Empire: World History - 33. Lady Mary: Our Woman in Constantinople

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

She was a pioneering scientist, proto-feminist, and letter writer extraordinaire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu escaped a marriage to Clotworthy Skeffington to become one of history's most incredible women. Listen this week as William and Anita are joined by Katie Hickman to tell the tale of her life. IRC link: https://www.rescue.org/uk  DEC link: https://donation.dec.org.uk/turkey-syria-earthquake-appeal LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. Now, if you are listening in the future, I should just tell you, we are recording this days after a series of earthquakes hit Southeastern. Turkey near the border with Syria. And as we speak, rescue teams are still desperately trying to

locate survivors in pockets beneath the rubble. Our minds are turning to those who are now homeless. The conditions are freezing. You're seeing this. If you're listening to this at the time the podcast comes out, you'll know it's cold in Turkey and Syria and they could do with all the help they could get. So if you're minded to give, we will be putting two websites on our program description, one for Disaster's Emergency Committee and the other for International Rescue. give generously. Yeah, and every little bit helps, as they say. 30 pounds could provide blankets for six people to keep warm. 50 could provide emergency food for two families for 10 days. A hundred pounds could provide emergency shelter for four families. And as William says, we're going to

put those links on our program page. So just do what you can. I've had so much hospitality from the people of Southeast Turkey and Syria. When you go around those regions, you're very much aware that this is a place where earthquakes are part of its history. the whole town of Antioch and Takia in modern Turkey, which was once the second city of the Roman Empire, there's barely a standing pillar from the Roman past now because it was wiped out in a 6th century earthquake, and everyone in the town went with it. But Alita, you've actually had firsthand experience, the experiences of covering earthquakes, haven't you? You went to the Budge earthquake in 2002. 2001, it was in Gujarat. And yeah, no, it actually made me decide I wasn't going to be a foreign correspondent,

because I just didn't have the metal for it. So, you know, the kind of amazing bravery of those journalists who go in and cover what is left after an earthquake of this magnitude. The one in Booge was similar, actually, I think it was 7.6 magnitude. And more than 20,000 people died there. And the thing I remember most of all is, you know, you're standing in a place where photographs, for some reason photographs and children's schoolbooks get pushed to the top of the rubble. And all you see is sort of like the handwritten scrawl of small people who aren't here anymore. So I don't. It's, I mean, it's awful. And awful, so awful for those who survive, the trauma for those people who have to now peace their lives back together. One thing I remember very, very clearly, is a woman in Bouges who was just so traumatized. She was just taking pebbles by the side of the road and stacking them one on top of the other. And so yes, that's why I don't do that job, that particular foreign affairs job.

And we've been busy over the last six weeks telling stories from Turkish and Ottoman history. And of course, quite a lot of Turkish history has been one. wiped out by that earthquake, most notably the beautiful walls of the castle at Gaziantep. I mean, that one goes back, doesn't it? It's a Roman Empire, second, third centuries AD. Yeah, byzantine bits. But I think, you know, appropriately for us, very much Ottoman superstructure, what you see today from outside, which has been relayed on so many news photographs, the before and after the pictures of that castle. That is indeed Ottoman. Yeah. Anyway, look, in short, this is a massive. blow to humanity, to history, to everything, whatever you can do, it would be helpful.

So again, we are going to put those donation websites on our site for the DEC Fund and for International Rescue. Our last podcast was Evli Cheneb. We've actually visited Gaziantep and described that castle. And so I think it's a very appropriate moment for anyone that's enjoyed this podcast to give generously to one of the disaster emergency funds looking after survivors. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnhann. And me, William, Durham.

Now, William, last week, we got quite immersed in the mad, mad, mad world of Elevier Cheleby. Who I've been reading this week. I have to say, he's available in an Eland book, the highlights of Euline Cheleby, published by our friend Barnaby, who was on a month ago on this podcast. And I highly recommend it for anyone, particularly anyone heading towards the Mediterranean, this summer. It's a wonderful read. It's also, it's disgusting, by the way.

Can we just for a moment, just dwell on the fact it is just filthy. There are bits of it which are filthy and disgusting. And I, again, would I like to apologise for those who ventured it. We did warn you. We warned you. So those people have been in touch on Twitter saying you can't eat a chicken sandwich anymore. That is not our fault. We have nothing to answer for there.

So, you know, you were told. Anyway, this week we have another travel writer who has no chicken-related stories and you can tuck into all the chicken momos or savages that you wish this week without any difficulty because we have the wonderful Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Okay, we have the wonderful historian and travel writer Katie Hickman here with us to discuss. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, that's how you say it quickly, who is this extraordinary creature of the 1700s. Now why should we be concerned Katie Hickman about somebody who I consider to be my kind of gal, really? Well, she was lots of things, but she was our first female travel writer, apart from anything else.

And she wrote a series of letters from Constantinople, which made her not famous in her day, but very, very famous indeed after they were published after her death. And you've, I mean, you've written beautifully about her in your book, Daughters of Britannia, and you've actually amassed quite a few wonderful women. She's on your front cover. She is on my front cover. Absolutely is. Not only on my front cover, but she's on my front cover dressed in Turkish dress. And the extraordinary thing about that painting, I think it's a beautiful painting, but when I was sort of wondering whether I was going to use it or not, all the men who looked at it went, oh my God, she's so ugly. And all the women said, oh my God, she's got the most interesting face I've ever seen. Well, you obviously had a male designer in your American edition because they've cut her head off. And what do you see is Lady Mary, Mary, Mary, Lady Mary's sort of headless body. You see her chest in the American. That can't be right. Oh, I think I think someone needs to have a word with somebody. Katie, let's go back to. So she was born in

1689 and Lady Mary spent her early life in England. What kind of child was she? Well, she was born into this incredibly aristocratic family. So she was born Mary Pierre Pont. Her father was successively an Earl, a Marquist and then a Duke. and her mother was also very aristocratic. She was a daughter of the Earl of Dembe and also extremely rich. So Lady Mary was born into, you know, not so much with a silver spoon in her mouth as a solid gold ladle in her mouth, aristocratic, rich. And when she was young, she was also supposed to be very beautiful. And so she had all these incredibly incredible blessings.

But there were two things about her. First of all, you know, she was born a woman and she was born very, very, very beautiful. clever and clever women in the early 18th century, you know, got a pretty raw deal because nobody thought that their education was very important. And so she was hardly educated at all when she was very young. She said she had one of the worst educations in the world. And so although she became extremely literary, she was totally self-taught to the degree that, you know, she had read all of the playwrights and novels and so forth by the time she was about 14 and became obsessed with Ovid's metamorphosis

and had to teach herself Latin. Under her bed sheets at night with a torture. In a cupboard, but also she had a, I mean, her dad, do you mind me saying it sounds like a proper git? Yes, I think so. She was worth educating. But he had a very well-furnished library. So he was one of those leading wigs of the country.

So, you know, the outward appearance of being literary. But she said, she writes that, you know, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., nobody would go in there or be. in the house. So she would just have free reign of this library and actually read books that were untouched. So you can just, and her greatest ambition was to be an abbess. So she could just sit in a corner and read and learn things. Yes. And not be bothered and not, you know, not have to marry if she didn't want to. But the thing that, so this is a bit of a bit of a kind of dog leg fact, but it's quite an interesting one that the only thing that she was really taught in a solid way

was the art of carving. And so she had a carving master who went to the house three times a week. Was this a kind of regular thing in the Denby family or the Pierpont family that's sculptorists were brought in to... It was a princely art. It was a princely art and very much tied to the art of chivalry. You're talking about carving meat.

You're not talking about carving statues. You're talking about the Rosed, the Sunday roast. I thought she had a sort of hunky sculptor brought in to teach her how to know. No, no, carving meat carvings. I knew you misunderstood, yeah. And there were whole manuals given over to the, you know, the correct way in which you would carve your, you know, chickens, you know, foul fish, you know, an ordinary, ordinary meat as well. And so she was very, you know, this was something that in an aristocratic household, you had to have somebody who was able to, it was a sort of performative art.

It was almost like a piece of theatre. So she wouldn't dine with her father and his political friends, but she would be brought in to do this piece of sort of. performance art almost. And this was a strange fact that I discovered the other day that there is something called the hereditary grand carver of England. And her, strange but true. Only in England. Only in England.

Her maternal grandfather, who was the Earl of Denby, was the hereditary grand carver of England. So this could be a reason why she was given this strange form of education. She wasn't taught Latin, but she was taught how to carve a jolly good raced. You just thought this is her heading for a sort of happy, Honourable Lecter ending this story. I'm glad to say she doesn't actually use this art in any sort of aggressive manner. But it's also, you know, she's been groomed to be a wife and a lady of a house.

I mean, the grooming starts really early because her dad said Gitt. At the age of seven, he's part of the Kit Kat Club, which is this sort of loose group of wigs who get together and drink quite a lot. The Grand wigs with Vanbrough and all these sort of, no, the great minds of their days. Grand but drunken. But they do this thing where every year they toast the bell of Britain. or the most beautiful woman in England. And they toast her, the finest Philly, age seven. Now, there's something not right there, is there?

That's very weird. And she was brought to the other men said, well, we don't know who this young woman is. And so he said, right, well, we'll, you know, get her out of bed. She was, you know, got out of bed, dressed up in all her fine clothes and taken to the tavern where they were having this drinking. And, yeah, and toasted as the great beauty. But it was a kind of thing in the 18th century that you gave toasts to the beauties, you know, the sort of beautiful women, many of whom, by the way, were courtisans, famous courtisans. Obviously, she was not in that category. But the sort of loochness, there was a kind of tinge of lusciousness about the whole notion of toasting a great beauty. Yes, I think you're right. I don't think her father was a particularly great father. So her father, who doesn't sound like he's one of the great intellectuals of the country either, decides to marry her off to. a man with the most fantastically sort of dim-sounding name, clotworthy Skeffington.

Surely that's a misprit. He can't really be called. I think he was called Clotworthy Scavington. And interesting, almost nothing else is known about him. I think, you know, that people are so stunned by his name when they hear it that they forget all other facts. I think he was the heir to an Irish peerage. And anyway, Lady Mary really, really did not want to marry this man.

She said she'd rather give her. her hand to the flames, in other words, to the flames of hell than be married to this man. But she had had all the time, while her father was trying to force her to marry, clotworthy Skeffington, she had a correspondence, an illicit correspondence with Edward Montague,

Edward Wortley Montague. Mary had been a friend of his sister, so he had a sister called Anne who died, and after her death, she carried on this correspondent. And it's a sort of curious thing because they debated for literally for several years whether or not they were going to get married. And actually he did go to the father and say, you know, they were sort of marriage negotiations started. But they stumbled on sort of the financial details.

They were haggling. They were haggling over her. Absolutely. And she had this rather sad thing that she wrote. She said, people in my way are sold as slaves. And I cannot tell what price might. master will put on me. If you read the letters of this time, they literally do talk about a 10,000 pounder or a 15,000 pounder.

Yeah, they were dynastic, especially at her level of society. They were dynastic marriages, which were supposed to be for the sort of consolidation of family finances. And people's feelings, one way or the other, you know, were not really taken into account. I have a theory about Clockworthy, by the way. Yes. He changed his name to Brian. I mean, why would you? Did he?

No, I'm just saying if you were called, no, I don't know this. But I'm just saying it's a line of scholarship that ought to be pursued if you're called clotworthy. Or do you think of his, or do you think his nickname was just clot? Clot. So look, Montague, who then does, you know, haggle over, he wants more money because you come with a bride price at that time. So he wants more money to marry. The woman he's supposedly in love with, oh my God. But he's no catch, is he, Katie?

No, he isn't really a. I mean, he was a politician. He was fairly aristocratic himself and also quite rich. I mean, his grandfather was the Earl of Sandwich, the first Earl of Sandwich. And his mother, on his mother's side, his mother was illegitimate, but extremely rich. And that's how they acquired the name Workley, that was the condition that they had to add Workley onto the family name of Montague. And he was a politician, and he had sort of a literary, slightly literary bent to him. He was friends of people like Addison, Steele, men of letters. And so I think that that may have been one of the attractions, the road is actually quite hard to see what the attraction was.

Because in their letters, they don't really agree about anything. There's an awful lot of haggling about whether she's going to have a dowry or not. And then the question arises, you know, her father says, no, well, I don't, you know, Wurley Montague is absolutely no good. He won't agree to my time. So you're going to marry Clotworthy Skeffington. The rest of this story takes on a kind of picarous novel aspect to it because there's a slight hitch in the details. I mean, this is a done and dusted deal with clotworthy Scafington.

The father's agreed to it. They've agreed to all the diary and so forth. But he lives in Ireland and so the marriage contract had to be returned to Ireland because there was some fault in it. So it had to be rewritten and re-signed. And so in this tiny little space of time, Edward Montague and Mary Pierpont, as she then still was, decide that they're going to elope together, because that is the only way that she's going to be able to, you know,

get out of this hideous marriage. But the elopement goes horribly wrong. So she goes one night, the night that they've agreed on, she goes onto her balcony, sort of shivering on the balcony of her house, but at six o'clock in the morning, waiting for Edward Montague. And he doesn't turn up.

He doesn't turn up in time to come and read. rescue her. So then, you know, they're discovered and she's taken pretty much under lock and key in her brother's carriage down to the family house in Wiltshire. And, you know, Edward Montague was on his horse pursuing them. And they then realized afterwards that they'd actually both spent the night in the same inn without actually realizing that the other one was there. And she's then taken onto this house in Wiltshire. And so the whole thing, you know, the whole thing had, you know. We're sort of keystone cops, isn't it? In through one don't have.

It was kind of botched job right from the beginning, and she did end up marrying him. She did, but she also laid out the terms of her relationship with him in a way that is so feminist and so modern because she talks about love. And she says, I don't know if I do love you. I'll just read you from one of her letters. She says, I don't know whether I can love. And then she sort of lays out her terms of, you know, what she thinks marriage is going to be like. And she says, make no answer to this. If you can like me on my own terms, then that's fine.

And that's amazing, isn't it? Yes. She knows what she wants. He has prospects, and very soon it becomes apparent that she did make the right decision for her. Just before, you know, Montague's going to make, Wortley Montague's going to make something of himself. Something life-changing happens to the beauty that is Lady Mary. Now, what happens to her the year before they leave Constantinople?

She contracts smallpox. She contracts smallpox. and which said the year before has killed her brother. And actually she very, very nearly dies of smallpox, but she manages to cling on to life and she does recover, but she has completely lost her looks in the proceeds. And that, you know, for a woman, well, for any woman, but particularly for a woman in her situation, you know,

this society figure was a personal catastrophe. And there were incredibly cruel things were written about. her. Well, cruel things written by her friends, Katie. I mean, first of all, just tell us about her circle of friends. She had some really influential names in her circle, who were completely beastly to her at this point. So when she finally came to London, having languished in the north of England for quite some time at the very beginning of her marriage, which was really a disaster. I mean, it was a completely loveless marriage, you know, despite the elopement.

She came to London and she became very caught up, both with the Hanoverian court. She was accepted at court, but also she made friends with a lot of literary men, such as most significantly, Alexander Pope, the dramatist John Gay as well. And she was part of a sort of literary coterie of principally men. I think she was the only woman there. And it was, you know, this was the age of scandal. So it was the age in which people wrote very freely about one another and they did not pull their punches. And so poor Lady Mary, when she recovered from this life-threatening disease, she lost all her eyelashes. You know, this was a woman who'd been considered one of the great beauties of London society.

And after smallpox, she was no longer a beauty. She'd lost her eyelashes, which never grew back. And also her face was very, very badly pitted. So there was something written about her. They said she was full of pox, but not pitied, in other words, not pitied. You know, people had absolutely no compunction about writing really cruel, vicious things about people. And physical deformity or physical problems were not considered, you know, nobody thought that they were subjects that should not be touched on. You just, they absolutely went for it.

Well, I mean, her friends were just awful. So what was it, Pope who called a pockmarked sappho? was it was it him? Yes there was potmark saffa I mean things hoted up later on I mean the real kind of war of attrition was was was late was later on was she aware that people were calling her this because she's writing to Pope I mean some of the best letters from well he fancies her William I reckon he fancies her I do I think that Pope's real real you know vitriol was reserved for later on when they really properly fell out in the 1730s so we might we might come back to that later on and she's they he certainly used her Pockmark's face as a as a stick to beat her with, but that was not until later.

Well, and her husband, who, by the way, is going to very soon become the ambassador to Constantinople says, when, you know, I should be overjoyed to hear your beauty is much impaired. Could I be pleased with anything that could give you displeasure for it would lessen your number of admirers? I mean, he's a charmer, isn't he? Great. She doesn't see no much of an eye for men, this woman. She just picks the, between clotworthy, Skeffington and.

Montague, Wortley. He was her chance to not to be married to someone who she actively disliked. And I think she just didn't know Whatley, Montague, very well beforehand. And he was cold. You know, he was a cold fish. And they never seem to really have loved one another. Even in the very early days of their marriage, she was always writing to him. You know, he sort of abandoned her up in the north.

Her early letters are very, very sad. You know, he's always writing saying, you never reply to my letters. And, you know, I'm loaves. I don't go about you. Well, so here she is in this kind of Cracker's marriage with a not very nice man, who is in 1716 to become the ambassador to, as they put it in those days, the sublime port of Constantinople. Join us after the break where we find out what Lady Mary made of her new life.

Welcome back to Empire where we're talking to the wonderful Katie Hickman about Lady Mary Wortley Montague. And just as we come back, her husband, who we all, has been made the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, to Istanbul. She has to get there, though, doesn't she? And that's not like just catching, you know, a flight. It takes a while. It was an incredibly...

She lands at Rotterdam, that's a initial... Rotterdam, then they made their way, you know, over Europe to Vienna. And she spent quite a lot of time in Vienna amongst the ladies, you know, writing wonderfully well about their monstrously large headdresses that were a yard high. and covered in gauze and the face is painted and everything. She writes really well about the court of Vienna. She's a fantastic writer. This is the first thing we should say.

She's a wonderful writer, yeah. We should just actually say, possibly at this point, that they are allegedly letters. They're not really letters at all. She used the letters that she wrote home to her friends and to her family, but they were heavily edited intercut with sections from her journal. you know, she really crafted that what we have as apparent letters were crafted in it. They were highly, you know, a lot of artifice went into creating.

Will you read a little bit of that journey, please, because she does make this rather, I mean, again, you're very wisely reminded this is the time of the Habsburgs. This is the time of great political flux and a time of war. So she has to actually literally traverse a battlefield, a freshly made battlefield. Absolutely. So she's told by everyone in Vienna that, you know, the cold is going to kill her on the way down through the Balkans. So she's in quite a sort of heightened state of fear. And one of the first things she comes across after she's left Vienna is the site of the Battle of Peter Warden, Wardine. I'm not quite sure how you pronounce it, which was the site of Prince Eugen's great victory over the Turks.

And she wrote, this little digression has interrupted my. telling you, we passed over the fields of Karlovitz, where the last great victory was obtained by Prince Yugan over the Turks. The marks of that glorious bloody day are yet recent, the field being strewed with the skulls and carcasses of unburied men, horses and camels. I could not look without horror on such numbers of mangled human bodies and reflect on the injustice of war that makes murder not only necessary but meritorious. This is a moment when the Ottoman Empire is beginning to sink before the power of resurgent Europe. We've seen the Ottomans expand into Europe at the beginning of this series, but this is now the moment of the beginning of the contraction.

And she's walking into the Ottomans at a time when they are beginning to be on the back foot. And probably a little suspicious of Western powers. I mean, it's her husband's job, Katie. isn't it, to try and negotiate a position for Britain or an end to the Austro-Turkish war. That's the mandate that he's gone with. Yes, that's exactly right. So the Austrians were committed by treaty to support the Venetian Empire and the Turks were at war with the Venetian. So, you know, it was everyone, everyone got involved. And the British didn't want the Austrians to be involved because they wanted Austria to be available to help them, you know, against the French.

So there was a lot of, you know, kind of jockeying. for position. This is three-dimensional chess. Yes, absolutely. But so she made her way from Vienna all the way down the Balkans across this scene of devastation. They were given, the Turks gave them almost a regiment of Janissaries to go with them. Something like 500 men went with them on this journey. And she writes beautifully about how these genissaries scour the landscape and these poor peasants in Serbia who've only got a couple of sheep and a chicken between them to keep them from starvation. The genocaries just hoover them all up without even finding out who owns them and take everything. Absolutely. Yes, like a swarm of locusts going before. And she feels,

you know, quite unusually for an 18th century aristocrat. She really feels the, you know, the pain of these poor peasants who absolutely everything is taken from them and obviously no hope of any recompense at all. This is what is so wonderful about her is that I think that, you know, despite the kind of the name and all the aristocratic background, she is a writer like Jane Austen who immediately talks to us today. She's a feminist. She's, she's intelligent, she's well-read, she's open to all things, and she doesn't judge anyone. And makes up her own mind. Yeah, happy to fly against, you know, that's it, fly against public opinion. Yeah. I think that's exactly what is so incredibly refreshing about her is that,

is that she, it doesn't, you know, and all the way through her letters, she keeps, you know, she's obviously, there's been a lot already written about the Ottoman Empire because people are fascinated by it. And there are all these books of travels that exist. And she keeps saying, well, don't listen to them. They don't know what they're talking about. They don't know what they're talking about. She's particularly hesitant for somebody called Paul Reichart, doesn't she, who's another British diplomat. She says, I don't know what, what empire he's visited, but nothing he said rings true at all to me. Yes, forget him, forget him. And with some, with some, with some, justification. One of the things that is so interesting about the way she writes is that she has this

knowledge of the female world, the knowledge of the harems and the hammams and so forth, that male writers have been very keen to put into their books of voyages, but of course they do it from hearsay, not from first person. Hesai and fantasy. And she meets the women and she goes wonderfully into a Turkish path. And she actually describes the scene of a entire room full of naked Ottoman women, which is something that all these painters have been busy painting without actually seeing. She actually sees it. So this is the bit you've all been waiting for, the Turkish path number. It is a completely fabulous description. So I'm going to read you a little bit. So this was actually in Sophia, which of them was part of the Ottoman

Empire. And she writes, the first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets on which sat the ladies, and on the second their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them. They walked and moved with the same majestic grace, which Milton describes of our general mother, by which she means Eve. And I should say, that at this point she is herself fully clothed because, of course, it's not in her cultural, you know, makeup to take her clothes off. So she goes on to say, the lady that seemed the most

considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and would fain have undressed me for the bath, because she was fully clothed. I excused myself with some difficulty. They being, however, all so earnest in persuading me, I was at last forced to open my shirt and show the mightest. stays, which satisfied them very well. For I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband. So they can join the We Hate Edward gang. Absolutely. Absolutely. They think she's in some sort of chastity belt or something. Brilliant. So it was a corset. It was her stays and her corset. So if you can imagine how unbelievably hot she must have been apart from anything else,

I'm sure you've both been into Turkish, you know, into hum-hams. I mean, you know, the temperature gets very, very great indeed. So she was sitting there sweating profusely and refusing to take her clothes off. But it's completely, it's not a titillating description at all. She's just telling it like it is. Very matter of fact. If you go into a hum-um, that is exactly what you find. What I was very impressed by her writing is that it's both very, very smart. For example, her political analysis, she says, and most modern historians would completely, agree with her that the government in the Ottomans, the real power lies partly with the Ulema, with the Islamic establishment, and partly with the genoceries, not with the Sultan.

And of course, this is proved right in the years to come, because you see endless genissary revolts during the 18th century, and sultans deposed by them. And she preempts this with this observation. She understands politically from her travels and her conversations with people exactly what's going on. But she also has an eye for beauty. She understands the beauty of a Turkish garden. She talks about how much Turks value their gardens and the value put on a good gardener, for example. Absolutely. And of course, this was the age. This was the tulip age. A great moment in Ottoman art and in Ottoman gardens. Absolutely. Absolutely. No, she was completely alive to the

aesthetic, you know, the aesthetics of it. And she really fell in love with Turkey, I think. You know, she writes with great, you know, it's sort of quite joyful and sort of, you know, she's come from this rather repressed world or repressed for, you know, for a woman with things that a woman were able to do. And she's sort of liberated by being away from everything, as, you know, as all the best tribal writers write and those. Yeah, she's, I mean, she's a tribal writer. But she's also, you know, as William was saying, just an unembellished journalist as well, because she writes, and I wonder whether she knows how important what the observations are

that she's making, because she often comments, don't believe what people are saying to you about the Ottomans because this is a really mixed society. She says about, you know, some of the most powerful people here in Istanbul are the Jews. And, you know, that wouldn't happen in our country. She's sort of flagrantly comes out with political comment. She also is very good in her way that she goes against Western preconceptions about how oppressed Islamic women are. And this is something which is as needed today as it is in her time. And she describes how, that they are. much more free than her, she says, that she cannot leave her house without someone seeing her or

