Histories Of Malta Volume 11, Travesties And Dynasties
by Giovanni Bonello
Midsea Books pp248
ISBN 978-99932-7-342-4
The 11th collection of histories researched by Giovanni Bonello, the self-confessed archive junkie in the title of the penultimate chapter, comes in a wrapping of unsurpassed elegance and style. Favray’s portrait of Annette, Comtesse de Vergennes, wife of the French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, is one of his finest. Its companion portrait, that of the Comte, Charles Gravier in Turkish costume, is indicative of one of France’s greatest 18th century diplomats who later on masterminded the Peace Treaty between the newly-fledged United States and Britain.
I ran into the author of Travesties and Dynasties and asked why he had placed the Comtesse on the cover when there was no “story” about her written in the volume under scrutiny and he replied that he found the portrait irresistibly beautiful and I could not have agreed more. Both paintings are in the Pera Museum in Istanbul which is how I first knew about them.
Judge Bonello’s 11 volumes of histories are invariably subtitled by two descriptive complimentary nouns that have become as respectably predictable as Fortnum and Mason, Lambert and Wilcox or even Marks and Spencer. We have had a plethora of poetic pairings, Passions and Compassions, Ventures and Adventures, Closures and Disclosures that are the product of artistic whimsy as much as the immortalisation of the Comtesse’s portrait.
Of all the stories in this volume my firm favourite concerns the story of the unscrupulous Duc of Rovigo, Anne Jean Marie Rene de Savary. Rovigo carries the can and is the real villain behind the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, the last of the royal Bourbon-Conde line in 1804.
The story was of special interest to me as only a couple of weeks ago I visited Chantilly, the largely rebuilt chateau of the Condes, which was left by Enghien’s father to one of Louis Philippe’s sons, the Duc d’Aumale. The wonderful Conde collection of paintings by Clouet still graces the chateau along with Poussins, Lorraines and even a Mattia Preti.
But back to Judge Bonello’s history, Rovigo was deeply implicated in the Enghien assassination which was something that shocked Europe as much as the execution of Louis XVI 12 years before and which was a royal murder the horror of which was comparable to that of the 16-year-old Conradin of Swabia in 1268. Savary was imprisoned in Malta from 1815 to 1816. His tomb, which I must have overlooked while searching out the monuments to the various composers with Brian Schembri, is found at Pere Lachaise. I was more interested in that of Nicolo Isouard, Frederic Chopin and of course the wonderful Epstein tribute to Oscar Wilde despite it being covered in tributes and graffiti in lipstick. This particular “history” deals with Rovigo’s so-called “escape” from Manoel Island. A story that stretched Judge Bonello’s sleuthing skills to the limit. But I will not spoil it for you.
The stories of the two recusant martyrs, Sir Adrian Fortesque and Sir Thomas Dingley – both members of the Order – are interwoven with the more lurid details of the marital and extramarital adventures of Henry VIII. I had no idea that between Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour was a mistress called Joanna Dingley who bore the king a daughter called Etheldreda and who may or may not have been a close relative to Sir Thomas.
We have the story of the five forgotten Maltese saints of which I found the strange malady of Timotea Cumbo the most intriguing. The knights of Malta who took part in Philip II’s armada against Elizabeth I is largely taken up by the papal Farneses of whom Ranuccio was immortalised forever by Titian in one of the most delightful child portraits ever painted.
Relics and reliquaries always fascinated me especially after reading the savagely wry final chapter of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard. The great diplomatic ploys which were used by the King of France and the Pope to persuade Grandmaster Wignacourt to part with the bodily appurtenances of the megalomartyr St Euphemia is in today’s more mundane world unbelievable and at times hilarious.
As a bonus the story of this particular set of bones is complemented by a plethora of others like that of the finger of St Anne which, to a member of any other religion bar our Roman Catholic one, would sound decidedly ghoulish.
The galloping hypochondria of Grandmaster Perellos, the lost “blazon” Preti drawing, the duelling stories in the early British period along with the career of King Tom Maitland – easily the most disagreeable Englishman ever to grace and disgrace our shores – are objects of curiosity and the author regales us with the scandalous end of Maitland in the bed of his mistress, Martha Le Mesurier, after having rewarded his cronies with KCMGs which are Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. The late Sir Anthony Mamo was the last Maltese member of this grandiloquent Order of Chivalry dreamt up by Maitland to buy loyalty in Malta and the Ionian Islands.
Travesties and Dynasties is of course an instant collectors’ item; a tome that along with the other 10 volumes is chock-full of the result of Giovanni Bonello’s extensive and at times even obsessive mania for research without which our collective history would be considerably the poorer and relatively colourless. May we have a round dozen very soon.
• Mr Zammit Tabona is an artist, an illustrator, a writer, a culture vulture and a bookworm, not necessarily in that order.
A review copy of this title was provided by the publisher.