MDMD(8) Questions - Tunnels

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	christinekaratnytsky at juno.com

>I would like to ask again:  What is all the business about the Tunnels? 
>Perhaps I should have gone over this in my tutorial with davemarc--alas,
>a missed opportunity.  I don't understand what they are at all, to tell
>the truth.  

Been meaning to finish this up... 

The passage in question reads:

232.35 - 233.2  "In the days of the '45,--guessing that the Young
Pretender would travel everywhere he could by way of those secret
Tunnels
known to Papists from ancient times, which ran from most parish Churches
away to other points of interest..."  What's all this about?  Who's the
Young Pretender? 

>From the "Victorian Web"* at Hartwick College
(http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/history/Ja
cobites.html):

"The Jacobites were supporters of the claim to the British throne of the
deposed James II and his son James, the "Old Pretender." Though a few of
the old Tories in England worked secretly for the Jacobite cause, the
chief centers of Jacobite resistance were in Scotland and Ireland, and
were supported, of course, by the French, with whom the English, at the
time, were more or less continually at war. For sixty years after the
"Glorious Revolution" in 1688, there were real or imaginary Jacobite
plots, though there were only two serious revolts, in 1715 and in 1745.
The "15," a rising under the "Old Pretender" in Scotland and
Northumberland, was an attempt to overthrow the recent succession to the
throne of the Hanoverian George I. The "45" involved a much larger
rising of the Scottish Jacobite Highland chiefs under "Bonnie Prince
Charlie," Charles Edward Stuart, whose army won several victories in
Scotland and invaded England -- ruled at the time by George II -- only
to be forced back and slaughtered at the battle of Culloden, effectively
ending the Jacobite cause forever."

No student of British history, I, but I'm willing to put a shiny new
penny up against a pound avoirdupois of pig waste that TRP's "Young
Pretender" is Bonnie Prince C, and will continue to do so until somebody
more qualified than I (that is to say, anybody at all) gainsays it.

On the tunnels, I'm also going on instinct,here, but surely, surely
these are the legendary escape tunnels supposedly built--from Time
Immemorial!--from churches to points of safety, such as nearby castles
or riverbanks? Built for quick getaways for the persecuted priesthood in
virtually every religious war that you've ever heard of? Part & parcel
with priestholes and tha'?

I'm drawing a complete blank, here, but isn't there some work of
reasonably great adventure literature that features one of these
tunnels? _Count of Monte Cristo_? _The Prisoner of Zenda_? Something in
that vein?

In our own day, these tunnels would be analogous to the huge underground
bunkers built Right Under the Capitol and the White House! for the
protection of the US Gubmint when the Rooskies finally drop the Big One.

There's probably an element of urban legend to most of these tunnels: My
alma mater had a little bijou chapel on campus that supposedly had an
underground escape route to a nearby river, for the use of the
population during Indian attacks. (Which actually _were_ a
consideration, in Ohio in the 1830s.) Despite many an undergraduate's
wide-eyed, candlelit, Tom-Sawyer poking around in dusty old cupboards
and under the altar, pulling sconces in various sequences or playing
certain chords on the organ, the tunnel was never found.

ObWooo-Scary: How 'bout: "Sometimes ('twas told) the Devil sent his own
Dodmen, to lead the Diggers in grisly play 'round the Corner again and
into the Church-yard, where Death in its full unpleasantness waited
them, a Skull, in the instant of any Spade's burden, emerging from the
Mud just at Eye-Level, smiling widely as in recognition..."

This whole tunnels thing, the more I explore it, is just vintage
Pynchon. Wonderful stuff.

I don't buy the Diggers/San Fran thingy. Sorta...forced, don't you
think? 

Harrison

-----

*And if the phrase "Victorian Web" doesn't put you in mind of a George
Cruikshank etching of a great, steam-vomiting, coal-fed infernal
machine, a Dark Satanic Mill capable of a 1 KB per  annum throughput,
with content thoroughly SurfWatched for references to piano legs and
chicken breasts, and replete with .sig lines twitting Charles Babbage,
then you're even more imagination-impoverished than I had you pegged
for, you callous philistine you.