Accessibility and Archives: “Nothing but ‘low’ and ‘little’”?

In this post, Philip Milnes-Smith experiments with communal biography and fictive narrative to give back voices to people known through the words and images of others.

One prompt for this blog was reading Sara E Johnson’s Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World, which takes an approach which its author terms “communal biography”.  This “extends a reader’s focus to the lives of others”, forcing us to pay attention to the human beings her main subject barely mentioned, misrepresented and ignored.  As one reviewer notes, Johnson prompts readers to “consider whether scholars reproducing enslavers’ thinking are offering accounts that are any less fictional.”  I want to link this approach with Verne Harris’ conceptualisation of archival banditry as an archival ethics for those “haunted by the ghosts of the ones excluded, side-lined, not listened to, dispossessed and in other ways oppressed”.  This represents a necessary challenge to the historical reality of archives being for (and not just of) the powerful.

Anonymous

A recent gallery visit included a chance encounter with a painted figure of an enchained, only partially dressed ‘Dwarf’ by the artist Domenichino (a diminutive that itself suggests someone short).  Looking for more information from the caption, I was disturbed first that the portrait sitter was unnamed (and that nobody seemed to have noticed that was an issue, or to think it worth mentioning that his name was not known).  But I was also bothered that what was being communicated curatorially as an explanation of his dehumanising inclusion (in what was a cycle of works with a mythological theme), was only the perspective of the 17th century commissioning patron, which ensures the ongoing humiliation of a disabled member of his household four centuries later.  As Johnson notes, the “worldviews of the dominated and the dominant (living in inter-connected, but not synonymous, worlds) require distinct and sometimes divergent sensitivities to evaluate.”  Even if the villa owner regarded this man as a naughty pet, we should be invited to see the chained man as having his own perspective (even if limited agency). 

Jeffrey Hudson

Back in 2018, Tom Shakespeare had raised some of these issues with reference to a different work of art, arguing that we need to stop seeing Captain Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682) as “an aesthetic embellishment” to the household of Charles I and Henrietta Maria “and appreciate him as a real person with an individual, extraordinary life.”  William Davenant wrote a poem about Hudson, narrating his capture by pirates (for the first time, and not yet a teenager), which offers us avenues for considering what Domenichino might have been doing two decades earlier by placing our man alongside a representation of Apollo slaying a Cyclops (a giant).  The poem notes that his captor amused himself with loading him with “Chaines, such as fitting seeme for Elephants, when manag'd in a Teeme” and called for “a Guard… of Switzers… to heave that Giant up!” warning that “now enrag'd, he may perchance so tosse us, as you would thinke, you touch'd a live Colossus!” 

Although Davenant’s intent seems also to have been somewhat satirical, we ought to note that he makes Hudson stand up to the “Pirat-Dogge”.  He denies descent from both (the Biblical giants) Og of Bashan and Anak, and also (the Classical giant) Cacus.  Threatened with the rack, he refuses to divulge any court secrets, and the narrator describes him as “noble”, “wise” and “bold” and compares him to “a second Tamburlaine” in his defiance.  While we should not consider the words he puts in Hudson’s mouth authentic, we are still left with the sense that he was more than just “a considerable part of the entertainment of the court”.  Droeshout’s engraving of 1636 proclaimed him “the abstract of the world’s Epitome”.

Richard and Anne Gibson

Turning now to the people of short stature in our preview image.  The larger portrait depicts Richard Gibson (1615-1690), while the miniature shows his wife Anne (née Shepherd, c.1625-1707).  Richard may have begun as the “page” of a Lady in Mortlake, but spotting his skill, she introduced him to the painter Francesco Cleyne, a designer for the tapestry production site there.  He subserquently entered the household of the Lord Chamberlain (Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke), whose second wife was the widowed Countess of Dorset (formerly Anne Clifford, 1590-1676).  Like Hudson, Gibson became part of the Caroline Court (page of the back stairs), but by the time of the Civil War, Pembroke’s relationship with the King had broken down and Richard stuck with Pembroke.  Unlike Hudson, he was a successful artist, and also taught art not just to future queens (Mary II and Anne), but his own daughter Susannah-Penelope, who would go on to be a professional artist. 

His wife Anne is reported to have served Henrietta Maria (as “The Queen’s Dwarf”), but a portrait identifies Anne Shepherd (Mrs Gibson) as lady’s maid to the Duchess of Lennox and Richmond.  Anne was married (as a girl of around 16) in February 1641.  It is difficult to judge the extent to which the presence of both King and Queen was a gesture of respect for Richard and Anne, or more of an entertainment for the Court.  Edmund Waller’s occasional poem deems Anne a Galatea – a Nereid famously desired by a Cyclops (again the imaginary linkage of Dwarf and Giant).  The conceit of the poem is that by virtue of their height the happy couple are:

Beneath the level of all care,

Over whose heads those arrows fly

Of sad distrust and jealousy,

Securèd in as high extreme

As if the world held none but them.

It seems likely that Anne accompanied her husband to the Hague in the decade or so he lived there following the princess Mary’s marriage to William of Orange.  By that time she had presumably had the last of their nine children (five of whom survived to adulthood, described as “well-proportioned and of average height”). 

Anne Gibson survived her husband for over a decade, but this tradesman’s daughter did not quite equal the length of life of the “great, and Good, Anne Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery” (who recorded her own life and whose funeral sermon was commemorated in print).  The following brief paragraphs of fictive narrative are informed speculation inviting us consider Anne Gibson’s possible perspective, and emotions.

While we were with Her Majesty in Holland, we heard of the death of Mr Hudson.  He was closer to me in age than my late husband, and I have sometimes wondered how differently my life could have turned out, had not the Earl of Pembroke, brought Richard to Court. 

I have seen people like us struggling to earn a living as street performers, at the mercy of those who stare at us and call us words like ‘Monster’ and ‘Baboon’.  Someone sent us a copy of Aphra Behn’s The second part of the Rover because it brought a Dwarf to the stage in a speaking role.  But I was disappointed: the actress was not named, and the role was no more than a joke.

Perhaps it seems that Jeffrey, Richard and I were lucky to have aristocratic and royal patronage – but that is to forget we were separated at an early age from our families, having been appraised like a hound or a pony.  And I was not sorry to leave serving others to become a wife, mother and grandmother.  

I think Richard and I have been happier together than the Earl and Countess of Pembroke – when my Susannah-Penelope and Anne were young, I kept reminding my husband how they fell out because she refused to marry her daughter Isabella against her will.

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