Butlers were doin' it for themselves
Gangster Hibernicized clan grafts (!) my family tree: mercenary merry men (Robin Hood's not technically Maid Marian), Rebels (Beyond the pale, Concord, Lexington)
As we’re watching “The Vikings,” my wife sighs: “it’s all legend, made up, right?"
James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond (1496–1546), by Hans Holbein. If imported trees hold firm, he and I share a grandfather, adding prefixes for 22 generations ago.
So opined my helpmeet from other end of couch. Call it a loveseat, if wedged apart by at least one flatulent canine where Odin made an object so heavy Thor can’t move her.
As I was tall-tale stretching my suspiciously top-heavy and bottom-light (however you parse who’s who in terms of biology, adoption, and reticence, fewer feel the urge of doves cry, bees buzz, nests build for eg/g/os as we’ve little less success in feathering our flocks in stork terms) family tree as stress relief during lockdown. By one fragile “shindig”—crossword puzzle clue akin to where branches join—I ingratiated myself to an attenuated, stilted inheritance. Thanks to the bedding, brawling, boozing social and royal-climbing, scheming, seducing, sometimes sexy Butlers**. Gaunt, odds rather than beefy, if my ectomorphic oval’s mirrored in Holbein’s delineation. Whose own forebears so undimmed that they’d be enacted on History Channel’s The Tens series. Serious, sassy, sinister, salacious, shrewd, solemn, thought-provoking, backstabbing saga. Plus CGI/ drones. Even better than the Real Thing. (Insert blunt Royal Pain pun.)
Rather than watching the same gormless election we thought we’d been doomed to last month. Manfully, I’m striving not to go there, can’t say scout’s honor as look where that mansplainin’ went south. Swore to git’-it-done by Thanksgiving 2020, that discredited near-quadracentennial, but going on Four More Years, a comeback kid.
Like “see my engravings of sights on our Grand Tour, tin-types, snapshots, home movies, slideshows, video cam, Snapchat, Instagram, FB, Tik-Tok,” (deepfakes next I predict at least for the more desirable among us, or is vice versa?) while the tech morphs, the imposition of obligations to feign interest in each other’s ever-extending kith + kin never let’s up. Generations breed, funerals and wakes turn “celebrations of life.” doves bill and coo at marriages and fka funerals, baptisms, bar/ bat mitzvot, seders, graduations, gender reveals, baby showers, Taylor who’s he-she-they again?
Around 2005 my institution installed a SmartBoard TM ©. Around $8k. Its biggest innovation was that the High Tech Sanctus Sanctorum Inner Classroom built at more cost walls you could write on with special erasable markers (not Magick’d.)
Dare we conjure office retreats, mandated fun as if we chortled at corporate parks. Zoom water-coolers at 3 PM Friday; at least my son’s SMO evil mini-me empire in Portland had a keg-couraging in-person who cares if it’s COVID happy-who-needs in Mic(robrew) City to wait for the fifth post-meridian). Deep thought: what impels tribal us, eons past savannah campfire to ward off hyenas, from reciting our lineage like the Book of Numbers, an Homeric recap, son-of-a-son-of-a-sailor, bat-this and bar-that, the Anthony Trollope fiction enabling him to distinguish “The Kelly’s” from “O’Kelly’s.” Ask me why btw. Although why neither Mac/Mc nor O’ caught on among the most common of all Irish Gaelic identifiers, thus its “spuds” synecdoche, Murphy.
“Mc” households. Click for comparison to “O”. “In 1865, 1.67 per cent of total births used “O'”. By 1913, it was 3.2 per cent, almost doubling in five decades here. Perhaps the difference is that “O” surnames were found predominantly in Munster (and Donegal), traditionally nationalist regions, whereas “Mc” surnames were concentrated in north and east Ulster, with a solid unionist majority.”
Segue. To escape the bitchy summer that was 2020, thanks to the combined freedom of Family Echo, a bare-bones but gratis to pedigree chart platform, Wiki Tree and to a less trusting extent, GENI (the latter relies on the LDS Family Search, which softens somewhat my suspicions of the LDS as they tried their best, naturally, to recruit posthumously, and pad the records no less than Cook County for JFK, but it’s manic pioneering in more than one rough track way), and a hunch by a third cousin doing her husband’s genealogy on Ancestry-dot-com, I’ve connected my attenuated line (cut off at the Famine, as before that either data were only for the Anglo-Irish gentry and their collaborating imperial occupiers) to a considerable slew of forebears, admittedly many legends—as in the literal Latinate sense of “read all about ‘em” plus layabouts.
In my previous post (and boy howdy, those Substack stats plunge like the stock market when it comes to who wants to meet about my imaginary friends once upon a time)…
…Shameless as Liberace, preening as Fulton Sheen, gurning as Jack Benny, pufferying as George Burns, simpering as Gracie, ditzy as Lucy + Ethel, to glissando my mental notes: my own really, really odd pre-game show tonight (why Golden Age of cigarette-sponsored-hour references from camp tv, oft predating my birth?) phantom thread. You’ve come this far, you’ve earned kudos, and as your erudite host, indulge my spiel.
Tapping away, mightily striving as one of my closest reader-friends cautions, during as always, “the most important election” ever. But discussion on who gets to recognize who, as in or out or on the sidelines of in-group, as redefining as every quarter-or-third century, we mate, multiply, and mess up those classifications the system, ourselves, the Other set in place to keep us all in place, out of it, or keep their place. Choices or not, imposed or invented, the ways past humans created us, and how we’re raised, explained, evaded, straightforwardly or not, about which box(es) to check about nationality, ethnicity, race, creed, orientation, pronouns: as we insist on unity we parse difference: the debates about how one can or cannot lay claim to transitioning into an alternate, parallel, hitherto-occluded, even hidden as in the skeleton closet, one’s proclaimed, no less than those disdained in the eyes of an dis-beholder, our clannish allegiance comes fraught with peril. Gender-affirming advocates laud choice; while a generation ago a scientist claimed discovering a “gay gene,” as Born This Way.
Robert Zimmerman, Iron Range Minnesotan. Dylan= de Leon/ Dillon Welsh’d Norman staged name. Thomas himself like many Welsh takes a patronymic as Crown law imposed surnames to regulate tax, conscription, usual imperial dicta; Celtic clannish tradition didn’t mandate fixed usage, but they loved nicknames.
I have a soft spot for Lady G, since my wife and I stayed in what was billed as her flat pre-Fame Monster, now an Air B+B on the Lower East Side. Despite an horrific snear-Mortal Kombat marital-marinated meltdown as she could not open the rental door. I could not stand to stand in the hallway after our flight watching her fumbles; we abandoned all hope to enter an even tinier flat by NYC measurements, apparently a Williams College grad. Verklempt, I leafed through scarce reading items, namely a dog-eared Vice—sorry, louts, this issue scrubbed from the net; their post-lawsuit, contrite archives in Montreal’s a Newspeak doubleplus triumph of the Justin will of “but he’s so cute” Trudeau (Wasn’t his dad dancing at Studio 54 with Bianca Jagger?) fils—with formidable- feminine (a combo with a short Slavic shelf life under these western eyes to my male gaze in Prague after their f-able or at least fertile age terminated, statuesque model doppelgangers shrunk into roly-poly unstacked matrushkhas, if not changing abandon all hope ye who enter here o’er Ultimate Dis mien) ninotchka rackin’ up stock, cradle snaps: topless, arch, happiness= warm gun cock. Photo shoot. Unconcealed carry. Je me souviens. Québec license plate.
Zachary Lupton, "The City of Dis" collage, 2011. “Upon arriving in the sixth circle of Hell, Heresy, Dante sees the capital of Hell. This was my interpretation of it, a corrupt, evil interpretation of all the Holy sites found in the world of the living.”
Given my maladroitly lack of street cred about these material girls, I’ll beat a retreat. Up to Kilkenny down south. Famed Cats, the nickname of the football team, and the county’s mascot (one of too few of Ireland’s 32). Butlers sailed in, not long after they hit the Welsh north across the Channel from Normandy, where they’d stomped in like Led Zep’s “Immigrant Song” (proto-punk classic, two minutes, as compressed lyrically as a kenning from Old English keening or Icelandic verse) having in turn done their icy dirty deeds cheap by throttling themselves barbarian arrivistes Merovingians, Wends, Sorbs, Franks, Carolingians, Ottonians, all Flanders Fields flounderers, and driving Scandia’s tempered steel and enflamed flesh into capitulating, italicizing, genuflecting Saxon-Frankish lots scrabbling for cover, compromise, and conjugation.
So, Butlers cross another sea. They hit Ireland as their 1169 moment portends as deadly as 10/14/1066, 5/29/1453, 4/19.1775, 7/14/1789. 4/24/16. 12/7/41, 9/11/01, 10/7/24. You get the gist: invasions, turncoats, massive attacks. As for occupations among hazards, the son of that hired gun or the guy who wielded the Bloodaxe or twinkled a Bluetooth seemed the Norse-Norman Norm. Added to that the duller toponyms such as of place name- geographic feature- territorial landmark. And those who tilled, spun, brewed, hewed it and dug up. As the Norse turned Norman, beginning to slightly settle if only to plot their next fief’s door hostile or hustling takeover, the nomenclature began to nestle into the soil, toil, and loyalties marking their turf wars.
Amonng camp followers (as polite a term as housing-insecure migrants for ca. 1073?) crowding around surely primitive courts, more Burning Man-meets-glamping-Tentifada to mix contemporary manifestations of folks who, a phrase I saw for the first time twice in one day, “touch grass” were a one lot deemed deserving took their surname from literally “boutillier.” When the king was crowned, they got to give him the first ceremonial cups of wine. On a related function, “dispenser” of the catering gave rise to the Spencers, who bided their time a waiting as lords and ladies for nearly a millennium until Diana ascended to the throne, not quite a humble commoner as such Pater-Familias Mob-sense may take centuries to become the men and women in waiting to be lords and ladies behind the bedchamber curtain, and strategically, coming and going in the dark. They manipulated their power-behind-the-throne sangfroid, cool at all costs. (“The Tudors” for my viewing pleasure showed this jockeying well, as after all, the Boleyns found. For more: “Wolf Hall” print + show.)
The Boleyn-engendering Butlers thrust into bowers, tore apart foes in battle, and tampered with the pliable forces of law and order, church and if not yet state, Crown. Synonymous with the Anglo-Irish who hibernated within their candle-snuffed mantels and eventually evacuated chamberpots, chamberlains laying about biding their time, come regime change, for “elevate me” speeches. Wore out their grudging welcome from local tribes who’d hired them as cheap help against their fur-flung foes.
They (image above) stuck around long enough, before Catholics crumbled against Protestant ethnic cleansing of those condemned as fifth columnists, gone native, with whips, furs, curs, gruel, Gaelic, whisky, unshod to be deemed Hibernians come lately.
Out of their peregrinations, pilgrimages, and/or Crusades, sprawled their strategems. Swept up we find upstart Saher de Cuincy (aka Quincy), a Gallicized Latinate “fifth” as in that son’s birth order. (Look at that squiggly green seashore around Francia and Iberia for future reference, and file that Septentrional Northman within a possible Septimania Southbound origin-myth+++ of an early-medieval, pre-Moorish “Jewish kingdom” in a non-verdant grey zone, up the coast from Al-Andalus roughly north of Barcelona, around Narbonne.) This Norman toponym turned vanity license plate, for it brought Butlers on board, who used their post-Conquest pole place prime position to play up their proximity to whomever the papal prattlers wined and dined to sanctify in 1169 the invasion of Éire, to settle internecine frat wars among those who, craven, desperate for score-settling, bargained for the economic refugees laborers all too eager to settle. Unstable, unmoored civilizations, however rough, ready to seek out those who promise to, after a present brief unpleasantness, to up stakes in Temporary Protected Status, but instead dwell as diaspora Dreamers, determined to dig in and stay put. You can see from the height of their hubris their global ambitions rubricated.
(The Quincified cabal also hastens into Scotland in the post-1066 chaos, as that bonnie congeries of petty sovereignties long suffers divide and conquer by its cross-border hordes impeded never by Hadrian’s Wall. The map indicates that no Normans mastered the Highest-landers, although Lowlanders were semi-Anglicized, weakened by constant border incursions, ladders notwithstanding. You’d think Hibernians, chastened by the fate of both the Scots felled by infighting alongside Cambrian cousins overwhelmed by Saxons, would choose Celtic confederation against Anglo blitzkrieg. But big booty, abduction of a willing woman, anger of a king deprived of his honor—familiar Iliad rolls on, a couple of thousand years later, another sea…)
As I started with the episodes, I will cut and comeback with more next week-ish. Back from Ecuador, catnaps only for the past 40 hours. I bet you can’t tell. Experiment in neither auto-fiction nor automatic writing, only insomnia. Let swords rip, bodices slash, and my come-on’s for fighting, fornicating, colonials, pirates, raiders, lost art bring your clicks my way, my likes up, and your enthusiasms uncurbed and unleashed.
**This details transmogrifying noble-adjacent surname. Anne Boleyn’s grandmother, William Butler Yeats, Yiddish-keiters came to grin and bear its glass tray in duties across the European steppes, bogs, shetls, and courts in session. Jean Butler, Irish-American “Riverdancer,” spins gender-performative chameleon critic Judith Butler.
+++This controversial but captivating story has exiled (again) Babylonian Jews settling Catalunya during the collapse of barely post-Arian Christianized, Roman remnant, post-”barbarian” Hispania amidst D-Day Muslims. Watch that space. We’ll be a-viking (that term akin to a-roaming and a-partying in search of wine, women, wealth, and livestock) to these realms in future portal port posts. Revealing scarce facts, but fun fan family romance. Trafficked princesses, suicidal generals, enslaved Berbers…