Grave Stories - Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Peccavi: Charles James Napier and Catherine Winkworth

On August 9, 2026

Trafalgar Square: the home of Nelson’s column, Landseer’s lions, Lutyens’s fountains, and, when the British begin to feel that Really Things Have Gone a Bit Too Far, a stage for political demonstrations. The National Gallery provides the backdrop. There are also four plinths which formerly aroused little interest, indeed prior to the millennium one of them had stood empty since money for statues ran out in 1841. In 1999 the Royal Society of Artists inaugurated the Fourth Plinth Project and since then a new artwork has appeared on the plinth every two years.

Here are my three favourites:

In 2010 Yinka Shonibare presented us with his Ship in a Bottle, a replica of Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, its sails decorated with African patterns.

When Ship in a Bottle completed its two year tenure in Trafalgar Square it moved to a permanent home outside the Greenwich museum.

Hans Haacke’s Gift Horse, a skeletal, riderless bronze horse, based on an etching by Stubbs found in the National Gallery, appeared in 2015. An electronic ribbon linked by tickertape machine to the London Stock Exchange was tied to its front leg.

Haake’s horse, focusing on the links between power, money, and history.

The Invisible Enemy Should not Exist, created in 2018 by Michael Rakowitz, recalled 7,000 objects looted from the Iraq museum or destroyed at archaeological sites across the country by ISIS. It is dominated by the Lamassu, which stood at the Nergal gate entrance to Ninevah. The reconstruction was made from 10,500 recycled date syrup cans, mirroring the recycled cannon used for the reliefs at the base of Nelson’s column.

The Lamassu is a deity with a human head, the body of a bull or lion, and the wings of an eagle.

Overlapping date syrup containers; the syrup was a major export from Iraq before the war.

Last time I visited the Square, I inspected the other three plinths. They bear undistinguished statues of George IV, Major-General Henry Havelock and Charles James Napier respectively. But the latter reminded me of a more dramatic, albeit equally ugly, image of Napier which lies outside the garrison church in Portsmouth where he was buried.

Stretched out on his back, an uncomfortable looking Napier clutches his sword.The plinth bears the names of the battles in which he participated.

Napier was buried inside the church which was extensively damaged by bombing during World War II.

As a young man Charles James Napier (1782-1853) took up a commission in the British army. He fought in the Peninsula War (1808-14) and the War of 1812 against the United States. From 1822-30 he was military resident in Cephalonia. Between 1839-41, as the chief of troops in the north of England, he was responsible for the violent suppression of the Chartist demonstrations.

When he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army of the East India Company Napier seized the opportunity for self-aggrandisement and military glory. The East India Company already had direct or indirect control over much of the Indian subcontinent. In the Sindh province however the Amirs of the Talpur dynasty still held nominal control although the passage of “friendship” treaties had left them paying tribute to the British, providing a base for their troops and military hardware, and supplying them with auxiliary forces.

By 1842 the British were seeking to expand their influence in the area developing trade routes along the Indus river and securing their defences against Russian attack through Afghanistan. The Talpurs opposed this, and there was increasing hostility towards the East India Company, but the disaffected Amirs were divided and lacked a professional army.

Napier shifted British policy from a combination of diplomacy and bullying, to outright aggression. He pushed the Amirs into open conflict by imposing a new treaty forcing them to cede territory and by marching on and destroying the desert fortress of Imamgarh.

On the grounds their alleged disloyalty, Napier then received orders that the “rebel” forces of the Amirs should be put down. He had easy victories at the battles of Meanee and Hyderabad. But Napier went further, exceeding his mandate to suppress the rebels, and in a ruthless and unauthorised campaign he subjugated Sindh, conquering the whole province. He knew that his action was neither legal nor moral,

We have no right to seize Sindh. Yet we shall do it,

but used the habitual spurious and hypocritical justification for colonial expansion,

and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it shall be.

Advantageous and useful it undoubtedly was for the East India Company and for Napier himself. The military conquest of Sindh paved the way for further annexations of the Punjab, and Napier became the first Governor-General of Sindh.

Even in Britain however Napier’s conduct was controversial: he faced criticism for his barbaric action, quest for personal glory and for exceeding his authority. Nonetheless he received a knighthood and later there was widespread public mourning and a military tribute at his funeral.

Moreover generations of Latin teachers in British schools delighted in elucidating Napier’s putative wit in a telegram which he allegedly sent home informing his superiors of his conquest. “Peccavi,” it read.

There was no telegraph in the Subcontinent until the 1850s.

But in Manchester in 1843 there was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called Catherine Winkworth. She coined the pun, substituting “I have sinned” for “I have Sindh” in the supposed dispatch to highlight the immorality of Napier’s assault on the territory. Amused, and in sympathy with her view, her teacher suggested that she forward her witticism to Punch magazine, where it was erroneously credited to Napier.

Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878) studied under the Unitarian William Gaskell. As a young woman she belonged to the circle of Manchester Liberals whose commitment to a more equal society led to their support for free trade, the repeal of the Corn Laws, pacifism, a free press, the separation of church and state, and opposition to slavery.

In adulthood she was known for her translations of German hymns and her support for higher education for women. After moving to Bristol, she became a founder and governor of girls’ schools including Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Red Maids’ School, and Clifton High School for Girls.

She died suddenly of heart disease while in Savoy, but there is a monument to her memory in Bristol Cathedral.

This pious memorial is devoid of puns. A suitable epitaph for a middleaged German hymn translator perhaps, but giving no hint of the smart,witty, radical young girl from Manchester.What a pity.

Marc Chagall: “the light of freedom… and the colours of love”

By Gravedigger

On July 26, 2026

In Artists

Entering Chichester Cathedral through the west door the impact of John Piper’s controversial altar tapestry is immediate. Symbols of the Trinity, the four evangelists and the four elements cavort in bold, arresting colours, noisily clamouring for attention.

Altar tapestry by John Piper.
(Universal Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

The presence of the tapestry and other twentieth century art in the eleventh century cathedral is attributable to Walter Hussey. In earlier centuries the church had been a major patron of the arts, and Hussey regretted that contemporary painting, music, sculpture and drama were little encouraged by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of his day. As vicar of St. Matthews in Northampton, he had set about rectifying this, commissioning works by Benjamin Britten, Henry Moore, Michael Tippett and Graham Sutherland.

When he became Dean of Chichester in 1955 his scope was increased, and the cathedral boasts an enviable collection of modern art. This was supplemented by Hussey’s personal collection which he left to the city, today located in the Queen Anne townhouse known as the Pallant Gallery. My personal favourite amongst the cathedral treasures is Hussey’s final commission, a stained-glass window by Marc Chagall based on psalm 150: “Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.”

The eleventh century Chichester cathedral

The vibrant window contrasts with the sombre fabric of the cathedral. Unusually for stained-glass by Chagall the dominant colour is red, but the animals, birds, and human figures playing harps and trumpets are familiar.

Chichester is one of only two locations in England with stained-glass by Chagall, and fond though I am of the cathedral window there is no question that the glass in an otherwise unremarkable church in neighbouring Kent far eclipses it.

Henry and Rosemary d’Avigor-Goldsmid commissioned Chagall to design a window for All Saints church, Tudeley, in memory of their daughter who had died in a sailing accident. When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, his response was immediate,

C’est magnifique! Je les ferai tous.

Over ten years he designed eleven more windows as a gift to the family and the community; the last one was installed in 1985 just before his death. All Saints became the only church in the world to have all its windows designed by Chagall.

East window of All Saints, Tudeley. Crucifixion and drowning

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born in Vitebsk, NE Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. From 1906 he attended art school in Saint Petersburg for four years, before moving to Paris where he began to produce paintings of life in Vitebsk. Life in the town had been hard; Chagall was one of nine children whose father was employed hauling barrels of herring. Chagall compared the work to that of a galley slave:

My heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I saw my father lift those weights.

Worse, there was always the fear of pogroms against the Jews.

But the paintings he produced do not emphasise the hardship, they are not realistic, objective portrayals. For Chagall was motivated at least in part by a tender desire to record and celebrate Jewish traditions and modes of living which were disappearing. The dream like paintings of snowy streets, wooden houses, fiddlers, circuses, acrobats, and ghostly figures floating in the sky led Picasso to wonder:

I don’t know where he gets those images from; he must have an angel in his head.

In 1914 Chagall went home to marry Bella Rosenfeld in Vitebsk. The most romantic pictures come from the years following his marriage. In The Birthday (1915) a couple kiss as they drift through the air. The Promenade (1918) shows him holding onto his wife’s hand as she flies above.

Chagall had not intended to remain in Vitebsk but with the closure of borders in World War I, he was unable to return to Paris and spent the years until 1923 between Vitebsk, Moscow and Petrograd. There he taught, illustrated books, and produced murals alive with dancers, fiddlers and acrobats for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre.

After his return to Paris, he worked and travelled extensively but in the 1930s Nazi campaigns against modernist, “degenerate” art began. Paintings, including those of Chagall, described as

green, purple and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air…representing an assault on Western civilisation

were confiscated from museums.

Yet even after the German invasion Chagall and his wife remained in Vichy France, slow to perceive the danger and unable at last to afford the passage to America. They were rescued in 1941, following their arrest and loss of citizenship, by the American journalist Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee who helped anti-Nazis and Jews, especially artists and intellectuals, to escape.

Chagall lived in New York until 1948 when he returned to France, seeking the “lumière – liberté” of the Cote d’Azur. There he experimented with ceramics and sculpture alongside his painting. Malraux, a great admirer of Chagall, commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the Paris opera in 1963, avowing

Chagall has looked at our world with the light of freedom and seen it with the colours of love.

And after a visit to Chartres in the 1950s Chagall began to produce stained glass with intense colours refracted by the light. For the Hebrew University’s medical centre in Jerusalem, he designed twelve windows representing the twelve tribes of Israel earning breathless praise from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard:

Chagall reads the bible and suddenly the passages become light.

The art historian Jean Leymarie in his commentary on the windows concurred:

The essence of the Jerusalem windows lies in colour, in Chagall’s magical ability to animate material and to transform it into light. Words do not have the power to describe Chagall’s colour, its spirituality, its dazzling luminosity…it is simultaneously jewel-hard and foamy, reverberating and penetrating, radiating light from an unknown interior.

Other windows followed: the peace window in the Secretariat building of the United Nations in New York; at Saint Stephen’s Mainz, a widow symbolising Jewish-German reconciliation; windows in the Fraumunster church in Zurich, in Metz cathedral, at the art institute in Chicago, in Reims and in Tudeley.

Chagall’s art defies description. It has been linked with Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, but ultimately it is unique. The paintings blend the real and the fantastic, at once whimsical fairy tales, romantic fantasies, dreams, and representations of the wonder and joy of the quotidian and the commonplace. And, as with the stained-glass, it is the colour and the light which leave us breathless. Picasso was confident that

When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is…His canvasses are really painted, not just tossed together. Some of the last things he has done in Vence convince me that there has never been anyone since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.

Chagall is buried in the multi-denominational cemetery of St. Paul de Vance, bathed in the light and colour of the south of France, but maybe still dreaming of Vitebsk.

Vava Chagall was Chagall’s second wife, Michael Brodsky was her brother. Bella Chagall had died of sepsis following a throat infection while the couple were in America.

The grave top is always decorated with offerings

Jeremy Bentham and the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number

By Gravedigger

On July 12, 2026

In Political Theorists, Philosophers and Economists, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

I first encountered Jeremy Bentham (1745-1832) in my O-level history class. Miss Brown expounded briefly upon Utilitarianism, adding “Bentham is a philosopher of whom you would approve, Josephine.” She was right: while her conservative values made Bentham anathema to her, I warmed to his radical, democratic view that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number…is the measure of right and wrong.”

Bentham had reasoned,

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

The greatest happiness principle consisted in the predominance of pleasure over pain.

JS Mill later distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, asserting that human happiness could not be reduced to mere sensual pleasure and that it was better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

But for Bentham it was essential that the principle applied to all individuals equally. All pleasures, intellectual or physical, were accorded equal weight in his ethical calculations.

He measured individual pain and pleasure by the “felicific calculus” taking account of their intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, purity, extent and productive nature.

Yet this universal hedonism would not result in selfish and thoughtless egoism, for people would realise that their own interests were inextricably linked with the interests and good of others and adapt their behaviour accordingly.

And if this failed then there might be recourse to the Pannomion, Bentham’s codified philosophy of law. He challenged Blackstone’s traditional commentaries on the law with their antipathy to reform, arguing that “judge made laws” should be replaced with rational statues enacted by democratic legislation. For Bentham, all law was a restriction on liberty, inculcating pain rather than pleasure. Limited legal control by the state could only be justified if it clearly promoted individual and community well-being:

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; first that in every case the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and secondly that if evils they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.

Rejecting concepts of natural law, inherent human rights, divine commandments, social contracts and other legal fictions as “nonsense on stilts,” he espoused legal positivism. Laws were just social constructs created by legislators for the protection and advantage of society, and as such they could be altered in response to changes in society.

In his own time, Bentham advocated changes in the law to give women equal rights, including suffrage, the right to public office and the right to divorce on the same terms as men; to de-criminalise homosexuality; to make slavery a crime; and to protect animals from unnecessary suffering.

A political radical, he reasoned that better law making would come through constitutional reform making government more accountable and open. A wider franchise, a more representative democracy, a more transparent government with greater checks on its power, and freedom to criticise government were essential.

And if the law were broken? Punishment clearly involved the infliction of pain and should only be used “so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.” Like the laws, punishment should be designed to achieve more good than harm, and while penalties should outweigh the immediate advantages arising from crime, the punishment should ultimately benefit both society and the individual.

Bentham opposed capital and corporal punishment. He sought to redesign and reform prisons.

His brother, supervising Potemkin’s factories in Russia, had designed a system whereby a circular building at the centre of a larger compound enabled a small number of managers to oversee the activities of a large workforce. Shutters on the central building ensured that the workforce did not know when they were being observed and this encouraged self-regulation.

Bentham adapted this model for use in prisons, designing a central, circular, shuttered tower, the Panopticon, with the prisoners’ cells facing inwards around its circumference. All the prisoners could be observed at various times by one person: not knowing whether they were being watched or not would ensure elective self-policing.

Bentham’s Panopticon has been tainted by the association of constant surveillance with violation of privacy and totalitarian control, but the Panopticon was designed purely for criminals. Moreover, it was only part of a wider proposal, according to which there would be no locks on cell doors, and prisoners would be free to move around the prison attending workshops and educational facilities which were at the heart of Bentham’s plan. Meaningful work and rehabilitation would see

morals reformed…health preserved…industry invigorated… instruction diffused…public burthens lightened.

The latter was effected by the decreased cost of prisons with fewer warders required. Finally, the issue of “who guards the guards” would be resolved by regular inspections guaranteeing humane management of the Panopticon.

There were always right-wing critics of Bentham: those who favoured law and government based on tradition rather than reason, and who were ever alert to the danger that, once enfranchised, “the masses” might pose a threat to the existing social order and hierarchy.

These disparagements aside, there are flaws in Bentham’s philosophy: the practicalities of quantitative measurement by the felicific calculus and of effective inspection of prisons; his overly sanguine view of democratic government; the possibility of the pleasures of one generation having a negative impact on the next; the obvious danger to minorities. Bentham wrote copiously throughout his life refuting criticisms with varying degrees of success. If I no longer swallow the greatest happiness principle with quite the enthusiasm of my sixteen-year-old self, nonetheless, there remains a compassionate decency at its core.

Yet what charms me most about Bentham is the manner of his leaving. A convinced atheist, committed to the separation of church and state, he was adamantly opposed to Christian burial. At a time when it was illegal to provide anatomists with bodies save those of criminals who had been hanged, Bentham left instructions that his corpse should be made available for dissection in the interests of medical research.

Following this his skeleton and his head were to be preserved as an “auto-icon” which would be his memorial. His instructions were specific: the skeleton would sit in his favourite chair wearing one of his suits padded out with hay. His mummified head would be placed on top and the whole displayed in a wooden cabinet.

This did not go entirely to plan: Bentham’s head was desiccated using an air pump over a bath of sulphuric acid, the result was macabre, especially when two cobalt glass eyes were added. A wax head fitted with his own hair was substituted while the original head sat at his feet. This would no doubt have delighted Bentham whose instructions regarding his remains may well have been designed to cock a snook at religious sensibilities about life and death.

He would have been gratified too that the auto-icon found a resting place at University College, London, “the godless institution in Gower Street,” established in line with his own beliefs to provide university education for those of all religions and none, unlike the older universities which still enforced the Test Acts.

The auto-icon has always evoked affection at UCL and inspired the urban myth that he attends meetings of the college council casting a deciding vote, always in favour of the motion, when the votes of other council members are equally split. In July 2013 at the final council meeting of the retiring provost, Malcolm Grant, the myth became reality when Bentham was removed from his box and sat in council, recorded in the minutes as “present but not voting.”

After his original head was stolen and held to ransom by a rival college in 1975 (although not as the rumours said used as a football nor discovered in a left luggage locker on a Scottish railway station) it was put away for safe keeping in the strong room of the college records department. Recently the auto-icon has been moved to a new glass display case. Visitors are welcome and he remains a popular attraction.

Jeremy Bentham in his original wooden cabinet

Forde Abbey, Dorset which Bentham rented as his summer residence, and where he hosted fellow philosophers, radicals, and reformers including James and John Stuart Mill, Joseph Hume, and David Ricardo

A more conventional memorial: Bentham’s bete-noire, William Blackstone (1723-80) lies in his family vault in Saint Peter’s, Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

Laskarina Bouboulina, (1771-1825),Heroine of the Greek Revolution

By Gravedigger

On June 14, 2026

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Meet Bouboulina, a handsome woman, as befits a revolutionary heroine.

Bouboulina, painting in the National Museum of Athens

Commensurate with her position as a celebrated freedom fighter, Bouboulina has a colourful history.

She was born Laskarina Pinotsi, in a Constantinople prison where her mother was visiting her father. Stavrianos Pinotsis, an Arvanite (Greek of Albanian origin) sea captain from Hydra had been incarcerated by the Ottomans for his part in the abortive Orlov Revolt. He died soon after his daughter’s birth and her mother returned to Hydra, later moving to Spetses where she married another veteran of the Orlov Insurgency.

Bouboulina grew up in Spetses, enjoying a more physically active childhood – sailing, swimming and riding – than might have been expected for a girl of her times. She married first Dimitrios Yiannouzas in 1788, then Dimitrios Bouboulis in 1801. Both were sea captains and both drowned in battles against Algerian pirates. This left Bouboulina a very wealthy widow.

Unusually, but consistent with her position as a woman of Arvanite descent, Bouboulina took over her husbands’ fortunes, their businesses, and their ships. She acquired more land, cash, and vessels, building up her own merchant fleet.

Defending her capital required steely resolution. The Ottomans sought to confiscate her assets on the grounds that her husband had fought on the Russian side in the Russo-Turkish war. Bouboulina travelled to Constantinople to defend her rights. Enlisting the aid of another woman, the Valide Sultan (the Sultan’s mother) Natsidil Sultan, she retained her property.

In 1820 two of her stepsons, in a dispute over their inheritance, instigated her excommunication by the Patriarch Gregory V. If this was designed to intimidate her into surrendering control of her wealth it was unsuccessful.

Bouboulina supported the Filiki Etaireia, an underground organisation, modelled on Carbonarist and Masonic lines, preparing Greece for revolution against Ottoman rule. The organisation did not admit women but along with others, like Manto Mavrogenous and Marigo Zarafoupoulo, Bouboulina financed ships and smuggled weapons and ammunition to revolutionaries.

Against Ottoman regulations she ordered the construction of the Agamemnon, the first modern warship in Greece, bearing eighteen cannons. She bribed Turkish officials to register it as a smaller trade ship. On 3rd April 1821, twelve days before the Greek Revolution was officially declared, she raised the flag of the revolution on the mast of the Agamemnon. Spetses became the first island to fly a revolutionary flag.

The Spetses Flag of the Revolution, now in the Spetses museum.The cross above the half-moon representing the Ottoman Empire indicates that the latter will be overthrown by the Hellenic navy (the anchor) and army (the lance) commanded by prudence (the snake) and wisdom (the owl – unfortunately obscured by a reflection of the electric light.)The flag bears the legend ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΙΑ H ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ, FREEDOM OR DEATH.

Modern version of the flag flying in Spetses

Bouboulina gave command of the Agamemnon to her son Yiannis Yiannouzas. They sailed together with eight other ships from Spetses to take part in the naval blockade of Nafplion.

Bouboulina at the siege of Nafplion, Spetses museum.

When Turkish forces hoping to raise the blockade rode towards Nafplion, the Greeks joined battle with them outside Argos. Yiannis Yiannouzas was killed and beheaded. Bouboulina collected her son’s remains, executed three Ottoman prisoners during the funeral ceremony, and sent back word to Spetses,

My son is dead, but Argos is ours.

In May, Bouboulina began a blockade of Monemvasia with the Agamemnon. The Turks surrendered in July.

In September with Tripolitsa about to fall to the Greek troops of Kolokotronis, she entered the city on a white horse. Remembering the assistance which the Valide Sultan had given her she was determined to save the lives of the women of the harem of Hourshid Pasha. Through her intervention and diplomacy, she negotiated a deal to exchange them for Greek ecclesiastical leaders. Drawing her own sword in defence of the women, she warned the disaffected Greek soldiers that they could take the women’s jewellery but not harm them: “whoever attempts to do so will have to pass first over my dead body.”

When the Ottomans surrendered Palamidi castle in Nafplion in November 1822, and the first Greek government was established there, Bouboulina moved into a house in the town. She continued to finance the revolution, spending most of her fortune providing weapons and support for the families of revolutionaries. She married her daughter, Eleni, to Kolokotronis’ son Panos.

When the civil war began in 1824, Bouboulina supported Kolokotronis and the old executive of the Provisional Administration against the new executive. As a result, this heroine of the revolution was arrested twice and briefly imprisoned accused of witchcraft and heresy. Her house was confiscated and she was expelled from Nafplion. She returned to Spetses.

Yet despite her support for Kolokotronis, when his son Panos was killed in the second civil war, she would not allow her ally to choose another husband for her daughter. Rather than let him organise another marriage for a strategic alliance she took her daughter home demanding the return of her dowry (unsuccessfully).

A final drama unfolded when Bouboulina’s son Georgis Yiannouzas eloped with Eugenia Koutsi, whose family had betrothed her to a man she disliked. Bouboulina’s sympathies lay with the couple, but the Koutsis family felt their honour had been compromised, or perhaps sought to avoid an alliance with a now impoverished family. Assuming the couple were at Bouboulina’s house the Koutsis family arrived there. Bouboulina confronted them and was shot in the forehead as she stood on the balcony of her house.

Bouboulina’s house on Spetses where she was shot.

She was buried in the family vault in the church of Agios Ioannis, and in 1928 the casket with her bones was moved to the church of Agios Nikolaos. When the Spetses museum was established in 1939 the casket was moved again.

Casket and portrait of Bouboulina in the Spetses museum.

I did not think the casket looked big enough for a complete skeleton but those with more experience of these matters tell me otherwise.

How accurate is this story of Bouboulina? Honestly, I have no idea. The accounts I read were contradictory even over minor details. And it is impossible not to wonder if the philhellenes, who published many of the early accounts, were impartial when they recorded the exploits of the woman whom they revered.

Did she save the women of the harem of Tripolitsa from compassion or did realpolitik dictate that they were worth more alive than dead? Elsewhere in the town there was butchery and looting. It was the norm on both sides, unlikely that Bouboulina was an exception. After the fall of Nafplion she may well have used her position on the commission charged with redistribution of property for personal gain. That too was a norm.

It was more than two hundred years ago, and I like the romantic story of Bouboulina in the same way that I like the story of another maritime national hero, Francis Drake. That is not to be blind to uncomfortable evidence, but this is a blog, not an academic treatise. And I am certain that for the courageous Bouboulina the words on the revolutionary flag – Freedom or Death – were no empty rhetoric.

The Elegies and Odes of Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

By Gravedigger

On May 31, 2026

In Poets

Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was an instant success when it was first published in 1751 and ensured his popularity throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. Although he published only thirteen poems in English, he was offered, and turned down, the position of Poet Laureate in 1757.

He became known, along with Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair and Edward Young, as one of the Graveyard or Churchyard Poets. Their work, like the religious revival of the day, was essentially melancholy, characterised by meditations on mortality, lost innocence, disillusionment, fate. They were perfectly in tune with the Age of Sensibility, focusing on the transience of life, on emotions, nature, the individual, on loss, grief, and suffering. Even Gray’s Ode on the Spring quickly establishes itself as a memento mori, with the vibrant spring day he describes not a symbol of renewal but a reminder that life is short and soon succeeded by death.

If this sounds unduly bleak it is well to remember that life in the eighteenth century was precarious. Gray was the only one of twelve siblings to survive infancy. He had sent the Ode on Spring to his closest friend Richard West in a letter which was returned unopened for West had died at the age of only twenty-four.

Gray’s poetry is little read today although even in my parents’ generation primary school children still learned sections of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by rote and quite surprising people could unexpectedly declaim its stanzas. Even today persons who may be entirely unfamiliar with the poem unknowingly reproduce it for many of Gray’s memorable aphorisms have passed into common parlance.

The poem opens with a lyrical evocation of the English countryside and rural life, the painterly detail and mellifluous tones conjuring a tranquil scene:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Gray then reflects on the people buried in the churchyard. Celebrating the lives and work of the unknown villagers, he reminds the rich and powerful of the transience of their achievements, that their end will be the same:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Moreover, he reflects, given the opportunity the obscure villagers may have been capable of great things. He imagines

Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

But he ruefully acknowledges,

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Yet the very obscurity of the villagers also proscribed their crimes, for they were

Forbade to wade thro’ slaughter to a throne

but remained

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.

Contemplating the “frail memorial(s)” and “uncouth rhymes” on the rustic graves, Gray empathises with the universal yearning to be loved and remembered.

He imagines someone contemplating his own grave and inquiring about his life, and ends with his own epitaph, describing himself as an obscure and melancholy poet, hopeful of an afterlife. I find the epitaph less successful than the rest of the poem, and it did not exist in the earliest version which had instead reemphasised the inevitability of death, returning to the theme of its levelling influence, and advising resignation and stoicism:

But through the cool sequester’d vale of life

Pursue the silent tenour of thy doom.

Even for a graveyard enthusiast Gray can be overly morbid with his constant reminders that the legacy of day is night, and his emphasis on mortality and finality. Yet he did occasionally exhibit a lighter side. His tragi-comic Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, written on the request of Horace Walpole when his cat Selima died, is a witty description of the feline’s demise, a prey to unseemly desire:

A whisker first and then a claw,

With many an ardent wish,

She stretched in vain to reach the prize

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

…

Again she stretch’d, again she bent

…

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mewed to every watery god,

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred

…

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know one false step is ne’er retrieved,

…

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

And heedless hearts is lawful prize;

Nor all that glisters, gold.

Following his own death Thomas Gray was buried alongside his mother at Saint Giles, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in the churchyard made famous by his poem.

A plaque on the church wall advises of the location

In 1799 a five metre high and monumentally ugly memorial was erected in a field adjoining the churchyard. John Penn commissioned it to form part of the vista from his new mansion at Stoke Park although he claimed it was erected to honour Thomas Gray.

Inscription on the monument. Other panels bear quotations from the poems.

There is also an extraordinarily bombastic memorial in Westminster Abbey which I can never pass without a cringe of embarrassment. The verse on it reads

No more the Grecian Muse unrivall’d reigns

To Britain let the Nations homage pay.

She felt a Homer’s fire in Milton’s strains.

A Pindar’s rapture in the Lyre of Gray.

Gray, I suspect, would have cared little for these grandiose memorials, preferring his own modest grave in the churchyard. He might even have been tempted to respond to the overblown language with a few satiric verses.