following her or knowing where she's going. But she says that counterintuitively, that wearing a veil or being in burqa allows anonymity and allows the women to pursue affairs and do whatever they like without their husbands able to follow them. Do you want to read a bit, Katie? Yes, yes, absolutely. I will because she writes really, really well about this. And as you say, she was sort of This is an example, a very good example, of how she didn't take anything that she'd previously read, you know, she wasn't influenced by anything. She just wrote what she herself experienced. She was completely clear-minded about what she saw. And of the liberty of Turkish women, which she writes about a lot, this is a good example. She says, it is very easy to see that they have more liberty than we have. No woman of what rank so ever, being permitted to go in the streets without two muslins, one that covers her face, all but her eyes, and another that hides the whole dress of her head and hangs halfway down her back. You may guess then how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great

lady from her slave, and it is impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street. This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery. And she ends by saying, upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire. So she was very, very impressed by what she saw. That's such an interesting observation. Because she also talks about the sultan being a slave of the genissaries. Absolutely. She is completely forensic in the way that she drills down into things. So she can see that women are, you know, there is an aspect of freedom associated with them wearing veils, but she also notices how financially independent these women are. And I mean, compared to her, she said herself when she was getting married that, you know, people in my way are like, you know, she felt that she was like a slave. Whereas Turkish women or Ottoman women, if they have any kind of estate, it's in their hands and they are free to dispose of their money as they wish. And so they are patrons of the

arts and all those things that they are able to do because they have control over their own money, which in the 18th century in Britain, you had no control over your finances whatsoever if you were a woman. Yeah. And also arguably, because she's in this women's realm, you know, we've talked about this before with Bettany Hughes. You know, this is the place of gossip and intrigue and exchanging information. I mean, she's never allowed in the room where the men are talking about matters of state, but arguably she knows a lot about what's going on in the state if, I mean, if her husband would only listen to her. I mean, goodness knows if he did listen to or whatever gave any credence to what she had to say. What I think is very interesting is to compare her observations to a French Huguenot travel writer.

And again, both of them in different ways are countering this idea that's already very prevalent in Western writing about the Islamic world, that it's a land of oppression, that it's a land of slavery. She's saying the women are free. At the same time, this Huguenot writer, Monsieur de la Mouretre writes, there is no country on earth where the exercise of all sorts of religions is more free and less subject to being troubled than in Turkey. Yes. So at the same time, you have these two writers very different, pointing out that the Ottoman Empire is quite different to the specter of violence

that has been haunting Europe and about which so many myths have grown up. Yes. And they were the sort of bogey men, weren't they? You know, beating at the walls of Vienna are going to take everything over. But actually what she finds is this incredibly cultured, civilised, beautiful way of life. And she's writing these letters, as you said, these curated, deliberate. I mean, they are chapters of a travelogue in all but name. Are they, do you know, being circulated around the court in England?

Because Princess Caroline is her great patron back at home. I mean, do we know how people were receiving this stuff that she was writing? They were to some degree public, you know, pieces of writing because you wrote a letter to somebody and you knew that they were going to be circulated. But they were only circulated amongst the people that you knew. So the question of whether they were going to be published or not, you know, that was something that a woman, you know, it was a sort of, it considered a scandalous thing and not something that if you were, certainly if you were not someone like Lady Marian and an aristocrat, you didn't want to sully yourself by going into the public sphere and being actually public. in the way that we would understand that today.

But the letters certainly would have had a much wider readership than just the person to whom they were, to whom they were addressed, that's for sure. Okay, so look, so she's gleaning all this information. As an autodidact, also rather charmingly, she's learning the language. And in some of her letters, she writes vocabs and translations for people back at home. But then something, again, it's smallpox that changes the course of her life again. and tell us what happens. This is now this time, she's had it.

She's already had it. She nearly died, nearly died and her brother did die. And she notices that smallpox is not something that is feared in the Ottoman Empire. And the reason for this is that they have a way of what she calls engrafting. So it's like a form of inoculation that happens within the women's quarters. And if you like, I can read, would you like me to read this? It's actually a rather famous passage in one of her letters, which is about this procedure that happens. And she writes, there is a set of old women who make it their business to perform the operation.

Every autumn in the month of September, when the great heat is abated, people send one another to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox. They make parties for this purpose, and when they are met, commonly 15 or 16 together, The old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asks what veins you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle, which gives you no more pain than a common scratch, and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell. And then she goes on to say that the fever begins to seize them after about the eighth day and they keep to their beds for two days, very seldom as many as three. They very rarely have above 20 or 30 in their faces, by which she means actual, you know,

pot marks, which never mark. And in eight days' time, they are as well as before their illness. There is no example of anyone that has died of it. And you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of the experiments. I intend to try it on my dear little son. And she did. She went ahead. It was an incredibly brave thing to do because smallpox was such a huge killer in Europe.

So the idea that you might deliberately try to expose your only child at that point. Your male heir called Edward, five years old. Your male heir, so very, very important. She had another child of daughter who was born out there, but the male air was everything. and it was successful and he recovered along with everybody else and therefore had immunity. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting though, because little boy, I mean, I think this is just a really interesting moment in her life. The little boy is there. You know, there's an elderly woman.

They were normally Christians who came over and did this walnut shell engrafts, so they'd have a bit of pus in their little walnut shell. And they would take a little knife and they would make a little, they would say, which vein would you like us to do? And the child would be held down. And her little Edward just flipped out. wouldn't let them close to him because they looked different. They were different. They were scary and they didn't speak the same language.

So there's the embassy doctor, a surgeon called Charles Maitland, who's there to observe. And he then steps in and says, okay, let me help. I've got a lance and I will make a scratch and let me do it then because a child will be a bit calmer. And that's all he does. I mean, it's basically their operation is their idea. But he then will go and take quite a lot of credit for this. He's the man who sort of does the engraftment. This would have huge repercussions, you know, later on when she returns to London.

So they returned in two years later in 1718. In 1721, there was a huge smallpox epidemic. And lots of Lady Mary's friends and acquaintances all died in it. And, you know, London's social life almost as important came to a complete standstill. And so she decided that she was going to publicly inoculate her daughter. She was going to try to bring this procedure. and show her fellow countrymen this procedure and how it could work. So she arranged to have her little daughter inoculated,

and the same doctor, Dr. Maitland, stepped up and performed it. But in front of an audience, they're like an audience. They had witnesses because people were so, so sort of, you know, they couldn't believe that someone would deliberately do this, expose their own little child. I think she was only about three. She was three and she didn't ask Edward. She just did it behind Edward's back.

She just did it. She just did it. gives you some idea of the state of their marriage. So there's an audience there of blue bloods who are watching this procedure and the little girl has an engraftment and they all witness, they see that she is ill for a little while and then she gets better. And then it becomes all the rage in the court to the point where the Princess of Wales decides to do her own children.

The Princess of Wales decides that she's going to inoculate her own children, but not until they've done a curious thing. they, they, you know, it's very controversial this whole engraftment. And so they, before that happens, they decide that they're going to engraft some, some criminals in, you know, in the, who are, in Newgate prison. In Newgate prison. They have three women and three men. I don't know whether they volunteered or whether they were volunteered. What do you reckon? Well, they, they, they engrafted these, these, at the six people and all of them survived and then they were pardoned. So they, you know, they got out. It was their guest.

out of, literally, they get out of jail card. And so at that point, Princess Caroline decides that she's going to inoculate her two little girls. Well, I thought actually, before they did that, there's a bit more horror in this story. So they do the Newgate prisoners who maybe have some agency, but then they do a bunch of orphans. Yes, they do a bunch of orphans. That's awful. In the St. James's area, so right round of St. James's Palace, they inoculate these children. And the thing that made me laugh so much is that then these children, when they've recovered, and then their notices appear in the press saying, these children, are, you know, on display for you to come and inspect them if you want. These are the survivors

of the, of the, you know, this procedure of engraftment, she calls it. So if you wanted to, you could go and you could, you know, have a look and to see for yourself that they were hailing hearty and unmarked by the, by the pox. And I think there was something, even the, you know, schoolboys in, you know, there was a huge kind of, kind of warfare in the media, which interestingly split down party lines. This has, you know, there's a tale. a modern kind of tale in this. So anyone who was associated with the court, they approved of this procedure,

but the opposition parties and the press associated them were furiously anti- anti-vax. Anti-vaxes. Anti-vaxes down party lines. So if you were a wig, you thought it was great. If you were a Tory, you thought it was disgraceful. What is interesting is that this is one of the last moments that you find Europe learning science from the Islamic world.

This has been going on since the 12th century when astronomical tables are brought in from Spain and so on, and Europe is learning mathematics, science, and astronomy from Islam. And by the 18th century, the academic boot is now on the other foot, and the direction of learning is beginning to be west to east. And you're finding the same in India, that there's, for example, there's an astronomer, an astronaut astronomer called Thomas Dean Pierce, exactly the same time in Calcutta,

and he's hanging out with Muslim astronomers in Lucknow, and he finds they know about, is it an extra moon of Venus? But there's some detail that the Islamic astrologers know in the mid-18th century that's not yet known in Europe until Herschel builds a bell at telescope. But by the 19th century, this will have ceased to have happened. And it's, again, one of these transition moments where the Ottomans is teaching the West something. Yes. But one of the, if I can just add in there that one of the things that made this procedure controversial was that it was considered to have been sort of, not that it wasn't

scientific, but that this was a folk remedy. You know, this was done by little old women in a horror. I mean, this is how it was interpreted in the West, that it was done by little old women in a harem. And so why should we, you know, even the people who were in favour of the idea of they're not, you know, you could see. Empirically, you could see that it worked. But it came via women and it came via foreigners. And so there was, you know, in this sort of pamphlet war, and it really was a vicious war. There was one, shall I just read this one little thing, this man, William Wagstaff, because this just shows you the degree of racism, that the racism and misogyny that there was surrounding this particular thing, which had been, you know, introduced,

you know, the two principal women, Lady Mary and the Princess Carrey. So there was a female aspect to this that the men didn't like. And this man called William Wigstaff, who was a medic, wrote this pamphlet and he wrote, posterity perhaps will scarcely be brought to believe that an experiment practiced only by a few ignorant women amongst an illiterate and unthinking people should of a sudden and upon slender experience so far obtain in one of the politest nations in the world, capital letters, as to be received into the royal Palace. You know, there was a lot going on in the debate. It wasn't just about the science of it. And years later, Edward Jenner does the same thing when he takes cowpox in grafts himself after seeing how his milkmaids are faring and not getting sick with smallpox. And then it's, and then it's almost as if it's rediscovered and then it's acceptable. And I never knew about Lady Mary Wirtley, Montague, until I read your book that she had anything to do with this. To me, inoculation always starts with Jenna. I've never heard anything.

other than that. Yes, well, there you go. There's a whole world of things learnt by the West from the Islamic world, which are not attributed to the right sources. Well, we're coming to the end of our time together. Can you just tell us sort of what, how does it all end for, I mean, feisty women never have lovely ends, I found what happens to her? No, alas and alack. And after this whole controversy about the smallpox, she was embroiled in yet another controversy because she fell out with Alexander Pope, who'd been her great friend and her great sort of literary collaborator. And no one quite knows what it was that made them fall out. There was one theory that he had declared passionate love to her and she'd laughed in his face. Pope had a curvature of the

spine. He was very small man. He was only four foot six. And so obviously his height was a huge issue for him. You know, she's alleged to have laughed in his face and he took great umbrage. But nothing was ever written down. There's another theory, I think probably put around by Pope that she had borrowed some sheets from his house and had returned them unlaundered, why this would spark a huge, literary, vicious campaign against one another. And she was very damaged by the sort of, you know,

the crossfire that followed. So Pope really let rip and he described her in the most horrible ways in several of his poems, including his great satirical poem, the Dunciad, where he lampoons a number of people, not only her, but he portrays her as being, you know, like a prostitute who's given venereal disease to her lover. I mean, you know, they didn't pull their punches in any way at all. And she hit back anonymously because, you know, as a lady, she wasn't supposed to go public. But it really did affect her reputation. And she ended up going to Europe. She ended up going and living in Venice amongst other places.

is, you know, on the continent sort of get away. There are worse fates than ending up in Venezuela, I feel. There are worse fates than that. If she'd been stuck with clotworthy in Ireland. Well, that would have been a lot worse. But she sort of ends up in Europe sort of friendless and alone. And then when she does die, and some people have suggested she may have died of cancer, but then her daughter does this really unforgivable thing where she burns her journals.

Dance her journals, yes. So then, you know, the journals are destroyed. They're gone. They're ashes. Any letters she can get hold of that her mother had, she burns those as well. But we still know about the letters. Why, Katie? Because she had all this while, this was, it was sort of 40 years since she'd been in Constantinople. All this time, she had kept the kind of literary draft of what became the letters. So it was a, it was the letters that had been reworked and then spliced in, you know, pieces from her diary and so forth. And she, you know, whether or not she intended it for publication isn't really known, but it was. certainly in a very literary, you know, beautiful form, the form that we have it in now. So Edward Montague died and at that point she decided she was going to come back to England on

route. She met or she was holed up for a while with this man called a clergyman called Benjamin Sauerden, I think he was called. And she sort of lived with him for a while because her maid was ill and so she had to, you know, make a pause in her journey. And she ended up giving him the manuscript of her letters, the letters that have come down to us, which is kind of a strange thing to do because she didn't say to him, here's my manuscript, I hope you'll publish it after I'm dead, but she gave them to him nonetheless and came back to England and died very shortly after that. So Benjamin Saladin was left with this extraordinary document and he then went to her daughter, the very prim and proper Lady Butte, and they said, not on your life, you are not allowed to

publish this. You know, this could damage us as a family. It's all very scandalous, you know, and they ended up buying this, you know, the manuscript back from him. But unbeknown, this is another kind of picaresque, pickerest aspect of the tale. Apparently, on Benjamin Sowardin's return, he had lent this manuscript to two anonymous Englishmen, young Englishman, who'd said, oh, please can we just read it overnight? And they had gone and they had, it must have taken the whole evening, both of them, they copied down, they'd made a copy of it. And so to the consternation of Lady Mary's family, this unauthorised version of her diaries appeared in print, which was the result of this copy that had been made. So it was just by the sheerest accident,

really, that the whole thing wasn't burnt, and we would never have had it. And then I think a great-grandson produces a final edited edition, because I think several errors in the pirate edition, if you like. And so one of her descendants makes good in the end. And we do now have a final edition, which you can read. I recommend to anyone that has enjoyed this podcast that the Turkish embassy letters of Mary Wortley-Montague are published by Eland with an afterword by Derbler Murphy. And if you want to read about Lady Mary and other women just like her, bloody-minded,

bloody difficult women, then Daughters of Britannia is for you by Katie Hickman. the great Katie Hillman. Absolutely. Thank you so much Katie for coming on. That was just wonderful. Loved every minute of it. Thank you for having me. That's all from me, Anita Arndt. And me, William Durhampool.