History Today 2014-12

December 2014 Vol 64 Issue 12

MURDER

in the Cathedral Why the Church of Henry VIII faked a City merchant’s suicide

WAR TOYS THEN AND NOW How ‘playing soldiers’ helps children to understand the past

BLACK DEATH TO EBOLA Is quarantine any more effective today than it was in the Middle Ages?

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Publishing Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Chairman Simon Biltcliffe CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 7079 9361 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3148 3539 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246580) is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor of the Open University Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of London Professor Geoffrey Parker Ohio State University Professor Paul Preston London School of Economics Professor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National University Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London Dr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today

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FROM THE EDITOR

No more heroes: Gillian Wearing’s A Real Birmingham Family.

THE FIRST STATUE of Horatio Nelson was erected not in London’s Trafalgar Square but in Birmingham, in 1809. It has been fiddled with and moved since then and now stands between Selfridges and the spruced up Bull Ring shopping centre. Nelson was born in Norfolk, a long way from Birmingham, a city with little maritime heritage, but he made a splash when he visited the bustling town, as it then was, in August 1802, enough to inspire the locals to raise £2,500 to commemorate his heroics. Brummies are famously self-deprecating, which may be why it took until 1956 for the second city to celebrate heroes of its own. That year, a gilded bronze statue, known locally as the ‘Golden Boys’, was unveiled in honour of three great pioneers of the Industrial Revolution: William Murdoch, James Watt and Matthew Boulton. Murdoch and Watt were Scots, who came to live and work in Birmingham in the 18th century, pioneering the use of steam engines and gas lighting, among numerous other advances. Boulton, a native of the city, was the business brains, the entrepreneur, whose Soho Manufactory, in the Handsworth area of the city, built the products that the likes of Watt and Murdoch devised. Boulton’s home nearby, Soho House, hosted the Lunar Society, the dinner club attended by Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, which gave voice to the Midlands Enlightenment. It seems right that we celebrate such figures, though there is much less eagerness today to vaunt the military, despite Britain’s seemingly endless participation in conflict. Even scientists are relatively undersung; there is a park bench statue in Manchester, raised in 2001, of Alan Turing, the computing genius whose cracking of German wartime codes was of immeasurable worth, though his homosexuality and its persecution, thankfully unthinkable today, at least in the civilised world, often seems of greater import. The shift in attitudes away from the ‘great and good’ is underlined by a prominent new statue in Birmingham, the work of Gillian Wearing. A Real Birmingham Family depicts local sisters Roma and Emma Jones and their young sons Kyan and Shaye. It celebrates what they are – ordinary – rather than what they have achieved. Perhaps the most significant thing about the statue is that it was not, as once so many things were, ‘Made in Birmingham’, but in China.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters Exodus • Happiness • Hogarth • Hitler

Deliverance: Battle at the Milvian Bridge by Pieter Lastman, 17th century.

‘Let My People Go!’

Hollywood offers a new version of the Exodus story, the West’s most enduring political narrative. John Coffey THE RELEASE of Ridley Scott’s Hollywood blockbuster, Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), highlights the enduring appeal of the Old Testament’s most spectacular story. Yet few appreciate the extraordinary reception history of Exodus. From Constantine to Martin Luther King, it has been among the most potent narratives in the western political imagination. The early Christians adopted a

‘spiritual’ or ‘typological’ reading of Exodus. Humans were in Egyptian bondage to sin; Christ was a new Moses who redeemed his people from slavery; the Passover was a type of Calvary, where he shed his blood; the passage through the Red Sea symbolised deliverance from the Pharaoh Satan; the Wilderness was a picture of this life, with its wanderings and woes; death was crossing the Jordan; the Land of Canaan was an earthly foreshadowing of Heaven. This has remained the primary meaning of Exodus in Christian liturgy, hymnody and preaching. In the fourth century, however, Christians started to read Exodus politically. The dramatic conversion of the Emperor Constantine rescued the early Church from the Diocletian persecution. Eusebius of Caesarea

hailed Constantine as a new Moses. His victory at the Milvian Bridge in ad 312 was another crossing of the Red Sea. He was leading the new Israel to a Promised Land of milk and honey. For centuries to come, Christian rulers and their propagandists would enlist Exodus to burnish their image. Even Machiavelli would end The Prince (1513) by calling on the Medici to play the part of Moses and ‘liberate Italy from the barbarian yoke’. In the Protestant Reformation, with its relentless appeal to the Bible, there was a sharp intensification of Exodus politics. Martin Luther was presented as a latter-day Moses, delivering the Church from popish bondage. Calvinists developed a particularly close identification with the oppressed children of Israel and in the 1550s and 1560s they became embroiled in a series of uprisings in France, the Netherlands and Scotland. During the Dutch Revolt, William of Orange was portrayed as Moses and the Exodus story was used as patriotic scripture in sermons, songs, engravings, paintings and the stage. As Elizabeth I brought the Marian persecution to an end and John Knox led the Scottish Reformation, the title page of the ‘Geneva’ Bible of 1560 bore a striking image of the Israelites pinned against the Red Sea by Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, with Jehovah’s pillar of cloud in the distance. The Exodus was being used to forge a Protestant national identity. After the Spanish Armada was scattered by a terrible storm in 1588, the commemorative medal bore a text from the song of Moses and Miriam at the Red Sea: ‘Jehovah blew with his wind and they were scattered.’ In the English Revolution of the mid-17th century Exodus was mobilised on a grand scale by the parlia-

In the Reformation, with its relentless appeal to the Bible, there was a sharp intensification of Exodus politics

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3

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mentarians. Oliver Cromwell told Parliament in 1654 that the deliverance of the Hebrews offered ‘the only parallel’ to England’s experience during the Civil Wars. England had been liberated from civil and ecclesiastical bondage and was making its painful progress through the Wilderness towards the Promised Land. The Royalist riposte to Puritan Exodus politics was displayed in a medal struck to celebrate the Restoration: Charles II appears as the young prince of Egypt returning to smite the Puritan taskmasters. When his brother, the Roman Catholic James II, was removed from the throne in 1688, there was a new wave of Exodus sermons, now praising William and Mary as Moses and Miriam. In the American Revolution, Exodus was cited once again to justify political revolt. Tom Paine dubbed George III ‘the sullen tempered Pharaoh of Britain’. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin suggested Moses at the Red Sea as a design for the Great Seal of the United States. This Exodus rhetoric backfired. American complaints about metaphorical enslavement by the British drew unwelcome attention to the all-too-literal enslavement of black bodies. Anti-slavery voices in both Britain and the US denounced the hypocrisy of white America. Black writers on both sides of the Atlantic now seized on the Exodus story, locating themselves within it as the new children of Israel. ‘For the first time in history’, writes the historian John Saillant, ‘slaves had a book on their side.’ In the decades to come, Exodus would be a key text for Anglo-American abolitionists and black preachers and activists, powerfully informing Protestant debates over slavery. The leaders of slave revolts hoped to re-enact the Exodus. Escape from the Southern states to the North was imagined as a flight from Egypt. Harriet Tubman, a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, was celebrated as a black Moses. Spirituals such as ‘Go Down Moses’ described America as ‘Egyptland’ and told old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’. Ironically, Southern Confederates denounced Abraham Lincoln as a Pharaoh, but his Emancipation Proclamation was welcomed by blacks as a Mosaic deliverance. 4 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Like the Israelites, however, African-Americans discovered that liberation could be a false dawn. Segregationist America could still seem like Egyptland, a Wilderness, a land of wanderings. Only in the marches and rallies of the Civil Rights Movement did black Americans acquire a new sense of momentum. On the night before his assassination, Martin Luther King electrified an audience gathered in a Memphis church by speaking as Moses to his people: We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop … And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. When Barack Obama ran for the presidency four decades later, he would tell black audiences that ‘the Joshua Generation’ was ready to complete what ‘the Moses Generation’ had begun. The heirs of Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement were finally poised to possess the land of Canaan, or at least the White House. As in the days of Constantine, Exodus inspired visions of deliverance and empowerment. John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester and the author of Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr (Oxford University Press, 2014). Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The Changing Nature of Happiness Revisiting one of the first historical studies in the developing ‘science’ of well-being. Sandie McHugh and Jerome Carson THE current preoccupation with happiness, manifested, for example, in the Office of National Statistics now adding questions on happiness to their household surveys, is not as recent as many experts would have us believe. Indeed Darrin McMahon provides a scholarly historical overview of the field of happiness in his book, Happiness: A History (2006). McMahon traces the origins of the concept back to Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and others and on through the centuries to the more recent involvement in the field of happiness of economists and psychologists, rather than philosophers and theologians. Our own interest in the topic was partly stimulated by our discovery of one of the first purportedly scientific studies of happiness, conducted as part of Mass Observation’s Worktown, in the Lancashire town of Bolton in 1938. We describe the background to the 1938 study and then contrast the findings from this with our own replication of the original Worktown study. We end by making some general observations on the concept of happiness. ‘An ugly place’, said J.B. Priestley of Bolton and contemporary photographs show a smoggy industrial town, its skyline dominated by tall chimneys. Despite the depression of the 1930s, Bolton still had 200 cotton mills, engineering and mining industries and its unemployed rate of 15 per cent was lower than many other declining industrial centres. Public works, such as the construction of Le Mans Crescent, an extension to the town hall and the building of some new housing eased the effect of contracting industries. So, with beautiful countryside on the

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doorstep, it was not all industrial toil and gloom. The expansion of pleasure opportunities in the interwar period benefited those with a little cash to spare: the first Butlin’s holiday camp opened in 1936. Bolton boasted six dance halls, 300 pubs, 47 cinemas and a freestyle wrestling stadium within a fivemile radius of the town centre. From 1933 special ‘Dance Trains’ transported Boltonians for a day trip or evening at Blackpool’s Tower Ballroom to ‘let their hair down’. Mills had staggered closures, enabling the workforce to decamp to Blackpool to enjoy its seaside attractions. Mass Observation had a team based there in 1937. Closer to home, the 200 churches and chapels in Bolton not only provided religious services, but also social activities and events. Mass Observation ran a series of competitions to solicit the views and attitudes of ordinary people. On March 28th, 1938 people in Bolton were invited to ‘give their opinion’ on happiness and the 226 letter writers were sent a questionnaire. Ten ‘qualities of life’ were specified and correspondents ranked them in order of importance. They were asked if it was easier to be happier in Blackpool or Bolton, at weekends or midweek, how often they were happy and whether luck played a part. In February 2014 the Bolton News invited readers to take part in a web survey, a re-run of this competition. The original questionnaire was adapted to be more representative of discourse in 2014, while retaining as much of the original meaning as possible. In 21st-century Bolton, service, hi-tech, electronics and data processing have largely replaced heavy industry. Warburton’s bakers, founded in 1876, have their headquarters in the town, but textiles and paper manufacture remain very small scale. Today Boltonians enjoy a material standard of living, consumer products and leisure opportunities that residents in 1938 would find astonishing. Globalisation and technological advances have transformed personal communication. Higher standards of housing, a universal benefit system, the NHS and access to education from primary to university level are now available to ordinary people. These welcome improvements bring different challenges and some commentators

Feet off the ground: holidaymakers enjoy a heatwave on Blackpool beach, 1934.

claim people have become alienated ‘consumer junkies’, with the ‘good life’ bringing unsustainable debt burdens and stress for some. The debate continues about the essence of happiness and the effect of technological and economic change on well-being. What did happiness mean to Bolton in 1938 and has its meaning changed in 76 years? The majority in 1938 were happiest in Bolton, whereas in 2014 63 per cent are happier away from the town. The growth in the popularity of weekends is reflected in the increase

What did happiness mean to Bolton in 1938 and has this changed in 76 years? from around a quarter (1938) to 41 per cent of residents reporting weekends as a happier time for them. The majority at both dates (56 per cent in 2014) stated their happiness was the same at weekends or weekdays. As to the role of luck, in 1938 20 per cent believed that it did influence happiness, increasing to 42 per cent in 2014. Although economic security was ranked top in 1938, respondents were under no illusion that by itself material wealth would bring happiness. Many of the letters refer to ‘enough to

meet everyday needs’. In 2014 76 per cent of respondents said no when asked if happiness was linked to material possessions. The main differences in 2014 from 1938 were in the position of religion, leisure and good humour. Politics and leadership are ranked low in importance in both periods. What do we know about these residents? Most were employed (70 per cent in 1938, 67 per cent in 2014) and there were more women (59 per cent in 1939, 65 per cent in 2014). The Mass Observation happiness competition was completed against a background of what we now recognise as momentous world events, as Hitler drove into Vienna and Franco gained the upper hand in Spain. Elsewhere, Walt Disney released the first featurelength cartoon film and nearby Preston North End won the FA Cup. How much external matters affect happiness is difficult to ascertain. The overall impression from the correspondence in 1938 is that happiness factors were rooted in everyday lives at home and within the community. In 2014 many comments value family and friends, with good humour and leisure time also ranked highly. The Mass Observation team did not appreciate the significance of its work. The Worktown Archive gives us insights into everyday life in the wonderful letters many people wrote at the time. Boltonians then rated security, knowledge and religion as the most important contributors to their happiness. Some 76 years later, good humour and more leisure were rated above security. The most striking difference was the decline in the perceived importance of religion, which dropped from third to last on our list. It is mirrored in declining church attendance. Happiness is, of course, more complex than the Mass Observation team realised. They neglected the importance of relationships, along with social and cultural factors. However, its early research was among the first in developing a science of happiness and for that we must be grateful.

Sandie McHugh is Research Associate in psychology at the University of Bolton, where Jerome Carson is Professor of Psychology. DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Hogarth’s New Britain

The painter’s reaction to the Jacobite Rebellion is more than mere satire. Jacqueline Riding IN THE winter of 1745 Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt to overthrow the House of Hanover and restore the House of Stuart to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland seemed unstoppable. On September 21st the only British troops available to crush the nascent rebellion in Scotland were routed by a predominantly Highland Jacobite army at the Battle of Prestonpans. By late November ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and his troops had marched south to Manchester, while two armies commanded by Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Field Marshal George Wade were attempting to stop their advance. On December 4th Charles and his army entered Derby, about 120 miles north of London. Two days later, on what became known as ‘Black Friday’, news reached the capital. Orders were issued that all Grenadier Guards should march immediately to the encampment at Finchley Common. If Cumberland and Wade failed in their task, these troops would be the last barrier between the Stuart prince and London. This is the starting point for William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley. However, it is not intended as an accurate depiction of events on Black Friday; there is an element of satire, directed chiefly at an unprepared British government and army, within the chaotic scene at Tottenham Court turnpike. But satire is not Hogarth’s sole aim. After all, it was painted between 1749 and 1750, in the knowledge of the defeat and aftermath of the rebellion, when the old Highland clan system, seen as the lifeblood of the Stuart cause in Scotland, was dismantled. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748 ended hostilities between Britain and France, so that no French-sponsored attempt to restore the Stuarts was now likely. The treaty also specified that the Stuarts, Charles (then in Paris) in particular, should be expelled from French territory. 6 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

By 1750, then, the Jacobite threat seemed to have passed. A commentary originally in French, written by Hogarth’s friend André Rouquet, offers an alternative view of the mayhem within the composition:

extremely different; they are even of opposite Parties, for the one disposes of Works in favour of the Government, and the other against it.

Discipline is less observed in the principal Design, but if you complain of this I must ingenuously inform you, that Order and Subordination belong only to Slaves; for what every where else is called Licentiousness, assumes here the venerable Name of Liberty. The display of collective and individual unruliness is symbolic of the liberties of the British people. The orderly column of grenadiers seen marching northwards in the distance, shows that boisterous Britons will become disciplined defenders of their liberties when the need arises.

Yet despite the crushing of the ’45 and the treaty with France, Hogarth signals to his countrymen to remain vigilant. Beneath the sign of the Adam and Eve tavern, to the left, a different sort of serpent, in the guise of a foppish Frenchman, whispers of an imminent invasion to an ecstatic or demented Jacobite sympathiser. To the right of these conspirators, in the central foreground of the composition, is a young grenadier. According to Rouquet: he is accompanied, or rather seized and beset by two Women, one of whom is a BalladSinger, and the other a News-Hawker; they are both with Child, and claim this Hero as the Father and except this Circumstance they have nothing in common, for their Figures, their Humours, their Characters appear

Call to liberty: The March of the Guards to Finchley.

The woman standing to the left gazes up at him with doleful eyes, hand placed on her swollen belly. Her song sheet, next to a print of the Duke of Cumberland, reads ‘God Save our Noble King’. She is a supporter of the Protestant settlement, embodied by the House of Hanover. The other woman, her face contorted in zealous rage, grasps the grenadier’s arm with her left hand, while raising a rolled-up newspaper with the other. The Jacobite Journal protrudes from her knapsack and a cross is visible on her back. She is a Catholic supporter of the Stuarts. In turn the young grenadier is a representation of the new nation of Great Britain, with the Union flag just behind him. Collectively, this group symbolises the dynastic struggle for the soul of this fledgling state. The Jacobite wields the Remembrancer, an anti-government paper, which serves as a reminder of Britain’s former loyalty to her. The fact that she is about to assault the grenadier with it demonstrates that she is willing to use violence and force to assert her rights over him. The younger woman simply and tearfully indicates to the future and their unborn child. After the ’45 Prince Charles continued to liaise with Jacobites in Britain and, in the year that Hogarth was completing his March … to Finchley, he made a secret visit to London to discuss a new campaign. Standing near the King’s Head tavern (right), in the shadow of the sign depicting Charles II, is a tall, pale young gentleman who gazes northward, oblivious of the rabble around him. Perhaps this figure is a covert allusion to another Charles Stuart, still determined to return from exile. But he may be too late. Despite the haranguing Jacobite, the young Briton and his comely mistress appear to be moving forward together in step: Britain has already made up its mind.

Jacqueline Riding is author of the forthcoming Jacobites (Bloomsbury, 2015).

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Führer fake: Hitler leaves what is not Landsberg Prison.

Calling time on Hitler’s Hoax A 90-year-old photograph of the future dictator soon after leaving prison still manages to fool the world’s media outlets. Roger Moorhouse IT IS one of the most famous images of Adolf Hitler’s much-documented life. The future dictator of Germany poses rather stiffly by the running board of a Mercedes, in a buttoned and belted mackintosh, his hair slicked across his head, his trademark toothbrush moustache neatly clipped. Behind him stands a dark medieval gateway. The picture was taken 90 years ago, on December 20th, 1924, to mark Hitler’s release from Landsberg Prison in Bavaria, where he had spent nine months of a five-year sentence for treason and where he had penned his manifesto-cum-autobiography, Mein Kampf. Taken by Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, it was intended to announce his release to Germany and the wider world, to proclaim that Hitler was ‘back’. Circulated to the world’s press that day, the picture carried the caption ‘Hitler leaving Landsberg Prison’, written by Hoffmann himself. It quickly

became a well-known image, with Hitler even re-enacting the scene for Hoffmann after his appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Yet, as so often, the picture is not all that it seems. Landsberg fortress still stands today and is still a prison, but it has never had a grand medieval gate like the one in the picture; indeed, it was only opened in 1910. The gate shown is, in fact, the elegant late-Gothic Bayertor, southern-most entrance to the old town of Landsberg, a kilometre away across the River Lech. Why, then, the switch? The story goes that Hoffmann, who had travelled from Munich to collect

In an age when the vast majority of politicians were blissfully ignorant of such apparently ephemeral matters, Hoffman’s picture marked the dawning of a new era Hitler upon his release, had naturally wanted to record the event for posterity, but had been forbidden from doing so by a prison guard, who threatened to confiscate his camera if he persisted. Frustrated, Hoffmann drove the short distance to the Bayertor and got Hitler to pose for the photo there. As he con-

fessed in his later memoir, he made the decision simply because the location offered ‘something of the fortress atmosphere’. The world’s press swallowed the deception wholesale, with some even embellishing the story with headlines such as ‘The Fortress Gate has Opened’, even though the real fortress had no gate at all. Ever since, journalists, historians, archivists and students have followed suit, taking Hoffmann’s caption at face value and erroneously assuming that the ‘fortress-like’ gateway in the background of the photograph is the entrance to the prison. It is a minor point, of course; a small corrective to an infinitely larger and more important story. But it does, nonetheless, illustrate a key aspect of that wider tale. It shows Hitler, and Hoffmann, not only as being acutely aware of the political importance of the image, but moreover willing to bend the truth in the process. In an age when the vast majority of politicians were blissfully ignorant of such apparently ephemeral matters, Hoffmann’s picture marked the dawning of a new era. It was the opening salvo in a concerted campaign of what we would today call ‘image management’, by which Hitler and Hoffmann meticulously crafted the public image of ‘the Führer’. It was a campaign that would continue throughout the 1920s and on to the very last days of the Third Reich. What’s most remarkable, perhaps, is that the petty fiction that Hoffmann concocted that December day in 1924 is still with us, trotted out by editors and picture archives the world over and still repeated ad nauseam on the myriad pages of the Internet. Perhaps now, 90 years on, it is finally time to consign this small piece of Nazi propaganda to the dustbin of history.

Roger Moorhouse is the author of His Struggle: Adolf Hitler in Landsberg, 1924 (Endeavour Press, 2014). DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

DECEMBER

By Richard Cavendish

DECEMBER 31st 1514

Andreas Vesalius born in Brussels The great Renaissance scientist is regarded as the founder of the modern study of human anatomy. His name in Flemish was Andries Van Wesel. The Brussels in which he grew up and went to school, in the former duchy of Brabant, was ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs and his father was pharmacist, or drug specialist, to the Emperor Charles V. At 15, in 1529 he was sent to the University of Louvain and at 19 in 1533 he went to the medical school at the University of Paris, where he studied human bones from cemeteries and dissected some human bodies. He went back to Louvain in 1536 and then in the following year to Italy and the University of Padua, which had a tradition of encouraging freedom of thought and experiment. Copernicus had studied there and later Galileo was professor of mathematics. William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was one of its graduates in medicine. Vesalius made such an impression in Padua that the day after receiving his doctorate in medicine he was appointed to lecture on surgery and anatomy. He dissected human cadavers and created anatomical charts of the human body to help his students. The parts of the body were labelled in a mixture of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew. He also published a textbook on dissection and a book on an improved method of blood-letting, then widely used in medical treatment. His appointment to the medical faculty was renewed in 1539 with a substantial increase in his salary and a note that his students held him in profound admiration. A judge in the criminal court in Padua had become so interested in Vesalius’ work that he started supplying him with the bodies of executed criminals, which gave the anatomist more corpses to work on. Sometimes a prisoner’s execution was delayed to suit Vesalius’ workload. 8 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Vesalius was coming to see that current theory was far too heavily dependent on Galen, the Greek anatomist of the second century ad, who had been physician to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus. Galen had learned much from treating injured gladiators and had dissected the bodies of animals, but dissecting human bodies was forbidden in the Roman Empire. Galen was a pagan, but he believed there was only one God, which helped to make his books accepted as authoritative all through the Christian centuries in the Middle Ages. Vesalius’ dissections convinced him that much of Galen’s teaching about human bodies had been based on dissections of monkeys and was misleading. He once remarked that very little was being currently offered to students of

In the raw: an illustration from Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, Basel, 1543.

anatomy that could not be better taught by a butcher in his shop. In 1542 he went to Venice to oversee, probably in Titian’s studio, the preparation of drawings to illustrate what proved to be his huge major work, De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (‘Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body’), which was published in 1543. The Fabrica dealt with the bones, the muscles, the nervous system, the liver and kidneys, the heart and the blood vessels, the reproductive organs, the skull and the brain. After some initial doubts, it was hugely admired and frequently reprinted, as a far more accurate and comprehensive treatment of human anatomy than any previous work. He presented a copy to Charles V, who appointed him as a physician to the imperial court. In 1544 Vesalius married Anne von Hamme, who came from a rich Brussels family and bore him a daughter. His position at Charles V’s court was a mixed blessing, involving him in wearisome consultations with the emperor and other patients about boring routine ailments, but after Charles abdicated in 1555 Vesalius went to be a court physician to Philip II of Spain in Madrid. He took every opportunity he could to teach anatomy and carry out post-mortems and, serving with the imperial army, he introduced effective new surgical techniques to treat wounds. Such was his reputation that when Henry II of France was severely injured in the head in a joust in 1559 it was Vesalius who was summoned urgently to take charge, though he was not able to save the king’s life. Vesalius decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1564, going by way of Venice and Cyprus. It is not clear whether he reached Palestine or not, but either on the way there or on the way back he fell so seriously ill that he was put ashore on the Greek island of Zakinthos, then under Venetian control. He died there in 1564, aged 49, and it was probably there that he was buried. There is no report of anyone attempting to dissect him.

DECEMBER 8th 1864

The Clifton Suspension Bridge opened Isambard Kingdom Brunel has been described as a titan in an age of titans. He built the Great Western Railway as well as the first transatlantic steamship and later the biggest ship in the world. He designed railway stations, docks, tunnels and bridges and his

Above and beyond: the opening of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Illustrated London News, December 17th, 1864.

best works have a magical blend of efficiency and beauty. That is true of his spectacular bridge across the Avon Gorge west of Bristol, with the river rolling 245ft (75m) below at high water. It is somehow not surprising that it is a magnet for suicides. A competition to design a bridge across the gorge was announced in 1829. Brunel, then in his early twenties, hastened to submit designs. The competition was judged by Thomas Telford, another engineering titan, who rejected all the entries and said that Brunel’s proposed spans for the bridge were far too long to be practical. He was asked for a design of his own instead, but it was much too expensive and a new competition with different judges was held in 1831. To his delight, Brunel was declared the winner. Work on the bridge did not properly begin until 1836 because of shortage of money and other complications. To carry building materials across, an iron bar 1,000ft-long was fixed over the gorge with a basket suspended beneath it. On its first trial the bar fell into the river. When it was fixed up again, according to one story, Brunel insisted on riding across in the basket

and when it got stuck halfway over he somehow clawed himself up to the bar and freed it. The basket, it is said, became a magnet for daringly romantic proposals of marriage. The towers at each end of the bridge were built, but money ran out again and work stopped in 1843. It was still not completed when Brunel died in 1859 at the age of 53. The Institution of Civil Engineers decided that completing the bridge would be the best possible tribute to his memory. Fresh money was raised and the bridge was finished at last in 1864. A crowd of around 150,000 people gathered to watch the formal opening ceremony, with a massive procession of soldiers marching out from the centre of Bristol played along by 16 bands with flags flying everywhere. Between the two towers, which stand 85ft (26m) high, the bridge has a span of roughly 700ft (214m), which is far longer than Telford’s suggested maximum. Although it was intended for horse-drawn traffic, it was so efficiently designed that it now carries more than 10,000 vehicles a day, as well as cyclists and pedestrians. It is run by a charitable trust.

seen in English-made films, Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford. He was determined to get Clark Gable for the crucial role of Rhett Butler and succeeded after negotiations with his fatherin-law, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, which lent him Gable and contributed over

$1 million to the budget in return for a half share of the profits. The principal director was Victor Fleming, though after a time he collapsed from exhaustion. Filming lasted from January 1939, when the scene of the burning of Atlanta was shot, to the end of June, with post-production work running on into November. Selznick said the responses from preview audiences were probably the most amazing any picture had ever received. The premiere in Atlanta drew a million people to the city and in 1940 the film won a then record haul of Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Vivien Leigh, Best Director for Fleming and Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first ever Oscar for a black American actor, who played Scarlett’s maid Mammy. It is estimated that in its first four years in the US Gone With the Wind sold 60 million tickets to the equivalent of half the population.

DECEMBER 15th 1939

Premiere of Gone With the Wind Clothed in superlatives, it is one of the best-loved films ever made and still reportedly, after allowing for inflation, the most profitable. Sidney Howard’s script was so long that the movie would have lasted more than six hours and even revised by an army of writers it ran well over three hours and had to be shown with an interval. Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Deep South and the American Civil War came out in 1936. The film rights were snapped up by the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick. Hundreds of women were considered to play the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, until Selznick settled on the 22-year-old Vivien Leigh, who he had

Burning desire: 1939 US poster for Gone With the Wind.

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 9

RICHARD HUNNE

Death at St Paul’s

Richard Dale investigates the mysterious death of Richard Hunne, one of the most notorious episodes of the English Reformation, and reveals what really happened in Lollards Tower by old St Paul’s half a millennium ago this month.

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IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, early in the morning of Monday December 4th, 1514, an assistant gaoler named Peter Turner entered the cathedral close of the old St Paul’s. He was to attend to the one inmate then held in Lollards Tower, the Bishop of London’s prison, which adjoined the cathedral. In the company of two church officials, Turner ascended the winding stone staircase and unlocked the cell door. There he found the prisoner hanging by his own belt with his face to the wall. The body was that of Richard Hunne, a liveryman of the Merchant Taylors Company, a prosperous London citizen, highly respected within his community and among his fellow tradesmen. His death while in the custody of the bishop, Richard Fitzjames, spread alarm among the London populace, where anti-clerical feelings were already running high. There were rumours of foul play but the Church 10 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

authorities insisted that Hunne had committed suicide (felo de se) and in order to lay the matter to rest the bishop decided to try Hunne’s corpse on a charge of heresy. The trial was held over several days in the week beginning December 11th. Witnesses were called and the prize exhibit displayed for all to see was Hunne’s Wycliffe Bible, with its notorious prologue that cast doubt on the miracle of the sacrament of the altar. On Saturday December 16th Fitzjames pronounced a verdict of guilty against the body of Hunne and a mandate requesting the Crown to implement punishment was dispatched to Westminster Palace. On December 20th the remains of the convicted man were carried to Smithfield and consigned to the flames. However, the furore unleashed by Hunne’s suspicious death would not die down. The Lord Mayor, George Monoux, had instructed the coroner to empanel a jury to

‘The Murder of Richard Hunne’ in a woodcut from a 16th-century edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

investigate the cause of death and 24 citizens from local wards were duly sworn in. After examining the body in situ and receiving evidence from witnesses, including a confession from one Charles Joseph, a church official in the employ of the Bishop’s Chancellor, Dr Horsey, they concluded that Hunne had been murdered and the body hung up to look like suicide. The alleged perpetrators were Horsey, Joseph and the prison gaoler, John Spalding, against whom indictments were issued. But there was a further unspoken implication: that none other than the Bishop of London, Fitzjames, had been the prime mover in the murder of Hunne. SO GREAT WAS THE threat to the church’s reputation that Fitzjames appealed to Thomas Wolsey, the newly appointed Archbishop of York, to halt legal proceedings against his

Old St Paul’s, destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Its spire had collapsed during a storm in 1561.

chancellor and have the case examined by independent councillors. Henry VIII became involved and called a series of conferences to discuss the case and the wider issues of clerical privilege and the jurisdiction of church courts. The final conference at Baynard’s Castle was attended by councillors, judges, bishops and Members of Parliament and presided over by the king. A compromise was eventually reached, whereby Horsey submitted himself before the Court of King’s Bench on a charge of murder. By acknowledging the authority of the royal courts, the Church opened the way for the king to instruct his Attorney General to accept Horsey’s plea of ‘not guilty’ and to dismiss the case against all three accused. Horsey was then removed from London to Exeter, where he lived out his years in exile. Hunne’s clash with the Church authorities had begun DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 11

RICHARD HUNNE

Baynard’s Castle, site of Henry VIII’s final conference on the Hunne case. Engraving, 17th century.

in 1511 with the death of his five-week-old son, Stephen. When he took the corpse for burial to St Mary Matfellon in Whitechapel, the parson, Thomas Dryfield, demanded as his traditional mortuary fee the most valuable possession of the deceased, in this case the infant’s christening robe. Hunne refused to comply with the request, arguing that a deceased infant could own nothing and that the robe was rightfully his father’s property. On April 26th, 1512 Hunne was cited before the Archbishop’s Court of Audience in Lambeth. This was was presided over by the future Bishop of London Cuthbert Tunstall, who upheld Dryfield’s claim and required Hunne either to surrender his dead son’s gown or else to pay its estimated value of six shillings and eightpence, roughly equivalent to ten times the daily wage of a skilled artisan. Hunne remained obdurate. On December 27th, 1512 he

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and some friends attended the church of St Mary Matfellon to celebrate the feast of St John the Evangelist, December 27th. The service was being conducted by parson Dryfield’s chaplain, Henry Marshall, and when the chaplain saw Hunne he denounced him, stopped the service and refused to continue until Hunne and his party had left, which they did. However, Hunne immediately brought an action for slander against Marshall in the Court of King’s Bench. The suit was heard on January 25th, 1513, but then adjourned until April. It was at this point that Hunne brought into play his heavy artillery: a writ of praemunire that cited as co-defendants, Dryfield, his chaplain, Marshall, and Joseph. Tunstall, though not named, would also be implicated if the suit progressed. To issue a writ of praemunire was daring enough but to target the archbishop’s own judicial representative was breathtaking in its effrontery.

The Great Act of Praemunire had been put on the statute book in the reign of Richard II (r.1377-99). Its original purpose was to restrict the Pope’s jurisdiction in England. More recently it had been invoked to challenge the right of ecclesiastical courts to hear cases that should more properly be heard by the royal courts.

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HE CASE WAS FIRST HEARD in the court of King’s Bench at Westminster Hall in the spring of 1513. Both this suit and the slander case were repeatedly adjourned until after Hunne’s death, so that the legal questions raised remained undecided. In October 1514 Hunne was arrested on suspicion of heresy and imprisoned in Lollards Tower. On Saturday December 2nd he was taken upriver to Fitzjames’ country residence, Fulham Palace, and there examined by the bishop in his chapel. He was required to answer to a number of charges, including his reported objection to the payment of tithes and his support for the views of a neighbour, Joan Baker, who had been found guilty of heresy. At the end of his examination Hunne did not recant by signing a declaration nor did he admit the charges against him. He did however acknowledge in his own writing that he had spoken inadvisedly and submitted himself to his lord’s charitable and favourable correction. After this inconclusive

It seemed clear to the jury that, if Hunne had not killed himself, he must have been murdered and the murder scene then arranged to give the appearance of a suicide hearing Hunne was taken back to Lollards Tower, where he was found hanging on the Monday morning. It was obvious to the jurymen, when they examined the corpse hanging in Lollards Tower, that Hunne could not have killed himself. The noose was too small to accommodate the head; marks on his wrists showed that his hands had been tied; the serrations round the neck had been caused by some metal object and not by a silken belt; the body was clean (‘without any drivelling or splurging in any place of his body’), which was inconsistent with death by hanging; and the chair from which Hunne would have had to jump was too precariously placed on the bed to allow anybody to stand on it. There was a lot of blood lying in one corner of the cell and on the left side of Hunne’s discarded jacket there were two great streams of blood. Yet the face, doublet, collar and shirt of the corpse were clear, except for a couple of drops of blood from each nostril. Furthermore, a candle that on the Sunday night had been left burning on top of the stocks had been snuffed out, even though it was seven or eight feet from the body. The jury were struck by one other curious aspect of the corpse: ‘his head [was] fair combed, and his bonnet right sitting upon his head, with his eyes and mouth fair closed, without any staring, gaping or frowning.’ Evidently the body had been touched up.

Top: Lollard John Wycliffe (1320-84), engraving, 1550. Above: a mother and child at a christening, c.1595.

It seemed clear to the jury that, if Hunne had not killed himself, he must have been murdered and the murder scene arranged to give the appearance of suicide:

Whereby it appeareth plainly to us all that the neck of Hunne was broken, and the great plenty of blood was shed before he was hanged. Wherefore all we find, by God and all our consciences, that Richard Hunne was murdered. Also we acquit the said Richard Hunne of his own death. The question for the jury then was who murdered Hunne? The answer appeared to be straightforward, because Joseph made the following confession while being held in the Tower of London: DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 13

RICHARD HUNNE Also Charles Joseph saith that, when Richard Hunne was slain, John Bellringer [Spalding] bare up the stairs into the Lollard’s Tower a wax candle, having the keys of the doors hanging on his arm. And I, Charles, went next to him, and Master Chancellor came up last. And when all we came up, we found Hunne lying on his bed. And then Master Chancellor said, Lay hands on the thief! And so we all three murdered Hunne. And then I, Charles, put the girdle about Hunne’s neck. And then John Bellringer and I, Charles, did heave up Hunne, and Master Chancellor pulled the girdle over the staple. And so Hunne was hanged. Relying mainly on Joseph’s testimony, the jury in their final verdict concluded that Horsey, Joseph and Spalding, otherwise known as John Bellringer, had indeed broken the neck of Hunne and hung him up by his own girdle.

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The single most important document on the subject of judicial torture by the Church is the decree Ad Extirpanda issued by Pope Innocent IV in 1252

HE VIEW favoured by contemporary opinion and by most modern historians – that Hunne was murdered by church officials – appears persuasive. But the key question is this: why on earth would the Church authorities wish to kill him? First, it appears that the praemunire suit, to be heard in the January term of the court of King’s Bench, was about to fail. If true, Hunne’s untimely death deprived the church of its victory. Second, Bishop Fitzjames and his chancellor already had Hunne in their power because there was enough available evidence against him to secure a conviction on a charge of heresy. Again, the church was robbed of its prey. As Thomas More later pointed out, Horsey had no need to commit murder when he was already in a position to bring Hunne ‘to shame and peradventure to shameful death also’. Indeed, the testimony of witnesses indicates that the chancellor was concerned that Hunne might be tempted to commit suicide after his examination at Fulham. Far from wishing Hunne dead, he took precautions against any attempt at self-harm because he wanted his prisoner kept alive. On the Sunday preceding Hunne’s death Turner, the junior gaoler, was for the first time locked into the prison cell while the inmate ate his dinner and, as a further safeguard, Spalding, when put in charge of the prisoner that same afternoon, was instructed by the chancellor to bring him neither ‘shirt, cap, kerchief or any other thing but that I see it before it come to him’. Why did the bishop and his chancellor want to keep Hunne alive? Surely it was because they believed that Hunne had powerful confederates. Certainly, the merchant taylor was comfortably off, possessing tenements and other property that may have amounted to some £600. But what man, especially a man of business, would sink his wealth into costly – and dangerous – legal actions against the Church? There was not one suit but three, of which the libel and praemunire cases were adjourned time and again, no doubt at great cost to the plaintiff. The expense of

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attorneys, pleadings, writs and other legal fees over several years must have been a heavy burden even for someone in Hunne’s position. Was it credible that a man with a young family and the ambition to expand his business would pour his money away in such a manner? A clue to the church’s suspicions on this score is provided in the testimony of Joseph’s servant, Julian Littel. According to him, Joseph complained that were it not for Hunne’s death ‘I could bring my Lord of London [Fitzjames] to the doors of heretics in London, both of men and women, that be worth £1,000’. At another time he said that he had in mind as potential suspects ‘the best in London’. From this it seems that Joseph had been led to believe that Hunne could be made to expose heretics in high places, which would offer the prospect of hefty summoner’s fees. ALL THIS supports the view that Fitzjames and his chancellor wanted Hunne alive so that he could be interrogated about his supposed confederates and backers. But if Hunne did not commit suicide, as the coroner’s jury proved beyond doubt he could not, and if he was not murdered by Horsey and his junior officials, as seems totally improbable, what happened in Lollards Tower that fateful night? To answer that question it is necessary to look closely at the canon law of torture. The single most important document on the subject of judicial torture by the church is the decree Ad Extirpanda issued by Pope Innocent IV in 1252:

Cuthbert Tunstall, Wolsey’s judicial representative, 17th-century illustration.

In addition, the official or rector should obtain from all heretics he has captured a confession by force without injuring the body or causing the danger of death, for they are indeed thieves and murderers of souls and apostates from the sacraments of God and of the Christian faith. They should confess to their own errors and accuse other heretics whom they know, as well as their accomplices, fellow-believers, receivers, and defenders, just as rogues and thieves [fures et latrones] of worldly goods are made to accuse their accomplices and confess the evils which they had committed. Ad Extirpanda therefore permitted the introduction of torture into the process of investigating heretics, particularly where the objective was to identify the accused’s accomplices. The significance of the language of Ad Extirpanda becomes apparent when viewed in the light of the words used by Joseph in his confession: And when all we came up, we found Hunne lying on his bed. And then Master Chancellor said, Lay hands on the thief! The curious characterisation of the suspect heretic as a ‘thief’ has caused puzzlement among some commentators. But, if Horsey was intending to torture Hunne in accordance with the papal decree Ad Extirpanda, the word thief would be entirely apt and fitting. Indeed, the language

used here provides a crucial clue to what really happened in Lollards Tower. Once it is recognised that Horsey and his two church officers were intent on torturing Hunne, much else falls into place, especially if reference is made to the relevant canon law. After the papal promulgation of 1252 the medieval canon lawyers and jurists developed a richly documented jurisprudence of judicial torture with its own rules, treatises and learned doctors of law. Many of the rules were designed to limit the obvious abuses to which indiscriminate torture could give rise and to protect the rights of the accused.

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Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in a contemporary portrait.

IRST AND FOREMOST torture, being a last resort, can only be used if the truth of the facts cannot be otherwise elicited. This means that if the accused has already confessed or if sufficient credible witnesses have already proved his guilt he cannot then be tortured. Second, there must be ‘half-proof’ against the accused or what we would call probable cause before resort can be had to duress. If these basic principles are applied to the judicial proceedings against Hunne they are found to fit exactly. Hunne was subjected to a preliminary examination in Fulham, where sufficient evidence was produced by his bishop to establish a strong prima facie case against him on a charge of heresy. However, full proof supported by witnesses was not offered. Furthermore, while Hunne submitted himself to his bishop’s correction, thereby conceding the strength of the charges he faced, he made no formal signed confession of his guilt. Here then were the precise circumstances in which torture could be justified in canon law. Other canonical rules are also significant. The interrogating judge (in this case Horsey) must not administer torture by his own hands but through junior officials (generally two). Hence the need for the presence of three men in Lollards Tower; one to preside as judge, another to hold down the accused and the third to administer the torture (Joseph’s role). The torture should not take place on a feast day such as Sunday: Hunne’s ordeal began just after midnight on the Monday morning. Furthermore, the accused must fast for nine or ten hours before torture; hence Horsey’s command on the Sunday, to the effect that Hunne should have no supper that night: And after dinner, when the Bellringer fetched out the boy [Turner] the Bellringer said to the same boy Come no more hither with meat for him [Hunne] until tomorrow at noon, for Master Chancellor hath commanded that he shall have but one meal a day. Finally, according to jurists, the accused should also be warned beforehand of the torture that is planned for him. This would account for an incident that is recorded in the coroner’s report: Moreover, it is well proved that before Hunne’s death the said chancellor came up into the said Lollards Tower and kneeled down before Hunne, holding up his hands to him, praying him of forgiveness for all that he had done to him, and must do to him.

Henry VIII before Parliament early in his reign, from the Wriothesley Garter Book. Wolsey, as Archbishop of York, is to his right wearing a cardinal’s hat.

The circumstantial detail points overwhelmingly to a plan to torture Hunne that went horribly wrong. But how can one reconcile this with Joseph’s apparent confession to DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 15

RICHARD HUNNE examination in Fulham. But Hunne was not permitted to sign a formal confession because this would undermine the canonical case for torture.

murder, made first to his servant, Littel, and later, when under interrogation in the Tower of London. Littel gave testimony as follows:

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Then Charles [Joseph] said to Julian I have destroyed Richard Hunne! Alas, Master, said Julian. How? He was called a honest man! Charles answered, I put a wire in his nose! There are two interesting points to be made about this testimony of Joseph’s servant. First of all, Joseph was not reported to have said that he intended to kill Hunne, only that he had done so by putting a wire up his nose. Second, Littel’s statement shows that Joseph was extremely upset over the killing: he was reported as saying that he would forego £100, if what had happened could be undone. He went on to complain that Hunne’s death had deprived him of the opportunity to turn in other wealthy persons suspected of heresy. For Joseph, Hunne’s death was a disaster. Fitzjames accused Joseph of making a false confession in the Tower. But why would his summoner falsely admit to (joint) murder rather than to administering a form of torture that went wrong? The answer, surely, is simple.

Under canon law someone who tortures an accused party may be held guilty of a capital offence if the victim dies as a consequence. The Church could also be expected to close ranks against the man who directly implemented the torture. On the other hand, by claiming that he and the bishop’s chancellor jointly murdered Hunne he would bring himself under the protection of the Church. After all, the Church authorities could not allow the bishop’s deputy to be convicted of a murder that would cast suspicion on the Bishop of London himself. It is now possible to reconstruct the events that led up to the death of Hunne. Bishop Fitzjames and his chancellor became convinced that Hunne’s apparently single-handed legal assault on the Church was actively backed by other significant figures in the City. They therefore decided to extract from their prisoner, under duress, the identity of his confederates. After Horsey’s expertise in canon law had been called upon, it was decided to establish a prima facie case against the suspect heretic during a preliminary 16 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Prisoners in the stocks in Lollards Tower, from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, 1563.

N SUNDAY December 3rd Horsey, having kneeled before Hunne and prayed forgiveness for what he must do to him, made sure that his prisoner fasted after his midday meal. Because Hunne would by now be aware that something unpleasant was in store, he was subjected to a regime that might today be described as a suicide watch. That evening he was left lying on his bed with his hands bound. Shortly after midnight Joseph and Spalding met up with Horsey and the three of them climbed the stairs of Lollards Tower, their way lit by a single candle. On entering the cell Horsey proclaimed the papal authority for his actions by calling out (in English, for the benefit of his collaborators) ‘Lay hands on the thief’. It was then an easy matter for Joseph to heat a wire in the candle flame and insert it into Hunne’s nose. The three conspirators would have been unaware of elementary medical facts about the circulation of blood and the presence of blood vessels in the upper nasal passages. They must therefore have been shocked when Hunne experienced a catastrophic posterior nasal haemorrhage, the more so as they found themselves powerless to staunch the resulting flow of blood (the tell-tale evidence of this haemorrhage in the hanging corpse was the presence of small streams of blood from both nostrils.) In his weakened condition Hunne, it may be surmised, died of loss of blood: much of it pouring over his clothes and the cell floor but a great deal also being absorbed down his throat. The trauma would be even greater if the wire had pierced the cribriform plate located between the upper nasal passages and the brain. It would probably have taken some time for Hunne to die and the conspirators must have been in a state of panic. The extent of that panic is difficult to exaggerate. To spill blood was a grave canonical sin but to kill a man under torture was unpardonable. It would also be a public relations disaster for the Church, if the truth ever got out. The decision was therefore taken to clear up the blood (some of it missed in the dim candlelight), break Hunne’s neck and then hang him up by his own belt to make it look like suicide. As a final gesture of remorse the conspirators combed the victim’s hair, placed his cap neatly on his head and closed his eyes. They knew they had done him a great wrong and, in a macabre acknowledgement of their fault, they gave Hunne in death a degree of dignity that they had denied him in life.

Richard Dale is an economist and barrister who was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

FURTHER READING Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Clarendon Press, 1989). Richard Dale, ‘The Death of an Alleged Heretic, Richard Hunne (d.1514) Explained’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, vol 15, no 2 (Maney, 2013). Arthur Ogle, The Tragedy of the Lollards Tower (Oxford University Press, 1949).

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 17

| MONARCHS IN THE FRANTIC atmosphere that accompanied the run-up to September 2014’s Scottish referendum, Westminster MPs of all stripes, scrabbling for every possible means to prevent Scotland’s secession from the UK, reached for the nuclear option. A statement from Elizabeth II in support of the union would, they said, ‘make all the difference’. One politician remarked that such a pronouncement would be ‘welcomed’ by the people of both England and Scotland, adding that ‘I don’t think it would be improper’. Royal sources disagreed, gently deprecating the possibility and stressing that even suggesting that the Queen could intervene was to misunderstand her constitutional role: she would always remain neutral and could not possibly take sides. Four days before the referendum, after attending her usual Sunday morning service at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral, the Queen’s pronouncement came as a moment of carefully choreographed spontaneity. The pack of waiting journalists – normally kept at a safe, 200-yard distance – was beckoned closer by a police sergeant as the Queen, instead of passing the small crowd of royal-watchers outside the church, stopped and exchanged some brief words with a few of them (equal numbers Scottish and English, it was noted). ‘She was lovely’, gushed one lady, ‘and she hoped everybody would think very carefully about the referendum this week.’ Elizabeth’s off-the-cuff remark immediately became front-page news: ‘Queen’s stark warning over Scottish independence vote.’ Yet the moment itself took on a curiously unreal quality. What the Queen had actually said remained unclear, while the reported source – the lady quoted had ‘asked not to be named’ – faded out of the picture. Asked to comment, palace adThomas Penn and his colleagues have embarked on a project visors demurred, saying that they would never talk about a private exchange and that, if the to publish a series of short biographies of England’s and, Queen had said anything, it had been ‘completesubsequently, Britain’s monarchs. Why is the study of kings ly spontaneous’ and ‘in response to a remark and queens still relevant in our less than deferential age? from the crowd’. As the details evaporated, the episode took on its own momentum: less a personal intervention on the Queen’s part than the Boy king: Edward collective expression of a desperate nation’s hopes. aura of ancient permanence that allowed government, in VI aged nine, in The British monarchy is an institution that retains its shadows, to get on with the business of evolving and an anonymous enormous power, even if for centuries that power has modernising. Bagehot’s conclusion, that Britain was ‘a monportrait of 1547. been largely symbolic. In the words of the Victorian archy disguised as a republic’, was one that the 15th-century journalist and constitutionalist Walter Bagehot, the jurist Sir John Fortescue, seeking a solution to the cataCrown’s pomp and circumstance act as a visual symbol strophic inanities of Henry VI’s reign four centuries before of national unity, exerting an ‘imaginative attraction’ Bagehot wrote, might have recognised. on people’s minds. It was, presumably, this precise In the eyes of unswerving republicans, all this is anathquality that Westminster’s MPs were trying to invoke in ema. For them, Bagehot’s ‘ancient and ever-altering contheir efforts to involve the Queen in the referendum of stitution’ is responsible for the perpetuation of an antique September 2014. Monarchy, Bagehot added, makes for a ruling structure that has retarded the emergence of a truly ‘deferential community’, a people dazzled by the ‘mystic modern national identity; responsible, too, as Tom Nairn awe’ of their sovereign. But such symbolic powers, has dyspeptically (and hilariously) detailed, for a national he noted, had a very real purpose: it was the Crown’s culture of servility and grovelling, especially when, ‘in the

Portraits of Power

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physical proximity of a royal person, dream and reality dissolve in a hopeless mix-up’. But even the likes of Nairn, when examining the nature of the British state, find that they can hardly relegate monarchy to the margins: indeed, they are constrained to place it at the centre of the picture. King in all but name These are just some of the reasons why the new Penguin Monarchs series seems particularly germane. It comprises 45 mini-biographies, from Athelstan, first ‘king of the English’ to Elizabeth II (and including that frustrated monarch, Oliver Cromwell, who was forced to take on only the trappings of kingship after his own army officers threatened to shoot him in the head, if he accepted the Crown itself). Bringing together some of the country’s most acclaimed historians and talented new writers, we asked them to tackle their monarch in 25,000 words – whether it be the vast bulk of Henry VIII, or his son Edward VI, who died at the age of 15 having spent his slight six years on the throne growing up in the shadow of factional intrigue. In the preface to his biography of Charles I, Mark Kishlansky sums up the challenge perfectly. The prospect of distilling Charles – ‘with whom I have lived more years than I care to remember’ – was, he writes, ‘terrifying’, in that it forced him to think afresh about his subject, with both an ‘economy of style and an economy of perspective’. The first five Penguin Monarchs, published this December, recast their subjects in a new and unexpected light, giving the reader an entry point into a life, a reign and an age. Stephen Alford reminds us that of all the Tudor monarchs, it was only Edward VI, Henry VIII’s long-awaited son and heir, who was ‘ever expected at birth to rule’ and reveals a boy king whose voice developed a ‘true kingly register’ and who kept his own private chronicle. At the other extreme, in 1936 the future George VI reacted to the news of his playboy brother Edward VIII’s abdication with horror: ‘That’s a dreadful thing to hear. None of us wants that, I least of all.’ Inarticulate, stammering and with an aversion to appearing in public, he nevertheless gritted his teeth and got on with the business of being king through the war years. So ‘extraordinary in his ordinariness’ was he, writes Philip Ziegler, that his daughter, Elizabeth II, inherited from him a throne ‘as secure as any in the world’. But, of course, and as David Cannadine emphasises in his George V, the king has two bodies: the monarch is not just an individual but an institution, ‘temporarily embodied in one particular sovereign’. Taken together, these 45 biographies will trace the story – sometimes evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary – of England’s, then Britain’s monarchy, revealing the impact of individual agency (or lack of it) through periods of strength and intense vulnerability; underscoring the randomness of dynastic succession (clearly illustrated in these first five lives, four of whom, as younger sons, were never supposed to inherit the throne); and illuminating the Crown’s age-old and often tensionladen relationship with Parliament and with the laws of

The monarchy is an institution that retains enormous power, even if for centuries it has been largely symbolic

On the Website

A Guide to British Monarchs

www.historytoday.com/ monarchs

England, by which, as Sir John Fortescue was among the earliest to stress, the monarchy was bound. All this is evident in the lives of the two monarchs that bookend the high watermark of English royal supremacy: Henry VIII and Charles I, both of whom believed that their will was law and who attempted to enforce that will in very different ways. As John Guy shows, Henry VIII, in his quest for fame, used Parliament and the courts to achieve his break with Rome, dissolve the monasteries, make himself supreme head of the English Church and turn England into an empire. A century later, Parliament was rather less complaisant and rather more powerful when Charles I – constantly impecunious, carrying the whiff of Catholicism and possessed of the belief that kingliness was next to godliness – attempted to rule more or less by decree. In 1642 he remarked querulously that Parliament had ‘taken the government all in pieces and I may say it is almost off the hinges’. That same year England dissolved into civil war and Charles became a factional leader, at war with Parliament and his own people. Almost 50 years later, following regicide, republic and restoration, Parliament issued its response to Stuart absolutism: the 1689 Bill of Rights, which set England and Britain on the path of constitutional monarchy. Collective dream Since that time the monarchy has at times struggled to retain its relevance and its political neutrality. David Cannadine notes how Bagehot, despite his best efforts, could not really articulate what powers the Crown actually exerted and, into the bargain, described Queen Victoria and her heir, Edward VII, in distinctly secular terms as a ‘retired widow and an unemployed youth’. Bagehot’s irreverence echoed the spirit of the age: in the following decade the statesman Joseph Chamberlain confidently predicted that for the British state ‘the republic must come’. Some half-century on, as Cannadine recounts, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith returned from a summer visit to George V at Balmoral complaining that the place ‘reeks of Toryism’. However, that same king, though fighting against the dying of the imperial light – ‘Remember, Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire’, he admonished the Indian rebel leader in 1932 – was also remarkably successful in co-opting the first Labour government into ‘the culture and processes of the British constitution’, a position from which Labour has subsequently scarcely deviated. Today the monarchy remains at the heart of the British constitution and of the ‘collective dream’ of English and British nationhood, as it has been for well over a thousand years. As well as delighting and surprising readers, we hope that Penguin Monarchs will enable them to think afresh about the history and the continued significance of this national institution.

Thomas Penn is the author of Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Penguin, 2012). The first five books in the Penguin Monarchs series are published by Allen Lane on December 4th. DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 19

More than Child’s 20 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

WAR TOYS

Do war toys encourage violent behaviour and make conflict more acceptable? Or do they offer genuine insight into military history? Philip Kirby, Sean Carter and Tara Woodyer examine the evidence.

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Play?

Left: Playing with toy soldiers in the uniforms of the American Civil War, 1961. Top: a British advertisement for ‘Hamley’s Patriotic Mascot Figures’, 1915.

WRITER all but forgotten today, E.J. Hawley, published a short story in 1902, The Toy Soldier: A Children’s Peace Story. In the tale, an aunt comes across her nephew, Bertie, playing with a toy British soldier and an enemy Boer. Bertie delights in imagining the former killing the latter, reflecting a patriotism that had reached its zenith with the mass celebration following the Relief of Mafeking two years earlier. That victory in the Boer War, which challenged perceptions of Britain’s status as the world’s most powerful country, had made a hero of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement. In the story Bertie creates his own imperial hero, valiantly protecting the British Empire from its foes. To complete the scene, Bertie insists on burying the fallen Boer. His aunt agrees to play along, but only if she can appear as ‘pastor’ at the funeral. Bertie agrees and his aunt eulogises, reminding her nephew of the Boer’s humanity by providing the latter with a touching back story: This man, whom we have just buried, lived in a farmhouse on the veldt. He was a very good husband and father. All his children loved him very much. When he went away to the war his little girl threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight, and said she hated war because it took father away. Then her mother cried, and said she hoped father would come back again for, if not, who was to see to the farm, and get food for the children to eat? The eldest boy, who was named Bertie, after an English man who had been kind to the farmer, stood very quiet and still, and when his turn came to say ‘good-bye’, he clenched his little hand and vowed that if ever he became a man he would not let people fight. DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 21

WAR TOYS Later that evening, Bertie, profoundly affected by his aunt’s words, asks whether the Boer can be brought back to life and returned to his loving family. And, because this is a game, he can. Just over a decade later, in 1914, and with another, far more catastrophic conflict on the horizon, the National Peace Council published a letter in a London morning newspaper. Quoted in Antonia Fraser’s A History of Toys (1966), the Council argued that ‘there are grave objections to presenting our boys with regiments of fighting men, batteries of guns, and squadrons of Dreadnoughts [battleships]’. To counter this: At the Children’s Welfare Exhibition [held in London’s Olympia Exhibition Hall], the Peace Council will make an alternative suggestion to parents in the shape of an exhibition of ‘peace toys’. In front of a specially-painted representation of the Peace Palace at the Hague will be grouped, not miniature soldiers but miniature civilians, not guns but ploughs and the tools of industry … Boys, the Council admits, naturally love fighting and all the panoply of war … but that is no reason for encouraging, and perhaps giving permanent form to, their primitive instincts. Action Man figures in a range of British and German uniforms of the Second World War, 1970s.

There is little record today of how contemporary readers reacted to either Hawley’s story or the Council’s request, but a few years later the latter was mocked in a short story by the English satirist, Saki (H.H. Munro). In his story, The Toys of Peace (1919), an uncle presents his nephews

22 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

with miniature models of the utilitarian philosopher and reformer John Stuart Mill, municipal dustbins and the Manchester branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, all in an effort to instil civic, rather than military virtues. Left to their own devices, however, the children soon circumvent their uncle’s noble intentions. The dustbins are punctured to accommodate cannon, Mill becomes Maurice de Saxe – the 18th century marshal general of France, whom the children have recently learnt about at school – and the Young Women’s Christian Association is the scene of a bloodbath, in which a hundred of the women are killed and the rest enslaved by Louis XIV. The experiment has failed, bemoans the uncle to his sister: ‘We have begun too late.’ Saki’s satire, though, was tragically ironic. By the time of its publication, the author was dead: having refused a commission, he served in the ranks and was killed by a sniper at the Somme in 1916. The debate between Saki and the Peace Council, however, endured. It was, in many ways, the first episode in a series of moral panics that have defined the ‘war play’ debate for the last hundred years. At various intervals, from the First World War to Vietnam to the War on Terror, questions have been asked of the effect that violent games have on the minds of (most frequently) young boys. Does violent play prefigure violent lives? Do toy guns eventually become real guns? Perhaps less drastically, does war play teach children military history in particular kinds of ways?

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GI Joe figures in US navy and army uniforms, 1960s.

NE WAY TO approach this history, at least that of the latter part of the 20th century, is through GI Joe, the action figure known in the UK as Action Man and one of the most successful toys of all time. Introduced in the US in 1964 and in the UK two years later, its history mirrors that of mid-to-late 20th century western military conflicts. At first, both versions were based upon Second World War troops; GI Joe represented the four branches of the US armed forces – the army, airforce, navy and marines – and Action Man appeared in regular army-cut denim. Later, other uniforms were introduced, as US and UK forces engaged in differing conflicts around the globe. Perhaps the most clear-cut link to a contemporary military operation was Action Man’s SAS outfit, introduced just four months after the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege, when the Special Air Service shifted from the shadows into the full glare of publicity. John Newsinger, the author of Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (1997), has traced the contribution of the mainstream media in forming the widespread image of the SAS. The Action Man incarnation, for children especially, was part of this process. Bob Brechin, the chief designer at Palitoy (the makers of Action Man), has also spoken of the intersection between his product and contemporary geopolitics. Brechin suggests that one of the reasons why the Falklands War of 1982 never featured in Action Man’s final years was because of the recentness of that conflict and the well-publicised deaths of British servicemen in the campaign. In this way, the SAS was a safer commercial bet, because its exploits at the Iranian Embassy had been extremely successful and had resulted in no (British) deaths. The same was true of the Second World War, the ‘good war’, which continually provided Action Man with commercially successful outfits and paraphernalia. In Brechin’s opinion, at least part of the popularity of this range came from the fact that the Second World War has been sustained in the popular consciousness in a variety of ways: from films, to television series, to books. It provides a set of durable stories from which producers of such media can draw, knowing that their productions will find a receptive audience.

T Action Man in a Special Air Service outfit released following the Iranian Embassy siege of 1980.

HERE IS ALSO evidence that Action Man taught young boys about war in particular ways. Men who later joined the British army have reflected that one of the ways in which they were introduced to this career path was through play with Action Man. The detail of the early models is also one of the reasons that they are so popular among collectors today; they depicted accurately everything from uniforms, to medals, to the exact weapons that soldiers, during particular eras, would have carried. It is well established that one of the earliest ways children come to understand the world is through play and in this way toys like Action Man are crucial in developing knowledge of war, nationalism and the military. From personal experience, Airfix models have served as introductions to topics as diverse as the Korean War (MIG fighter-jet), the Tudors (the Mary Rose) and, especially, the Second World War (an assortment of soldiers and planes). Playing with British- and US-themed Action Man models also taught much about who the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ of international politics were (and they were always ‘guys’ not ‘girls’). DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 23

WAR TOYS

Classic Airfix model kits of Second World War planes: Curtis Helldiver (above) and a Spitfire.

Across the Atlantic, GI Joe was also seeing a shift in his military credentials around the same time as Action Man was being re-evaluated in the wake of the Iranian Embassy siege. The large and vociferous anti-Vietnam peace movement had adversely affected GI Joe’s sales during the 1970s, as much of the US became disillusioned with conflict and its devastating effect on young lives. To combat this ennui, the designers of GI Joe introduced a more action-orientated range, which dispensed with the figure’s military characteristics in favour of a new ‘Adventure-Team’ approach. This included, among other outfits, a scuba costume, with which the more pacifistic figurine could explore the oceans, harming no one in the process (except the occasional shark). The message was clear: there were plenty of ways to keep young boys entertained, ways that did not require violence. The Adventure-Team range, though, was a commercial failure and within a few years Hasbro, GI Joe’s makers, had reintroduced more militaristic qualities to the toys, including new uniforms and weapons. Perhaps, as Saki said, they had started too late; children were already accustomed to the more militaristic version of GI Joe. And G. Wayne Miller, in Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between GI Joe, Barbie and the Companies that Make Them (1998), has mapped this shift onto the presidential administrations of the time. 24 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

For him, the figure was altered in direct response to the Reagan era, losing the pacific qualities it possessed under the less belligerent policies of Jimmy Carter and becoming more bellicose as Reagan dramatically expanded Cold War military programmes, such as the ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system. We might recall here, too, Reagan’s stated ambition to rid the US of its ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, a broad, public malaise toward future wars, triggered by the massive unpopularity of that previous conflict. GI Joe and other military toys were one way in which the syndrome played out.

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HERE IS AN interesting comparison to be made here with perhaps the most famous children’s toy of all – and certainly one of the most commercially successful – Lego. Founded in Denmark in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen, Lego has always attempted to adhere to the principles of pacifism. To this day Lego refuses to produce models of contemporary military hardware. Unlike the GI Joe and Action Man ranges, there are no Lego tanks, warplanes or modern weapons and one of the earliest incarnations of the toy even attempted to teach children about traffic safety. In recent years this rule has been somewhat relaxed and Lego ranges related to cinema tie-ins such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Lone Ranger have

Lego’s war toys are futuristic or fantasy based: a Galaxy Squad Bug Obliterator (left); a Galaxy Squad Galactic Titan (top); a Mindstorms robot (right).

all been released. Toys in these ranges come replete with blasters, swords and revolvers, respectively, but these are fantasy and/or historical weapons, rather than contemporary armaments. The Lego policeman, for example, despite being modelled on US officers (who are armed), carries no weapon; rather, he possesses only an identification badge and a pair of handcuffs. Perhaps sensing an opportunity in the market, the British-based toy designer, Character Group, has recently introduced a Lego-compatible range of toys of their own. Designed in conjunction with Her Majesty’s Armed Forces (HMAF), these include miniature rocket launchers, combat vehicles and artillery and are modelled on actual soldiers and materiel employed in the theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of the controversies that have surrounded this range, though, perhaps explain one of the reasons why Lego have been reticent to replicate existing military hardware in its product lines. In 2012 Character introduced the ‘RAF Reaper Aircraft & Remote Pilot’, which consists of a Reaper drone and ground-control station. We might recall here, too, Airfix’s model of a ruined ‘Afghan

To this day Lego refuses to produce models of contemporary military hardware

Single Storey Dwelling’ (presumably wrecked by Coalition bombardment). It is perhaps an oversimplification to suggest that, because these toys are inspired by these wars, they necessarily naturalise the same for children. Such an assertion ignores the fact that children do not necessarily play with toys as intended. While children may militarise non-military toys, as Saki suggested, the reverse is also true. In this way, future research might approach children’s ‘war’ play ethnographically, to understand not just some of the messages that are being relayed by certain toys, but how children actually play with them. Building upon the historical success of Action Man, Character has also introduced an action figure based upon serving British soldiers. These can be bought in a variety of uniforms, from standard infantryman, to commando, to paratrooper. A selection of vehicles can be acquired, too, including an attack helicopter, fast-pursuit battle tank and 105mm field gun. Again, given the reticence of Action Man’s designers to engage with contemporary conflicts such as the Falklands, it is perhaps surprising that this range has been released (and to some commercial success). But what does this trend mean? Has militarism expanded in Britain in recent years? Perhaps, as the ‘Help for Heroes’ charity and the widespread media coverage DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 25

WAR TOYS COMPUTER GAMES have perhaps a particular ability to educate indirectly on matters of war and geopolitics. This is because their ‘universes’ can be extremely detailed; unlike traditional toy soldiers, they leave little to the imagination. More than with any other medium, computer games provide the player with the feeling of actually ‘being there’. One of the most popular Second World War-themed games, Medal of Honor (which runs to 12 instalments), allows players to cycle through a myriad of different weapons – from Browning rifles, to Thompson submachine guns, to Webley revolvers – and campaigns – from Pearl Harbor, to D-Day, to the Battle of the Bulge – with a level of detail impossible for all but the most ardent collector of material toy soldiers and weapons-enthusiasts of the Second World War. Moreover, special attention is paid to ensuring that the weapons not only look, but also sound exactly as they would have done during the 1940s. It is this immersive quality that perhaps inculcates war more deeply in the minds of those that play such games. While they are mostly targeted at teenagers and young adults (the Call of Duty series is rated for 16-year-olds and above), younger children often play such games.

A Daily Mirror cartoon of December 1917 comments upon the way in which war toys adapt to the realities of conflict.

of Royal Wootton Bassett repatriation ceremonies attest. Perhaps, too, realistic conflict has simply become more accepted in children’s culture. Contemporary video games contain a graphic and immersive realisation of war previously unattainable. THE LABOUR MP Keith Vaz sponsored an Early Day Motion in the UK Parliament in 2012 to ‘provide for closer scrutiny of aggressive first-person shooter video games’. He was reacting, in part, to the claims of Anders Breivik, the far-right fanatic who murdered 77 of his fellow Norwegians in 2011. Breivik claimed that, before his killing spree, he had trained on the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, using the game to, in his words, ‘develop target acquisition’. This instalment in the Call of Duty series was also controversial for other reasons, featuring, as it did, a mission that necessitated the player murdering several hostages, an action that maintained, for the purposes of the game, the cover of a double agent. While the mission could be skipped without penalty, there was no way for the mission itself to be completed without killing the civilians. Games, of course, have always, intentionally or otherwise, promoted war and violence. Chess is an abstract representation of a battlefield that has been used to teach military strategy for centuries. Originating in India around the sixth century, chess was based upon an earlier game of strategy called chaturanga, a Sanskrit word for battle formation first mentioned in the Indian epic poem, Mahabharata. From its beginning chess was entwined with martial practice, being both a form of entertainment and a didactic tool for teaching battle tactics (centuries later Peter the Great would take chess sets on his military campaigns). More recently, the game has been entwined with conflict in other ways. During the Cold War, in 1972, the ‘match of the century’, which took place in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik between the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky and the United States’ Bobby Fischer, served as a proxy for the wider ideological clash between the superpowers. Fischer triumphed, having been persuaded to compete by, among others, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. 26 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

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HIS ASPECT OF the debate over the interface between virtual and actual warfare was crystallised by one of the more famous soldiers of recent years: Prince Harry of Wales. Returning from a three month deployment in Afghanistan in late January, 2013, the prince was asked for his reflections upon his experiences as an Apache helicopter pilot. In a series of interviews he spoke of his satisfaction at being on active duty. In particular he cited his ability to play computer games as an

Boris Spassky (left) and Bobby Fischer contest a virtual Cold War, Reykjavik, 1972.

advantage in the fighting that he had undertaken: ‘I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs [on the trigger] I like to think that I’m probably quite useful.’ He then continued to say that, if the Taliban were a threat to him or his comrades, he would have no hesitation in taking them ‘out of the game’. The prince’s reference was hardly novel; the British army itself has endorsed the kind of connection that he made.

More than with any other medium, computer games provide the player with the feeling of actually ‘being there’ In 2009 it introduced a recruiting campaign called ‘Start Thinking Soldier’, which involved playing through a set of virtual missions to see whether one had the ‘right stuff’ to enlist in the armed forces. This followed a similar approach in the US, where the military introduced a recruitment tool, ‘America’s Army’, which required comparable actions from its users. The principle demographic targeted by military recruiters is also, of course, the leading consumer of computer games, which makes this strategy logical. That the controls of Apache helicopters and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are broadly similar to those of, among other consoles, the PlayStation (indeed, the former are often designed with this in mind), only makes this overlap more useful to western militaries.

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OMPARED TO GAMES LIKE CHESS, though, what is notable about virtual games is how they create hyper-realistic worlds. As the geographer Derek Gregory has suggested: ‘Video games do not stage violence as passive spectacle; they are profoundly immersive, drawing players in to their virtual worlds.’ Apache helicopters, such as Prince Harry’s, recreate just such an experience, with a zoomed video display of the target and controls akin to a games console. The prince’s comparison of war with computer games, then, might be read less as a

A screen shot from Call of Duty: Black Ops highlights the immersive, graphic quality of the modern video war game.

suggestion that western soldiers are becoming increasingly divorced from fighting (although this may be true, too) and more as evidence that the experience of computer games is perhaps being replicated by militaries to facilitate easier and simpler killing of increasingly distanced enemies. We have come a long way from E.J. Hawley and the attempt to humanise the little toy Boer, but the subject of war toys is no less emotive. With the advent of digital games, the issues addressed here will continue to increase in complexity. Philip Kirby is Associate Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Exeter, where Sean Carter is Senior Lecturer in Geography. Tara Woodyer is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Portsmouth. For more on the team’s project, a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth and the University of Exeter funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, see www.ludicgeopolitics.wordpress.com

FURTHER READING Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (Hamlyn, 1966). G. Wayne Miller, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between GI Joe, Barbie and the Companies that Make Them (Time, 1998). Saki, The Complete Short Stories (Penguin Classics, 2000). DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 27

InFocus

A Distant Corner of the Eastern Front, 1914

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WO JEWS stand disconsolately among the ashes of wooden houses burnt to the ground in their Galician town in 1914, only brick chimney stacks left standing. The photograph was probably taken in August or September during or shortly after what was known as the Battle of Galicia, which ended in a crushing Russian victory over the Austro-Hungarians. Today, many would be hard put to say where Galicia was – find Krakow and let your finger run eastwards across the map to Tarnopol (Ternopil). Until 1772 it was in southern Poland, but when Prussia, Russia and Austria set about partitioning that country, it fell to Austria, becoming the northernmost province of its empire. After the dual monarchy of AustriaHungary was established in 1867, Galicia came under the part administered by Austria, though bordering on Hungary to the south. There seem to have been larger numbers of Poles than of Ruthenes – Catholic Ukrainians, as distinct from the Orthodox Ukrainians of the Russian empire – and about 12 per cent of the population were Jews. It was the most populous and the poorest province of Austria, probably also in Europe as a whole. Unsurprisingly, there was mass emigration to Vienna, the US, Canada and Brazil from the 1880s; surprisingly, the Austrians allowed Galicia a good measure of autonomy, not enforcing the speaking of German, allowing a local assembly and administration, though not encouraging investment or industry.

For Galicia’s Jews the arrival of the Russian soldiery was a disaster, since they came with the tradition of the pogrom Jews were emancipated in 1867, so gaining the right to own land and the lifting of restrictions on what occupations they could follow. By 1914 one fifth of large Galician estates were Jewish-owned. The Polish intelligentsia and landowners were in the ascendant and the Jews were aligned with them, not the Ukrainians, at least until 1900 when Polish antisemitism began to grow, while the Ukrainians got less Russophile. The Austrians made a fundamental strategic error in 1914 by committing 19 divisions to an attack on Serbia, when they should have been concentrating on the threat from Russia in Galicia. The first Russian thrusts there were thrown back amid widespread confusion and incompetence on both sides. But by September there were 35 Russian divisions facing 20 Austrian; Russian victory was assured when the eastern Galician city of Lemberg (or Lvov, Lviv or Lwow) fell on September 10th. There were 324,000 Austrian casualties, including much of the professional officer corps, and 130,000 prisoners, with many Austrian soldiers of Slav origin happy to surrender. Przemsyl 28 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

was the last Austrian stronghold, only falling the following March, with the surrender of a further 117,000 men. The Austrian army never recovered from these blows. Russia may also have lost a quarter of a million men but had much greater reserves of manpower and the victory in Galicia softened the massive blow it had received at the same time from the Germans at Tannenberg and then at the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia. For Galicia’s Jews the arrival of the Russian soldiery was

a disaster, since they came with the tradition of the pogrom firmly embedded among them. Tens of thousands of Jews became refugees, trying to escape murder, rape and pillage. The days when they had helped the Poles to run Galicia, managing their estates, inns, distilleries, breweries, mills and saw mills, were over and did not return in 1918. After a brief war with the short-lived Ukrainian republic, re-emergent Poland took back Galicia. But this was an increasingly antisemitic Poland, with Jews banned from holding govern-

ment posts and their chances of education restricted. What followed after 1939 needs no retelling. And what of Galicia today? Radek Sikorski, Poland’s former foreign minister, reports that in 2008 President Putin suggested to Poland that ‘Ukraine is an artificial country and Lwow is a Polish city and why don’t we just sort it out together?’ The Poles made it clear to the Russians: ‘We wanted nothing to do with this.’

ROGER HUDSON

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 29

WARTIME COLLABORATION

Stepan Bandera as a student in Stryy, Ukraine alongside his graduation certificate.

Collaborator.

(No longer a dirty word?) The crisis in Ukraine has revealed to the world the divisions that exist throughout Europe about how the Second World War is remembered. Gareth Pritchard and Desislava Gancheva look at the controversial debate around wartime collaboration.

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CROSS SWATHES of Europe a sustained campaign is now being waged to rehabilitate the memory of individuals and organisations who, during the Second World War, collaborated with the forces of Nazi Germany. This has led to bitter controversies, sometimes between states, sometimes between different political and ethnic groups within states. The rehabilitation of collaborators and war criminals is closely connected to the rise in popularity of extreme nationalist parties, but in some countries it has become a mainstream phenomenon, embraced by governments. It is also linked to the growth of racism and antisemitism in Europe.

The country in which debates about the memory of wartime collaboration are currently most contentious is Ukraine. The most prominent collaborator at the heart of these debates is Stepan Bandera. During the 1940s Bandera was the leader of a radical nationalist party called the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Until 1941 he worked closely with the Nazis, but then fell out favour with them shortly after the German invasion of Ukraine. After putting him in a concentration camp for three years, the Nazis renewed their alliance with Bandera in 1944. He survived the war and was eventually killed by KGB agents in Munich in 1959. DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 31

WARTIME COLLABORATION

Above: A monument to Stepan Bandera is unveiled in Lviv, Ukraine. Above right: Ukrainians, dressed in the uniform of the Galician SS, mark the 70th anniversary of the division’s founding, July 21st, 2013.

Galician volunteers of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, c.1943.

In recent years, Bandera has become a rallying symbol for Ukrainian nationalists. In 2010 the then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, awarded Bandera the title ‘Hero of the Ukraine’. He was stripped of the title by Yushchenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Nonetheless, numerous statues of Bandera have been erected in western Ukraine. Every year, on January 1st, a torchlit parade is held in Kiev to celebrate Bandera’s birthday and in 2014 the event was attended by approximately 15,000 people. There have even been attempts to rename Lviv International Airport in Bandera’s honour.

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EFORE 2014 Bandera was little known in the West, but the current crisis in Ukraine has changed that. During the ‘Maidan’ protest movement that toppled Yanukovych, one of the most prominent faces on the demonstrations that took place in Kiev and other cities in western Ukraine was that of Bandera. Photographs and pictures of him were carried frequently by anti-Yanukovych protestors. After taking control of the city hall in Kiev, the demonstrators hung a giant portrait of Bandera in the columned central hall of the building. Bandera is just one of several controversial individuals and organisations whose memory is celebrated by Ukrainian nationalists. During the protests of January and February

32 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

The rehabilitation in Ukraine of Bandera, the OUN, the UPA and the Galician SS Division is part of a much wider phenomenon 2014, the crowds rallied behind the flags and slogans of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). During the Second World War the UPA fought against both the occupying Germans and pro-Soviet partisans and then against the Red Army. The UPA also participated in ethnic cleansing and the mass killings of civilians, above all of Jews and Poles. Some Ukrainian nationalists also celebrate the memory of the Galician Division of the Waffen SS, which was established in 1943, units of which also participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles. Stepan Bandera, the fighters of the UPA and the soldiers of the Galician Division are not seen as heroes by all Ukrainians. Particularly in the Russophone eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, Bandera and other wartime Ukrainian nationalists are regarded as collaborators who murdered thousands of Soviet citizens. The fact that some nationalists in Kiev and western Ukraine openly celebrate his memory is one of the reasons why the post-Yanukovych authorities are viewed with hostility by some people in the Russophone regions. Pro-Russian activists frequently denounce the Ukrainian nationalists as ‘fascists’ and ‘Banderites’. Conflicting attitudes to the war are also an important reason for the tensions between the post-Yanukovych regime in Kiev and the Russian government. Most Russians still refer to the Second World War as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and see it as a war of liberation against the Nazi invaders. The memory of the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens who perished during the war and, in particular, the eight to 13 million Red Army soldiers who were killed, remains sacrosanct. From the point of view of most Russians, Stepan Bandera was a fascist collaborator and the public celebration of his memory is regarded as deeply offensive.

Duce had not been as entirely bad as the history books would have us believe. There have also been local controversies on the issue of the Fascist past. In August 2012 a publicly funded mausoleum was opened in Affile near Rome to the memory of Rodolfo Graziani, the Fascist commander. In 2013 the municipal authorities in Brescia decided to restore a Fascist-era statue to its original position. All such attempts to normalise the Fascist past have been denounced by liberal and left-wing politicians, Holocaust survivors and veterans of the Italian partisan movement.

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The rehabilitation in Ukraine of Bandera, the OUN, the UPA and the Galician SS Division is part of a much wider phenomenon. In Belgium, for example, the rehabilitation of Flemish wartime collaborators was always a demand popular on the extreme fringes of the Flemish nationalist movement. In 2011, however, all the mainstream Flemish parties – with the sole exception of the Flemish Greens – supported a motion advocating an amnesty for those who collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of 1940-44. This did not go down well with French-speaking Walloons and their political representatives, who still regard those who collaborated with the Nazis as fascists and traitors. In Italy some politicians, of whom Silvio Berlusconi is most prominent, have long advocated what they consider a more ‘balanced’ view of the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. In January 2013 there was a high-profile controversy after Berlusconi made a speech in which he said that the

‘For the Motherland, For Honour, For Freedom’, a Soviet propaganda poster of 1941.

TTEMPTS TO RESTORE the public reputation of wartime collaborators are particularly common in the former Communist countries of East-Central Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic. In Latvia, for example, an annual parade is held on March 16th to commemorate the Latvian Legion of the Waffen SS. Though the parade is not an official event, it has been attended by members of the Latvian parliament. In 2012 the President of Latvia, Andris Bērziņš, publicly defended the annual parade. Similar events are held in the two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania. In all three, such commemorations have led to political controversy. Jewish groups have vigorously protested against the celebration of military units that included many men who, before they joined the Waffen SS, were members of nationalist militias that carried out massacres of Jews. Ethnic Russians who live in the Baltic states have also condemned the rehabilitation of collaborators and there have been sharp diplomatic protests from the Kremlin. In Slovakia, the figure at the heart of controversies about the Second World War is Jozef Tiso. A Roman Catholic priest who led a puppet government in Bratislava from 1939 to 1945, Tiso was responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to the Nazi death camps. Tiso is viewed with sympathy, even enthusiasm, by many Slovak nationalists. In November 2013 an open admirer of Tiso, Marian Kotleba, became regional governor of the province of Banská Bystrica, after winning 55 per cent of the vote. In 2008 the then Archbishop of Trvana, Ján Sokol, held a mass to commemorate Tiso. Attempts have been made to raise money to turn Tiso’s birthplace into a museum and to erect other public monuments in his honour. But Tiso’s memory is deeply controversial. The campaign to rehabilitate Tiso is viewed with repugnance by members of Slovakia’s Jewish, Hungarian and Roma minorities, as well as left-wing and liberal Slovaks. APART FROM UKRAINE, the country in which the rehabilitation of such figures has gone furthest is Hungary. The man whose reputation is at the centre of this process is Miklós Horthy. From March 1920 to October 1944 Admiral Horthy was the self-styled ‘regent’ of Hungary and the dominant figure in Hungarian politics. An authoritarian DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 33

WARTIME COLLABORATION Left: Italian foreign minister Count Ciano (left) dines with Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy after a deer shoot at GödöllŐ, Hungary, December 1938. Below: a German army newspaper featuring Mussolini and Rodolfo Graziani, 1943.

nationalist, Horthy imposed a brutal ‘white terror’ on socialists and communists. He was also a virulent antisemite; in September 1920 Horthy’s regime introduced restrictions on the number of Jewish students allowed into universities, Europe’s first piece of antisemitic legislation in the interwar period. Further anti-Jewish laws followed in 1938 and 1939. During the war Horthy was an ally of Hitler and Hungarian troops participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union. In March 1944 Hungary was occupied by the German army but Horthy remained in power. By October 1944, when Horthy was deposed, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to the death camps with the active support of the Hungarian state. In recent years vigorous efforts have been made to portray Horthy as a patriot and a wise statesman, who led Hungary through a difficult period in its history. One of the main groups that is set on rehabilitating him is the extreme nationalist political party, Jobbik. Since 2010, however, Horthy’s most powerful patron has been the right-wing government of Victor Orbán. As Nora Berend noted in History Today in March 2014, Orbán has thrown the weight of the Hungarian state behind a systematic campaign to manipulate history in order ‘to strengthen the ties of national belonging’. Central to this campaign is the rehabilitation of Horthy. Statues of him have been erected in Budapest, Csókakő, Kereki and elsewhere. In 2012 the main square of a town near Budapest was renamed in his honour. The work of Horthy-era writers, including the fascist and war criminal József Nyírő, has

been incorporated into the school curriculum. In the official discourse of the Hungarian government, the role of Horthy and of the Hungarian state in the persecution and deportation of Jews is downplayed, while the ‘victimhood’ of Hungary is stressed. Though Orbán’s doctored version of Hungary’s history is popular with sections of the public, it is also deeply divisive. There was a clash between the Hungarian and Romanian governments over plans to bury the remains of József Nyírő near the town of his birth, Jimbor, which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary but is now located inside the borders of Romania. Jewish organisations, including the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, have condemned Orbán’s historical revisionism, which they see as closely connected to the rise of antisemitism in Hungary. High-profile figures in the arts have also made their feelings known. Imre Kertész, the Nobel prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor, has taken a strong public stance against Orbán’s revision of Hungarian history. As a result, Kertész has been vilified by Hungarian nationalists. Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, returned an award that had been given to him by the Hungarian state as a protest against what he sees as the ‘white-washing of a tragic and criminal episode in Hungary’s past’. The historian Randolph L. Braham, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust in Hungary, has also strongly condemned the Hungarian government’s ‘cowardly attempt to detract attention from the Horthy regime’s involvement in the destruction of the Jews’. There are several factors that explain the growth of

Vigorous efforts have been made to portray Horthy as a patriot who led Hungary through a difficult period

34 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Above: Red Army soldiers liberate a village near Moscow, December 1941. Right: Slovak leader Josef Tiso shakes hands with German foreign minister Ribbentrop as Hitler looks on, East Prussia, 1941.

Second World War revisionism in contemporary Europe, not least the growing popularity of extreme nationalist political parties: as well as Jobbik in Hungary, there is the Attack Party in Bulgaria, Golden Dawn in Greece and Svoboda in Ukraine, which are often in the forefront of campaigns to rehabilitate wartime collaborators. Their popularity is in turn connected to economic hardship, cynicism about mainstream political elites and increasing racism against ethnic minorities and immigrants. In almost all those countries where there are strong campaigns to rehabilitate collaborators, there has also been a marked increase in racist discourse and racially motivated violence. The group that has suffered most at the hands of extreme rightwing nationalists has been the Roma, but other minority communities – including Jews – have also been targeted.

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ET ECONOMIC HARDSHIP and the rising popularity of extreme nationalism can provide us with only a partial explanation for this phenomenon. In the Belgian region of Flanders, where Second World War revisionism is now mainstream, the Flemish nationalist party Vlaams Belang, which traditionally was the most bellicose advocate of the rehabilitation of wartime collaborators, performed poorly in the federal elections of 2010 and even worse in the local elections of 2012 and the European elections of May 2014. Flanders is not only one of the richest parts of Europe, it is also wealthier than the French-speaking region of Wallonia. Despite the fact that many French-speaking Belgians also collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation, the majority of francophone Belgians – unlike their Flemish compatriots – are opposed to any rehabilitation of wartime collaborators. In Bulgaria,

which is the poorest member state of the EU, revisionism of the type seen in Flanders is weaker. Though there is a movement in Bulgaria to rehabilitate 1940s-era collaborators, such as Hristo Lukov, it is limited to the extremist fringe of Bulgarian politics. An underlying cause of revisionism is the resurgence of radical ethnic nationalism in post-Cold War Europe. At the heart of all nationalisms are national narratives: collective stories about how the nation came into being and what the nation has accomplished. In almost all these narratives, recurring themes are the heroism of the nation (as exemplified in the deeds of particular heroes, usually in the struggle against national enemies) and its victimhood at the hands of other nations. These national narratives are now being rewritten. In East-Central Europe and the Balkans, official Communist interpretations of national histories collapsed with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the pro-Soviet regimes. Ever since, different political and ethnic groups have been competing with each other to determine which historical figures are assigned the role of heroes and which are cast in the role of villains. In some parts of western Europe, rising scepticism about the project of European integration and the concomitant growth of nationalism, have likewise destabilised traditional narratives of the recent past, in particular of the Second World War. IN MANY COUNTRIES, however, constructing a usable national narrative of the war is problematic, especially for conservative governments. In Hungary, for instance, wartime resistance to the Germans was minimal and collaboration was widespread. In Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Ukraine many people actively DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 35

WARTIME COLLABORATION

Revisionists argue that the men who served with the Latvian Division were patriots who allied themselves with the Nazis for patriotic reasons

Veterans of the Latvian Division of the Waffen SS are among those marching through the capital Riga, March 16th, 2014.

resisted the Nazis, but the majority of those who did so fought with the Communist-led partisans or served directly in the ranks of the Red Army. By contrast, nationalists and conservative elites in the region collaborated actively with the Nazis and in some cases took up arms to fight in German uniforms. The major point of friction everywhere was the ideological divide between those who saw the Soviets as the primary threat and those who regarded the Nazis as their main enemies. However, other ideological factors were also important. Many of the ultra-nationalists who collaborated with the Germans in Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltic states and elsewhere were also racists and antisemites, who participated actively in the killing of Jews and other ethnic minorities.

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N ORDER TO create a usable past, contemporary conservative nationalists need to fashion narratives that both delegitimise the Nazi-resisters on the one hand, while detoxifying the memory of Nazi collaborators on the other. A variety of tactics are employed to this end. One tactic is to deny, minimise or simply ignore the collaboration of wartime nationalists. A second is to vilify those who fought against the Nazis. In Italy, for example, Giampaolo Pansa’s book Il Sangue dei vinti (Blood of the Losers; 2003), which attacked the heroic idea of the Italian resistance movement, sold 350,000 copies in its first year of publication. In 2008, criminal investigators in Lithuania threatened to take action against two elderly Holocaust survivors, who

36 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

had escaped the Vilnius ghetto and joined the Soviet-backed partisans. According to the investigators, the pair had been involved in an attack on a village in which civilians had been killed. In 2011 Lithuanian officials demanded that Israeli police investigate an 86-year old Holocaust survivor and former partisan on the grounds that he had ‘libelled national heroes’. THE MOST IMPORTANT tactic of those who seek to rehabilitate collaborators is to argue that Communism and Nazism were both totalitarian and genocidal systems, the crimes of which were equally evil. From this perspective, choosing to fight with the Nazis against the Communists was not necessarily morally worse than choosing (as Roosevelt and Churchill did) to fight with Stalin against Hitler. Under some circumstances, claim revisionists, the decision to make a temporary alliance with the Nazis against the threat of Communism was understandable, even commendable. Revisionists thus argue that the men who served with the Latvian or Galician divisions of the Waffen SS were simply patriots, who allied themselves with the Nazis for patriotic reasons and not out of ideological sympathy. Their goal was simply to defend their countries from invasion by the Red Army. Fighting in German uniforms with German weapons was the only way to do this. Similar arguments have been used by revisionists to exculpate Bandera, Horthy, Tiso and other politicians who sided with the Nazis. Two academics, Dovid Katz and Danny BenMoshe, initiated the ‘Seventy Years Declaration on the Anniversary of the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee’ in 2012 to protest against attempts by several European states to draw a moral equivalence between the crimes of Nazism and of Communism. The declaration was signed by 70 prominent politicians from across Europe. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the passage of time is making its legacy more – not less – divisive. Gareth Pritchard is a lecturer in modern history at the University of Adelaide. Desislava Gancheva is a graduate of the University of Adelaide.

FURTHER READING L. Fekete, Pedlars of Hate, The Violent Impact of the European Far Right (Institute of Race Relations, 2012). C. Hale, Hitler’s Foreign Executioners: Europe’s Dirty Secret (History Press, 2011). O. Luminet, ‘The Interplay between Collective Memory and the Erosion of Nation States’, Memory Studies vol 5, no 1 (Sage, 2012). A. Mammone, et al (eds), Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2012). D. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Central European University, 2007). R. Wodak, J.E. Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge, 2013).

MakingHistory Historians should adhere to a rigorous code of professional practice if they are to avoid the kinds of careless mistakes that bring their professional integrity into question, says Suzannah Lipscomb.

The Errors of Our Ways I RECENTLY READ the film critic Mark Kermode’s book, Hatchet Job, an examination of the devastating review, in which he mentions that some critics admit to reviewing films they haven’t seen. Kermode, rightly, regards this as a breach of professional integrity. During the summer, I was researching and writing a new book. This meant reading or re-reading much of the secondary literature in my field and heading to the archives to consult primary sources. I was also reading books to review. This combined exposure to historiography old and new, in the light of a renewed familiarity with the primary sources, was a chastening experience. I discovered a string of notable errors or sloppy thinking. Some were errors that historians had picked up from each other without checking the primary evidence. For example, a crop of Tudor historians from Elton onwards have noted that in the month of December 1546 Henry VIII’s Privy Council met at the London home of Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, sometimes given as ‘Somerset House’ (though Hertford wasn’t yet Duke of Somerset). The reason this is important is because it is claimed that this indicates that Hertford, as the leader of a reformist faction at court, was consolidating his power. This misinformation derives from the Holy Roman ambassador, François Van der Delft, but a quick look at the minutes of the Privy Council shows that between December 8th, 1546 and January 2nd, 1547 the Privy Council met at Ely Place in Holborn, the town house of Thomas Wriothesley, Lord Chancellor and not one of the leaders of the supposed reformist faction. Such an unchecked error makes a crucial difference to a reading of the last months of Henry VIII. In the works of some historians, I also found footnotes with archival call references that were patently wrong. 38 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

are just bad history and we need practices that safeguard against human error. I thought I would presumptuously suggest a Code of Conduct for how historians should use evidence:

I tended to assume this was a case of a change in the referencing system, but some works are too recent for that to apply and others have specific slips, like dates that are not quite right, as if misremembered; as if someone’s gone home and made them up.

Historians are humans; we make mistakes. But some of these instances are just bad history Even more invidious than simple error was the way that evidence was, at times, misused: cited out of context in a way that distorted the reading; used to confirm pre-existing biases; or treated with increasing certainty without additional corroboration. At a recent history festival, a scientist asked me if historians triangulate: if we look specifically for data or evidence that might undermine our hypotheses, as well as confirm them; I replied that I sincerely hoped so. Historians are humans; we make mistakes. But some of these instances Penning the truth: Saint Jerome in his Study (detail) by Caravaggio, c.1606.

☐ Use evidence to support your interpretation and seek to understand that evidence correctly. ☐ Do not wilfully present evidence out of context, especially not in such a way that the lack of context will render the meaning of the evidence different, unclear or manipulable. ☐ Do not cite evidence from sources that you elsewhere discount. ☐ At best, do not waste a reader’s time on unsubstantiated sources. ☐ At least flag up evidence that is drawn from such sources; do not use it silently. ☐ Triangulate; search ardently for evidence that might undermine, as well as corroborate, your hypothesis. ☐ Avoid assumption creep: do not allow assertions to move from ‘possibly’ to ‘probably’ to ‘definitely’; do not build more elaborate layers of interpretation on a foundation that is rocky. ☐ Do not rely on the secondary assertions of other historians; ad fontes! Go back to the original sources. ☐ Guard against confirmation bias; interrogate the ‘facts’ anew and bring a fresh analysis to them; do not mould the facts to your interpretation. ☐ Root out and resolve any internal inconsistencies in your argument. ☐ Cite sources so that they can be traced, with page numbers, archival call numbers and publication details. Our professional integrity as historians relies on our adherence to standards such as these. Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New College of the Humanities, London.

CONGRESS OF VIENNA Allegory of the First Partition of Poland, 1772, after Gustave Moreau.

Vladimir Putin is by no means the first Russian leader to threaten his neighbours with force and annexations. Two centuries ago European statesmen faced a similar predicament. Only then it was Poland at stake, not Ukraine, as Mark Jarrett explains.

Hard and Soft Power

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INCE THE 16TH CENTURY Poland had been an elective monarchy. Its nobility enjoyed great license – their ‘golden freedoms’ – but Poland’s elected monarchs failed to establish the golden pillars of ancien régime monarchy: a centralised bureaucracy, a standing army and increased taxes. Foreign powers even put forward their own candidates in Polish royal elections. In the election contest of 1764 Catherine the Great of Russia sponsored her former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski. Russian troops, invited by the wealthy Czartoryski family, kept in the distance but close enough to influence Polish electors. After his elevation to the Crown, Poniatowski refused to perform the Tsarina’s bidding. At the same time he proved unable to push much

needed reforms through the Polish parliament, the Sejm. A group of dissatisfied nobles rebelled and even attempted to kidnap the king to remove him from Russian influence. Russian forces then intervened. In 1771 Catherine reached an agreement with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria: each would take a slice of Poland, thereby preserving the ‘balance of power’ between themselves. When Russia became involved in a war with Ottoman Turkey, the Polish king took the opportunity to introduce the acclaimed Constitution of May 3rd, 1791: to this day a Polish national holiday. But Russia soon defeated the Turks and conservative nobles backed by Catherine the Great rebelled against the new constitution and invited Russian DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 39

CONGRESS OF VIENNA to procure the assent of the rest of Europe to lend legitimacy to their decisions. But their plan foundered when they failed to reach agreement during their negotiations in Paris and London before the Congress assembled. The chief stumbling block was the future of Poland.

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HE SUDDEN COLLAPSE of the French imperium had placed the fate of the infant Duchy of Warsaw in doubt. The Tsar made known his general intention to restore Poland, although he kept the precise details of his plan shrouded in mystery. On the way to Vienna he even met with leading Polish nobles at Czartoryski’s estate at Puławy in eastern Poland. At the same time, to win the adherence of Prussia to the new coalition against France, the Tsar had promised to restore Prussia to its former dimensions. But, if Russia were not to return part of Poland to Prussia, where was the Tsar going to find sufficient territory to return Prussia to its former size? The answer was in Saxony, an independent kingdom across Prussia’s south-western border. Since the Saxon king had remained loyal to France long after other German princes had deserted, the Tsar argued that he had forfeited all rights to his throne. Saxony would therefore be awarded to Prussia in compensation for the latter’s loss of its former Polish territories. Those lands would in turn form the kernel of Stanislaw Poniatowski, last a resurrected Kingdom of Poland, to be ruled King of Poland, by over directly by the Tsar, but with its own Marcello Bacciarelli, constitution, national legislature, laws and 18th century.

Tsar Alexander I, by Baron Gerard, 1814.

intervention. After initial resistance, the Polish monarch reluctantly deserted the reformers to avoid the destruction of his country. The outcome was the further loss of territories to Russia and Prussia in a second partition. Polish reformers were shocked and immediately began preparing for a new confrontation. Tadeusz Kościuszko raised the banner of insurrection in 1794 but, after an initial victory, Polish forces were crushed. What was left of Poland disappeared in the third and final partition of 1795. What was in 1770 the second largest country in Europe had been erased from the map. Only 12 years later Napoleon vanquished Prussia at the Battle of Jena and created the Duchy of Warsaw out of the Prussian slice of Poland. In 1809 the Austrians challenged Napoleon and were similarly defeated. Napoleon took most of the Austrian slice of Poland, including Krakow, and added it to the Duchy of Warsaw. Most Poles consequently favoured an alliance with Napoleonic France against the three partitioning powers, although Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski placed his faith in his friend, Tsar Alexander I, who promised to restore Polish independence. THESE EVENTS SET THE STAGE for the major confrontation at the Vienna Congress. The Congress was publicly announced in Article 32 of the First Peace of Paris, concluded between France and the allied powers in May 1814 after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. In this treaty the new boundaries of France were set; the purpose of the forthcoming Congress was therefore to deal with territories beyond French borders. The plan of the great powers in summoning the Congress was transparent to all: to settle first all outstanding issues on their own and then 40 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

The Battle of Jena, October 14th, 1806, aquatint by Edme Boviney.

Napoleon vanquished Prussia at the Battle of Jena and created the Duchy of Warsaw out of Prussia’s slice of Poland

army, separate from Russia. Curiously, the Russian slice of Poland was not to be immediately joined to the new Polish Kingdom (made up of the former Prussian and Austrian shares), although there were plans to do so at a later date. The other allied statesmen were far from pleased with the Tsar’s agenda. Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, was utterly opposed to Alexander’s acquisition of Poland, which would have given Russia control of the heights above the main invasion route to Vienna, incited unrest among those Poles still under Austrian rule and turned Prussia into a Russian vassal state. The interests of Britain were less directly affected. Nonetheless, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, also feared the growth of Russian power and the potential discord that the Tsar’s scheme might cause between Austria and Prussia. The Polish-Saxon question bedevilled the talks in Paris and London throughout the long, hot summer of 1814. In early September the allied monarchs and statesmen began arriving in Vienna, yet the problem of how to reconstruct Central Europe remained unresolved. FROM SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER Castlereagh and Metternich worked closely with the Prussian minister, Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, to limit Russian gains in Poland. Why was Hardenberg willing to cooperate with Austria and Britain when the Tsar had already promised all of Saxony to Prussia? The answer seems to be that Hardenberg wanted Metternich’s support on German questions, especially the creation of a new confederation uniting all the German states for purposes of defence. Cooperation with Austria and Britain also seemed to offer the pleasing prospect of gains in both Saxony and Poland.

From a balance-of-power perspective, Austria, Britain and Prussia banded together because they believed that Russia had become too strong. Castlereagh served as their main spokesman in a series of private audiences with Alexander I in September and October. The British foreign secretary argued that Russian acquisition of Poland would deprive Prussia of a defensible frontier, violate the sanctity of existing treaties and stir discontent among the Poles. The Tsar insisted, however, that he had a genuine moral obligation to the Polish nation. Prince Adam Czartoryski, who accompanied the Tsar to the Congress, and even the aging Kościuszko, both saw the Tsar as Poland’s last, best hope. The other powers offered them only an assurance of dismemberment.

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HE HARVARD POLITICAL SCIENTIST Joseph Nye defines ‘hard power’ as the use of ‘force or payment’ to affect others to achieve desired outcomes – in other words, power resting on either military or economic resources – and he defines ‘soft power’ as ‘the ability to get what you want by the co-optive means of framing the agenda, persuading and eliciting positive attraction’. In a graphic illustration of Nye’s concept of ‘hard power’ – the application of military or economic force – the Tsar taunted Castlereagh with the fact that Russian troops were already in occupation of Polish territories (as Stalin was to do in 1945). ‘The Emperor’, Castlereagh reported back to London, ‘insinuated that this question could only end in one way as he was in possession.’ Castlereagh disclaimed all intention of dislodging the Russians by force, but told the Tsar that he believed his aim was not to possess Poland as a conqueror but to govern the Poles as a legitimate sovereign with the sanction of Europe. Clearly Castlereagh was skilfully DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 41

CONGRESS OF VIENNA attempting to deploy the instruments of ‘soft power’ – attractiveness and persuasion, with the ‘sanction of Europe’ – to counter the Tsar’s ‘hard power’ of military force.

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ETTERNICH, CASTLEREAGH AND HARDENBERG met at Castlereagh’s apartments on the Minoritenplatz on October 23rd. Metternich had only just consented to the Prussian annexation of all of Saxony. The three statesmen agreed to offer the Tsar an independent Poland, knowing full well he would refuse. Then they planned to propose that the Tsar should be given Polish territory up to the River Vistula, including Warsaw, but no further; about half the territory he claimed. Metternich acted as their representative the next day, when he informed Alexander that Austria might also create its own Polish kingdom in the south. The Tsar reacted with indignation. The collaboration of Metternich and Castlereagh with Hardenberg ultimately failed because the Prussian ruler, King Frederick William II, still felt beholden to the Tsar for the liberation of his territories from Napoleon. On November 5th the king summoned Hardenberg and ordered him to cease all resistance to the Tsar. Five days later the Russians turned the military occupation of Saxony over to the Prussians. The united front of Prussia, Austria and Britain collapsed like a house of cards. On the surface, allied strategy in these three months appears to have been a classic exercise in the balance of power. Even though the Tsar had already offered Prussia all of Saxony and even though Britain had no direct interest in the dispute, Hardenberg and Castlereagh had joined forces with Metternich because they feared the growing power of Russia. But, despite appearances, it seems obvious that there was really no chance at all that these powers would ever use military force to expel Russia from Poland. So the contest really devolved into one of ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ power. In the next phase of the negotiation the ministers shifted their focus to Saxony. Neither Castlereagh nor Metternich was now willing to hand over all of the Saxon kingdom to Prussia and in early December both rescinded their earlier offers to Hardenberg. Austria and Prussia also began quietly preparing for the almost unthinkable possibility of war. Castlereagh explained the Austrian viewpoint to the British Cabinet: ‘It is the deliberate opinion of many of their officers, and … ministers, that, rather than have the Russians at Craco[w] and the Prussians at Dresde[n], they had better risk a war with what they can get.’ ON DECEMBER 5TH Hardenberg sent a message to the military reformer General Gneisenau, himself of Saxon origin, that ‘it would be better to have a new war than that Prussia, after such glorious deeds and so many sacrifices, should come out of the affair badly’. Castlereagh addressed the British Cabinet the same day, weighing the prospects for maintaining peace: ‘My opinion is, that … as Europe is more extensively armed than at any former period, [this disagreement] may suddenly end in war.’ Three weeks later he again explained that the Prussians were ‘organising their army for the field … This may be all menace to sustain their negotiation, but they may also meditate some sudden effort, in conjunction with Russia, to coerce Austria and place themselves in a situation to dictate their own terms on all other points’. Meanwhile the Grand Duke Constantine, the younger brother of the Tsar, issued a stirring proclamation to the Polish army ‘to take up arms in the defence of your country and the preservation of your political existence’. Were all of these steps mere sabre-rattling? Were military leaders just taking reasonable precautions, or was there a genuine risk of conflict? Most historians concur that, despite the display, war was unlikely. By mid-December Russia, Britain and Austria were all making overtures to the French delegation. Since the goal of Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had always been to maintain the King of Saxony on 42 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Castlereagh, Hardenberg and Metternich in an engraving of 1815 by Bollinger.

‘Take what you want but leave us peace’: Kaiser Franz II and Tsar Alexander I with a French diplomat in a caricature by Delaunois, 1815.

his throne, he gravitated to the side of Austria and Britain. Prussian and Russian ministers introduced the idea of moving the King of Saxony to a principality on the Rhine so that he might keep a kingdom, while Saxony was transferred to Prussia. This Rhineland proposal was submitted to Castlereagh on December 20th. On the same day, the allies agreed to establish a ‘Statistical Committee’ to resolve their deepening disagreements over population sizes. Formal conferences of the four allied powers to determine the fates of Saxony and Poland opened at Metternich’s offices on the Ballhausplatz on December 29th. Castlereagh and Metternich pushed for the immediate entry of France into the deliberations. At the session of the 30th Metternich suggested that the permission of the King of Saxony would be needed before dividing up his kingdom. This was all too much for Hardenberg to bear. Only three weeks earlier, Metternich himself had been offering all of Saxony to Prussia. Hardenberg angrily

announced that any refusal to recognise Prussian acquisition of Saxony would be tantamount to an act of war. It was, in Castlereagh’s words, ‘a most alarming and unheard-of menace’. The result of Hardenberg’s angry outburst was the secret treaty of January 3rd, 1815: a defensive alliance between Britain, Austria and France. It is certainly remarkable that, after 20 years of war, both Britain and Austria were now willing to unite with their former adversary. Castlereagh himself drew up the treaty on New Year’s Eve. Some historians argue that news of this treaty forced the Russians and Prussians to back down in a classic case of coercive diplomacy. Castlereagh himself lent credence to this interpretation of events in a later letter to the Cabinet. But the reality was different. The conclusion of this treaty – an ostensible exercise of ‘hard power’ – simply cannot account for the resolution of the crisis. The new alliance was purely defensive in nature: in the event that any of its signatories were attacked in completing or enforcing the Peace of Paris, the other parties were obliged to come to its aid. There is no evidence, however, that either Russia or Prussia ever planned to move beyond the borders of Poland and Saxony to attack the signatories of the Triple Alliance. The treaty was thus a dead letter from the

It is certainly remarkable that after 20 years of war, both Britain and Austria were willing to unite with their former adversary, France

Contemporary souvenir of the gathering of statesmen at the Congress of Vienna.

start. Meanwhile, Hardenberg had already come to terms with the sacrifice of much of Saxony a fortnight earlier. In his diary on December 21st the Prussian chancellor had scribbled: ‘We are ready to cede a great part of Saxony.’ Finally, the treaty remained secret. Rumours of its existence abounded but were never officially confirmed. All this runs against the essence of coercive diplomacy, a form of ‘hard power’ requiring a credible threat to be conveyed to an adversary to influence its behaviour. British Cabinet minister Lord Mulgrave expressed it best: ‘I know not why it should have been made, or kept secret … if it were meant as a check to their pretensions, it seems to me that it ought to have been avowed; kept secret it leads to nothing but action which we want to avoid.’

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LTHOUGH THE secret alliance of January 3rd, 1815 did not lead to the resolution of the Polish-Saxon question, it coincided with other factors that did. What finally resolved it was not the threat of ‘hard power’ embodied in the secret treaty, but the impact of several ‘soft power’ influences on the Tsar, who now made fresh concessions. First, the Tsar clearly did not wish to antagonise his former allies for the sake of Prussia. ‘Russia’, Castlereagh wrote to London, ‘will not encourage Prussia to resist now that she has secured her own arrangement in Poland.’ Second, the Tsar wanted to court the friendship of the German middle states; third, the Tsar looked to Britain to pay the Russian debt to Dutch bankers. Overshadowing all considerations was the Tsar’s increasing religiosity. Alexander now pictured himself as the saviour of all humanity. On December 31st, DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 43

CONGRESS OF VIENNA while Castlereagh was drafting the secret alliance, the Tsar was writing an appeal to other European sovereigns, which would lead to the Holy Alliance. The Russian Emperor was hoping to unite all sovereigns and their peoples in a spirit of Christian brotherhood. Against these lofty concerns the future boundaries of Prussia paled into insignificance. One might say that Prussia lacked the ‘hard power’ resources of Russia and was therefore forced to succumb to allied demands. At the same time, the ‘soft power’ attractions of legitimacy and the sanction of Europe did have an impact, especially on the Tsar’s impressionable mind.

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HIS BRINGS US to the third and oft-neglected final phase of the negotiation. Although war between the allies had been avoided, the Prussians had backed down and the Tsar had made concessions, the Congress still required another month of hard bargaining. The statesmen were trying to strike the best balance they could in terms of the ‘hard power’ resource of population, which they saw as the key to future military strength. As early as January 5th, Castlereagh had drawn up an entirely new plan for the reconstruction of Prussia, restoring it to its former size while awarding it only a part of Saxony. Castlereagh revealed his skill as a negotiator by opposing extremes on all sides. His efforts provide a remarkable picture of ‘balance-of-power’ diplomacy in action. Still believing in the need to strengthen Prussia in northern Germany, the foreign secretary insisted that the Prussians should be awarded two fifths of Saxony as well as territories along the Elbe and on the Rhine. Castlereagh even insisted, over Austrian objections, that the fortresses of Erfurt and Torgau be handed over to Prussia. The Prussians obstinately maintained their Rhineland proposal, to no avail. The Austrians offered to return part of their Polish territory to Russia so that the latter might, in turn, give more of Poland to Prussia, instead of Saxony. The British and French members of the From the Archive Statistical Committee recommended More on the Congress a different approach: Prussia would be of Vienna given, as Castlereagh had suggested, www.historytoday.com/ the fortresses of Torgau and Erfurt, and congressofvienna another 900,000 inhabitants. The Prussians were willing to surrender the Saxon capital of Dresden, but they were determined to make a last stand to acquire Leipzig, scene of the decisive victory over Napoleon the year before. This final dispute was only resolved when the Tsar, still in a conciliatory mood, consented, at Castlereagh’s urging, to make further concessions in Poland. Hanover and the Netherlands, under British pressure, also turned over additional slices of territory to Prussia. ‘A fund was created’, wrote Castlereagh, to ‘operate a salutary reduction in favour of Saxony.’ The labours of the Statistical Committee greatly assisted in the final push. Populations of districts were added and subtracted in mechanical fashion to attain the desired results and a final agreement on the reconstruction of Central Europe was at long last achieved in early February, just before Castlereagh’s departure for London. Although the Prussians did not receive all of Saxony and their territories remained dispersed, they gained a large arc stretching across northern Germany. Their position in the Rhineland made them part of the new barrier of states around France, much as Pitt and Castlereagh had intended, and actually thrust Prussia westward, setting the stage 44 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

for later German unification under Prussian leadership. Meanwhile, Russia annexed most of the Duchy of Warsaw but made several other last-minute concessions, giving up not only Posen and Thorn but also the ancient royal capital of Krakow, which became a free city.

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HAT DO THESE NEGOTIATIONS REVEAL about the workings of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power? At Vienna, much as today, the possession of substantial ‘hard power’ resources furnished the credentials for membership in the exclusive club of great powers. The negotiations at Vienna highlighted the determination of those powers to reach major decisions by themselves without consulting the lesser states and with little concern for the wishes of the subject populations actually involved. At the same time, ‘hard power’ resources alone were not decisive. Certainly, Russia set the agenda and dictated the outcome in Poland. This was truly an exercise of ‘hard power’. With fewer ‘hard power’ resources, Prussia met with less success. Russian president But the fact is that Russia made some Vladimir Putin chairs a concessions in Poland, while Prussia still security council meeting took a large slice of Saxony and obtained at the Kremlin, June 2014. further compensation elsewhere. In the end, ‘soft power’ considerations reduced the impact of ‘hard power’ and opened the door to a compromise solution. By the beginning of February 1815 the interplay of ‘soft’ and ‘hard power’, expertly applied by the statesmen at Vienna, had performed its work. The allies were once again united and ready to meet a new challenge when Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to the Tuileries Palace in Paris in early March. Does this episode offer any lessons for dealing with the likes of President Putin today? As in both 1814 and 1945, the western powers may not be in a position to apply their own military force effectively to the region between Russia and the rest of Europe. The main instruments of foreign policy at their disposal appear to be the ‘hard power’ measures of offering arms to Ukraine and applying economic sanctions against Russia, combined with the ‘soft power’ tools of diplomacy, publicity and persuasion. It remains to be seen whether, given time and perseverance, Putin can be persuaded to make concessions as Alexander once was. The current Russian leader seems to lack the same devotion to European ideals as the former Tsar. But, as at the Vienna Congress, it may be in the exercise of ‘soft power’ that the best hope of restraining Russia still lies. Mark Jarrett is the author of The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (I.B. Tauris, 2013).

FURTHER READING Enno Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy, vol ii, The Congress of Vienna (Princeton University Press, 1983). Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (Perseus Books, 2011). Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014). Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (HarperCollins, 2007).

| EBOLA WITH UNCLAIMED Ebola victims on the streets of towns and villages in West Africa, orphans ostracised and abandoned and an ever-increasing death toll, it is inevitable that comparisons are made with past epidemics. Public statements from frustrated aid agencies and health officials on the current and potential impact of this epidemic are increasingly echoed by western political rhetoric, tinged with a xenophobic edge. In such a context, historical references, however misconstrued, are unsurprising, as age-old practices of mass isolation and quarantine, with all their medieval connotations, are given a 21st-century repackaging. Quarantine never left the lexicon of available public health measures and it returned to the public eye during the SARS crisis of 2003. But such a controversial measure, the temporary isolation of suspected carriers of a disease, merits further analysis in terms of past practice, along with perceived and actual effectiveness. In West Africa today there are many kinds of quarantine in place. Most drastic have been attempts at placing entire neighbourhoods and districts under lockdown. Given the media presence, Freetown and Monrovia, capitals of Sierra Leone and Liberia, respectively, have produced particularly vivid examples, although large rural areas, notably those abutting the borders around Guinea, have been equally dramatic. More broadly still, some airlines have suspended flights to the region, a trend that, if it continues, would resemble an international quarantine over affected West Africa. Beyond the impracticality of such measures, as well as the human and economic implications, there are numerous historical precedents that indicate why such actions may be counter-productive in containing Ebola. More harm than good There is limited and far from definitive research on quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good, especially when access to food, water and medical care is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it requires perfect compliance and transmission without symptoms. In the case of Ebola, the former is highly unlikely and the latter is simply not the case. Easier to trace are the economic and social consequences of isolating large numbers of people in the interest of public health. Mass quarantine inevitably spreads mistrust and historically has been open to abuse. Such perceptions are amplified when seemingly healthy individuals are targeted or stigmatised, particularly when already marginalised or economically disadvantaged. Compounding a tricky equation in determining the public good is the experience of quarantine being periodically used as a convenient policing or political tool. While the term quarantine originates from the time 46 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Gold, fire and gallows: quarantine in history As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues its dreadful march, Duncan McLean looks at the 600-year-old practice of isolating individuals and communities in order to bring an end to epidemics and assesses the effectiveness of such measures.

Plague on their houses: 14th-century English engraving on the Black Death.

of the Black Death, the application of what amounted to quarantine laws has existed at least since the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century ad. Earlier still, the Old Testament and the writings of Hippocrates refer to measures aimed at avoiding contact with those who are ill, or with the potential to become so. This is an important question of semantics that needs clarification, particularly as isolation and quarantine are at times used interchangeably. Isolation refers to the medical seclusion of individuals already infected with a contagious disease, as opposed to restricting the movement of those who pose an unconfirmed risk. Despite hazy explanations over the spread of disease, medical confinement of the ill had been established long before the second plague pandemic emerged in the Mediterranean in 1348. An obvious example is documented through the establishment of leprosaria, or leper colonies, around 19,000 of which are estimated to have existed in Europe by the 13th century. Long-term isolation of the ‘unclean’ was expected to reduce the risk of contagion, even if the nature of transmission was misunderstood. Indeed it was not until the 20th century that the infectious nature of Hansen’s Disease (historic leprosy) was definitively established. The great contribution of the Black Death as regards disease control was the formal, if frequently ad hoc, establishment of control measures in an attempt to limit exposure to infectious disease. So while many leprosaria were being transformed into lazarettos or pest houses for those dying of plague, broader preventative measures were introduced to limit the impact of the disease. The ‘Italian model’ of plague control, essentially the first health boards, subsequently replicated elsewhere in Europe, eventually came to deal with matters such as sanitation, destruction of clothing, fumigation and the collection and burial of corpses. The modern understanding of quarantine dates from the actions of one of these preventative initiatives, that of the Rector of the Venetian colony of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) in 1377. All ships coming from suspected plague sites were required to anchor outside the port harbour for 30 days while awaiting clearance to dock. Later expanded to 40 days (quaranta), land travellers were also included. The basis of the duration is open to historical debate, possibly related to the Hippocratic precepts for the recovery or death from acute illness, or in reference to biblical events. Regardless, the dual objective was clear: protection of health along with safeguarding the network of trade on which the region’s wealth depended. Closely related to the development of quarantine was that of the cordon sanitaire. Protective lines would be established, often by armed guards, designed to keep an epidemic in or out of a specified area. An oft-repeated example of this practice was the voluntary isolation of the Derbyshire village of Eyam during a plague outbreak in late 17thcentury England. External supplies were left at stone boundary points in exchange for disinfected coins. Eventually three quarters of its 350 inhabitants would perish. Plague did not spread to the surrounding district. More

The dual objective of quarantine was the protection of health along with safeguarding the network of trade

ambitiously, the Habsburgs maintained an armed cordon sanitaire between Austria and the Ottoman Empire for a century up until 1871, an action which they credited for the absence of plague in their territory. Whether in reference to those specific examples or more generally, it is notoriously difficult to evaluate preventative measures such as quarantine or a cordon sanitaire in restricting the spread of plague. Despite generally being based on the false hypothesis of ‘pestilential air’ being responsible for all communicable disease, miasmatic theory at least served to reduce airborne infections. However, ignorance about the role of either rats or fleas meant that the benefits of quarantine risked being incidental. Towards a turning point Attempts at isolating plague victims and their families in homes until death or recovery, or barring entry and exit en masse, ran contrary to the ancient maxim of Cito, Longe, Tarde (‘Leave quickly, go far away and come back slowly’), assuming one possessed the means. Consequently, it is unsurprising that draconian measures were necessary to enforce plague regulations, quarantinerelated and otherwise. Essential tools in the arsenal included funds to pay administrative costs, fire to burn dubious goods and purify the atmosphere and gallows to maintain order: ‘gold, fire, and gallows’, as a Sicilian physician astutely summarised during an outbreak in 1576. Given the choice of starving under isolation, the loss of all worldly possessions for fear of contamination, or condemnation to a near certain death in a pest house, resistance to plague regulations was inevitable. Initially, minorities were targeted as harbingers of disease, pogroms against Jews having been well documented. The risk of disorder and breakdown eventually turned towards the regulations themselves and the authorities who espoused them, at times more dangerous than the disease itself. More ominously still, without reasonable compliance with quarantine measures, attempts at evasion actually facilitated the spread of plague. As the practice of quarantine spread, both in the Old World and New, a gamut of illnesses was added to the list of those surveyed. Typhus and smallpox were seen as threatening to the lucrative Slave Trade, especially after 17th-century epidemics occurred in Havana, Cartagena, Rio de Janeiro and Portobello. Smuggling and bribery increased as vessels attempted to circumvent quarantine regulations. Falsified bills of health were likewise prized as a means to avoid weeks at harbour in pestilential ships. With racist constructs having determined yellow fever as a threat to white populations, quarantine became standard practice in cities and plantations of the western hemisphere, mirroring developments in Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. In the US, repeated outbreaks of yellow fever led to federal quarantine legislation in 1878. The ‘Yellow Jack’ flag had long since become ubiquitous in port cities, notably those receiving seaborne traffic originating in the West Indies. It was the waves of 19th-century cholera epidemics DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 47

| EBOLA that led to an increase in quarantine regulations. Transport technology was already reducing travel time, whether by land or by sea, facilitating the speed at which new pathogens could interact with susceptible hosts. As the administrative and bureaucratic branches of the state grew larger, recourse to quarantine was reinforced as a first line of defence. Perceptions of quarantine as a nuisance, open to abuse, gave way to calls for standardisation, a frequent subject of debate in international sanitary conferences scattered over the course of the century. Politics was never far from the surface, a notable example being the quarantine debates around the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. French and British prerogatives had more to do with securing regional hegemony than limiting the spread of infectious disease. The more subtle – and nefarious – side of quarantine regulations can be seen in an increase in police powers and suspension of personal liberties. If the French Revolution propagated ideas of individual rights, strict sanitary measures were a convenient tool unleashed on undesirables. Immigrants were frequently seen as a menace, although marginalised populations generally, be they beggars, prostitutes or the unwashed masses, were considered a threat to healthy urban populations. A turning point in the application of quarantine came with the advent of germ theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This did not remove population restrictions from public health initiatives but it did prompt greater nuance. Debate over quarantine efficacy by contagionists and anti-contagionists became irrelevant, at least as far the mosquito or cholera bacillus was concerned, and individual patterns of disease propagation could be addressed separately. Lazarettos were transformed into health stations, not just symbolically but in practical terms, as the distinction between stages of illness became apparent. By the time of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 many of the old quarantine measures were considered outdated and eventual attempts at halting transmission came too late. The chaos that followed the First World War, with millions of troops and refugees returning home, provided ideal conditions for the spread of the virus. More striking was the resurgence of quarantine measures during the 2003 SARS crisis. Despite the evolution in transport technologies, or perhaps because of them, the traditional system of quarantining the potentially ill returned, along with the medical isolation of the sick. Punishment for breaking quarantine went so far as the death penalty in China, while familiar complaints of discrimination and stigmatisation were widespread. In describing the experience of immigrants with infectious disease to the US, medical scholar Howard Markel writes that ‘medical scapegoating may be transformed into a mentality of quarantine’. Not only is disease the enemy but so are the human beings that are potentially infected. While efforts understandably focus on halting an epidemic, this is often done at the neglect of those 48 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

with the most acute medical needs. This seems a particularly apt description of the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Medical needs are obviously not ignored entirely; the infection of at least 400 health workers provides depressing evidence of those most at risk (beyond family members of the victims themselves). But the broader emphasis has clearly been on halting the epidemic, even if such efforts are counter-productive.

Protection? Rubber boots at a Médecins Sans Frontières medical centre, Monrovia, October 18th, 2014.

From the Archive More on disease

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Stigmatism and discrimination Under such circumstances the concept of quarantine has returned to prominence. Yet if the measure has historic benefits –it has remained a pillar of disease control over 600 years – there is a dark side to it. Stigmatisation and discrimination accompany quarantine measures. And the greater the mistrust of the health authorities, the greater the chance individuals will evade quarantine and surveillance measures, inadvertently contributing to the spread of disease. Such suspicions manifested themselves most clearly with the murder of a health team in southern Guinea this September, accused of intentionally spreading Ebola. Though quarantine is intended to limit the breakdown of social order, the effect can be the opposite. Aside from the ethical and social issues that accompany mass quarantines, repressive public health measures in the present outbreak are also a result of recent history. Both Liberia and Sierra Leone have many more soldiers than doctors, so a military response reflects the means available, however misguided. Meanwhile, animosity towards the Guinean government from communities where the epidemic originated certainly predates Ebola. Most telling is the need for governments to be seen to be responding irrespective of doubts about the effectiveness of quarantine: incurable diseases frequently provoke an overreaction, as it is often better to be seen do something, even if that something is irrelevant or worse. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the international response. Cancelling flights may reassure the public from afar but will hinder the response on the ground, weaken governments and slow delivery of aid. More worryingly, the urge to flee under such circumstances will make those infected more creative and correspondingly more difficult to track. Confusion, fear and hysteria, whether manifested locally, internationally or through the media, are the most difficult elements to overcome. Quarantine is still with us. Given its checkered past, the assumption that the indiscriminate seclusion of healthy and sick individuals will be effective gives pause for thought. As three West African states teeter on the brink of economic and political collapse, controlling the epidemic will require more than token gestures while keeping the region quarantined at arms length.

Duncan McLean lectures in history at Charles University and at the Anglo-American University in Prague. He worked for Médecins Sans Frontières for 12 years.

HENRY III Henry III at court, from the First Chapter of the Holy Spirit, 16th-century manuscript.

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A Monarch and his Mignons The young men who surrounded Henry III of France have been dismissed by some historians as effeminate, inconsequential sycophants. Robert Knecht offers a very different account of their activities and influence.

UCH OF THE information we have on day-to-day life in Paris during the troubled years of Henry III’s reign (1574-89) comes from the diary of the lawyer, Pierre de L’Estoile. Not content to describe events, he was also an avid collector of pamphlets, mostly scurrilous, which poured off the numerous Parisian printing presses. They enable us to share the tittle-tattle flourishing at the time and to penetrate the prejudices shaping public opinion. France was then sharply divided by religion. Thousands of Protestants, or Huguenots, had been massacred in Paris and other cities in 1572, but they remained strong in the south and west, while Paris was fiercely Catholic. Though a Catholic himself, Henry III lacked the means to take on the Huguenots in an all-out war. He was accused of timidity, even of double-dealing, by Catholic extremists, known as Leaguers. L’Estoile was a royalist, but not an uncritical admirer of the court. In particular, he shared public hostility towards Henry III’s small circle of favourites, known as his ‘mignons’. On October 20th, 1577 L’Estoile noted the arrival of the king at his country residence of Ollainville with a group of young mignons who were ‘heavily made-up, prettily coiffured, wore brightly coloured clothes and powdered with scent of violets and other perfumes which they exuded in the streets, squares and houses’. Such accounts were grist to the mill of 19thcentury historians, brainwashed by Bourbon propaganda of the previous two centuries. They saw the mignons as ‘miserable wretches who in his [Henry’s] licentious court presided over mysteries worthy of Nero or Heliogabalus’. Their way of life was described as ‘a mix of unspeakable debauchery, false piety and sword fights’. Lavisse in his Histoire de France (1901) accused the mignons of destroying Henry III’s virility. More recent historians have been less severe. THAT HENRY III SHOULD have had favourites is hardly surprising. Monarchs were used to distributing special favours to certain members of their entourage in return for their loyalty and services. The first French king to do so was Philip III, ‘the Bold’ (1270-85). A long line of favourites can be traced through the succeeding reigns until that of Louis XIV, who had none. Henry III seems to have had more than any other French king. They can be divided into two groups: the first, formed in the 1570s, comprised some 20 young men, roughly of the same age as Henry. They belonged to families of the provincial nobility (or noblesse seconde), which had served the crown for generations. The second group was formed in the 1580s. It consisted of only two DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 49

HENRY III still duc d’Anjou, that the first mignon joined his clientèle. The moment of decision was the siege of La Rochelle, the Atlantic port which had become a Huguenot refuge following the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. The siege became not only a baptism of fire for Henry, who commanded it, but also an event in which lasting friendships were formed. The contemporary writer, Brantôme, described it as a ‘celebration of friendship’. Anjou’s election to the Polish throne, which gave him a credible excuse for lifting the siege, also provided his companions with another opportunity of gaining his friendship. Caylus, Saint-Sulpice, Villequier, d’O and Saint-Luc all chose to share his Polish adventure. This called for considerable courage, for Poland was a distant country full of unknown dangers. Duly grateful to his companions, Henry rewarded them following his accession to the French throne in 1574.

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Henry preferred indoor pastimes, especially dancing, and shared his mother’s passion for courtly entertainments men, Anne de Joyeuse, baron d’Arques and Jean-Louis de La Valette. They became far more powerful than their predecessors and were known as the archimignons. The first group of mignons included René de Villequier, Louis du Guast, Guy d’Arces, alias Livarot, Gilles de Souvré, Paul de Saint-Mégrin and, especially, five men whom Henry called his chère bande (dear band). These were Jacques de Caylus, Louis de Maugiron, François d’O, Henri de SaintSulpice and François de Saint-Luc. They had one thing in common: none of them belonged to the clientèle of a powerful nobleman or, if he did, his integration was not sufficiently firm to resist the king’s blandishments. It was during the reign of Charles IX (1559-74), while Henry was 50 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Ball at the court of Henry III, French school after 1583.

E SHOULD NOT imagine, however, in the light of the abuse subsequently directed at the mignons, that Henry gave them undue political authority. On his way back from Poland to take up his crown, he received a letter of advice from his hugely experienced mother, Catherine de’ Medici. Knowing his weaknesses, she warned him against allowing himself to be manipulated by others. ‘You must be the master,’, she wrote, ‘not just a companion.’ No one should be allowed to take advantage of his youth. He needed to attach more value to an office than to a particular individual, otherwise his authority would be called into question. Henry came to resent his mother’s intrusiveness, but in this instance he took her advice. He retained the services of men like René de Birague, Pomponne de Bellièvre and Nicolas de Villeroy, who had served his predecessor. The mignons were rewarded with posts of secondary importance, close to the king’s person but not crucial to the realm’s administration. They joined his household as échansons, or cup-bearers. In addition to court offices, they were given military and provincial commands, thereby exemplifying Henry’s aim of creating a nobility tied exclusively to his person. Henry’s mignons soon realised that the best way to win and retain his favour was to model their conduct on his. Unlike his predecessors, he was a private man, who disliked crowds and believed that his authority would be enhanced by distancing himself from the general mass of courtiers. He devised an elaborate system of etiquette, which kept them at bay. Nor was he keen on hunting. Unlike his grandfather, Francis I, who had spent much of his life travelling across France in search of game, Henry preferred to stay in and around Paris. He also loved to retire from court, sometimes for several weeks on end with a few close friends. He preferred indoor pastimes, especially dancing, and shared

his mother’s passion for courtly entertainments. These offered him a pretext for dressing up. In the 1580s Henry took to wearing black, but earlier in life he was a fop. In 1572 a Venetian observer described him as follows: His manner of dressing and pretentious gestures make him seem delicate and effeminate, for, in addition to rich clothes which he wears with gold embroideries, precious stones and pearls of great price, he gives close attention to his linen and hair-style. He usually wears around his neck a double necklace of amber mounted in gold which floats on his chest exuding a pleasant scent. In February 1577 L’Estoile reported Henry as ‘taking part in jousts, tournaments, ballets and many masquerades in which he usually appeared dressed as a woman’. But this was not unusual at the time. Courtiers often liked to assume feminine disguise. The nature of Henry’s relations with his mignons has aroused much speculation. When separated from them, he would write to them effusively. He urged them to love him as tenderly as he loved them. To Saint-Sulpice, he wrote: ‘Always love him [the king ] well, and believe that he loves you dearly … and, if possible, even more.’ The letter bears the sign (:S:+=), used by lovers to express the strength of their attachment. A letter written to Souvré in September 1577 expresses Henry’s burning desire to see him soon. The

mignons, for their part, assured him of their willingness to sacrifice their lives for him. Are we to conclude that Henry was gay? René de Lucinge, the ambassador of Savoy, wrote in 1586 that Henry had learned ‘the vice that nature detests’ from the godless Villequier and that his cabinet had been ‘a veritable seraglio of every lubricious act and lewdness, a school of sodomy, where all the filthy revels which the whole world has known took place’. But Lucinge was politically biased. We also need to bear in mind that writing love letters (lettres galantes) was a literary genre much in vogue at the time. Corbinelli, the king’s Italian reader, thanked a Paduan friend for sending him a volume of love letters that he had found most useful when advising the king and his friends on how to compose such letters. Nor should we forget that Henry wrote equally amorous missives to women. Over three or four months he wrote around 40 letters to Mademoiselle de La Mirandole, one of the queen’s ladies in waiting. He wrote several times from Poland to Marie de Clèves, with whom he had fallen madly in love, dipping his pen in his own blood. THE IDEA THAT the mignons were effeminate fops who minced around Henry III in fanciful attire is misleading. Violence was the order of the day. In September 1577 René de Villequier stabbed his pregnant wife to death in the

Clockwise from top right: contemporary portraits of Anne, duc de Joyeuse and Jean Louis de La Valette, duc d'Épernon; 'Henry III and the Murder of Guise', December 23rd, 1588, from Guizot's A Popular History of France, c.1885, which disparages Henry's reign.

