SeacoastNH Home

FRESH STUFF DAILY
Seacoast New Hampshire
& South Coast Maine

facebook logo


facebook logo

Header flag

SEE ALL SIGNED BOOKS by J. Dennis Robinson click here
blogbrainsmallSeacoast History Blog # 90
July 22, 2010

To distract myself from ongoing research on the Isles of Shoals, I rented a DVD called “The Last King” about Charles II of Britain. To be honest, there is a Shoals connection. The more I study 17th century New Hampshire and Maine, the more it looks like British history. What happened over there with the bloody succession of monarchs powerfully affected the founding century of New England which was also a political nightmare. The first minister at the Isles of Shoals was an Anglican, for example. Then Oliver Cromwell took over the throne, chopped off the head of Charles I, and suddenly the next minister at the Shoals 3,000 miles away was a Puritan from Harvard. After Cromwell’s death, when Charles II came out of hiding and was restored to the monarchy, the minister at the Isles of Shoals swapped back to Anglican. That’s what I call political clout. (Continued below)

 

The only way I can picture the English monarchs is to relate them to movie stars. The hard part is remembering which monarch ruled when, married who, and did what. The action really doesn’t start in this region until the death of Shakespeare, so reading all those History Plays in college didn’t do give me much return on my investment as a local history writer.

CharlesII in The Last King

The TV-miniseries “The Last King” goes a long way toward explaining who Charles II was. Poor guy spent his youth in exile, and then returned to rule over an angry Parliament during years of plague and fire in London. Charles had about a dozen known mistresses and eventually shut down Parliament when politicians tried to block his catholic brother James II from ascending to the throne. Charles II, it turns out, was more tolerant toward differing religions than his government. Unfortunately, tolerance lost, and England hasn’t had a Catholic monarch since James II. That religious intolerance spread to protestant New England until John F, Kennedy broke the tradition here.

From the Shoals to Charles II to Joan of Arc and back

henrietaa_crosman played So with the House of Stuart on my mind, I bumped into the film “The Libertine” on IFC. This movie is also set in the grim, sexually liberated era of the Restoration. John Malkevich plays Charles which Johnny Depp as the drunken syphilitic second Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. Don’t worry, our Rochester, NH was named after Laurence Hyde, the FIRST Earl of Rochester. That film is gross, but it certainly gets across the depraved conditions in England during an era when our Portsmouth was expanding from a backwater plantation to one of the top colonial ports on the Atlantic.

All this has nothing to do with the title of this blog except to explain the condition my brain was in when, while researching the Shoals, I bumped into the article posted below. Now this is obscure stuff, but apparently a woman named Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland wrote a play set at the Isles of Shoals. IT was being performed in New York in 1902, “Joan of the Shoals” is set in, you guessed it, the era of Charles II and includes characters based on the “half-savage fisherfolk” of the Isles of Shoals. Joan is “a wild, unrestrained fisherlass, bred to danger, a stranger to fear on sea or land, but with a true woman’s heart.” How’s that for weird?

According to the summary in the Portsmouth Journal, Joan falls in love with an outcast of the court of Charles II and her lover Vivian Moore, asks her to wreck the ship of his enemy by luring it onto the rocks with a false beacon. Joan changes her mind at the last moment. She climbs up the rocks and snuffs out signal by throwing herself onto the flames (thus the Joan of Arc there). This bit of folklore likely comes from the suspicion among Shoalers that Sam Haley lured ships to wreck on Smuttynose Island so that he could salvage their booty.

I searched for the play, the author and the actress on Google, and there are lots of references, but I’ll lose the whole day if I start reading them. So this quoted item will have to do. The photo comes from a Web auction site. The quote is from the book Actors and American culture, 1880-1920 by Benjamin McArthur and reminds us that our ancestors watched plays as bad as the TV we watch today:

“In Joan of the Shoals, golden-haired Henrietta Crosman had to simulate climbing up a cliff to replace a beacon light. Directly behind the light was a large electric fan that gave the effect of heavy winds. As Crosman leaned close to the fan her dress caught in the flanges and began ripping to shreds. It momentarily appeared that she might be drawn into the fan. Her screams brought patrons on the front rows to their feet before Harry Woodruff, her leading man, rescued her. As in the case with most stage accidents, the scene continued as if nothing had happened.”

© 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.

Joan_of_the_Shoals_001


 

 

Please visit these SeacoastNH.com ad partners.

News about Portsmouth from Fosters.com

Joan of the Shoals?
Tuesday, November 03, 2026 
 
Piscataqua Savings Bank Online Banking
Piscataqua Savings Bank Online Banking

Copyright ® 1996-2020 SeacoastNH.com. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement

Site maintained by ad-cetera graphics

Joomla! Debug Console