History Today 2015-07

July 2015 Vol 65 Issue 7

SPECIAL EDITION

MAGNA CARTA From Runnymede to the World

Warrior queen: Aï Keïta in the title role of Sarraounia.

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate Wiles Editorial 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

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FROM THE EDITOR ‘WHY DOES HISTORY ON TV have to be (almost always, but increasingly) so stupid, patronising and awful.’ That was the question posed to his social media followers by the historian Matthew Parker, author of the acclaimed Goldeneye, his book on Jamaica during Ian Fleming’s time there. Parker’s outburst has the air of exasperation common to anyone frustrated at the simplicities and stereotypes pedalled too often by the makers of history documentaries. The timing of the tweet, two thirds through the BBC’s heavily trailed three-part series Armada, suggests that programme was the source of his frustration. He is not the first to be critical of the series, which too often wasted its access to top-flight historians, including such illustrious figures as Geoffrey Parker and Jessie Childs. Kate Maltby in the Guardian expressed her anger, following the first episode, at what she perceived as the programme’s division between male historians (guns! galleons!) and female historians (clothes! make up!) and in particular the series’ portrayal of Elizabeth I. It’s bad enough putting up with comedy Spaniards, but to portray Elizabeth as a sterile grotesque was profoundly anachronistic. At the time of the Armada, the great Tudor monarch was almost exactly the same age as Margaret Thatcher was when, in 1979, as a bustle of energy and moral certainty, she first entered Downing Street. Not that Britain’s first female prime minister escaped the caricatures unique to her sex, even in death. Oddly enough, in the same week that the second part of Armada was broadcast, so was another BBC television documentary about a powerful woman who became the incarnation of a nation: Joan of Arc. In just one hour, with little whizz bangery, the excellent Helen Castor, Joan’s latest and best biographer, offered a clear narrative, conscious of the latest scholarship, of one of the most remarkable stories of the European Middle Ages. For whatever reason, Joan has been better treated by both the small screen and the big than has Elizabeth: think of Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) or Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent 1928 classic The Passion of Joan of Arc, both of which were based on the actual trial transcriptions. Let me guide you, however, to a more obscure title that will need some tracking down. Sarraounia is the 1986 film by the Mauretanian director Med Hondo, which tells the story of the eponymous queen of the Azna of West Africa who, in 1899, led her people in a sustained and, ultimately successful, guerilla war against French colonial forces. If there is a better cinematic representation of a female leader, I have not seen it.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Medieval multiculturalism • Historians and Europe • Texel • Pirate Treasure

Tolerant and Diverse: a Different Picture of the Middle Ages A rich mixture of language and culture thrived in what is now modern Belgium, challenging our perception of the medieval world. Adrian Armstrong WHEN JOURNALISTS or politicians describe a modern phenomenon as ‘medieval’, we can confidently expect the word to be freighted with negative connotations. To be medieval is to be behind the times, but not in a comforting retro or vintage sense. Medieval means ignorant and everything that stems from it: intolerant, unhygienic, superstitious. A concept such as medieval multiculturalism, then, seems self-contradictory. Yet western Europe in the Middle Ages offers some intriguing examples of

Social equals: the Dukes of Burgundy and their ladies, French, 15th century.

respect for other ways of living, thinking and speaking. The late medieval Low Countries are a case in point. In the 15th and early 16th centuries this region was ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy, a Valois house that was absorbed through marriage into the Habsburg dynasty, and so is often termed ‘the Burgundian Low Countries’. It was home to speakers of both French and Dutch, among other languages, with French spoken primarily in the south and in aristocratic circles. The distribution of languages in modern Belgium broadly reflects the situation in the equivalent areas 500

years ago, though the French-Dutch language boundary has drifted northwards in the interim and Brussels was a predominantly Dutch-speaking city. (Incidentally, ‘Dutch’ is a more appropriate linguistic term than ‘Flemish’, which is just one variety of the language – speakers within Belgium refer to the language as Nederlands rather than Vlaams.) Over recent decades, French- and Dutch-speakers in modern Belgium have tended to interact less with one another as a side-effect of successive waves of devolutionary legislation. So much so, indeed, that employees in many Brussels businesses, at least those with an international clientele, now speak English during their first contact with customers in preference to initiating conversation in what may turn out to be the ‘wrong’ regional language. Rewind five centuries and the picture looks quite different. Trading and commerce, always important in the region, inevitably encouraged communication between speakers of the two languages. So did the practical workings of political administration: for a civil servant working for the Dukes of Burgundy, it was a distinct advantage to speak both French and Dutch. The demand for multilingual competence sustained a minor local industry in the production of phrase books and vocabularies. Probably aimed mainly at merchants, these were originally compiled in manuscript form, but flourished after the introduction of printing. For households with a long-term commitment and money to spare, there was a more radical option: sending children to live temporarily with a family who spoke the other language. The chronicler George Chastelain (d. 1475) may have benefited from this practice. Born into a Dutch-speaking family of shippers based in Ghent, he was to become the first official historian of the dukes, for whom he wrote in an eloquent JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3

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French that betrays almost nothing of his ancestry. Chastelain’s career is a reminder that traffic in the Low Countries was not only a commercial matter; it was deeply bound up with culture. Writers were not isolated from their society, but, as shown by Chastelain’s official appointment, shaped opinion, expression and imagination. In doing so, they drew not only on their own language and its cultural tradition, but also on

Writers were not isolated from their society, but shaped opinion, expression and imagination the region’s other main language and culture. The French-speaking poet and chronicler Jean Molinet (d. 1507), Chastelain’s successor as the official historian of the Dukes of Burgundy, liberally sprinkled his work with words borrowed from Dutch. Anthonis de Roovere (d. 1482), a Dutch-speaking poet based in Bruges, adopted techniques from francophone authors and introduced them into the Dutch literary tradition. The interplay between languages and cultures was not limited to authors; it also involved other participants in what we might today call the institutions of literature. Translators, for instance, made works available to new audiences in the region. The traffic in translation was overwhelmingly from French to Dutch, but this does not mean that Dutch literary culture was subservient to French. On the contrary, when poetry was translated, the Dutch versions often adopted more complex and challenging verse forms than the French originals, as if the translators were actively seeking to improve on their sources. Publishing was also a cross-cultural affair: manuscript workshops and printers often catered for readers of both languages and some topical works were even printed simultaneously in French- and Dutch-language versions. Perhaps most strikingly, municipal theatre competitions – analogous to the modern circuit of cinema festivals – sometimes awarded prizes for the 4 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

best foreign-language entry. In other words, French-speaking hosts enabled Dutch-language plays (and vice versa) to be publicly performed, evaluated and recognised. Interactions of this kind were not limited to French- and Dutch-speakers. William Caxton published the first printed books in English – themselves translated from French sources – in the Low Countries. He may have produced them in Ghent, which at that time was effectively a bilingual city, in association with the French-speaking professional scribe David Aubert. Some 50 years later, in 1525, the victory of Habsburg over French forces at the battle of Pavia was celebrated in a play by the Dutch-speaking Cornelis Everaert, which was performed for the community of Aragonese and Catalan merchants in Bruges. In a variety of ways, then, speakers of different languages both drew on and appealed to each other’s cultures. In doing so they contributed to the richness of their own language and culture, while at the same time demonstrating and encouraging respect for the other. Linguistic diversity in the Low Countries may have caused division and misunderstanding at times; but these were challenges to be overcome, not barriers to be resented. So much for medieval intolerance. Adrian Armstrong is Centenary Professor of French at Queen Mary University of London. The project was funded by the AHRC.

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated An open letter responding to a recent article in support of the Historians for Britain campaign. David Andress, Richard Blakemore, Thomas Charlton, Neil Gregor, Rachel Moss, Natalia Nowakowska, Charlotte Riley and Mark Williams ‘GRAMMAR SCHOOL children know French no better than they know their left heel’, the 14th-century Cornish translator John Trevisa wrote mournfully in 1385. This was a late turnaround for Trevisa, who, in 1329, had worried about the negative impact on English culture from Latin and French; 56 years later he feared that abandoning other languages would disconnect England from a wider world. The debate over the political, cultural and economic place of Britain within Europe may seem particularly fractious in the current climate, but it has been around for centuries. The claim that Britain is exceptional when compared to the rest of Europe, as argued by Professor David Abulafia in a History Today article (May, 2015) on behalf of Historians for Britain, is nothing new either. It dominated British scholarship for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has been comprehensively overhauled in recent decades. Professor Abulafia writes that his organisation ‘aims to facilitate … debate’ over Britain’s relationship with Europe by offering a ‘historical perspective’. We welcome this invitation to debate, but are unconvinced by the perspective provided. On their website, Historians for Britain state that ‘the terms of Britain’s EU membership are undermining … Britain’s values’ and must therefore be renegotiated. These values, allegedly ‘peculiar to our shores’, stretch from ‘the ideas of common law and parliamentary sovereignty to the struggle for greater democracy and fairness’. Britain’s ‘ancient institutions’ have experienced

HISTORYMATTERS

For the world: portrait of Desiderius Erasmus by Albrecht Dürer, engraved in Nuremberg, 1526.

a ‘degree of continuity … unparalleled in continental Europe’. Such continuity would indeed be spectacular, but it is illusory. Britain’s past is neither so exalted nor so unique. Parliamentary sovereignty was not a feature of the British political landscape until the late 17th century and emerged from revolutions that embroiled Scotland, Ireland and England in probably the most devastating bloodshed these countries witnessed before the 20th century. This hardly bespeaks an ‘uninterrupted’ connection to a medieval past, nor did it lead directly to ‘greater democracy and fairness’. Universal suffrage came in 1928, later than in other European countries. Common law (which is English, not British) may be a peculiar system, but it is not the only such system in Europe and laws in Britain and Ireland have always been influenced in practice and principle by European legal codes, long before the European Convention on Human Rights. Nor has Britain escaped the darker

side of Europe’s past. While – as Professor Abulafia says – antisemitism did not take root as deeply in Britain as in Nazi Germany, it nevertheless has a long history here. The 12th century witnessed accusations of ritual murder against Jews, which soon spread to Europe and provoked violence, while Edward I was the first (but certainly not the only) European king to expel Jews from his entire kingdom; they were not readmitted to England for three and a half centuries. A raft of negative literary portrayals have become cornerstones of British culture, from Shakespeare to Dickens, and the Marconi scandal, only a few years after the Dreyfus affair, reminds us that 20th-century British history was uncomfortably similar to European history in this respect, too. Political, social, cultural and economic life in Britain has always depended on, drawn upon and given back to Europe. Since prehistory, migration into and out of these islands has defined their population and created generations

of families with strong connections to Europe and elsewhere. Professor Abulafia notes that medieval English monarchs ruled provinces of France; until George III, British monarchs styled themselves as rulers of France, looking back longingly to those former possessions and signalling their preoccupation with prestige among European nations, while from George I to William IV they were also Electors of Hanover. The centrality of Christianity to Britain’s cultural past makes sense only with reference to the broader world of Christendom, both before and after the Reformation. As commercial and imperial networks began to expand in what we now call globalisation, these connections have developed far beyond Europe in both beneficial and devastating ways, but remain essential to our understanding of Britain in the past and the present. More fundamentally, ‘Britain’ cannot be treated as a bloc: as Professor Abulafia acknowledges, Scotland’s (and Ireland’s) relations with Europe were separate from those of England at least until the 18th century. More obviously, Europe is no bloc either and to think of it as such flattens a complex collection of communities, each with their own distinctive, but not isolated, history. Besides this, a narrative of national exceptionalism is far from exceptional. Polish and Icelandic schoolchildren are taught that their ancestors pioneered liberty and parliamentary government, as are pupils in the US and many other countries. We challenge this narrative, because it does not fit with the evidence we have encountered in our own research, and this approach, because it does not provoke debate but rather presents a foregone conclusion. We think that a history that emphasises Britain’s differences and separation from Europe (or elsewhere) narrows and diminishes our parameters, making our history not exceptional but undernourished. Britain’s past – and, therefore, its future – must be understood in the context of a complex, messy, exciting and above all continuous interaction with European neighbours and indeed with the rest of the world.

For a list of the 282 signatories to this letter, go to www.historytoday.com/signatories JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Europe’s Last Battle

but it made them traitors. As the end of the war loomed, the Texel Georgians’ future looked bleak – a return to retaliation and punishment in the USSR. Fearing that fate, the members of the 822nd Battalion, having already replaced Soviet uniforms with German ones, changed their allegiance again, back to the Allied side. Inside their barracks just after midnight on April 5th-6th, 1945, the Georgians turned on their German comrades, killing many of them with bayonets and knives in coordinated attacks. But some, including the commander, Major

The carnage at Texel has been largely forgotten. Larry Hannant

FOR FIVE YEARS it was as idyllic as war could be. But for the last six weeks – extending beyond the official end of the Second World War – it was bloody carnage. Those who were once comrades in uniform suddenly took to butchering one another in a conflict that has come to be called ‘Europe’s last battle’. Photographs of German soldiers, who in the Second World War were stationed on the pastoral island of Texel, the largest of the West Friesian Islands, show them beaming as they write home. Texel (pronounced ‘tessel’) was a plum posting, a gem of endless sandy beaches surrounding productive fields of grain, potatoes and pasture for contented sheep. By April 1945, in what everyone knew were the last days of an appalling conflict, the 1,200 Wehrmacht soldiers on Texel had good reason to hope they would see war’s end without firing an angry shot. But early on the morning of April 6th, tranquility turned to terror as Wehrmacht soldier slaughtered Wehrmacht soldier, using everything from bayonets to artillery. Friend and foe were distinguished by one small difference in their uniforms: some 800 of the men wore a small patch identifying them as Georgians, while 400 officers and non-commissioned officers were German. The Georgians had begun the war not in German uniforms but Soviet. In 1941, when the USSR mounted a desperate resistance to Hitler’s massive invading army, the Soviets pressed every citizen into service. Coming from Stalin’s birthplace, Georgian citizens were given Soviet colours and weapons and thrown into the defence of the motherland. The Georgians, captured earlier on the Eastern Front, were given a dismal choice. They could accept prisoner of war status with a future promising hunger, abuse and possible death, or they could enlist in the Wehrmacht. The choice of some 30,000 Georgians to don a German uniform was understandable 6 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Tranquility turned to terror as Wehrmacht soldier slaughtered Wehrmacht soldier

Quiet posting: a soldier in German uniform stands with a captured Dutch gun at Texel, May, 1940.

Klaus Breitner, who had spent the night with his mistress in the village of Den Burg, survived. Breitner and a few other German survivors were able to escape to the mainland. On April 6th Breitner launched a counter-attack, having mobilised a force of 2,000 marines and members of the feared German SS. What had appeared to be a complete Georgian victory was quickly reversed. A house-to-house hunt for Georgians swept through Texel. Captured Georgians, including 57 who finally surrendered control of the lighthouse where they had barricaded themselves, were forced to strip – their mutiny having disgraced their uniforms – and dig their own graves. Over 130 of them were executed in this gruesome fashion. Texel was turned into a scene of carnage that spared no one, including civilian Dutch inhabitants. Resistance

forces and ordinary citizens who sheltered and helped the Georgians were executed and the villages of Den Burg and Eierland saw serious damage to homes and buildings as the Germans exacted their revenge. ‘Texel is under a reign of terror’, wrote one Texeler. Even the surrender of German forces throughout the Netherlands on May 5th and the official end of the war on May 8th brought no end to the slaughter, as the German execution campaign continued for almost two more weeks. The death toll in the six-week battle was 812 Germans, 565 Georgians and 120 Dutch. Throughout the nightmare, Texel received no Allied assistance. Only on May 20th was a small unit of the Canadian First Army sent to the island to negotiate an end to the conflict. The Canadian commander on the scene was so impressed by the Georgian resistance that he refused to class the 228 survivors as enemy personnel. Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes wrote to the Soviet High Command urging clemency for the Georgians. This would have been a significant bending of the rules agreed upon by the Big Three leaders at the Yalta Conference that all nationals would return to their homeland at the end of hostilities. Stories circulated that the surviving 228 Georgians would not have to return to the USSR. But, if the promise was made, it was revoked over the course of the next few weeks and the surviving Georgians were despatched to their home country. Contrary to expectations of retribution, in 1946 the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda praised the Texel Georgians as ‘Soviet patriots’ and wrote of them as rebelling prisoners of war. Soviet officials also visited the island regularly after the Second World War to pay tribute to the Georgians’ anti-German resistance. Today, few pause at the collective grave of 475 Georgians killed in combat or through summary execution, their resting place marked by 12 rows of red roses and a simple cairn. Europe’s last battlefield is silent, remembering the murderous nationalist antagonisms unleashed on it when the outcome of the Second World War was already decided.

Larry Hannant teaches History at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia.

HISTORYMATTERS

The Many Deaths of Captain Kidd

Our fascination with pirates and the search for buried treasure continues to make headlines.

Rebecca Simon NEWS BROKE on May 7th, 2015 that the long-lost treasure of the notorious pirate, Captain William Kidd, had been found off the coast of Madagascar in the form of a silver bar. This is not the first time someone has claimed to find Kidd’s lost treasure, or at least evidence of it. One of the most famous cases was the discovery of a map known as the Kidd-Palmer Charts, which pinpointed the location of Kidd’s treasure in the South China Seas; the fervour it provoked even sparked the financing of a major expedition in the 1950s, which fell through when the map was shown to be a hoax. As of the writing of this article, it seems possible that the discovered treasure and the accompanying shipwreck are Kidd’s, based on what we know of his travels before his arrest in New York City in 1698. However, there has not yet been any forensic or archaeological confirmation of Kidd’s ship, the Adventure Galley, so the legitimacy of this claim remains to be seen. Why has Captain Kidd remained in our memory for so long? Much mystery surrounds his life and legacy. Kidd is known in history and popular culture as a notorious pirate, but many historians argue that his reputation was unjustified. He was known to have letters of marque, which sanctioned him to rob enemy ships, but he did not have them at the time of his capture. The timing of Kidd’s capture was unfortunate, as he was imprisoned only four years after the disappearance of the pirate Henry Avery, whose actions created considerable embarrassment for the East India Company. Avery’s piracy in the East Indies enraged Indian moguls and they threatened to close off all trade if the British did not put a

stop to it. When Kidd’s actions further angered chief traders, the British had to make an example to appease them and Kidd was an easy target. When Kidd realised he was wanted for piracy, he sailed to New York for protection but his main financier, Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, betrayed him, luring him to Boston, where he was thrown in jail for two years before his transportation back to England. Throughout his trial, Kidd maintained his innocence. When he was asked if he had any final words he said: ‘I have nothing to say except that I have been sworn against by perjured and wicked people.’ Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping, where his body remained strung up in the gibbets for three years to serve as a warning to other would-be pirates. Throughout his trial, rumours of Kidd’s treasure circulated in official letters and newspapers. Reports in the Calendar of State Papers detailed the goods belonging to Kidd’s ship, including 60 pounds of solid gold and silver ingots, but the whereabouts of these treasures could not be determined. When word

Hanging around: Captain William Kidd in the gibbets in 1701. Hand-coloured woodcut, 19th century.

of them got out, newspapers began to print rumours of Kidd’s lost treasure. Kidd’s life quickly turned into legend after his death. The drama of his execution remained in circulation for many years to come and other pirates continued to reference his death, virtually making Kidd a martyr. In 1720 the Weekly Journal reported a pirate attack led by Captain Thomas Roberts, stating that the pirates stripped the passengers and sailors of their money and effects and stole the ship’s artillery and gunpowder. All the while they were reported to be ‘cursing, swearing, damning, and blaspheming, to the greatest Degree imaginable’. The pirates paid no heed to what would be the eventual consequences of their actions and declared that they would not be strung up in the gibbets like Kidd and, if they were caught, ‘they would immediately put Fire with one of their Pistols to their Powder, and all go merrily to Hell together’. The tale of Kidd’s notorious crimes continued to make its way into popular papers and magazines into the 20th century. Fifty years after his death the Penny London Post published an entire spread detailing his life and condemnation. In addition to this his life story had been made widely available via his public execution, the account of his trial (which sold so many copies it had to be reprinted) and the publication of Captain Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Newspaper articles in the late 19th century even played devil’s advocate, suggesting Kidd’s innocence in an article called ‘The Virtuous Captain Kidd’, which analysed the possibility that Kidd was made an unfortunate scapegoat by the East India Company to ‘avoid foreign embroglios’. With what may be the discovery of his lost treasure, Kidd has yet again resurfaced in our memory. Physical evidence has not yet been presented, so whether or not the silver ingots found off the coast of Madagascar are actually Kidd’s remains to be seen. But the discovery of this loot proves that real pirates who were condemned and executed over 300 years ago are as interesting today as they have ever been.

Rebecca Simon is a PhD student in History at King’s College London researching pirate executions. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

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By Richard Cavendish

JULY 8th 1115

military experience. Whole families often joined up, so there were women and children as well as men. Peter led them across Hungary and the Balkans and, although some of them gave up and went home and while the undisciplined behaviour of some pillaging for food alarmed the authorities along the way, Peter and the majority reached Constantinople safely late in July. Peter’s ragtag horde was not what the Emperor Alexios had expected or wanted. He treated Peter politely, but shipped him and his followers across the Bosphorus and into Anatolia as

Peter the Hermit dies in Flanders THE PEOPLE’S CRUSADE was one of history’s weirder episodes. The city of Jerusalem, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, had been under Muslim rule for more than 400 years and Christian pilgrims from Europe had generally been treated tolerantly. Then in 1095 the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios Komnenos, asked Pope Urban II for aid against the Seljuq Turks, who were overrunning his territory in Asia Minor. The pope took the opportunity of a church council at Clermont in France in November to preach to the assembled delegates, bidding Christians to answer the call. What exactly the pope’s motives were is uncertain and disputed because the contemporary versions of his oration differ considerably, but it seems he may have called for ‘an armed pilgrimage’ and conferred remission of sins on all who heeded him, which meant he promised them a life in heaven after death. If the pope had wanted an armed pilgrimage, that was not what he got at first. His call was passed on from European pulpits, but a priest from Amiens nicknamed Peter the Hermit also took up the cause. He was described by the chronicler Guibert of Nogent, who knew and admired him, as an ugly, swarthy, kindly little man, a devout ascetic who lived simply and went about barefoot. Now in his mid-forties perhaps, he was evidently a compelling personality and a mesmerising speaker and he travelled through northern France and into Germany, riding a donkey and gathering recruits to the cause. By April 1096 Peter had assembled some 40,000 followers in Cologne. There were a few knights and trained warriors among them, but the majority were poor people, unarmed and with no 8 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Eastward bound: Peter the Hermit depicted in the Histoire Universelle, c.1286.

fast as he could. There the equally astonished Seljuq Turks, after cautious reconnaissance, gleefully attacked them. Thousands were slaughtered and those who were captured alive were sold into slavery. Peter and a few others had meanwhile gone back to Constantinople. Between November 1096 and April 1097 successive detachments of experienced lords, knights and their fighting men, properly trained, armed and equipped, arrived in Constantinople under French and Norman leadership. In April 1097 they crossed into Anatolia and headed on south to Antioch.

Peter and a few followers went with them. He was someone who seemed to be in direct touch with the divine and his sermons helped to keep up the crusaders’ morale. It was he who pronounced that an old spear they discovered at Antioch was the Holy Lance which had pierced Christ’s side on the cross and, when the crusaders were trapped in the city and besieged in their turn, they sent him to negotiate with the Muslim war leader, Kerbogha of Mosul, and suggest a duel between him and a Christian leader to decide matters. Kerbogha declined and Peter now inspired the crusaders to sally out and drive the Muslims away. When the crusading army came to Jerusalem and set siege to the city in June 1099, Peter led processions around the walls to summon divine aid and, after they had stormed it and were again trapped inside by a Muslim army, he led a procession from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Temple and again inspired the crusading warriors to force their way out and drive the Muslims away. That was in August 1099. Jerusalem was now securely under Christian rule and would soon be the capital of a Christian kingdom. Peter was back in Europe by 1100. He founded an Augustinian monastery in Flanders and it was there that he died and was buried. Some writers in the 12th century hailed him rather than Pope Urban II as the true originator of the Crusade. They said that he had been to Jerusalem earlier and that Jesus had appeared to him in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and commanded him to go back to Europe and tell everyone about the sufferings of their fellow Christians in the Holy City. Peter returned to Europe and went to Pope Urban to tell him what Jesus had said. It was that which inspired the pope to preach the Crusade. The story may perhaps have come from Peter himself. If so, it was a suitable myth with which to complete his curious career.

JULY 29th 1565

Mary, Queen of Scots marries in Edinburgh

HENRY STEWART, Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, was descended from both the kings of Scots and the Tudor monarchs of England. He was born in England in 1545, the year in which his family’s Scottish estates were confiscated. They were restored in 1564 and the young man arrived in Edinburgh early the following year.

JULY 1st 1915

Serial killer Smith convicted GEORGE JOSEPH SMITH was a vicious predator of women. He was married at least eight times. The first was legal, the rest were bigamous. A persuasive fellow of vaguely military bearing, using a succession of aliases, he stole his victims’ money before moving on. He explained his frequent absences from home to the one he ‘married’ in 1908 by pretending to be an antiques dealer making business trips around the country. Smith murdered three of the women. He killed Bessie Mundy in 1912 after she had made a will in his favour. He killed Alice Burnham in 1913 after she, too, made a will in his favour, taking out life insurance with him as the beneficiary. He married Margaret Elizabeth Lofty in 1914. He took her to a doctor that

King and Queen of Scots: Darnley and Mary, Scottish school, c.1565.

