History Today 2015-02

RICHARD III: LEGITIMATE KING?

RUSSIA’S TIME OF TROUBLES February 2015 Vol 65 Issue 2

MOSLEY Politics Beyond The Pale

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 Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston 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

Total Average Net Circulation 19,551 Jan-Dec 2013

2 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Sealed, not signed: Magna Carta.

FROM THE EDITOR MAGNA CARTA, WATERLOO, Agincourt, Gallipoli and more: 2015 is a year of significant anniversaries. The first one, the death of Winston Churchill and his state funeral on January 30th, 1965, is already upon us. Churchill’s passing is often cited by commentators such as the historian Dominic Sandbrook and, more convincingly, by the columnist Peter Hitchens as a turning point in British and especially English history: a goodbye to the buttoned up, obdurate people with one foot in the Victorian era and hello to the liberated, irreverent age personified at first by the Beatles and a Wilson government committed to social and cultural reform. Such a simple narrative ignores the fact that, for most Britons, the swinging sixties only got going in the 1970s and 1980s; Thatcherism was as much a democratisation of the permissiveness and self-love of 1960s elites as it was an attempt to turn back the clocks. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a more cautious, less individualistic Scotland turned its back on a Conservative party that appeared to want to conserve little. Anniversaries can be a crutch for lazy journalists, but they also offer valuable opportunities to reassess our understanding of the past, though the mainstream media fails too often to make the most of them. This is especially evident with regards to the First World War, which appears largely to have been given over to children’s authors and blanket coverage of Paul Cummins’ and Tom Piper’s Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red installation at the Tower of London. As the military historian Gary Sheffield argues, a unique opportunity to educate people about the First World War is ‘gurgling down the plug’. Surely it is not too much, laments Sheffield, to ask and seek to answer a basic question: ‘Why did those people fight and die?’ There is time yet, but as we at History Today know all too well, those who seek seriously to engage with the Great War do so against a tide of unthinking emotion. Fortunately, Magna Carta and Waterloo are subjects that largely escape such indulgence and, as Jeremy Black pointed out in January in an excellent polemic in The Times, they offer a chance for Britons at least to reflect on their culture’s more positive contributions to civilisation. A thumbs down to the Royal Mint though, whose new £2 coin commemorating Magna Carta’s 800th anniversary depicts King John flourishing a quill. Magna Carta was sealed, not signed. As any fule kno.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Exercising Greeks • Education Reform • Literary Lives • Belsen on Film

Panathenaic Way to Fitness The Ancient Greek gymnasion was a place to perfect the body for future festivals rather than somewhere to assuage the guilt of excess. Eric Chaline THE NEW YEAR’S resolution to join a gym is nothing new. The male citizens of classical Athens (sixth to fourth centuries bc) would have thronged the city’s three public gymnasia – the Akademia (Academy), Lykeion (Lyceum) and Kinosarges (Cynosarges) – around the new year. One cannot help but feel, however, that the ancient Greeks had things much better organised than we do. For one, the Athenian New Year began on the first new moon after the summer solstice, during the month of Hekatombaion (June/July), in midsummer, not midwinter. They

did not go to the gym after the event to assuage their guilt about the excesses of the preceding festive season but beforehand in order to look their best for the forthcoming celebrations. Of the three major festivals held during Hekatombaion, the most important was the Panathenaia, marking the birthday of Athena on the 28th with a pompe (procession), in which freeborn Athenians of both sexes progressed from the Dipylon Gate along the Panathenaic Way to the Agora and thence up through the Propylaia to the Altar of Athena on the Acropolis. Freeborn male citizens and their sons would have trained even

Body beautiful: Greek amphora, Attica, fourth century bc.

more assiduously for the quadrennial Greater Panathenaia, which included a full programme of athletic events, with the added edge that they were expected to compete in the Panathenaic Stadium, gymnos, naked. It is not just etymology that links the ancient gymnasion with its modern successor. Like today’s gym members, freeborn Athenian men and boys went to the city’s public gymnasia to perform aesthetic training, that is, exercises that enabled them to achieve or maintain the bodily ideal that was visibly glorified in the city’s public art. And for good reason: male nudity was no mere artistic convention in classical Athens, as it would be in neoclassical London, Paris or Berlin. It was obligatory during local and Pan-Hellenic competitions, such as the Panathenaic and Olympic Games and while training at the gymnasium. It was a common sight, too, during religious festivals. To cite one sculptural example, the western section of the Parthenon frieze (most of which is now in the British Museum) shows athletic young cavalrymen, naked except for a himation rakishly carried over one arm or thrown back over the shoulders, preparing to ride out in the Greater Panathenaic pompe. Training for sporting competition (which would now be classed as complementary or assistance exercise) and for the narcissistic pursuit of the body beautiful (aesthetic training) are two functions shared by the ancient and modern institutions. To this we can add a third: therapeutic training, because the ancient Greeks, too, understood the value of exercise in maintaining health and curing disease. But there the similarities end. A visitor to a gym built between the closing decades of the 19th century and the present day would expect to walk into an indoor hall filled with equipment. In contrast, the visitor to a Greek gymnasion would have found FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3

HISTORYMATTERS

something more akin to an open-air athletics field set within extensive parklands, devoid of any fixed equipment, though with the addition of altars and shrines. The only major constructions would have been the palaistra, a large courtyard enclosed by porticos, and the xystoi, the covered running tracks for use in bad weather. Instead of performing on the parallel bars or ‘pumping iron’ on free weights in figure-hugging lycra, the patrons would be seen practising running, long jump, javelin, discus, wrestling and pankration, naked but oiled, covered with a coating of protective dust and with their genitals tied in place by a leather thong know as a kynodesme (literally a ‘dog leash’; a penis was a ‘dog’ in ancient Greek slang). The rooms housed within the porticos of the palaistra reveal the functions that a gymnasion provided its patrons. Alongside the facilities that one would expect in an athletics facility – changing rooms (apodyterion), oiling, massage and medical room (aleipthrion), bath (loutron), punch-bag room (korykion) and ballgames room (sphairisterion) – there were rooms furnished with seating (exedrai) set aside for the education of boys from the ages of seven to 14; the epheboi, the city’s military cadets, who did two years’ military service from the ages of 18 to 20; and adult men who attended lectures given by sophists and philosophers. During the classical period, in addition to being a facility dedicated to the training of the body, the Akademia served as a primary and secondary school, a military academy and mess hall and an adult education institute. As the site of shrines and altars dedicated to heroes and gods, it would also have played its part in the religious life of the city. Informally, the gymnasion was where boys had their first sexual experiences with other boys and older men. The erastes-eromenos system of age-graded same-sex relations that was part of the citizenship and military training of Greek boys and adolescents found a natural home within the confines of the all-male gymnasion. However, I would not like 4 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

to give the reader the impression that the gymnasion was home to a culture of unbridled same-sex hedonism. Although Greek men and boys were accustomed to being naked in the gym, where they freely admired each others’ bodies, they also abided by strict rules of propriety and selfrestraint. The gymnasion was where boys attained manhood in the broadest sense of the term and adult men pursued arete: their full physical, intellectual, emotional, social and moral potential. In The Laws, Plato discusses the concept of sophrosyne, the moderation of one’s desires in order to achieve full mastery of the self and true masculinity. He stresses the importance of physical training in the gym in its development and asserts that a man who is agymnastos (untrained physically, intellectually and morally) will not achieve sophrosyne and, by extension, arete. We can see in the New Year’s resolution to join a gym a modern echo of the ancient Greek pursuit of arete, as modern gym-goers strive to achieve their full human potential through the discipline of gym-based exercise.

The gymnasion was where boys had their first sexual experiences with other boys and older men

Eric Chaline is the author of The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym, which will be published by Reaktion in March 2015. Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The Poor Child’s Friend One of the 19th-century pioneers of education for the working class is emerging from neglect. Pen Vogler JOSEPH LANCASTER, a man of modest background and education, was responsible for transforming education for the poor in the early 19th century. His ebullience, generosity and vision helped change the lives of millions of children and, ultimately, ruin his own. Today he is largely forgotten; historian Roy Porter attributed this to an ingrained Anglo-Saxon distrust of educational theorisings. But at the time, his nonconformist views brought him into conflict with the Church of England, which did its best to erase his significance. His 1803 book Improvements in Education was treated as a dangerously subversive tract by those who feared teaching the poor would lead to a French-style revolution and also by Anglican moralisers and reformers such as Sarah Trimmer, who described him as ‘that Goliath of Schismatics’ and was horrified by his assertion that ‘above all things education ought not to be subservient to the propagation of the particular tenets of any sect’. Aged 20, he started teaching the working-class children of Southwark in a room in his father’s house. His dedication and charisma brought him more pupils than he could teach. He could not afford a teaching assistant and so developed the monitorial method, teaching trusted student ‘monitors’ to deliver simple, well-defined lessons. His economical methods included using sand for them to form their ABCs and standing around the enlarged pages of a single book to practise reading. Today we would call it ‘peer-topeer’ teaching; 200 years ago it combined two innovations: the teaching of poor children, generally left to Sunday schools, with the idea that teachers should be trained, raising their social status and improving the education

HISTORYMATTERS

Still remembered: Joseph Lancaster in an illustration from Our World’s Greatest Benefactors, 1888.

Lancaster’s legacy far outweighed his fame. He showed that educating the poor was possible, beneficial and cost-effective they were giving the children in their care. His other innovations included the arrangement of classes so that all children faced the front and, strange as it may seem to us today, a conviction that writing was just as important as reading and that the two reinforced one another. He challenged the common belief that the poor should be taught literacy only so that they could read the Bible and other morally improving works. He also recognised that small children had a limited attention span (‘variety is ever productive of agreeable sensation’, he argued). As a Quaker, he refused to beat the children in his care, although some punishments (including suspending naughty children in a cage from the ceiling) were elaborate and he was later accused of beating boys for his own amusement.

Lancaster established his first school in Southwark. Its busy, methodical and successful atmosphere attracted august visitors, including William Wilberforce and the Duke of Kent, who became subscribers, and Tsar Alexander I, who took Lancaster’s methods to establish schools for his army. Lancaster presented a copy of his Improvement in Education to George III, who was so impressed that he subscribed £100 per annum. The monitorial system was picked up in the Americas; by the time of Lancaster’s death it was estimated that there were upwards of 1,200 schools using his methods in Britain, Venezuela, Mexico, Switzerland, Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, Canada and the United States. Lancaster worked tirelessly in travelling, lecturing and – it has to be said – self-aggrandisement. A typical visit, in 1808 to Hitchin in

Hertfordshire, so inspired a local lawyer and landowner, William Wilshere, that he opened his own Lancasterian school in a malthouse he owned and, in 1837, built a monitorial schoolroom with clerestory windows and pillared side aisles, to Lancaster’s specifications. Lancaster was zealous, generous, but expensive in his tastes. His grasp of economics was not up to his own standards of teaching arithmetic and he fell more and more into debt. He suffered from what is now known as bipolar disorder: at one moment driven by a euphoric belief that he was doing God’s work; at another cast into paranoid despair. He lambasted friends and benefactors, believing they were trying to steal his glory or betray the cause. He was frequently in conflict with the committee set up to relieve him of the financial responsibility for what became the British and Foreign Schools Society; he became bankrupt and was imprisoned in a sponging house for debt. Eventually, he took himself to the US and in 1838 he was knocked down by a cab in New York and died the next day. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Lancaster’s legacy far outweighed his fame. He showed that educating the poor was possible, beneficial and cost-effective. His success galvanised the established Church out of its lethargic opposition to proper schooling for working-class children. In the words of Robert Southey: What we are obliged to Lancaster for is, for having been the means of frightening the Bishops who, except for the Bishop of Durham, would never have exerted themselves if they had not been compelled to it. He is still remembered in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. The Lancasterian school opened by Wilshere taught children up to 1969 and is now the British Schools Museum, where visiting children (and adults) can take Victorian lessons in the monitorial schoolroom and visit other historic classrooms, including one built on the advice of Matthew Arnold, and the Victorian Headmaster’s House. It is a fitting tribute to the man dubbed the ‘Poor Child’s Friend’.

Pen Vogler is a trustee of the British Schools Museum: www.britishschoolsmuseum.co.uk FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORYMATTERS

Ham-fisted: a scene from Ill Met by Moonlight, the 1957 film based on W. Stanley Moss’s account of the Kreipe abduction.

Their Back Pages Second-hand books don’t just tell the stories of their authors but of their former owners, too. Josh Spero PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR’S kidnapping of the German General Kreipe on Crete during the Second World War is a well-told tale in book and film. Leigh Fermor and a couple of his SOE cohort lay in wait for the general’s car at night, hustled him out and led him across the mountains until he could be evacuated. There is even a touching moment where one completes the other’s ode of Horace. It has come down to us as a heroic endeavour. Except the version we have is nonsense. I came to learn this in an odd way. In 2007 I embarked on a project to track down the owners of my second-hand classics books and write about them. Among the 11 owners I tracked down is an academic called Thomas Dunbabin, who had owned my copy of a commentary on Herodotus. It was already 75 years old when I came to buy it as an undergraduate. The book, with its thick wine-dark covers, expounded on the first historian, where he had been and what he had seen. But Dunbabin’s story was so much more interesting to me then than that of Herodotus. Inside the book, a curling hand 6 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

wrote: ‘T.J. Dunbabin, C.C.C., Oxford, 13.3.31.’ This was plenty to go on: CCC is Corpus Christi College. A quick enquiry with the college archivist led me to a bare-bones account of his life – his birth, parents, academic career, military career, his own family and his books – and then to the email addresses of his children, themselves distinguished academics. His children, along with careful archiveransacking, led me into Dunbabin’s life, brief but genuinely heroic. Dunbabin was born in Australia. After his degree, he became an academic, alternating time in Oxford with long stretches in Greece. When war came, like so many classicists, he was called up to serve in Greece. His responsibilities were complex for someone who spent much of the war up trees and in caves disguised in Cretan clothes with a semi-convincing moustache: he did not just have to subvert the Germans, he had to negotiate a civil war between the nationalists and the communists then brewing on the mainland. This latter task involved the cultivation of new political parties, the diffusion of aggression, strategic placating and occasional assassinations. The Germans were still enemy number one and attacks on them had to be managed with delicacy for fear of brutal reprisals. Dunbabin, unshowy and cautious, was the perfect man to lead such a campaign. As a servant of such a man, Leigh Fermor – attention-seeking, self-aggrandising, indifferent to the consequences – was less than perfect. In Ill Met by Moonlight, his account of

the kidnap, W. Stanley Moss says they left a note in General Kreipe’s car after they had taken him: ‘TO THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES IN CRETE ... We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans.’ This ham-fisted attempt to persuade the Germans not to take revenge on the locals was as ineffective as it was foolish: the Germans razed the village of Anoyia, where they had kept the general on their march. What makes this inglorious episode worse is that Dunbabin says he was sure it would be pointless. ‘Much of the purpose of the operation was lost’, he wrote in a report after the war, since the real target – the cruel General Müller – had already been replaced in Crete and Kreipe was a recent, weak substitute. A colleague of Dunbabin’s I spoke to said Dunbabin would never have approved of it, caring more for the lives of Cretans than for a tale to tell. Leigh Fermor was all about tales to tell. Dunbabin’s was just one life I stepped into, which span the decades: Belinda Dennis was born almost a century ago, in August 1915, Seb Armesto in 1982. They lived in countries from Britain to Australia, via Italy and Greece, Turkey and Georgia, India and Papua New Guinea. They are teachers and students, actors and authors, lovers and poets, haters and fighters. They are the story of a century and all are in my ragtag library. Take Dennis, a Latin teacher in London. The book she owned was a guide to the monuments of the Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome, those lesserknown public spaces of Augustus and Trajan. But it was more than that: the book had a dark fascist provenance, which led me on to disturbing truths about Italy in the 1930s. Donald Russell is a particular favourite. My tutor at Oxford in the abstruse art of turning English into Greek verse, it turned out that he had cracked codes at Bletchley Park during the war; but Japanese ones, not German, a part of Britain’s war story hardly known. Everyone who owns a second-hand book: think of the lives your books have lived next time you look.

Josh Spero is art critic of the Tatler. You can help fund his Secondhand Stories at unbound.co.uk

HISTORYMATTERS

Night Will Fall

After 70 years, a visual record of the liberation of Belsen has been restored. Taylor Downing

WHEN THE British 11th Armoured Division liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover in mid-April 1945, British Army Film Unit cameramen recorded images of bodies piled one on another and of the captured SS guards throwing the naked corpses into vast burial pits. In London, the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force realised that this footage provided the most powerful record yet of Nazi war crimes. Sidney Bernstein, a film consultant at the Ministry of Information (who later founded Granada Television), produced a treatment, along with future Labour minister Richard Crossman, that would feature the footage from Belsen as well as other camps across Germany. Bernstein invited Alfred Hitchcock to supervise the edit, though it is now clear that Hitchcock played little role in its production other than in suggesting transparency in the use of footage so no one could claim it was faked. The film was never completed. The Americans pulled out of the collaboration and Billy Wilder produced their own film about the camps, Death Mills. The Foreign Office concluded there was no longer a need to demonstrate to Germans the guilt they shared; it was time to rebuild Germany against a possible Soviet threat. In 1952 five reels of ‘rough cut’ were deposited at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). This has now been restored as a film, unpromisingly titled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. The IWM team led by Toby Haggith had to complete, from the production notes, a sixth reel that was never cut, using mostly Soviet footage of Auschwitz. They have recorded the commentary that they believe Crossman wrote. The result, says Haggith, is a ‘lost masterpiece of British documentary film-making’. It includes a fascinating sequence about the recovery of some of

the women in the camp, who are given new clothes to wear. Such remarkable images provide a rare moment of hope and the film ends on a universalist message claiming that: ‘Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall.’ The IWM has decided to restrict screenings, only allowing the film to be shown where it can be introduced by a member of the IWM team. Clearly this limits the potential audience. This is partly where a new documentary, Night Will Fall, directed by André Singer, comes in. It includes interviews with some of those who liberated Bergen-Belsen and with the cameramen who shot the footage. David Dimbleby describes the initial BBC disbelief at his father Richard’s radio broadcast from the liberated camp. Bernstein features from a 1984 interview and even Hitchcock appears in a 1962 audio interview, although the film speculates that the master of suspense never even visited the cutting room. Also appearing are several survivors, inlcuding Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who had played in the camp orchestra at Auschwitz. These are important films. It is fascinating to see how the horror of the camps might have been presented by a team of skilled British film-makers in 1945. Night Will Fall puts this original project into its historical context and brings it alive with thought-provoking testimony. It is vital that we look at these records of crimes committed just two generations ago.

Taylor Downing is the author of The World at War (BFI Palgrave Macmillan 2012).

A minor role: Alfred Hitchcock, c.1930s.

XXXXXXXXX

OBITUARY

Gerald Harriss A masterly medievalist, he trained a generation of leading historians.

GERALD HARRISS, who died on November 2nd, 2014 aged 89, was one of the most distinguished English medievalists of his generation. A pupil of the great Oxford historian, K.B. McFarlane, whom he was to succeed at Magdalen and whose letters he was to edit, Harriss was an eloquent interpreter of the workings of English late-medieval political society, illuminating not only its institutional aspects but also the characters of its leading actors, notably Cardinal Beaufort, whose biography he wrote. In 2005, when well into retirement, he published Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461, his volume in the Oxford History of England series, a magisterial survey that ranges with equal authority not only over politics and diplomacy but also over areas well outside Harriss’ field of research, such as trade and peasant living standards. As a doctoral supervisor, Harriss was as successful as his mentor McFarlane, training a generation of research students, many of whom now occupy academic or academic-related posts. As an undergraduate tutor Harriss was incisive, conscientious, a good listener and always quietly encouraging. Oxford students, who in their third year studied ‘The Reign of King Henry V’ with him and his colleague, Maurice Keen, owe to him their training in the arcane but still invaluable art of gobbet writing. Gerald Harriss was an historian of supreme distinction, a dedicated teacher and a good and generous human being. Nigel Saul FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

FEBRUARY

By Richard Cavendish

FEBRUARY 10th 1840

Queen Victoria’s wedding Victoria was 18 when she succeeded to the throne in 1837, amid mounting speculation about who she would marry. The key figure proved to be her German uncle, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, her mother’s brother, who had been King of the Belgians since 1831. To further strengthen his family’s European influence, he hoped to secure Victoria for one of his nephews, Ernst or Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The youngest brother, Albert, was three months younger than Victoria and he later recalled that even as a small boy he had been told that one day he should marry Victoria and had always thought of her in that light. At the apparently innocent suggestion of Leopold’s adviser, Baron Stockmar, in April 1836 Victoria’s Saxe-Coburg mother invited Ernst and Albert to London for the princess’s 17th birthday celebrations in Kensington Palace, along with their father, the Duke of SaxeCoburg. Young Victoria was smitten with Albert, whom she thought extremely handsome. They talked happily and played piano duets together and, after he left London for Brussels in June, she wrote to tell Uncle Leopold that she had cried bitterly at Albert’s departure and to thank him for ‘the prospect of great happiness you have contributed to give me in the person of dear Albert’. On Victoria’s accession, Albert wrote to wish her ‘a long, happy and glorious’ reign and later sent her presents from abroad. Victoria was enjoying her independence and she was determined not to be rushed into a bad marital decision, of which her family offered all too many examples. After consultations with Leopold and Baron Stockmar, she invited Albert and Ernst to England again in 1839. They arrived at Windsor Castle in October and the instant Victoria saw Albert she made up her mind. A few days later she summoned him to her private 8 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

room and it was she who proposed to him, as protocol required. He accepted immediately and they kissed over and over again. All the talk was in German, though Albert’s English would soon improve. ‘Oh!’, Victoria confided to her diary, ‘to feel I was, and am, loved by such an Angel as Albert was too great delight to describe! he is perfection … Oh! how I love and adore him I cannot say!!’ The couple spent every minute they could together, singing and dancing, while seizing every opportunity to kiss and cuddle in private, until Albert left in November to return to Germany. Much argument now broke out about what exactly Albert’s position would be after the marriage, what rank and precedence he would hold, how his household was to be organised and how much he would be paid. There were those who did not relish the prospect of paying for a penniless foreign princeling

Happiest day: the wedding of Victoria and Albert by George Hayter.

and there were also false rumours that Albert was a Roman Catholic. Matters were sorted out, however, and Albert was invested with the Order of the Garter and escorted back to London from Gotha in January 1840. The wedding in February, the first marriage of a reigning English queen since Bloody Mary almost 300 years before, was held at 1pm in the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Victoria arrived in a procession of carriages from Buckingham Palace, to which she had moved to get away from her mother. She wore a white dress of heavy silk satin, trimmed with Honiton lace. She had a white lace veil and wore a diamond necklace and earrings as well as a sapphire brooch given her by Albert and she carried a wreath of orange blossoms, a symbol of fertility. Albert was in a British field marshal’s uniform and was escorted by a squadron of Life Guards. He entered the chapel to the strains of Handel’s ‘See, the conquering hero comes’, followed by Victoria, who was given away by her uncle the Duke of Sussex. Twelve young bridesmaids carried her train. There was not remotely room in the chapel for the huge crowds that had gathered and which cheered the young couple at every chance. The wedding breakfast was held at Buckingham Palace and the wedding cake weighed 300 pounds. The newlyweds went off to Windsor Castle for a three-day honeymoon. Victoria described her wedding day as ‘the happiest day of my life!’ and the wedding night that followed as ‘most gratifying’. There is no doubt about the sexual intensity involved. Victoria was pregnant within a couple of months of the wedding and, although she would always detest pregnancy and childbirth, she and Albert would have nine children. He proved himself an admirable consort and made a strong positive contribution to British life. His premature death at 42 in 1861 was a devastating blow to Victoria. It was many years before she could even begin to recover.

FEBRUARY 11th 1940

John Buchan dies in Montreal

He was known for his prodigious output of classy adventure stories, historical novels and biographies, which he wrote while working at high-powered jobs that carried him to the peerage as Lord Tweedsmuir before his appointment as GovernorGeneral of Canada in 1935. Buchan’s term of office was five years and by 1939 he had decided that he would not accept another term. His health had been worrying him and one Tuesday morning in January 1940 in his residence in Ottawa, Rideau Hall, he slipped and fell in the bath, hit his head and knocked himself out. He was still unconscious when he was found an hour later and was taken for immediate surgery. He had suffered a stroke and the doctors did not think he would last long, but he was moved to the Neurological Institute in Montreal for more operations before he died soon after seven o’clock on the Sunday evening. He was 64. The Canadian prime minister,

W. Mackenzie King, went on the radio to tell his people that they had lost ‘a friend who from the day of his arrival in this country dedicated his life to their service’. Returned to Ottawa, the body lay in state in the Parliament Building before a state funeral in St Andrews’s Presbyterian Church. It was cremated and the ashes were returned to the UK on a warship to be interred in the churchyard at Elsfield, a village outside Oxford. Elsfield Manor had been Buchan and his wife By royal right: John Buchan in 1906.

Out on a limb: Sarah Bernhardt, c.1920.

FEBRUARY 22nd 1915

Sarah Bernhardt’s leg

The great French actress was 70 and her right knee was causing her agonising pain. She had injured her leg when performing Victorien Sardou’s play Tosca (on which Puccini’s opera was based), in which she was the heroine who finally hurls herself off a castle wall to kill herself in despair. In 1914 she tried wearing a cast and in January 1915 she rented a villa at Andernos, near Bordeaux, hoping that a period of complete immobilisation would help, but it did not. The ‘Divine Sarah’ was nothing if not strong minded and she decided she would be better off without the leg altogether. She wrote to one of her lovers, the surgeon Samuel Pozzi, telling him to cut it off above the knee. ‘Why condemn me to constant suffering?’, she asked. If he did not help her, she threatened to shoot herself in the leg and then it would have to be cut off. ‘I want to live what life remains to me,’ she wrote, ‘or die at once.’ Pozzi authorised a young

Susan’s country house in England for many years. Andrew Lownie’s 1995 biography called Buchan ‘the Presbyterian cavalier’. Born in Perth in 1875, son of a Presbyterian minister, he went to Glasgow University at 17 and on to Oxford, where he was President of the Union and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. Between 1901 and 1903 he was private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner for Southern Africa. Back in England he became a director of Nelson’s, his publishers. His books included The 39 Steps in 1915, the first of his Richard Hannay series. From 1918 he ran the Ministry of Information in London and he was later on the board of Reuter’s news agency. From 1927 to 1935 he was MP for the Combined Scottish Universities and from 1933 High Commisioner of the Church of Scotland. His biographies of Montrose and Sir Walter Scott came out in 1928 and 1932. Charming, gifted and impressive, he moved easily in the most influential circles and a friend said that he seemed to achieve success ‘by a kind of royal right’ that no one challenged or begrudged.

surgeon called Maurice Denucé to carry out the operation in Bordeaux. He used ether as an anaesthetic and telegraphed Pozzi that day to say that there had been no problems, the minimum ether had been needed and all was well. The unstoppable Sarah tried several wooden legs, but irritably threw them away and bought a sedan chair to be carried about in. Before the year was out she was on stage in Paris again. She entertained French soldiers at the front, made numerous theatre appearances and a final tour of the US before she died in Paris aged 78 in 1923 and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. Her amputated leg was supposedly rediscovered late in 2008, preserved in formalin at Bordeaux’s Faculty of Medicine and found in a storeroom with other grisly curiosities. Experts, however, said it was a left leg that had been amputated below the knee, so not in any sense the right one. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

The ruins of Corfe Castle, painting by John Richards, 1764. Inset: Lady Bankes, by Henry Bone, 18th century.

