Melesina Trench - diarist who lampooned Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton

Although the Irish Huguenot writer Melesina Trench has been memorialised on a marble plaque on the south wall of Winchester Cathedral’s North Transept for nearly two hundred years, she only recently returned to popular notice when a new female peregrine arrived by the transept’s rose window in early spring this year. The bird was named “Mel” after her and so the focus has turned to this largely forgotten writer.

   Both the peregrine and the author have shown their talons, with Melissa Trench, also known as Melissa Chevenix St George Trench, showing them in a scathing literary form about the great naval hero Horatio Nelson and his lover Emma Hamilton.

She was born in Dublin on 22 March 1768, as the only child of the Rev Philip and Mary Chenevix. Her wealthy parents were both dead by her fourth birthday and she was then raised by family. From the age of thirteen onwards, Melissa was an independent heiress and able to live life on her own terms. Always a bright and good-looking young woman, she was married at eighteen to Colonel Richard St George, an Irish officer, in October 1786.

Two children were born to the marriage, but Richard St George died of consumption in 1790 which left Melesina a widow at the age of twenty-one. Although one writer claimed she was “alone in the world”, her striking good looks were recorded in portraits by George Romney, Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Sir Thomas Lawrence. The best-known image of her is a later engraving of Romney’s 1792 portrait which shows a fashionably dressed young woman, “with beautiful black eyes and … [a] fascinating smile”.

For the next decade, she travelled extensively. It was her travels in Germany starting in 1799 which brought her in contact with many famous and powerful people that turned her into a writer and diarist for which she is best known, although her Journal Kept During A Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800 was not published until 1861.

The section of the diary in which she exhibits her peregrine-like literary talons is a very uncharitable description of Lady Emma Hamilton and a drunken Lord Horatio Nelson whom she met in Dresden. Referring to Lady Hamilton’s attempts to befriend her, Melesina commented that “she does not gain upon me. I think her bold, daring, vain even to folly, and stamped with manners of her first situation [as a courtesan]”. Nelson who is a “little man, without any dignity” has a vanity “so undisguised that it wears the form of frankness”. The great admiral, she wrote, was in the possession of Lady Hamilton “and he is a willing captive, the most submissive and devoted I have seen”.

Having dined with the couple, Melesina found they were besotted with each other and added that Emma Hamilton was “bold, forward, coarse, assuming, and vain”. Adding brutally that “her figure is colossal, but, excepting her feet, which are hideous, well shaped. Her bones are large and she is exceedingly embonpoint …”

This critique of Emma Hamilton has not met with universal praise over time. One of Emma’s biographers, Mollie Hardwick, has described Melesina Trench as “a prig of the first degree” for what some consider to be “bitingly malicious” descriptions. Ironically portraits of both Melesina Trench and Emma Hamilton were painted by the same artist George Romney.

In 1803, she married again, this time in Paris to Richard Trench, a younger lawyer. Trench was classically good-looking and was said to have resembled the Apollo Belvedere”. (The Apollo Belvedere is a famous Roman marble statue of a naked god Apollo which is now at the Vatican in Rome). After being interned in France for several years during the Napoleonic wars, the Trenches returned to England and Ireland before setting up home at Bursledon, Hampshire in a house which they renamed Elm Lodge. 

Among their guests in 1815 was the Duke of Wellington, the recent victor at Waterloo, which demonstrated the Trench’s elevated position in society. Melesina was not, however, as enthusiastic about her local church which caused her discomfort. It was a damp building, she wrote, full of people with unbrushed hair and “not a drop of eau de Cologne to sweeten the atmosphere”.

While in France, she had lost two children, Frederick and an unnamed daughter. To cope with her grief, she resumed her diary writing and created The Mourning Journal which records her responses to the children’s early deaths and her progress through depression to consolation. The unpublished diary was a departure from the way a child’s death was treated in the late Georgian period, which was that the mother should suffer in silence. She gave full voice to her grief and refocused her life on motherhood, including early home education of her surviving children. 

Another daughter died in 1816 but three surviving sons, Francis, Richard and Philip, were educated at Twyford and Harrow. Richard and Francis entered the church, where they had long careers, with Richard becoming the Dean of Westminster Abbey and, later, Archbishop of Dublin. Richard Trench’s early church career was in the Diocese of Winchester in the south Hampshire villages of Curdridge and Alverstoke.

During her remaining years in England, Melesina Trench campaigned for the welfare of chimney-sweeps and the itinerant poor in England and Ireland. One of her initiatives resulted in the establishment of soup kitchens for the homeless, first in Southampton and later in London. In 1816, she also wrote Laura’s Dream or, The Moonlanders, an epic poem in a science fiction style which preceded Mary Shelley’s much better-known Frankenstein by two years.

During the 1820s, her health declined and she died on 27 May 1827 at Malvern where she had gone to take the waters. Melesina Trench was buried in the Cathedral’s Guardian Chapel and the commemorative marble plaque was placed in the North Transept. Its Latin text can be translated as “To the best, most accomplished, and most beloved wife and mother, Melesina Trench.”

After her death, her writing about parenting, Thoughts of a Parent on Education, was published in 1837. At its core was her view that mothers should trust their own observations about their children and not to follow “the guidance of any general system.” 

It was not until 1860 when Richard Trench died, that his wife’s papers were passed to their son, the Rev Richard Chenevix Trench, who was then Dean of Westminster. He prepared an edition of his mother’s Journal Kept During a Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800, extensive excerpts of which, including her biting comments on Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson, were published with fanfare in the Times during October 1861. 

In the following year, a collection of her writings, The Remains of Mrs. Richard Trench, was widely reviewed and sold out on its first printing. Her diary writing about Nelson, says American academic Katharine Kittredge, made her “a celebrity thirty-five years after her death”, but the fame was not lasting and she quickly faded from literary notice. 

Sources

Sheila Gray, “Mrs Melesina Trench 1768-1827”, Winchester Cathedral Record 68 (1999), p. 21.

Katharine Kittredge, “Melesina Chenevix St. George Trench (1768-1827)”, Chawton House Library, p. 2. https://chawtonhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Melesina-Chenevix-St.-George-Trench.pdf

Melesina Chenevix St George Trench, Journal Kept During a Visit to Germany in 1799, 1800, edited by Richard Chenevix Trench (London: Savill & Edwards printers, 1861).

 

Illustrations

Engraving by William Holl the Younger, dated 1862, after portrait by George Romney.

Source: The Remains of the Late Mrs Richard Trench being Selections from her Journals, Letters and Other Papers, 1862. (Public Domain).

Memorial Tablet for Melesina Trench, south wall of North Transept, Winchester Cathedral (© Tom Watson).

Earlier versions of this article were published in the June 2024 edition of Record Extra, the journal of the Friends of Winchester Cathedral (www.wincathrecord.org), and in the Hampshire Chronicle, June 20, 2024.

 

The battle over St Birinus's bones

St Birinus, the seventh-century Apostle of Wessex, is somewhat forgotten now but he could have been chosen as a patron of Winchester’s Old Minster instead of St Swithun in the tenth century. Although his saintly cult was overshadowed by others, he came back into prominence in the early thirteenth century as a result of a short but intense dispute when the Augustinian canons of Dorchester-on-Thames contested Winchester’s long-held claim to have his relics. It was a row that was sent to Rome for a decision with farcical results.

 

Birinus, also called Berin and Birin, was probably a Lombard from northern Italy. He was sent to ‘the most inland and remote regions of the English’ by Pope Honorius I in 635 as a bishop-evangelist. His plan had been to travel to the Midlands but when Birinus encountered the Gewissae (the West Saxons), ‘he found them completely heathen’ and chose to focus his evangelization in the central South. Birinus was preceded as an apostle to the English by Augustine who established himself at Canterbury from 597 onwards.

 

After converting Cynegils, king of the West Saxons, to Christianity with the assistance of King Oswald of Northumbria, Birinus established his episcopal see at Dorcic, a Romano-British town by the Thames which we know as Dorchester-on-Thames. Many people were baptized by Birinus, and he built and dedicated several churches, according to Bede. Towards the end of his fifteen-year apostolate, he dedicated a church at Winchester, whose political importance caused it to become the ecclesiastical centre of the West Saxon kingdom. His later successor Hedda (or Haeddi) translated his body from Dorchester-on-Thames to Winchester (which Bede called Venta). It was laid in the Old Minster in c. 690, which was dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul.

 

Until the establishment of the cult of St Swithun in 970, the relics of Birinus would have been an important shrine for pilgrims to visit in the south of England. However, King Edgar and Bishop Ethelwold chose Swithun as Winchester’s patron saint as his life offered greater support to their advocacy of monastic reform. Nonetheless, Birinus was treated with great reverence and in 980 his body was moved and placed next to the high altar in the Old Minster.

 

In the period before the Norman Conquest, the date of Birinus’s festival on 3^rd December was included in many kalendars of saints’ festivals: in eighteen of the twenty-seven surviving Anglo-Saxon kalendars of saints’ festivals, as well as twelve inclusions of the festival of his translation on 4^th September. Birinus was also included in many litanies which also indicated his popularity and high standing among the English saints until the mid-late eleventh century. After this time his importance was confined largely to Winchester, although the prolific hagiographer Goscelin of Canterbury is credited with a Life (Vita) of Birinus in the late eleventh century.

 

Birinus’ relics would have been brought from the Old Minster into the new cathedral in the late eleventh century. They were moved again in the time of Bishop Henry of Blois in 1150. According to the Winchester Annals, the bodies of the ‘holy confessors Birinus, Swithun, Haeddi, Beornstan and Alfheah’ were translated into prominent positions but it is unclear where these were.

 

The quiet, established and respectful situation of Birinus’ relics was shaken up almost seventy-five years later when in 1224 the Augustinian (Austin) canons of Dorchester Abbey launched their own cult of Birinus. They claimed to have rediscovered his relics and petitioned Pope Honorius III to support their case.

 

This claim, which John Crook calls a ‘dubious cult’, came soon after Thomas Becket’s relics had been translated to a more prominent position at Canterbury Cathedral in 1220. His new shrine rapidly became the main place of pilgrimage in England and very important within Europe. It drew pilgrims away from other shrines and religious places which scrambled to revive cults and renew shrines. There was a wave of enthusiasm for the translation and rediscovery of relics of English saints. This included the translation of Augustine’s relics at Christ Church, Canterbury, the canonization of Hugh of Lincoln, and among others, attempts by Salisbury Cathedral to gain recognition of the cult of bishop Osmund.

 

Dorchester Abbey took advantage of this trend. Its canons had been inspired by a vision in 1223 and found the tomb of a bishop clothed in full pontificals (bishop’s robes) which they claimed was Birinus. The find was followed by several miraculous cures including a dumb child who became able to speak both English and French. Spurred on by an Oxford anchorite (hermit) Matthew of Holywell, the canons wrote to the Pope. In their documents they claimed that Bede had made a simple error in his History of the English Church and People: it was not Birinus who was translated to Winchester by Hedda but an otherwise unheard-of Bertinus whom they claimed was an unrecorded bishop of the West Saxons. Nicholas Vincent acidly comments that Bertinus ‘may have been invented by the canons … to suit the occasion’.

 

The Benedictines of St Swithun’s Priory in Winchester swiftly contested the Dorchester claim. They referred to Bede’s evidence which had been unchallenged for four centuries and pointed to the tenth century Secgan which mentioned that Birinus lay in the Ealden mynster (Old Minster) and made no reference to Dorchester.

 

The pope’s solution to the dispute verged on the farcical. He chose to have a contest of miracles recorded at the rival shrines in order to determine which had the authentic relics of Birinus. The French sociologist Pierre Delooz has made fun of the process:

 

Let us pause to consider the fact that the pope was convinced that miracles were obtained by the veneration which took place at two tombs, which were both supposed to contain the same saint’s body. He decided that the saint’s body must actually be in the tomb in which most miracles occurred. Why? If we continue with the story, we learn that the canons of Dorchester near Oxford triumphed because they produced more miracles than the canons of Winchester, which was in fact the real place of burial. In this way social pressure produced miracles on a false basis, if we assume that they should have happened only in so far as the invoked saint’s remains were authentic.

 

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, was appointed by the Pope to implement Dorchester’s claim but it is not clear whether he did so. Dorchester never abandoned its claim and soon erected a shrine, which was refurbished in 1320 but removed in the dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s. Fragments from the shrine were found in 1858 and incorporated in a monument cum shrine erected at Dorchester Abbey in 1963.

 

The Dorchester claims had the effect of reviving interest in Birinus in Winchester. By 1224, his relics had been translated again into a chapel in the south-east corner of the retroquire, which had been completed by Bishop Peter des Roches some twenty years after he succeeded Bishop Godfrey de Lucy who had planned it. In 1501, the relics were removed when the chapel was transformed into a chantry for Bishop Thomas Langton who died of the plague on the eve of taking up an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not known what became of them. In any case they would most likely have been destroyed in 1539 when Swithun’s shrine was demolished and his relics dispersed. However, the well situated in the south ambulatory aisle of the cathedral crypt is still known as ‘Birinus’ well’.

 

The controversy led to Bishop des Roches commissioning a metrical life of Birinus Vita Sancti Birini on the eve of his departure for the Sixth Crusade (1228-9). Written by Henry of Avranches, it emphasised the bishop’s position as successor to the old confessor saints such as Birinus, Swithun and Ethelwold, as well as promoting Birinus’ cult.

 

In Winchester, the Dorchester claims were brushed aside and the pope’s decision ignored. If anything, Birinus’ status as a major saintly cult in the cathedral and diocese was strengthened. The statutes of the Bishop of Winchester in 1224, at the time of the Dorchester claims, and in 1247 stipulated that the diocese’s parishes had to observe the feasts of the saints whose bodies lay in the diocese. It specifically named only the two main saints whose shrines were at the cathedral who were Swithun and Birinus.

 

Although Birinus was not included in the Sarum calendar of saints’ festivals, which was used across the archdiocese of Canterbury, his festival of 3^rd December was included in a fourteenth century supplement to the Winchester version, indicating that the saint was still considered important to the cathedral and the diocese. His standing outside the Winchester diocese in the period from 1066 to the dissolution of the monasteries, compared with the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish periods, declined as shown by minimal inclusion in litanies and kalendars. There was only one ‘ancient church’ dedicated to him.

 

Sources

Julie Adams, “An Indulgence for The Chapel of St Birinus”. Winchester Cathedral Record, 80, 2011, p. 18.

Bede, A History of the English Church and People, translated by L. Shirley-Price, revised by R. E. Latham. London, 1968, iii. 7, p. 151.

John Crook, English Medieval Shrines. Woodbridge, 2016, pp. 86, 174, 224, 227, 245.

Pierre Delooz, “Towards a sociological study of canonized sainthood in the Catholic Church”, translated by Jane Hodgkin, In Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, edited by Stephen Wilson. Cambridge, 1985, pp. 209-210.

David Hugh Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th Ed., revised. Oxford, 2011, pp. 52-53.

R. C. Love, “Birinus”, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, edited by Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes and Donald Scragg. Oxford, 2001, p. 67.

Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics 1205-1238. Cambridge, 1996, pp. 243, 245, 246.

The statue of St Birinus in the screen of Fox's Chantry in Winchester Cathedral.

This is a 19th century image

 

1141 – the Siege of Winchester

Much is known about the damage to Winchester Cathedral in the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, but the Cathedral had witnessed another violent conflict 500 years early. In 1141 it was in the centre of the Siege of Winchester which resulted in parts of the walled city being destroyed by fire. There are, however, no contemporary or archaeological reports of damage to the Cathedral itself.

 

The conflict was between troops and supporters of Bishop Henry of Blois and those of Empress Matilda who was contesting the crown of England with Henry’s brother Stephen. She was the daughter of Henry I and should have succeeded him in 1135. She was thwarted by Stephen of Blois, who staged a coup d’état, and took the English crown instead. This period has become known as The Anarchy and lasted from 1138 to 1153, when a permanent truce was brokered between King Stephen and his successor, Empress Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet who would become Henry II.

 

The siege came about in early August 1141 when Empress Matilda and her half-brother and champion Robert of Gloucester returned to Winchester Castle after reports that Bishop Henry of Blois had been reinforcing and provisioning Wolvesey Castle.  Earlier in the year the bishop transferred his support to Matilda after his brother King Stephen was defeated and captured at the Battle of Lincoln. Stephen was imprisoned in Bristol Castle, but the bishop soon became disenchanted with Matilda.

 

She, like his imprisoned brother, wanted more control over the affairs of the church and sought to reduce the number of castles that the bishops controlled. Henry, one of the richest and most politically powerful men in England, controlled more castles and fortified palaces than all other bishops. They included Merdon Castle, near Winchester, Bishops Waltham Palace, Downton Castle, south of Salisbury, Farnham Castle and a three-storey keep in Taunton with massive walls. His favourite was probably Wolvesey Castle in Winchester.  

 

Empress Matilda summoned Henry to the castle but he fled to Farnham Castle.  Both called for support and Winchester became a battleground with the forces of the empress attacking Wolvesey Castle and the bishop’s men defending it.

 

Matilda’s force started their attack on August 1, 1141. The well-provisioned Wolvesey garrison shot lighted brands ‘with which they reduced to ashes the greater part of the city.’ Contemporary chronicles reported that outcome was widespread devastation including the loss of at least one abbey, that of the nuns of St Mary’s (Nunnaminster), close to Wolvesey Castle. Hyde Abbey, outside the city walls, was also burnt. It was also claimed that up to 23 churches and many houses were destroyed or damaged. Conflagrations were not uncommon in the early medieval period as houses were constructed of wood with thatched roofs, which enabled the rapid spread of urban fires.

 

There has been debate as to whether the bishop’s troops were based in Wolvesey Palace or the Royal Palace , which is considered to have been to the west of the Cathedral, probably in the area of Great Minster Street and extending to the High Street or close to it. In either place, the Cathedral was very close to the fighting and the subsequent damage to the city.

 

While Empress Matilda’s troops sought to suppress the bishop’s troops in the city by a siege, the Empress was outflanked by supporters of King Stephen, led by his wife Queen Mathilde of Boulogne, who surrounded Winchester’s walls and controlled much of the central Hampshire countryside. They were able to defeat troops who were coming to support the Empress, which left her stranded on the western side of the city.

 

The castle was attacked from inside the city and from outside the walls. There was not enough food in Winchester for Matilda’s force and its horses. After six weeks of stalemate, the Empress had three choices – starve, surrender, or try to break out.  She chose to break out through the West Gate on September 14 and head for Stockbridge to cross the River Test in a move towards the comparative safety of the West Country. The withdrawal soon turned into a series of attacks by Queen Mathilde’s forces, ending in a rearguard action at the Test crossing while the Empress made an ignominious escape to Ludgershall, Devizes and finally Gloucester. She was carried on a horse-borne litter for the final two days.

 

The actions became known as the Rout of Winchester  and were effectively the end of Empress Matilda’s campaign to gain the throne of England. King Stephen was released from Bristol Cathedral soon after in exchange for Robert of Gloucester who was captured in the rearguard action at the Test crossing.

 

The Cathedral had little or no damage. Its sanctified position appears to have been respected by both sides. Other churches and buildings in the city, however, were looted and damaged by the victorious forces of Queen Matilda.  Recent archaeological evidence indicates that the dramatic story of conflagration engulfing Winchester may have been over-stated. The Winchester survey of 1148 showed ‘little evidence of any devastation which may have been caused by the siege’.  

 

By 1153, Winchester must have been rebuilt sufficiently to retain its role as a royal centre of administration, particularly for the treasury. After conflict between Stephen and Empress Matilda’s son Henry Plantagenet over succession, an agreement, known as the Treaty of Winchester, was concluded in the Cathedral on November 6 that year. In it, Stephen formally established Henry as his successor and Henry swore to accept him as his liege man and to protect him. Stephen undertook to govern with the advice of his successor. Henry was to be guided by Bishop Henry. The chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote, ‘what boundless joy, what a day of rejoicing, when the king himself led the illustrious young prince through the streets of Winchester itself’. 

 

Sources:

 

Martin Biddle & D. J. Keene, “Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries”, in Winchester Studies I: Winchester in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Martin Biddle. Oxford, 1976, p. 389.

Teresa Cole, The Anarchy, Stroud, 2019, pp. 142, 189, 365.

Catherine Hanley, Matilda, London, 2019, pp. 162, 165, 168-9.

Tom Beaumont James, Winchester – From Prehistory to the Present. Stroud, 2007, p. 76

Nicholas Riall, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, Hampshire Papers 5, Winchester, 1994, p. 6.

Did it rain on St Swithun's Day? Probably not!

The aphorism that ‘if it rains on St Swithun’s Day, it will rain for forty days’, or words to that effect is well known. It does not appear, however, to have started from legendarily torrential rain on the day when St Swithun's relics (bones) were moved into Winchester’s Old Minster on July 15, 971. The source may have been a prognostic couplet for the saints’ days of two Roman martyrs Saints Processus and Martinianus, which was on July 2 and the same day as the deposition of Swithun’s relics. 

The leading Anglo-Saxon historian Michael Lapidge suggests that there may have been a shift of dates from July 2 to 15 over time. In any case, it was not until the late medieval period that the ‘forty days of rain’ was ascribed to Winchester’s local patron saint and became fixed in folk memory and print. It is ironic that, just as the cult officially ended in 1539 when his shrine was broken up by Henry VIII’s commissioners, the one memorable popular reference to St Swithun arose. 

 

The claim of rain or a tempest on the day of Swithun’s translation to Winchester’s Old Minster probably came from a misinterpretation of the Latin phrase qua tempestate written by Wulfstan around the 990s. According to Lapidge, it means ‘at that time’ in this context and not a tempest.

 

Source: Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun, Oxford 2003, p. 48.

 

• There is a longer article on St Swithun’s cult in the Friends of Winchester Cathedral’s Record Extra online journal’s June 2024 edition. Go to www.wincathrecord.org, choose Browse and select Record Extra.