History Today 2014-08

FIRST WORLD WAR Why Britain FOUGHT

ROMAN CLASS STRUGGLE From Caesar to CAESAR August 2014 Vol 64 Issue 8

The Day Washington

BURNED

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Brothers in arms: Private Lay (seated) with unknown comrade, c.1916.

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FROM THE EDITOR THE CENTENARY of the outbreak of the First World War has raised a number of questions, many of them seeking the answer of who should bear ultimate responsibility for the carnage that followed. But another kind of question arose at one of the first of a number of public Great War debates I have attended this year, held in February at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. ‘Where are the black faces?’ asked a man in the audience, a film-maker of African heritage, who pointed out that, of 100 or so people in the room, he and an elderly Asian man were the only ones from ethnic minorities. His point is an important one, for around one and a half million Indians – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – served the British Empire during the war and as many as two million Africans were involved as soldiers and labourers. The next few years present a real opportunity, already grasped in part, to tell their story and paint a more detailed, more accurate story of the global nature of the conflict. But we should be careful, whatever our background, of identifying too closely with those who simply bear a physical resemblance to us, for history is more than skin deep. I cannot, for example, get closer physically to the Great War than the man seated in the photograph above, my paternal grandfather, with whom I share a quarter of my genes. Private Nicholas Neil Lay volunteered for the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, lying about his age, as did so many, in order to go to France in search of his father, who had already taken the king’s shilling. He was later transferred to the Hampshire Regiment and fought at the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres, before coming home alive – as 88 per cent of all British soldiers did, including his father – apparently without trauma but bearing a shrapnel wound on his neck as a reminder. There is a family resemblance, especially to my father, but it is important to recognise how different my grandfather’s generation was from ours. Their world was much harder, with little in the way of welfare and relatively primitive health care; it would take another war to deliver a National Health Service. Attitudes to pain, to suffering, to hardship were different, more stoic, as were notions of honour and patriotism. There were far fewer distractions and there was greater moral certainty, on religion, race and gender. Amid the commemorations of August 1914 we must remember that even those combatants who look like us are a distant world away.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

FO Females • Army Cuts • Britain and Crimea • Kenneth Clark

Opening the Doors of Diplomacy The Foreign Office was long a bastion of male chauvinism. Only during the Second World War did women diplomats begin to make their mark. Helen McCarthy IN HER interwar classic, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf imagined the following scene. The daughter of an educated man, in the course of conversation with a brother or male acquaintance, raises the possibility that newly enfranchised women should now be admitted to all professions, including those still reserved for men: We on our side of the table become aware at once of some ‘strong emotion’ on your side ‘arising from some motive below the level of conscious thought’... The physical symptoms are unmistakable. Nerves erect themselves; fingers automatically tighten upon spoon or cigarette; a glance at the private psychometer shows that the emotional temperature has risen from ten to twenty degrees above normal. Woolf was not present at the proceedings of the departmental committee convened by the British Foreign Office in 1934 to consider women’s suitability for diplomatic careers. Had she been, she would have felt little need to reconsider her analysis of the masculine instinct to preserve its professional privileges. Feminist efforts to unlock the doors of the Foreign Office were met with fierce resistance from its long-time incumbents, who were profoundly disturbed by the prospect of a feminine invasion of their club-like world. Only the large-scale mobilisation of women on the home and fighting fronts during the Second

Locked out: a Punch cartoon of 1936 reflects on the barriers to female diplomats.

World War was sufficient to force a change to the masculine status quo. In 1946 women finally became eligible for posts in the British Diplomatic Service. The strength of feeling on the part of men in the Foreign Office stemmed from the perceived threat posed by women diplomats to the social and sexual order underpinning the modern diplomatic profession. In the 19th century diplomacy evolved into a well-defined career for elite men accompanied by dutiful and loyal

Feminist efforts to unlock the doors of the Foreign Office were met with fierce resistance from its long-time incumbents

spouses. By the interwar years women were employed as typists and in lower-grade clerical roles in embassies, but never as the professional equals of men. This state of affairs clearly suited Foreign Office authorities, who only reluctantly agreed to consider the possibility of appointing female diplomats following pressure from feminists and professional women’s societies. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, made his position clear. Such a move ‘would not be in the interests of the women themselves, nor in the interest of His Majesty’s Service; and it would be damaging to the prestige of His Majesty’s Government in foreign countries’. In 1933 Vansittart handed the task of preparing the Foreign Office case to an assistant under-secretary, Charles Howard Smith, who swiftly pledged to gather ‘all the ammunition I can get’. This did not prove difficult. Of 51 ambassadors canvassed for their opinions, only three were in favour of employing women. The heads of the Consular Service, whose officers worked in less salubrious surroundings in remote outposts or port towns, were even more emphatically opposed. Their combined evidence advanced three main arguments. The first dwelt on the practical difficulties of posting women to countries where their status was low. In Vansittart’s words: ‘It is a false argument to say that, because we treat women as equal in this country, an Englishwoman abroad will be so treated by foreigners. She will not.’ The ambassador to Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, reinforced the point, noting that Nazi officials ‘would probably feel that they themselves were not being taken sufficiently seriously for being asked to receive her’. The second argument centred on the rough and tumble of the port, where consular officers could be called upon to placate violent and AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3

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inebriated sailors, deal with outbreaks of venereal disease on merchant ships, or investigate allegations of ‘homosexual crime’ at sea. Such tasks were ‘obviously’ unsuitable for women. The third argument focused on marital status. A single woman, it was suggested, was of dramatically lower value than a male diplomat, who came with a spouse in tow. The ambassador to Buenos Aires, Sir Henry Chilton, speculated that ‘a femme sole as Ambassadress would do no more than 50 per cent of the work done by my wife and myself’. Conversely, a married woman presented the thorny problem of the

The sacrifices of women on the home front made it impossible to deny renewed feminist demands for equality diplomatic husband: if he shunned the part of trailing spouse, then her resignation became inevitable but, if he accompanied her en poste, the chances were he would quickly make himself a nuisance to the work of the embassy. These arguments were skilfully marshalled by Howard Smith, who ensured the committee did not see the more rabidly misogynistic comments of ambassadors like Sir Joseph Addison, who confessed that he would rather die than ‘see England with 400 MPs, 15 Cabinet Ministers, 10 High Court Judges, 6 Permanent UnderSecretaries and 8 Ambassadors, all of the female sex and running the country on the famous “intuition” lines’. In truth, beliefs about women’s supposed temperamental shortcomings were widely held. Many ambassadors noted a tendency towards ‘sentimentality’, while one official, David Scott, expressed the view that women ‘were only too apt to espouse causes, and would be even if fully trained. It was a matter of their very nature’. In 1934 the committee found in favour of maintaining the status quo, yet just over a decade later women were representing Britain as diplomats in their own right. What happened 4 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

to effect this dramatic reversal? Put simply, the answer was the war. Manpower shortages forced the Foreign Office, alongside other Whitehall departments, to post women overseas to carry out responsible political work. This included (among others) the traveller Freya Stark in Egypt and Iraq, the Persian scholar Nancy Lambton in Tehran, Canadian-born Mary McGeachy in Washington DC and the journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann in Switzerland. Their professional competence destroyed much of the Foreign Office case against women, while the sacrifices of ordinary women on the home front made it impossible to deny renewed feminist demands for equality in all areas of public life, including that of diplomacy. Woolf’s psychometer, however, still ran high even after 1946. Alongside a marriage bar, which stayed in place until 1973, postwar female recruits encountered hostile department heads in London and were denied overseas postings by sceptical ambassadors. The Foreign Office today is a far more welcoming place, yet women remain outnumbered by men in the most senior grades to the level of three to one. The battle for the Foreign Office may be over, but it is not yet history. Helen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London and the author of Women of the World: the Rise of the Female Diplomat (Bloomsbury, 2014). Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The New Contemptibles? Neglected by politicians, today’s British army bears an alarming resemblance to the force of 1914. Allan Mallinson GIVING EVIDENCE in June this year before the Public Accounts Committee on the plans for ‘Army 2020’, in which 30,000 territorials will replace 20,000 regulars, the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Peter Wall, was asked what contingency plans there were in case enough territorials couldn’t be recruited. He replied that to sustain operations the army might have to recall former regulars to the colours. We have been here before: in August 1914. Then, as now, the British army relied wholly on volunteers, whereas every major power in Europe (and most minor ones) had conscription. The advantage of conscription was that it not only produced large, ready armies, but also a pool of trained reservist manpower, topped up annually when the conscript intake of two or three years before returned to civilian life. Reflecting on this disparity in a lecture at the Royal United Services Institution in December 1920, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, declared: There are a great many advantages in a voluntary army; there are a great many disadvantages. But whatever the advantages, and whatever the disadvantages, there is this constant factor in a voluntary army: it solves no military problem alone – none … In 1914, if we take that year, there was not one single campaign that the wit of man could imagine where the right answer was: ‘Six Regular divisions and fourteen Territorials’. Yet in 1914, the then Major-General Wilson, as Director of Military Operations, had been content to send just four of the British Expeditionary Force’s (BEF) six divisions to fight on the left wing of the French army (of some 90 divisions) along the Belgian border. Either his eyes

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had been opened by the experience of four years of needless losses or he was attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of those in the audience who might question his earlier judgement. Unfortunately there is no record of the subsequent discussion. Wilson’s ‘defence’ would have been that his preferred solution was to send every soldier in the UK – regular and territorial – to France at once, for he believed there was no realistic threat of invasion and that the scales of the French and German armies were so finely balanced that the British contribution could be decisive. He may have been right, but he would have been trying to fashion a coat from cloth that was available but beyond his pocket. The Territorial Force’s (TF) raison d’être was home – territorial – defence. There was nothing to stop a territorial volunteering for service overseas, but he couldn’t be compelled. That was the deal. Why 14 divisions of territorials? Because 14 was the maximum that could be raised from the money voted by Parliament and because the county TF associations were a powerful lobby with no wish to see their power reduced. Strictly, too, the BEF of August 1914 was not all-regular. The first requirement of the army in Britain was to keep the overseas garrisons up to strength. Each infantry regiment therefore comprised two regular battalions (some regiments had four) and the one stationed at home sent drafts periodically to the other overseas, which meant the home battalion was invariably under-strength. When mobilised for war the home battalion relied on the recall of regular reservists; men who had completed their service and retained a seven-year reserve liability after discharge. In August 1914 these reservists, mobilised in a masterful programme that was completed in three days, comprised 60 per cent of the BEF. Their fitness, efficiency and enthusiasm were variable, though they did, on the whole, perform well. Wilson could only send four regular divisions to France because in 1912 the Committee of Imperial Defence had recommended that, in spite of

Then, as now, the British army relied wholly on volunteers, whereas every major power in Europe had conscription Bound for the front: soldiers of the BEF share a railway carriage with horses, August 1914.

the 14 TF divisions and the might of the Royal Navy, two regular divisions would remain in these islands until the TF was fully mobilised or the threat of invasion was demonstrably nil. In the event, just four infantry divisions (and the cavalry division) – around 80,000 combatants – would find themselves facing several times their number of Germans in their first encounter of the war, at Mons on August 23rd. A fifth division, sent out hurriedly, was caught on the hop a few days later at Le Cateau in the middle of the BEF’s fighting retreat; a sixth joined during the counter-attack on the Marne in early September and was cut up in the battle to take the heights on the River Aisne; a seventh – a scratch division made up of regular troops pulled back from various overseas garrisons – joined

a few weeks later; and an eighth arrived in November as the fighting intensified around Ypres. Three more divisions from overseas garrisons would arrive (as well as hastily formed divisions of the Indian army) until there were no more regulars to send. All of these divisions had been committed to battle piecemeal, instead of en masse as some, notably Churchill and Haig, had advocated (see ‘Churchill’s Plan to Win the First World War’, History Today, December 2013) and by the end of November the old regular army was a shadow of its former self. Wilson’s plan broke Clausewitz’s first principle of war: ‘The first rule is therefore to enter the field with an army as strong as possible.’ The Kaiser can be forgiven for (reputedly) calling the BEF ‘a contemptible little army’; he protested after the war that he had not, but that he might have described it as ‘contemptibly little’ – an indisputable description of a tiny, if highly trained, army seeking to influence a war between two nations with universal adult male conscription. There had been voices in Britain calling for conscription. The National Service League, founded in February 1902 in the later stages of the Boer War (a shock to the army’s prestige), argued for compulsory military training for men aged between 18 and 30 for the purpose of home defence. Under the presidency of the former Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts, membership of the league reached 60,000 in 1910. Churchill, by then Home Secretary, expressed some private, if guarded, support, as did the Chancellor, Lloyd George, who preferred a militia system on the Swiss model, implying a less ‘aggressive’ stance than full-blown conscription; but the voluntary principle prevailed. Haldane, the great reforming Secretary of State for War, even turned the old militia – service in which could still in theory be compulsory through the ‘militia ballot’ – into an all-volunteer force to provide battle-casualty replacements for the regulars, renaming it the Special Reserve (SR). In August 1914 this worked reasonably well, especially with officers, who had AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 5

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joined the SR through the school and university officer training corps. Both Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon joined regular battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers as SR officers. When it was realised – on the first day of the war – that a far larger army would be needed than the 14 divisions of the TF – Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, appointed war minister on August 5th, decided arbitrarily to raise in stages a citizen-volunteer army that by 1917 would number some 800,000, albeit without the men, the system or the materiel to train, equip and lead them. Losses among the regulars in 1914 and then among the territorials who were sent to France to reinforce them led in 1916 to the introduction of conscription. Britain had had to fashion an army from scratch, while at the same time fighting the enemy, unlike the Continental powers, who could mobilise huge numbers of reservists, while continuing to prepare those nearing conscript age. Even the United States, whose army at the beginning of 1917 numbered just 80,000, had a million and a half men in France 18 months later. They were able to do so because the task of the 80,000 regulars was first to build an army and only then to fight. The British army, on the other hand, was knocked off balance in the first month of fighting and did not regain it until the summer of 1918, when conscription and experience at last fashioned a strong instrument. The lesson of 1914, wrote Lloyd George, is that minority governments can be distracted by peripheral matters: During the eight years that preceded the war, the Cabinet devoted a ridiculously small percentage of its time to a consideration of foreign affairs … Education, Temperance, Land Taxation, culminating in the most serious constitutional crisis since the Reform Bill – the Parliament Act – Home Rule, and the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales: these subjects challenged an infinite variety of human interests, sentiment and emotion. Today free schools, HS2, another Heathrow and much else are subjects that similarly challenge an infinite variety of human interests, sentiment and emotion.

Allan Mallinson’s latest book is 1914: Fight the Good Fight – Britain, the Army and the Coming of the First World War (Bantam Press, 2013). 6 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Pitted Against the Bear

Britain and Russia came close to blows over Crimea in the 18th century. Jeremy Black

THE BRITISH FORCES sent to the Black Sea during the Crimean and Russian civil wars would not have been the first had the government of William Pitt the Younger had its way in 1791. Benefiting from divisions among the Crimean Tatars, Catherine the Great had annexed Crimea eight years earlier, only for the Ottoman Sultan, the overlord of the Crimean khanate, to launch a war of reconquest in 1787. Repulsing the Turkish attack, the Russians went on to make major gains. Concerned about a threat to the balance of power, Britain, which had allied with Prussia in 1787, pressed Russia and its ally Austria to end the war without making territorial gains. Austria agreed, but Russia refused. In 1791 the crisis centred on Russian determination to retain the fortress of Ochavov (stormed by Potemkin in 1788) and its lands between the rivers Bug and Dniester, consolidating control over Crimea. Britain prepared for action, with fleets in the Baltic and Black seas and with a Prussian army on the Russian frontier. Efforts were made to create an international league, including Poland, Sweden and Holland.

On March 28th, 1791 the British government asked Parliament for funds for naval armaments. The next day it won majorities in both Houses, but the cohesion of the ministry was damaged by the debates. Meanwhile, public agitation in favour of Russia and against war developed, encouraged both by the Russian envoy, Count Vorontsov, and by the Russia Company, which acted as a powerful lobby. It was difficult for the ministry to justify a policy designed to intimidate Russia just short of going to war and to retain Prussia as an ally, while restraining it militarily. The government’s majority began to crumble in April, over a range of concerns affecting parliamentarians, including the loss of Russian trade, the costs of war and geopolitical considerations. In the Lords the Duke of Richmond told the Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, that ‘the country would not support’ confrontation with Russia, but Leeds wanted to press on. In contrast, Pitt was affected by the opposition in the Commons, which saw him change policy to one of conciliation and compromise. Leeds resigned in disgust. By abandoning his policy, Pitt rode out the political storm. Britain was marginalised in the RussoTurkish Treaty of Jassy (1792). The Russians gained Ochakov and territory up to the Dniester. The annexation of Crimea was accepted. The Eastern Question had emerged.

Jeremy Black’s most recent book is The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World (Yale, 2014).

‘The Political Warrior Mowing Down the Russian Trade’, a satire on Pitt’s foreign policy from 1791.

A vision in tweed: Kenneth Clark filming an episode of Civilisation in the Lake District.

In Defence of Civilisation

Plans to remake the landmark BBC TV series raise challenging questions about contemporary pieties. Michael Prodger HOW OFTEN has Lord Hall paused to regret announcing that the BBC intends to remake Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation? The notion becomes more fraught with difficulty at every turn. Set aside the question as to whether a modern Civilisation is a good idea and still Hall’s problems, or rather those of his commissioning editors, multiply. First shown in 1969 in 12 episodes, Civilisation focused exclusively on western Europe. It is inconceivable that today’s BBC could make a series that excluded the cultures of the Far East, India, Africa and Central and South America. So is one that paid little attention to women. Or indeed one that started, as Clark’s did, with the disarming statement: ‘What is civilisation? I don’t know … but I think I can recognise it when I see it.’ Early attacks on Clark were instigated by his ideological opposite John Berger and they hit home. The way that Clark has been wilfully misinterpreted is, however, also a measure of changed times and contemporary pieties. His omission of other cultures was not because he thought them inferior but because, as he admitted, he didn’t know much about them. He did not ‘suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian

era and the east’, but people did. It is worth noting that he hardly mentioned Spain – Velázquez, Goya et al – in the series because he thought the country’s contribution to culture too slight: ‘One asks what Spain has done to enlarge the human mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill.’ It is also forgotten that the series had the all-important subtitle; ‘A personal view by Kenneth Clark’. Hall’s greatest problem though

If you are going to make grand statements then it is best to be able to back them up and Kenneth Clark could is who should play the Clark role. Immediately after the BBC announcement, the retiring novelist Kathy Lette unhelpfully whipped up a petition signed by the likes of Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier and Sandi Toksvig instructing Hall not to plump for a man. Mary Beard is their poster girl, though what attributes she would bring to a discussion of 19th-century Paris or pre-Columbian Peru was not made clear. Among other widely tipped names Neil MacGregor and Simon Schama stand out. Pick a woman and Hall will be accused of pandering to feminists, pick MacGregor and he will be demonstrat-

ing patrician tendencies; pick Schama and it will show a lack of imagination. And why no black or Indian presenter? Clark may have been derided for his tweediness and his plummy tones but he had a breadth of expertise that is unrivalled today. By 28 he was Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean and, three years later, Director of the National Gallery and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Civilisation was far from his only foray into television; he presented more than 50 programmes, including a series on Japanese art. Indeed it was the gift of a set of Japanese prints from his father, heir to a textile fortune and supposedly the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, that first fired Clark’s interest in art. His tastes were far from Eurocentric. His grand generalisations (‘One fancies that Nordic man took a long time to emerge from the primeval forest’ or ‘I suppose it’s debatable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilised’) may now seem laughably de haut en bas but they were born from a lifetime of study: Clark was 66 when he made Civilisation. If you are going to make grand statements then it is best to be able to back them up and Kenneth Clark could. Although his books are no longer required reading, they were groundbreaking in condensing vast genres for the first time. Like those of his hero Ruskin, they were readable in a way that subsequent art history often is not. In one sense, though, Hall’s initiative seems apposite. Civilisation was first aired while both the Cold War and the Vietnam wars were in full swing and only a year after the événements in Paris and the assassination of Martin Luther King. So, when Clark said of the fall of the Roman Empire that ‘It does seem hard to believe that western civilisation could ever vanish and yet, you know, it has happened once’, his words had a contemporary relevance. And when David Attenborough, then controller of BBC2, asked him to create the series he had ‘no clear idea’ of what civilisation meant except that: ‘I thought it was preferable to barbarism, and fancied that now was the moment to say so.’ Different times perhaps but it is worth saying it again.

Michael Prodger is a senior research fellow at the University of Buckingham. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

AUGUST

By Richard Cavendish

AUGUST 1st, 1464

The death of Cosimo de’ Medici By the end of the 14th century the city-state of Florence had built up a profitable textile industry with a flourishing export trade and had become a major banking centre, lending money to businessmen, kings and lords, popes and senior clergy. The city and its surrounding territory was an independent republic governed by its wealthiest families through the Signoria, the city council, behind a façade of democracy. The Medicis, originally Tuscan peasantry, worked their way up into the rich elite and Cosimo the Elder, as he was known, would make himself the effective ruler of Florence and one of the key figures of the Italian Renaissance. Cosimo was the elder son and successor of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who founded the Medici Bank in the 1390s, opened branches in Rome, Venice and Naples and went on to take charge of the Vatican’s finances. He died in 1429, when Cosimo was 39. Cosimo was a brilliant businessman who made a colossal fortune in banking and also adroitly built up Medici political power in Florence. In 1433 some of his rivals had him arrested and charged with trying to elevate himself above the status of an ordinary citizen, which in supposedly democratic Florence could carry the death penalty. Imprisoned in a tiny dungeon, Cosimo contrived to make sure that his food was not poisoned and quietly bribed enough members of the Signoria to reduce the sentence to banishment for five years. Cosimo went to Padua and soon moved on to Venice, where he and his money were warmly received. He had taken his bank with him and the effect on the economy of Florence was so severe that the banishment was cancelled and Cosimo returned to Florence in 1434. He then had his opponents banished in their turn and made sure that they never returned. 8 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Renaissance man: Cosimo the Elder by Pontormo, c.1520.

Cosimo’s huge wealth and his combination of open-handed generosity and shrewd bribery took him to the top of Florentine society. He took care never to behave like a despot and his simple, straightforward manner helped to endear him to many citizens. So did his generous gifts to churches, the religious orders and other good causes. He gained the support of the majority of the Signoria, who considered him the most influential figure in helping them to retain their privileged position in the city. Pope Pius II, who knew him well, said that political matters were settled at Cosimo’s house; he chose who should fill public positions; he decided peace and war; and he was virtually king of Florence. Another factor was Cosimo’s exaltation of Florentine prestige through his encouragement of scholars and artists. From his boyhood he had been interested in ‘the new humanism’, the study of the literature, learning and philosophy of

Ancient Greece and Rome. He lavished money on the Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino and financed his translation of the entire works of Plato. They became close friends and enjoyed discussing philosophy together. He also backed the scholar Poggio Bracciolino, who travelled about rediscovering longlost classical manuscripts, and Cosimo built up his own library of books and Greek, Latin and Hebrew documents, which he had translated. Cosimo also commissioned work from the city’s architects and artists. The Medici Palace, where he lived with his wife Contessina and his slavemistress Maddalena (he bought her in Venice), was designed by Michelozzo de Bartolozzi and built in Florence from the 1440s. Cosimo had already paid Michelozzo to rebuild the monastery of San Marco, where he had his own private cell and held deep theological discussions with the prior, the future St Antonio Pierozzi. He paid Filippo Brunelleschi to rebuild the Medici family’s parish church of San Lorenzo. Others he backed included Michelangelo, the sculptors Donatello and Ghiberti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. He is on record as saying that his two supreme pleasures in life were making and spending money and that spending it was even more satisfying than making it. In his later years Cosimo suffered badly from gout, arthritis and bladder problems. Ficino recorded that when Cosimo’s wife reproached him for spending so much time sitting in a chair with his eyes closed, doing nothing, he replied that when they moved to their country estates she took plenty of time over her preparations and he equally needed time to prepare for his journey to a country from which he would not return. He was 74 when he died at his country house at Careggi. His body was taken to Florence and huge crowds filled the streets as he was buried in the church of San Lorenzo, where his tomb can still be seen. Carved on it by order of the Signoria were the words Pater Patriae, ‘Father of the Country’.

AUGUST 21st, 1614

Death of Countess Elizabeth Bathory

She has been described as the most vicious female serial killer in all recorded history. Where fact ends and fiction begins in her horrible story is now impossible to determine, but in her fame as a legendary vampire she is outrivalled only by Count Dracula. Born in 1560, she was endowed with looks, wealth, an excellent education and a stellar social position as one of the Bathory family, who ruled Transylvania as a virtually independent principality within the kingdom of Hungary. When she was 11 or 12 Elizabeth was betrothed to Ferenc Nádasdy of another aristocratic Hungarian family, but a year or two later she had a baby by a lower-order lover. Nádasdy was reported to have had him castrated and then torn to pieces by dogs. The child, a daughter, was quietly hidden from view and Elizabeth and Nádasdy were married in 1575 when she was 14. Because Elizabeth socially outranked her husband, she kept the surname Bathory, which he added

to his own. The young couple lived in the Nádasdy castles in Hungary at Sárvár and Csetje (now in Slovakia), but Ferenc was an ambitious soldier and was often away. Elizabeth ran the estates, took various lovers and bore her husband four children. She was 43 when he died in 1604. Word was beginning to spread about her sadistic activities. It was said that she enjoyed torturing and killing young girls. At first they were servants at her castles, daughters of

Blood countess: Elizabeth Bathory, anonymous portrait, 17th century.

Blown away: a scene from The Wizard of Oz.

AUGUST 12th, 1939

‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ Premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, The Wizard of Oz was one of the best-loved Hollywood films ever made. It was the most expensive movie

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had produced to date and it made an international star of Judy Garland, who had begun life with the not wildly glamorous name of Frances Gumm, but endowed with a compelling singing voice. MGM signed her aged 13 in 1935 and did its utmost to pretend that she was still a young teenager when she played the role of the film’s 12-year-old heroine, Dorothy Gale, who with her dog Toto is blown away by a whirlwind to Oz in Munchkin Land. Following the yellow brick road to find the Wizard of Oz, who she hopes will use his magic to send her home, she falls in with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion (played by Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr, respectively), who also need the Wizard’s help. The travellers are welcomed to Munchkin Land by its inhabitants, the Munchkins, played by an assortment of dwarfs.

the local peasants, but later they included girls sent to her by local gentry families to learn good manners. She believed that drinking the blood of young girls would preserve her youthfulness and her looks. Witnesses told of her stabbing victims or biting their breasts, hands, faces and arms, cutting them with scissors, sticking needles into their lips or burning them with red-hot irons, coins or keys. Some were beaten to death and some were starved. The story that Elizabeth used to bathe in their blood seems to have been added later on. A Lutheran minister went to the Hungarian authorities, who eventually began an investigation in 1610. In December of that year Elizabeth was arrested and so were four of her favourite servants and intimates, who were accused of being her accomplices. They were tried and found guilty. Three of them were executed and the fourth was sentenced to life imprisonment. Elizabeth herself was not put on trial, because of her family’s standing, but she was shut up in Csetje Castle, held in solitary confinement in a room whose windows were walled up. She was 54 when she died there in 1614.

The Wizard turns out to be a fake and Dorothy eventually returns home by clapping her hands three times and saying ‘There’s no place like home’. Work on the film started in 1938. The producer was Mervyn LeRoy and the principal director Victor Fleming. The script, by many different writers, was based on a novel written for children years before by Frank Baum. The songs had music by Harold Arlen and words by E.Y. Harburg. Besides ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which won an Academy Award and which Judy Garland would have to sing to audiences on demand for years, the songs included ‘We’re Off to See the Wizard’ and ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’. Sadly, there was to be no place like home for Garland herself. Her life was a miserable progression through mental problems, addiction to alcohol and drugs, failed relationships, suicide attempts and desperate unhappiness until death freed her when she was 47 in 1969. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 9

ROME

The Many and the Few T.P. Wiseman looks at how Roman republican ideals and the struggle between optimates and populares shaped the lives and legacies of the Roman imperator, Augustus, and his designated successor, Tiberius.

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WO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, on August 18th, ad 14, at the town of Nola, about 20 miles east of Naples, Caesar Augustus lay dying. He was lucid enough to have a long private talk with his adopted son and heir, Tiberius, who had been urgently called back across the Adriatic from his military command. There can have been only one subject for their discussion: how Rome and its empire were now to be governed. Augustus’ biographer Suetonius, a scrupulous and well-informed author, does not speculate on what was said, but adds this comment: I know it is commonly believed that when Tiberius had left after this confidential talk, Augustus’ personal staff heard him say: ‘Poor Roman people, to be under such slow-moving jaws!’ From his access to the imperial archives, Suetonius also knew that Augustus’ private letters to Tiberius gave a more favourable view of him. He quotes a selection of passages, including these two: Please look after yourself. If we heard you were ill it would be the death of your mother and me, and the Roman people would be risking the whole of their empire.

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I pray the gods, if they don’t simply hate the Roman people, to preserve you for us and allow you good health, now and always. Modern readers may find the phraseology surprising. Surely Augustus was an emperor and Tiberius his successor? What did the Roman people have to do with it? They had everything to do with it. The term ‘emperor’, when used of either Augustus or Tiberius, is a deeply misleading anachronism. To understand why, we need to go back three centuries. IN THE THIRD CENTURY bc, the earliest for which we have reliable information, ‘the Roman people’ and ‘the Roman republic’ were synonymous. All Roman citizens were equal, as established in the beginning by Romulus. Political authority and military command, even when held by descendants of old aristocratic families, were for the benefit of and in the control of the populus Romanus. It was the war with Hannibal (218-201 bc) that undermined the egalitarian ideal. Rome’s two most disastrous defeats were the fault of ‘popular’ commanders (Flaminius and Varro), while the men responsible both for the patient defensive strategy that prevented Hannibal

The Great Cameo of France was carved in the reign of Tiberius, ad c.23, and shows him enthroned, while Augustus, veiled and crowned, floats above. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 11

ROME from winning and for the bold aggression that finally defeated him (respectively, Fabius Maximus and Cornelius Scipio) were patricians of the old nobility. The Senate took credit for Rome’s new position as the superpower of the western Mediterranean and it was another aristocrat, Aemilius Paullus, who conquered Macedon and in 167 bc led the last of Alexander the Great’s successors in a Roman triumph. The profits of empire exacerbated the difference in wealth between the top and the bottom of Roman society and by the second half of the second century bc there were many among the senatorial aristocracy arrogant enough to believe that the republic was for their benefit alone. When legally elected tribunes of the plebs were murdered with impunity for carrying legislation against the political and economic interests of the aristocratic elite, as happened in 133, 121, 100 and 88 bc, the politics of the republic were fatally polarised and political assassination led directly to civil war.

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E ARE uniquely well informed about this catastrophic period thanks to the surviving speeches, dialogues and letters of Cicero (106-43 bc), for whom ideological confrontation was an inevitable fact. ‘In this state’, he said, ‘there have always been two sorts of politician, by name and by nature respectively populares and optimates; the former speak and act for the many [multitudo], the latter for the elite [optimus quisque].’ What Cicero called the elite was described more precisely by his younger contemporary, the historian Sallust, as ‘a few powerful men’ (pauci potentes). In Cicero’s time the populares had a formidable champion in Julius Caesar. When he crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome in 49 bc his wellpublicised aim was ‘to free the Roman people from their oppression by a clique of a few men’. Victorious in the civil war, he pardoned his defeated enemies and dismissed his bodyguard, relying on the oath sworn by all senators to protect his safety. The optimate ‘clique’ broke their oath and killed him on the Ides of March, 44 bc. The Roman people called for vengeance and rioted at his funeral. Caesar had no son, but had adopted in his will his great-nephew Octavius, a young man now receiving a military and oratorical education in Greece. The question was whether Octavius would accept the inheritance, the name ‘Caesar’ and the duty of vengeance? He did. In his own words, listing his achievements nearly 60 years later: At the age of 19, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by which I freed the republic from its oppression by a dominant clique. The echo of Caesar’s declaration is unmistakable – and now this young man was Caesar, too. (Modern authors tend to call him ‘Octavi-

The Century That Changed Rome 49 bc

Julius Caesar’s march on Rome

44 bc

Julius Caesar murdered

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42 bc

Assassins defeated at Philippi

Augustus wearing an imperial crown of honour made from oak leaves, first century bc.

an’, but that was a name he never used.) The Roman people elected him, along with two older colleagues, to a special five-year supreme command, in order to destroy the assassins and their allies. That was largely achieved at Philippi (42 bc) and the last diehard optimates were defeated in Sicily six years later. Meanwhile the dead Caesar was officially deified as Divus Iulius. It is important to understand that to call the forces of the assassins Brutus and Cassius ‘the republicans’, as some modern authors do, is to accept the optimates’ tendentious definition of what the republic was or should be. Like his father, the young Caesar was the champion of the populus Romanus. It was in that capacity that he went on to fight his ex-triumviral colleague Marcus Antonius, who had allied himself with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. Their defeat and suicide in 30 bc left Augustus the undisputed master of the Roman world.

30 bc

Defeat of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra

23 bc

Caesar Augustus receives tribunician authority

17 bc

Adoption of Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar

Left: Mosaics from Caesarea in North Africa show Romans working the land, 1st-2nd century ad. Below: Gold aureus of imperator Caesar, 28 bc (the year before he took the name Augustus). On the reverse is the legend: ‘He has restored to the people of Rome their laws and their rights.’

The position of Augustus was unique and his authority went unchallenged, but he was not an ‘emperor’ After the necessary mopping-up operations, in 28 bc Octavius ‘restored laws and justice to the Roman people’, as one of his coin issues phrased it, and the proper constitutional working of the republic resumed. The people’s vote decided elections to magistracies and legislation: if the magistrates elected and the laws passed were those that Caesar wanted, that was fine by the Roman people. He was their man, keeping the aristocrats in check; he was the son of Divus Iulius; from 27 bc he was Caesar Augustus, the honorific extra name suggesting divinely-approved authority; and from 23 bc he had the full powers of a tribune of the plebs, symbolising his role as protector of the people. THE POSITION OF AUGUSTUS WAS UNIQUE and his authority went unchallenged, but he was not an ‘emperor’. His title, imperator, meant ‘commander’ and the armies he commanded were those voted to him by the Roman people, not for life but for renewable fixed terms. The people could pull the plug on him at any time, but if they did they would be back with an oligarchy and the resumption of civil war.

2 bc

Caesar Augustus as pater patriae

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Adoption of Tiberius Caesar

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Death of Caesar Augustus

Augustus and his wife Livia had no children, but he had a daughter, Julia, and Livia two sons by their previous marriages. Julia (‘I never forget that I am Caesar’s daughter!’) was married to Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’ oldest friend and most trusted ally, and bore him two sons, whom Augustus then adopted as his own: they became Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar. Augustus’ stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus, Livia’s boys, were 20 years older and soon commanding armies of conquest in Germany and the Balkans, though Drusus died young in 9 bc. Tiberius’ father had been a patrician senator who served under Julius Caesar but later voted in favour of an optimate proposal that the assassins should be rewarded for their deed. Perhaps the Roman people remembered this; certainly they did not like Tiberius. Haughty, taciturn, grimly dutiful, he was a Roman aristocrat of the old school.

RESTORED TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY after the civil wars, the stability of the republic depended on the unofficial influence of one man. How could it be expressed in constitutional terms? Greeks simply assumed it was a monarchy and addressed Augustus as basileu, roughly ‘your majesty’. That was impossible for Romans: their last king had been driven out 500 years before and the republic was defined by the absence of royal power. What they called him was ‘Caesar’ – his family name, of course, but one with a unique resonance. In his father’s case, that uniqueness was expressed by his unprecedented status as a god and his temple that looked down the length of the Roman Forum. Everyone knew that when the time came, Augustus, too, would be posthumously deified. But in the meantime he was just a princeps, a ‘leading citizen’. In 2 bc, 40 years after the battle of Philippi, the Roman plebs wanted to honour their protector, then in his 61st year, in a special ceremony. Augustus said no: such a proposal would have to come from the whole citizen body, the Senate included. And so it did. He recorded it as the culminating item in his list of achievements:

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Tiberius Caesar retires to Capri

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Death of Tiberius Caesar

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Assassination of Caligula

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Right: The altar of Augustan Peace, the Ara Pacis, was commissioned by the Senate to honour the return of Augustus from war and the achievements of the JulioClaudian dynasty. This procession of dignitaries accompanies the emperor. Below: a Roman casts a vote on a coin of c.63 bc.

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While I was holding my 13th consulship [in 2 bc], the Senate, the equestrian order and the entire Roman people hailed me as Father of our country [pater patriae]. The spokesman in the Senate house was a senior ex-consul who had fought for the assassins at Philippi. Suetonius, who had an intimate knowledge of the documents, quotes him as speaking for ‘the Senate in consensus with the Roman people’ and gives Augustus’ exact words in reply: Now I have achieved all I prayed for. I have only this to ask of the immortal gods, that I may be allowed to carry this consensus of yours through to my life’s end. If the long ideological stand-off between the many and the few was really over, it was only because of Augustus’ constant presence and unique prestige. In that sense, he was indeed the father of his country – but what would happen when he died? In 2 bc Gaius Caesar was 18, his brother Lucius 15. A letter from Augustus to Gaius in ad 1 happens to be quoted by a later author. It shows that Augustus expected the two of them to understand their responsibilities and in due course take over his own ‘position’ (statio) in the republic. Not an easy job, especially for young men enjoying popular adulation, but in the end they were never tested. Lucius died in ad 2, Gaius in ad 4. Augustus was devastated, but there was no alternative. He adopted Tiberius as his son and heir. 14 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

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HE PEOPLE hated Tiberius till the day he died. Not for what he did – on the contrary, he wore himself out commanding their armies and securing their empire – but for what he was: unsociable, unglamorous and uncharismatic. Now the patrician Tiberius Claudius was to bear the talismanic name of Caesar. What did Divus Iulius think of such a development? The following year there were earthquakes, the Tiber flooded the city and when the corn supply failed, too, there was famine that lasted for several years. Augustus is said to have contemplated suicide, but he knew that Tiberius, loyal, efficient and dutiful, was his only option, if his own demise was not to trigger off a power struggle that could bring back the nightmare of civil war. So there was plenty for the two men to talk about that day at Nola in August ad 14 and for Tiberius to think about on the long walk back to Rome behind the coffin. There was no constitutional problem. The previous year Tiberius had been voted the same executive powers as Augustus, on the same fixed-term basis, so he had the authority to look after national security in the short term. But would he take over Augustus’ role in the broader sense, guiding the republic by letting his views be known, protecting the people against the free play of aristocratic competition? That was what everyone wanted to know. They found out on September 17th, at the first meeting of the Senate after Augustus’ funeral and deification (Divus Augustus joined Divus Iulius among the gods) and after the necessary days of mourning. Tiberius made it clear that he did not plan to emulate Augustus’ style of rule. He expected the Senate and magistrates to govern on their own responsibility. The senators were horrified. They had got used to policy being made by the princeps and his advisers and they

ROME assumed that Tiberius would succeed Augustus as the unofficial head of state. But he was an old-fashioned optimate who took it for granted that the republic could govern itself. After a difficult, unstructured and bad-tempered debate, he eventually agreed to accept an undefined responsibility, ‘until I come to the time when you may think it right to give my old age a rest’. Twelve years later, at the age of 67, Tiberius himself decided that the time had come and retired to Capri. The republic could not govern itself. Tiberius was still imperator, military commander-in-chief (on the same fixed-term renewable basis), and the man in charge in Rome, Tiberius’ deputy in all but name had a very un-republican responsibility. He was Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard, which Tiberius had quartered in purpose-built barracks just outside the old city wall. The Guard’s job was to protect the Roman people; they swore allegiance to Caesar and that was what it meant. But effectively they were the garrison of

Being Caesar did not yet mean being an emperor. There was no palace, no regalia, no elaborate protocol

Rome and in ad 29 Sejanus, in his master’s interests, used them to destroy the people’s favourites, Augustus’ granddaughter Agrippina the Elder and two of her three sons, Nero and Drusus. The people longed for Tiberius to die. When eventually he did, aged 77 in ad 37, and his coffin was brought up the Via Appia to Rome just like Augustus’ 23 years before, they greeted it not with sorrow but with joy. Tiberium in Tiberim, they shouted, ‘into the Tiber with Tiberius’. The dying Augustus’ foreboding had turned out all too true.

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EING CAESAR did not yet mean being an emperor. There was no palace, no regalia, no elaborate protocol. Things began to change with Tiberius’ successor, Agrippina’s surviving son, Gaius Caesar, nicknamed ‘Caligula’. Extravagant, irresponsible and sadistic, Gaius flaunted his power like a despot and expected to be worshipped as a god in his lifetime. In ad 41, after four years in power, he was killed by a group of Guards officers who were sickened by his behaviour. The Senate took the opportunity to announce that ‘the tyranny of the Caesars’ was over and the temples of Divus Iulius and Divus Augustus would be demolished. That idea lasted about 24 hours. The Guards rank and file, less idealistic than their officers, found themselves a ‘Caesar’ to swear allegiance to: Caligula’s uncle Claudius. We happen to have a wellinformed narrative of the events by an eyewitness (reported by the Jewish historian Josephus as an example of God’s providence, because if Caligula had lived he would have turned the Temple at Jerusalem into a cult centre for his own divinity); and what this source tells us is that the Roman people were shocked at Caligula’s murder and had no sympathy at all with the Senate’s ambition to turn back the clock: The people resented the Senate. They regarded the imperatores as a curb on its rapacity and a protection for themselves. They were delighted at the seizure of Claudius, believing that if he came to power he would save them from the sort of evil strife there had been in the days of Pompeius. Pompeius, ‘Pompey the Great’, had commanded the optimate forces against Julius Caesar in the civil war of 49-48 bc. Ninety years later the Roman people still knew what was at stake. Julius Caesar and his son Caesar Augustus had tamed the oligarchs. Now, the only way of protecting the victory of the populares was to formalise the position of ‘Caesar’ in an acknowledged dynastic monarchy. Claudius, not a Caesar by birth or adoption, was the first to bear the name as a title to be held by the imperator, commander-in-chief of the legions and therefore of everything else. What it meant was the end of an ideology. There was no escape from ‘evil strife’, but now it was simply a power struggle, the murderous intrigue or armed conflict of rivals competing for the position of emperor. The many had prevailed against the few, but at what a price!

T.P Wiseman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Exeter and the author of The Death of Caligula (Liverpool University Press, 2013).

FURTHER READING T.P. Wiseman, Remembering the Roman People (OUP, 2009). Alison E. Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge, 2009). Barbara Levick, Augustus: Image and Substance (Longman, 2010).

Tiberius, successor designate of Augustus.

Karl Galinsky, Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor (Cambridge, 2012). Barbara Levick, Tiberius the Politician (Routledge, 1999). Robin Seager, Tiberius (Blackwell, 2004). AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 15

| SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN

Dreadnoughts without Wheels Stephen Cooper and Ashley Cooper find parallels between the Schleswig-Holstein question and more recent European interventions. THE BRITISH prime minister Lord Palmerston is said to have remarked in the early 1860s that only three men in Europe had ever understood the ‘Schleswig-Holstein Question’: one (Prince Albert) was dead, the second (a Danish statesman) was in an asylum and the third (himself) had forgotten it. The Question concerned the governance of Schleswig and Holstein, two duchies occupying the southern half of the Jutland peninsula between Denmark and Prussia, which were ruled by the King of Denmark in a ‘personal union’. Whereas the northern part of Schleswig 16 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Brigands dividing the spoil, a Punch cartoon of 1864 shows Prussia taking the lion’s share.

was Danish-speaking, the people in the southern part, and in almost the whole of Holstein, spoke German. Holstein was also a member of the German Confederation, the polity established in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon. Prussia was the de facto military agent of the Confederation. There was nothing particularly complicated about this form of government. The medieval Holy Roman Empire had been a patchwork of competing jurisdictions and loyalties and Hanover had been ruled by the kings of England in a personal union between 1714 and 1837; but, during the 19th century, a number of factors cast doubt on the survival of the ancient constitution of Schleswig and Holstein. The first was the increasing likelihood that at some future date the person who succeeded to the kingdom of Denmark would not also succeed as duke in the duchies. The second

was the increasing desire among many in Holstein and some in Schleswig to shake off Danish rule and seek closer union with the German Confederation. This coincided with a general impulse throughout Europe towards the creation and consolidation of nation states. However, it was difficult to know how the other Great Powers who had settled the affairs of Europe in 1815 would react to any expansion of Germany. Similar anxieties were expressed in relation to German reunification in 1990. During the rule of the Danish king Christian VIII (1839-48) it became increasingly clear that, although he had an heir, the future Frederick VII, the latter was unlikely to produce one himself. Furthermore, although there were more distant claimants to the throne, these would be ineligible to succeed to the duchies, where Salic law applied. Shortly after Frederick VII came to the throne in 1848 there was an uprising in the duchies against the Danish king, which was supported by the German Confederation. Prussia led an invasion in response, while the other Great Powers – Britain, France, Russia and even German-speaking Austria – took the side of Denmark and made warlike threats. Under pressure, Prussia withdrew and the Treaty of London of 1852 (in which Palmerston played a leading role) saw the duchies restored to Danish rule, subject to the proviso that they should continue to be governed separately from the Danish kingdom. The death of Frederick VII in 1863 precipitated a second and deeper crisis. The different inheritance laws prevailing in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein meant that only a male from the Oldenburg dynasty could succeed in Denmark, but that any new ruler of the duchies had to come from the Schauenberg family. So, whereas Christian IX (1863-1906) succeeded without objection as king of Denmark, it was Duke Frederick of Augustenborg who was entitled to succeed as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein; and Duke Frederick did indeed claim this right, though his father had once waived it. Moreover, he was known to favour closer links with the German Confederation. Christian IX confirmed a new constitution, incorporating Schleswig into his kingdom. This contravened the provisions of the Treaty of London and Prussia was now joined by Austria in lending military support to the duchies. War followed in 1864. Prussia and Austria quickly occupied the duchies, at one stage overrunning the whole of Jutland, to the great concern of other European powers. There was a brief pause and a further period of fighting; but then Bismarck, the minister-president of Prussia, dictated peace. At the Treaty of Vienna on August 1st, 1864 Denmark agreed to cede Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia and Austria. The age-old Question had been resolved.

The Jutland peninsula in 1864, following the settlement.

Drawing the line The crisis in Schleswig-Holstein has some resonance with recent events in Syria, when the US and the UK both made vain threats to intervene. In 1863, Lord Palmerston made a speech in Parliament in which he drew a ‘red line’ under Schleswig-Holstein, declaring that, if Prussia and Austria were to try to take those provinces by force, it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend. The Danes took him seriously. On February 11th, 1864 they appealed for help, relying both on this speech and an old treaty of 1720, but Palmerston sat on his hands. In June 1864 he made a further statement to the Commons, focusing this time on Denmark itself, rather than the duchies, saying that Britain would not go to war with the German powers unless the existence of Denmark as an independent power was at stake or its capital was threatened. Yet, when the Prussians and Austrians did invade Jutland and a majority of the British Cabinet voted to send the Royal Navy to defend Copenhagen, Palmerston still sent no assistance. Later he argued that he had never meant to imply that British assistance would be provided to the Danes, but rather that Denmark might not find itself alone, because the French and the Russians might help it. But this attempt to ‘spin’ his own words convinced no one. Disraeli remarked that no one in Denmark was blaming France or Russia for betraying them: on the contrary, they all blamed Palmerston. In any event, Palmerston’s threats were not even issued with the backing of his own governing party, let alone the country, where sympathies were keenly divided. At the top, Queen Victoria was strongly opposed to intervention: after all, her late husband Prince Albert had been German and her daughter Victoria had married into the Prussian royal family in 1859, though the Prince of Wales had married into the Danish in 1863. Why did Palmerston, already internationally famous for ‘gun-boat diplomacy’, send not a single frigate to help the Danes? Essentially, because there was nothing the British could do militarily to alter the situation. Britain was a world power but it was no superpower: it had the largest navy by far, but lacked the capacity to ‘put boots on the ground’ in sufficient numbers to assist the Danes; and the Prussians in particular were fully aware of this. Their strategist, General von Moltke, said that England was as powerless on the Continent as it was presumptuous. On another occasion Bismarck remarked that ‘Dreadnoughts have no wheels’. There are parallels here, too, with August 1914, when Germany discounted British military intervention, but with much more catastrophic results for all concerned.

Stephen Cooper is a retired solicitor and historian. Ashley Cooper resumed his interest in history after retirement from business. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 17

AUGUST 1914

The Shadows Lengthen The Concert of Europe, the diplomatic model championed by Britain in the run-up to the First World War, was doomed by the actions of competing nationalisms. Britain’s entry into the conflict became inevitable, despite its lack of military preparation, as Vernon Bogdanor explains.

Prince Lichnowsky, Imperial German Ambassador to the Court of St James, begged his government to accept Britain’s offer of mediation in the Austro-Serbian dispute. He left London on August 4th, saluted by a military guard of honour.

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HE FIRST WORLD WAR was, so the American diplomat George Kennan declared, ‘the great seminal catastrophe of the 20th century’. It had two basic causes. The first was the clash in the Balkans between Slav nationalism and the decaying Austro-Hungarian empire. The second and perhaps more fundamental cause was the rise of German power and the difficulty of containing it by peaceful means. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 19

AUGUST 1914

German reunification came in the wake of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870. The significance of that conflict had been noticed by Benjamin Disraeli, who as Leader of the Opposition told the House of Commons in February 1871: This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century … The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England. Germany had been unified by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The great conservative statesman tamed German nationalism and kept it within bounds. Bismarck was a master of restraint and gave Europe a generation of peace, which by 1914 had come to be taken for granted. It is often said that if Bismarck had been chancellor in 1914 there would not have been a war, but perhaps an international system that depends for its success upon one genius is not, in the last resort, a very stable one. Bismarck’s unscrupulous, authoritarian methods were later to be adopted by those who lacked his genius or indeed his restraint.

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HE GROWTH OF German power posed a challenge to an international system based on the Concert of Europe, developed at the Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleon, whereby members could call a conference to resolve diplomatic issues, a system Britain, and particularly the Liberals in government in 1914, were committed to defend. Sir Edward Grey had been foreign secretary since 1905, a position he retained until 1916, the longest continuous tenure in modern times. He was a right-leaning Liberal who found himself subject to more criticism from his own backbenchers than from Conservative opponents. In his handling of foreign policy his critics alleged that Grey had abandoned the idea of the

20 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Bismarck, at the height of his powers, pulls cultural figures and politicians, including Disraeli, into his orbit. German caricature, 1878.

Concert of Europe and was worshipping what John Bright had called ‘the foul idol’ of the balance of power. They suggested that he was making Britain part of an alliance system, the Triple Entente, with France and Russia and that he was concealing his policies from Parliament, the public and even from Cabinet colleagues. By helping to divide Europe into two armed camps he was increasing the likelihood of war. ON HIS APPOINTMENT in December 1905 Grey had indeed maintained the loose Anglo-French entente of 1904, which the Conservatives of the previous government had negotiated. He extended that policy by negotiating an entente with France’s ally, Russia, in 1907. In 1905 France was embroiled in a conflict with Germany over rival claims in Morocco. The French had essentially said to Lord

Grey, foreign secretary since 1905, was a right-leaning Liberal who found himself subject to more criticism from his own backbenchers than from Conservative opponents Lansdowne, Grey’s Conservative predecessor: ‘Suppose this conflict leads to war – if you are to support us, let us consult together on naval matters to consider how your support can be made effective.’ The Conservatives had responded that, while they would discuss contingency plans, they could not make any commitments. Grey continued the naval conversations and extended them to include military dialogue. He informed the prime

minister, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, and two senior ministers of these talks, but not the rest of the Cabinet. Nevertheless, Britain could not be committed to military action without the approval of both Cabinet and Parliament. In November 1912, at the insistence of the Cabinet, there was an exchange of letters between Grey and the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, making it explicit that Britain was under no commitment, except to consult, were France to be threatened. In 1914, furthermore, the French never suggested that Britain was under any sort of obligation to support them, only that it would be the honourable course of action. The Moroccan conflict was settled peacefully at the conference of Algeciras in 1906. A further crisis over Morocco broke out in 1911, which seemed, for a time, as if it might lead to war. But this was not, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, ‘the first stage to world war but rather a last episode in an age of European rivalries in Africa, which had been running for the previous 40 years’. Imperial conflicts could be, and were, contained by the great powers. The world war was caused by conflicts, not in Africa or Asia, but in Europe and specifically in the Balkans. The cause lay, not in rival imperialisms, but rival nationalisms. In the Balkans the Slavs were seeking what Germany,

Italy and Hungary had recently achieved, the realisation of their national aspirations. In their way stood the Ottoman Empire and the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. The latter was dominated by the Germans and Hungarians. The Slavs living within it were subordinate and the empire stood in the way of their national aspirations, in particular the aspirations of the southern Slavs.

I Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, 1914. Sketch by George Fiddes Watt for a portrait commissioned by the Foreign Office.

N 1908 A DRESS REHEARSAL for the Sarajevo crisis occurred, when Austria-Hungary converted its occupation of the Slav provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which it had administered since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878) into an annexation. It had been agreed at Berlin that the occupation would be temporary and that the provinces would be returned to the Ottoman Empire once order and prosperity had been restored. The annexation, therefore, was a breach of the treaty and of international law. It would have significant consequences. The first was that it made non-Slav rule in Bosnia appear permanent, since the Austro-Hungarian Empire was far more durable than the Ottoman Empire. The annexation was a particular blow to the independent south Slav state of Serbia, which objected. Second, the annexation made the southern Slav issue an international problem, since it involved Serbia’s ally, Russia, which saw itself as the protector of the Slavs. In March 1909 Austria demanded, under threat of war, that Serbia accept the annexation, while Germany told Russia that, in case of war, it would take Austria’s side. Britain helped persuade Serbia and Russia to back down. The great powers accepted the annexation. The Kaiser, unwisely perhaps, boasted in Vienna in 1910 that he had come to Austria’s side as a ‘knight in shining armour’. The annexation of Bosnia pitted two rival nationalisms against each other in south-eastern Europe: Slav nationalism, seeking to unite all the southern Slavs in a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia; and German nationalism, seeking to expand eastwards. It was this tension between the two that was to lead to a world war. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Europe, as in 1908, appeared to be divided into two camps. But in 1914, by contrast with 1908-9, Russia refused to back down, largely because it considered the existence of Serbia as an independent state to be at risk. Russia has, in consequence, been fingered by some historians as primarily responsible for the war. But of course war can always be avoided if the potential victim always backs down. The crisis of 1914 came at a time when it seemed as if Europe was settling down. After the first Balkan war of 1912, which almost ended Turkish rule in Europe, Grey sponsored a Conference of Ambassadors in London to secure a negotiated peace between the great powers. It has not been sufficiently noted that, strikingly, on most contentious issues, Grey took the side of Austro-Hungary – and therefore of Germany. He helped to ensure that the borders of a new non-Slav state, Albania, made a buffer between Austria and the Slavs, denying Serbia access to the Adriatic. When in 1913 Serbia’s ally, the tiny state of Montenegro, captured and sought to annex the strategic city of Scutari (now Shkoder), allocated to Albania at the conference, Grey refused to oppose Austrian action to remove AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 21

AUGUST 1914 the Montenegrins. Instead he joined the powers in a naval demonstration, compelling Montenegro to withdraw. Grey defended this policy in the House of Commons by arguing that the Albanian population of Scutari was mainly Catholic and Muslim, rather than Slav, and that its people had the same right of self-determination as the Slavs. But he had other reasons for supporting Austria, which he did not express publicly. The first was that concessions by Serbia and Montenegro were necessary to keep the peace and the need for peace outweighed the wishes of the ententes. The second was to show Germany that its fears of encirclement by hostile powers were baseless. The ententes, Grey believed, did not commit Britain to supporting Russia or its allies in the Balkans. Britain would take the side of Austria-Hungary and of Germany, if that was required.

D

ESPITE THE ALLEGATIONS of his Liberal critics, Grey was a true believer in the Gladstonian concept of the Concert of Europe and after 1918 was to prove an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. He had hoped that the settlement at the London Conference might prove the prelude both to détente with Germany and also to a true and permanent Concert, based on the conference approach to diplomacy. Reporting the outcome of the London Conference on May 10th, 1913, the radical journal The Nation stated: ‘The credit belongs in equal parts to the statesmen of Germany and Sir Edward Grey. They have found at last a consciousness of their common duties. There might evolve from this temporary association some permanent machinery of legislation’ – some sort of proto-League of Nations, perhaps. Grey certainly hoped so. By December 15th, 1913, he told the Commons: ‘Nothing more than a memory is left of the old Anglo-German antagonism.’ Yet the London Conference proved to be not the beginning of a new Concert of Europe, but its end. It was not to be renewed until after the fall of Communism in 1989. For Grey’s conception was hardly representative. In Austria-Hungary different voices were to be heard, voices worried by threatened encroachments on the empire. The Balkan wars had increased Serbia’s territory and also its population, from 3 to 4.5 million. Austria regarded Serbia as an irredentist threat to the Slavs in the empire. In November 1913 the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Berchtold, told a colleague: The solution of the South Slav issue ... in face of the tenacity and confidence with which Serbia is pursuing the idea of a Greater Serbia, can only be by force. It will either almost completely destroy the present state of Serbia or shake Austria-Hungary to its foundations. In fact it would do both. THE TRIGGER WAS the assassination of the heir to the Austrio-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914. He was killed by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. The killer and his fellow conspirators had obtained their weapons from Serbia and they had been aided by renegade members of the Serb armed forces, seeking to embarrass their own government, which they saw as insufficiently militant. The Serb government was almost certainly not involved. For a month after the assassination nothing seemed to happen, though on July 5th Germany had given Austria-

22 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

A priest blesses allied soldiers from France, Great Britain and Russia, French postcard of 1914.

Hungary carte blanche to do with Serbia as it wished. Austria-Hungary would not need German support to crush a small state like Serbia, but its assurances were needed in case Russia should intervene. There was then already a fear that a war with Serbia could not be localised. Indeed on July 7th the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, told his secretary that ‘an action against Serbia can lead to a world war’. On July 23rd Austria presented its terms to Serbia, with a 48-hour time-limit demanding unconditional acceptance; in effect an ultimatum. Grey told the Austrian ambassador in London, Albert Count von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, that the note was ‘the most formidable document that was ever addressed from one state to another’. The demands were framed so as to ensure rejection and provide a pretext for military action; although Serbia sent a conciliatory reply, Austria-Hungary broke off diplomatic relations. It was clear that war was threatened in the Balkans and that it might spread. It was at this point that the European crisis came before the British Cabinet, at the end of a long discussion about Ulster. The atmosphere was graphically described by Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time: The discussion had reached its inconclusive end, and the Cabinet was about to separate, when the quiet grave tones of Sir Edward Grey’s voice were heard reading a document which had just been brought to him from the Foreign Office. It was the Austrian note to Serbia. He had been reading or speaking for several minutes before I could disengage my mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed. We were all very tired, but gradually as the phrases and sentences followed one another, impressions of a wholly different character began to form in my mind. This note was clearly an ultimatum, but it was an ultimatum such as had never been penned in modern times. As the reading proceeded it seemed absolutely impossible that any State in the world could accept it, or that any acceptance, however abject, would satisfy the aggressor. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe. Nevertheless, even if the war spread, it did not seem that Britain need be involved in this obscure squabble. On the evening of July 24th the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, told his girlfriend, Venetia Stanley, that: ‘Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators [in any European conflict].’ Just five days before Britain entered the war the Manchester Guardian declared on July 30th, 1914: ‘We care as little for Belgrade as Belgrade does for Manchester.’ Grey followed the same conciliatory policy he had pursued after the first Balkan war and sought to recreate the Conference of Ambassadors. Russia responded that it

Europe takes sides, August 1914.

In rejecting the conference proposal, Germany and Austria-Hungary consciously accepted the risk of a Continental War would prefer direct talks with Austria-Hungary; but, if that were not possible, it would attend a conference. The Austrians rejected both direct talks and the conference, as did Germany, on the grounds that it would amount to a court of arbitration against Austria, which was entitled to settle its dispute with Serbia in its own way. Germany argued that in such a conference it would be Austria’s only defender. In fact Grey might well have taken the Austrian side at such a conference as he had done in 1912-13. He would have been aiming to exert his influence to achieve a peaceful solution – and that would require Serbian concessions. He produced a formula to the effect that the powers would ‘examine how Serbia can fully satisfy Austria without impairing Serbia’s sovereign rights or independence’. Russian support for Serbia would have been limited, since it could hardly have condoned regicide, especially as Tsar Nicholas II’s grandfather had himself been assassinated in 1881 by terrorists. Rejection of Grey’s proposal seems conclusive in the debate on responsibility for the war. For it took from his hands a lever with which he could have persuaded Russia not to mobilise. ‘Had such a conference taken place’, Churchill wrote, ‘there would have been no war. Mere acceptance of the principle of a conference of the Central Powers would have instantly relieved the tension.’ Grey declared that he would accept any proposal for peaceful

mediation offered by Germany or Austria-Hungary. He repeatedly invited Germany to make proposals of its own, but there was no response. In his 2012 book, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark argues that the Austrians could not have defended their interests in ‘the absence of any international legal bodies capable of arbitrating in such cases, and the impossibility in the current international climate of enforcing the future compliance of Belgrade’. But there was in fact such a body – the Court of Arbitration at The Hague, established in 1899. The Tsar proposed that the dispute be put to The Hague, but Austria refused. Had it accepted, Britain would have put its weight behind enforcement and it would have been difficult for the Russians to resist such pressure against a state accused of being involved in regicide. It is difficult to see what Austria-Hungary and Germany could have lost by agreeing to a conference, or by arbitration. Had agreement not been reached, they would have been in a strong position to use force against Serbia. A war against Serbia, under such circumstances, might well have been localised. In rejecting the conference proposal, Germany and Austria-Hungary consciously accepted the risk of a Continental war in order to reduce Serbia to a vassal state, if not to annex its territory, or to allow other states to do so.

O

N JULY 29TH Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg strove to secure British neutrality, offering to guarantee the territorial integrity both of France and Belgium, but not the French colonies, nor, more importantly, the neutrality of Belgium. Asquith told the Commons on August 6th that for Britain to have accepted neutrality on such a basis would have been contemptible. It was being asked to agree to AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 23

AUGUST 1914

If a great power could simply ignore the neutral status of a small country to which it had pledged its word, Europe would not be safe

the disposal of the colonies of an ally and to bargain away Belgian neutrality, thus becoming, in effect, an accomplice to a German invasion. So if, as proved to be the case, Belgium was to ask for British support to protect its neutrality, the reply would be that it had already been bargained away. In return for betraying Belgium, Britain would secure a promise from Germany to respect British neutrality and independence, a guarantee given at the very same time as Germany was proposing to violate the neutrality and independence of another power that it had promised to respect. Nevertheless, the Liberal Cabinet was deeply divided over the threat of war. Grey, Asquith and some senior colleagues, including Churchill, the Lord Chancellor, Haldane and the India Secretary, Lord Crewe, believed that Britain was bound in honour to support France. The majority of the Cabinet did not. Nor did most Liberal backbenchers. However, the invasion of Belgium was to transform Liberal opinion. At around this time, Grey recalls in his memoirs: A very active Liberal member came up to me in the lobby and told me that he wished me to understand that under no circumstances whatever ought this country to take part in the war, if it came. I answered pretty roughly to the effect that I hoped we should not be involved in war, but that it was nonsense to say that there were no circumstances conceivable in which we ought to go to war. ‘Under no circumstances whatever’ was the 24 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Germany violates Belgium in a French postcard of 1914.

retort. ‘Suppose Germany violates the neutrality of Belgium?’ For a moment he paused, like one who, running at speed, finds himself suddenly confronted with an obstacle, unexpected and unforeseen. Then he said with emphasis, ‘She won’t do it’. ‘I don’t say she will, but supposing she does?’ ‘She won’t do it’, he repeated, confidently, and with that assurance he left me. HAD BELGIUM NOT BEEN INVADED, the Liberals could not have led Britain into war. They had 261 seats in the Commons out of 670, some distance from an overall majority, but they were supported by the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had 84 seats and Labour with 37. The Conservative opposition had 288 seats and there were three vacancies. Neither the Irish nor Labour would have supported a war before the invasion of Belgium. Nor would most Liberal MPs. On August 2nd, two days before Britain declared war, Asquith noted: ‘A good three-quarters of our own party in the House of Commons for absolute non-interference at any price.’ There would almost certainly have been a split in the Liberal Party, with the majority opposed to intervention. But, as Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley when he learned of the ultimatum to Belgium, this ‘simplifies matters so we sent the Germans an ultimatum to expire at midnight’. The guarantee of Belgium, recognising Belgian independence, was a collective one signed by the powers in 1831. Every signatory had the legal right to enforce it, but there was no legal obligation on any single guarantor to act. As the Cabinet recognised, the matter was one of policy not of obligation. But, in practice, no British government could conceivably have accepted the invasion of Belgium. The 20th century has seen numerous atrocities and they have perhaps dulled our sensibilities so that it is difficult to appreciate the sense of moral outrage caused by the invasion, which, apart from the breach of a treaty, was an act of unprovoked aggression against a small power. There was a general feeling that, if a great power could simply ignore the neutral status of a small country to which it had pledged its word, Europe would not be safe; and in 1914 no government that had failed to help Belgium could have survived in the House of Commons. Indeed opinion was nearly unanimous. The Left had argued that Germany was not as bad as it had been painted by Conservatives and that Britain should make more effort to secure détente. Grey had come to agree with them. But the invasion of Belgium seemed to show that Germany was far worse than anyone had thought. On August 3rd, after Grey addressed the Commons, the leader of the Conservative opposition spoke to support the war. He was followed by the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, who to everyone’s surprise spoke in favour of the war because of the need to defend small nationalities. Redmond said that: ‘There never was – that he believed was the universal sentiment of Ireland – a juster

war, or one in which higher and nobler principles and issues were at stake.’ Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party, and Keir Hardie then spoke against the war, but they were repudiated by their parliamentary colleagues. Only four of the 37 Labour MPs refused to support the war and MacDonald resigned his leadership. George V – who as Asquith once said was rather like ‘the man in the tube’ – summed up the general opinion when he told the American Ambassador, ‘My God, Mr Page, what else could we do?’ Grey has been attacked by historians for two contradictory reasons. First, that he allowed France and Russia to believe that he would support them, so preventing conciliation. Yet France and Russia made their dispositions while still quite uncertain as to what Britain would do; and in any case France made no provision for the appearance of a British Expeditionary Force on the Continent. Second, that he did not warn Germany in advance that Britain would go to war if Belgium were invaded. In fact he did tell the German ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, that Britain could not let France disappear as a great power. The trouble was that no one in Berlin listened to the ambassador. Even so, no one with the slightest familiarity with Britain could have any doubt on this matter. In 1912 a German correspondent in Britain asked J.A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, whether Britain would join in a war if France were threatened. Spender replied: ‘My dear Sir, you have lived in England for ten years and you know the English people. Can you really see them sitting still while the German army wiped out the French and planted itself on the French coast?’

B

RITAIN’S DECISION to go to war was based not simply on morality, in terms of upholding Belgian neutrality, but also on self-interest. Most British politicians and, one suspects, the British people, felt that to allow Germany to conquer France and Belgium would compromise British independence so that it would become a vassal state of Germany. The same judgement would have been made had the ententes not existed, had there been no military or naval conversations and regardless of who was foreign secretary. The achievement of Asquith and Grey was to bring a united country into the war. A Conservative government facing opposition from the Left would have found it more difficult. Grey alone among the diplomats of 1914 sought peace in the sense of making concrete proposals that might have prevented war. He could do this precisely because Britain had no interest in the quarrel between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and no territorial demands upon any other power. There was, however, a disconnection between British foreign policy and defence policy under the Liberals. If, in practice, Britain could not allow France to be defeated, then she might have done better to draw the conclusion that

The international treaty of 1839, signed in London, assuring Belgian neutrality.

the entente should in fact become a formal alliance. In his book, The Pity of War (1999), Niall Ferguson criticises Grey for turning a Continental war into a world war, implying that Britain was not part of the Continent. But, if it could not afford to allow France to be defeated, then Britain was in fact a Continental power. Its security depended not only on mastery of the seas but on what happened in Europe. If Britain wanted influence on the Continent, it needed not just a strong navy but a strong army. Instead, it had what Lord Kitchener contemptuously called a ‘town clerk’s army’. A strong army would have meant conscription and that was almost certainly politically impossible in the years before 1914. It was, as Grey declared in 1914, ‘unnatural’. Only a strong Continental commitment would have deterred Germany in 1914, yet the Liberals had followed a policy of limited liability, since they did not believe that Germany was fundamentally an aggressive power. ‘The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay’, declared Lloyd George in his war memoirs, a view endorsed by Christopher Clark. In reality, the war came about as a result of the actions of politicians and diplomats, in particular the leaders of Austria-Hungary and Germany, who made decisions that they knew might involve more than a localised war. Britain went to war not because it was prepared to accept German domination of Europe, but because it was so ill-prepared to resist that domination, it found that it could be resisted only by war. Indeed the threat of German domination could only be ended by two world wars. That resistance finally triumphed in April 1945 when two extra-European powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – joined hands at Torgau, cutting Hitler’s Reich in two. This ended the final German bid for power in Europe. It also ended the era of European supremacy in world affairs. We are still living with the consequences. Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College London. He is currently writing a book on British political history from 1895 to 1914.

FURTHER READING T.G. Otte, The July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War (Cambridge University Press, 2014). H. Strachan, To Arms (OUP, 2001). M. Macmillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (Profile, 2013). R.C.K. Ensor, England 1870-1914 (OUP, 1936). Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Allen Lane, 2012). Edward Grey, Twenty Five Years 1892-1916 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1925). AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 25

AUGUST 1914

When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914 there was no outbreak of jingoism and no immediate rush to enlist. What Anthony Fletcher finds instead, in letters, diaries and newspapers, is a people who had little comprehension of the profound changes to come.

A New Moral Order 26 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

The 1st Life Guards prepare to leave Hyde Park Barracks for Mons on August 15th in a photograph by Christina Broom, Britain’s first female press photographer.

AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 27

P

EOPLE TALKED ABOUT the ‘Great War’ before Britain had even declared war on Germany in August 1914. On the 2nd Robert Saunders, a schoolmaster at Fletching in Sussex, told his son living abroad about the war plans being made in southern England: ‘Everything points to the Great War, so long expected, being upon us, so you can picture the restless excitement among all classes.’ Winifred Tower, at Cowes for the annual yachting festival, left a vivid diary account of her state of mind on the day, August 4th, that war was actually declared on Germany. She had been to a Red Cross meeting and the territorials there were mobilising. The declaration at midnight was ‘almost a relief’: But it was impossible to believe that ‘the Day’ had actually come. We had talked about it, argued about its possibilities, volumes had been written about it, it had been a sort of nightmare, always hanging over us, and yet I don’t suppose many of us thought that it would become a reality in our time and that we were destined to live in the stirring days of our history … suddenly it seemed like a bad dream that we should wake from to find our world unchanged.

This article explores the many emotions – apprehension, anxiety, shock, disorientation and fear – experienced by the British people in a month when family and personal lives were ripped apart by an unprecedented international crisis. Investigating the national mood, it argues that already, in August 1914, a new moral order was replacing the carelessness of the long Edwardian peace. The outline and chief features of this new moral order, fully apparent by the end of the year, were being established. The jingoism and war fever of August 1914 have been shown to be a myth. The crowds outside Buckingham Palace in the first week of the month were mostly middle-class young men in straw boaters, drawn there by uncertainty and the search for news. The ultimatum to Germany expired on the evening of the day after a Bank Holiday. This was picnicking time in the London parks. More people were out on the streets than usual in other towns, too. Vera Brittain recorded that she was part of an ‘excited little group’, which gathered on August 4th to watch the territorials mobilise at Buxton in Derbyshire. But for

Top: A page from the Bystander of August 5th offers an idyllic scene from Cowes yachting festival. Above: The Birmingham Evening Despatch, August 4th. Right: a London crowd cheers the declaration of war. 28 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

AUGUST 1914

Left: Territorial soldier on duty outside a school in King’s Cross, London during the first week of the war. Below: Territorials of the Artists’ Rifles being signed up in Dean’s Yard, Westminster soon after war was declared. Below left: Territorial call up papers dated August 5th.

many, like the MP Holcombe Ingelby, that day was sombre. Because of Belgium, he declared to his son, ‘we must go the whole hog … in fact we are in for the biggest thing in wars that the world has ever seen’. How people discovered that Britain was at war depended on where they were. Alice Remington, in a Lancashire village, heard the noise of lorries going down the main road with lots of men in them. The news drifted through ‘that all these lorries were going overseas … and then it brought the war home’. Many heard about the declaration of war from the shouts of newsboys. A notice on the church board announced the war, recalled Grace Whitham, a mill worker in North Yorkshire. George Ewart Evans discovered his country was at war when a motor car, with a newspaper placard blaring out ‘WAR DECLARED’, passed through his South Wales village. At first rural England remained quiet but anxious. ‘Everyone restless and ready to discuss war news on the slightest provocation’, noted Robert Saunders in Sussex on August 15th. ‘Poor Mr Fenner’, he reported, ‘was awfully cut up as they came round and commandeered his black horse Kitty.’ THERE WAS VIRTUALLY no opposition to the war. The general commitment meant that those who had reservations quickly put them to one side. ‘The simple Suffolker doesn’t panic’, wrote Rudyard Kipling,

away from home on holiday, ‘he just carries on all serene.’ Each evening, recounted Robert Saunders at Fletching, ‘the doctor and his wife come in to compare notes and discuss the war generally’. The strong lead given by the national press was important in rallying the middle and upper classes. The centre pages of The Times on August 7th were taken up by a powerfully argued leading article, ‘In Battle Array’. Kitchener’s ‘Call to Arms’ was prominently displayed under the royal crest. The famous words ‘Your King and Country need you’ were beginning to be burned into the minds of all men over 19 and under 30. It is striking how clear-headed people were about the perils of war. Newspapers in northern and midland towns were gloomy about a collapse of credit and trade. There was some panic in London. The Daily Mail reported a rush to buy food, clearing out many shops on August 3rd. One London lady noted in her diary how ‘the well-to-do people’ there had ‘lost their heads’: ‘They are buying enormous stores of food, as if for siege provisions … taxis today are laden … some of the big stores have run out of fish.’ On August 4th the artist Augustus John urged his partner to ‘get in at once a supply of flour and potted goods, tea etc for a month or two. It looks as if we’ll need them’. Urban and rural industries suffered dislocation. There was immediate depression in the three main industries of Cornwall, china clay, tin mining and AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 29

AUGUST 1914 was entirely predictable that it took men time to turn their shock into decision making. The consequences of enlistment for individuals, families and careers were far reaching. Impetuosity was most common among very young men. Graham Greenwell was 18 that month and had just left Winchester, planning to go up to Christ Church, Oxford in October. Instead he joined the Public Schools Camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain. On a Sunday break from training he walked over for a meal with friends at the Dog and Whistle pub in the village of Netheravon, telling his mother ‘everyone was most respectful to the King’s uniform’. Wilbert Spencer enlisted on impulse, on his way home from school at Dulwich College to Highgate. His father, a professional man, seeing his son’s insistence on leaving school early, persuaded him to take a crash course at Sandhurst. ‘My word you do have to drill smartly here’, Wilbert wrote to his parents on August 14th. But he found life there ‘very healthy and extraordinarily interesting’. He needed his dressing gown, he added, and sent a kiss to his baby sister. Lance Spicer, 21 years old, was accosted early in August by a woman in Jermyn Street in London’s West End and felt ‘a pin being stuck into the lapel of my jacket’. He looked down and found ‘a white feather on me’, which hastened his plans for getting a commission. Prognostications about how long the war would last were rare in August. Harold Cousins wrote in his diary on the 9th: ‘England now involved in what will probably be known as the First World War of 1914 – probably 1915.’ For the whole idea of trench warfare simply had not yet entered British consciousness. The letters of Clare Howard, to her fiancé Reggie Trench, who was training officers for the Western Front in Richmond Park and on Wimbledon Common,

Left: Members of the public watch soldiers drilling in a Hull street, August 1914. Below: London buses with their tops removed are adapted for use as transport vehicles, August 1914.

fishing. On August 12th the author and joiner George Sturt commented on his business difficulties at Farnham in Surrey, through disruption of supplies and commandeering of horses. The chronology of recruitment tells a different tale from the conventional story of a rush to the colours, for it was only 100,000 men that Kitchener asked for on August 7th. Many found it hard to decide quickly on how to act. George Singles, a regular soldier working at the Whitehall recruiting office, noted that straggling volunteers were ‘all

September 1914 became the strongest recruitment month, not just in 1914, but during the whole war grumbling as most of them had to leave good jobs’. The lowest daily national returns were August 22nd and 23rd, at which time many still believed 100,000 men was the total required. On the 25th it was announced that objective had been almost reached.

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HERE WAS LITTLE bad news in the press during the first three weeks of the war. It was the ‘Mons Despatch’, in The Times of August 25th, that electrified the nation. ‘I have seen the broken bits of many regiments’, wrote Arthur Moore. ‘We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and requires immediate and immense reinforcement.’ This had an instant effect. On the 29th The Times carried Kitchener’s appeal for a further 100,000 men. Two days later daily enlistment topped 20,000 in a single day for the first time. September 1914 became the strongest recruitment month, not just in 1914, but during the whole war. It

August 1914: The Month That Changed the World August 1st

Germany orders general mobilisation. Germany declares war on Russia. France mobilises.

August 2nd German ultimatum to Belgium. German troops move into Luxembourg.

30 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

August 3rd

Germany declares war on France.

August 4th

After an ultimatum Britain declares war on Germany. Sir John Jellicoe takes command of the British Grand Fleet. Sir John French takes command of British Expeditionary Force.

August 6th

Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia.

August 7th British Expeditionary Force lands in France.

August 12th

Britain and France declare war on AustriaHungary.

Surrey Regiment was certainly in Belgium. She understood the developing Western Front geography from maps that quickly became available. She checked the story of Waterloo, more than a hundred years before, the only evidence at hand about conflict in Europe. ‘The line of battle was two and a half miles as compared to the 220 miles of today’, Clare believed; a million men, not 72,000 English plus 52,000 Prussians like then, were involved this time. Yet she concluded on August 14th: ‘I suppose this battle will begin at any time now’, thinking it might be decisive. Following the news of the German advances through northern Belgium, on August 21st she guessed perceptively: ‘I suppose it cannot now be more than a day or two before our troops are engaged.’ In fact, it was the next day that the first shots were fired, just outside Casteau, north of Mons, in a conflict that was to last for four years and nearly three months.

Herbert Trench’s pass, August 13th.

reveal the total incomprehension about what kind of war this was going to be. Trench digging had not yet begun on the Western Front. The Expeditionary Force started landing in France on August 7th. But this all remained secret from the public. The vacuum was filled with rumours. There was a sense that the war was slowly but inevitably taking over people’s lives: Lydia Middleton, the wife of a civil servant, declared on the 21st that it was ‘hard to believe that the war has only lasted for 17 days’. It felt ‘like 17 weeks at least’. Living at Orpington in Kent, Clare Howard had access to local information. She knew by the 11th of nightly troop sailings to the Continent from Dover and Newhaven. That day Reggie told her the Royal

T

HE STRENGTH of the Trench-Howard correspondence, 37 letters to and fro during August, is that it indicates how a single family based in the south-east, where things moved fastest, responded to the war. Clare echoed many women in her initial panic at the idea of her man being in danger. Since he was an officer in the Inns of Court Training Corps, she trusted he would be kept to instruct recruits: ‘Is it very cowardly of me?’. As the war took Reggie over, he gradually became more candid. Encouraging her Red Cross work at Orpington, on August 6th he predicted: ‘We shall have a good deal of casualties before we are through with this show.’ Within a few days, wounded Belgian soldiers were being cared for in the 50-bed hospital Clare and her sisters had helped set up in the

Will Spencer enlisted on impulse on his way home from school.

Clare Howard in 1911, aged 18, in her coming out dress.

August 13th

AustroHungarian Forces invade Serbia.

August 20th German occupation of Brussels.

Reggie Trench in 1914.

Graham Greenwell joined the Public Schools Camp at 18.

August 23rd Battle of Mons: 1,600 British troops killed or wounded. Japan declares war on Germany.

August 24th

Fall of Namur: retreat from Mons.

August 26th Battle of Tannenberg begins: German defeat of Russia.

August 28th German cruisers destroyed and damaged in the Heligoland Bight.

August 30th The Times ‘Mons Despatch’.

AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 31

AUGUST 1914 village hall at Orpington. She worked there daily from August 12th. In these hectic days men and women fell into traditional roles. Females were at once the carers. The Howard girls fed the local East Kent territorials, 90 of them just back from Salisbury Plain ‘absolutely done’. Their captain was ‘too hungry to eat a mutton chop’. Clare’s brother Edgar had ‘gone in the ranks with them … there was a large crowd at the station to cheer them off’ when they were ordered to Dover. Masculinity was suddenly at a premium. Clare was delighted that Reggie had begun growing a moustache. Spotting him on a visit to her home, the chauffeur there told her he had the right ‘martial bearing’, requesting ‘a photograph of him in uniform’. Khaki fever was beginning to turn female heads. Reggie’s brother Herbert crossed the channel on an abortive motor cycle dash to assist the French army. They were ‘rather fed up’, noted Reggie; ‘of course they will get something if they hang about long enough but it is rather trying’. He agreed with Clare that her brother Walter, hampered by a stammer, would find his special constable job ‘dull and pretty long hours’. ‘Perhaps it is the same as the rest of us’, he declared, ‘days and weeks of routine to fit one for other duties’. The watchwords were ‘doing your bit’.

‘rather a wrench’. Mothers at Little Crosby on Merseyside were said on the 25th to be ‘up in arms against the idea of enlistment’. Mary, Countess of Wemyss and Lady Ettie Desborough, each with three boys grown up or almost so, had a ‘sad and serious confab’, trying to ‘keep quiet and calm’, on August 4th. Mary’s son Ego went off to join the Gloucestershire Hussars; on the 9th she saw them parade in the cathedral, noting in her diary how moving she found this. It was only years later that she recalled how this was the moment, watching the ‘quiet earnest faces’ of his troop in prayer, that ‘it sank into my heart for the first time that they were going to fight’. She had kept a diary since she was 16 but briefly abandoned it that month, with the explanation: ‘shall we put it down to the war which has caused so much misery and infinite sorrow and loss to so many nothing seems to matter when so much is amiss’. As the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote to his wife Margot on August 18th, no one could ignore the fact that ‘the curtain is lifted’. Early morning rides on the Cotswold edge lifted Mary Wemyss’s heart: the countryside was ‘magically silent, waving corn and misty distances, the world had a strange unreal look’. Mostly we do

Right: 11th Hussars arrive at Le Havre with the British Expeditionary Force, August 16th. Far right: Nurses and nuns leave the War Office after receiving their orders following the outbreak of war.

From the Archive More on the Great War

www.historytoday. com/first-world-war

‘Everyone’s plans are cancelled – everything is suddenly changed’, recorded Beatrice Trefusis on August 5th

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VERYWHERE SOME KIND OF disruption brought the war home to the British people. ‘Everyone’s plans are cancelled – everything is suddenly changed’, recorded Beatrice Trefusis in her diary in London on the 5th. In Plymouth, W. Eaves told in a letter on the 8th of being ‘confronted by a barbed wire entanglement and a redoubt of sandbags’. Virginia Woolf, visiting Lewes from her home at Rodmell, found sentries all over the place, which gave a sense of ‘martial law’. An American visitor to London reported territorials marching, confiscated horses and motor cars, ‘long lines of artillery and ammunition wagons with their horses picketed near’. The Bishop of Galloway circulated a prayer to be said at all masses about the suffering and upheaval caused by the war, urging calm in the ‘common calamity’. In Glasgow, Thomas Macmillan tossed a coin with his brother about which of them should enlist and which stay to care for ageing parents. A vicar in Lechlade agreed to his son’s joining the Royal Naval Division, then confessed how he found the decision

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not know what the British people were thinking and feeling, but occasionally there is a sharp insight into the emergence of patriotic commitment. In the last two weeks of the month everyone had at least a hazy awareness that there were countrymen now in Europe under arms to defend their island. The poet Edward Thomas was at Dymock in Gloucestershire in August, walking and talking with his close friend and fellow poet, the American Robert Frost. He wrote in his notebook on August 26th about ‘a sky of dark rough horizontal masses in the north-west … I thought of men eastward, seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up till now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.’ This was when his idea of defence of the English landscape, for which he would in time enlist, came to him. His article ‘This England’, published in November, included a crucial passage: ‘All I can tell is, it seemed to me I had never loved England or had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having

realised that it was mine unless I were willing and prepared to die rather than leave it as Belgian women and old men and children had left their country. Something I had omitted. Something I felt had to be done before I could look composedly again at English landscape …’

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OME HAD experienced patriotic feelings with a surge of insistency earlier. Siegfried Sassoon, after a cycle ride in the sunny Kentish countryside, volunteered on August 1st and was in khaki by the 3rd. ‘The Weald’, he declared, ‘had been the world of my youngness and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do what I could to defend it. After all, dying for one’s native land was believed to be the most glorious thing one could possibly do.’ Rupert Brooke was a Warwickshire man. ‘I know the heart of England’, he told a friend on August 2nd, ‘ it has a hedgy, warm, bountiful dimpled air. Baby fields run up and down the hills and the roads wriggle with pleasure.’ Soon after, he wrote an autobiographical piece, contemplating ‘with a tightening of his heart’ a raid on the English coast. He was coming to understand the holiness with which he perceived ‘the actual earth of England’. Brooke was an unusually specific spokesman for the new mood that was taking hold of the nation, intent, determined, uncompromising. He summarised it in his Five Sonnets of 1914, the words of which, forming in his mind during August, were written down in October and published in December: Honour has come back, as a king to earth And paid his subjects with a bounteous wage; And nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage. COUPLES DRAWN IN to the war badgered each other about driving themselves too hard. ‘Do rest when you can’, Clare Howard urged Reggie on the 3rd. ‘I am sorry that you must work on Sunday too’, she commiserated on the 27th, ‘but I know that you will rest as much as you can.’ Besides her hospital work, working parties organised by the womenfolk in her family started on the 14th, focused on making vests and splint padding. It was being in it together that mattered: ‘Remember I love to hear how you spend every minute of your day’, Reggie insisted. There were plenty of people ‘longing to do something’, Clare’s sister told her on the 19th. So, she confessed, she cut the next working party and went off for tennis in a nearby village. She was back on their tennis court, after a full day of hospital scrubbing out, the next evening. But the news over the weekend of August 22nd and 23rd, when Reggie joined the family for tennis, left him feeling guilty and alarmed. ‘My weekend was simply priceless’, he told Clare. But, now Namur had fallen, it all looked ‘very serious – and think of

British recruitment poster compares tranquil English rural life with the wreckage of a Belgian town.

it, our men were fighting all yesterday while I was slacking at Bark Hart – that hot day – and fighting for their lives indeed’. Clare resumed her protector role: ‘My own, it is no good being perturbed because our troops are fighting and you are here slaving for the very same army all the week … so think of that, Darling, and don’t think that the fighting line is the only place where you will be any use.’ Tennis, with all its connotations of relaxed country house life, became a kind of metaphor for the past. In a new world young people took intensely the seriousness of their country being at war. Young lovers threw themselves into unexpected roles: Reggie learnt the strong voice he needed for the parade ground, Clare revelled in the physical work of making beds and cleaning wards. She even coped with watching wounds being dressed, which she ‘rather disliked’. ‘Our troops have done splendidly’, Clare asserted on August 26th in a fog of confused reports from the Front. ‘How awful it is now for those who are waiting for the casualty list’, she went on. These were the personal realities of war in London and Kent in August 1914. The first of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets he called ‘Peace’. He felt nostalgia for careless years gone by but no regret that peace was over:

Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. He put it more starkly than most would have done. But it was Brooke, perhaps, who best summarised Britain’s response to the Great War, as people felt it in the depth of their hearts. This was a quite extraordinary month, a month unlike any before that the British had lived through, in a country they had grown up to think of as an unthreatened ‘green and pleasant land’. Anthony Fletcher’s most recent book is Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front (Yale University Press, 2013).

FURTHER READING D. Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon Continuum, 2007). C. Pennell, A Kingdom United: British Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012). P. Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914-1916 (Pen and Sword, 2007). H. Strachan, The First World War: a New Illustrated History (Simon and Schuster, 2003). AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 33

| SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE INFORMING ELECTORS of the importance of the opportunity now afforded them, one of Scotland’s most prominent nationalists declared that: For the first time since the Union, they will have it in their power to determine whether Scotland is to recover the management of its own affairs. At first glance we may naturally assume that this comment relates to the independence referendum that takes place this September, but it was actually written 121 years ago by William Mitchell, treasurer of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA). In the same piece Mitchell urged that the time had come for his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackles of the Westminster party system and support solely those who were pledged to the restoration of a Scottish parliament. The SHRA, formed in 1886 in the midst of an acute constitutional crisis, sought the passage of ‘legislation for Scotland in Scotland’ and used the term ‘Home Rule’ to ‘express shortly the right of the Scottish people to manage their own affairs’. They counselled that only a reinstated legislature could ‘carry out what the people of Scotland want’, for ‘the Scottish people know their own business best’. Curious absence That these sentiments resonate today suggests that the modern Scottish National Party (SNP) is the inheritor of a deep-rooted nationalist mantle. Yet the SHRA is curiously absent from the SNP’s founding narrative. The party claims that its origins ‘can be traced back to several organisations advocating Home Rule for Scotland in the 1920s and 30s’. Nor does the SHRA feature in the SNP’s campaign literature. When in June the SNP leader Alex Salmond marked the 100-day countdown to the referendum, he pronounced that Scotland had ‘100 days in which to complete a 100-year Home Rule journey’, presumably referring to the introduction in 1913 of a Scottish Home Rule bill. To have harked back to its 1892 equivalent would have necessitated a slightly less pithy turn of phrase: ‘100 days in which to complete a 122-year Home Rule history’ does not have quite the same ring to it. Although more than a century separates them, it is by studying the language employed and the convictions held by these two sets of nationalists that we can throw fresh light on the history of the Home Rule campaign and assess its true significance. However unknowingly, the SNP and the government it has formed borrow heavily from the same vocabulary that informed the SHRA’s actions. It is instructive to compare their respective arguments in order to get a sense of their consanguinity. For instance, Salmond has alleged that: ‘The current UK system means that Scotland will always be an afterthought at Westminster.’ The SHRA’s chairman John Stuart Blackie was similarly convinced that: ‘To a metropolitan assembly mainly composed of Englishmen, Scottish affairs will always be looked upon as subordinate and secondary.’ According to Salmond, it is possible to render Scotland ‘subject to Westminster policies against the wishes of our democratic representatives’. If so, then little has changed 34 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

A Separate Scotland

With the independence referendum just around the corner, Naomi Lloyd-Jones asks why the Scottish Home Rule Association, an important precursor of the SNP, has been largely forgotten.

Gladstone satirised in Punch, June 1886.

since the Association protested upon its formation against the practice of ‘altering the Laws of Scotland by English votes against the voice of Scotland’s representatives’. The impetus behind both campaigns is the desire, as conveyed by the Scottish government, to attain ‘the ability to make our own decisions’. If made on the spot and ‘tailored to Scottish needs’, such decisions would ensure that the country’s ‘vast wealth and resources work much better for everyone … creating a society that reflects our hopes and ambitions’. This vision of the likely boons of independence mirrors that articulated for Home Rule. It was contended that ‘they could get no genuine reforms in which they were interested unless the Scottish people had the control of their own affairs’. Home Rule was portrayed as a ‘cure’ for a series of ‘evils’, a means of ‘getting rid of many grievances which the public claim of’. In addition, it could be presented as a practical arrangement that would deal effectively with ‘National questions affecting Scotland and long ripe for settlement, which are at present retarded in the Imperial Parliament’. Simply put, ‘the business of Scotland could be better managed in Scotland’. Blight of the Union What more do we know about the SHRA and its influence on nationalist rhetoric? Broadly speaking, it brought together those who sought to re-establish ‘a legislature sitting in Scotland, with full control over all purely Scotch questions, and with an executive government responsible to it and the crown’. It condemned the deal that had done away with the former Scottish parliament. The secretary, Charles Waddie, lamented that the Union ‘acts as a blight upon our national life’ and dismissed the notion that ‘anything but good came to Scotland of being united to England’ as ‘so extraordinary as to be past belief’. The Association denied that Scotland enjoyed anything like a partnership-based relationship with England and was adamant that ‘the practical character of the Scottish people enabled them, in the end, to make the best of a bad bargain’. A steady stream of propaganda poured forth from its headquarters on Edinburgh’s Princes Street, prompting one opponent to warn that these ‘thousands of pamphlets’ could ‘revive again the almost extinct fires of ... bitterness and jealousy’. The SHRA also sought assistance from the Liberal Party and its organisational machinery, both at Westminster and in Scotland. It may have styled itself as non-partisan, but the Association consistently lobbied for the inclusion of Scottish Home Rule on the Liberal programme. Under William Gladstone the party invested heavily in the policy of Irish self-government but, more crucially, Liberalism had dominated Scotland electorally since the Great Reform Act. The SHRA publicly acknowledged that ‘the majority of Scotsmen were Liberals’ and inferred that it was therefore reasonable to have ‘naturally expected’ the ‘solution of the Home Rule problem’ to fall to the party. Moreover, it was possible to interpret some of Gladstone’s most famous speeches as indicating that ‘Scotland can have Home Rule if she desires it’. It was up to Home Rulers to furnish evidence of this desire. They appear to have had some success in this respect. In 1889 the Scottish Liberal grandee Lord Rosebery informed

Gladstone that the cause ‘really is stirring people’ and by 1892 the SHRA counted 18 sitting Liberal MPs among its vice-presidents and another as president. SHRA members were vocal at a rank-and-file level within the Scottish Liberal Association (SLA), where they pressed for the adoption of resolutions committing the caucus to the cause. Over time these motions crept up the order paper and in late 1888 the SLA’s Executive was forced to convene a special meeting to discuss their increasing prevalence. It was with the executive that the grass roots campaign hit a major stumbling block. The SLA’s president, Lord Elgin, was personally disdainful and signalled the organisation’s reluctance to adopt the policy. Relations between the SHRA and SLA deteriorated; the party was openly denounced for ‘betraying’ a trust imparted by the Scottish nation. With ‘the whole organisation of the Gladstonian party … set in motion to crush us’, Home Rulers were left with no choice but to ‘agitate and organise if their influence is to be felt in parliament’. Only the SHRA could claim to be truly ‘national’. Much of the scorn fired at the SHRA stemmed from what has since been labelled by historians as ‘Unionistnationalism’. Although a seemingly oxymoronic term, ‘Unionist-nationalism’ has helped to make sense of the landscape of 19th-century Scottish political culture. It denotes a belief that the Union with England enabled Scots to express

The Association protested upon its formation against the practice of ‘altering the Laws of Scotland by English votes against the voice of Scotland’s representatives’ their nation’s distinctive attributes within a wider British and imperial framework. As one rejoinder to the SHRA put it: ‘We are by no means a down-trodden race … we have generally got what we wanted.’ It was held that ‘by virtue of the Parliamentary Union, Scotland has infinitely more power than it could have in a separate parliamentary system’. The current Better Together campaign has attempted to rejuvenate Unionist-nationalism and make it relevant to the era of devolution. Its head, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has said that, while ‘fiercely proud of being Scottish’, he sees ‘the value of being part of something bigger’. The ethos of today’s anti-independence Unionist-nationalism has probably best been communicated by the Scottish Conservative Lord Strathclyde, who proclaims: The genius at the heart of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 is that it allows both nations to blossom within a shared state. The Union was not and never has been an incorporating Union requiring Scotland to assimilate as if she were nothing more than a northern region of England. From the content, Strathclyde could well have been addressing allegations made 120 years ago. His words are easily transferrable rebuttals to Waddie’s complaint that AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 35

| SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE the ‘Incorporating Union’ had enabled the English to ‘quietly ignore’ the ‘national sentiment of Scotland’ and Blackie’s indictment that ‘Scotland is defacto [sic] in their estimations already the northern province of England’. So is this a question of history repeating itself? The SHRA certainly liked to think of itself as ‘embod[ying] the last in a long series of protests which … have been made by a succession of Scotsmen against the evils of incorporation’. Yet the SNP does not make the same link to the SHRA. It is less that the Association has been consigned to history and more that it is not easily traceable, so as to construct a continuous narrative. There is no central repository for its material, in contrast to those for its 1918 reincarnation and the subsequent National Party of Scotland. Partly as a result of this, it is typically assumed that the SHRA fell into obsolescence sometime in the mid-1890s. However, newspaper reports show that monthly meetings were held in late 1897, when members bemoaned Liberal policy that ‘ignores the constitutional right of the Scottish people to the making of their own laws’ and should therefore receive ‘strenuous opposition’. Remarkably, the obsession with the party endured into the new century. At the 1900 general election the Association insisted that Liberalism betrayed ‘the best interests of Scotland’, although Waddie did continue to seek pledges from Liberal candidates at subsequent by-elections. A manifesto was issued for the 1906 contest and it was only in 1908 that Waddie appears to have admitted defeat. He informed the press that the SHRA had ‘been allowed to become a derelict’. His explanation: ‘The Liberal Association has taken up the matter, and it was said there was no longer a reason for its existence.’ Home Rule all round? The irony of this reflection is borne out in the modern Liberal Democrats’ decision to style themselves as ‘the party of Home Rule’. They advocate what was once described as ‘Home Rule All Round’, suggesting that, in this respect at least, the Liberals finally became the party the SHRA had wanted them to be. What is now known as the West Lothian Question was first aired during the debates on Irish self-government, when it was stressed that the existence of a separate Irish legislature and simultaneous presence of Irish Members at Westminster would allow the Irish a finger in the ‘Scottish pie’, but prevent Scots interfering in Irish affairs. The SHRA touted ‘the delegation … to each of the British kingdoms of the powers for its internal legislation and administration’ as an ‘obvious way out of the difficulty’ and avowed ‘the problem solved’. The past is always with us, 36 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

A Scottish Home Rule campaigner with posters attacking the Labour Party’s stance on the issue, late 1940s.

but a note of caution should be sounded when seeking to make connections. Speaking in Glasgow last autumn, the Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams argued that Liberals have ‘played such an important part in trying to create a federal Britain’, crediting Gladstone with having ‘practically invented the concept of Home Rule’. The innovative role played by the Irish aside, it should be noted that Gladstone sought to ‘temper and restrain’ the progress of the Home Rule movement in Scotland. He even informed Queen Victoria that the cause had ‘in no way been promoted by the leaders of the Liberal party’ and, to emphasise his Unionist credentials, informed her that he had ‘incurred much obloquy thereby’. ‘Massive opportunity’ It could equally be asserted that we must not push the SNP-SHRA analogy too far. Home Rulers may well have rejected the independence campaign as apostasy. The Association’s vice-chairman John Romans was by no means alone in advising that ‘No Scotsman, whose opinion is worth repeating, entertains for a moment, an approximation to repeal of the Union’. Yet so many of the examples compared here indicate the existence of deep-seated, long-held grievances that have been articulated through what is ultimately a shared nationalist discourse. It appears that devolution failed to ‘pacify’ (to borrow a Gladstonian term) Scottish nationalism. Home Rule has not been the ‘cure’ it was presented as by its early advocates. A belief persists that the constitutional settlement does not work and that only fundamental change can bring national renewal. The conviction that ‘Scotland can be better than today’ is not a new one; after all, it was the SHRA that urged: We must secure for Scotland a yet greater future, but this can only be done by vindicating her rights and securing to her the legitimate control of her own affairs. That in nationalist eyes this aim has still not been fully achieved is indicated by Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon beseeching electors not to waste a ‘massive opportunity’. We may ask, is the referendum therefore the logical outcome of the SHRA’s ‘desire to bring before the people of Scotland the importance of giving expression to their opinions’? Perhaps the independence campaign is belatedly delivering what the SHRA claimed for the Home Rule movement; that ‘no better opportunity is likely to be afforded them of securing their national rights’.

Naomi Lloyd-Jones is a research student in the department of history at King’s College London.

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WASHINGTON 1814

Washington is Burning

Graeme Garrard describes the events that led to the torching of the new US capital by British troops in August 1814 and considers the impact of the ‘greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms’ on the US, Britain and Canada.

W Washington in flames, August 24th, 1814, a contemporary English engraving.

HEN JAMES MADISON, fourth President of the United States and ‘Father of the Constitution’, signed a declaration of war against Britain on June 18th, 1812 he could scarcely have imagined that two years later he would be fleeing from his burning capital before the invading enemy. At the start of the ‘War of 1812’, the first the US had declared on another nation, his friend and predecessor as president, Thomas Jefferson, had smugly declared that the war against Britain’s colonies in what is today Canada would be

‘a mere matter of marching’. As Madison abandoned the White House on horseback with his entourage and raced towards Virginia on August 24th, 1814 he stopped and looked back as he beheld the ruined city of Washington. The smoke from flames that engulfed it could be seen as far away as Baltimore, Maryland. Although he left no personal account of his feelings about these shattering events, the normally imperturbable president must have been deeply shaken by the turn they had taken, as were most Americans. What his many domestic critics had derisively AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 37

WASHINGTON 1814 39 opposition Federalists in Congress voted in favour. The House of Representatives backed Madison’s call to arms by 79 votes to 49, while the Senate narrowly voted 19 to 13 in favour. There were serious threats of disunion from New England, where the war was deeply unpopular. After two years of fighting neither side had much to show for its efforts and bloodshed. However, with the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France early in 1814, large numbers of British forces became available to take on the Americans. A small force of seasoned British troops from the Duke of Wellington’s army was sent to Bermuda under General Ross, a decorated Irish veteran of the Peninsular War, who was given overall command of British soldiers on the east coast of the US. They sailed towards Washington and anchored at the town of Benedict, Maryland on the Patuxent River, 45 miles to the south of Washington, on August 19th, 1814. Here they joined forces with a battalion of Royal Marines under Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who commanded a modest fleet of Royal Navy ships that had harassed and plundered the isolated settlements Left: Painting of along the shores of Chesapeake Bay. James Madison by As a result a reward was offered in the an unknown artist, US of $1,000 for his head and $500 commissioned by James Monroe for for each of his ears. the White House Both Ross and Cockburn reported in 1816. to Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Below: Dolley Cochrane, Commander-in-Chief of Madison by Bass the Royal Navy’s North America and Otis, 1817.

branded ‘Mr Madison’s War’ had led to the only foreign occupation of the US capital in its history. Soldiers and marines under Major-General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn put Washington’s public buildings, including the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, the Treasury building, the State and War Departments, the historic Navy Yard and the President’s House (as the White House was then known), to the torch. Exactly two centuries later, few people in the United States or Britain are aware of this national humiliation, the ‘greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms’.

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HE WAR OF 1812 began when a series of provocations by the British outraged segments of American opinion during the wars with Napoleon. Many Americans saw an irresistible opportunity to grab large tracts of the vast, sparsely populated British colonies to their north while Britain was distracted fighting the French in Europe. Some even believed that it was their ‘manifest destiny’ to unite the entire continent, from the Arctic to the Rio Grande, under one (US) flag. On the eve of the war John Quincy Adams wrote that the ‘whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles’. When they failed to take British North America, they turned south and invaded Mexico instead. Yet Americans were deeply divided on the desirability of a second war of independence with Britain. The Congressional vote that sanctioned it was the closest formally to lead to a declaration of war in American history. None of the

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Armstrong seriously misjudged the massive symbolic significance of the capture and burning of the young nation’s capital and the effect this would have on American morale A contemporary French satire on British treachery in setting fire to public buildings in Washington. It includes an attack on their attempt to induce France to abolish the slave trade, which was seen as a hypocritical cover for British colonial supremacy. General Ross is probably the officer standing on the right.

West Indies Station. The energetic and headstrong Cockburn, who had fought with Nelson at the Battle of Cape St Vincent, wrote to Cochrane on July 17th recommending an immediate attack on the poorly defended American capital for ‘the greater political effect likely to result’. On July 18th Cochrane ordered his eager subordinate ‘to destroy and lay waste such towns and districts as you may find assailable’. Ross and Cockburn joined forces and agreed to march on Washington under the former’s command. When the cautious Cochrane ordered them to return, Cockburn defiantly refused. ‘There is now no choice left us. We must go on’. Ross agreed. ‘Well, be it so! We will proceed!’, the general declared. A short distance away in Washington, the US Secretary of War, John Armstrong, scoffed at the idea that the British would be foolish enough to attack the American capital, which was virtually undefended. He was sure that they would turn towards Baltimore instead. ‘They will certainly not come here!’, he confidently predicted to the president.

‘What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the place, Sir. That is of so much more consequence.’ He further anticipated (also wrongly) that, if the British dared to move against Washington, their attack would end as ‘a mere Cossack hurrah, a rapid march and hasty retreat’. Militarily, Armstrong’s view was not unreasonable. Washington at the time was little more than a dusty village of 13,000 citizens and slaves, built on swamps with few houses. Pennsylvania Avenue, which would later become ‘America’s Main Street’, running between the Capitol Building and the President’s House, was then unpaved and ‘always in an awful condition from either mud or dust’. But Armstrong seriously misjudged the massive symbolic significance of the capture and burning of the young nation’s capital and the effect this would have on American morale. Before marching on Washington, Ross and Cockburn led their troops against a hastily organised American force assembled near the quiet little village of Bladensburg, Maryland, a few miles from downtown Washington. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 39

WASHINGTON 1814

Right: George Munger’s watercolour of the burned-out shell of the President’s House standing alone in the landscape, 1814. Below: ‘The Fall of Washington – or Maddy in full flight’, British cartoon of 1814, shows the president and probably his secretary of war, John Armstrong, escaping from Washington with bundles of state papers, watched by bemused Americans on the left and British sailors on the right.

During the fighting, Cockburn charged recklessly across the battlefield on his white horse, his large, gold-laced hat conspicuous in the August sun. When a bullet struck his saddle and another killed a nearby marine, an aide pleaded with him to take cover. ‘Poh! Poh! Nonsense!’, the admiral blustered. The US defenders were routed by the British on August 24th at the Battle of Bladensburg, thereby removing the last significant obstacle to the capital. ROSS AND COCKBURN led a small advance guard to Capitol Hill in Washington under a flag of truce to agree terms. Both commanders were in complete agreement that looting and the wanton destruction of private property would under no circumstances be tolerated by their troops and this was made clear to the dejected Americans. In the end seven soldiers would be flogged for disobeying this order. But they saw the destruction of public buildings as fair game. Indeed, it was at the heart of the expedition. As Ross and Cockburn rode up to the Capitol Building a group of diehards fired a volley at them from a nearby house, killing a British soldier. The general’s horse fell dead beneath him. The house was promptly burned down and the Union Jack raised over the American Capitol. The invaders were impressed by the grandeur of the Senate and House of Representatives with their elegant interiors, which at the time were temporarily separated by a makeshift wooden structure joining the two wings of the still-unfinished Capitol Building, where the distinctive central rotunda would later be constructed. The whole 40 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

building was set alight with rockets and flares, gutting both wings, which burned fiercely. The Library of Congress (then housed in the offices of the Senate majority leader) was consumed by the fires, taking its 3,000 volumes with it. But the thick stone walls of the Capitol survived, leaving an empty, burned-out shell. Cockburn on horseback then led the British troops down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House. The ‘great little Madison’ (who stood just

It must have been a strange moment as the descendants of Madison’s slave beheld the famous portrait of the slave-owning first president

5’ 4” tall) and his wife Dolley had fled, separately, just hours before. Ross and Cockburn found an elegant, deserted, 23-room building that had been tastefully furnished by Thomas Jefferson during his presidency. A large dining table was carefully laid for 40 guests; Dolley Madison had been expecting the cabinet for lunch at 3pm that very afternoon. Cockburn, Ross and their troops feasted on the food and toasted the health of the Prince Regent in London before they set about gathering furniture together in the oval drawing room to start a fire. The President’s House burned furiously until the following day. Like the Capitol Building, the heavy outer walls, survived while the interior and its furnishings were completely gutted.

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PARED FROM THIS conflagration was a copy of the large ‘Lansdowne’ portrait of George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart and named after the Marquess of Lansdowne, the British prime minister who had negotiated peace with the American colonists in 1783. It depicts the retiring Washington nobly renouncing a third term as president. The US government bought a Stuart-painted replica of the painting for the President’s House in 1800. On August 24th, 1814 it hung in the large dining room. Credit for saving the painting was claimed by and has usually been ascribed to, Dolley Madison, who remained behind in the house after her husband and officials had departed, supervising the loading of personal affects into a wagon before she escaped shortly before the arrival of the British. Pointing to the Washington painting, she is supposed to have ordered ‘Save that picture! Save that picture if possible. If not possible, destroy it. Under no circumstances is it to fall into the hands of the British!’ The canvas was cut from its frame and removed for safe-keeping. This account was later challenged by Madison’s 15-year-old slave and manservant, Paul Jennings, who wrote a short memoir, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison, many years later, which flatly contradicts the First Lady:

An American propaganda painting by John Archibald Woodside, c.1814.

It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected any moment. Jennings identified the French doorkeeper John Susé (Jean-Pierre Soiussat) and the president’s gardener Magraw (McGraw) as the people who actually rescued the Washington portrait, which today hangs in the East Room of the White House – the only object to remain on display since the building was completed in the 1820s. In 2009, descendants of Jennings were invited to the White House by President Obama ‘to look at the painting their relative helped save’. It must have been a strange moment as the descendants of Madison’s slave beheld the famous portrait of the slave-owning first president of the United States during the first term of America’s first black president. Most of the other prominent public buildings in Washington were systematically fired by the British, with few exceptions, such as the Patent Office, where the members of Congress later convened when they returned to the devastated city. A ‘great fire in the direction of Washington’ was observed from Cockburn’s flagship on the River Patuxent. Ross’s deputy recorded that the events of the last ten days, culminating in the burning of the US capital, were ‘as fine a thing as any done during this war, and a rub to the Americans that can never be forgotten’. Cochrane agreed, boasting that the war-making President Madison had been ‘hurled from his throne’. Cockburn was initially determined to burn down the offices of the Washington newspaper the National Intelligencer, which was an enthusiastic supporter of Madison and had roundly denounced and abused the admiral as a ‘Ruffian’ for his campaign of destruction in Chesapeake Bay. He was persuaded not to by neighbours, who feared that the fire would engulf their homes as well. Instead he compromised and ordered the building to be torn down brick by brick, decreeing that all the letters ‘C’ of its metal type be destroyed on the presses ‘so that the rascals can have no further means of abusing my name’. Most of the fires that engulfed the city were doused by a huge thunderstorm and hurricane, which swept through Washington while the British were still present. ‘Great God, Madam!’, Cockburn exclaimed to a resident. ‘Is this the kind of storm to which you are accustomed in this AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 41

Above: Fort McHenry near Baltimore under attack by the British in September 1814, contemporary aquatint by John Bower. Right: RearAdmiral Sir George Cockburn, credited by Ross with the idea of attacking Washington, stands before the burning Capitol buildings, in a contemporary painting.

42 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Secretary of State Monroe cursed the British troops as ‘all damn’d rascals from highest to lowest’ for torching the capital infernal country?’ The admiral then headed out of the city, very pleased with the devastation he left in his wake after an occupation that had lasted barely 24 hours. The Americans were as dejected and enraged as the British were elated by the effects of the occupation. The reserved and stoical Madison returned to Washington as soon as the British had departed. Unable to live in the President’s House, he took up residence at the home of his brother-inlaw. His wife soon joined him, exclaiming when she saw the ruined capital: ‘Such destruction, such devastation!’ The secretary of state James Monroe, Madison’s successor as president, cursed the British troops as ‘all damn’d rascals from highest to lowest’ for torching the capital. He seems to have forgotten that American troops had done much the same in 1813 when they occupied the undefended city of York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario). Then they had burned the colony’s legislative and judicial buildings, plundered its public library and destroyed private property. Indeed, the Governor

WASHINGTON 1814 General and military Commander-in-Chief of British North America during the war, Lieutenant-General Sir George Prévost, wrote that, as a ‘just retribution, the proud capital at Washington has experienced a similar fate’. When the news reached London a month later of the British retaliation, guns outside Parliament and the Tower of London boomed a joyous salute, a reaction echoed throughout the colonies of British North America, particularly in York. In the wake of the British attack, many Americans favoured moving the capital north to Philadelphia, which had been a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States and where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both drafted. It had also been the capital during the Revolutionary War. Afraid that this suggestion might be taken up, Washington property owners paid for the construction of a temporary brick building where Congress met from December 1815 until 1819, while the gutted Capitol Building was rebuilt. Ultimately, a bill to relocate the capital was defeated and Washington remained the seat of government. The White House was restored in time for James Monroe’s inauguration as president in 1817.

F

OR THE AMERICANS the summer of 1814 presented few silver linings in the dark cloud of their national humiliation. General Ross reluctantly agreed to lead a joint attack on Baltimore with Admiral Cockburn. He landed his troops just over 10 miles from the city at North Point on September 12th. During the ensuing battle, Ross was shot dead by an American sniper. When told of his death, Cockburn exclaimed: ‘It is impossible! I parted with him this moment.’ Cockburn mourned his friend’s death: ‘Our country, sir, has lost in him one of its best and bravest soldiers, and those who knew him, as I did, a friend honoured and beloved.’ Admiral Cochrane lamented the loss of ‘one of the brightest ornaments’ in the British Army. Ross’s body was preserved in a hogshead of Jamaican rum and shipped to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was interred in the city’s Old Burying Ground of St Paul’s Church. A monument to Ross was erected in St Paul’s Cathedral in London and at his Irish birthplace, Rostrevor, County Down, on the spot where he had planned to build a home for his retirement after the war. Surprisingly, a painting of Ross by an unknown artist now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in the city. The Americans repelled the attacking British forces at the Battle of Baltimore immediately after Ross’s death. Famously, the siege of the city’s Fort McHenry inspired the lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key to compose the poem ‘Defence of Fort McHenry’, which later provided the lyrics for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Set to the tune of the 18th-century drinking song ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’, the reference to ‘the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’ in the future national anthem were references to the attack on Fort McHenry witnessed by Key. On Christmas Eve, 1814 delegations from Britain and the United States (including the future sixth president John Quincy Adams) met in a former monastery in the Belgian city of Ghent to sign a ‘Treaty of Peace and Amity’ between the two states. This news did not reach America in time to stop Major-General Andrew Jackson inflicting a heavy defeat on British troops at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. The Prince Regent later confirmed the treaty

The flag flying over Fort McHenry, which inspired the writing of the poem that became the US national anthem.

for Britain with his signature, as did Madison for the US on February 17th, 1815. Neither side had gained any territory and both claimed victory after over two years of war that left deep national scars for many decades to come. For Britain the war was a minor sideshow of its imperial saga that is now almost wholly forgotten, completely eclipsed by the victories of Wolfe at Quebec, Wellington at Waterloo and Nelson at Trafalgar. For the US it proved to be a sobering lesson in the weaknesses of its military preparation and leadership and it exposed some ominous internal political divisions in the young state. For Canada, by contrast, the War of 1812 was a turning point in the formation of English-Canadian identity. It was a decisive crucible out of which the remaining English-speaking British colonies in North America forged a new sense of self-confidence and solidarity with themselves and with Britain. This may explain why there have been major celebrations and commemorations of the war in Canada, particularly Ontario, many more than in the US, and none at all in Britain. Graeme Garrard is a reader in history at the School of European Studies, Cardiff University.

FURTHER READING Pierre Burton, Flames Across the Border: 1813–1814 (McClelland and Stewart, 1981). Christopher George. Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay (White Mane Books, 2000). John Grant and Ray Jones, A Guide to Battlefields and Historic Sites: The War of 1812 (Western New York Public Broadcasting Association, 2011). MacKay J. Hitsman, The Incredible War of 1812: A Military History (University of Toronto Press, 1965). James A. Pack, The Man Who Burned The White House (Naval Institute Press, 1987). Anthony S. Pitch, The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814 (Naval Institute PressBest, 2008). AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 43

InFocus

The Fire Fly on Union Mills Bridge, 1863

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T

HE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR is entering its third year and so far the South has had the best of it. There have been two battles close to this spot, called First and Second Bull Run, or Manassas, as both sides fought to control the strategically vital junction of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, running north to south in Virginia, with the Manassas Gap Railroad running east to west through the Shenandoah Range. First Bull Run, the opening battle of the war in July 1861, saw the Union forces routed; in the second encounter, in August 1862, they were again beaten but were able to retreat, in better order, back to the defensive lines round Washington DC. It must have been shortly after that this bridge at Union Mills, a little to the north of the junction, across a creek flowing into the Bull Run, was destroyed by the Confederate forces, maybe as General Robert E. Lee led them northwards three weeks later to fight the bloodiest one-day battle in US history, at Antietam. Now, in 1863, it has been temporarily repaired with wooden trestles and the North’s Fire Fly locomotive poses for a photograph by one of the pioneering US photographer Mathew Brady’s team. It makes a handsome sight, with its distinctive chimney to catch the sparks from its wood-burning boiler, its huge lantern and the gothic windows of the driver’s cab. Early in 1862 Abraham Lincoln’s administration had made a key appointment when Herman Haupt, previously chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was put in charge of the North’s railroads within the theatre of war.

Mathew Brady employed 23 photographers to record the American Civil War He brought efficiency, time savings and swift repairs. In May 1862, after he had rebuilt the bridge across Potomac Creek, Lincoln said: ‘That man Haupt has built a bridge 400 feet long and 80 high, on which loaded trains are passing every hour, and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but corn stalks and bean poles.’ Haupt was probably responsible for the repair of the Union Mills bridge, the US Military Construction Corps able to do a job like that in a day or two, using timber cut down in the locality. Mathew Brady employed 23 photographers to record the Civil War, each equipped with his own travelling dark room, something that Roger Fenton had pioneered a few years earlier when photographing the Crimean War. In October 1862 Brady had mounted an exhibition in New York baldly entitled ‘The Dead of Antietam’, which included pictures of corpses scattered on the battlefield taken two or three days after the battle the month before. Fenton had not taken such shots, but Felice Beato had, during the Third Opium War in China in 1860, when an Anglo-French force had stormed the Taku Forts on the way to Beijing. Brady’s team took over 10,000 plates during the war and, although the US government refused to buy the collection from him afterwards, a great many of them have survived.

ROGER HUDSON

AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 45

| HANOVER

A British on Hanging Genocide in to Hanover

Three hundred years ago, in August 1714, the Protestant Elector of Hanover ascended to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland, becoming George I. Graham Darby describes the latter phase of the personal union, which lasted until 1837.

THE PERSONAL UNION between the monarchs of England and the state of Hanover, the outcome of the Protestant Settlement signed in 1701, came to an end with the death of William IV in 1837. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, was delighted:

Hussars of the King’s German Legion in the Peninsula, watercolour possibly by Henry Alken, 1808.

The Hanoverian Dynasty, and German prejudices which belonged to it, and which for a century have embarrassed and impeded our march both at home and abroad will cease. The Sovereign of England will no longer be hampered by considerations belonging to the petty state of Hanover; and I believe that since the accession of George I, these German politics have more or less continually had their influence on the Councils of England.

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Historians have long recognised that the Electorate of Hanover (so-called as one of eight states whose heads elected the Holy Roman Emperor) played an important role in British foreign policy under the first two Georges, the ‘German’ kings. It has been acknowleged more recently that Hanover was important to George III (r. 1760-1820), too, though he was careful to separate Hanoverian from British interests. During the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), however, this became impossible. After French troops occupied Hanover in 1803 the remnants of the Hanoverian army came to England and formed the King’s German Legion (KGL), around 14,000 strong, based in Bexhill and Weymouth. The Legion served with distinction in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.

However, in 1806 the French were ousted and Hanover was occupied by Prussia. This prompted the foreign secretary, Charles James Fox, to engineer a declaration of war against Prussia, but it was unusual for the Hanoverian tail to wag the British dog in George III’s reign. There was criticism from republican and other quarters, particularly from the radical journalist William Cobbett (whose anti-Hanoverian stance culminated in a two-year jail sentence in 1810 for his condemnation of the KGL’s action in flogging militiamen in Ely). The situation was shortlived, as France reoccupied Hanover in 1807. Napoleon now abolished the Electorate (having already abolished the Holy Roman Empire) and incorporated it into the newly created kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by his brother Jérôme. Prussia now became an ally and the restoration of Hanover an aim of British foreign policy, as much as a personal wish of George III. The objective was not practical until after 1812, when Napoleon’s defeat became a real possibility, by which time the Regency was fully established. Following his appointment as foreign secretary in 1812, Viscount Castlereagh worked closely with Count Münster, the head of the Hanoverian chancellory. Castlereagh was impressed by Hanover’s diplomatic network and this cooperation aided the foreign secretary’s strategy of establishing a firm Continental alliance to defeat Napoleon once and for all, a plan that was successful at Waterloo. French control of Hanover continued until October 1813. Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig later that month spelt the end of the Confederation of the Rhine. Hanover’s territories were formally restored to George III and his youngest son, the Duke of Cambridge, was appointed military governor in December 1813. He would become governor general in 1816 and subsequently, under William IV, viceroy. Despite Castlereagh’s good relationship with Münster he was not prepared to sacrifice British for Hanoverian interests. His main aim was to ensure that France would not revive and to do this he wanted Prussia to act as a bulwark on the Rhine. Münster’s extensive territorial ambitions for Hanover were consequently subordinated to those of Prussia. Nevertheless, it did gain substantial territory, increasing in size by 20 per cent, and at the Congress of Vienna it was elevated to the status of kingdom in October 1814, though this was not so much a reward as a necessity, given that the Holy Roman Empire was not restored. With no emperor to elect, the electorate was redundant. After 1815, however, Hanover and Britain’s interests diverged. When the Prince Regent finally became George IV in 1820 he was quick to arrange a formal state visit to Hanover, the first since 1755. His visit the following year was met with much ceremony and jubilation in

the new kingdom and, surprisingly, with little criticism in Britain (despite the traditional dislike of German militarism in general and especially Hanoverian standing armies paid for by the British taxpayer). Like his father, George IV also sought to keep Hanoverian policy separate from British, as did George Canning, who was foreign secretary from 1822. This was one reason why Canning opened up foreign policy to public scrutiny through speeches and the publication of despatches – in order to counter association with the king’s ‘other’ foreign policy. Despite this separation, there was some suggestion that Hanoverian troops might be used to aid British interests in Portugal in 1824, as no British troops were available. However, there were objections from both kingdoms. After Canning’s relationship with the king, hitherto frosty, improved, he was able to be less circumspect and could take advantage of Hanover’s diplomatic network to further British foreign policy interests. Public ignorance Hanoverian news was generally of little interest in Britain and newspapers and periodicals often commented about the public’s ignorance of it. There were times, though, when Hanover did attract attention. Its new constitution passed almost unnoticed on its announcement in 1819, but from 1825 it became a matter of public interest in Britain over the issue of Catholic Emancipation. The addition of Catholic territories to Hanover in 1814-15 had led to the granting of toleration to Catholics there and the contradictory policy of the monarchy on this issue at home prompted even the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV, to observe ‘an inconsistency of the king refusing in Ireland what he had granted in Hanover’. Of course, the counter argument was that, whereas Hanover was ruled by hereditary right, Britain was ruled by ‘Protestant Settlement’. Despite George IV’s objections, Catholic Emancipation was eventually granted in Britain in 1829. Hanover was prominent again in British politics at the beginning of William IV’s reign. The Great Reform Act extending the franchise had just received royal assent in early June 1832, when William IV accepted (for Hanover) Metternich’s oppressive Six Articles, which after that same month sought to limit the rights of representative assemblies later that same month. This seemingly contradictory policy prompted Palmerston to condemn the Six Articles in the Commons and make his famous declaration that constitutional states were the natural allies of England. The Times was apoplectic, declaring ‘Thank God, Hanover is no kingdom of ours’ and eagerly anticipated the end of the personal union at the death of the king. In fact, the end of the personal union

The contradictory policy of the monarchy on the issue of Catholic toleration prompted the Duke of Clarence to observe an ‘inconsistency of the king refusing in Ireland what he had granted in Hanover’

AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 47

| HANOVER seemed a possibility throughout the reigns of both George IV and William IV. Whereas George III fathered 15 children, his offspring were less productive. The Salic law operated in Hanover and consequently male heirs had precedence over female. From 1830 Princess Victoria of Kent was heir apparent to the British throne. This meant that her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, would inherit the kingdom of Hanover. And so it came to pass on the death of William IV in 1837, much to Palmerston’s relief. Unpopular figure The general public was largely indifferent to this shift, though there was some satisfaction that the Duke of Cumberland, now King Ernst Augustus of Hanover, would be leaving Britain. The duke, an ultra-Tory, was unpopular in some quarters. To be fair to him, malicious accusations levelled by the Whig propaganda machine had been quite outrageous. Among other offences, he was held responsible for the suicide of Lord Graves by dint of having had an affair with his wife. It was also alleged that he had killed his valet and sired a son by his sister. The charges seem to be without foundation, but mud sticks. Moreover, Ernst Augustus remained the heir apparent to the throne of England, so the possibility of his return was a factor until Queen Victoria gave birth to a daughter late in 1840. Ernst Augustus’ reign in Hanover was reasonably successful (his equestrian statue still stands outside Hanover station). He made a formal state visit to Britain in 1843 and, despite previous slanders, was generally well received, though relations with Queen Victoria were cool, mainly due to arguments over precedence and heirlooms. He was succeeded in 1851 by his son, George V.

Brass medal showing the Duke of Cumberland’s galloping horse trampling a dragon en route to Hanover.

Born Hanover, British subject The centenary of the personal union in August 1814 had been the subject of considerable celebration, with the Prince Regent organising fêtes in three London parks. Of course, the link was still ‘live’ at that time and Hanover had just been recovered after several years of French occupation. In many ways this was a double celebration. The bicentenary in August 1914 was totally overshadowed by the outbreak of hostilities with the (relatively new) German empire, which had absorbed Hanover in 1866. Historians have long appreciated the political significance of the personal union, but less attention has been paid to the economic and social dimension that also went with it. Some study has been made of the economic relationship: it appears that it was a rather one-sided arrangement, whereby Britain used Hanover to access the markets of Germany for its manufactures, while not granting Hanover any significant trading concessions in return. Little research has been conducted into the social relationship – though there has been some investigation into the links between Britain and the University of Göttingen, which were broken by the French occupation. However, those of us with ancestors whose records state: ‘born Hanover, British Subject’ – my mother’s family included – have a story to investigate. Between 1714 and 1837 many Hanoverians settled in Britain and a great number did so after 1837, until immigration became an issue later in the century. In 1886 it was ruled that Hanoverians born after the death of William IV were not entitled to be British, though this ruling was designed to stem future immigration and did not affect those already residing in the United Kingdom. Understandably, the two world wars with Germany in the first half of the 20th century

It appears that the economic relationship was rather one-sided, whereby Britain used Hanover to access the markets of Germany for its manufactures, while not granting Hanover any significant trading concessions in return. In 1863-64 Britain nearly went to war with Prussia in support of Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein question (see page 16), but the ageing Palmerston had met his match in Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor, who joked that he would have his police force arrest the British army, if it invaded. When in 1866 Prussia went to war with Austria, the Hanoverian parliament recommended neutrality but George stubbornly insisted on taking Austria’s side. Hanover was soon overrun. The last ruler of Hanover, George, died in exile in Paris in 1878 but was buried at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle: the royal family bond remained, even if the demise of the kingdom was of little significance to the British public. 48 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

led many families to gloss over memories of their German ancestry; possibly the most famous incidence in this respect is the current royal family, which felt compelled to change its German name from Saxe-Coburg to the House of Windsor in 1917. Still, on this, the 300th anniversary of the personal union between Britain and Hanover, it is probably about time that the relationship can once more be explored without prejudice.

Graham Darby is the author of The Thirty Years War available via Kindle Publishing Direct. A number of events are taking place to celebrate the tercentenary in both Britain and Germany. For details see www.london.diplo.de/300yearsBritishGermanRoyalTies

MakingHistory Understanding the emotional lives of people in the past is one of the most difficult challenges facing the historian, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.

How Does it Feel? WHEN I WORKED at Hampton Court Palace one of the questions that visitors often asked was: ‘How did Henry VIII feel when …?’ For the historian, it is a difficult question to answer; it is fantastically hard to chart a history of feelings and to access the emotions of people in the past. Yet it is not impossible. As with all history, the tightrope to be walked is between the mystery and the familiarity of the past. Back in the 1960s the French historian Philippe Ariès claimed that modern concepts of childhood and family sentiment did not exist in the medieval period. Through examining changing vocabulary, family portraiture, toys, dress and education patterns, Ariès concluded, in the face of devastatingly high infant mortality rates, that late medieval parents didn’t feel as we would do and instead experienced inured indifference in the face of the deaths of their children because ‘too many of them died’. This indifference, he argued, ‘was a direct and inevitable consequence of the demography of the period’; ‘nothing about this callousness … should surprise us: it was only natural in the community conditions of the time’. Historians have since used letters, diaries and other personal documents to demonstrate that parents did, in fact, feel great sadness in the face of their children’s deaths, but Ariès’ work carries an important and salutary reminder that we should not just assume that people in the past felt as we do. Yet sometimes I find myself in a battle between myself as a scholar – knowing that thoughts, beliefs and feelings in the past must have been culturally conditioned and historically variable – and myself as a friend, lover, daughter, recognising what looks like a similar emotion in the affective life of people of the past. Following BBC Radio 4’s broadcast in April (still available online) of Five 50 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Hundred Years of Friendship, presented by Thomas Dixon, I have been thinking in particular about the historical nature of friendship. Friendship was a preoccupation of the period I study, the Renaissance. The intelligentsia of the period looked back to ancient models of companionship, as charted by Aristotle and Cicero, and wrote their own odes to true friendship. As Susan Brigden noted in her award-winning book on Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Heart's Forest (2012), poets

Friendship could encompass a love that we moderns find hard to credit outside the bonds of an erotic attachment of the Henrician court often wrote of friendship. At court it meant, above all, honesty; the false friend was a flatterer. It also meant constancy and fidelity in the face of temptations to betrayal. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey praised his childhood friend, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, when he wrote of: ‘The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust … The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just.’ This was a rare prize. Sir Thomas More called a

The Three Species of Friendship, an illustration from a 15th-century French edition of Aristotle's Ethics.

‘faithful and constant friendship in the storms of fortune … a high and noble gift’. The rarity of true friendship was emphasised in the writings of the inventor of the essay form, Michel de Montaigne. For six years in the 1550s, until his friend’s death, Montaigne was a bosom companion to Etienne de la Boétie. Theirs was such a devoted friendship that Montaigne described them as having ‘souls … mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found’. Looking to history, Montaigne and La Boétie modelled themselves on the friendship of Socrates and Alcibiades – even to the point of Montaigne casting the (slightly) older La Boétie in the role of ugly sage. This unflattering attribution aside, the language of their friendship seems, to a modern reader, distinctly romantic. Montaigne writes: ‘If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: “Because it was him: because it was me”.’ Yet, like Socrates and Alcibiades, few scholars conclude that they had a sexual relationship. Friendship could encompass a love that we moderns find hard to credit outside the bonds of an erotic attachment. So is it possible to have a friend like this in the modern age? For Renaissance writers, I wouldn’t stand a chance. For I am a woman and such heights of friendship were never thought attainable by mere females. It is again a reminder that feelings were culturally conditioned and historically variable. Yet isn’t this one instance in which the past seems to give us a rare and beautiful emotional ideal to which to aspire, male and female alike? Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New College of the Humanities, London.

PANAMA CANAL

The Keys to the Universe Matthew Parker, on the centenary of the completion of the Panama Canal, describes the gruelling challenges faced by those competing to succeed in the project to join the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, from the 16th century to the present day.

I

T WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE a glorious histori- A postcard cal symmetry. This month, exactly a hundred celebrating the opening of the years after the triumphant completion of the Panama Canal Panama Canal in August 1914, should have seen as the kiss of the the opening of the new $5.5bn expansion, one of oceans, 1914. the biggest engineering projects currently underway anywhere in the world. But the Panama Canal has broken men and reputations before. Amid strikes, huge cost overruns and rumours that the main construction consortium was in financial difficulty, the completion date slipped first to October, then to March 2015; now it is ‘early 2016’. Each day of delay reportedly costs the canal company nearly a million dollars in lost revenue. Construction of the massive new locks began in 2009. There was enormous optimism. Vessels carrying up to 12,000 containers – more than twice the current Panamax limit – would be able to cross the isthmus, hugely benefiting world trade and bringing vast revenue for the Panamanian government. But critics smelled corruption and doubted

the financial viability of the Spanish-led consortium, which won the main lock-construction contract by underbidding its nearest rival by $1bn. Bechtel, the US engineering giant, which had expected to get the work, sneered that the price bid would not even cover the cost of the concrete required. The canal project has always attracted insane optimism, corruption and disaster. Part of the danger of what became known as ‘the lure of Panama’ was that, from the very earliest days, it always looked so obvious and easy. Having established a colony on the isthmus’ Atlantic coast in September 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa led a party of men into the interior to search for the rumoured Great Ocean across the mountains. Only a third survived the heat, insects, snakes and hostile Cuna Indians in the jungle, but on September 25th Balboa climbed a hill and ‘silent on a peak in Darien’ he turned one way and then the other; he could see both oceans quite clearly. He fell to his knees in prayer and then called up his men, ‘shewing them the great maine sea heretofore unknowne to the inhabitants of Europe, Aphrike, and Asia’. The ‘discovery’ of the Pacific Ocean came with another realisation: that only a tantalisingly narrow strip of land blocked the way to the riches of the East, the motivation, of course, for the voyages of

Part of the danger of what became known as ‘the lure of Panama’ was that, from the earliest days, it always looked so obvious and easy AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 51

PANAMA CANAL

Above: the frontispiece to the first volume of the Company of Scotland’s directors’ meeting minutes, 1696. Left: Balboa extracting gold from the natives and being told of the South Sea in Theodor de Bry’s engraving for La Historia dei Mondo Nuovo by Girolamo Benzoni, late 16th century.

discovery in the first place. In Balboa’s party was an engineer, Alvaro de Saavedra, who suggested in a report to the Spanish King Charles V that although the search for a strait between the two oceans should continue, if it was not found, ‘yet it might not be impossible to make one’. By 1530 it was clear that no such waterway existed in the tropics and in 1534 Charles ordered that a survey be carried out with a view to excavation. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream attracted throughout its history, a priest wrote to Charles from Panama: If there are mountains there are also hands … To a King of Spain with the wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the spice trade, what is possible is easy. Fortunately for those who would have been ordered to dig, the Spanish authorities soon decided that it was safer to have a wall of land between the riches of Peru and rival European powers, so no work was undertaken. But at the end of the 17th century a Scottish adventurer produced a bold plan. William Paterson was born in 1658 and as a young man had travelled, as part missionary, part buccaneer, to the West Indies. Returning to England, he made a fortune in business and became a ‘projector’, a promoter of speculative moneymaking schemes. Ever since his sojourn in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a ‘Great Idea’, the venture to cap everything. If ports could be established on both coasts of the Panama isthmus, cargoes could be transferred over the narrow strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. He had identified a spot where there was ‘no mountain range at all’ and where ‘broad, low valleys’ extended from coast to coast. It was perfect enough to envisage not just a road but, in time, a waterway. Paterson intended a truly global entrepôt, to rival any in the world, and 52 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess ‘the Gates to the Pacific and the keys to the Universe’.

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HEN THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT, jealous of the riches flowing into England from trade, passed an Act to encourage new settlements and commerce, Paterson rushed to Edinburgh to sell his scheme. ‘Do but open these doors’, he wrote in his proposal to parliament, ‘and trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.’ There were warnings that the area was jealously guarded by Spain and that Paterson ‘talks too much and raises people’s expectations’, but the government were sold. In June 1695 an Act of the Scottish Parliament established the ‘Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies’. But then the English Parliament turned against the project. Royal assent to the Act was withdrawn, along with substantial English subscriptions of £300,000. However a wave of patriotic indignation in Scotland saw money pouring in from all levels of society. £400,000 was quickly raised, about half the country’s available capital. It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver. In July 1698 five large vessels carrying 1,200 people left Edinburgh for Panama. Although more than 40 of the colonists died on the threeand-a-half month voyage, at first all went well. Friendly relations were established with the local tribes, land was cleared and the soil found to be highly fertile. But as soon as the Scots had landed in the New World, there were fierce protests in London from the Spanish ambassador, as well as from English merchants. In response, William III issued orders to the Governors of Virginia, New York, New England, Jamaica and Barbados, forbidding them to trade with or supply provisions to the Darién colonists. For a settlement established as a trading station, this was a fatal blow.

Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland was merged into Great Britain in 1707

Scots abandoned the isthmus. Only half of the weakened settlers would survive the journey home. Two further fleets sailed from Scotland and twice the colony was briefly re-established. But in March 1700 the last settlers, weakened by hunger and disease, were driven out by Spanish troops. In all, Paterson’s ‘Great Idea’ had cost over 2,000 lives and the precious savings of an entire nation. The ‘Darien Disaster’ hastened the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish parliament. Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland was merged into Great Britain in 1707, an early but spectacular casualty of the ‘lure of Panama’. The disaster did nothing, however, to dampen interest in the dream of a transisthmian canal. Among those gripped by the idea were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The former envisaged a canal as a means to ensuring world peace through enhanced commerce and communication; the latter saw the canal as an essential step towards the southwards expansion of US power. During the 18th century France sent a number of explorers to the isthmus. But it was the lifting of the dead hand of Spanish rule in the 1820s, together with the advent of the ‘Canal Age’ in Europe and the United States and the arrival of steam power, that gave the idea fresh momentum. Thereafter the isthmus saw a stream of optimistic surveyors and explorers from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Denmark and Holland. Their backers were sometimes private companies, sometimes kings or emperors. The King of the Netherlands and Louis-Philippe of France were at various times interested. It was an idea that, once taken on, seemed again and again to become an obsession. Most of the explorers got lost, perished from hunger or disease, or were wiped out by the hostile Cuna Indians. But they still sent back optimistic reports of ‘remarkable depressions’ and ‘lost’ Indian canals.

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To build a ‘bridge of water’ over the isthmus required what was then the biggest dam in the world at GatÚn. This, in turn, created the largest man-made lake of its day. (Three huge locks at either end of the canal lifted vessels to 85 feet above sea-level.)

EVERYTHING STARTED TO UNRAVEL. The death rate from fever was rapidly rising. The valleys ‘extending coast to coast’ turned out to be a fiction and no realistic attempt was made as planned to open up an overland route to the Pacific. Relations with the Indians cooled when it became apparent that the new arrivals were preparing no blow against the common Spanish enemy. Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease and demoralisation; among the first to die was Paterson’s wife. Within six months, nearly 400 settlers had perished from fever or starvation. The onset of the rainy season in May, and the concurrent further worsening of living conditions, was the final straw. Utterly discouraged, on June 20th, 1699, after just seven months, the

HE CIVIL ENGINEER, THOMAS TELFORD, proposed a ‘grand scheme’ for a transisthmian canal. The Great Idea of such a structure now attracted not only proven engineers, but millionaires, dreamers, amateur engineers and crackpots. With the canal the great unfulfilled engineering challenge of the world, the isthmus remained the focus of international great power rivalry. In the 1840s it almost brought war between Britain and the US, only averted when the two powers agreed in a treaty in 1850 that neither would build a canal on their own. Particularly for the Americans, no canal was better than one under the control of a foreign power. At the end of the American Civil War, Washington launched an aggressive policy to reverse creeping European involvement in Central America. For the Secretary of State William Seward, a transisthmian canal was a cornerstone of his country’s Manifest Destiny, spreading US commerce and ‘civilisation’. Under President Ulysses Grant a series of meticulous surveys was carried out to decide the preferred route. The best option, it was decided, was for a canal in Nicaragua, using the high great lake. But the US was held in check by its treaty with Britain and by concerns that it did not have a strong enough navy to defend the waterway should it be completed. Into this impasse snuck a French company, launching in the 1880s what would result in one of history’s greatest ever engineering disasters. Led by the celebrated builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, it was an effort characterised by corruption, fantasy and heroism. The initiative was doomed from the start: at an international conference in Paris a sea-level canal at Panama was decided on, thanks to the mesmeric influence of de Lesseps, who had decided, before he had even AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 53

PANAMA CANAL

John Bull looks on approvingly as France defies the Monroe Doctrine and highlights US military weakness by planning a canal at Panama, from the American Harper’s Weekly, 1880.

seen Central America, that only an ‘ocean Bosporus’ would do. American delegates at the conference, committed to a lock canal at Nicaragua, condemned the whole show as, ‘a comedy of the most deplorable kind’. But de Lesseps shared the huge confidence of his age in the benign effects of new technology. The French public were told that it was their patriotic duty to back the canal project and duly did so in their hundreds of thousands. De Lesseps also tried to raise money in Britain and the United States. The Americans were infuriated that the French should be meddling in what they saw as their backyard. So no money was forthcoming from them. In Britain, de Lesseps was applauded for his achievement at Suez, but his Panama plans were cold-shouldered. ‘It is magnificent,’ wrote The Times newspaper, ‘but it is not business.’

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N 1880, AMID GREAT FANFARE, the construction effort was personally launched by de Lesseps, greeted in Panama by banners declaring him ‘The Presiding Genius of the Nineteenth Century’. But by 1884 it was clear that the estimates of cost had been wildly optimistic and there was a pretty much permanent epidemic of disease on the isthmus. The worst killers were malaria and yellow fever. The former was thought to be caused by ‘miasma’ – toxic emanations from the rich corruption of tropical soil disturbed by the digging. Yellow fever was supposedly the result of filth or dead animals, or even, experts suggested, from a particular wind off the sea or from eating apples. Treatment consisted of mustard, brandy and cigars. The realisation that both diseases were transmitted by mosquitoes was still a decade or so away. Jules Dingler, a proven great engineer, arrived in Panama as chief engineer in early 1883. His theory, shared by many, was that yellow fever was caused by immoral personal behaviour or moral weakness. He declared that only the ‘drunk and dissipated die of yellow fever’. To prove that the disease held no fear for him and to stiffen morale, he brought out to Panama his wife, his son and daughter and his daughter’s fiancé. Within a few months, his daughter, 19-year-old Louise, contracted yellow fever and died a miserable, agonising death. Eighteen months later, her fiancé, brother and then mother had also all succumbed to the disease. Dingler returned to France a broken man. 54 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

As many as 20,000 died during the French canal period, the majority of them Jamaicans, who provided the muscle for the effort. Three out of four of the French engineers who set out to be part of de Lesseps’ scheme were dead within three months. The sense of death all around, a sword of Damocles hanging over them, stoked a feeling of idealistic unreality: ‘The constant dangers of yellow fever’, wrote one young engineer, ‘exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.’ Amazingly, some Frenchmen were prepared to die for the canal. American observers on the isthmus took a more cynical line. To them such reflections were so much ‘Gallic hot air’. ‘Nothing is ever done by the canal company without a great amount of pomp, circumstance and red tape’, one American journalist wrote in late 1887. ‘Of what one hears in Panama disregard one third, doubt one third, and disbelieve the

other third … The air is as rife with deception as with miasma.’ In order to raise money at home, the company was forced to cover up the death rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets while distributing, it later turned out, over 12 million francs to the French press to keep it on side. Nonetheless, the money borrowed became ever more expensive.

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S THE DE LESSEPS adventure slid towards catastrophe, bedeviled by disease and engineering problems (many due to Panama’s extraordinarily heavy rainfall) and also fire, war and earthquakes, American technicians on the isthmus were convinced that their country would assume control of the enterprise.

The British in Panama thought the same – the Panama Canal would be taken over by Great Britain, just as de Lesseps’ Suez Canal had been. Yet, when it came to the crunch at the beginning of the 20th century, the American diplomats found their British counterparts at last willing to remove the restrictions of the 1850 treaty. Embroiled in a costly and unpopular war in South Africa, a naval arms race with Germany and fearful of Russian ambitions towards India, Great Britain was forced to remove the shackles of the treaty and thereby concede to the United States hegemony over the western hemisphere. The American leadership under Theodore Roosevelt now moved with utter ruthlessness to make the canal a reality. They bought out the French company for $40m, a figure that dwarfs the purchases of Louisiana, Canal workers Alaska and the Philippines. When the gather to receive their wages, Colombian government seemed unwillc.1885, by which ing to give in to the American demands time there were that they concede total control over a around 20,000 canal zone, Roosevelt made plans to employed by the French invade Panama, but instead fomented, company. supported and protected a separatist revolution on the isthmus. He then bullied the new Panama republic into signing a treaty that reduced it to vassalage and established total military control of the new canal zone. There was a sharp backlash in the US, where the president was accused of dragging the country down to the sordid level of the European land-grabbing powers, but it was a fait accompli and a watershed for US presidential power and American imperial ambition. The Americans learned virtually nothing from the failures of the French over the canal’s history. For the first two years they even hoped to build a sea-level canal – which had been proven to be impossible. Because of the fallout

In order to raise money at home, the company was forced to cover up the death rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets. Over 12 million francs were distributed to the French press to keep it on side Surveying the jungle and swamp of Panama for the canal, engraving, c.1840. AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 55

PANAMA CANAL

Because of the fallout from Roosevelt’s action, there was pressure to ‘make the dirt fly’ and excavation work started without proper preparation Above: Roosevelt’s rough diggers, from Puck, 1906. The president’s aggression in Panama divided US opinion. John Stevens is depicted in the foreground. Right: construction workers from Barbados arrive by boat at Colón, 1909.

56 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

from Roosevelt’s action, there was pressure to ‘make the dirt fly’ and excavation work started without proper preparation. Determined to avoid the corruption of the French era, the project was tied up in horrendous bureaucracy.

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ORST OF ALL, although the mosquito theory of the transmission of malaria and yellow fever had by now been established, conservative members of the US canal leadership dismissed this as ‘balderdash’ and refused to support the work of William Gorgas, the Commission’s head doctor, an experienced yellow fever specialist. The disease inevitably struck and, lacking the motivation of the French, three quarters of the American workers fled the isthmus as panic broke out. A year after the start, the project was on its knees. After two years of chaotic bungling, a plan was decided on for a lock and lake canal, a ‘bridge of water’ rather than a sea-level through-cut. New leadership emerged in the figure of John Stevens, a successful railway engineer who was hired by Roosevelt to be chief engineer for the canal. He fully supported Gorgas’ work and, in 1906, a visit by the president himself boosted morale. To attract and retain skilled labour from the US, the canal authorities offered generous holidays, high pay and free accommodation. Nevertheless, such was the turnover of white staff – 100 per cent a year – that in 1907, following a crisis after the resignation of the exhausted Stevens, coupled with criticism at home that the project was riddled with ‘graft’

The final joining of the oceans, October 1913. It required the humble pick-and-shovel men to complete the job.

and waste, Roosevelt found it necessary to hand the project over to the army, or as he said, put it ‘in the charge of men who will stay on the job until I get tired of having them there, or till I say they may abandon it’.

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HE NEW ARMY regime was utterly ruthless, arresting and deporting critics and keeping the Panama republic on a tight rein. This achieved, its greatest challenge was the Culebra Cut, the highest point of the canal line. This nine-mile stretch required three quarters of the total excavation. At the peak of the work, it contained 76 miles of track carrying 160 trains, 300 rock drills and 6,000 men. With temperatures reaching 120 degrees, it became known as ‘Hell’s Gorge’. And as the mountain was removed, the ground fought back. Because of the extreme geological complexity of the isthmus, slides were numberless, eventually adding 25 million cubic yards to the total excavation, which in the end would be three times that required for the Suez Canal. An American called it the ‘land of fantastical and unexpected. No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be the next morning’. Or, as one West Indian put it: ‘Today you dig, tomorrow it slides.’ MOST OF THE labour force was from the small island of Barbados. Of a population of 200,000, some 45,000 went to Panama during the American period. The West Indians were treated as cheap and expendable by both the French and Americans. The working conditions were described by one as ‘some sort of semi-slavery’ and, under the Americans, there was a rigid apartheid system in place throughout the canal zone. The West Indian workers were given all the most dangerous jobs and were three times as likely as any others to die from disease or accidents on the works. In all nearly 6,000 died during the American construction period, as well as 300 US citizens. Nonetheless, in spite of obvious resentments, the West Indian accounts are full of pride in knowing they were part of a great, heroic and civilising achievement. ‘Many times I met death at the door’, wrote one worker 50 years after the completion of the canal, ‘but thank God I am alive to see the great improvement the canal had made and the wonderful fame it has around the world.’ Thus the canal carries a legacy of poor labour relations. During one of the first strikes soon after the recent expansion plan got underway, a union leader declared that his members ‘would not be treated as our Jamaican forebears were’. Moreover, the estimated costs have been shown to be hopelessly optimistic, and the projected annual revenue of the completed canal – ‘money will beget money’ – has now been revised down from $5 billion a year to just over $3 billion. In a further echo of the initial construction, cost overruns have been blamed on Panama’s fiendish geology and extraordinary rainfall. Given the history, what is

startling is that any of these setbacks should come as a surprise. There may be one further replaying of history. As the European-led expansion effort stumbles from crisis to crisis, so the American embassy in Panama reported to Washington, the US company Bechtel, ‘with their reputation for coming in to clean up messes, are keeping a close eye’ on the project. Matthew Parker is a historian of the West Indies and the author of Hell’s Gorge: The Battle to Build the Panama Canal (Arrow, 2008).

FURTHER READING Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and Panama Canal, 1903-1979 (Cambridge University Press, 1993). Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (University of the West Indies Press, 1984). Bonham C. Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900-1920 (University of Tennessee Press, 1985). James M. Skinner, France and Panama: The Unknown Years, 1894-1908 (Peter Lang, 1989). AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

Joan E. Taylor seeks the real Herod • Daniel Swift revisits Fussell’s Great War • Roger Moorhouse praises an account of the Warsaw Uprising

5th Battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers in the trenches at Gallipoli, 1915.

SIGNPOSTS

Britain, Ireland and the First World War British historiography has been offered a oncein-a-generation opportunity to integrate Ireland’s contribution into analyses of the Great War, argues Catriona Pennell. IN OCTOBER 2012 David Cameron promised ‘a truly national commemoration’ to mark the centenary of the First World War. Concerns quickly emerged that ‘national’, in reality, meant ‘England’. Not only would this be unrepresentative of the United Kingdom as it exists today but it also disregards the geopolitical configuration of the state that declared war on August 4th, 1914: the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. 58 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Understanding the interconnected relationship that existed during the war between the now independent states of Britain and the Republic of Ireland is significant to our understanding of the First World War on a number of levels. How did nationalist Ireland – the most significant threat to the British authorities in the summer of 1914 – come to support the war effort? What contribution did Ireland make to the British war effort and how

can it be framed more broadly within a colonial response? How did Anglo-Irish relations evolve over the course of and as a result of the war? Where and when did divergences emerge? What was the postwar legacy of Ireland’s contribution, for both Britain and the Irish Free State? How has that contribution been remembered, if at all? Existing historiography on Britain and the First World War tends to exacerbate this sense of separateness. There is no shortage of work that looks at British experience of the war and its consequences either holistically or from specific angles. However, scholars of the British perspective have struggled to integrate Ireland into their explorations. Alan G.V. Simmonds devotes less than five per cent of his highly accessible Britain and World War One (2012) to the topic. Adrian Gregory’s The Last Great War (2008) is one of the most imaginative and important books on British society and the conflict and should be the starting point for anyone wishing to understand how British people ‘made sense’ of the war as it unfolded. However, while he acknowledges that the break up of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland is crucial to any overall history of the war, he admits defeat, owing to restrictions of space. My own attempt to integrate Ireland into an exam-

ination of public responses to the outbreak of war in 1914 – A Kingdom United (2012) – tackles the conundrum directly but is not without issue. The confinement of Irish material largely to a single chapter continues to encourage a sense of separation. Why has it been so difficult to write a fully integrated history of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland in the First World War? It is a combination of difference and denial. First, the situation in Ireland was completely different from that in Britain, due to the Home Rule crisis and threat of civil war (in 1914) that evolved into wartime political flashpoints, most notably Irish resistance to the introduction of conscription. Ireland as an anomaly – relative to Britain, at least – created its own logic of historiographical separatism. Second, the historiography of early 20th-century Ireland was restricted until recently by Ireland’s fraught relationship with the First World War. Many scholars were in denial about nationalist Ireland’s involvement with the war. Instead, the Easter Rising of 1916 was the central military struggle toward national liberation. The historic breakthrough in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s created a new space to consider how the First World War was, in fact, a part of nationalist Irish history. Significant research has been done on a plethora of aspects of Ireland’s involvement in the war and new work is appearing all

the time. A quick glance at the reading list provided via www. Irelandww1.org reveals research into Irish involvement in the war, ranging from military to home front experiences and from macro-level political organisation to micro-historical local studies, with many more in between. Important syntheses exist, such as Keith Jeffery’s Ireland and the Great War (2000), in which he argues that the First World War was the single most central experience in 20th-century Ireland. Our War, edited by John Horne (2008), together with Gregory and Senia Pašeta’s edited volume, Ireland and the Great War, explores the lasting impact the war had on personal, social, economic and political aspects of Irish life. The recent volume, Towards Commemoration, edited by Horne and Madigan (reviewed right),

Many historians are already expressing concerns that the forthcoming centenary commemorations may be little more than an exercise in national navel-gazing makes a unique contribution to debates surrounding Ireland’s centenary decade (1912-23), of which the war is central. Nuala C. Johnson and Catherine Swizter have both made pioneering contributions to the historiography of Irish commemoration of the war. There is still more research to be done, particularly in relation to the role and experience of women in the story of the foundation of modern Ireland. Perhaps the most important contribution to recent scholarship on Ireland and the war is the expansion of the traditional chronological

parameters of 1914-18 to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that the end of the Great War did not immediately bring peace. The outbreak of revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars of independence and fratricidal conflict were not unique to Ireland but are an important part of the legacy of the First World War. Robert Gerwarth and John Horne’s edited volume War in Peace (2012) is the starting point for anyone interested in this aspect of the historiography. Anne Dolan’s Commemorating the Irish Civil War (2003) explores the tensions between memory and national amnesia in Ireland between 1923 and 2000 in order to highlight that forgetting is a key feature of Irish remembrance. Many historians are already expressing concerns that the forthcoming centenary commemorations may be little more than an exercise in national navel-gazing. The centenary provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to situate national experiences of the war within broader European and global contexts. For British historiography an important first step would be genuinely to integrate Ireland into analyses of the war. Certainly the recent visit of the Queen to Ireland in May 2011 (the first royal visit to Ireland in a hundred years) and the reciprocal visit of the Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in April 2014 suggest that the time is ripe for the two nations to look collectively at the experience and implications of the history of the First World War. However, in line with the latest academic research, such scholarship would be deficient if it did not situate the analysis within a wider transnational framework. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert’s two-volume Capital Cities at War (1997 and 2007) still remains on the somewhat unobtainable pedestal of comparative, historical analysis; but one that First World War historians – including those of Britain and Ireland – should continue to strive towards.

Towards Commemoration

Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912-1923 John Horne and Edward Madigan (eds.) Royal Irish Academy 182pp £14.75

Political Imprisonment & the Irish, 1912-1921 William Murphy

Oxford University Press 301pp £65

THE YEARS between 1912 and 1923 were arguably the most transformative in modern Irish history. The mass signing of the Ulster Covenant, which highlighted Unionist opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, marked the beginning of a period of war, revolution and change in Ireland, north and south. By 1923 Ireland had witnessed the birth of two states, the Irish Free State and that of Northern Ireland, experienced political upheaval, endured a violent war of independence and a bloody and divisive civil war. It is these various events that are now being marked in Ireland’s decade of commemoration. Towards Commemoration is a collection of 18 essays, written mostly by historians, but also including the views of media commentators, civic activists and politicians, all reflecting on the meaning and significance of events during the period. The majority of the essays focus on

COMING SOON A special issue of History Today about the Great War Available on iPad, Kindle Fire and Android tablets

www.historytoday.com/fww-issue

Catriona Pennell AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS Ireland and the First World War. Questions are asked about how we should commemorate the past, the potential benefits and dangers of such memorialisation and the relationship between commemoration and history. The essays, written in an accessible style, are thoughtful and challenging and the volume makes a considerable contribution to debates on the subject of commemoration. Political Imprisonment in Ireland marks the appearance of a significant publication relating to Ireland’s revolutionary decade. This is the first comprehensive study of political imprisonment in the years between 1912 and 1921, when 6,129 men and women were either interned or imprisoned as a result of the unrest in the country in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion and subsequent

A number of prisoners who died on hunger strike or were executed ... became central to republican martyrology and to supporters of the revolutionary movement War of Independence. The focus is on the treatment of Irish political prisoners by the British government, including how it operated in Ireland. Murphy’s study begins in 1912, the year in which suffragette prison protest began in Ireland. This marked the beginning of a new approach to political imprisonment when the women involved employed levels of prison militancy, including hunger strikes, unprecedented in an Irish context. Murphy argues that the suffragettes provided an influential, though rarely acknowledged, model of political imprisonment, for those prisoners who followed them in subsequent years. A number of prisoners who died while on hunger strike or 60 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

who were executed, including Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas Ashe and Kevin Barry, became central to republican martyrology and to the supporters of the revolutionary movement. The propaganda value of such deaths was immense. Murphy uses the letters and diaries of prisoners to explore the experience of imprisonment, whether in camps or prisons. Some felt the lack of privacy in the internment camps, complained about the constant noise or the boredom. There were rows among the internees and tempers were frayed. Many worried about their families or the burden of work placed on wives and children, left to manage farms and businesses. For some, though, the camps were a haven because, once they survived arrest and arrived at a camp, they were safe from possible execution (between February 1st and June 7th, 1921 23 convicted rebels were executed in Ireland), or of being killed by the crown forces in Ireland. Prison authorities, such as governors, warders and medical officers, faced danger for their perceived roles in the treatment of prisoners. Imprisonment was central to the personal experience of thousands of men and women who shaped the Irish revolution. Time served as a political prisoner became an important qualification for public life in Ireland and in other European countries. Political prisoners came to be seen as models of self-sacrifice. While the aim of the government was to suppress dissent, their actions by interning men and women saw the prisons and camps become a focus of radical challenge to the legitimacy of the state and many individuals were radicalised by their incarceration. Public support for those imprisoned was strong and added to the government’s headache in trying to contain dissent. The prisons and camps were spaces where revolutionary identities were shaped and sites where revolutionaries directly and often successfully challenged the British state, affecting the shape of the Irish revolution. Maria Luddy

The Aesthetics of Loss

German Women’s Art of the First World War Claudia Siebrecht Oxford University Press 188pp £65

IN AUGUST 1932 the German artist Käthe Kollwitz was present at the unveiling of the war memorial she had designed at the German war cemetery in Eesen Roggeveld in Belgium. In itself this was not remarkable, as in the years following the First World War thousands of memorials to the dead and missing were erected in the cemeteries, battlefields, villages, towns and cities of Europe, as societies profoundly affected by the mass loss of life during the war attempted to mark it. However, what was unusual was the intimate nature of Kollwitz’s sculpture. Die Traurnden Eltern (The Grieving Parents) marked a private grief as well as a public remembrance: Kollwitz’s youngest son, Peter, had been killed on the Western Front in October 1914 and the sculpture was placed in the cemetery where he was buried. Thus, Kollwitz’s sculpture is a memorial to the German war dead, a representation of bereaved parents and a means of commemorating her son, and her personal loss. Claudia Siebrecht’s fascinating and timely book, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women’s Art of the First World War, begins with Kollwitz’s story to draw the reader into the world of wartime and postwar Germany through a study of the visual responses to war and loss of a range of female German artists. Across Europe, artists respond-

ed to this new kind of war with new forms of representation: modernist visions by Nash and Lewis in Britain, Dadaism in Switzerland and a reworking of traditionalist iconography among German women artists, who drew widely on images of the Pieta to represent maternal sacrifice. Siebrecht examines the work of 38 women to explore the ways that they were affected by, and responded to, war. Of course these responses were varied, shaped by the impact of war on the individual, by the progress of the war and by the artist’s political beliefs and moving, as the war dragged on, from patriotic representations of citizenship and nationhood to a more personal focus on grief and loss. However, Siebrecht finds common themes and modes of expression in the images and sculptures she analyses, which combined modern forms with traditional iconographical tropes, increasingly focusing on maternal grief, redemptive sacrifice and the hope for a peaceful future. Well illustrated, the stark nature of many of the sculptures, paintings, woodcuts, linographs and linocuts discussed here act as a visual narrative of the multiple demands that the war made on civilians as well as combatants. This cultural history draws on these public works of art, so redolent of private emotion, both to explore civilian responses to mass death and bereavement in wartime and to expand our understanding of aesthetic responses to this modern, total, war. By focusing her research on female artists, Siebrecht helps to move the historical studies of the First World War away from the male world of the battlefield towards a wider understanding of the impact of, and responses to, this most transformative of conflicts. Sensitively written and carefully researched, Siebrecht’s book opens up a whole range of German sources to an Englishspeaking audience, reminding us of the universality of grief amongst the bereaved of the First World War. Lucy Noakes

THE CLASSIC BOOK

The True Herod Geza Vermes

Bloomsbury/T&T Clark 192pp £19.99

HEROD THE GREAT is remembered as one of history’s bogeymen: the paranoid king of Matthew’s Gospel, scared of anyone usurping his rule. On hearing from Magi and priests about the future Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem, he has every child aged two years old and under slaughtered. Herod casts an ominous shadow over the nativity stories seen in primary schools, a pantomime villain. According to Geza Vermes, who died in May 2013, the so-called Massacre of the Innocents never happened. It is a literary construction: Herod is configured as the pharaoh of the Exodus, the cruel ruler who killed Hebrew infant boys at the time of Moses, with Moses alone saved thanks to a reed basket floated on the Nile. By the time of the Gospel account, this story had evolved into an attested folkloric form, with Pharaoh warned of a future king by a prophetic sacred scribe. Matthew’s story was told for meaning, not for actuality: Jesus is like Moses. The True Herod re-examines the evidence and offers a fresh telling of the story of Herod. Vermes also notes how Herod is presented over the centuries, including in film. We are confronted with a young man, born around the year 73 bc of an Idumaean Jewish convert father and a Nabataean (Arab) mother, who was thrust into responsibility as governor of Galilee at the age of 25 and embroiled in a fierce struggle within the ruling priestly dynasty of the Hasmoneans. Backed by successive powerful Romans, eventually Augustus, he

FIRST PUBLISHED in 1975, Fussell’s study of the Graves’ subsequent memoir, Goodbye to All That, will perhaps never be bettered. But the book is literature of the First World War, and the ways also a weak, often simplistic, account of almost in which that conflict has been remembered, is everything before and after the war. It is great a canonical work. His argument has two strands. literary criticism and lousy history. Fussell wants First, that the First World War – as fought in the the war to be two things: a total break with the trenches of France and Belgium – had a curious past and the exemplary modern war. literariness. He finds specific rhetorical patterns In 2001 the International Committee of the in the memoirs, novels and poems written by Red Cross released a study of relative casualty soldiers: the imagery of sport and chivalry, for rates for all wars of the 20th century. During example, or the imaginative habit of what he the First World War nine soldiers were killed calls ‘gross dichotomising’, which is the division of a situation into extremes of black and white. Chief among these motifs is irony, by which he means a gap between expectation and experience and the dark laughter which arises.  Second, the war sets the terms for all that follows, both in warfare and in literature. ‘I am saying’, he writes, ‘that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.’ for every civilian. During the Fussell describes the passing Second World War and all of the Military Service Act in wars fought in the second half early 1916 as ‘an event which of the century, however, 10 could be said to mark the becivilians were killed for every ginning of the modern world’. soldier. In this light, the First Previous wars were ‘conceived World War begins to look like as taking place within a seama strange throwback.  less, purposeful “history” We might end with one involving a coherent stream example: of a poet who of time running from past saw precisely this strange through present to future’, conventionality of the war but the First World War ended and whose articulation of this that and we are ‘Far now from antique quality is inevitably such innocence, instructed in condemned by Fussell. David cynicism and draft-dodging.’ Jones served with the Royal As should be clear from even Welch Fusiliers from 1915 this brief sketch, behind Fusto 1918 and with his long sell’s account is the Christian The Great War and poem, In Parenthesis (1937), story of the Fall ( ‘The innoModern Memory attempted to tell his wartime cent army fully attained the Paul Fussell experiences in a heavily knowledge of good and evil at OUP/The Folio Society 464pp £44.95 allusive, high Modernist mix the Somme on July 1st, 1916’.) of prose and verse, lyric and This seems to overstate the list. He worries throughout at the possibility for importance of the conflict. Surely the US wars poetry to tell history; he uses imagery drawn post-9/11 have been fought with an evangelical from Shakespeare’s Henry V and from the biblical sense of history; and there have been disenaccount of Christ’s crucifixion. Fussell, of course, chanted treatments of warfare for centuries. will not accept this. He describes Jones as a Shakespeare’s Henry V, for example, establishes ‘turgid allusionist’ and the poem as an ‘honouraan ironic distance between the chorus’ claims ble miscarriage’. for Henry’s glamour and the grubby, indignant For Fussell ‘The war will not be understood group of soldiers we actually see doing the fightin traditional terms’; it must be ‘special and ing on his behalf.  unexampled’. Jones’ crime is to hint that the Here is the odd paradox of this book: it is a First World War belonged to the past as much as superb study of the literature and language of to the future. A century on, we might wonder the Great War and specifically the metaphors who is right.  and myths by which it was waged. Fussell’s readDaniel Swift ings of Rosenberg and Owen’s poetry or Robert

A superb study of the literature and language of the Great War and specifically the metaphors and myths by which it was waged

AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS was the Romans’ golden boy who would help them defeat the rival Parthians in 40 bc and become their loyal King of the Jews. Clearly, Herod was ruthless and his family intrigues are worthy of a movie. The list of family and friends whom Herod executed included his beloved Hasmonean wife Mariamme and three of his sons. Vermes relishes telling these tales, but ultimately he is interested in what motivated Herod. Using Josephus, he identifies what drove him as a quest for honour. Lack of approval made Herod crave it and, as he gave honour to his mentors and benefactors, he wanted it back. His great buildings were sometimes erected for reasons of security, or architectural brilliance, but often also for honour, as in the case of the cities of Caesarea or Sebaste (for Augustus), with the greatest honour of all given to the God of the Jews: the rebuilt Temple of Jerusalem. In the end Herod

This is a rich read, demonstrating the knowledge and understanding of an author at the peak of his powers, even so close to his death would honour himself by building his glorious tomb and theatre at the fortress Herodium. This beautiful book has been produced with the dedicated skill of Geza Vermes’ widow Margaret and a fine team at Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark. Assembling an array of gorgeous illustrations to match the lively text, they have created a lush product befitting Herod’s aesthetic. This is a rich read, despite its brevity, demonstrating the knowledge and understanding of an author at the peak of his powers, even so close to his death. In this book that honours the complex character of Herod, we have also an honourable tribute to the exceptional historian who wrote it. Joan E. Taylor 62 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

Between Court and Confessional The Politics of Spanish Inquisitors Kimberly Lynn

Cambridge University Press 391pp £60

FROM 1478 a new ‘Inquisition’ against Christian ‘heresy’ spread throughout Spain and its overseas possessions in Europe (Sicily) and America. It would last until the 19th century and acquire a reputation for almost totalitarian cruelty, but was attacked at the time by Spain’s enemies and by lovers of religious liberty. In recent decades it has been the object of a vast amount of historical work by scholars from various countries. In this carefully researched monograph Kimberly Lynn focuses sharply on individual inquisitors who made the system function in the 16th and 17th centuries. Her chosen five careers cover a wide range of the Inquisition’s activities, in Spain itself, Sicily and Latin America. Using many manuscript and printed sources, she traces the lives of these officials, most of them priests and all trained in the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church. We follow them in their usually considerable ambitions, as they struggled in local tribunals, or tried to make their way at the centre of Spanish power, either on the governing council of the Inquisition (Suprema), or in the royal court. The chapters on the five selected inquisitors are introduced by a discussion of the history of the institution and to the ways in which historians have tackled it. In the last chapter and epilogue

more general issues are raised about the values of the Inquisition and their implications for its target groups – converts from Judaism and Islam, Protestants and those whose religion was not in accordance with that laid down by the Catholic hierarchy. This is a demanding read, but we emerge much the wiser about what made these men tick as they wrote up the trials that they conducted and composed histories and treatises about the institution to which they devoted their lives, often in difficult and even dangerous circumstances. Yet the book’s strength is also its weakness. We find ourselves sucked into the inquisitorial mind. This is a good thing insofar as a writer should identify closely with her subject, but the reader gains, rightly or wrongly, the alarming impression that Lynn appears to swallow the official line. The word ‘heretic’ never receives such qualifying inverted commas, Luther, Calvin and the other Protestant reformers are (a) wrong and (b) a menace. Judaism is a threat to society, Native American religions are not religions at all and the worst enemies are reformers within the Catholic Church. Thus the unwary reader would never know from this account that the mid-16th century witnessed a major debate between the legalistic gospel of the inquisitors in Spain and Italy and those, including the Spanish Dominican Bartolomé Carranza and the English Cardinal Reginald Pole, who preached a gospel of mercy and reconciliation. Carranza and Pole were not lawyers like the inquisitors presented here but theologians and Lynn appears to accept without question the inquisitorial doctrine that jurists, some of them not even priests, were better equipped to define the niceties of Christian doctrine than those who were trained in it and lived it. Carranza is presented partially, in both senses of the word. In the latter pages of the book it is suggested that criticism of the Inquisition is largely justified by ideas that

originate in the 18th-century Enlightenment, as though the moral values of earlier centuries were somehow different and the Inquisition’s violence and oppression were therefore acceptable. Yet there was public, and even official, opposition to religious intolerance from the very beginning of the Spanish Inquisition and it is a shame that this scholarly and otherwise enlightening account takes so little notice of it. John Edwards

God’s Traitors

Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England Jessie Childs Bodley Head 443p £25

ELIZABETH I embraced an important truth that had evaded her father and her siblings: no ruler can dictate his/her subject’s beliefs. What she could, and did, demand was their loyalty. However, as Richard Hooker pointed out, since the Kingdom of England and the Church of England were the same thing viewed from different angles, politics and religion could not be conveniently compartmentalised. Thus, convinced Catholics and Puritans found themselves at odds with the Elizabethan Settlement. Quite what this might mean for successive generations of a single family is the subject of Jessie Childs’ latest book. Her chosen clan is the extended East Midlands family of Vaux, the descendants of Nicholas, first Baron Vaux of Harrowden (d.1528). Like some of Elizabeth’s subjects, they maintained their allegiance to the old faith. However, unlike most,

they could afford to be discreetly disloyal. The government, ever averse to making martyrs (and concerned not to be likened to the persecuting regimens of Spain and France), demanded attendance at Anglican worship and imposed fines on defiant recusants. Such financial constraints had their effect and papal fifth-columnists, sent to restore heretic Elizabeth and her people to their Roman allegiance, found few English households that could afford the risk of giving them succour. This was why affluent families were so important – indeed vital – to the survival of a vestigious English Catholicism. Those familiar with Childs’ earlier biography of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Henry VIII’s Last Victim (2006), will find the same thorough research coupled to a vigorous, readable style. However, God’s Traitors is a more complex

This colourful saga of a downwardlymobile family on the losing side of national events reminds us that history is not all about winners book with a large dramatis personae and deals with the intricacies of familial relationships among the Catholic minor nobility. The dramatic tale of itinerant Jesuit missionaries dodging government posses, devout country squires holding clandestine masses and priests concealed in ingenious hiding places has been oft told (e.g., John Robinson, Recusant Yeomen in the Counties of York and Lancaster, 2003; Ethan Shagan, Catholics and the ‘Protestant’ Nation, 2005) but this concentration on one family sharply focuses the narrative and the principal contenders emerge as well-rounded characters. Strangely, the word ‘Elizabethan’ in the subtitle is not altogether appropriate. While the first two thirds of the book covers the Vaux fortunes during the reign of the last Tudor, the story’s climax, which

occupies the last 100 or so pages is the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath. Arch-conspirator Robert Catesby was a Vaux kinsman who sought to involve some of his relatives in his schemes. In this section, Jessie Childs’ forensic investigation of every aspect of the plot and her careful analysis attempts to discover who knew what and when; who met whom and where; who was implicated in the crime; and who tried to dissuade the plotters. Having sifted through the conflicting evidence, Childs confesses, ‘any narrative of the Gunpowder Plot is necessarily based more on credibility than certainty’. The temptation with this kind of story is to make all the principal characters, principled characters. Jessie Childs avoids this trap in her even-handed narrative. This colourful saga of a downwardly mobile family on the losing side of national events reminds us that history is not all about winners. Derek Wilson

Warsaw 1944

The Fateful Uprising Alexandra Richie William Collins 738pp £25

AS WELL AS other rather more loudly trumpeted commemorations, August 2014 will also see the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Rising; the fateful summer when the Polish underground army rose in the name of liberty against its Nazi oppressors. Alexandra Richie’s new book, Warsaw 1944, first published in 2013, is an engaging retelling of that harrowing story; one that

is still largely unknown outside Poland and is confused persistently in the public mind with the Ghetto Uprising of 1943. The Rising marked the moment when the Polish underground – having gallantly resisted the worst effects of the German occupation – attempted to exploit the decline in Hitler’s fortunes to wrest control of the Polish capital before the expected arrival of Stalin’s troops. It was a brave but ultimately futile effort. Lacking arms and facing the murderous fury of the SS alone, the Polish fighters provoked the destruction of their city and large-scale massacres of its civilian population. In the aftermath of 63 days of bitter fighting, as many as 150,000 civilians lay dead alongside 18,000 members of the Polish Underground Army – the Armia Krajowa or AK. A further 150,000 Varsovians were deported to the Reich as forced labour, countless more became refugees. Their city, meanwhile, would be systematically razed. Not for nothing does Richie invoke the name of Carthage throughout her book. Richie’s is certainly a harrowing account, giving particular focus to the bestial atrocities committed by the troops of the infamous Dirlewanger and Kaminski brigades of the SS, who ran amok through the suburbs of Wola and Ochota, raping, looting and slaughtering seemingly at will. The book, consequently, is not for the faint-hearted. Even the most hardened reader of the 20th century’s horrors will be appalled. Richie has benefited greatly from her access to the archive and library of Władysław Bartoszewski, a former Polish foreign minister, a veteran of the fighting and, incidentally, her father-in-law. Consequently there is a good deal of new material included, much of it relating to the horrendous sufferings of the city’s civilians. However, this asset is also a weakness. In presenting so many vivid eyewitness accounts,

Richie’s narrative drifts somewhat into an extended nightmare of murders, rapes and mounds of decomposing corpses, which not only induces a degree of fatigue in the reader, but also causes the book to lose some of its drive and focus. In this respect, one feels, less really might have been more. The same applies to the book’s length. At more than 700 pages Warsaw 1944 is rather long and one has to question the structure and pacing of any volume that takes almost 200 pages to reach its main subject matter. Given the occasional repetitions, the reader can only conclude that the book might have benefited from a more interventionist editor. Beyond the horrors – and aside from the quibbles – the wider context of western impotence, German desperation, Soviet intransigence and, of course, the tragic determination of the Poles is competently presented. Richie does well, for instance, to locate the Rising within the nexus of events of that summer – the July 20th Plot against Hitler and Model’s attack on the Red Army east of Warsaw. The broader political and strategic struggles prove a little more problematic. One gleans only a patchy impression, for instance, of the complex progress of the fighting in the city itself and the inter-Allied wrestling match over supplying the Polish insurgents is given only cursory coverage. Richie is quite right, nonetheless, to note that Warsaw was, in essence, the first engagement of the coming Cold War. Warsaw 1944 is a sympathetic, detailed and well-written account of one of the most seminal yet under-known events of the Second World War. It is not without flaws, but for its general accessibility and its wealth of new eyewitness material it deserves genuine praise and a prominent place in the still-slim canon of English-language books relating to the subject. Roger Moorhouse AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

The Hero of Budapest The Triumph and Tragedy of Raoul Wallenberg  Bengt Jangfeldt I.B.Tauris 352pp £25

AMONG the heroes who, at great risk to their own lives, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust under the noses of the Nazis, few deserve a more prominent place in the pantheon than Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg. This ‘Scandinavian Schindler’ personally rescued between 8,000

64 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

and 10,000 Jews by his own courageous and resourceful initiatives. Moreover, by bribing, persuading and browbeating the retreating Nazis not to activate their plans to blow up the Budapest Ghetto, where some 70,000 Jewish survivors were left at the war’s end, Wallenberg probably saved more wartime lives than any other individual. Not for nothing is he honoured with memorials worldwide. But, if that role was the ‘triumph’ of the subtitle of Bengt Jangfeldt’s meticulously researched and surely definitive biography, then Wallenberg’s ‘tragedy’ was his hideous fate at the very moment of Hitler’s defeat.  In January 1945, probably on the direct orders of the Stalinist apparatchik Nikolai Bulganin (a decade later feted on a state visit to Britain with Khruschev), Wallenberg was summoned to the Budapest HQ of the Red Army commanded by General Malinovsky, where he disappeared from history. The mystery of Wallenberg’s

abduction remained unsolved for decades, despite strenuous efforts to discover what had happened to him. For years rumours persisted that he was still alive in some forgotten frozen hellhole, fuelled by reports from those who had escaped the Gulag. The British spy Greville Wynne, for example, also arrested in Budapest and released from Russian captivity in 1964, reported hearing a Swede speaking in the next-door cell. In fact, as Jangfeldt finally establishes, Wallenberg had died

Wallenberg’s ‘tragedy’ was his hideous fate at the very moment of Hitler’s defeat as early as 1947, almost certainly murdered, in the dreaded cells of the notorious Lubyanka, the KGB’s combined HQ, prison, interrogation centre, torture chamber and execution site in central Moscow. The man who had saved so many was finally unable to save himself. Wallenberg was born to a wealthy family and travelled widely in his youth. Later, working with a Jewish owned importexport company, he frequently visited Hungary. Here he learned the language and observed the increasing persecution of Jews under the antisemitic regime of Admiral Horthy. He also gathered how to outwit the Nazi officials who had occupied Hungary in March 1944, intent on exterminating its Jewish population. Under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann’s SS, aided by the Nazis’ Hungarian auxiliaries, the fascist Arrow Cross party, half a million Hungarians were shipped to Auschwitz and their deaths. When, in July 1944, Wallenberg returned as a diplomat to Budapest, he was on a mission of mercy and began a deadly race with Eichmann. Wallenberg issued thousands of his own private passports to Jews. These had no legal validity, but looked sufficiently ‘official’ to impress bureaucratic Germans. Hundreds

CONTRIBUTORS John Edwards has recently completed a biography of Archbishop Pole (Ashgate). Nigel Jones’ Peace and War: Britain in 1914 is published by Head of Zeus. Maria Luddy is Head of the History Department at the University of Warwick. Roger Moorhouse is the author of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-41 (Basic Books, 2014). Lucy Noakes has co-edited (with Juliette Pattinson) British Cultural Memory and the Second World War (Bloomsbury, 2013). Catriona Pennell is author of A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2012). Daniel Swift is the author of Shakespeare’s Common Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2012), Joan E. Taylor is Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College, London. Derek Wilson is the author of several books on the Reformation.

of other Jews were sheltered in buildings that Wallenberg bought and declared Swedish territory. On at least one occasion, ignoring warning shots, he boarded a death train and scattered passports like confetti, snatching scores of Jews from the jaws of death. But when the Red Army ‘liberated’ Budapest it was Wallenberg himself who was doomed as one of the first victims of the burgeoning Cold War. Jangfeldt’s research in Russian and Swedish archives proves that the reason behind his abduction and murder was paranoid Soviet suspicion that he was spying for America, because the agency that funded his Scarlet Pimpernel activities was based in the US. Like his fellow Swedish wartime humanitarian, Count Folke Bernadotte, Wallenberg’s life-saving work cost him his own. Nigel Jones

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Compare and Contrast Paul Legg’s article (‘It’s Over! Over! Over!’, July 2014) brought home anew to me the rocky road Germany has travelled to rebuild international trust and put itself at the centre of the European Union. As a long-time resident of Japan I cannot help but contrast the experiences of the two countries. Anti-Japanese sentiment remains strong throughout Asia, yet is greeted with official denial and public bewilderment. I teach a course in modern Japanese history and am astounded by how little awareness compulsory education gives Japanese people of their modern history. One common refrain is ‘we started at the beginning and ran out of time’, leaving a gaping hole between samurai and smartphones. Coupled with rote memorisation and a lack of analysis, little is retained beyond the exams, creating Japanese citizens who are ill-equipped to understand tensions with other Asian nations. I will be lecturing on Japanese imperialism and its aftermath with this article as a thought-provoking and topical point of comparison. Caroline Hutchinson Sunfield NASU, Chiba-ken, Japan

Now and Then The article ‘Just How Nasty Were the 1590s?’ (July) and David Cameron’s recent statement about the threat posed by native Islamists returning from Syria should prompt us to recognise the similarities between the two situations. Like contemporary Britain, late Elizabethan England was subject to an existential threat: a foreign, non-territorial power embodying a militant ideology challenged the legitimacy of the state and its allies overseas. In order to overturn this state, devotees of the ideology within the country travelled overseas to receive training and then re66 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

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turned to carry out subversion. Whether the danger posed by recusant priests was as great as that posed by today’s terrorist network is debatable, but the Catholic conspirators of 1605 had intentions similar to Islamic bomb-makers inspired by local ‘preachers of hate’ and foreign demagogues. Of course, the majority of Catholics at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, as with most Muslims in Britain today, did not embrace extremism and sought to balance their loyalties in a peaceful way, even when they suffered marginalisation. The government, in turn, devoted its intelligence resources to exposing and thwarting such plans. It was Walsingham’s secret service that implicated Mary Stuart in the intrigues of Catholic plotters, a revelation that ultimately led to her execution. The government when faced with such threats chose to take the fight to the enemy, as the article makes clear. Elizabeth’s decision to send troops to aid Protestant forces in the Netherlands and France, as with the policy of sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, was in part prompted by the wish to avoid confrontation nearer home. Arguably European religious conflict came to an end with the Thirty Years’ War, although the Catholic challenge to the British state continued with the Jacobites, supported by France for most of the 18th century. This religious rivalry ceased with the 1789 revolution, which upset and brought about significant changes to the Catholic powers of Europe. An upheaval of similar dimensions in the Muslim world of the future might also reduce the dangerous global polarity that exists at present. Whether today’s policy of conciliation and inclusion towards Muslims will prove as effective in eliminating the domestic

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threat as was the process of harsh repression of Catholics practised by Elizabeth and her successors remains to be seen. In part it is a matter of confidence: the Tudors managed to create a strong sense of national identity in the wake of a period of protracted civil war following the dissolution of the Angevin empire; today’s Britain is struggling to achieve a similar coherence. Colin Sowden Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Don’t Ignore Me I enjoyed Onyeka’s article (‘Black Equestrians’, July) but I am surprised he did not mention my book Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the British Slave Trade, c. 1660-1807 (Manchester University Press, 2011). It uses a database of 3,000 references drawn from a range of primary sources to produce a comprehensive examination of the black presence at all levels of society over the long 18th century. It includes some lesser-known gentlemen whom Onyeka might have mentioned, such as Nathaniel Wells, Under Sheriff of Monmouthshire, JP and Master of Foxhounds; Cesar Picton, merchant in Surrey; and John Cranbrook, greengrocer in Clapham at the time of the Sect. New discoveries are being made all the time which show how black people were not stigmatised outsiders but were woven into the fabric of all classes in British society. Kathleen Chater via email

Not a Tool Joanne Bailey’s ‘Signpost’ on gender history (June) is interesting, but I believe she is wrong to call gender historical studies a ‘tool’. For me it is a line of inquiry. A ‘tool’ implies the employment of a certain statistical technique

or some such. To investigate the role of gender in a certain period is equivalent to studying how societies cope with recovering from major natural disasters or how the Greek hoplites differed from their Roman counterparts. One uses methodological tools in history to answer questions. As such, gender history is a subdiscipline within history, in the same vein as military history or political history. Mario de Vivo São Paulo, Brazil

Attention Grabbing I began reading William H. Funk’s article ‘Brutal Saviours of the Black Patch’ (June): ‘Deepest night in southern Kentucky …’ Hmm, very atmospheric, I thought. I continued reading: ‘ ... the humid air thick with the sprightly scent of tobacco plants’. Perhaps this is from someone’s memoirs or diary? I was intrigued so I continued again. Some men attack the farmhouse: ‘A gutter is severed and slides like the arm of a dying man down the front of the façade.’ Surely this is from an original letter or diary, but where is the reference? Is this historical fiction? Has this episode been dramatised for effect, or simply made up to grab my attention? Richard Stride via email

Correction An error introduced to my appreciation of the life and career of the great French medievalist Jacques Le Goff (History Matters, June) may have led readers to understand that the historian Marc Bloch was Le Goff’s uncle. This was not the case. Le Goff was inspired in different ways both by Marc Bloch and by his own uncle and both men were involved in the Resistance during the Second World War. Miri Rubin Queen Mary, University of London

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Coming Next Month

The Dancing Congress

The Congress of Vienna, convened in September 1814 after the defeat of Napoleon, marked the first attempt in history to build a peaceful European order based on the active cooperation of the major states. Stella Ghervas surveys the aims of this transformational project, while Glenda Sluga offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which women influenced the diplomatic manoeuvrings that shaped the innovations of the Congress.

No Plain Sailing

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www.historytoday.com/subscribe June’s Prize Crossword

Roger Moorhouse tells the bizarre story of the LÜtzow, a vast 20,000ton warship sold in an unfinished state, by Germany to the USSR for 100 million reichsmarks. The fate of the vessel presents an unlikely metaphor for the wider strategic relationship between Germany and the USSR, from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to its dramatic scuppering in 1941.

An Article of Faith

On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Patricia Rothman commemorates the British-born mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, whose progress on the long road to his appointment as Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford was thwarted on several occasions by the antisemitic restrictions of the age and his refusal to compromise.

Suffragette Cities

Jad Adams reflects on the international impact of the Women’s Social and Political Union from Munich to Mexico City. He explores the actions during the movement’s most militant years, which led Gandhi to conclude: ‘We have a great deal to learn from these ladies.’

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the Archive, Pastimes and much more.

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PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for June is James Watson, Wirral.

HISTORY MATTERS: 5 Mary Evans Picture Library/ILN; 6 British Museum; 7 BBC Photo Library. MONTHS PAST: 8 Art Archive/De Agostini/Uffizi Gallery, Florence; 9 top Bridgeman Art Library/Private Collection; 9 bottom Kobal Collection/MGM. THE MANY AND THE FEW: 11 Bridgeman/Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; 12 Art Archive/Dagli Orti/ Staatliche Glyptothek, Munich; 13 top Bridgeman/De Agostini/Musee Archeologique, Cherchell; 13 bottom British Museum; 14 top Art Archive/De Agostini; 14 bottom AKG Images; 15 Art Archive/Dagli Orti. DREADNOUGHTS WITHOUT WHEELS: 16 HT Archive; 17 HT/Tim Aspden. THE SHADOWS LENGTHEN: 19 Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 20 AKG Images; 21 Bridgeman/Philip Mould Ltd/Private Collection; 22 AKG/Jean-Pierre Verney; 23 HT/Tim Aspden; 24 AKG/Private Collection; 25 Mary Evans Picture Library. A NEW MORAL ORDER: 26-27 Museum of London; 28 top Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 28 centre Getty Images/Popperfoto; 28 bottom Getty/Hulton Archive; 29 top Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 29 bottom left Getty/Popperfoto; 29 bottom right Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 30 Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 31 courtesy of the author; 32 left Mary Evans/Robert Hunt Collection; 32 right Mary Evans/ILN Ltd; 33 Mary Evans/National Army Museum. A SEPARATE SCOTLAND: 34 HT Archive; 36 Getty/Gamma-Keystone. WASHINGTON IS BURNING: 37 Bridgeman/Brown University Library, Providence, Rhode Island; 38 top Corbis; 38 bottom Bridgeman/Collection of the New York Historical Society; 39 British Museum; 40 top White House Historical Association; 40 bottom Library of Congress; 41 Scala Archives/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; 42 top Library of Congress; 42 bottom Art Archive/National Maritime Museum; 43 Corbis/Smithsonian Institution. IN FOCUS: 44-45 Getty/ Hulton. HANGING ON TO HANOVER: 46 Art Archive/National Army Museum. MAKING HISTORY: 50 Bridgeman/ Bibliotheque de Rouen, Cabinet D’Estampes. THE KEYS TO THE UNIVERSE: 51 Mary Evans /Grenville Collins Postcard Collection; 52 left HT Archive; 52 right Reproduced by kind permission of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc; 53 HT/Tim Aspden; 54 Library of Congress; 55 top Getty/SSPL; 55 bottom Mary Evans Picture Library; 56 Library of Congress; 56 bottom Corbis/National Archives; 57 Corbis. REVIEWS: 58 Mary Evans/Robert Hunt Collection/ Imperial War Museum. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 AKG/Erich Lessing. PASTIMES: 70 Library of Congress; 71 Bridgeman/De Agostini/Private Collection. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

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Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz

3 Where did the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fight its first battle of the war on August 23rd, 1914? 4 Which two men were awarded the first Victoria Crosses of the Great War? 5 Which major Belgian port city capitulated to German forces on October 9th, 1914? 6 Which German naval base in China was attacked by Japan on August 23rd, 1914?

7 ‘Papa’ was the nickname given to which French general? 8 Around how many Britons volunteered for military service in the first eight weeks of the war? 70 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

9 Which German general, commander of the Eighth Army, was sacked for failing to halt the Russian advance of 1914? 10 What was a ‘Rosalie’? 11 Which German commerceraider caused havoc among Allied

shipping in the Indian Ocean before it was attacked by HMAS Sydney in November 1914? 12 Where in eastern Prussia did German forces rout the Russian First and Second Armies between August 26th and 30th, 1914 before advancing into Poland?

ANSWERS

2 What is the name of the German ship that laid mines in the Thames estuary in August 1914 only to be sunk on its way home?

1. Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum (1850-1916). 2. Königin Luise. 3. Mons, Belgium. 4. Lt. Maurice Dease and Pte. Sidney Godley of the Royal Fusiliers. 5. Antwerp. 6. Tsingtao. 7. Joseph Joffre (1852-1931). 8. 761,000. 9. Maximilian von Prittwitz. 10. A cruciform bayonet used by the French army. 11. Emden. 12. Tannenberg.

1 Who was appointed British war minister on the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914?

Prize Crossword ACROSS 6 Zulu king of Natal, d.1840 (7) 7 Japanese Buddhist thinker (11731263), born Matsuwaka-Maru (7) 9 Jack ___ (d.1686), London executioner (5) 10 Donald ___ (1919-95), English actor whose film roles included Dr Crippen, Himmler, Lenin and Pontius Pilate (9) 11 Fermat’s Last ___, 2002 book by Simon Singh (7) 13 City of Kyushu, Japan, known historically for its patterned cotton textiles (6) 15 Building of the Vatican Palace erected in 1473-81 by the architect Giovanni dei Dolci (7,6) 19 Ancient Libyan city, formerly a Greek agricultural colony known as Antipyrgos (6) 20 Devon resort with docks designed in 1868 by Eugenius Birch (7) 23 One of a Gothic people ruled in the fifth century by Theodoric the Great (9) 24 Influential Greek physician of the second century bc (5) 26 Richard ___ (1804-54), Warwickshire-born inventor and patent campaigner (7) 27 Phase of cultural and technological development beginning in Europe in around 1200 bc (4,3)

Gregor Mendel (1822-84)

DOWN 1 Anglo-Scandinavian king, father of Harold ‘Harefoot’ (4) 2 ‘And When Did You Last See Your ___?’, 1878 painting by W.F. Yeames (6) 3 In Greek myth, the muse of tragedy (9) 4 Montana city, formerly known as Hellgate Village (8) 5 Ornamental style, popular in Europe and the US between 1890 and 1910 (3,7) 6 RAF name for the Douglas DC-3 airliner (6) 7 Maximilian, Count von ___ (18611914), German admiral killed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands (4) 8 US river, disputed former boundary with Mexico (6) 12/21 ‘All good to me is lost; ___’ – Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) (4,2,4,2,4) 14 William Sharp ___ (1863-1930), historian and author of Magna Carta (1905) (9) 16 Medieval county of southern France (8) 17 Jürgen ___ (1895-1952), SS officer notorious for his role in the 1943 destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto (6) 18 Thomas ___ (1648-82), ‘Tom of Ten Thousand’, murdered by Charles George Borosky, ‘the Polonian’ (6) 21 See 12 22 Neils ___ (1885-1962), Danish physicist (4) 25 Legendary king of the Britons (4)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT by August 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

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AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 71

HENRY V

FromtheArchive Dan Jones argues that Nigel Saul’s article on Henry V and the union of the crowns of England and France does not take into account the long-term consequences of the king’s achievements.

From Agincourt to Bosworth WHEN HENRY V died in August 1422 he had ruled for fewer than ten years, the shortest reign of any English king since Harold Godwinson in 1066. Nevertheless, Henry had achieved something unique: he unified the crowns of England and France. The Treaty of Troyes, sealed on May 21st, 1420 following the battle of Agincourt (1415) and a ferocious military assault on northern France, recognised Henry as legal successor to the ‘mad king’ Charles VI of France. It disinherited Charles’ son, the dauphin, and was sealed with the marriage of Henry to Charles’ daughter Catherine de Valois. When, 19 months later, Catherine gave birth to a son, the union between Christendom’s two greatest royal families appeared complete. Two realms, two crowns, one king. Astonishing. But what next? Nigel Saul’s 1986 article, ‘Henry V and the Dual Monarchy’, is an astute analysis of the immediate consequences of Troyes. As Saul points out, the English had claimed the French crown since the 1330s, but the claim was largely ‘opportunistic’: it was trumpeted or forgotten depending on England’s see-sawing fortunes in the Hundred Years War. The problem of what to do if the dual monarchy was actually achieved had never been seriously considered. After 1420, though, it became real – and troublesome. Henry’s victories in France had been paid for handsomely by the English and were celebrated in London with wild street parties. Now the mood changed. Troyes, writes Saul, meant that ‘in legal terms, the war for the crown of France was over … the war between two nations had given way to one between the king of France (Henry) and his rebellious subjects (the dauphinist resistance), in which the people of England had no part 72 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014

to play’. From this point on it would be increasingly difficult to convince English parliaments to pay for further campaigning. The French situation was also complicated. The realm was fractious and obstinately regionalist. Under Charles VI it had been torn in half between the factions of Burgundy and Armagnac. Henry had exploited this division, siding with the Burgundians to seize the crown. Now the division that had

The pressures of defending Henry V’s conquests slowly destroyed his son’s mind and rule helped him win it became his biggest headache. A diehard opposition party would entrench itself around the dauphin to leave the English ruling not as rightful kings, but as an occupying army. The war of subjection would be even more difficult and expensive than the war of conquest. Henry V neatly avoided most of the consequences of his triumph by dying. He was followed two months later by Charles VI. England’s struggle to maintain the dual monarchy passed to Henry’s relatives, governing in the name of the infant Henry VI (theoretically ‘Henri II’ of France). At first things went well: Henry V’s brother John, Duke of Bedford won battles (e.g. Verneuil in 1424), bombarded the country with dynastic propaganda and passed onerous penal laws against his opponents. In 1429, however, Joan of Arc turned up and the Hundred Years War turned – fatally – against England. In 1986 Saul did not consider the longer-term repercussions of Henry V’s achievement at Troyes. But the

king’s over-reach in 1420 sowed the seeds of the Wars of the Roses 35 years later. The financial and psychological pressures of defending Henry V’s conquests slowly destroyed his son’s mind and rule. Bitter rivalries began between men like Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset and Richard, Duke of York, who fell out during their military service in France. Defeat at the battle of Castillon in 1453 pushed Henry VI into madness and eventually sparked a terrible war between the houses of Lancaster and York; quite an irony, given that Henry’s father had won so much by exploiting a near-identical schism between the houses of Burgundy and Armagnac, caused by the madness of Charles VI. There was one last important consequence of the dual monarchy. Catherine de Valois, whom Henry V married at Troyes, took as her second husband a Welsh squire called Owen Tudor and her grandson, Henry, would kill the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, at Bosworth in 1485. Out of the Plantagenets’ greatest triumph came the seeds of their final defeat. Dan Jones‘ The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors is published by Faber in September.

VOLUME 36 ISSUE 5 May 1986 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta