she said, which ‘transported her at once to my beloved hills’.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/september/the-queen-mother-and-the-poet

So is that where Prince Charles got his ideas about communicating with plants from?

The Queen Mother and Wicca

According to the book Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth by Jack Fritscher, Ted Hughes learned about Wicca and mind control from his mother. I wonder whether this partly explains his friendship with the Queen Mother.

This is not the only time her name has been mentioned in a Wiccan context. From a post about the famous Wiccan High Priestess Doreen Valiente on the Sussex thread:

“... the Queen Mother flew Valiente to Balmoral, which is the royal family’s official summer residence in the Scottish Highlands, by private jet in the 1980s to warn her that the government of the time was thinking about outlawing Witchcraft again.”

“...the hand-held mirror used by Valiente in her ritual...once belonged to the Queen Mother. Valiente reportedly picked it up at a jumble sale at a village neighbouring Balmoral after the Queen Mother had a clear-out. She is said to have got chatting to the Queen Mother at the sale, who confirmed that the mirror was hers.“

Balmoral again... that is where they invited that medium. I wonder what else they got up to there!

Prince Charles and his memorial to Ted Hughes

The Prince of Wales has a private ‘shrine’ to Ted Hughes at his Highgrove home, according to the biographer of the late poet laureate.

The memorial, which includes signed copies of Hughes’s work and the addition of two commemorative stained glass windows to a private temple hidden away amongst trees in the garden, was completed after the poet’s death in 1998.

“Sir Jonathan Bate, the literary scholar, said that Hughes was an important influence on Prince Charles and his sons. ‘Prince Charles was absolutely devoted to Ted,’ Sir Jonathan said, adding that the prince would sit at the feet of this ‘wonderful storyteller’.”

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/charles-has-poet-s-corner-at-highgrove-n9sqjz8bk

The two royals who were particularly close to Ted Hughes attending his memorial service:



“MAY 13 1999: Prince Charles And The Queen Mother Leaving Westminster Abbey, London, Having Attended The Service Of Thanksgiving For The Life And Work Of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate”

Ted Hughes and the two young princes

Ted Hughes used to read to princes William and Harry:

“ONCE upon a time there were two young princes in need of a storyteller . . . Now it can be revealed that the man who came riding to their rescue was none other than Ted Hughes.

The former poet laureate gave private readings of his work to princes William and Harry at their home, a close friend of Hughes has disclosed for the first time. He captivated the young royals with passages from The Iron Man, his popular children's novel that was later turned into a film.

Another favourite of the princes was The Horses, a poem about 10 greys "megalith-still" in "the hour-before-dawn dark". The recitals took place mainly at Highgrove, the Gloucestershire home of the Prince of Wales, in the early 1990s before William and Harry entered their teens. Hughes also read to Prince Charles and the Queen Mother, to whom he was close.

Details of the private readings have been recounted by Roy Davids, former head of the books department at Sotheby's auction house, who knew Hughes well in the last 20 years of the poet's life.

"Ted's relationship with the royals was much closer than anybody has so far known. He was a great and loyal royalist," he says.

The readings may help to explain why Charles erected a bust of the poet at Highgrove following Hughes's death in 1998 and gave permission for a stone memorial on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall on Dartmoor, where Hughes used to go walking."

The article from The Australian from which this was taken is now behind a paywall.

Ted Hughes and Prince William’s horoscope

Did Ted Hughes see himself and the Queen as John Dee and Elizabeth I?

He was certainly involved with astrology, and he wrote a poem based on Prince William’s horoscope:

“The casting of horoscopes was a shared interest amongst Ted’s friends at Cambridge, and whilst for most of them it was a curiosity, something they might impress the girls with, for Ted it was more serious. He regarded astrology as an art, rather than a science, but he investigated it thoroughly and became expert in it, and he was fascinated by the mythology in which it is steeped.

Whether or not he believed in it absolutely is hard to tell, but he was superstitious and his letters show how often he urged his editors to ensure that his books were published on dates when the stars were propitious. Now, a poem discovered in a collection of rare books recently donated to Hughes Hall College, Cambridge, suggests that he may well have contemplated taking on the mantle of John Dee as astrologer to the Royal Family...

Like at least three of the poems Ted wrote for the Royal Family, ‘The Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’, takes the form of a Court Masque. And whilst other Laureate poems refer simply to astrological birth signs in the Royal birth-charts, this poem describes the Prince’s (William) horoscope in detail. It also conjures the gods of the Zodiac to appear and gives them voice. Just as Prospero calls forth Ceres, Iris and Juno ‘from their confines to enact [his] present fancies’ (The Tempest IV: 1) and to bless the union of Miranda and Ferdinand by their presence, so Ted commands

Sun and Moon and all their family stand
Around an [sic] new-born babe, in England.
One by one the Sun and Moon and Planets appear, speak their parts and present the gifts they bring ‘For one born to be King’.

The whole poem is a masterpiece of compression, dealing with Prince William’s horoscope in such a way that any competent astrology can reconstruct it. It also makes comparisons with the birth-charts of several other Royals, from Queen Elizabeth I to the present Queen, in a way which makes it clear that Ted had detailed knowledge of these charts. Above all, it is a wonderfully vivid, amusing and lyrical drama, which is played out around the Prince’s cradle as each of his ‘high godparents’ speaks according to his or her particular character, and offers gifts and advice according to their own mythological and astrological strengths and weaknesses..."

ann.skea.com/Zodiacpoem.htm

Nicholas Hagger , the Illuminati and Ted Hughes

Nicholas Hagger’s book King Charles the Wise features a masque about Prince Charles in which various Graeco-Roman gods appear.

Ted Hughes wrote a poem in the form of a masque about Prince William in which the gods appear in their astrological aspects.

The two men knew each other and exchanged cards and letters.

After receiving a copy of Hagger’s epic poem Overlord, Ted Hughes wrote this to him:

“3rd Dec 96

Dear Nicholas –

Thank you for the epic. What a prodigious amount of work!

You hit a pace, a tilt, that really carries your reader along…I have only dipped in here and there so far.

You’re obviously serious about the Rothschilds and the Illuminati – can any human endeavour be so successfully organised?...

Yours ever, Ted H.”

www.nicholashagger.co.uk/114-overlord-letters-from-ted-hughes-pp-946-7

This and other works need an investigation. In the meantime, here is an example of Nicholas Hagger’s books:

Nicholas Hagger, spying and the Rothschilds

In My Double Life Volume 1: This Dark Wood and My Double Life Volume 2: A Rainbow Over The Hills, Nicholas Hagger has a lot to say about the Rothschilds. Some of it is political, some is about conspiracies and the New Wold Order.

He mentions Lord Victor Rothschild as the fifth man and the head of Edward Heath’s think tank many times.

He says that he was sent on a report-writing course in preparation for a trip to Tanzania on behalf of British Intelligence. When he asked his tutor who he was ultimately working for, the man replied:

“It is not widely known that the Rothschild family control MI6...you are ultimately working for the Rothschilds.”

This worried him greatly; it led to a big investigation into the Rothschilds, which led to a book or two.

He also says that a new gardener who joined his household came from Evelyn de Rothschild’s Ascott House.

In this book, the Rothschilds are said to have figured prominently in many revolutions, revolutions that affected royal families: