Death of the Lion Queen

Harry Lowther

The true and tragic story of the Lion Queen really features one English girl, one lion, and one tiger, however, since the girl’s death, her litter of large cats has continued to grow. The Lion Queen went by the names of Ellen Blight and Helen Bright, or sometimes Eliza, and was born to the Royally named John and Elizabeth (Wombwell) Blight/Bright in 1833. She did not live to reach her eighteenth birthday.

The Queen’s uncle was the infamous George Wombwell, an entertainment man whose life simultaneously orbited both death and royalty in strangely overlapping ways - not that the two are necessarily separated in history, a relationship as to which many a princess can attest. He started humbly, engaging in the great British tradition of showing off curiosities in pubs in exchange for money – in this case two boa constrictors. Soon his menagerie had grown to include tigers, lions, leopards, as well as elephants, giraffes, and even a gorilla. Some of these creatures can still be found inhabiting certain British pubs. Many of these animals quickly died as they were paraded o’er hill and dale in the unforgiving British climate. Wombwell, never discouraged, always selling, continued to exhibit the dead bodies, either taxidermized, or in states of decomposition.

This was demonstrated following the unexpected death of his largest attraction. His exhibition of a decomposing elephant, advertised as “the only dead elephant in the fair,” enticed the public away from the live elephant being displayed across the fair by a nearby competitor. They were thrilled at the unique opportunity to play with the carcass, some even removing souvenirs. Picture the resulting scene. The rather morbid menagerie was a success.

Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, impressed by Wombwell’s way with wildlife, called him to examine his dogs at the Palace, as they insisted on dying almost as quickly as they could be replaced. Wombwell’s expertise identified that the dogs should be given fresh water, instead of the stagnant, diseased water which they had been drinking. In payment for this advice, the Prince gave him timber salvaged from the HMS Royal George, from which Wombwell fashioned himself a coffin. The HMS Royal George had sunk decades earlier after an accident while being maintained at port, killing more than 800 people as it rolled out beyond control. Likely, he wished to make a Royal George of himself.

Wombwell must have known how dangerous his big cats were. He raised the first lion to ever be born into captivity in Britain, and named him William, after William Wallace. William Wallace was a Scottish knight who was executed in London in perhaps the grizzliest fashion ever recorded, but not until after being dragged through the English streets, naked, behind a horse. William Wombwell fared better in London, mauling to death six English bulldogs in one arranged showdown for his blighted master.

But let’s not dwell any longer on this woeful man Wombwell in this woman’s sad story.

Ellen – or was it Helen? – had, in fact, already suffered rejection at the hands of the nation’s royalty. On bringing the family’s menagerie of big cats to be shown to the Palace, the young Queen Victoria declined to see The Lion Queen’s famous command of the animals in action, suggesting that she did not wish to see such a dangerous performance. However, Blight/Bright was far more successful in bringing her show to the people of England, touring successfully until a fateful, cold January night in 1850. She was seventeen and a princess of the people.

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

In a private show for a group of British officers, The Lion Queen entered a cage with two cats, a lion and a tiger. The witnesses said that the tiger appeared to be unhappy, and no wonder, having found himself caged in freezing conditions in the English winter, but lay down when Bright entered and tapped it on the nose, before turning to perform her usual lion-taming routine with the second cat. The performance complete, she turned again to the tiger, giving him a second tap on the nose. This was too far for the restless animal, who rose to his hind legs before crashing back down on to the girl, pinning her to the ground. The watching crowd were helpless to the scene unfolding inside the cage, yet somehow Ellen was still alive when she could be pulled back out. A surgeon on hand attempted to stop the bleeding, which was coming from the Queen’s face and neck, and to revive her with brandy. Neither was successful, and within minutes she was dead.

Ellen Blight was commemorated in two ways.

Wombwell continued to tour and exhibited the surviving tiger as a celebrity, the killer of The Lion Queen. The other is a ceramic figurine, showing the death scene with Ellen/Helen, a lion, and in which the killer is changed to a leopard, which I found nearly 175 years later in a drawer in a Scottish art gallery and which bore the legend “Death of the Lion Queen”. I close the drawer and take a note.

***

A short time later I travelled down to London myself. Here, housed in the National Portrait Gallery, nearby the famous portrait of one William Shakespeare, if indeed it really is him - the basis for his image is dubious, and surrounded on all sides by monarchs of all descriptions - another ceramic figurine can be found, apparently a match to the one I found in a drawer in Aberdeen, and which started this whole thing off.

The night before I had seen Hero temporarily struck down by the keen teeth of false testimony at the rebuilt Globe theatre, shortly after a masquerade ball in which the visage of more than one animal was on display, in a comedy of mistaken impressions and deceit.

After Hero’s phoenix-like return from the dead, my partner and I crossed back over the Thames, taking in the reflections of a million people burning bright on the surface of the water. The bells of St Paul’s chimed midnight and we realised that the night had tipped over to her birthday. So, of course, we went for a drink. Lions are common amongst English pubs, The Red Lion the most common of all. Years before, in Greece, I had watched the Three Lions lose to Italy in a Red Lion pub on the island of Crete, where Theseus cut the minotaur’s throat. But, for now, that’s the wrong thread to follow.

Stalking back from distant deeps.

In what was surely a depraved attempt at scandal and publicity, the inquest was held at The Golden Lion Hotel. The inquest stated that the tiger’s jaw had closed over her own in a fatal embrace. Later, she was buried in a grave shared with her cousin, another William Wombwell, who had been killed in an entirely separate misadventure by yet another elephant.

All the ways that we commemorate our dead. London is full of statues and blue plaques, and this or that building and street named for whoever. Monuments. Obituaries. Social media posts. George Wombwell, buried in London in his Royal George coffin, memorialised by a stone carving of a sleeping lion, as his niece shares her grave with her cousin.

These figures differ in their fearful symmetry.

The two ornaments come from the same mould, making them identical in silhouette. However, they appear to have been decorated by different hands. Both feature Ellen stood between two large cats, of whom one is prone to her right, the other rises on hind legs to her left. The three figures are on a heavy base and the Queen is the largest of the three, the highest point being the tip of her hat, and in both cases a cape or a shawl is held in both of her hands and around her body. Both ornaments, as was common to the time, have flat, undecorated backs to them, to be placed flat against a wall without obfuscation.

Though emerging from the same mould, much is revealed in the differences.

There appears to be some confusion in both figurines about the exact appearance of various big cats. The Aberdeen example features a lion with a grey complexion and a black mane, as well as having had a remarkable set of human eyebrows painted on. The Queen’s clothing features three different and detailed patterns. At her feet sit several flowers, perhaps thrown to her by an admiring audience after a performance, or perhaps to commemorate her passing. Detailing on her hat and jacket is in gold, reflective of her royal status. Slightly raised from the base, the cat to her left is the tiger. The stripes are not painted realistically, curving slim lines of black on the yellow coat, however, do form a pleasing pattern. The tiger’s back has a thick stripe of deep umber. While the tiger does rise to the Queen’s shoulder, it still appears to be somewhat submissive, with paws crossed against her waist and the same expression with which my own cats look at me when they ask for food - rather than how they would look at food, hopefully. As an aside, my second visit to the gallery saw the figurines moved around slightly, apparently due to a broken drawer. Now, they are fully on display, placed upright. The next figure to the left of the tiger is the far less regal poet Robert Burns.

The submissive lion to her right looks up at the Queen in the London figurine. His mane is multicoloured, and the artist appears to have continued to paint the mane onto the top of his skull, rather than around the back of his neck, giving him the appearance of having styled himself a combover. The Queen’s attire is much more basic in this iteration, a simple black coat, plain white hat with green plumage, however her cape is a nice shade of lilac, perhaps again gesturing towards royalty. Appropriately for one based a few hundred miles further south, her complexion is slightly darker. The base features no decoration beyond the gold inscription. The cat to her left is, rather than a tiger, a spotted cat; a leopard or a cheetah. I’m inclined to say leopard, as Wombwell was known to have owned at least one. While, of course, in the same pose, the leopard’s mouth is painted open, a slash of red visible inside, looking more inclined to attack. The leopard’s spots are, rather than circles, a kind of rounded cross shape, reminiscent of the royal orb.         

The artistry of these types of figures varies wildly. There are many beautiful, highly detailed examples, and many otherwise too. In ‘The Kiss’ (1865), a man and a woman share the cover of an umbrella, embracing beneath it. Where the two faces meet, the artist has declined to attempt to depict the smooch itself, instead opting for a single face placed front-on in between the pair, resulting in a distorted, widened visage, as if one person is being painfully split into two, rather than the more common interpretation of two becoming one. The Lion Queen is thought to be from around the same time, the 1860s, though no date is known.

While the figurines were often made in places beyond Stoke-on-Trent, including in Scotland, it is here with which they are most associated, and the Stafforsdshire name and style travels far. Potters suffered for their work. The use of lead in creating the glaze led to a condition known as dropsy, called as such for its tendency to afflict the wrists and ankles, causing the attached appendages to drop. The figurines, while produced in numbers, were handmade, using moulds, and the differences that emerged stemmed from the painting of the finished figurine, the painter’s style and ability.

There are many of these figures in circulation and housed in museums or in galleries or still decorating the mantels of, perhaps, our oldest relatives. These Staffordshire figurines never aimed for fine art. Yet, in Aberdeen, the Lion Queen shares the same space as paintings by Bacon and Rossetti. But, then again, two feet away is an embedded camera where - if you can fit your adult body into a frame designed for children - you can dress up as one of the nearby paintings’ subjects and take a photograph. Photography itself hailed the decline of these mass-produced figurines. Moments could be captured at the time, rather than reproduced after the fact. Quickly, the Victorians took it upon themselves to photograph their dead. These memento mori might involve eyes being painted over the closed lids of the deceased, or disturbing compositions between the living and the dead; the fresh corpse of your youngest propped up beside their still shallow breathing siblings. The only dead elephant in the fair. Who is commemorated, and when, and where, and how? These questions do not stop after the subject’s death. Neither do they remain still; they change over time as does the eye which observes them.

The Lion Queen, recalled, repeated, and reimagined, continues, captured before death, dispersed and advertised across the country, commemorated in her youth, cracked and reassembled many times over. Hidden away in the drawer as to the whims of fashions. The Lion Queen has many likenesses and no true portrait, a new portrait imagined afresh by the painter after every slip. Ellen and Eliza and Helen and her litter.