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HENRY III

Above: the siege of La Rochelle, commanded by Henry while duc d'Anjou, 1573, tapestry, 1623. Right: Catherine de' Medici by FranÇois Clouet c.1570.

king’s own lodging at Poitiers. He accused her of having an affair and of seeking to poison him. A maidservant threw herself out of a window, injuring herself badly. Villequier, however, escaped prosecution. In 1576 the French court began to split into two main factions, the king’s and that of his brother, the duc d’Anjou. They soon came to blows. Le Guast was fatally stabbed by armed men in his own home as he was having his toe-nails cut by a servant. By 1578 fights became a daily occurrence. Anjou eventually fled from the court, whereupon the mignons started fighting among 52 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

themselves. On April 27th, Caylus, Maugiron and Livarot met Entraguet, Ribérac and the young Schomberg near the Porte Saint-Antoine in Paris. A pitched battle, known as the ‘duel des mignons’, ensued in which Maugiron and Schomberg were killed. Badly wounded, Ribérac died the next day. Livarot was kept in bed for six weeks by a head wound. Only Entraguet escaped serious injury. Henry III was devastated by the loss. He ordered funerals for Caylus and Maugiron, designed to immortalise their membership of his most intimate circle. Caylus lay in state with his face uncovered, an honour normally reserved to persons of the highest rank. He was soon joined by another mignon. On July 21st SaintMégrin was hacked to pieces by some 30 men as he left the Louvre after attending the king’s coucher. Henry ordered splendid tombs for the three mignons from the sculptor Germain Pilon. They were erected in the church of SaintPaul in the Marais and a Latin encomium by Jean Dorat was engraved in letters of gold on the black marble base. Verses in praise of the deceased were commissioned by Henry from the poets Desportes and Ronsard. The funeral elegy was spoken by Arnauld Sorbin, who had done likewise at the funerals of Charles IX and his daughter, thereby linking the mignons to the royal family. The church became the centre of a veritable cult of the king’s deceased favourites. The tombs no longer exist, for they were destroyed by a Parisian mob in 1588. In the 1580s, as we have seen, two new mignons appeared. They were Anne de Joyeuse, baron d’Arques, and

of the queen’s residence at Romorantin in the Sologne. One day, as the king and his mother stood at an open window, they saw the tent and, impressed by its magnificence, asked who might be its owner. On learning it was La Valette, they praised his galanterie. True or false, the story shows how royal favour might be captured by a would-be mignon. La Valette himself continued to tell the story 60 years later. Arques became duc de Joyeuse in August 1581. His elevation was a reward for loyal service to Henry in a recent siege to which a facial scar bore witness. As an additional reward, he was given precedence over all other dukes and peers save princes of the blood. La Valette became duc d’Épernon one month later and was also given precedence over other dukes and peers, placing him on the same footing as Joyeuse. In 1582 both men were given the title of First Gentleman of the Chamber. They alone were allowed access to the king’s person without having to wait in an antechamber for permission to enter. They also shared the privilege of eating at the far end of his table.

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Henry wrote several times from Poland to Marie de Clèves, with whom he had fallen madly in love, dipping his pen in his own blood Jean-Louis de La Valette. Their careers ran more or less along parallel lines. Both studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris before taking up military careers. In 1577 Arques served under the duc d’Anjou at the siege of Issoire before joining the court, where he was soon noticed by Henry. La Valette was a Gascon whose father had belonged to the noblesse seconde. He was introduced to Henry at the siege of La Rochelle, but did not follow him to Poland. He entered the service of the King of Navarre, but, following Henry’s return from Poland, he managed to capture his attention by bringing him useful information about events in southwest France. But La Valette’s biographer gives another account of how he won the king’s favour. He allegedly bought a magnificent tent, which he erected within sight

Henry III, portrait by FranÇois Clouet.

ENRY CALLED D’O, Joyeuse and Épernon ‘my children’ and said that, like any good parent, he needed to marry them off. The first to be so honoured was Joyeuse, who married Marguerite de Lorraine, the queen’s sister-in-law. At the wedding in Paris on September 24th, 1581 the king gave away the bride wearing exactly the same costume as the groom. Covered with embroidery pearls and precious stones, it was valued at 10,000 écus. The wedding was followed by a series of festivities known as ‘the Magnificences of the duc de Joyeuse’. They included the Balet comique de la reine. L’Estoile described them as ‘mummeries, finery, dances, music, masks, tournaments and similar follies and superfluities’. Hugely expensive, they had still not been paid for 15 years later. Writing to Joyeuse’s grandmother, Henry said: If I could have made him my son I would have done so, but I am making him my brother … I love him so much that I cannot love myself more. Henry decided to marry Épernon to one of the queen’s sisters, but she was only eight years old at the time and Épernon was unwilling to wait. In August 1587 he married Marguerite de Foix-Candale. Henry gave the bride a necklace valued at 100,000 écus. She was the niece of Henri de Montmorency-Damville, governor of Languedoc, and her marriage may be seen as part of a strategy to strengthen Épernon’s position in the south-west. By arranging several marriages linking the families of Joyeuse and La Valette, Henry aimed to create a substantial family united by royal favour. In November 1581 Joyeuse’s brother, Henri, married Épernon’s sister, Catherine, and in February 1582 Épernon’s brother married Joyeuse’s aunt. The purpose of these marriages was to build around the king a solid network of fidélités. Not everyone, however, appreciated this DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 53

HENRY III strategy. François d’O ceased to be a mignon around this time. According to Pasquier, he was dismissed by the king on the day of the Joyeuse wedding, which had ‘broken his heart’. By bringing the archimignons into his family Henry hoped to silence those who complained of their sudden rise to eminence. Henry’s joy over the marriage of Joyeuse was short-lived. In the summer of 1587 the religious wars entered a new phase as German troops invaded western France. The king decided to deploy three armies. He sent Joyeuse at the head of his best troops to fight Henry of Navarre in Guyenne, the duc de Guise with inadequate troops to harass the Germans, while he himself took up a position on the Loire

O A ball at the court of Henry III to celebrate the Marriage of Anne, duc de Joyeuse to Marguerite de Vaudémont, September 14th, 1581.

N 21 FEBRUARY Henry took formal leave of Joyeuse. His effigy, exposed for three days in the church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, drew large crowds. On March 6th it was seated at a table and given a meal as at a royal funeral. The funeral, which took place next day at the church of the Grands Augustins, was attended by a vast number of clergy, court officials, magistrates, academics and heralds. A commemorative medal struck in honour of the deceased carried the device: Victimo pro salvo domino, fit in aethere sidus (Sacrificed for the king’s salvation, now a star in the firmament). A literary campaign in his memory was designed to revive Henry III’s standing in public opinion, for Joyeuse had died fighting the Huguenots. Raoul Caillet wrote a poem comparing Henry’s loss with that of Phoebus after the fall of Phaeton. But nothing could appease the Parisians, who soon rebelled. As they erected barricades, he fled from the capital, never to return. He sealed his fate by ordering the assassination of the duc de Guise, who had become their hero. Hatred of the king was fuelled by an avalanche of pamphlets: 237 were printed in Paris in the first six months of 1589. One, entitled La Vie et faits notables de Henri de Valois, accused the king of siding with the heretics and of debauchery with his mignons. He was identified with tyrants of Antiquity: Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus. Henry, meanwhile, allied with the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre. Jointly, they laid siege to Paris. Henry set up his headquarters at Saint-Cloud, from where he could see the capital. On August 1st, 1589 a Jacobin friar, Jacques Clément, who had claimed to be the bearer of an important message for the king, was admitted to his presence, even though Henry was sitting on his close-stool. The king ordered his attendants to withdraw as the friar drew closer to whisper in his ear. As he did so, he drew a knife from his sleeve and plunged it into the king’s abdomen. Henry died a few days later. Épernon was the only mignon who witnessed the scene. Ten years later, he was sitting next t0 Henry IV in his carriage when he, too, was assassinated. Two regicides in one lifetime must be a record, even for an archimignon.

Henry’s joy over the marriage of Joyeuse was short-lived. In the summer of 1587 France’s religious wars entered a new phase with the bulk of the army. He hoped to destroy both Guise and Navarre, but fate dictated otherwise. Joyeuse proved no match for Navarre, who on October 20th routed his army at Coutras. Hundreds of noblemen died, including Joyeuse. Guise, on the other hand, was victorious. Henry returned to Paris in triumph, but no one was deceived. The real victor was his enemy, the duc de Guise. The king denied him any share in the celebrations by effectively banishing him to his province of Champagne. He then compounded his foolishness by giving to Épernon the offices previously held by Joyeuse. In particular, he was appointed governor of Normandy, an office normally reserved for a prince of the blood. Épernon was extremely unpopular. Preachers attacked him and several pamphlets denounced him as the ‘new Gaveston’: Piers Gaveston had been the favourite of the English king, Edward II. His murder in 1312 was now presented as an anticipation of the fate awaiting not only Épernon, but Henry III. 54 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Robert J. Knecht is Emeritus Professor of History in the University of Birmingham.

FURTHER READING Jacqueline Boucher, La cour d’Henri III (Ouest-France, 1986).

From the Archive More on Henry III

www.historytoday.com/ henryIII

Pierre Chevallier, Henri III, roi Shakespearien (Fayard, 1985). R.J.Knecht, Hero or Tyrant: Henry III King of France, 1574-89 (Ashgate, 2014). N. Le Roux, La Faveur du roi (Champvallon, 2001).

REVIEWS

Ruth Kinna on anarchy and art • Andrew Lycett praises a study of the ‘other’ Arab revolt • Zareer Masani questions a ‘neo-colonial’ urban history ‘An Outdoor Literary Salon’, French 19thcentury illustration.

SIGNPOSTS

Books of the Year

From Piketty’s trumpet-blast to the great deeds of medieval saints, ten leading historians tell us about their best reads from 2014. Michael Burleigh

Justin Marozzi is both a courageous traveller and a fine historian, with an in-depth knowledge of Arabic culture. His Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Allen Lane) reflects these qualities in an estimable fashion. Starting with Caliph Mansur in the eighth century and ending with the recently ousted Nouri al-Maliki government, Marozzi describes 13 centuries of the history of this remarkable city without succumbing to the tyranny of a present in which the Iraqi capital is besieged by the genocidal nihilists of ISIS and subjected to daily sectarian suicide

bombings. The various books by Toby Dodge on Iraqi politics also deserve an honourable mention in this context, though he lacks Marozzi’s gifts as a storyteller. Michael Burleigh’s books include Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World, 1945-1965 (Macmillan, 2012).

Kate Cooper

One of the quandaries of 2014 has been the volatile role of religion in global conflict and Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Bodley Head) puts forward a novel and illuminating thesis. The turning point,

she argues, is the 16th century, when agrarian empires gave way to a new kind of civilisation in Europe. Economic prosperity was now to be found not in the divinely sanctioned plunder of warrior kings, but in ‘new technologies and the constant reinvestment of capital’. Religion became a matter of private conscience, uncoupled from the state and its monopoly on violence. A disturbing and refreshing view of 20,000 years of human society, from stone age brain development to the peculiar cognitive and social landscape of the age of the Internet. Kate Cooper is author of Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women (Atlantic Books, 2013).

Paul Cartledge

My favourite history book of 2014? It is a no-brainer: Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright/W.W. Norton). Professor Allen (now of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) is by origin a brilliant classicist and she reads the Declaration as if it were a manifesto drawn up by a committee presided over by a Pericles and drafted by a Demosthenes. She even agonises over its punctuation. The motor that moves America today, it has been said, is not equality but inequality. Professor Allen aims to reverse that unhappy thrust and, if intellectual rigour combined with political commitment and eloquence

were enough, she would surely succeed. Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at Cambridge.

Penelope Corfield

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press/ Harvard) is a major study with significant implications for historians. As the Marx-echoing title suggests, it is a work of political economy with radical implications. Yet there is more. Piketty not only analyses the comparative distribution of wealth since the 18th century (with complex data for historians to debate) but, simultaneously, denounces the current state of economics. In his view, the discipline has atrophied into a sterile set of mathematical models. Instead it should re-tool and re-integrate with economic and social history. Piketty’s trumpet-blast constitutes one notable sign, among many others across the humanities and social sciences, of a desired return to long-term perspectives. The diachronic is back! At last, an intellectual shift which historians can welcome wholeheartedly. Penelope J. Corfield’s publications include The Time and Shape of History (Yale, 2007).

Tom Holland

The history book I most enjoyed this year was also my first of 2014. I tucked into Robert Bartlett’s Why Can The Dead Do Such Great Things DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 55

REVIEWS (Princeton University Press) on New Year’s Day and could not have hoped for a more stimulating festive read. A sweeping study of medieval saints, covering the entire Christian world from Late Antiquity to the Reformation, it is also a compendium of anecdotes, such as one rarely finds in a work of scholarship. Whether it be St Modwenna of Burton and her red cow, the Bishop of Lincoln who bit off two chunks of Mary Magdalene’s arm, or Queen Bathildis cleaning out toilets, all of human – and much of divine – life is here. Tom Holland’s latest book is Herodotus: The Histories (Penguin Classics, 2013).

Lucy Delap

In 2014 I have particularly enjoyed the provocative questions raised by Mo Moulton’s Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England (Cambridge University Press). Moulton portrays the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21 as a civil war, fought not only in Ireland but also in England, and having deep political and social repercussions for the following decades. Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum (Penguin) offers a very different kind of history, in which her own experiences as a service user of psychiatric hospitals allows for a wider historical look at varieties of care for the mentally ill during the transfer from older asylums to new forms of ‘community care’. Alison Light’s Common People (Fig Tree) similarly foregrounds the author through an exploration of her own family history. Tracing the migratory paths taken by the English working poor, Light illuminates what it meant to be ‘common’ across multiple generations. Lucy Delap’s publications include Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2010).

John Maddicott

Andrew M. Spencer’s Nobility and Kingship in Medieval England: The Earls and 56 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Edward I, 1272–1307 (Cambridge University Press) provides a new and enterprising view of an old subject by arguing, contra almost everyone, that most of Edward’s earls were loyalists during the great crises of his reign and that their local power was more dependent on the defence and extension of jurisdictional rights than on their use of retainers to control the shires. More likely to be overlooked, but equally rewarding, is Nicholas Orme’s deftly and expertly written The Church in Devon, 400–1560 (Imprint Press): a local work but one which exemplifies larger and national themes as well as illuminating the peculiarities of its county. John Maddicott’s publications include The Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327 (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Global Crisis is truly global ... making what usually appear as isolated incidents part of a universal whole ... Groundbreaking and thrilling Judith Flanders

My history read of the year – and probably of many years to come – is Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale). Even as our world has become more interconnected, history writing is all too often increasingly specialised, focused on smaller and smaller chunks of space and time. By contrast, Global Crisis is truly global, connecting the dots and making what usually appear as isolated incidents part of a universal chain-reaction. Ground-breaking and thrilling. Judith Flanders’ latest book is The Making of Home (Atlantic, 2014).

Peter Mandler

Peter Baldwin’s The Copyright Wars:  Three Centuries of TransAtlantic Battle (Princeton University Press) traces the swings of power and interest between authors and their audiences in the long struggle between copyright and access. It sparkles with Baldwin’s characteristic qualities: caustic and epigrammatic prose, a forensic comparative approach to differences between the US and Europe, scorn for vested interests and sloppy thinking. It has a special relevance today when corporate rights-owners are seeking in law to extend their ownership of culture in perpetuity and digital activists (and, now, academics) are fighting for open access. Peter Mandler is President of the Royal Historical Society.  

Chris Wickham

John Sabapathy’s Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300 (Oxford University Press) is a very elegant book that comes at how medieval administration worked from a new direction. How rulers kept control over their officials was not a new issue in the 12th and 13th centuries, but the practice of holding officials literally to account now came into western political and administrative life for the first time. Rulers had been concerned before that their officials were just (and of course loyal), but that they were honest had not really been a separate issue in their minds. From here on it would be, at least as an ideal. Sabapathy is the first person to properly set out all the implications of this. There is a real sea-change here, for with accountability comes, fairly soon, the idea that one might also seek to find ways to improve government as well; it would have a long future. Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford and author of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 (Penguin 2009).

A Short History of the Byzantine Empire Dionysios Stathakopoulos I.B. Tauris 192pp £12.99

Byzantine Matters Averil Cameron

Princeton University Press 184pp £15.95

FOR MOST people the Byzantine Empire is probably an unfamiliar entity, despite its historical importance. The empire (in reality the Roman Empire that survived throughout the medieval period centred on the ancient Greek city of Byzantium; the term Byzantine is modern) can trace its origins to the re-founding of Byzantium as Constantinople in ad 324 by the Christian Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, and its demise to 1453, when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks. These two books are attractively produced short works on the empire which aim to make it better known and understood. Dionysios Stathakopoulos, lecturer in Byzantine Studies at King’s College London, provides a potted history of Byzantium in eight main chapters, as well as an introduction and a final chapter on Aftermath and Afterlife. This would be a suitable book for a beginner, providing political narrative as well as focus on social, economic and cultural developments. Footnotes are not used but there is guidance on further reading and a web address for fuller bibliographies.

Averil Cameron, Professor Emeritus of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford and the first Chair of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, established in 1983, has produced a more distinctive book, accessible but also directed at the field itself. It consists of five short essays on aspects of Byzantium (Absence, Empire, Hellenism, Art and Orthodoxy), framed by an introduction and epilogue. Despite the shortness and dainty size of her book, she gives footnotes as well as providing further reading, reflecting the different purpose of her work. Both books are preoccupied with the image of Byzantium. Stathakopoulos declares that his book has ‘the modest aim to put together a basic body of knowledge about this state, to challenge stereotypes about it by providing a straightforward and sober account and to place it firmly in the context of both the European and Middle Eastern Middle Ages’ and observes ‘it is easy, even convenient to overlook it. But ... Byzantium is an indispensable and fascinating part of European history. It needs to be taken seriously’. Cameron is also concerned to challenge stere0types: not just western Orientalist views of Byzantium but also traditional views that have developed within Byzantine studies. She sets out an agenda for future study of Byzantium, one that locates it firmly within its Roman imperial origins and embraces theoretical approaches to its culture. As both authors make clear, though, it is not that Byzantium has received no attention at all. For example, the work of Judith Herrin in popularising Byzantium and challenging stereotypical views is acknowledged and a number of recent guides and handbooks to Byzantium are highlighted (see also the March 2014 Signposts article on Byzantium by Liz James at http:// www.historytoday.com/liz-james/ short-history-byzantium). A host of new translation series will make the subject of Byzantium

even more accessible (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Harvard University Press and Translated Texts for Byzantinists, Liverpool University Press). Indeed, there has been a regular thread of interest in Byzantium in the modern world; it is just that perceptions of it have tended to be loaded and subjective. Edward Gibbon may have taken a dim view of it in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), but at least he saw that the Roman Empire ended in 1453. For Russia, which owes so much to Byzantium since the conversion to Orthodoxy of Vladimir of Kiev in the tenth century, the fate of the empire can provide a warning about the insidious dangers posed by the West. Above all, it is the need to see

‘Byzantium is an indispensable and fascinating part of European history. It needs to be taken seriously’ Byzantium accurately that these books avow. It is also true, however, that Byzantium forged a deceptive vision of itself, as an unchanging uniform empire. It is the stories and images that Byzantium created for itself that have resulted in such a particular perception of it in the West, belying the view of it as irrelevant. It is the reactions that Byzantium has elicited from others that makes it such a fascinating empire to study; they reveal more about viewers’ preoccupations and histories than they do about Byzantium itself. Ultimately, it is the very unfamiliarity of Byzantium that forms the foundation of its appeal. The joy of discovering it for the first time is not to be underestimated. Yes, Byzantium is important and for all (Averil Cameron’s rallying cry), but we also value its individual specialness. Shaun Tougher

Ten Cities That Made An Empire Tristram Hunt Allen Lane 511pp £25

THE ENTICING title of this book unfortunately turns out to be something of a misnomer. Instead of hearing how key urban centres shaped the British Empire, we get the historical equivalent of Around The World in 80 Days: a whirlwind tour from Boston to Dublin, eastwards through Cape Town and the great cities of the Raj in India, to Hong Kong and Melbourne and finally back home to Liverpool. The result is at best picaresque, with some tantalising insights into what might have been explored, if the book had focused on half the number of cities crammed in here. Hunt declares at the outset that he will avoid the extremes of Niall Ferguson’s imperial triumphalism and Richard Gott’s demonisation of empire. He cites the more nuanced approach of Linda Colley, exploring the complex exchanges between colonisers and the colonised. He rightly identifies great urban centres as crucibles for the cosmopolitan, hybrid and often mutually beneficial results of imperial interaction. But he falls short of the meticulous scholarship that makes Colley’s work so illuminating. Instead, we’re offered a familiar story of how imperial trade and administration created port-cities, some of which, such as Bombay and Hong Kong, have survived as powerhouses of the post-colonial global economy. What Hunt puts his finger on is the extent to which the British Empire, far more successfully than any of its rivals, built cities that have survived and prospered long after the end of

empire. Whether in Hong Kong, Cape Town or Bombay, the secret of these ‘maximum cities’ has been the institutional framework that the British left behind: western education, the rule of law, a professional civil service, free press, municipal facilities and free market capitalism. The relative success of these institutions has depended upon the enthusiasm with which they were assimilated by indigenous elites, but Hunt offers us little understanding of how that assimilation occurred. His account of Hong Kong largely ignores the rise of Chinese entrepreneurs; likewise in Calcutta he overlooks the anglophile Bengali cultural renaissance. He treats the philanthropic Indian city fathers of Bombay as passive recipients of distant Victorian wisdom from the likes of Florence Nightingale, while saying nothing of the great industrialist, Jamsetji Tata, who created a global business empire that is today Britain’s largest manufacturing employer. However unintentionally, this book perpetuates a neo-colonial view of imperial cities by focusing on their British rulers and architects. It glosses over important distinctions between cities like Boston, Cape Town and Melbourne, ruled by white settlers, and those like Bombay and Hong Kong, where power was shared by dynamic indigenous elites. As a front-bench politician who continues his academic career and gives frequent media performances, it is impressive that Tristram Hunt still finds time to write books. Unfortunately, his own imperial overstretch shows in research which is often sketchy and sometimes factually inaccurate. Some errors are minor, such as the name of the first Indian MP at Westminster, Dadabhai Naoroji, being inverted and the description of him as a ‘black man’ being wrongly attributed to the Liberal Lord Rosebery, instead of to the Tory Premier, Lord Salisbury. Others are more serious, such as the assertion that no Indians were allowed into the Indian Civil Service as late as 1909, when in fact many were, starting as early as 1864. Zareer Masani DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

Baghdad

City of Peace, City of Blood Justin Marozzi Allen Lane 459pp £25

BAGHDAD is at once familiar and yet quintessentially unknown. Regularly and for so long has it made the news that we are inured to the apparently unchanging narrative of random violence, political corruption and human tragedy in the city. Justin Marozzi, a journalist who has worked in Iraq for many years, aims to provide historical perspective on Baghdad. He takes us on a lively, accessible romp through 1,400 years of Baghdad’s history, from its foundation in ad 762 as the capital of the Abbasid caliphate – when it was known as medinat salam, ‘city of peace’ – through the gradual waning of its power and influence under Persian and Ottoman rule, to its role as a centre of global affairs from the First World War onwards and its current status as a ‘city of blood’. Marozzi has a journalist’s eye for a good anecdote. He berates the great medieval geographer Ibn Battuta as ‘an incorrigible gossip’ who couldn’t resist a ‘scandalous story’. The early modern English merchant John Newberry has ‘a taste for the dramatic’. But so does Marozzi himself. No scurrilous whisper of palace intrigue, violent atrocity or dissolute living is missed. The upshot is a history of the stories people have wanted to tell about Baghdad, the images that travellers have wanted to paint of it rather than an insider account of what it was actually 58 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

like to live in the city itself. Any book of this scope depends on a huge number of sources, ranging from masterly Arabic and Persian historical accounts of a millennium ago to the diaries, blogs and tweets of the 21st century. The breadth of Marozzi’s references is impressive but his apparent refusal to engage with the reliability of their testimony is not. Accessible, expert authorities on classical Baghdad, such as Dmitri Gutas and James Montgomery, are missing from the bibliography. Conversely, he is overly dependent on Mandate Era authors such as Steven Longrigg and Richard Coke. An unpleasant whiff of their superior orientalism trickles down here, too, in statements such as ‘Turbulence and turmoil were the natural order of affairs’; ‘The Baghdadi has long been sensitive to any insults, real or perceived to his religion’; or reference to ‘the historical genius for cruelty that Baghdad’s rulers had exhibited for the past ten centuries’. Such judgments could be applied just as well to pre-moderns anywhere, if one thinks that it is the historian’s role to articulate them at all. Marozzi’s presentation of Baghdad as alien, corrupt and doomed to bloodshed is curiously old-fashioned and appears to ignore the past 30 years’ work in the historical study of urbanism and orientalism. He has missed the opportunity to challenge western preconceptions of the city, rather than confirm them. In between the sex and violence there are hints of a more sober, less sensationalist, history of Baghdad. After each episode of destruction there were periods of rebuilding and renewal. Despite the sporadic bouts of interdenominational tensions, for much of the time different faiths rubbed along pretty well together. Pilgrims, traders, the intellectually curious all found good things to say about Baghdad and they are here in Marozzi’s book, too, if one looks hard enough for them. Eleanor Robson

Enemy on the Euphrates

The British Occupation of Iraq and The Great Arab Revolt 1914-1921 Ian Rutledge Saqi Books 471pp £20

WESTERN historians have tended to focus on one Arab Revolt in the early 20th century, while ignoring another, which was bigger and, in the opinion of the author of this vivid book, almost as significant. The revolt which generally grabs the attention started in the Hejaz, where, helped by T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Bureau in Cairo, the Emir Hussein rose up against the Ottomans in 1916 and marched on Jerusalem. The lesser-known but better supported one occurred only four years later in the Euphrates region of what is now Iraq, where a ragtag army of Arab peasants and former Ottoman soldiers, led largely by Shia notables angry at being denied their promised independence, rebelled against British rule. Rutledge relates how Britain’s desire to retain political control in the new kingdom of Iraq was motivated by its desire for secure supplies of oil. It had gained a taste for black gold after its discovery in northern Iraq and southern Iran in the first decade of the century. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, became convinced of the arguments in favour of this new source of energy for ships of the Royal Navy. After the Ottomans entered the First World War on the German side in October 1914, the Allies offered the Arabs their freedom in return for their support. Cue for the first

Hejazi-led Arab revolt. But European political haggling, epitomised by the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, put paid to these promises. By then the British were hooked on oil and determined to retain access to supplies. They arranged for the Emir Hussein’s son Faisal to be given the throne of a new state of Iraq, which was assembled from three former Ottoman vilayets: Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. As the revolt against this renewed foreign occupation raged in the early 1920s, the British became seriously stretched. In a replay of General Townshend’s disastrous campaign at Kut in 1916, they were holed up in cities and shot at when they ventured out on rivers. Gradually, with the support of air strikes and soldiers from the Indian subcontinent, they wrested back the advantage. Rutledge lays much of the blame for Iraq’s subsequent instability on that period. There was no ‘representative state formation’ as King Faisal depended on British

Rutledge ... admirably succeeds in illuminating an important episode in British imperial history imperial muscle to shore up an ineffectual executive dominated by Sunnis, who made up just 19 per cent of the new country’s population. The Shia antecedents of what soon became known as the 1920 Revolution were brushed out. There is no doubting the seriousness of this insurrection, which at its height involved 131,000 Arabs. Rutledge’s account is enhanced by his clear understanding of the physical realities of the Middle East. His populist writing style, with its frequent recourse to the historic present, might not please everyone, but it provides a proper sense of urgency and engagement to an excellently produced book that admirably succeeds in illuminating an important episode in British imperial history. Andrew Lycett

REVIEWS

FILM & EXHIBITION

India

A Short History Andrew Robinson Thames and Hudson 224 pp £16.95

INDIA presents its historian with unique challenges. It is a land of great disparity in economic conditions. It is composed of many linguistic groups and diverse cultures. India has had a long history of engagement with the world outside. Yet, for a people that have so much to remember, Indians maintained an indifferent attitude to history. Reliable chronicles before the 19th century are rare. History scholarship was encouraged by the British Indian state, but the effect was not wholly salutary. While uncovering new evidence, both British imperialists and Indian nationalists built stylised versions of history to make political points. In the 20th century, the old nationalism cooled, but new nationalist agendas emerged. Even the narratives that are free of obvious biases disagree, often sharply, on the link between modern India and its past. Writing an accessible and coherent history of India is, therefore, an ambitious task. Andrew Robinson meets the challenge successfully. Among recent books written in response to a renewed interest in the region, India: A Short History stands out for its distinct tone. The book is as much an effort to present India free of biases as it is a personal debt to ‘a civilisation that has changed my life’. The author’s many-sided engagement with the subcontinent –

are practically invisible: that is, the sailors on the deck of the warship and the two tiny figures in a boat on the Thames to the left of the railway bridge. A less familiar painting, The Disembarkation of Louis-Philippe at the Royal Clarence Yard, Gosport (1844), admittedly unfinished according to the catalogue, devotes more than half its space to the sky and does not bother to depict the French king. Indeed, the heads of the drowning people in the painting selected for the exhibition’s poster, The Morning after the Deluge (1843), are little more than dots for the eyes, nose and mouth enclosed in a circle. One cannot help wondering whether Turner’s apparent indifference to humans in the face of nature was a product of his mighty self-absorption, verging on misanthropy, as chronicled by Leigh. Apart from an affectionate relationship with his father and later with Mrs Booth, the widow from Margate with whom an incognito Turner eventually settled in Chelsea, the film’s Turner has no other deep friendships. ‘He was a giant among artists, single-minded and uncompromising, extraordinarily prolific, revolutionary in approach, consummate at his craft, clairvoyant in his vision’, writes Leigh. ‘Yet Turner the man was eccentric, anarchic, vulnerable, imperfect, erratic, and sometimes uncouth. He could be selfish and disingenuous, mean yet generous, and he was capable of great passion and poetry.’ Most of these characteristics Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh emerge, often vividly, through TurnLate Turner Painting Set Free er’s encounters with, for example, An exhibition at Tate Britain, until January 25th, 2015 the impecunious artist Benjamin Haydon, the supportive Ruskin, the privately dismissive Queen Victoria and a portrait in the exhibition, seems shockingly lampoon of his paintings in a popular London small, almost wizened, compared with the theatre. The film also offers a diverting cornucobed-ridden Turner’s robust appearance in the pia of busy Victorian interiors and street scenes. film as he utters his last words, ‘The sun is God!’, Technology and science are woven in, too, although these may have been an invention of notably railways and daguerreotypes. A fascinathis admirer, John Ruskin. ed Turner sits for his photograph, while mutterThen a second, less obvious, thought occurs. ing that photography may replace painting. He Why the sketchiness of the human figures, parobserves the magnetic properties of violet light ticularly the faces, in Turner’s works? Leigh, in a in the spectrum of a prism, demonstrated at his Tate interview, states that, although Turner was house by the indomitable Mary Somerville. Yet, no portrait painter, ‘in the simplest way he delineates character’. But this claim remains highly for all its strength of character, the film never gets quite to grips with the relationship between debatable, as it was for Turner’s contemporaries; the man and the art. There is barely a hint of how hence the many paintings in the exhibition that and why the Covent Garden-born Turner became failed to please their patrons. Not even Turner’s obsessed with sunlight, landscapes and sealarge canvases depicting classical mythology, scapes. The focus is on the man, not his art. But prominent in the exhibition though not in the then, the most sublime art by Turner is unlikely film, pay much attention to human character. In The Fighting Temeraire (1838) and Rain, Steam and ever to divulge the mysteries of its creation. Andrew Robinson Speed – the Great Western Railway (1844) people STRAIGHT AFTER watching Mr Turner, Mike Leigh’s engaging, if frequently unflattering, film dramatisation of the later years of J.M.W. Turner, I returned to the Tate Gallery’s exhibition of the painter’s late works, dating from after his 60th year in 1835, hoping to see the paintings with fresh eyes informed by the film. Immediately obvious is that the excellent casting of the jowly Timothy Spall as Turner must have been strongly influenced by an 1840 portrait in the exhibition, Turner on Varnishing Day by William Parrott. Here a stocky, top-hatted, Turner, brushes and palette in hands, intent on putting finishing touches to a painting for a Royal Academy exhibition, has his back to two other watching Royal Academicians, who are apparently gossiping about him. Turner’s famous ‘red blob’ spat with John Constable at a varnishing day is a highlight of the film. By contrast, Turner’s 1851 death mask, placed next to this

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS Robinson has written books on the film-maker Satyajit Ray and the poet-reformer Rabindranath Tagore – makes this book more readable than the course texts lately produced by professional historians. In terms of coverage and analyses of facts, it is just as knowledgeable and authentic. To call this book ‘popular history’ would be doing it an injustice. In broad sweep, Robinson covers the Indus Valley Civilisation that began around 2600 bc, the settlements in the Gangetic plains around 1500 bc that produced the extraordinary corpus of hymns now known as the Vedas, followed by chapters on the age of Buddha, classical Hinduism, the Indo-Islamic empires, the British colonial period and postcolonial India. Some of this ground would be familiar to anyone who has already been in contact with Indian history, but even a specialist will enjoy reading it. Here history is not an arrangement of the classical, medieval and modern on a chronological scale; rather it is an attempt to understand why the classical persists into the medieval and the modern. For example, the greatest of the Indo-Islamic states, the Mughal Empire, was established by a central Asian (Mongol) warlord, but its remarkable vitality was owed to a successful incorporation of indigenous and Hindu polities within the imperial frame. Or again, in the late1700s, the British East India Company officers designed a civil law for Bengal after manuals written in the era of classical Hinduism (c. 500 ad), unwittingly incorporating classical ideas of caste into their own legal codes. The front cover of Robinson’s book shows Benares, one of the oldest holy cities of the world, while on the back cover there appears a panoramic view of the Bandra-Worli sea link, one of modern India’s key engineering projects. In India: A Short History these images come alive as integral, but not necessarily harmonious, parts of the Indian world today. Tirthankar Roy 60 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

The Indian Army on the Western Front George Morton-Jack

Cambridge University Press 335pp £65

THE INDIAN ARMY that arrived in Marseilles six weeks after the start of the war was probably the most curious of the First World War. In a battle for freedom the Indian army was from a country that was itself not free and to call it Indian was a misnomer. The Raj’s racial theory restricted recruitment to the so-called ‘martial races’, the only Indians considered capable of fighting. So the soldiers came from a thin strip of rural communities, generally in the north, with one group, the much loved Gurkhas, from Nepal, a neutral country whose last war had been nearly a century earlier against the British themselves. The British did value the fighting qualities of these ‘martial races’ but they could not accept they could ever become officers. To be an officer the person had to be pure British, one Indian parent or grandparent made the person ineligible. Even then the British of the Home Army were so contemptuous of their fellow Britons in the Indian army that they called them ‘Hindus’ and objected to any marriage alliance between them and a ‘Hindu daughter’. In the middle of the war, when a British officer of the Indian army left the front, one Home Army senior cavalry commander wrote that British forces in France were ‘well rid of a stupid old Hindu’. Modern historians have argued that the Indians should never have ventured west. Badly trained for modern warfare, they could not cope with the climate and were

so frightened by German shell fire that they deliberately shot themselves in the hand, calf or foot to be invalided. It has been estimated that in the first ten days of fighting 65 per cent of all Indian wounds were self-inflicted, much higher than that for British forces. Morton-Jack brings all his forensic skills as a barrister to demolish these conclusions, showing that in the First Battle of Ypres, between October and November 1914, the Indians provided a vital link that helped the Allies avoid ‘a disastrous defeat’. Also, the crucial decision to withdraw the Indian battalions in late 1915 was not because they were useless but because they were needed to capture Baghdad, which they did in March 1917. Despite being used to fight rebellious tribals on the North-West Frontier, they adapted well to the mud of Flanders and their court-martial convictions for

Morton-Jack brings all his forensic skills as a barrister to show that [at] Ypres the Indians ... helped the Allies to avoid ‘a disastrous defeat’ malingering were a fraction of those for British troops. The research cannot be faulted but the voice we most often hear comes from the senior ranks of the Raj. Lower-ranked British soldiers were not so impressed with Frank Richards of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers in a 1933 book, concluding: ‘The bloody niggers were no good at fighting.’ Morton-Jack dismisses this as racist thinking but does not fully examine whether the praise from on high was not motivated by the postwar imperial need of shoring up support from Indian collaborators, just as the nationalist agitation was gathering strength. Despite this, by shining the light on a little discussed subject, this book fills a big hole in the literature on the war. Mihir Bose

British Cultural Memory and the Second World War Edited by Lucy Noakes and Juliette Pattinson Bloomsbury 218pp £16.99

THE CENTENARY of the outbreak of the First World War has reawakened controversy about its origins. Those of the Second World War are less debatable, but arguments over its legacy continue. Once a paradigm of British triumph, it is an event that, to trivialise, is topped only by England’s World Cup victory in 1966 in evoking pride. In recent years this view of when Britain ‘stood alone (if the contribution of the Empire troops is disregarded)’, ‘ a people’s war’ of equal hardship and sacrifice with class differences put aside, civilians pulling together in a brave and feisty example of British endurance fortitude and unity has been steadily chipped away. More prominence has been given, for example, to the treatment of conscientious objectors, the internment of thousands of aliens – many of them fugitives from Nazism – the embedded nature of antisemitism, the rise in crime, examples of official incompetence and contumely, sometimes even cowardice and the way that hardship continued to fall more heavily on the poor than the rich. The Second World War remains a live forum for debate about nationality, class, governance, morality and pragmatism. In a series of essays Noakes’ and Pattinson’s volume probes

REVIEWS the fashioning and functioning of Britain’s collective memory of a war that for decades was heralded as Britain’s ‘finest hour’. The memorialisation of the war remains complex and contested. How was the conflict represented and how does that construction impact on the understanding of later generations? Contributors consider how somewhat romanticised accounts of women’s extreme bravery in the SOE in occupied France dominate accounts of the ‘Secret War’ in memoirs and novels, interrogate the BBC’s website, ‘The People’s War’, which encourages participants to recount their own experiences, many of which are noticeably filtered through the now accepted narrative of the war, be it evacuation or Dunkirk. Yet it is around the literal concretisation of war that most recent controversies have revolved. The stark bronze construction in Whitehall, a monument to women, unveiled 60 years after the end of the war (and two years after one to animals caught up in conflict had been erected), its inscription in ‘ration book’ typeface, depicts 17 sets of uniform, hanging empty, each representing the range of jobs, both military and civilian, that women undertook between 1939 and 1945. As Corinna M. Peniston Bird points out, some onlookers consider this ‘cloakroom’ representation banal, an inadequate recognition of the myriad dangers and hardships that women, both military and civilian, faced. But the most sensitive of all commemorations is what Frances Houghton entitles ‘The Missing Chapter’, the RAF Bomber Command Memorial unveiled by the Queen in 2012 after a 70-year campaign by those veterans who had been required to implement the ‘saturation bombing’ of Germany, a strategy that continues to raise very uncomfortable questions about responsibility and morality in times of war. The British are often accused of being unable to let go of their

fascination with the Second World War. This rich volume rebuts this charge with chapters on the obscuration of the almost immediate postwar demise of Empire, the failure to acknowledge the part West Indian (Caribbean), Indian and Polish troops and even Italian and German POWS played in Britain’s victory. There is still much to enquire into, learn from and ponder. Juliet Gardiner

Beastly London

A History of Animals in the City Hannah Velten Reaktion Press 288pp £29

ASK A Londoner today which beasts they are nearest to and they may well reply that you are never more than six feet away from a rat. Similarly, the city has no shortage of starlings, pigeons and foxes, the animals with which Londoners are most familiar. By contrast, Hannah Velten’s Beastly London introduces us to a more exotic London; a city which until recent times was shared with the inmates of menageries and the stock of exotic animal dealers, in addition to the sheep, cattle and pigs driven into the city for market and slaughter. Velten’s sumptuously illustrated, well-researched history of the city is a comprehensive and accessible account of changing and complex animal-human relationships. While it spans a period of almost 400 years, Velten’s lively re-telling of sources and depth of research is particularly evident and rewarding to the reader in those chapters that address the Victorian era.

Thematically, the book is arranged in the ways in which animals were commonly categorised or encountered by Londoners. We are introduced to animals as livestock, working animals, sporting animals, entertainers, strange and alluring spectacles, and as pampered pets, even sad strays. The history of pet ownership is linked to a social history of animal welfare, criminality, consumption and the class politics of London’s residents. Victorian middle-class reformers pushed for animal protection, regulation and the sanitisation of public spaces, such that, in particular, the animals of working-class Londoners became increasingly scrutinised and censured. It was the butchers, the animal dealers, the dog thieves and those who skinned cats or dogs for a living who attracted the ire of reformers, while the cruel social inequality between the poorest humans starving in tenements and the pampered pooches of the wellheeled feasting on chops or steak was not lost on critics. However, it is not just the story of posh pets; we are also introduced to London’s working-class pet owners. Bird fanciers gathering in pubs, artisan pigeon fanciers and rabbit enthusiasts are some of those to be found in this rich social history. Beastly London boasts its share of wild beasts and while the study of the Victorian era is rich, the 18th-century history is a little sparse. That said, we learn that, before the gardens of the London Zoological Society catered for genteel mid-Victorian tastes, exotic spectacles were hosted in taverns, coffee houses or in the city’s menageries, including at the Tower or London. The book’s greatest strength, though, is its indepth history of less remarkable or ostentatious animals, in cats, dogs, horses and pigs. Velten’s historical narrative is exhaustively researched and engaging and profits fruitfully from a skilful linking between past and contemporary London. This history, although deeply absorbing, is not always an easy read. In the history of beastly London there is much tragedy, both animal and human. Christopher Plumb

Being Soviet

Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 Timothy Johnston Oxford University Press 294pp £61

A KEY debate in recent Soviet historiography has concerned the impact of Stalinist propaganda on citizens’ attitudes and identities. It has tended to focus on their resistance to authority at one extreme and an inability to resist Soviet models of identity at the other. Timothy Johnston’s study suggests a possible middle way, arguing that most citizens engaged with official rhetoric but also compared it with other ‘unofficial’ sources. Such bricolage or ‘fusing’, he argues, was the key ‘tactic’ of Stalinist life, more common than either conformity or resistance. Johnston outlines the shifts in the rhetoric of Sovietness from wartime to postwar Stalinism and then presents an array of popular responses to each ‘ebb and flow’. While necessary to his analysis of popular responses, the chronological survey of ‘Official Soviet Identity’ offers little new compared with Jeffrey Brooks’ earlier study of the Stalinist press. It also tends to flatten the complexity of Soviet culture, especially during the war, when ‘official’ media evoked Soviet experience in strikingly new ways. The insistence that Soviet identity was constructed chiefly in relation to the West also overlooks the MarxistLeninist narratives of domestic progress, which had crucially defined Soviet identity in the previous two decades (This post-revolutionary context is DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS neglected in the otherwise comprehensive introduction.) The investigation of popular responses to these narratives draws on a remarkably broad range of sources: postwar and post-Soviet interviews, citizens’ diaries and letters, police surveillance and local propagandists’ reports and memoirs. While offering one of the fullest pictures of popular attitudes in this under-researched period, the collation of these sources often overlooks the significant differences between them as sources, especially for the Stalinist mentalité that this book also seeks to reconstruct. During this period, while official media often contained a bewildering shortage of information and coherence, its audience tried to dispel confusion through empirical observation, insights from other media or speculation and rumour. As Johnston persuasively argues, these practices extended beyond Stalinism, forming a consistent response to Soviet ‘information hunger’. However, his conclusion, that ‘unofficial’ culture inexorably overwhelmed ‘official’ culture after Stalin’s death and led to the Soviet collapse, underestimates attempts to inject greater ‘truthfulness’ and debate into post-Stalinist public life, particularly under Khrushchev and Gorbachev. The book’s kaleidoscope of popular narratives amply confirms that Stalinist citizens could be ‘creative’ and far from ‘passive’; however they were not necessarily more coherent or logical than the ‘confused’ media. The notions of bricolage and ‘fusing’ imply that ‘unofficial’ narratives were always more comprehensive and insightful than ‘official’ ones. Viewing any combinations of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ culture also conflates actions that were ‘tactical’ to different degrees. Was the life and death business of information-gathering about the war really comparable to consorting with foreigners, as described in the book’s most captivating chapter, with Soviet sailors in 62 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

the Arctic Circle enjoying Hollywood films and jazz? These all show that Soviet citizens could be flexible and pragmatic, but were they all equally important ‘tactics’ for the Stalinist ‘habitat’? At times, the vivid picture of Stalinist life, so assiduously unearthed by the author, spills out beyond his tight theoretical framework, suggesting that there may be more ways to understand the different behaviours of this eventful period. Polly Jones

cles to Stalin ‘memory work’ and binary positions to the Stalinist inheritance that are still with us today. Myth, Memory, Trauma forces the reader to rethink established truths about de-Stalinisation. It follows the complex twists and turns in the dynamics of memory, from Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ in February 1956, his famous denunciation of the Stalin cult of personality, through to the commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Stalin’s birth in December 1969. In the process we explore the increase in ideological vigilance and cautious praise for Stalin in the freeze of the late 1950s, followed in 1961 by the revival of traumatic narratives and attacks on cult symbols after the 22nd Party Conference. There was no single, clear or fixed interpretation of the Stalinist past under Khrushchev. Away from the key

Yale University Press 362pp £45

Polly Jones provides one of the most sophisticated and nuanced analyses of the complexities of de-Stalinisation currently available

FOR STUDENTS of Russian history and observers of Putin’s Russia, the rehabilitation of the Stalinist past and Josef Stalin’s resurgent personal popularity is a disturbing development. Ever since Stalin’s death in March 1953, his ghost has continued to haunt contemporary Russia. Polly Jones’ brilliantly researched study of de-Stalinisation in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras provides a timely reminder of previous efforts to come to terms with Stalinism. From the mid-1950s until the late 1960s the Soviet Union attempted to confront the trauma, shame and guilt of political terror and the suffering of a brutal war. Jones argues that de-Stalinisation, although frequently imperfect, witnessed genuine attempts to work through the moral and historical complexities of Stalinism. Although a missed opportunity, it nevertheless revealed obsta-

moments of assault, Stalin’s image was unstable, subject to inversion and repeated reassessment. Political pressures meant negotiating a course between narratives of ‘glory’ and ‘guilt’. In Brezhnev’s early years, pro-Stalinist sentiment re-emerged as Soviet culture moved away from discussion of tragedy and trauma towards a celebration of Stalin’s achievements. Only towards the end of the 1960s was a stable discourse reached, albeit one which left Stalinism as an uncomfortable and unresolved issue in collective memory. Jones’ approach combines history and literary scholarship and draws upon an impressive palette of published and archival materials, including internal party reports, discussions about official historiography and the correspondence of writers, journal editors

Myth, Memory, Trauma Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953–70 Polly Jones

and readers. Jones is at her most fluent when analysing literary texts, which explored the trauma of terror and the disastrous early months of the Great Patriotic War and the reception of these texts by readers and censors. These sources move the debate from discussions of de-Stalinisation within the elite to popular reactions. Polly Jones provides one of the most sophisticated and nuanced analyses of the complexities of de-Stalinisation currently available. The Soviet Union never entirely silenced traumatic memories, although there were strict limits in which these could be expressed. Indeed the notion that repressing difficult memories was detrimental to the collective psyche enjoyed currency in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet this idea coexisted with a countervailing feeling that introspective or ‘gloomy’ discussion of war and terror was equally damaging. Although celebration of Stalin’s modernising project and victorious military leadership triumphed in the late 1960s and currently holds the ascendancy, it is worth remembering, as this important study argues, that this outcome was by no means certain. Robert Dale

Poor But Sexy

Culture Clashes in Europe East And West Agata Pyzik Zero Books 310pp £15.99

A QUARTER of a century ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was an expectation that the Evil Empire’s colonies, no longer subjugated by the yoke of statist

orthodoxy, would blithely ascend to the Reaganomic utopia they had been presumed to covet. The former satellites, the former vassal states, the former East – there was a lot of former about – would adopt the West’s capitalist mores, worship at the shrine of the market, join the club called the Free World. They would be cured. They would normalise. Of course, they weren’t former at all. Throughout the 1990s to cross, unimpeded, from what had been West Germany to what had been the DDR would have been laughable had it not been so pathetically tawdry. The land of economic miracles gave way to the land of potholes, stained nylon shirts, Trabbies, bad diet faces, infrastructural neglect, neckless neo-Nazis (a Rostock speciality): there was little sign that the multiple legacies of indigence and stagnation were being addressed. The Great Occidental Dream was as far off as ever. The euphoria of 1989-90 had within a few years been dented by Ostalgia - longing for the solaces of the known in the DDR, of no-choice, of a quiet risk-free life, of authoritarian certainty, of social housing and public transport of a far higher standard than, say, Britain’s. This longing was incomprehensible to many in the consumerist West who may, more generally, have quite misread the Eastern Bloc’s aspirations. Maybe these heterogeneous (and ingrate) nations didn’t actually want to model themselves on those of western Europe. Maybe they hoped to throw off the notion of the East ‘as a constantly sick place’ and reconfigure themselves according to programmes of their own. A country which has been bullied and violated for half a century will surely be more likely to rediscover its identity if it doesn’t wholly appropriate someone else’s. One of the recurrent themes intertwined in Agata Pyzik’s energetic, sprawling, densely detailed, dauntingly well-

EXHIBITION News From Nowhere occupies a central place WILLIAM MORRIS did not hold his beliefs lightly. He became a socialist desperate to find an among the exhibits. G.F. Watt’s magnificent portrait underlines Morris’ distinction and clout. outlet for his radicalism. In the Socialist League Ken Loach, Edmund de Waal and Jeremy Deller he stood at the extreme left of the political testify to the continued resonance of Morris’ spectrum. Ducking the label ‘anarchist’, Morris aspirations. His artistic innovation is exemplified was committed to capitalism’s destruction and by the inclusion of portraits of the friends who advocated a form of communism which chimed gravitated around the Red House and the objects with the anarchism of friends like Peter Krothey produced. Notable figures from the socialist potkin. His incredible efforts to agitate, educate movement, including Eleanor Marx, Edward Carand organise were intended to stimulate a mass penter and Bernard Shaw, are also present. Yet proletarian movement, capable of emancipatErnest Belfort Bax, Morris’ co-author and guide ing itself by direct action and withstanding the to Marx’s thought, is oddly absent. Also missing militarised force against which he expected it are the establishment targets of Morris’ sharp would be pitted. These political aspirations are critiques, whose inclusion might have provided a described in News From Nowhere (1890), Morris’ useful foil to explore his radicalism. seductive utopian romance. The exhibition Morris had been inexcels in championing cubating socialist ideas Morris’ influence on in his artistic practice, radical women and long before he decided his feminist-friendly to invest his time and defence of the ‘lesser money in campaigning. arts’. However, in other What appeared to his respects, the treatment friends as shocking – to of his legacy risks give up art for politics – undercutting his fusion was actually an attempt of art and politics. to come to terms with Moreover, the focus on the realisation that aesthetics creates a bias commerce made art towards the parliamenimpossible. Art and Anarchy and Beauty tary left – the Labour communism were William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960 Party, trade union and synonymous because National Portrait Gallery, London, suffrage movement – making life beautifrom which Morris was until January 11th, 2015 ful depended on the at best semi-detached. transformation of work Morris’ devotee Guy Aldred is not represented, through art. In place of exploitation, cultural though he was a bearer of the communist tradiimpoverishment, mass production for profit, tions that Morris pioneered. Nor is Colin Ward, fashion-driven consumption and filthy, destrucdespite his anarchist contributions to urban tive industry, Morris envisaged a world where planning and the links he provides to contempindividuals would engage in pleasurable work: orary radical art and protest movements. art. In equality, art was a vehicle for inventiveThe history of the Arts and Crafts movement supports another shift, from the creation of social art towards the marketing of design. There are some wonderful illustrations of the craft principles Morris championed, notably the striking garden roller designed by Eric Gill. The joy of making shines through these physical exhibits. But the emphasis on Garden Cities, the postwar design revolution and the Festival of Britain promotes a welfarist idea of ‘art for the people’, not an activist principle of ‘art of the people’. Thus the anarchy of individual creativity is abstracted ness and fellowship. By reconnecting makers from the conditions of anarchy that Morris adwith nature, it had the power to make everyday vocated for its expression, in this otherwise rich, life elevating. Marx talked disparagingly of the bold and perceptive exhibition. anarchy of production; Morris saw the transRuth Kinna formative potential of anarchy for production. All that would remain was art. Morris’ anarchic Catalogue: Fiona McCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty. William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960 (NPG, 2014). politics are boldly illuminated in this exhibition.

Art and communism were synonymous because making life beautiful depended on the transformation of work through art

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 63

informed book, is that of this tension between exhuming an indigenous past and borrowing from without in the quest for regeneration. But in places of ever-shifting boundaries does indigenous signify anything more than narrow tribalism? Pyzik ascribes Polish racism and xenophobia to the country’s being untouched by cosmopolitanism. The concomitant provincialism is expressed through a sort of officially sanctioned, catholic folk art, flower carpets and similar homely kitsch. This sort of verruca-like monoculture was not always the case: Poland’s ‘national poet’ Adam Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania. The remarkable painter Bronislaw Linke had evident affinities with both the German Neue Sachlikeit (Dix, Scholz) and the Dutch Magic Realists (Willink, Ket): there is nothing specifically Polish about his work. Again, Stach z Warty Szukalski’s doctrines about Poles being descended from Easter Islanders are as dotty as the Nazis’ believing their forbears came from Hyperborea; the nationalism of opposing nations is routinely susceptible to kindred delusions. Nationalism is international. It is a tired commonplace that the socialist realist statuary of the Stalin era and that of the Nazi regime are stylistically close; but we overlook their equal proximity to work that was being made in the US, Britain and France, none of them aesthetically preoccupied dictatorships. The point, here implicit in various guises, is that no matter how isolated a regime’s masters might wish it, it will never be watertight. American and English pop music seeped in all right. Its pretensions, which usually seemed hollow, pompous and infantile at home, were taken seriously in the pleasure-starved East. This, then, is where David Bowie fulfilled his destiny. A self-anointed shaman is not without honour save in his own country. Jonathan Meades 64 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Mitterrand

A Study in Ambiguity Philip Short Bodley Head 704pp £30

FOR THOSE on the British Left, François Mitterrand’s victory in May 1981 was a ray of hope. Here was a president resolutely of the Left, whose socialist programme, evoking the great revolutionary moments in French history, represented a humane alternative to Thatcher’s unbridled capitalism. I lived in France for part of the 1980s, as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate doing research on the Left and the Algerian War and my hope dissipated as I learned some uncomfortable truths. There was, for example, Mitterrand and Algeria. As the Minister of the Interior in November 1954, when confronted with revolt in Algeria, Mitterrand had followed a policy of repression rather than negotiation, banning the leading Algerian nationalist party and declaring that ‘Algeria was France’. Then, in 1956, as justice minister, Mitterrand sanctioned the guillotining of Algerian prisoners on death row: a point of no return that unleashed a savage cycle of violence and counter-violence. One Algerian lawyer, Omar Oussedik, told me that Mitterrand ordered the killing of nationalist leaders in an effort to decapitate the anti-colonial revolt. Then there were Mitterrand’s Occupation years. I learned that he had fought in the French army in 1940, escaped from a German prisoner of war camp and had been in the Resistance. However, I also learned that he had worked for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and had been personally decorated by its leader, Marshal Pétain. I learned,

too, that he had flirted with the extreme Right in the 1930s and had forged some dubious friendships in post-1945 France, not least with René Bousquet, the former Vichy police chief. In 1993 Bousquet was assassinated in the street shortly before coming to trial for crimes against humanity for his part in the deportation of Jews in 1942. By 1983, though, Mitterrand performed an economic U-turn that jettisoned planning and embraced the free market. It was a historic moment and in the ensuing years Mitterrand’s real political colours became clear. He was not an ideologue but a pragmatist, whose goal was the retention of power. Thus, Mitterrand cynically encouraged the rise of the far-right National Front knowing that it would undermine his right-wing challengers and on this basis he was easily re-elected president in

Short calls for a proper assessment of Mitterrand’s achievements ... in particular the way he promoted European unity and social justice May 1988. Not for nothing did his opponents call him Machiavellian. All of these complexities are captured in Philip Short’s compelling biography, Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity. In the 1980s Short was the BBC’s correspondent in Paris, with a close-up view of Mitterrand in action. From the start he was fascinated by Mitterrand’s unique political talents, which, in his opinion, combined the visionary with the pragmatic and the gifted with the devious. The book draws upon exhaustive research and here Short had unique access to Mitterrand’s inner circle. He interviewed friends and relatives and in this way the book sheds light not only on his political beliefs but also on his complicated private life – Mitterrand had in effect two families – which until

recently was a no-go area for researchers and journalists in France. Mitterrand was born in 1916 in the town of Jarnac to the north of Bordeaux and Short carefully traces his journey from the middle-class provinces to student life in 1930s Paris. We then follow Mitterrand through the intricacies of the Occupation and on into the postSecond World War Fourth Republic, where he became the Minister for War Veterans in 1947. At just 30 he was the youngest Cabinet member since the French Revolution. In telling this story, which is skilfully woven into a wider history of 20th-century France, Short successfully gets under Mitterrand’s skin; what made him tick was a mixture of ambition, arrogance and a visceral hatred of any punctuality. On this basis, Short explains, when Minister of the Interior in 1954, Mitterrand kept Ferhat Abbas, the Algerian nationalist leader, waiting for an hour and a half because he was engrossed by the cartoons in a French newspaper. He was also, Short rightly underlines, a very learned man who thrived in the company of intellectuals and writers. By the late 1950s his career was in the scuppers, however. In 1958, with the return to power of General de Gaulle, the Fourth Republic establishment was swept aside and Mitterrand, who lost his seat, was one of the high profile casualties. He was also dogged by scandal, accused of staging an assassination attempt on himself in Paris in 1959 as a way of bolstering his image on the Left. Yet, as Short shows, two qualities kept him in the political game: resilience and the long view. Mitterrand knew that he had to establish himself as the anti-Gaullist figure in French politics and after much subtle manoeuvring he was de Gaulle’s principal challenger at the 1965 presidential elections. Mitterrand lost but in forcing de Gaulle into a second round he recovered his political credibility. Thereafter, althoug wrong footed by the ‘events’ of May 1968, he was instrumental in establishing the Socialist Party in 1971, which, in uniting the non-communist Left, became a

vehicle for his political ambitions. He was now the undisputed leader of the Left, losing the presidential election in 1974 but winning in 1981. It was a case of third time lucky. However, the high hopes of 1981 ended in scandal 14 years later. By this point Mitterrand’s standing had been damaged by revelations about his Vichy years and by his role in the illicit use of the state owned oil giant Elf-Aquitaine. Under Mitterrand Elf became a money machine that bought influence on the international stage through bribery and corruption. When he died in 1996 many in the Socialist Party distanced themselves from the Mitterrand legacy. Now, Short’s book calls for a proper assessment of Mitterrand’s achievements. For Short they are on a par with de Gaulle’s, in particular the way in which he promoted European unity and social justice. In my opinion this is an exaggeration, although this perceptive book underlines why historians will always be fascinated by this complex figure, whose story tells us so much about the ambiguities of modern France. Martin Evans

Queer Domesticities

Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London Matt Cook Palgrave 344pp £60

IN THIS scholarly but immensely readable book Matt Cook explores the domestic interiors of homosexual men at various times from the end of the 19th century to the onset of AIDS and the acceptance of gay parenting. Trawling through diaries, auto-

biographies and self-made films, Cook examines the multiple and complex identities of queer men in domestic settings to show how they battled to preserve their tastes in spaces which would reflect their identities. He places well-known men under the spotlight in a series of mini-biographies, of George Ives, Joe Orton and Derek Jarman and lesser-known men, such as Charles Ricketts, C.R. Ashbee and Joe Ackerley. He reveals distinctive types of domestic style: a separation of queer men from families in the early 20th century, men in bedsits in the 1950s and 1960s and the politicisation of young gay men’s spaces from the 1970s onwards. One of the men, George Ives, took bachelor chambers in Albany on Piccadilly, a place which gained a reputation for housing homosexual men; this was reflected in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest when Miss Prism calls Ernest ‘as bad as any young man who had chambers in the Albany, or indeed in the vicinity of Piccadilly can possibly be’. Ives later set up home with his self-selected ‘family’, including his male servant, Kit (who may well have been Ives’ lover, too), Kit’s wife and two daughters and a series of working-class young men. Of the latter, he wrote tellingly: ‘We have no secrets between us.’ Ackerly’s quest was to establish a bachelor home. The rooms in his Little Venice flat were artistic and queer-friendly, but when this was bombed and he moved to a dingy one-bedroomed apartment by Putney Bridge, he was less happy. His bid for independence was thwarted by the intrusion of his sister, his aunt and a dog. Families were not always the disapproving brood they have been depicted as, but were often important and supportive in a quiet way. When Quentin Crisp was portrayed as the lonely queer in the TV documentary The Naked Civil Servant, based on his autobiography published in 1968, his family was upset by the depiction. His niece said,

CONTRIBUTORS Mihir Bose is an awardingwinning journalist and author. Robert Dale is a British Academy, Postdoctoral Fellow at King’s College London.

Jonathan Meades is a writer, essayist and film-maker. Julie Peakman is the author of The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (Reaktion 2013).

Martin Evans is Professor of Modern European History at Sussex University.

Christopher Plumb is author of The Georgian Menagerie: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century London, to be published in 2015 by I.B. Tauris.

Juliet Gardiner is a historian and writer and a former editor of History Today.

Andrew Robinson is the author of The Art of Rabindranath Tagore (Andre Deutsch, 1989).

Polly Jones is SchreckerBarbour Fellow and Associate Professor in Russian at University College, Oxford.

Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at University College London and voluntary Chair of Council for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq.

Ruth Kinna is a historian of ideas at Loughborough University and is the author of William Morris: The Art of Socialism (University of Wales, 2000). Zareer Masani’s most recent book is Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, 2013).

Tirthankar Roy is a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and the author of India in the World Economy from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Andrew Lycett, co-author of Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution (Little, Brown, 1987), is a biographer and commentator on the Middle East.

Shaun Tougher is Reader in Ancient History at Cardiff University. His publications include Approaches to the Byzantine Family (Ashgate, 2013).

‘He had a style that he was all alone in the world; the family spoilt that image.’ His nephew’s documentary about him showed a completely different side to him. In fact, Crisp was very much involved in his extended family’s life and was invited to weddings and celebrations. Family support was not always the case. Although

In this scholarly but immensely readable book ... Matt Cook examines the multiple and complex identities of queer men in domestic settings

Joe Orton wrote letters to his mother, she never wrote back. In place of family, he carved out a unique space for himself, one which had interiority at its heart. He and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, hardly ever left the flat but spent hours together making collages for their walls and writing. But, perhaps, it was the over-intimate claustrophobic atmosphere of their bedsit which contributed to their demise. Once Orton was getting recognition for his plays, an insanely jealous Halliwell took Orton’s life, then committed suicide. Cook has managed to capture the heart of the home of these gay men and brings a new insight into gendered domestic interiors, making a firm contribution to the history of homosexuality. Julie Peakman DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters

Email [email protected] Post to History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH

Threats and Denials Helen Castor in ‘From the Archive’ (November) rightly emphasises the importance of religion to Joan of Arc and her contemporaries, but, while in her biography Castor places Joan in the political and military context of late medieval France, she does not go far enough in establishing Joan, her exploits and her trial in the religious context of the time. The late 14th and early 15th centuries had seen profound social change after the trauma of the Black Death, which, in part, had led to a crisis of confidence in the authority of a Church already undermined by the Great Schism, exemplified by heterodox critics such as the Lollards and Hussites and, less controversially, in the growth of personal piety and the later devotio moderna. The threat Joan posed to orthodoxy was her claim to be the recipient of divine messages. If she could communicate directly with the spiritual, then the role of the Church as sole mediator between God and man was undermined. This was at the heart of her trial and why, after she had recanted, she relapsed into heresy. By accepting the authority of the Church, Joan had to accept its ruling that her voices were not from God. When she realised that this shattered the legitimacy of her actions and her identity as one chosen to do God’s work, she was forced to reassert her divine inspiration against Church orthodoxy. For both Joan and her opponents, the matters at issue were: what is orthodox and who had the authority to determine it? By putting her personal belief above the teaching of the Church, Joan relapsed into the error of denying its authority and so she was a threat to the Church and for this she had to be burned.

Overlooking the Ancients I enjoyed Matt Carr’s article ‘General Sherman’s March to the Sea’ (November), but was Sherman really ‘The Man Who Invented Total War?’. Once again the ancient world seems to have been overlooked: what about, for example, the way that Roman society was completely refashioned to focus entirely on the destruction of Carthage in the Punic Wars? There was even a law passed to limit the amount of jewellery a woman could wear, as this was deemed to impact on both the economy and the morale of Rome during the crisis. Too many historians still seem to think that history began in 1066.

David K. Warner Havant, Hants

Rev Bill Shackleton Burnside, Glasgow

66 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

Richard Stride via email

House Divided Richard Weight’s statement that almost half the Scottish electorate voted to leave the Union is seriously misleading (History Matters, November). Out of the total electorate 37 per cent voted for independence. The referendum involved much emotional distress, rancour and intimidation; people were afraid to put ‘No’ posters on their cars and a friend of mine had a brick thrown through his house window. I know of three cases where the police were called to a polling station because of intimidation by ‘Yes’ supporters. If there were cases of intimidation by the other side, I have yet to learn of them. The referendum brought an animosity which still lingers. How anyone could think emotions would not run high shows how little understanding the media had about what they were stirring up. ‘If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand’ (Mark 3:25).

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Unjustly Ignored I was disappointed that, as a Professor of Women’s and Gender History, June Purvis did not mention Millicent Garrett Fawcett or the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, also ignored by the BBC in its 1974 drama Shoulder to Shoulder (History Matters, November). The NUWSS, too, played its part in inspiring women to campaign for votes and shape a new idea of womanhood. It was attractive to working- and middle-class women and, after 1918, as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), it campaigned ‘to open the legal profession and the civil service to women, for equal access for women to divorce and for equal suffrage’ (Janet Howarth, ‘Fawcett, Dame Millicent Garrett 1847–1929’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Garrett Fawcett’s life, biography and autobiography raise ‘important questions about how the history of feminism is written’. I look forward to an article in History Today about Garrett Fawcett and the NUWSS. Alys Blakeway via email

Misattribution Through a curious misreading of my review in the September issue of James Graham Wilson’s The Triumph of Improvisation, Catherine Hale (Letters, November 2014) implies that I underestimate the role of Mikhail Gorbachev in the transformation of East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s. That will come as a surprise to anyone who has read any of my numerous articles on Gorbachev or such books as The Gorbachev Factor (1996), Seven Years that Changed the World (2007), The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009) and The Myth of the Strong Leader (2014).

Hale writes: ‘Although Brown mentions several names – George Shultz, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan – as important historical agents, I believe that it is Mikhail Gorbachev who is the prime mover’. In my review, I endorsed Wilson’s view that Shultz, Reagan and Bush the elder were the people who mattered most ‘on the American side’. I welcomed, however, his recognition that globally (my words) ‘Mikhail Gorbachev was by some distance the most important political actor in the dramatic sequence of events between 1985 and 1991’. More serious than her oversight is Hale’s attribution to me of a statement of Wilson’s which I quoted because I disagreed with it. After praising his book for not being triumphalist, I regretted the sudden change of tone in his final paragraph. There Wilson writes that Gorbachev ‘did not believe that he lost the Cold War. But he did. And because he did, a generation of human beings in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere on this planet grew up innocent of the specter of a nuclear holocaust’. That statement makes little sense and I do not appreciate being wrongly credited with its authorship. I concluded by contrasting Gorbachev’s vision of a transformed Russia as a co-operative and integral part of a ‘common European home’ with the outlook of Russian leaders today. ‘That development’, I noted, ‘can hardly be divorced from NATO’s expansion into the former Soviet Union and the treatment of Russia as if it were, indeed, the loser of a war.’ Given the tensions, conflicts and fundamentalist extremism to be found in the contemporary world, it is too soon to congratulate ourselves on having avoided the dangers of nuclear catastrophe. Archie Brown St Antony’s College, Oxford

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Coming Next Month Alexander and the Amazon

How believable is the story that, in 330 bc, having conquered Persia, Alexander the Great was sought out by the imperious Amazon queen Thalestris with the sole intention of conceiving his child? Despite its sensational nature – and uncertainty over details of Thalestris’ existence – accounts of their union recur without exaggeration throughout antiquity. Adrienne Mayor considers the evidence for and against an unlikely romance that held legendary status in the ancient world.

The Invention of English Fiction

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

Despite having a thriving literary culture, Anglo-Saxon England appears not to have felt any need for fiction. Dating fiction’s emergence to the 1150s, Laura Ashe examines the fertile conditions for its development as a recognisable literary form and describes how, following Abelard’s philosophy of interiorised morality, its advent marked one of the greatest shifts in English society, heralding the rise of the individual and the concept of love as an agent of self-fulfilment.

The Putney Debates

When the radical Colonel Rainborowe and General Ireton debated the merits of universal manhood suffrage and other issues in 1647 at Putney, where the New Model Army had its headquarters, it was emblematic of a deeper divide within the parliamentarian cause. Precipitated by the publication of the pamphlet, The Case of the Army Truly Stated, Sarah Mortimer explores the events leading up to Putney and how the debates pushed parliamentarian logic to near breaking point.

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

The January issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on December 18th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winners for October are D.R. Dare, Edinburgh; Sid Field, Stockton-on-Tees; Stuart Glover, Bristol; Sylvia L. Lee, Plumpton Green; Bruno Wyman, Walton-on-Thames.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 Photograph © Paul Weston/Alamy HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Municipal Art Collection, Augsburg, Germany/Bridgeman Images; 5 © Getty Images; 6 © The Foundling Museum, London/Bridgeman Images; 7 © Getty Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 Private Collection/Bridgeman Images; 9 top © Getty Images; 9 bottom © Universal History Archive/Getty Images. DEATH AT ST PAUL’S: 10 © The Trustees of the British Museum; 11 © O’Shea Gallery, London/ Bridgeman Images; 12 © Bridgeman Images; 13 top © Bridgeman Images; 13 bottom photo © Christie’s Images/ Bridgeman Images; 14 © Bridgeman Images; 15 top © National Portrait Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 15 bottom Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/Bridgeman; 16 © Bridgeman Images. PORTRAITS OF POWER: 18 Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/Bridgeman Images. MORE THAN CHILD’S PLAY: 20 © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 21 © The British Library Board; 22 © Radharc Images/Alamy; 23 top © Chris Wilson/Alamy; 23 bottom Private Collection; 24 top left © migrant_60/flickr/Creative Commons; 24 top right © 2014 The LEGO Group; 24 middle © CBW/Alamy; 25 top and middle © 2014 The LEGO Group; 26 top by W.K. Haselden, 1917. Courtesy the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent © Mirrorpix; 26 bottom © Interfoto/Alamy; 27 © Jamaway/ Alamy. INFOCUS: 28-29 Imagno/Getty Images. COLLABORATOR: 31 © ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy; 32 top left © RIA Novosti/Alamy; 32 top right photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/Press Association Images; 32 bottom © Mary Evans/Süddeutscher Zeitung; 33 © Laski Diffusion/Getty Images; 34 top left © AP/Press Association Images; 34 top right © VintageCorner/Alamy; 35 top left © Sovfoto/Getty Images; 35 top right © Interfoto/Alamy; 36 © ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy. MAKING HISTORY: 38 akg-images/MPortfolio/Electa. HARD AND SOFT POWER: 39 photo © Tarker/Bridgeman Images; 40 top Musée du Château de Malmaison/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 40 bottom De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 41 The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images; 42 top akg-images; 42 bottom Bibliothèque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images; 43 akg-images/De Agostini Picture Library; 44 Alexei Nikolsky/Getty Images. Subscriptions Ad: 45 original photograph (enhanced) © George Marks/Getty Images. GOLD, FIRE AND GALLOWS: 46 Bridgeman Images; 48 Zoom Dosso/Stringer/Getty Images. A MONARCH AND HIS MIGNONS: 49 Musée Condé, Chantilly/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 50 De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 51 left © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images; 51 top right © Château de Beauregard/Patrick Lorette/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 51 bottom right © Château de Beauregard/Peter Willi/Bridgeman Images; 52 top Musée d’Orbigny Bernon; 52 bottom © Musée Carnavalet, Paris/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 53 © RMN-Grand Palais (domaine de Chantilly)/René-Gabriel Ojéda; 54 © Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images. REVIEWS: 55 ©Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images; 56 photo of Lucy Delap by Graham Copekoga; photo of Judith Flanders by Clive Barda; 63 William Morris by G.F. Watts, 1870 © National Portrait Gallery, London. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 top Wellcome Images; 70 middle Library of Congress; 71 Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images. 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.

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 2 Which Italian patriot of the 14th century became the subject of an 1842 opera by Richard Wagner? 3 The Prose Edda and Heimskringla, both important works of Old Norse literature, were written by which Icelandic chieftain and historian?

8 Which one of ancient Rome’s buildings was transformed into the National Roman Museum in 1889?

4 Which architect, whose works include the 1937 house Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, founded the Prairie School of architecture?

9 Which French noblewoman stabbed the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat to death as he was bathing in 1793?

5 Who devised the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1828 to blow up the British Cabinet as it dined at the house of the Earl of Harrowsby? 6 Who was the first black woman to become a member of the US House of Representatives when she was elected as a Democrat in 1968? 7 Which Chinese feminist writer and political activist was expelled by the Communist Party and imprisoned in 1959 before being rehabilitated in 1979? 70 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

11 Who founded the Liberal Party of Australia at the end of the Second World War, becoming prime minister for the second time in 1949? 12 Which veteran British general was defeated by a Boer force under the command of Louis Botha at the Battle of Colenso on December 5th, 1899?

ANSWERS

10 In which present-day country did the Battle of the Thames, fought on October 5th, 1813, take place?

1. William Howard Taft (1857-1930). 2. Rienzi, or Cola di Rienzo (1313-54). 3. Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). 4. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). 5. Arthur Thistlewood (1774-1820). 6. Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005). 7. Ding Ling (1904-86). 8. The Baths of Diocletian (built 298-306 ad). 9. Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont (1768-93). 10. Canada. 11. Robert Menzies (1894-1978). 12. Sir Redvers Buller (1839-1908).

1 Who was the last US President to have a beard or moustache?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 1 The ___ of Nations, 1776 work by Adam Smith (6) 2 ‘The Guards die but do not ___’ – de Cambronne, at Waterloo, 1815 (attrib.) (9) 3 Moorish potentate who rebelled against Rome in 397-98 (5) 4 Member of an early 20th-century reform movement in the Ottoman Empire (5,4) 5 Matthew ___ (1664-1721), English poet and diplomat (5) 6 Town and historic borough in northeast England (9) 7 Harold Arundell ___ (1882-1947), founder of the League of Coloured Peoples (5) 8 French resort associated historically with Lord Brougham (1778-1868) (6) 14 ___ Purchase, 1803 acquisition by the US (9) 16 G.M. ___ (1876-1962), English historian (9) 17 ‘To be ___ is not all, but it helps’ – physicist Eugene Wigner (attrib.) (9) 20 ‘___ is a continent of energetic mongrels’ – H.A.L. Fisher, 1935 (6) 21 Daughter of Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (6) 23 Tree featured on the flag of Lebanon (5) 24 ‘No man is a hero to his ___’ – Mme Cornuel (5) 25 Monstrous creature in Scandinavian folklore (5)

ACROSS 1 1986 Mafia history by Nicholas Pileggi (7) 5 Army of the ___, eastern Union force in the American Civil War (7) 9 ___ Theses, revolutionary programme issued up by V.I. Lenin in 1917 (5) 10 Pennsylvania city, formerly known as Beeson’s Town (9) 11 1913 crime novel by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (3,6) 12 Cuthbert ___ (1544-77), Roman Catholic priest and martyr (5) 13 Surburb of Leeds, home to a notable Norman church (4) 15 ‘The ___ harmony of spring’ – Gray, 1748 (8) 18 Roscoe ___ (1887-1933), US film director and comic actor (8) 19 Henry ___ (1773-1835), English radical known as ‘Orator’ (4) 22 17th-century leader of the Mohegan Native American tribe (5) 24 Capital of Laos since 1563 (9) 26 London thoroughfare, formerly the site of Newgate Prison (3,6) 27 ___ Wars, Anglo-Chinese conflicts of 1839-42 and 1856-60 (5) 28 Amelia ___ (b.1897), US aviator, disappeared in 1937 (7) 29 Ancient Buddhist monastic centre of NE India (7)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by December 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation ‘Good’ King Wenceslas (c. 907-935)

‘Good’ King Wenceslas

Bohemian ruler who was the subject of a comic epic poem, ‘The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t’, written by ...

US screen actor, who was born on Christmas Day, just like ...

Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Ogden Nash (1902-71) who wrote poems to accompany the Carnival of the Animals by the French composer Camille SaintSaëns, the first recording of which features the voice of …

physicist, who studied and taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, as did ...

John Mason Neale (1818-66)

Noël Coward (1899-1973)

playwright, songwriter and wit, whose friend and fellow martini devotee was …

Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957)

By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Anglican priest, scholar and hymn-writer, who wrote the words to the popular carol …

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 71

GIN CRAZE

FromtheArchive Olivia Williams takes issue with some of the wilder assertions and anachronisms contained in Thomas Maples’ otherwise engaging 1991 article on the 18th-century gin craze.

Spirit of the Age THE GIN CRAZE, London’s first binge drinking crisis, is prone to oversimplification: partly because it makes for an irresistibly dramatic story and also because it inspired vivid portrayals among contemporary writers and artists. It is all too easy to be swept along on a wave of juniper-scented, 18th-century hysteria. Thomas Maples wrote an entertaining overview of the period for History Today in 1991, but there are nuances that need restoring to the narrative. The ‘invention’ of gin is certainly not as clear cut as stating that we owe it to Franciscus de la Boe, a professor at the University of Leiden from 1658 to 1672. It was rumoured for a long time that de la Boe was the first to introduce juniper berries to alcohol, in the hope of treating kidney and bladder complaints. However, there has yet to be a mention of this discovery found in his papers, which would be a surprising omission on his part. In any case the 1650s seem too late a date, because even in Britain there were already similar spirits being made on a small scale for medicinal purposes. That de la Boe invented gin and Charles I promoted it in Britain seems contradictory. Charles I did grant a Royal Charter to the Worshipful Company of Distillers, giving them the power to run a monopoly of those making ‘Aqua Vitae, Aqua Composita and other strong and hot waters’ and that is what they made, not gin. The company described itself as supplying ‘those that be aged and weak in time of sudden qualms and pangs’ and the ‘King’s ships and merchant ships for use shipboard and for the sale to foreign nations’. The aqua vitae often contained a range of aromatic and expensive ingredients, including rue, sage, lavender, thistle, valerian, 72 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

sandalwood, saffron and cinnamon, of which juniper may have been just one. Calling any spirits containing juniper ‘gin’ gives the wrong impression that these spirits were recreational and surely undermines the idea that it was invented in Leiden. It is tempting to interpret lively cultural depictions of the gin craze as fact. We have to be careful, for example, about overstating the prevalence of ‘Drunk for a penny/ Dead drunk for two pence/ Clean straw for

guards on duty at St James’s, Kensington and Whitehall for fear of rioting. There are a few anachronisms from Maples that need addressing, too, with the mention of ‘speakeasies’, ‘citizens’ and the ‘working class’. None of these are terms that 18th-century Londoners would have recognised. Ending with the ‘demise’ of gin is not appropriate either; it just changed. It remained popular among the working poor for centuries to come. One seasonally appropriate reference to gin’s continued popularity comes from 1843. Bob Cratchit, the impoverished hero of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, puts together a festive gin punch for his family, with touching relish:

The ‘invention’ of gin is certainly not as clear cut as stating that we owe it to Franciscus de la Boe nothing’. Because the slogan features as an evocative detail in William Hogarth’s Gin Lane etching, it has since been assumed to be a general feature of gin shops: Hogarth was apparently inspired by one gin shop that he apparently saw in Southwark, but so far that is all we know. There are other hints at overstatement by Maples. The High Constable of Holborn reported 7,066 gin shops in his patch alone, meaning that roughly one house in every five was waiting to relieve Londoners of their meagre wages. However, we cannot be certain that this was true for all of London, as Maples asserts, particularly as Holborn was known to be the heart of the phenomenon. After decades of gin-fuelled chaos in London from the 1690s, Parliament passed a draconian act in 1736 that was tantamount to prohibition. It was not that prime minister Robert Walpole was answering his critics as such, which Maples suggests. Walpole himself had misgivings over the harsh measures and doubled the number of

Turning up his cuffs – as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made any more shabby – [he] compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer. Gin was down in the 1750s, but it was certainly not out.

Olivia Williams is the author of Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London (Headline, 2014).

VOLUME 41 ISSUE 3 1991 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta