The Glass Chronicles – Part 2: Three Smashing Tales
He is the most powerful man in the world. He is venal. He is racist. He is bigoted. A congenital liar. An abuser. And a murderer.
He is a narcissist. He has to win – at everything he does – or he will throw a tantrum. Which can destroy people.
He will do anything for power, for riches, for adulation. And will lie and cheat and, if required, kill to achieve and own them.
Above all he craves for what is out of reach – in respect, love, possessions – and is obsessed with his all-consuming need to control too much that lies beyond him, however much he blames and ‘fires’ others along the way for having failed or thwarted him.
For it is all about him, his NAME; and to feed this ego’s maw, too many blindly follow him as the Great Saviour of their land, their race, their creed, believing his empty promises, his boasts, his lies, no matter what he does or fails to do.
Above all gods, the greatest of these for him is Gold and it is GOLD with which he stamps his name on all the things he owns.
But there is one thing that he craves that he cannot ever have. And that torments him.
Who is he?
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Better known as the infamous Emperor Nero, the last emperor before Rome descended into bloody civil war.
What is this elusive thing he lusts after?
A priceless glass vase. So beautiful it made men weep.
So why can’t he have it, this man entitled to anything he wants?
It has been smashed. On purpose. As the only way to prevent him possessing it.
A few people came to mind when I read this story – people alive and kicking today rather than 2,000 years ago, when Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder, wrote about the Emperor Nero’s antics while Rome burned.
And I wondered what the vase might represent in the modern day as a kind of symbol of something as beautiful, as precious, as the object of supreme craftsmanship described by Pliny.
How about – The Constitution of the United States of America? Or the union of liberal-minded, peace-loving, compassionate European countries who came together to avoid, at all costs, the risk of another conflict that destroyed the youth and well-being of millions of their citizens in two, savage global wars.
Alright, like most things, they are both flawed and misrepresented and, in the first case, not being an American (unlike Barack Obama, for example, despite determined attempts to suggest he wasn’t), I am on shaky ground when it comes to criticising another country and its leader. Particularly when there is a much easier target staring me in the face in my own back yard. And my conceit, too, is flawed, given that we are seeing the Neros of today happily smashing their own vases, thank you, while the world burns around them.
But if we take, say, the idea of Democracy as the vase in question, the principle of giving people the universal right to choose how they would like to be governed, and who by, without intimidation or exclusion or false information designed to prejudice their thinking in a fraudulent way – that’s pretty beautiful, isn’t it? Even if it seems almost impossible to achieve. And Plato believed it was only one step away from Tyranny. But then, as Winston Churchill famously said (and he should know), democracy is the best worst option out there, so don’t knock it, or words to that effect.
But is it really beautiful? The reality, of course, would say it is not.
You have dictators who call themselves ‘presidents’ and hold ‘elections’ which they manipulate and falsify and ‘neutralise’ – nerve gas works quite well – those who oppose them in order to achieve their heart’s desire, Power, for Life.
You have people who disguise, or laugh off, their naked ambition for power and are prepared to switch allegiance like a weather-cock in order to achieve their goal.
You have a cabal of the super-rich who hide behind the smoke-screen of their private wealth. Who pour vast sums into determining who wins and who loses in their ruthless endeavour to resist being prevented from poisoning the planet and all life that inhabits it. Who fight any attempt to reduce their wealth through an equitable system of contribution towards the well-being, in health and education, of those most at risk of falling into an unprotected, resentful, persecuted and poisoned underclass.
You have a world in which no-one knows what’s true or false any more, to which we become serfs in a feudal virtuality ruled by algorithms in the hands of the Big Tech 5 – or it is just out of control? Twas ever thus, perhaps. Maybe just more so now.
Let’s say, then, the vase is the planet Earth itself. Which we, ourselves, are smashing in our complicit sleep-walk to the apocalypse. This beautiful blue-green sphere, an exquisite aquamarine marble suspended in the velvet heavens and, so ironically, going to hell.
Or, have I, in this time of pestilence, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet:“…lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”…?
In Pliny’s account referred to earlier, or my somewhat free interpretation of it, he describes how a man called Gaius Petronius played the role of arbiter elegantarium, or personal advisor on taste, style and the finer things in life to the Emperor. As time went on, he found himself torn between his own cupidity and that of feeding Nero’s insatiable desire for gratification – of all kinds.
Petronius found himself becoming sick of Nero, of acting as his procurer and paying off, or worse, those who made claims against him. But it was taking the rap for something Nero forced him to do, something so terrible, so disgusting, that eventually persuaded even him enough was enough. It was pay-back time. But how?
Firstly he wrote Satyricon, a thinly disguised, satirical romp through the mores of Roman excess, in which every form of sexual activity, up to and including cannibalism, is described in graphic detail – all of which Petronius took from the reality of his time with Nero. And he made no bones about the fact that he had been a full participant, if not an organising force, of these murderously orgiastic diversions in which Nero indulged.
Then Petronius fell in love. But not with a girl, or a boy, for once, nor even his poor, long-suffering wife, whom he’d only married for her money anyway. No, not with a person or living creature – he’d had plenty of fun with the beasts of the field along the way – but with a glass vase.
This wasn’t any old vase, you can be sure. It was made of Vasa murrina, a form of fluorspar, so not actually glass at all but with a glass-like appearance, hugely fashionable with the glitterati in their penthouse apartments at the top of the chain of, let’s call them, Nero Towers that were so ubiquitous at the time.
It may have been just a vase but it was the finest Petronius had ever seen. It was the Salvator Mundi of vases. It shone in all the colours of the rainbow and was so finely formed, so sensual in its proportions, so exquisite in every way, that grown men burst into tears in their togas when they saw it.
It haunted and obsessed him. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. He was prepared to pay any price to own the piece. He had to have it - for himself, and not that bastard, Nero, for once.
Finally – he was dying, on his last legs. He had nothing to lose. All those years of excess had taken their toll at last. Poor old Petronius had pretty well every pox going and his putrid body, let alone his mind, was falling apart.
So he sold or mortgaged everything he had – his mosaics, his statues, his fleet of super-chariots, his house in town, his country villa, his gladiator school, his string of strip joints, his mistresses, boyfriends, goats, wife, children, everything. And he bought it, this priceless vase, sweating and trembling, a husk of the man he had been in his prime, but it was his. He was, for once in his life, triumphantly, genuinely, profoundly happy. Briefly.
Inevitably, when Nero heard about this exquisite vase that Petronius had bought and kept for himself, he had to have it. For all Petronius’s protestations – “Vase? What vase? There is no vase, I swear!” – Nero knew a liar when he saw one and left no stone unturned in his quest to find it. But Petronius had it well hidden.
Nevertheless, he knew that Nero would never give up till he found it; would torture him in the worst, most terrible ways until he did. Hence, the realisation came that there was only one absolute way to prevent the vase from getting into Nero’s hands, whether he, Petronius, was alive or dead.
And so, that night, with a last gathering of what little strength he had, he made his way slowly and painfully down into the stinking bowels of the great, foetid city of Rome through the secret passageway he’d made under his house many years before for just such an eventuality as this.
Feeling his way through the catacombs by the guttering rush light in his hand, he went straight to the sarcophagus where his long-dead mother lay. Heaving the heavy stone lid aside, he took the vase from its hiding-place, deep among the clattering, cobwebbed bones of his old mater familias.
His house, now bare of all furnishings, echoed to the clang of the secret door closing behind him, as he emerged, exhausted, the vase concealed under his cloak. He drew it out with infinite care and took one last, long, loving look at this unbearably beautiful, priceless vase, that was his and only his. Then he kissed it and with the tears pouring down his ashen face, lifted it high above his head.
The smash of fluorspar on marble woke the dogs in the street outside. As they howled, a decrepit old retainer, the last to remain in the eviscerated household, struggled, muttering to himself, down the stairs to see what the fuss was about.
There on the floor lay his master, Petronius, dead as the dodo would be in times to come. Beside him, in a thousand glittering fragments, lay shattered what had once been the vase without price.
Nero, so legend has it, had the pieces picked up from where they lay and preserved for him alone so that no-one else should even be able to imagine the magnificence it once had. Petronius, with no money and no-one but the old servant to care for him – and that was only because he had nowhere else to go – suffered the indignity of a pauper’s funeral. But it was said, before he was thrown into the pit, that he had a smile of pure beatitude on his face. He had won his last battle. More importantly, Nero had well and truly lost.
One piece of Roman glass, that really is glass, has survived, just, the last 2,000 years and is called the Portland Vase. Made in the very early years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it is what is known as ‘cameo glass’ in which a blown inner vessel is dipped, in this case, into white glass which is then cut away to create the part-mythical, part-historical story, figured in the raised white glass on the deep, violet-blue glass background.
It is a superb piece of craftsmanship that took its makers – and the cameo cutter was most probably one Dioskourides, known for the signature quality of his work – at least two years to finish. It then passed through many hands over the centuries, including the Emperor Severus in whose sarcophagus it was originally found. A Cardinal, a Pope and a Princess had it successively until it was bought by the British Ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, in 1778 and brought to England. It was sold at auction to the 3rd Duke of Portland in 1786 and, finally, lent to the British Museum on a permanent basis by the 4th Duke of Portland in 1810 after a friend broke its base. It has remained there ever since.
The miracle is that it survives at all.
Like Petronius’s vase, it, too, became something that turned the mind of one person in particular. At face value, it was a young student, behaving like a mindless vandal after a week-long drinking binge – or was it?
From the court records I have seen, we know nothing about him other than his name, Michael Mulcahy, that he was an impoverished student at Trinity College, Dublin, that, at the time of the incident, he had been drinking heavily for a week and what happened as a consequence. Nevertheless, I will attempt to build a picture of the young Irish lad that he might have been and how he found himself, intoxicated and distressed, in the British Museum in London, one cold day in early 1845.
Let’s say he was an unusually bright young man from a poor background, whose talent for literature and learning had been spotted and nurtured from an early age by a local priest in his village in the wilds of County Cork. With the priest’s encouragement, despite his parents’ concern, he had tried for a scholarship at Trinity and to the delight of all had won the award, the first young lad for miles around to achieve such heights of academic achievement.
But when he found himself far, far away from home, surrounded by the wealthy and privileged, alone and lost to all that was familiar to him, it was hard. So hard he started drinking and missing lectures and tutorials, to the point that his academic performance dropped away and he was told if he didn’t pull his socks up, he risked losing his place at the university. A not untypical scenario today.
Quite different, though, were the circumstances in which the Irish found themselves by early 1845, when a report by the Earl of Devon highlighted the plight of the ‘impoverished tenant’ among the Catholic country-living majority, of whom Michael’s family were typical, as follows:
“It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.”
Michael knew his family were suffering and the appearance of the potato blight was already wreaking havoc as what became known as The Great Famine began to take its deadly toll.
By 1847, Ireland’s population had fallen by nearly a quarter, with a million dead and a million more emigrated to America, Canada and Australia, as well as Scotland and Wales. One in five people died from disease and malnutrition in Canada alone, let alone those who died on the journey there. Two years earlier, in February 1845, Michael received some terrible news from home.
His father, a skilled craftsman, even, perhaps, a glass-maker himself, had lost his job owing to the English owner of the concern, whom no-one had ever seen, without warning, had closed it all down. With the job, went the roof over a family of seven children, of whom Michael was the eldest. Suddenly, the Mulcahys were destitute. Jobless, homeless, in an Ireland where there was no work and, progressively, no food, with no help forthcoming from anyone, anywhere, least of all the British Government who believed in “laissez-faire”.
Young Michael was caught in a terrible dilemma. Should he go home and join his starving family, or stay and try to recover his wits to achieve what so many had invested in and expected of him?
It was too much for him and so he fled. Taking the first ship he could, he crossed the Irish sea to England, the source of his family’s plight, and made his way, hardly knowing where he was, let alone what he would do, to London.
So it was that on 7th February, having spent his last few shillings on cheap gin and sour ale, he found himself in the British Museum, as it was free ‘to all studious and curious persons’ and out of the bitter wind and lashing sleet that had frozen him to the bone.
By 3 o’clock that afternoon, he found himself surrounded by all the treasures of the world. Everywhere he looked, there were glass cases filled with beautiful, exotic, priceless and untouchable things. Gold, silver, jewellery, porcelain and glass – glass such as he had never seen, even that made by his father.
He was dazzled and astounded and, at the same time, filled with a conflicting rage. Although he had had the good fortune to know something of the wealthier world of his fellow students at Trinity, it was always at odds with the bitter contrast of life back home. It was too hard to reconcile the two worlds in which he, progressively, belonged to neither.
Michael gazed at these impossible riches, these beautiful objets d’art, from all the corners of the earth and all the ages gone by, manifestations of wealth and privilege so far beyond his reach… Before he knew it, he had picked up the nearest object to hand and hurled it at the cabinet in front of him.
The splintering of glass shattered the silence of the museum. And there on the floor, in broken, glittering fragments, lay the remains of the Portland Vase.
Michael was arrested and charged with the crime of wilful damage, convicted and given either a £3 fine or two months imprisonment. Even with the laughable twist of there being a flaw in the law that said you could not be charged for the criminal destruction of an object ‘worth no more than £5’ – somewhat less than the value of the priceless Portland Vase – the basic fine being the equivalent of £350 today, there was no way he could pay it and so to prison he went.
Remarkably, Michael was released after an anonymous benefactor paid his fine and, presumably, made his way back to Ireland and whatever fate lay in store for him and his family there. Or maybe not. Like so many footnotes in history, we shall never know what happened to him, or his desperate family, in times thereafter.
If Dickens had told this story, I wonder how he would have played it. Maybe the ‘anonymous benefactor’ would have had a hand in Michael’s future, much like Pip in Great Expectations. In real life, sadly, things rarely end so well, and even Pip never achieved his heart’s desire.
More remarkably still, the Portland Vase was, unbelievably, reassembled and restored, not once, but three times over the last 150 years, despite at one time missing 37 fragments which miraculously reappeared 100 years after they were lost in a box. They were found in the deceased box-maker’s effects by sheer chance. Now, after its latest restoration, completed in 1989, it is almost impossible to tell that it once lay in smithereens on the British Museum floor, let alone how and why it happened.
But not all stories involving broken glass or even the history of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, let alone both together, end badly, as a personal experience involving another noble peer of the realm can tell.
This particular peer happened to be Sir Toby Belch to my Sir Andrew Aguecheek in an amateur production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night which my father directed in the open air at Stourhead Gardens in Wiltshire back in the 1970s. We teamed up again in The Importance of Being Earnest, where he was Lane, the portly (in this case) butler to my Algy for whom “there were no cucumbers in the market….not even for ready money” when asked what had happened to the demanding Lady Bracknell’s cucumber sandwiches.
By then we had become good friends, having shared many pints after rehearsal in The Spread Eagle that overlooks the beautiful 18th century landscape gardens at Stourhead. So much so that one day we invited him to dinner in our humble farm labourer’s cottage hard by White Sheet Down, near Mere, in Wiltshire.
John Kingsale was the only man in the kingdom given the right not to doff his hat to the sovereign, courtesy of an ancestor who famously was allowed to keep all the land he could ride around within a day, or something like that. As John de Courcy, 35th Baron Kinsale, Premier Baron of Ireland, Lord of Kingsale, Ringrone, Courcy, Stoke, Newham, Sarsden, Foxcote, Islitt, Ruthernie "and another five places I can't remember - they're in France", you might have thought he carried a bit of clout. Unfortunately, all that was left of his estate was 15 inches of castle, in height at least, and a lighthouse, the consequence of a spot of trouble over the years, I shouldn’t wonder. Whatever the cause, it didn’t bring in a lot of bacon. And he had a good appetite as his casting bore suitable witness to. What a Falstaff he would have made!
He was the most delightful, unassuming, erudite, sensitive and hard-drinking man, who longed, above all, for an heir. That we couldn’t give him, alas. Nevertheless, despite his living on a pittance and our being the peasants we were, he arrived on a fine Spring evening, armed with not one, but two, fine bottles of claret, no doubt having primed himself beforehand at the Red Lion, Kilmington, at the bottom of the track up which we lived.
Why we didn’t provide him with a companion of child-bearing age will no doubt be played back to us by St. Peter at the moment of reckoning – before we join John for a riotous session in the Hell-Fire Club down below. But there we were, the three of us, me, Gill and John, with little Leo safely tucked up in bed above, and we toasted our brother-and-sisterhood in a series of healthy bumpers, as you would expect.
For the occasion, I had dusted off our three fine late Georgian glass rummers that a kind friend of my mother’s had very generously given us as a wedding present and that, for the most part, were kept in a cupboard in our freezing, North-facing kitchen. Actually the whole house was freezing apart from a lethal hot water pipe that acted as the tap to our bath in our primitive and flesh-shrivelling bathroom.
But this was Spring, the larks had just gone to bed, the butterflies were snoozing on the pale blue scabious on the chalk hills above and the bee orchids were just settling down for a good night’s debuzzing under the stars.
What could possibly go wrong?
John lifted his well-charged rummer for a toast to Bacchus and All his Cherubs and, for added emphasis, decided he would thump it on the fireplace on which he sat – we didn’t have many chairs and he preferred to sit on the floor with us.
The glass, which had survived 150 years of hard use up to this particular evening without protest, or even a chip, gave up the ghost. Or at least, the bit it stood on.
This fine, lead crystal creation, lovingly blown by a lung-blasted craftsman just after the Napoleonic Wars, surrendered to the noble, non-hat-doffing lord with an almighty crack. Of course, he was mortified.
But what is a glass in the big scheme of things? Isn’t friendship, well-being and a good story worth vastly more? And it was only the foot, after all.
We still have the glass, leaning at a John Kingsale angle to the universe, as is only fitting, come to think of it. We haven’t had it mended. Perhaps, we never should.
And when I found myself in Kinsale, a year or so ago, I had to enter the door of the Lord Kingsale pub and raise a toast to my old and much missed friend in a fine pint of Murphy’s. In contrast, despite his photograph on the wall, I was shocked by the young Irish woman behind the bar who had never heard of Michael Collins, Cork-born scourge of the British, let alone Anglo-Irish establishment at the time, when the struggle for Irish Independence was at its height. I think John would have blushed to think his name remained while that of the great Irish patriot was forgotten.
Touch wood, I haven’t broken, or had broken, any of my most precious glasses since, although I have lost too many tumblers and workaday wine glasses along the way, some more missed than others. As for the rummer, it makes me smile and think of John every time I see it, so no harm done there.
As for the tyrants, let’s hope that the precious vases which previous generations have fought tears and blood to craft for future generations like us to wonder at, do not get crushed and smashed to all our costs. It’s all too easily done.
But let’s remember Michael Mulcahy too. He had all the reason in the world to see such things as symbols of a privilege bought on the backs of those who had none, be they slaves, the oppressed and exploited of all nations, or even the craftspeople themselves, the true creators of beauty in our artefacts, our every day works of art if you like, whose names are so often lost and forgotten as we smash our selfish, short-sighted, uncaring way in the world.