Tall, handsome, highly educated, sophisticated and a Roman Catholic, he almost immediately presented himself to Mary, Queen of Scots, herself a committed Catholic in need of a husband and an heir. Mary told a friend that Darnley was ‘the lustiest and best proportioned long man that she had seen’ and it was soon clear that she had fallen helplessly in love with him. On July 22nd the banns of marriage were called and on the 28th it was proclaimed that Scotland would henceforth be ruled jointly by the King and Queen of Scots. The pair were married the next day. The wedding was held at 6am that Sunday morning in the chapel royal in Holyrood Palace. The 22-year-old bride in her widow’s black gown was outshone by her 19-year-old groom in an outfit studded with jewels. He placed a diamond ring and two other rings on her finger before leaving her alone for the nuptial mass, which was perhaps the first clear sign that there were significant differences between them. There were plenty more to come, but for the moment trumpets heralded the newly-weds to a lavish wedding feast with 16 dishes of game,

The brides and their killer: the trial reported, July 2nd, 1915.

evening, after she had taken out life insurance, saying she had a headache. He killed her the next day. In all three cases Smith took the woman to live in a town where she knew no one, told a local doctor

chicken and lamb, followed by music and dancing. Then they hurled gold and silver coins in handfuls to the crowd outside the palace and there was another feast in the evening, with another masque and more music and dancing before the happy couple went to bed. Feasts with more masques and dancing followed on the next three nights. After a brief honeymoon away from Edinburgh the newly-weds returned to Holyrood. Darnley did his duty in Mary’s bed and she was pregnant by September, but she came to realise that he was self-centred, conceited, arrogant and positively dangerous as her consort because he kept intriguing with her Protestant opponents. Their baby son, James, was born in 1566, but her infatuation with Darnley was over. She took up with the ruthless Earl of Bothwell instead and in February 1567 the strangled bodies of Darnley and his valet were found at Kirk o’ Field in Edinburgh after barrels of gunpowder had exploded under Darnley’s room there. The failed marriage had momentous consequences, for the baby James grew up to rule both Scotland and England as James VI and I.

there was something wrong with her health and was then suitably horrified and distraught when she was found drowned in the bathtub. He was caught after a report of Lofty’s inquest in the News of the World was seen by Burnham’s father, who spotted the similarities and informed the police. Smith was arrested in 1915 and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. One of the strange things about the deaths was that the women’s bodies showed no sign of violence or of resistance. Bernard Spilsbury, the distinguished pathologist who gave evidence for the prosecution, suggested that Smith had pulled each victim’s legs up suddenly so that her head went under the water and she quickly drowned. Smith’s equally distinguished defence counsel, Edward Marshall Hall, privately thought he had used hypnotism. The jury convicted him and he was hanged at Maidstone Prison in Kent on August 13th, aged 45. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

Magna Carta was born of the loss of King John’s French territories and his increasingly desperate – and expensive – attempts to regain them, argues Sean McGlynn. 10 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

The Road

KING JOHN’S WAR Effigy of King John from his tomb at Worcester Cathedral.

All that his great men could expect from him was dishonour … He forbade his chief men from marrying or giving their daughters in marriage without the king’s knowledge … he abolished old laws and every year issued new ones … He crushed almost everyone with his scutages [military taxes] and a flood of forced services … he undermined the written privileges of all, prepared traps for the liberties of all … he retained or sold inheritances … he prevaricated in determining lawsuits and often sold justice.

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HIS DAMNING contemporary indictment highlights many of the grievances expressed in Magna Carta, forced by his barons onto ‘Bad’ King John, who has a reputation as arguably England’s worst monarch. The criticisms, however, are directed at John’s father, Henry II, who is widely regarded as one of England’s greatest rulers and come from Ralph Niger, a late 12th-century chronicler. Ralph was not alone in his reproaches: Gerald of Wales, who knew Henry well, wrote that the king was ‘from beginning to end, an oppressor of the nobility, weighing equity and injustice, right and wrong, as it suited him. He sold and delayed justice, his word was changeable and deceitful’. All these charges were, in turn, to be levelled at John. Such attacks on Henry have led historians to see the English as being subjected to an Angevin despotism in government that began when Henry of Anjou became ruler of England in 1154. For some who take

Magna Carta had a long gestation period, but there is no need for a paternity suit: John was its feckless father this line, it is during Henry’s long reign until 1189 and that of his heir, Richard (r.1189-99), that the increasingly harsh exactions of unrelenting government ratcheted up the financial pain of the country to such an extent that, by the time John inherited the draconian system in 1199, the country was already near breaking point. After over half a century of Angevin rule, the barons had had enough and, in 1215, they rebelled and compelled John to agree to the terms we know as Magna Carta. Did the road to Runnymede start 60 years earlier when Henry became king? Has John unfairly been made the unfortunate Angevin scapegoat? Or did John simply take too many wrong turnings as monarch of England? Certainly, Magna Carta had a long gestation period, but there is no need for a paternity suit: John was its feckless father. The historian David Crouch has demonstrated how far things had deteriorated under John. In the immediate years preceding the events

to RUNNYMEDE JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

KING JOHN’S WAR

Above: Falaise Castle, where Arthur, Duke of Brittany was imprisoned for a time. Right: King John hunting a stag with hounds, contemporary image. Far right: Arthur's seal, 13th century.

12 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

at Runnymede, he reveals that a real measure of how critical matters were can be gauged by the number of ‘corporate baronial letters suddenly flying everywhere’, arguing that ‘statements of joint baronial positions and beliefs are the most evocative symbol of crisis. Things have to be really bad to get the barons to work that closely together’. They were unified above all by one factor: John. The question of why Magna Carta never materialised under Henry or Richard can be answered simply: they were strong and successful kings. John, on the other hand, was a failure. Periodic attempts to salvage John’s reputation as a maligned and misunderstood monarch stand on the same uncertain ground that reputedly swallowed up John’s treasure in The Wash in the dying months of his disastrous reign. John certainly could be energetic and intelligent and he had a number of impressive successes, but he was incapable of either sustaining or capitalising on these. None stack up favourably against the damning situation of his kingdom at his death in October 1216, with Angevin lands in France long since lost, London in baronial hands for nearly a year and a half and half the country under French occupation for nearly six months. JOHN WAS IN A strong position in 1202 after his victory at Mirebeau in France, where he captured his 15-year-old nephew and rival claimant to the throne, Duke Arthur of Brittany, and many prisoners. But the disappearance of the former (he was almost certainly killed by John to the horror of contemporaries) and his maltreatment of the latter alienated the Bretons and many important regional figures still further. They opted not to support John when King Philip Augustus of France invaded the Duchy of Normandy.

John confirmed all the worst fears about his military leadership and lived up to his sobriquet ‘Softsword’ John’s reputation fell further following his loss of Normandy in 1204. Philip Augustus’s alliance with the Bretons only strengthened after their duke’s death, enabling the French king to attack John’s lands from two fronts. After Philip had taken the key fortress of Château Gaillard, following a dramatic six months’ siege, he was able to move on to the duchy’s capital, Rouen. John advised his commander there that he could not expect any help from him and should do as they saw fit. When Philip addressed the citizens, says Roger of Wendover, he played on this desertion: ‘He begged them as a friend to receive him as their lord since they had no other.’ Rouen capitulated and Normandy was lost.

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OHN HAD CONFIRMED all the worst fears about his military leadership and had lived up to his sobriquet of ‘Softsword’ (Mollegladium). He did not lead the fight against the French from the front, as Richard would have done; instead he sailed for England in December 1203, never to return to Normandy. Accusations that he preferred to spend his days in bed with his barely teenaged bride, Isabella of Angoulême, reveal something of how contemporaries perceived his character, but the reality was that John was not wired for war. Neither his alienating actions nor his lack of military resolve could inspire his men to follow him; instead, to cries of treachery, many sought greater security for their interests in Philip’s camp and his rising power. John’s campaigning in France after 1204 achieved little and by 1206 all the lands north of the Loire were in the hands of the French king. The loss of Normandy was an enormous political, economic and strategic blow, not just for the Crown but also for the barons and knights who had held land in both England and the duchy. Confidence in John, real or pretended, became the self-interested preserve of those who owed their positions to him. Neither Henry nor Richard had lost Normandy and overseen the collapse of the Angevin Empire; John had. He was labelled a loser and it stuck. As David Carpenter has noted: ‘The Capetian conquest of Normandy was a turning point in European history. It made the Capetian kings dominant in western Europe and ended the cross-Channel Anglo-Norman state.’ For John, it defined his reign, for the rest of his time as king was spent in costly and futile attempts to regain the lands he had so humiliatingly lost in France. It was his pursuit of this that more than anything else led to Magna Carta. IF THERE WAS ONE THING more costly to a medieval monarch than war, it was unsuccessful war. John needed to fill his coffers to fund the men, mercenaries and materiel in the large-scale expeditionary enterprises required, if he were to win his lands back. This meant turning the screws on England like never before. One way to achieve this was through the military shield tax known as scutage, levied on knights as a substitute for military service. This was an increasingly onerous imposition on the barons. Already by 1205 Robert Fitzwalter, later the military commander of the rebels, and Roger Bigod, the Earl of Norfolk, were vociferously opposed to this tax. But John pressed ahead in his pursuit of money to fund his ineffective wars: Henry II had levied eight scutages in 34 years; John levied 11 in just 16. Furthermore, by 1214 they had climbed to a record high rate of exaction. At this point, many barons simply refused to pay up. ‘In effect, this represented a tax strike’, says the historian Nicholas Vincent. John also stamped his mark on government bureaucracy and the justice system to maximise royal income. Justice became even more

King Philip lies in mortal danger at the Battle of Bouvines, while Hugh de Boves makes his escape, contemporary image. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

KING JOHN’S WAR

Gaillard Castle in Normandy, taken from John by Philip II after a six-month siege.

A large group of barons organised themselves into a political movement determined to curb the excesses of John’s power of a financial commodity than it had previously been. John’s use of amercements (fines) caused particular grievance. Robert de Ros, Sheriff of Cumberland, was fined 300 marks for failing to hold some prisoners in custody; William of Cornborough died in gaol because he was unable to pay his penalty. John exploited every possibility, even, it would seem, blackmail. The official pipe roll records reveal that in 1210 Robert de Vaux offered John 750 marks so that the king ‘would keep quiet about the wife of Henry Pinel’. John’s combination of extortion and blackmail was intended to keep as many barons as possible indebted to the king.

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ISTORIANS SEEKING to mitigate attacks on John often praise him for his administrative innovations and efficiencies in government. But being an effective king entailed more than being a good book-keeper. John was proficient in extracting money from his subjects: during the Interdict (John’s five-year quarrel with the papacy of Innocent III) he raked in the equivalent of over £30 million in today’s money, some of it gained by holding mistresses of the clergy for ransom. One has to question whether this revenue collecting can be judged a clear success. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister, stated: ‘The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.’ John’s geese were making a racket. Furthermore, the very fact that John ruthlessly pursued so much money was in itself a sign of his failure, for the revenues were needed to recover the lands that he failed to hold. Another consequence of his loss of so much land was that John became a stay-at-home king: turfed out of most of France, he was confined to the domestic sphere of the British Isles, stepping on everyone’s toes and sticking his nose into their every affair. This rendered him for a brief while as master of the house, but it did not last long. 14 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

King John's French campaign of 1206. John's success at Montauban in the far south was not mirrored further north.

Right: the seal matrix of Robert Fitzwalter, c.1235. Below: a soldier of King John, wearing the livery of William Marshal, tortures prisoners, contemporary manuscript.

William de Briouze fell out with John over money and politics connected to Ireland, John went after him, ever keen to cut down to size anyone he thought too influential. He rebuffed de Briouze’s attempts at reconciliation by making impossible financial demands on him. John seized William’s wife and son as hostages. Like Arthur, they disappeared. The chronicles agree that they were starved to death in one of John’s royal castles, one reporting luridly that the mother’s body was found slumped between her son’s legs with her head on his chest, having gnawed at his cheeks for food. The news shocked the kingdom. If this could happen to de Briouze, then no-one was safe from John’s arbitrary, unpredictable and vindictive cruelty. He had once again managed to swell the ranks of the baronial discontents. Sidney Painter called the de Briouze affair ‘the greatest mistake John made during his reign’.

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PPOSITION TO JOHN began to manifest itself more strongly. In 1212, when John was still under excommunication by Pope Innocent III, there had been a plot to abandon him to the Welsh while on campaign, or even to assassinate him. John’s reconciliation with the papacy made such a move harder to justify, so instead a large group of barons organised themselves into a political movement determined to curb the increasing excesses of John’s power. The last straw came in the summer of 1214. Having drained the country of funds, John’s war coffers were by now full and he could finally set in motion his plan to win back his lands in France. John’s bank-rolling of German princes and of his nephew, Emperor Otto, enabled a formidable coalition to be drawn up against France. In a well-conceived strategy, John was to attack France from the south-west, while his allies moved in from the north-east. Unsurprisingly, John did not cover himself in military glory. In early July at La Roche-aux-Moines he was unable to persuade his Poitevin barons to fight against a smaller French army and fled to the safety of La Rochelle.

Many powerful men of the realm harboured a personal animosity towards John as their king that went way beyond baronial sulkiness at the financial demands of the crown. John was a notorious womaniser. This was not startling for a king but, as in his financial dealings, John’s tactlessness and inability to know where to draw the line served only to antagonise opinion against him. Eustace de Vesci claimed that John attempted to have sex with his wife, while Robert Fitzwalter accused John of having forced himself upon his daughter. These were serious accusations, playing on the insecurities of powerful men who feared for their own families. Of course, it made for a powerful recruitment tool against the king, but it should not be dismissed as fabricated, negative campaigning. The men who made the charges were proud and prominent figures; revelations of this nature besmirched family honour. There is further substance to these accusations from the well-informed Anonymous of Béthune, whose patron fought for John in the Magna Carta war: ‘The king lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated.’ John overstepped the boundaries of chivalric behaviour spectacularly in his deplorable treatment of the de Briouze family. When

AT THE END of the month, his allies in the north-east, under the supervision of his more martially abled half-brother William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, engaged in a full-scale pitched battle against Philip of France’s army at Bouvines. At one point, Philip was unhorsed and close to death, saved only by the heroic action of his personal bodyguard, who threw himself on top of his king and received the fatal blows meant for Philip. Had Philip died, it is likely that the French would have collapsed and the coalition would have won the day. But he survived and it was John’s allies that were routed. John’s expensive plans had once again come to naught. He returned to England in mid-October, still demanding payment of scutages. His revenues of that year (just under £26,000 according to the pipe roll) was half that of 1212. His cash was nearly gone. But the barons were no longer prepared to throw good money after bad. There was no return – only heavy loss – on investing in the continental campaigns of a habitually unsuccessful military leader. They had had enough. The baronial party began to draw up the demands that were to evolve into Magna Carta. The rebels coalesced around the earls Robert de Vere, Saer de JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

KING JOHN’S WAR Quincy, Henry de Bohun, Richard de Clare, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Roger de Bigod and the Lord of Dunmow, Robert Fitzwalter. Although the rebels are often known collectively as the Northerners, the most important group (including the last four in the above list) came from East Anglia and Essex. Of some nearly 200 baronies in England, only about 20 per cent opposed the king; however, only another 20 per cent openly supported him. The rest sat on the fence and waited to see how matters unfolded.

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Pope Innocent III decried opposition to John and berated England’s clergy for not doing enough to support the king

Top: knights and foot soldiers engage in battle during the war between Philip II of France and King John, French manuscript, 13th century. Above: prisoners being set free, 13th-century manuscript. 16 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

FTER YEARS of simmering unrest, events moved quickly. Belatedly, John attempted to sweet-talk waverers over to his side. Meanwhile, he brought in mercenaries and garrisoned his dominating network of some 100 castles. The barons reached out to the new king of Scotland, Alexander II, and to Prince Louis, heir to the Capetian throne in France, for support. Louis responded eagerly. The baronial confederation met at Bury St Edmunds in the autumn of 1214 and attempted to bolster their platform by appealing to Henry I’s coronation charter, which promised the crown’s commitment to upholding the rights, customs and regulations between the king and his barons. The barons met John in London in January 1215 in a show of force. John played for time, promising to address their grievances by April 26th. In March, John gained papal support for his side by cynically taking the vows of a crusader. Pope Innocent III decried opposition to John and berated England’s clergy, including his old university friend, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, for not doing enough to support the king. Both sides continued to prepare for war. On April 13th another meeting was held at Oxford to discuss the agenda of the upcoming conference promised by the king. When John heard the barons’ demands, which Langton had helped draw up, he is reported to have snorted: ‘Why do these barons not just ask for my kingdom?’ Buoyed by papal backing, John felt strong enough to reject the terms outright. The rebels had mustered their forces at Stamford. On May 5th they proclaimed diffidatio – the breaking of their homage to the king. It was a declaration of war. Robert Fitzwalter was made Marshal of the Army of God and the Holy Church and he led his forces against John’s castle at Northampton. The Magna Carta war had begun. ITS FIRST FATALITY came at Northampton: Fitzwalter’s standard bearer was shot through the head with a crossbow bolt. When the castle held out for a fortnight, the rebels moved on to Bedford Castle, which opened its gates to them. After an inauspicious start they then achieved a huge boost: the taking of London. Both sides rushed to secure the capital but the rebels gained the prize. Londoners had been feeling the pinch under John and were displaying their radical streak. It also helped that Robert Fitzwalter owned Baynard’s Castle there and had a faction of supporters within the city. It was a major turning point. As Ralph of Coggeshall observed, London caused ‘many daily to go over to the army of God’; John was so shaken by the loss ‘he was besieged with terror and never left Windsor’. The momentum was now with the rebels; Northampton, Lincoln, Chester and Carlisle capitulated as increasing numbers of baronial fence-sitters joined the rebellion. It was the fall of London that forced John to Runnymede in mid-June, 1215.

The tomb of King John at Worcester Cathedral.

V.H. Galbraith says Clause 61 of Magna Carta denoted ‘the most fantastic surrender of any English king to his subjects’

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HE ARTICLES OF THE BARONS (as Magna Carta was initially known) presented to the king is a charter of liberties reflecting the long-held concerns of the discontents. Within the document’s 63 clauses financial matters dominate, usually relating to feudal payments such as reliefs, where a sum of £100 for a barony and 100 shillings for a knight’s fee was fixed upon to preclude arbitrary rises by the crown. The rights of widows and minors under wardship were protected to permit volition against highest bidders. Other clauses address debts, tariffs and the stipulation that scutages required consent. Even seemingly obscure clauses, such as the one calling for the removal of fish weirs from the Thames, Medway and other waterways, had clear economic implications: weirs impeded the flow of traffic and trade on rivers. The matter of patronage and the bestowal of the plum official jobs is raised by the clause demanding the removal of named foreign servants of the state: the Charter was, in its way, demanding English jobs for English people. Justice is another key feature, reflecting exasperation at the corrupt and arbitrary nature of John’s rule and the fines he imposed through the judicial system, often for political ends. Thus two of the most famous clauses that run consecutively state: ‘To no one shall we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay justice’; and ‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled in any way destroyed, neither will we set forth against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.’ Security issues were also to the fore, with clauses demanding the

return of hostages, lands and castles. Another intended to weaken John’s military arm with the ‘removal from the kingdom of all foreign knights, crossbowmen, sergeants and mercenaries, who have come with horses and arms to the detriment of the kingdom’. Clause 61, the security clause, is the most radical of all. In it, the barons represented themselves as acting for ‘the community of the realm’ by establishing a council of 25 barons to oversee the king’s adherence to the Charter. Warren says the king was thereby ‘virtually reduced to the role of executive officer of the law under the supervision of a baronial committee’; V.H. Galbraith says the clause denoted ‘the most fantastic surrender of any English king to his subjects’. Both sides expected that the Charter would not be permanent and that what had been agreed was little more than a temporary truce: it lasted about ten weeks. Pope Innocent annulled the Charter on the grounds that it was coerced. Both sides had been busy in the meantime preparing for a renewal of the conflict. The Magna Carta war still had over two years left to run. When John died in October 1216, the Angevin Empire had been lost, half of the country was under French rule and up to two thirds of the baronage had paid homage to ‘King Louis I of England’. This was the legacy John left to his nine-year-old son, Henry III. Sean McGlynn is Lecturer in History at Plymouth University at Strode College.

FURTHER READING David Carpenter, Magna Carta (Penguin, 2015). Stephen Church, King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant (Macmillan, 2015). Sean McGlynn, Blood Cries Afar: The Magna Carta War and the Invasion of England, 1215-1217 (The History Press, 2015). JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

Opposite: detail from the Genealogical Roll of the Kings of England, with Henry III’s son Edmund (centre), vellum, c.1300-40.

Simon de Montfort and the ORIGINS OF

PARLIAMENT Just half a century on from Magna Carta, a radical noble, part idealist, part megalomaniac, came into conflict with King John’s son, Henry III. The result, argues Nigel Saul, was a form of assembly which shapes English political life to this day.

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HE 13TH CENTURY saw the emergence of the idea of popular consent to royal government. The seeds of the idea were sown in King John’s agreement to the terms of Magna Carta in June 1215 and were to bear fruit in Simon de Montfort’s summoning of urban representatives in 1265. De Montfort’s initiative arose in part as a consequence of Magna Carta, since the idea of common consent to the levying of taxes had been enshrined in Clause 12 of the Charter. The summoning of the townsmen was to prove a milestone in the history of parliamentary representation, although its importance could hardly have been foreseen at the time. Like so many events which seem momentous with hindsight, it was the consequence less of grand design than of expediency and the needs of the moment. The problem that De Montfort, the champion of political reform, faced in the closing months of 1264 was that he lacked support among the people who really mattered, the higher nobility. His bid for the support of the burgesses, the urban representatives in the future parliamentary Commons, was less the action of a visionary than an attempt made in an emergency to reach out to a wider political constituency. De Montfort’s radicalism, characteristic of his political boldness more generally, arose out of his commitment to the Provisions of Oxford, the reforming constitution imposed on Henry III in 1258. By the mid-1250s a string of political mistakes by the king – his partisan

generosity to his kinsmen, the Lusignans, his sidelining of his queen’s relatives, the Savoyards, and his folly in accepting the kingdom of Sicily for his younger son, Edmund – had brought him to the brink of crisis. At a meeting of the barons at Oxford, Henry submitted to the appointment of a council of 15, which, in effect, took the government of the country out of his hands and set in motion a reform programme that was to roll on for the next seven years. De Montfort was appointed to the new council and devoted himself to advancing its work with almost messianic fervour. Henry, however, was affronted at this unprecedented assault on his prerogative and directed his energies to securing annulment of the reforms. In 1261, having regained the support of sufficient of the aristocracy, he finally achieved his end: he was released by the pope from his oath to uphold the Provisions and immediately set about dismissing his baronial ministers and sheriffs. Henry’s initiative inaugurated a long period of political instability in England. While there were many around the king who shared his distaste for the Provisions, equally there were others, chief among them De Montfort, who saw them as essential to national salvation and opposed the king’s action. For the moment the king was firmly in control of affairs and De Montfort removed himself to France, where, in a way characteristic of his ability to combine idealism with self-interest, he pursued his wife’s claim to a share in the French inheritance of her mother. In 1263, however, with the emergence of new divisions in

Henry III’s folly in accepting the kingdom of Sicily for his son, Edmund, had brought his kingdom to the brink of crisis

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DE MONTFORT

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DE MONTFORT the court provoked by the king’s purging of his son, Edward’s, retainers, he returned to England, forged an alliance with the former retainers and once again set about championing the Provisions. There was a state of tense and uneasy truce. Henry lacked the strength entirely to see off De Montfort, while the latter could not prevail for long in the face of overt royal hostility. Towards the end of 1263, as a way of resolving the differences between them, the two sides agreed to submit their differences to Louis IX of France, a much admired figure and someone they could both trust. Louis’ judgement, given at Amiens in the following January, emphatically favoured the king and quashed the Provisions. De Montfort now realised that he had no alternative but to fight to save not only his political ideals but his life. In the opening stages of the campaign, in April, the royalists enjoyed the advantage. In a major engagement at Lewes on May 14th, however, De Montfort won a decisive victory, taking the king and his son into custody and using the opportunity to reinstate the Provisions. In the hour of his triumph De Montfort seemed to enjoy complete mastery. Beneath the surface, however, his position was by no means as impregnable as it seemed. The sheer scale of his triumph, along with his and his sons’ avarice and rapid accumulation of landed wealth, gave offence to many. Among the nobility his support began to slip. It is against this background that his summoning of the burgesses to Parliament in January 1265 needs to be seen.

In the mid-13th century these consultative meetings gained a new importance in the king’s eyes because of a sudden increase in his need to secure from them grants of taxation. Clause two of Magna Carta had deprived the crown of what had hitherto been a major source of revenue by prescribing that reliefs, or entry fines paid by tenants-in-chief to the king on succeeding to their inheritances, should now be fixed. From this time on, the king, instead of being able to charge any notionally ‘reasonable’ sum that he liked, as he had in the past, could charge only relatively small sums: £100 for a barony and 100 shillings for a knight’s fee. By eliminating the element of discretion open to the crown, the Charter severely curtailed its ability to mulct the landholding classes. Early in Henry III’s reign, then, the king’s exchequer officials embarked upon a search for a substitute form of taxation and found it in the levy on moveable property, the tax eventually to become the fiscal mainstay of the English medieval monarchy. For the levying of this impost, however, unlike the collection of reliefs, consent was required. By the terms of Clause 12 of Magna Carta no scutage or aid was to be levied except by common counsel – such counsel being defined in Clause 14 as constituting that of the great Churchmen, earls and barons, all summoned individually by letter, and other tenants-in-chief summoned through the sheriffs. The body envisaged in this clause by the Charter’s draftsmen was not one which they ever specifically referred to by the name ‘Parliament’. However, it was definitely a parliamentary sort of assembly which, by a presumed notion of virtual representation, spoke for the whole taxpaying class of the kingdom.

Parliament came into its own as a representative and consultative body in the early and middle years of Henry III’s reign

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E MONTFORT’S DECISION to convene a Parliament that January was characteristic of his actions at this stage of his career. The summoning of Parliament three times a year, at OLLOWING THIS, in the reign of Henry III some sessions exMichaelmas, Candlemas and June 1st, had been ordained in tended the membership of this assembly to include an elected element drawn from the county knightly class. In the face of a the Provisions and Earl Simon took his stand on them. The earl’s adherence to the reforming programme laid down in that document stands growing reluctance by the peers and the greater tenants-in-chief out as the most consistent thread in his sometimes tortuous political to speak in the name of the wider realm, the king and his ministers felt it path from 1258. But his attachment to Parliament was also founded on a necessary to cast the consultative net more widely. A key episode was to second consideration: he found in it a convenient forum for promoting, occur in early 1254, when the lords, approached by the king’s ministers justifying and publicising his policies. Parliament was by now a major to grant an aid for the defence of Gascony, said that they could not speak institution in the political life of the realm. Among those who attended for the ‘other laity’ and advised the summoning of a second assembly at which such laity would be represented. A couple of months later, a it were numbered some of his most loyal and sympathetic adherents. Parliament had come into its own as a national representative and Parliament composed of two knights from each shire, chosen by the consultative body in the early and middle shires they represented, was indeed conyears of Henry III’s reign. It is first referred vened, although it failed to authorise the to by name in a surviving document from tax required. The election of knightly repa legal case in 1236, in the course of which resentatives to the assembly of April 1254 constituted a unique episode in Henry III’s an action was deferred to a ‘parliamentum’ personal rule. No other record survives of the following January. Parliaments at this time were essentially glorified ‘great counan elected knightly element in a Parliament cils’, gatherings of the good and the great, before those held in the crisis years after convened by the king to treat of matters 1258. Yet there is reason to believe that of high political importance, chief among knights had been present in some earlier them questions of foreign policy, the proParliaments, albeit in a different capacity vision of financial aid to the crown and the as lesser tenants-in-chief. Groups of lesser dispensation of justice to those who sought tenants had been summoned in the 12th it. These meetings had their origins in the century to the councils convened by the assemblies of the king’s tenants-in-chief Anglo-Norman and Angevin kings. While and other leading barons held from time the capacity in which the knights were to to time in the Anglo-Norman period. The attend in the 1250s and 1260s may well obligation to offer counsel and aid to the have been new, the idea of securing their king was one which was carried by a tenantattendance in the first place was almost in-chief in his capacity as a vassal holding certainly not. directly from the crown. Simon de Montfort would have been Tomb effigy of Henry III, Westminster Abbey. 20 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

F

Above: a letter from Henry III to Louis IX of France appealing for him to act as abitrator in his dispute with the barons, December 16th, 1263. Below: Louis IX passes judgement in favour of Henry III at Amiens, January 1264, an idealised representation by Georges Rouget, 1820.

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

DE MONTFORT

Clockwise fom top left: Louis IX offers instruction to his son, the future Philip III, from the Collection of Treatise on Devotion, vellum, c.1371-8. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 13th-century image. Henry III returns by sea from Gascony, manuscript illustration, 1250s.

well aware of the precedent of 1254, when he arranged for the election of knights to the first of his two Parliaments in June 1264. The main aims of this meeting, which was held a month after the earl’s triumph at Lewes, were to consolidate his position in power, rally popular support behind him and provide for the government of the kingdom in the aftermath of the collapse of royal power. The writs of summons provided for the election of as many as four knights from each shire, which would have made for a large assembly. If all of the representatives had turned up, which is admittedly unlikely, some 140 knights would have been present, more than all the magnates and prelates combined. De Montfort saw in the county knights the bedrock of popular support for his reform movement. Many of the most radical measures published since 1258 had been passed with their needs in mind. Among these were the curbs on the lord’s right to exact suit of court and limitations on the sheriff’s power to demand attendance at his tourn and sessions of the assize, enactments which generally favoured lesser tenants against their lords. The Montfortian movement was to a large extent a movement of the lesser landowners, the knights and vassals in the shires. When, six months after this Parliament, De Montfort went on to issue summonses to the burgesses from the towns as well, he was pitching his appeal to a constituency still more closely associated with his cause. By 1264 he was drawing some of his most solid and consistent support from the Londoners who, under the leadership of their radical mayor Thomas fitz Thomas, had come over to his side in reaction to a raid by the Lord Edward on the New Temple. At the battle of Lewes a 22 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

well-armed force of Londoners had actually fought on his side against the royalists. De Montfort also enjoyed support in a number of other towns or cities, notably Bristol. His cause was typically championed by the lesser folk, the ‘populares’, and by those with a grievance against the Jews, which De Montfort himself did nothing to discourage.

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E MONTFORT’S novelty in summoning burgess representatives to Parliament makes this initiative his most celebrated contribution to the development of Parliament as an institution. Yet at the time it was an initiative that attracted remarkably little attention and, like his earlier summons of representatives from the shires, may well have been less radical than it now appears. There are strong indications that burgess representatives had been summoned to at least one or two assemblies in the early and middle years of Henry’s reign. In 1225 a couple of representatives from each of the Cinque Ports had been summoned to a great council at which the Charters were confirmed, while in 1237, according to the Tewkesbury chronicler, ‘citizens and burgesses’ had been summoned alongside the prelates and barons to a tax granting assembly. What was remarkable about

De Montfort’s initiative was that, unlike these earlier summonses, it established a lasting precedent. Representatives from the towns were invited to attend alongside the knights in virtually all later Parliaments in which an elected element was present. De Montfort had prised open a political door which would never again be swung shut. The most immediate explanation for De Montfort’s constitutional radicalism is to be found in the extraordinary circumstances of his ascendancy after the battle of Lewes. In the aftermath of his triumph, De Montfort was faced with a serious political problem. In the streets and alleyways of Lewes he had won a major victory over the royalists, which had made him virtually the uncrowned king of England; yet his sheer presumption in appropriating to himself the royal power cost him heavily among those who really mattered, the aristocratic power-brokers, meaning that he had to seek support among the knights and burgesses, who had hitherto been only intermittently involved in parliamentary politics. His actions were driven by sheer political necessity.

baronial officials’ power. De Montfort, taking his stand on the Provisions, to which he had sworn an oath, espoused an ideal of government for the common good, which offered redress to all and looked for its moral compass to the spiritual arm. The reformist movement, which began in 1258 and which he eventually headed, was characterised by a moral intensity which distinguished it from almost every other baronial reform movement of the Middle Ages. Yet, for all his apparent high-mindedness, De Montfort’s character was marred by failings of inconstancy and rapacity which raise questions about his commitment to those principles that he devoted such energy to professing. At crucial moments towards the end of his life, De Montfort seemed more interested in securing his and his wife’s financial interests than in promoting implementation of the Provisions. Moreover, as many historians have pointed out, in his 12 months of power after Lewes he and his sons indulged in a campaign of family aggrandisement without equal before the land-grabbing of the Despensers 60 years later during the reign of Edward II. While a posthumous aura of sanctity was to surround him in the aftermath of his grisly death at Evesham in August 1265, De Montfort was most definitely no saint. It is true that he had high ideals, but his personality was fatally flawed and constancy in conduct eluded him. To understand his career, we need to remember that he was the product of an aristocratic society at once cosmopolitan and transnational but also in some ways intolerant and that he lived at a time when baronial thinking was quite exceptionally creative. For these reasons it would be altogether unwise to see him, as he was seen a century ago, as someone whose radical constitutionalism might be accommodated within a Whiggish grand narrative of widening political participation. De Montfort was a man who defies categorisation in such simple

De Montfort was a highly complex man whose character and personality it is difficult for us to recapture

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EYOND THESE PRESSURES of the moment, there were larger forces at work which bore on De Montfort’s thinking. De Montfort, ever a political adventurer and an outsider in English affairs, was a highly complex man whose character and personality it is difficult for us to recapture. Deeply influenced by the reformist churchmen, chief among them Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, and Walter Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, he developed a passionate commitment to justice, which both influenced his personal conduct and De Montfort’s charter left its mark on the reform movement in expelling the Jews from Leicester, c.1231. the passing of such measures as curbs on

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DE MONTFORT

Simon de Montfort meets a grisly death at the Battle of Evesham, August 4th, 1265. Contemporary manuscript.

and straightforward terms. His idealism sat awkwardly alongside his self-seeking, his concern for the common good alongside crude antisemitism and his smooth cosmopolitanism alongside a campaign, by the 1260s, of England for the English. Xenophobia and intolerance were as much a part of his make-up as were conscience and championing the common good. If De Montfort himself can scarcely be accommodated to a linear account of English constitutional history, what are we to make of the long-term significance of the parliamentary initiative for which he is so famous? Here there can be little doubt: massive consequences were to flow from a decision, which, at the time, hardly seemed momentous at all. In both its structure and its composition, the English Parliament was set on a course that was to mark it apart from most other representative assemblies in Europe at the time. ELSEWHERE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE representative assemblies were organised in houses or ‘estates’, corresponding to the three divinely ordained orders of earthly society – that is to say, those who prayed, those who fought and those who supported the other two, that is those who worked. Typically, the upper and lower nobility – the rich titled lords and their lesser brethren, those who in England would be called the gentry – all sat together in the second estate, while the burgesses sat separately in the third. In England, thanks in large measure to De Montfort’s initiative, this form of organisation never established itself. Instead, a representative institution was created in which the gentry sat in the lower house alongside the townsmen and the nobility sat separately in their own house, the Lords. How far this unique form of organisation contributed to social cohesion and the growth of understanding between the urban and rural elites 24 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

The English Parliament was set on a course which was to mark it apart from most other representative assemblies in medieval Europe is an interesting question and one that is still debated. Conceivably, it had little effect at all, because in the remainder of the Middle Ages it was the county gentry who were to take the lead in Parliament, not the burgesses. Yet, at the very least, the fact that both groups sat in the same house must have broken down the barriers separating them and promoted social understanding. In England intermarriage between gentry and townsfolk was never to attract the turning-up of gentry noses that it usually did on the Continent. It may well be that the most lasting consequence of the parliamentary initiative of Simon de Montfort, the revolutionary, was to steer England in a direction that avoided the revolutionary upheavals that were to afflict so many other European societies in later centuries. Nigel Saul is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway University of London.

FURTHER READING J.R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1996). J.R. Maddicott, The Origins of Parliament, 924-1327 (Oxford UP, 2010). D.A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (A&C Black, 1994).

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InFocus

The Monkey Trial

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N THE STIFLING HEAT of a Bible Belt July a court is sitting in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 to try a young supply teacher called John Thomas Scopes, accused of teaching evolution in a local high school. Religion seems pitted here in a straight fight against science, the Bible v Darwin, and it has turned into one of the first modern media circuses. Over 200 journalists have come to cover the story, filing over 165,000 words a day, dispatched to their papers by telegraph. It is the first trial to be broadcast on national radio in the US and film footage of it is also regularly being flown out. The competition to catch the public eye is feverish and, if a fatuous photograph might do that, then OK. William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential candidate, a fervent presbyterian and leading for the prosecution, has condemned evolution for teaching that humans are merely one of 35,000 types of mammal, descended ‘not even from American monkeys but from old world ones’. America’s most famous journalist, H.L. Mencken, has christened this the Monkey Trial, so the obvious next move is to set up a shot of Jock, the monkey, listening to it on the radio. Once the background to the trial is examined, it emerges things were not quite what they seemed. Tennessee had indeed recently passed an act making it illegal to teach

The obvious next move is to set up a shot of Jock the monkey listening to the trial on the radio evolution in state schools, but the governor had signed it merely to get the rural vote and did not think it would be enforced. The primary motive of those pressing for the trial was to attract publicity to Dayton. The textbook, Civic Biology, from which Scopes was required to teach, covered evolution and endorsed it, too, though Scopes later said he was not even sure he had taught it to his class. However, he was prepared to go on trial encouraged by the American Civil Liberties Union and even urged his pupils to testify against him. The prosecution had the backing of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. Clarence Darrow, who led for the defence at the prompting of Mencken without charging a fee, had become famous across America the previous year when he got two Chicago teenagers, Leopold and Loeb, life rather than the electric chair, on a plea of insanity, after they had kidnapped and murdered a young neighbour. When the judge ruled that Darrow’s expert biblical witnesses were irrelevant, he sprang a surprise by calling Bryan himself as a witness and then attacking his literal interpretation of the Old Testament and ignorance of other religions. He was asked whether Eve was actually created from Adam’s rib, where Cain’s wife came from, had a whale actually swallowed Jonah. His answers to such questions 26 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

showed plainly that he was not the full-blown fundamentalist his team took him to be. Scopes himself never testified because it was never an issue that he had taught evolution. He was found guilty, fined $100, then let off on a technicality, frustrating the Civil Liberties Union, which hoped to see the case ending up in the Supreme Court. Fundamentalist anti-evolution rumbled on, though

Bryan was not there to lead it: he died five days after the trial. It found a rival in the so-called Creation Science movement, which based itself on pseudo-science rather than religion. Then, in the 1950s, Soviet Russia’s successful Sputnik satellites set off a scare that the US was falling behind in scientific studies. The National Defence Education Act was passed and new textbooks were published by the American

Institute of Biological Sciences, which stressed the importance of evolution. Tennessee’s act was eventually repealed in 1967, after the Supreme Court ruled that it violated the Constitution’s prohibition of the establishment of religion. Mencken can have the last word: ‘It is hard for the ape to believe that he is descended from man.’

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| WEIMAR GERMANY

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Reinterpreting the Republic The archetypal image of the Weimar Republic is one of political instability, economic crisis and debauched hedonism. Colin Storer challenges the clichéd view of the Republic as a tragic failed state.

Unicyclists on Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, c.1920.

THE UNIVERSAL PICTURES film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front had its German premiere at the Mozart Hall in Berlin on December 5th, 1930. Hailed as a masterpiece in Britain and America, ‘the most impressive talking picture yet seen’, the film had a very different reception in Germany. Barely ten minutes after it had begun, the performance was interrupted when the National Socialist propaganda chief Josef Goebbels walked noisily out of the theatre. This was the signal for Nazi activists in the audience to release white mice, stink bombs and itching powder into the crowded auditorium. Fights broke out between the demonstrators

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and other cinema-goers and eventually the police, who were there in force, intervened and ‘cleared the theatre with their truncheons’. There followed four days of demonstrations and rioting until, on December 11th, the Supreme Film Censorship Board, in an act condemned abroad as ‘the worst kind of censorship … an artistic lynching’, bowed to pressure and revoked its decision to pass the film for distribution on the grounds that it was ‘detrimental to German prestige’. The one-dimensional view This incident in some ways encapsulates the archetypal image of the Weimar Republic in the English-speaking

XXXXXXXXXXX world; a society that, following its establishment on August 11th, 1919, existed in the shadow of the Great War, caught between cosmopolitan cultural experimentation and violent political and economic upheaval. For many, the very words ‘Weimar Republic’ conjure up images of avant-garde art, risqué cabaret shows, wheelbarrows full of worthless paper money and violent political confrontation on the streets, of the sort depicted in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret. Incidents such as the one recounted above seem vividly to illustrate the violent clash between the forces of innovation and reaction that characterised the life of the Republic. In the decision to ban All Quiet on the Western Front we see concern over ‘Americanisation’ and the perceived threat it posed to German culture and values. Here, too, is the highly charged atmosphere in which almost every question and action, no matter how seemingly mundane and innocuous, became politicised. Most of all we see the shadow of Hitler hanging over the Republic, the violent attacks of the Nazis and the apparent impotence of the German establishment in the face of such tactics. Yet, as enduring as this interpretation of Weimar has been, it seriously misrepresents the period and those who lived through it. As a growing body of research is making apparent, the older, overly pessimistic and one-dimensional view of the Republic does not stand up to close scrutiny. This was a complex and fascinating period in German history that witnessed violent political unrest, economic crisis and cultural ferment, but was not defined by any of these. It is, therefore, high time for a reinterpretation of the Republic that takes into account its complexities and achievements as well as its failures. One could be forgiven for thinking that in 1933 the Republic was snuffed out, leaving nothing behind it other than a few striking modernist pictures, songs, films and theories. On the contrary, the Republic left a much more positive legacy. Alongside its failures there were also real and lasting achievements that, although submerged during the Nazi era, resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s. Weimar Germany had one of the most open and progressive societies in Europe. The Republic led the world in social legislation, cultural experimentation and sexual tolerance and blazed a trail that many societies would follow.

businesses woke up to this fact, they increasingly targeted the advertising of household goods and fashion items at women, who became a powerful consumer market under the Republic. Their new status was reflected by efforts to display their individuality and forge a distinct identity for themselves through their dress and behaviour. A militant democracy The gender imbalance caused by the deaths of young men in the First World War forced all those women to abandon hope of ever taking on the traditional roles of wife and mother and instead to focus their energies on their careers, but it also meant that the rules of the dating game changed. With so many more women than men, competition for partners was fierce and women became more assertive and adopted more liberal attitudes towards sex and sexuality. This reflected a wider trend in the Republic, which saw a much more open approach towards sex. Middle-class sex reformers argued that the key to a happier and healthier society was a fulfilling sex life, while parliament considered a range of surprisingly liberal reforms, including the legalisation of prostitution and homosexuality. Although Paragraph 175 of the German legal code stated that ‘An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex … is punishable by imprisonment’, the authorities displayed a fairly tolerant attitude towards homosexuality, with the result that Berlin became home to a thriving gay and lesbian subculture. There were, in Berlin alone, 26 magazines aimed at a gay or lesbian audience during the 1920s and it has been estimated that by 1929 there were between 65 and 80 bars (or Dielen) catering for an exclusively homosexual clientele, as well as 50 clubs catering for lesbians. Such broadmindedness was quickly brought to an end after the Nazis came to power, but in the case of both women’s rights and sexual liberation, the Weimar Republic provided a model of tolerance and progressive social intervention for later postwar societies throughout the West. Nor was the republican state as weak and ineffectual as historians have sometimes suggested. Rather than a failed state, the Weimar Republic was in many ways a ‘militant democracy’, which not only possessed the means to robustly defend itself from its opponents, but also made full use of them. The 1922 Law for the Protection of the Republic (Republikschutzgesetz) prefigured postwar anti-extremist and anti-terrorist legislation in not only providing the authorities with powers to prohibit anti-republican organisations but also in criminalising the language and imagery of extremism. From the beginning, the new democracy was able to mobilise mass support and continued to do so until at least 1929. Political participation remained high throughout the 15-year lifespan of the Republic, with electoral turnouts consistently reaching levels that many of today’s liberal democracies can only dream of. There was also a much higher degree of consensus among Weimar’s political class than previously appreciated and, despite the high turnover of different governments, the personalities often remained the same. The willingness of Weimar’s political elite to

Alongside the Republic’s failures there were lasting achievements that resurfaced in the 1950s and 1960s

Women at work Equal voting rights were extended to all men and women over the age of 20 on November 12th, 1918 and the Weimar period saw women increasingly move out of their traditional roles to become workers and consumers as well as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers. By 1927 there were 35 female parliamentarians in the Reichstag and 40 in the Prussian Diet, compared with only four female MPs elected to the British House of Commons in 1924. Elsewhere, despite initial attempts to force women out of the workplace to make way for men returning from the war, women were employed in large numbers as secretaries, shop-girls and in the new rationalised industries. This gave young women in particular incomes of their own, freeing them from dependence on their parents or husbands. As

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| WEIMAR GERMANY of Weimar’s instability and emptiness as worthless paper money or political violence. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Weimar’s culture and nightlife cannot help but give the feeling that those participating in it were ‘dancing on the edge of a volcano’. And there is a fatalism in such accounts perhaps best summed up by Peter Cook’s claim to have modelled London’s Soho Establishment Club in 1961 on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’.

Poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927.

compromise, at least during the relative stability of the Republic’s middle period, is illustrated by the fact that even the anti-republican right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) was persuaded to enter government twice, in 1925 and in 1927-8. It was ultimately only the extremist parties of the Left and Right that refused to participate fully in the system and, although proportional representation did make it comparatively easy for these parties to gain seats in parliament, they were unable even after the onset of the Great Depression to secure the backing of the majority of German voters. Even in the March 1933 elections, which were carried out in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, the Nazis could not muster an overall majority, securing only 43.9 per cent of the vote. The truth is that the democratic parties could still have formed a parliamentary majority, if they had been willing to work together to form a common front against fascism.

A tragedy for Europe But there was more to ‘Weimar culture’ than Thomas Mann on one hand and Sally Bowles on the other. If we move away from the established ‘canon’ of Weimar culture to consider the arts under the Weimar Republic in a broader sense, we get a very different picture. Alongside the metropolitan avant-garde were more conservative and traditionalist tastes, often (perhaps paradoxically) expressed in the new media that made up ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture. For every experimental expressionist masterpiece like Robert Wiene's Das Cabinett des Dr Caligari (1919) or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), there were scores of screwball comedies, horror films or historical epics. Glossy fashion magazines and hard-boiled detective stories had a larger readership than the novels of Alfred Döblin or Heinrich Mann and the extent to which most ordinary people were even aware of the paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix or the theories of Einstein and Heisenberg is debateable. When looked at in this way, Weimar culture may seem less startlingly original or excitingly advanced than in most accounts, but it also seems richer, more multi-faceted and more reflective of the lives of ordinary Germans and, as a result, more useful in helping us to understand what it was like to live in this period. Above all, its very openness is stressed and calls into question the deterministic and pessimistic interpretation of the Republic through an examination of the public debates surrounding politics, morality, society and the arts. Considering what came after it, the fact that Weimar democracy ultimately failed to survive the domestic and international pressures placed on it after 1929 was a tragedy not just for Germany but for Europe as a whole. Yet this should not detract from the myriad achievements of the Republic’s 15 years of existence. In trying to understand how and why the Weimar Republic collapsed, as so much of the historical literature has done over the last 80 years, we should not lose sight of the positive features of its history. The story of the Republic is one of creation as well as destruction and it deserves to be remembered as such. It was a remarkable period in German history that demonstrates both the best and worst features of democratic politics and what can happen to modern industrial societies when they face extreme conditions. Indeed, given the pressures placed upon it and the consistent opposition it faced from large sections of German society, that Weimar democracy endured as long as it did is a remarkable achievement in itself.

The openness of Weimar culture calls into question the deterministic interpretation of the Republic

On the edge of a volcano Perhaps the one area where the Weimar Republic has traditionally been singled out for praise is the cultural sphere. Historians have always been keen to point out that, to a large extent, the political and economic failures of the Weimar Republic were offset by an extraordinarily rich cultural scene. In visual art, architecture, literature, music, cinema and theatre the Weimar period saw an outpouring of avant-garde creativity which was matched by the achievements of German academics and scientists. The Weimar era has become famous – even notorious – for its hedonistic nightlife, avant-garde art and saucy cabarets. Yet even this perception of Weimar as a liberated land of artistic experimentation is not without its darker side. There is a sense that all of this decadence merely masked the hollow and rotten heart of the Republic and was as much a symptom 30 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Colin Storer teaches at the University of Nottingham and is the author of A Short History of the Weimar Republic (I.B. Tauris, 2013).

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In no country is Magna Carta held in greater reverence than in the United States. Alexander Lock examines its crucial role in the founding of the republic’s political and legal system and looks at the Charter’s transatlantic transition.

MAGNA CARTA

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Previous page: the doors of the United States Supreme Court, the bottom right-hand panel of which depicts King John using his seal press to seal Magna Carta. This page: the American Bar Association's Magna Carta memorial at Runnymede.

AGNA CARTA holds a place of premier importance in American constitutional history, politics and legal culture. It is perhaps in the US that Magna Carta enjoys the greatest respect today. With the exception of a small plaque laid by the prime minister of India in 1997, the site of Runnymede itself is almost entirely composed of American monuments, from a grand neoclassical rotunda funded by the American Bar Association to the cenotaph commemorating President John F. Kennedy. Such is America’s reverence for the document that in 2007 the US financier David Rubenstein paid $21.3 million (£13.5 million) to obtain a copy for his nation, the highest price ever paid for a single sheet of parchment. Across the US, murals depicting the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede decorate the walls of numerous county court houses, where it is displayed as an important symbol of liberty and justice. Its depiction even appears in the United States Supreme Court itself, whose north wall frieze and grand golden doors display several scenes depicting the Charter’s story. How did Magna Carta come to America and achieve such prestige? It is simply because of its intrinsic influence on the most important documents in the foundation of the US, from the early colonial charters of the 17th century to the Declaration of Independence (1776) and Bill of Rights (1789). In particular, clauses 39 and 40 of the 1215 Magna Carta were singled out for special veneration, stating that: No freeman shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice. These clauses came to underscore the fundamental ideals of early America based upon the rule of law and due process. It

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was the aim of the first American colonists and, later, rebels of the American War of Independence to give historical precedent to the legal traditions that underpinned the citizen’s fundamental rights and liberties as outlined in their founding documents. As John Adams wrote in 1771, no people were ‘more strongly attached to the natural and constitutional rights and liberties than the British colonists of this American Continent’. Magna Carta was first extended to North America by the royal charters granted by the Crown to the pioneers of Empire in the early 17th century. Ironically, it was in the gift of precisely those Stuart kings, who were elsewhere accused in England of disregarding the constitutional rights of their subjects, that the principles of English liberty, enshrined in Magna Carta, emigrated across the Atlantic. The earliest charter that tacitly extended the protection of Magna Carta to North America by confirming that English law had jurisdiction in the new colonies was the First Charter of Virginia, drafted by the lawyer and jurist Sir Edward Coke in 1606. It proclaimed: That all and every the Persons … which shall dwell and inhabit within … the said several Colonies and Plantations … shall HAVE and enjoy all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities … to all Intents and Purposes, as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England. In similar language and with the same intent, the foundational charters of Massachusetts (1629), Maryland (1632), Maine (1639), Connecticut (1662), Carolina (1663) and Rhode Island (1663) all copied this phrase, extending the protection of English law and, by extension, the rights enshrined in Magna Carta, to them. Although Magna Carta was not explicitly mentioned by name in these early charters, the fact that the key statement granting them the ‘Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities’ of English law was first drafted by Coke made

the connection implicit. A leading lawyer, legal writer and politician, it was Coke who, more than any other, was most responsible for reviving interest in Magna Carta in the 17th century. As attorney general to Elizabeth I and James I, chief justice of both the courts of Common Pleas and King’s Bench and an MP, Coke was a robust champion of English common law and the principle that the legitimate rule of law lay in the hands of an independent judiciary, rather than in the gift of the monarch. Throughout a prolific career Coke produced some 13 volumes of law Reports, a fourvolume legal commentary known as the Institutes of the Lawes of England as well as a number of other smaller legal treatises. These works, especially his Reports, first published

Signatories of the Declaration of Independence leave Pennsylvania State House, July 4th, 1776. Engraving, c.1860.

rights and liberties of an ‘ancient constitution’, dating to before the Norman Conquest, that was ‘the birthright and … best inheritance that the subjects of this realm have’ and from which all subsequent liberties sprang. Thus for Coke, Magna Carta underpinned the common law tradition and ancient English ‘liberties’ that the royal charters emphatically granted to the settlers in North America. All politically aware colonists would have recognised the implicit connection between the rights and liberties granted in their foundational charters and their basis in Magna Carta as interpreted by Coke. The settling of the American colonies coincided with the great revival of Magna Carta in 17th-century England and the colonial emigrants from England took these ideas with them to America, incorporating them into their own colony’s laws. Early collections of laws known as the Body of Liberties drafted by Nathaniel Ward (1578-1652) for Massachusetts in 1641 explicitly aimed ‘to frame a body of … law, in resemblance to Magna Carta’ and, to help in the legislative process, two copies of ‘Sir Edward Cooke upon Magna Carta’ were ordered and purchased by the General Court. The finished Body of Liberties purposefully echoed clauses 39 and 40 from Magna Carta, promising from the outset that: No mans life shall be taken away … no mans person shall be arested, restrayned, banished, dismembred, nor any wayes punished … no mans goods or estaite shall be taken away from him, nor any way indammaged … unlesse it be by vertue or equitie of some expresse law.

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HOSE MASSACHUSETTSANS who lived under these laws emphatically recognised their origin in the Great Charter. Indeed, their basis in old English law was a fact that they jealously guarded and that helped lend the new colony’s laws legitimacy. When, in 1646, the colonists of Massachusetts felt they were not being fairly treated at law and that their rights, enshrined in Magna Carta, were being ignored, they presented a ‘Remonstrance and Petition’ to the governor and deputy governor of the colony. In response, the General Court produced a document known as the Declaration and Parallels, which ‘sett downe the fundamental and common laws and customes of England, beginning with Magna Charta’, arranging them in parallel with the Body of Liberties to demonstrate before the colonists how closely the two actually compared. That the Court went to such lengths demonstrates how seriously they took the accusations that their colony’s laws failed to uphold the ‘lawes or libertyes’ of England. Later American law codes would similarly go on to copy the language of the Great Charter to ensure the protection of individual liberties and in some cases – such as in the Connecticut code of 1650 or the New Haven code of 1656 – simply copied the key phrases from the Massachusetts Body of Liberties itself. Other law codes, such as the New York Charter of Liberties and Privileges of 1683, chose instead to quote Magna Carta’s key clauses almost verbatim, stating in its 13th article:

For Coke, Magna Carta ‘should be taken as the Common Law’ as it reaffirmed the rights and liberties of an ‘ancient constitution’ in 1600, created a platform upon which the organisation of the common law could be perceived and into which he inserted Magna Carta as a key legal instrument. As much as his activities in the courts of law or in Parliament, these writings transformed the public perception of Magna Carta by laying down in print Coke’s understanding of the law and the central role he believed Magna Carta played in it. In making his case for the role of the common law, Coke eulogised the Great Charter as ‘being the fountaine of all the fundamental laws of the Realme, and … a confirmation or restitution of the Common law’. For Coke, Magna Carta ‘should be taken as the Common Law’ as it reaffirmed the

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Lithograph facsimile of the draft of the Declaration of Independence, with images of the signatories around its border, c.1896. 34 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Top: portrait of Sir Edward Coke, artist unknown, 17th century. Below left: Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress, Philadelphia, September 5th, 1774. Below right: The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania, 1682.

courts of law. Throughout, reference is constantly made to the category of ‘freemen’ and many of the articles are conscious echoes of clauses from Magna Carta. Clause 40 was re-duplicated in article 5 of the Frame of Government, which required that ‘all courts shall be open, and justice shall neither be sold, denied nor delayed’. The Frame of Government also decreed in its article 18 that ‘all fines shall be moderate, and saving men’s contenements, merchandize, or wainage’, a principle derived from clause 20 of Magna Carta stating that a freeman was to be amerced ‘in accordance with the degree of the offence ... saving his livelihood’. This last, ensuring that the punishment did not exceed the crime nor ruin the defendant, would later find its most powerful expression in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Bill of Rights prohibiting ‘excessive fines’ and ‘cruel and unusual punishments’.

outlawed or Exiled or any other wayes destroyed nor shall be passed upon adjudged or condemned But by the Law-full Judgment of his peers and by the Law of this province. Justice nor Right shall be neither sold denyed or deferred to any man within this province. Of all the colonial constitutions, however, the one that drew most emphatically on Magna Carta was the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania. Drafted in 1682 by the proprietor of the colony, William Penn, this instrument drew heavily on both the language and traditions of Magna Carta, especially in the administration of justice in the

IN ADDITION TO using the Great Charter as the basis for his Frame of Government, Penn also sought to promote Magna Carta within the colony itself. Before setting out for Pennsylvania in 1681 Penn had an exact copy made of the Great Charter, ‘certified by the Keeper and other officers of the Cottonian Library, illuminated and ornamented as the original’, which he deposited in the fledgling archives of his colony. He also produced in 1687 the first published translation of Magna Carta in North America, along with a commentary, in a treatise entitled The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty and Property. In the preface, Penn noted the scarcity of legal textbooks in America and that it was his aim in publishing the text to acquaint those living in Pennsylvania with the ‘inestimable Inheritance that every Free-born Subject of England is Heir unto by Birthright’. He hoped that the publication of Magna Carta would ‘raise up Noble Resolutions in all the Freeholders in these new Colonies, not to give away anything of Liberty and Property that at present they do, (or of right as Loyal English Subjects, ought to) enjoy’. The commentary as it appeared in The Excellent Priviledge was not original to Penn, but plagiarised verbatim from an earlier English work entitled English Liberties (1680) by the Whig propagandist Henry Care. An enormously popular work in England, Care’s English Liberties ran into many editions and drew extensively upon Sir Edward Coke’s interpretation of Magna Carta. In copying Care’s commentary, Penn’s Excellent Priviledge simply reaffirmed Coke’s already influential reading of the Great Charter. In a passage that echoed Coke’s description of the ‘Golden passages of Magna Carta’, Penn’s Excellent Priviledge, following Care, pronounced how clause 39: Deserves to be written in Letters of Gold; and … Inscribed in Capitals on all our Courts of Judicature, Town-Halls, and most publick Edifices; they are the Elixer of our English Freedoms, the Store-house of all our Liberties. In light of the designs of many future American courthouses, this was a particularly prescient statement. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

P

GO WEST

ENN’S extensive use of Magna Carta as the basis for his own colony’s law was based upon particular affection for Magna Carta fostered from first-hand experience of it in the courts of law in England. In 1670 Penn was arrested and charged with addressing an ‘unlawful and tumultuous assembly’, having attempted to preside over a religious meeting of Quakers in Gracechurch Street, London: a consequence of the Conventicle Act (1664) that forbade religious assemblies of more than five people outside the Church of England. At his trial, Penn invoked Magna Carta and the rights of an Englishman to challenge his arrest and, when he was ultimately acquitted, the jury who found him innocent were themselves imprisoned and fined by the Recorder of London (acting as judge), who thought they had wilfully come to the wrong decision. In fact they had accurately ascertained that Penn could not have presided over a ‘tumultuous assembly’ as the meeting house doors had been locked by the arresting authorities preventing him from entering. The suit that followed that same year, known as Bushell’s Case (after the juror Edward Bushell who brought it), drew heavily upon Magna Carta and established an important precedent in English law regarding the autonomy of English juries. Seeking redress, Bushell petitioned the Court of Common Pleas for a writ of habeas corpus, which was eventually granted by the Chief Justice of that court, Sir John Vaughan, who, invoking Magna Carta’s clauses 39 and 40, ruled it illegal to punish jurors for the verdict they returned. The trial was significant in developing Penn’s thinking on Magna Carta, which he came to see as an important safeguard of individual liberty. AS PENN’S INVOLVEMENT in Bushell’s case demonstrates, the colonists’ invocation of Magna Carta was not simply opportunistic rhetorical spin, but based upon a vibrant and persistent political discourse forged in their native England. To the Americans of the New World, Magna Carta was the basis and defence of their individual liberties. Given this historical background, it was logical for the colonialists in the 17th and 18th centuries to believe that they lived under a system of legal and political institutions that originated in England, confirmed in their colony’s charters and reinforced in the statements of fundamental rights drafted – and reconfirmed – by their local assemblies. It was also natural that when they began to challenge the British Crown for greater political rights and, eventually, independence in the 1760s and 1770s, they did so invoking these same rights, liberties and laws that they believed they had inherited as descendants of Britons. They regarded earlier struggles of the English against arbitrary rulers as part of their own history and their actions against George III as a continuation of this struggle. As the First Continental Congress resolved in October 1774, the colonists were doing ‘as Englishmen their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties’. In the decade before the outbreak of hostilities in the American War of Independence, colonial lawyers, pamphleteers and politicians used Magna Carta to support their claims against the actions of the British government. A series of taxes and duties imposed on America by Parliament led to increasingly violent opposition. Especially concerning for Americans was the Stamp Act (1765), which imposed a direct tax on paper in the American colonies. The Act compounded colonial anxieties about the expanding reach 36 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Right: William Penn, Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. Engraving, 19th century. Below: Bank note depicting an American soldier holding a sword and Magna Carta, dated August 18th, 1775.

To the Americans of the New World, Magna Carta was the basis and defence of their individual liberties

of the British government, who at the same time ignored their rights as Britons by excluding them from participation in the political process. Colonial assemblies quickly adopted resolutions opposing the Stamp Act and publicly invoked Magna Carta in so doing. The Great Charter’s clauses 39 and 40 proved especially useful in challenging the admiralty courts that tried, without juries, those accused of violating the Act, while clause 14 – stating that ‘No scutage or aid is to be levied … except by the common counsel of our realm’ – provided a historical basis for the colonial’s cry, ‘no taxation without representation’. When Benjamin Franklin was brought before the House of Commons in 1766 to justify his calls for a repeal of the Stamp Act, he answered that the colonists, sharing ‘common rights of Englishmen’, could not ‘be taxed but by their common consent … as declared by Magna Charta’. A variant of the argument was made by John Adams in his Braintree Instructions (1765), which claimed that the Act was:

redesigned its own state seal to represent ‘an English American holding a Sword in the right hand and Magna Charta in the Left hand with the Words Magna Charta imprinted on it’. The rebels were now fighting for a freedom that they felt was enshrined in the Great Charter and which – though heralding from England – no longer simply contained ‘English liberties’ but was the basis for fundamental rights that were internationally applicable.

T Lord Lothian (right), the British Ambassador, deposits a copy of Magna Carta in the Congressional Library, Washington, D.C. on November 28th, 1939, for the duration of the Second World War. The recipient is librarian Archibald MacLeish.

directly repugnant to the Great Charter itself. For, by that charter, ‘no Amerciament shall be assessed, but by the Oath of honest and lawful Men of the Vicinage’. – And, ‘No Freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties or free Customs, nor passed upon, nor condemned, but by lawful Judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land’. Though the Stamp Act was soon repealed, later legislation passed by Parliament would prove equally repugnant to the colonists. The Declaratory Act (1766) asserted that the king in Parliament ‘had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force … to bind the colonies and people of America’, while a series of ‘Intolerable Acts’ in 1774 included bringing the Massachusetts Assembly under direct British rule and granted the capacity to hold American trials outside America. Such legislation compounded hostility to the British government and in the lead up to and during the War of Independence Magna Carta was widely invoked as a symbol of freedom against such oppression. The rebels commended the barons of 1215 as champions of liberty in their extortion of Magna Carta from King John and represented their own struggle against George III in similar terms. The seal of the First Continental Congress, published on the title page of their journal, depicted a pedestal inscribed ‘Magna Charta’, from which rose a column with a liberty cap supported by 13 hands representing the colonies. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1775 the Council of Massachusetts

HIS INTERPRETATION of Magna Carta would come to underwrite the key constitutional documents in the founding of the United States of America from the Declaration of Independence (1776) to the Bill of Rights (1789). From the outset these documents were recognised as something akin to Magna Carta. Thomas Paine in 1776 was an early proponent of America’s need to ‘frame a CONTINENTAL CHARTER, or Charter of the United Colonies; (answering to what is called the Magna Charta of England)’. Of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence, 25 were lawyers, steeped in the legal traditions of Britain and the jurisprudence of Coke. Given this background it is unsurprising that the Declaration drew conceptual inspiration from Magna Carta in the defence of fundamental liberties and developed upon the foundational charters (themselves influenced by Magna Carta) of the early colonies in the 17th century. Nowhere is the drafter’s debt more discernible than in its itemisation of grievances against George III, who is accused of ‘cutting off our trade with all parts of the world’ (contrary to clause 41 of Magna Carta), ‘imposing Taxation … without our consent’ (contrary to clause 14) and ‘depriving us of the benefits of Trial by Jury’ (contrary to clause 39). In the same way the United States Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in August 1789, also drew explicitly on Magna Carta to itemise fundamental personal liberties against which the state could not trespass. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments consciously developed upon the Great Charter’s clauses 39 and 40 by providing defendants with the right to a prompt and proper trial by an impartial jury under due process, while the Eighth Amendment followed clause 20 circumscribing excessive punishment. These constitutional documents ended British dominion over the American colonies and heralded the birth of a new nation. Yet the conceptual basis for many of their provisions was based upon ideas first drafted in England in 1215 that had emigrated in the colonial charters of the 17th century. Magna Carta formed one of the fundamental foundations of America’s legal traditions and it is one that has endured well into the modern age, inextricably binding the constitutional history of the United Kingdom with that of the United States. Alexander Lock is Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library and a former researcher on the post-medieval legacy of Magna Carta.

FURTHER READING A.E. Dick Howard, The Road from Runnymede: Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America (University of Virginia, 1968). Joyce Lee Malcolm, ‘Magna Carta in America: Entrenched’ in Nicholas Vincent (ed), Magna Carta the Fountain of Freedom (Third Millennium Publishing, 2014). JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

MakingHistory Confronting the brutal facts of history can be difficult, says Mathew Lyons. But how far should we protect ourselves from them before it becomes censorship?

Safe Spaces and Comfort Zones THE Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board at New York’s Columbia University recently recommended trigger warnings be placed on Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and implicitly other classic texts in the western canon – because it contains material that is difficult for ‘a [rape] survivor, a person of colour, or a student from a low-income background’. For those who do not know, a ‘trigger warning’ is akin to the descriptive notes that accompany DVD classification ratings. So, for instance, my copy of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is described as containing ‘intense scenes of verbal and physical abuse’. The immediate cause of this pronouncement was a female student who had been sexually assaulted finding a discussion of the Persephone and Daphne myths traumatic in the classroom environment, which is entirely understandable. Yet it is not to demean her pain when questioning whether the anxiety and distress she felt is sufficient reason to remodel the course for all students; or whether, more generally, we have the right to go through life without encountering texts, opinions and experiences that we find too emotionally difficult to deal with. As individuals we are surely entitled to evade distress. Whether we are entitled to demand society remodel itself around our trauma, to expect absolute public obeisance to the private tyrannies of our hurt is much less certain. It is only a matter of time before such sensibilities are brought to the study of history, where we do not have the comfort of fiction or the consolations of literary aesthetics with which to distance us from the darkness. The advisory board at Columbia was well intentioned, but to avoid 38 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

discussion of sexual violence, racism and oppression is not to fight such evils; it is to pretend that there are public spaces in which they cannot exist. To live in a prison of your own design does not make you any less of a prisoner. Is this not contrary to what the study of literature and history is about? Surely both are at least in part concerned with understanding how Abuse of history: The Rape of Proserpina by Pluto, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1621.

It is the historian’s duty as much as the novelist’s or poet’s to understand what people think and why and why horror rises in the human heart, about the ebb and flow of power and resistance, of humanity against inhumanity, the moral and political struggles of individuals and societies, the fight of hope and faith against hunger, fear and death? Are not both subjects ultimately about the infinitely complex varieties of experience flowering endlessly into events, patterned yet unique, as we all are?

This desire to dissociate from reality is not a problem unique to education. It seems endemic in society, from the section of the US population which turns to Fox News or the Drudge Report for information, to the echo chambers of the bourgeois political elite which led the UK Labour party to its worst electoral defeat since the war. No party has a monopoly on moral squalor. It is a human characteristic, not a political one. Characteristic of the mindset is the othering of your opponents, delegitimising contrary and challenging opinions by demonising those who hold them. There seems to me little intellectual difference between those who consider Barack Obama a socialist dictator because he believes in the efficacy and virtue of government and those who privilege the most reactionary elements of Salafi Islamic thought over women’s rights because opposition to any aspect of Islam is de facto Islamophobic. How far are we from declaring parts of literature or history hate speech? Not far enough. It is the historian’s duty as much as the novelist’s or poet’s to understand what people think and why. We must resist anything that pushes us towards the comfortable and the familiar rather than challenges us with the arbitrary and exceptional. Neither serenity nor strength come from avoiding difficult thoughts and feelings. Experience inures us; only by accepting reality can we begin to change it. Safe spaces and comfort zones, whether emotional or intellectual, may be invaluable for dealing with personal trauma, but they diminish us all if they do not equip us for the multiplicity of the world as it is. Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).

CHARLES SIMS

Charles Sims' 'Magna Carta', in St Stephen's Hall, Westminster, 1925-7.

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HE EVENTS IN RUNNYMEDE of June 1215 have a long tradition of being remembered in artistic representation, including in the form of large-scale murals in public buildings in Britain and elsewhere. One such mural is generally little known, even though hundreds of thousands of members of the general public and all of Britain’s political masters have walked past it since its unveiling in 1927. The work in question is by Charles Sims. Upon its unveiling it provoked a storm in the press, disquieted George V and led to questions in the House of Commons. Sims’ mural is one of eight commemorative panels to be found in the Building of Britain series in St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster. It has a rather indulgent title: ‘King John, Confronted by his Barons Assembled in Force at Runnymede, Gives Unwilling Consent to Magna Carta, the Foundation of Justice and Individual freedom, 1215’. With the arrival of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta it is time for this mural and, indeed, for Charles Sims, to become better known. At the beginning of the 20th century the eight panels, each of the order of 15 x 10 ft, in St Stephen’s Hall were the last to be filled with murals, Charles Sims R.A. (1873-1928).

The ARTIST and the KING Graham E. Seel explores the life of the artist Charles Sims and his controversial, little-known mural in St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster depicting King John at Runnymede.

following the rebuilding of the palace from 1834. Progress to this end remained fitful until a palpable new energy and vision was instituted by the newly appointed First Commissioner of Works, Viscount Peel (1924-8), but even more so by Speaker John Whitley (1921-8). Whitley fervently believed that the empty spaces had too long remained as ‘eyesores and reproaches to those who remembered the vision of the Prince Consort in 1851’. Consequently, the decoration – the mosaics, the stained glass, the lighting and the murals – of St Stephen’s Hall as the visitor sees it today is significantly the achievement of Whitley. With the scheme for the mosaics above the entrances in the east and west ends of the hall underway, Whitley turned JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

CHARLES SIMS

Above: Sims' 'Magna Carta' mural in St Stephen's Hall. Right: John Henry Whitley, 1866-1935, by Glyn Warren Philpot, 1929.

his attention to the panels. ‘I had lunch with the Speaker today’, reports the Earl of Crawford, chairman of the Fine Art Commission in a letter of October 11th, 1923: ‘[After discussing the mosaics he told me that] he has an ultimate scheme, much more likely to cause controversy, namely the preparations of eight great painted cartoons to fill the lateral panels, which of course involves scrapping those [three] which already exist.’

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N JANUARY 25TH, 1925 Whitley wrote to Peel confidently asserting that ‘the vision takes form’. The panels were to be filled with pictures, each undertaken by a different artist, telling the ‘story of our liberties … and should be simple enough to make its impress on the hearts of the visitors who come in tens of thousands through the Hall every year’. Since ‘it would evidently have been impossible to represent in eight pictures the varied and multitudinous scenes of a thousand years of history [and since] it was felt that the later part of this long record was no very happy subject for the art of today, [it was agreed that the scenes] they were to cover must be the eight centuries which begin with King Alfred and end with Queen Anne’. It was estimated that the scheme would take about 18 months to complete. The three existing paintings were to be removed, creating what was recognised as ‘a very odious and difficult problem’. Sir Henry Newbolt was appointed

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the eight artists and was equally content with the subject he had been allocated. On August 7th, 1925 Sims told Cameron that:

as advising historian, since he was felt to be ‘a good fellow’ who was ‘prepared to consult the regular historians’ and ‘in advising about the selection of subject matter will thoroughly understand the painter’s point of view’. Keen to deny the painters too much independence and the likely disastrous effects that would follow – one commentator, pointing to the recently finished 24 murals in the panels around the ambulatory of the Royal Exchange, spoke of the ‘hideous result … which is a standing example of how not to do it’ – Sir D.Y. Cameron was appointed ‘to supervise the scheme [and] to ensure that the painters should cooperate in making the series a logical and homogeneous entity’. ANY GENERAL QUESTIONS that might arise were to be submitted to an informal committee of three: Whitley, Peel and Crawford. Cameron was to receive 500 guineas; each artist was to be paid £1,250. The money for the scheme was to be raised by donation. Whitley’s ambition was to ‘get many of the great families in the past history of England to associate themselves with the scheme’. In this he proved extraordinarily successful: Crawford noted that the speaker ‘has facilities which he alone knows how to exercise of impressing donors with the importance of contributing towards the decoration of the Palace of Westminster’. By April 1st the terms of reference were definitively agreed. Three months later Whitley and his colleagues had identified donors, matched them with subjects and appointed the artists. ‘I feel quite astonished that we have got through such a difficult bit of navigation’, observed Newbolt. ‘More than once I couldn’t see the water for the shoal and the rapids … The matter is now in the hands of the artists: being magicians they can take things through any water.’ From the summer of 1925 the artists were at work. Sketches were submitted and displayed in the Tea Room of the House of Commons in January 1926. The murals were complete and in situ by June of 1927. On the 26th of that month the king and queen were shown the panels by the speaker. Prime Minister Baldwin unveiled the panels two days later. In what must have been a memorable occasion, Union Flags – which had been placed over the pictures – were dramatically lowered at a given signal. Newbolt, meanwhile, had prepared a short educational booklet and arrangements were made to produce copies of the murals so that they would soon ‘be on the walls of every school in the Empire, telling the story of the Building of Britain’. Charles Sims had been pleased to be appointed as one of

I’m glad to have the Magna Charta [sic] and I’ll begin planning at once. It is a great help that you repeated the details … Newbolt will put me on the track of authentics concerning King John and his times … I’m sure he will be a valuable assistant. Be sure I’ll be doing my utmost: only the vaguest and most hopeless outlines come to one’s mind at this stage – but the measure of one’s despair is the measure of the effort isn’t it? EVEN BEFORE SIMS had presented any draft sketches it was ominous that the original title to which he was working – ‘The Barons and King John Signing the Magna Carta at Runnymede’ – had prompted concern behind the scenes. Sir Charles Reed Peers, Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments from 1913 to 1933, bombastically declared that ‘Magna Carta has no signatures whatsoever [and therefore] clearly the artist must not depict the king with a quill pen in his hand!’ This in turn induced Sir Lionel Earle, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Peel, to author a rather panicky letter to Cameron, requesting to be informed as to ‘what steps the painters are taking to check the historical accuracy of their composition … Obviously, painters cannot also be expected to be historians [and we must do what we can so that] we may be spared the inevitable flood of criticism’. (Witness the strictures suffered by the Royal Mint this year when they produced a £2 coin showing Magna Carta being signed not sealed.) The word ‘signing’ was thus duly removed from the title of Sims’ panel and Cameron issued assurances that he was pressing the importance of historical accuracy upon ‘the men’. In fact, draft sketches by Sims held in the Northumbria Archive indicate that he never contemplated portraying John with a quilled pen. Instead, at least in the early stages of formulating his composition, it seems likely that Sims was dealing with broader questions: first, how to make his composition of events at Runnymede memorably different from the many others that existed and, second, how best he might deploy the medium of egg tempera – a mixture of egg yolk, powdered pigment and distilled water, a once popular medium that reached its peak during the Renaissance and of whose revival Sims was a leading exponent. This second ambition encouraged Sims to pay close attention to Renaissance artists such as Piero della Francesca (c.1415-92) and Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) and there is no doubt that Sims’ ‘Magna Carta’ was significantly influenced by Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, now in London’s National Gallery.

Sims had been pleased to be appointed and was equally content with the subject he had been allocated

A preliminary sketch by Sims for ‘Magna Carta’.

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ESPITE THE ASSURANCES of Newbolt, Sims in fact had little material with which to work as so few precise details are known about events at Runnymede. The opening section of Magna Carta enumerates the attendant barons and this Sims surely consulted. He will have discovered that contemporary or near-contemporary chronicle accounts are few and limited. It is almost certain that Sims made use of the work of William McKechnie, regarded as the leading scholar JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

CHARLES SIMS of his day on Magna Carta. In those pages he will have discovered that John met with his barons on each of the days between June 15th and 19th, 1215, with the first and last of these days carrying a greater significance than the others but that ‘what exactly happened on each of these days is matter for conjecture’. Sims perhaps also consulted Kate Norgate’s well-received 1902 biography of King John. It is worth quoting in full her description of events at Runnymede: There [in a meadow between Staines and Windsor, called Runnymede] the two parties pitched their tents at a little distance from each other on the long reach of level grass-land which stretched along the riverbank. The barons ‘came with a multitude of most illustrious knights, all thoroughly well armed.’ ‘It is useless’, says another chronicler, ‘to enumerate those who were present on the side of the barons, for they comprised well-nigh all the nobility of England’. With the king were the archbishops of Canterbury and Dublin, seven bishops, Pandulf [the papal representative] the Master of the English Templars, the earls of Pembroke, Salisbury, Warenne and Arundel, and about a dozen barons of lesser degree, including Hubert de Burgh. It was to these chosen few, and above all to the first of them, that John really capitulated.

Sims’ picture of Magna Carta … in tone and idea … bids fair to ruin the whole scheme … Unless this picture is very considerably altered and improved, in my opinion it should be rejected … The camp of the Barons reminds me of Barnet Fair; and there is a drunken looking Cardinal lying at the foot of the King’s dais, which is really a grotesque and impossible figure. Sims’ fellow artists also articulated their concerns. In a document headed ‘recorded and confidential’ they ‘offered no criticism of [Sims’] work’ but complained of the artist’s ‘failure to comply with the conditions agreed’ and in this way sought ‘to cover themselves in any controversy that may arise’. Upon unveiling, the painters’ fears proved correct: although the Manchester Guardian found ‘a hundred

‘Unless this picture is very considerably altered and improved, in my opinion it should be rejected’

I

NTERESTINGLY, IN HIS address on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Magna Carta in 1915, McKechnie, in his opening line, describes ‘King John, bending before a storm he had raised but could not lay, set the Great Seal of England to a Charter of Liberties’. It is not beyond reason to suggest that Sims turned McKechnie’s figurative ‘storm’ into the artistic representation that we see in his mural, though the striking ‘Japanese’-style rain was probably inspired by Sims’ collection of prints from that country. Even before Sims’ painting was complete it was fomenting disquiet following early viewings. Earle sounded the alarm. In a letter to Crawford he described how:

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The Battle of San Romano, by Paolo Uccello, c.1438-40.

touches of brilliant and witty painting’, most of the press judged against Sims’ painting. The Times, while not wholly antagonistic to the painting, complained that ‘the colour is imperfectly organised’ and that ‘the work of Mr Sims falls below the level of the rest’. Apollo described it as ‘neither quite cricket nor mural decoration. It is not cricket because the artist has played his own game…; nor is it mural decoration because [of the absence] of the static quality which it is the mural decorator’s peculiar duty to establish’. The king ‘declared that he could not see what Sims’ picture meant’. By far the most serious and sustained attack was headed by the MP Charles Oman, distinguished Oxford historian and very much the voice of the establishment, who asked in the House ‘whether measures can be taken to replace [the

happening around him and for which he is apparently responsible. The sense of sinister dissonance is enhanced further by the tension between the vertical lines of the scaffold of the dais and the diagonal lines of the broken flagpole and the driving rain, as well as by the connectivity established by the pointing fingers of Aymeric and the monk. The array of erect swords resist the apparently malign intent of the king, whose very form is slashed with the harsh line of a pike. At first sight Sims’ painting thus appears to be a classic representation of the Bad King John thesis and clearly in line with the Whig interpretation of history as put forward by the entire Building of Britain project. However, there may be a different interpretation, in part obtained by an awareness of Sims’ struggles, both personal and professional.

painting] by a more satisfactory picture?’ Seeking to expedite his ambition, Oman protested directly to Peel: ‘the flagstaff [having been sawn through] is wholly unhistorical … and as a mere improbability I should indicate the appearance in the left lower corner … of a group of half-clothed people apparently of the stone age … Nor is there any authority for … the ceremony as having taken place on a high dais in the open air … And what is the meaning of the straw?’ Four days later he followed this with another letter promising to raise a petition signed by 250 MPs to ‘clear out the fresco’. Despite the intensity of the attack, Sims’ painting survived. Cameron declared the work ‘brilliant and daring’ and ‘the removal of this panel would be a very grave matter and lead to serious trouble’. In a masterly letter, Crawford erected an impregnable defence asserting that ‘in such works of art a margin of error as to fact and probability is perfectly justifiable – approval is even expressed for Rembrandt’s Night Watch, for Rodin’s statue of Balzac and for Copley’s Siege of Gibraltar’. This intervention persuaded Oman to let the matter lie for a year, by which time the concerns he had articulated had been either forgotten or diminished; and by which time also Sims was dead. The artist took his own life: he drowned in the River Tweed near St Boswell’s in Scotland on April 28th, 1928.

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HATEVER criticisms Sims’ painting has endured, in a number of key details it nevertheless seems accurate: the standard of Robert FitzWalter, the leader of the rebel barons, held aloft by the rider on the black horse, is given suitable prominence; so, too, Archbishop Stephen Langton, shown in profile approaching the king from the right and appropriately portrayed without his mitre; Aymeric, Master of the Knighthood of the Temple in England, is correctly depicted wearing a white surcoat with red cross over his armour. Similarly, Eustace de Vesci was a notable rebel baron and thus his arms of a black cross against a yellow shield appear in the top right of the picture. William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury, remained loyal to his half-brother King John, permitting the prominence that Sims has given to Salisbury’s arms of six upright lions on a blue shield. Pandulf is shown in the foreground of the painting, appropriately attired in a cardinal’s red cappa clausa with a cowl and hood lined with white fur. In its totality Sims’ painting presents a cinematic, widescreen portrayal of events at Runnymede. The driving rain, broken flagpole, arabesques of curling pennants, rearing horses, flickering pool of sunlight, rhythmic lines of lances and peasants intent upon their everyday business collectively instill a powerful sense of movement and dynamism which contrasts with the static aloofness of the king, remote and seemingly indifferent to the chaos that is

George V, by Charles Sims, c.1924.

EVEN BEFORE the critical reception of his mural, Sims was enduring something of a burgeoning crisis. In the opening days of the First World War his eldest son, aged 16, lost his life when HMS Bulwark exploded in port. Appointed as an official war artist, Sims was then sent to paint the carnage and thereafter, as Sims’ lifelong friend, Harold Speed, observed, the artist ‘not only withdrew himself from his friends, but from his family also, and in the end was a very lonely and pathetic figure indeed’. He received a temporary boost in 1922 when his painting of the Countess of Rocksavage and her Son was hailed by the Royal Academy as picture of the year. However, at about this time a sketch he submitted for a panel at the Royal Exchange was turned down and Speed describes the impact of this upon his friend as ‘another stab’. In 1922 Sims had been commissioned by the Royal Academy to produce a portrait of George V. Displayed in the summer of 1924, it created a storm and the press drank deeply: ‘the problem picture of this year’s Royal Academy’, shouted the Daily Times; the Australia and New Zealand press association reported ‘London is simmering with resentment … Mayfair hums with criticism which is reflected in many newspapers’. Loud was the complaint that the king looked ‘undistinguished and worn’, that the ‘royal legs assumed undue prominence’ and that here was ‘a man to the waist and a fairy below’. Then, in the summer of 1925, Sims’ magnificent painting of Lady Astor’s introduction into Parliament, initially hung on a staircase there, incurred much criticism because it was against precedent to admit pictures of living members. The painting was thus removed, though not soon enough to prevent it being mutilated in an attack. The episode encouraged the Brooklyn Eagle to tell its readers that ‘Sims was the perennial bad boy of the London art season’. When the king made transparent his disapproval of Sims’ attempt to capture the royal likeness, the fate of JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

CHARLES SIMS the portrait was sealed: in an extraordinary scene ‘the President [of the Royal Academy] cut the head out of the canvas and burnt it’. However, ‘as there was reason to suppose that the king had expected the portrait to be entirely destroyed, [some time later] the Treasurer and Secretary cut up and burnt in the boiler house [of Burlington House] the rest of the canvas’. Speed records that ‘the hostile reception [to the portrait] hurt him more deeply than he cared to admit’ and Sims later complained at having ‘borne both the injury and the annoyance consequent upon the publicity of the [royal portrait] affair’. Alongside these professional setbacks, Sims was also finding his role as keeper, or headmaster, of the Royal Academy – a position to which he had been appointed in 1920 – increasingly difficult to fulfil. This was partly because of his lucrative sojourns in the US but more especially because relations between Sims and Sir Frank Dicksee, President of the Royal Academy from 1924, were steadily deteriorating; by the middle of 1926 they had broken down completely over the issue of the royal portrait, Dicksee telling the king that he considered the affair ‘a disastrous failure on our part’. After a stormy council meeting on June 13th, 1926, the secretary of the Royal Academy felt impelled to write to Sims stating that ‘in order to preserve the decency of intercourse which is necessary between officers of the Academy’ the president ‘demand[s] some sort of apology from you … otherwise he will have to raise the dignity of the Chair as affected by your remarks to him’. Three months later, Sims resigned. The wheel of fortune had turned briskly since the heady days of 1922 when the Daily Mail had declared that ‘Mr Sims is apparently the idol of the present generation’.

The Introduction of Lady Astor as the First Woman Member of Parliament by Charles Sims c.1919.

one blade seemingly slashing the forearm of the archbishop. The pointing monk and the imperious Cistercian seem more intent upon violence than kindness. We barely notice Eustace de Vesci in the top right-hand corner, clad in some sort of imperial toga and with evil in his eye, seemingly poised to depose John. It takes even keener eyes to recognise that the flagpole bearing the royal standard has been sawn through, rather than simply having broken asunder in the storm. When the king protested at the royal standard being trampled in the mud Sims explained that it was a bit of treachery, ‘just like the modern Bolsheviks’, a remark that was echoed in a Commons debate in which a speaker said that the composition ‘looks like a Bolshevik rising’. This encourages us to recall that, as Sims was composing his painting, the General Strike made it seem like the world was about to be turned upside down: fights broke out between police and strikers across the land; the army was called into London; Russian Bolsheviks lent ostentatious support to the strikers and the government sent a warship to Newcastle. A state of emergency was declared. ‘Government is being attacked’, barked Baldwin. ‘Let all good citizens ... stand behind the Government.’ The details of Sims’ work ultimately compel the viewer to believe that sinister forces have been unleashed, not by the actions of John, but by the actions of those determined to break John. A study of Sims’ ‘Magna Carta’ thus presents us with the real legacy of 1215: a flawed peace treaty that induced a vicious civil war rather than ushering England into a promised land of liberty. Increasingly beset by his own demons, Sims has also given us a form of self-portrait. Nor should we be surprised that Sims’ ‘Magna Carta’ does not fit easily with the Whig interpretation of history espoused by the other paintings in the Building of Britain, for throughout his career Sims ‘liked being different from other people, and delighted in doing the unexpected’.

Sims ‘liked being different from other people, and delighted in doing the unexpected’

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HIS ATTRITIONAL LOSS of stature suffered by Sims, played out for the large part in the press, led to the deterioration in the artist’s condition, as observed by Speed. Even before the critical reception of ‘Magna Carta’, Sims was a forlorn, tragic figure, albeit one who still commanded respect. He must, though, have felt himself increasingly isolated and have come to doubt his considerable abilities. Above all he must have become unable to trust. It therefore follows that he felt considerable affinity and sympathy for the condition in which King John found himself in 1215, a supposition that would seem to be evidenced by key details in Sims’ painting. For instance, Archbishop Langton, conventionally portrayed as the benign priestly go-between, now appears more like Nosferatu: the unnatural black claw of his hand silhouetted against the sky dramatically echoing F.W. Murnau’s portrayal of the vampire in his 1922 film of that name. Only eventually do we realise that the soldiers holding their swords erect perhaps have Langton in their sights and not the king,

44 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Graham E. Seel is Head of History at St Paul's School, London. His latest book is King John: An Underrated King (Anthem Press, 2012).

FURTHER READING Malcolm Hay, J. Riding, Art in Parliament: The Permanent Collection of the House of Commons (Jarrold, 1996). Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1970 (Oxford University Press, 2000). Clare A.P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain, 1840-1940: Image and Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2001). James Fenton, School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (Royal Academy of Arts, 2006).

| FOOD

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Food technology: a design for a pinery and orangery at Teddington, Middlesex, 1806.

‘GROW YOUR OWN’ is everywhere at the moment. We are exhorted to grow for flavour, for relaxation and for the good of the planet. If we are unable to grow it ourselves then we should at least, so the argument goes, try and source it locally. We must aspire to be locavores, using farmers’ markets, local butchers and to stroll through the woods, foraging for titbits such as wild garlic and (safe) mushrooms. Time and time again modern food commentators insinuate that eating seasonally is the ‘right’ thing to do. Frequently they call upon the example of the past, when we lived, supposedly, in a rose-tinted harmony with our surroundings. We ate, apparently, according to what was in season, sourced everything locally and were largely self-sufficient. After all, just look at all those big country houses, producing everything they needed within the estate. This represents a deeply simplified view of the past, especially of the last 350 years. Just as we are finally reassessing British cuisine and finding it contains forgotten delights, which deserve to be celebrated, so, too, do we need to promote a better understanding of the ways in which households obtained food in the past. Commentators need to stop generalising about provenance across the broad sweep of history, ignoring class differences and changing technology. Rather, we should challenge the gentrification of ‘foraging’, of seeking out and consuming wild foods, which for many people, for most of history, has not been a choice but a necessity. There are no easy options when it comes to the morality of food sourcing. Britain over the next 20 years faces food shortages, including of meat and chocolate, an ever-widening gap between the diets of the rich and poor and growing concerns around malnutrition – which includes obesity – the debates around which an understanding of the past can actively contribute to. Seasonal eating Most people had to eat seasonally in the past, which was all the more reason for those who were able to, to beat nature. In doing so they showed their wealth, taste and the skill of their gardeners. By the 17th century, technological change was gathering pace. The kitchen garden became a focal point, newly separated from the main house, in order to be in the best possible position for productive gardening. Gardeners already used carefully positioned walls and beds and selective breeding to encourage or retard growth, but now improved methods of glass production meant that plants 46 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

The Myth of ‘Moral’ Food

There was no period in the past when people did not try to manipulate nature in order to provide a more varied and nutritious diet, argues Annie Gray. We will need similarly ingenious methods in the future.

XXXXXXXXXXX could be grown in greenhouses. Weeks, if not months, could be added to either end of the season. Further advances came in the 18th century, as coal became cheaper and more widely available. Many large landowners installed giant boilers in their walled gardens, pumping heat into their greenhouses, as well as around their walls, through hollow horizontal chimneys that ran around the garden. By the 19th century almost anything could be produced throughout the year and, with the advent of the railways, the rich could ship produce from their country estates to their townhouses on a weekly basis. Advances in gardening were not confined to super-rich estate owners. Market gardeners often led the way, fuelled by the profits it was possible to make feeding urban populations without access to their own plots. A craze for new-season peas swept the nation in the late 17th century, predating the Delia Smith effect by centuries. For those without heated walled gardens, manure was a saviour and was readily available. One commentator suggested that a man in possession of four horses could provide himself with enough manure to heat hotbeds to produce two pineapples every month of the year. As well as advancing the season, careful positioning of crops could retard growth. Today’s dessert apple varieties usually require full sun to ripen. Older varieties, which often pre-date the peculiarly British and British-influenced division into cooking and dessert, grow happily in shade. Contemporary books advise on the best plants for walls facing in every direction to extend the fruiting season in both directions. A comparison of seasonality lists for 2015 and 1815 makes for a stark contrast, both in terms of the range of produce consumed and the months in which it was available.

Shopping list: a page from the Ickworth household accounts book, Bury St Edmunds, 1857.

Even where foodstuffs, such as meat, could be sourced locally, it was not always a simple process. For big estates, accounts indicate that home farms supplied selected products – eggs, boiling fowl, sometimes pigs and dairy products – but meat was also bought from a local butcher. It might well have been produced on the estate, but farms were under no obligation to supply their produce to their landlord (game, of course, was a different matter). Additionally, relying on local suppliers would have left households then, as now, unable to eat brie or parmesan, or procure more specialist items such as asses’ milk. Even small houses did not rely completely on local shops and letters between friends testify to the informal network of exchange, which existed long before ready access to Internet shopping. The majority of households, even at a working-class level, were linked into networks far beyond the local community. Servants were recruited from across the country and migration within Britain was a significant factor in eroding regional culinary traditions. Rural homes within the orbit of a country estate benefited from the tradition of edible almsgiving, introducing them to tastes and ingredients outside the usually documented norm. In the 18th century, tea drinking spread from the rich to the working classes directly, as servants re-used tea leaves from upstairs and cooks then sold them on to back-door buyers to be ‘upcycled’ into cheap and adulterated tea for the urban poor. By the 19th century, tea with sugar had become a ubiquitous part of the British diet. Human desire From published books and household accounts it is clear that a great variety of food was eaten in the past and that it was sourced from just as wide a variety of sources as today. Technological advances allowed commercial and private gardeners to retard and advance the seasons as they wished, harnessing nature to human desire: as long as money, horse manure and cheap fossil fuels were plentiful. Eating was not seasonal, nor were all ingredients locally sourced and methods were not always sustainable, as a number of species of bird were eaten to the edge of extinction and beyond. Procuring food in the past was as complex and varied as food itself and facile arguments, intended to back up current concerns to draw in history without fully understanding it, should be avoided. Modern food is complicated, modern issues are complex and realising that they were just as nuanced in the past can surely only be beneficial as we look for solutions for the future.

Eating was not seasonal, nor were all ingredients locally sourced and methods were not always sustainable

Self-sufficiency Kitchen gardens did supply most fresh produce for country estates. Even middle-class villas had productive spaces. But the idea that big houses were self-sufficient, or that British households were not reliant on imports, is as fallacious as the myth of seasonality. There were fruits, such as lemons, which could be produced with work but were more often imported. Some of the markers of Britishness, such as tea, cake and curry, all as current now as in the past, show that imported goods were a daily part of life, reliant on spices imported from afar. And finally, sugar. Consumption rose steadily from the start of production in the first British-owned plantations in the 17th century until the 1950s. Despite the current hysteria over sugar, per capita consumption has been declining since then, though we now consume it in different ways and as part of a much less active lifestyle.

Annie Gray is a research associate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 47

The Conference on

AFRICAN CONFERENCE

African Peoples

A multiracial community of activists began organising public meetings and rallies in the 1930s, paving the way for the Pan-African Congress of 1945, writes Daniel Whittall.

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REJUDICE OFTEN intruded into the private lives of non-white people in 1930s Britain. The Trinidadian George Padmore was relaying an experience familiar to many black people in London when he wrote in the US periodical the Crisis in 1938 that ‘few Negroes in England, I imagine, have not passed through the bitter experience of looking for apartments and being told constantly: “We do not take coloured people”. In five weeks of flat hunting the writer learned to find his way competently around London’. In the face of such prejudice, some black activists made it their priority to ensure that they raised public protest against such practices, bringing questions of race and racism into public view and attempting to situate them at the heart of debates around world politics. The impulse to speak out publicly in order to confront racism was one of the driving factors in the flourishing network of organisations, periodicals and public gatherings led by black activists, which blossomed in the 1930s. Indeed, thanks in part to the contribution of non-white activists, that decade can be seen as the one in which an anti-racist social movement that had long been gathering momentum first began to break into wider public view. Central to this movement was the use of public gatherings, ranging from garden parties to political rallies, at which anti-racist activists of all backgrounds could meet, mingle, establish relationships of solidarity and debate – often ferociously – the future direction of their anti-racist politics and consider the best ways to confront racism in Britain and overseas. One of the ways in which the history of African diasporic peoples in Britain has been told is through a focus on the major conferences in which they participated. Usually, this approach focuses on the various Pan-African conferences and congresses which took place in Britain, particularly the gatherings in London in 1900 and Manchester in 1945. However, while these events are of undoubted significance, it is important that we situate them in the context of the vast array of other public events in Britain in which African diasporic peoples participated. Take for example the much less well documented Conference on African Peoples, Democracy and World Peace, which took place in July 1939 at the Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street on the outskirts of the City of London. It was part of a nascent black public sphere in Britain, consisting of publishing networks and public events that sought both

Front page of The Keys, 1937. JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

AFRICAN CONFERENCE Left: John McNair, General Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, addresses the first Pan-African Congress, November 1945. Below: excerpt from the front page of The Keys, 1933.

to challenge racism and raise awareness of the role of imperialism in global politics. Indeed, the LCP was formed in the wake of a series of such gatherings, hosted by the Quakers, in which the Jamaican doctor Harold Moody was involved alongside the Barbadian communist Arnold Ward and British humanitarians, writers, politicians and intellectuals such as Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain and Charles Roden Buxton. The LCP was inaugurated at a public meeting on Tottenham Court Road in 1931. At another rally, held shortly after its founding, the African-American singer, actor and musician Paul Robeson and the British radical Ellen Wilkinson were among the speakers.

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to engage with the major global political issues of the day and, at the same time, to make connections between these issues and the matters of most concern to African diasporic peoples in Britain, namely, imperialism, racism and anti-racism. TWO PRIMARY ORGANISATIONS, the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP) and the West African Students Union (WASU), were at the forefront of efforts by black activists in the 1930s to publicly confront racism. They were joined, in the middle years of the decade, by the more radical International African Friends of Abyssinia, a body which transmuted into the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in 1937 and whose politics were significantly to the left of both the WASU and, especially, the LCP. Public gatherings were central to political engagement in the 1930s, despite the growing prominence of radio and film and the long established print media. For Richard Overy, in his pioneering social history of the period, The Morbid Age (2010), public gatherings represented one of several ‘mechanisms of dissemination’, as he puts it, that enabled the British intellectual and political classes to engage with and be engaged by the broader public, or at least those elements of it that wished to be so engaged. It is hardly surprising, in this context, that black activists turned to public gatherings in their efforts 50 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Below: objectives of the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), The Keys, 1933. Facing: handbill for a public meeting called by the LCP, 1938.

ROM THIS POINT ON, the League organised a host of events. Many were informal, multiracial social gatherings, often centred on a garden party or reception for a prominent individual or group. At one event, a reception for the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir Samuel Wilson, and his wife Lady Wilson, hosted by LCP member R.S. Nehra at his home in south London, prominent Britons mingled with African, West Indian and South Asian men and women. Such receptions became a regular part of the League’s repertoire. They held similar gatherings for the likes of Sir Edward Denham, Governor of British Guiana, Sir Ransford Slater, Governor of Jamaica, Sir Donald Cameron, Governor of Nigeria, and Sir Reginald Stubbs, former Governor of Jamaica, as well as for visiting West Indian cricket teams. They also held a reception for Gandhi on his visit to Britain in 1931 and hosted a delegation of Gold Coast activists in 1934. These events provided opportunities for members and associates to come together in a single place, ensuring a degree of social connection between members, or at least those who were able or inclined to attend such events. Although LCP receptions often involved a short speech from Moody and a response from the honorary guests and other speakers, their emphasis was more on sociability than on public speaking or directly political activism. Such gatherings contested explicitly the dominant racialised norms of British society. They foregrounded expressions of African diasporic artistic and cultural expression, including the singing of ‘Negro spirituals’ and musical performances

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

AFRICAN CONFERENCE

from such figures as the British Guiana (now Guyana) swing band leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson. As well as their social gatherings, the LCP also hosted lectures by prominent speakers on colonial matters. Such events, as when the imperial historian W.M. Macmillan addressed them in 1934, provided opportunities for LCP members and supporters to familiarise themselves with the ideas of leading writers and thinkers on colonial matters and to challenge and debate these ideas, as well as creating a space for the public discussion of matters relating to the British Empire and its colonial possessions.

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ATHERINGS WERE NOT always amicable. At the LCP’s Annual General Meeting for 1934 there was considerable unrest among those present. Moody later wrote that the League had been ‘fiercely attacked’ and in the official report it was noted that a strong Indian element, opposed to the current LCP executive and its prioritisation of Africans and West Indians, had attempted both to disrupt the meeting and to propose an alternate body of officers. Similarly, the more radical black activist, Ras Makonnen, would later recall that he and George Padmore, attending a function on Abyssinia, rounded on Moody and the League: ‘How dare you, Moody, who receives so much of your money from missionaries and the Colonial Office, use your apparatus to denigrate and defame African people?’ The LCP organised a large number of conferences and these events were arguably the most prominent way in which it sought to display itself publicly. From its earliest years, the organisation endeavoured to host an annual conference, which often took the form of an ‘away weekend’, 52 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

Left: Dr Harold Moody, c.1930. Right: C.L.R. James, Trinidadian socialist and chair of the IAFE, speaking at a rally in Trafalgar Square, August 25th, 1935.

usually held in High Leigh, Hoddleston, just outside London. At such gatherings, members debated the dynamics of Empire and the direction of world politics, as well as the finer points of racism and anti-racist politics. The LCP often collaborated with other organisations and reports of conferences appeared regularly in The Keys, the periodical of the LCP, as well as in other press outlets. Like the LCP, the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFE), launched in the context of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, was inaugurated at a public meeting, on July 23rd, 1935. At the meeting, which was described as being ‘crowded’ with an audience largely of ‘men and women of African descent’, the IAFE passed resolutions in support of Abyssinian independence and began to collect for a fund to provide an ambulance for those wounded in the fighting, or a hospital if war should not be forthcoming. Although the earliest IAFE gatherings were held indoors at London’s Memorial Hall, its members soon began to organise events elsewhere. IAFE speakers regularly frequented Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Ras Makonnen, a member, recalled spending his days torn between his studies in the reading rooms of the British Museum and agitating from the platform at Speaker’s Corner. IAFE members – particularly after their group developed into the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in 1937 – also agitated from Trafalgar Square. In advance of one IASB gathering there, the journalist Hannen Swaffer used his column in the Daily Herald to advertise the event: ‘[T]o-morrow, the International African Friends of Ethiopia, as they call themselves, are holding a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square … I advise Labour people in London to go and hear the Negroes case. C.L.R. James, a West Indian

[It was] a vibrant anti-racist public sphere where questions of Empire, race and world politics were at the heart of discussion journalist … speaks with eloquence and with an honest fervour.’ Writing in the Herald two days later, Ritchie Calder reported that ‘Negroes and coloured peoples from every part of the world crowded the plinth of Nelson’s Column and mixed with the large white audience in Trafalgar Square, at yesterday’s protest meeting.’

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HE MEETINGS of the IAFE and the IASB were significantly more radical than those of the LCP. They forcefully condemned the influence of imperialism on world politics and urged the British working classes to join with their colonial counterparts to overthrow the Empire as a central part of their own quest for emancipation. It was in this wider context of a vibrant anti-racist public sphere, where questions of Empire, race and world politics were at the heart of discussion, that the LCP collaborated with a variety of groups in organising the 1939 Conference on African Peoples, Democracy and World Peace, a role it shared with the Coloured Film Artistes’ Association, the Gold Coast Students Association and the Negro Welfare Association. While they do not appear in any of the documentation from the conference, Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, the future president of Kenya, and their International African Service Bureau were also reportedly involved in the preliminary planning discussions. Moody, now president of the LCP, was chairman of the conference and the initiative was supported by a wide variety of individuals, including a number of MPs, communists, church leaders and many others, such as the publisher Victor Gollancz, Paul Robeson, Professor William Macmillan, Barbadian Grantley Adams and Langston Hughes from the US.

Left: Princess Tsehai (far left), Haile Selassie (centre left) and Crown Prince Asfa-Wossen (far right) with Dr Martin, the Abyssinian Minister, June 4th, 1936. Right: Mahatma Gandhi visits London’s East End, 1931.

The programme for the event was divided into four main sections: ‘The Negro and the World Today’; ‘Africa since Versailles’; ‘The Negro in America and the West Indies’; and ‘Self-determination and Peoples of African Descent’. The organisers framed the conference as an attempt to explore the historical and contemporary contributions of ‘African peoples the world over’ to ideas of freedom and democracy. They positioned the conference as an educational endeavour, attempting to ‘show how the British people can help’ to ‘lay the foundations for true freedom and lasting peace in the world’ by extending democracy to the colonial empires. When advertising the conference in the Keys, the LCP did so under the sub-heading ‘Propaganda and Knowledge’. It went on to stress that one function of the conference would be to challenge some of the wrong-headed assumptions about Africa and the wider Empire, which often appeared in the British press, and to ‘bring to light and to provide some correction for such glaring wrongs’ as were being committed around the Empire. As early as 1938 the LCP had been planning to hold a ‘world congress of Africans and people of African descent’ and these plans had gained support in Sylvia Pankhurst’s anti-fascist newspaper, New Times and Ethiopia News, in which the proposed gathering was described as a ‘Pan-African World Congress’. Whether or not the 1939 gathering was intended as a preliminary to a larger event in 1940 is unknown, though no large conference organised by the LCP appears to have taken place in 1940, perhaps because the Second World War made arrangements difficult. The proposed conference came to the attention of officials in the Colonial Office. In their correspondence about JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

AFRICAN CONFERENCE the event, they decided that it would be of minor significance because ‘Dr Harold Moody, who figures as Chairman of this queer Conference, has never given us any reason for doubting his loyalty’. However, they did express concern that a number of the organisers, particularly the Barbadian Peter Blackman (an active member of both the LCP and the Communist Party of Great Britain) were believed to have ‘rather extreme ideas’.

the attractive naiveness of eg. Mr Kenyatta.’ We might read much into Perham’s own prejudices from these comments, particularly the way in which she seems to favour non-white activists who are ‘quiet’ and ‘sensible’, or else have some degree of ‘attractive naiveness’. Clearly, she had little sympathy for the political left, regardless of race.

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RESOLUTION WAS ISSUED at the conference, the terms of which can be found in the pages of the Colonial Information Bulletin. The resolution proclaimed that the conference ‘condemns the methods of rule used by the various powers now occupying Africa and other countries inhabited by Peoples of African descent’, insisting that ‘the African peoples claim the right

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HE CONFERENCE itself was well attended and attracted speakers such as Princess Tsehai of Ethiopia, H.G. Wells, Sir Stafford Cripps and Krishna Menon, then President of the India League and described by historian Nicholas Owen as ‘the leading figure in anti-imperialist politics in London’ in 1939. Other important speakers included Moody, Blackman, Padmore, Desmond Buckle from the Gold Coast and many other black activists in Britain. Notably, Princess Tsehai, daughter of the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, seems to have been the only woman to speak at the conference, a fact which illustrates the male-dominated nature of many such gatherings and raises questions about just how inclusive conferences such as these were for black women. The conference was reported in several newspapers, including those such as West Africa and the Daily Gleaner (Jamaica) which circulated in the colonies. Recollections from participants in the conference, such as Dorothy Abrahams, have suggested that a Communist element ‘tried to control the proceedings’, and in particular launched an attack on Padmore who, no doubt to Moody’s pleasure, responded in such a way as to calmly but firmly dismiss them. Padmore had been a leading Communist activist in Moscow until 1934, after which point he had broken with the Communist movement and found other outlets for his pan-African socialism. It should therefore be of no surprise that he would be attacked by Communist delegates at the conference, nor that the Communists would leave him out entirely from the list of speakers in their report of the event published in their periodical the Colonial Information Bulletin. Among the other interested observers at the conference was the prominent imperial historian Margery Perham. In her notes on the event, which survive in her personal papers held at Rhodes House Library in Oxford, Perham describes Padmore as ‘v. belligerent’, and describes him as of the ‘agitator type’, but she also notes that his speech was ‘Rather impressive. Much more self-possessed than any other African present, and aware of how to conduct public business.’ About the other conference attendees, Perham wrote that ‘Africans varied v. much. Some v. nice, quiet, sensible ones didn’t speak at all. On the whole those that spoke were impressive. V. nice manners, and nicely dressed.’ Other contributions to the conference, however, came in for withering criticism. She wrote, ‘Europeans present a ghastly collection – whose ignorance arrogance and stupidity would have taken a lot of beating. All Labour, or left of Labour. Mostly quite young. Outnumbered Africans by about 10 to 1. A good many Indians present – also pretty nasty. The professional agitator type – but lacking

Top: Chris Braithwaite, Barbadian leader of the Colonial Seamen’s Association, speaking at a rally in London, April 19th, 1936. Bottom: audience members at the first Pan-African Congress, Manchester, November 10th, 1945.

Princess Tsehai, daughter of the Emperor Haile Selassie, seems to have been the only woman to speak at the conference

54 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

of self determination so that they may take their place as equal members in the council of nations’. It also entered explicitly into the debate over the British appeasement of Nazi Germany, insisting that any attempt to give Germany more control over colonial territories in exchange for peace in Europe would be ‘a great disservice to peace’. The conference took an explicitly anti-fascist stance and argued that the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, and the weak response of Britain to this, had been crucial in developing the self-confidence of the fascist powers in Europe. Announcing that ‘This conference stands unreservedly for the African peoples in their struggle for full self-determination,’ the conference resolution concluded by declaring its support for the following principals to be applied to all colonial possessions in Africa and the West Indies: 1) Universal adult suffrage and representative, democratic institutions. 2) Universal, free, compulsory education. 3) Freedom of speech, press and organisation. 4) Full rights for political, Trade Union, Co-operative and peasant organisations, and a minimum level of labour and social legislation. 5) The immediate abrogation of all existing repressive legislation. The 1939 Conference on African Peoples, Democracy and World Peace demonstrated that black organisations and individuals in 1930s Britain were engaging in depth with important concepts such as freedom and democracy at this crucial moment in world history. It also highlights the

Mrs Renner, a Nigerian barrister, at the first PanAfrican Congress, Manchester, November 10th, 1945.

fact that it was possible to align anti-fascism and anti-imperialism alongside one another at a time when many in Britain saw the British Empire as a crucial bulwark against the rise of fascism. The fact that the conference brought together a multiracial community of activists from a broad range of political positions demonstrates the importance of such events in forging connections between diverse activist networks and illustrates the importance of public debate to the politics of the 1930s. It also highlights the role of public events such as conferences as staging grounds for the playing out of conflicts between differing activists and organisations, as in the case of Padmore’s relationship with the Communists. The conference also stands as an example of the gendered nature of many public political gatherings in the 1930s at which women, despite the recent successes of the feminist movement, often continued to be marginalised or under-represented on the platform. The debates at the conference and the resolution produced after it could not help but be marked by the political context from which they emerged. The historian Susan Pennybacker has argued that in the years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War the question of transferring colonies to Germany as part of the process of appeasement was a live issue in British politics and this background placed any discussions on the future of African peoples into a particularly charged context. Pennybacker writes that ‘During 1938 and 1939, the debate about the viability and desirability of colonial transfers absorbed [George] Padmore’ in particular, and the resolution passed at the Conference on African Peoples, Democracy and World Peace illustrates that a considerably broader community of activists was also absorbed by the issue. By articulating explicitly anti-fascist and anti-imperial arguments alongside a focus on the role of workers, peasants and trade unionists as agents of change, the conference foreshadowed many of the debates which were to take place at the much better-known Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945. Daniel Whittall is a schoolteacher who is currently writing a history of the League of Coloured Peoples.

FURTHER READING Marc Matera, Black London (University of California, 2015). Hakim Adi, Marika Sherwood (eds), The Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (New Beacon, 1995). Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, 2009). Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization From Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and the End of Empire (Princeton, 2015). Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939 (Africa World Press, 2013). JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 55

REVIEWS

Gary Sheffield with the best books on the Battle of Waterloo Mathew Lyons Shakespeare in London • Roger Moorhouse Nazis in Ukraine

IN THE LATE evening and early dawn hours of April 24-25th, 1915, angry voices and shouts of protest reverberated throughout the streets of Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s imperial capital. In the days ahead this phenomenon would recur and soon spread across the Empire’s vast stretches. The Armenian intellectual, political and religious elite were arrested and transported to prisons in the Anatolian interior. Most would eventually perish, sharing the fate of well over one million of their compatriots. What we now recognise as the Armenian Genocide had begun. The arrests and executions effectively decapitated the Armenian nation’s leadership, presaging one of the 20th century’s greatest crimes against humanity. That this crime still captures headlines today finds its origins in how this history was at first silenced and then revised in the following decades. Two different stories of this genocide were written, even as the events were unfolding. A young Arnold Toynbee was tasked with gathering evidence for what, a year earlier, the Entente powers of Britain, France and Russia had declared ‘a crime against humanity and civilisation’. The resulting 1916 volume, co-edited with Viscount Bryce, contained hundreds of highly credible eyewitness accounts of Armenian persecutions, arrests, murders and deportations. Dismissed by the Young Turks and their German allies as wartime propaganda, the work has withstood modern historical scrutiny: 56 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

The Eternal Flame, at the Armenian Genocide Memorial, at Tsitsernakaberd, Yerevan.

SIGNPOSTS

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 Armen T. Marsoobian explores the complex history of one of the 20th-century’s worst and most neglected crimes against humanity. in 2005 Ara Sarafian published it in an uncensored critical edition, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, an invaluable guide for exploring the microhistory of individual events within the broader genocide. Almost simultaneous with this 1916 publication was the first denialist publication written by one of the genocide’s chief architects, Talaat Pasha (Ermeni vahşeti [Armenian Atrocities]). This photographically illustrated account of Armenian ‘revolutionary’ activities attempted to justify the state’s benign ‘reloca-

tion’ of women, children and the elderly away from the war zone. Thoroughly discredited, this work and its underlying thesis of Armenian disloyalty are still cited by the current Turkish government and the historians under its patronage. My grandfather, a photographer in Marsovan, took one of the photographs used in this book; the family memoirs explain that the photograph was a total fabrication. For many complicated reasons, public consciousness of the genocide began to fade in the 1930s and ’40s. Yet Raphael

Lemkin, the man who coined the word ‘genocide’, knew the Armenians’ fate, for he explicitly acknowledges that his motivation for creating the word rested partly on the Armenian case. For most of the last century, scholarly writing on the Ottoman Empire, the First World War and modern Turkey rarely referenced the genocide; that changed in the 1980s and ’90s with the pioneering works of Richard G. Hovannisian and Vahakn N. Dadrian. As Holocaust studies matured and began to expand into the now interdisciplinary field of genocide studies, more attention was paid to the Armenian case. A key moment in the Armenian Genocide’s historiography was the publication of Taner Akçam’s From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (2004) and Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (2005). These works by non-Armenian historians made it plain that the case for the genocide was not a partisan issue. Bloxham, a well-respected Holocaust scholar, places the ‘Armenian question’ and subsequent genocide into the context of imperial geopolitics and the rise of ethnic polarisation in the Empire’s latter decades. In 1995 Akçam, who has faced death threats for his work, was the first Turkish scholar openly to discuss the genocide and has

published important work since. In The Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2006), Akçam confronts the question of who were the responsible parties in the decision-making behind the genocide. In his most important book, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (2012), greater access to the Ottoman archives and a nuanced and careful reading of its documents make it clear that the Young Turks’ policy of Turkification and demographic transformation of Anatolia ultimately resulted in the genocide of its Christians. Rather than the exigencies of the eastern front’s wartime conditions, ending the Armenian desire for equitable treatment (the ‘Armenian Question’) motivated the 1915 events.

That this crime still captures headlines ... finds its origins in the how it was first silenced and then revised in the following decades With Dadrian, Akçam examined the postwar Ottoman military tribunals established to punish the perpetrators in Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (2011). These unprecedented trials might well have become the ‘Nuremberg’ of their time, but the rise of Atatürk’s nationalist movement and the competing interests of the victorious Entente powers brought the trials to a premature end. More than 30 years would pass before international law would evolve to the point where such crimes could be punished. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide went into effect in 1951, but it took nearly 50 years before the first genocide conviction – in Rwanda – was achieved. Ironically, Turkey’s July 1950 ratification of the Convention

helped provide the 20 signatories required to put the Convention into effect. Nonetheless, for Armenians justice has been delayed and denied for 100 years. As the genocide’s centenary has approached, publications have steadily increased. The 2011 English translation of Raymond Kévorkian’s monumental Le Génocide des Arméniens (2006) (The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History) is particularly noteworthy for both contextualising the genocide in the violence of the preceding 20 years and providing province-by-province detail. Geoffrey Robertson’s An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? (2014) marshals, in a lawyerly fashion, much evidence from the best historical accounts to reach the verdict that a genocide indisputably occurred. Some Turkish scholars have also begun rigorously examining this history. Conferences have brought together diverse groups of researchers, most notably the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (2011), co-edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark, is one fruit of these endeavours. Two of this important collection’s co-editors have subsequently produced studies. Göçek has written Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (2014), which explores the roots of the collective violence against Armenians by analysing memoirs, journals, newspapers and other primary sources. Suny’s ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide (2015) is a rigorous yet readable account of the genocide, providing the best explanation of the complex causes that led to the 1915 violence. As Suny himself has noted, Armenian Genocide scholarship has evolved from trying to prove that a genocide happened to recounting why and how this massive crime of violence could have occurred. Armen T. Marsoobian

An Eye for an Eye

A Global History of Crime and Punishment Mitchel P. Roth Reaktion 342pp £20

THIS accessible and well-written synthesis offers grim details of punishments prescribed for various ‘crimes’ across the globe over more than 2,000 years. What did the laws of the ancient world have in common with those of today? Rather a lot, it seems, for selected activities have always been legally defined as criminal acts punishable by sanction, including execution, mutilation, banishment, fines and imprisonment. The book’s nine chapters are divided into numerous subsections and follow a chronological structure. Three key themes are stressed: the relative status of victim and perpetrator typically determines the outcomes of cases and the punishments imposed; as societies develop, physical punishments tend to be discarded in favour of financial compensation and incarceration; where execution is used, the search for more humane methods has been constant. Many of the remarkable similarities identified result from common legal traditions, especially Roman civil law, English common law and Islamic or sharia law, blended with customary practices. Crimes evolved or were abandoned as societies changed. As the nation state emerged, rebellion and treason attracted ever more severe penalties, while penal servitude grew in importance:

someone had to row the galleys and provide the labour that sustained growing empires. In an unintended consequence of state centralisation, regional gangs used expanding road networks to rob and pillage. The aims and motives of criminals have not changed, only the opportunities open to them. Today globalisation defines the criminal frontier, but prohibition laws and financial cunning continue to spawn new forms of crime. Exceptionally, one chapter is devoted to a single offence, serial murder. Some well-known stories (Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Báthory) are recounted, together with a reflection on the usefulness of werewolf and vampire tales as a means to investigate its past incidence. The author is on firmer ground in the final two chapters, which bring the study up to the present day. The impact of colonialism, modern execution protocols, burgeoning prison populations, women’s rights and the re-emergence of crimes and punishments once thought consigned to history (witchcraft, shaming) are among the topics handled with sensitivity. Swaziland’s 1998 search for a new ‘hangperson’ elicits a flash of (gallows) humour, but generally this is sobering stuff. If criticism is warranted, it is that Roth focuses too much on the grisly mechanisms of punishment at the expense of deeper consideration of some important issues. The distinction between torture and punishment is not sufficiently explained, nor the competing purposes of punishment: retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, restitution, rehabilitation. Legal processes remain opaque. It is perhaps unsurprising that in a work of such wide chronological and geographical scope, a few inaccuracies, some abrupt transitions and a considerable amount of repetition have crept in. However, there is much to learn from this book, which rightly concludes that the global history of crime and punishment remains a work in progress. Katherine D. Watson JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS Thomas Jones Barker, An Incident at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Waterloo

A multi-book review THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO on June 18th, 1815 has been written about so frequently that one might think that any new book would lack originality. The books under review, published to coincide with the bicentenary of the battle, show that this is far from the case. Tim Clayton’s Waterloo, a military history of the battle, benefits from a non-Anglocentric perspective and new interpretations. Some are controversial: his playing down of the inexperience of British troops is a case in point. A much shorter account appears in the second volume of Rory Muir’s epic Wellington biography. Muir is particularly good on the sheer chaos of battle, which is reflected in contradictory sources. Waterloo seems especially bedevilled by controversies, but this, Muir argues persuasively, is because every element of the battle has been picked over by writers. If other Napoleonic battles were subjected to the same level of scrutiny, similar discrepancies would emerge. Napoleon Bonaparte is central to any discussion of Waterloo; he continues to fascinate and divide opinion, just as he did in his life58 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

time. David Crane usefully reminds us that Napoleon was not regarded by all Britons as the Corsican Ogre. Some, such as the radical writer William Hazlitt, saw him as a hero. Here is a paradox: Hazlitt had a hatred of tyranny, yet Napoleon was regarded by his enemies as a tyrant. When he reclaimed his crown in 1815, Napoleon reinvented himself, at least in theory, as a constitutional monarch. Andrew Roberts’ superb biography gives Napoleon the benefit of the doubt on this matter, although it is interesting to speculate whether this ‘new’ Napoleon would have lasted for long in the event of a French victory in 1815 that left him securely upon the throne. Another great controversy is whether by 1815 Napoleon was past his best as a military commander. The evidence is ambiguous. In the first stage of the brief campaign he out-generalled Wellington and Blücher by seizing the initiative and at Ligny on June 16th inflicted a sharp, although not decisive, defeat on the Prussian army. But at Waterloo Napoleon’s touch deserted him. As Clayton, following many other historians, points out, Napoleon lacked ‘key components’ of his previous winning formula, not least his by then deceased chief of staff, Berthier. The truth was

that Napoleon had ridden his luck too many times. He was capable of showing strategic brilliance, but a combination of errors, poor staffwork and flawed decisions by his principal subordinates, such as Ney and Grouchy (appointed of course, by Napoleon himself), undid him at Waterloo. As Muir stresses, Napoleon grossly underestimated Wellington’s skill as a general. Rather than attempting to manoeuvre the Anglo-Dutch army out of the Mont St Jean position, Napoleon launched a series of frontal and often poorly coordinated assaults. With the fall of the Allied-held farm of La Haye Saint – Crane has a particularly vivid account, told from the perspective of its King’s German Legion defenders – there was an opportunity to commit French reserves and bring the battle to a decisive conclusion. Napoleon failed to seize it and lived to rue his mistake. It is difficult to disagree with Roberts’ conclusion that Napoleon’s performance was such that he ‘deserved to lose’. By contrast, Wellington swiftly recovered from his setbacks at the beginning of the campaign and at Waterloo he showed his true worth as a commander. His reputation as primarily a defensive general comes from this battle; in reality, his instinct was always to

attack. At Waterloo Wellington had to hold his ground and wait for the Prussians to arrive. We are currently living through a golden age of Wellingtonian studies. Huw Davies’ fine book portrays Wellington as a deeply flawed man but a military genius. In particular, Wellington had by 1815 developed very well-attuned political skills. These came into play in the Waterloo campaign, not least in Wellington’s handling of the difficult relationship with his Prussian allies. Taken together, Davies and Muir provide a balanced and up-to-date assessment of Wellington’s generalship during the Hundred Days. The publication of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle in 1976 firmly established ‘soldier’s eye’ views of battles in Anglophone military history writing and all the books under review showcase the experience of the rank and file. Saul David’s book, which covers the British army in the period from the Restoration to Waterloo, is particularly useful in placing the Redcoat experience of 1815 into a wider context. David Crane takes this approach even further by including the experience of civilians, some of whom - like Charles and Mary Lamb - were nowhere near Mont St Jean on June 18th, 1815. Crane’s aim is to show how ‘individuals are touched by remote events’. On the whole this makes for a satisfying and unusual book and we can forgive him for appropriating the title of the finest British film of the Second World War. Paul O’Keeffe’s approach is similar, as he tells the story of the 50 days that separated

By 1815 Napoleon was past his best as a military commander ... By contrast, Wellington swiftly recovered from his setbacks and showed his true worth as a commander

REVIEWS Waterloo from Napoleon boarding the British warship that would carry him into exile. In terms of originality, as well as readability, Crane’s and O’Keeffe’s books score very highly indeed. The words on the title page of Alan Forrest’s Great Battles: Waterloo are misleading. It is not a conventional military history (the ‘military’ sections are the weakest in the book). Rather, Forrest has written a strikingly original analysis of responses to Waterloo and the memory of it, from 1815 to the present day. He shows that Waterloo means something different to Germans, Dutch and Belgians and, of course, the French, than to the British. Justifiably, the Prussians felt their role in the victory was marginalised by British triumphalism. Forrest reminds us that during his lifetime Wellington’s reputation was contested. He was both military hero and unpopular politician and the contradiction was not easily resolved. These books demonstrate that even an event as well known as Waterloo can yield new angles, ideas and interpretations. Gary Sheffield

BOOKS REVIEWED: Waterloo: Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny by Tim Clayton Little, Brown 588pp £25 Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814-1852 by Rory Muir Yale 714pp £30 Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts Penguin 976pp £12.99 Went the Day Well? Witnessing Waterloo by David Crane William Collins 366pp £20 All The King’s Men: The British Soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo by Saul David Viking 608pp £9.99 Wellington’s Wars: The Making of a Military Genius by Huw J Davies Yale 336pp £12.99 Waterloo by Alan Forrest Oxford 240pp £18.99 Waterloo: The Aftermath by Paul O’Keefe Vintage 392pp £8.99

EXHIBITION

Homes of the Homeless

Seeking Shelter in Victorian London Exhibition at the Geffrye Museum, London E2 Runs until July 12th, 2015

WHEN Penguin published The Buildings of England: London Except the Cities of London and Westminster, Pevsner’s text referred to the Rowton Houses in Camden Town as ‘still belonging to the slums’. This brought a threat of action against the publisher for defamation. Rowton Houses are now largely forgotten, but figure in the Homes of the Homeless exhibition at the Geffrye Museum. Starting with life on the streets, the exhibition reveals that the homeless had to sleep during the day because the police moved them on at night. Homelessness became an acute problem in London as the drift from the country to the towns accelerated in the early 19th century. Itinerant workers, ‘Navigators’ or ‘navvies’, arrived in vast numbers to dig the canal network and to build the railway lines. Where were they to be housed? What would they eat? If a labourer lost his job, he and his family might be made homeless. The rapid growth of slums, often in close proximity to wealthy areas, alarmed those of the middling class and motivated religious zealots. Faster, cheaper methods of graphic reproduction fed the consternation of the better-off. Magazines such as the Graphic, the Illustrated London News and the Sketch shocked their readers with pictures of poverty. Religious campaigners fuelled controversy with pamphlets detailing the horrors of the slums. For the most part the curators ignore missionary campaigns, instead concentrating on housing provision. This varied from the municipal workhouse to common lodging houses. Visitors to the

Geffrye can see what ‘picking oakum’ actually means; the bold may try a replica ‘coffin bed’ for size (inset, left). Prince Albert, in his quest to improve housing for the poor, took up the architect Henry Roberts in the 1840s. Roberts was the honorary architect to the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes. Large watercolours and a model of his flats for the society open the exhibition. Built near the British Museum in 1849, they still stand today. They illustrate a problem for the reformers: how to design large buildings, for multiple occupation by separate families, without them being liable to Window Tax? A humble fourthrate family house with six windows or fewer was exempt, a large block for a hundred people would be taxed at a shilling per window. Roberts was commissioned to design model cottages for poor families, which were shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the year that the Window Tax was repealed, permitting the building of immense blocks. Paintings in the exhibition tend to be sentimental rather than controversial, our empathy with photographs is more immediate. Jack London concealed a small camera about him when he lived rough in London. He used his surreptitious photographs to illustrate his People of the Abyss (1903). Photographs, whether taken secretly, or by those in positions of power, allow for no self-conscious posing: a queue of women awaiting free tea, eye the photographer unconcernedly. Almost life-size, their steady gaze is disconcerting. Their ragged clothes not a style statement, but the only ones that they possessed. Charles Dickens had known the horror of the workhouse and loathed the blacking factory to which he was sent to work. A fragment of a blacking bottle is shown, as is a bowl such as might have been used by Oliver Twist. An unexpected exhibit is a stuffed and mounted stag’s head from a Rowton House. The caption claims that they were considered as luxurious as gentlemen’s clubs in the West End. Spartan as the establishments of Pall Mall and St James’s may be, they are not as grim as Rowton lodgings. Pevsner was not dragged into court: the management of the Rowton Houses were content with an apology and an erratum slip. Sportingly, they sent Pevsner an invitation to spend a night to see for himself. His reaction is not recorded, but one suspects he did not see the joke. David Brady

A queue of women awaiting free tea ... Their ragged clothes not a style statement, but the only ones they possessed

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

The Longest Afternoon

The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo Brendan Simms Allen Lane 160pp £14.99

‘IT IS UP TO YOU to save the world’, said Tsar Alexander to the Duke of Wellington as he left the Congress of Vienna to take charge of the allied army hastily reassembled to confront Napoleon in the summer of 1815. Britain’s allies comprised British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops and has been

60 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

called ‘the first Nato operation’. Prussia’s General von Blücher also played a leading role in the battle, which finally ended over 20 years of total war in Europe and copper-fastened a peace deal that was to stabilise the continent for nearly a century. As we enter a period of commemorative overdrive, Brendan Simms has unearthed a largely hidden story within a much told tale, in a book that is as brief as it is original. Amid bulging armies pushing against each other on the bloodsoaked fields, straining to gain advantage by cavalry charges and hails of artillery, a crucial pressure point in the struggle was for control of the farm of La Haye Sainte, which held together the raggedy allied lines. Its defence was entrusted to an elite band of soldiers from the 2nd Light Battalion King’s German Legion, who, to modern eyes, might seem to present an anomaly: a ‘hybrid’ force of native Germans fighting in British army

Simms reminds us that British history is more entangled with that of Europe than we care to admit uniforms under British command. However, these men were no mercenaries and embodied much more than an awkward hangover from Europe’s tangled dynastic politics. By mining new manuscript sources, Simms proves that ideas mattered to the brave riflemen, who held the makeshift fort at the farm at La Haye Sainte, firing at the enemy from the piggery, hayloft and orchard and sustaining themselves with meagre spoils (wine from the farm’s cellar, peas from the ground). These men combined loyalty to George III with nascent German patriotism and hatred of the Napoleonic army which stretched back to the fall of

their homeland in 1803. Numbering just 400, they stood strong against wave after wave of attack from thousands of French troops – baring the brunt of the siege until Prussian troops arrived to turn back the tide. Simms reminds us that British history is more entangled with that of Europe than we care to admit. Britain’s two wars with Germany in the 20th century sometimes obscure the nations’ strong cultural, strategic and military connections. The experience of the 2nd Light Battalion contains within it another lesson, when set against the unravelling of the Congress system after 1815 and the fraying of the European project in recent times: that such alliances could work effectively when they were held together by the immediate concerns of humble people – survival, unity against a common enemy, and the protection of the homeland – but soon came into difficulty when they were justified, by elites, by recourse to vague supranational ideals. John Bew

REVIEWS

The Poet’s Tale

Chaucer and the Year That Made the Canterbury Tales Paul Strohm Profile Books 284pp £15.99

THE RECORDS of Geoffrey Chaucer’s official activities for the court are plentiful but they reveal nothing about his career as a writer. Worse, Chaucer’s compositions contain only elliptical references to his life and contemporaneous events. Faced by these conundrums, Strohm follows Chaucer’s advice and makes ‘vertu of necessitee’, narrowing his focus to one turbulent year and the known events of his subject’s life. Strohm has a time traveller’s gift for animating historical materials with vivid, clear language. The arcane practices of the London wool custom; the corrupt activities of its collector, the grocer and mayor Sir Nicholas Brembre; city street life; the proceedings of the Wonderful Parliament and the riotous recreations available at Westminster – there are few better introductions to these topics as they impinged on Chaucer and impinge they did, with a vengeance. Come 1386, Chaucer had completed his masterwork, Troilus and Criseyde; enjoyed a lucrative position as controller of the wool custom, where he was Brembre’s associate; was returned as a knight of the shire (MP) for Kent; and lived rent-free above Aldgate. But long-term separation from his socialite wife, Philippa de Roet, hardened into estrangement and consequent isolation from

his former patron, John of Gaunt. At parliament Chaucer witnessed the trouncing of Richard II’s faction, to which he was affiliated, by the Lords Appellant. In the prevailing winds of hostility towards royal appointees, he resigned his custom house post. He also lost his Aldgate accommodation. Alienated, jobless and homeless, Chaucer took the path of necessitee and left the city of his birth when others were soon to lose their heads (his fellowwriter, Thomas Usk, and Brembre among them), victims of the Appellants’ purge. Cut adrift, Chaucer headed across into Kent where he conceived and began a new kind of literature, the Canterbury Tales. Like any Chaucerian tale, this episode is open to debate. Chaucer was perhaps more familiar with Boaccaccio’s Decameron than Strohm allows; the evidence for his Kent exile is thin; and it was brief: by 1389, the crisis over, Chaucer was back in London to take up the significant royal appointment of Clerk of the Works. In his influential Social Chaucer (1989) Strohm delineated the son of a wine merchant who, having married a social superior and acquired his gentility from royal service not inheritance, was on the margins of more powerful groups: the nobility, landed gentry and great merchants. Now Strohm adds further characteristics: a creature of other people’s designs, vulnerable to political struggles and expendable, something of a loner. He colours them with the occasional ‘truth-saturated invention’, such as Chaucer’s feelings, but that is easily forgiven in a book so scrupulously attentive to historical sources and medieval poetry. Evidence from the latter is used sparingly. The paradoxical result is that The Poet’s Tale is much more about history than literature – the very thing for which Chaucer is justly famous and revered. A bravura demonstration of how the two categories entwine is not the least of this book’s many achievements. Peter Brown

The History of Bhutan Karma Phuntsho

Haus Publishing 659pp £30

FLATTENED OUT, Bhutan’s landmass might stretch across as much as half of her southern neighbour, India. But Bhutan is a small, remote and mountainous state nestled in the Himalayas. Unsurprisingly, much of Bhutan’s history remains shrouded in mystery, much like the clouds covering the ancient monasteries perched perilously on its mountain slopes, or the accounting methods of the Gross National Happiness Index that claims Bhutan is the happiest place on the planet. Spanning from the ancient period to the present, this book gives readers a glimpse into this remarkable corner of Earth.

Phuntsho’s achievement is a volume that will serve as a useful reference for travellers and scholars alike To the north, Tibet exerted a tremendous influence on Bhutan and half of the book examines the role of Tibetan Buddhism and imperial expansionism over 1,000 years, from the seventh century to the emergence of a unified Bhutanese polity in the 17th. From the mid-18th century, the balance of power relations shifted towards India. From George Bogle’s expedition on behalf of the freshly defeated British East India Company in 1774, to Nehru’s state visit on a yak

in 1958, Bhutan has been drawn closer into the orbit of (British) Indian commercial and geopolitical concerns and has been profoundly reshaped in the process. The repercussions of the 19th-century ‘Great Game’, Phuntsho notes, were felt as far east as Bhutan, via Tibet. By the turn of the century, however, the angst-ridden mind of British officialdom turned from Russian expansion in Asia to the threat posed by the Chinese reconquest of Tibet and to making Bhutan a buffer-state to India. After 1947 this formed the basis of India’s ‘maternal’ relations with Bhutan, especially as China asserted itself in the Sino-Indian borderlands. Bhutan’s role and agency in regional geopolitics is a pivotal and fascinating, albeit rushed, aspect of Phuntsho’s narrative. The book’s strength is the synthesis into a single volume of the scholarship on Bhutan. However this is also its weakness. Driven by the nature of the surviving sources, political history and the elites figure at the expense of economic, social or cultural history and the changing lives of the Bhutanese. Alas, the book makes little of fascinating details – such as the electric apparatus presented by the Turner mission to Bhutan in 1783 – to enliven the narrative. What did the Bhutanese make of the electric-jolts produced by the device? How did the British describe their response? How did these sorts of cultural encounters transform the diplomatic relations between Bhutan and British India? Such questions are not answered in this fast-paced political history. Driven by the impulse to compile a comprehensive history of Bhutan, Phuntsho has written a history of a nation state. This is ironic, not only because of his wariness of writing ‘nationalist’ history, but because, as he acknowledges, Bhutan was for most of its history not a unit at all and in recent times is integrating more deeply into regional and global networks of political influence, trade and tourism. Phuntsho’s achievement, though, is a volume that will serve as useful reference for travellers and scholars of Bhutan alike. Jagjeet Lally JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine Eric C. Steinhart

Cambridge University Press 263pp £65

UKRAINE stood at the very heart of Hitler’s perverted vision for Eastern Europe; the centrepiece of the Nazi Lebensraum project and an economic powerhouse, it was also home to nearly three million Jews. Such a subject would be difficult to cover in fewer than 300 pages. However, technically, this book is not about Ukraine in its entirety, but a micro-study of German policy in the district of Transnistria, a small territory (about the size of the Netherlands) in the south-west of the country that fell under Roma-

Steinhart has [produced] an illuminating and valuable contribution to Holocaust studies nian control following the Nazi invasion in 1941. Caveat emptor. That aside, this is an excellent and rigorous study. Using a wealth of archival sources, many of which have only recently been released, the author recreates Nazi racial policy in a district where a large ethnic German minority promised a plethora of sympathetic collaborators with whom to push forward 62 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

the planned Germanisation programme. That collaboration, spurred by the arrival of a team of experts and facilitators from Berlin, known as Sonderkommando R, was not slow to emerge and soon extended to the mass execution of the Nazis’ perceived enemies. In four months, local ethnic German militias murdered 50,000 Jews. Of course, it was not all plain sailing from the Nazi perspective. For one thing, the ‘Black Sea Germans’, though the largest ethnic German community in the Soviet Union, were considered racially rather dubious, not least as they had long been isolated from mainstream German influence and evidently had intermarried with their Jewish neighbours. Moreover, while welcoming their new rulers when it suited them, local ethnic Germans were also not above hiding Jews or being creative with their own genealogy. As a result, Steinhart says, normal Nazi criteria had to be jettisoned, leaving Berlin’s administrators effectively to make up racial policy as they went along. Crucially, Steinhart also focuses his attention on the factors that made those ethnic Germans into such willing and murderous tools of Nazi policy. Surprisingly, perhaps, he concludes that antisemitism was rather low on their list of motivators, behind anticipatory obedience, venality and, most importantly, anti-Soviet sentiment. As in the example of the Baltic States, recent persecution at Soviet hands meant that the Nazis’ local collaborators were often anti-Soviet first and antisemitic second. Indeed, Steinhart suggests that many of the perpetrators in Transnistria only became antisemites after participating in the Holocaust. This is an important conclusion, which draws on and amplifies the better-known work of Christopher Browning, Wendy Lower and Jan Gross, while also concurring with those such as Bogdan Musial (who is not cited) who posit anti-Soviet sentiment

as a central motivator for the Nazis’ local collaborators. Though academic in its approach, the book is pleasingly readable and wears its considerable scholarly credentials lightly enough to appeal to the general reader. Steinhart has mastered the available material on the German occupation of Transnistria and has much of interest to say on the nature of Nazi rule there and the motivations of those that collaborated with them. The book is not about ‘Ukraine’ as most people would understand it, but nonetheless it is an illuminating and valuable contribution to Holocaust studies. Roger Moorhouse

Enemy in the East

Hitler’s Secret Plans to Invade the Soviet Union Rolf-Dieter Müller I.B. Tauris 320pp £25

IN THIS VOLUME, Rolf-Dieter Müller, former director of research at the German Military History Research Office, sets out to undermine what he regards as a persistent myth in the scholarship on the German Barbarossa campaign against the Soviet Union launched in June 1941, namely that this was an idea thought up by Hitler only in 1940 and then imposed on his armed forces, who were compelled to do what he ordered. This is a useful exercise, if he is right about the ‘myth’ of Barbarossa in the popular view of the war, not least because it shows that decision-making in National

Socialist Germany was never a one-man show. Müller is not helped by his English title. The ‘secret plans’ turn out chiefly to be a series of contingency plans drawn up by the armed forces in the 1930s, because they were forced to think about possible military scenarios, particularly in the light of rapid Soviet rearmament, rather than genuine invasion planning. As is well known, Hitler always harboured the idea that at some point Germany might need ‘living space’ in the East, but this was hardly secret and certainly not from the Russians. But there are no ‘secret plans’ hatched by Hitler to invade in the 1930s, only a deterioration in German-Soviet relations, as well as much internal Party rhetoric about the eventual settlement with Bolshevism. Müller has interesting things to say about the efforts to woo Poland as a satellite state in early 1939, which might, he speculates, have led to an earlier war against the Soviet Union, but once Poland refused Hitler’s overtures, Poland became the chief target, not the Soviet Union. When we get to 1940-41, Müller argues that the ‘secret plans’ were actually the army’s idea, not Hitler’s. Faced with a growing military threat in the East, as Stalin moved into his sphere of influence agreed in the NonAggression Pact, the army fuelled the desire to inflict a major defeat on the Red Army, in order to restore the balance of power in Eastern Europe in Germany’s favour and keep the Soviet Union in its place. This initiative is not unknown in the historiography, but by putting the argument this way round, Hitler’s ‘secret plans’ more or less evaporate. Building on the army’s initiative and frustrated at the refusal of Britain to give up in the summer of 1940, Hitler saw in an Eastern campaign the chance of killing a number of birds with one stone: Britain would be robbed of any chance of a European alliance, while Jewish-Bolshevism would be destroyed and a new territorial empire created to give Germany European mastery. The war that Hitler wanted was much greater in scope and political aim than the

REVIEWS army plan, though it was some time before it was certain that Hitler would authorise it. When and why this happened is a much weaker part of the book, perhaps because for Müller’s argument it is what the army did in 1940 that really matters. This is nonetheless an important argument because it finally lays to rest the myth established after 1945 by the German generals that they had been forced along a path they had not wanted by a wayward commander who did not understand the risks he ran. Right through to the invasion in summer 1941, the army underestimated the Soviet Union and assumed that, if they could knock out the French army in six weeks, they must surely be able to do the same to Soviet forces. Of course, this is a narrowly military inter-

Hitler always harboured the idea that at some point Germany might need ‘living space’ in the East pretation of events and although Müller does not ignore politics and ideology, it takes a back seat. Yet Hitler’s vision of a new territorial empire, peopled by sturdy German peasants and governed with harsh colonial methods, nevertheless created a campaign for which the army leadership had not really been planning. Their concerns were generally governed by power-political considerations, while Hitler was motivated by a longing for a new German hegemony that would rescue Europe and European ‘culture’, create a new German imperial ruling class and solve Germany’s tight economic and resources situation. The army’s plan to smash the Red Army quickly and put the Soviet Union in its place was more modest, though it still seems as fanciful as Hitler’s. But no doubt NATO was drawing up similar contingency plans 20 years later and may be doing so again today. Richard Overy

POLITICAL SCULPTURE traditional art training, winning many prizes and THERE IS AN over life-sized bronze of Sir scholarships, but he longed for something edgier. Winston Churchill in bullish pose to the left of the door from Members’ Lobby into the House of While expressing admiration for his contempCommons’ Chamber. The dull, dark brown patina oraries, notably Henry Moore, Alberto Giacomof the majority of this sculpture has been rubbed etti, Elizabeth Frink, Charles Sergeant Jagger and Jacob Epstein, it was the grandfather of modern away on the right foot to a shiny, light pinkiesculpture, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), who was brown: an indication of its role as talisman ‘his God, his guiding star’. to nervous Tory maiden speechers. In recent On leaving the Royal Academy, Roberts-Jones decades, the feet of David Lloyd George and Clement Attlee have also received a good rubbing established a studio in Chelsea, which was hit for similar reasons. Representative and symbolic, during the London Blitz, destroying most of the sculptor’s pre-war work in the process. At three-dimensional and tactile and, unlike a the time he was serving in the Royal Artillery, painting, intruding benignly or otherwise into initially stationed in Northern Ireland, and later our interior and exterior spaces, love it or hate it, saw combat in Burma, of which he recalled, as public portrait sculpture matters. paraphrased by Jonathan If you walk from Members’ Black, that he had ‘never Lobby out into Parliament Square been more frightened, and and then along Whitehall to yet had never felt more alive Trafalgar Square, you will pass and observant’. On his return, many more memorials to Roberts-Jones’ experience various worthies, four of which and status as a war veteran, in (including Clement Atlee in tandem with his talent, was to Members’ Lobby and Field give him the edge over his fellow Marshal Slim on Whitehall), sculptors in getting public monumonu are the work of Ivor Robertsment commissions. Jones (1913-1996), a name The Churchill sculpture in perhaps unfamiliar to History Members’ Lobby is by Oscar Today regulars, this reviewer Nemon. In Parliament included. And yet, during his Square, however, you can lifetime, Roberts-Jones was Abstraction and Reality view another mighty bronze regarded as Britain’s leading The Sculpture of figure of the great man by figure sculptor for public monIvor Roberts-Jones Roberts-Jones. Unveiled by uments: the ‘last icon maker’. Churchill’s widow, ClemenThe present volume is the Jonathan Black and Sara Ayres tine, in 1973, it is arguably the first in-depth study of his life Philip Wilson Publishers 320pp £25 sculptor’s masterpiece. and work – covering drawings In support of this, two of the five chapters in the and preparatory sketches, as well as sculptures – current volume focus on this commission and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research then subsequent versions in Oslo, New Orleans Council and the Henry Moore Institute. It will and Prague. The authors rightly draw attention go a long way to restoring this lost reputation. to the resonances between Roberts-Jones’ depiction of Churchill – an imposing dark mass in his great coat, leaning on a walking stick and brooding into eternity – and Rodin’s controversial bronze megalith of the writer, Honoré de Balzac (1896-8). That Roberts-Jones achieves such presence and gravitas is all the more surprising, when you discover that the sculptor was deeply ambivalent about his subject, describing Britain’s redoubtable war leader as Abstraction and Reality contains a sequence resembling ‘a boiled sweet’ in a uniform. But of scholarly essays, followed by a catalogue then many Britons, past and present, are similarraisonné, and is very well illustrated. Setting the scene, the opening chapter covers Roberts-Jones’ ly ambivalent. Yet, for Roberts-Jones, such contradiction was crucial. As he himself delife and career. The future artist was born in clared, in order for the portrait sculpture to truly Shropshire in 1913, initially studied painting at ‘live’, it must possess ‘dignity and caricature, a Goldsmiths College, London (1932-34), after kind of irony’, as well as ‘edge and a suggestion which, having made the decision to focus on of an inner life’. sculpture, he transferred to the Royal Academy Jacqueline Riding Schools in Piccadilly. Here, he received a very

The dark brown patina of the over life-size bronze of Churchill has been rubbed away on the right foot by Tory maiden speechers

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

The Cause of All Nations

An International History of the American Civil War Don H. Doyle Basic Books 382pp £20

THIS TOUR DE FORCE stunningly reconceives the American Civil War. It shows how European public opinion impelled the North to free slaves; how transatlantic responses to the conflict clinched Union victory; and how both outcomes quashed French and Spanish imperial ventures in Latin America and fostered political liberty in Europe. Against entrenched monarchical and clerical rule – Habsburg, Bourbon, Napoleonic, papal – that dominated post-1848 Europe, the outpouring of antislavery sentiment empowered liberal democracy in Britain, France and Italy. European support was crucial to both American combatants, the South to legitimate secession, the North to scuttle it. The Confederacy ultimately forfeited European recognition because it failed to break the Union blockade of Southern cotton exports and armament imports, because its self-serving emissaries proved inept diplomats and because slavery and self-government came to seem antithetical. European antislavery feeling made foreign recruitment a vital asset to the Union. The 1862 emancipation proclamation triggered massive enlistment abroad, notably from Germany and Ireland, that produced over 40 per cent of Union forces. While Confederate armies bled and dwindled, fresh recruits sustained Northern armies despite heavy losses. 64 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

However, until late 1862, Northern victory seemed highly unlikely. Before hostilities began, Southern states established a de jure government and lobbied their cause through envoys and consuls in Europe. Lincoln’s diplomats began to replace them only in 1861 and some Confederate sympathisers remained in US legations and consular offices. To dissuade border slave-states from joining the rebellion, Lincoln’s narrowly legalistic first inaugural disclaimed any notion of ending slavery. The embargo of Southern cotton idled European factories and impoverished their workers. British-based blockade-runners defied official neutrality with impunity and in July 1862 the Confederate warship Alabama was launched from Liverpool to terrorise Union shipping. Meanwhile, disastrous Union battlefield defeats suggested that the Confederacy might be invincible. In a spellbinding chapter, Doyle recounts the rise and fall of foreign support for the South. In August 1862 Confederate forces routed the Union army and prepared to surround and capture Washington.

Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations is a tour de force that stunningly re-conceives the American Civil War In September the British prime minister Palmerston proposed joint mediation with France, based on Confederate recognition. His rival Gladstone went further: ‘The South have made an army; they are making a navy [made by Britain]; and what is more than either – they have made a nation.’ Lincoln’s rumoured emancipation proclamation initially furthered intervention, European leaders feared ‘exciting the passions of slaves’ and cotton economy chaos. The Emperor Napoleon III thought ‘the time has come to recognise the South’. All this was confounded by fortuitous events in Italy, a nation newly uniting just as the United

States, the Italian Risorgimento’s role-model, was fragmenting. Italian unification begun by Garibaldi’s famed exploits was now being consummated by his march on the Roman papal states, which were protected by Napoleon III’s troops. But on August 28th, 1862, at Aspromonte, Garibaldi confronted the regular Italian army, compelled by Italy’s king and cabinet to appease France, and was wounded and imprisoned. The widely beloved hero’s uncertain fate –from fatal wound or court-martial – sent shock waves north and west. One hundred thousand Garibaldi supporters demonstrated in Hyde Park. George Perkins Marsh, the US minister to Italy, persuaded Italian officials to grant amnesty and offered asylum in America for Garibaldi, who had previously declined a Union army generalship, unless the North would free the slaves. Just then came timely notices of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. This enabled Garibaldi to save the Union, ‘my second home’, without leaving Italy. Thanking Marsh, he appealed ‘to all the democrats of Europe to join us in fighting this holy battle’ against conjoined papacy and Confederacy. ‘All tyrannies sympathize’, remarked Marsh, as Pope Pius IX endorsed the South; ‘the slave-driver and the priest are twin brothers.’ With Napoleon III disconcerted by Garibaldian fervour and England, like France, shrinking from war against the revitalised North, foreign support of Southern sovereignty collapsed. That the emancipation proclamation brought no race riots doomed Southern recognition. Lincoln brilliantly cast America’s Civil War as no mere domestic cause but all humanity’s, ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth’. Old World monarchical statesmen marvelled that the American republic had raised a citizen’s army and weathered traumatic loss without a break in mandated succession from one elected regime to the next. Union victory, won in substantial measure by European popular sentiment, virtually rescued democracy from global extinction. David Lowenthal

Whistle Stop Philip White

ForeEdge 320pp £19.99

HARRY TRUMAN’s unexpected victory in the presidential election of 1948 was immortalised by the premature headline printed in the Chicago Tribune, ‘Dewey Defeats Truman,’ which allowed the triumphant, beaming president to gleefully pose for photographs holding a copy aloft. Philip White’s Whistle Stop embraces with gusto the ever-appealing narrative of a dramatic comeback against all odds, engagingly recounting Truman’s tireless speaking tour of the United States that turned the tide of the election. Covering 31,700 miles of train-track and making 352 speeches, White paints a picture of a politician outworking his opponents and appealing to the nation through a straightforward commitment to liberal values. Truman faced a daunting campaign in 1948, with the Republican challenge of New York Governor Thomas Dewey and revolts from within his own party. From the right came Strom Thurmond and the ‘Dixiecrats’, segregationist Southern Democrats, horrified at the Civil Rights platform advocated by their Northern colleagues and from the left came Henry Wallace, former vice-president and representative of the Progressive Party, advocating an end to the nascent Cold War and extensive domestic reform. With his fractured support base and status as an ‘accidental president’ in power only because of

REVIEWS FDR’s untimely death, Truman’s victory is rightly acknowledged as an impressive achievement. Whistle Stop’s most fascinating contribution to what is a well-tilled field is the focus on the Democrat’s newly created Research Division and their invaluable role in supplying Truman with the information needed for his mammoth tour. Able to crack jokes about or lavish praise upon provincial sports teams, minor celebrities and local history, the president could also speak directly to the political concerns of each audience. The Research Division’s work also provides a fascinating insight into the era of presidential elections when the height of technology was a telephone on a train and campaign funding was so limited that the president could barely afford the cost of his transportation. Whistle Stop is a lively and detailed telling of a hugely important election, yet it is not without its faults. At times the author appears a little too wedded to the narrative of Truman, the underdog. As president, Truman was able to exercise powers such as embarrassing the notorious ‘do nothing’ Congress by calling them into emergency session, advantages that are rarely noted. There is also little sense of Truman as a complex and flawed human being. Whistle Stop veers at times towards hagiography in its celebration of Truman the man and the politician. Also, despite some efforts to incorporate foreign affairs into the narrative, little is said on how the father of containment policy or his Research Division sought to use foreign affairs to their advantage. Entertaining and engaging, if not hugely original, Whistle Stop’s narrative of a politician connecting with his electorate through research, hard work and progressive values is an inspiring one. As campaigns in the United States gear up for 2016, it appears increasingly unlikely to be repeated. Thomas Tunstall Allcock

Army and the Nation Steven I. Wilkinson

Harvard University Press 304pp £29.95

THERE IS ONE FACT that links nearly all post-colonial countries. At some stage the army marches out of the barracks and seizes power. India is very nearly the only country where that has not happened. Yet India inherited the same British-trained army as all the other British colonies and, in par-

Before independence, the senior officers of both India and Pakistan were trained at Sandhurst and were colleagues ticular, Pakistan. Before independence, the senior officers of both India and Pakistan were trained at Sandhurst and were colleagues. In Pakistan the army seized power just 11 years after independence and remains a major political player. So why not in India? Wilkinson sets out to answer this in a diligently researched book coming to the conclusion that it did not happen by chance. The Congress party, which won freedom, had long examined what to do with the army and soon after coming to power made sure the army commanders understood that they now answered to elected civilians. The steps varied from the symbolic to the more far reaching. So Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first

prime minister, made the Delhi residence of the British commander-in-chief, his home. In the Indian cabinet the commander-in-chief was not given a seat, unlike the pre-independence viceroy and commander-in-chief. The title was changed to the less grand one of chief of army staff and it was decreed that at state occasions the army top brass would rank below politicians and civil servants. Along with changes to the command structure, this meant General J.N. Chaudhuri, chief of the army staff from 1962 to 1966, could write in his autobiography: ‘I can say now with the utmost confidence that to the best of my knowledge, no officer in the Indian army, however senior, has ever thought of a military coup at any time.’ However, the Indians have not met their objective of converting an army constructed to suit the imperial power’s objective of divide and rule policy into a truly national one. The British, believing in the martial race theory, argued that only certain Indians were capable of fighting, recruited their soldiers from very selected areas. In 1929, less then 20 years before independence, the northern state of Punjab contributed 54.4 per cent of the troops when it had 6.5 per cent of the population, while three huge provinces with 39 per cent of the population had less than 3 per cent. Wilkinson’s analysis of recruits from 1998 to 2009 shows that the promise of a flood of recruits from states that before 1947 did not get a look in has not been fulfilled. The Indian Supreme Court is now hearing a case alleging discrimination and like all such legal issues in India this promises to run and run. The Indians have also paid a price for making sure it is coup proof with military and strategic inefficiency. Nuclear weapons are controlled outside the army creating an asymmetric situation and placing it as a disadvantage with respect to Pakistan. The challenge for the current Modi government is how to make sure this is rectified and to make the army more truly national. Neither will be easy. Mihir Bose

CONTRIBUTORS John Bew is author of Castlereagh: War, Enlightenment, and Tyranny (Quercus, 2012). Mihir Bose is an awardwinning author and journalist. David Brady is a historian of art, architecture and design. Peter Brown is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Kent and author of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 2011). Jagjeet Lally is Lecturer in the History of Early Modern and Modern India at UCL. David Lowenthal is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London. Armen T Marsoobian is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University and author of Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia (I.B. Tauris, 2015). Roger Moorhouse is author of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 (Bodley Head, 2014). Richard Overy has published extensively on the Second World War. His latest book is the Oxford Illustrated History of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2015). Jacqueline Riding was formerly curator at the Palace of Westminster and specialises in Georgian and Victorian history and art. Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. He is currently writing a concise biography of the Duke of Wellington. Thomas Tunstall Allcock is a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. Katherine D Watson is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes, and author of Forensic Medicine in Western Society: A History (Routledge, 2011).

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Mantel on More Like Paul Lay, I detest the ‘binary representation’ of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More (From the Editor, March 2015). But I do not believe Wolf Hall is part of the problem. In my novel, I showed Cromwell’s long fascination with More, his often reluctant sympathy with him. They share a common intellectual background and, if they are divided on one fatal issue, they are united on many. I formed my picture of their relationship from More’s own letters. I situate More’s heresy hunting in the context of his time, but I cannot treat it as an aberration, a minor flaw in an otherwise impeccable character. It was at the core of what he did and what he was. He was proud of it and, in the light of his worldview, it made sense. But he conceded neither sincerity nor humanity to those who disagreed with him; he relished the thought of their pain, which he hoped would be prolonged for eternity. In his century or ours, we are entitled to be repelled by this. It is convenient for certain churchmen to describe my view of More as arising from my ‘rejection of a Catholic upbringing’. It makes the problem mine, not theirs; it saves them having to make a proper answer, or explain their hypocrisy in allowing people to regard More as a champion of individual freedom, when in fact he was a man of his time, his conscience captive to tradition and authority. In A Man for All Seasons Robert Bolt wrenched him out of his age and context and polished him up to make him acceptable to a secular and liberal era, an era whose values he would have abhorred. The play and the film implanted a mistaken idea of More in people’s minds and the Roman Catholic church has taken complacent advantage ever since. I believe that the portraits in 66 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

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my novel are fair. When the story is told in another medium, the balance dips and sways. On television we see Cromwell’s little children die in front of us. Of course it puts us on his side. Is this manipulative? I don’t think so. You could portray Thomas More in the midst of his family at Chelsea and no doubt that would be very affecting, too. But this happens to be a story about Cromwell. He is indeed portrayed in the television version as ‘a gentle family man’: but as much else, too. Historically, we cannot be sure how Cromwell’s wife and daughters died, or when. In the novel I offer my best guess. The screenwriter followed it. When the deaths are shown, it rivets the attention and no doubt provokes more of an emotional response than the indirection of the same pages in the novel. But what should the screenwriter have done? Stripped away Cromwell’s family context, as if it somehow gives him an unfair advantage? Minimised his losses, as if fathers in the past did not mourn their children? That would be bad drama and bad history. We can trust viewers to keep on using their heads, even if we wring their hearts. I cannot agree that Anton Lesser’s nuanced, masterly performance showed More as ‘vile … despicable’. His desiccated precision may have shocked those who expected a warmer portrait, but one must bear in mind that the story is not told from some lofty neutral viewpoint; it is seen through Cromwell’s eyes and his inferences are ours. If you were a member of the London evangelical community in the 1520s and early 1530s, as many of Cromwell’s friends were, More was a deeply unpleasant proposition. You feared him, you didn’t trust him an inch and you certainly did not think he was holy. I dissent also from the idea that historical fiction tends to

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falsify because it ‘needs heroes’. Why does it? Readers are not simple-minded. They can entertain ambiguities, appreciate complexity. My story about Cromwell is not finished. I am still dwelling on those complexities and ambiguities, looking for a shape in them. One thing I can be sure of: the man who emerges will not be a hero or a villain: why should he be? I am writing for grown-ups. I am not interested in polishing up those prejudices to which age has already given a fascinating patina and I am doing my best to avoid reproducing ingrained errors. In one matter I do agree with the editor’s views: Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Cromwell biography, now in progress, will bring clarity and will take us back to the sources so we can ground our opinions in context and even agree on a few facts. Sadly for the bishops, history isn’t just what you would like it to be. Hilary Mantel via email

Ricardian Revenge It is good to hear of the work of the Cromwell Association, and of the quality of its journal, Cromwelliana (From the Editor, May 2015) but to ‘contrast, for example, the literature produced by the Cromwell Association with that of the Richard III Society’ one’s needs to produce some evidence to back up the statement. In fact the academic publications of the latter society and its charitable arm, the Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, stand comparison with the achievements of any specialist historical society. I do not know the journal of the Cromwell Association so will not attempt to make invidious comparisons with The Ricardian, the annual 200-page journal of late 15th-century studies produced by the society and filled with articles and reviews by leading historians of that period,

but the fact remains that both journals are, I am sure, serious contributions to the history of the period they cover. The quarterly Bulletin of the Richard III Society has to cater for the wide range of interests of its membership but it also contains a number of shorter, well-researched articles. From the monumental achievement of the four-volume publication of the manuscript Harley 433, the society and its sister charity have published many original texts and academic studies. It is sufficient to give just a few titles – The Alien Communities of London in the 15th Century; The Merchant Taylors’ Company, Court Minutes 1486-1493; The Logge Register of PCC Wills 1479-1486; English Wills Proved in the Prerogative Court of York 1477-1499 (both these last fully calendared) – of the many produced to evidence a fine publishing record. To this might be added the published papers from the society’s Triennial Conference, held as part of its remit to support the dissemination of, and education in, later 15th-century studies. This has been aided for many years by several bursaries that have helped students in further education peruse a wide range of 15th-century studies. Finally, few societies have a record as good in involving its membership in serious historical research. Many dozens helped in some way in the production of the 28,000 records in the ‘Index to Testators of English Late Medieval and Early Tudor Wills and Testaments 1399-1540’, which has proved a valuable research tool. In praising the record of the Richard III Society I have no wish to denigrate that of any other, similar, society but merely seek fairness, and balance, as all historians should. Bill Featherstone Desborough, Northamptonshire

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Reassuringly intelligent. Comfortingly rational. July 2015 Vol 65 Issue 7

Coming Next Month Success of Sweet Smells

Accounts of smell in the early modern period tend to revel in the stinking streets that existed before what has been described as the 18th century’s ‘vast deodorisation project’. However, against this unpleasant olfactory background, perfumers and their shops represented important imaginative spaces, writes William Tullett. References to a range of smells – often emanating from the world of luxury and exotic goods – abound in the print culture of the time.

Cops and Dockers

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For the poorly paid workers of London’s docks in the 19th and 20th centuries, the petty theft of cargo was a useful way of adding to a lowly income and supplementing an impoverished diet. ‘Fiddling’ dates back to the 18th century and was central to the creation of the Thames Police in 1799. Yet, as Clive Emsley explains, dock pilfering did not end when the British population ‘pulled together’ to win the Second World War: instead shortages of alcohol, clothing and medicines made fiddling more tempting to both civilians and soldiers alike and presented a major problem for the authorities.

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Richard III and the the Cult of Saints

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In the 11th century a peasant in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire uncovered the bones of a seventh-century archbishop, whose identity was made known when he ‘appeared in a vision to a local smith’. The monks at Ramsey Abbey transformed the find into a pilgrim attraction and the cult of St Ivo was born. Such religious tourism blossomed in the 11th and 12th centuries, says Anne E. Bailey, but does the furore surrounding the recent re-burial of Richard III represent an echo of such medieval cults?

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PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for May is A. Harrow, Worksop, Nottinghamshire.

CONTENTS: 1 Detail of the Salisbury Magna Carta, 1215 © epa/Alamy. EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 Still from Sarraounia. Written, directed and produced by Med Hondo © Films Soleil, Les/Kobal Collection. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Bridgeman Images; 5 HT Archive; 6 © Getty Images; 7 © Alamy. MONTHS PAST: 8 Eg 1500 f.45v © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images; 9 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Alamy. THE ROAD TO RUNNYMEDE: 10-11 Photograph by Mr. Christopher Guy, Worcester Cathedral Archaeologist. Reproduced by permission of the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral; 12 top © Alamy; bottom left Cotton Claudius D.II, f.116 © The British Library Board; bottom right © Paris National Archives/Bridgeman Images; 13 MS 16, ff.41r © the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; 14 top © Alamy; bottom © Tim Aspden; 15 top © Trustees of the British Museum; bottom MS 16, ff.48v © the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; 16 top MS. Royal 16 G VI, fol.380v © akg-images/British Library; bottom MS 16, ff.149r © the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; 17 © Alamy. SIMON DE MONTFORT AND THE ORIGINS OF PARLIAMENT: 19 Royal 14 B. VI © Bridgeman Images/ British Library; 20 © Angelo Hornak/Alamy; 21 top © Paris National Archives/Bridgeman Images; bottom © RMNGrand Palais; 22 top left MS 137/1687 fol.119v © Musée Condé/Bridgeman Images; top right © Bridgeman Images/ British Library; bottom Royal 14 C.VII, f.134v © The British Library Board; 23 © The Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland; 24 © The British Library Board. INFOCUS 26-27 © Getty Images. REINTERPRETING THE REPUBLIC: 28-29 © Getty Images; 30 © Alamy. MAGNA CARTA THE ATLANTIC CROSSING: 31 and 32 © Alamy; 33 and 34 Library of Congress; 35 top © the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; bottom left Private Collection; bottom right C.32.I.2.(3.) © The British Library Board; 36 top © Bridgeman Images, bottom Paul Revere Collection/American Antiquarian Society; 37 Library of Congress. SAFE SPACES AND COMFORT ZONES: 38 © Art Archive/Alamy. THE ARTIST AND THE KING: 39 top © Palace of Westminster Collection, WOA 2602 www. parliament.uk/art; bottom courtesy of Charles Sims Archive, Northumbria University; 40 top Building of Britain Series in St. Stephen’s Hall, Palace of Westminster, photograph by Graham Seel, 2014 www.parliament.uk/art; 40 bottom © Palace of Westminster Collection WOA 3226 www.parliament.uk/art; 41 courtesy of Charles Sims Archive, Northumbria University; 42 © National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 43 © Scottish National Portrait Gallery; 44 © Plymouth City Council (Arts and Heritage). THE MYTH OF MORAL FOOD: 46 © Bridgeman Images; 47 Photo by Annie Gray/Bury St Edmunds Archive. THE CONFERENCE ON AFRICAN PEOPLES: 49 © British Library Board; 50 top © John Deakin/Getty Images; middle and bottom © The British Library Board; 51 The National Archives; 52 left and right © Getty Images; 53 left © Press Association Images, right © Getty Images; 54 top © Getty Images; 54 bottom and 55 © John Deakin/Getty Images. REVIEWS: 56 © Alamy; 58 © Malcolm Inness Gallery/ Bridgeman Images; 59 © The Salvation Army Heritage Centre Canterbury Cathedral; 61 © Bodleian Libraries/ University of Oxford. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 © Musée Carnavalet, Paris/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 top Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest by Mihai Petre/Wikimedia/Creative Commons; middle Woody Guthrie, Library of Congress; bottom Ivan the Terrible, State Historical Museum, Moscow. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 Collection of Margaret and Mary Meehan. 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.

JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 ‘Alone of creatures, it has no tongue’ – which animal does Herodotus describe thus?

22 What began following Pope Urban II’s war cry ‘Deus volt’ in 1095?

2 Where did ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’ congregate in August 1938?

23 Who could Queen Victoria not look upon ‘without a shudder’?

5 Who released Dust Bowl Ballads, possibly the first ever concept album, in 1940? 6 Who overthrew Gaumata to take control of the Achaemenid Empire in 522 bc? 7 Which English king died from injuries sustained after his horse tripped on a molehill?

8 In which year was the infamous ‘Wicked Bible’ published by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas? 9 What did Winston Churchill call ‘the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’ on February 15th, 1942?

18 What was Charles Vasant the first recorded victim of in New Jersey on July 1st, 1916?

10 Which city did Ivan the Terrible notoriously sack in 1570? 11 Who did Philip IV of France take prisoner on September 7th, 1303? 12 In the context of Nazi Germany, what does SS stand for? 13 ‘Its only possible value is metaphorical’ – which 1980s building did Tony Judt describe thus? 14 What is Konrad Kujau famous for forging? 15 ‘Raleigh, Raleigh, I have heard but rawly of thee’ – who greeted Walter Raleigh thus? 16 Who was condemned as ‘the Benedict Arnold of the Sea’ in 1912?

70 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

17 Whose attempt to find the Northwest Passage ended with a mutiny aboard his ship on June 23rd, 1611?

19 Which Christian teacher and saint was stabbed to death by his own students in ad 363? 20 Whose autobiography of 1975 was subtitled From A to B and Back Again? 21 Which cult leader was designated ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ by Los Angeles Herald Examiner in October 1976?

25 What did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sell the rights to for $130 in 1938?

ANSWERS

4 Whose Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693) appeared in the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials?

24 What was officially organised in Pulaski, Tennessee on Christmas Eve 1865?

1. The crocodile. 2. Bletchley Park. 3. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870–1932). 4. Increase Mather (1639–1723). 5. Woody Guthrie (1912–1967). 6. Darius I (c.550–486 bc). 7. William III (1650–1702). 8. 1631. 9. The surrender of Singapore to Japan. 10. Novgorod. 11. Pope Boniface VIII. 12. Schutzstaffel. 13. Ceaușescu’s Palace or Palace of the Parliament, Bucharest. 14. Hitler’s diaries. 15. James I. 16. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line and Titanic survivor. 17. Henry Hudson (c.1560–1611). 18. A shark attack on a recreational bather in the United States. 19. Cassian of Imola. 20. Andy Warhol (1928–1987). 21. Jim Jones (1931–1978) 22. The Crusades. 23. Her son, Edward VII. 24. The Ku Klux Klan. 25. Superman.

3 Which Soviet scientist attempted to create a human-ape hybrid called the ‘humanzee’ in the late 1920s?

Prize Crossword ACROSS 7 Dubthach maccu ___, legendary fifth-century ‘chief poet’ of Ireland (6) 8 French town in which Louis XVI and his family were apprehended in 1791 (8) 9 Oscar-winning 1952 western by Fred Zinnemann (4,4) 10 The Thieving ___, English title of an 1817 opera by Gioachino Rossini (6) 11 Cyril ___ (d.1626), dramatist best known for The Atheist’s Tragedie (1611) (8) 12 George ___ (1924-2008), Archbishop of Wales (6) 13 Virtue associated with the Austen heroine Marianne Dashwood (11) 18 Robert ___ (1921-2000), Archbishop of Canterbury (6) 20 El ___, Spanish village and burial-place for sovereigns since Emperor Charles V (8) 22 Menno ___ (1496-1561), Dutch Anabaptist leader (6) 23 Term coined in 1961 for an official of a European organisation (8) 24 Lord ___, title of eccentric judge Sir David Rae (1729–1804) (8) 25 In Greek myth, the Muse of Astronomy (6)

Set by Richard Smyth DOWN 1 Minor river crossed by the forces of Julius Caesar in 49 bc (7) 2 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, set during the First World War (3,5) 3 Frances ___ (d.1789), writer and editor of the Old Maid (6) 4 ‘I work for a government I despise for ends I think ___’ – John Maynard Keynes, 1917 (8) 5 German rotor cipher machine in use during the Second World War (6) 6 Wiltshire birth-town of reformer Mary Ann Higgs and composer Daphne Oram (7) 8 The ___, name given to the author of the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (9,4) 14 George ___, fictionalised alter ego of poet Siegfried Sassoon (8) 15 Old Andrew ___, nickname of Ely dean Andrew Perne (d.1589) (8) 16 Il ___, name by which the Italian painter Tintoretto was known (7) 17 480 bc sea-battle of the GrecoPersian Wars (7) 19 Clym of the ___, legendary English outlaw (6) 21 Chemical element discovered in 1803 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger (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 July 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation Violet Jessop (1887-1971)

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JULY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

ROBOTS

FromtheArchive John Cohen’s 1963 article on myth, science and our fascination with automata cuts to the heart of how humanity perceives itself, argues E.R. Truitt.

Mysticism and Machines JOHN COHEN’S 1963 essay, ‘Automata in Myth and Science’, tantalisingly introduces some of the beguiling objects and strange stories that appear, just a few years later, in his monograph Human Robots in Myth and Science (1966). In both, Cohen explores humanity’s longstanding fascination with the idea of making artificial people, stretching back to the Babylonians and encompassing not only Ancient Greek culture and its heirs, but also ancient Chinese and Indian culture. In everything from the Biblical teraphim (mummified oracular heads) and Haephestos’s handmaidens, endowed with speech and sentience, to the Chinese practitioners of khwai shuh, who sought to bring images and statues to life to serve as slaves, Cohen’s focus is on the mystical origins behind the search for perfect human imitation. So often the ability to create life was taken as the prerogative of the gods: ‘The age-old quest for technical skill in simulating human performance must … be distinguished from a deeper desire to wrest from the gods the secret of the creation of man’, notes Cohen. To him, the mystical elements of the drive to replicate human thought and behaviour are bound up in our desire to understand the hidden, esoteric and fundamental power of the universe. But this desire must be understood for what it is: providing an allegorical interpretation of the universe rather than being a literal understanding, or ‘science’. The range of objects – material and fantastical – that Cohen calls ‘automata’ and ‘human robots’ includes those that promise enlightenment, that perform labour and that provide entertainment. A head that speaks 72 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2015

the future, whether made from a preserved human head or from brass, is different from a being or machine created to perform slave labour (the word ‘robot’ comes originally from the Czech word for forced labour or drudgery: robota). Moreover, there were many different ideas in circulation at different times and places about how to make this kind of object. According to some legends, learned men could animate lifeless matter using the spirits – benevolent and ma-

Technology offered the possibility of surpassing the limitations of human creation levolent – of the universe: this is the accomplishment attributed to ancient Egyptian priests, who brought statues to life; to the nameless sorcerers in the 13th-century Lancelot, who entrapped demons inside metal statues; and to Rabbi Lowe of 16th-century Prague, who created a golem from clay. My own research into the history of automata suggests that the mystical and technological approaches to making artificial life are not as distinct as Cohen would have them. Haephestos was, after all, the god of metal-smithing and fabrication and conceptual links between metalworking and magic appear in multiple societies and belief systems. The promise of technology was, for many writers, precisely that it offered the possibility of surpassing the regular and obvious limitations of human creation by using human (and sometimes non-human, or demonic) ingenuity. Furthermore, the explanations and legends that cultures create around artificial people reflect the preoccupations, assump-

tions and beliefs of those cultures. In medieval Latin culture, the moving statues that were relatively common in the Greek- and Arabic-speaking worlds were believed to be made by using the hidden powers of natural objects such as gemstones or animal parts or by using the fundamental connections between celestial bodies and earthly things. These were machines without mechanisms. Cohen’s essay reveals that, at heart, these objects, however different in function or operation, are doing the same kind of cultural work: they embody humanity’s attempts to define life. Is something that moves like a person the same as a person? What if it can feel? Or speak? These questions, which seem so urgent in an age of cloning, super-intelligent machines, cybernetic prostheses and medical devices that keep the body alive long after consciousness has departed it, pre-date the invention of DNA sequencing or the computer. We have been asking them for as long as we have been human. E.R. Truitt’s Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in May 2015.

VOLUME XIII ISSUE 5 MAY 1963 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta