History Today 2016-02

February 2016 Vol 66 Issue 2

France Loses its Head

The French Revolution explained

Britain’s Failures in the Middle East When Gay Was Not Good The Origins of the English Kingdom

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.

To new worlds: Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 1620 by Robert Walter Weir, 1857.

FROM THE EDITOR

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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 Tom Holland 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 Ulinka Rublack St John’s College, Cambridge 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

THIS MONTH, in the second in our series of major articles on great historical events, David Andress surveys the French Revolution with the help of the History Today archive. The extraordinary narrative that unfolds during the late 18th century is seen traditionally as the beginning of modern history. Why, though, did it happen in France and not, say, in comparable European polities such as Britain or Spain? Demography may help us answer that question. During the turbulent 17th century, almost 400,000 people left Britain and Ireland for North America. Though the figures are harder to verify, even more left the Iberian peninsula for Central and South America from the 1500s onwards. Around 250,000 Dutch went in the opposite direction, settling trading stations in South-east Asia with an almost manic energy. Such vigour, recklessness even, is a characteristic of the young and ambitious, keen to turn their backs on the constrictions of their homeland, to embrace new political and religious ideas and forge a more nourishing existence in new territories far away, even at the risk of hardship and death. Tim Blanning, in The Pursuit of Glory (2008), his masterly study of Europe from the Peace of Westphalia to Waterloo, quotes one such adventurer, John Dunlap, publisher of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote from the newly independent US to his brother-in-law in Ulster in 1785: People with a family advanced in life find great difficulties in emigration, but the young men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick as possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America. Curiously, among the great nations of early modern Europe, only the inhabitants of France seemed reluctant to embrace such adventure. There were around 15 people from Britain and Ireland in North America during the 17th century for every French man or woman. As a consequence, as Blanning points out, Britain’s revolution took place in North America at the end of the 18th century and those of Spain in Central and South America during the 19th. In France, by contrast, the energies of its frustrated, alienated and energetic young people were turned on the patrie.

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2 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

HistoryMatters

British Empire • Peace of Westphalia • Roman Beauty • Pilgrims

Britain’s Willing Imperialists Were 19th-century Britons as apathetic towards their nation’s vast Empire as some historians have argued? Andrew Griffiths TWENTY YEARS after its publication, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, stands out for the rigour of its approach. Its argument, that the German people were more acquiescent in the crimes of Nazism than was once thought, is firmly grounded culturally, historically and philosophically. Yet how far are Goldhagen’s ideas relevant to current debates about the depth and extent of popular imperialism in 19th-century Britain? Goldhagen’s belief that researchers should address the time and place of their study ‘as an anthropologist would the world of a people about

whom little is known’ is excellent advice for any researcher. Modern historians of British imperial culture may yet be guilty of underestimating the sheer ‘differentness’ of 19th-century Britain. Lytton Strachey’s observation that ‘the history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it’ is surely relevant here. Strachey was writing long before the advent of digital archives; when historians can read Victorian newspapers from the comfort of their offices, the period can feel dangerously familiar. Since before the turn of the millennium, important historical works have questioned whether ordinary British people were ever truly enthusiastic about imperialism. In their 1993

Global reach: Allegory of the British Empire Strangling the World, Italian, 1878.

study, British Imperialism, P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins presented it as the result of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. In their view, imperialism was the product of surplus capital deployed globally by genteel investors who turned to high finance as a way to generate wealth without having to engage directly in trade. Thinking about imperialism in this way absolves most of the British population of any responsibility for it. Imperialism becomes the product of an economic and social system in which the only true agents are the gentlemanly capitalists of the City of London. A body of scholarship supports the idea that imperialism was never as popular as is sometimes imagined. In his 2004 work, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, Bernard Porter argued that public opinion cared little for Empire and that evidence of public engagement with imperialism would be better understood in alternative FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3

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contexts. John Darwin’s The Empire Project (2009) takes a similar view, pointing out that Victorian celebrations of imperialism, however eyecatching, were ‘lost in the mass of non-imperial production’. Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) argues that working-class memoirs tend to display apathy, even antipathy, towards matters imperial. Goldhagen’s thoughts are of special relevance here. He argues that so firmly was antisemitism rooted in

precisely because they are taken for granted, often are not expressed in a manner commensurate with their prominence and significance or, when uttered, seen as worthy by others to be noted and recorded.

It is high time that scholars took up the challenge laid down by Porter’s thesis German society that the burden of proof should lie with those seeking to deny its prevalence, rather than with those seeking to make the claim that Germany was indeed antisemitic. Might the same logic be applicable to British popular imperialism? How easy is it to make a convincing case that the society at the centre of the largest empire the world has ever seen was not the home of widespread imperialist sentiments? Britain in the 19th century was not, after all, a totalitarian society; the period saw an unprecedented flowering of print media. Following the progressive repeal of the taxes on knowledge in the middle decades of the century, newspapers and periodicals carried a wide range of opinion to an ever larger audience and, while there were frequent challenges to specific imperial policies, opposition to the fundamental principles of imperialism were far less common. Where such challenges do appear – such as Marlow’s reflection in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) that imperialism ‘is not a pretty thing when one looks into it too much’ – it would be reasonable to accept them as evidence that such challenges were not unthinkable and then to ask why they were not more in evidence. As Goldhagen points out: Notions fundamental to the dominant worldview and operation of a society, 4 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Were imperialist attitudes so ingrained into the psyche of ordinary British people that they were simply not worth remarking on? If so, a hypothetical absence of pro-imperial sentiments in the private communications of ordinary Britons cannot be interpreted as evidence of the absence of imperial attitudes. Perhaps sceptical historians have been raising the wrong objections. Goldhagen’s approach might prompt different questions. Was imperialism such an integral part of British intellectual life that it went unmentioned by the majority? Does opposition to specific policies or episodes necessarily denote a rejection of the racial and imperial logic of the British Empire? Could a system of imperial finance operate sustainably without the participation of individual consumers, as well as wealthy investors? It is high time that scholars took up the challenge laid down by Porter’s thesis and asked if ordinary Britons were, if not enthusiastic, then at least willing imperialists. Andrew Griffiths is Associate Lecturer in English at Plymouth University.

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Treaties and Turning Points

Historians need to dispel the myths that have grown up around the Peace of Westphalia. Cormac Shine THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA, which brought the brutalities of the Thirty Years’ War to an end in 1648, still looms large as a major turning point in the history of both international law and international politics. Indeed, few historical events can match the prevalence of the Westphalian myth, which holds that the Peace marked the emergence of the sovereign state and the modern international system as we know it. The source of this enduring myth can be traced to an influential article by Leo Gross, described by one critic as ‘the Homer of the Westphalia myth’, which was published in the American Journal of International Law in 1948. Writing on the tercentenary of the Peace, soon after the founding of the United Nations, the Austrian-born legal scholar described 1648 as ‘the majestic portal which leads from the old into the new world’ and ‘the starting point for the development of international law’. This is still the dominant image of Westphalia: a major turning point between the medieval and the modern, the birth certificate of the international legal order. Political and legal theorists generally adopt wholesale the views promoted by Gross, while historians have done little to dispel this myth. Even today, when scholars regularly invoke the need for a ‘post-Westphalian’ order, or wonder what lies ‘beyond Westphalia’, they implicitly take Westphalian sovereignty as their natural starting point. It is rare to ask ‘why Westphalia?’, though it is a far more useful query if we aim to broaden the scope of the history of international law and politics. For when we consider the content and context of the treaties of Westphalia, it is clear that they did not radically alter the nature of sovereignty, nor did the Peace invent a new

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In context: The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 1648, by Gerard ter Borch.

Westphalia is detached from its context and assigned great importance because it suits the narrative of existing international law and international relations as Whiggish, evolutionary processes international system. The idea that Westphalia paved the way for an international system of sovereign states relies on the argument that the treaties dismantled the twin supreme authorities of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Yet there was nothing particularly new or groundbreaking in the treaties that caused this: Protestantism had been recognised by the Empire as early as 1532 in the Treaty of Nuremberg. Though the Catholic Church’s political authority was certainly declining throughout the early modern period, there is nothing to suggest that Westphalia provided the ultimate turning point. Similarly, the idea that the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by a network of independent states after 1648 is exaggerated. The Peace of Westphalia officially gave imperial princely states the power to sign treaties, but this had already been widely practised for at least a half century before. Brandenburg, for example, had independently formed an

alliance with the Netherlands in 1605. The German states still thought of themselves as a single body after the Peace: the Emperor was recognised as their overlord and representatives were still sent to the Imperial Diet, which retained control over legislation, warfare and taxation. Overlapping sovereignties were as much a fact of life and a source of conflict after 1648 as they had been before. So why does Westphalia still figure so prominently in the history of international law and politics? One answer is perhaps the ahistorical nature of those two disciplines. Westphalia is detached from its context and assigned great importance because it suits the narrative of existing international law and international relations as Whiggish, evolutionary processes. So 1648 marks the first stepping stone on a path that leaps neatly from there to 1815, 1919, 1945 to the present day. By cutting out events before this date and painting Westphalia as the birthplace of the

sovereign states system, the historiography of international law and politics is narrowed to make the formation of the existing settlement seem inevitable. Any alternatives outside the realm of sovereign states are discounted. The results of this narrowing are clear. It is as difficult for us to properly envision the Holy Roman Empire, with its confused sovereignties and stubborn refusal to act like a conventional ‘state’, as it is for many international relations scholars to account for the increasing influence of non-state actors in contemporary politics. The challenge, then, is not to imagine a ‘post-Westphalian’ world order, but instead to apply a historical, non-Westphalian perspective to our study of international law and politics in the past, the present and the future.

Cormac Shine is a Scholar in History and Political Science at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 5

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The Make-up of Rome Evidence of beauty treatments reveal the daily nuances of Roman life. Susan Stewart THE ROMANS set high standards in terms of female beauty: flawless skin, a pale complexion with just a hint of pink, styled hair in an alluring colour and large bright eyes. In pursuit of this ideal, women had recourse to cosmetics, applying a wide variety of products, including white lead as foundation, almond oil as face cream, soot as eye make-up, hair dye made from the juice of elderberries, arsenic to remove unwanted hair and the dregs of wine as rouge. In the contemporary literature, almost exclusively written by men, make-up became a means of expressing ideas of wealth, health, status and gender as well as beauty. Cosmetics often received a negative press; its use was satirised and presented as an inferior foil to natural beauty in much of the surviving elegiac poetry. In contrast, however, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History offers more factual information, while in the poems of Ovid cosmetics are presented positively, as a feature of sophisticated urban living. The required elements of female Roman beauty, such as a pale complexion and large dark eyes, are not only described in literary texts but are also

to be found in paintings, funerary reliefs and mosaics. Idealism is the rhetoric of the visual image and, just as pictures of women in the fashion pages of today’s magazines are airbrushed and photoshopped, presenting us with women who bear little resemblance to ordinary people, a similar contrast existed between the representation of women in Roman art and their counterparts in real life. There is, in fact, little evidence that clearly depicts Roman women actually wearing make-up, but there are a number of examples of women applying beauty products. Toilette scenes appear frequently in art, alluding again to ideas of wealth, status and gender. In addition to the toilette, objects visible in these works of art include mirrors, spoons and palettes for preparation and bottles and boxes for storage, which survive in considerable quantities among the small finds in the archaeological record. They are the detritus of everyday life. Looking at all the evidence relating to cosmetics, whether it is written, visual or material, is an essential tenet of research; every medium has something to contribute to the overall picture. In addition, a careful comparison of these different types of material not only highlights the importance of make-up Mistress and servants: the Neumagen relief, Trier, Germany, c.ad 200.

per se in the ancient world, it also presents the prospect of a clearer interpretation of the rhetoric that surrounds the topic, by acting as a counterbalance to the problems of specific types of evidence: for example, the exclusivity of the male-authored text, the chance survival of artefacts and the lack of paint on sculpture. Looking at this overall picture also offers us the possibility of a better understanding of the reality of contemporary daily life. Three examples show how this approach can work. First, consider the absence of the made-up face in Roman art. Far from being odd, this omission fits well with evidence found in the written sources. Ovid remarks: ‘Why should I see what makes your skin so white? Keep your door shut and don’t let me see the work until it is finished.’ The finished product, that is, the woman’s face, should not exhibit the mechanics by which such an appearance had been achieved. Second, comparing a toilette scene depicted in art, in this case the Neumagen relief, with an object such as the Wroxeter mirror, can raise interesting questions. How clear was the reflection in a mirror of polished metal? If clarity was in doubt what did this mean for the relationship of the matrona and her servants? Did the mistress, for example, rely on her slaves for an accurate or hopefully honest opinion regarding her appearance? Third, we can fill the cosmetic containers found among the archaeological evidence with the contents described in written texts. The woman’s dressing table, on which, according to Ovid, ‘you will find boxes and a thousand colours’, comes alive when paired with a small find, perhaps a pot or bottle, especially where there is residue remaining. The so called Londinium cream, found to consist of a mixture of animal fat, starch and tin, is one notable example of such a find. Modern non-invasive techniques, such as synchrotron radiation and mass spectrometry, can be used where the container is fragile, or residue difficult to extract. Make-up mattered in the ancient world and it warrants serious consideration today.

Susan Stewart is the author of Cosmetics and Perfumes in the Roman World (Tempus, 2007). 6 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

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Miniature depicting a funeral at the beginning of the Office of the Dead. Needle holes indicate 12 pilgrim tokens were sewn onto the previous folio. Horae, mid15th century.

Tokens of Affection What do pilgrim badges tell us about emotion in the Middle Ages? Diane Heath HOW CAN dirty marks in an old book help us access a medieval reader’s emotions? Why is it important that we try to establish such connections? The history of emotions is a new field but one that encourages a wider public engagement with history. Emotions are accessible: we all understand and experience anger, pity, love and hate. These feelings help us make links to those who previously expressed them and open up new pathways to understand how people in the past felt about their world. Historians search literary and documentary evidence for publicly expressed emotions, if not interior feelings. Public emotions are revealed in the rhetoric of medieval writers, who were trained to express pathos to their readership and so inspire emotional responses by making clear their own feelings, which were considered just as important as putting forward rational arguments. Yet what about those non-literate people who were barely or never recorded? How might we learn about their feelings? Medieval pilgrimage was a significant source of material objects that address emotion. The historian Brian Spencer was the first to point out the importance of pilgrim badges or tokens as a means to explore medieval ritual, practice and belief. Inexpensive metal

badges (sometimes gold ones, too) were bought as souvenirs by pilgrims who venerated saints’ relics at popular shrines. Badges were made in their thousands in Britain and on the Continent, to be sewn or pinned to the clothing of those making a return journey as an important part of the pilgrimage ritual. Pilgrim badges might be given to others too sick to travel, or hung in the local parish church as evidence of a completed pilgrimage. They were usually bought just outside the shrine and, once inside, pilgrims might hold their tokens against the reliquary or tomb of the saint. This was a way to bring home to others some of the holiness invested in the relics. Ampullae (little lead vessels) were filled with holy water from the site. Those from Canterbury Cathedral allegedly contained infinitesimal specks of Thomas Becket’s blood and were considered medicinal; a Museum of London exhibit announces in Latin ‘Thomas is the best doctor of the worthy sick’. Such tokens might be used as a defence against evil or bad luck. Other pilgrim badges point to political contexts, such as those for Thomas of Lancaster, executed for his revolt against Edward II in 1322. One little-discussed aspect marks them not as carriers of belief, or healing, or political statements, but as bearers of emotional meaning. This is where the ‘dirty marks’ come in. Inside a mid-15th-century French Book of Hours at Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library, there

are some marks and holes on a blank folio. Closer investigation reveals these marks to be the impressions made by 12 pilgrim tokens once stitched onto the parchment. On the next right-hand folio there is a half-page miniature depicting a funeral to illustrate the Office of the Dead. The tokens were placed so that the stitching would not damage the image. These mementoes were stitched into a book used for daily prayers, as close as possible to the litany for the remembrance of the dead. This means the tokens might represent shared pilgrimages with someone no longer alive. Or the pilgrimages may have been undertaken for the good of the soul of someone close to the book’s owner, as souls remembered in prayers secured an earlier release from the pains of purgatory. These tokens embody the prayers of someone bereft; they are material witnesses to the act of grieving and a method of remembrance and commemoration. No writing was required; no names or marginalia adorn this book. Yet these tokens represent an absent presence, just as they did to the person who once stitched them into place. They signify grief, hope and devotion: human emotions remembered in repeated private prayers. These sewn-in tokens are not unique. Christopher de Hamel, head of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, thinks that as many as 20 per cent of extant Books of Hours bear evidence of pilgrim tokens. Even though few tokens themselves survive in situ, they leave behind evidence of being affixed to Books of Hours that survive in such quantities they are (almost) affordable. Many digitised examples are now online, including ones with pilgrim badge marks, which reveal something of the emotions of their previous early owners, who were frequently women. This stitching of pilgrim tokens is as much a marking of the Hours as the marginalia the historian Eamon Duffy has noted and allows us some access to the feelings of those who could not write but sought nevertheless to attest their remembrance and love.

Diane Heath is an assistant lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. The Medieval Canterbury Weekend runs from April 1st to 3rd, 2016. FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

FEBRUARY

By Richard Cavendish

FEBRUARY 18th 1516

‘Bloody Mary’ born at Greenwich Palace BORN AT ABOUT four o’clock that Monday morning, Mary Tudor was the first surviving child of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon. He was 24 years old, she was 30, they had been married for six years and she had suffered a succession of miscarriages and stillbirths. Although Henry had hoped for a son and heir, Mary’s safe arrival was a relief. As Henry said: ‘By the grace of God the sons will follow.’ The relief was not only his. The christening in the nearby friary church two days later to the sound of trumpets and the proclamations of heralds drew an impressive turn-out of supportive English nobility. Accompanied by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Countess of Surrey carried the baby to the font beneath a canopy borne by four knights. Cardinal Wolsey, the Duchess of 8 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Heir hunters: Philip II and Mary I, 1558 by Hans Eworth, 16th century.

Norfolk and the Countesses of Salisbury and Devon were waiting as godparents and the Marquess of Dorset and his wife bore the salt and the oil. The child was named Mary after her father’s younger sister and the baptism was immediately followed by confirmation, with the Countess of Salisbury, herself of royal Plantagenet blood, as sponsor. Little Mary did not see much of her parents in her early years. She was suckled by a wet-nurse and, once weaned, she was given a household 50 or more strong. Run by the highly competent Margaret, Lady Brian, it included a chamberlain, a treasurer, ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting, stewards, cooks, grooms and maids and cost more than £1,000 a year (perhaps equivalent to £375 million or more today). It moved from palace to palace frequently, but not often to the same palace as the royal household. Catherine of Aragon, however, certainly took a keen interest in her daughter’s education. The Countess of Salisbury was Mary’s ‘lady governess’. A distinguished Spanish scholar called Juan Luis Vives, who wrote books on the education of Christian women, was living in England and Catherine put him in overall charge. A bright girl, Mary was soon fluent in Latin and later learned French, Spanish and some Greek. She also especially loved music, singing and dancing. From very early on Mary was a puppet in English foreign policy. At the age of two she was formally betrothed to the baby dauphin of France, but when she was four her father dropped that and organised her betrothal to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. That did not work out either, nor did a later suggestion of another French royal marriage. In 1525, aged nine, Mary was sent to Ludlow Castle in the Welsh borders, with a strong team of advisers and a household now more than 300 strong, to be in effect Princess of Wales. The title was not officially given to her, but she

was often called that. Disaster struck in the 1530s. No more royal children had arrived and Henry desperately needed a son and heir. He had also fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, who refused to bed him unless he married her. In what his subjects called the king’s ‘Great Matter‘, he decided to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. She resisted as best she could, with the support of the pope, who refused to invalidate the marriage, but Henry broke with Rome and declared the English church a separate entity, with himself as its Supreme Head. In 1533 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, formally proclaimed the marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void and Henry proceeded to marry Anne Boleyn. Mary, who was now 17, was considered illegitimate. No longer a princess, she was henceforth the Lady Mary. She was a devout Roman Catholic and strongly disapproved of the Protestant regime headed by her young halfbrother Edward VI from 1547 to his death in 1553. With the armed support of prominent Catholics she succeeded to the throne, determined to restore Catholicism and obedience to the pope. It was now Mary’s turn to need an heir and, aged 37, in 1554 she married a Catholic prince, Philip of Spain, which incidentally made her officially Queen of Naples and Jerusalem. Philip was 26 and not a popular figure in England. Protestants were being ruthlessly persecuted for heresy and over 250 were burned at the stake during Mary’s five-year reign, which would earn her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. She more than once fancied herself pregnant by Philip, but turned out not to be, which made her miserably unhappy. Ill with dropsy and fever, she died in St James’s Palace in London in 1558, aged 42, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Her successor was her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, an incomparably greater monarch than poor Mary could ever have been.

FEBRUARY 24th 616

Death of King Ethelbert of Kent ETHELBERT was the first English king to be converted to Christianity, which proved to be a crucial event in the development of English national identity. In 597 a Roman monk called Augustine arrived in Kent as leader of a group of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory the Great. There were plenty of Christians in Britain already and had been ever since Roman and early Celtic times, before the country was invaded from the mid-fifth century onwards by pagan English of various Germanic tribes, who in time set up small kingdoms. Augustine’s mission was not to establish British Christianity, but Roman Catholic Christianity. Ethelbert’s wife, Bertha, was a daughter of the Merovingian Frankish king in what is now France. She was

a Christian and it was a condition of the marriage that she would be free to practise her religion. Ethelbert evidently considered that an acceptable price for a close connection with the most powerful ruler in western Europe. The details and dates are often uncertain, but Bertha brought a bishop with her from France as her chaplain and presumably she had her own Christian retinue as well. For worship she restored the ancient church of St Martin of Tours, which dated back to Roman times. Ethelbert had consequently been in close touch with Christianity and he soon accepted it for himself. His household followed suit and pagans lower down the social scale in Kent found it in their interest to be baptised in numbers in the local rivers. Ethelbert now presided over the creation of a law code which gave the Roman church a secure place in the kingdom. Augustine was made Archbishop of

Convert king: statue of Ethelbert at Canterbury Cathedral, Kent.

FEBRUARY 20th 1816

Premiere of The Barber of Seville FAT, LAZY AND WITTY, Gioachino Rossini was born in Pesaro in Italy in 1792. His father and mother were professional musicians and he was a child prodigy. He played various instruments and, until his voice broke, he earned money as a singer. In time he would compose some 40 operas, often written at astonishing speed. He is quoted as once saying that he could set the laundry bill to music if he needed to. Rossini’s most popular opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia was written in less than three weeks. Based on a French comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, it was at first called Almaviva. The central character is a barber named Figaro and the heroine is Rosina, a beautiful rich girl who is the

Rotund wit: a caricature of Gioachino Rossini and a score for Il barbiere di Siviglia, 19th century.

ward of an elderly doctor called Bartolo. A young aristocrat, Count Almaviva, has fallen in love with Rosina and hires Figaro to help him win her, which he duly does. Rosina soon returns

the English on the pope’s orders and he appointed bishops of London and Rochester before his death in 604. London was in the kingdom of Essex, which was ruled by Ethelbert’s pagan nephew Sebert, who had also became a Christian convert. Bertha died in or soon after 601, it seems. Ethelbert apparently took a second wife. When he died in 616 he was buried in what was later St Augustine of Canterbury’s abbey. He was succeeded by his son Eadbald, who had reverted to paganism. He horrified the Roman clerics by marrying his father’s second wife, which was strictly against the rules, but he afterwards reverted to Christianity. Augustine, Bertha and Ethelbert were all later canonised as saints. In time, other pagan English kings were impressed by the Roman Church’s positive support for strong regimes, which in turn made religious control easier. These kings accepted the Roman church and carried their people with them. Over centuries the process would lead to the creation of a single unified English nation.

Almaviva’s love and after all sorts of farcical complications the two are allowed to marry when Almaviva bribes Bartolo with Rosina’s dowry. The premiere at the Teatro Argentina in Rome did not go well. A rival Italian composer, Giovanni Paisiello, had already based a popular opera called Il Barbiere di Siviglia on the Beaumarchais play and too many of the audience in Rome for Rossini’s version were Paisiello enthusiasts, who had gone to the premiere to disrupt it. They shouted and hissed throughout, while one of the singers fell over and bloodied his nose and a cat came casually on and wandered about the stage. The second performance, however, was a triumph and all Italy went Rossini-mad and would remain so. At the age of 37 in 1829, rich and famous at home and abroad, Rossini virtually retired and wrote no more operas, though nobody knows why. He spent his last years living it up in France and died at his villa at Passy, near Paris, in 1868. He was 76. FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 9

N A kerosene delivery cart in the United Arab Emirates, 1971.

MIDDLE EAST

ELSON received intelligence on July 28th, 1798 that the French fleet he had been chasing across the Mediterranean had reached Egypt. Four days later, at Aboukir Bay near Alexandria, 11 French battleships and two frigates were sunk. ‘Victory’, the admiral wrote home to his wife, ‘is certainly not a name strong enough for such a scene.’ The Battle of the Nile marks the beginning of Britain’s modern engagement with a part of the world that would come to play an increasingly prominent and distinctive role in the history of its foreign policy. British activity in the Middle East spans the Napoleonic Wars, 19th-century rivalry with Russia in Persia, two world wars and the Cold War. Contrary to all expectations, the end of Empire in the Middle East did not mean permanent withdrawal. Despite withdrawing formally from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Britain has been involved in a succession of military conflicts, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,

Contrary to all expectations, the end of Empire in the Middle East did not mean permanent withdrawal

Learning lessons in the

MIDDLE EAST

The history of Britain’s foreign policy in the Middle East is largely a litany of failure, of self-inflicted wounds that are still felt today. Peter Mangold considers what British diplomats and politicians have failed to learn.

Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya and now ISIS. Britain is building a new military base in Bahrain this year. British fears and emotions run high in the Middle East. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, became a vital route to India and gained a symbolic significance in the British imagination, which, by the mid-20th century, made it peculiarly hard to relinquish. It was no accident that the biggest crisis of the end of Empire, the Suez Crisis of 1956, centred on the canal’s nationalisation. Oil evoked even more emotive reactions. ‘No Cyprus’, Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared in 1955, ‘no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil: unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that.’ Fear of a British 9/11 underlay Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq in 2003. Prime Minister David Cameron has referred to ISIS as ‘an existential threat’. THE NUMBER OF British mistakes and failures in the Middle East is striking. British policy in the region has been remarkably accident-prone, resulting in a series of official enquiries. The first of these was into the surrender in 1916 of some 13,000 British and Indian troops at Kut-al-Amarah, in what was then Mesopotamia. In the interwar years there were enquiries into disturbances in Palestine. The Iraq invasion of 2003 sparked a raft of enquiries, including the long-awaited Chilcot report. The cost of Britain’s self-inflicted wounds in the Middle East has been high. The heaviest brunt has been born within the region, where the impact of decisions made nearly a century ago, over Palestine and Iraq, along with the consequences of the 2003 Iraq War, are still working themselves out. From the British perspective, the pursuit of certain policies has undermined its position in and beyond the Middle East. Suez drove Britain and France apart, with Britain embracing its ‘special relationship’ with Washington with new urgency, while France turned away from the Entente Cordiale towards West Germany. The consequences of this would be played out in de Gaulle’s two vetoes, in FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 11

MIDDLE EAST

1963 and 1967, of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Both Eden and Blair suffered serious reputational damage as a result of their actions in the Middle East. How are we to explain these failures? Were they caused by mistakes made in London or were they result of the challenging circumstances in which policy was often made and the peculiar complexities of Middle Eastern politics? The answer is best approached by looking at three clusters of failures.

Israel, Palestine and Iraq The first surrounds the final, helter-skelter expansion of British power in the Middle East during and immediately after the First World War, when Britain expelled the Turks and then gained League of Nation mandates over Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. Dividing the rump of the Ottoman 12 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

The bureaucratic machine dealing with the Middle East was hydra-headed. In 1916, 18 different authorities needed to be consulted about decisions on the region Battle of the Nile, 1st August 1798 at 10pm by Thomas Luny, 1834.

Empire was a difficult task, conducted under unpropitious circumstances. Decisions about an important, but nevertheless secondary theatre of the war were made by ministers and officials much more concerned with the disastrous stalemate on the Western Front. The bureaucratic machine dealing with the Middle East was hydra-headed. During 1916, 18 different authorities needed to be consulted about decisions on the region. Ministers and officials were ill-equipped to cope with the problems of reconciling competing claims to the Ottoman territory, while attempting to create a stable new order in a region riven with ethnic, tribal and sectarian divisions. The result was a series of muddles and delays, with conflicting promises to the Hashemites and the French over Syria and to Arabs and Zionists over Palestine. Under the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, Palestine was to be internationalised. This may have saved a great deal of future trouble. In November 1917, however, the British government decided instead, with the Balfour Declaration, to sponsor a Jewish homeland. This was seen as offering an immediate propaganda advantage with American and Russian Jewish populations, as well as establishing an important strategic buffer for the Suez Canal. Put more bluntly, it kept the French out.

Captured British and Indian troops are transported after the battle at Kut-al-Amarah, 1916.

eluding the generals on the Western Front. The government of India, despite having no experience of operations on this scale, was responsible for the campaign and was anxious for it to continue, so as to avoid India being overshadowed by the European fighting. The result was the disaster at Kut-alAmarah, the worst British military humiliation since defeat by George Washington’s forces at Yorktown in 1781. The 8,000-strong British-Indian garrison in the town of Kut was besieged by Ottoman troops, with the survivors imprisoned at Aleppo. As the subsequent commission of enquiry noted, ‘the scope of the object of the mission was never sufficiently defined in advance’. No lessons were learned. The advance was resumed in 1917, despite the fact that it had no real strategic rationale in the larger context of the war. It was only once Baghdad had been taken that the War Cabinet set up a Mesopotamia Administration Committee to consider the problems raised by occupation of the two Turkish provinces of Basra and Baghdad, which were serious. Antipathy between the minority Sunni and majority Shia population, along with tribal and clan rivalries, meant that a unified and cohesive government was almost impossible. But the British then proceeded to compound the difficulties at the end of the war with a dash to Mosul, which was believed to have

The opening of the Suez Canal, Port Said, 1869.

valuable oilfields. Officials subsequently debated whether Mosul province, with its large Kurdish population, should become part of Iraq, but the argument that the new state needed these potential oilfields to be economically viable was seen to outweigh the additional risks to its political cohesion. The costs to Britain of its Mesopotamian venture were brought home by a revolt in 1920. While the British were able to extract themselves from the difficult situation they had got themselves into, the Iraqis were faced with the problem of creating unity out of Britain’s contrived invention. Shortly before his death in 1933, King Feisal I had remarked that ‘there is no Iraqi people inside Iraq. There are only diverse groups with no patriotic sentiment’. Nearly 80 years later, little had changed, with the Economist noting in 2011 that few Iraqi politicians seemed willing to put their country above their religious sect or ethnicity.

The Balfour Declaration suffered from the problem characteristic of most of Britain’s Middle Eastern failures: its practical implications had not been thought through. By endorsing the Zionist claim to Palestine, Britain created a new conflict in the region. In a far-sighted memorandum to the War Cabinet, Lord Curzon warned that the local Arabs, who then constituted some 92 per cent of the population, ‘will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigration, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’. A qualifying rider was then added to the British declaration of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland: that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The result was an incompatible set of promises to two communities, both of whom wanted the same land. The British tried to muddle through for 30 years, only admitting defeat in the wake of the Second World War when, in the words of the colonial secretary’s report of June 1948, their task ‘concluded in circumstances of tragedy, disintegration and loss’.

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RITAIN’S other troubled creation was Iraq, a state which might be best described as having been born out of mission creep. A campaign that eventually absorbed some 890,000 men had originated in the despatch, in October 1914, of a mere 5,000 troops from India to the head of the Persian Gulf. Their mission was to protect oil facilities in Persia and to reassure Britain’s two main allies in the area, the sheikhs of Kuwait and Mohamerrah. Following the Turkish declaration of war in early November, Force D, as it was known, landed and quickly took Basra. Baghdad immediately beckoned. Sir Percy Cox, political adviser to the expedition, found it ‘difficult to see how we can well avoid taking over Baghdad. We can hardly allow Turkey to retain possession and make difficulties for us at Basra; nor can we allow any other Power to take it’. Unaware of how the advance was outstripping its lines of supply, ministers in London looked to this seemingly successful Mesopotamian expedition to provide the victories

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MIDDLE EAST

Egypt and the Gulf British policy regained its poise in the interwar period and the region was held successfully during the Second World War. There was one serious misjudgement, however. Egypt was central to the British war effort, yet the sympathies of King Farouk were with the Axis powers. In February 1942 the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, surrounded the Abdin palace in Cairo with tanks and forced the king to either change his government or abdicate. This deliberate humiliation of the monarch was supported by Churchill and Eden, the foreign secretary. But there was a dangerous element of personal animus behind the affair. Lampson had long had poor relations with Farouk. ‘So much for the events of the evening’, the ambassador recorded in his diary, ‘which I confess I could not have more enjoyed.’ While Britain’s immediate strategic interests had been secured, there was a long-term cost. The incident helped set the scene for a second cluster of British failures. This centred on the ending of Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East, which proved much more painful than decolonisation in Africa and Asia. Britain’s problem was that its interests in the Middle East had increased at the very moment when its ability to defend them had declined. While the route to the subcontinent had lost much of its strategic importance following Indian independence in 1947, Britain had become dependent on the Middle East for oil. In addition, the Cold War put a premium on maintaining military bases in the region, the most important of which was the Suez Canal Zone base. But Britain now faced a resurgent Arab nationalist movement, led by one of the Egyptian army officers who had resented Lampson’s behaviour in 1942. Gamal Abdel Nasser stands out among nationalist leaders in the postwar world in that he sought not only his country’s independence but also waged a propaganda war against the British presence across the Arab world. The crisis came to a head in July 1956, with Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. British patience finally snapped.

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ASSER CAUSED A government comprised of senior ministers, who had held high office during the Second World War, to do something which Hitler had never succeeded in doing. He caused them to panic. Eden’s description of Britain’s secret agreement with France and Israel to attack Egypt as ‘the highest form of statesmanship’ suggests a policy which had lost its traditional moorings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, believed that, if Britain failed to act, it would become ‘another Netherlands’, a view shared by the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In addition, the

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From top: Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1956; King Feisal of Iraq, 1921; King Farouk of Egypt, 1939.

Below: Lord Curzon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1923. Right: The Balfour Declaration, signed by Arthur James Balfour in 1917.

Egypt had become the lightning rod for British anger at the loss of Empire and great power status, with Nasser in Egypt as its focus. This meant that, as far as British ministers were concerned, the crisis had become dangerously personalised. Getting rid of him, like getting rid of Saddam Hussein in 2003, became an overriding imperative. It drove and distorted policy. Dissenting views, whether from the US or from British officials, were either excluded or ignored. In consequence, the impracticalities of trying to put the imperial clock back by reinvading Egypt – the dubious international legality of the operations, the transparency of the charade of Britain and France intervening to separate Egyptian and Israeli forces after an Israeli attack, the political risks for Britain’s being seen to cooperate with Israel, not to mention the lack of any exit strategy – were either downplayed or glossed over.

A Anthony Eden (centre), General Bernard Cyril Freyberg (left) and Sir Miles Lampson (right) welcome troops at Suez, 1940.

Soviets were making inroads in Egypt and Syria. Britain was facing an existential crisis. In the words of Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office: If we sit back while Nasser consolidates his position and gradually acquires control of the oil-bearing countries, he can, and is according to our information, resolved to wreck us. If Middle East oil is denied us for a year or two, our gold reserves will disappear. If our gold reserves disappear, the sterling area disintegrates. If the sterling area disintegrates and we have no reserves, we shall not be able to maintain our force in Germany, or, indeed, anywhere else. I doubt whether we shall be able to pay for the bare minimum necessary for our defence. And a country which cannot provide for its defence is finished.

FTER SUEZ, the focus of British policy moved to Arabia and the Gulf, where by 1957 Kuwait was providing around half of British oil, as well as amassing large sterling reserves. The security of Gulf oil supplies was judged to require a regional base. The place chosen was Aden, the only sovereign British territory in the region. Securing it in an era when Cairo radio’s nationalist messages could be heard in even the remotest parts of Arabia, represented a challenge which was not fully confronted in London. Once again an overriding imperative was allowed to ride roughshod over inconvenient facts. Officials tried to square the circle. The Governor of Aden, Sir William Luce, put forward a far-sighted proposal in 1958 for an early merger between protectorates and colony. The new state, in a treaty relationship with Britain, would acquire independence within ten years, with provision for the maintenance of the base. Ministers, however, regarded this as too risky. What they failed to appreciate was that so were the alternatives. This was certainly true of the chosen option: a federation between Aden and FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 15

MIDDLE EAST its tribal hinterland. It had some advantages, not least the fact that the protectorate rulers, who would constitute the majority in the South Arabian Federation, were friendly to Britain, while political activists in the more developed port of Aden were not. This was a shotgun marriage. Charles Johnson, who succeeded Luce as governor, wrote ‘of bringing together not only urban and rural but different centuries as well; modern Glasgow say and the 18th-century Highlands’. Lack of knowledge of the area among politicians meant that the federation’s flaws were not properly appreciated in London. Ministers and officials compounded their difficulties in at least two ways. Although ready to invest heavily in

The course of recent Middle Eastern history might have been different had it been possible to pre-empt the 1958 Iraqi coup or the occupation of Kuwait in 1990 developing the base, the Treasury was reluctant to provide economic development funds for the federation, a classic failure to view policy in the round. This was further complicated by British intervention in the Yemeni civil war, which had begun in 1962, in part an attempt to get even with Nasser, who had made the mistake of sending troops to Yemen. This was dangerous, since it did not take much violence to render the base too expensive to keep, a lesson which should have been learned from the experience in Palestine in the late 1940s and the Suez Canal zone base in the early 1950s. The enforced British withdrawal from Aden, completed in November 1967, led to the collapse of the South Arabian Federation. It was replaced by a People’s Democratic Republic, which proceeded to allow access to Aden to the Soviet navy and supported the growing insurBritish troops round up Arab demonstrators in Aden, April, 1967.

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gency in the neighbouring Dhofar province of Oman. Along with the forced withdrawal from Palestine, Aden ended up one of the worst debacles in the history of end of Empire. Failures in intelligence There is one remaining cluster of Middle East failures: those involving intelligence. Policy-makers were taken by surprise by a whole series of events after 1945. They include the Egyptian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian revolutions, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in response to the US withdrawal of the offer to finance the Aswan Dam, the 1961 Iraqi threats to Kuwait, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the fall of the Shah in 1979, the 1990 Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 and the emergence of ISIS. Intelligence was also critically lacking during the Palestine insurgency of the late 1940s and the Aden insurgency of the 1960s. The repercussions were serious. The course of recent Middle Eastern history might have been different had it been possible to pre-empt the 1958 Iraqi coup or the occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Had it been known that Saddam Hussein no longer had a WMD programme in 2003, the rationale for the war would have been undercut. The Middle East in the second half of the 20th century was highly volatile and Britain’s allies shared some of the intelligence failures. Britain’s problems were in the field of human intelligence (HUMINT): getting agents and information. MI6 had a particular problem in penetrating conspiratorial nationalist movements in Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s, which were by nature anti-British. Recruiting agents was also difficult in the highly secretive and tightly controlled totalitarian regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where there were high levels of fear and intimidation. In addition, policy-makers were taken by surprise as a result of some bad diplomatic judgements. In the run-up to the Iraqi coup of 1958, the ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, insisted that there was no revolutionary situation in the country,

suppressing the dissenting views of his oriental secretary. In Iran the British had got too close to the Shah, avoiding contacts with opposition figures, which they knew, thanks to Britain’s long history of intervening in Iranian affairs, would be unpopular with him. Britain’s one advantage was in the field of signals intelligence (SIGINT), with Egyptian ciphers known to have been broken.

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RITISH POLICY in the Middle East since the First World War has been, to say the least, challenging. Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East reached its apogee when its global power was already well into decline. As Commander Hogarth of the Arab Bureau in Cairo warned in 1920: The Empire has reached its maximum and begun the descent. There is no more expansion in us ... and that being so we make but a poor Best of the Arab Countries. Against this background it was a tall order to try to create a stable new order in place of the Ottoman Empire. Managing the complex political, strategic and psychological adjustments entailed in the precipitous decline of British power in the Middle East after the Second World War proved unexpectedly painful. The subsequent instability of the region has, as most recently evident in Iraq and Syria, created a new set of difficulties. The British compounded their own problems. Policymaking was often vitiated by a lack of intellectual rigour. Problems were not thought through, whether because ministers were distracted, as during the First World War, or because the machinery of government was inadequately coordinated and at times short-circuited. Experts were not infallible, as evidenced by Lampson’s wartime handling of King Farouk. Nevertheless, the key mistakes were made by

Firefighters pull water hoses next to burning oil wells at Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait, 1991.

those ministers in London who either failed to consult or ignored expert advice. This was most true of Suez and the 2003 Iraq War. In the run up to the Iraq conflict the Foreign Office sent an official to explain some of the complexities of Iraq to the prime minister, Tony Blair. ‘That’s all history’, came his reply. ‘This is about the future.’ In his 1967 account of the Suez Crisis, Anthony Nutting, minister of state at the Foreign Office, drew his title, No End of a Lesson, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Lesson’, written after the Boer War: Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good. Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain, But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and Again. Learning lessons has not been a strong point of British policy-making in the Middle East, yet those lessons are certainly there to be learned. Peter Mangold is a former member of the BBC World Service and Foreign Commonwealth Office Research Department. He is an Academic Visitor at St Antony's College, Oxford. His history of Britain and the Middle East will be published by I.B. Tauris in 2016.

FURTHER READING David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (Penguin, 1999). Keith Kyle, Suez (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991). Peter Hinchcliffe, John T. Ducker and Maria Holt, Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden (I.B.Tauris, 2006). FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 17

InFocus

Attlee On His Way 1945

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HE FIFTH OF JULY 1945, polling day, and Clement Attlee, ‘The Major’ as he is known by his Limehouse constituents who surround him, has been brought a mug of tea. A woman has even produced what looks like a malt loaf and a plate, in case he should be peckish. He has been their Member of Parliament since 1922 and there is no way that he is going to lose his seat now. But what will remain in doubt for three weeks is whether Labour will win a majority and so form a government with him at its head. There is still a war on in the Far East and the forces’ votes must have time to come in before the count takes place on July 26th. Attlee’s father was a successful City solicitor who sent him and his brothers to Haileybury and Oxford. It was to be his involvement with a boys’ club in Stepney and the time he spent living there before the Great War that brought him to join that new phenomenon, the Labour Party. His wartime experiences as an infantry officer at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and on the Western Front reinforced his commitment. In 1919 and 1920 he was mayor of Stepney and then Limehouse elected him, unseating a Liberal to become the first Labour MP who was also an Oxford graduate. As deputy prime minister during the wartime coalition Attlee had shown himself to be a tireless, efficient chairman of the Cabinet in Churchill’s absence. A decent, patriotic man of notoriously few words, he was not a formulator of new initiatives but a brisk dispatcher of business who could deploy a ruthless streak when it counted. The question now was whether the country would stick to Churchill, coming into the election trailing clouds of glory as his country’s – even civilisation’s – saviour, or would it decide that Labour was a better bet to build the houses, secure the jobs and bring in the social insurance and National Health Service, which both parties were promising? There was another consideration, which may have weighed heaviest of all. It was encapsulated in an exchange that remarkable wartime diarist George Beardmore (Civilians at War, 1984) overheard in July, between a North London plumber and a gas fitter: ‘Don’t want him again.’ ‘Enough battles for one life time.’ Long pause. ‘Bloody Russia.’ ‘The old cock’s just aching to wave us up and at ’em again.’ Churchill did not help his cause by claiming in a broadcast that a socialist government could not afford to allow free speech and ‘would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo’. Professor Harold Laski, chairman of the Labour NEC, balanced things up by asserting that: ‘If Labour did not obtain what it needed by general consent, we shall have

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to use violence even if it means revolution.’ Most people, including Attlee, it seems, expected a Conservative victory, in spite of memories of the unemployment, the means test and appeasement in the 1930s. The impact of Ernest Bevin, who, as wartime minister of labour, had mobilised the nation’s manpower on the understanding that the status of the workers must henceforth be transformed, was not appreciated. Neither was Beveridge’s Report of 1942, with his

A decent, patriotic man of notoriously few words, Attlee was not a formulator of new initiatives but a brisk dispatcher of business who could deploy a ruthless streak when it counted

Five Giants to be laid low: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness. The Gallup polls might have been predicting a Labour win for years but they were a novelty and ignored. Many years after his 146-seat victory Attlee was asked what his emotions had been on becoming prime minister. His answer was totally in character: ‘Just to know that there were jobs that were to be done.’ There were indeed. Two days later he was at the Potsdam Conference alongside

Harry Truman and Josef Stalin, where ruthless Soviet ambition was obvious. The surrender of Japan in August signalled the end of the war, but also triggered the abrupt end of the Lend-Lease agreement with the US. Britain’s financial carpet had been whipped from under her feet by American politicians disinclined to be generous to a country gone socialist, but which was also still an Empire. ROGER HUDSON

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The FRENCH REVOLUTION A Complete History? In the second of our occasional series in which leading historians tell the story of major events with reference to articles from the archive of History Today, David Andress offers a compelling account of this tumultuous period.

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FRENCH REVOLUTION

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HAT THE FRENCH REVOLUTION was depends, perhaps more than any other major historical event, on what you choose to believe about it. Was it a great epoch in the history of the modern West, or an ugly and unnecessary carnage? Was it the product of the collapse of the French state from inside, or of irresistible social pressures? Was it a brave attempt to create a constitutional state betrayed by irresponsible radicals, or a radical bid to bring happiness to the world betrayed by compromisers and aristocrats? Was it a doomed descent into anarchic violence, or a desperate, but managed, effort to resist enemies on all sides? It has been all these things, not just in the longer term of history, but within the debates and memories of its participants. Every subsequent generation has imposed its ideas and concerns onto the fabric of revolutionary events but none has succeeded in doing more than establishing a temporary supremacy of one prevailing view or another.

The Taking of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789. Contemporary coloured engraving.

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FRENCH REVOLUTION A complete history of the French Revolution can only be a review of events so disturbing to their contemporaries – and so central to modern politics – that assigning them a fixed significance continues to elude us. If that seems disappointing, it should not be, because history is not about settled questions (for those, a mere chronicle will suffice). Rather, we should see in the endlessly disturbed waters of debate on this subject a better reflection of the unsettled, unfinished nature of society today and a stronger reason to continue debating it into the future.

Historians in the last 40 years have tended to move away from thinking about social class as a cause of conflict: the evidence for a strong capitalist bourgeoisie before 1789 was always thin and faded away under detailed inspection. (See Maurice Cranston for a bicentennial reflection on 1789.) This has opened the field to revived interest in the worldview of elite individuals – ministers themselves and the 144 noblemen invited in 1787 to form an ‘Assembly of Notables’ to approve royal reforms. Many of these rejected the proposals, using an intriguing cocktail of reasons that both defended their privileged place in the state and talked of the wider interests of the ‘nation’ against the crown.

THERE IS A straightforward explanation for the events that became the Revolution: the French state was lurching towards bankruptcy. Burdened with massive debts accumulated N SO DOING and in continued defiance through military expenditure in the Seven of royal plans by France’s network of high This feature contains links (marked Years’ War and the War of American Indecourts, the parlements, over the next year pendence, unable to raise enough in taxathe elite attracted a great deal of support in red) to related articles from our tion to pay down the debts, coming danfrom the public. That public was an unmeasextensive archive. They are available at: gerously close to borrowing more simply urable mix of the two or three per cent of www.historytoday.com/frenchrevolution to keep the government’s candles lit, Louis the country who were nobles and clergy, XVI’s ministers were, by the mid-1780s, in another few per cent who made up a wider dire straits. (See Peter Burley for an exploration of French finances.) educated and propertied class of commoners and a more visible public of They could simply have repudiated the debts, either by blatantly urban protesters who supported their local institutions with vociferous cancelling them or through forms of restructuring that many states, protest. This was particularly notable in the summer of 1788, when royal including France itself, had used on occasion in previous centuries. The despotism seemed to take a leap forward, abolishing the parlements and revolutionary situation arose precisely because ministers felt compelled seeking to implement changes without them. not to do this. The influence of a culture of ‘Enlightenment’, a belief in By the end of that year, the public had fractured dramatically. Its the value of public debate and of ‘public opinion’ as a worthy judge of voice and real looming bankruptcy had forced the crown to give in and state actions, hovered in their minds. So, too, did the knowledge that restore the parlements. A national consultative Estates General was to the idea of state bankruptcy had already been branded as a hallmark of be held, the first since 1614, to address grievances and pave the way for evil despotism in the writings of eminent commentators. (See J.L Carr reform. The judges in the senior Paris parlement had greeted news of for a 1965 overview of cultural change in this period.) this event, which the nation had cried out for, with a pronouncement that it should meet in three equal chambers, with two reserved for the This insight allows us to see another dimension of the traditional nobility and clergy. Thus the wider public, the so-called ‘Third Estate’, debate between the social and the political origins of the Revolution.

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Opening of the Estates General at Versailles, May 5th 1789, by Isidore Stanislas Helman, 18th century. 22 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Heads of two of the king's guards, killed at Versailles on October 5th, 1789, are carried through Paris. Coloured engraving, 18th century.

hope and dread. It began with communities gathering to take part in elections, an event for which there was a significant level of local precedent, but none in living memory for such a national event. With those elections went the composition of cahiers de doléances, registers of grievances for redress, which were an essential component of the medieval consultative nature of the Estates. After 175 years of absolute monarchy, which had piled up layer upon layer of divisive privileges, often selling them for cash as part of its fiscal strategies, the pent-up volume of social resentment was immense and explosive. As communities unleashed their complaints about the injustice they endured – including the great burden of owing not just taxes and church tithes but also ‘feudal dues’ to local lords – they also felt the immediate burden of a harsh winter after a poor harvest, with food stocks running low and prices in the towns rising dangerously.

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The Third Estate was everything and nothing and, in comparison, the privileged were a ‘malignant tumour’ in the body politic would lose any chance of a significant voice. In the tidal wave of protests, petitions and pamphlets that followed it became clear that the coalition against royal despotism concealed a deep divide. The privileges of nobility, their legal rights to be different from, and superior to, others, paying fewer taxes and milking the state for support were in their own eyes perfectly compatible with ideas of anti-despotic liberty. In the view of others, however, they were themselves a form of tyranny, which talk of the nation and an Estates General had already seemed to undermine. There may not have been a strong capitalist bourgeoisie, but there was a strong enlightened public, whose ideas of individual freedom and equality – against privilege, if not in material terms – were just as corrosive. France ended 1788 with the edifice of royal power tottering. The crown had decreed at the last moment that the Third Estate could have double the Estates General representatives of the other two, but ducked the issue of whether votes would be ‘by head’, leaving the concession moot. The effort to reject an unacceptably old-fashioned solution of bankruptcy had brought on the very accusations of tyranny it had sought to avoid. The necessity to compromise with opposition had led to further rifts. The abbé Sieyès, a commoner who had made his way in the professional ranks of the church, published at the start of the new year 200 pages of vivid prose entitled What is the Third Estate? His answer was that it was currently everything and nothing and that, in comparison, the privileged orders were a ‘malignant tumour’ in the body politic. The year of the Estates General was an astonishing rollercoaster of

Y THE EARLY SPRING, communities had begun to take direct action. Some claimed they had a licence to fulfil the demands they had made in their cahiers, others voiced the need for justice or simple material need. Tax offices, monastic granaries, noble game reserves, enclosed commons and document rooms of local chateaux all experienced popular wrath up and down the country in sporadic and spontaneous movements. Had it been only a little more consistent, this activity would have been recognised as a mass movement. Many elite observers at the time wrote it off as delusional and it introduced another dimension of complexity to the political landscape: soon, town populations would be forming militias to defend themselves against a peasantry whose motivations they could not decipher and would not trust. It was in the shadow of all this that the Estates General met at Versailles in early May and for the first month of its existence remained entirely deadlocked. The majority of noble deputies were convinced their social identity was at stake in the pretentions of the Third Estate and resisted all moves to meet together as the latter demanded. Only after the Third had vowed in June to proceed alone, declaring itself the ‘National Assembly’ and pledging to write a new constitution, did privileged resistance crumble. In early July a sudden spark of royal despotism took its place and Louis XVI was persuaded by his family to sack the popular minister Necker and bring in a hard-line ministry that could, they thought, crush the Assembly. News of this, as well as rumours of menacing troop movements, sparked the uprising of the Parisian population on July 12th that, within 48 hours, had formed a citizens’ militia, seized state armouries and besieged the Bastille to secure its stocks of gunpowder. News of this rising caused dread in the National Assembly and only unequivocal word that it had been done on their behalf, which arrived after the fall of the Bastille, broke the immense tension with near hysterical relief. The king arrived at their meeting hall on the 15th to pledge to work with them. This and a ceremonial royal visit to Paris on the 17th, where Louis was greeted by the city’s new revolutionary authorities, cemented a sense of epoch-making change. But the first counter-revolutionary aristocrats, including the king’s brother Artois, had already fled the country, becoming the émigrés whose threat would haunt the coming years. Like other aspects of revolutionary action across the country, the extent to which different groups and social constituencies acted both independently towards similar ideals, yet at potential cross-purposes, was remarkable. Soon the Parisian leaders were trying to disarm the FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 23

FRENCH REVOLUTION less ‘reliable’ (that is, poorer) elements of their militia, while across France the ‘Great Fear’ broke out. Rumours of aristocratically sponsored brigandage, crop-burning and general marauding – almost entirely false – flashed around the nation, mobilising communities (and thus sparking further rumours) and also bounced back to Versailles, creating the impression of a universal collapse of order. In a moderately desperate attempt to regain the political initiative, leading reformers in the Assembly proposed that at least some ‘feudal’ and other privileges should be ended. As a result of this, the ‘Night of 4th August’ saw an emotional crescendo of proposals from nobles, clerics and commoners, sacrificing church income, noble tax exemptions, feudal rights and all the geographical distinctions that had ‘privileged’ different communities and regions against each other. It redefined the nation as a community equal in civic identity and set the stage for the truly momentous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen a few weeks later. It also proved cripplingly disappointing to the rural population, whose feudal burdens, despite apparent abolition, were largely slated instead to be ‘redeemed’ at the ludicrous price of a lump sum of 20 years’ dues.

Louis XVI by AntoineFrançois Callet, 1779.

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UGUST 4TH was a decisive high point in revolutionary unity. By the end of the month many nobles and clergy were already regretting their lost status, new quarrels were rising over the basic structure of the planned constitution and further rumours of counter-revolutionary plotting, all the way up to the royal family, were swirling. Clashes over proposals for a royal veto exposed further sharp divides, while continuing food shortages in Paris were read by radicals as evidence of a famine plot. News at the start of October that troops arriving at Versailles had been greeted by a ‘counter-revolutionary’ banquet, with the king and queen in attendance, was the spark for a march from Paris, beginning with groups of market women but expanding to include thousands of the National Guard militia. The ‘October Days’ cost several royal guards their lives and a number of more conservative deputies thought they were lucky to escape with their own. How close Marie Antoinette truly came to a confrontation with knife-wielding intruders remains a mystery, but the king’s agreement to move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris remained, in his own mind, the coerced submission of a prisoner. It was in the shocked international aftermath of this that Edmund Burke began writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which placed the National Assembly at the whim of the mob and the whole culture of the country under the hooves of a ‘swinish multitude’. The National Assembly that followed the royal couple to Paris a few days later had almost two years’ more work ahead of it to complete its new constitution. Nobody knew that at the time and there was still talk of having it done within months, but the structural obstacles to completion soon began to pile ever higher. Roughly a quarter of the membership, mostly nobles and some clergy, were locked in permanent, aggressive, increasingly ‘counter-revolutionary’, opposition. By the end of 1789, after a decision to nationalise church property (thus staving off bankruptcy again), even more of the clergy became intransigent. (See Nigel Aston for a discussion of how the clergy first welcomed, then undermined, the Revolution.) The vigour of the ‘counter-revolution’ was one spur to the foundation of a group that soon rose to become a national movement. The Jacobin Club in Paris was initially a gathering of the relatively few radically democratic Assembly deputies, who felt the need to form what we would now call a caucus to defend their positions from reactionary assaults. By the end of 1790 dozens of provincial clubs had joined it, in what was 24 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Clothing worn by the three orders of the Estates General: the clergy, the nobility and the common people, 1789.

The Siege of the Bastille by Claude Cholat, 1789.

becoming a dense network of correspondence and political identity – but one built, paradoxically, on the idea of politics without party. The notion, central to their identity, that Jacobins were simply patriots and that it was their enemies who formed a ‘faction’ was echoed in the wider assumptions structuring the revolutionised nation. A tax-paying male electorate of several million ‘active citizens’ was established and structures of local government, administration and the judiciary from the village upwards were made elective. Nobody, however, was permitted to publicly stand for election – this was too divisive. Rather, in interminable processes, electors nominated lengthy lists of individuals they thought worthy for various roles, only finding out at the end whether any had achieved a majority of votes or were indeed willing to serve. It was little wonder, in hindsight, that initially healthy levels of voter participation plunged, after several different elections stretching into 1791, towards a small minority of persistent activists.

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HESE IDEAS OF SIMPLE, patriotic public spirit existed alongside not just reactionaries and Jacobins, but a huge spectrum of vociferous press and public debate, marked by the refusal to recognise that there was anything like a spectrum of positions involved. The constant cry was of what ‘all the good citizens’ must think, feel, want or fear – and any differing suggestions were denounced, loudly, as unpatriotic, aristocratic, counter-revolutionary. Even voices that were clearly radical in their advocacy of popular engagement could be damned as aristocratic by seeing them as ‘disorganisers’, fomenting chaos through which the émigrés would triumph. Fear of gens malintentionnés – ‘ill-intentioned people’ of unknown identity and dread motive – was everywhere. As such acrimony flourished, major political decisions fuelled it

further. From early 1790, authorities had begun to inventory ‘surplus’ religious buildings for sale, leading to the wholesale abolition of monasticism, as new rules for the state-funded church were finalised that June. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy split that body almost down the middle and with it much of the general population. The new structure explicitly denied the authority of the pope in ways that fuelled fears of a secret anti-religious (possibly Protestant, Masonic, Jewish) agenda behind the whole Revolution. Many priests scorned such views, seeing a church which was renewed and cleansed of plutocratic excesses. But many others clung to them, as parishioners clung to actual churches now threatened with closure through structural rationalisation and to the educational and charitable services of monks and nuns. Riotous protest, amounting almost to insurrection in some regions, increased and meshed too easily with groups of real counter-revolutionary agents. Rural discontent in general rose through the second half of 1790 as the population absorbed the news that legislation demanded they ‘redeem’ their feudal dues at great cost and in some regions peasants had to endure landlords lumping abolished tithes into their rents. This was sanctioned by the National Assembly, presumably believing that money left in the hands of peasants would be wasted. While this helped to aggravate the rising levels of protest around religion, in the cities revolutionary leaders also faced growing radical pressure, as club organisation spread from the prosperous ranks of Jacobins down to more ‘popular societies’, with low subscriptions and mixed-sex membership. In Paris and Lyon in particular, networks of clubs grew up that saw the shadow of counter-revolution in everything that was not uncompromisingly anti-aristocratic and made this known vehemently in the press and in public demonstrations. Two events in 1791 shattered the idea of a swift final resolution FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 25

FRENCH REVOLUTION to the constitutional travails of the country. In January almost half of all priests refused to take a loyalty oath, imposed to try to end dissent over the Civil Constitution. In some regions, notably the north-west, refusal ran at over 80 per cent. ‘Non-juring’ priests became a new category of revolutionary enemy and a dissident ‘refractory’ church now competed openly for popular loyalties with the ‘constitutional’ clergy appointed to replace them. Violence accompanied the split everywhere – priests, old and new, were dragged from pulpits, a few were even shot at, while in Paris furious crowds inflicted humiliating beatings on nuns, with salacious press commentary. As with every other problem of public life – notably rising inflation in the assignat paper currency introduced on the collateral of the church’s lands – counter-revolution was blamed automatically for this situation and actual counterrevolutionaries strove to take advantage of it. (See Gemma Betros for an overview of this critical issue.)

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T THE VERY TOP of politics, the religious crisis engaged the conscience of the king, who tried to avoid Easter communion with a constitutional priest by leaving the city but was blockaded by a huge crowd. This confirmed the royal couple in the plans they were already making for escape and on the night of June 20th they fled the city with their children, heading for the eastern frontier garrisons and their loyal officers. Louis left behind a comprehensive written denunciation of the Revolution and all its works, showing without a doubt that the constitutional monarchy the Assembly had hoped it was crafting was a hollow sham. The royal coach was stopped at the small town that gives this episode its name: the Flight to Varennes. The humble town councillors could not be browbeaten into letting the king and queen pass and, over the next day, thousands of locals rallied to defend against a possible counterrevolutionary armed incursion. Escorted back to Paris in a massive paramilitary procession, harangued by local officials about patriotism at every stop, they were stripped of any illusion that the ‘real’ France, outside the capital they detested, was still royalist. Rather than a change of heart, this occasioned more plotting, as they agreed with the desperate leadership of the Assembly to go along with the fairy story that they had been kidnapped and to accept Louis’ constitutional role, while secretly agitating for a foreign invasion. Reactions to the Flight crystallised the growing tension between revolutionaries and the elite. The Jacobin Club split, with most of its members within the Assembly accepting the royal compromise and many outside demanding a popular voice in the decision. The latter managed to hang onto the identity and legitimacy of Jacobins, while the former started a breakaway ‘Feuillant’ club that remained a relatively closed circle of politicians. Meanwhile, the wider Parisian club movement tried to launch a mass petition for a referendum on the king’s position. With tension high in the city and a continued belief amongst the elite in ‘disorganisers’ and ‘anarchists’ as a rowdy front for counter-revolutionary brigandage, martial law was declared and the National Guard militia opened fire on the crowd in the ‘Champ de Mars Massacre’. Some radical leaders were arrested and others went into hiding. THE CULMINATION OF THE WORK of the National Assembly was thus marked, first with blood and threats of legal persecution and then with weeks in which new restrictive laws on public meetings and popular activism were added to the constitutional edifice in a desperate effort to shore it up. Although a general amnesty for political offences was passed to celebrate its completion and a wave of relief-tinged joy swept the country upon the king’s acceptance of it in September, the portents were gloomy. Louis, humiliated by deputies’ lack of respect at the ceremony in which he swore himself in, wept helplessly in front of his horrified family. Many others would have been horrified, too, if they 26 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Clockwise from right: A Citizen Ready to Fight and a Citizen Carrying the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the Lesueur Brothers; The Seizing of the Tuileries Palace by Jean DuplessisBertaux; and a cartoon showing Mirabeau presiding over the Jacobins. All 18th century.

had known that he had perjured himself and was working with the queen and the émigrés to bring about an ‘armed congress’ of European powers to free him from revolutionary shackles.

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HE AGENDA OF THE newly elected Legislative Assembly, that Feuillant leaders hoped to use to stabilise the country, soon instead became dominated by the continued echoes of the king’s flight. Radical Jacobins, led by the Parisian journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and men who had risen through the politics of their local regions in the turbulent revolutionary years, presented an uncompromising challenge to the idea that the king, as head of the executive branch, would be allowed to peaceably set policy. It took less than two months to push him into vetoing measures against émigré nobles and refractory priests and by the end of the year the ‘Brissotins’ were actively calling for a war against the German powers sheltering the Revolution’s enemies. Maximilien Robespierre, who had built a reputation as an ‘incorruptible’ spokesman for the oppressed people in the National Assembly, was in these months almost a lone voice warning of the dangers of war. Where Brissotins asserted the invincibility of free men in combat against the ‘slaves’ of tyranny, he saw an unprepared nation being hurried towards a death-trap. As more conservative figures came around to the war agenda, seeking to use it to stamp authority on the turbulent people, and as the royal couple and their allies increasingly plotted to use war to bring the Revolution down, Robespierre’s suspicions were all too well-founded. The drumbeat of hostilities became irresistible, however, and on April 20th France declared war on Austria, the leader, under the Habsburg emperor, of the Holy Roman Empire. The period of the spring and early summer of 1792 was a turningpoint for future politics, beyond the simple, albeit critical, fact of movement from peace to war. The Brissotins in the Assembly had been seeking not merely influence for their views, but power, and specifically to install their friends as royal ministers. They succeeded in this

Robespierre, an ‘incorruptible’ spokesman for the oppressed people, was a lone voice warning of the dangers of war a month before the declaration of war, but this meant that they took the blame from forces to their left as the war proved to go very badly. Robespierre’s analysis, that there was some nefarious intent beneath their martial ardour, gained currency especially with the Parisian local Sections. In these neighbourhood committees, some were increasingly accepting the newly minted identity of ‘sans-culottes’: radical popular patriots, not the ‘friends of the people’ the Brissotins claimed to be, but the people themselves. Through May and June, as French armies failed to make advances and the unthinkable prospect of an enemy invasion loomed, Brissotins both assailed the sinister influence of an ‘Austrian Committee’ inside the Court and called for more decisive royal action. The Assembly produced further emergency measures but ministers despaired as Louis refused to sanction them. In mid-June the Brissotin ministers were dismissed after openly warning that the king was heading down a disastrous path, but their supporters in the Assembly continued to harass their Feuillant successors. (See M.J. Sydenham for a further traumatic episode when the king was confronted by protesters in his own palace.) By early July, with Prussia entering the war, the Assembly was driven to create and enact a measure to declare ‘The Fatherland in Danger’, mobilising the National Guard and taking powers to override the royal veto – powers FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 27

FRENCH REVOLUTION The Terrible Night in Paris, 10th August 1792.

which, having never been formally sanctioned by the king, were unconstitutional in their essence. In the second half of July, with ardently patriotic militiamen from around the country beginning to gather in the capital as a fédéré force for its defence, the Brissotin leadership sought desperately to stabilise the situation. Fatally for its political future, it negotiated secretly with the king for a return to power, while publicly warning of the risks of a decisive move against Louis. This would damn it forever in more radical eyes. Momentum among the sans-culottes and the fédérés for action was rising, especially after word that the enemy’s ‘Brunswick Manifesto’ had threatened to raze Paris, if the king were harmed. On August 9th, the Assembly refused to rule on Parisian petitions to topple the king and on that same day forces in the capital formed an ‘Insurrectional Commune’, which on August 10th ordered an advance by several columns of National Guards on the Tuileries Palace.

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HE KING, primarily concerned for his family’s safety, surrendered into the custody of the Legislative Assembly before any overt confrontation, but his garrison of Swiss Guards, left behind without orders, refused Parisians’ demands to lay down their arms. Someone fired a first shot and a battle erupted that turned into a slaughter. Some 300 insurgents were shot down but the Swiss were overwhelmed, with hundreds killed on the spot and dozens more hunted down and butchered as they tried to flee through neighbouring streets. Crowds invaded the palace, hauling out royal finery to burn in massive bonfires. The Assembly decreed the king ‘suspended’, but in truth the monarchy had clearly been toppled. That fact was reinforced by the purge of the administration that followed: in many ways more rapid and decisive than the changes of 1789, which had often left old authorities effectively intact for months. Now royalists of every stripe were driven from office and many found themselves in custody. In Paris, the prisons swelled with hundreds of new suspects and a new tribunal began work a week after the Tuileries events, sentencing some of the more egregious counter-revolutionaries to death. This was not fast enough for many local sans-culottes: politicians and press warned of catastrophic subversion in the city as enemy armies drew near, besieging Verdun, the last fortress before the capital, at the start of September. Between September 2nd and 5th, in the region of 1,500 people were killed in the Parisian prisons in what almost all revolutionary observers at the time agreed was a regrettable necessity. The great majority of those killed were ordinary criminals, defined as ‘brigands’ available for aristocratic subversion; the rest were a selection of those priests, nobles and officials recently rounded up. 28 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

It is important to recognise the selective element in these ‘September Massacres’. They became the iconic moment of popular savagery in counter-revolutionary retellings and for Brissotins, who came to believe Robespierre had tried to dispose of their leaders through them. But most ‘counter-revolutionary’ prisoners survived the massacres, having had their case files reviewed and sometimes having been questioned for hours by ad-hoc tribunals in each prison. The princesse de Lamballe, Marie Antoinette’s favourite, was indeed decapitated but did not suffer the sexual mutilations of many accounts and was almost the only woman to die. There is very little truly contemporary evidence for the many scenes of sadism later alleged to have taken place – it is true that victims were mostly hacked to death in very bloody processes but accounts of actual torture from immediate witnesses are essentially absent.

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N A SOCIETY that recoils from all face-to-face violence, it may seem odd to insist on a distinction between grim and gruesome killings and acts of popular savagery and sadism, but grim and gruesome public execution was an 18th-century norm (one which, indeed, the Revolution itself had only just toned down to ‘painless’ decapitation). Stories of the September Massacres were used, consciously and persistently, to paint their perpetrators as subhuman monsters of perversion, when they seem, mostly, to have been men grimly committed to a bloody solution to a clear problem of political and military survival. Less than three weeks later the Revolution’s forces stemmed the enemy tide at the Battle of Valmy and began an advance that would see them largely overrunning modern-day Belgium by the winter, and occupying the Rhineland in the east. From the perspective of patriots on the ground, what had happened in Paris was part and parcel of the effort required to move from disaster under the monarchy to apparent stunning triumph. The first meeting of the hastily elected National Convention had been on the day of Valmy and, two days later, on September 22nd, it had proclaimed France a Republic. Within only a few more days, Brissotins in the new body had called for a new fédéré force to protect them, not from aristocrats but from the overweening power of the Parisian sans-culottes, and had accused Robespierre of aspiring to dictatorship. Moments of genuine unity in revolutionary politics were rare and fleeting. (See Marisa Linton on how Robespierre navigated revolutionary politics.) David Andress is Professor of Modern History at the University of Portsmouth.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION CONTINUES The survey of the revolution continues in the February digital edition of History Today, which traces the development of the Terror, culminating in the events of 9 Thermidor and the struggle of surviving republicans to rebuild a stable state between the twin threats of radicalism and royalism. The digital edition is free to print subscribers. To download the digital edition visit www.historytoday.com/app

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| BAGEHOT Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well. ‘Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But ‘tis not what youth desires. Matthew Arnold

IN A TIME OF POLITICAL TENSION across Britain, Europe and the US, when rival parties see society through their ideological lenses, it is worth recalling the views of the Victorian writer, banker and economist Walter Bagehot (1826-77). As the author of The English Constitution (1867), which dissected the structure of British government, and Lombard Street (1873), a timeless analysis of the workings of finance, he saw politics from the outside. As the editor of the Economist and ‘shadow chancellor’ to both Liberal and Tory administrations, he was also well placed to see it from the inside. Much, of course, has changed politically and constitutionally since his lifetime, not least in the size and scope of Britain’s government. Yet many of the issues that he addressed continue to excite division, from party rivalries to relations with Europe, from constitutional reform to economic crises.

Walter Bagehot, mezzotint by Norman Hirst, 19th century.

As politics in Britain, Europe and the US descends into fragmentation and bitter division, Frank Prochaska commends the civilising voice of Walter Bagehot.

Educate! Educate! Educate! In a lifetime bounded by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, Bagehot was highly sensitive to the effects of Britain’s emerging democracy, which he viewed with alarm. He was, as he put it, ‘between sizes in politics’: too conservative for many Liberals and too liberal for many Tories. Wanting in zeal, he lacked the didactic and oratorical impulses that were becoming necessary to aspiring politicians in a democratising state. In his view, all selfish ambition was the consequence of a widening electorate, which is why his refrain during the passage of the 1867 Reform Act was ‘Educate! Educate! Educate!’ To a man like Bagehot, who stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Gladstonian Liberal, nothing was so vexing as having to act a role forced on him by the masses. What troubled Bagehot after the 1867 Reform Act was the coarsening of political life. The growing vulgarity of political discussion not only misled the poor but also disgusted the cultivated, who were easily put off politics by the language of selfishness. ‘A high morality’, he wrote, ‘shrinks with the shyness of superiority from intruding

The Champion of Moderation 30 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

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itself into the presence of low debates.’ As he saw it, the inevitable consequence of vulgarising Parliament would be the deterioration of public opinion in its more refined elements. Bagehot was of the opinion that the English people (he rarely used the word British) had fashioned the greatest political culture since that of ancient Rome. His chief worry was that a nation with a long history of continuous creation might ultimately collapse as its institutions weakened. In Bagehot’s opinion, the rise of popular government was likely to promote ‘excitement’. And nothing was so dangerous to a nation’s stability as the habit of uniting thought with excitement, which, if history were a guide, led to the fervent advocacy of unattainable ideals. To counter extreme opinion, he flirted with the formation of a coalition of moderate Liberals and Conservatives in what he called ‘a middle government’. To sustain England’s successful political culture, Bagehot thought all constitutional and political reforms should be made slowly, after public opinion had reflected maturely upon the issues. English institutions, such as the monarchy, were relics of a long past. Like old houses, they had undergone many transformations. Too often a rash reformer would pull

Giving politicians and bankers a wider culture would provide a check on reckless conduct down the very part that made them habitable in order to cure a minor defect. Bagehot had what he called ‘an experiencing nature’ and he took a dim view of ‘sentimental radicals’ who lived in the abstract. As a banker grounded in economic and political history, he concluded that man was by nature a creature of the market place. As a psychologist of economic behaviour, Bagehot detected the same disposition in commerce that he noted in politics, a tendency to excessive action: what his friend the poet Arthur Clough called ‘the ruinous force of the will’. The most dangerous men were those who had no other channels for their energy and intellectual life. Giving politicians and bankers a wider culture would, in his mind, provide a check on reckless conduct. ‘Culture always diminishes intensity’, he noted. Constant disappointment Bagehot lived through several banking crises and was acutely aware that the public understandably blamed commercial men for imprudence and speculative indiscretion. In finance, as elsewhere, people rarely desire what they already have. As he observed, much of the panic to which the economy was susceptible resulted from an over-extension of credit. In an era of rising prices, the mercantile world would be unusually fortunate not to make great mistakes, for the good times of high prices were likely to encourage fraud. ‘Credulity’, as he noted, ‘is the natural condition of man, and all people are most credulous when they are most happy.’ Like children who believe in fairy tales, they expected that some magical wand would be found at last, when only ‘the hard discipline of

constant disappointment would batter their credulity’. His personal experience and reading of history suggested that the swings in the trade cycle and the quicksand of the money market could not be eliminated. Their ill effects, however, might be mitigated. In Lombard Street he criticised the directors of the Bank of England for amateurish management. What was needed was to devise a policy of increasing the Bank’s gold reserves to meet emergencies. In such circumstances, central banks should lend freely but at high rates of interest on solid securities. Such modest reforms were not intended to sweep away the existing system but simply to achieve a more sensible policy to deal with inevitable financial crises. Nothing but a revolution would change behaviour and there was ‘nothing to cause a revolution’. As he saw it, only ‘palliatives’ would work; the government must simply find the best ones available. Permanent interests Bagehot was of the view that politicians often took too much on board and that individuals burdened themselves with unnecessary responsibilities. Until all the facts were in place, it was prudent to avoid risky enterprises. At the Economist, he consistently opposed British engagement with European quarrels. He advised his fellow countrymen to remain armed but detached, willing to mediate but hesitant to intervene. Beyond England’s shores, trade, not power, was the national priority. Like Lord Palmerston, a statesman of the ‘middle ground’, Bagehot believed that England had no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. He was suspicious of an ambitious foreign policy and could not justify the financial risk of foreign entanglements. If that meant the English people accepting the place of a lesser power, then so be it. This was not an unpatriotic wish, but a course that would elevate the national mind and lead to greater contentment. Bagehot was a man from the ‘quiet’ West Country county of Somerset, transported to the clamour of the capital. Without a craving for power and deeply conscious of life’s absurdities, he shrank from facile abstraction and hasty action. His moderate liberalism was undogmatic, centred on tolerance, steady judgment and pleasure. He sought to find a delicate balance, a ‘centrality of mind’, which was the reward of an educated man with a knowledge of the world. In his writing, he aimed to create greater communion between literature and commerce; to restrain reckless enterprise through culture and common sense; to give expression to a philosophy of equanimity; to translate the truths discovered by the dead into the language of the living. In his conversation with the world, the customary and familiar were the most endearing. As his friend Richard Hutton, the editor of the Spectator, observed, a poem by Clough would serve as the motto of Bagehot’s creed:

Old things need not be therefore true, O brother men, nor yet the new; Ah, still awhile, the old thought retain, And yet consider it again! Frank Prochaska is a member of Somerville and Wolfson colleges at the University of Oxford. FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 31

MakingHistory The public expects historians to deliver authoritative accounts of the past, yet different conclusions can be drawn from the same sources, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.

A Question of Interpretation I RECENTLY READ an amateur review of a history book with which I am familiar, which stated: ‘It is just an interpretation.’ The phrase has stayed with me, my mind lingering on the injustice of the ‘just’. What could the writer possibly mean by this attempted insult? By ‘interpretation’ did he or she really mean ‘speculation’? For an interpretation is based on evidence. What do the public think history – as a discipline, as a subject – is? Is anyone under any illusions that what historians write is ever anything but an interpretation? In the term before Christmas I was teaching first-year undergraduates. At the end of each term those who have been lecturing and tutoring get together with each student to talk about how it has gone. They are bright students who made great progress, but a repeating theme that emerged from this general round-up was the need for them to develop their own voices in the midst of the historical argument: to imagine, with each essay, that they take their seat at the dinner table of historians who have written in that field and then join in the debate. This is no new counsel. I remember a comment written on one of my undergraduate history essays at Oxford by my then-tutor, Susan Brigden, with her characteristic elegance of phrase: ‘Don’t bow with such becoming submission to the secondary authorities.’ History is debate, history is discussion, history is a conversation. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1957, ‘history that is not controversial is dead history’. While some of this controversy comes from the pronouncements of historians as public intellectuals addressing the present day, much of it comes from them arguing with each other. The collective noun for historians is – honestly – an ‘argumentation’. This is not in contradiction to 32 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

saying that historians aim at truth. What sort of truth we might achieve is debatable. Justin Champion, in writing about what historians are for, states that ‘historical claims to truth are aesthetic and ethical, rather than empirical and objective’. Peter Novick argued that historians make up stories and ‘make no greater (but also no lesser) truth claims than poets or painters’. I think this is to go too far. The past did exist, the events of history did happen.

