Subterranean enucleation

The Northern Line has those posters, puffing Jeremy Clarkson’s latest opus. The profundity of the work is demonstrated by the slogan:

Shakespeare? I’d rather stick pencils in my eyes!

Clarkson, it should be remembered, is a thinker so influential that Iain Dale’s readers recently voted him 47th among political commentators in Britain today. So, eat your heart out, Vernon Bogdanor. Which says a great deal about all three parties there involved in that bathetic beauty parade. Lower still and lower shall the bounds be set.

As for that poster, Malcolm was at a loss this dreary afternoon. Who would want Clarkson in a book, for heaven’s sake? He’s bad enough as lining for a budgie cage, or to wrap the ashes in.

Out of the ether came an imagined note, writ full in quill-pen:

As I wrote for Cornwall (Act III, scene vii):

See’t shalt thou never. Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.

Do, do: we steal by line and level, an’t like your grace.

Ah yes, thought Malcolm. That last line’s Trinculo, to Caliban. Appropriate indeed. So the mind goes from one monster to another to another to another.

Froth on the coffee = spring in the step

Malcolm’s mornings have been transformed. By an appliance of science.

He came across one, initially, in the dee-lite-ful home of his emigré daughter, as he tried to face the rigours of a Noo Joisey morning. A milk frother.

Insert a small quantum of skimmed red-top. Press the button: blue light comes on, frothing starts. Press the button again: light changes to red, milk is being frothed and heated. Wowza! Seconds later, scalding black coffee is topped with a white duvet of foam. A new way to counter last evening’s hangover. Aaah!

The wee appliance that delivered this wonder has been available in all good UK stores (i.e. John Lewis) for some time, at an inordinate cost out of all proportion to the benefit gained. But, hey!, that’s what Christmas presents are all about, huh?

Sometimes I sits and thinks …

Pause. And sometimes I just sits. The profound two-part observation, regularly repeated of Malcolm’s dear, dead old Dad, with the obligatory mid-point double puffing of pipe.

So, today, Malcolm sits and blogs, with his cup of froth-topped coffee. And reminisces of drinking frothy coffee, fifty years gone, in a coffee bar just off Dublin’s Dawson Street (so the time must be the droughty mid-afternoon “holy hour“). And the memory is the juke-box playing Jimmy Giuffre and The Train and the River

And, inevitably, this mentally morphs into colour and the titles of Jazz on a Summer’s Day:

Nostalgia: froth up and taste the Arabica.

Any man’s death diminishes me …

Which is the more disgusting?

• The paeons of bloodlusty applause from the Main Street Media for China killing Akmal Shaikh? In which regard, step forward Leo McKinstry in the Mail (complete with wholly relevant, no doubt, piccie of Kate Moss). Britain expected no less of  you.
• The like of Iain Dale blaming it all on the present British Government for the singular failure to send a gunboat. Britain could never expect a whit more of him. Alas, poor Dale, struggling to find a seasonal voice: even his hot-links seem not to be working. Compare and contrast with Tim Montgomerie’s humane, decent and rational stance: perhaps it’s the difference between an intelligent Tory (a rare but identifiable breed) and total, irredeemable dross.

Medieval filth (part 92)

Obviously, this season of peace and goodwill, the dog-walkers of Norf Lunnun did not extend the same to other pedestrians.

Christmas Day in the workhouse

What is it with the feminine psyche? For therein lies the continued need for Christmas. Men just get drunk, blithely, blissfully, hog-whimperingly, quiescently, as they traditionally have, ever since Beowulf’s Hrothgar determined the model.

In this secret world of women, for weeks there has been covert parcel wrappings, wholesale depredations on the provisioners, reviving of the discarded freezer in the garage to accommodate overflows.

Then there is the arrival of daughters, and associated broods. Suddenly the bathroom has serried ranks of toothbrushes, soaps, shampoos and tinctures. Piles of discarded clothes for laundering. Queues for loos. Ankle-grabbers and carpet-munchers everywhere. We have a child farm. Enough to man a rugby sevens team (if we play the girl at full back).

Christmas Eve becomes a frantic whirl. The turkey has to be collected from the poulterer at some ungodly hour. The supermarket has to be raided lest there be a famine of sprouts, a dearth of different types of milk. Between the feeding of the young and older (now a two-session job), neighbours come calling to leave keys — sensibly they are taking themselves away to impose on others.

The Day itself starts early. Excited children are about and susurrating with expectation. There is this replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, not much less than full size, in varicoloured wrapping papers, occupying the front hallway, around the base of the tree. Little fingers keep poking at the choicer, larger, parcels.

The Redfellow Hovel tradition, the mid-day present opening, has to be brought forward to cope with the excess of infantile energy. It takes perhpas three quarters of an hour to reduce the single mammoth pile to individual loot piles. Again it seems remarkably akin to what is described in the hall of Heorot, except the modern need for batteries (AA, AAA and smaller buttons) for which, for once, there is stock laid in.

Next up the dresin, stuffing and ovening of the turkey. This has been planned for weeks: it becomes a military enterprise as complex as Overlord. Children have to be equally stuffed: this is a holding operation, which seems to involve various fruits and lurid finger-snacks spread across the table.

Then a moment of blessed peace. The small livestock disappear to ramp, romp, scurry and slide through the woods. Vegetables are prepared. Malcolm retreats from the field of battle, defeated and surplus to requirements, with a stiff scotch.

Borismaster

Now, what’s the proper reaction to a political announcement squeezed out on Christmas Eve?

Precisely!

Let’s go back a bit. Just over twenty seven months, in fact. We find this:

Boris Johnson has vowed that his first act as Mayor of London will be to scrap bendy buses and replace them with a modern-day Routemaster.

For the record, that was 12th September 2007: say, seven months before Blasted Boris entered the Great Testicle to be en-stooled. In the meanwhile, from time to time, the expectant public have managed to suppress the odd yawn when this non-event was up-dated. Now, finally, we have a manufacturer, Wrightbus, and an unoriginal specification:

Due to be introduced into service in 2011, the bus will have an open platform at one of its three entrances, with the platform able to be closed off at certain times, such as at night.

There will be two staircases and the bus will incorporate the latest hybrid technology to make it 40% more fuel efficient than conventional diesel buses and 15% more fuel efficient than current London hybrid buses.

That interprets as:

• barely in time for the next Mayoral election;
• a conventional double-decker which may, from time to time, be a two-person operation (and that’s when, and only when, – apart from the initial photo-op – the “hop-on, hop-off” arrangement would be permitted);
• less efficient than the derided articulated bus;
• occupying twelve metres length of road space (which, in itself, limits the routes on which it might be used);
• probably not many seats on the lower deck; and
• probably only a couple of buses for “evaluation” in the initial order.

It seems likely we are looking at is a slight up-dating and re-panelling of the Scania model that is operated by the Kowloon Motor Bus Company. So here it is:

The coded message is in the footnote to the (remarkably unenthused) barely-adjusted press release, as relayed by the professional website,  busandcoach.com:

The Capoco conception, joint winner of the initial design competition which may bear little resemblance to the final product due to hit London streets in 2011.

In other words, no more coverage for Boris’s well-cut flannel.

Disconnections and grapeful expectations

Malcolm has commented previously on the incongruous views expressed in the Sunday Times Business section, so contrary to the negativism of the news and views elsewhere in the rag. This week the dissident is David Smith’s Economic Outlook.

He sets out his stall thus:

It may seem odd then to say that things could have been a lot worse. Part of my mission is to take the “dismal” out of the dismal science of economics.

Even that would be enough to cause expulsion from the high table of Jeff Randall at Sky or the Telegraph. In the Mail, Sun and Express it would be unthinkable that there could be anything less than gloom, doom and despond (all personally plotted, with malice aforethought, by one G. Brown).

David Smith then proceeds to tick the boxes on the annual report card, and it comes up pretty positive: the stock market, the state of housing, the value of sterling,  avoiding deflation:

As it is, I would much rather have Britain’s problems than those of Japan.

Best of all is the job market. Employers and employees have shown huge flexibility to get through this recession. Wage freezes, cuts and shorter working weeks mean employment has fallen by only a third of what it was reasonable to expect…

… as we … say farewell to a fascinating year, probably never to be repeated, we can breathe a sigh of relief that it was not even worse.

Ummm, nice.

Over at the Observer, though, there’s a real goody. William Keegan has his moment of cheer, but mainly spends this week bashing the dirty politics of bankers:

I did not expect the banking system itself to go bankrupt.

What was more predictable was that the bankers would not recognise their own condition and would want to carry on as normal.

But I am not convinced our policymakers really know what to do with the banking system – at least not while there is not enough competition within national banking centres, but too much competition between banking centres, with bankers cynically playing off one government against another.

Then he goes for a bit of therapeutic shin-hacking:

… there are some retired Treasury hands – and a lot of Conservatives – forecasting dire things, sterling crises and the need for further cuts. That the Treasury, under whatever government, is planning to halve the deficit in four years and carry on reducing it is not good enough for them.

A bunch of fives

Over his head, Ruth Sunderland is at the same game, but it is her side-bar which has the gem of the week. Again, it seems missing from the on-line edition, and deserves repetition:

I’m not sure whether British Airways boss Willie Walsh is a fan of the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, but he should have a look at her book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. In it, she describes an experiment with capuchin monkeys that illuminates industrial disputes. Scientists taught the capuchins to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber; so long as the monkeys got the same, they were all content. Then the scientists gave one of them a grape. The other were so upset that they threw their pebbles out of the cage; some were so angry they went on hunger strike. Atwood says: “It was a monkey picket line: they might as well have been carrying signs that read ‘Management Grape Dispensing Unfair’. “

That demonstrates how deeply the concept of fairness is hardwired into the simian and human brain … However much rage BA cabin crew provoked by threatening to strike at Christmas, most ordinary employees would identify on some level with their sense that they are being made to pay for mistakes made by managements, bankers and politicians.

She sees the BA affair and the bankers’ ramp as:

… a wholesale violation of people’s sense of fairness. Does this matter? You bet. Unchecked, it will lead to more industrial and social unrest. Disaffection will also hobble the recovery: building a healthy post-cruch economy will require committed, creative and innovative entrepreneurs and employees. It’s not just sour grapes.

Now, think on: just how helpful to that healing process would be a penny-counting, job-cutting, benefits-chopping, us-versus-them Thatcher-lite Tory government?

The great Eurostar disaster

Malcolm cannot precisely date the Times headline:

Fog in the channel. Continent cut off.

Even the precise wording varies: was it Storms in the Channel and Continent isolated, as variants propose? The present storms seem to be in the media.

Then there was British Rail, blaming the disruption of February, 1991, on “the wrong kind of snow”. Since Eurostar are saying that their locomotives have coped for fifteen years with all conditions until the recent snow in northern France, that one looks ready for another outing (and see below).

A Malcolmian aside

Consider the glory that is the revitalised St Pancras Station (above, right). Note the public money well-spent. Even though a privatised company “owns” the station.

A further Malcolmian aside

The Lady in his Life and Malcolm successfully left London early on Saturday, 12th December. That was despite the new circuitous perambulation now required at Kings Cross- St Pancras underground station. The immigration staff at passport control are, of course, as dour and offensive as ever: do they all train in brusqueness and petty abrasiveness with the Department of Homeland Security at Newark-Liberty? Malcolm noted that the departure was to the second. The return late on Wednesday, 16th December, was again precisely as time-tabled, precisely as timetabled. Plaudits and certainly no complaints.

However, the night before Malcolm had a prognosticating dream of being stuck in the tunnel. The dream became a nightmare when it combined with a parallel notion: Malcolm used to torment his (then young) children by suggesting the Circle Line at certain places ran between the Thames on one side and a main sewer on the other: if either was breached, which would they prefer?

So, by some sympathetic black magic, Malcolm feels he may have brought this divine retribution upon thousands of innocents.

The blame game

The twenty-eight train-sets used on Eurostar are designated as Class 373 (in the UK) and series 373000 in France.

The sets were built, variously, at La Rochelle and Belfort in France, at Birmingham’s Washwood Head in Britain, and at Bruges in Belgium. All were GEC-Alstom products.

So, to the issue:

• are all the sets built to the same design and specification? [probably]
• has maintenance been consistent over the fleet [apparently not: the French sets, and possibly all, have had the third-rail feed removed]
• are the faulty units all from the same manufactured source?

The enquiry will be historic by the time it reports: by then any remedial work will have been undertaken. Its main utility will be in making insurance claims. In one respect it will be of use: in finding whether inadequate weatherproofing is a uniquely British failing.

There’s a bit of fog worth clearing.

________________________________________

An appendage

Had Malcolm dug a little further, he would have found a partial answer and a definite ho-hum in today’s Times.

Sure enough, it was the:

wrong type of fluffy snow was blamed today for the shut down of Eurostar services that has left the Christmas holiday plans of more than 100,000 people in tatters.

Predictable, but there’s more.

The print edition of the Times (but seemingly not the on-line version) has a side-bar piece by Nigel Harris, “managing editor” of Rail magazine. After a technophobe-friendly explanation of what seems to be the problem, he continues:

… this has happened before.

On January 31, 2003, a train from Brussels broke down in the tunnel after a passenger heard loud bangs. It arrived two hours late in London. Eurostar said that condensation had been caused by the cold train entering the warm tunnel, causing a partial electric breakdown.

The question is: what was done after the 2003 incident which made all run well — until now?

Indeed.

Now consider the fire-and-brimstone heaped on managerial and ministerial heads had this been a nationalised enterprise.

Private enterprise, here as with BA (of which more in a separate post), is not always working.

Watching for the tide

Consider this post, today, by Tim Montgomerie on ConHome:

I want to be cautious in interpreting all by-election results. Without knowing the local circumstances we always have to remember that such is our current dominance in local government that we are often defending high watermark gains and holding these landslide-period gains are often going to be the best we can hope for.

That’s in the context of the Tories holding a council seat in Reigate. Repeat: in Reigate. Turnout 13.4%. Last year Tories on 50.7%: this week on 37.9% Wha-hoo! Big deal. How many swallows make a summer hangover?

Even so …

… read again what Montgomerie is suggesting. He is a remarkable, rare and almost-extinct breed: an almost-intelligent Tory.

He is recognising that the only potential is downhill from here. The Tory tide has passed the flood, and he has the wit and wisdom to recognise it.

Now of what did that remind Malcolm?

Ah yes!

‘He’s a going out with the tide,’ said Mr. Peggotty to me, behind his hand.
My eyes were dim and so were Mr. Peggotty’s; but I repeated in a whisper, ‘With the tide?’
‘People can’t die, along the coast,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in – not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide. It’s ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.’

And so David Copperfield and the Peggottys wait hours for Barkis’s demise.

Malcolm, born further up the Norfolk coast, remembers reading that for the first time, probably near the start of the Macmillan premiership. He decided that, when his natural time came, he too would wait for an ebbing tide. With that went the conventional adolescent fear of death.

This night, at Wells-next-the-sea, high tide was at 7:30 pm. Provided he makes it until the early hours, Malcolm’s OK until after 8:00 am tomorrow.

For the Tories and their too high hopes, it might not be the same.

The man from Brabant

As Malcolm was noting in that earlier post, he has a distant ancestor from Brabant. Or perhaps not.

When Malcolm received a genealogy from a distant connection, it included a reference to “Sir James Granado, a knight-equerry at the court of King Henry VIII”.

Any cogent and comprehensive explication of this is a long way off. What Malcolm thinks he knows so far amounts to the following:

The husband

The familysearch.org website throws up a match, taken from a preserved church register: on 8th October 1539 “Jamys Granado” married “Mawdlen Kyldermans” at Saint Dionis Backchurch, London:

Near the south west corner of Lime-street, behind the houses in Fenchurch street, stands St. Dionis Back-church, dedicated to St. Dennis, or Dionysius, an Athenian Areopagite, or judge, and now the patron of France. It receives the epithet of Back-church from its situation behind a row of houses, to distinguish it from St. Gabriel’s church, which formerly stood in the middle of Fenchurchstreet … The old edifice was burnt down in 1666.

If “Kyldermans” is a phonetic for “Keldermans”, our “Mawdlen” could come from a very remarkable Brabant family of architects. What that doesn’t explain is what she and her new husband were doing in London. The move to London and the use of the vernacular “Jamys” — rather than the Latinised “Jacobus” expected of a “high” clerk — might have religious connotations at this historical moment.

The soldier

Lord Grey writes a dispatch from Boulogne, 27th April 1546, recounting a skirmish with the French, which had led to a number being taken prisoner: among the names is Jacques Granado.

Next year, Granado is at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, 10th September 1547, at the tail-end of the “Rough Wooing”, in the heat of the action and, in the spotlight, taking at least one prisoner:

The Scots continued their bravery on the hill ; the which we not being so well able to bear, made out a band of Light Horsemen and a troop of Demi-lances to back them. Our men gat up on the hill, and thereby, of even ground with the enemy, rode straight towards them, with good speed and order ; whom, at the first, the Scots did boldly countenance and abide ; but, after, when they perceived that our men would needs come on, they began to prick [ride away], and would fain have begone ere they had told their errand. But our men hasted so speedily after, that, even straight, they were at their elbows, and did so stoutly then bestir them, that, what in the onset at the first, and after in the chase, which lasted a three mile, well-nigh to as far as the furthest of their camp on the south side, they had killed of the Scots, within a three hours, above the number of thirteen hundred, and taken the Master of Home, Lord Home’s son and heir, two priests and six gentlemen (whereof one, I remember, by Sir Jacques Granado) : and all, upon the highest, and well nighest towards them, of the hill ; within the full sight of their whole camp.

After the Battle, the Duke of Somerset, in his camp at Roxburgh on the 28th of September, knighted Sir James Granado, Brabander.

In Royal service

Thomas Rymer produced a collection of documents from the Royal Patent Rolls which includes a key reference. This is also foot-noted for the on-line version of Machyn, edited by J.G.Nichols:

An annuity of 50l. was granted March 10, 1549-50, to sir Jaques Granado and Magdalen his wife, and to the longer liver: see the patent printed in Rymer, xv. 210.

The National Archives contain two references to Granado, both post-1547: one that he is liable for taxation in London, another that he is liable for taxation as a member of the Royal household.

The diplomat

In the autumn of 1551 (the letter of introduction is dated 26 October), sir Jaques Granado knight, one of the esquyres of the stable, was sent by Edward VI to

to his good brother the French king and the dolphin of Fraunce and the constable of Fraunce with certen geldinges, as tokens and presentes from his Majesty to every of them.

Sir William Pickering, writing a dispatch from Paris on 18th November, reported the safe delivery of the horses:

mr. Granado withoute faile hathe done his part righte welle to them bothe upon the waye and in their delyverye lykeivise.

The King then sent an autographed reply to Edward VI through:

le s’ de Grenadde, escuyer de vostre escuyrie, present porteur…

Escript a Fontainebleau le iiij jour de Decembre 1551.

Granado then took a return (and seemingly more generous) present back to England. As was customary, Granado received a personal royal gift, as Pickering details, writing a further dispatch from Melun on 8th December:

Mr. Granado hath taken his leave, and hathe in reward three cheyns, one of the king, the queue, and dolphin, in valewe by estimacion viij. [gold] crownes. The Kinges majesty shalle have sent him from hence vj. cortalles, iij. Spanishe horses, one torke [Turk], a barbery, one cowerser, and ij. lyttel mewles.

The courtier

On 3 January 1552 Granado features in a tourney organised as part of the Christmas celebrations. A mock contest was enacted:

… there came in two apparelled like Almains (the Earl of Ormonde and Jacques Granado) and two came in like friars (Mr Drury and Thomas Cobham); but the Almains would not suffer the friars to pass until they had fought. After this followed two masques, one of men, the other of women. Then there was a banquet of 120 dishes.

That, incidentally, would be “Black Tom” Butler, the tenth Earl of Ormonde, and — more to the point — one of Edward VI’s closest buddies.

The secret agent?

There is a side-light on all this in a document from the Imperial Archives in Vienna, edited in a collection of State Papers for the Institute of Historical Research by Royall Tylor (1916), and here hosted by the magnificent British History on-line.  And here we enter a murky world of Big Politics.

The Emperor Charles V’s man in London, Simon Renard de Bermont (portrait, right), was negotiating the proposed marriage of Queen Mary of England to Charles’s son, Philip II of Spain. The notion was that, were a son-and-heir to be born of such a marriage, he would inherit:

in England and the Low Countries, and if no heir is born, the Infante Don Carlos, son of the Prince, is to marry the Queen’s sister [i.e. the Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth I] under the same conditions.

On 13th November 1553, Renard sends a complex report back to Vienna, relating an interview with Mary. The point at issue was messages from Cardinal Pole, then fidgetting in Dillingen. With Parliament about to rise, Mary was urgently seeking advice on the English matter … the cause of the Church’s authority (i.e. the restoration of the Catholic Church in England).

However, the Emperor Charles’s brother, and soon to be successor, was Ferdinand, the King of the Romans. Ferdinand had put his second son, the Archduke Ferdinand (aged 24) into play as a potential match for Queen Mary (aged 37). So Alonso de Games, Ferdinand’s man, was also in London on a parallel mission.

In that letter of 13th November 1553, Renard reports:

I gather that the King of the Romans has some suspicion of your Majesty, because he says that Licenciate Games, the King’s ambassador with you, failed to obtain audience or a reply to the letters the King sent you, for which reason he sent Alonso over here to carry out the King’s orders. I take it from what I have heard him say and from his communications with the Grenades that the King has decided to press his (son’s) suit, and believes that he stands a better chance of being accepted than does your Majesty.

Royall Tylor foot-notes that reference to Grenades as:

This may be Sir Jacques Granado, who was Esquire of the Stable to Edward VI and took a present of geldings to Henry II of France, from whom he received presents … This circumstance would have been enough to make him suspect in Renard’s eyes.

The death

Henry Machyn’s diary, in an entry for 4th May 1557, gives a gory description of Granado’s death:

The fourth day of May did ride before the King and Queen in Her Grace’s privy garden Sir James Granado. And so the bridle bit did break and so the horse ran against the wall and so he broke his neck, for his horse threw him against the wall, and his brains ran out.

Machyn also notes Granado’s funeral:

The sixth day of May was buried in St. Dunstan in the East Sir James Granado, knight, with two white branches and twelve staff torches and four great tapers and a two dozen of escutcheons.

John Strype’s Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (from the early 1700s) lists the monuments of the City worthies in the church of St. Dunstan’s in the East, including that of Sir James Granado, Knt.

Widow and daughter

This does not complete the immediately-available story of Jacques Granado. We hear more of his widow in the introduction by Alexander Grosart to Robert Chester’s Love’s martyr, or, Rosalins complaint:

Sir Robert Chester married as his second wife, Magdalen, widow of Sir James Granado, Knt., on the same day and at the same place, that his son Edward Chester, married Sir James Granado’s only daughter and heiress. i.e.,  father and son married respectively mother and daughter. This took place at Royston on 27th November 1564. The wife of Edward Chester survived her husband and was again married, viz., to Alexander Dyer, Esq.

Apart from a bit of additional family history, Grosart provides a roundabout link between the Chester family and Shakespeare. Love’s martyr has been interpreted (in the main by Grosart) as an allegory on the love between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex. As for the Chester connection, this shows that Granado and his widow moved in quite elevated circles. Robert Chester had bought the monastic benefits of Royston Priory from Henry VIII for the sum of £1751 and five shillings, was knighted in 1552, and went to be Sheriff of Hertford and Essex under Elizabeth:

Edward Chester his Son and Heir; who about 16 Octob. 6 Eliz. married Katharine the Daughter and Heir of Sir James Granado, Kt. by whom he had Issue Robert Chester, which Robert Anno 41 Eliz. was constituted Sheriff for this County, and married Ann the Daughter of Henry Capell, Esq. by the Lady Katharine Manners his Wife, Daughter of Thomas [Manners, who had Plantagenet ancestry through his mother, Anne St Leger] first Earl of Rutland: He was in Commission of the Peace for this County, and entertain’d King James I. at his House in his Royal Progress from Scotland to London: Who on the 23d of July 1603 knighted him at Whitehall.

The persistence of the name

Granado’s daughter, Katharine, carried the Granado name into the Chester line. Two sons went into the church: Dr Robert Chester, Rector of Stevenage, and Dr Granado Chester, Rector of Broadwater, Sussex, between 1624-1645. In early 18th-century London there is a Granado Chester (or perhaps a father and son: two separate wills in the name of “Granado Chester of Hertfordshire” are proved in 1726 and again in 1757),  a grocer, occupying a warehouse at Crosby Place, Bishopgate Street. There’s quite a bit of hatching, matching and dispatching on the familysearch genealogy site involving various “Granado Chesters”; however, St Helen Bishopgate has a curious baptismal record:

5 August 1708 Anne the natural daughter of Granado Chester by Anne wife of …. she cohabiting with the said Chester incontinent as being sold by her said husband to Chester to common fame.

The reference to Crosby Place leads to another speculation: Granado Chester’s warehouse occupied the ground floor, while another tenant was the East India Company. We then find a later Granado Chester is an officer with the EastIndia Company, and a veterinary surgeon with the 1st Light Cavalry at Fort St George on the India list in 1827. There is a John Granado Chester, practising as a solicitor in London, SE11, until the mid-20th century. “Granado Chester” persists to the present-day in a business family of businessmen in East Anglia.

Similarly, Frances Chester, the grand-daughter of Edward Chester and Katharine Granado, married John Pigott at Barkway, Hertfordshire, on 3rd February 1630. One of their surviving sons, Sir Granado Pigott was a south Cambridgeshire squire (the village of Abington Pigotts takes the family name). staunch Tory MP in Queen Anne’s time, and passed the name down the Pigott line.

Reflection

Jacques Granado was not a “notable” personality, but he does leave marks on the records of history.

What this does not show is his origins. He is “of Brabant”, with a surname that could be Spanish. His wife, “Mawdlen”, seems to have a Dutch surname. They are wed in the “aliens” church in London.

After the marriage of Maria of Burgundy and Maximilian of Austria in 1477 Brabant was ruled by Hapsburgs, and remained so until the outbreak of the Eighty Years’ War (the Dutch War of Independence) after the Beeldenstorm in 1566. Quite how Granado gets from there to soldiering for the English at the Second Siege of Boulogne in 1546 is unclear: however, these are the times of the wars of religion; and already the persecuted Anabaptists are making their way to London. Equally, the continental wars are affecting English trade: Antwerp was losing importance to London, and exports developed from raw wool to finished cloth — the power of the London Merchant Adventurers Company was burgeoning. It may be significant that Katharine Granado and her mother marry into the Hertfordshire merchant-gentry. Granado himself is buried in some state, with a monument in his parish church, and accompanied to his grave by armorial-bearers.

We can see from the records that Granado is in London in 1539 and a decade later he is on the royal pay-roll. We also can see that he got around quite a bit: Boulogne, the Scottish war, the French court. His marriage is in Fenchurch Street, but he later moves his home parish to St Dunstans in the East, only a few hundred yards distant, but convenient to the Tower of London. We might observe that later, when Francis Walsingham was running Elizabeth’s secret service, he too lived convenient for the “office”, at Seething Lane. Simon Renard not only feels that any comment passed by Granado is of valuable, and Renard’s suspicions about Granado should, then, be very well placed.

What we can be assured is that Granado was one of those 16th-century novi homines (“new men”) who rose through the social ranks on his merits. In Granado’s case the merit is partly military, and partly because of some expertise, which may be or may include his horsemanship and expert equine-management. Did he also arrive in England as a mercenary, an adept in one of the new military applications? Whatever his origins, he evidences courtly mannerisms, and is to be trusted in diplomatic exchanges.

And not a bad root to find, fully fifteen generations down to the base of the family tree.