It's funny what our subconscious can sometimes dredge up.
This morning I woke with a few odd words of a bit of verse rattling around in my mind. Something about ‘treason’, made to rhyme with ‘reason’. That’s all I could remember, but it’s great to have the web so readily to hand, isn’t it? How on Earth did we get by before we had access to it?
The best thing is that tracking the words down taught me a bit more about their author, John Harington, than I knew, or even guessed, before.
It turns out that Harington was one of those great but obscure benefactors of humanity, whose contribution is immeasurable and by no means adequately recognised.
He invented the flush toilet.
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| A contribution of inestimable benefit to mankind: Sir John Harington’s flushing toilet |
His aim, as he explained, was to ‘make unsavoury Places sweet, noisome Places wholesome and filthy Places cleanly’.
This was back in the England of Elizabeth I, as you may have spotted from the language. One of her 102 godchildren, Harington made a flush toilet for her, but she was apparently unimpressed. She was perfectly happy with her ‘closed stool’, basically just a wooden piece of furniture with a lid to shut out smells (I imagine not terribly well), a seat and a chamber pot.
Of course, Elizabeth didn’t have to empty the pot.
Harington’s invention didn’t enjoy the success one might have hoped for it. Flush toilets, with the salutary addition of an S-bend, finally began to be more broadly adopted in the eighteenth century. But Harington did have one installed in his own home. He also wrote a book on the invention, A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax.
Ajax is a pun on ‘a jakes’, a slang term of the time for a privy.
Unfortunately (for him), he didn’t stick exclusively to the subject of the jakes. A book about excrement and related matters lent itself far too easily to commentary on politics. Or it certainly did back then. Probably today as well. After all, the politicians we’re blessed with today seem at least as likely to leave us navigating the contents of a sewer as any others in the past. However, in a spirit of strict political neutrality, I’m going to refrain from mentioning, in this context, either Trump or Johnson (or should that be Dominic Cummings anyway?)
In his book, Harington had a go at the Earl of Leicester, a bit of an insensitive move on his part, since it was a subject on which the Queen was highly sensitive. After her death, a letter from Leicester to her, the last he wrote before he died, was found in her bedside table, marked in her own hand, ‘his last letter’.
Still, Elizabeth must have had a soft spot for this godson of hers (presumably not as deep a one as for Leicester), since all she did was banish him from court for a while. It wasn’t the first time that had happened to him. He must have been relieved not to have suffered a worse fate.
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| Sir John Harington Wit and benefactor to humanity |
As for myself, shamefully unaware of his substantial contribution to human happiness, it was his quickness and wit on political matters that that I’d always found appealing. Cynicism has a justifiably bad press, but sometimes, if it’s reasonably gentle, it can add just the touch of spice that turns a mere comment into a joy. If it’s as insightful as it’s barbed, that makes it all the more memorable, and certainly memorable enough to rattle around my brain as I wake from sleep one morning.
Here, with no further ado [but please imagine a drum roll], is Sir John Harington on the matter of treason:
Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
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