Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [166]
The ape was washed ashore, where it was found by the people of Hartlepool: people who, in this parochial age, had never even seen a picture of such a beast before. As the locals gathered around the stunned animal, they reached the obvious conclusion. The creature was a Frenchman. After all, hadn’t they heard that the French were human and yet less than human? Hadn’t they been taught that the men of the continent looked something like the men of the British isles, but with more hair and far less civilised charm?
So the ape was hanged, states the legend, executed by the locals as a French spy. The story’s told even to this day, so much so that the people of Hartlepool are sometimes (with good – if insulting – humour) known as ‘monkey-danglers’.
Like so many of the tales of the era, the legend’s almost certainly untrue. Apart from anything else, there’s no record of any ship called the Chasse Maree in that era, let alone one lost off the coast of England. Besides, illustrations of apes were common in the early nineteenth century even if very few people had seen one of the animals in the flesh. It’s a piece of folklore most probably devised by one of Hartlepool’s rival fishing-towns, to make the competition sound like buffoons.
Nonetheless, it’s telling. It tells posterity that even in the 1800s, the ape was the symbol of something exotic, of something bloody and dangerous from far away. It was the most buried, most primal part of mankind, ready to threaten humanity again at any opportunity. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Frankenstein age began and the message to the world was dear. All change gave birth to monsters… except, of course, that most of those monsters were borne of the past rather than the future. As later generations were to discover, the more humanity tried to avoid the monstrosities of progress, the more apelike and savage humanity itself became. Perhaps a ritualist would have speculated that the apes weren’t simply the price of progress. They were the initiation, the trial by fire, that made progress worthwhile.
On February 24, 1783, the British government fell once again. The chaos had lasted the best part of a year, and only now was the true new order of the age about to manifest itself. The new money was ready to begin its grand struggle against the old blood, and the Countess of Jersey was part of that process. In 1783 she began to associate with all manner of Whig politicians and arch-manipulators, seducing her way into the heart of the new society. The new Britain, corporate Britain, would spawn the Industrial Revolution itself. It would create a world of new ideas and new machineries, of unprecedented corporate corruption but at the same time unprecedented scientific knowledge. In the years to come there’d be blood and fire; war and renewal; the burning of coal and the burning of peace-treaties; human workers redefined as machine parts while freethinkers made the most glorious of discoveries. Perhaps, then, the Countess really had learned something from her experience with the apes.
Everything revolves around symbols, in the history of 1782-83. So Scarlette’s funeral, held on February 9, might well be interpreted as the greatest symbol of all. The old order, some might have argued, had ended with the Siege of Henrietta Street. That was why there had to be a funeral, one way or another.
It was snowing that day in February: February, like March, was a colder month then. The procession left Covent Garden at six o’clock in the morning, when the sun was still only half-risen and most of London hadn’t woken up for the day. Those who carried the coffin crossed the open ground around Oxford Street, heading in the direction of Mayfair, leaving grey footprints behind them as they waked across the snow. They didn’t make much noise as they went, and there weren’t many in the cortege. It would have been unseemly to give Scarlette a traditional Christian