If you take a group of historians working on the same problem, the conclusions they reach may differ Our job as historians is to get at them as best as possible, on the basis of the evidence we have, in a way that is epistemic: that fits with the facts we can establish. It is this forensic, interrogatory process that is the joy of being an historian. Yet the truth is, if you take a group of historians working on the same problem, writing at different times and in different places – even if they all use their evidence in a scrupulous, Just interpreter: Truth Presenting a Mirror to the Vanities, Dutch, c.1625.

honest, critical and informed way – the conclusions they reach may differ. This is because we are all different people; our context, our formation, our insights are different and the histories we write are personal. If it were not so, there would be little point training up more students to be historians. This is still a pursuit of truth. In each examination of a problem, even if new facts are not discovered, a new insight might be brought. The experience of the historian’s life might help her spot a previously missed connection, previous errors might be cleared up and some facts shown not to be facts. The historian might provide a context that gives a much needed, less partisan slant on an issue. There are reasons why one interpretation might be more plausible than another. But they are all still interpretations: the best informed, most thoroughly considered, factual of interpretations, but interpretations nonetheless. Even history that hides its workings (or to misuse Gibbon, its ‘nice and secret springs’) and presents itself as narrative – for historians are always storytellers – rests on interpretation. Does this clash with a public expectation that historians will tell an unfettered, impartial and objective truth? Is an historian’s public credibility to make authoritative statements about what happened in the past undermined by the contingent nature of history? I do not think so. The truth is what we must always seek. It is not possible to be both an historian and a liar. But what we arrive at is, ultimately, informed, epistemic, honest opinion: ‘just an interpretation’. Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the history faculty at the New College of the Humanities, London and author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015) .

HOMOSEXUALITY Mannequins on Carnaby Street, London, March 1966.

A new normal During the 1950s and 1960s, debates over the legality and morality of homosexuality drove gay men and doctors to desperate and dangerous measures in their search for a ‘cure’, writes John-Pierre Joyce.

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N THE EVENING OF September 5th, 1957 viewers in ITV’s Granada (North-west) and Rediffusion (London) regions were presented with an unusual spectacle. An anonymous doctor, seated in shadow, his back to the camera, admitted on live television to being a homosexual. When asked if he would prefer to be ‘normal’, the doctor responded: ‘Oh yes, I would. If there was a guaranteed cure – a hope – that I could become an ordinary normal person I would certainly welcome it. I think all homosexuals would like to be cured.’ The doctor’s comments reflected the attitudes of the medical profession towards homosexuality in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The programme – broadcast at 10:30pm and preceded by a warning about its controversial nature – was a discussion and debate about the Wolfenden Report, which had been published that day. The report was the result of a three-year investigation by a Home and Scottish Office-appointed committee chaired by John Wolfenden into the twin ‘problems’ of homosexuality and prostitution. While proposing tighter controls on street prostitution, it recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts

between consenting males over the age of 21. The Wolfenden Committee also pondered the vexed question of whether or not homosexuality was a sickness or disease. To this end, it examined the views of a wide range of medical witnesses, including representatives of the British Medical Association, the British Psychological Society and two of the Wolfenden Committee’s own members, Desmond Curran and Joseph Whitby. Ultimately, the committee decided that ‘the evidence put before us has not established to our satisfaction the proposition that homosexuality is a disease’. Citing the large-scale research undertaken by Alfred Kinsey in the US in the late 1940s, it acknowledged that homosexual tendencies could be present in most people in the course of their lifetime. This, the final report stated, ‘leads to the conclusion that homosexuals cannot reasonably be regarded as quite separate from the rest of mankind’. The committee also cast doubt on the claims of doctors to be able to ‘cure’ or reverse homosexuality. In a damning paragraph on therapeutic treatment, the report noted: We were struck by the fact that none of our medical witnesses were able … to provide any reference in medical literature to a complete change of this kind. Our evidence leads us to the conclusion that a total reorientation from complete homosexuality to complete heterosexuality is very unlikely indeed. Yet, despite these conclusions, doctors and gay men themselves continued to seek cures for homosexuality. There FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 33

were three main reasons for this. First, all homosexual acts were a crime, at least until 1967. For many gay men, unable to form relationships in a punitive legal climate, or who risked prosecution, imprisonment, social shame, loss of career and even the break-up of marriages and families, the attractions of a cure were strong. Tony Kildwick, for example, married in the late 1950s but soon turned to his doctor for help: ‘I went to him and I said, “Now look, I get no sexual satisfaction at all in my married life. I still have these male fantasies. Do you think I’m homosexual?”’ Eventually, the psychiatrist concluded that Kildwick was homosexual and recommended treatment. Hostile and disapproving public attitudes towards homosexuality during the 1950s and 60s also compelled many men to try to turn ‘normal’, either through marriage or medical treatment. Parents, too, feared that their children might become ‘queer’. One listener from Essex wrote to the ‘You Ask For It’ advice slot on BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour in July 1958: Am I right in thinking that homosexuality is inborn in a small percentage of individuals? Is it inevitable? Is there a modern ‘miracle drug’ that works? Can it be discovered early enough for something to be done? The guest psychiatrist, Clifford Allen, who had given evidence to Wolfenden, gave reassuring advice: It can sometimes be cured, not by magic drugs, but by painstaking psychological treatment. Naturally, like other diseases, the earlier it is treated, the more likely it is to respond.

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S ALLEN’S COMMENTS SHOWED, the medical profession was undecided as to whether or not homosexuality was a sickness that could be cured. In an editorial on the Wolfenden Report in September 1957, The Lancet lamented that: The claim of doctors to be heard on homosexuality is weakened by deep divisions of opinion within the profession. To the psychiatric wing, homosexuality is a medical disorder, but at the opposite extreme there are doctors to whom homosexual behaviour is the abominable offence – in the realm of morals not medicine. The Wolfenden Report advocated research into the origins of homosexuality and the effects of treatment. It recommended lifting the ban on oestrogen treatment for prisoners in England and Wales (it was still permitted in Scotland) in order to curb their sexual behaviour and so ‘reduce the number of homosexual offences and offenders’. By the late 1950s, however, the belief that homosexuality could be controlled with female hormones was largely discredited. As Eustace Chesser (another medical witness for the Wolfenden Committee) pointed out in 1959, ‘it is possible to reduce sexual desire but not to change its direction by these means’. W. Lindesay Neustatter also noted in the Medico-Legal Journal in 1961 that injecting homosexuals with male hormones such as testosterone in 34 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

The Wolfenden Report, 1957.

a bid to reorient their sexual desires towards women also had ‘no curative effect’ and, indeed, increased ‘the inverted drive’. Such views led to the abandonment of treatment by means of hormone injections, which had been prescribed for the mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing as a condition of his probation order, following his conviction for gross indecency in 1952. Doctors turned instead to increasingly fashionable behaviour therapy. The theory behind it was simple. Homosexuality, explained Clifford Allen in his 1958 book Homosexuality: Its Nature, Causation and Treatment, was the result of either hostility to the mother or father, or else excessive affection for one or other parent during infancy and childhood. The homosexual, he argued, ‘must be made to realise that he is not irrevocably homosexual, but has drifted into such behaviour’. Curing the fear of the female or fixation with the male was just a matter of emotional re-education; learning to be straight and unlearning to be gay. This could be achieved through either lengthy psychoanalysis or shortterm (and cheaper) courses of ‘aversive conditioning’. Early forms of aversion therapy had been developed in the United States in the 1940s to treat alcoholism and by the early 1960s it was being used in Britain to treat homosexuality. One of its earliest exponents was Basil James, who described the treatment of a 40-year-old man at Glenside Hospital, Bristol, in an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in March 1962: The treatment was carried out in a darkened single room and during this time no food or drink was allowed. At regular twohour intervals he was given an emetic dose of apomorphine

HOMOSEXUALITY This time, a card was placed in the patient’s room with ‘carefully selected photographs of sexually attractive young women’ pasted onto it. Each morning the patient was injected with testosterone and told to go to his room ‘when he felt any sexual excitement’. There, he was given a record-player and records of ‘a female vocalist whose performance is generally recognised as “sexy”’. Basil claimed success. In a follow-up letter to the BMJ he reported that the patient ‘has had no recurrence of his homosexual drives’ and was now ‘courting’ a woman. He did, though, concede that the man’s ‘considerable physical satisfaction’ with his girlfriend did not have ‘the same emotional component as his homosexual experiences’ and he ‘occasionally found himself admiring pretty boys’.

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HE DRUG AND ALCOHOL-INDUCED method of aversion therapy was widely used in clinics and hospitals across Britain. Peter Price, an 18-year-old, was referred by his GP for treatment at a Chester psychiatric hospital in 1964. ‘I sat in the doctor’s room with an old-fashioned tape recorder,’ he recalled: The doctor was asking me questions, like did I realise how offensive it was to be homosexual? He … put me in a room with this male nurse and a stack of ‘dirty’ books of male bodies. And he said, ‘What do you drink?’ So I had a couple of cases of Guinness stacked up. He then gave me an injection. And the injection made me violently ill. I said, ‘I’m going to be sick,’ and he said, ‘Go on then, just be sick in the bed.’ I was vomiting everywhere. That lasted an hour, and every hour they gave me an injection. Three days later Peter Price discharged himself. As well as patient intolerance to the procedure, chemical aversion therapy had other disadvantages. In an article in the BMJ of January 1964, R.J. McGuire and M. Vallance pointed out that the time taken between the patient’s viewing of gay pornography and the sickening effect of the drug and alcohol was unpredictable. They also warned of ‘dangerous side-effects’, as in the case of 29-year-old Gerald

When nausea was felt, a light was shone on a piece of card on which were pasted several photographs of nude men by injections followed by 2 oz of brandy. On each occasion when nausea was felt, a strong light was shone on a large piece of card on which were pasted several photographs of nude or near-nude men. Thereafter a tape was played twice over every two hours during the period of nausea. This began with an explanation of his homosexual attraction along the lines of father-deprivation. The adverse effect of this on him and its consequent social repercussions was then described in slow and graphic terms ending with words such as ‘sickening’, ‘nauseating’, etc., followed by the noise of someone vomiting. After 24 hours the treatment was started again and the following night the patient was woken up every two hours and made to listen to a record which congratulated him on what he was doing and explained what would happen if his homosexuality was reversed. On the third, fourth and fifth days of treatment, ‘positive conditioning’ was introduced.

Top: an article on homosexuality in the Daily Mirror, April 15th, 1965. Above left: John Wolfenden, 1961. Above right: Alan Turing, 1951.

William (‘Billy’) Clegg-Hill, a captain in the Royal Tank Regiment convicted of homosexual offences at Somerset Assizes in 1962. Put on probation for three years on condition of in-patient treatment at a military psychiatric hospital at Netley, near Southampton, he died after being injected with apomorphine. Stomach haemorrhages led to convulsions and a coma, although his death was quietly attributed to ‘natural causes’ in order to spare his family’s embarrassment. The drive for efficiency and better clinical outcomes drew doctors to another medium for curing homosexuality: electricity. The treatment was first outlined by J.G. Thorpe, E. Schmidt and D. Castell in an article in Behaviour Research and Therapy published in March 1964. In it, the three doctors described how a 35-year-old homosexual had asked for psychiatric help after reading an account in a Sunday FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 35

HOMOSEXUALITY

newspaper of Basil James’ treatment at Bristol. Demanding aversion therapy and even bringing his own stash of nude male photographs, he was admitted to Banstead Hospital in Surrey for a course of ‘positive and negative aversive conditioning’. The treatment began with an effort to stimulate heterosexual desires: The patient was directed into a small room, having a three by three feet floor area which was completely covered by an electrical grid. The door was closed and all lights switched off. In front of the patient, at head height, was a picture of an attractive, scantily dressed female, which was visible only when illuminated by the operation of a switch by the psychologist. The patient was supplied with tissues and instructed to masturbate in the darkness, using whatever fantasy he desired. He should, however, keep his eyes open, look ahead of him, and report ‘now’ when he felt that orgasm was being reached. This served as the cue to illuminate the female picture, which remained illuminated until the patient reported ‘finished’ immediately following ejaculation. By the 16th session, the patient had still not learned normal sexual desires so ‘negative conditioning’ was applied. As in the chemical treatment of the early 1960s, the patient was shown male nude photographs (his own), but with a new twist. Each time the pictures were lit up, the patient was given a shock on his bare feet through the floor grid. Reminiscent of Pavlov’s experiments on dogs in the 1900s, ‘the patient was very soon reporting sensations of electric shock when the picture was illuminated, irrespective of whether shock actually followed’. After three sessions he was masturbating ‘100 per cent’ to heterosexual fantasies. This apparent success was not to last. After a week out of hospital, the patient reported slipping back into his old ways. He ‘became extremely emotional, accusing the 36 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Top: members of the Gay Liberation Movement, London, July 4th, 1977. Above: US gay rights activist Craig Rodwell, 1969.

psychologists of a complete lack of understanding of him as a person. He claimed that we had been critical of him right from the start and that we were more interested in our experimental results than in him’. Treatment was later resumed but the results were inconclusive. Eight months after discharge, the patient reported that he had tried and failed to have sex with a woman and, the doctors noted, ‘occasional homosexual patterns of behaviour had occurred’. Whereas before treatment he had only been aroused by men and boys, ‘he now considered persons of both sexes. This occurred only in hot weather, of which there was not much in an English summer’. Over the course of the decade the electric shock method of aversion therapy was refined further. Doctors based at hospitals and clinics in Manchester, London, Chester,

Birmingham and Oxford treated hundreds of men and described their techniques with increasing confidence. McGuire and Vallance told the BMJ in January 1964 about their portable Do-It-Yourself kit: a six-inch square box fitted with a nine-volt battery and electrodes connected to arm cuffs. The patient could decide how strong the shocks could be and, after initial training, ‘he can treat himself and take the apparatus home to continue the treatment there’. M.P. Feldman and M.J. MacCulloch, two of aversion therapy’s strongest advocates, reported in Behaviour Research and Therapy in January 1965 that their attempt to ‘reproduce the method used with dogs’ involved a viewing box with colour and black and white slides of men and women. These were placed in a ‘hierarchy of attractiveness’ and the patient was allowed to remove or recall the slides before, during or in between shocks. In the same journal in August 1966 John Bancroft, together with H. Gwynne Jones and B.R. Pullan, introduced their wire ‘strain gauge for measuring penile erection’, which could more accurately test the degree of arousal and better control the timing and intensity of electric shocks.

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HILE DOCTORS’ techniques were being evolved, doubts about the effectiveness and even the morality of gay cures were beginning to emerge. The first signs of uncertainty came from the medical practitioners themselves. Despite their enthusiasm, doctors were unable to prove that treatment was successful. Most of the case studies presented in journals between 1957 and 1959 were based on single patients whose longer-term sexual reorientation was unrecorded. Where follow-up studies were made, the outcomes were hardly resounding successes. In 1958 the Czech psychiatrist Kurt Freund reported that only a quarter of 47 patients treated with chemical aversion therapy showed ‘improvement’ three to five years later and none were completely rid of their homosexual desires. In the next largest study, published in the BMJ in June 1967, MacCulloch and Feldman found that 20 out of 43 patients (including two women) treated with electric shocks were ‘actively practising heterosexually’ 12 months later, although what this meant and whether or not the improvement lasted beyond a year was not noted. In August 1968 John Bancroft and Isaac Marks informed the Royal Society of Medicine that, out of ten homosexuals treated, only one was ‘much improved’. Crucially, gay men themselves found that the treatment did not work. Tony Kildwick, who had been referred to a psychiatrist by his family doctor, went to hospital in Bristol for treatment in the 1960s: This chap explained to me that he would present pictures of attractive young men, and if I suddenly got sexually aroused I should be given an electric shock, which would hopefully turn me off. He started off by showing me a lot of brunette moustachioed Latins and I was really attracted to blond Nords, so it didn’t work very well, and I thought ‘This is ridiculous’. Journalists and social commentators were also increasingly uncomfortable with aversion therapy. ‘What baffles me’, wrote Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail in October 1964, ‘is that people do not consider this process infinitely more immoral, more damaging to everyone who takes part in it, than the condition it sets out to cure.’ In 1965 the sociologist Michael Schofield – himself gay – condemned behav-

iour therapy as ‘brain washing’ and, the following year, philosopher and writer Bryan Magee ridiculed the very notion of sexual reorientation: Presumably if one made the treatment violent or prolonged enough one could give a happily married man a violent aversion to heterosexual intercourse by associating it with nausea, vomiting and electric shocks. Public attitudes towards homosexuality were also changing. A National Opinion Poll published in the Daily Mail in 1965 found that 93 per cent of the public thought that homosexuals were in need of medical or psychological treatment. By 1969, when Geoffrey Gorer interviewed almost 2,000 people for his book Sex and Marriage in England Today (1971), that figure had dropped to just two per cent.

The scientific certainties of the 1960s gave way to the scepticism and assertiveness of movements such as the Gay Liberation Front Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, finally implementing the main recommendation of the Wolfenden Report: that sex between consenting adult men over 21 should no longer be a criminal offence. The fear of arrest and prosecution – and the need to seek a cure for their illegal behaviour – was at once removed for millions of men. Under-21s remained outside the law and feelings of shame and denial persisted for many. Aversion therapy continued to be available to those who wanted it, but as trust in the scientific certainties of the 1960s gave way to the scepticism and assertiveness of social movements, such as the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s, gay men learned not to change, but to be more comfortable with themselves. Eventually, even doctors shifted their opinions. Writing in the British Journal of Hospital Medicine in February 1970, John Bancroft conceded that: If the patient does not wish to lose his homosexuality or to become more heterosexual, then there is little point in advising him to do so. It should be made clear that a person can still have homosexual tendencies and be a likeable, decent person. It should be stressed that homosexuality is a normal variant of sexual behaviour. John-Pierre Joyce is a writer, journalist and teacher. He is currently working on a gay history of Britain, 1957-1970.

FURTHER READING Michael Schofield, Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality: A Comparative Study of Three Types of Homosexuals (Longman, 1965). Bryan Magee, One in Twenty (Secker & Warburg, 1966). Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Post-War Britain (Fourth Estate, 1996). Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895-1995 (HarperCollins, 1997). FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 37

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Drilling and Disaster in the North Sea Klaus Dodds looks back 50 years to a crucial – and ultimately tragic – moment in the UK’s exploitation of its oil and gas resources.

Makeshift: the Sea Gem in position in the North Sea.

JUST OVER 50 YEARS AGO a converted steel barge operating off the coastline of Lincolnshire contributed to a new chapter in Britain’s offshore history. A short film made by British Pathé declared the barge to be a ‘beacon of promise’, offering new hope that Britain would no longer depend upon coal for its energy supplies. Named the Sea Gem, the converted barge acted as an improvised oil rig under the operational authority of British Petroleum (BP). Bought by BP in 1964, it had been built in the United States in the 1950s. Elevated by steel legs, it was an extraordinary looking assemblage, with the barge providing a platform for the accommodation block, which housed 34 employees, the drilling rig itself (brought over from BP operations in Trinidad), a crane and a helipad.

Words like ‘makeshift’ spring to mind on looking at some of the photographs of it. Weighing in at over 5,000 tons and standing around 15 metres above the waterline, it was considered to be suitable for North Sea conditions. The rig was towed to Block 48/6 in June 1965. Interest in the potential of North Sea oil and gas goes back to the 1850s. While offshore oil and gas technology was extremely rudimentary even in the 1950s, the legal and political conditions enabling offshore exploitation were also a work in progress. One major stumbling block was uncertainty over the extent of the sovereign rights of coastal states. The 1958 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea established the rights of coastal states to enjoy sovereignty over the resources on the continental shelf, extending FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 39

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some 200 nautical miles from the coastal baseline. With the UN Convention entering into force in 1964, coastal states and energy companies could license and explore with greater confidence. The 1958 UN Continental Shelf Convention was incorporated in the 1964 Continental Shelf Act, also enabling the UK government to license offshore areas for oil and gas exploration. Legal clarity notwithstanding, in the 1960s oil and gas companies were not entirely convinced that the North Sea was going to be a new frontier worth exploring, despite some promising finds off the Dutch coast in the late 1950s. Yet the prospect of such hydrocarbon wealth was undoubtedly appealing, given that the UK was a net importer of oil and gas. Discovery Commercially, the prospects had been considered risky, but attitudes changed when new finds were uncovered and operators such as British Petroleum acquired 22 licenses from the UK government to further explore the North Sea Continental Shelf (NSCF). BP was eager to begin exploration and the Sea Gem was an interim acquisition, while the company waited for the Belfast-based shipbuilders, Harland and Wolff, to build a new drilling rig. After a summer drilling, the Sea Gem made the first discovery of ‘British’ gas on September 17th, 1965, in an area that was later to be named the West Sole Field. The drilling went down to over 9,000 feet before traces were discovered. Drilling finished in October and plans were made to cap the well and move the rig to another location within Block 48/6. Within weeks of that first find, the Sea Gem became embroiled in another, less enviable ‘first’. In late December 1965, disaster struck as the improvised rig capsized with the loss of 19 men. While undertaking a jacking operation in preparation to move to another drilling site, several of its metal legs had failed. No mayday signal was sent as its radio shack was swiftly immersed in water. A Royal Air Force and a civilian helicopter, as well as a nearby cargo ship, the Baltrover, rescued the survivors from the freezing waters. An inquiry into the accident, organised by the Ministry of Power, cited metal fatigue as the likely cause of the collapse and recommended a series of changes that were to be implemented in order to improve safety on board such drilling structures, operating in the testing conditions of the North Sea. Had BP taken sufficient account of the prevailing wind and sea conditions affecting the Sea Gem or was it the case that working knowledge of the marine area was simply poor? Despite making the UK’s first gas find in the North Sea, the well was eventually sealed off.

As the oil crisis of 1973-4 unfolded, rising oil prices made the North Sea an attractive alternative for UK governments

Transformation The idea that vast quantities of North Sea oil and gas were going to transform the lives of British citizens and the financial coffers of the UK government appeared to be dashed. Oil and gas would flow from the North Sea, but it was going to be an expensive, challenging and often dangerous business. New legislation, such as the 1971 40 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Mineral Workings (Offshore Installations) Act, was intended to improve safety. In the meantime, exploration, drilling, transporting and refining facilities were commissioned and deployed around and off the English and Scottish coastlines. During the late 1960s and early 1970s major fields such as Montrose, Forties and Brent were discovered and opened up. No oil and gas came ashore until pipeline infrastructure was constructed, with north-east Scotland becoming in 1975 the first area of the UK to host terminal facilities. The Queen formally opened the oil terminal at Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire, ushering in a new era of pipeline networks covering onshore and offshore Scotland. At the time, the BBC reported the threat posed by the ‘Tartan Army’, which threatened to disrupt the opening ceremony and the 130-mile pipeline itself. As the oil crisis of 1973-4 unfolded, rising oil prices made the North Sea an attractive alternative for successive UK governments and provided welcome revenue streams running into hundreds of millions pounds per year. By 2013 the UK oil and gas sector was estimated to be worth £35 billion to the national economy, contributing around £6 billion in tax revenue to the UK Treasury. Yet production from the North Sea is in long-term decline and weak oil prices deter further exploitation. What now appears germane, given the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) success at the 2015 general election, is the fact that there were repeated calls for oil revenues from the Scottish/North Sea sector to be ‘piped’ directly to Scotland rather than to Westminster. As early as 1972, demands such as ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’ were mobilised by those demanding greater Scottish autonomy, even independence. It never came to pass, because Scotland was part of the UK rather than an independent state such as oil-rich Norway. Had the extent of UK oil and gas wealth been more publicly known, it is possible that Scotland might have become independent in the 1970s. Ninety per cent of the UK reserves were in ‘Scottish waters’, which puts into perspective the pioneering work of the Sea Gem in ‘English waters’. Tense relationships Though it remains a neglected episode, the Sea Gem was an important moment in the history of the UK’s exploitation of North Sea oil and gas. Its mission was modest and it is perhaps best known for the tragedy of December 1965. Such a disaster is as much as part of the UK’s offshore history as that involving the oil platform Piper Alpha in 1988, which claimed the lives of 167 men. Yet there are other aspects of the Sea Gem story that deserve recognition. The development of the UK oil and gas sector brought to light the growing role of US energy companies and other multinationals, stimulated employment opportunities and contributed markedly to the rise of Scottish nationalism in the 1970s onwards. Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film Local Hero captured something of the uneasy relationship between a US energy company, local Scottish communities and the role of North Sea oil and gas revenue streams for successive UK governments from the Labour government of Harold Wilson to this day. Such tensions will not quickly disappear. Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2014).

ENGLISH KINGDOM

The Origins of the English

KINGDOM George Molyneaux explores how the realm of the English was formed and asks why it eclipsed an earlier kingship of Britain.

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UKE WILLIAM of Normandy defeated King Harold at Hastings in 1066 and conquered the English kingdom. This was the second time in 50 years that the realm had succumbed to external attack, the first being the Danish king Cnut’s conquest of 1016. Two points about these conquests are as important as they are easily overlooked. The first is that contemporaries regarded Cnut and William as conquerors not merely of an expanse of land, but of what Latin texts call a regnum and

King Harold is killed. Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, late 11th century.

Old English ones a rice – both words can be translated as ‘kingdom’. The second is that both in 1016 and in 1066 the kingdom continued as a political unit, despite the change in ruling dynasty. It did not fragment, lose its identity, or become subsumed into the other territories of its conquerors. These observations prompt questions. What did this 11th-century English kingdom comprise? How had it come into being? And how had it become sufficiently robust and coherent that it could endure repeated conquest? FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 41

ENGLISH KINGDOM Writers of the 11th century referred to the English kingdom in Latin as the regnum of ‘Anglia’, or, in the vernacular, as the rice of ‘Englaland’. It is clear that these words denoted a territory of broadly similar size and shape to what we think of as ‘England’, distinct from Wales and stretching from the Channel to somewhere north of York. Anglia and Englaland could, however, refer to areas larger or smaller than modern England. Thus, for example, the Domesday survey of 1086 was said to describe the whole of Anglia or Englaland, but it covered only the land from the Channel to the Tees (excluding Wales), an area that I call ‘Domesday Anglia’. Similarly, a royal document issued a few years later mentioned land ‘north of the Tyne, and south of the Tyne, and in Anglia’. This would suggest that Anglia ended somewhere short of the Tyne, quite possibly at the Tees. On the other hand, however, an English chronicle recounts that in 1091 Malcolm III, King of Scots, ‘went out of Scotland into Lothian in Englaland’, thereby indicating that Englaland could encompass the area around what is now Edinburgh. We even find a forerunner of the still-prevalent practice of conflating England with the island of Britain: Æthelweard, a late tenth-century chronicler, narrated the ancient Britons’ defeat, then declared that ‘Britannia is now called Anglia, taking the name of the victors’.

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MID THESE apparent contradictions, the claim that Britain had become Anglia is perhaps the easiest to explain. Since fairly early in the AngloSaxon period, certain English kings had probably been able to throw their weight around across much of the island. King Æthelstan, whose heartlands lay in Wessex and the West Midlands, rampaged to the island’s northernmost extremity in 934 and, for centuries thereafter, his successors often had at least a loose hegemony over all other kings in Britain. Such island-wide English domination explains how Æthelweard and a handful of other chroniclers could assert that Britain had become Anglia. This does not, however, explain the 1091 annal, where Englaland includes Lothian, but seemingly not the land north of the Firth of Forth. The king of the English had a measure of power in Lothian, in the sense that he could lead an army there, but much the same was probably true further north. The idea of the Forth as Englaland’s northern limit can, however, be explained by looking back to the early Anglo-Saxon period, when the Northumbrian kingdom had stretched from the Humber to the Forth. The Northumbrians saw themselves – and were seen by others – as part of an English people, along with the other Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who were believed to have migrated from the Continent in the fifth century. English habitation therefore reached to the Forth. Indeed Bede, writing in 731, explained that the church of Abercorn, in modern West Lothian, was ‘in the land of the English [regione Anglorum] but near the sea [i.e. the Firth of Forth] that divides the lands of the English and of the Picts’. Sometime before about 900 an anonymous writer translated this into 42 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Above: Æthelstan presenting a book to St Cuthbert, 934, in a manuscript held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Below: the Firth of Forth, the frontier between the English and the Picts.

of the English kingdom. This distinction explains the apparent contradictions in how words like Anglia and Englaland were used. When the author of the 1091 annal said that Lothian was in Englaland, he was – like Bede before and Adam afterwards – expressing the commonplace view that the Forth constituted the limit of English habitation. When, however, the land north of the Tees was presented as outside Anglia or Englaland, despite the Englishness of its inhabitants, these words were most likely being used to designate the English kingdom. This was a political unit, whose bounds would not necessarily correspond with those of English settlement. The inference that the 11th-century English kingdom was perceived to end at the Tees is strengthened by accounts of the construction of Durham Cathedral in 1093. Malcolm III, along with the bishop and prior, laid its foundation stones. That the Scottish king should do this, especially in his English counterpart’s absence, would be surprising, if Durham were unambiguously within the English kingdom. It does not, however, follow that Durham was part of the Scottish kingdom. Both English and Scottish kings were active between the Tees and Forth and it is likely that this expanse was widely seen as distinct from either of their kingdoms.

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HILE THE 11TH-CENTURY English kingdom probably did not extend across all of modern England, it was different from anything that had gone before. In the late ninth century there had been no political unit of remotely similar size and shape. Much of the north and east of the future English kingdom was under the domination of various Scandinavian potentates, who had destroyed the former East Anglian and Northumbrian kingdoms and seized the eastern part of the Midland kingdom of Mercia. The kingdom of Wessex, ruled by the Cerdicing dynasty, managed (just) to resist the Viking onslaught, but until the late ninth century its power was largely confined to south of the Thames. The West Saxon king Alfred, now often called ‘the Great’, gained

While the 11th-century English kingdom probably did not extend across all of modern England, it was different from anything that had gone before Old English, using the term Englaland, its earliest known appearance. Given the significance of the so-called ‘West Lothian Question’ in current Anglo-Scottish relations, the context is ironic. By the tenth century, the Scottish kings had considerable power in Lothian, but there remained a perception that the Forth separated the English from the Scots; for centuries afterwards, the word ‘Scotia’ was used to refer specifically to the land north of the Forth. Furthermore, while the Tweed came to be recognised as the border between the English and Scottish kingdoms during the 12th century, at least some of those dwelling to its north continued to see themselves as English. Thus Adam of Dryburgh, a late 12th-century monk, wrote that he lived ‘in the land of the English [terra Anglorum] and in the kingdom of the Scots [regno Scotorum]’. Adam’s comment demonstrates that the land inhabited by the English was not necessarily the same as the territory

some degree of domination over the western remnant of Mercia in the 880s, but even then his kingdom was vastly smaller than the one that would exist by the 11th century. During the first half of the tenth century, Alfred’s successors gradually extended their power northwards, encompassing all of what would become the English kingdom and, indeed, the rest of Britain. Much is uncertain about the events of this period, but the precise sequence of kings, campaigns and battles need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that Alfred’s successors killed, expelled or subjugated the principal Scandinavian potentates based in East Anglia, the East Midlands and Northumbria. They also made the leading figures of Wales and northern Britain acknowledge their superiority. Æthelstan had such rulers meet him at Eamont (Cumbria) in 927 and, for a time, the Cerdicings’ assemblies were attended by men from across the island. The geographical extension of the Cerdicings’ power was neither smooth nor inexorable. Thus, for example, York FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 43

ENGLISH KINGDOM changed hands several times between the 920s and 950s and Scandinavian domination in the East Midlands was temporarily re-established in the 940s. Even when the final Scandinavian king to base himself at York, Erik Haraldson, was killed in 954, contemporaries could not have been sure that he would be the last. As it turned out, though, the Cerdicings were not (so far as we know) involved in major armed conflict for over 30 years thereafter. There were renewed Scandinavian attacks from the 980s, which culminated in Cnut’s conquest of 1016, but the intervening three decades of relative calm were highly significant. This period was crucial to the development of the English kingdom as a coherent territorial unit.

Below: a coin minted in the name of Olaf Guthfrithson, a Scandanavian who ruled at York, c.940. Bottom: Domesday Book, 1086.

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E HAVE ALREADY seen that some people in the 11th century saw the Tees as the English kingdom’s northern limit, even though English habitation stretched far beyond. The question therefore arises: what distinguished the land between the English Channel and the Tees (and east of – roughly – the dyke ascribed to Offa) from the rest of Britain, such that ‘Domesday Anglia’ constituted an identifiable kingdom? Three features of this part of the island stand out. The first is that, at the time of Domesday, it was divided into administrative districts called shires. Many of these shires, such as Hampshire, Shropshire and Yorkshire, remain recognisable today, despite a major reorganisation in 1974. Kings appear to have used these districts to organise tax collection, military levies and judicial assemblies and the Domesday survey itself was arranged by shire. In contrast to ‘Domesday Anglia’, however, shire organisation was not imposed between the Tees and the Tweed until the very end of the 11th century and was only extended west of the Pennines in the 12th. (Whether the land between the Mersey, the Pennines and the Lake District was considered part of the kingdom in the 11th century is doubtful. This area is described in Domesday, but only sketchily.) The second key characteristic of ‘Domesday Anglia’ was that its shires all had subdivisions known as hundreds or wapentakes, which were not found further north or in Wales. The terminological distinction between hundreds and wapentakes was linked to the distribution of Scandinavian settlement, but there do not seem to have been significant functional differences between them. Kings of the 11th century appear to have used hundreds and wapentakes to arrange (among other things) fiscal assessments, law enforcement groups and the witnessing of transactions. These administrative units performed similar functions to shires, but on a more local level. The third thing making ‘Domesday Anglia’ distinctive was that, for almost all of the 11th century, this was the only part of Britain in which coins were struck. Two points make this especially significant. The first is that a uniform design, incorporating the king’s name, was used in all 44 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

parts of ‘Domesday Anglia’ at any one time. A coin would carry a legend stating its location of issue and the moneyer responsible, but would otherwise look the same, whether it came from London, Exeter, York or Chester (to name but a few major minting places). The second crucial point is that the design in use was changed frequently and coin hoards imply that old types were systematically withdrawn from circulation. It is quite likely that kings sought to ban the use of obsolete coins and that they achieved considerable

The inference that the 11th-century kingdom was perceived to end at the Tees is strengthened by accounts of the construction of Durham Cathedral success. There was thus uniformity in production and something approaching uniformity in the circulating currency between the Channel and the Tees. Coins were by no means unknown elsewhere in Britain, but they were rarer and were imported from various places. Consequently, there was nothing like the standardised currency that circulated in ‘Domesday Anglia’. The system of shires, hundreds and wapentakes meant that, within ‘Domesday Anglia’, there were standardised administrative structures through which kings could implement their commands. The 11th-century kings used this apparatus to impinge routinely upon the lives of even quite ordinary people, notably through taxation, judicial organisation and the regulation of the circulating currency. Moreover, the features outlined above marked ‘Domesday Anglia’ as a unit that was distinct from the rest of Britain and ruled in a relatively uniform way. There is therefore a clear explanation for why people in the 11th century could regard this area as the full extent of the English kingdom. Such structures did not, however, merely serve to define the kingdom. They also gave it the institutional coherence that enabled it to outlast repeated conquest. Many historians have written about 11th-century shires, hundreds and wapentakes, although few have discussed their importance in the kingdom’s definition. Another

Durham Cathedral, construction of which began in 1093.

neglected issue is the question of when this administrative apparatus became important to the Cerdicings’ power. It is often assumed that in Wessex itself they had ruled through shires and hundreds since some indeterminate point in the distant past and swiftly replicated this system as they pushed northwards. There may be an element of truth in this: Berkshire, Wiltshire and other shires south of the Thames are mentioned in ninth-century sources and some of the Domesday hundreds of this area may well perpetuate districts that had been recognisable for centuries. There is, however, little to suggest that ninth-century shires, or (if they existed) hundreds, already served the functions that they did in the 11th century, or that kings routinely used them to impose their will. The first evidence that hundreds and wapentakes were important to royal rule comes in the mid-10th century. By the end of King Edgar’s reign (959–75), they existed right across ‘Domesday Anglia’ and from then on they are ubiquitous in royal legislation. By contrast, there is just one reference to hundreds in the legislation of King Edmund (939–46) and none in the fairly voluminous ordinances of his predecessors. This suggests that, whatever earlier existence hundreds may have had, they were not especially significant to the Cerdicings. A similar point can be made about shires. Edgar is FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 45

ENGLISH KINGDOM

Edgar was the first king who had both the desire and the ability to impose numismatic uniformity between the Channel and the Tees the first king known to have ordered the regular holding of shire assemblies and soon afterwards we get our earliest definite accounts of their being held. This is unlikely to be coincidental and implies (at the very least) that shire meetings became much more widespread and routine around this time. It was probably not until the 11th century that Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire operated as shires, but such units had been established across much of the Midlands (as 46 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

King Edgar (bottom, centre) offering a charter to Christ, 966.

well as in the south) by the 980s at the latest. The proposition that shires, hundreds and wapentakes first became important around the third quarter of the 10th century is based on the silence of earlier texts. Historians are rightly cautious about such arguments; that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ is well known. There are, however, two reasons for accepting the argument from silence here. The first is that we are to

a large extent dealing not with absent sources, but with silent sources. There is plenty of surviving legislation from before Edmund’s reign and the lack of references to hundreds would be very odd if these were already central to the Cerdicings’ power. The second key consideration is coins. Surviving coins are plentiful from throughout the 10th and 11th centuries, which allows us to see that uniformity in production and circulation began in Edgar’s reign. Previously, coins of contrasting designs were struck in different regions and the circulating currency was correspondingly varied. Edgar was evidently the first king who had both the desire and the ability to impose numismatic uniformity between the Channel and the Tees. That this major reform was implemented in his reign should give us confidence that key elements of local administration were likewise standardised around the same time. This hypothesis would also fit with the political context of the period; the prolonged respite from external attack after 954 would have been a propitious time to effect substantial administrative change. There are, therefore, good grounds to conclude that the features that defined the English kingdom of the 11th century date only from around the third quarter of the previous one.

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ANY historians, notably Patrick Wormald, have explained the English kingdom’s formation by arguing that Alfred and his successors were aiming to achieve English unification. If this was their goal, they did not succeed; we have already seen that the English kingdom of the 11th century (and later) did not include all those seen at the time as English. It is, however, doubtful whether the Cerdicings were engaged on a unification project. No contemporary source expressly states, or hints, that they were seeking to execute such a plan. The main reasons why the Cerdicings extended their power northwards were probably more prosaic. In part, they were almost certainly inspired by the things that made most medieval kings want to expand their territories, especially the prospect of land and treasure. In addition, however, they probably wanted to obtain security from the Scandinavians who had gravely threatened Wessex in the ninth century. This would explain why they killed or expelled the principal Scandinavian potentates based in Britain, but generally left in place the other leading figures on the island, providing the latter acknowledged Cerdicing superiority. North of the Tees, there had been little Scandinavian settlement and the Cerdicings were content to establish relatively loose client relationships with the bishops of Chester-le-Street (who moved their seat to Durham in 995) and an English dynasty based at Bamburgh. Providing such figures could be induced (by intimidation or otherwise) to give the Cerdicings’ enemies no assistance, there was little reason to depose them. This did, however, mean that Cerdicing power was less direct than further south. In turn, this probably explains why the administrative reforms that gave ‘Domesday Anglia’ its coherence stopped at the Tees. Insofar as any grand idea inspired the Cerdicings to

Coin of King Edgar's reformed type, minted in the 970s.

expand, a vision of domination over the whole of Britain was probably more important than some notion of English unity. There were venerable precedents for the idea that one man might enjoy hegemony throughout the island. Indeed, Bede had described the power of certain seventhcentury Northumbrian kings in such terms and titles like rex Britanniae (‘king of Britain’) had occasionally been used in eighth-century Mercia. Æthelstan swiftly adopted similar styles after the Eamont meeting of 927 and Edgar, too, was widely celebrated as king of the whole island. For the Cerdicings, this idea seemingly held considerable allure. Claims to supremacy over the whole island should not be dismissed as bombast, even though the Cerdicings’ hegemony over the other kings in Britain was loose and intermittent. Before the administrative reforms of the mid10th century it is likely that the Cerdicings had few means with which to impinge routinely on the lives of the general populace in any part of Britain. Throughout the island their power was based on a mix of personal relationships with powerful people. The intensity of Cerdicing domination will have decreased with distance from Wessex, but it never quite disappeared and there was probably no sharp dividing line to separate the future ‘Domesday Anglia’ from the rest of the island. As such, contemporaries may well have had little difficulty in conceiving of Britain as a unitary realm. In and after the 11th century, however, claims to rulership over the whole of Britain became less common in royal titulature. They did not disappear and Æthelweard’s conflation of Britain and England had a long future, but by William the Conqueror’s reign the normal kingly style was rex Anglorum (‘king of the English’). This shift to more modest royal titles was not precipitated by some prolonged collapse of Æthelstan and Edgar’s island-wide hegemony, which had always been episodic. Rather, the administrative changes of the late tenth century had so intensified and standardised the Cerdicings’ power within one part of Britain – the future ‘Domesday Anglia’ – that it became increasingly difficult to think of the island as a single realm. It is most unlikely that the Cerdicings intended (or anticipated) that administrative reform should eclipse their kingship of Britain, but this was one of its effects. The mid- to late-10th century Cerdicing kings established the framework for what would be an enduring English kingdom. But in doing so, they forfeited the possibility of a unitary realm of Britain. George Molyneaux is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

FURTHER READING James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (Hambledon & London, 2000). Rees Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093-1343 (Oxford University Press, 2000). George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2015). FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 47

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WHEN THE Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka flew into Paris from Geneva on the morning of October 29th, 1965, he had no idea of the fate awaiting him. Brimming with intent, the 45-year-old had a lunchtime rendezvous with a journalist, a film producer and a scriptwriter in the Brasserie Lipp, the fashionable leftist restaurant on the Boulevard St Germain, to discuss a film about liberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Provisionally titled Basta (Enough), Ben Barka wanted the documentary to be screened at the opening of an anti-colonial conference he was organising in Cuba for the following January. However, the meeting did not take place as planned. Alerted to his arrival by Moroccan intelligence, Antoine Lopez, an Air France superintendent at Orly Airport and a French secret service agent, gave the order to detain Ben Barka. On the pavement outside the restaurant he was ushered into a waiting Peugeot by two plain-clothes officers and whisked away to a villa on the outskirts of the city. He was held overnight and then handed over to Mohammed Oufkir, the Moroccan minister of the interior, and his deputy Ahmed Dlimi. Ben Barka was never seen again. In all likelihood he died under torture, though numerous rumours about his fate remain unconfirmed. Did the Moroccan secret services fly the body back and destroy it in a vat of acid? Or did they take his body to Rouen, put it on a cargo aircraft and then dump it in the sea? Was it decapitated and then incinerated so that Oufkir could present his head to Morocco’s King Hassan II? Officially the kidnapping remains unsolved. The fact that Morocco’s most famous dissident could be abducted in broad daylight on the streets of Paris caused a diplomatic rupture between the two countries. President de Gaulle was furious. For him the affair represented a violation of French sovereignty, all the more embarrassing because it occurred amid a presidential election campaign. A projected visit by Hassan II was cancelled in protest. A murky underworld Ben Barka’s disappearance reverberated through French political life. On January 10th, 1966 the weekly magazine L’Express published an account of what happened, ‘I Saw Ben Barka Killed’, based upon an interview with Georges Figon, one of the men waiting to meet Ben Barka. Figon claimed to have followed the police car to the villa by taxi and, in his account, he detailed the roles of Oufkir and Dlimi. One week later Figon was found dead in a Paris flat. The official verdict was suicide but the press was unconvinced and a petition, signed by intellectuals ranging from the Gaullist François Mauriac to the Communist Louis Aragon, called for the truth to be revealed. At a subsequent trial, lasting from September 1966 to June 1967, some facts did seep out, revealing a murky underworld linking the Moroccan secret services with rogue elements in French intelligence, as well as criminals and former Nazi collaborators. Lopez was given eight years in prison, while Oufkir was sentenced to life in absentia. Hassan II stood by

Snatched: Mehdi Ben Barka photographed in the early 1960s.

The Ben Barka Affair After the kidnapping of Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965, the fingers of blame pointed in several directions. The details of what happened are still not known, writes Martin Evans. FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 49

| MEHDI BEN BARKA

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Oufkir and stubbornly refused to deport him. Why was Ben Barka’s disappearance such a scandal? Born in Rabat in 1920 (his father was a civil servant and the first Moroccan to graduate in maths), Ben Barka was a founder member of Istiqlal (Independence), the nationalist movement that grew rapidly in the late 1940s. From the beginning he stood out as a formidable activist. Meeting him in 1954 the US journalist Marvine Howe, covering the Moroccan crisis for the BBC, was impressed by his ‘boundless energy’ and ‘capacity to absorb new ideas rapidly’. She later recalled how, placed under house arrest in the Sahara and High Atlas for three years, he used his incarceration not only to perfect his English and Arabic and learn Berber, but also to take a correspondence course in political economy. Ben Barka took up a leadership role following independence in March 1956. Elected as president of the new National Assembly, he wanted to transform the lives of ordinary Moroccans and launched campaigns to promote mass literacy and to modernise agriculture. But by the late 1950s Ben Barka was disenchanted by the power struggle between the monarch, Mohammed V and Istiqlal. For him the monarchy was too conservative, Istiqlal too timid. He was especially frustrated by Istiqlal’s unwillingness to embrace the socialist doctrines that were challenging elites elsewhere in the Arab World and so he, along with other young activists, broke away to found the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP) in 1959. Demanding agrarian reform, an end to the vestiges of French rule and solidarity with liberation movements throughout the world, the UNFP proclaimed itself to be revolutionary and in this respect Ben Barka was inspired by the on-going war of decolonisation led by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against France in neighbouring Algeria. In particular, he was inspired by Frantz Fanon, the theoretician of the Algerian revolution, who saw the FLN struggle in global terms, the spark for one vast uprising of the ‘wretched of the earth’ that would overthrow colonialism and neocolonialism everywhere.

The truth of what happened to Ben Barka is still not known. In France the case is still under investigation

Going global Mohammed V died unexpectedly in 1961, leaving the monarchy vulnerable. His son, Hassan II, was just 32 and he assumed the throne of a country beset with social unrest, poverty and spiralling unemployment. Sensing his moment had come, Ben Barka became more strident in his opposition to the monarchy, which he attacked as ‘feudal’ and ‘pro-Western’, words that struck a chord with the younger generation, especially with the Moroccan National Students’ Union, which called for the ‘abolition of the regime’. Hassan II saw Ben Barka as the chief threat to his fledgling power. The UNFP had to be broken and Ben Barka was confronted with constant police intimidation, including a failed assassination attempt in November 1962. By the summer of 1963 he had been forced into exile as 5,000 UNFP militants were arrested and in the ensuing trial 11 party leaders, including Ben Barka, were condemned to death in March 1964 for allegedly plotting to kill Hassan II. 50 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

The accusation of treachery was intensified by Ben Barka’s support for Algeria, independent since July 1962, over a border dispute with Morocco in 1963. By this point Ben Barka had become a global figure. Establishing his headquarters in Geneva, he was appointed secretary of the Afro-Asia Solidarity Committee. This led him to forge close political links with the likes of Ahmed Ben Bella, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X and reinforced his conviction that Moroccan freedom was inseparable from the wider anti-imperialist struggle. He began to talk excitedly of the way in which this Afro-Asia Committee represented a fusion of the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution with those of a new ‘Third Revolution’. Becoming taboo Back in Morocco Ben Barka’s prestige soared still further in the wake of riots in Casablanca in March 1965. Instigated by students angry at restrictions on admissions, the violence spread across the city as crowds burned cars, attacked shops and denounced Hassan II, a pattern of protest that was repeated in Rabat, Settat, Meknes and Kénitra. In Casablanca tanks were deployed, with Oufkir coordinating operations from helicopter. Many hundreds died but Hassan was unrepentant, declaring on national television: ‘Allow me to tell you there is no greater danger to the state than the so-called intellectual; it would have been better for you to be illiterate.’ In such a hostile atmosphere Hassan knew that he was isolated. He even contacted Ben Barka about a possible return and this formed another context for the dissident’s disappearance. Oufkir did not want any such rapprochement. He feared that it would push Morocco in a potentially pro-Soviet direction. Israel and the US, too, were frightened at this prospect, which is why fingers have been pointed at Mossad and the CIA, suggesting collusion over Ben Barka’s disappearance. The Ben Barka Affair is an insight into the brutal nature of Cold War espionage. He was one of several anti-colonial leaders, including Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of newly independent Congo, who were eliminated in dubious circumstances in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also an insight into the politics of post-independence Morocco. Ben Barka became a taboo subject in public life as Hassan ruled with an iron fist, cracking down on leftists in the late 1960s. Hassan died in 1999 and, significantly, one of the first gestures by his son, the 35-year-old Mohammed VI, was to invite Ben Barka’s widow and their four children to return to Morocco. At the reception, attended by around 200 friends and supporters of Ben Barka, Mohammed VI welcomed back the family in a mood of reconciliation. But, as Bachir, his son observed, the truth is still not known. In France the case is still under investigation. There is an annual ceremony at Brasserie Lipp on October 29th and there have been numerous books and articles, as well as a 2005 film, I Saw Ben Barka Killed, testament to a continuing interest and scepticism towards the demise of one of decolonisation’s key figures. Martin Evans is Professor of Modern History at Sussex University. He is writing a history of contemporary Morocco to be published by Yale University Press.

TEUTONIC KNIGHTS

The Rise of the

Teutonic Knights Herman von Salza is one of the outstanding examples of social mobility in medieval Europe. Nicholas Morton looks at the role he played in the creation of the great military order.

The legendary German knight Tannhauser in the robes of a Teutonic Knight, Codex Manesse, c.1310.

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HE ARMY of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem was annihilated at the Horns of Hattin on July 4th, 1187. The defeat was almost total and the survivors few. In the following months the crusader states crumbled. The victor in this hard-fought struggle was the Kurdish ruler Saladin and by October of the same year the holy city of Jerusalem was in his hands. When news of these events reached western Christendom, the papacy’s reaction was immediate: a new campaign was launched to wrest back control of Jerusalem. Rulers from across Europe responded to the call, their armies were marshalled and set out for the East. The meeting point for these forces was the recently conquered, now Muslimheld, city of Acre, which became the first major arena in which these incoming forces (now known as the Third Crusade) would test their mettle against Saladin. Legend reports that among the besieging Christian forces at Acre was a group of pilgrims from the north German cities of Bremen and

Lübeck, who had created a small hospice for the care of pilgrims under the shade of a ship’s sail. In its humble origins, this pious, self-sacrificing establishment could not have been less auspicious. Nevertheless, within 50 years it was on its way to becoming one of the mightiest religious orders in Christendom. By 1240 it was a fully fledged military order of the Catholic Church (established on the pattern of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller) and its forces were active in many theatres of war, especially the eastern Mediterranean, Prussia and Livonia (now Latvia). During this same period, it had acquired a solid economic base with great estates stretching from Germany to the Italian peninsula. In later centuries it would play a defining role in shaping the history of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. The Teutonic Knights’ rapid rise from obscurity to great power is remarkable not just for its speed, but also because within it lies the rags-to-riches tale of one of the most dynamic individuals of the 13th century: Herman von Salza. Born into a simple knightly family, by the end of his life Herman would be the master of the Teutonic Knights, the confidant of popes, kings and emperors and the defender of hundreds of miles of Christendom’s frontier lands. In the centuries to come, the order’s historians and propagandists would rhapsodise about Herman FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 51

TEUTONIC KNIGHTS Right: a 19th-century statue of Salza at Malbork, Poland.

and the dramatic transformation the order underwent during his time as leader. One commentator observed that, when he became master in 1210, the order could arm and equip no more than ten brother knights, yet by the time of his death in 1239 it could muster 2,000 brothers. Even making allowance for hyperbole, Herman’s impact was considerable. How did he do it? The Teutonic Knights were not the first military order to rise to prominence during the Middle Ages. By the time of their foundation in 1190, both the Templars and the Hospitallers were already huge international orders and the foundations of their growth were, moreover, broadly similar. To listen to many modern fantasies about the Knights Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights, one might think that the roots of their military muscle and financial clout were bound up with their possession of mighty religious relics such as the Holy Grail or their shadowy status as some form of secret society. Such wild claims appeal to conspiracy theorists, but they have no foundation in the sources. All three of these orders grew and maintained themselves in a manner similar to that of a modern charity. That is not to say that their goals and vocation bore relation to anything that might be deemed worthy of charity status today. Rather, it was in their reliance upon donations and public support. Like modern charities, the military orders’

The military orders’ prosperity was based on their ability to persuade potential donors that they were engaged in a worthy cause prosperity was based on their ability to persuade potential donors that they were engaged in a worthy cause deserving of their patronage. As with modern charities, the military orders became adept in the art of publicising themselves through multiple channels to encourage and maintain a flow of donations (we would call it marketing). The challenge was to persuade potential benefactors that it was their work, rather than that of other orders, that was deserving of support.

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HEN HERMAN von Salza became the master of the Teutonic Knights in 1210, the pathway to success for an aspiring military order was well established. Back in the 1120s, Hugh of Payns, the first master of the Templar Order, had taken ship for western Europe, leaving his small band of knights to guard the roads to Jerusalem. He had then toured France and England, ostensibly to raise troops for a new crusade, but also drawing attention to his institution. He had attracted many admirers, including high-ranking nobles, who had lavished lands, money and privileges upon his order, seeking to express their piety and support for the defence of distant Jerusalem through the donation of alms. The papacy had also offered its support, confirming the order in its then unique status as a military religious order. Armed with this new-found wealth, the Templars had then begun to build-up estates (known as commanderies) across western Europe, whose task was to enhance the order’s profile and finances. These commanderies sent one third of their produce to support their brethren’s activities in the crusader states. They also sought to strengthen relations with neighbouring noble families, seeking further financial support and recruits. Over time the Templars’ sources of income diversified, as it acquired plunder from its military campaigning and began to deploy and invest its own wealth in western 52 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Above: Saladin's troops devastate the Holy Land, an image from William of Tyre's Estoire d'Outremer, 12th century.

Frederick II, illustration from De arte Venandi cum avibus, c.1220-1250.

had acquired a military role in 1198 at the behest of the leaders of a German crusade, which had reached the East in the previous year. The order had a handful of small properties, though these scarcely represented the launchpad required for future growth. The Teutonic Order did, however, possess a number of potential advantages. From the outset it had been closely allied with the German imperial house. Duke Frederick of Swabia (son of the late emperor, Frederick Barbarossa) participated in the siege of Acre during the Third Crusade and was evidently so impressed by the work of the small German hospital that, when he fell terminally ill, he asked to be buried there. He also wrote to his brother, Emperor Henry VI, praising the order, creating a vital avenue to the seat of imperial power. From the beginning, the order had friends in high places. Many of those who had advocated the order’s militarisation were among the most powerful in the German empire. German influence was also growing in the eastern Mediterranean. Between 1190 and 1227 no less than three major German crusades reached the Holy Land, seeking to rebuild the slowly recovering kingdom of Jerusalem and there were many smaller expeditions. Frederick II, the German emperor, became King of Jerusalem in 1225, a title that he and his successors held until 1267.

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Europe. The steady annual flow of wealth from the commanderies remained, however, the backbone of its economic power. This, then, was the model which Herman sought to imitate. The real trick was to capture the attention of Europe’s elites. This was a difficult task, given that the Hospitallers and Templars were already firmly entrenched across the West and that they received the lion’s share of donations from those who wished to support both the defence of the Holy Land and, in the case of the Hospitallers, the provision of medical care in the crusader states. So, as with other charities and businesses, Herman’s task was to find a new ‘niche’ for his order. His success in this challenge was founded upon his ability to harness the order’s existing strengths. When Herman first became master, there was little to suggest that the Teutonic Order was destined for anything other than mediocrity. Though it had been founded as a charitable, medical institution, it

ERMAN’S GENIUS was to develop these relationships. He worked hard to strengthen the order’s relations with the German emperors. This was a time when the imperial throne was contested between the Hohenstaufen and Welf families and Herman proved willing to support whichever faction was in the ascendancy, if it meant that they would back his cause. He also travelled at length around Germany and other kingdoms in western Europe, building relations with the dukes of Austria and the landgraves of Thuringia, along with many other aristocratic families. The donations began to roll in. In this task, Herman was assisted by the fact that neither the Templars nor the Hospitallers had ever managed to gain much of a foothold in Germany. Their support base lay in France, Italy, England and northern Spain. Thus, there was potential for Herman’s order to expand with only limited competition from the other orders. A key moment in this process, when Herman demonstrated dramatically both his own abilities and those of his order, was the Fifth Crusade (1217-21). Like many others, this crusade represented yet another effort to regain Jerusalem by first attacking Egypt. The campaign’s battle plan was founded on the strategic logic of first seizing the Nile delta and then using its colossal wealth (derived from the fertile delta and the trade FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 53

TEUTONIC KNIGHTS income from the Silk Roads and the trans-Saharan gold routes) to fund the permanent reconquest of the Holy Land. That was the idea, but the campaign was a disaster. For 15 months the large Christian army rotted outside the port city of Damietta on Egypt’s northern coast, which eventually fell in November 1219. Its subsequent attempts to strike inland towards Cairo met with catastrophe.

cation and invading Frederick’s kingdom of Sicily. Frederick by this stage was ready to embark for the East and he later arrived in the kingdom of Jerusalem as an excommunicated crusader. For Herman this was the worst possible news; his patrons were at war. Both had the power to destroy his order and neither relationship could be risked. He could not afford the luxury of taking sides. In this moment of crisis, Herman demonstrated his abilities as a diplomat. He supported the emperor on crusade, helping to secure the return of Jerusalem by treaty. He wrote repeatedly to the pope assuring him of his continued loyalty. Then he returned to Italy as fast as possible, where he acted as a mediator between the two factions, eventually drawing them to the negotiation table. The pope had some doubts initially about the order’s loyalty and officially censured the Teutonic Knights in 1229, but his wrath was assuaged after Herman’s

HERMAN SAW opportunity in the midst of calamity. Throughout the crusade, he and his lieutenants travelled like worker bees between the papacy, the emperor and the army in Egypt. Herman and his Teutonic Knights offered counsel, spread news, conveyed funds and discussed plans. He won respect at the highest level and the chroniclers of this time started to record his views and opinions, even though he was merely the commander of an obscure institution. When the army eventually surrendered Damietta back to the Muslim forces, it was Herman along with the Templar master who negotiated the handover. It was also around this time that writers began to speak of the ‘three orders’ (Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights), a term that demonstrated that this still small institution was now deemed worthy of inclusion within the ranks of the most powerful military orders. Donations grew rapidly. Knights, churchmen and nobles declared themselves to have been impressed by the order’s work during the Fifth Crusade, despite the campaign’s overall defeat. The Duke of Austria supplied money to help the order construct a fortress in the kingdom of Jerusalem. The papacy showered the order with ecclesiastical privileges, even granting it the same liberties as the Templars and Hospitallers. Frederick II offered further support, perhaps hoping thereby to conceal the fact that he had not participated in the campaign in person, as he had promised. In the years that followed, the order continued to grow and Herman criss-crossed Christendom, recruiting troops for a new Malbork Castle, the Prussian headquarters crusade, while simultaneously advocating of the Teutonic Knights. the work of his own order. More commanderies were founded, recruits were gathered, supporters were identified. return from crusade. It was a performance of consummate diplomatic ET, for all his success, Herman was playing with fire. By far his skill and the order not only survived the test but actually prospered in biggest supporters were the German emperor and the papacy. this dispute’s aftermath, because Pope Gregory IX proved willing to On the one hand, these were the most powerful men in Chrissponsor the order’s new adventure: the conquest of Prussia. Herman had been contemplating the expansion of his order’s miltendom (and therefore ideal patrons). On the other, they were embittered adversaries. The struggle between the papacy and the empire itary activities into Eastern Europe since the time of his election as dated back to the 11th century and would continue for hundreds of years. master, though his record in this area was not great. As far back as Time and time again during the Middle Ages, the tectonic plates of the 1211, he had secured an invitation to defend the eastern frontier of the Church and empire would rupture afresh. The issues dividing them kingdom of Hungary. The order’s warriors and settlers occupied the area were many, but ultimately they were vying with one another for and began to strengthen and fortify their position. The problem was that supremacy over Christendom. By the 1220s the papacy and Frederick they were too successful. They began to exceed their mandate and the II were in the process of squaring up for another round in this ongoing Hungarian nobility soon came to see them as a threat, forcing the king to contest and both sides demanded the unquestioning loyalty of the expel them. It was a major failure, the most glaring of Herman’s time as Teutonic Knights. Herman had led his order into a dangerous conflict master, although it did not quench his appetite for future campaigning of interests. on Europe’s eastern margins. The ultimate breakdown in relations occurred in 1227. Frederick By 1230 the order had been considering an expansion into Prussia for had been promising to go on crusade for years and the papacy had lost some time. It had been patient, gaining the support of the emperor, the patience with his continual prevarication, issuing a bull of excommunipapacy and the local prince, Conrad of Masovia. The order drove north

The order drove north up the River Vistula, established new settlements and forts and waged war against the local pagan tribes

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large estates across Germany and other parts of western Europe. Herman had erected a mighty edifice and the order would continue to grow and expand, particularly in Prussia and Livonia, for centuries to come. Within this process he had proven himself to be one of the most brilliant diplomats of his age. The tools he used to dramatically enlarge his order were inspired by the preceding orders, the Templars and Hospitallers. He saw clearly that it was the support of patrons which made or broke such institutions. Some potential benefactors were approached for money, others were cajoled into taking a crusading vow and marching to their aid. In this search for patronage the Teutonic Knights cultivated a carefully manicured public image, seeking to persuade donors of their virtues and achievements. Some of the stories they told when garnering aid have survived in the pages of the orders’ histories and it is not difficult to see their potential for drumming up support.

O

Pope Gregory IX, a miniature from a 14th-century Italian manuscript.

up the River Vistula, established new settlements and forts and waged war against the local pagan tribes. Herman himself was rarely at the frontier. He left the military conquest of Prussia to his able deputy, Herman Balk. Herman von Salza’s skill remained that of diplomacy and he used it to great effect in 1237, securing another major territorial advance for the Teutonic Knights in Livonia on the Baltic coast. Livonia had been seized decades previously by German crusaders and missionaries, who, in the early stages of their conquest, had established a military order called the Swordbrethren. It had proved to be an enthusiastic campaigner and conqueror, joining the local bishop and the citizens of the main city, Riga, as one of Livonia’s rulers. Nevertheless, by the 1230s complaints were being made to the papacy about the conduct of the Swordbrethren, especially their attempts to take control of neighbouring Estonia. The order managed to clear itself of these charges, but almost immediately afterwards, in 1236, it suffered a major defeat at the battle of Saule, probably at a location in modern Lithuania. It was at this moment that Herman, ever the opportunist, made the suggestion to the papacy that perhaps the Swordbrethren should be incorporated into the Teutonic Order. Pope Gregory agreed and the Teutonic Order duly acquired another major territorial stake in a frontier province. When Herman fell ill and died in 1239 he had left his successors a substantial legacy. By this stage the order was an active presence in the Holy Land, with major fortifications and estates in the kingdom of Jerusalem and Armenia. It was consolidating a strong position in Prussia and now held much of Livonia. In addition, the Teutonic Knights had

NE LATER CHRONICLER told the story of a young man who went out in search of his father, who had been fighting with the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. He was initially unsuccessful in his search, but one day his diligence was rewarded when he passed a graveyard that was being consecrated by a bishop. Unexpectedly, a grave opened and a corpse leapt out. The corpse told anyone within earshot that he had once been a sinner condemned to Hell, but that through fighting for God with the Teutonic Knights he had earned his salvation. The bishop then blessed him and he returned to the ground, while the young man suddenly realised that he had seen his father. The chronicle’s message could not be more clear: that whatever sins his readers may have committed in their past life, they will be rewarded with salvation if they come armed and willing to the order’s defence. It was a powerful message and one that would have appealed to noble and commoner alike. We should envisage stories of this kind being told by the orders’ members across Germany and other parts of Christendom, seeking recruits and aid. Certainly many responded to their call. Herman’s life reads like a ‘how to’ guide in building a military order, but his was not a complete success. Looking back on his considerable achievements, the case could be made that he had gone too far. By the time of his death in 1239 the order may have grown greatly in size but it was also vulnerable. Five years later, in 1244, the order suffered reverses in all three of its major frontier zones: Prussia (in rebellion from 1243), the Holy Land (reeling from a defeat suffered at the hands of the Egyptians in 1244) and Livonia (routed by the Rus to the north-east in 1242). In the wake of these disasters the order’s future was hanging by a thread and it took decades of hard campaigning for his successors to regain their former strength. The order was simply not strong enough to reinforce multiple frontiers simultaneously. Perhaps this legacy reveals the weakness of Herman’s determination to expand his order and is the underside of his unstinted ambition. Ultimately, these issues would be overcome. The order’s growth continued into the 14th and 15th centuries and Herman von Salza had laid the foundations for one of the most powerful military orders in medieval Europe. Nicholas Morton is Senior Lecturer in History at Nottingham Trent University and the author of The Medieval Military Orders 1120-1314 (Routledge, 2012).

FURTHER READING Nicholas Morton, The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land, 1190-1291 (Boydell, 2009). Jonthan Riley-Smith, The Crusades (third edition, Bloomsbury, 2014). William Urban, The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (Greenhill Books, 2003). FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 55

REVIEWS

John Morrill relishes a tale about the murder of James I David Brady seeks out Samuel Pepys • Clare Mulley admires Alan Turing

Intelligence hub: GCHQ, Cheltenham.

SIGNPOSTS

Secrets Made Public

Andrew Lycett uncovers the intriguing, labyrinthine paths to publication of the histories of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Special Operations Executive. THERE IS no better place to start a survey of intelligence literature than the official accounts – both comprehensive and readable – of the two main secret services. Christopher Andrew, who pioneered intelligence history studies at Cambridge University, wrote the MI5 book (The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2009), while Keith Jeffery, from Queen’s University, Belfast, was entrusted with MI6 (MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 56 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

1909-1949, which was published in 2010). However there is not (and do not expect) an official history of GCHQ, Britain’s other main espionage agency. Signals intelligence and cryptanalysis are still considered too sensitive. So, for as good a summary as is possible, reach for GCHQ by Richard Aldrich (2010). These books show the influence of three major developments in the late 20th century. The first was the publication in

1974 of The Ultra Secret by F.W. Winterbotham, a former RAF officer. During the war he had been responsible for distributing the secret German intelligence, known as ULTRA, which had been intercepted and decrypted at Bletchley Park. Only two years earlier J.C. Masterman, who headed the system which turned German spies into British double agents, had been prevented from publishing The Double Cross System at home and had turned to Yale University

Press in the US, but even then it appeared without reference to ULTRA. As soon as ULTRA could be mentioned, the history of the Second World War became more interesting, a trend maintained by the second development, the publication in 1984 of The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the 20th Century. This collection of essays, edited by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, aimed to use details of clandestine operations to tell a fuller version of episodes such as that of the British in Ireland. A third spur was the Waldegrave initiative on open government in the early 1990s, when John Major’s government sought to speed up the release of official documents into the National Archives. Peter Hennessy has written in these pages how he could not have produced The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (2002), his study of the government’s nuclear planning, without this development (which also fostered the climate for the official MI5 and MI6 histories). There had been literature about intelligence for at least a century beforehand. The origins of the British penchant for spy fiction lie before the First World War, when writers such as William Le Queux stoked up fears of German conspiracies. The two World Wars and the intervening years spawned sometimes fanciful accounts of intelligence operations, ranging from Basil Thomson’s Queer People (1922) to Greek Memories

(1932) by Compton McKenzie. The Faber Book of Espionage (1993), edited by Nigel West, is a treasure trove of such memoirs, offering extracts, fictional and factual, from Somerset Maugham, Samuel Hoare, Dennis Wheatley, Dusko Popov, Monty Woodhouse and many others, neatly packaged with biographical information. Nigel West was one of the first historians to question official intelligence narratives. His studies of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), mainly from the 1980s, still surprise with their revelations. West also edited The Guy Liddell Diaries (2005), one of the few private journals of an intelligence officer to have worked in publishing terms. At the same time came the work of more consciously radical writers such as Stephen Dorrill, author of The Silent Conspiracy

As soon as ULTRA could be mentioned, the history of the Second World War became much more interesting (1993), and Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, with British Intelligence and Covert Action: Africa, Middle East and Europe since 1945 (1983). This has since been largely superseded by Calder Walton’s Empire of Secrets (2013). The Bloch and Fitzgerald book had an introduction by Philip Agee, a former CIA employee who left and denounced the service before going on to write Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975). American and other foreign intelligence agencies lie outside the scope of this piece, but when examining the CIA, The Agency: The Rise & Decline of the CIA by John Ranelagh (1987) remains a good round-up. Biography is an enduring branch of writing on intelligence. A couple of good, unusual lives of spies are Richard Meinertzhagen by Mark Crocker (1989) and

Colonel Z (1984), about Colonel Claude Dansey, who ran his own private anti-Nazi intelligence agency, Organisation Z, by Anthony Read and David Fisher. From the era of more open sources came Tom Bower’s The Perfect Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935-1990 (1995), about the only man ever to have headed both MI5 and MI6. In the background was Peter Wright’s ground-breaking Spycatcher (1987). These books put the Cambridge spies firmly on the literary map, a tradition that continues with titles such as Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (2014), Andrew Lownie’s much praised Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess (2015) and The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, Geoff Andrews’ study of the elusive James Klugmann (also 2015). The tradition of the big synoptic read continued in 2015 with The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945 by Max Hastings, while biographies were well served by Queen of Spies, Paddy Hayes’ life of Daphne Park, who reached the highest ranks of MI6. Several books have tried to explain the realities of espionage in the 21st century, the age of bulk data collection. The New Spymasters by Stephen Grey took a thoughtful historical view, as did Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence by Brian Stewart and Samantha Newbery. In Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies, the BBC’s Gordon Corera explains lucidly the history of electronic surveillance, leading to Edward Snowden’s revelations. Several books in 2015 showed that the art of interrogating post-Waldegrave releases into the National Archives is not dead. One fine example is The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks, while Jonathan Haslan’s Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence made excellent use of declassified Soviet material. Andrew Lycett

Codebreakers

The Secret Intelligence Unit that Changed the Course of the First World War James Wyllie and Michael McKinley Ebury Press 352pp £20

I AM NATURALLY suspicious of any book that sells itself by claiming to tell the story of a secret unit ‘that changed the course of the First World War’. One wonders, however, why the stories told here – in racy, journalistic tone by Wyllie and McKinley – have not before been been brought together in a single volume.

What is so enjoyable about much First World War spying is that it was so amateurish Much that they have to say about Room 40, the secret codebreaking operation at the Admiralty led by Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall and his eccentric team of cryptanalysts, is familiar. The coup in finding three sets of German naval code books, the failures in processing intelligence at the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland, the triumph of decoding the Zimmerman Telegram, are all familiar. The work of Military Intelligence 1(b) at the War Office under Malcolm Hay is less well known. As is the codebreaking of

Ferdinand Tuohy on the Western Front, or Eric Gill and Reginald Thompson in the Middle East. The War Office was far slower than the Admiralty to embrace radio communications and to see the possibility of finding out what the other side was up to. Also, the descriptions of the late start in American codebreaking under Ralph Van Deman are less well known here. The book moves from the world of the codebreakers to the cloak and dagger activities of international spies and agents. The authors discuss German agents operating in America, trying to disrupt supplies from being sent to the Allies and the attempts to prevent this by British agents. An odd cast of characters emerges, including Franz von Papen, the German military attaché in Washington (who later inadvertently helped Hitler to power) and Captain Karl Boy-Ed, the naval attaché. They recruited a team of shady, disreputable figures to carry out acts of sabotage. The most successful was at the Black Tom wharves in New York harbour on July 30th, 1916, when 100,000 tons of TNT and 25,000 detonators for export to the Allies were ignited. The resulting explosion had the equivalent force of an earthquake at 5.5 on the Richter Scale and was the biggest explosion in New York before 9/11. What is so enjoyable about much First World War spying is that it was so amateurish. Most spies were gentlemen who could move about easily and freely entertain and be entertained. There is a charming quality to their undercover adventures, which reads like a John Buchan novel, that had disappeared by the era of the more ideologically-driven spying of the 1930s and the Second World War. Codebreakers is at its best when it stays within the realms of the eccentrics gathered at the Admiralty and elsewhere. It is a great story, whose legacy would lead to Bletchley Park and ultimately to the development of the modern surveillance state. Taylor Downing FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

Prof: Alan Turing Decoded Dermot Turing

The History Press 320pp £20

FEW LIVES provide a more appropriate subject for biographical decoding than the brilliant mathematician, cryptanalyst and father of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, yet few men were so wrongly judged by their countries. Dermot Turing is well placed to reassess his uncle. Although Alan was not emotionally close to his family, Dermot comes at some remove, having been born after his uncle’s tragic death. As a family member, however, and trustee of Bletchley Park, he has had access to many unpublished papers and photographs. What results is a cheerfully anecdotal account of a slightly grubby, surprisingly athletic, formidably clever and pleasingly humorous and humane man. Dermot Turing first takes issue with the image of his uncle as a solitary and slightly eccentric genius. It is the solitary part that rankles. Instead, a rather endearing and, if unconventional, not unpopular child appears. At school Alan Turing started an origami craze for ‘not just darts and paper boats’ but paper kettles, in which water could be boiled over a flame. By 11, he was designing fountain pens and typewriters and secretly doing algebra during dull divinity lessons. The adult man emerges seamlessly, still seeking out independent projects while enjoying the company of his peers, only now it is colleagues, rather than teachers, who curse him for his ‘smudgy copy’. He is still indisputably eccentric, happily cycling to work in his 58 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

gas mask to ward off hay fever and coding notes to friends without considering how many hours they take to decipher. Turing is best known for his work designing the mechanical nemesis to the Nazi’s Enigma coding machine during the Second World War. Reportedly only two mathematicians believed Enigma could be defeated. ‘Birch thought it could be broken because it had to be broken and Turing thought it could be broken because it would be so interesting to break it.’ Break it he famously did, helping to turn the tide of the war. But Turing’s interest in intelligence went much further than ciphers. In 1947 he produced a paper on ‘Intelligent Machinery’, in which he proposed engineering ‘a “brain” which is more or less without a body’. It is tempting to imagine that this brilliant intellectual, who pitched his own brain against a regime built upon biological prejudice and who later suffered so much as a result of Britain’s inability to tolerate human diversity, might have yearned for a more cerebral, less physical world. But Turing, a man of many passions, was not so binary in his thinking. He loved recondite puzzles, long-distance running, human decency and men. Unlike previous biographers, Dermot Turing neither ignores nor elevates the importance of his uncle’s sexuality. Joan Clarke is dealt with in less than three pages, though she gets more attention than any individual male romance. ‘The dominant passion in his life was his ideas’, Dermot Turing insists. ‘It is those for which he should be remembered.’ Yet this is not an academic book and should perhaps be read with a glass of wine at hand. The style is personable. There are some lists and overlong quotes, but not too much maths, and regular stylistic flourishes. Those hoping for new revelations about Alan Turing’s personal life or final confirmation of the circumstances of death will be disappointed. For anyone seeking a more nuanced picture of the human side of Turing, however, this book makes a useful and sometimes poignant contribution. Clare Mulley

America’s Dreyfus The Case Nixon Rigged Joan Brady

Skyscraper Publications 387pp £20 

THE INFAMIES of the British spies Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt barely ruffled British politics; Alger Hiss transformed America. He spurred Senator McCarthy’s persecutions and elevated Hiss inquisitor Nixon to the presidency. Cold War witchhunts, that victimised thousands and subverted justice, still corrode American society. In France in 1896 Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of espionage for Germany and deported to Devil’s Island. Eight years later he was proven framed amid antisemitic hysteria. In the 1949-50 ‘trial of the century’, former US State Department officer Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury for concealing Communist associations and imprisoned for 44 months. Joining outnumbered but undaunted believers in the innocence of Hiss, Joan Brady seeks to show how and why Hiss was framed. A Harvard Law School graduate, the brilliant and personable Hiss became Roosevelt’s adviser at the Allies’ 1945 Yalta conference and secretary-general of the incipient United Nations. Accused of Communist ties by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers at the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1948, he denied knowing Chambers. Later Hiss recognised him under another name and challenged him to repeat his allegations out of court. Chambers did so, adding new charges that

Hiss had given him confidential data for transmission to Soviet agents. From a dumb-waiter shaft in a relative’s home, Chambers produced handwritten notes and papers he claimed Hiss’ wife had retyped. A month on, surrounded by HUAC staff, Chambers exhumed 35mm film rolls from a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Hiss denied giving Chambers these materials and was indicted for perjury (the statute of limitations for espionage had expired). After the first trial’s divided jury, Hiss was convicted in a second trial. Judges rejected subsequent mistrial appeals. Russian testimony repudiating Hiss’ complicity seemed controverted by decrypted Soviet cables linking him with Communist cells and agents. Hiss died unvindicated in 1996. Brady’s strength lies in her narrative skill, which renders the frame-up convincing. She relates how Hiss, eager to clear his name, was entrapped by Nixon. Chambers, a fantasist of 50 aliases and countless conflicting fables, said everything HUAC wanted, lest he be charged with sodomy and child abuse. The months before Hiss’ indictment enabled Chambers to amend original and concoct new charges, in line with innocuous – publicly available or worthless for espionage – dumb-waiter and pumpkin data, whose significance Nixon ballyhooed. Chambers updated manifold sworn assertions that he had defected from Communism in 1937, to 1938, to fit data purportedly received from Hiss. Hence Chambers’ recall of Hiss’ homes changed radically in contents, colour and layout. So, too, his memories of times with Hiss, previously vague and falsified, gained accuracy through FBI coaching on ‘friends, neighbours, children, servants, dinner guests, holidays, pets, purchases, commuting, furniture …’ There there was the affair of the notorious typewriter, tracked down by Hiss’ defence team and impounded by the FBI. After years of neglected decay

REVIEWS it turned up in court in pristine condition. Neither jury knew this was not Hiss’ typewriter. ‘It wasn’t old enough. None of the boring documents had been typed on it’, Nixon later boasted. ‘We built one in the Hiss case.’ Nor were jurors told that transmitting retyped documents was nonsensical, because easily doctored. Traceable to their author, they also violated basic espionage safeguards; Hiss would have been insane to transmit handwritten notes. Chambers testified that he often collected data from Hiss at home. Why would a highly intelligent, long-time agent defy strictly imposed safety rules and neglect elementary precautions to protect himself? Why would Soviet spymasters continue to use Hiss after Chambers’ defection, as alleged, and why would Hiss continue to assist them? Since at least 1941 both Hiss and the Soviets would have known the risks of exposure and done their utmost to prevent it. Before the Hiss’ trials, the mass of misinformation and innuendo in Nixon’s press releases, twisting the facts beyond recognition, persuaded many of his guilt. ‘We won the Hiss case in the [news]papers’, bragged Nixon. ‘I had him convicted before he got to the grand jury.’ Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 for having ‘stood alone against the face of evil’. Thus was sanctified Orwell’s 1984 dictum: ‘If all others accepted the lie, then the lie passed into history and became truth.’ ‘Lying comes easily to you’, Hiss’ lawyer chastised oft-perjured Chambers, ‘I believe so’, agreed Chambers. Loathed by Time magazine colleagues for falsifying foreign dispatches, Chambers habitually replied: ‘Truth doesn’t matter.’ So he and Nixon destroyed Hiss and crippled public trust. ‘Not a single human being’, concludes Brady, ‘has corroborated Chambers’ tale of Alger the spy.’ The FBI tried and failed and hid its failure.   David Lowenthal

Arcadian Nights

The Greek Myths Reimagined John Spurling Duckworth-Overlook 320pp £19.99

The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception A Companion Edited by Marco Fantuzzi & Christos Tsagalis Cambridge University Press 678pp £120

BOOKS ON the myths of ancient Greece are not exactly two a penny, but they are hardly as rare as hen’s teeth, either. I was brought up on ‘told to the children’ versions of the IIiad and Odyssey illustrated by W. Heath Robinson and, much later, the scholarly Handbook of Greek Mythology (originally published in 1928) by the ‘learned barbarian’ H.J. Rose. Among the plethora of more recent offerings I would single out Jenny March’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology (1998) and her Penguin Book of Classical Myths (2009), which are not confined to the ancient Hellenic world, and the even more cross-cultural and contemporary-focused Mythology. An Illustrated Journey Into Our Imagined World (2012) by Christopher Dell.

Good stories all ... but still only a mere skimming off the top of the full monty of the ancient Greek pantheon

So, why tell them again, these well-known stories, asks the historical novelist John Spurling? Well, one reason is that they are not actually that well known. In his very useful Glossary of Names, under ‘Helen’, Spurling epitomises the Spartan femme fatale’s life trajectory in six aptly laconic lines, though he does not mention here the rape of Helen as a young girl by the Athenian king, Theseus. It is a tale, or variant, that he does relate just a dozen pages earlier in his version of the myth or rather myths (there never was just one myth of such cardinal characters) of Theseus. And how many people – I mean ‘educated general readers’ – know that the fall of Troy is not related in the Iliad (despite the epic’s title, which means a tale about Ilion, or Troy), or that before Euripides’ eponymous play, the exotic Colchian princess-witch Medea had not been debited with the murder of her own two children by her faithless Greek husband Jason of Iolcus? The two books under review could hardly be more different. The 678-page Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle differs in its content as well as conception, implementation and size. The Cycle, as it became known, is a precisely post-Homeric collection of minor epic poems, in the same metre as Homer but lacking the archetype’s astonishing depth and originality. It provides what John Barton in his own homage, Tantalus, wittily calls ‘the missing bits’: that is, the episodes that the composer or composers of the Iliad and Odyssey deliberately left out in order to focus sharply on

the source, course and resolution of the anger of Achilles at Troy and on the 20-year travels and travails of Odysseus during his outrageously prolonged nostos (return) to his intermittently beloved Penelope, another Spartan (the niece not, as Spurling has it, sister of Tyndareus and so cousin of Helen). Spurling majors on Herakles (the Greek spelling) and Theseus, who between them account for about half his novel, but also finds space for Agamemnon, Apollo and Perseus: one god, one demi-god by birth, who became a full god and gained admittance to the divine company of Mount Olympus by fulfilling his 12 labours, two demigods who, despite their labours, remained that and one wholly mortal hero. They are all good stories, excellently reimagined and retold, but still only a mere skimming off the top of the full monty of the ancient Greek pantheon, not to mention the whole pullulating cast of lesser immortals, mortals and monsters that populated the ancient Greeks’ preternaturally fertile minds. But what is a myth, exactly, as opposed to or at least differentiated from any other kind or category of more or less traditional tale? The editors and authors of the Cambridge Companion do not think their readers need to be troubled with such basic matters of definition. They operate rather at the level of relentlessly minute scholarly technicality, as befits the august university publishing house from which it emanates. A Mythographus Homericus turns up in the chapter on the Cypria, the first of the six poems in the Trojan Cycle, and in the ‘Index nominum et rerum’. But though there is an index entry for ‘folktale’, there is not one for ‘myth’. The chief interest for nonspecialists lies in some of the ‘reception’ chapters, for example those on Virgil, Ovid and Statius, or that on the ‘Epic Circle’ (not Cycle) in art. But as reception is here understood as ‘ancient’, interpreted broadly as culminating with the 48-book, 21,000-line Dionysiaca of the sixth-century ad Nonnus of Panopolis in Egypt, the volume cannot, alas, engage with the likes of Barton’s splendidly dramatic and original Tantalus cycle. Paul Cartledge FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

The Murder of King James I Alastair Bellany & Thomas Cogswell

Yale University Press 664pp £30

I HAVE BEEN studying Stuart history for 50 years without encountering George Eglisham. He was a Scottish Catholic with a dodgy reputation as a physician and man of letters, whose long struggle for recognition and wealth came crashing down when his patent for manufacturing golden foliats was revoked by Parliament in 1621 and a brief pogrom was launched against furtive papists. He poured out the bile of disillusion as he withdrew to renewed poverty in the Spanish Netherlands and used all his expertise in making bricks without straw (as a doctor and would-be courtier) into a sensational pamphlet alleging that the Duke of Buckingham had poisoned James I. This tract caught the popular mood and was endlessly reprinted. It suited the purposes of Buckingham’s political enemies in the later 1620s and of Charles I in the 1630s and 1640s to take these allegations seriously. The charge played a significant part in the impeachment of Buckingham in 1626 and fed and focused the inner rage of John Felton, the lone fanatic who assassinated Buckingham in 1628. It fuelled muttered claims in opposition politics that Charles I was at the least involved in a cover-up that stoked the hysteria of the early 1640s and the road to Regicide. Enlightenment historiography 60 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

marginalised such elements in a grand narrative of the 17th century, as the high road to religious and civil liberties and the allegation has become a footnote in textbooks and Eglisham a lost name. Cogswell and Bellany are accomplished storytellers and their collaboration is much more than the sum of their considerable parts. Modern security services on the trail of a terrorist network and its sympathisers could not have been more thorough in their investigations or in their careful sifting of the evidence. This is an astonishing detective work. It is also a magnificent piece of political reconstruction, locating each twist and turn in the plot within a fully international, as well as national, series of contexts. It is a major contribution to the history of print culture and to the complex interaction of underground printing and the

This is an astonishing detective work ... a magnificent piece of political reconstruction even more radical circulation of manuscripts. It does what the best history does in that it recreates the mental world of the past and shows how the historian must engage with and seek to understand the dross of the particular, the contingent, the specifics of the past and not just extract the residual gold of whatever it is in the past that inhabits the present. This book does more than anything published in the past 20 years to explain why Charles I never really had a chance and indeed why there was a civil war. It does so with a delight in storytelling that is truly infectious. Wolf Hall meets Scandinavian noir: a great way to spend cosy evenings in whatever weather the New Year hurls at us. John Morrill

Spain

The Centre of the World 1519-1682 Robert Goodwin Bloomsbury Press 608pp £30

WRITTEN IN swashbuckling style by honorary Sevillian Robert Goodwin, Spain: the Centre of the World 1519-1682 is the story of the rise and fall of Spain’s Habsburg rulers from the early glories of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, to its agonising decline under Philips III and IV. Part I, Gold, marches us assuredly through historical events, lingering only for those telling anecdotes which give a sense of the very real human beings who led the Old World and the New at this crucial juncture in history. All the hubris, heroism, self-sacrifice and venality we perceive in our modern politicians and royals are to be found in abundance here, as Goodwin combs the archives for the gossip and glamour which inevitably attached to those monstres sacrés, Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles V and Philip II, or their rivals, Henry VIII and Francis I. We get to know their obsessions and foibles through spouses, attendants, artists, poets, commanders, and a legion of hangers-on. The author’s engaging, opinionated approach, combined with his passion for the rambunctious exploits of the poet Garcilaso and that supreme chronicler of the Indies, Fernández de Oviedo, manages to embrace discussion of the labyrinthine Castilian legal system, or the niceties of European banking – topics not normally guaranteed to enthrall, but

thoroughly absorbing here thanks to his brisk incorporation of punchy quotations into the text, unobtrusively relegating the apparatus of academic reference to extensive, specialist endnotes. In similar style, Part II, Glitter, charts the 17th-century desengaño (disillusionment) of the Baroque via the endemic favouritism and corruption of the courts of Philips III and IV (madness, profligacy, homosexual intrigue, murder!) and the outpourings of that dazzling array of writers, poets, artists and sculptors (Cervantes, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Velázquez, Zurbarán, et al) who constitute Spain’s miraculous Golden Age of arts and letters, giving us a host of treasures: Las Meninas, or that great European archetype, Don Juan and the incomparable Don Quixote, whom Goodwin tackles head on. ‘All human life is there’, as the saying goes: surely no reader can remain indifferent to the folly of the Prince of Wales (later Charles I) and his reckless pursuit of the Spanish Infanta as he arrives unannounced at the Court of Philip IV, or to the pain of Charles V, bitten on his arthritic knuckle by a mosquito so that ‘unable to endure it, he gently scratched himself until both his hand and forearm became inflamed’, or fail to be intrigued by comments that his mother, Juana the Mad, ‘urinates more often than ever seen in any other person’ and ‘eats on the floor’. Indeed, the corporeal nature of much of what Goodwin has to say takes the book into the realm of the medieval Carnival: the two facing pages, where he describes the eucharistic mystique surrounding a monarch’s consumption of bread and wine, followed by an analysis of the transcendent nature of the role of the Camarero Mayor (Groom of the Stool), is brilliant and hilarious. In this impassioned, ribald and thrilling book, Goodwin’s ambition is not merely to document the decline of the largest empire the world had ever seen, but to peer into its soul as its glory slides from underneath it, its rulers clinging somehow to their illusions as its artists and commentators lambast this folly. David McGrath

REVIEWS

EXHIBITION

Bitter Freedom

Ireland in a Revolutionary World, 1918-1923 Maurice Walsh Faber & Faber 544pp £16.99

THE IRISH are by no means the only people afflicted with a generally inward-looking understanding of their past; modern history and, perhaps, especially the history of modern Europe, tends to be nationcentric and there is nothing unusually parochial about Irish historiography. It should also be remembered that some of the most insightful books on the birth of the Irish state have been written from a narrowly Irish or Anglo-Irish perspective. Charles Townshend’s recent The Republic, an excellent, argument-driven account of the Irish struggle for independence that doesn’t give much of a thought to comparisons between Ireland and

Bitter Freedom seeks to place Ireland in the global disorder born of the terrible slaughter of total war other emerging nation-states, provides a good case in point. Yet, in order to gain a full understanding of the Anglo-Irish War, comparisons between events in Ireland after the Armistice and nationalist protest and paramilitary conflicts across

Naseby, hastily renamed the Royal Charles, when Charles II was conveyed from exile in the Netherlands to England. The Royal Charles is represented by one of several models of ships drawn from the collections of the NMM; Charles II by a large, looming, and lubricious portrait. We all keep anniversaries of one kind or another. Pepys was ‘cut for the stone’, or underwent a lithotomy as we might now say, in the summer of 1658. He marked forever afterwards the anniversary of his successful survival of this serious procedure. Pepys had endured great chronic pain, but the agony and danger of the operation, without anaesthetic or antisepsis, are almost unimaginable for anyone today. An assortment of fearsome-looking surgical instruments is on display. Pepys retained his billiard ball-sized stone as a souvenir, in a specially made box, for the rest of his life. It is notoriously difficult to adequately convey momentous events that are abstract by scale and by time. Pepys lived through the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, providing a vivid account of both in his Diary. Entirely because of this journal, everyone interested in the history of the 17th century knows something of Pepys. You may have dipped into the scholarly edition produced in the 1970s, which revealed his reprehensible pursuit of many women. This side of Pepys’ character is ignored by the curators, except for Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution a few exhibits about the actresses National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF of the restoration theatre. Surely Runs until March 28th, 2016 the Bibliotheque National Française could be prevailed upon to lend a copy of the little erotic book L’escole des filles that both The show begins with a naïve painting of intrigued and shamed Pepys? a grisly spectacle that turned the world on its The elephant-sized lacuna in the exhibition head. Playing truant from St Paul’s on January is the Diary. The exhibits are well worth seeing, 30th, 1649, Pepys went to join the crowds around the scaffold at the execution of Charles I. but can they really convey enough about Pepys’ world and his place in it? His Diary covers Pepys complained that he could not get a good approximately eight years of his life, so the view and that he needed to pee. Near this exhibition and publication do fill in the gaps in painting are relics, including the Blood Royal of his early and later years. When Pepys left his the ‘King Martyr’. The Royal Collection has lent collections to Magdalene, his old Cambridge a copy of Eikon Basilike, the self-justifying book College, he included a clause that the items attributed posthumously to the king; it is shown must never leave. To this day his Diary and other alongside the Puritan’s answer, Eikonoklastes, speedily written in October 1649 by John Milton. material remain in the college’s Bibliotheca Pepysiana. So, go to Greenwich to see the show, Pepys went on to the Puritan university, preferably arriving by water, but next time you where he shared in his youth the turbulent opare in Cambridge visit Magdalene to enjoy the timism of the Commonwealth. He had trimmed these opinions by the time Oliver Cromwell died documents themselves. David Brady in 1658, to be replaced as Lord Protector by his son. The unfortunate Richard Cromwell lasted Catalogue: Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution less than a year. Pepys, under the patronage of Margarette Lincoln (Ed.) Thames & Hudson 224pp £29.95 his cousin Edward Montagu, was aboard the THERE IS an ancient Chinese curse (probably neither ancient nor Chinese): ‘May you live in interesting times.’ It must have been pronounced over Pepys in his cradle. The momentous events of his life are traversed in Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution, now showing at the National Maritime Museum (NMM). The Navy made Pepys and, in return, Pepys made the Navy. The connection has led Margarette Lincoln and other NMM curators to produce this major exhibition. Pepys the man was revealed by Claire Tomalin in her authoritative 2002 biography. Tomalin provides a short preface to the excellent publication which accompanies this show. Credit must go to the in-house exhibition design team, who have conjured-up a series of vaguely 17th-century rooms within the gallery.

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REVIEWS Central Europe and in Britain’s other overseas possessions, notably Iraq, Egypt and India, are not simply desirable, they are arguably indispensable. For without at least considering postwar violence elsewhere, the historian cannot properly contextualise the break-up of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Great War. Nor, crucially, can they effectively address the question of what was distinctively Irish about the Irish Revolution. When considered solely in the context of what was then the United Kingdom, for example, the IRA’s guerrilla campaign and the counter-insurgency policies pursued by the Crown Forces in 1920 and 1921 seem like an aberration. If examined alongside outbreaks of paramilitary fighting in Finland, Lithuania or

A vivid account of the most turbulent, transformative period in the history of the United Kingdom Poland during roughly the same period, however, the situation in Ireland, dire as it was, begins to look quite consistent with the global phenomenon of antiimperial violence that stemmed from the world war. All of this being the case, Maurice Walsh’s Bitter Freedom, a text that seeks to place Ireland ‘in the global disorder born of the terrible slaughter of total war’, should be warmly welcomed. Unfortunately, the book falls somewhat short of its promise to properly consider events in a global context. Thus, while postwar turmoil in continental Europe and the Middle East is briefly alluded to, the conflicts that occurred in these regions are not evaluated in a way that sheds new light on social, military or political dynamics in Ireland from 1918 to 1923. Hence Walsh acknowledges that the fundamental difference 62 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

between nationalist movements in Central Europe and in Ireland is that in the former case the imperial regimes against which these movements had railed were destroyed as a result of the Great War. In Ireland, by contrast, Sinn Féin and the IRA faced a British state and Empire that had emerged victorious in 1918 and initially held the moral high ground in the eyes of the international community. Pushing this point further and exploring the fact that, in Ireland, each side had an established and recognised adversary with which they could negotiate could potentially have taken the author into interesting new territory. No such enquiries are made, however, and Walsh’s commentary on international affairs is largely confined to colourful observations on the emergence of the US as the cultural and political superpower of the 20th century. Yet, while those looking for a genuinely fresh contribution to the scholarly pool of knowledge on the Irish Revolution may be disappointed, there is still much to admire in Bitter Freedom. Walsh certainly writes well, possessing a keen eye for the dramatic and the personal. He also offers some very perceptive commentary on a range of specifically Irish themes, including class tensions within the nationalist community and the generational divide between the older, more traditional Home Rulers and the brash, invariably young and modern-looking Republicans. The chapter on the Royal Irish Constabulary, which highlights the complex, outsider status occupied by Irish policemen and reminds us that they served as the model for colonial, paramilitary police forces across the British Empire, is particularly illuminating. Ultimately, Bitter Freedom promises more than it delivers, but nonetheless provides a vivid and highly engaging account of events in Ireland during the most turbulent and transformative period in the history of the United Kingdom. Edward Madigan

The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy Andrew Hoberek (Ed.)

Cambridge University Press 286pp £17.99

WHENEVER a new study of John F. Kennedy appears, one is tempted to ask whether we really need yet another assessment of a 1,000-day presidency that was short on substantive achievement. The answer here is an affirmative one. That said, anyone wanting to know more about the politics and policies associated with JFK should look elsewhere. There are a handful of political essays here, all of them illuminating, especially Robert Mason’s on JFK’s surprising significance to modern American conservatism. However, the collection is largely focused on Kennedy within the cultural, intellectual and social milieu of his times and most of the essays are written by academics drawn from departments of English rather than History. Two interesting essays respectively explore the related significance of Kennedy’s Irish-American ethnicity and Catholicism. In a well-crafted analysis, Eoin Cannon demonstrates that JFK’s ascent to the presidency marked not just the completion of the Irish mobility saga, but the launch of hyphenated Americanism as a badge of pride. The greater barrier he faced in 1960, however, was religion, in a nation where anti-Catholicism was still a respectable prejudice, as demonstrated when the editor of Christianity Today declared that ‘Rome was little better than Moscow’. As Paul Giles shows, Kennedy’s campaign not only

broke through a glass ceiling that had kept out Democrat presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith in 1928, but also formed part of a much broader movement to modernise American Catholic thought and culture by circumscribing its parameters. As a consequence, religious difference increasingly became a non-issue in US politics, as the presidential ambitions of two other sons of Massachusetts would demonstrate: Catholic John Kerry in 2004 and Mormon Mitt Romney in 2012. Modernity is the theme of many essays, ranging from Mary Ann Watson’s exploration of Kennedy’s unprecedented and still unmatched capacity to project himself on television as the epitome of cool when alive to the significance of the Camelot legacy for what Lee Konstantinou terms his ‘undying cinematic body’. In an illuminating essay, John Hellman analyses the surprising admiration of the New York intellectual elite for a politician who dabbled in middlebrow literature with his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Profiles in Courage. Whatever its doubts about this form of writing, this circle saw in Kennedy, both in his written words and his later presidential image, a celebrant of an ideal close to its heart: the tense, lonely and sacrificial relationship of the heroically independent thinker to society. Kennedy’s modernity was more symbol than substance. As Vaughn Rasberry shows, the future president had distinguished himself as a critic of European colonialism when a senator, but in the Oval Office could not break free from Cold War considerations in supporting overseas aid and modernisation projects that were intended to stifle Third World autonomy. This brings us back to why Kennedy has spawned a literary industry on his life and significance. What these essays make clear is that the youngest president’s apparent challenge to so many orthodoxies in his brief tenure has become an infinitely renewable resource of hope for anyone invested in the promise of the United States. Iwan Morgan

REVIEWS

EXHIBITION

Weeping Britannia

Portrait of a Nation in Tears Thomas Dixon Oxford University Press 456pp £25

I BEGIN THIS review with a confession. I am an inveterate weeper. I cry in the cinema, at television programmes and at the news. Music can leave me sobbing, as can school assemblies. I have also, shockingly, been known to bite back a tear in the archive, when I find a particularly moving story. I am also old enough to be embarrassed by this emotional incontinence and can usually be found trying to discretely wipe these tears away. Thank goodness, then, for Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia and its assurance that this unwelcome lachrymosity is part of a long tradition of tearfulness, one that far from being alien to British culture is a long-standing aspect of national identity. I come from a long line of weepers. Dixon’s enjoyable and scholarly work takes the reader on a tearful journey. He shows us that crying has its history, beginning with the story of Margery of King’s Lynn, whose near constant weeping so annoyed her fellow pilgrims en-route to Jerusalem in the 15th century, to the more recent tears of Paul Gascoigne, Margaret Thatcher and endless contestants on television talent shows. After a ‘stoical pause’ between approximately 1875 and 1945, it is again widely considered an acceptable emotional response to a variety of events.

Artist and Empire

Facing Britain’s Imperial Past Tate Britain, until April 10th, 2016 THE BRITISH EMPIRE and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol closed in 2008 after only six years of operation. Attempts to revive it in London failed and its collections were donated to the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. The chairman of its trustees, Neil Cossons, blamed the failure on ‘post-imperial angst’, commenting: ‘I think the time has not yet arrived for the proper story of Empire and Commonwealth to be told.’ After all, Bristol owes much of its past prosperity to the slave trade, while London’s astonishingly multi-ethnic and multicultural make-up probably complicates the idea of an Empire museum beyond resolution. I am reminded of what post-colonial India’s greatest artist, Satyajit Ray – director of the classic film about colonial Lucknow, The Chess Players – told me, as his biographer, when I asked him for his view of the British heritage in India. After a long pause for thought, Ray responded: ‘It’s a very, very complex, mixed kind of thing. I think many of us owe a great deal to it. I’m thankful for the fact that at least I’m familiar with both cultures and it gives me a very much stronger footing as a film-maker, but I’m also aware of all the dirty things that were being done. I really don’t know how I feel about it.’

Of the British heritage in India, Satyajit Ray said: ‘It’s a very, very complex, mixed kind of thing’ Reflecting on the museum’s demise in a thoughtful introduction to the lavish catalogue of Tate Britain’s exhibition Artist and Empire, Alison Smith, the gallery’s lead curator of 19th-century British art, observes that Britain has never had a museum of Empire, whether at London’s Imperial Institute, established after

the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, or its successor, the now-defunct Commonwealth Institute. ‘In Britain the art of Empire is generally presented in an illustrative and non-artistic way, in institutions governed by such disciplines as history, natural history, geography, archaeology and anthropology’, she notes. Thus, much of what is displayed in Artist and Empire comes not from art galleries but from institutions such as the National Maritime Museum: ‘In evoking the memory of the “imperial museum”, this exhibition retains something of the polyglot culture that sustained the British Empire in the past and remains its most positive legacy.’ The range – geographical, chronological and cultural – is inevitably very broad, covering maps such as Matthew Flinders’ chart of the coast of Terra Australis 1798-1803 (which defined Australia), botanical drawings from India and tribal objects from Africa (including Benin bronzes), as well as history paintings such as The Death of General James Wolfe by Benjamin West (1779), the Tate’s portrait of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, in Arab dress, by Augustus John (1919) and artworks created as recently as 2015; for example, Andrew Gilbert’s satirical installation with dummies of British soldiers as exotic as the Zulu warriors they are marching to attack. Walter Crane’s world map of 1886, Imperial Federation, highlights the Empire’s complexity. At first glance, it looks like a straightforward celebration of imperialism, depicting the global spread of British dominion in pink, with a logo of Britannia at the bottom, sitting on the shoulders of the mythical figure of Atlas surrounded by stereotypical scenes of white-settler and native colonial life: three female figures at the top hold banners reading ‘Freedom’, ‘Fraternity’ and ‘Federation’. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the females are wearing Phyrgian caps, standing for revolutionary liberty, while some of the scenes, such as a bare-breasted Aboriginal woman proudly holding up a boomerang and a turbaned Indian porter, bent low beneath a heavy load, offer a less-than-imperial message. Crane, who was a socialist, created the map to promote a single federated state among the colonies of the Empire as an alternative to colonial imperialism. Artist and Empire is an exhibition without a thesis – and is the better for it. It contains something for all tastes, whether the visitor prefers military heroism or subaltern studies. Overall it shows that British imperial exploitation could enrich the cultural experience of both the coloniser and the colonised. Andrew Robinson Catalogue: Artist and Empire, Alison Smith et al. Tate Publishing 256pp £29.99

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REVIEWS At the heart of Dixon’s study is the shift in British emotional cultures, from sensibility to stoicism and back again. While Protestant reformers understood weeping as a Catholic emotional indulgence, it was not until the late 19th century that the stiff upper lip took precedence over the sentimental in British culture. Even then, it was only among certain social groups. The growth of Empire and the the 20th century’s two world wars helped to spread a repressive emotional culture from public schools, those incubators of imperial administrators, politicians and military leaders, to wider British society. As Britain defined itself against the supposedly emotional subject peoples of Empire and attempted to manage mass death in wartime, stoicism and restraint became aligned with British culture. Giving rein to one’s emotions, particularly tears, was seen as a sign of regrettable weakness.

Giving rein to one’s emotions, particularly tears, was seen as a sign of regrettable weakness However, one of the many pleasures of Dixon’s book is the range of examples that he uses to show us how this story of weeping and the emotional cultures framed by it is never absolute. One fascinating story is of First World War soldiers who, fresh from the horror of the trenches, packed into theatres to weep over a sentimental play about fairies. Near the height of the cult of stoicism, when the bereaved were being advised to control their grief, combatants were finding an emotional release in the darkness of the theatre. A robust fondness for the pleasures of ‘a good cry’ never, it appears, entirely disappeared from British culture. Lucy Noakes 64 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

Coney Island

Visions of an American Dreamland 1861-2008 Robin Jaffee Frank (Ed.) Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Yale University Press 286pp £35

CONEY ISLAND is a small strip of land in the south-western corner of Brooklyn, a beach-side community abutting the Atlantic Ocean. From the 1840s, with the arrival of a regular ferryboat service from the city, Coney Island established itself as a resort and a playground. By the end of the 1860s it had become a thriving, thronging place for entertainments and amusements: from shooting galleries, carnivals, fortune-tellers, and freak- and animal shows, to galleries of ferrotypes, viewing towers, telescopes and fantastic architectural follies such as the Elephant Hotel (built in the shape of an elephant), as well as (inevitably) brothels, gambling dens, dance halls, tattoo shops and saloons. The poet J.P. Sweet called Coney ‘The People’s Paradise’; other writers dubbed it ‘Sodom by the Sea’. This fully and beautifully illustrated book forms a catalogue of paintings, photographs, film and ephemera from an exhibition of the same name, which opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in January 2015 and is touring through 2016. The exhibition includes works by major artists from the 1860s to 2008 and charts the rise, fall and rebirth of the island, documenting changes in fashion, taste, politics, sexual mores and popular culture, telling a story of a unique piece of land that is a microcosm of the history of the modern US itself. In one of the excellent essays, which chart, analyse and contextualise the images, Robin Jaffee Frank notes

that ‘Coney Island was not merely a place, but a collective soul of a nation’. Early images, such as William Merrit Chase’s At the Shore (1884), bring the gaze of the Impressionist avant-garde to bear on an America emerging from the Civil War confident and hopeful, seeing shimmering seas, bustling beaches and chattering tourists in a way strangely reminiscent of Manet’s Paris. Later pieces, such as Reginald Marsh’s expressionist Wonderland Circus: Sideshow Coney Island (1930), depict thronging crowds groping each other in the harsh, electric lights of the strip, kicking litter and discarded food, as club promoters bark invitations and salacious women twist their hips, as if to lead grubby, bawdy sailors away. Through the 1940s, photographs by Weegee, Morris Engel and others show Coney’s heyday as a place of rollercoasters, candyfloss and beach-side leisure; romance, laughter and fun. By the 1950s, Diane Arbus turned her uncanny lens onto the increasingly lurid attractions and, into the 1980s, when Coney Island had become (according to The New York Times) ‘disfigured’, Jean-Michel Basquiat depicted its Luna Park, in an allegory of biblical fall, a lost Eden, covered in graffiti but still thronging with life. Even as Coney declined, its deep and rich history ensured it remained a draw for travellers looking for romance and adventure; the old New York from the days before the dying decades of the 20th century sucked the soul from the city. With the support and love of a small community of performers, artists, historians and architectural heritage organisations, Coney resisted the looming threats of gentrification and the storm forces of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy and just managed to survive. It remains today, under the constant vigilance of community groups such as the Coney Island Hysterical Society, a vibrant, diverse and thrilling draw. This book and its accompanying exhibition serve as a testament to its cultures and are an important read for anyone who wants to truly understand modern America. Matt Lodder

Going to the Palais

A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 James Nott Oxford University Press 327pp £65

FROM THE 1920S to the 1950s, the dance hall (or ‘palais de dance’ as it was often more grandly called) was an integral part of British popular culture, the second biggest entertainment industry after the cinema, with an estimated weekly attendance of four million. In his exhaustively researched, authoritative and consistently fascinating book, James Nott has produced the first social, cultural and economic history of dance and dance halls in Britain between 1918 and 1960. He tackles the subject thematically, dividing his discussion into three sections. The first traces the expansion of the dance hall industry and the creation of a mass audience for dancing. An explosion of interest in dancing, particularly among the working classes after the First World War, led to a demand for purposebuilt dance halls. By 1939 all major cities had a palais. During the Second World War dancing boomed and dance halls helped maintain morale. Against a background of full employment, the dance hall enjoyed a ‘golden age’ in the 1950s, before experiencing a rapid decline in the 1960s after the rock’n’roll revolution and the rise of nightclubs and discotheques challenged the supremacy of the palais. The regular dance hall patrons, like the most assiduous cinema-goers, were mainly

REVIEWS young, more often female than male and usually working class. In his second section, Nott charts the role of the dance hall in the social life of the young and the development of a distinct dance culture of their own. He stresses the importance of the dance hall in the lives of women, for whom it was an arena of freedom and equality, vital to their growing emancipation and self-confidence. The dance hall also became synonymous with romance. As one sociologist observed in 1943: ‘Dancing is one of the recognised ways in which boys and girls expect to find their future partner.’ It was these factors behind the popularity of the dance halls that alarmed middle-class moralists and caused periodic moral panics. These are covered in the third section of the book, which examines the fears that dance halls encouraged promiscuity in young women and feminised young men, while promoting

The first social, cultural and economic history of the dance hall ... authoritative and fascinating drug use, violence and hooliganism. Most interesting of all, the dance hall became a focus for racial prejudice, as many of the popular dance forms derived from black American culture and reinforced pre-existing racial stereotypes. The dance hall became the first popular venue where the increasingly multiracial nature of British society became apparent. The arrival in wartime of African-American G.I.s was a precursor to the era of mass non-white immigration after the war. In its range of topics, density of assembled evidence and consistent subtlety of argument, this book is set to become the definitive account of dance halls in 20th century Britain. Jeffrey Richards

American Hippies W. J. Rorabaugh

Cambridge University Press 239pp £17.99

UNFORTUNATELY for the hippies, posterity favours those who provide articulate accounts of themselves. Theirs, writes Rorabaugh, was a movement that appeared ‘suddenly’ in the mid1960s without manifesto, produced no great literature and whose greatest cultural legacy are ‘drug song lyrics’. ‘Sources’, he admits, ‘are a problem.’ That said, there is no paucity in cultural representations of hippies. Recently, the movement served as the recurring yin to the suit-wearing mainstream-in-decline-yang of Don Draper and co in the television series Mad Men. At best, hippie is a byword for naivety and, at worst, ‘full of shit’. By the mid 1970s, even rock music, the counterculture’s medium of choice, had turned on it, as expressed in Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers song I’m Straight. Canonical countercultural icons (not the contradiction in terms it might once have seemed) are rarely associated with the movement. The tie-dyed Grateful Dead do not enjoy the same reputation as the monochrome Velvet Underground. Reasons for ridicule are many. In addition to the vagaries in hippie philosophy, the great unwashed were 97 per cent white and middle class, whose wilful rejection of their origins struck a sour note with those minorities who aspired to the privilege they eschewed. Like all movements, the hippies had followers and leaders and the homogeneous latter had gender, class and race in common.

To what extent are the cliches lazy? Rorabaugh’s book is a concise study surveying the counterculture (he uses the definite article), but his probing of the hippies reveals no hidden depths. While sympathetic to his subject, Rorabaugh acknowledges that hippies were not always ‘right on’ by contemporary standards, so to what extent are the hippies responsible for the progressive standards by which we now judge them poorly? With reason, the author claims that hippie scepticism about government has gradually become the dominant view. Their distrust of authority arguably paved the way for our cynical world. Environmental consciousness might be said to have its roots with the movement, but so, too, did the negative and hindering perceptions of the

Unfortunately for the hippies, posterity favours those who provide articulate accounts of themselves po-faced eco-warrior. Then there’s alternative medicine. Rorabaugh suggests two stand-out examples of the movement’s legacy: rural communes and, less convincingly, the mindset that allowed J.K. Rowling to create Harry Potter. This is an earnest, uncynical study of a movement that has aged badly. The media ignored important aspects of hippie culture to focus on the surface, argues Rorabaugh, and hippies were famously inarticulate, leaving them as sitting ducks; indeed, when Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion chronicled ‘the freaks’, they did so from the outside. But cynicism is inevitable and where better to look than the Wikipedia page of ‘Lysergic Lenin’ and Yippies founder Jerry Rubin: Jerry Clyde Rubin (July 14, 1938– November 28, 1994) was an American social activist, anti-war leader, and counterculture icon during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman. Rhys Griffiths

CONTRIBUTORS David Brady is a freelance lecturer, researcher and writer. Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Taylor Downing is author of Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code-Breakers and Propagandists of the Great War (Little, Brown, 2014). Rhys Griffiths is Editorial Assistant at History Today. Matt Lodder is a lecturer in Contemporary Art and Director of American Studies at the University of Essex. David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. Andrew Lycett has published a number of notable biographies, including of Muammar Gaddafi, Ian Fleming, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. David McGrath is Visiting Scholar at King’s College London, specialising in Golden Age Spanish Literature. Edward Madigan is Lecturer in Public History and First World War Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Iwan Morgan is Professor of United States Studies at King’s College London. John Morrill is General Editor of the new five-volume edition of all Oliver Cromwell’s recorded words for OUP. Clare Mulley is author of The Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and Lives of Britain’s First Female Special Agent of WWII (Pan, 2013). Lucy Noakes is Reader in History at the University of Brighton. Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Lancaster. Andrew Robinson is the author of India: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2014) and biographer of Satyajit Ray and Rabindranath Tagore.

FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Political Asylums Stuart M. Archer’s excellent article on shell shock (‘The Racket and the Fear’, January 2016) highlights the complexity of human suffering in the First World War. Matters were even more politically convoluted in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Despite a long history of rebellion against British rule, over 200,000 Irish soldiers served in British forces in the First World War and up to 35,000 died in it. Many of these Irish men believed that Home Rule was imminent and that serving in the British army was good for Irish nationalism. In the midst of the conflict, however, there came the Easter Rising of April 1916. It was a military failure but a key episode in the story of Irish independence. In the meantime, increasing numbers of Irish soldiers were being sent home with shell shock. A dedicated hospital was opened on the grounds of a large asylum in Dublin on June 16th, 1916, just two months after the Easter Rising. This 32-bed establishment operated until December 23rd, 1919 and 362 soldiers were treated, a majority of whom returned home without ever being formally certified insane. Case histories from the archives are stark. Private JK (age 19) ‘was blown up and buried for 36 hours’ near Ypres and presented with hair loss, tremor, depression and headache. He slept ‘badly and is disturbed by dreams’. Gunner MN (age 35) was admitted in 1919 with ‘shell shock’ after a head injury, having ‘lost himself completely for a time’. Treatment was based on rest and recuperation. Soldiers were taken out on trips and singers and drama groups visited. 66 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

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Additional treatments included hot and cold baths, bromides (sedatives), antipyrin (antiinflammatory) and caffeine (the soldiers’ favourite). Despite this relatively enlightened approach, political problems persisted. Many of Ireland’s asylums had strong anti-British sympathies and some staff of the Richmond Asylum refused to work in the War Hospital. More broadly, the Irish soldiers who served in the British forces in the First World War tended to be written out of Irish history until the recent anniversary of the start of the conflict. Their stories, including those with shell shock, are only now emerging. Brendan Kelly Trinity College Dublin

Chronic Error The article on shell shock has a photo (p.16) with an inscription transcribed in the caption as ‘chronic movements due to shell shock’. Yet the first word is surely not ‘chronic’: it appears to be ‘choricc’, presumably an error for ‘choric’, which translates as ‘like a chorus’, including dancing, and derives from the same Greek root as the first part of ‘choreography’. Paul Bennett Manchester

Bishop’s Move The cartoon, The Bishop and his Clarke, which illustrates the article ‘Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Britain’ (December 2015), benefits from some explanation as regards ‘The Bishop’. The first volume of Burke’s Royal Families of the World notes that Frederick, the second son of George III and later Duke of York, was born on August 16th, 1763 and was elected (effectively by his father) as Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück on February 27th,

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1764 (when he was six months old), thereby enjoying the benefits of the prince-bishopric until that part of Europe was reorganised by Napoleon. Under the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück was to alternate between Catholic and Protestant office holders. By naming his infant son as prince-bishop, George III gained effective control of that territory on a long-term basis. Brian F. Hubka Calgary, Canada

London Bias With reference to David Waller’s article ‘Technology Capital Then and Now’ (November 2015), Roman chariots and wagons had a standard axle length and so paved Roman roads were based on two lines of carefully laid stone slabs on which the wheels of the horse-drawn carts were aligned. This seems to be what Waller is describing for the Wandsworth to Croydon route of 1802-3. In Coalbrookdale the carts delivering the coal, iron ore and limestone to the Quakerdeveloped ironworks had iron wheels by 1720 and by 1785 there were 20 miles of iron rails for them to run on and the wheels had flanges. In 1802 Richard Trevithick developed and demonstrated his high pressure, compact steam engine powering a locomotive running up and down on these rails. The word spread through the Quaker network and Edward Pease, involved in discussions about a canal from Stockton to Darlington to transport the coal to the port to be shipped to London, proposed that they develop a railway instead, which after a good number of years of discussion and eventual approval, got built (and yes, George Stephenson was its engineer). It was called ‘The Quaker Line’

because of the social trajectory of its origination. London does not come into the story, but understanding of the significance of the engineering details does. If Waller understood the significance to the development of engineering of Maudslay’s insistence on the process of measurement itself (you made something to a dimension, you did not ‘make it fit’) – to which both Whitworth and Nasmyth pointed – and Whitworth’s own insistence on the standardisation of dimensions, he would be able to tell a far more insightful and compelling story of the development of the technological mindset that continues to underpin our modern world. It emerged out of a network of hugely creative people over many generations who not only knew each other but admired each other and were consistently and wonderfully geography-free in their associations. Jim Platts Institute for Manufacturing University of Cambridge

Labour for Churchill In response to those critics who call Winston Churchill a ‘reactionary’, it should be pointed out that the Labour Party made him prime minister in 1940. Perhaps today that is a widely forgotten fact. Almost everyone wanted Neville Chamberlain gone after the Norway fiasco and George VI requested a National Unity government. Many Tories, however, wanted Lord Halifax, the foreign minister, to be appointed premier. The Labour Party announced that they would serve under no one other than Churchill, who wrote in his memoirs that, for his first few weeks as prime minister, Labour MPs would cheer him and his own party give him dirty looks. Michael B. Carson Imperial, California, USA

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Coming Next Month Positive Reactions

History appears to teach us that, when calamity strikes, scapegoats will be found. The reaction to diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, is one of fear, that causes people to lash out at outsiders. Yet this has not always been the case. Samuel Cohn surveys responses to epidemics from ancient Rome, where contrary to expectations the coming of the plague brought citizens together, to 20th-century Europe, where cholera outbreaks led to popular revolts against the authorities, rather than to violence against its victims.

Global Marketplace

The modern world is defined by its love of consumer goods. The rise of global consumerism, an ‘empire of things’, seems unstoppable. Yet this is not a purely modern phenomenon. In his search for the origins of consumerism, Frank Trentmann explores the shifting relationship between objects and morality – goods and goodness – and its links to imperialism, which whetted ever greater appetites for exotic products.

A Song of Sappho

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The tenth muse and one of the few female voices to survive from antiquity, Sappho’s work spread across the ancient world, where it was copied, disseminated and treasured, though little of it survived: the fragile papyus on which it was recorded disintegrated and some was even used as material for mummies. But last year, reports David Gribble, a new poem was found, which is subtle, intimate and melancholy and offers us a fascinating glimpse into the private longings of a woman of the classical era, yearning for her brother’s return from war.

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the

December’s Prize Crossword

Archive, Pastimes and much more.

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

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for December is Timothy Weakley, Dundee.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Brooklyn Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 5 National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 6 © akg-images; 7 Photograph by Dr Toby Huitson. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library CCL HH/L-3-3. Reproduced with kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Trustees of the Bedford Estate, Woburn Abbey/Bridgeman Images; 9 top © Alamy; bottom © Lebrecht Music & Arts. LEARNING LESSONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: 11 © PA Images; 12 top © Bonhams/Bridgeman Images; bottom map © Tim Aspden; 13 top and bottom © Bridgeman Images; 14, from top: map © Tim Aspden; Reza Shah © PA Images; King Feisal © Alamy; Gamel Abdel Nasser and King Farouk I © Getty Images; 15 top left © Getty Images; top right © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Getty Images 16 © Jim Gray/ Getty Images; 17 © Per-Anders Petterson/Getty Images. INFOCUS: 18-19 © Popperfoto/Getty Images. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: 20-21 and 22 © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 23 © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 24 top and bottom © Château de Versailles/Bridgeman Images; 25 © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 26 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Château de Versailles/ Bridgeman Images; 27 top © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 28 © Bibliothèque Nationale/ Bridgeman Images. THE CHAMPION OF MODERATION: 30 © Bridgeman Images; MAKING HISTORY: 32 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/Bridgeman Images. A NEW NORMAL: 33 © Mirrorpix/ Alamy; 34 © Crown Copyright/British Library; 35 top © Mirrorpix; bottom left © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom right © Alamy; 36 top © Malcolm Clarke/Getty Images; bottom © Fred W. McDarrah/ Getty Images. DISASTER IN THE NORTH SEA: 39 © Popperfoto/Getty Images. ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH KINGDOM: 41 © Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux/Bridgeman Images; 42 top Æthelstan, MS183, fol 1v, courtesy The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; bottom © Alamy; 43 map © Tim Aspden; 44 top © The Trustees of the British Museum; bottom © The Art Archive/Public Record Office, London; 45 © Alamy; 46 King Edgar, MS Cotton Vespasian A. Viii, fol 2b © British Library; 47 © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. THE BEN BARKA AFFAIR: 49 © PA Images. THE RISE OF THE TEUTONIC KNIGHTS: 51 and 52 © akg-images; 53 © Bridgeman Images; 54 © Steven May/Alamy; 55 © akg-images. SIGNPOSTS: 56 © Adrian Sherratt/Alamy; 61 The Royal Charles carried into Dutch Waters, 12th June 1667, by Ludolf Backhuysen, 1667 © National Maritime Museum. 63 A Cheetha and Stag with Two Indian Attendants by George Stubbs, 1765 © Manchester Art Gallery. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 Image interpreted as an illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible, 1411 © Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 top The School of Athens by Raphael, c.1511. Wikimedia/Creative Commons; bottom left detail from Codex Skylitzes, Madrid, 12th century. Wikimedia/Creative Commons; bottom right Franz Ferdinand, c.1919, Library of Congress. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 Edward Lear © Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 Which two figures stand at the centre of Raphael’s 1509 painting The School of Athens?

22 What name was given to the pipeline that extended from Liverpool to Normandy to supply the Allied Armies in 1944?

2 Who was the first person to be assassinated live on television?

23 John Harris published the first what in English in 1708-10?

3 Who shot him? 24 Norman Lewis’ 1951 book A Dragon Apparent describes travels in which countries?

4 What, according to Thomas De Quincey, were the three ‘nuisances, special to Greece, which repel tourists from that country’?

11 What name did Leon Trotsky give to one who agreed with the Communist party but who was not a member?

18 To which philosophical movement did Camus, de Beauvoir and Sartre belong? 19 Who did Stefan Zweig describe as the ‘man with the bulldog neck and cold, staring eyes’?

12 ‘Fourth estate’ was whose phrase for the press? 13 Built in 1872, Lord Kelvin’s tide predictor was the first what?

7 According to legend, at which Dorset landmark was Edward the Martyr murdered in 978? 8 Which game, originally played in a French convent in Ulster, became popular in England in the 1850s? 9 What name was given to Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus’ 1594 doctrine advocating the subjection of the church to the state? 70 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

14 Agostinho Neto was the first president of which former Portuguese colony? 15 Who patented his waterproof cloth in 1822? 16 Martello Towers are so called after naval defences on which island? 17 Who published her Awful Disclosures in 1836?

20 Where did Black Agnes successfully defend against English invasion in 1338? 21 The introduction of what, in 1840, ended the system of free franking by signature?

ANSWERS

6 A Byzantine state secret, what name was given to the liquid naphtha compound used in battle?

10 Who was ‘Farmer George’?

1. Plato and Aristotle 2. Lee Harvey Oswald 3. Jack Ruby 4. Robbers, fleas, dogs 5. Coffee House 6. Greek Fire 7. Corfe Castle 8. Croquet 9. Erastianism 10. George III – so called because he was a progressive farmer 11. Fellow traveller 12. Edmund Burke 13. Analogue computer 14. Angola 15. Charles Macintosh 16. Corsica 17. Maria Monk 18. Existentialism 19. Archduke Franz Ferdinand 20. Dunbar Castle 21. The Penny Post 22. PLUTO – Pipe Line Under The Ocean 23. Encyclopaedia 24. Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos 25. King William Ill’s Years

5 Pasqua Rosée opened the first what in London in 1652?

25 The famine years between 1695-99 in Scotland are known as what?

Prize Crossword ACROSS 8 Indiana city, subject of the 1929 sociological study Middletown (6) 9 Greek hero, son of Peleus (8) 10 John (1813-58), York-born epidemiologist (4) 11/29 A ___, 1852 collection by Ivan Turgenev (10,8) 12 1958 musical film by Vincente Minnelli (4) 13 ‘Man’s ___ to man/Makes countless thousands mourn!’ – Robert Burns, 1786 (10) 17 City of Lorraine, ceded to France in 1648 (4) 18 Rod ___ (b.1938), tennis player named ‘Rockhampton Rocket’ (5) 19 C14th emperor of Mali who built the Great Mosque at Timbuktu (4) 21 British conductor (1912-97), born György Stern in Hungary (5,5) 23 Robert ___ (d.1705), civil servant and editor of the London Gazette (4) 24 Religious office contested in Jerusalem during Great War by Kamil al-Husayni and As’ad Shukeiri (5,5) 28 ‘The Mighty ___’, nickname of the Welsh boxer Jimmy Wilde (18921969) (4) 29 See 11 30 City of central Italy, ruled in the 15th century by Federico da Montefeltro (6) DOWN 1 Ambrose Everett ___ (1824-81),

Set by Richard Smyth hirsute Union general in the American Civil War (8) 2 Albert ___(1875-1965), doctor and theologian, winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize (10) 3 ‘One blow from the German army and another from the Soviet army put an end to this ugly product of ___’ – V.M. Molotov, on Poland (10) 4 Robert ___ (b.1935), US historian and biographer (4) 5 Battle of Barari ___, 1760 Afghan victory over the Marathas (4) 6 William ___ (1890-1970), British field marshal and chief of the Imperial General Staff (4) 7 Principal family in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice (1813) (6) 14 Vaclav ___ (1936-2011), president of Czechoslovakia (5) 15 Island of the Lesser Antilles, occupied in 1635 by Pierre Bélain, sieur d’Esnambuc (10) 16 1725 satire on poet Ambrose Philips by Henry Carey (5-5) 20 College of ___, division of Paris University, founded in 1253 (8) 22 City of Humboldt Bay, California, laid out in 1850 (6) 25 Sir William ___ (1782-1845), army officer in the East India Company (4) 26 Otto ___ (1835-1918), German civil engineer (4) 27 Preserved ___ (1766-1846), New York City shipping merchant (4)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by February 29th or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation EDWARD LEAR

Edward Lear (1812-88)

Arabella Hunt (1662-1705) English singer and musician who was employed as a lutenist at the royal court, the subject of a painting by …

English artist, musician and poet, whose first publication was on the subjects of parrots, an African grey example of which was inherited by …

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

Andrew Jackson (1767-1845)

Italian painter who witnessed the public execution of the Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, whose story inspired the play Nemesis by …

Seventh President of the United States, who survived smallpox, as did …

Anne of Cleves (1515-57) Queen of England, whose marriage to Henry VIII was annulled, as was the marriage of …

Alfred Nobel (1833-96) By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Swedish chemist, who died at his villa in San Remo, Italy, as did …

FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 71

MARIE-LOUISE

FromtheArchive Marie-Louise, Napoleon’s second, lesser-known wife, achieved great political success while exiled in Parma. She should not be forgotten, argues Deborah Jay.

The Forgotten Archduchess EVERYONE has heard of Josephine. Yet it was only when Napoleon found love with Marie-Louise, Habsburg archduchess and daughter of his enemy, Austrian emperor Francis II/I, that he found true marital happiness. Despite this, next to Josephine, MarieLouise is almost unknown. Across History Today’s extensive archives she garners no more than a passing mention, as in Philip Mansel’s 1998 profile of Napoleon. When Josephine failed to deliver the heir Napoleon believed he needed, he looked to the leading dynasties of Europe for a second wife. Having subdued Austria for a second time in 1809, he forced Emperor Francis to surrender his eldest daughter on pain of losing his Habsburg throne. Aged 18, highly educated, witty and caring, Marie-Louise understood the dynastic marriage market and her duty to emperor and country. As instructed, she set aside preconceptions about her husband and his countrymen and, during her tenure as empress, all would fail to engage her on the subject of her great-aunt Marie-Antoinette or any other subject that might be noxious to the Franco-Austrian alliance. She was more than a match for her overweening husband, whose misjudgments during their years together were already sowing his downfall. Napoleon adored her from the moment he set eyes on her. Unlike Josephine, she appreciated his lovemaking and returned his affection, treasuring his gifts, attention and love-letters. In 1811, she produced the yearned-for son. Napoleon Francis was to be known as the king of Rome, Napoleon having ejected the pope and subsumed his capital into France. Twice – in the Spring of 1813 and 72 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

in January 1814 – the French emperor appointed his wife regent of France before setting out for battle, so much did he trust her good sense, integrity and loyalty to her adopted country. Yet all unravelled in March 1814, when Napoleon’s fortunes changed and Francis and his allies laid siege to Paris. Rather than allowing MarieLouise to stand and confront the invaders, Napoleon’s courtiers and family urged her to flee with her son to the Loire in accordance with

Marie-Louise proved herself the most enlightened sovereign of her age Napoleon’s instructions. Napoleon did not summon Marie-Louise to him but told her to await her father’s decision, believing that his father-in-law was bound to favour reunion of husband, wife and child. Napoleon was wrong. Marie-Louise and her son were taken to Vienna effectively as hostages. The Austrian Chancellor, Klemens Metternich, ensured Marie-Louise never received Napoleon’s letters and that an attractive equerry was charged to detach her emotionally from him. She was forced to sit out negotiations between the Great Powers at the Vienna Congress, while Napoleon prepared accommodation for her on Elba, of which he was now king. In the Spring of 1815, she learned that Napoleon had escaped his kingdom, had seized power in Paris and demanded her return. Furious at what she perceived to be his irresponsible behaviour and unaware of his justified grievances, Marie-Louise declared her detachment from his enterprise. As the allies proclaimed victory after

Waterloo, she was rewarded by the grant of the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, promised her on Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814. In March 1816, she set out for Parma with her equerry, now her chief administrator. Her son, now five, was not allowed to accompany her, too dangerous a Bonaparte mascot to live on the politically volatile Italian peninsula. In Parma, living under constant threat of eviction, Marie-Louise flouted Austrian dictates and proved herself to be the most enlightened sovereign of her age, her duchies a place of refuge for many of the political dissidents of the Italian Risorgimento. Forced to lead a double life, she scandalised Europe when, upon the death of her chief administrator, the existence of her second secret family was revealed. She held on to her duchies as the fires of Italian unification became irrepressible, revolution breaking out across Europe within three weeks of her death. Her numerous achievements are still celebrated today, 200 years since she set foot in Parma. Deborah Jay is the author of Napoleon’s Other Wife (Rosa’s Press, 2015).

VOLUME 48 ISSUE 3 MARCH 1998 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta