History's greatest survivors (and crossovers)

Or How to Survive in Tudor England

This is part two of a post on people who cross historical eras.

We tend to think of history as being compiled of neat categories, and things that incongruously cross them confuse us. So it doesn’t really make sense that France was still guillotining people while moviegoers were watching Star Wars in the cinema, and that you could take the Metropolitan Line to watch a public execution in London; or that on the cusp of the European age of exploration Latin was still spoken as a vernacular language in Africa. This is partly why the Byzantine Empire confuses people and remains outside the mainstream of conventional history: Romans fighting Vikings doesn’t make sense, like cavemen fighting dinosaurs, and yet it happened. Indeed the last Roman Emperor fell in battle 20 years after the appearance of handguns.

Some people are fortunate enough to live such a long time that they overlap historical eras, and if they have children late in life the link with the distant past seems stronger. My maternal grandfather was born in 1877, more than a century before me, and was getting on a bit when my mother came into the world in 1944, 11 years after her youngest sibling. Born into a middle-class Dublin family, he had trained to be a Jesuit but, having been sent to Damascus, apparently found the women of Syria too beautiful and realised he could not endure a life of celibacy. So he was quite old when he got around to marrying, although in Ireland at the time a third of middle-aged men were unmarried, a legacy of the famine.

My great-grandfather, Michael Kenny, had been alive at the time of the great hunger; he apparently claimed to have taken part in the 1867 Fenian Rising, although my uncle was sceptical of this story; like the Easter Rising, the storming of the Iranian Embassy and the Sex Pistols gig in Manchester, hundreds of thousands of people were apparently involved in the event.

Certainly, elderly parents can provide more of a link between eras. John Major, one of the six living former prime ministers attending the recent Succession Council, had a half-brother born in 1901. His father Tom Major-Ball, born in 1879, was a Victorian era circus performer who found fame before the end of the 19th century. Most strangely of all, one authority on David Bowie thinks that Major’s father was the inspiration for Major Tom, Bowie having been a fellow Brixtonian who would have seen posters for Tom Major as a child.

HT Jeremy Driver.

Sir David Butler. The father of psephology, the study of elections, will be 98 next week, and ‘remembers as a small boy, his great-grandmother Alice telling him how she and her sister, as young girls, watched the Duke of Wellington’s state funeral procession in 1852.’

Via Simon Cook

Art historian Sir John Richardson died in 2019, aged 95. His father, a Boer War officer, was born in the 1850s and his grandfather in the reign of George III.

From Jonathan Law.

One of the great advantages of old age is that you so outlive your own era that you help to write its history. As everyone between the age of about 10-45 will know, Eliza Hamilton was the long-lived widow of the Founding Father Alexander. After her husband had been killed in a moronic duel, she lived almost to see the Civil War which grew out of the sectional differences over slavery clearly visible in Alexander’s time. She was 97 when she passed away in 1854, having spent the previous few decades campaigning to improve her husband’s reputation, which she clearly did a good job of. 

Thanks to Gary Maylin.

Conrad Heyer is another notable figure from the American Revolution. Born to German parents in 1749 in the province of Massachusetts Bay, he was possibly the first white person born in an area recently inhabited by the Wabanaki. Taking part in George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, Heyer went back to farming and enjoyed a very long life. At the age of 103, in 1853, he became the earliest-born person to ever be photographed.

Via Nick Anstead

Muhammad al-Muqri (1854-1957), Moroccan grand vizier, was the only person to have attended the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and to have still been alive at the time of the Suez crisis.

Via the Office of Rational Statistics.

The philosopher Isocrates was born into the Athens of Pericles in 436 BC but the Peloponnese War wiped out his family wealth and forced the young man to seek employment — a truly awful prospect for a philosophy student. He lived to such a great age that by his death in 338 Philip of Macedon had begun his conquest of Greece and the Hellenistic Age was on its way.

Irish statesman Éamon de Valera also lived to become something from a different era. Born in 1882, he took part in the Eastern Rising in 1916 and lived until 1975, during another period of political violence in Ireland. Already a grown man when the Wright Brothers first flew, he was President of Ireland at the time of the Apollo 11 launch and his message of goodwill lies on the surface of the moon along with that of Queen Elizabeth II, who would have to wait another 42 years before visiting the Irish Republic.

Thanks to Malchera.

C Aubrey Smith, the cricketer and actor, was born in 1863 and played against W.G. Grace, ending his life among the Golden Age of Hollywood. As a young man he went to South Africa to make his fortune where he caught pneumonia, and was pronounced dead by doctors; a keen Victorian cricketer wouldn’t allow a small thing like this to stop him, and he was soon captaining England to a test match victory against South Africa. Setting up the Hollywood Cricket Club in 1932, where he hung out with the likes of David Niven, Leslie Howard, Boris Karloff and Laurence Olivier, possibly the very high point of Anglo-cool, Smith lived until 1948, his final film performance being in the Elizabeth Taylor version of Little Women.

Thanks to Peter Walker.

I mentioned Alexander Kerensky in the first instalment, but I did not know that the leader of the 1917 Provisional Government became a friend of Cheers and The Good Place star Ted Danson. It really does not compute.

Via Kerensky24

The joke in 1066 and All That is that Walter Raleigh was executed by James I for ‘being left over from the previous reign’, and there were real examples of people who survived into eras they did not fit. 

Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, was the great survivor of the Tudor era, unlike the various men in her family. When she was born, Henry VIII was just getting married for the sixth time; she died deep into the crisis between Charles I and Parliament. While her son the Earl of Essex was executed for treason in 1601, Knollys lived through the span of the religious revolution in England, growing up in a country which was still essentially Catholic and almost living to see the Civil War.

Via Joanne Paul (author of  The House of Dudley)

William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, was born around 1483, during the Plantagenet era, served in high office under Henry VIII and all three of his children, before dying in 1572. Asked the secret of his success at court, he said: ‘I was made of the pliable willow, not the stubborn oak.’ A lesson there for all of us.

Via Matthew Lyons

The Tudor period followed a succession of dynastic conflicts between cousins that became known as the War of the Roses. One woman lived through it all. Cecily Neville was born in 1415, the year of Agincourt, the youngest daughter of the prolific Ralph Neville, who was himself born way back in 1364 and produced a stunning number of children, who went on to have countless children themselves; you’re likely descended from him if you have any English ancestry. (He’s sort of the model for Walder Frey.)

Cecily married Richard of York, the main driver of the conflict, and after his death in battle her eldest son Edward took the throne. Cecily had 12 children, including eight boys, four of whom survived into manhood; she outlived all of them, as well as her grandchildren Edward and Richard, murdered by her youngest son Richard III. She died in 1495, three years after the birth of her great-grandson, the future Henry VIII AKA History’s Greatest Monster.

Recommended by Joanna Laynesmith, her biographer, and Benjamin Jones.

Cassiodorus, Italian scholar and statesman, lived from 485 to 585 and would have seen the collapse of Antiquity in Italy. Although the last Roman Emperor was deposed a decade before his birth, life would have seemed quite classical until the 6th century, when the Justinian Plague, the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the destruction of the aqueducts in the Gothic Wars would have felt apocalyptic. Probably no one in history has seen such decline in their civilisation. Yet.

Via Tom Flanagan.

Franz Joseph I of Austria is another great example of a monarch who ruled over the long transformation of a country, ruling his culturally dynamic but internally divided multi-ethnic state for seven decades before it all fell apart following the aged sovereign’s death during a time of international instability, the regime’s well-intentioned efforts at promoting different identities only further accelerating… (am I spelling out this laboured analogy enough?) Born in 1830, he was already a grown man at the time of the 1848 revolutions, and lived to see the First World War that brought everything down.

Thanks to Marty.

Thomas Hardy, born in 1840, ‘heard his grandmother reminiscing about the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793. She had been ironing her best dress when she learned of the Queen's death, but set down the iron and stood stock still in shock; decades later could still recall the exact pattern of the muslin. Norrie Woodhall, the last surviving member of the Hardy Players, appeared in the small role of the heroine's sister in Hardy's stage adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 1924. Hardy, then in his eighties, personally wrote a line for her in what had been a non-speaking part. In 2007, Norrie, aged 101, was on stage in Dorchester reading Hardy's poetry.’ She died in 2011.

That’s from Wrong Side of History subscriber Basil Chamberlain.

Wellington Koo, born in 1888, was part of the Chinese delegation at the Treaty of Versailles, served as Foreign Minister for the Republic in China, and lived until 1985, by which time the country’s economic reforms were well under way.

Via Jimmy Chen

Celal Bayar, president of Turkey in the 1950s, was already middle aged at the time the Republic was proclaimed, having grown up in the largely Greek area around Gemlik. He died in 1986, 103 years later, in a country which had by then become both monoethnic and secular.

Via John Oxley.

Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876 and had been Mayor of Cologne in the days of Wilhelm II — and already ancient by the time of the Second World War. Yet despite this he was made Chancellor of the new West Germany well into his 70s and came to shape the country in a way his Nazi predecessors failed to do, dying in April 1967 — in historical context, a month before the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

Thanks to Risto Pyykkö