Today is one of the two consecutive “Glorious Twelfths”, and I’m a fan of neither. On this occasion, the twelfth in question refers to the Orange Order commemoration of the coronation of William and Mary after what has been described as an invasion of the British Isles in 1688. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this. Nor do I plan to stick to the topic because the word and subject of “orange” is broader than just this and I also want a chance to explain where the sequel of my novel ‘Replicas‘ was going to go.
First of all, to explain the Glorious Revolution. This followed from James II of England’s decision to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1669, which triggered Parliament to pass the Test Act in 1673, restricting public office to people who took the sacraments of the Church of England. The defrocked clergyman Titus Oates began the rumour that there was a Popish Plot to assassinate Charles II so as to make James King. His perjury was exposed and James became Kind anyway in 1685. The Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, then led a rebellion against him which culminated in the Battle of Sedgemoor followed by the Bloody Assizes, presided over by Judge Jeffreys, which resulted in the beheading of the Duke, the hanging of 250 people, the transportation of a further eight hundred to indentured servitude in Barbados and the death of many more in prison. Due to fear of rebellion, James increased the size of the standing army, which was not usually significant in peacetime. In 1687, he issued the Declaration of Indulgence, which sought to cancel the effect of laws against Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. This would of course include the Quakers, among others. He also tried to create a majority in Parliament in his favour to repeal the Test Act. Then, in 1688, he reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered Anglican clergy to read it out in churches. When some bishops protested, he had them arrested for seditious libel. Then came the birth of his son James, alleged to have been a “warming-pan baby”, i.e. smuggled into Queen Mary of Modena’s chamber, on 10th June, who unlike his daughters would be raised as a Roman Catholic. This was of course a fairly fantastic lie, which led to the tradition of Home Secretaries being present at royal births, but helped foment feeling against the King. A group of Protestant nobles then invited William of Orange of Dutch royalty into the country with his army, which is of course the most significant of the incidents which tend to be ignored when it’s claimed that England hasn’t been invaded since 1066. James fled to France, dropping the Great Seal in the Thames, and was deemed to have abdicated. When he landed in Ireland the year after, the Dublin Parliament did acknowledge him as King. By this time, William and Mary had taken control of England and Scotland, and the Battle of the Boyne ensued, on what is now 12th July 1690 but back then was the first due to calendar reform. William’s victory is what the Orange Lodges celebrate on this day every year when they march through settlements in the North. To me that seems triumphalist and provocative, like they’re spoiling for a fight and aren’t interested in compromise, and to be honest I’m hard-pressed to understand the mindset of unionists, but my family, being Glaswegian, doubtless partook in sectarianism and was almost certainly on the “Protestant” side.
I really can see both sides very easily here though. On the one hand I’d see James’s apparent attitude of tolerance towards Roman Catholics, and even more Dissenters, as entirely fair-minded although I’m sure he had ulterior motives. On the other, at the time I would expect the Roman Catholic Church to be a political power able to intervene in countries’ affairs and interfere with their sovereignty, so in this respect the whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of Brexit.
I’ve heard that one of the consequences of the House of Orange-Nassau is that carrots were bred to be orange in celebration of their fight against Spain in the Netherlands. However, this is not so. Before their cultivation, carrots were white or cream-coloured like their relatives parsnip and parsley roots. Afterwards, they tended to be purple, I’m assuming because of high anthocyanin content but that’s just a guess, in an eastern, Himalayan group, and orange in a western Persian group. The latter were probably selected for due to their hue, which means there is a more than casual link with their carotenoid content since humans are instinctively driven to prefer foods of certain colours. These orange carrots were then brought to Iberia by the Moors. Orange carrots were also more suited to the Dutch climate than purple ones. However, the orange colour of these carrots was ultimately used to promote Dutch nationalism, so there is a link.
The colour of these carrots indicates an extremely high β carotene content, as is often the case with orange plant organs such as pumpkins and marigolds. This particular carotenoid is one of many, but is the most efficiently converted to retinol, actual vitamin A as found in animal products. Vitamin A is the most toxic of all the vitamins, it’s notoriously easy to kill yourself by drinking too much carrot juice, and yes it does turn you orange. Carotenoids are also used by birds and crustacea as a pigment, unlike mammals who essentially only ever use melanin unless you count hæmoglobin showing through the skin, which can be significant. Lycopene is a red carotenoid found in tomatoes and capsicums, which is also converted to vitamin A by the body, though not as efficiently.
Perhaps surprisingly, β carotene is a hydrocarbon. Here is the structural formula:
Everything in that molecule is either a carbon or a hydrogen, which is unusual in biochemistry which generally has oxygen in there too. At this point I have to confess that I don’t understand how colour chemistry works. Structural colour is straightforward. It’s fairly obvious that rock doves and starlings have iridescent feathers because there are layers of light and dark in them which are spaced by a distance close to a wavelength of visible light, and I’m aware that the colour of ions such as sodium and strontium have those colours due to something to do with energy levels in their orbitals, but I have no idea at all what makes this substance here yellow, or lycopene red, or for that matter anthocyanins purple. I’ve been told that it’s to do with the large number of double bonds in the molecule, which may be the case as saturated fats tend to be white, monounsaturated olive oil is green and polyunsaturated cis vegetable oils are yellow. But why this would make a difference I have not one clue.
Oranges are not the only fruit which is coloured orange, but like many of the others the reason is once again their high carotenoid content. Here in England oranges and other Citrus fruits have an unearned reputation for being high in vitamin C. However, once they’ve been transported from their countries of origin most of this has been destroyed by ultraviolet light from the Sun and the vitamin is also annoyingly fragile in general, meaning that by the time they’ve got to us, they may well have none whatever. Orange trees do grow in this country but don’t, as far as I know, produce edible fruit: they’re kept for the ornamental effect of their leaves. Citrus is related to rue, which has similar looking but much tinier fruits. Citrus fruits in general are referred to botanically as “hesperidia” and as far as I know are completely unique in anatomy. Orange pips are also unusual because the outside of the seed can become one variety of tree and the inside another. A hesperidium is defined as a fruit with sectioned pulp beneath a removable rind. There are also the distantly related “Osage oranges”, which are definitely not hesperidia. An Osage orange is a dioecious (separate-sexed) tree related to figs which produces superficially orange-like, but not orange-coloured, fruits comprising compound drupes, which are fleshy fruits with skins and central stones like peaches.
Like some other words, the word “orange” has two different origins. Orange as the name of the fruit is slightly confusing. Although it used to be called “a norange” in English, similar to “napron” and “nadder”, the Latin name for them is Citrus aurantium, a reference to golden apples, which they tend to be associated with, and it seems that the word “aurantium” could easily become “orange” in French and English. That said, “norange” is actually from a completely different source, namely the Sanskrit नारङ्ग, narangah, which is in turn from a Dravidian root as seen in Malayalam നാരങ്ങ, narangnga, which actually means “lemon”. However, there’s also Orange the placename, which is in the south of France. Thisses name is derived from Arausio, the name of a Celtic water god. The association with the fruit and colour came later.
Famously, there is no rhyme for “orange”. This is part of a coincidental trio of colour words for which there is also no rhyme, “purple” and “silver” being the other two. There is a mountain in, of all places, Monmouthshire whose English name is Blorenge, but that’s a proper noun. People have tried also to popularise the word “borange” with various meanings but it’s never caught on. This is where ‘Replicas’ comes in.
‘Replicas’ is my novel set in Steve Wolfe’s and Roy Wysack’s excellent Galactic Association universe, based on ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers‘. It was originally going to be twice the length it ended up as, and as a minor plot point I had a plan regarding the word “orange”. There was a brief chapter in the first draft called “Hesperidium”, which simply described what that kind of fruit was botanically, but I removed this because it made no sense in the book as published. The reason it was in there was associated with the planet Athena, the most Earth-like of all the habitable exoplanets. The earlier part of the novel is set in the 24th century before the discovery of Athena, which unlike the other planets suitable for human habitation was discovered by aliens who couldn’t use it themselves due to their very different biochemistry. The name of the alien discovering it was Tnupic Kzorange. My plan was for my central character to travel to the planet and settle on it to discover new food sources, and one of the continents would be named after the discoverer of the planet, hence Kzorange. It would then emerge that there was an edible and highly nutritious teal-coloured fruit on that continent which was in the form of a hesperidium and would end up being named a “kzorange”, causing the word “orange” to have a rhyme in English. There is a precedent for fruit being named after their presumed land of origin, since in Arabic the word for the fruit “orange” is برتقال, burtuqal, due to a presumed origin in Portugal. However, it was not to be. Incidentally, this wasn’t supposed to be a major part of the plot!
Orange as a colour is actually my least favourite. It’s basically bright brown. I find it a low-energy, dull, depressing colour, a bit like red. I’m aware as well that this perception is at odds with how most people with colour vision perceive it, and also that there’s nothing deficient about my colour perception, so I don’t know how to explain this. As far as I can remember I’ve only had one substantially orange garment in my life – a pair of leggings with orange side panels. I wasn’t particularly keen on them. I don’t know what it is about orange I dislike. I’ve just read a description of it as “warm, energetic, vibrant and happy”, which I don’t see at all. It may be due to the fact that it’s the complementary colour to blue, which is one of my favourites (violet is my favourite colour of all). I find blue to be energetic and happy.
There are also orangish stars, that is, K-type stars, one example being Arcturus. Orange dwarfs may turn out to be more suitable places for the evolution of intelligent life than Sun-like stars, because they last considerably longer and give life more time to evolve. An orange dwarf would have a habitable zone closer to it than Earth, so the year of such a planet would be shorter and it might also be colder, but orange dwarfs are actually more common than yellow dwarfs like our own star.
Finally, the only element which is orange is copper and the only orange ion is one oxidation state of chromium, although some would say sodium ions are also. The only herbal remedy which is orange is the rarely used rhubarb root, which is a powerful laxative.
So that’s orange!
A Box Of Chocolates 