10 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

CIVIL WAR

Lady Bankes

defends

Corfe Castle Accounts of the second siege of the royalist stronghold in Dorset during England’s Civil Wars have romanticised the role of its aristocratic owner. But was Mary, Lady Bankes even there? Patrick Little investigates.

A

MONG THE MANY romantic stories from the English Civil Wars, the heroic defence of strongholds by aristocratic women have a special place. The royalist Countess of Derby at Lathom in Lancashire and the parliamentarian Lady Brilliana Harley at Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire both resisted sieges while their husbands were away. Perhaps the most famous of these heroines is Mary, Lady Bankes, whose defence of Corfe Castle in Dorset during two sieges has inspired painters and sculptors, with the dramatic ruins of the stronghold featuring in innumerable tourist photographs. Mary was born in August 1601, the only daughter of Ralph Hawtrey of Ruislip in Middlesex, and she married the ambitious young lawyer, John Bankes, in May 1618. The family were based at Ruislip until 1631, with seven children being born there; from 1633 to 1635 they lived in High Holborn, close to the Inns of Court, where they had three more children; and from 1637 until the summer of 1642 FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

they were at another of the Hawtrey houses at Stanwell in Middlesex, where three more children were born. It was only in July 1642, as civil war approached, that Lady Bankes removed her household to their newly acquired estate in Dorset, centred on the Norman castle at Corfe, guarding the entrance to the Isle of Purbeck. The couple’s youngest child, a boy, was born at Corfe in June 1644. The family were commoners but they had the resources of nobles. Their estates in Dorset yielded at least £5,000 a year in the later 1630s and her husband’s legal career was notably lucrative. ALTHOUGH JOHN BANKES had risen to be Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas by 1642, he was a reluctant royalist. In a private letter to the steward of his Dorset estates (and MP for the borough of Corfe Castle), Giles Grene, he admitted in the summer of 1642 that he had offended the king. His crime was to refuse to condemn Parliament’s controversial Militia Ordinance, which allowed both Houses to raise troops on their own authority. Despite the king’s displeasure, he continued to argue for a last-minute settlement between the two sides. In the same

Entries from the Bankes Papers in the Dorset Record Office: ‘Since August 13 a bill at London’.

The Bankes were commoners but they had the resources of nobles. Their estates in Dorset yielded at least £5,000 a year in the later 1630s period he was in touch with prominent opponents of the king, such as Denzil Holles and the 3rd Earl of Essex. Even after the outbreak of war, Bankes was reluctant to attend the king in person and in January 1643 received a terse note by Charles to ‘command you, upon your allegiance’ to travel to Oxford by the 21st of the month. Bankes had little choice but to leave Corfe Castle in the safe-keeping of his wife.

A

T FIRST there was no serious attempt by local parliamentarians to take the castle. According to the royalist newsbook, Mercurius Rusticus, in May 1643 the parliamentarians in Poole sent a force of sailors to demand that Lady Bankes surrender the four small cannons held by the castle: but instead of delivering them, though at that time there were but five men in the castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid servants, at their lady’s command … lading one of them gave fire, which small thunder so affrighted the seamen that they all quitted the place and ran away.

Sir John Bankes in his role as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, portrait by Gilbert Jackson, 1643.

12 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

The first proper siege was a similarly shambolic affair. Sir Walter Erle of Charborough Park, who fancied himself as a soldier on the strength of a few months in the continental wars, invested the castle in the following June. By this time Lady Bankes had been reinforced by 80 men from the king’s army, commanded by a local gentleman, Captain Lawrence. Erle had received two artillery pieces from Portsmouth to assist in the siege, but progress was slow and there were soon criticisms that he and his men came no closer to the castle than the neighbouring town of Wareham. In July,

CIVIL WAR make good against the rebels, and did bravely perform what she undertook, for by heaving over stones and hot embers, they repelled the rebels, and kept them from climbing their ladders. Even allowing for exaggeration, it is obvious that the local parliamentarians were no match for Lady Bankes. Their final humiliation came only a few days later. After a rapid march from the west, the royalist army took Bristol by storm on July 26th and, as news of this disaster spread, parliamentarian resistance in Dorset crumbled. Erle left the siege of Corfe with indecent haste on August 4th, retreating first to Poole and then by ship to Southampton, leaving his two cannons to be dragged into the castle by the triumphant defenders.

A

Erle wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons to protest that he needed larger cannons: for all the good I can do till then is but to keep off victual and ammunition from the castle I am before, the walls being strong and the iron guns sent hither from Portsmouth being such as will stand in no great stead for such a work. Even this blockade had not been effective, as two barrels of gunpowder had recently been smuggled into the castle by one John Browne, ‘of late being an attendant of the Lady Bankes, having borne arms there’. Mercurius Rusticus provides an account of what happened next. In desperation, Erle offered his men bribes and plied them with drink, ‘knowing that drunkenness makes some men fight like lions that being sober would run like hares’. He then encouraged them to attack the unbreached walls in two places, including the upper ward: which the Lady Bankes (to her eternal honour be it spoken), with her daughters, women and five soldiers, undertook to

‘Storming the Castle’, an illustration from the Story of Corfe Castle by George Bankes, 1853.

SECOND, more serious attempt on the castle started in the dying days of 1645, as the victorious parliamentarians followed up their decisive defeat of the king at Naseby with a campaign to reduce royalist strongholds in the west. Despite this, the strength of the castle’s walls and the determination of its defenders once again made the parliamentarians’ task almost impossible. It was only the treachery of one of the royalist officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, that led to the defenders’ capitulation. Pitman, by prior agreement with the besiegers, let 120 enemy musketeers in to the castle by a rear entrance. These men soon took over the two wings of the main keep and the garrison had little choice but to surrender, which it did on February 27th, 1646. Colonel John Bingham, who commanded the besiegers, saw the seizure of the castle without bloodshed as an example of ‘God’s great providence’, telling the Speaker of the Commons that ‘the castle being of vast strength and my men but about 400’, it could only have been taken by subterfuge. According to the popular account, Lady Bankes was present throughout the second siege. The tale was told by her descendant, George Bankes, in his Story of Corfe Castle, published in 1853, and it has been repeated many times since, most recently in the entry on Lady Bankes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her role was suitably romantic. When the castle was overrun, she threw the family treasure down the well to deny it to the king’s enemies. Despite this gesture of defiance, Colonel Bingham ‘could not but admire the courage of the lady who was his foe’ and intervened to make sure her servants were unmolested and that no massacre of the garrison took place. He also presented her with the keys of the fortress. Lady Bankes’ story was made all the more poignant by the fate of the castle, which was deliberately destroyed by the parliamentarians after the siege, leaving it one of the most evocative civil war sites in England. The Bankes’ new house at Kingston Lacy (built by her son, Ralph, after the Restoration and now owned by the National Trust) has in its collection portraits of ‘Brave Dame Mary’ and her husband, life-sized statues of the couple cast by Baron Marochetti in the mid-19th century and a glass cabinet containing the keys said to be those of the castle. But is this account of Lady Bankes’ heroism during the second siege actually true? In the Bankes Papers in the Dorset Record Office there are two small volumes of private accounts belonging to Lady Bankes. These include all the moneys received and the expenses incurred from the end of 1644 onwards, starting FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

with those covering the period of her husband’s last illness and his funeral. The bulk of the entries are about ordinary household matters: the receipt of rents, to a greater or lesser extent disrupted by the war; payments for basic foodstuffs as well as delicacies such as ‘fruit and sugar’; and necessary expenses like horseshoes and tips for servants. Crucially, the volumes also give information of Lady Bankes’ movements in the last 18 months of Corfe Castle’s existence as a royalist garrison. What is revealed turns the traditional account on its head. Far from defending Corfe in person, Lady Bankes had not been there, or anywhere else in Dorset, for at least a year before the castle’s capture in February 1646.

Kingston Lacy, Dorset, built for Sir Ralph Bankes in 1663-65.

T

HE EXACT DATE of Lady Bankes’ departure from Dorset is not clear, but it probably followed soon after she received news of her husband’s death in December 1644. A section in her accounts for ‘receipts’, starting December 28th – the date of her husband’s death – lists £26 for plate and £25 for horses sold at Oxford, but it is not clear when these transactions took place. When it comes to disbursements, this period is covered by a section headed ‘when I came away’, which includes ‘expenses to the college cooks, butlers, grooms at Oxford’. She may not have been in Oxford for more than a few days, as these expenses also covered her journey to Middlesex and payments made at Ruislip, Stanwell and Bothmore, where she stayed with relatives. One reason for staying in Middlesex was to make sure she would not be arrested as soon as she set foot in London, as she had failed to pay assessment fines imposed on her during the spring. Any such fears were settled in July 1645, however, when the Commons issued orders to allow Lady Bankes and her daughters to travel to London in order to ‘compound’ (pay a fine) for the release of the family’s estates from ‘sequestration’ (confiscation). 14 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

‘Lady Bankes on the Ramparts’, from the Story of Corfe Castle.

The account books make it clear that the family took advantage of the amnesty with alacrity. A separate heading covered payments incurred in her dealings with Parliament and its committees ‘since August 1645’, including the composition fines. There is also a section marked ‘Since August 13 a bill at London’, with a dated entry mentioning the payment of money ‘to the door-keepers at the committee’ on September 9th. This was probably the Committee for Compounding, a leading member of which was Roger Hill, son-in-law of the Bankes’ old friend, Giles Grene. Grene was himself an important figure in the parliamentarian administration, as chairman of the Navy Committee, and, as we shall see, he may also have been using his influence behind the scenes. We know from the official records that Lady Bankes – perhaps in person – had submitted an initial petition to the Committee for Compounding on September 2nd. She had less success with the Committee for Advance of Money, which administered the assessment fines and, despite the earlier amnesty, on September 22nd and October 1st orders were issued for her arrest. Instead of leaving the area, on October 6th Lady Bankes agreed to pay what she owed within a fortnight, although in a petition of October 15th she asked that the money be taken into account when she paid her composition fine. The apparently fickle attitude of the Committee for Advance of Money may reflect the political divisions within it after the death of its long-time chairman, William Strode, in September of that year. Lady Bankes had two potentially useful allies on this committee: Hill and his ally, the Purbeck landowner, Denis Bond, a friend of Grene, but their influence was not as great as it had once been. The continuing resistance of Corfe Castle was another serious impediment to Lady Bankes’ efforts with committees and on November 27th, 1645 it was asserted that

CIVIL WAR

The Dorset County Committee was certain that Lady Bankes was not involved in the second siege of Corfe Castle she would not be allowed to compound until the castle surrendered. Perhaps as a result of this, during the winter of 1645-6 the family seems to have left the capital for Bothmore in Middlesex. An entry for late December records 10s. ‘sent to a minister where myself and family received the communion’, presumably on Christmas Day. Immediately afterwards she noted payments ‘for a coach to Purley’ and sums ‘given in at the house there, when I went to my brother’ (probably Edward Hawtrey). In early March 1646, immediately after the fall of Corfe, Lady Bankes evidently returned to London. She paid for coach hire, rent ‘beforehand for the lodgings beginning 12 March’ and fodder ‘for Will’s horse standing a week in town’. In the week beginning March 14th she paid for coal, the common fuel in the capital, for heating her lodgings, the costs of a cart ‘to bring my things to my lodging’ and 12 shillings for a week’s rent. Other entries show that Lady Bankes was concerned with saving as much as she could from the ruins of her old home. An entry for the week of April 4-11th records the payment of £1 to a servant ‘for bringing things from Purbeck’, while at the end of April she notes the cost of coach hire for some of her children ‘from Blandford’ and their subsequent lodging expenses in London. In May she paid the substantial sum of £8 to a servant ‘for three journeys to Dorset and his staying there’.

The board now at Kingston Lacy with what is claimed to be the set of original keys to Corfe Castle.

L

OCAL SOURCES CONFIRM that Lady Bankes was absent from Corfe Castle during the final siege. Colonel Bingham, who commanded the besiegers, wrote to Parliament three times in the days following the surrender, but made no mention of Lady Bankes. The sheriff of Dorset, John Fitzjames, who was also an eyewitness, told the parliamentarian general, Sir Thomas Fairfax, that the garrison had been commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Anketill, ‘who since Colonel Lawrence came out was governor thereof’, but again makes no reference to Lady Bankes. In the aftermath of the siege Corfe Castle was stripped of its furniture, tapestries and other valuables by local people; one gentleman, Richard Gould, was rumoured to have ‘a room furnished and hung round with the castle goods, besides many stones and much timber he had’. Colonel Bingham also helped himself, later selling ‘hangings for a room of rich washed damask’; and he later admitted to having in his possession ‘a large bed, a single velvet red chair and a suit of fine damask’ as well as horses and other goods. Such actions by local people – and in the case of the townspeople almost certainly tenants of the family – would have been unthinkable if the owner had been present and Bingham would hardly have given Lady Bankes the keys while his men carted off the contents of her private apartments. The Dorset County Committee was certain that Lady Bankes was not involved in the second siege. In a letter to the Sequestrations Committee of June

A handwritten receipt in which Charles II acknowledges a loan of five hundred guineas from Sir John Bankes, 1660s. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

CIVIL WAR

T

1646 they argued for the confiscation of the estate, ‘finding her active in the defence of Corfe Castle against the parliament during her coverture’ but added that they were unsure of ‘any delinquency in her since her husband’s decease, from which time the greatest part of her residence hath been near London, as we are informed’.

T

HE LENIENCY shown to Lady Bankes following the fall of Corfe suggests that the parliamentarians knew that she had not recently been ‘in arms’ against them. Her position as a helpless widow had helped her friends in the Committees for Compounding and Advance of Money to shield her from the worst effects of delinquency. Others soon came to her assistance. The sequestration of the estates was delayed until July 1646, when a fifth part of the income was reserved for the maintenance of her and her children. The effects of sequestration were cushioned by family friends on the Dorset County Committee, who ensured that the existing agents, John Hunt and William Ettrick, were allowed to manage the properties, with the proceeds going to the committee. This prevented further asset-stripping from unscrupulous locals, keen to make as much money as possible while they held the lands. In the spring of 1647 the Committee for Compounding set fines on Lady Bankes’ private estate, that of her husband and the lands held in trust for their children, amounting to around £2,600, a modest sum

In her will, Lady Bankes left various personal items for her children, including jewellery for her daughters and a bracelet for her son, Ralph considering the wealth of the family. Again, it is not hard to see the influence of men such as Grene and Hill behind this decision. On March 25th their friends on the County Committee implemented an order of the Compounding Committee to lift the sequestration and Lady Bankes was given custody of her lands and estates. On December 27th a ‘special pardon’ was granted to her, covering ‘all treasons and offences by her committed since the 20th of May 1642, in levying war etc for which she paid £455 fine, also a grant of her lands etc with the mean profits thereof from the day of payment and securing the said fine’. A final piece of evidence reveals the extent of Grene’s involvement in the Bankes’ affairs: in May 1648 John Bankes, the heir to the estate, asked the Committee for Advance of Money for his own assessment fine to be waived, as before his majority his lands were held in trust by his mother and Grene. 16 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Sir Ralph Bankes, eldest surviving son of Lady Bankes, portrait by the studio of Peter Lely, 1660s.

HE PRIVATE ACCOUNT books, the records of the local committee and the executive committees in Westminster all show that Lady Bankes was nowhere near Corfe during the second siege. The stories of the family silver being cast down the well and of the keys being granted to Lady Bankes are almost certainly myths. But we should not condemn Lady Bankes for not living up to her romantic image. Barbara Donagan has pointed out how the nature of the civil war changed dramatically from the amateur soldiering of 1642-3, when a gentleman, with his servants and tenants might well hold his castle against an ill-prepared foe, to the mid-1640s, when war became the preserve of the professional. It was entirely appropriate that a ‘professional’ royalist garrison should take over the defence of a strategically important castle such as Corfe and that the family should move to a place of greater safety, or even, by the end of the war, throw themselves on the mercy of the parliamentarians. Furthermore, Lady Bankes’ role had changed with the death of her husband. From being a dutiful wife defending the family home on her husband’s behalf, from the winter of 1644-5 she was a widow, whose primary concern was to salvage the estate for the next generation. There was an element of calculation in her decision to move to Middlesex. As a supposedly helpless widow she was likely to fare better when dealing with the committees at Westminster. She also knew she would benefit from her husband’s moderate position before the beginning of the war and his contacts within the parliamentarian camp. Above all, she trusted – and rightly so – in her loyal and influential friends in Parliament, Grene and his son-in-law, Hill, and the goodwill of their colleagues on the Dorset Counts Committee. Lady Bankes lived to see the execution of Charles I, the many and varied regimes of the Commonwealth and Protectorate and the restoration of Charles II. When she died in April 1661, the future of her family was secure. In her will she left various personal items to her children, including jewellery for her daughters and a bracelet for her eldest surviving son, Ralph. Conspicuous by their absence were the keys of Corfe Castle. Patrick Little is Senior Research Fellow at the History of Parliament Trust.

FURTHER READING Patrick Little, The English Civil Wars: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2014). Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642-1649 (Oxford University Press, 2008). Peter Gaunt, The English Civil War: a Military History (I.B. Tauris, 2014).

| RICHARD III THE RECENT publication by the University of Leicester of the DNA of Richard III’s bones is, according to some newspapers, shocking. The Y-chromosome DNA, which is inherited by sons from their fathers, shows that Richard III and another male-line descendant of Edward III, the 5th Duke of Beaufort (1744-1803), did not share a common male ancestor. The implication is that one side or the other was the result of an adulterous union. This should surprise no one. More shocking is the mass of unfounded speculation that has followed in the media. According to some reports, the DNA casts questions over the legitimacy of the Tudor dynasty. For others, it is the Yorkists that were illegitimate. For a brash few, the entire royal family is now open to question. Science editors have taken it upon themselves to write articles about medieval history. A news conference about the DNA results did not help matters, for a professor of local history was widely quoted as stating that, because there were 15 generations between Edward III and the Duke of Beaufort and only four between Edward III and Richard III, then it was statistically more likely that the illicit conception took place on the Beaufort side rather than the Yorkist. The professor in question, Kevin Schurer, went on to say that ‘if there’s one particular link that has more significance than any other, it has to be the link between Edward III and his son, John of Gaunt’. Reductionism I cannot help but feel that the handling of this information has been irresponsible. For a start, people have been encouraged by a preferred expert to think that we can make an assessment about the illegitimacy on statistical grounds, because one side has 15 generations and the other only four. This is reductionism: in historical analysis we do not proceed on the basis of statistical probability, as if any man was as likely to be illegitimately conceived as any other, but on the basis of evidence. When it comes to evidence, ‘the link between Edward III and John of Gaunt’ is the least significant of three dubious conceptions that require examination.

People have been encouraged to think that we can make an assessment about the illegitimacy on statistical grounds Let us begin with Gaunt, the ancestor of the Lancastrian kings. Two late 14th-century chronicles tell us that, after Queen Philippa had given birth to a daughter – not a son – in March 1340 she accidentally suffocated her and, fearing the wrath of the king, replaced her with the male child of a Flemish woman. This boy was accepted by the king and became known as John of Gaunt, later Duke of Lancaster. The story continues that, on her death bed in 1369, Philippa confessed this to the Bishop of Winchester, urging him to make the knowledge public, if ever there was a chance that John might become king. When John’s elder brother, the Black Prince, died in

Richard III Legitimate Questions Speculation about the illegitimacy of England’s royal lines has been encouraged by the publication of the DNA of the last Yorkist king. But, argues Ian Mortimer, it is history rather than science that should lead the debate. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

| RICHARD III 1376, leaving only a nine-year-old son (the future Richard II), that possibility became all the more likely. The main problem with this story is its very nature. The switched-baby narrative was a common form of propaganda in the 14th century. In 1318 Edward II was accused of being swapped in the cradle by John of Powderham. The posthumous king of France, John I, who died at the age of five days in 1316, was later claimed by enemies of Philip de Valois to have been saved from death by being swapped in the cradle. Claiming that Philippa, the recently deceased darling of the nation, wished that John of Gaunt’s base birth should be exposed if ever there was a chance of him becoming king was a brilliant piece of propaganda. John was deeply unpopular in the years after 1376 and many people feared that he would indeed attempt to take the throne. Unbelievable rumour There are other circumstantial details that cause us to doubt the veracity of this story. The queen lost several children in infancy, so she did not need to fear her husband’s wrath. As a queen, it is unlikely that she was left to lie in bed with the baby long enough to smother him or her: royal children were handed over to wet nurses. More importantly, no one ever breathed a word about this until John was politically unpopular. Edward III himself never doubted John’s legitimacy and promoted him far beyond his next son, Edmund, who was only a year younger. John was the first-named executor of Edward III’s will. If Edward ever heard the rumour that his son John was not his, he did not believe it. There is one caveat to that last statement. When I was writing The Perfect King, I paused over a letter dated November 18th, 1340 from Edward III to the pope. It is one of the most extraordinary letters of any medieval king, not least because the pope was French and England and France were at war. Edward said that the then Archbishop of Canterbury was hoping he (the king) would be killed. Even more extraordinarily, he said that the archbishop had ‘spoken separately to me of my wife, and of my wife to me, in order that, if he were listened to, he might provoke us to such anger as to divide us forever’. Was Edward referring to the replacement of John of Gaunt in the cradle, earlier that same year? There is another explanation for Edward’s letter – that he was not referring to the birth of John of Gaunt but to the recent conception of his next son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, who was born on June 5th, 1341. We do not know if gestation was the same length in medieval times as today – an average of 38 weeks and 2 days – but if it was, Edmund was conceived about September 10th, 1340, just over two months before Edward wrote to the pope. However, Edward was not with Philippa on that day: he was besieging Tournai. He remained there until September 25th and did not return to Philippa’s bed until the 28th. Eighteen days prematurity is within the bounds of normality today – so is inconclusive – but it does raise a question mark over the ancestor of the Yorkist dynasty as well as over that of the Lancastrians. There is also circumstantial evidence to consider. Whereas Edward III loved John as a true son, he was distant from Edmund. Although Edward created his eldest three surviving sons earls at young ages (two to three years), Edmund was not created an earl until the age of 21. When 18 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Effigy of Philippa of Hainault, queen of Edward III (below), Westminster Abbey.

Edmund was finally elevated to Earl of Cambridge, it was on the same day as his three older brothers were raised to dukedoms. Edmund was not mentioned in his elder brother’s will, nor in his father’s; John of Gaunt was, in both. The evidence is insufficient to say that John or Edmund were illicitly conceived. One other important circumstantial detail is that Edward doted on his wife, Philippa. Whatever caused the outburst in that letter in November 1340, it was forgotten. He remained physically close to her until she suffered a bad accident while hunting with him in the summer of 1358. By 1363 she had started to prepare for death and Edward had taken a mistress, Alice Perrers. Apart from the letter of November 1340, there is no indication that he ever doubted that she had always been faithful to him and that both John and Edmund were his sons. But then we come to the next generation: and you don’t need genetic markers to work out that this is by far the most

likely break in the Y-chromosome DNA. It concerns the paternity of Edmund’s second son, Richard of Conisbrough (1385-1415), the grandfather of Edward IV and Richard III. Alluring concubine In July 1372 Edmund married Isabella, a younger daughter of the king of Castile by his favourite mistress. In 1373 Isabella gave birth to their son, Edward. The following year she gave birth to a second child, Constance, who later married Thomas Despenser. After that there is no indication that Edmund and Isabella had any more children until Richard of Conisbrough was born in 1385. Isabella seems to have taken after her mother, an alluring concubine, for she was described by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham as a ‘carnal and wanton woman’. A manuscript copy of Chaucer’s The Complaint of Mars was annotated by its owner, John Shirley, to say that the inspiration for the poem was a love affair between her and John Holland, the womanising, murderous half-brother of Richard II. Astrological evidence was cited in 1926 to show that this was probably not the case: it was more likely that Chaucer’s inspiration was Holland’s love for Elizabeth of Lancaster. Little more was thought of Isabella’s affair; it used to be presumed that Richard of Conisbrough was born in 1375, not 1385, which would have rendered the affair little more than a personal anecdote. However T. B. Pugh pointed out in a footnote in The Southampton Plot (1988) that John Shirley was a gentleman in the service of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who was then married to Isabel Despenser, daughter of Constance Despenser and thus the granddaughter of Edmund of Langley and Isabella of Castile. Interestingly, Constance herself had been the mistress of John Holland’s nephew, Edmund Holland, Earl of Kent and had an illegitimate daughter by him. Thus, when John Shirley was writing, it was an open secret in the Warwick household that Lady Warwick’s mother and grandmother had both had affairs with members of the Holland family. Gifts from John Holland to Isabella were among her possessions when she died 1393. Pugh concluded that the possibility that Richard of Conisbrough was the biological son of John of Holland and not Edmund of Langley ‘cannot be ignored’. What Pugh failed to note was the chronological framework within which Isabella’s affair took place. Holland became close to Gaunt in the early 1380s, serving on an embassy with him to Calais in 1383. In May 1384, during the parliament at Salisbury, Holland murdered a Carmelite friar for disparaging Gaunt. Two months later he accompanied Gaunt on another embassy, to Leulinghem, returning to the English court in October 1384. On the campaign to Scotland in 1385 he murdered the heir to the earldom of Stafford. He fled and took sanctuary in Beverley and remained there until he was forgiven by the king in February 1386. When he emerged, he came to court and seduced Elizabeth, John of Gaunt’s daughter. She was already married to the underage Earl of Pembroke, so her father was none

Edward III remained physically close to Philippa until she suffered a bad accident while hunting in the summer of 1358

too pleased when he found out that she was pregnant by Holland. Gaunt arranged for the annulment of her first marriage, for her to be married to Holland on June 24th, 1386 and for the newlyweds to accompany him on his military campaign to Spain the following month. To sum up, there is no evidence that Edmund and Isabella continued their sexual relationship after the birth of their daughter in 1374. It is possible that Edmund was already affected by the chronic back pain he suffered in later life – several of his vertebrae were found fused together when he was exhumed in 1877 – and he had no children by his second wife. Isabella’s affair with the king’s half-brother took place either before July 1384 or between October 1384 and June 1385 (or both). Her second son, Richard of Conisbrough, was baptised on or about July 20th, 1385. If he was baptised at three days of age (as Edward III was), the modern length of gestation would suggest he was conceived around October 25th, 1384; just after Holland and Gaunt had returned to England from Leulinghem. How did Edmund of Langley treat this surprise new child? He hardly noticed him. He did not mention him in his will, even though his supposed son was 15 when it was drawn up in 1400. He made no financial provision for him, which is extraordinary in the upper reaches of the royal family. He asked to be buried with Isabella, however, so the affair did not break their marriage. She had died in 1393 and left her possessions to the king, asking only that he provide her younger son, Richard, with a life annuity of 500 marks, seemingly knowing her husband would make no provision for the boy. Henry IV also ignored Richard, despite being his first cousin. Not until the reign of Henry V was Richard given a title and even then he was left without much income. No significant positions of authority were entrusted to him by the royal family. Nor was he given a wealthy bride: when he married Anne Mortimer, a distant kinswoman of the king, he did so in secret and without the king’s permission. People should, therefore, not have been surprised to hear that the Yorkist Y-chromosome DNA does not match that of another male branch of the family. It seems likely that the Yorkists were the biological offspring of John Holland, not Edmund, Duke of York. Crucially, it seems also that this was tacitly understood within the royal family at the time. It was fortunate for the Yorkists that they had another claim on the throne of Edward III, through Anne Mortimer, eventual sole heiress of Lionel of Antwerp, Edward III’s second surviving son. Given that scientific data is today treated with greater seriousness than historical evidence, where should we look for further DNA to test Richard’s paternity? Unfortunately the Holland male line died out in 1475. John Holland’s son, however, has an effigy in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London. If his bones and teeth are within the vault beneath (which is not necessarily the case, as it seems he was originally buried elsewhere), the Y-chromosome DNA they carry may furnish the conclusive answer. If it matches the DNA of Richard III, the mystery is solved. Ian Mortimer is author of The Perfect King – Edward III: Father of the English Nation (Vintage, 2008). FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 19

| DEVOLUTION

Four nations or one?

Can the UK’s politicians offer lasting, inclusive solutions to the constitutional fall-out from last year’s referendum on Scottish independence? The historical precedents are not encouraging, warns Naomi Lloyd-Jones.

22 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

I

N APRIL 1886 the Whig leader Lord Hartington posed a question that resonates today: ‘What is the meaning of “United Kingdom”?’ For Hartington and his fellow Unionists the United Kingdom was the product of the 1800 Act of Union, the ‘distinguishing feature’ of which was the establishment of a ‘sole Legislative Body for the Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland’. The ‘creation’ Hartington knew has long since disappeared: Ireland was partitioned in 1922 and successive devolution agreements have resulted in the formation of three new legislatures within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Yet, as we continue to anatomise the fall-out from last September’s Scottish independence referendum, it becomes apparent that Hartington’s question is as relevant now as it was when he opposed William Gladstone’s proposal for the restoration of an Irish parliament in 1886. Indeed, the term most closely associated with Gladstone’s scheme, ‘Home Rule’, has re-entered mainstream political discourse. Initially employed as short-hand for the allocation of greater powers to Holyrood, since the Scottish ‘No’ vote it has appeared in incarnations as seemingly diverse as ‘Home Rule All Round’ and ‘English Home Rule’. The Radical politician Henry Labouchere’s 1882 maxim still rings clear: Home Rule [could] be understood in any one of 100 senses, some of them perfectly acceptable and even desirable, others of them mischievous and revolutionary. We have also witnessed the emergence of a rhetoric on the ‘four nations’ of the United Kingdom. Immediately following the referendum result David Cameron spoke

A newspaper advertisement ponders the result of the referendum on Scottish independence, Edinburgh, September 15th, 2014.

of his relief that the Scots had ‘kept our country of four nations together’ and, when addressing his party conference in October, styled himself as ‘Prime Minister of four nations in one United Kingdom’. This too raises the issue of definition. Cameron’s forbear as Conservative prime minister, Lord Salisbury, declared in 1886 that ‘emphatically Ireland is not a nation: Ireland is two nations … deeply divided and bitterly antagonistic’. According to Salisbury, this precluded any resolution of the ‘Irish question’ along Gladstonian lines. His comments also hint at the limitations within Gladstone’s comprehension of Home Rule. The Grand Old Man was criticised first by contemporaries and later by historians for his seeming unwillingness to

Cameron has stressed the need for a ‘balanced settlement’, fair to all. Quite what this settlement will – or can – look like remains to be seen accommodate the concerns of Ulster. That Gladstone was single-minded in his pursuit of a Dublin parliament and attached meagre value to parallel calls for Scottish and Welsh devolution casts doubt on modern Liberal Democrat claims that their party has campaigned for a ‘federal solution’ since Gladstone ‘first called for Home Rule All Round more than 100 years ago’. Gladstone depicted his advocacy of Irish Home Rule as a just response to the constitutional expression of ‘the voice of Ireland’. Cameron has interpreted the referendum result as Scotland’s vote ‘for a stronger Scottish parliament backed by the strength and security of the United Kingdom’. But he has likewise called for ‘the millions of voices of England’ to be heard, for Wales ‘to be at the heart of the debate on how to make our United Kingdom work’ and for measures to ensure that Northern Ireland’s ‘devolved institutions function effectively’. Cameron has stressed the need for a ‘balanced settlement’, fair to all. Quite what this settlement will – or can – look like remains to be seen. Gladstonian Liberals typically explained Irish Home Rule as meaning: A Statutory Parliament – with legislative and executive power in respect to all exclusively Irish matters – subordinate to the Imperial Parliament. This definition was most closely appropriated by the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), formed a mere three weeks after Gladstone introduced his Irish legislation. The Association argued for: The establishment of a legislature sitting in Scotland, with full control over all purely Scotch questions and with an executive government responsible to it and the Crown. Its members maintained that ‘the business of Scotland could be better managed in Scotland’, for, ‘to a metropolitan assembly composed mainly of Englishmen, Scottish affairs will always be looked upon as subordinate and secondary’. Pro-Home Rule publications attested that the ‘Incorporating Union’ of 1707 had been convenient for the English

because it enabled them to ‘quietly ignore’ the ‘national sentiment of Scotland’. This had inaugurated a ‘process of decay’, which, unless arrested, would see Scotland ‘cease to be a nation’. The remedy, as identified by the SHRA, was to give ‘the Scotch people control over their own affairs’. From 1889 annual motions in favour of a Scottish parliament were introduced to the House of Commons by the SHRA’s president, the Liberal MP Gavin Clark. While these resolutions invariably emphasised the importance of giving ‘speedier and fuller effect to the special desires and wants of the respective nationalities constituting the United Kingdom’, they rarely sought uniform means for achieving this goal. Clark readily admitted in 1891 that he had produced a ‘vague’ motion because ‘it may be that the Welsh people do not require what the Scotch and Irish people require’; Scotland and Ireland had ‘had Parliaments in the past’, Wales had not. Samuel Evans, the Welsh member who seconded Clark’s resolution, concurred, adding ‘it does not seem to me to be necessary to give identical powers to every part of the United Kingdom’. Clark’s vision of Scotland and Ireland as being in the vanguard extended to his attitude toward England: he did not think that ‘the English people were in the same frame of mind’, for ‘England is only beginning to look at this question’. English Liberals were nevertheless unafraid to appropriate the term ‘Home Rule’. This was perhaps an attempt to divest it of negative connotations of imperial disintegration and national ruin. For example, at the 1892 general election several candidates described the policy of extended local government as ‘Home Rule for the villages’. In Barnsley the Liberal contender declared a willingness to establish a ‘national parliament to control Irish affairs’ and, in the next sentence, urged that ‘the principle of self-government should be extended in Great Britain’, in the shape of district and parish councils. Other candidates clarified that these bodies would ‘deal with matters concerning the daily life of residents’ and thus ensure ‘the satisfaction of the just claims of the English people’. Such arrogation could also help fashion a stick with which to beat the Conservatives. In London, Liberals campaigned for greater powers for the London County Council, the attainment of which they alleged had been ‘thwarted by the Tory Government and the ring of Tory Metropolitan Members’. One candidate went so far as to suggest that ‘the needs of London for a measure of Home Rule are no less pressing than the needs of Ireland’.

S

OMEWHAT counterintuitively, perhaps, Welsh Liberals did not often draw on the same language. Stuart Rendel, the leader of the Welsh Liberal grouping in the Commons from 1886 to 1894, confessed to a colleague that he was wary of making public declarations in favour of Welsh Home Rule because he recognised that the words he used ‘may mean one thing to me and another thing, or indeed various other things, to other people’. The colleague, Tom Ellis, noted that while a ‘full blown Welsh parliament’ was the only thing that would satisfy certain people, others were ‘talking in the usual and indefinite way’. He even took the line that ‘we need not yet proceed to definitions’ and cautioned that FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 23

| DEVOLUTION there was no need to ‘make any desperate plunges’. On the other hand, in 1888 the Welsh National Council, a body formed by the executives of the separate North and South Wales Liberal Federations, outlined four policies for the fulfilment of Wales’ ‘national aspirations’. These were: disestablishment and disendowment of the Church; nationalisation of the tithe; an overhaul of the education system; and land law reform. In Parliament these demands were frequently forwarded by Alfred Thomas, who would assert that, ‘since the annexation of Wales to England’, ‘English’ governments had desired to ‘Anglicise the Welsh people, and treat the country generally as if it were a corner of England’. Yet he pursued the creation of a Secretary and Department of State for Wales, not a Home Rule parliament. This tactic received short shrift from the Conservative Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, who appeared to repudiate the notion that Thomas sought the redress of national grievances. He contended that Welsh Liberals could not expect the government to ‘go with them in their views’ on subjects like disestablishment, because these were ‘matters of policy’. Indeed, ‘the fact of having a Welsh Secretary would in no way help them to get what they desire’. The Welsh Liberal leadership was undeniably focused on securing these policies and disestablishment in particular. In February 1890 the Federations met with the SHRA and the Cymru Fydd Society – a group which promoted Welsh self-government – to discuss ‘how both countries can work together to secure respectively Home Rule’. As a condition for attending, the North Wales Federation requested that the intended resolution be amended to guarantee that ‘no agitation should be undertaken which may tend to embarrass the Liberal party in its efforts to obtain Home Rule for Ireland and Disestablishment for Wales’. Nor were Welsh Liberals afraid to use Irish Home Rule as leverage to gain concessions on disestablishment from the national party. Just two months later the leadership announced that it would only pledge support for a future Liberal government, if disestablishment was introduced alongside the planned Irish legislation. In tandem, the North Wales Federation recoiled still further from Welsh Home Rule. Tentative plans for a pamphlet on the subject were abandoned on the advice that, in the light of this ultimatum, ‘no further steps should be taken to push the subject of Home Rule for Wales at the present time’.

Lord Salisbury, whose Conservative government legislated for the creation of county councils.

Unionists portrayed themselves as willing to ensure that England, Scotland and Ireland received ‘local selfgovernment’

T

HE REACTION of ‘official’ Scottish Liberalism, in the form of the Scottish Liberal Association (SLA), provoked the ire of the SHRA. The SLA’s chairman, Lord Elgin, refused to mention the policy in his 1888 annual report, because although it ‘was discussed at all the conferences … [it was] not always in the same words’. The SHRA, in turn, was scornful of what

24 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

A Unionist election poster from 1892.

it suspected was the party’s ‘insidious attempt … to confine the Home Rule movement to Ireland’. The Association reasoned that this ploy risked ‘dividing the United Kingdom into only Two Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland’ and placed ‘Scottish Nationality’ at risk. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Unionists portrayed themselves as willing to ensure that England, Scotland and Ireland (Wales rarely featured in Unionist rhetoric) received ‘local self-government’ in equal measure. It was the Salisbury government that in 1888-9 legislated for the creation of county councils in England, Scotland and Wales. In 1892 it introduced a ‘county government’ scheme for Ireland, but dissolved Parliament shortly after (rather convenient timing, according to Liberal opponents). At the election that followed, Unionist candidates emphasised their readiness to extend to Ireland ‘a measure of Local Government similar to that which has worked so well’, albeit with the caveat that this would be tailored ‘according to the peculiar circumstances of that country’. Unionists were nonetheless adamant that ‘the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament ought to be maintained over Ireland as it is over the rest of the United Kingdom’. It could therefore be suggested that Unionists were content to buy into the distinction, offered by a delegate at the SLA’s 1888 conference, that ‘local government was the government of localities by the people in the locality’, while ‘Home Rule was the government of the nation’s own affairs by the people of that nation’. It was by ‘putting a non-national sense’, as Gladstone described it, upon the concept of decentralisation, that local government could be bestowed as a harmless measure of useful reform. This diversity of responses indicates that solving the United Kingdom question will be no easy task. Some comfort could perhaps be found in the thought that we are dealing with an issue of scale. After all, the definition offered by one Liberal candidate in 1892 is attractive in its simplicity: Home Rule means LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT; and what is good on a large scale, for the sister kingdom of Ireland, is good on a smaller scale, for every County and Parish in England. However it was all too easy for Unionists to caution against reducing this model to the lowest denominator. As the Peckham MP A.A. Baumann opined: With a Parliament for the north of Ireland, a Parliament for the south of Ireland, a Parliament for Scotland, Wales, the north of England, the south of England and for London, there would be a restoration of the heptarchy. The theory of ‘English votes for English laws’ allows for a reversal of centuries of rhetoric on the injustices of Union settlements. It enables England to appear the aggrieved party. William Hague, the Leader of the House of Commons, has

condemned decades of ‘prevarication, postponement and delay’ on the ‘English question’. Hague has stated that: With further devolution to the nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland it is not unreasonable – indeed, it is a matter of basic fairness – to say that the voice of England should also be heard.

A

CCORDING TO previous generations of nationalists, England has suffered no such deprivation. In 1892 the Irish Nationalist MP Colonel John Philip Nolan proclaimed:

The English people have got Home Rule at present. The English Members are about two to one of all the other Members put together, and they could carry any question they liked through the House. This sentiment was echoed 19 years later by the Young Scots Society, an organisation that was something of a successor to the SHRA. It insisted: Legislation is framed by an English minister with the assistance of English lawyers, and is based on English experience, custom and law. A clause at the end makes it applicable to Scotland.

Gladstone blows the bubble of Home Rule. Cartoon from United Ireland, 1891.

Even Gladstone gave no quarter to the wit who pointed out in a Commons debate that ‘English Members are outvoted on occasion by the Scotch and Irish votes’. Gladstone inquired as to whether it was more likely that 70 Scottish MPs could ‘exercise as much influence on the determination of English business’ as ‘the 400 odd Members from England are likely to exercise on Scotch questions’. ‘Such is not according to my arithmetic’ was his conclusion. What lessons, if any, can be drawn from the history of Home Rule in the United Kingdom? Whether consciously or not, the ex-First Minister of Scotland and aspiring MP Alex Salmond chose to hold the independence referendum on the 100th anniversary of the enactment and suspension of Irish self-government. When he introduced that measure of Home Rule, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told Parliament: ‘I take up the narrative where Mr. Gladstone was obliged to leave it.’ Gladstonian Home Rule came to define and dominate a political generation and it is feasible that Cameronian devolution could do the same. Arguably, one of Gladstone’s greatest mistakes was his decision to devise a Home Rule bill virtually single handed in a period of only three months, in response to nationalist victories in Ireland at the 1885 general election. The present UK government intended to bring forward draft legislation for further Scottish devolution in January 2015, just four months after the referendum. That Gladstone failed to ‘solve’ the Irish question as he so desired has had lasting ramifications. For others to succeed with the United Kingdom question, they must put their House in order. Naomi Lloyd-Jones is a research student in the department of history at King's College London and co-founder of the Four Nations History Network. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 25

InFocus

The Romanovs in Ukraine, 1911

T

SAR NICHOLAS II WALKS in the grounds of the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev. With him are the Tsaritsa Alexandra and their children, though only the two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatiana, are visible. Flavian, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia, leads the way, while the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Frederiks, is second from the right and Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, far right. The monastery, founded as early as 1024, was the centre of Orthodox Christianity in Kievan Rus and pilgrims have been coming for centuries to worship in its underground churches and see the naturally mummified remains of its monks. But the overriding reason for the Tsar’s presence in Kiev is his unveiling of a grandiose statue of Alexander II on this day, August 30th, 1911, the 50th anniversary of ‘The Liberator’s’ emancipation of the serfs. Statues of grateful peasants are grouped below Alexander’s and there are subsidiary groupings to either side embodying Justice and Mercy. There seemed little chance of a Jew called Mendel Beilis, arrested in Kiev the previous month, meeting with either. The charge against him was of the ritual murder of a 13-year-old gentile boy, whose body had been

The overriding reason for the Tsar’s presence in Kiev is his unveiling of a grandiose statue of Alexander II found with multiple stab wounds. This was the age-old ‘blood libel’, the belief that Jews needed the blood of one such for mixing with their Passover matzo. Antisemitism was rampant in Russia, seen as a way of unifying the country after the humiliating defeat inflicted by the Japanese in 1904-05. Between 1905 and 1916 the government allowed over 14 million copies of 3,000 antisemitic books to be printed, including of course the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its fabrication of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Right from the start there were many in and out of government with the strongest doubts about Beilis’ guilt. Many of Russia’s newspapers and influential figures were incredulous at the charges brought against him, as was liberal public opinion throughout the world. He was to remain in gaol for two years before coming to trial and then finally being acquitted, ending Russia’s own highly damaging ‘Dreyfus case’. 26 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

It might have seemed that even more damage was inflicted less than a month after the unveiling by the assassination on September 18th of chief minister Peter Stolypin in the Kiev opera house, in front of the Tsar. Stolypin had already asked to be relieved of his office in March, realising that his attempts to reform Russia in the previous five years had made him too many enemies. Undeterred by the bombing of his villa within three months of his appointment, leaving two of his children seriously injured, Stolypin waged a ruthless campaign against the terrorists. Over a thousand were hanged in 1906-07 after

summary courts martial, since the courts were themselves terrorised. He reformed the unmanageable Duma so it gradually became a more responsible body to which even the Tsar listened. Above all, building on the work of Alexander II, he ended the peasants’ compulsory membership of their village communes, so as to make successful individual peasant farmers possible; these were the ‘kulaks’, spat on by Lenin and exterminated by Stalin. Combined with the enormous industrial advances, here was a formula that could have effected the transformation of Russia. But

Stolypin had a whole spectrum of opposition ranged against him, from the Reds and Constitutional Democrats, through redundant officials, disgruntled landowners, Poles and Finns, to court reactionaries backed by the Tsaritsa Alexandra, angered by his banning of Rasputin from St Petersburg. It will never be known just what the motive was of the assassin Bogrov, a Jewish student Socialist Revolutionary, but also a police informer. He was hustled off and executed before any questions could be asked. ROGER HUDSON

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 27

R

USSIA ALMOST DIDN’T SURVIVE the beginning of the 17th century. Convulsed by civil wars, peasant uprisings, foreign invasions, mass famine and repeated power struggles, it faced violence so apocalyptic that a special word was applied to embrace this blood-soaked anarchy: smuta [smoot-uh], usually translated as the ‘Time of Troubles’. It is the most terrifying word in the nation’s history, and yet today, far from just referring to one of the darkest chapters in Russia’s past, it plays a central role in the resurgence of 21st-century Russian nationalism. 28 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

If what befell Russia four centuries ago was unprecedented, for those living then it was also totally unexpected. Just decades before, Russia had reached its greatest power to date during the reign of Ivan IV, better known to us as ‘the Terrible’. In English the sobriquet is a misnomer, for it means inspiring awe of the dreadful kind. Not only did his own subjects face that wrath during Ivan’s reign as tsar from 1547 to his death in 1584, so too did his neighbours, particularly to the east. At that time the Volga, while so evocative of Russia now, was controlled by the successors to the Mongol invaders from the 13th century.

RUSSIA Left: Ivan IV, 'the Terrible', early 18th century. Opposite: Ivan roasts Johann Boy, governor of Livonia, on a spit, 1573. Engraving c. 1630.

Forever a Time of Troubles

Westerners often consider Russia through the prism of the Soviet Union and the Second World War. But we must look further back if we wish to understand the modern nation’s fears, aims and motivations, argues Greg Carleton.

Hostilities between those descendants and Russia were rampant until Ivan launched an attack in 1552, promoted by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church as a crusade to eliminate their Muslim foe, against the Khanate of Kazan, whose capital of the same name lay on the mighty river, nearly 450 miles from Moscow. Kazan fell after a vicious siege and Russia’s victory changed it forever. The city’s conquest permanently altered Russia’s geographic identity by delivering much of the Volga into its hands. This opened up the Urals and Siberia for exploration and annexation and also spelled the end for

another neighbouring khanate, Astrakhan, which controlled the river’s mouth as it flows into the Caspian Sea. Four years after Kazan, it fell to Ivan’s soldiers, bringing his power to the foothills of the Caucasus. The age of Russian empire-building had begun. Within three centuries its imperial standard would fly over one sixth of the world’s land mass. Yet, before Russia reached that peak, the disaster struck that almost brought it to its knees. When Ivan died, he left two surviving sons (two other potential heirs had died in infancy and another he killed with his own hands). By the end of the 16th century, these last two were FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 29

RUSSIA Fyodor, the also dead. The younger sibling, Dmitri, died first, 'intellectually ostensibly from a self-inflicted wound during an disabled' son of epileptic fit; the elder, Fyodor, by natural causes Ivan IV, contemin 1598, but having failed to produce an heir. The porary image. Riurik dynasty, which for over eight centuries had ruled the various Slavic principalities making up present-day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, was no more. The calamity had no precedent and neither did the solution: to elevate Fyodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, to tsar, though his own blood, albeit noble, ran in the opposite direction, back to the Mongols. Shortly after his reign began, the clouds gathered. Snow fell in the summer and a series of failed harvests left the population reeling from famine. Entire villages succumbed or were abandoned as the starving wandered, desperately looking for food. Those most desperate resorted to cannibalism. Historians estimate that, all told, up to a third of Godunov’s subjects perished.

W

HAT MIGHT SO DISPLEASE the Lord, shattered survivors could ask, since His assumed pleasure, or lack of it, determined all in the Orthodox world? The people’s collective sins could be summoned as the usual cause, but might there be another one as well, circling around Godunov’s coronation? Was he God’s chosen, as would have been the presumption? Fears over his legitimacy mixed with suspicions over his past. Had he plotted the murder of nine-year-old Dmitri so as to seize power upon the older brother’s death? Or had Dmitri miraculously survived, meaning that Godunov’s election had violated the divine order of succession? The last idea became fertile ground for much of the violence that followed. A rival to Godunov emerged, claiming to be Dmitri. Backed by Polish troops, this ‘false Dmitri’ also attracted Russians wanting to overthrow the unholy usurper and regain God’s favour. As this army of mixed religions, nationalities and motivations marched on Moscow in 1605, Godunov died, a sure sign of the righteousness of Dmitri’s cause. That impression lasted less than a year. Tsar Dmitri, with his Catholic Polish wife and retinue of foreign mercenaries, soon grated on Orthodox sensitivities in the capital. He was murdered by Russian nobles who again elevated one of their own as tsar. What then befell Russia defies imagination and conventional categorisation. More false Dmitris, then false Fyodors and still other claimants to the throne emerged. As devastation spread through the population and across the land, central power collapsed. At one point Russia had two tsars, two royal courts and two patriarchs. It could only be described as smuta, a term signifying confusion, disorder and foreboding doom. THE ONLY CONSTANT during the Time of Troubles was chaos, the kind that marauding bands feasted on and of which foreign neighbours dreamed. From the south came the Crimean Tatars, also descendants of the Mongols, who burned the area around Moscow; from the north came the Swedes, who seized Russia’s Baltic territories. From the west the Poles marched in and, by 1611, would seem to have driven the stake into their longtime rival. They occupied the Kremlin and took the patriarch of the Russian Church (there being only one at this time) prisoner. For that matter there was no longer a tsar and, as if to confirm that Russia’s future was over, a group of nobles, some from prestigious families, had agreed that rule should pass to the Polish king’s son. Yet Russia survived and the story of its deliverance has given it an irresistible tale to tell, retell and project across its history, up to the present day. The first hero is the imprisoned patriarch, Hermogen, who, though over 70 years of age, turned Orthodoxy itself into a weapon of resistance. Sending secret missives from his cell in the Kremlin, he urged Russians to stop killing their ‘brothers of the faith’ and strike instead against ‘accursed Latinism’. 30 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Others followed suit and a wave of literary broadsides appealed to ‘Christ’s flock' to fight ‘Satan’s hordes’. The tropes were not original but the impact was real, as Russians could rally around the idea that they, members of the true faith, standing alone against their predatory neighbours, whether Catholic, Protestant or Muslim, were under existential threat. Those who did just that in 1612 constitute the second hero in this saga of resurrection. That year a national militia gathered under the leadership of Prince Pozharsky (a title of nobility, not royalty) and Kuzma Minin, a butcher in charge of its finances and logistics and, seemingly against all odds, they marched on Moscow and threw the Poles out, thereby saving their country and, as they understood it, their souls. While fighting would continue, this event generally marks the end of the Time of Troubles. The following year witnessed the swift election of a new tsar, Mikhail Romanov, whose progeny would make up the next – and last – royal dynasty in Russia. With this victory came a special sense of salvation for Russia. If everything in their experience derived from God’s wishes, then how could their success, just like their initial punishment, not be part of a divine plan? If they began the ordeal as God’s victims, they ended it as His agents, comprising, as a participant in the militia wrote in a popular history of the time, ‘the forces of the Higher One’. This account

‘Great Russia’ constitutes a terrestrial and spiritual union, defended by those through whom the Holy Spirit works its wonders

by Avraam Palitsyn, a member of the clerical elite, reflects the maturing of a distinctly Russian national self-consciousness, which was inseparable from the land and their faith. ‘Great Russia’, in his words, constitutes a terrestrial and spiritual union, defended by those through whom the Holy Spirit works its wonders. The bond was so tight that it allowed Palitsyn to make striking assertions, such as ‘[the enemy] suffered defeat from the Russian people, that is, rather from God’. Not for nothing has his history been reprinted century after century so that every generation can learn, long before the emergence of Napoleon or Hitler, the key lesson to Russia’s survival: only unity, cemented by faith, can defeat foreign invasion.

T

HE TIME OF TROUBLES has lived on in Russian culture and collective memory as an inspiring and edifying episode, no matter what flag has flown over the Kremlin. The decisive victory over Napoleon in 1812, which launched Russian nationalism on a meteoric course, also coincided with the 200th anniversary of the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow. Both times, on its own, Russia repelled western invaders. Soon after, a statue to Minin and Pozharsky was erected in Red Square, the only Russians still to be honoured there in such fashion. The century’s best-selling novel, a swashbuckling paean to Russian greatness, was Mikhail Zagoskin’s Iury Miloslavsky or the Russians in 1612. One of its composers, Mikhail Glinka, devoted his opera, A Life for the Tsar, to the same period. And when time came for its 300th anniversary at the beginning of the 20th century, Patriarch Hermogen, who had been Illustration from starved to death by the Poles, was canonised. the Stories of the The Romanov dynasty did not survive long Life of Dmitri, after that celebration, but the one that followed, eldest son of Ivan, 18th century. of Soviet pedigree, carried the banner of

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 31

RUSSIA

remembrance further. The religious angle was abandoned, but not the story of triumph over western aggression. Its most brazen expression was the film, Minin and Pozharsky, released just weeks after the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 in accord with the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Its two directors and the two actors who played the title roles all won the Stalin Prize. The Time of Troubles now has a claim on a 21st-century audience. The reason is simple and undergirds the core narrative behind President Vladimir Putin’s rise and mainstream popularity, even though he has turned increasingly authoritarian. In 1991 the Soviet dynasty was extinguished in the catastrophic implosion of the USSR. For certain nationalities, like those of the Baltic States, it was a time to celebrate liberation from the decades-long tyranny of the Kremlin; for Russia, however, the curse of smuta struck once more. Throughout the 1990s a single word – crisis – was applied to virtually any concern: political stability, socio-economic infrastructure, financial solvency, standards of living, demographic health or international prestige. ‘Nearly everything that could be destroyed’, declared the metropolitan of St Petersburg during the turmoil, ‘has been’. 32 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

The Siege of Smolensk, 1609-11 by Frans Hogenberg, c. 1612.

Internal fractures again brought foreign invasion, though of a different kind. Western prophets of wildcat capitalism and shock therapy descended like vultures, just as foreign goods and franchises inundated the formerly closed society. The impact flipped its value system so that consumerism, not Marxism, became the new religion. Oligarchs arose like the warlords and marauders of before, seizing large swathes of its economy and preying on a helpless populace. The leader who emerged, President Boris Yeltsin, not only shared the first name of his ill-fated predecessor of 1605, Godunov, unfortunately he liked to jest that he was ‘Tsar Boris’. His hands were also stained with the blood of his countrymen after a violent clash with hardliners in 1993 and much more Russian blood was spilt in a war with Chechnya, which ended in 1996 in defeat for the former superpower. Along the way the Kremlin fell victim to the intrigues and corruption of the henchmen surrounding Yeltsin, who manipulated him just like the nobles who had plied their own selfinterests through the dizzying bounty of claimants and imposters during the Time of Troubles. How would the misery end?

swordplay buttressed by magical realism. Nevertheless, the director has admitted his true motivations behind the making of the film: [In 1612] I am talking about the period after Perestroika. We lived in a Time of Troubles. Its duration even coincided with the one in the 17th century. Even the film’s day of release, November 4th, was carefully chosen to mark the debut of a new holiday, Day of Unity, which falls on the date when the Poles were expelled from Moscow.

Proclamation of Kuzma Minin, Novgorod, 1611, by Mikhail Peskov, 1861.

IN 2012, FOR THE 400th anniversary of Russia’s deliverance, the anti-Polish platform grew into a generic anti-western one in Vladimir Medinsky’s novel, The Wall, published just before the writer’s appointment as minister of culture. The title indulges a number of assumed barriers distinguishing Russia from the West. Orthodox Christianity lies on Russia’s side, as do moral propriety, compassion for others, human decency, ‘pure love’ and traditional family values. On the other side we find debauchery amid a world of corruption and lies. On these pages, Russia’s superiority over the West even extends to habits of hygiene and rates of literacy among peasants. All of these cultural and religious ‘walls’ merge with a physical one comprising the fortress of Smolensk, a major city then on Russia’s border, sitting astride the road between Warsaw and Moscow. (The Kingdom of Poland was at this time in union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and their combined territories included present-day Belarus and much of Ukraine.) Though Smolensk fell to the Polish-led army after a nearly two-year siege, it never surrendered, allowing for a story of triumph to emerge from defeat, literally with a bang. After fighting in the streets, the last defenders retreated to the city’s cathedral where the main powder supply was also housed. It blew up, killing all inside. The explosion may have been an accident, but that view has little purchase in Russia. In this rendition, the protagonist sets the fuse himself and, upon explosion, angels bear his and all the defendants’ souls to heaven, where we learn that in martyrdom ‘the Russians were victorious’.

Though Smolensk fell to the Polish-led army after a nearly two-year siege, it never surrendered, allowing for a story of triumph to emerge from defeat

Y

ET, AS IN 1612, Russia rose from its knees and the hero of this nationalist version of history is President Putin. Crushing Chechen separatists, taming or co-opting the oligarchs, restoring centralised power, making Russia a military force to be respected once more; these are the key chapters of his political biography. Though not all is due to his hand – the global rise in oil prices, now horribly in reverse, helped rescue the state from fiscal insolvency – the laurels claimed are exclusively his. Putin’s legacy to date is that of a modern-day Hermogen, Pozharsky and Minin wrapped into one. He is Russia’s saviour, which, more than anything else, fuels his domestic support no matter how he appears to outsiders. In Russian popular culture, which is increasingly difMEDINSKY ALSO MAKES room in his novel, which ficult to separate from the official kind, the Time of was stridently displayed at the centre of book stores Troubles reigns again as a favoured topic for historical upon its debut, to trumpet key positions taken by the reflection. While nothing can displace victory in the Kremlin. (He is also the author of a wildly popular Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, as series debunking the negative stereotypes the the crown jewel in Russia’s self-imaging, smuta, West has of Russia.) Russians themselves are when boiled down to a few essentials, offers comnon-aggressive, defending their country plementary lessons. Two examples will suffice to against an existential attack from the West. demonstrate its patriotic potential. The only move they would ever make – and In 2007 the award-winning director, Vladimir with hindsight it rings ominous – would Khotinenko, turned his blockbuster movie, 1612: be to reunite with Ukraine and Belarus, A Chronicle of the Time of Troubles, into a showcase two countries that did not exist then for Poland’s murderous designs, with its scenes of as independent states. The invading burning villages strikingly reminiscent of earlier western army is precisely that: a comcinematic renditions of genocidal Nazis. Khotinenbined Polish, German and Hungarian Monument to Patriarch Hermogen, ko’s movie makes a minimal claim on historical accucore supported by mercenaries repunveiled in 2013 at the Alexandrovsky racy, preferring instead to indulge in swashbuckling resenting the rest of Europe. A Gardens, Moscow. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 33

RUSSIA

1612 is a unique chapter in Russian history, which offers a potent cocktail of tenets no nationalist would foreswear precursor to NATO, the myth also references the Nazis, killing Russians for their faith and planning to enslave the rest under a New Order. The division between good and bad also breaks along the value system upheld by the Kremlin today. According to the novel, the West is apparently awash with predatory homosexuals and the protagonist’s first act when abroad in Germany is to kill in self-defence a ‘sodomite’ who attacks him.

W

HILE CARTOONISHLY xenophobic for over 600 pages, the novel succeeds, if that is the word, in showing how malleable the Time of Troubles has become, able to adapt to any ideological shift while still enforcing the bedrock rule bequeathed by others before. A great Russia stands on two rocks: a strong leader and a state made equally strong by those who will serve (and obey) it. Such versions of smuta, echoed in popular histories, religious venues, academic tomes and elsewhere, have armed Putin and the governing elite with exceptionally strong language to speak about their country and their presumed role in it. Favoured refrains concerning ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’ tap into some of the deepest fears in Russia’s collective consciousness while, at the same time, reflexively justifying the power they have amassed and the suppression of dissident voices. While the West prefers to reference Russia through its Soviet past, the 1990s serve as a more illuminating point to understand the trajectory of official rhetoric. No one wants to return to that decade’s debacles and humiliations and that knowledge greatly simplifies the narrative of what Russia ostensibly ‘needs’ as a society. Clarification can come not just from the president but also from the Academy of Sciences, the country’s most powerful academic institution. A 2008 round table of historians, for instance, offered a point by point analysis of the ‘disorder and instability’ that inevitably follows any weakening of central authority. The existence of ‘different political groups’ breeds ‘conflict’ with results ‘that are deplorable and disastrous for the country and for the people’. This crisp cause-and-effect puts any political opposition or, theoretically, mere disagreement under the shadow of suspicion. Pressing the analogy further have been others who rail against ‘smuta-sowers’ in their midst, recognisable as anyone who questions authority or harbours ‘anti-Russian’ attitudes. IN 2000 PRESIDENT PUTIN closed his first inaugural speech with the pledge that unifying Russians was his ‘sacred 34 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

duty’. Then it meant only one thing: repairAbove: Boris Godunov, from the ing the fissures that were tearing through Tsarist Book of Russian society. Now, following the events Titularies, 1672. of 2014, one might wonder if, with Putin Below: Monument to having largely done that inside Russia, a Minin and Pozharsky, Red Square, Moscow. second chapter has begun. His March 2014 speech announcing Russia’s annexation of Crimea spoke to the same impulse. In the first case splotit means to strengthen or fit together, like the planking on a ship’s deck; in the second vossoedinit means to reunify, that is, to bring Crimea back to the Russia that was once its home. Both, however, point to the same thing: correcting a situation tied to the crises of the 1990s. When Catherine the Great’s troops conquered Crimea in 1783, it became part of the Russian Empire and remained so until the Bolshevik Revolution. In the new Soviet Union it continued as part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 1954 when, a year after Stalin died, Nikita Krushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party, transferred it to the similarly titled Ukrainian Republic. (He was born in Russia near the border of modern Ukraine and moved to

Donetsk, a Ukrainian city, as a teenager, where his Marxism was nurtured.) Upon the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Ukraine became a sovereign state, Crimea stayed with it. In his speech Putin declared Krushchev’s move unconstitutional, though no one in the USSR at that time could really have objected since it was still locked in Soviet territory. Russia, he continued, should have addressed Crimea’s status in the 1990s but could not because smuta had brought it to its knees. Russia remained, in effect, the victim of a past injustice until Putin rescued his nation and made it whole again by reversing that constitutional crime. Crimea, the land where legend has it that the common ancestors of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus embraced Orthodox Christianity (but which in his terms is ‘Russian land from time immemorial’), has finally returned home. HOWEVER, the key assertion of Putin’s speech, indeed one that frames the Kremlin’s version of the entire crisis in Ukraine, is that the latter still suffers from its own smuta-like condition. After 1991 Ukraine also fell prey to the demons of anarchy, chaos and economic instability, while its government was overrun by ‘usurpers’ and ‘false claimants’ to power. The West, as always, took advantage of that vacuum, backing its own clients and proxies, who in early 2014 pushed out pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich and whose aspirations include bringing Ukraine into NATO’s fold; as happened in the 1990s, when the US-dominated military coalition spread to former Soviet and imperial Russian dominions like Poland and the Baltic States. What started centuries ago as the West’s efforts to contain Russia, ‘to Left: a poster for Khotinenko's 1612. Below: Vladimir Putin greets the Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexei II as Boris Yeltsin looks on, Moscow, May 2000.

drive it into a corner’, as Putin put it, still continues. ‘If you press down on a spring hard enough', he warned, ‘it will snap back with force.’ This is what Russia did by annexing Crimea. It had to intervene to ‘defend the rights and very life’ of innocent Crimeans, the majority of whom identify as Russians. There was, to be sure, no invasion; rather a defensive operation involving Russian troops legally stationed there and whose numbers were increased according to treaty. Threading through his speech is a simple story that explains the overall positive response in Russia to annexation (though there were demonstrations against it). Not only does this action right a historical ‘wrong’, it demonstrates on an international stage that Russia has shed its sense of humiliation; no longer can it be ignored or treated as a second-rate power. Russia, President Putin declared, is an ‘independent, active participant in international affairs and it has, just like other countries, its own national interests which need to be taken into account and respected’. Such rhetoric gains more traction when it is woven into the fabric of another analogy, one that still lives in collective memory: the Second World War. It animates Russian perceptions of the conflict in Ukraine, following a simple logic. If Russia led the fight against Nazi aggression (that is, a western coalition including, inter alia, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and Finns), then those, on some of the very same soil, who oppose Russia today are nothing less than the next-generation bearers of a similar impulse. (The fact that some Ukrainian nationalists did, at times, side with German forces during the war never goes unmentioned in the current use of ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ to characterise Russia’s opponents.)

W

HILE THESE ALLUSIONS receive much attention in the West, those to the Time of Troubles often fall unnoticed due to unfamiliarity with Russian history. The two, however, operate in tandem as heralding triumph over existential attacks by combined western influences. An impressive pairing, they reverberate in a near infinite loop in the mainstream Russian media. Recognising the domestic appeal of these references does not make one an apologist for Russian actions. Rather, it provides an essential tool to better comprehend what we see and hear coming from there. In this dynamic the Time of Troubles fulfills a dual role: not only does it provide the historical precedent for President Putin to play the role of national saviour and promote his amassing of power as sound policy, it puts his country and people in a special light. Even the most patriotic historians in Russia must acknowledge that Britain, the United States and others played a role in defeating Hitler, albeit at less cost in human life. For 1612, however, Russia shares the laurels with no one else. It is a unique chapter of Russian history, one that offers a potent cocktail of tenets no nationalist would foreswear: surrounded by these threats, Russia can never trust its neighbours; Russia can only rely on Russia. This is why, no matter how distant in the past, the Time of Troubles resonates today more than ever. Greg Carleton is Professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University and Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

FURTHER READING Chester Dunning, Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (Penn State, 2001). Sergei Platonov, Time of Troubles: A Historical Study of the Internal Crises and Social Struggle in the 16th and 17th century (Kansas, 1970). Ruslan Skrynnikov, Time of Troubles (Academic International, 1988). FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

MakingHistory A revolution in communications and new technology means that we now live in an age of speeded-up history. Historians should wake up to this shift, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.

How recent is history? WHEN I WAS an undergraduate, the Modern History degree ended at 1945. Today the degree I teach ends in 1997. Elsewhere, it tracks even later: BAs in History at Manchester and Lancaster have modules that bring the story up to 2000. Portsmouth even has a course on British identity that ends in 2005. In short, these degrees include events that happened in the short lifetimes of the students reading for them. This issue is prompted by two recent events. At the Grierson Documentary Awards in 2014, the winner of the award for Best Historical Documentary was the first of a three-part series for BBC2 called The Iraq War: Regime Change, made by the production company Brook Lapping. It was a powerful, informative series, with archive footage and photographs and interviews with the key players from Washington, London and Baghdad, including Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, the deputy director of the CIA and the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. It is not to detract at all from the brilliance of that series to point out that of the four historical documentaries shortlisted for the award, only one – Oxford Film and Television’s Story of the Jews: Over the Rainbow, the fourth of a glorious five-part series written and presented by Simon Schama – did not focus wholly on the 20th century. It is hard to make documentaries about pre-20th-century history for obvious reasons. There is no archival footage, no interviews with eyewitnesses and key strategists. The field of vision must be filled with lingering shots of locations, documents, objects and archives, interviews with experts and presenter’s pieces to camera. There is lots of footage of presenters walking around historic sites to provide opportunities for crucial narrative voiceover. Yet programmes on the very recent past are considered 36 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

by the establishment to be historical enough to win awards. The Iraq War is the sort of programme that, like all good history television, should make you turn to your history books. One of the books you might pick up is Jack Fairweather’s A War of Choice: The British in Iraq 2003-9 (2011). Fairweather, a former war correspondent in Iraq for the Daily Telegraph and now Bloomberg News Middle East editor, conducted 300 interviews to compile his analysis of the abominable failure of the war in Iraq. The second event that brought

An abundance of immediate primary evidence makes it possible to write history much closer to the event this question of the end of history to mind was that he has pulled off such an exercise again and published his companion volume, The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan (2014). Described in the cover quotes as ‘a superb history’ and Fairweather as ‘a narrative historian of the first order’, the book has nevertheless been rejected by leading history journals for review because the subject matter is not thought to count as history.

Recorded history: a cameraman follows troop movements in Northern Iraq, 2014.

If television programmes on recent political events count as history, why not books? Is it because the author offers firsthand war reporting? Or because his book has a didactic purpose, offering a moral tale of the consequences of a lack of preparation and purpose and a surplus of military power? Or is it simply considered too early to believe in the sort of clear-eyed, insightful analysis that Fairweather provides? Is it too raw, too subject to change, to be canonised as history? Certainly, he can offer only the first interpretation of the campaign. Yet, he uses the same scholarly methodology one would hope to find in a work of history and demonstrates that it is possible to treat the recent past in an historical fashion: like The Iraq War series, for example, Fairweather interviewed the key players – but hundreds, not just a few. By writing these books, he alerts us to the fact that we now live in an age of speeded-up history: an abundance of immediate primary evidence makes it possible to write history much closer to the event. I wrote to ask Fairweather’s views and he replied with a call to arms: Why are historians writing about Lawrence of Arabia when there’s 10,000 government memos from diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan that tell us something fascinating about the evolution of how we fight wars, government institutions adapting, military tactics evolving and anthropological interactions between cultures? I think it is odd that we stop weaving the tapestry in 1945 or 1997. There is urgent stitching to be done. Historians of the page might want to learn from those of the screen. Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New College of the Humanities, London.

WILLIAM MARSHAL

The Greatest Knight or a Failed Crusader? William Marshal, warrior and tutor-in-arms to the son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, promised his dying charge that he would complete the sacred task of crusading to the Levant. Did he succeed in his mission and fight the forces of Saladin, asks Thomas Asbridge?

A joust between a crusader (left) and a Muslim, from the Luttrell Psalter, c. 1340.

O

NE OF ENGLAND’S FINEST warriors was laid to rest in London’s Temple Church on May 20th, 1219. In his funeral oration that day, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, reportedly described this celebrated veteran of countless wars – William Marshal – as ‘the greatest knight in the world’. The youngest son of a minor Anglo-Norman noble, Marshal had risen through the ranks to serve at the right hand of five English monarchs. He became a revered tournament champion, esteemed by his peers as the paragon of chivalry and a powerful landed baron of the realm. Having been on intimate terms with figures such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart and ‘Bad’ King John, Marshal was ultimately appointed as regent for the boy-king Henry III. Fighting in one final campaign, the 70-year-old Marshal successfully stemmed the tide of a major French invasion and baronial revolt in 1217, at the Battle of Lincoln, saving the Angevin (or Plantagenet) dynasty from utter annihilation. Though Marshal is far from a household name today, this remarkable career marks the knight out as one of the most compelling,

extraordinary and intriguing figures of the Middle Ages. Marshal was also the subject of the first known contemporary biography of a medieval knight, the so-called History of William Marshal, written some six years after his death on the orders of his eldest son and now surviving in a single manuscript held in New York’s Morgan Library. This work serves as the key source for Marshal’s life, though inevitably it offers a highly partisan account of his achievements. However, the biography has sparked an enduring mystery about one particular phase of its hero’s career: the time he spent on crusade in the Holy Land. While still in his early twenties, Marshal was appointed as tutor-in-arms to Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s son and heir, Young Henry. In the course of the next 13 years the pair became close associates, achieving renown on the tournament fields of northern France; but they were also embroiled in two abortive rebellions against Henry II’s overbearing authority. In the midst of the second of these civil wars, in June 1183, Young Henry contracted dysentery and suffered a squalid and agonising death in Aquitaine. As he lay dying, Young Henry charged his friend and

William Marshal was the subject of the first known contemporary biography of a medieval knight

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

WILLIAM MARSHAL

confidante with a sacred task. Some months Above: tomb effigy of earlier, the Angevin heir had made a com- William Marshal, Temple mitment to lead a crusade to the Levant Church, London. Right, clockwise from (modern Lebanon, Syria and Palestine) and top left: Henry II, Henry he now begged his ‘dearest friend’, Marshal, the Young King (inset), to fulfil that vow in his stead, carrying the Richard I, Henry III, John. cloak upon which Henry had affixed his cloth crusader’s cross all the way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Honouring Young Henry’s request was no simple matter; it involved a challenging journey of more than 2,000 miles, almost to the edge of what was then the known world, but Marshal undertook this last act of service, nonetheless. The best estimates suggest that Marshal set out from western Europe in the autumn of 1183 and probably returned either in late 1185 or early 1186. This places him in the Near East at the precise moment when a titanic struggle was brewing between the Latin Christian crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the emerging might of the great Muslim sultan, Saladin. Not surprisingly, the notion of one of the foremost warriors of the Middle Ages arriving in such a contested battleground has sparked both scholarly and popular imaginations. Over the last century, the leading historians of Marshal’s career – from Sidney Painter to Georges Duby and David Crouch – have all struggled to interpret or to explain his short-lived crusading career. This was largely because the History of William Marshal offered only a brief and frustratingly evasive comment upon the period that its chief 38 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

protagonist spent in the Holy Land. The History recorded that William performed ‘many feats of bravery and valour’ during his stay, achieving as much as ‘if he had lived there for seven years’, adding that these ‘fine deeds’ were ‘still known about today’ and widely discussed. But Marshal’s biographer then declared that he could not describe these marvellous exploits because: ‘I was not there and did not witness them, nor can I find anyone who can tell me half of them.’

A

S A RESULT, MOST HISTORIANS have been content simply to pass over William’s time in the East in a few sentences. Painter, for example, argued that, as ‘a crusade was the supreme adventure’, William ‘undoubtedly performed [great deeds] against the forces of the redoubtable Saladin’. More recently, Crouch suggested that, while ‘a cynic might conclude’ from the History’s relative silence that Marshal ‘had done very little’ in Palestine, ‘this would be unjust’. Crouch also stated that ‘by no stretch of the imagination could [William’s crusading pilgrimage] be interpreted as a career move’. It is true that, beyond the brief account offered by the History, virtually nothing is known for certain about Marshal’s actions in the Holy Land. His visit was not recorded by any Levantine chronicler, nor did he appear in any official surviving documentation, such as charters issued in the Latin East. Even so, considerably more can be deduced about the nature, progress and impact of Marshal’s crusade than has been previously indicated.

W

ILLIAM MARSHAL’S CRUSADING pilgrimage seems, first and foremost, to have been driven by selfless dedication and authentic religious devotion. With Young Henry defeated and dead, there was little advantage to be gained from upholding his memory. Had William’s first priority been to secure his future, he would have focused on finding a new post in a military retinue; instead, he made a firm commitment to travel to the Near East by taking the crusaders’ cross himself. In many respects, this was a step away from royal service and an interruption to his career; one that prevented him from seeking personal advancement. This is not to suggest that William was simply the saintly retainer, his eyes fixed only on the distant Holy City. He was willing to make some sacrifices in 1183, Aerial view of the old but he was also a realist. Once Young Henry city of Acre, where had been laid to rest in Rouen Cathedral, Marshall probably Marshal sought an audience with Henry arrived in 1183. II. The Angevin king evidently knew that his eldest son had charged Marshal with a crusading obligation before his death and seems to have respected William’s fidelity, while also recognising his martial renown. As a result, Henry II promised to hold a place for Marshal in the royal household, probably in response to his request for such a guarantee. Marshal had laid the groundwork for a prosperous future in western Europe should he return from the Levant, but in spite of the king’s commitment, Marshal seems to have considered the possibility that he might remain in the Holy Land. In midsummer 1183 he travelled back to England, taking ‘leave of his friends, his sisters, his immediate family and all his other kinsmen’, in the words of the History. The journey to England was certainly a detour for William and seems like the act of a man placing his affairs in order ahead of a prolonged, perhaps even permanent, absence. Many knights of William’s age, background and station had forged new careers in the Levant. For much of the 12th century the crusader states established after the Latin Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 offered manifold opportunities for men of Marshal’s class. By travelling to defend the Holy Places, knights could do ‘God’s work’ and at the same time find advancement, even lands of their own. The Burgundian knight Reynald of Chatillon was a case in point. He had fought on the Second Crusade in the contingent of Louis VII of France in his mid-twenties, but remained in the East. In spite of being a relative unknown, Reynald married Constance of Antioch, heiress to the northern crusader state, in 1153 and ruled as prince of Antioch for eight years. Captured by Muslims, he spent 15 years in prison in Aleppo before being ransomed. By the time he was freed, Constance had died and a new ruler of Antioch had been declared, but Reynald

Many knights of William Marshal’s age, background and station had forged new careers in the Levant

soon secured another advantageous union, this time with the heiress of the great desert lordship of Transjordan. This brought him command of the fortresses of Kerak and Montreal and put him in the frontline of the holy war with Saladin. Another knight who made his fortune in the East was Guy of Lusignan, one of two brothers who had ambushed William Marshal and his maternal uncle, Earl Patrick of Salisbury, in Poitou in 1168. At some point in the 1170s Guy had travelled to Palestine, perhaps in part to atone for Patrick’s death, but like Reynald he achieved sudden advancement through marriage in 1180, wedding Sibylla of Jerusalem, the sister of Baldwin IV, the Leper King. In light of Baldwin’s ill health, Guy soon had his eyes on the crown of Jerusalem itself: a staggering transformation of fortunes, given that just 15 years earlier he had been an Aquitainean outlaw on the run from Henry II. With such precedent, it would be surprising if William did not entertain at least some thoughts of a Levantine future. Certainly, the possibility of his crusade being, in part, a ‘career move’ cannot be wholly discounted. Marshal probably arrived in Palestine at the thriving port of Acre – a bustling, cosmopolitan hub of trade and commerce, which even welcomed Muslim merchants and travellers, in spite of the ongoing holy war – having undertaken a four- to six-week sea voyage from a southern French port like Marseille. Given that Young Henry was buried in mid-July and that Marshal travelled to England first, the earliest probable date for his departure for the Levant was September 1183 and, in all probability, he set out before the Mediterranean sea lanes closed for winter in early November.

I

T IS LIKELY THAT William’s priority was to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, thereby fulfilling his promise to Young Henry. That journey brought him inland, through the Judean hills, to the Holy City itself: a great, walled metropolis and the epicentre of the Christian faith. Marshal’s ultimate destination was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to have been built on the site of Christ’s death and resurrection. For William, like all medieval Latin Christians, this was the most sacred space on Earth. One of the few additional details mentioned by the History was that, during his time in the East, Marshal became friendly with members of the two celebrated military orders: the Templars and the Hospitallers. These religious movements combined the ideals of knighthood and monasticism and their adherents were regarded as the ultimate holy warriors, forming the elite core of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s armies. Given his own background and the martial renown he had garnered in western Europe, the association with these revered knightly orders was natural. According to the History, the Templars and Hospitallers ‘loved the Marshal very dearly because of his many fine qualities’ and he must have been equally impressed by their legendary discipline and skill-at-arms. In Jerusalem itself he would surely have spent time in the Templar compound (now part of what is the Aqsa Mosque) on the Haram as-Sharif or Temple Mount, where he would also have seen the Dome of the Rock transformed into the Latin Templum Domini, topped by a huge cross rather than a crescent. It is also likely that William visited the massive Hospital in Jerusalem, where up to 2,000 poor or sick Christians could be treated. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

WILLIAM MARSHAL Beyond this probable reconstruction of Marshal’s initial movements in the Levant, what more can be inferred about his time in Palestine between the autumn of 1183 and early 1186? The History of William Marshal may tell us little, but by using an array of other contemporary sources, it is possible to establish a detailed account of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s history in these precise years. This picture is revealing, because it demonstrates that Marshal arrived in a Latin realm that was on the brink of disaster and that the looming shadow of this catastrophe was obvious to all. More importantly, and perhaps surprisingly, in spite of the simmering tension with the Muslim world, Marshal happened to reach Palestine in a period of relative calm.

T

HE KINGDOM OF Jerusalem had been in an embattled state in 1183. That June, Saladin had finally managed to overcome Muslim rivals in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. This gave the sultan control of an arc of territory running south to Damascus, then on to Egypt and the great city of Cairo, effectively surrounding the Kingdom of Jerusalem. However, his ambitious plan to unite the Muslim world remained incomplete, as he had yet to subdue the Iraqi city of Mosul, and Saladin was determined to assemble a grand coalition of Islamic forces before attempting a mass invasion of Latin Palestine. This meant that, although the sultan did prosecute two exploratory attacks on Christian territory in the autumn of 1183 and the summer of 1184, his real focus lay elsewhere. It is just possible that Marshal saw almost immediate action in September 1183, after Saladin marched his forces into Galilee in the northern reaches of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A large Latin army was assembled in response to this incursion and pilgrims waiting in Acre to sail back to Europe were even pressed into service. It may be that William joined this draft as a new arrival in the second half of September, but it is perhaps doubtful that he reached the Levant so quickly. Baldwin’s illness meant that the Latin forces were commanded by Guy of Lusignan. Given that this was his first experience of leading a large field army, he did an admirable, if unspectacular job, advancing in close

Above: a late medieval image of Saladin. Below: Richard Marshal, second son of William, unhorses Baldwin of Guisnes at Monmouth, from Matthew Paris’ Historia Major, 1233.

40 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Saladin was determined to assemble a grand coalition of Islamic forces before attempting a mass invasion of Latin Palestine

The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, recaptured by Islamic forces in 1187.

formation to threaten Saladin’s forces, yet staunchly refusing to be drawn into a hasty confrontation. Barring some limited skirmishing, there was no determined combat and, faced with a stalemate, Saladin withdrew. Thus, even if Marshal did participate in this campaign, he would hardly have been party to a monumental confrontation. Saladin moved on that autumn to besiege Reynald of Chatillon’s massive desert castle at Kerak, on the route linking Damascus with Arabia and Egypt, and the sultan returned to attack the fortress for a

second time in the summer of 1184. On both occasions, Latin armies marched to break the siege and it must be likely that William joined one or both of these expeditions, but neither resulted in fighting, as the Muslim sultan retreated as soon as the Christians approached. In this period, Saladin moved with extreme caution, testing his enemy and building his own forces. There were no other notable campaigns in Palestine during Marshal’s time in the East. By the spring of 1185, Saladin was more interested in battering distant Mosul into submission and, to forestall a war on two fronts, he agreed a 12-month truce with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The resultant lull in fighting dismayed newly arrived crusaders, including a party of frustrated European knights, who appeared in early 1186 only to be strictly forbidden from launching an attack on Muslim territory for fear of inciting reprisal.

T

Tomb effigy of Richard the Lionheart, Fontevraud Abbey, Anjou, France.

HE ONLY OTHER military offensive in these years was a small, illegal raid conducted by Guy of Lusignan, probably at some point before early October 1184, against Bedouin nomads living near the fortress settlement of Darum (on the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s southern border with the Sinai). Bedouin often provided the Latins with valuable intelligence about Saladin’s movements and were therefore afforded official protection by the Jerusalemite crown, so Guy’s unsanctioned plundering expedition infuriated Baldwin. Given their past history in Poitou, it would be easy to imagine that Marshal still harboured considerable ill-feeling towards the Lusignan ‘murderer’ of 1168. In fact, in his brief account of Marshal’s time in the Holy Land, the author of the History mentioned that his hero was on good terms with Guy, so it may be that William was party to this disreputable raid. FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

WILLIAM MARSHAL

In military terms, Marshal was disillusioned by his crusade; he would have had few tales of glorious daring to relate on his return to Europe and this may explain his biographer’s cursory treatment of these years William had little opportunity to perform the ‘many feats of bravery and valour’ alluded to in the History. In military terms, Marshal was disillusioned by his crusade; certainly he would have had few tales of glorious daring to relate on his return to Europe and this may explain his biographer’s cursory treatment of these years. Despite the lack of decisive military confrontation, William can have been in no doubt that the Kingdom of Jerusalem was plunging inexorably towards disaster. It was apparent to those living in the Kingdom of Jerusalem that a catastrophe was looming. Shortly before his death in around 1185 the great chronicler Archbishop William of Tyre wrote that it now seemed inevitable that the ‘palm of victory, which had so often been earned’ by the Christians would soon pass to their Muslim foes and he expressed his fear that Jerusalem could not be saved. If Marshal had considered forging a new life in the Levant in 1183, he likely discarded those plans in the face of this mounting evidence of imminent collapse.

A

FTER AN ABSENCE of around two years, Marshal returned to western Europe at some point between the autumn of 1185 and the spring of 1186. A little over a year later, the cataclysm that had been threatening finally struck. On July 4th, 1187 Saladin crushed the Latin Christians at the Battle of Hattin. Guy was taken prisoner, Reynald of Chatillon was executed by Saladin’s own hand and 200 knights of the Military Orders were also put to death. Later that year Jerusalem itself was recovered for Islam and the sultan ordered the huge cross atop the Dome of the Rock to be ripped down and smashed. For all the frustration and dread that must have coloured his visit to the East, Marshal’s pilgrimage had a lasting spiritual impact and exerted a significant practical influence over the course of his remaining years. William made a heartfelt commitment while in the Near East to end his days within the Templar order. After his return to the West, as his career blossomed in the service of Henry II, Richard I and King John, Marshal cultivated ever closer ties with the Templars in England. By the early 13th century he had befriended the order’s local master, Aimery of St Maur, and this connection may have helped the embattled King John to garner the Templars’ much-needed support towards the end of his reign. In May 1213 the critical negotiations to secure John’s rapprochement with the papacy were held in a Templar house near Dover and less than two years later the first major assembly on the 42 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Above left: Lincoln, scene of Marshal’s final victory in 1217. Right: manuscript of the History of William Marshal.

road to Magna Carta was convened in the Templars’ London headquarters. Marshal played a prominent role in both of these meetings and was later named, alongside Aimery of St Maur, in the opening of the 1215 Magna Carta itself.

WHEN WILLIAM’S HEALTH finally failed him, at the age of 72, he summoned Aimery to his deathbed and the master duly inducted him into the order. Around this same time Marshal also revealed that, while still in the Holy Land, he had secretly made another provision for the eventuality of his demise. Most Latin Christian pilgrims and crusaders who visited Jerusalem travelled back to Europe with some token of their journey; many First Crusaders had returned carrying palm fronds in imitation of Christ. William bought two large lengths of precious silken cloth in the Holy City to serve as his funerary shroud. These were carefully packed away and borne back to England in total secrecy. It was only as his last days approached, more than 30 years later, that Marshal ordered these same silks, the spiritually resonant mementos of his crusade, to be brought from their hiding place. William Marshal died on May 14th, 1219. In accordance with his wishes his body was wrapped in the Levantine silks, carried to London and buried in the Temple Church, where his tomb effigy can be seen to this day. Thomas Asbridge is Reader in Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London.

FURTHER READING Thomas Asbridge, The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Sidney Painter, William Marshal: Knight-Errant, Baron and Regent of Medieval England (Johns Hopkins Press, 1933). David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 11471219 (Routledge, 2002). Bernard Hamilton, The Leper King and his Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 2000).

| UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION A highway-woman depicted in a cartoon of 1791. The man at the centre may be the Prince of Wales.

This is an extract from Anna Field’s ‘Masculinity and Myth’, which won the 2014 History Today undergraduate dissertation prize, awarded in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society.

MOSES BROTHERTON was assaulted and robbed of a bank note worth £20 while on the road from London to Staines, Middlesex with a consignment of post. His attacker was tried at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, in September 1744. Brotherton’s robber, who was mounted on horseback, had donned a ‘long white wig’ and obscured their face with a cape in order to carry out the attack. The mysterious assailant drew a pistol, which so frightened Brotherton that he tumbled from his horse to the ground. The robber also took two bags of mail destined for Portsmouth and Exeter. Brotherton claimed that, just before departing, the robber ‘put her hand in her pocket, and gave me a shilling’. After this unusual revelation, the court asked why Brotherton thought the robber was a woman. It emerged that upon attempting gestures characteristic of the dashing highwayman – the exchange of a polite handshake, a swift apology for the inconvenience and a jaunty exit – the ‘soft’ hands and feminine voice of the defendant, Ann Hocks, were revealed. In this testimony, the male victim drew upon the romanticised language of literary depictions of the highwayman, mounted on horseback, dressed as a gentleman and sporting an array of weapons. Old Bailey trials were summarised in printed transcripts called the Old Bailey Proceedings and released in regular instalments throughout the 18th century. Out of 298 transcripts reporting trials of female highway robbers from 1681 to 1800, Brotherton’s testimony was the only example where this particular masculine image was evoked. So what did the other 297 transcripts say about female highway robbers? To help answer this question, we must first look at the legal context of the crime. A fearful crime Highway robbery was both a crime against property and a crime against the person. Perpetrators used a tangible threat or actual violence in order to steal goods from their victim. As the 17th-century magistrate Michael Dalton instructed in his Countrey Justice (1619), it was necessary for the victim to be ‘put in feare’ by the perpetrator’s 44 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

On Her Own Terms: the Highwaywoman

‘menacing’ actions and, as a result of that fear, handed over his goods. Any road in the country could be defined as the king’s highway, which meant that the legal term applied to robberies committed on the streets of both urban and rural areas. The inclusion of violence in the legal category meant that highway robbery was not understood by juries in the same way as a crime such as grand larceny, which was another felonious property crime. Grand larcenists could claim benefit of clergy, whereby if the suspect correctly recited a passage from the Bible they received the punishment of whipping or branding instead of hanging. A convicted highway robber could not claim benefit of clergy. The punishment for highway robbery was hanging and pardons could only be conditional on transportation. Ambiguous status The 298 Old Bailey transcripts are reports from the trials of women prosecuted for highway robbery in 18th-century London and Middlesex. The female suspects were tried alone, with members of their own sex or in groups where female defendants equalled or outnumbered the male counterparts with whom they were prosecuted. A quick search of statistics from the Old Bailey Proceedings online database reveals that a total of 420 female defendants were tried over the period. This larger total includes women who were tried as accessories to male defendants, as well as in groups where men predominated. However the status of these particular women as active agents in the robberies is ambiguous, so they have not been included in this study. Nonetheless, the numbers show that the incidence of women prosecuted for highway robbery was much higher than for stereotypically ‘female’ felonies such as infanticide (186 defendants) or petty treason (17 defendants), crimes which have so far received greater attention from historians and others. We cannot assume that images of highway-women in the Proceedings, or in the semi-fictitious printed literature of criminal biographies and broadside ballads, carried the same cultural weight as depictions of murderers of new-born children. Trial reporters, as well as authors of various forms of printed literature, relied on assumptions about both female violence and sexuality that warrant further and more detailed explanation. Our present concern with the legal category reveals that the law did not require horses, pistols or fine clothing to convict a highway robber. The law instead emphasised the use of fear to steal goods from a person. To start with, then, a comparison with non-violent female property crime is especially instructive. The kinds of goods women stole, who they stole from and how female thieves behaved all contributed to the image of the female highway robber in the trial reports. Female highway robbers stole the same kinds of items as non-violent female thieves, such as clothing, household goods, jewellery and watches. These items remained a popular target for female thieves during the 17th and 18th centuries, because the personal and economic value, as well as the ubiquity of the goods, remained fairly unchanged. For example, in 1721 Jane Worsley violently stole ‘a Stuff

Ridinghood and a Linnen sheet’ from Margaret Pritchard. Worsley had to ‘throttle’ Pritchard in order to wrestle the hood from her. The linen could easily have been sold, as it kept a constant value, whereas the hood may have been selected for its aesthetic appeal. In the early modern period, clothing was one of the most obvious indicators of status and a person’s immediate wealth. It was possible that Worsley wanted the hood for herself; perhaps the temptation of fine clothing caused her to act opportunistically. On the other hand, her actions could have been premeditated, because it would have been fairly easy to sell the hood at the same time as the linen and for it to disappear into the legitimate trade in second-hand clothes. The wider cultural and economic value of clothing remained the same, regardless of whether the theft was violent or not. Examining the kinds of items that were stolen also allows us to consider the motives of the suspects in their own terms, separate from the explanations favoured by elite male commentators of the time or crime pamphlet authors, such as the female criminal’s ‘natural’ feminine weaknesses that led her to steal, or the dangerous nature of female violence.

Female highway robbers stole the same kinds of items as nonviolent female thieves, such as clothing, household goods, jewellery and watches

JUST AS IT informed the items favoured by female thieves, gender also informed the ways in which women’s crimes against property were discovered and the culprits pursued. For example, historians such as Garthine Walker have shown that early modern women could single out the most likely perpetrators of a theft in their communities by knowledge of unique items or identifying suspicious behaviour. This also applied to cases of highway robbery. Susan Perry was tried in 1713 at the Old Bailey for highway robbery committed against a young boy. She was also tried at the same time for the child’s murder. According to the trial account, Perry had stripped the child victim and sold some of the clothing to a female street peddler. The street peddler heard the news that a small boy had gone missing. She realised that the goods purchased from Perry matched the description of what the child was wearing when he disappeared. The woman searched the streets for Perry, managed to find her and took her to the local justice of the peace, under suspicion of stealing the child’s clothes. Meanwhile, the child’s aunt had received word of Perry’s arrest for stripping a child, so she went to the justice and identified the clothes as those of her nephew. The child’s body was later found in a ditch. Perry’s suspected involvement in the robbery contributed to circumstantial evidence that she was the murderer, too. The position of the peddler and the boy’s aunt locally enabled the first steps of the investigation to occur. The street peddler’s experience in lawful exchanges of goods meant she was more likely to pay attention to the appearance or distinguishing features of the items she bought. Her knowledge then allowed her to connect the purchase from Perry with the boy’s disappearance. Susan Perry and Jane Worsley’s trials also show that highway-women did not always commit their crimes outside of the communities in which they conducted their daily lives. Both Worsley and Perry operated in circles where they lived or worked, FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

| UNDERGRADUATE DISSERTATION Evelyn Wrentan plays a highway-woman in the 1935 film, Hands Up.

which indicates that gendered networks of employment and socialisation were just as important in cases of highway robbery as they were for non-violent thefts. Yet we cannot adequately consider highway-women without paying attention to violence. Violence was essential in order for the perpetrator’s actions to meet the legal criteria and secure conviction. In the past, historians have suggested that female property criminals were generally unwilling to risk confrontation with their victims, so they undertook ‘petty’, nonviolent thefts. However, it has since been shown by early modern gender historians that women did commit property crimes carrying a risk of confrontation with the victim, such as burglary or housebreaking. The trial reports from the Old Bailey contain evidence that can help us examine the nature of violence perpetrated by highway-women. Many of the victim testimonies included in the Old Bailey Proceedings depicted highway-women as dangerously violent. For example, Mary Mukes and Jane Dennis were put on trial at the Old Bailey in January 1727 for highway robbery. In order to make the suspects appear guilty, the victim, Isaac Estwick, attempted to frame Mukes’ and Dennis’ violence as serious enough to meet the legal criteria for conviction. Estwick deposed that the two women grabbed him ‘by the Cholar and pull’d’ him into a gin shop against his will. They hit his two companions with a poker, threw them out and locked Estwick inside the shop. Mukes and Dennis then assaulted him and took his money bag. 46 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

The trial reports from the Old Bailey contain evidence that can help us examine the nature of violence perpetrated by highway-women

He only escaped when his friends returned and managed to open the door again. The attack on Estwick took place behind closed doors, which meant that a clandestine element was involved in the crime. Estwick’s companions had been thrown out; they did not know for certain what was happening inside, their only experience having just been assaulted and now Estwick was stuck inside with the suspects. Such uncertainty about what was going on evoked a stereotype that a woman’s potential for violence was just as dangerous as any visibly violent actions. However, a stereotype was not enough for the women to be found guilty of highway robbery; their actions had to satisfy the legal criteria. They were ‘menacing’ and made a substantial threat of violence, but the crime took place in the gin shop, which was not on the king’s highway. Mukes and Dennis did use initiative and courage, because they selected and confronted their victim in order to carry out their crime. However, the courage and initiative displayed by female suspects in the Proceedings did not have the same origins as the courage of the gentleman highwayman. Narratives of violence in the trial accounts of female highway robbers were complex and bound up with assumptions of gender. Sensational depiction The trials of Worsley, Perry, Mukes and Dennis show the various ways in which women prosecuted for highway robbery were constructed in 18th-century sources. It is clear that these women’s crimes did not rely on the gallant, literary image of the highwayman. Yet what about Ann Hocks, the caped, bewigged attacker of Moses Brotherton? Hocks’s story does not have an end as glamorous as her sensational depiction warrants. She was acquitted at her trial due to insufficient evidence of her identity as the robber. Instead, more representative examples taken from the Old Bailey Proceedings show that the highway-woman has enough substance to be studied in her own right, which in turn opens up new ways of studying the crime in both its legal and cultural context. While the focus has been on the ways in which the crime was depicted at the Old Bailey, there is still further evidence to explore. Many more accounts of violence, as well as sexuality, underpinned contemporary accounts of female highway robbers in the Proceedings and in other printed sources, such as broadside ballads and criminal biographies. Attempting to identify and explain the significance of these languages offers us revealing ways to analyse the female highway robber on her own historical terms. Anna Field is a postgraduate student at Cardiff University.

MOSLEY

Mosley: antisemite

Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, attempted to portray himself as a reluctant antisemite, a narrative that many historians have bought into. Daniel Tilles argues that such a reading is wrong. Opposition to Jews was at the very core of the would-be dictator’s ideology.

Oswald Mosley with four of his followers wearing the blackshirt uniform of the BUF, 1933.

S

IR OSWALD MOSLEY, leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists (BUF), remains perhaps the most notorious figure in modern British history, remembered for his failed attempts to introduce to Britain a political movement explicitly inspired by the creeds of Mussolini and Hitler. In particular, the violence and antisemitism that accompanied these efforts – both of which

were employed in a manner and to a degree unprecedented in British political life – have retained a powerful place in collective memory, regarded as the features of his campaigning that pushed Mosley, once tipped as a future leader of both the Conservative and Labour parties, ‘beyond the pale’ of respectable opinion. Yet in Mosley’s version of events neither of these FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 47

MOSLEY facets of the BUF’s activity had been part of his plan; nor, indeed, were they his own fault. Upon establishing his party in late 1932 he had explicitly renounced unprovoked violence and antisemitism; it had only been, he claimed, the aggression of Jews themselves towards the BUF that had forced him to react defensively, announcing the formal adoption of an anti-Jewish policy in autumn 1934. This was a narrative he established during his time as BUF leader and later reinforced in his 1968 autobiography, in which he claimed that his ‘quarrel’ with Jews ‘had nothing to do with anti-semitism’; instead, it had come about because Jews had ‘jump[ed] to unjustified conclusions’ about the BUF and attacked it, necessitating a response on his part.

W

HILE ONE MAY BE tempted to dismiss Mosley’s account as self-serving revisionism, what is striking is the extent to which it has seeped into much of the subsequent scholarship. There remains a lingering sense that the BUF’s antisemitism was not an inherent or authentic feature of its ideology, but instead a belated appendage, incorpor ated partly in response to Jewish aggression. Moreover, Mosley himself is often presented as an unenthusiastic antisemite, manipulated by extremists within his party, who pushed it in a more anti-Jewish direction. Thus Richard Thurlow, one of the foremost historians of British fascism, argues that Mosley was ‘not an ideological antisemite’ and that his growing opposition to Jews was based on a ‘rational analysis’ of their aggression towards the BUF. Mosley’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, likewise believes that his subject was not inherently antisemitic or violent, but was ‘pushed in these ways’ by Jewish actions, which caused him a ‘genuine’ set of problems that required a solution. Another scholar, D.S. Lewis, suggests that Mosley could be viewed as a ‘victim of influential hard-line anti-Semites within the party’. MOSLEY, THEN, has been presented not as an agent of his party’s antisemitism, but as a ‘victim’ of it. Jews, conversely, are not simply the victims of that antisemitism, but also partly responsible for bringing it about. This image of Mosley as, in the words of another historian, Martin Pugh, being ‘buffeted by forces beyond his control’ may appear rather odd, given that he was the founder, primary ideologist, most generous benefactor and unchallenged leader of

48 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Top: members guard the London headquarters of the BUF, December 1933. Above: the Jewish Free School in London’s East End, an area where the BUF presence was strong.

a party that preached authoritarian leadership. That is because the image is false. Mosley was in direct control of his party’s antisemitism, just as he was every other major facet of policy. Moreover, far from being an artificial addition to his doctrine, antisemitism was an integral part of it and had been from the start. Mosley had initially chosen to partially conceal it, but this was a purely tactical decision, part of an effort to create a context in which his antisemitism, which he knew would be a hard sell in Britain, could be portrayed as a reluctant but rational and necessary response to Jewish aggression. This was a process that had begun even before the BUF’s founding. In April 1932, having decided to wind down

his short-lived, proto-fascist New Party and complete his journey to fully fledged fascism, Mosley invited two of Britain’s most radical antisemites, Arnold Leese and Henry Beamish, to address the party’s youth wing on the subject of ‘The Blindness of British Politics under the Jew [sic] Money-Power’. It was these youths whom Mosley intended to constitute the core of his new fascist party. The Jewish Chronicle warned in August that their activity had already become a ‘hot-bed of anti-Semitic propaganda’. During this period Mosley was working on the BUF’s founding treatise, The Greater Britain, in which he would lay out the central tenets of his fascist beliefs. According to the diary of his close associate Harold Nicolson, a draft of the book contained attacks upon Jews, leading Nicolson to warn Mosley that their ‘Nazi note’ would alienate British audiences. Perhaps as a consequence of his friend’s advice, in the final version of the text Mosley removed direct references to Jews; but coded criticism remained of the ‘alien elements, which arrogate ... power above the State, and ha[ve] used that influence to drive flaccid governments of

In his earliest pronouncements as leader, Mosley had already singled out Jews for association with ‘anti-British’ behaviour

Suffragist Charlotte Despard speaks out at an anti-fascist rally in Trafalgar Square, June 1933.

all political parties along the high road to national disaster’. The true meaning behind such allusions was made clear in a statement issued by Mosley on the eve of the BUF’s formation in September. While he guaranteed a ‘square deal’ for any Jews who showed themselves to be ‘loyal citizens’ of Britain (a clear insinuation that he believed many were not), he warned that he would ‘attack Jews if they are engaged in subversive activities such as the direction of the Communist Party or … international financial transactions’. This message was reinforced in Mosley’s first public speech as a fascist, during which, The Times recorded, ‘hostility to Jews was directed against those who financed Communists or were pursuing anti-British policy’. Thus, in his earliest pronouncements as leader of the BUF, Mosley had already singled out Jews for association with the kind of ‘anti-British’ behaviour to which he was ideologically opposed and hinted at the consequences that would follow.

N

EVERTHELESS, for the time being Mosley maintained that his party was not antisemitic, emphasising that he would ‘never attack Jews because they are Jews’, only those individuals who happened to be involved in certain types of activity. Yet by November 1933 this façade had been stripped away. In a front-page article in Blackshirt, his party’s newspaper, Mosley, writing anonymously, revealed that, although his movement had thus far eschewed antisemitism, this stance had always been open to adjustment should it become apparent that Jews, as a collective body, were undermining British interests. This boundary had been crossed, with it becoming clear that ‘Jews have now organised as a racial minority within the State’, using their ‘great money power ... not for the benefit of Britain, but for their own race’. As this suggests, Mosley cast Jews not only as a disloyal group, but a dangerously influential one. He buttressed his case with various ‘revelations’ of this alleged power: their ‘domination’ over the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties, who ‘dance to the Jewish tune’; their control of Britain’s financial industry; and their ‘corrupt monopoly’ over the media. These tools had been harnessed in service of an international conspiracy to destroy fascism, with Jews ‘all over the world ... organis[ing] against the Fascist revolution’. In particular, they were attempting to use their vast power to ‘drag Britain to war’ with Nazi Germany. As such, Mosley was now forced to make clear the BUF’s stance towards Britain’s Jews: ‘We oppose them.’ This position was further confirmed when, in March 1934, he revealed at a public meeting that Jews had been barred from membership of the BUF on the grounds that he could not ‘invite an enemy to come into my camp’. For appearance’s sake, Mosley continued to acknowledge the possibility that ‘good’ Jews did exist (and this would always remain a means of obfuscating his antisemitism). But there was now a pointed change of language: the presence of such Jews was no longer taken for granted; it was their job to ‘come forward’ and prove that they ‘set the interests of Britain before racial passion’. This was, of course, a completely disingenuous challenge. It ignored the fact that the leaders of Anglo-Jewry had already repeatedly emphasised that they did not oppose fascism as an ideology, only any antisemitism associated with it, and had gone to great lengths to prevent Jewish involvement in antiFEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

MOSLEY

Mosley can hardly have been surprised if Jews were antagonistic towards his movement in the summer of 1934, given that he had explicitly declared his own opposition to them

fascist activity. And it was couched in terms that Mosley knew would be impossible to meet, thereby providing further justification for the policy of antisemitism he was now – and had always been – committed to. What is particularly significant here is that Mosley had made clear his belief that Jews were an ‘alien and anti-national minority’ and therefore his ‘enemies’ well before the alleged wave of Jewish anti-fascism, starting in June 1934, that Mosley later claimed had propelled him towards an antisemitic position. In the fascists’ telling, Mosley had been so ‘puzzled’ by this supposed outpouring of Jewish opposition in mid-1934 that he ‘ordered a thorough research’ into the matter. This was carried out by A.K. Chesterton, one of the BUF’s leading propagandists, who ‘discovered’ that Jews held great power in finance, politics and the media, which they exploited ‘to the detriment of Britain’. Mosley realised he had ‘stumbled upon the secret of Jewry’s bitter 50 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Above: a BUF rally meets an antifascist demonstration, Hyde Park, September 9th, 1934. Right: Mosley shares a podium with Mussolini at a gathering of Young Fascists, Rome, April 1933.

attack on his movement’: they were involved in all the types of injurious activity that fascism promised to bring to an end. Chesterton lamented the sad irony that fascism, which simply wished ‘to preach a straightforward doctrine of patriotism and economic reform’, had ‘been driven into a racial policy by the very people who had most to lose from the implementing of that policy’. Some historians have taken this account almost completely at face value. Thurlow, for example, agrees that Mosley was ‘genuinely puzzled by growing Jewish hostility to the BUF’ and that only in October 1934 did he ‘signal …[the] turn to anti-semitism’. Skidelsky, too, believes that ‘Jews were responsible for the ... escalation’ of hostilities over 1934. Yet, in light of what we have seen above, it is a plainly dishonest version of events.

O

N THE BUF’S founding, Mosley was already associating Jews with the types of ‘subversive’ activity he claimed to oppose, and by the end of 1933 he had laid out these charges in detail. So this cannot have been a ‘discovery’ that he made in 1934. Moreover, he can hardly have been surprised if Jews were antagonistic towards his movement in the summer of 1934, given that this came after he had explicitly declared his own opposition to them. In any case he had already long been alleging that Jews were aggressors against his party. At the BUF’s first public event Mosley decried the ‘class warriors from Jerusalem’, who he claimed were inciting trouble in the crowd. In November 1933 he argued that Jews ‘hate us because we ... challenge their corrupt power’; it was ‘the[y], not we, who have forced the struggle’. Two weeks later the Blackshirt proclaimed that there had been ‘a declaration of war by Jewry against us ... long before [now]’. THESE LATTER STATEMENTS are indicative of what Mosley was really up to. While he had, from the start, intended antisemitism to constitute a significant element of his ideology and programme, he understood that such explicit prejudice would be ill suited to the British political environment. Thus, before revealing this aspect of his doctrine, he aimed to establish a narrative of events in which it could be presented as a defensive and inescapable response to the aggression of Jews, whose great power he had unwittingly challenged simply by pursuing his fascist policies. In this scenario, Mosley’s early anti-Jewish outbursts – sporadic enough for plausible deniability, but explicit enough to send a clear message to Jews – were specifically designed to provoke hostility from Jews, which he would be able to exploit for his own ends. Yet, to his apparent chagrin, no such response had initially been forthcoming. This was not because Anglo-Jewry had missed the signals. On the BUF’s founding, the Jewish Chronicle already detected the ‘cloven hoof of anti-Semitism peeping out’ of Mosley’s statements. By November

1933 the newspaper was confident enough to publish an editorial entitled ‘Sir Oswald Mosley, Anti-Semite’, accusing him of an ‘undisguised call to war on the Jewish people’ and dismissing his disavowals of antisemitism as the ‘idlest nonsense’. Behind closed doors the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community’s representative body, declared in July 1934 that, despite Mosley’s public denials, he had long had ‘no doubt as to the ultimately anti-Semitic character of the Fascist movement’. Yet, despite its concerns, the Jewish leadership urged restraint, warning that to seek conflict with the fascists would bring dishonour on the community and risk inflaming the situation. While many Jews further down the social Left: The Jewish Chronicle accuses Mosley of antisemitism, November 11th, 1933. Below: Daily Express cartoonist Sidney ‘George’ Strube comments on the Hyde Park demonstrations of September 1934.

rungs would later come to find this passive stance unsatisfactory, for the time being very few involved themselves in disruptive forms of anti-fascism, with only a handful of scattered, usually spontaneous, incidents during 1933 and the first half of 1934. Mosley’s frustration that Jews were failing to play the role he had assigned to them was made clear when, in April 1934, during a major address at the Royal Albert Hall, he announced: ‘When [Jews] talk of declaring war on Fascism, my answer is “Get on with it!”’. Over the summer an opportunity finally presented itself. Beginning in June at London’s Olympia Hall, a series of organised attempts were made by anti-fascists to FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

MOSLEY disrupt BUF events. Jews had been conspicuous among the protesters, and Mosley seized upon this fact to substantiate his narrative of victimhood, as he prepared the ground formally to adopt antisemitism in the autumn. That this was part of a cynical and opportunistic political move rather than a genuine response to Jewish aggression is further indicated by Mosley’s deliberate exaggeration of the extent of Jewish involvement. Initially, in July, he claimed that 80 per cent of those arrested for anti-fascist violence were Jews; by October the figure had fallen to 50 per cent; in early 1936 it was just 20 per cent. Not only the inconsistency but also the direction of his numbers suggest their mendacity: during this period, as the BUF became more explicitly antisemitic, the proportion of Jews involved in anti-fascist activity went up, not down.

M

OSLEY’S CLAIM of 20 per cent may be closest to the true figure (in London at least, where most British Jews lived). Even so, it is important to remember that, in absolute terms, a relatively small number of Jews were involved in disruptive forms of opposition to the BUF in mid-1934, representing a minority of both Britain’s anti-fascist movement and of its Jewish community. Stephen Cullen, who has surveyed police arrest records, finds that at a sample of 142 BUF meetings over 1934-5 only 10 Jews were arrested – hardly grounds for Mosley to declare opposition to all of Anglo-Jewry. Yet the most compelling evidence of Mosley’s true motivation comes from a rare glimpse behind the scenes of the BUF. Buried within his personal papers, a handwritten note in the margin of a document overlooked by earlier researchers provides the only extant record of Mosley’s private, unguarded thoughts on the Jewish question. The document, written at some stage in the summer or autumn of 1934, is a report by General J.F.C. Fuller, a renowned military strategist and recent recruit to the BUF. In the relevant section of the text Fuller advises Mosley on the party’s Jewish policy. The general warns that, ‘however undesirable the bulk of [Jews] may be’, indiscriminate attacks against them would repel the majority of British people. The BUF should not, therefore, ‘condemn [Jews] as a race’, but instead should denounce ‘only such sections as are connected with illegal and criminal undertakings’, on the basis of the same rules that ‘apply to all people’. This was precisely the path Mosley had already been following: denying that he opposed Jews as a whole but highlighting what he claimed were concrete examples of the ‘subversive’, ‘anti-British’ behaviour that was endemic among them, all the while hoping that doing so would provoke a reaction from Jews that he could present as evidence of their hostility towards fascism. Thus, in

the margin alongside Fuller’s advice, Mosley scribbled (in his distinctive but unfortunately not easily decipherable script): This is a [...ull] arg[ume]nt in favour of the strategy of [...ing] the onus of aggression onto the Jews. It may be shown from now [in?] [illegible] that the Jew is the aggressor and the [... ter] [...ession] may be launched [with?] a good [illegible] of [further?] [support?].

Mosley takes the salute of women members of the Blackshirts, Hyde Park, September 9th, 1934.

‘Mere abuse’ of Jews, Mosley cautioned, is ‘bad propaganda’, which would make the BUF look like ‘liars and lunatics’

52 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

These are not the words of a man being impelled towards antisemitism by Jewish attacks (or even baffled or angered by them), but rather one who sees in them an opportunity to justify the unveiling of a pre-existing policy. This impression is reinforced by two further insights into the BUF’s internal workings, provided by senior party members who abandoned Mosley during this period. In an

outburst that appears to have been brewing for some time, the BUF’s second-in-command, Robert Forgan, privately admitted in July 1934 that it had become ‘impossible to work with’ Mosley due to ‘his anti-Semitic utterances and the anti-Semitic trend of the Fascist movement’ under his leadership. Later in the year, Charles Dolan, a former national propagandist for the BUF, claimed that Mosley’s previous denials of antisemitism had always been ‘for political reasons only’. While in other circumstances one could perhaps dismiss such statements as efforts by embittered defectors to discredit their former leader, together with the evidence above they appear far more credible. Even Mosley himself, two years later, publicly hinted at his real approach to the Jewish question. In another frontpage article in Blackshirt, this time under his own name, he made clear that he was ‘fully aware of the racial differences between Jews and ourselves’ and, as such, promised to ‘take any measures necessary for the preservation of the British race’. However, he warned his followers that there was a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way’ of pursuing such a policy. ‘Mere abuse’ of Jews, he cautioned, is ‘bad propaganda’, which would make the fascists look like ‘liars and lunatics’

Britain, but to another race in foreign countries’, were ‘undermining the prosperity of Britain ... more than any other single factor’, ‘destroy[ing] the foundations of our national life’ and ‘rob[bing] us of our heritage’. Fascism could ‘not tolerate those who sabotage the nation’ in this way. Consequently Mosley made the removal of Jewish influence an integral aspect of his mission to purify and resurrect Britain. In a typically fascist rallying call, he appealed to Britain’s ‘epic generation’ to lead ‘a new spiritual revival of British manhood against [these] aliens’, to overturn their ‘decadent, rotting, reeking’ system of ‘corruption and decay’, ‘to sweep away, to destroy, and then to build again’. This was, for Mosley, a zero-sum game between Jews and the true people of Britain: by ‘put[ting] them down ... we shall put the nation up’. Reporting on his words, Blackshirt succinctly summarised the leader’s message: two ‘forces are arrayed – on the one hand the great cleansing spirit of Fascism, and on the other, organised Jewry, representing unclean, alien influence on our national and imperial life’.

and allow Jews to portray themselves as victims. The BUF, therefore, had to be ‘cleverer’ and ensure that Jews were condemned only for specific, demonstrable anti-British or anti-fascist behaviour. Once more we see the careful calculation behind Mosley’s antisemitism, and in particular the attention he paid to presenting it in a manner that would not alienate the British public. The question that all of this raises, of course, is why Mosley would go to such trouble to pursue a policy that he was aware could hinder his political progress. The answer is that antisemitism was an inherent and immutable feature of his fascist ideology, which sought the creation of a homogeneous society through the removal of groups deemed irreconcilable to this vision of purity. Jews did not necessarily have to be the target of this exclusionary drive. But in 1930s Britain, as in much of interwar Europe, they

were the most prominent out-group, widely regarded as distinctive from, and even incompatible with, indigenous culture and society. This made them an obvious target.

M

OREOVER, Jews were also popularly (though that is not to say fairly) associated with precisely the aspects of economic, political and cultural ‘decay’ that fascism sought to sweep away: socialism and communism; liberal democracy; immigration and ethnic mixing; the internationalisation of trade, production and finance; modern art, music and other novel forms of culture; ‘unproductive’ middleman professions. Thus Jews provided a tangible embodiment of the ‘alien’ influences fascism so vehemently opposed, and ridding Britain of their presence became a necessary prerequisite for Mosley’s envisioned national rebirth. This synthesis between Mosley’s fascist beliefs and his antisemitism, which had already been adumbrated in his early anti-Jewish pronouncements, was unambiguously delineated during the two speeches he used in autumn 1934 to officially declare his ‘new’ anti-Jewish policy. First, he laid out how Jews, a minority that ‘owes allegiance not to

Mosley is attacked on his return to the East End in August 1962. Police closed the event after three minutes, making 54 arrests.

IN LATER LIFE Mosley would distance himself from such language, while many historians have perpetuated the idea that he regarded antisemitism as peripheral to, indeed a distraction from, his central fascist mission. This position is untenable. One may quibble over the extent to which Mosley genuinely believed his own anti-Jewish rhetoric, but this is to miss the point. As Mosley undertook his ideological journey towards fascism over 1932, he came to understand that purging Britain of ‘alien’ influences was an essential component of his ultranationalistic, exclusionary creed, and that Jews would be the inevitable target of this drive. Whether he really thought that Jews were responsible for the ills he ascribed to them, or if instead he cynically chose them as the most suitable target, is immaterial. In either case, antisemitism was absolutely central to his ideology. This fact has begun to be acknowledged in the most recent scholarship on the BUF, especially ijn the work of Thomas Linehan, and one can hope that it will help to finally put to bed the myth of Mosley as a reluctant antisemite. Daniel Tilles is author of British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses (Bloomsbury, 2014), extracts of which appear in the present article.

FURTHER READING D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley Fascism and British Society, 1931-81 (Manchester University Press, 1987). Thomas Linehan, British Fascism 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2000). Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (Vintage, 2009). Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Macmillan, 1990). FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

| PRIVACY Once among the least monitored nations in the world, Britain is now probably the most watched. Why do Britons make so little fuss about this erosion of their ancient liberties, asks Bernard Porter? MOST BRITONS today are acutely aware of the degree of surveillance that they are subjected to by governments and other powers. There is MI5, GCHQ, police undercover agents, cameras in streets, shops and public transport, satellite mapping, phone hacking and email interception; Amazon nosing in on their tastes in books and music (and politics if the books are political); their every movement followed via bank machines or mobile phones; and probably more they are unaware of as yet. I am surprised that most Britons seem to be taking this so calmly. That may be because, as a historian, I am aware of how new it all is and how much it runs counter to Britain’s historic identity. Britons used to pride themselves on their privacy more than almost anything: ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’ Spying on someone – anyone – was the ultimate social sin. This applied even to law enforcement agencies. The reason why the early English policeman was dressed in a silly tall hat was so that potential wrongdoers would be able to spot him a mile off. In 1851 a London policeman was cashiered for hiding behind a tree to observe an ‘indecent offence’. There was a handful of plain clothes detectives, but they were not greatly trusted. ‘Men whose business it is to detect hidden and secret things’, wrote Anthony Trollope in 1869, ‘are very apt to detect things that have never been done.’ He was right to be suspicious; eight years later the Met’s detective department collapsed when three of its four inspectors were convicted of complicity in a betting scam. The fourth only escaped prison by turning Queen’s evidence. The prejudice applied especially to ‘political’ policing and even to foreign military espionage: British officers, being gentlemen, would not stoop to such practices. Christopher Andrew, the historian of British Intelligence, describes how one British government agent in Poland dressed himself in ‘coloured trousers and a distinctive hat’ so as not to give the impression that he was observing the country surreptitiously. There was a huge parliamentary row in 1844, when the Post Office was revealed to have opened the letters of the Italian architect of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini. That sort of thing was associated with Continental tyrannies. Even the detection of heinous crimes could not justify

Once a rare sight, a CCTV camera overlooks a street in Croydon, 1968.

it. ‘I would rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years’, said the future Earl of Dudley in 1811, ‘than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances.’ (Ratcliffe Highway was a notorious crime blackspot in east London; Fouché was the chief of Paris’s notorious secret police.) For years the word ‘espionage’ was always printed in italics, which probably indicates that it was pronounced in an exaggerated French way. Britain’s ‘spylessness’ was one

Surveillance: a new British tradition 54 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

about Germany, the Soviet Union, the IRA and Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Enemy Within’. Second, the claim, made by the foreign minister William Hague in 2013, that ‘if you are a law-abiding citizen ... you have nothing to fear’ from any of this. Was Hague aware that Josef Goebbels used to employ almost the same form of words? An unfair comparison, but it helps explain why there is strong resistance to such claims. The surprising thing is that the resistance is not more widespread than it seems to be. Times change. It may be true that the threat from militant Islam is more serious than any of its forerunners. It could also be that Britain is safer from the misuse of secret intelligence now that there is a whole new medium, the Internet, to relay our concerns and people like Assange, Manning and Snowden, prepared to spill the beans about the secret deeds of governments. It is possible, even likely, that our spooks are less reactionary than they used to be. And there is no reason why we should ever be restricted in our actions and attitudes by our past. Granted all that, however, it is important to realise how Political policemen unprecedented the present situation Exceptions in the 19th century were is. Those who argue for the teaching of Ireland, which had a different police British history in schools often do so system with less liberal values; the colobecause they think it will boost patrinies; and then the new ‘Special Branch’ otism, by emphasising continuity as of the London Metropolitan Police, set a nation with a proud past. There are up in 1883 to counter violent anarchism difficulties with that, obviously: should and Fenianism. Special Branch largely Britons really identify with its past? Was recruited from Ireland and was officered its history really as ‘proud’ as patriots by ex-colonials; it was the only respectable claim? Another problem, however, has to source of ‘political’ policemen. Even then do with the idea of ‘continuity’. British they could not be altogether trusted: there history has not always been ‘continuous’, are credible reports of some of them acting or even evolutionary. There have been as agents provocateurs (note, again, the Two Metropolitan policemen take a relaxed breaks. This is one. Historians of the use of the French expression) and were attitude towards patrolling, London, 1976. British secret services often claim a ‘tradwidely vilified if they were suspected of esition’ for them, going back to Elizabeth I’s Francis Walsingpionage. A panic about German agents led to the creation of ham, even earlier. Philip Knightley called his pathbreaking Britain’s first genuine domestic intelligence agency in 1909 1986 study The Second Oldest Profession, though this was (later to become MI5) and to a significant expansion of its not the case with espionage so far as Britain was concerned. activities during the First World War, after which its powers To qualify as a ‘tradition’, any institution really needs to be were curbed. When the ‘threat’ of Communism gave it a joined up. With domestic surveillance, there was a huge gap new lease of life in the interwar years, it hid in the shadows in the 19th-century. Not only that: the ‘gap’ was supposed as much as it could. Indeed, it is notorious that both MI5 to be a vital signifier of ‘British national identity’, which and MI6 were supposed not to exist officially until 1989. is what patriotic historians claim to be able to infer from Espionage and surveillance were kept under wraps. Britain’s past. ‘Spylessness’ was one of the ‘freedoms’, the The rapid and unprecedented spread of these practices in real ‘tradition’ that marked off the United Kingdom (or the modern Britain – which has passed in a very few years from British bit of it) most dramatically and crucially from the being the least ‘surveilled’ nation in Europe to probably the tyrannical, police-infested Continent. Today it is almost most spied upon – still arouses controversy. From at least the other way around. If you travel to eastern Germany, the 1980s rumours of derring-do by both government and for example, you will find the people there, with recent private secret agencies – spying on allies, black propaganda experience, of course, of two ‘police states’, far more ‘liberal’ against trade unionists, employee ‘blacklists’, ‘dirty tricks’ in this regard than Britain has become. Britons are not what abroad, even plots against serving Labour prime ministers they once were. Whether or not that should affect their – fuelled an ongoing debate about the gathering and use opinion of the necessity of intrusive surveillance in this of secret intelligence. This culminated in rows over Julian undoubtedly scarier new age, they should at least be aware Assange’s and Edward Snowden’s attempts to pry beneath of the difference it makes to Britain’s historical ‘identity’. the cloak of government secrecy and over the present government’s efforts to extend the scope of its surveillance Bernard Porter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Newcastle tools to all private emails and telephone calls. The arguand the author of Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain ments in favour of surveillance are familiar. First, the threat 1790-1988 (Unwin Hyman, 1989). from international terrorism, following successive concerns of the things that defined it as a good, liberal nation. Governments and government agencies were aware of the handicap this imposed on them and often succumbed to temptation. The problem was that when they did employ spies, occasionally and surreptitiously, the infamy of the activity meant that only men who were careless of their reputations ever volunteered (they were nearly always men). Most of them were rogues, like those early Met detectives, and many others who became infamous in popular culture for decades afterwards, such as ‘Oliver the Spy’. That compounded the problem. If their roles ever surfaced in court, they were often disbelieved, which invariably led to acquittals. In fiction they were always presented negatively, though the creation of Sherlock Holmes changed that a little. Holmes, however, was not really British: intelligent, a drug user, musical – not British qualities at all. Which is why he had to have the very British John Watson – solid, stupid, philistine – keeping an eye on him.

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 55

REVIEWS

Pat Hudson on clothing the poor • Lucy Inglis praises a history of the home • Christopher Smith finds civilised pleasure in reading

A North London street, 1950s.

WHEN HISTORY emerged as a scholarly discipline in British universities at the end of the 19th century, it rarely took working-class people as its focus. History was about the great and the good – about kings, queens, archbishops and diplomats. Historians studied reigns, constitutions, parliaments, wars and religion. Although some historians inevitably strayed from the mainstream, they rarely organised their ideas around the concept of ‘the working class’. For example, Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1930) and, with Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society (1969) certainly foreshadowed the concerns of a later generation of social historians, yet took ‘women’ and ‘children’, rather than the ‘working class’ as their subject. This changed with the emergence of the social history movement in the second half of the 20th century. At the end of the Second World War and – a decade or so later – as the universities expanded, the historian’s remit widened enormously. Poor and disenfranchised subjects, such as the working women and orphaned children that Pinchbeck had studied, swiftly moved from the intellectual margins to the mainstream. The newly-formed social history movement splintered into numerous branches – black history, subaltern studies, women’s history, urban history, rural history and so on. Soon working-class history had also emerged as a distinct historical 56 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

SIGNPOSTS

Working-Class History Emma Griffin charts the postwar emergence of working-class history as a scholarly discipline and argues that, thanks to the torch-bearers, the rationale for it has ebbed away. specialism. The Communist Party History Group (founded 1946) and the Society for the Study of Labour History (1960) together consolidated its place in the universities. The History Workshop movement, established in the late 1960s with a slightly broader remit, provided an important platform for the study of

ordinary people. Now historians of the working class enjoyed all the trappings of a modern academic sub-discipline, with their own societies, annual conferences and journals. The cause of this fledgling historical strand was greatly advanced through association with some of the leading schol-

ars of the age, including the Communist Party History Group members Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel and E. P. Thompson. These four were also part of the group that founded the journal Past & Present, now widely regarded as one of the most important historical journals published in Britain today. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was arguably the single most significant contribution to working-class history, but it is easy to forget that he was just one part of a larger community of scholars with a shared interest in the emergence and experiences of the working class at the time of the British Industrial Revolution. Much of Hobsbawm’s early work was devoted to explaining the absence of a working-class revolution in Britain. He made his entry to academia with the influential essays ‘General Labour Unions in Britain, 18891914’ (1949) and ‘The Tramping Artisan’ (1951) in the Economic History Review; ‘The Machine Breakers’ in Past & Present (1952); and ‘The labour aristocracy in 19th-century Britain’, which appeared in John Saville’s, Democracy and the Labour Movement: essays in honour of Dona Torr (1954). Like Thompson, he was part of a much larger community of scholars interested in the working class. Hobsbawm’s interventions on the ‘standard of living debate’ in Economic History Review in the late 1950s and 1960s only achieved such

prominence because the question of what happened to the working class during the Industrial Revolution was a question of enormous academic interest in those years. Working-class history does not arouse the passions that it once did and, although historians continue to question what happened to working people during the Industrial Revolution, for the most part they do so without the vitriol that characterised debate in the 1960s. There are a number of reasons for this. An important essay by Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, published in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982 (1983), caused scholars to question a core working assumption of historians of the working class, namely whether such a thing as a ‘working class’ actually existed. Stedman Jones

Impassioned, angry scholarship and the figure of the activist-cumscholar became increasingly rare asked, what if the emergence of this term was a linguistic and rhetorical development rather than a reflection of a new social reality? This incendiary suggestion struck at the core of the Marxist account of class that had long underpinned working-class history. For a number of years afterwards, historians were distracted by debating whether or not the working class actually existed, rather than thinking about what happened to those working people during the Industrial Revolution (a debate played out at length in the pages of the journal Social History in the 1990s). At the same time, the 1980s saw a waning of the initial energy and enthusiasm of the social history movement and a shift towards a much more apolitical style of writing. Impassioned, angry scholarship and the figure of the activist-cum-scholar

were becoming increasingly rare across the profession. Working-class history as originally established has not disappeared completely. The Society for the Study of Labour History and History Workshop movement still exist, as does the successor to the Communist Party History Group, the Socialist History Society. All three publish journals and remain committed to the study of the working class broadly conceived. Nonetheless, most historians studying working people in 19th- and 20th-century Britain do not publish under the working-class history banner. Much of the work published today with working people as its focus takes a quantitative form and comes from practitioners who consider themselves to be economic historians rather than working-class ones. Others find an intellectual home in the broader traditions of social and cultural history, which illustrate the diverse interests of historians of the working class today, such as Andrew August’s The British Working Class, 1832-1940 (2007); Julie-Marie Strange’s Fatherhood, Attachment and the British Working Class, c.1871-1914 (2013); and Selina Todd’s The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010 (2014). My own Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) looked at hundreds of autobiographies written by working people to reconsider the question of what happened to them during the Industrial Revolution, but framed the research around questions of experience, family and culture rather than ‘class’. In this respect, ‘working-class history’ has shared the fate of many of the other branches that splintered from the social history tree in the 1960s. Thanks to their efforts, we no longer need to justify our interest in marginalised groups. Now that the working class has been firmly established as a legitimate topic for serious academic enquiry, the rationale for being a separate sub-discipline has simply ebbed away. Emma Griffin

Child Workers and Industrial Health in Britain 1780-1850 Peter Kirby

The Boydell Press 224pp £17.99

YEARS AGO I read, in Margaret Llewellyn Davies’ collection of letters by Women’s Co-operative Guild members, Life as We Have Known It, an account of an eight-year-old agricultural labourer in the 1850s. She worked 14 hours a day, outdoors in all weathers, supervised by a man with a whip. When, after four years, she transferred to factory work in Leeds it felt, she said, ‘like Heaven’. Her story confused me: surely it was in those ‘dark Satanic mills’, not the idyllic countryside, where children worked long hours under cruel masters? It is this stereotypical image of the early industrial workplace that Peter Kirby investigates, a task complicated by the scarcity of reliable sources and the imperfect medical knowledge of the time. Nevertheless, through careful reading of parliamentary inquiries and medical texts and the retrospective application of modern medical knowledge Kirby demonstrates that ‘discrete workplace factors’ were neither the only, nor always the most harmful, threats to child workers’ health. Kirby focuses on northern textile mills, arguably the most controversial of the new manufactures that drove Britain’s rapid industrialisation. While domestic child labour was commonplace, mills and factories were alarming because they

took children out of the parental home and into a startling new working environment of ceaseless, steam-powered machinery. They therefore became the focus of intense public scrutiny so that, despite factories’ enduring bad reputation, the employment conditions of their child workers were in fact regulated decades before those of most traditional industries, including agriculture. One of Kirby’s main achievements is to separate the often conflated health risks posed by the new industrial workplaces and the insanitary, unregulated living conditions of the towns and cities that grew up around them. As he explains, children were exposed to urban pollution long before they set foot in a factory. When they began work, therefore, many already bore deformities caused by diseases

The most disturbing aspect of Kirby’s research is not what it reveals about child labour 200 years ago, but about the present, when we can no longer claim the defence of ignorance such as rickets, but which critics attributed to industrial employment. Indeed, Kirby’s potentially most provocative argument is that mills and factories were the salvation, rather than the curse, of many children, providing employment for those too puny for work in more strenuous occupations such as agriculture or mining. ‘There is’, he says, ‘considerable evidence that slender or disabled children were positively selected to work in factories.’ Kirby’s theory rests on the contemporary view that a working-class child was either a contributor to, or a drain FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS on, the scanty family income. Similarly, he says, ill treatment of child workers occurred within a culture of public executions and flogging and customary casual violence. Even parents might prefer their children to be beaten, albeit not harshly, rather than fined for workplace offences. But employer assaults on child labourers, he argues, were rarely mindless or severe, in part because they would have been counter-productive, rendering the child unfit for work and the employer liable to prosecution. Kirby does not deny that terrible things happened to workers in early factories and that some children, especially pauper apprentices, who lacked parental protection, were particularly vulnerable. But since legislation did not address machine safety until 1844, he also suggests that ‘physical correction’ might sometimes have been used to prevent a child suffering more serious injury through inattentiveness. For example, he includes a gruesome account of a boy who, ignoring a warning, became caught in the machinery, one witness almost fainting when the boy’s severed leg flew past her, while his shredded flesh scattered around. Yet it was the very infrequency and dramatic nature of such horrendous incidents that made them a focus of attention. Less sensational health problems, such as those caused by extended exposure to hazardous materials, affected much larger numbers but were often not apparent until later life. Kirby is not an apologist for the dangers of the early industrial workplace, but he does complicate our understanding of them. By using modern studies of child-worker health in developing countries to shed light on the possible medical conditions of early 19th-century operatives, the most disturbing aspect of his research is not what it reveals about child labour 200 years ago, but about the present, when we can no longer claim the defence of ignorance. Vivienne Richmond 58 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England Vivienne Richmond

Cambridge University Press 357pp £65

MUCH HAS BEEN written about the increase in consumption and the growing richness of material life and culture that accompanied the process of industrialisation. Middle- and upper-class incomes were buoyant and, further down the social scale, a growing proportion of the increasingly wage-dependent population were able to afford more than the basic necessaries of life. Through the symbolism and social currency attached to various possessions, a growing number of working families were able actively to participate in the shifting social hierarchies that characterised the period. However, because of poverty, a large proportion of the population remained excluded from new patterns of consumption. Low, unstable wages, big families and rising prices for food and rent make it difficult to understand how many of the poor could afford even basic clothing. How they managed and even contributed to new forms of respectability and employability is the task of this volume. Vivienne Richmond combines a thorough, careful reading of a vast secondary literature on textile and fashion history and cultural studies with analyses of evidence given to various parliamentary enquiries, accounts of social reformers and foreign visitors, newspaper sources, school and poor relief records, instruction books for philanthropic visitors and domestic servants, sewing manuals, sermons, religious

tracts and parish magazines, records of shops and advertising, evidence from charities, prisons, asylums and workhouses. She also makes excellent use of subjective accounts of the importance of clothing and its absence recorded in working-class autobiographies and diaries. Richmond paints a fascinating picture not only of the ways in which the poor were able to acquire clothing but also of the importance of vestments in creating images of the self and of distinctive social and occupational hierarchies, from the clean and respectable to the ragged and dirty, especially after the innovations of plate glass, full-length mirrors and photography gave ordinary people the modern visual awareness that we now take for granted. Following a survey of the main components of working dress and of the major shifts occurring in the 19th century, including the rise of cotton and of ready-made garments, Richmond casts new light upon the importance of female budgeting, pawning and credit, mending and refashioning, home sewing skills and second-hand supplies. The growing importance of cleanliness and of sober, plain dress in marking out the respectable working classes from the rest is convincingly portrayed. Next follows an analysis of the provision of clothing as outdoor relief under the Old Poor Law, which challenges the view that parishes often provided generous quantities of quality or even fashionable clothing. Richmond argues that new, more stringent and self-help forms of charity emerged from the 1820s to replace parish provision. Clothing clubs and societies provided basic utilitarian garments and aimed to regulate the moral behaviour of their members. Those who could not afford a weekly penny were increasingly ostracised as undeserving paupers. Other forms of local clothing charities proliferated in the later 19th century, from those loaning maternity boxes (trousseaus) to parish jumble sales: these are subject to the first serious study by a historian. Finally, Richmond focuses on uniforms, from the liveries of

servants and attempts to control servants’ dress outside as well as inside working hours to the social and classificatory roles of clothing worn in charity schools, asylums, prisons and workhouses. For example, prison clothing classified inmates according to gender, age, crime, sentence length and behaviour, illustrating the use of clothing as a form of degrading punishment and the potentially reforming role of dress. This book embodies a distinct empathy for the mothers who stitched into the night or went barefoot in order to feed their family; for the children who missed school because they lacked adequate clothing or shoes; and for those struggling to avoid the ‘vestimentary vicious circle’ (unable to obtain the work that would allow them to be better dressed because their clothing was inadequate or gave the wrong signals). It is a pioneering and well written study that will appeal to general as well as to professional readers. Pat Hudson

Fish & Chips: A History Panikos Panayi Reaktion 176pp £18

THIS IS the best history yet written of a British institution. Like Panayi’s earlier work, Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (2008), this one is alive to the cosmopolitan origins of food through global migration. The tradition of frying potatoes – shared with the French – dates back to the early 19th century, while the frying

REVIEWS of fish was a Yiddish tradition, imported by Eastern European Jews who settled in the East End of London. ‘Rather than marrying’, says Panayi, ‘the two products courted and gradually moved in together as the century progressed.’ Wider availability of fish in urban Britain was key: fleets of trawlers, better refrigeration techniques and faster rail transport made fish more affordable and less perishable. The standardisation of frying machines led to the creation of designated fish and chip shops: 12,000 in Britain by 1888 rising to 25,000 by 1910 and spreading from seaside resorts to the inner city. It became a staple of the working-class diet during the First World War, providing a cheap and relatively nutritious hot meal. The trade was also an easy way for entrepreneurial Britons to earn a living, although the profit margins were too small for large chains to be established, so the ‘chippie’ retained its personal, neighbourhood character. Panayi gets the nuances of national cultures within the British Isles. He shows that Italian immigrants largely ran fish and chip shops in Scotland, as well as controlling the ice cream trade; the dish also spread to Ireland, becoming a shared culture amid the political conflict between the British and Irish. The trade declined after the Second World War (by 2003 the number of chippies had fallen to 8,600). The arrival of Chinese, Indian and Cypriot takeaways ate into the popularity of fish and chips from the 1960s; so, too, did the American hamburger after the arrival of McDonald’s in 1974. Health concerns about fatty food undermined the dish’s middle-class market, while the overfishing of cod stocks made fish and chips more expensive for poorer Britons than newer fast foods like the kebab. Yet the dish survived, partly because it was marketed in a more patriotic way in order to distinguish it from ‘foreign’ rivals. The world sees fish and chips as quintessentially British but it was

EXHIBITION Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. In contrast, the THE INTERIORS of the grand new houses less well-known J.W. Godward has a different, of wealthy late-Victorian industrialists were more populist effect. His pictures reveal that designed to impress, their crowded walls vying intersection between a rarefied aestheticism and with recently established public galleries. Many the Victorian commercial art market; they are of these rooms are recorded in contemporary bright in colour and hard-edged; the decorative photographs, which remain as witness to the objects that surround the blushing young ladies twin activities of collection and display. In the who lounge around in classical settings suggest exhibition, Victorian Obsession, we have an Victorian country house bric-a-brac. opportunity to view a selection of works from a One of the several pictures by John Melhuish recent collection, assembled since the 1990s by Strudwick, Song without Words (1875), represthe Mexican businessman, Juan Antonio Pérez ents perfectly the ambitions of the enervated Simón. The handsome exhibition catalogue ‘new painting’ that had followed in the wake contains well-informed essays by the curators of Pre-Raphaelitism. The London vogue for Daniel Robbins and Véronique Gerard-Powell, Strudwick was short-lived, coinciding with the who contextualise the collection and supply Aesthetic Movement enthusiasm for previously comprehensive accounts of each painting. Hung in a domestic setting – the home of one overlooked Italian Renaissance painters, such as Botticelli and Crivelli. The of the featured artists – the Pérez Simón collection paintings regain some of contains several examples the presence they had in of this rare artist, who rose the houses of their original from being Burne-Jones’s owners. The exhibition studio assistant to having suggests that brief period a successful independent of the late-19th century career of his own. in which buying contemAlthough, for the porary art was, for the most part, storytelling wealthy, a paradigm for the has evaporated in these prodigious consumption works there is a strong of material culture. Those interest in surface realism hastily assembled collectThe Pérez Simón Collection and in representing ‘stuff’. ions were just as hastily Leighton House Museum, London, Highly elaborated fabrics, dispersed by the 1920s and to March 29th, 2015 glass, marble, gold, silver the rooms that contained and cloisonné confuse or them demolished throughengage us. Inlaid and polished, these surfaces out the rest of the 20th century. confront the viewer with kinds of visual puzzles The selection on display avoids genre and in which slivers of lustre and iridescence get history subjects, emphasising instead the confused with the glint of the sea or a corner subjectless, aestheticised pictures appropriate of summer sky. The paintings are frequently for display in the studio and home of Leighton, like pieces of intarsia or mosaic, put together who was a master of this mode. A shared feature in paint rather than in wood or glass. They are of the majority of this selection is the female much more beguiling than their 20th-century figure in various stages of reflection, reverie, critics admitted, but clearly a desire for illusion triumphs over formal qualities throughout, Moore’s work excepted. Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888, inset) it is the most impressive work here in scale and pictorial ambition and the only one in a conventional museum presentation, hung as a showpiece in the exhibition annex to the house. Around it is displayed contextual material borrowed from the Alma-Tadema archive in or grief. Leighton’s Antigone (1882) is a fine Birmingham University and beside it is a revealexample of the emotion with which he could ing study for the finished picture. Otherwise, the imbue the female head and bust. His Greek girls works are hung around the rooms of Leighton picking up pebbles by the sea (1871) is all rhythm House as if they might always have been there, and colour without a moral story in sight. Three contributing to the atmosphere of an exhibition examples of Albert Moore’s work include the that is both rewarding and revealing. reduced version of Shells (1875), the larger and Colin Cruise differently coloured version of which is in the

The interiors of the grand houses of late-Victorian industrialists were designed to impress ... vying with the new public galleries

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS not exported as successfully as the hamburger, although this added to the patriotic allure of the dish for Britons queasy about postwar Americanisation. Panayi does not sufficiently discuss the impact of America on British food; and there is not enough on why the British liked fish and chips: how much did their enjoyment come from a sense of tucking into Britishness, the collective physical consumption of a nebulous national identity? The book would be tastier if Panayi had augmented his story of the frying industry with salty first-hand accounts from diaries and magazines; there is also little on how fish and chips was represented in music hall, film and television. Nonetheless, this is a rewarding read for anyone interested in the history of Britain; so good in fact that it made me venture out on a windy night to buy a fish supper at my traditional local chippie, expertly run by Kemahl, a Turkish Cypriot immigrant. Richard Weight

England, arise

The People, The King & The Great Revolt of 1381 Juliet Barker Little, Brown 528pp £25

ENGLAND, ARISE is an accessible book, but not one that simplifies the issues or patronises the reader in an attempt to reach a mass market. Instead, Barker provides an exhaustive survey of the evidence available in print and sets this out clearly in her footnotes. The first part of the book provides a 60 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

snapshot of England in 1381 and the second a description and analysis of the revolt itself. Thus, Barker makes important points about the backdrop to the revolt, including fears surrounding the renewal of hostilities with the French, substantiated by French raids on the south coast of England, and passive

England, arise is an accessible and informative read ... Juliet Barker has succeeded in writing an engaging and thought-provoking account of the Great Revolt resistance to the third poll tax to be levied in quick succession, which meant that around one third of the taxable population ‘disappeared’ from the tax census. Barker then gives a dense blow-by-blow account of most of the episodes that occurred during the summer of 1381, events which became known as the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ (although, in line with many historians, she shuns this label because of its association with Marxist notions of class-based struggle and because the rebels were by no means exclusively peasants). Barker develops her own interpretations of several episodes, drawing on the sources and she also has a ‘Big Idea’; that the young Richard II was sympathetic to the rebels (an interpretation that will certainly provoke debate, if not agreement). She argues that, because Richard initially granted letters of manumission and pardon to the rebels, and took 18 days to revoke them, he did so only under pressure from his councillors. This is the same boy king who, according to one chronicler, sent an uncompromising message to the rebels in Essex: ‘Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before but incomparably harsher.’ Barker’s riposte is that these words

came from the pen of Walsingham, a chronicler prone to exaggeration. But presumably a contemporary audience would have to have found it at least conceivable that these words were uttered by the king with conviction. To entirely misrepresent Richard’s stance would have been a dangerous game for Walsingham to play. Barker also argues that Richard pleaded with Parliament to allow the abolition of villeinage, which is perhaps an overstatement of his stance. Several other important themes receive careful attention from Barker. She emphasises the important but neglected role of the ‘urban voice’, warning that historians have tended to dismiss urban riots as the result of internal civic politics. The book also stresses the part played by local leaders among the rebels, men like John Wrawe, William Grindecobbe and Geoffrey Lister, who did not garner the fame of Wat Tyler or Jack Straw, but about whom more is actually known. Barker picks up on a major theme of recent scholarship when she discusses the role of documents and the emphasis on the written word in the revolt. Several historians have investigated the ambivalent attitude the rebels displayed towards written documents. On the one hand, they targeted legal and financial documents for destruction (identifying exchequer documents by the green seal attached to them) and they cast the contents of manorial, abbey and university archives into the flames, but on the other hand they demanded their own copies of letters of manumission and pardon and refused to leave London until scribes had written up the documents for them. England, Arise is an accessible and informative read for history enthusiasts and useful for undergraduate students, as the most complete modern account of the rising. The secondary bibliography is not quite complete and Barker does not examine the unprinted archival material, but certainly she has succeeded in writing an engaging and thought-provoking account of the Great Revolt. Helen Lacey

Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome

Ancient Ideas for Modern Times Christopher Pelling & Maria Wyke Oxford University Press 288pp £18.99

‘A PALATABLE taster of what ancient literature and culture can do for us in the present day’; so the editors describe this short book. In their engagingly personal essays, Pelling and Wyke reveal a Welsh grammar school boy reading Homer in a caravan and a convent school girl hiding Tacitus in her book of saints’ lives. The authors are the usual big guns of the classical canon: Homer and Virgil; Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus; Euripides, Horace and Juvenal. They are made attractive through the tropes of impeccably up-to-date contemporary classical scholarship: Cicero’s invective and philosophy; Caesar’s narrative drive and appalling bloodlust; Sappho and sex. The least popularly known, Lucian, nods to current academic interest in Greek writing under the Roman empire through a swift presentation of the essayist poking amiable but serious fun at religion. These essays do not flinch from showing the authors in all their explicitness and that brings them closer to us. Men and women are presented writing about familiar problems. They are better understood by us now, after having been liberated from the prudish Wilamowitz, who made Sappho into a schoolmistress, or the public school Horace as the club bore. Pelling

REVIEWS and Wyke suggest that we ‘get’ these authors because they were what we are, or as one generation remembers itself; edgy, knowing, but insecure, operating in a tricky world of scary powermongers, ambiguous wars, religious uncertainty and shifting political and ethnic divides. We are pretty hard to shock these days. One can imagine readers of this book sitting down with tea, biscuits and Horace’s Epodes. The bridge thrown across by this book from antiquity to the contemporary is not especially challenging; the reaction is more a smile of recognition – ‘so they got up to that sort of thing then too!’ Reading Juvenal reinforces one’s own sense of balance; reading Tacitus is an exercise in the perennially enjoyable game of what is history for (not prescriptively helpful, but intellectually essential). Screamingly horrible things happen in Euripides: well, deal with it, or rather, hope you don’t have to; it is not unlike the contemporary experience of going to see Ibsen and thinking the experience has earnt one a decent bottle of wine to enjoy. This might seem rather negative, an accusation of having made the ancients bland. Could not other authors jolt us harder, or make antiquity seem stranger? Isn’t raw Aristophanes just that bit harder to explain away? Why not make the comfortable reader wade through Plato’s Laws and feel the draught coming off the perfect state; or the swivel-eyed lunacies of Tertullian and the Lives of the Martyrs; or the obsessive neuroses of Aelius Aristeides? But that’s not the point. Recovering great literature for new readers does not have to be an act of cultural conservatism; there is plenty here to show that these authors were not unequivocally safe. Pelling and Wyke are doing what those who love the classics have been doing for centuries; opening the way for readers to find a civilised pleasure in thinking. Christopher Smith

Women and the Vote A World History Jad Adams

Oxford University Press 516pp £30

Vanishing for the Vote

Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the Census Jill Liddington Manchester University Press 304pp £16.99

TRAVELLING across America in the 1970s, Jad Adams chanced upon a statue of the suffrage campaigner Esther Hobart Morris, credited with promoting legislation that made Wyoming the first state to grant votes to women in 1869. The question of how an ‘out of the way place’ might enact a democratic reform that eluded much of the world until the 20th century provoked Adams to look more widely at franchise reforms. The result is a broad global history of suffrage campaigns from early 19th-century British radicals to recent reforms in Afghanistan, Kuwait and elsewhere. Adams’ ambitious global survey is rendered accessible through his engaging biographical approach, especially where his focus is on countries whose suffrage scholarship is familiar: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, leader of a Nigerian woman’s organisation, who snatched the symbolic phallic oro stick in a confrontation with local male authorities and kept it in her home; Pura Villaneuva, a former beauty queen who founded the Filipino Asociacion Feminista Ilonga; and other figures from Japan, Latin America and the Middle-East, who sit alongside better-known campaigners such as the Pankhursts,

Alexandra Kollontai and Carrie Chapman Catt. However, the lack of emphasis on cross-country organisation fuels Adams’ conclusion, acknowledged as ‘controversial’ by the publisher, that nationalism not feminism was key to achieving the vote, thus downplaying the role of campaigners. While it may be the case that women’s suffrage was often granted alongside broader extensions to the male franchise, this does not consider the impact of suffrage campaigns prior to new legislation being shaped, as Adams suggests when offering the ‘low level of feminist activity’ in Belgium as a reason it lagged behind the Netherlands and Luxembourg in giving women votes. Adams concludes that voting women have done little to change

... suffragettes risked fines and imprisonment to defy the census, arguing that voteless women should not count in the eyes of the state politics. This may be overly pessimistic. True, more than 40 years separated full political equality from the Equal Pay Act (1970) in Britain but in the context of the 60 years that divided equal enfranchisement from the first suffrage petitions proximity between the two events narrows. Adams’ global perspective presents women’s suffrage as a very recent develop-

ment in much of the world; it may be some time before its full impact can be evaluated in detail. In contrast to Adams’ macrohistory, Jill Liddington’s Vanishing for the Vote takes a much closer focus. The book centres on events of April 2nd, 1911, when indeterminate numbers of suffragettes risked fines and imprisonment to defy the census, arguing that voteless women should not count in the eyes of the state. Their boycott campaign is contextualised through an examination of the political priorities of suffrage opponents, particularly the welfare reforms of Lloyd George in the Treasury and John Burns at the Local Government Board. These alternative concerns help to explain why some suffragist organisations opposed the boycott as many of the new questions on the census were aimed at quantifying maternal health and infant mortality, long-standing feminist concerns. Liddington (with her researcher Elizabeth Crawford) has made good use of the newly released 1911 data to track ‘resisters’. They reproduce several facsimiles of census schedules ‘spoiled’ by irate suffragettes. Equally fascinating are the examples of compliance by prominent campaigners. Emma Sproson’s memoir tells how she cut out the names of women from her census schedule then gave the enumerator short shrift when he called to collect it, yet her schedule shows that she offered no protest on the form. Liddington’s conclusion, that Sproson remembered ‘what she would have liked to have done’ and her lack of sustained engagement with the decisions underlying compliance, is disappointing given the amount of detail here on the motivation of evaders. The book makes a strong case for the boycott’s ‘compelling symbolism’, arguing that to reduce analysis of its effectiveness to arithmetic (the number of evaders was in the low thousands) misses its broader implications. Yet with so many paradoxes between activists’ stated intent and their documented actions it is difficult to assess the full impact of this symbolic protest. Krista Cowman FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

Uncertain Glory

Joan Sales (Trans. Peter Bush) MacLehose Press 560pp £20

IN THIS BRAVURA novel of the Spanish Civil War 1936-39, Catalan author Joan Sales (191283) evokes its messy, devastating lived reality, but even more memorably the intense feeling of being alive which war paradoxically produces. Set in the Republican zone, in Aragón and Barcelona, at the novel’s core is a group of young ‘voices’, brilliantly rendered, as they rage to live, confronting not only the huge contradictions of the war, but also its deepest causes in themselves – torn between the comfort, even sanctity of a claustrophobic ‘old’ and the exhilaration of a fearful ‘new’. Soleràs, the almost anti-hero, is full of restless, protean energy; Milmany, the activist daughter of time-locked, shabbily genteel Barcelona anarchist intellectuals, yearns for transcendent meaning, finds comfort in the memory of the old city and her geology studies – permanence amidst flux – yet she still feels the past ‘like an abyss’. The war which many believed ‘would be over by Christmas’ changes them utterly, as they take cognisance of the civilian-on-civilian violence spreading like wildfire following the military coup. For Sales, even though he was a (Republican) soldier, the war’s meaning lay not on the battlefield, nor in the tangled partisan politics which suffused Spain’s civil war (both of which remain off-page), but in the radically altered texture of everyday life which marks change as 62 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

irrevocable. The novel’s virtuoso depiction of how war makes everything grotesque, consuming utterly the ‘uncertain glory’ of a dream of political renewal, might make for unbearable reading, but in Sales’ rumbustious, humane telling it enthrals from beginning to end. Sales writes against the terminal lack of imagination that caused the military rebels to propose war as a ‘solution’ to the messiness of social change, but succeeded only in reducing people to impossible choices: the novel is full of those for whom ‘taking sides’ makes no existential sense. As a war-defying act, Sales blurs the lines, allowing complexity and contradiction to breathe through every pore of the novel, reminding us that life always overflows theory and dogma. Soleràs quips about the tendency of foreigners to bury the war beneath a welter of the heroic and folkloric, but the author’s main target was closer to home: his most compelling voices belong to ordinary Catholics who stood at odds to the military rebellion but were subsequently rendered invisible by the Franco dictatorship’s totalising and enduring myth of a ‘Catholic crusade’. Sales’ own Catholic sensibility recognises the violent anticlericalism of Republican Spain for the religious phenomenon it was, while reminding us how, before Franco, the divide between believers and non-believers was dwarfed by that between urban and rural cultures, a historical truth conveyed in high comedic style as Sales’ Barcelona city boy ponders the unfathomability of the peasantry on whom he is billeted. Inevitably Sales’ novel had trouble with Franco’s censors. The most comprehensive version (in its original Catalan) was published only in 1971, as political twilight descended on the dictatorship, although not, as we still see today, on its most flagrant myths – whose exposure here redoubles the importance of Sales’ work. Helen Graham

A Soldier on the Southern Front

The Classic Italian Memoir of World War I Emilio Lussu, with a foreword by Mark Thompson, translated by Gregory Conti Rizzoli 256pp £16.95

The Italian Army and the First World War John Gooch

Cambridge University Press 398pp £19.99

EMILIO LUSSU led an extraordinary life. Born into a wealthy family in Sardinia, he was studying law when Italy entered the First World War in 1915. As a convinced Italian nationalist, he volunteered for the army and was sent to the front. His experiences of the war were shocking and transformational. He fought bravely for a brigade of Sardinian soldiers, winning four medals, and after the conflict became a convinced anti-fascist and fought for the rights of ex-combatants. Forced into exile by the regime, he decided to write about his war experiences in the late 1930s. What emerged was one of the classics of war literature, which only appeared in Italy in 1945, but has been in print ever since. A Soldier on the Southern Front, appearing here in a new translation and with an elegant introduction by Mark Thompson, is a magnificent, angry, ironic account of a year of trench warfare, which still packs the same punch as it did 70 years ago. Lussu takes apart the army hierarchy by depicting them

as vicious bureaucrats, or pompous psychopaths. One officer – General Leone – is a grotesque and terrifying figure, willing to sacrifice his own men at the drop of a hat. The descriptions of battle scenes are vivid and realistic and we enter into the rhythm of the war, with its long pauses punctuated by moments of chaotic massacre. Lussu never lets the officer class off the hook and uses black humour to undermine their authority and power. He also makes clear how unprepared Italy was for a war of this kind. Many scenes smack of farce: ordinary soldiers are forced to don elaborate armour that gives them no protection against the Austrian guns, or simply told to walk towards certain death, uphill, into machine gun fire.

Lussu never lets the officer class off the hook, using black humour to undermine their authority and power Lussu’s use of minute descriptions of locations – hills, trenches, battles – and names that can easily identify the people they describe (Thompson names them all in the introduction) gives the prose a realistic feel, despite the fact that it was written 20 years after the events it narrates and with the hindsight provided by Fascism and its exaltation of the supposed beauty and heroism of war. Lussu’s army is one fuelled by alcohol and

REVIEWS alcoholism, where many soldiers and lower-level officers see the ‘real enemy’ as their own generals. In one unforgettable scene everyone stands by as the arrogant General appears to face certain death from enemy fire. They are all hoping for the same outcome, but the General (of course) escapes yet again. Yet, this is not simply an anti-war book. Lussu understands the complexity of conflict, the loyalties and friendships which bound together the Sardinian troops, the sense of duty which kept the men going, despite everything. When a mutiny breaks out, Lussu is not a supporter, although he opposes mass executions in its aftermath. Italy’s war campaign is often overlooked in the history books, despite the mobilisation of six million men and the deaths of 571,000 of them. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the devastating experience of that war. However, to fully understand that conflict some history is required. John Gooch’s careful and meticulously researched account, The Italian Army and the First World War is a very good place to start, alongside Mark Thompson’s superb The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 (2009). Gooch is a military historian with a deep understanding of the complexities of war and the technical aspects of the conflict. His volume, written with verve and a witty turn of phrase, is the perfect companion to Lussu’s stark and clear prose. The Italian Army takes the story right through from intervention, providing detailed analysis of the army itself, its tactics and the various battles, attacks, defeats or near-defeats (above all the semi-disaster at Caporetto in 1917) and the final and perhaps unexpected victory in 1918. Italy’s commemorations of the war have already started and it will be fascinating to see how that conflict is depicted in today’s world, given the manipulation of its history in the period since 1918 and the role of fascism. Thus far, the pacifist account – war as universal tragedy – has held sway, as interpreted in 2014 by Pope Francis in Gorizia. John Foot

EXHIBITION

Conscience and Conflict

British Artists and the Spanish Civil War Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, until February 15th, 2015 THE MORE THAT historians arrive at an understanding of the 20th century, the more the Spanish Civil War stands out as a pivotal event. This is because, if the 20th century was, to cite Eric Hobsbawm, an ‘age of extremes’ driven by ideological conflicts between communism, fascism and liberalism, then Spain was at the crux of these conflicts. The fight between the democratically elected Spanish Republic and the rebel Nationalist force led by General Franco was emblematic of the European clash between left- and right-wing forces. The Spanish Civil War was also a conflict of intimate enemies and local massacres where civilians were killed by their own compatriots. As Helen Graham argues in The War and Its Shadow (2012), Spain was a constitutive element in a wider pattern of violence between 1936 and 1947; where mass killing of non-combatants became the brutal medium through which societies enacted structure-shattering forms of change. To date, thousands of books have been penned on the Spanish Civil War, which is why Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War is remarkable: it explores a gap in our understanding, namely how British visual artists responded to it. As the curator Simon Lester asserts, much has been said about literary reactions of the likes of George Orwell, Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden, but almost nothing about British artists’ engagement in the conflict. In this way the exhibition poses big questions that resonate beyond the 1930s. It asks how artists engage a mass audience with political issues, which in this case was a choice: the Republic or Franco.

The exhibition draws upon an astonishing array of objects, some of which will be familiar. So the exhibition tells the story of how Pablo Picasso’s depiction of the aerial devastation of the Basque capital, Guernica (1937), toured Britain in 1938 and 1939, including a stint in a car showroom in support of the Manchester Food Ship for Spain. It also contains Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), based upon his lover, Dora Maar, whose fragmented face expressed the conflict’s agony, and Joan Miró’s print Help Spain (1937), where a Catalan peasant raises his clenched fist in the Loyalist salute, originally envisaged as a one franc stamp to raise funds for the Republican cause in France. But most is unfamiliar. The work of Frank Brangwyn, Clive Branson and Ursula McCannell has long been forgotten, while many of the banners, leaflets, tracts, photos, textiles and posters are presented for the first time. Conscience and Conflict recreates the political culture of the 1930s, which was moving left in the wake of the Depression, the Labour defeat of 1931 and the international rise of fascism. In this context, for so many of the artists on display, as either Communists or fellow travellers, the Soviet Union was seen as the answer to all these ills. Importantly, the exhibition shows how this culture was connected internationally to modernism and how the key conduit was the surrealist Roland Penrose. His friendship with Picasso led him to Spain early in the war and he returned committed to the Republic. For Penrose, it was good versus evil and he wanted to use art to counter Francoist propaganda, win support for the British men and women who went to fight in Spain – of whom there were 2,500 – and denounce Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Conscience and Conflict also shows the impact of the Spanish tragedy upon the artistic imagination. In particular, artists expressed fears about war from the air and here Walter Nessler’s 1937 canvas, Premonition (inset), is a highlight. Portraying a gas mask on top of a bombed out London skyline, it was a chilling anticipation of the Blitz. This outstanding exhibition is accompanied by an equally outstanding catalogue written by Lester. The way in which Conscience and Conflict engages the audience with a complex subject is a model for other galleries to follow. Anybody with an interest in the connections between history, politics and art should go. Martin Evans

The Spanish Civil War was a conflict of intimate enemies and local massacres where civilians were killed by their own compatriots

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

Origins of Classical Architecture

Architecture Temples, Orders and Gifts to the Gods in Ancient Greece Mark Wilson Jones Yale University Press 288pp £40

THE STATELY, rhythmic elegance of Greek temple architecture has inspired generations of architects (and tourists) from the Romans to the Renaissance to modern times. Wilson Jones’ handsome book makes an important contribution to the age-old discussion about how their architectural ‘orders’ or styles developed and what they might mean. The conventional picture, established by the Roman writer Vitruvius, is that the massive Doric order evolved from now-vanished precursors in wood. Later thinkers read into this paradigm a virtuous respect for structural honesty and primitive simplicity; subsequent Ionic and Corinthian orders responded to a taste for more elegant, ornamented, ‘feminine’ forms. Wilson Jones presents a more complicated picture in which Greek stone temple architecture developed not gradually through evolution, but in a ‘surprisingly rapid jump … a race for splendour’ in the seventh century bc. After a burst of fertile creativity, taking in a wide variety of influences, architectural forms settled down into an increasingly well-defined canon. Throughout, the author cautions against looking for single explanations. After introductory chapters on the development and function of temples, he explores four different modes of interpretation, each illustrated chiefly by an order to which it closely applies: 64 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

constructional questions (Doric); the migration of design ideas between cultures (Aeolic); the visual qualities of architectural form (Ionic); and symbolism (Corinthian). As Wilson Jones immediately admits, this paired structure is a ‘strategic device’, a way of schematising a complex picture: in reality, all these factors were ‘inextricably tangled’ in the architectural products of the seventh and sixth centuries bc and even in the minds of the individual builders and craftsmen responsible.

Wilson Jones ... makes an important contribution to the age-old discussion about how architectural ‘orders’ or styles developed and what they mean Thus the builders of Greek temples were in part concerned with questions of construction and a memory of wooden elements, but also open to foreign influence, interested in revivals of earlier Greek styles, affected by developments in the other art forms that filled religious sanctuary sites and willing to incorporate symbolism (the author makes a particular case for the bronze tripod having influenced the grooved panel that alternates with square metopes in the frieze running horizontally above a Doric temple’s columns). Growing economic prosperity led to confident competition between Greek city states and sanctuaries; the sense that temples were an appropriate offering to and home for the gods helped fuel the development of sophisticated, elaborate buildings. This wide range of contributing factors does not make Greek architecture an eclectic mish-mash. ‘Design is also knowing what to leave out’ and the author points to the distinctive contribution of builders and craftsmen working

either side of the year 600 bc: ‘It is as if designers inhaled all manner of things, drawing in that which was of use, while exhaling that which was not.’ Wilson Jones’ writing is vivid and fluent, managing the difficult task of amassing and explaining a great deal of technical material without losing sight of an overall argument. This is particularly important given that his aim is to combine multiple strands of interpretation, challenging previous scholarship, ‘which in its concern for detail can miss the forest for the trees’. The book’s success in that aim makes it useful to specialists, but also to anyone interested in Classical Greek architecture, not least for its prolific, often sumptuous, illustrations. Matthew Nicholls

The Downfall of Money Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class Frederick Taylor Bloomsbury 432pp £25

RALPH Waldo Emerson once said that ‘money often costs too much’, a sentiment that would have rung true to governing politicians in the early years of Germany’s Weimar Republic. They faced the choice of deflationary policies, which would stabilise the mark, but mean spending cuts that would savage the new social welfare state they needed to ensure the loyalty of the working classes to the volatile new German republic. Frederick Taylor shows how successive Weimar governments opted to

sacrifice the currency. They were following an existing trend. Taylor does well to make short work of the myth that the Allies’ reparations after the First World War started the German inflation crisis. He emphasises that inflation was, first, a deliberate wartime policy of the Kaiserreich. Germany funded its war effort by abandoning the gold standard, meaning that Marks were no longer directly convertible to the value of gold, allowing it to print additional paper money to pay its war costs. Second, inflation was a choice of the first governments of the Weimar Republic, who saw it as a way to avoid unemployment: keeping the German currency weak internationally meant booming exports as German goods were cheaper than the foreign-made competition. It was hoped that inflating the currency would force the Allies to adjust their reparations demands downwards by making the German economy look weak and unable to pay. Not all politicians were so reckless: Taylor is sympathetic to Matthias Erzberger, who sought to reform Germany’s tax system to pay its war debts, and Walther Rathenau, who realised inflation had gone too far; however both were murdered by anti-republican nationalists before they could rescue the currency. In January 1919 one US dollar bought 8.20 marks. By January 1922 it was 207.82, but a far worse spiral was to come: when the Belgians and French occupied the Ruhr in January 1923, to exploit coal because Germany was stalling on paying war reparations, the German government paid the workers in the Ruhr who were instructed not to work for the occupiers. Hyperinflation was immediate: the mark jumped to 17,972 against the dollar. In October 1923 it reached an astounding 41 billion against the dollar. The economy was only salvaged by the introduction of a new currency and an American loan package. Of course, hyperinflation had winners and losers, as Taylor

REVIEWS highlights. Those paying off mortgages or loans found their debt was wiped out overnight; those with access to foreign currency – exporters, foreigners – lived like kings. The real losers were the old middle-class intelligentsia, the Bildungsbürgertum, often living from fixed dividends, savings, investments, pensions or inherited money. Completely ruined, forced to sell heirlooms or even their daughters to survive, they never forgave the Weimar Republic. When a second economic crisis hit in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, they abandoned Weimar and democracy altogether for the Nazi party. Although this is as much a narrative political history of the Weimar state as of its economy – the hyperinflation is the subject only of the final third of the book – it is a

Hyperinflation had its winners and losers ... those paying mortgages found their dept wiped out overnight ... the old middle-class intelligentsia were completely ruined compelling read; Taylor has an eye for evocative, fresh firsthand quotations. Moreover, he rightly grasps the legacy: Weimar’s hyperinflation has left German policy-makers allergic to inflationary spending to ease unemployment during the Euro crisis. Yet there is another lesson here: after all, Weimar survived the hyperinflation, however, traumatic. It was the deflationary austerity measures taken in response to the 1929 crash, partly in an over-reaction to the horrors of 1923, that ultimately brought Hitler’s far-right movement to power. Heather Jones

The Making of Home

The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes Judith Flanders Atlantic Books 368pp £20

THE latest book from Judith Flanders explores the intriguing phenomenon of what makes a ‘home’ in the countries of North-Western Europe and the US. She begins on an unexpected note of whimsy, in Oz, where the Scarecrow questions Dorothy on her reasons for wishing to return to ‘dry, grey’ Kansas. We know Dorothy’s answer, of course, but just why is there No Place Like Home? The book is divided into two parts and moves chronologically. Part One deals with our domestic space and the centuries of social, economic and emotional change in North-West Europe since the medieval period, which, Flanders argues, has resulted in a unique way of inhabiting our homes. Her point that ordinary people, not architects, are responsible for domestic architecture is backed up by evidence of how we have occupied the place we call home over time. Part Two deals with the technological advances that allow us now to live comfortably, such as the move from open to ‘range’ cooking, kitchen design, water supply and waste removal, notions of what constitutes ‘dirt’ and the relatively recent innovation of the bathroom. Judith Flanders is an accomplished historian and author and the level-headed voice that permeates her other books is equally present in The Making of Home. Her grasp of the broader issues which she seeks to address is assured and

the text is woven with the art of 17th-century Holland, 18th-century British literature and interior design, 19th-century American household manuals and 20thcentury film and entertainments. Particularly strong are the sections on the roles of women in the household ‘economy’ and in providing the ‘invisible commodities of hygiene, nutrition and good housekeeping’. As Britain moved towards urban living, roles changed and women no longer had control of kitchen gardens, small animals and their produce, but were instead moving into urban homes, where they worked without wages while their husbands left the home and were paid in cash, resulting in an immediate change in the balance of power. ‘Women’s work’ became worth less than that of the male provider. The book is also enlightening on the development of American domestic architecture and the appropriation of colloquial vernacular styles, both in and directly around the home. Log cabins, for instance, were a Scandinavian import to America; the introduction of the swept dirt ‘yard’, West African. Style, both architectural and interior, is a strong theme and how it evolves from necessity. Flanders deals not only with the introduction of new-fangled forks in England in the early 18th century, but the first designs for fitted kitchens and three-piece suites. This close attention to style is reflected in the book itself, which has been beautifully produced by Atlantic, with 32 plates, mainly in colour. The cover design, an interpretation of the doll’s houses of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum furnished with items and people from across the centuries, is a mischievous touch. At the close of this splendid book, the reader has been taken on an eye-opening journey to a space they thought they knew, guided by the author through the ‘messy multiple realities of history’. The Making of Home is about a mythical and emotional premise, the story of its construction, and shows us the many reasons Dorothy had for returning to Kansas. Lucy Inglis

CONTRIBUTORS Krista Cowman is Professor of History at the University of Lincoln. Colin Cruise is Reader in Art History at Aberystwyth University and author of Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (Thames & Hudson, 2012). Martin Evans is Professor of History at the University of Sussex. John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol. Helen Graham‘s most recent book is The War and its Shadow: The Spanish Civil War in the Long Twentieth Century (Sussex Academic Press, 2012). Emma Griffin is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia. She is writing a history of working-class life during the Industrial Revolution for Yale. Pat Hudson is Professor Emerita, Cardiff University and Honorary Fellow in Economic History at the LSE. Lucy Inglis is a historian, novelist and occasional television presenter. Her most recent book is Georgian London: Into the Streets (Penguin, 2013). Heather Jones’ most recent book is Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 19141920 (Cambridge, 2011). Helen Lacey is author of The Royal Pardon: Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England (Boydell & Brewer, 2009). Matthew Nicholls is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading. Vivienne Richmond is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Christopher Smith is the Director of the British School at Rome. Richard Weight is the author of Mod: A Very British Style (The Bodley Head, 2013).

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters War Games I was fascinated by the article, ‘More than Child’s Play’ (December 2014). In my childhood, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, my father lent me two books for children by H.G. Wells, entitled Floor Games and Little Wars. These had been published in 1911 and 1913, respectively. Floor Games was entirely pacific, using model houses, cattle, carts, coaches and civilian people. Little Wars described games for toy soldiers, cavalry and artillery. The guns were spring loaded with wooden pellets accurate and powerful enough to knock model soldiers and horses over. There were elaborate, detailed and welldeveloped rules for moving troops, manoeuvring through varied terrain, capturing houses, farms and villages, fighting hand to hand, taking prisoners and so on. The games might be played indoors or, according to photographs, outside on garden lawns. It was possible to fight small melees with a few men or horses, or to engage in strategic conflicts with large bodies of troops moving hidden in boxes, to be uncovered only when within range of an enemy. My father described how, as a child, he and a friend had played the war game. They had even written to Wells asking for a rule preventing prisoners being deliberately positioned to shelter troops from enemy guns. Wells obliged with a modification; prisoners must be marched off the field under adequate escort. Wells hoped that such games, which he likened to the German Army’s Kriegspiel, might discourage boys from real war. That does not seem to have worked in 1914. In 1939 I was unable to play because I could not afford to equip even a small toy army. Martin Simons Moonee Ponds, Victoria, Australia 66 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

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

Ranke’s Rules With interest, I have read the troublesome discovery of Suzannah Lipscomb and her suggestions for a Code of Conduct (Making History, December). However, the same problems were already faced by the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) nearly 200 years earlier, who had exactly the same issues with Enlightenment historians. It was these problems that drove him to document his ideas on source criticism and objectivity in the 1820s. Within the next 60 years his ideas and approaches for academic history – more commonly known as ‘scientific’ history – became commonplace in universities. In recent years Ranke has been highly disputed, declared as old-fashioned and described as completely out-dated. Although we do not document history as he did, his techniques and methods are still relevant and actively taught in the classes and lecture halls of today; just not as much practiced, as revealed by Dr Lipscomb. Her Code of Conduct is a modern rephrasing of Ranke’s ideas: source criticism, objectivity and footnotes. But her complaint and suggestions show that despite the numerous approaches to history, such as empiricism or postmodernism, we still have the problem that too many historians do not follow these rules. The approach of Ranke is more important than ever before. Andreas Boldt National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Collaboration Controversy I very much enjoyed the article by Gareth Pritchard and Desislava Gancheva (‘Collaborator. No Longer a Dirty Word?’, December). It was a fascinating treatment of collaboration with the Nazis and their fascist allies and

Connect with us on Twitter twitter.com/historytoday

of how this remains a sensitive issue three generations later. Sensitivity should not, however, stop us facing the truth: many people co-operated with the Axis willingly and some did so for perhaps understandable reasons. Stepan Bandera, Josef Tiso and Miklós Horthy are not, I agree, good role models; but it would be unfair if all collaborators were viewed as being the same as they. There were individual and personal motives for collaboration: fear, greed, desire for revenge, simple survival. In 1969 a superb French documentary by Marcel Ophüls dealt with collaboration in ClermontFerrand under the Nazi occupation. The Sorrow and The Pity explored how individual circumstances and personal motives played a very great, perhaps the greatest part, in their behaviour. It was controversial at the time and remains so. There were also national and ethnic motives for collaboration, but many of these might also be considered understandable. Axis forces were often welcomed as liberators in areas that had suffered under Stalin’s ghastly regime. This included Ukraine and the Baltic states. I submit that not everyone handing out flowers, bread and salt to advancing German columns in 1941 was a fascist, a Nazi sympathiser, or antisemitic: they might have just been glad to be rid of the NKVD and the Gulags. Not all were nationalists and those that were might have had good motives for their actions. For example, Andrey Andreivich Vlasov was a rising star in the Red Army during the 1930s and early 1940s. He defected in 1942 and played a lead role in the establishment of the Russian Liberation Army, the ROA (Russkaya Osvoboditel’naya Armiya). The ROA was

intended to secure an independent Russian state free of Stalinism, along broadly democratic lines. The ROA supported Hitler against Stalin but there is no evidence that Vlasov was a fascist or a Nazi; quite the opposite. There are other examples of such collaboration and such people deserve re-evaluation. Pritchard and Gancheva mentioned Silvio Berlusconi’s advocacy of a more ‘balanced’ view of Benito Mussolini; their inverted commas, not mine. In this, if nothing else, I agree with Signor Berlusconi: we should look at these matters in a balanced way, whatever our contemporary sensitivities. Balance does not, of course, mean moral equivalence; but it does mean that we should strive to understand why people behaved as they did at the time, give due weight to their particular circumstances and make allowances. Current politics should not stop us from doing so. Mark Evans Llanddeusant, Llangadog

Brummie Banter The From the Editor column in the December issue referred to a ‘gilded bronze statue, known locally as the “Golden Boys’’’ in Birmingham. This came as something of a surprise to me, having grown up in Birmingham during the 1950s and 1960. I have only ever heard that particular statue referred to as the ‘Three Shop Stewards’. This seems to be much more in keeping with the local sense of humour, which has resulted in a statue and fountain in front of the Council House becoming known popularly as the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’. In my experience the people of Birmingham tend to prefer nicknames that poke fun at something or somebody. Ken Clayton via email

CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: [email protected] Books & Publishing

Travel

Courses

Wanted

Travel

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 67

CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: [email protected] Charity

Health

68 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Reassuringly intelligent. Comfortingly rational.

Coming Next Month Violence and the Vote

Violent protest was a small but significant part of the struggle in Britain for women’s right to vote. Fern Riddell examines this neglected issue and reveals the impact that violent acts had on the wider suffragette movement and how it caused division and controversy both among supporters of women’s suffrage and in British society at large.

Sex and Supremacy in the British Empire

In 1915 wounded Indian soldiers convalescing in Brighton after the First Battle of Ypres became something of a cause célèbre among the local community. Letters sent home by the Indians attest to the respect with which they were greeted as they convalesced. So why, in February 1915, was the freedom of the city previously granted to them curbed? The answer, explains Suzanne Bardgett, lies with ‘the sex problem’ that threatened the very assumption of white supremacy on which the British Empire was built.

Subscribe

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

The Rise of the Sons of Mars

When, in 288 bc, a group of Campanian mercenaries known as the Mamertines took control of the Sicilian city of Messina, they did so with a level of violence befitting their self-styled name, ‘Sons of Mars’. Following their expulsion from the city in 265 bc, the mercenaries sought aid from the forces of both Carthage and Rome. Erich B. Anderson describes how this action led to the first battle in what became the century-long struggle for the Mediterranean known as the Punic Wars.

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

The March issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on February 19th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for December is Sarah Upton, Southampton.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 Cotton MS Augustus II.106 © The British Library Board. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © British Museum Images; 5 © Bridgeman Images; 6 © Alamy; 7 left © Peter Stackpole/LIFE/Getty Images; 7 right Courtesy of the President, Magdalen College, Oxford. MONTHS PAST: 8 Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014; 9 top and bottom © Getty Images. LADY BANKES DEFENDS CORFE CASTLE: 10-11 © Yale Center for British Art/Paul Mellon/Bridgeman Images; 11 © National Trust Images/Richard Pink; 12 top by kind permission of the Dorset History Centre; 12 bottom © National Trust Images; 13 HMNTS 12638.bbb.14 (p110) © The British Library Board; 14 top © National Trust Images/John Hammond; 14 bottom HMNTS 12638.bbb.14 (p59) © The British Library Board; 15 top © National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel; 15 bottom © National Trust Images/John Hammond; 16 © National Trust Images/Christopher Hurst. RICHARD III LEGITIMATE QUESTIONS: 17 © Society of Antiquaries/Bridgeman Images; 18 top and bottom © Angelo Hornak/Alamy. FOUR NATIONS OR ONE? 22 © Getty Images; 24 top National Portrait Gallery/Bridgeman Images; 24 bottom 1899/r49 © British Library Board; 25 © Hulton Archive/Getty Images. INFOCUS: 26-27 © Getty Images. FOREVER A TIME OF TROUBLES: 28-29 © akg-images 29 © akg-images; 30 top © akg-images; 30-31 © akg-images; 32 © Heritage Images; 33 top © akg-images; 33 bottom © Press Association Images; 34 top and bottom akg-images; 35 poster inset © Alamy. Main photograph © Wojtek Laski/Getty Images. MAKING HISTORY: 36 © Anadolu Agency/Getty Images. THE GREATEST KNIGHT OR A FAILED CRUSADER? 37 Ms 16 Roll 178 © Corpus Christi College, Cambridge/Bridgeman Images; 38 left © Thomas Asbridge; 38 right Roy 14 C VII f.9 © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images; 39 © Duby Tal/Albatross/Alamy; 40 top © Bridgeman Images; 40 bottom Ms.42130, fol. 82 © akg-images/British Library; 41 top and bottom © Thomas Asbridge; 42 left © Alamy; 42 right © Thomas Asbridge. ON HER OWN TERMS: THE HIGHWAYWOMAN: 44 © Mary Evans Picture Library/ Reform Club; 46 © Getty Images. MOSLEY: ANTISEMITE: 47 © National Media Museum/Daily Herald Archive/ Getty Images; 48 top Topfoto; 48 bottom © Lebrecht Photo Library/Alamy; 49 Getty Images; 50 top and bottom © Topfoto; 51 top MFM.MLD71. © The British Library Board, courtesy The Jewish Chronicle; 51 bottom © Strube/Express Newspapers/N&S Syndication, published 10th September 1934, courtesy British Cartoon Archive; 52 © Popperfoto/ Getty Images; 53 © Mirrorpix. SURVEILLANCE: A NEW BRITISH TRADITION: 54 © William Lovelace/Getty Images; 55 © Evening Standard/Getty Images. REVIEWS: 56 © Bridgeman Images; 59 The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888. The Pérez Simón collection, Mexico © Studio Sébert Photographes; 63 Premonition by Walter Nessler, 1937. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon © Estate of Walter Nessler. COMING NEXT MONTH 69 © Popperfoto/Getty Images. PASTIMES: 70 top The Battle of the Pyramids by Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1808; 70 left W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1963 courtesy Library of Congress. SIX DEGREES: 71 © Alamy. 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.

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz

3 The Nazi wartime acronym ‘HHhH’ is the title of a Laurent Binet novel of 2010 based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. What do the initials stand for? 4 Which King of Denmark and Norway and later Sweden was responsible for the Stockholm Bloodbath of November 1520?

5 Of which African country did US civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois become a citizen at the age of 93 in 1961? 6 Which 1495 statute removed the Irish parliament’s right to meet without the English government’s permission? 7 Who is considered to be the first wife of a Soviet leader to play a public role? 70 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

8 In which year did British control of Tripolitania end? 9 Roe v. Wade refers to the US Supreme Court’s decision of 1973 that legalised what? 10 Who is the author of The English Constitution (1867) and one-time editor of the Economist?

11 Which prominent figure of the 1960s acoustic folk revival was the inspiration for the titular character of the 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis? 12 At which treaty of 1832 was Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire recognised by the Turkish Porte?

ANSWERS

2 At which battle of 1798 did Napoleon take Cairo and thus control of Egypt?

1. 1922, 1945. 2. The Battle of the Pyramids. 3. Himmler’s Hirn heißt Heydrich, or, ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’. 4. Christian II (1481-1559). 5. Ghana. 6. Poynings’ Law. 7. Raisa Maximovna Gorbachev (1932-99). 8. 1952. 9. Abortion. 10. Walter Bagehot (1826-77). 11. Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002). 12. The Treaty of Constantinople.

1 In which year was the Japanese Communist Party founded and when was it first legalised?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 2 The ___, San Antonio mission overrun by Mexican forces in 1836 (5) 3 A Dictionary of ___ And Unconventional English, 1937 work by Eric Partridge (5) 4 Sir Clements ___ (1830-1916), English geographer (7) 5 John ___ (1758-1810), portrait painter (7) 6 1896 play by Alfred Nobel (7) 7 ‘Oh! The ___ of England’ – Fielding, The Grub Street Opera (1731) (5,4) 8 ___ Horizon, oil rig whose 2010 sinking caused the largest offshore oil spill in US history (9) 14 Obsequious clerk in Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) (5,4) 15 Robin of ___, leader of a 15thcentury rising in east Yorkshire (9) 18 Salman ___ (b.1947), novelist, author of The Satanic Verses (7) 19 Somerset village associated with the composition of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (7) 20 Bruce ___ (1940-89), English travel writer (7) 23 Legendary fabulist of ancient Greece (5) 24 ‘___ is the cruellest month’ – T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (1922) (5)

ACROSS 1 John Crowe ___ (1888-1974), US poet and critic (6) 5 Chiltern ___, ancient administrative area of southern England (8) 9 Mrs ___, character in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775) (8) 10 Cecil ___ (1887-1937), adventurer and Antarctic explorer (6) 11 Nickname given to Edward I (10) 12 ‘God made the country, and man made the ___’ – Cowper, 1785 (4) 13 Term for the Crusader states established in the Middle East after the First Crusade (8) 16 1970 play by Anthony Schaffer, filmed in 1972 (6) 17 Billy ___ (1906-2002), Austrianborn film director (6) 19 Joseph ___ (d.1782), architect from the English Midlands (8) 21 Gruffudd ap ___ (d.1137), ruler in South Wales (4) 22 Figure of Arthurian legend, noted for his purity (3,7) 25 Daily ___, left-wing newspaper published in London from 1912 to 1964 (6) 26 Town in Shropshire, associated with the death of Oswald of Northumbria (8) 27 Lady Susan Harriet Catherine ___ (1814-89), scandalous daughter of the Duke of Hamilton (8) 28 Incendiary agent deployed by US forces in Japan, Korea and Vietnam (6)

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 February 28th or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation Queen Marie of Romania

Queen Consort Marie of Romania (1875-1938)

Dame Nellie Melba (1861-1931) Australian operatic soprano who had an affair with ….

was immortalised in a poem written on the occasion of her successful visit to the US by ...

Prince Philippe d’Orléans, Duke of Orléans (1869-1936)

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967 )

Orléanist claimant to the French throne, who was exiled from his native land, as was ...

US writer and satirist who was put on the Hollywood Blacklist by studio bosses, as was …

Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany (1859-1941)

Leonard Bernstein (1918-90)

US composer and conductor who was the first American to conduct at La Scala, Milan, the favourite venue of …

By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

who was the first witness to sign the register at the marriage of his first cousin …

FEBRUARY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

ALEXANDER III

FromtheArchive Daniel Beer reassesses W. Bruce Lincoln’s 1976 study of Tsar Alexander III’s brief reign, which combined reaction with rapid industrialisation and left a troubling legacy for his successors.

Rule of Contradictions W. BRUCE LINCOLN tackles a central paradox in the reign of Alexander III: political reaction in an era of rapid social and economic modernisation. His reign was brief; a mere 13 years. Politically, it was a protracted epilogue to the assassination by revolutionaries of Alexander II in March 1881. His son responded with a raft of counterreforms intended to roll back the concessions the autocracy had made in the areas of self-government, the law and censorship. Yet, as Lincoln emphasises, Alexander’s reign was not just one of reaction. His government aggressively pursued the necessity of industrialisation, investing heavily in railway construction, mining and manufacturing. Many of the issues that Lincoln addresses have, over the last 40 years, flourished into vibrant areas of research. The single greatest shift has been the turn away from political and economic to social and cultural history. Pioneering studies of peasant society, urban culture, the growth of civil society, nationalism, the legal system and colonialism have all enriched, even complicated, Lincoln’s arguments. While he argues that Alexander successfully pursued counter-reforms and industrialisation in tandem, more recent studies have tended to emphasise the irreconcilable tensions between the two. The routing of the revolutionary movement after 1881 was a tactical victory that concealed a wider strategic failure. The regime succeeded in destroying the symptoms of subversion but not its well-springs, which lay in the social inequalities of the empire and the rise of ideologies of opposition. The authorities banished opponents to Siberia, but it did so at the expense of embittering them further against the regime. Lincoln points to the importance of 72 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2015

Alexander’s policies of Russification, especially in the ethnically fractured regions of the western borderlands. A number of recent studies of Russification have emphasised how nationalism proved a dangerous card to play in a multi-ethnic empire bound together by the authority of the tsar. Russification succeeded not so much in unifying disparate ethnicities with a common language and religion but rather in catalysing the centrifugal forces of local nationalisms – Polish, Jewish, German and so on – that would

One example was the famine of 1891, which, Lincoln argues, ‘did not disturb the tranquillity of Alexander’s Russia’. More recent research has, however, emphasised civil society’s ‘political awakening’ during the crisis. Appalled by the government’s apparent callous indifference to the suffering of the peasantry, voluntary associations and charities stepped into the breach and began to organise famine relief. This vibrant public sphere sat uncomfortably with the social quietism and dynastic loyalty demanded by the crown. Alexander’s renewed insistence on the autocracy as the supreme authority in the empire was beginning to look like an anachronism. From the perspective of recent research, Alexander’s reign looks less like an oasis of calm and more like a pressure cooker of unstable change. Rapid modernisation in an era of political reaction piled contradiction upon contradiction. Lincoln is right that Alexander succeeded in projecting an aura of implacable authority but, beneath the pomp of the court, the fissures were beginning to open.

Alexander’s reign looks less like an oasis of calm and more like a pressure cooker of unstable change erupt at the turn of the 20th century. Whereas social historians of the 1970s and 1980s tended to emphasise the rise of a politically engaged proletariat amid the industrialisation drive of the 1880s, recent studies have presented a more ambiguous workingclass milieu. They have painted a picture of economic insecurity, crime and poverty and dislocation from the official culture of the state; not the proletarian vanguard of the Marxist imagination, but still a combustible pool of alienation that swelled as the end of the 19th century approached. Over the last two decades historians have examined the rise and influence of civil society in the 1880s and 1890s. An explosion in printing and a rapid expansion in voluntary associations heightened popular involvement in discussions of colonialism, the peasant question, industrialisation, law and order, the working classes and the exile system. Public criticism of the management of the empire was on the increase.

Daniel Beer is senior lecturer in history at Royal Holloway University of London.

VOLUME 26 ISSUE 10 OCT 1976 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta