Blackadder is "cancel culture"..................
Sir Benjamin, & Mr Richard won BAFTAs for creating Blackadder.
University graduates ,they are, of Oxford and University College,
They know stuff. Edmund Blackadder esq. i.e Butler to Prince George is
for the most part the real life stories of the triply knighted Groom of the Bedchamber Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH &c. A very well known Royal Navy war hero and
'a great favourite' of Prince George since 1803 until 1830.
Nagle used to be very famous but was "cancelled" by Rex Victoriana's
frowning upon Regency Rakes & the Catholic Irish.
And then cancelled again as a result of him being from Rebel Cork ,
heart & soul of the Fenian rebellion of 1919 to 1921.
The "creators" of Edmund Blackadder esq have used, unacknowledged,
the life of a great and brave man, an intelligent man, and an Irishman,
Cancelled now triply ,since OK-boomer 'radicals 'of the 'Greed Is Good" 1980s
erased him from the credits
image.png
Bryan Perrett,author of The Real Hornblower says he was really Captain James Gordon, the Scot & Prot of Aberdeenshire as the best candidate to fit the wide berm of years
that encompass the full anthology of Cecil Smith's naval hero Horatio,
Perrett missed the real target. : Captain Nagle on the Artois
I'm sure we'd agree, that truly no one individual could attain all of that compass
of herculean effort and laurel crowns that "Forester" lauds his protagonist "Hornblower" However, with respect to a much greater scholar than myself,
I would suggest the ideal candidate is rather: Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH Groom of His Majesty's Bedchamber. Nagle's record of service on the original Artois class frigate "HMS "Artois" from 1794 to 1797 stands as proof alone ,
If you also then add duties as Aide de Camp to the Regent, Commander in Chief at Guernsey Leith, Newfoundland, and the most importantly as Commander of the Sussex Sea Fencibles: He did it all and more,
Nagle starts his service at the First Falkland Crisis, He serves out of Gibraltar & Malta in the Med stations He served in the naval war with the rebel American Colonies & France in the North Atlantic. He famously captures Raccoon, and in turn is captured by the enemy, held as a PoW , which is followed by release on parole, He's involved in the 18th century's version of The Bay of Pigs ie invading France whilst the revolution proceeds, with the Quiberon Bay Expeditionary Forces , He, like all sailors of the era, was in the service during the great mutiny He was commander of the royal yacht,
Nagle started his early service as a midshipman from the minimum age of 13 years (like his nephew Archibald Nagle, in the van on Royal Sovereign @Trafalgar)
He makes Lieutenant at the minimum requisite age of 20.
Captain James Gordon is a slacker in comparison
Nagle's a real hornblower, and like the fictional Horatio actually
DID serve under Admiral Edward Pellew.
Nagle had been stationed in The Falklands,Jamaica, the Med, Home, Channel, and Leith Why Forester omits to credit Nagle is because of the embarrassing (for the 1920s and 1930s) propaganda issues regarding Nagle being Irish ,(possibly still a 'crypto-catholic although enrolled in a Masonic Lodge) at a time when the rump-UK
was dealing with the newly rebellious Irish Free State,,
And Nagle's involvement in action during America's Revolutionary War
Unlike Gordon who was given later commands of Revolutionaire and Raccoon ,
Nagle actually had previously captured both these vessels.
Nagle is feted by George III & George IV,
And he is already a member of the peerage through his uncle Edmund Burke,
Burke's mother Mary Nagle, and through the Nagle barons of Meath and Cork .
Nagle, like Hornblower , does in fact marry Mary ( or is it Maria?)Harnage Blackman. Nagle is on the attendance list for Lord Nelson's funeral ,
and a decade later he is also standing next to George IV at the opening
of Waterloo Bridge, whereas Gordon is somewhat AWOL .
Gordon wasn't even in Scotland when George IV visited famously in 1821,
whereas Nagle was aboard every vessel standing next to the King as his right hand man. Troughton-Smith, or the more US type-macho " C.Scott Forester" worked as an apparatchik for the UK's Ministry of Information in the wake of the Irish War of Independence, and IMHO , was still at work for the M o I whilst in the USA.
He's a propagandist, He has axes to grind, and skeletons to hide, and a hero to create which will rally The Pacific colonies of Australia & New Zealand, as well as
the West Indies, Canada, the US, and other anglophones in the Empire
upon which the sun was at last setting.
To establish your hero as an Irishman in 1920 to 39 is like making Che Guevara
the hero of Hemmingway's "Old Man and the Sea" It just wouldn't be diplomatically
and politically correct in that zeitgeist.
when the socialist & fascist bogeymen, Stalin,Franco,Mussolini, & Hitler
were on the prowl.
Nagle is excellently reviewed at various online sites:
More Than Nelson, Three Decks, Wikipedia &c under his own name,
and also under HMS Artois(1794), and under Christopher Nugent (Physician)
as well as under Edmund Burke MP.
He's easily found, , just somewhat "cancelled" by the culture
of the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties
Your candidate, and I don't deny he is a worthy fellow,
certainly isn't a boxer like Nagle,
nor is he recorded to be possessing a wit to amuse and instruct royalty,
the intelligentsia and aesthetes of the Regency,
Gordon, in contrast, has lived in the shadow of Nagle his whole life,
By an easy reckoning of the contemporaneous dates of Pellew & Nagle's
Royal Navy service records ,alone and in themselves,
quite obviously and chronologically excludes Gordon .
He's just too young.
Nagle is worth as many novels as Hornblower,
and that's even before he's Prince George's best friend,
equerry, aide-de-camp, butler, and erstwhile companion,
And by so being, he then serves as Ben Elton's & Richard Curtis' model
for Edmund Blackadder esq.(ie BA3).
image.png
Edmund Nagle, in conclusion is every bit,
like the protagonist of Robert Browning's narrative poem
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came",
a real hornblower !
image.png
an open letter to the creators of Blackadder
Dear Sir Ben Elton,& Mr Richard Curtis
I had an idea on how a resurrection of Blackadder might begin,
Something that would address the "wokes" need for 'PC" content
and still be amusing and entertainingly informative.
Imagine, for a moment, Sir Tony Robinson's Time-Team
meets Blackadder-Back & Forth.
And imitate Peter Carey's Ned Kelly tome with
The Real History of the Blackadder Gang
I did try publishing this online at blackadder's wiki-fandom
but was shut down in less than three days by the "cancel culture" fundamentalists ,aka forum moderators.
(those who put the "fun" in 'fundamentalism'):
It seems no one wants to hear the truth:
especially in relation to the core of my thesis that
Mr.Edmund Blackadder Esq.of Blackadder the 3rd
is in fact , historically, the similarly named
Sir Edmund Nagle RN KB KCB GCH &c
There are two fan club sites online and I've published many articles at blackadder-fanpop
In regard the ab-fab BBCTV show of the mid to late 1980s
I noted the obvious connections with the references to the plantation in Barbados,
and the irony, and the goldy too, in the admiralty inspired
butler's uniform that were made vogue by the admirals and equerries who were indeed , ipso facto, George Augustus Frederick's closest friends and 'great favourites'.,
and thus also were Grooms of the Bedchamber,
Especially the most famous of them all, Admiral Nagle.
As Nelson was dead and got- pickled 'our Edmund' was the next
most famous hero of the Revolutionary Wars in America and France, and two Napoleonic Wars.
His many involvements in all three major conflicts
afforded him by notoriety (as Beckham does with Will & Harry)
proximity to royalty
As Captain "Ned" Nagle he amused George the Third initially,
and then later his son George the Fourth.
But ,let's not lose the plot:
So, returning to Edmund Blackadder.
Apart from the admiral outfits ;the obvious reference to
the Plantation in Barbados "Amy and Amiability "
In Willie Wilberforce's 'PC' wake, any mention of the issue of slavery becomes just a joke, and a chance to say: "Ivor Bigun"..
In the same episode as Amy Hardwood, our Edmund encounters the highwayman called Shadow , who turns out to be not of the expected gender. Nagle himself is famous for relating his own anecdote on how he dealt with
a young lad with a pistol up on "Shooters Hill" (its near the Greenwich Observatory) when he was a passenger in the 'post-chaise', last printed in the New York Mirror, and in Poughkeepsie's Journals. It's worth reading.
The episodes of BA3 that troubled me the most, offered in the end, the greatest rewards The finale "Duel & Duality": Where Edmund fights Arthur Wellesley, and the other "ink and Incapability" where Edmund and Dr Samuel Johnson
go tete-e-tete over a Dictionary.and Blackadder's Butler memoir
A long standing family and territorial struggle existed
between the Duke of Wellington , Arthur Wellesley ( nee Wesley, nee Colley)
And Edmund "Ned" Nagle, butler to George Prince of Wales.,
It began not long after the Battle of the Boyne in1690. Even the date is in dispute
with Nagle calling it the 12th, and, the Colley-Wesley( later Wellesley)
calling it the 1st day of July.
That's important to note since the Gregorian calendar was not followed by the Protestant victors of the battle at the ford on that foggy summer's morning
130 years prior to the contest between them in King George's private rooms.
Before "Old Nosey" ( Wellington) became a famous military hero in India,
Spain, and in Belgium 1795 to 1815 he had tried his hand at politics.
As the resident rich kid of Church of Ireland parent's who very well ran the town of Trim , in Meath, Eire, Young Arthur was able to procure his way
into being the elected member of the Irish House of Commons for Trim.
As was the prerogative and inclination of his father and grandfather ,
who being on the side of the victorious "Williamites" at the Boyne ,
replaced the pre-existent proprietors and squires , the Irish Catholic
"Jacobines" families of Nagle and Tyrell.
These families having held these lands, and attended parliaments since they were granted to them by Hugh de Lacy, the leader of Henry the Second's invasion in 1171, i.e. 520years prior to the Boyne.And well attested to in the Song of Dermot and the Earl
To rub salt in the wound, if that hasn't festered enough over the previous 130 years,
Wellington further slight's Nagle, not 'our Edmund', in particular, but his family
in general by giving the credit to Major Hill, his second in command, at
his most successful triumph in India ( and by his own estimation : his great battle victory) being at Assaye, in late September 1803 in the official record.
Where in fact Major Hill was absent from the battle that day, as recorded by two other well deserving sources, and Hall's role
as "number two" to Arthur Wesley (sic) was assumed by Edmund's cousin Captain James Nagle.That official record
is still unamended
Influence in any privy council, general chiefs of staff,
or other ''war room" an ancient rivalry existed between the Army and Navy.
Whereas, Sir Edmund was at George's side as confidant, friend, and valet, Wellington was still only halfway across Spain,
when the real boy from the Munster's Blackwater was chums with "Prinny"..
Competition for the King's, or Prince Regent's preferment would have been a daily battle
Napoleon rightly called Wellington the "Sepoy General",
as he gained all his worthwhile experiences in India;
His previous engagements in Flanders and The Netherlands after his first exit from parliament were failures.
Somewhat like the original BA series( a bizarro-superman version of Richard the Third by Will Shakespeare.
This episode is very much taking the Dickens with its bizarro-Prince & the Pauper tropes.
And
Doctor Samuel Johnson,the lexicographer, and Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist,
are the accredited founders of the famous Literary Club, or just "The Club", that met to discuss, debate, perform, and converse upon all matters intellectual and aesthetic. It was a very exclusive club indeed, and if you didn't attend a regular meeting a member had to pay a forfeit fee to the secretary and bursar.
The details of the club's formation are obscure , but preeminence is given to Johnson & Reynolds . This however is a fiction created by the prejudices,
literary, cultural, and sectarian, of the past two hundred and fifty years.
A cursory view of the clubs formation names its original members 9 nine members as being Johnson, Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent,Oliver Goldsmith, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, & Anthony Charmier.
Whilst the concept of intellectual soirees, and assemblies of the intelligentsia are part and parcel of the history of civilisation since well before Plato's "academy" , the original inspiration for such a similar gathering of aesthetes and scholars was devised by Christopher Nugent the famous doctor from Bath,
and his son-in-law Edmund Burke ( and his son Richard Burke). These three were all influenced by their regular invitations to attend the castle home of the 'gentleman-piper' and patron of the bardic arts, Garrett Nagle.
Who unsurprisingly, along with Edmund Burke, are the co-ward/co-stepfathers
of Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle, Groom of the Bedchamber for George IV.
It is no coincidence then that apart from his own lexicographic masterpiece
"The English Dictionary" Johnson , as he is portrayed in Curtis & Elton's satire, lists Edmund's (under his nom de plume) intellectual and social discourse ,
the memoirs of a butler, as his second choice in the stratosphere of literature.
Harvard University's library has letters with Johnson's signature addressed to the aforementioned Garrett Nagle, so there is evidence the two men corresponded. And , in lieu of Garrett esq. leaving his castle in Cork to attend The Club, he has as his lieutenants his three very close kinsmen Nugent
and the two Burkes.
In conclusion, let me readdress the marriage to Amy Hardwood.
The TV show has George the Regent about to marry Amy Hardwood , supposedly the daughter of a rich industrialist, just for the money,
although she's portrayed by the stunning Miranda Richardson,
and is half the age Mary Harnage-Blackman was in 1797 when she married our hero , her second husband who she never called "Neddy".
(Not even King George IV got away with calling him "Neddy!")
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales , was induced
by the will of Parliament to marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick
in order for the government to agree to paying off many of his debts.
The marriage was an unmitigated disaster .
George arranged that at his coronation in 1821 that the Princess, rightfully now Queen-consort , be locked out of Westminster Abbey George's debts in toto were only recently fully paid off,
thanks always to the British taxpayer.
Edmund, the alter ego of Whacky George at times,
did marry an heiress, who was also the widow of a well known
West Indian Sugar Merchant.
Her name was not quite Amy Hardwood ( an obvious 'dick-joke')
but at least the equally recognizable Mary Hardman.
Mary, unlike Amy, truly delivered a plantation in Barbados ,
it is called 'Boarded Hall' gained through loaning her son ,
(from her first marriage), Sir George Harnage ( the regularly bankrupt Director of the Bank of England) , money to pay his debts ,Boarded Hall was mortgaged as a surety It is still there today in St George's Valley, the parish of Christchurch ,just east of Bridgetown and the statue of Bussa the slave rebel leader,of Barbados' "Black History"...
THE REAL HISTORICAL EDMUND
Historians will note that the character portrayed by
Rowan Atkinson is a composite of the equerry William Congreve and the Groom of the Bedchamber Edmund Nagle. Congreve , is in fact played by Robinson as the character Baldrick, assuming as he does a seat in the House of Commons via a 'rotten borough' whilst Edmund Nagle, is a renowned naval hero, being a "great favorite' of the prince of Wales(later King) . Nagle possessed plantations in Barbados called 'Boarded Hall", He had a long standing familial association and feud with the Duke of Wellington, and was also closely associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson's and the "Literary Club" he and Reynolds are incorrectly accredited with establishing, when in fact Johnson and Reynolds got the idea from Nagle's grandfather and stepfather Christopher Nugent & Edmund Burke et al . Who got the idea from Garrett Nagle , famously of Doneraile in County Cork, and the surrounding districts.
The creation of the character, and particulars of the "life of Edmund Blackadder esq." is NOT original. There are multiple published anecdotes from the 1820s through to the 1940s in English language newspapers. especially those with Blackadder is "cancel culture"..................
Sir Benjamin, & Mr Richard won BAFTAs for creating Blackadder.
University graduates ,they are, of Oxford and University College,
They know stuff. Edmund Blackadder esq. i.e Butler to Prince George is
for the most part the real life stories of the triply knighted Groom of the Bedchamber Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH &c. A very well known Royal Navy war hero and
'a great favourite' of Prince George since 1803 until 1830.
Nagle used to be very famous but was "cancelled" by Rex Victoriana's
frowning upon Regency Rakes & the Catholic Irish.
And then cancelled again as a result of him being from Rebel Cork ,
heart & soul of the Fenian rebellion of 1919 to 1921.
The "creators" of Edmund Blackadder esq have used, unacknowledged,
the life of a great and brave man, an intelligent man, and an Irishman,
Cancelled now triply ,since OK-boomer 'radicals 'of the 'Greed Is Good" 1980s
erased him from the credits
image.png
Bryan Perrett,author of The Real Hornblower says he was really Captain James Gordon, the Scot & Prot of Aberdeenshire as the best candidate to fit the wide berm of years
that encompass the full anthology of Cecil Smith's naval hero Horatio,
Perrett missed the real target. : Captain Nagle on the Artois
I'm sure we'd agree, that truly no one individual could attain all of that compass
of herculean effort and laurel crowns that "Forester" lauds his protagonist "Hornblower" However, with respect to a much greater scholar than myself,
I would suggest the ideal candidate is rather: Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH Groom of His Majesty's Bedchamber. Nagle's record of service on the original Artois class frigate "HMS "Artois" from 1794 to 1797 stands as proof alone ,
If you also then add duties as Aide de Camp to the Regent, Commander in Chief at Guernsey Leith, Newfoundland, and the most importantly as Commander of the Sussex Sea Fencibles: He did it all and more,
Nagle starts his service at the First Falkland Crisis, He serves out of Gibraltar & Malta in the Med stations He served in the naval war with the rebel American Colonies & France in the North Atlantic. He famously captures Raccoon, and in turn is captured by the enemy, held as a PoW , which is followed by release on parole, He's involved in the 18th century's version of The Bay of Pigs ie invading France whilst the revolution proceeds, with the Quiberon Bay Expeditionary Forces , He, like all sailors of the era, was in the service during the great mutiny He was commander of the royal yacht,
Nagle started his early service as a midshipman from the minimum age of 13 years (like his nephew Archibald Nagle, in the van on Royal Sovereign @Trafalgar)
He makes Lieutenant at the minimum requisite age of 20.
Captain James Gordon is a slacker in comparison
Nagle's a real hornblower, and like the fictional Horatio actually
DID serve under Admiral Edward Pellew.
Nagle had been stationed in The Falklands,Jamaica, the Med, Home, Channel, and Leith Why Forester omits to credit Nagle is because of the embarrassing (for the 1920s and 1930s) propaganda issues regarding Nagle being Irish ,(possibly still a 'crypto-catholic although enrolled in a Masonic Lodge) at a time when the rump-UK
was dealing with the newly rebellious Irish Free State,,
And Nagle's involvement in action during America's Revolutionary War
Unlike Gordon who was given later commands of Revolutionaire and Raccoon ,
Nagle actually had previously captured both these vessels.
Nagle is feted by George III & George IV,
And he is already a member of the peerage through his uncle Edmund Burke,
Burke's mother Mary Nagle, and through the Nagle barons of Meath and Cork .
Nagle, like Hornblower , does in fact marry Mary ( or is it Maria?)Harnage Blackman. Nagle is on the attendance list for Lord Nelson's funeral ,
and a decade later he is also standing next to George IV at the opening
of Waterloo Bridge, whereas Gordon is somewhat AWOL .
Gordon wasn't even in Scotland when George IV visited famously in 1821,
whereas Nagle was aboard every vessel standing next to the King as his right hand man. Troughton-Smith, or the more US type-macho " C.Scott Forester" worked as an apparatchik for the UK's Ministry of Information in the wake of the Irish War of Independence, and IMHO , was still at work for the M o I whilst in the USA.
He's a propagandist, He has axes to grind, and skeletons to hide, and a hero to create which will rally The Pacific colonies of Australia & New Zealand, as well as
the West Indies, Canada, the US, and other anglophones in the Empire
upon which the sun was at last setting.
To establish your hero as an Irishman in 1920 to 39 is like making Che Guevara
the hero of Hemmingway's "Old Man and the Sea" It just wouldn't be diplomatically
and politically correct in that zeitgeist.
when the socialist & fascist bogeymen, Stalin,Franco,Mussolini, & Hitler
were on the prowl.
Nagle is excellently reviewed at various online sites:
More Than Nelson, Three Decks, Wikipedia &c under his own name,
and also under HMS Artois(1794), and under Christopher Nugent (Physician)
as well as under Edmund Burke MP.
He's easily found, , just somewhat "cancelled" by the culture
of the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties
Your candidate, and I don't deny he is a worthy fellow,
certainly isn't a boxer like Nagle,
nor is he recorded to be possessing a wit to amuse and instruct royalty,
the intelligentsia and aesthetes of the Regency,
Gordon, in contrast, has lived in the shadow of Nagle his whole life,
By an easy reckoning of the contemporaneous dates of Pellew & Nagle's
Royal Navy service records ,alone and in themselves,
quite obviously and chronologically excludes Gordon .
He's just too young.
Nagle is worth as many novels as Hornblower,
and that's even before he's Prince George's best friend,
equerry, aide-de-camp, butler, and erstwhile companion,
And by so being, he then serves as Ben Elton's & Richard Curtis' model
for Edmund Blackadder esq.(ie BA3).
image.png
Edmund Nagle, in conclusion is every bit,
like the protagonist of Robert Browning's narrative poem
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came",
a real hornblower !
image.png
an open letter to the creators of Blackadder
Dear Sir Ben Elton,& Mr Richard Curtis
I had an idea on how a resurrection of Blackadder might begin,
Something that would address the "wokes" need for 'PC" content
and still be amusing and entertainingly informative.
Imagine, for a moment, Sir Tony Robinson's Time-Team
meets Blackadder-Back & Forth.
And imitate Peter Carey's Ned Kelly tome with
The Real History of the Blackadder Gang
I did try publishing this online at blackadder's wiki-fandom
but was shut down in less than three days by the "cancel culture" fundamentalists ,aka forum moderators.
(those who put the "fun" in 'fundamentalism'):
It seems no one wants to hear the truth:
especially in relation to the core of my thesis that
Mr.Edmund Blackadder Esq.of Blackadder the 3rd
is in fact , historically, the similarly named
Sir Edmund Nagle RN KB KCB GCH &c
There are two fan club sites online and I've published many articles at blackadder-fanpop
In regard the ab-fab BBCTV show of the mid to late 1980s
I noted the obvious connections with the references to the plantation in Barbados,
and the irony, and the goldy too, in the admiralty inspired
butler's uniform that were made vogue by the admirals and equerries who were indeed , ipso facto, George Augustus Frederick's closest friends and 'great favourites'.,
and thus also were Grooms of the Bedchamber,
Especially the most famous of them all, Admiral Nagle.
As Nelson was dead and got- pickled 'our Edmund' was the next
most famous hero of the Revolutionary Wars in America and France, and two Napoleonic Wars.
His many involvements in all three major conflicts
afforded him by notoriety (as Beckham does with Will & Harry)
proximity to royalty
As Captain "Ned" Nagle he amused George the Third initially,
and then later his son George the Fourth.
But ,let's not lose the plot:
So, returning to Edmund Blackadder.
Apart from the admiral outfits ;the obvious reference to
the Plantation in Barbados "Amy and Amiability "
In Willie Wilberforce's 'PC' wake, any mention of the issue of slavery becomes just a joke, and a chance to say: "Ivor Bigun"..
In the same episode as Amy Hardwood, our Edmund encounters the highwayman called Shadow , who turns out to be not of the expected gender. Nagle himself is famous for relating his own anecdote on how he dealt with
a young lad with a pistol up on "Shooters Hill" (its near the Greenwich Observatory) when he was a passenger in the 'post-chaise', last printed in the New York Mirror, and in Poughkeepsie's Journals. It's worth reading.
The episodes of BA3 that troubled me the most, offered in the end, the greatest rewards The finale "Duel & Duality": Where Edmund fights Arthur Wellesley, and the other "ink and Incapability" where Edmund and Dr Samuel Johnson
go tete-e-tete over a Dictionary.and Blackadder's Butler memoir
A long standing family and territorial struggle existed
between the Duke of Wellington , Arthur Wellesley ( nee Wesley, nee Colley)
And Edmund "Ned" Nagle, butler to George Prince of Wales.,
It began not long after the Battle of the Boyne in1690. Even the date is in dispute
with Nagle calling it the 12th, and, the Colley-Wesley( later Wellesley)
calling it the 1st day of July.
That's important to note since the Gregorian calendar was not followed by the Protestant victors of the battle at the ford on that foggy summer's morning
130 years prior to the contest between them in King George's private rooms.
Before "Old Nosey" ( Wellington) became a famous military hero in India,
Spain, and in Belgium 1795 to 1815 he had tried his hand at politics.
As the resident rich kid of Church of Ireland parent's who very well ran the town of Trim , in Meath, Eire, Young Arthur was able to procure his way
into being the elected member of the Irish House of Commons for Trim.
As was the prerogative and inclination of his father and grandfather ,
who being on the side of the victorious "Williamites" at the Boyne ,
replaced the pre-existent proprietors and squires , the Irish Catholic
"Jacobines" families of Nagle and Tyrell.
These families having held these lands, and attended parliaments since they were granted to them by Hugh de Lacy, the leader of Henry the Second's invasion in 1171, i.e. 520years prior to the Boyne.And well attested to in the Song of Dermot and the Earl
To rub salt in the wound, if that hasn't festered enough over the previous 130 years,
Wellington further slight's Nagle, not 'our Edmund', in particular, but his family
in general by giving the credit to Major Hill, his second in command, at
his most successful triumph in India ( and by his own estimation : his great battle victory) being at Assaye, in late September 1803 in the official record.
Where in fact Major Hill was absent from the battle that day, as recorded by two other well deserving sources, and Hall's role
as "number two" to Arthur Wesley (sic) was assumed by Edmund's cousin Captain James Nagle.That official record
is still unamended
Influence in any privy council, general chiefs of staff,
or other ''war room" an ancient rivalry existed between the Army and Navy.
Whereas, Sir Edmund was at George's side as confidant, friend, and valet, Wellington was still only halfway across Spain,
when the real boy from the Munster's Blackwater was chums with "Prinny"..
Competition for the King's, or Prince Regent's preferment would have been a daily battle
Napoleon rightly called Wellington the "Sepoy General",
as he gained all his worthwhile experiences in India;
His previous engagements in Flanders and The Netherlands after his first exit from parliament were failures.
Somewhat like the original BA series( a bizarro-superman version of Richard the Third by Will Shakespeare.
This episode is very much taking the Dickens with its bizarro-Prince & the Pauper tropes.
And
Doctor Samuel Johnson,the lexicographer, and Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist,
are the accredited founders of the famous Literary Club, or just "The Club", that met to discuss, debate, perform, and converse upon all matters intellectual and aesthetic. It was a very exclusive club indeed, and if you didn't attend a regular meeting a member had to pay a forfeit fee to the secretary and bursar.
The details of the club's formation are obscure , but preeminence is given to Johnson & Reynolds . This however is a fiction created by the prejudices,
literary, cultural, and sectarian, of the past two hundred and fifty years.
A cursory view of the clubs formation names its original members 9 nine members as being Johnson, Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent,Oliver Goldsmith, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, & Anthony Charmier.
Whilst the concept of intellectual soirees, and assemblies of the intelligentsia are part and parcel of the history of civilisation since well before Plato's "academy" , the original inspiration for such a similar gathering of aesthetes and scholars was devised by Christopher Nugent the famous doctor from Bath,
and his son-in-law Edmund Burke ( and his son Richard Burke). These three were all influenced by their regular invitations to attend the castle home of the 'gentleman-piper' and patron of the bardic arts, Garrett Nagle.
Who unsurprisingly, along with Edmund Burke, are the co-ward/co-stepfathers
of Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle, Groom of the Bedchamber for George IV.
It is no coincidence then that apart from his own lexicographic masterpiece
"The English Dictionary" Johnson , as he is portrayed in Curtis & Elton's satire, lists Edmund's (under his nom de plume) intellectual and social discourse ,
the memoirs of a butler, as his second choice in the stratosphere of literature.
Harvard University's library has letters with Johnson's signature addressed to the aforementioned Garrett Nagle, so there is evidence the two men corresponded. And , in lieu of Garrett esq. leaving his castle in Cork to attend The Club, he has as his lieutenants his three very close kinsmen Nugent
and the two Burkes.
In conclusion, let me readdress the marriage to Amy Hardwood.
The TV show has George the Regent about to marry Amy Hardwood , supposedly the daughter of a rich industrialist, just for the money,
although she's portrayed by the stunning Miranda Richardson,
and is half the age Mary Harnage-Blackman was in 1797 when she married our hero , her second husband who she never called "Neddy".
(Not even King George IV got away with calling him "Neddy!")
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales , was induced
by the will of Parliament to marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick
in order for the government to agree to paying off many of his debts.
The marriage was an unmitigated disaster .
George arranged that at his coronation in 1821 that the Princess, rightfully now Queen-consort , be locked out of Westminster Abbey George's debts in toto were only recently fully paid off,
thanks always to the British taxpayer.
Edmund, the alter ego of Whacky George at times,
did marry an heiress, who was also the widow of a well known
West Indian Sugar Merchant.
Her name was not quite Amy Hardwood ( an obvious 'dick-joke')
but at least the equally recognizable Mary Hardman.
Mary, unlike Amy, truly delivered a plantation in Barbados ,
it is called 'Boarded Hall' gained through loaning her son ,
(from her first marriage), Sir George Harnage ( the regularly bankrupt Director of the Bank of England) , money to pay his debts ,Boarded Hall was mortgaged as a surety It is still there today in St George's Valley, the parish of Christchurch ,just east of Bridgetown and the statue of Bussa the slave rebel leader,of Barbados' "Black History"...
THE REAL HISTORICAL EDMUND
Historians will note that the character portrayed by
Rowan Atkinson is a composite of the equerry William Congreve and the Groom of the Bedchamber Edmund Nagle. Congreve , is in fact played by Robinson as the character Baldrick, assuming as he does a seat in the House of Commons via a 'rotten borough' whilst Edmund Nagle, is a renowned naval hero, being a "great favorite' of the prince of Wales(later King) . Nagle possessed plantations in Barbados called 'Boarded Hall", He had a long standing familial association and feud with the Duke of Wellington, and was also closely associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson's and the "Literary Club" he and Reynolds are incorrectly accredited with establishing, when in fact Johnson and Reynolds got the idea from Nagle's grandfather and stepfather Christopher Nugent & Edmund Burke et al . Who got the idea from Garrett Nagle , famously of Doneraile in County Cork, and the surrounding districts.
The creation of the character, and particulars of the "life of Edmund Blackadder esq." is NOT original. There are multiple published anecdotes from the 1820s through to the 1940s in English language newspapers. especially those with an Irish Catholic diaspora like New York and Sydney.. Anecdotes that portray Nagle capturing a youthful Highwayman.And rescuing a shipmate from the jaws of a shark
Nagle is also noted as amusing the Prince's father George III with his Hibernian jokes and stories of naval warfare during' the great age of sail'..
In anecdotal reports contemporary to the late Regency Period , Nagle is often described as possessing a curt, blunt, and no-nonsense personality and possessed a rollicking wit that enamored him to the Prince and to both the Georges III & IV..
image.png
Sir E. Nagle ( pronounced like Neagle)
dances with the Bear whilst Nero fiddles as Rome burnsan Irish Catholic diaspora like New York and Sydney.. Anecdotes that portray Nagle capturing a youthful Highwayman.And rescuing a shipmate from the jaws of a shark
Nagle is also noted as amusing the Prince's father George III with his Hibernian jokes and stories of naval warfare during' the great age of sail'..
In anecdotal reports contemporary to the late Regency Period , Nagle is often described as possessing a curt, blunt, and no-nonsense personality and possessed a rollicking wit that enamored him to the Prince and to both the Georges III & IV..
image.png
Sir E. Nagle ( pronounced like Neagle)
dances with the Bear whilst Nero fiddles as Rome burns
Sir Benjamin, & Mr Richard won BAFTAs for creating Blackadder.
University graduates ,they are, of Oxford and University College,
They know stuff. Edmund Blackadder esq. i.e Butler to Prince George is
for the most part the real life stories of the triply knighted Groom of the Bedchamber Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH &c. A very well known Royal Navy war hero and
'a great favourite' of Prince George since 1803 until 1830.
Nagle used to be very famous but was "cancelled" by Rex Victoriana's
frowning upon Regency Rakes & the Catholic Irish.
And then cancelled again as a result of him being from Rebel Cork ,
heart & soul of the Fenian rebellion of 1919 to 1921.
The "creators" of Edmund Blackadder esq have used, unacknowledged,
the life of a great and brave man, an intelligent man, and an Irishman,
Cancelled now triply ,since OK-boomer 'radicals 'of the 'Greed Is Good" 1980s
erased him from the credits
image.png
Bryan Perrett,author of The Real Hornblower says he was really Captain James Gordon, the Scot & Prot of Aberdeenshire as the best candidate to fit the wide berm of years
that encompass the full anthology of Cecil Smith's naval hero Horatio,
Perrett missed the real target. : Captain Nagle on the Artois
I'm sure we'd agree, that truly no one individual could attain all of that compass
of herculean effort and laurel crowns that "Forester" lauds his protagonist "Hornblower" However, with respect to a much greater scholar than myself,
I would suggest the ideal candidate is rather: Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH Groom of His Majesty's Bedchamber. Nagle's record of service on the original Artois class frigate "HMS "Artois" from 1794 to 1797 stands as proof alone ,
If you also then add duties as Aide de Camp to the Regent, Commander in Chief at Guernsey Leith, Newfoundland, and the most importantly as Commander of the Sussex Sea Fencibles: He did it all and more,
Nagle starts his service at the First Falkland Crisis, He serves out of Gibraltar & Malta in the Med stations He served in the naval war with the rebel American Colonies & France in the North Atlantic. He famously captures Raccoon, and in turn is captured by the enemy, held as a PoW , which is followed by release on parole, He's involved in the 18th century's version of The Bay of Pigs ie invading France whilst the revolution proceeds, with the Quiberon Bay Expeditionary Forces , He, like all sailors of the era, was in the service during the great mutiny He was commander of the royal yacht,
Nagle started his early service as a midshipman from the minimum age of 13 years (like his nephew Archibald Nagle, in the van on Royal Sovereign @Trafalgar)
He makes Lieutenant at the minimum requisite age of 20.
Captain James Gordon is a slacker in comparison
Nagle's a real hornblower, and like the fictional Horatio actually
DID serve under Admiral Edward Pellew.
Nagle had been stationed in The Falklands,Jamaica, the Med, Home, Channel, and Leith Why Forester omits to credit Nagle is because of the embarrassing (for the 1920s and 1930s) propaganda issues regarding Nagle being Irish ,(possibly still a 'crypto-catholic although enrolled in a Masonic Lodge) at a time when the rump-UK
was dealing with the newly rebellious Irish Free State,,
And Nagle's involvement in action during America's Revolutionary War
Unlike Gordon who was given later commands of Revolutionaire and Raccoon ,
Nagle actually had previously captured both these vessels.
Nagle is feted by George III & George IV,
And he is already a member of the peerage through his uncle Edmund Burke,
Burke's mother Mary Nagle, and through the Nagle barons of Meath and Cork .
Nagle, like Hornblower , does in fact marry Mary ( or is it Maria?)Harnage Blackman. Nagle is on the attendance list for Lord Nelson's funeral ,
and a decade later he is also standing next to George IV at the opening
of Waterloo Bridge, whereas Gordon is somewhat AWOL .
Gordon wasn't even in Scotland when George IV visited famously in 1821,
whereas Nagle was aboard every vessel standing next to the King as his right hand man. Troughton-Smith, or the more US type-macho " C.Scott Forester" worked as an apparatchik for the UK's Ministry of Information in the wake of the Irish War of Independence, and IMHO , was still at work for the M o I whilst in the USA.
He's a propagandist, He has axes to grind, and skeletons to hide, and a hero to create which will rally The Pacific colonies of Australia & New Zealand, as well as
the West Indies, Canada, the US, and other anglophones in the Empire
upon which the sun was at last setting.
To establish your hero as an Irishman in 1920 to 39 is like making Che Guevara
the hero of Hemmingway's "Old Man and the Sea" It just wouldn't be diplomatically
and politically correct in that zeitgeist.
when the socialist & fascist bogeymen, Stalin,Franco,Mussolini, & Hitler
were on the prowl.
Nagle is excellently reviewed at various online sites:
More Than Nelson, Three Decks, Wikipedia &c under his own name,
and also under HMS Artois(1794), and under Christopher Nugent (Physician)
as well as under Edmund Burke MP.
He's easily found, , just somewhat "cancelled" by the culture
of the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties
Your candidate, and I don't deny he is a worthy fellow,
certainly isn't a boxer like Nagle,
nor is he recorded to be possessing a wit to amuse and instruct royalty,
the intelligentsia and aesthetes of the Regency,
Gordon, in contrast, has lived in the shadow of Nagle his whole life,
By an easy reckoning of the contemporaneous dates of Pellew & Nagle's
Royal Navy service records ,alone and in themselves,
quite obviously and chronologically excludes Gordon .
He's just too young.
Nagle is worth as many novels as Hornblower,
and that's even before he's Prince George's best friend,
equerry, aide-de-camp, butler, and erstwhile companion,
And by so being, he then serves as Ben Elton's & Richard Curtis' model
for Edmund Blackadder esq.(ie BA3).
image.png
Edmund Nagle, in conclusion is every bit,
like the protagonist of Robert Browning's narrative poem
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came",
a real hornblower !
image.png
an open letter to the creators of Blackadder
Dear Sir Ben Elton,& Mr Richard Curtis
I had an idea on how a resurrection of Blackadder might begin,
Something that would address the "wokes" need for 'PC" content
and still be amusing and entertainingly informative.
Imagine, for a moment, Sir Tony Robinson's Time-Team
meets Blackadder-Back & Forth.
And imitate Peter Carey's Ned Kelly tome with
The Real History of the Blackadder Gang
I did try publishing this online at blackadder's wiki-fandom
but was shut down in less than three days by the "cancel culture" fundamentalists ,aka forum moderators.
(those who put the "fun" in 'fundamentalism'):
It seems no one wants to hear the truth:
especially in relation to the core of my thesis that
Mr.Edmund Blackadder Esq.of Blackadder the 3rd
is in fact , historically, the similarly named
Sir Edmund Nagle RN KB KCB GCH &c
There are two fan club sites online and I've published many articles at blackadder-fanpop
In regard the ab-fab BBCTV show of the mid to late 1980s
I noted the obvious connections with the references to the plantation in Barbados,
and the irony, and the goldy too, in the admiralty inspired
butler's uniform that were made vogue by the admirals and equerries who were indeed , ipso facto, George Augustus Frederick's closest friends and 'great favourites'.,
and thus also were Grooms of the Bedchamber,
Especially the most famous of them all, Admiral Nagle.
As Nelson was dead and got- pickled 'our Edmund' was the next
most famous hero of the Revolutionary Wars in America and France, and two Napoleonic Wars.
His many involvements in all three major conflicts
afforded him by notoriety (as Beckham does with Will & Harry)
proximity to royalty
As Captain "Ned" Nagle he amused George the Third initially,
and then later his son George the Fourth.
But ,let's not lose the plot:
So, returning to Edmund Blackadder.
Apart from the admiral outfits ;the obvious reference to
the Plantation in Barbados "Amy and Amiability "
In Willie Wilberforce's 'PC' wake, any mention of the issue of slavery becomes just a joke, and a chance to say: "Ivor Bigun"..
In the same episode as Amy Hardwood, our Edmund encounters the highwayman called Shadow , who turns out to be not of the expected gender. Nagle himself is famous for relating his own anecdote on how he dealt with
a young lad with a pistol up on "Shooters Hill" (its near the Greenwich Observatory) when he was a passenger in the 'post-chaise', last printed in the New York Mirror, and in Poughkeepsie's Journals. It's worth reading.
The episodes of BA3 that troubled me the most, offered in the end, the greatest rewards The finale "Duel & Duality": Where Edmund fights Arthur Wellesley, and the other "ink and Incapability" where Edmund and Dr Samuel Johnson
go tete-e-tete over a Dictionary.and Blackadder's Butler memoir
A long standing family and territorial struggle existed
between the Duke of Wellington , Arthur Wellesley ( nee Wesley, nee Colley)
And Edmund "Ned" Nagle, butler to George Prince of Wales.,
It began not long after the Battle of the Boyne in1690. Even the date is in dispute
with Nagle calling it the 12th, and, the Colley-Wesley( later Wellesley)
calling it the 1st day of July.
That's important to note since the Gregorian calendar was not followed by the Protestant victors of the battle at the ford on that foggy summer's morning
130 years prior to the contest between them in King George's private rooms.
Before "Old Nosey" ( Wellington) became a famous military hero in India,
Spain, and in Belgium 1795 to 1815 he had tried his hand at politics.
As the resident rich kid of Church of Ireland parent's who very well ran the town of Trim , in Meath, Eire, Young Arthur was able to procure his way
into being the elected member of the Irish House of Commons for Trim.
As was the prerogative and inclination of his father and grandfather ,
who being on the side of the victorious "Williamites" at the Boyne ,
replaced the pre-existent proprietors and squires , the Irish Catholic
"Jacobines" families of Nagle and Tyrell.
These families having held these lands, and attended parliaments since they were granted to them by Hugh de Lacy, the leader of Henry the Second's invasion in 1171, i.e. 520years prior to the Boyne.And well attested to in the Song of Dermot and the Earl
To rub salt in the wound, if that hasn't festered enough over the previous 130 years,
Wellington further slight's Nagle, not 'our Edmund', in particular, but his family
in general by giving the credit to Major Hill, his second in command, at
his most successful triumph in India ( and by his own estimation : his great battle victory) being at Assaye, in late September 1803 in the official record.
Where in fact Major Hill was absent from the battle that day, as recorded by two other well deserving sources, and Hall's role
as "number two" to Arthur Wesley (sic) was assumed by Edmund's cousin Captain James Nagle.That official record
is still unamended
Influence in any privy council, general chiefs of staff,
or other ''war room" an ancient rivalry existed between the Army and Navy.
Whereas, Sir Edmund was at George's side as confidant, friend, and valet, Wellington was still only halfway across Spain,
when the real boy from the Munster's Blackwater was chums with "Prinny"..
Competition for the King's, or Prince Regent's preferment would have been a daily battle
Napoleon rightly called Wellington the "Sepoy General",
as he gained all his worthwhile experiences in India;
His previous engagements in Flanders and The Netherlands after his first exit from parliament were failures.
Somewhat like the original BA series( a bizarro-superman version of Richard the Third by Will Shakespeare.
This episode is very much taking the Dickens with its bizarro-Prince & the Pauper tropes.
And
Doctor Samuel Johnson,the lexicographer, and Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist,
are the accredited founders of the famous Literary Club, or just "The Club", that met to discuss, debate, perform, and converse upon all matters intellectual and aesthetic. It was a very exclusive club indeed, and if you didn't attend a regular meeting a member had to pay a forfeit fee to the secretary and bursar.
The details of the club's formation are obscure , but preeminence is given to Johnson & Reynolds . This however is a fiction created by the prejudices,
literary, cultural, and sectarian, of the past two hundred and fifty years.
A cursory view of the clubs formation names its original members 9 nine members as being Johnson, Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent,Oliver Goldsmith, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, & Anthony Charmier.
Whilst the concept of intellectual soirees, and assemblies of the intelligentsia are part and parcel of the history of civilisation since well before Plato's "academy" , the original inspiration for such a similar gathering of aesthetes and scholars was devised by Christopher Nugent the famous doctor from Bath,
and his son-in-law Edmund Burke ( and his son Richard Burke). These three were all influenced by their regular invitations to attend the castle home of the 'gentleman-piper' and patron of the bardic arts, Garrett Nagle.
Who unsurprisingly, along with Edmund Burke, are the co-ward/co-stepfathers
of Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle, Groom of the Bedchamber for George IV.
It is no coincidence then that apart from his own lexicographic masterpiece
"The English Dictionary" Johnson , as he is portrayed in Curtis & Elton's satire, lists Edmund's (under his nom de plume) intellectual and social discourse ,
the memoirs of a butler, as his second choice in the stratosphere of literature.
Harvard University's library has letters with Johnson's signature addressed to the aforementioned Garrett Nagle, so there is evidence the two men corresponded. And , in lieu of Garrett esq. leaving his castle in Cork to attend The Club, he has as his lieutenants his three very close kinsmen Nugent
and the two Burkes.
In conclusion, let me readdress the marriage to Amy Hardwood.
The TV show has George the Regent about to marry Amy Hardwood , supposedly the daughter of a rich industrialist, just for the money,
although she's portrayed by the stunning Miranda Richardson,
and is half the age Mary Harnage-Blackman was in 1797 when she married our hero , her second husband who she never called "Neddy".
(Not even King George IV got away with calling him "Neddy!")
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales , was induced
by the will of Parliament to marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick
in order for the government to agree to paying off many of his debts.
The marriage was an unmitigated disaster .
George arranged that at his coronation in 1821 that the Princess, rightfully now Queen-consort , be locked out of Westminster Abbey George's debts in toto were only recently fully paid off,
thanks always to the British taxpayer.
Edmund, the alter ego of Whacky George at times,
did marry an heiress, who was also the widow of a well known
West Indian Sugar Merchant.
Her name was not quite Amy Hardwood ( an obvious 'dick-joke')
but at least the equally recognizable Mary Hardman.
Mary, unlike Amy, truly delivered a plantation in Barbados ,
it is called 'Boarded Hall' gained through loaning her son ,
(from her first marriage), Sir George Harnage ( the regularly bankrupt Director of the Bank of England) , money to pay his debts ,Boarded Hall was mortgaged as a surety It is still there today in St George's Valley, the parish of Christchurch ,just east of Bridgetown and the statue of Bussa the slave rebel leader,of Barbados' "Black History"...
THE REAL HISTORICAL EDMUND
Historians will note that the character portrayed by
Rowan Atkinson is a composite of the equerry William Congreve and the Groom of the Bedchamber Edmund Nagle. Congreve , is in fact played by Robinson as the character Baldrick, assuming as he does a seat in the House of Commons via a 'rotten borough' whilst Edmund Nagle, is a renowned naval hero, being a "great favorite' of the prince of Wales(later King) . Nagle possessed plantations in Barbados called 'Boarded Hall", He had a long standing familial association and feud with the Duke of Wellington, and was also closely associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson's and the "Literary Club" he and Reynolds are incorrectly accredited with establishing, when in fact Johnson and Reynolds got the idea from Nagle's grandfather and stepfather Christopher Nugent & Edmund Burke et al . Who got the idea from Garrett Nagle , famously of Doneraile in County Cork, and the surrounding districts.
The creation of the character, and particulars of the "life of Edmund Blackadder esq." is NOT original. There are multiple published anecdotes from the 1820s through to the 1940s in English language newspapers. especially those with Blackadder is "cancel culture"..................
Sir Benjamin, & Mr Richard won BAFTAs for creating Blackadder.
University graduates ,they are, of Oxford and University College,
They know stuff. Edmund Blackadder esq. i.e Butler to Prince George is
for the most part the real life stories of the triply knighted Groom of the Bedchamber Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH &c. A very well known Royal Navy war hero and
'a great favourite' of Prince George since 1803 until 1830.
Nagle used to be very famous but was "cancelled" by Rex Victoriana's
frowning upon Regency Rakes & the Catholic Irish.
And then cancelled again as a result of him being from Rebel Cork ,
heart & soul of the Fenian rebellion of 1919 to 1921.
The "creators" of Edmund Blackadder esq have used, unacknowledged,
the life of a great and brave man, an intelligent man, and an Irishman,
Cancelled now triply ,since OK-boomer 'radicals 'of the 'Greed Is Good" 1980s
erased him from the credits
image.png
Bryan Perrett,author of The Real Hornblower says he was really Captain James Gordon, the Scot & Prot of Aberdeenshire as the best candidate to fit the wide berm of years
that encompass the full anthology of Cecil Smith's naval hero Horatio,
Perrett missed the real target. : Captain Nagle on the Artois
I'm sure we'd agree, that truly no one individual could attain all of that compass
of herculean effort and laurel crowns that "Forester" lauds his protagonist "Hornblower" However, with respect to a much greater scholar than myself,
I would suggest the ideal candidate is rather: Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle KB KCB GCH Groom of His Majesty's Bedchamber. Nagle's record of service on the original Artois class frigate "HMS "Artois" from 1794 to 1797 stands as proof alone ,
If you also then add duties as Aide de Camp to the Regent, Commander in Chief at Guernsey Leith, Newfoundland, and the most importantly as Commander of the Sussex Sea Fencibles: He did it all and more,
Nagle starts his service at the First Falkland Crisis, He serves out of Gibraltar & Malta in the Med stations He served in the naval war with the rebel American Colonies & France in the North Atlantic. He famously captures Raccoon, and in turn is captured by the enemy, held as a PoW , which is followed by release on parole, He's involved in the 18th century's version of The Bay of Pigs ie invading France whilst the revolution proceeds, with the Quiberon Bay Expeditionary Forces , He, like all sailors of the era, was in the service during the great mutiny He was commander of the royal yacht,
Nagle started his early service as a midshipman from the minimum age of 13 years (like his nephew Archibald Nagle, in the van on Royal Sovereign @Trafalgar)
He makes Lieutenant at the minimum requisite age of 20.
Captain James Gordon is a slacker in comparison
Nagle's a real hornblower, and like the fictional Horatio actually
DID serve under Admiral Edward Pellew.
Nagle had been stationed in The Falklands,Jamaica, the Med, Home, Channel, and Leith Why Forester omits to credit Nagle is because of the embarrassing (for the 1920s and 1930s) propaganda issues regarding Nagle being Irish ,(possibly still a 'crypto-catholic although enrolled in a Masonic Lodge) at a time when the rump-UK
was dealing with the newly rebellious Irish Free State,,
And Nagle's involvement in action during America's Revolutionary War
Unlike Gordon who was given later commands of Revolutionaire and Raccoon ,
Nagle actually had previously captured both these vessels.
Nagle is feted by George III & George IV,
And he is already a member of the peerage through his uncle Edmund Burke,
Burke's mother Mary Nagle, and through the Nagle barons of Meath and Cork .
Nagle, like Hornblower , does in fact marry Mary ( or is it Maria?)Harnage Blackman. Nagle is on the attendance list for Lord Nelson's funeral ,
and a decade later he is also standing next to George IV at the opening
of Waterloo Bridge, whereas Gordon is somewhat AWOL .
Gordon wasn't even in Scotland when George IV visited famously in 1821,
whereas Nagle was aboard every vessel standing next to the King as his right hand man. Troughton-Smith, or the more US type-macho " C.Scott Forester" worked as an apparatchik for the UK's Ministry of Information in the wake of the Irish War of Independence, and IMHO , was still at work for the M o I whilst in the USA.
He's a propagandist, He has axes to grind, and skeletons to hide, and a hero to create which will rally The Pacific colonies of Australia & New Zealand, as well as
the West Indies, Canada, the US, and other anglophones in the Empire
upon which the sun was at last setting.
To establish your hero as an Irishman in 1920 to 39 is like making Che Guevara
the hero of Hemmingway's "Old Man and the Sea" It just wouldn't be diplomatically
and politically correct in that zeitgeist.
when the socialist & fascist bogeymen, Stalin,Franco,Mussolini, & Hitler
were on the prowl.
Nagle is excellently reviewed at various online sites:
More Than Nelson, Three Decks, Wikipedia &c under his own name,
and also under HMS Artois(1794), and under Christopher Nugent (Physician)
as well as under Edmund Burke MP.
He's easily found, , just somewhat "cancelled" by the culture
of the Roaring Twenties and Depressing Thirties
Your candidate, and I don't deny he is a worthy fellow,
certainly isn't a boxer like Nagle,
nor is he recorded to be possessing a wit to amuse and instruct royalty,
the intelligentsia and aesthetes of the Regency,
Gordon, in contrast, has lived in the shadow of Nagle his whole life,
By an easy reckoning of the contemporaneous dates of Pellew & Nagle's
Royal Navy service records ,alone and in themselves,
quite obviously and chronologically excludes Gordon .
He's just too young.
Nagle is worth as many novels as Hornblower,
and that's even before he's Prince George's best friend,
equerry, aide-de-camp, butler, and erstwhile companion,
And by so being, he then serves as Ben Elton's & Richard Curtis' model
for Edmund Blackadder esq.(ie BA3).
image.png
Edmund Nagle, in conclusion is every bit,
like the protagonist of Robert Browning's narrative poem
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came",
a real hornblower !
image.png
an open letter to the creators of Blackadder
Dear Sir Ben Elton,& Mr Richard Curtis
I had an idea on how a resurrection of Blackadder might begin,
Something that would address the "wokes" need for 'PC" content
and still be amusing and entertainingly informative.
Imagine, for a moment, Sir Tony Robinson's Time-Team
meets Blackadder-Back & Forth.
And imitate Peter Carey's Ned Kelly tome with
The Real History of the Blackadder Gang
I did try publishing this online at blackadder's wiki-fandom
but was shut down in less than three days by the "cancel culture" fundamentalists ,aka forum moderators.
(those who put the "fun" in 'fundamentalism'):
It seems no one wants to hear the truth:
especially in relation to the core of my thesis that
Mr.Edmund Blackadder Esq.of Blackadder the 3rd
is in fact , historically, the similarly named
Sir Edmund Nagle RN KB KCB GCH &c
There are two fan club sites online and I've published many articles at blackadder-fanpop
In regard the ab-fab BBCTV show of the mid to late 1980s
I noted the obvious connections with the references to the plantation in Barbados,
and the irony, and the goldy too, in the admiralty inspired
butler's uniform that were made vogue by the admirals and equerries who were indeed , ipso facto, George Augustus Frederick's closest friends and 'great favourites'.,
and thus also were Grooms of the Bedchamber,
Especially the most famous of them all, Admiral Nagle.
As Nelson was dead and got- pickled 'our Edmund' was the next
most famous hero of the Revolutionary Wars in America and France, and two Napoleonic Wars.
His many involvements in all three major conflicts
afforded him by notoriety (as Beckham does with Will & Harry)
proximity to royalty
As Captain "Ned" Nagle he amused George the Third initially,
and then later his son George the Fourth.
But ,let's not lose the plot:
So, returning to Edmund Blackadder.
Apart from the admiral outfits ;the obvious reference to
the Plantation in Barbados "Amy and Amiability "
In Willie Wilberforce's 'PC' wake, any mention of the issue of slavery becomes just a joke, and a chance to say: "Ivor Bigun"..
In the same episode as Amy Hardwood, our Edmund encounters the highwayman called Shadow , who turns out to be not of the expected gender. Nagle himself is famous for relating his own anecdote on how he dealt with
a young lad with a pistol up on "Shooters Hill" (its near the Greenwich Observatory) when he was a passenger in the 'post-chaise', last printed in the New York Mirror, and in Poughkeepsie's Journals. It's worth reading.
The episodes of BA3 that troubled me the most, offered in the end, the greatest rewards The finale "Duel & Duality": Where Edmund fights Arthur Wellesley, and the other "ink and Incapability" where Edmund and Dr Samuel Johnson
go tete-e-tete over a Dictionary.and Blackadder's Butler memoir
A long standing family and territorial struggle existed
between the Duke of Wellington , Arthur Wellesley ( nee Wesley, nee Colley)
And Edmund "Ned" Nagle, butler to George Prince of Wales.,
It began not long after the Battle of the Boyne in1690. Even the date is in dispute
with Nagle calling it the 12th, and, the Colley-Wesley( later Wellesley)
calling it the 1st day of July.
That's important to note since the Gregorian calendar was not followed by the Protestant victors of the battle at the ford on that foggy summer's morning
130 years prior to the contest between them in King George's private rooms.
Before "Old Nosey" ( Wellington) became a famous military hero in India,
Spain, and in Belgium 1795 to 1815 he had tried his hand at politics.
As the resident rich kid of Church of Ireland parent's who very well ran the town of Trim , in Meath, Eire, Young Arthur was able to procure his way
into being the elected member of the Irish House of Commons for Trim.
As was the prerogative and inclination of his father and grandfather ,
who being on the side of the victorious "Williamites" at the Boyne ,
replaced the pre-existent proprietors and squires , the Irish Catholic
"Jacobines" families of Nagle and Tyrell.
These families having held these lands, and attended parliaments since they were granted to them by Hugh de Lacy, the leader of Henry the Second's invasion in 1171, i.e. 520years prior to the Boyne.And well attested to in the Song of Dermot and the Earl
To rub salt in the wound, if that hasn't festered enough over the previous 130 years,
Wellington further slight's Nagle, not 'our Edmund', in particular, but his family
in general by giving the credit to Major Hill, his second in command, at
his most successful triumph in India ( and by his own estimation : his great battle victory) being at Assaye, in late September 1803 in the official record.
Where in fact Major Hill was absent from the battle that day, as recorded by two other well deserving sources, and Hall's role
as "number two" to Arthur Wesley (sic) was assumed by Edmund's cousin Captain James Nagle.That official record
is still unamended
Influence in any privy council, general chiefs of staff,
or other ''war room" an ancient rivalry existed between the Army and Navy.
Whereas, Sir Edmund was at George's side as confidant, friend, and valet, Wellington was still only halfway across Spain,
when the real boy from the Munster's Blackwater was chums with "Prinny"..
Competition for the King's, or Prince Regent's preferment would have been a daily battle
Napoleon rightly called Wellington the "Sepoy General",
as he gained all his worthwhile experiences in India;
His previous engagements in Flanders and The Netherlands after his first exit from parliament were failures.
Somewhat like the original BA series( a bizarro-superman version of Richard the Third by Will Shakespeare.
This episode is very much taking the Dickens with its bizarro-Prince & the Pauper tropes.
And
Doctor Samuel Johnson,the lexicographer, and Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist,
are the accredited founders of the famous Literary Club, or just "The Club", that met to discuss, debate, perform, and converse upon all matters intellectual and aesthetic. It was a very exclusive club indeed, and if you didn't attend a regular meeting a member had to pay a forfeit fee to the secretary and bursar.
The details of the club's formation are obscure , but preeminence is given to Johnson & Reynolds . This however is a fiction created by the prejudices,
literary, cultural, and sectarian, of the past two hundred and fifty years.
A cursory view of the clubs formation names its original members 9 nine members as being Johnson, Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent,Oliver Goldsmith, Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, & Anthony Charmier.
Whilst the concept of intellectual soirees, and assemblies of the intelligentsia are part and parcel of the history of civilisation since well before Plato's "academy" , the original inspiration for such a similar gathering of aesthetes and scholars was devised by Christopher Nugent the famous doctor from Bath,
and his son-in-law Edmund Burke ( and his son Richard Burke). These three were all influenced by their regular invitations to attend the castle home of the 'gentleman-piper' and patron of the bardic arts, Garrett Nagle.
Who unsurprisingly, along with Edmund Burke, are the co-ward/co-stepfathers
of Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle, Groom of the Bedchamber for George IV.
It is no coincidence then that apart from his own lexicographic masterpiece
"The English Dictionary" Johnson , as he is portrayed in Curtis & Elton's satire, lists Edmund's (under his nom de plume) intellectual and social discourse ,
the memoirs of a butler, as his second choice in the stratosphere of literature.
Harvard University's library has letters with Johnson's signature addressed to the aforementioned Garrett Nagle, so there is evidence the two men corresponded. And , in lieu of Garrett esq. leaving his castle in Cork to attend The Club, he has as his lieutenants his three very close kinsmen Nugent
and the two Burkes.
In conclusion, let me readdress the marriage to Amy Hardwood.
The TV show has George the Regent about to marry Amy Hardwood , supposedly the daughter of a rich industrialist, just for the money,
although she's portrayed by the stunning Miranda Richardson,
and is half the age Mary Harnage-Blackman was in 1797 when she married our hero , her second husband who she never called "Neddy".
(Not even King George IV got away with calling him "Neddy!")
George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales , was induced
by the will of Parliament to marry his cousin Caroline of Brunswick
in order for the government to agree to paying off many of his debts.
The marriage was an unmitigated disaster .
George arranged that at his coronation in 1821 that the Princess, rightfully now Queen-consort , be locked out of Westminster Abbey George's debts in toto were only recently fully paid off,
thanks always to the British taxpayer.
Edmund, the alter ego of Whacky George at times,
did marry an heiress, who was also the widow of a well known
West Indian Sugar Merchant.
Her name was not quite Amy Hardwood ( an obvious 'dick-joke')
but at least the equally recognizable Mary Hardman.
Mary, unlike Amy, truly delivered a plantation in Barbados ,
it is called 'Boarded Hall' gained through loaning her son ,
(from her first marriage), Sir George Harnage ( the regularly bankrupt Director of the Bank of England) , money to pay his debts ,Boarded Hall was mortgaged as a surety It is still there today in St George's Valley, the parish of Christchurch ,just east of Bridgetown and the statue of Bussa the slave rebel leader,of Barbados' "Black History"...
THE REAL HISTORICAL EDMUND
Historians will note that the character portrayed by
Rowan Atkinson is a composite of the equerry William Congreve and the Groom of the Bedchamber Edmund Nagle. Congreve , is in fact played by Robinson as the character Baldrick, assuming as he does a seat in the House of Commons via a 'rotten borough' whilst Edmund Nagle, is a renowned naval hero, being a "great favorite' of the prince of Wales(later King) . Nagle possessed plantations in Barbados called 'Boarded Hall", He had a long standing familial association and feud with the Duke of Wellington, and was also closely associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson's and the "Literary Club" he and Reynolds are incorrectly accredited with establishing, when in fact Johnson and Reynolds got the idea from Nagle's grandfather and stepfather Christopher Nugent & Edmund Burke et al . Who got the idea from Garrett Nagle , famously of Doneraile in County Cork, and the surrounding districts.
The creation of the character, and particulars of the "life of Edmund Blackadder esq." is NOT original. There are multiple published anecdotes from the 1820s through to the 1940s in English language newspapers. especially those with an Irish Catholic diaspora like New York and Sydney.. Anecdotes that portray Nagle capturing a youthful Highwayman.And rescuing a shipmate from the jaws of a shark
Nagle is also noted as amusing the Prince's father George III with his Hibernian jokes and stories of naval warfare during' the great age of sail'..
In anecdotal reports contemporary to the late Regency Period , Nagle is often described as possessing a curt, blunt, and no-nonsense personality and possessed a rollicking wit that enamored him to the Prince and to both the Georges III & IV..
image.png
Sir E. Nagle ( pronounced like Neagle)
dances with the Bear whilst Nero fiddles as Rome burnsan Irish Catholic diaspora like New York and Sydney.. Anecdotes that portray Nagle capturing a youthful Highwayman.And rescuing a shipmate from the jaws of a shark
Nagle is also noted as amusing the Prince's father George III with his Hibernian jokes and stories of naval warfare during' the great age of sail'..
In anecdotal reports contemporary to the late Regency Period , Nagle is often described as possessing a curt, blunt, and no-nonsense personality and possessed a rollicking wit that enamored him to the Prince and to both the Georges III & IV..
image.png
Sir E. Nagle ( pronounced like Neagle)
dances with the Bear whilst Nero fiddles as Rome burns
sincerely,
Stacy Nicole Fletcher
