THE PROFESSIONAL PRIG

I have absolutely no sympathy for Anthony Comstock (above),  a man described by a biographer as having  “no conspicuous talents and...boundless energy”.   His brother's death from wounds suffered in the three days of slaughter at Gettysburg, compelled Anthony to join the Union Army. But chance sent the Connecticut farm boy far from the crucial battles around Richmond, and he spent a year of isolation and boredom guarding the backwaters of St. Augustine, Florida. Most of his fellow soldiers considered him a bible thumping prig, who instead of simply refusing it, pompously poured his daily whiskey ration out on the ground. And the great lesson this “religio-monomaniac” took from the war that ended slavery, was that his fellow soldiers were addicted to pornography.

By 1861 there were almost 3,000 photographers in Paris, and 200 schools teaching the skill in London. And from day one, a significant percentage of these technicians found taking “dirty pictures” very profitable. Shortly after Gettysburg, another smug priss, General Marsena Patrick, had boasted in his diary of “burning up a large quantity of obscene books, taken from the mails.” And it wasn't just pocket editions of “Fanny Hill”, and the “Libertine Enchantress” that he burned. There were also the “barrack favorites”, the “carte de visite” french postcards – nude photos of women, which went for twelve cents each, and “London and Paris Volupuarties” engaged in actual sex, for $3 a dozen ($9 for stereoscopic views). Comstock found himself drawn to these “deadly poisons” - as he called them - “cast into the fountain of moral purity.”

By 1868 the muscular Comstock was a menial worker in New York City, making $12 a week as a porter for a dry goods store. He was a man "devoid of humor, lustful after publicity, and vastly ignorant “ who, by his own admission, spent many lonely evenings fearing “for the souls of the young men” who roomed with him. He joined the Young Men's Christian Association, and became convinced he faced “some of the most insidious and deadly forces of evil” in America. A nation racked by continued violence inspired by four bloody years of war saw pornography as a low priority. But Comstock did not share that opinion.

He quickly attracted the attention of the President of the WMCA, Morris K. Jessup, who had made his fortune as a banker for railroad tycoons. Jessup interviewed Comstock in his Madison Avenue mansion and liked what he saw. They made an unlikely pair. Jessup stood over six feet tall, and was a philanthropist to many causes. Comstock was short and brutally single minded. But for forty years Jessup was supportive of Comstock, with money and political influence, even creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Christian warrior, when others in the WMCA questioned his tactics. (It is interesting to note that of all the social reform movements of the late 19^th century, the Comstock's “Society” was the only one with no women in positions of authority.) Comstock would admit in his diary, “ Only one man thinks as I do and that is Mr. Jessup.”

With Jessup's support Comstock successfully lobbied congress for the Comstock Law, the last act of a lame duck congress on 3 March, 1873,  which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material through the mail. The act also created a job of Special Postal Inspector for Comstock, allowing him define as pornographic anything mentioning birth control or preventing venereal disease. In Comstock's view, “God has set certain natural barriers. If you turn loose the passions and break down the fear (of unwanted pregnancies or disease) you bring . . . disaster.” His first year the new Special Inspector, always dressed in his black frock, traveled 23, 000 miles on a free rail pass, looking for sin in America. And luckily, since his job depended on it, he found it everywhere, and 24 states passed their own versions of "his" law, collectively called the Little Comstock Laws.

In 1872 Comstock won national attention when he went after Victoria Woodhull (above). She was no common pornographer, but a feminist who had run her own Wall Street brokerage firm and her “Weekly” newspaper -  in which Victoria argued,”When woman rises... into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom...then will woman be raised” To highlight the hypocrisy of men making decisions about birth control, the “Weekly” published details of an extramarital affair by one of her critics, popular Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Breecher. The same day the article appeared, Victoria, her husband and her sister were all arrested. Reporting the affair, said Comstock, was spreading obscenity. Comstock's belligerent theatrics in the court room so offended some members of the jury, they hung. Still, the trial only increased the popularity of both Comstock and Breecher.

Comstock claimed he convicted 3,500 people of distribution of pornography and destroyed 15 tons of obscene books, including medical text books that displayed female anatomy charts or mentioned abortion. To Comstock, woman’s health was far less important than their moral purity. He also burned novels written by D.H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser. Comstock even tried to close down a play by George Bernard Shaw, whom he called an “Irish smut dealer”. Of the first twelve people convicted of violating the Federal Comstock law, 5 were pardoned by President Ulysses Grant, who had signed the law. And of the 105 people arrested for violating Comstock's federal anti-birth control campaign, all but 16 were found not guilty. In state courts Comstock fared much better.

He saw himself as “the weeder in God's garden”, but his critics saw him as “a first class Torquemada” and chief of America's “moral eunuchs.” In 1877 Comstock went after Massachusetts social activist Ezra Heywood for publishing a pamphlet about marriage called “Cupid’s Yokes”. The judge told the jury the pamphlet was too offensive to allow them to read it, and they sentenced Heywood to two years at hard labor in the Dedham jail. Six months later President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood, but Comstock saw that as a challenge. He now persecuted Heywood, having him arrested four more times, once for reprinting two poems by Walt Whitman, and again for discussing a contraceptive device called the “Comstock syringe” . By the fourth arrest the sixty year old Heywood was broke and emotionally exhausted, and was convicted and sentenced to another two years of hard labor. This time there was no pardon. A year after he was released in 1892, Heywood died of tuberculosis he had contracted in jail. Comstock had won again.

Comstock boasted he had driven 15 people to suicide. His most famous victim was Ida Craddock, a free spirit and writer of fact based guides like “The Marriage Night” and “Right Marital Living”. After pleading guilty and receiving a suspended sentence in 1899, for to violating Illinois' Little Comstock Law, she was arrested under New York's version in 1892 and suffered three months in a workhouse. As she left that jail Comstock had her arrested again on Federal charges for the same offense. This time she was sentenced to five years at hard labor. And Comstock let her know, that as soon as she served that term, he intended on arresting her again.

The night before she was to enter prison, Ida Craddock put her head in the oven, turned on the gas jets, and then slit her wrists. In her public suicide note, Ida blamed her death on “This man, Anthony Comstock,...(who is) unctuous with hypocrisy...if the reading of impure books and the gazing upon impure pictures does debauch and corrupt and pervert the mind...(and) Anthony Comstock has himself read perhaps more obscene books, and has gazed upon perhaps more lewd pictures than has any other one man in the United States, what are we to think of the probable state of Mr. Comstock's imagination? ...The man is a sex pervert; he is what physicians term a Sadist...for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock..I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book...” Comstock insisted that her death was one of his proudest moments.

It was not Comstock's bullying, but his lack of self awareness that gradually weakened his grip on public morals. The final breaking point came in 1913 when Harry Reichenbach besieged Comstock with complaints about the Braun and Company gallery on west 46^th street in Manhattan. The prig-in-chief found the sidewalk in front of the art gallery crowded with young men snickering and praising the beauty of a painting of a nude woman in the front window. Comstock stormed into the gallery and ordered the painting removed. The clerk, James Kelly, stammered, “But that is the famous “September Morn” by Paul Chabas”(above).  The work was famous, having won a medal of honor from the French Academy of Painting just the year before. Undaunted, Comstock replied, “There is too little morning and too much maid”, and threatened to arrest the gallery owner, Philippe Ortiz,  if the painting was not removed.

Defiantly, Mr. Ortiz kept the painting in his gallery's front window for another two weeks, removing it only after the crowds jamming his studio had bought out every print of it.  Twenty years later in his memoir, “Phantom Fame”, Reichenbach admitted he had staged the entire thing, including hiring the young men to ogle the painting, as a publicity stunt for the gallery. Comstock, who was not in on the joke, had behaved as boorishly and brutally as expected.

Comstock died suddenly on the evening of 21 September, 1915. His monument was that during World War One the United States was the only nation not to supply its soldiers with prophylactics.. Instead, under Comstock's insistence, the Army and Navy  lectured its soldiers on abstinence.  As a result the American Army and Navy discharged 10,000 men who had become infected with sexually transmitted diseases, the largest single cause of American causalities during the war. It would be another 18 years before birth control could be openly purchased in the United States. Shadows of Anthony Comstock's warped vision have distorted American education well into the 21st century, in states that refuse to offer high school students sex education, opting instead for preaching abstinence - which has proved no more effective today than it had in the 19th century.  It seems that every prig,  Anthony Comstock was convinced he was the savior of civilization. And yet no prig ever saves anything,  because they trade human lives for a tattered myth of morality.

- 30 -

HALL OF MIRRORS

I think it a profound insight that all telescopes involve mirrors. In 1846 this idea was stumbled upon by the obsessive-compulsive painter Alvan G. Clark, when he realized there was more money to be made in selling  telescopes to rich people than in just painting portraits of rich people. And since both involved selling positive self-images, Alvan dropped his brush and took up the polishing rag. It was said this self taught optician could feel imperfections in the glass lenses through his thumb while polishing them. For over a half a century Alvin and his sons ground magnificent telescopes for rich clients who saw funding observatories as grand monuments to their own intellectual beneficence. Five times Alvin Clark and Sons produced lenses for the largest refraction telescopes in the world. But it is another sad truth that making optical telescopes is an ephemeral art form, since over time all glass lenses tell lies. Even a Clark

One of Alvan Clark's most enthusiastic customers was Mr. Percival Lowell, whose mommy gave him a 2 1/4 inch Clark on his fifteenth birthday. Astronomy was the kind of hobby mother and son could share atop their Brookline mansion. At his father's insistence Percival went into business in Japan (above - the tall one without the hat). But he always returned to his first love; astronomy. And as  the end of the 19^th century approached, Percy was attracted by the approach of Mars. 

The more people looked at the red planet, the more it looked like earth. Kepler was the first to realize that Mars was a neighbor of ours. But it was the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who drew the first detailed maps of the planet's surface. Then in September of 1877, as the orbits of Earth and Mars converged, Giovanni Schiaparelli used a new telescope and saw what looked like mountain ranges and plains and long mysterious grooves which criss-crossed the planet. He described the grooves in Italian as “canalii”,  a word meaning a channel, or path.  It is sad to point out here, that although Percival Lowell spoke fluent Japanese, he did not speak Italian. 

In 1896, Percival retired from the business world and built his own world class observatory in the mountains, 7,180 feet above Flagstaff, Arizona, atop a peak he named Mars Hill.  Here, for $20,000 (half a million today) Percival installed a 24 inch Clark refracting telescope. Every summer night for the next 23 years, Percival Lowell (above) sat at the bottom of his telescope, observing Mars. During the days he slept in the 24 room mansion he also built on Mars Hill. Being born rich has its advantages, and Percival would have been a fool if he had not taken advantage of his advantages.

And what he saw through the eyepiece of his expensive magical tube was amazing. He saw canals - real canals - more than 180 of them, some of them 4,000 miles long. And he wondered what sort of creatures had constructed such a massive, intricate irrigation system. “Quite possibly, “ he wrote, “such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed...Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.” 

Percival wrote three books, “Mars”, “Mars and its Canals”, and “Mars as the Abode of :Life”. Each and every book became a best seller. He inspired H.G. Wells to write “War of the Worlds”, as well as inspiring Edgar Rice Burrows, who besides the “Tarzan” series, wrote 13 adventure books centering on Mars. By the year his third book was published, in 1907, Percival Lowell was recognized as the world's expert on the planet Mars. And then, almost over night, Percival's magical red world was deflated by his doppelganger, Mr. George Hale.

George Hale also came from a rich Boston family. But where Percival's father had insisted he attend business school, George's father had sent him to MIT to become a professional astronomer. And in 1908 George opened the lens cap on his new 60” reflector telescope in his new observatory atop California's 5,700 foot high Mount Wilson. And almost the first thing George peered at was Mars, where he found...no canals. Not a one. No matter how hard he looked. It is alleged that George saw an elf in his bedroom, but he saw no canals on Mars.

The photographic proof was conclusive. What Percival had seen as canals proved, when seen through a  newer, bigger, telescope,   to be just an optical illusion, or maybe the blood vessels in the back of Percival's own eye.  Percival had a nervous breakdown. And when he recovered he sought to re-establish his reputation. He took up the search for the the last great mystery in the night sky, the powerful conundrum of Planet X.

According to Percival's own mathematics, there was something very odd about the planets Neptune and Uranus. They were too big, their orbits were odd, Neptune was spinning on its side and they both wobbled. It looked to Percival as as if there had to be another planet further out from the sun, tugging at Uranus and Neptune. He called his suspect Planet X. Percival even calculated Planet X's mass, and he knew exactly where it had to be in the sky, 40 times further out from the sun than the earth.

For ten years Percival and his assistants – okay, mostly his assistants – scoured photographs of the night sky, searching for the tell-tale movement in the star field that would herald the discovery of Planet X. Twice the camera on Percival's 12” Clark took pictures of the moving X.  But the humans who had to examine each one of the thousands of photographs, failed to notice the one dot that had moved slightly. And then,  in 1916, at the age of sixty-one, Percival Lowell suffered a stroke and died. He was buried next to his beloved 12” Clark atop Mars Hill.  But thanks to Percival's fortune, the search for Planet X continued.

In 1930 Clyde Tombaugh found Planet X. And since he was being paid by Percival's endowment, and still using Percival's 12” Clark, Planet X was named using Percival Lowell's initials – PLuto. And isn't it amazing that Planet X became the official IX planet in the solar system? You don't often get to use Roman Numerals in a joke.

Ah, but things were about to get even more amazing. With the refinement of observations of the outer planets a number of new great mysteries appeared in the night sky, as they always do. The more you know the less you know, you know.  You know?

The first thing astronomers realized they did not know was why  two of those three cold blobs of rock and ice circling far out from the Sun– Neptune and Uranus - were so darn massive, too massive to have been formed so far out at the edge of the spinning disc that eventually became the solar system. In 2005 the mystery was solved (we think) at the University of Nice, France.  Neptune and Uranus, said the French astronomers, had actually formed in the inner solar system, and out of rock, like the Earth, Venus and Mars.

Four billion years ago the newly formed gas giants Jupiter and Saturn had turned the inner solar system into pool table on the break -  with the still molten planets and asteroids slamming and careening into and off of each other. This gravitational pin ball game had pulled the moon into a collision with the Earth, and allowed its capture. It had ground up the rocks trying to form a planet into the asteroid belt. And it had flung Uranus and Neptune out of their formation orbits and into their current orbits, leaving behind a lot of oddities as they swerved out into the edge of our solar system.

And that left Pluto. The more people looked at the guardian of the outer realms the odder it looked. Better telescopes, including one in earth orbit, showed it to have less than two tenths of 1% of the mass of the Earth, and to be only about half the size of our moon. That was too small to have perturbed the orbits of Neptune or Uranus. In fact it was even too small to be classified as a planet.

On August 24, 2006 the International Astronomical Union struck Pluto from the list of planets and gave it the new title of "134340 Pluto, dwarf planet".  It seems that for all of Percival Lowell's careful calculations, and for all of Clyde Tombaugh's perseverance, and for all the power of Alvan Clark's thumb,  finding Planet X right where it was supposed to be was...just a coincidence.  It was the human mind which mistook blind luck for a deep cosmological insight,  just as the swelling in the blood vessels behind Percival Lowell's eye had built the canals of Mars.

It makes me wonder how we can ever really be certain we are certain of anything. And it seems that no matter how big our telescopes become, we will always looking into a mirror.

- 30 -

OH, HENRY!

I have long held the view that "anarchist" as a label became passé with the invention of psychiatry. Of course it has stuck around as a vestigial etymological fossil, but any current criminal shrink can now vouch that the loonies who espoused anarchy were really just pathological egotistical narcissists. As proof of this contention I now present you with the head of Emile Henri, who lost his head over the injustice he suffered because of another inarticulate Frenchman who sought to challenge the establishment and managed only to blow his nose at them.

Everything about Auguste Vaillant screams of irony. He was a kin of Lee Harvey Oswald, a little man who wanted to be important, but lacked the necessary attention span. He claimed to be the leader of a socialist group but seems to have been the only regular member. While waiting for the revolution he was ironically employed sewing expensive handbags and wallets for rich people to store their money in. 

Concerned about justice for the poor, Vaillant had abandoned a wife and two children - leaving them in poverty - and then lived with a deaf woman. For a political revolutionary to be living with a woman who could not hear his rants against capitalism passes beyond ironic into the realm of absurdity. And that is where we find Auguste Vaillant on Saturday, 10  December 1893 entering the public gallery above the Chamber of Deputies, the French congress, carrying a sauce pan bomb in his overcoat. Ce n'est pas ironique, c'est le plus absurde

Auguste had constructed two sauce pan bombs, but discarded the larger one after realizing he could never sneak a 3 quart sauce pan past security. Spotting his intended target, the French President, standing on the Chamber floor, Auguste revealed and armed his 1 quart sauce pan. This attracted the attention of the woman sitting next to him. (“Excuse me, but is that a sauce pan bomb in your pocket or are you just unhappy to see me?”). She was able to deflect his throw so that the sauce pan bounced off a decorative cornice before exploding. The blast shattered Auguste’s right arm. The nuts and bolts packed around the explosive, shrapnel intended to kill 150 deputies, instead lacerated Auguste’s neck and chest. And the explosion blew his nose completely off his face. Unfortunately, the quick acting heroine was also badly wounded, as were at least 20 politicians. But the only person who died, if not immediately, was Auguste. Ce n'est pas tragique, c'est le plus absurde.

Auguste’s trial was brief. And on 3 February, 1894, the guillotine finished what Auguste’s own bomb had started. His last words, before the blade severed the rest of his head from his body, were, “Mort à la société bourgeoise! Vive l’anarchie!” The translation would be, “Death to the Bourgeoisie! Long live Anarchy!” Even his last words turned out to have been ironic, since he barely lived long enough to utter them.

The irony developed because, of the millions who were outraged by Auguste’s departing utterance, the most significant turned out to have been another nobody anarchist fanatic, this one named Emile Henri, a 21 year old who was consumed with envy. Henri was convinced that Auguste’s noble death scene should have been his. After all, just over a year before had not Henri stricken a much more effective blow against the bourgeois but had received little of the press coverage afforded to the now headless incompetent dead man?

Henri had decided to strike his blow for striking miners. He packed 20 sticks of dynamite into a sauce pan and rigged to explode if it was jostled. He then carefully left this “infernal device” outside the second floor offices of a mining company just before lunch on 8 November 1892.

A lowly Porter noticed the sauce pan, and realized immediately it was probably not somebodies' lunch. But rather than evacuating the offices he ordered an office boy to carry the suspect sauce pan down to the street. Somehow the office boy made it in once piece, but he felt a little uneasy about just leaving it on the sidewalk, in case a passing pedestrian should be injured. So he alerted a nearby school crossing guard. She called the police, and two patrol officers responded. They tied a napkin around the bomb and then the three of them, the cops and the office boy, carried the bomb suspended between them to the local police station at the rather mis-named Rue des Bon Enfants (Street of the wonderful children.) There the bomb exploded, killing four cops and the office Porter.

Henri had to lay low for awhile, but he was still living in anonymity in a crummy apartment when he opened his anarchist newspaper on 4 February 1894 to read of Auguste’s dramatic speech at his execution. And Henri was green with envy.

Now, there might be some who feel my tone slights the victims of such attacks; baloney. Murder has been anathema for at least six thousand years, when the ancient Egyptians made “Thou shalt not kill” their first commandment, predating Moses by at least a thousand years. If a human being is murdered by a serial killer, a lunatic at the controls of a hijacked jet, a deluded doctor, a drunk at the wheel of a car or a waiter too busy to wash their hands, the result for the victims is the same; tragedy. Fundamentalist Islamic-Christian-Marxist- Socialist-cultural-political justifications matter only to the perpetrator; I say again, baloney.

As if to prove my point, one week after the glorious execution of Auguste, Henri entered the restaurant at Hotel Terminus, next to the Gar Saint Lazare train station in Paris. He had stopped at two other bars earlier but, he claimed later, they weren’t crowded enough. My guess is he had not yet drunk enough courage. He nursed two drinks for an hour at the Terminus, and then as he staggered out the door, tossed his bomb back into the café, where it exploded, killing one. A waiter ran after Henri, who shot him. Two policemen took up the chase. Henri shot one of them. The other knocked him down and restrained him. Henri’s toll was now eight dead – five at the police station and three at the restaurant.

At his trial Henri was defiant and bombastic, until his attorney put Henri’s mother on the witness list. Henri objected. He told the judge, “It never occurred to me to inflict such pain on my mother.” In fact I suspect Henri was more concerned about his image. It would be difficult to remain an anarchist hero with your mummy explaining to the court how hard it was to get you toilet trained.. 

According to the New York Times, On 21 May  1894 at “4:07 a.m.…the iron doors swung apart…Henri was ghastly white, but walked with a firm step. As he approached the platform he shouted, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.” His voice…trembled noticeably…As they pushed him against the plank he shouted again, “Courage comrades. Long live anarchy.”  He had evidently worked this out and wanted to be quoted exactly. The click of the knife was heard the next moment, and Henri’s head dropped to the ground. The blood from the trunk spurted high as the body revolved into the basket. (The executioner) himself picked up the head from the sawdust and threw it viciously into the basket with the body.”

Anarchy, it turned out, was not long lived, either. History proved it to be a temporary delusion, to join those other temporary delusions people have claimed as justification or random murder; communism, fascism, Black power, White power, the Basque Independence Party, the Irish Republican Army, the John Birch Society, the Confederacy, and the myriad other stupid self-justifications invented by humans to demand their get their way..

Hatred is a lot like ideology in this respect - reduced to its core it is all about self.

- 30 -

NEW PLACE, SAME PLACE

“I grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin

That has a name.”
Prince Malcolm describing Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3

In Shakespeare's tragedy of “Macbeth”, Prince Malcolm is the answer to the question 'what should Hamlet have done?' Like the 'unhappy Dane', Malcolm was the spoiled son of a King. When his father is murdered by Macbeth, the boy suffers indecision, just like Hamlet. But then Malcolm adopts all the worst traits he sees in Macbeth, and methodically lies his way to the top, pausing only to kill Macbeth along the way. If there was one thing William Shakespeare was familiar with it was human frailties of greed and self justification. I mean, it brought down his house, for God's sake.

The 'immortal bard' was born in the English midlands town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the the road - or in old English the 'strat', which gives us our modern word 'street' – forded the river Avon, about 22 miles south-east of modern day Birmingham. At 19 William married a Stratford girl. But it was a very unpleasant place to live. Stratford was the final destination for herds of sheep from the rolling Cotswold county just to the south, which were fuel for a 16^th century agro-chemical industry. Stratford was dotted with noisy, stinking slaughter houses and reeking tanneries, which produced meat and wool and glue and soap and leather and a myriad of other animal by-products the world has forgotten it ever needed. Shakespeare's father was a glove maker, and his raw material was sheepskin. As a layer of smog envelopes modern cities, the residents of Stratford lived under a permanent cloud of stench and flies.

Perhaps the flies explain why a good Catholic boy like William left Stratford, abandoning his wife and children, to pursue a career then viewed as sinful – in the theater. Against all odds he became a success, so well paid on the London stage that in 1597 he was able to pay sixty pounds for a 17 acre estate at the corner of Stratford and Chapel streets, in the middle of Stratford.  It had two gardens, two small orchards, two barns and outbuildings, and the second largest house in Stratford, a two story Tudor stucco and beam affair, with a brick foundation - even the cesspit was brick. Though it was already a hundred years old, it was still called called “New Place”, and William deposited his wife and two daughters here, while he returned to London.

But even then the theater was a tough way to make a farthing. Between 1603 and 1610 the London theaters were closed more often than they were open, because of plague. New Place, with its gardens and the mulberry tree William had planted himself, became a sanctuary where he composed his last play, “The Tempest” - about an old man named Prospero, who is exiled on an island with his daughter, and a son-of-a-witch who makes his life miserable. To keep his sanity William often returned to London to go drinking with his friends William Burbage and Ben Johnson. But he was not a spring chicken anymore. He was in fact an ill man. And in 1616, at the age of 53, just two months after marrying his youngest daughter to the guy who owned the liquor store next door, William Shakespeare died. In his will William left his wife, Ann Hathaway, his “second best bed”, but he left the house it sat in, to his eldest daughter and her doctor husband.

The trouble was, none of Williams children's children had children who had children. Call it the Shakespeare curse, but within a hundred years his blood line had dried up completely. In 1702 the house and garden was sold to Sir John Clopton, whose family had originally built the house before Columbus left for America. John gutted it to the exterior walls and then rebuilt it. But he regularly allowed the public in to tour “Shakespeare’s garden” next door, including the mulberry tree. Then in 1757 John Clopton died suddenly and his family was forced to sell the house to pay his debts. The buyer this time had no connection to the house, nor any interest in Shakespeare. He was an arrogant neuveau riche Bishop from Chester named Francis Gastrell. We will pause here for a moment so you can boo and hiss this villain’s entrance upon the stage.

Done? Okay. Francis (above) inherited his money when his father, the previous Bishop of Chester, died in 1748 without a will. And he needed one because Daddy had been a very acquisitive clergyman who left behind a lot of investment properties. Now, you might ask how a man of God had obtained all that money – I would - but that is another story. This story is about his son, Francis.

The courts sold the old man's property, and then divided the money between his two sons. It took a few years, but by the time he was 50 Francis was finally “independently” wealthy.  Like any good upwardly mobile Englishman of his time, he used his money to mobile upward further. In 1752 he married the daughter of a Baronet , and then he retired.. Upwardly mobile Englishmen did not “labor” for a living. Even Bishops. In 1756, Francis bought New Place in Stratford as a vacation home. And the first thing he noticed was the crowds of tourists who still expected to wander about in Shakespeare's garden. Except Francis saw it as “his” garden. He put up a fence. And padlocked the gate. Francis saw no reason he should allow strangers on “his” private property. Of course at the same time he saw no reason why he should be paying taxes on “his” property, either.  Does any of this sound like rich bastards around today? You're damn right it does.

The local merchants recognized that keeping the town looking nice was an investment in the tourist trade, which even in 1760 was proving profitable. And keeping the poor off the streets kept Stratford looking prosperous and safe, not to mention it being the “Christian” duty of every believer. But Bishop Francis Gastrell did not see why he should care about the poor. In fact he asked for a tax cut, arguing that he didn't live in Stratford year-round (he wintered in Lichfield) and should not have to pay the poor taxes when he was not in residence. The town council disagreed. The poor did not stop needing food just because Francis was out of town. Francis still owed his forty schillings for the “Poor Tax”. And that made Francis angry. So he cut down Shakespeare's mulberry tree.

Oh, when challenged he explained the 150 year old tree had cast a shadow over the house, making it feel dank and dark. Like Tudor houses don't all feel dark and dank.  But while the entire town went into shock, one man showed Francis how to turn his problem with the tourists into a gold mine. His name was Thomas Sharpe, and he was a local clock maker. He bought the corpse of Shakespeare's tree, at firewood prices, and carved it into Shakespeare mementos, which he sold to the tourists – clocks, statues, medallions, trinkets and cameos (above). He sold so many and he made so much money, that he was accused of fraud. Sharpe was forced to issue a statement. “I do hear by declare and take my solemn oath, upon the four Evangelists, in the presence of the Almighty God, that I never worked, sold, or substituted any other wood than what came from, and was part of, the said tree.”

But rather than sell tickets to the garden for a few days each week in the summer, when he wasn't in town anyway, Francis Gastrell went the other way. To protest his “Poor Taxes”, he boarded up the house (above) and refused to pay any taxes at all. He was a Tea Party thinker before there was a tea party. Of course this meant his servants were now unemployed and without a residence – in other words, poor. Besides being insulted by Francis' treatment of their citizens, the Stratford council did not agree with Francis' morality or his logic. The house might not be occupied, but it was still in the town, so there were still taxes to be paid.

In 1759, just three years after he bought it, Francis Gastrell had “Shakespeare's” house pulled down to make a political point. It was dismantled and burned, so nobody would profit from even the wreckage. Then, according to the London Gazette and Journal, “Upon completion of his outrages on the memory of Shakespeare ...Francis Gastrell departed from Stratford, hooted out of the town, and pursued by the excretions of its inhabitants.” The council even passed an ordnance that no one named Gastrell would ever be allowed to live in Stratford, ever again – not that there is a line of wandering Gastrells waiting at the city gates, but the law is still on the books

And that is why, if you go to Stratford-upon-Avon today, and you should if you can, you will see the house where Shakespeare was born, and the cottage where his wife, Ann Hathaway was born. You can visit their graves in the local church (above). You can visit his garden, where you will see a plaque where the mulberry tree once stood. But the house he owned, where he died, where Ann died as well, is long gone, thanks to an arrogant selfish jackass who could boast to the world, not that “I built that”, but “I destroyed that”.

But then, that is the only achievement of selfish people.

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