History Today 03-2016

THE MURDER OF JAMES I

RISE AND FALL OF A CARIBBEAN KING March 2016 Vol 66 Issue 3

PLAGUE & PREJUDICE From Ancient Greece to AIDS. How do societies deal with the threat of disease?

Art of history: Asa Briggs at the National Portrait Gallery in 1999.

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 7079 9361 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3787 9001 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246-580) is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor of the Open University Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author 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

FROM THE EDITOR ASA BRIGGS has been a supporter of and adviser and friend to History Today since it was founded in 1951. As he approaches 95, he is understandably less mobile than in his globe-trotting days, when he earned the nickname Lord Briggs of Heathrow, yet he remains sharp. Though pre-eminently a social historian, principally of the Victorian age, Briggs’ long career has been marked by an extraordinary breadth of interests: he played a major role in the establishment of Britain’s new universities, Sussex in particular, and the Open University; he was the official historian of the BBC; he has written incisively on Intelligence, with insights gained when working as a young officer at Bletchley Park during the Second World War; and, long before it became fashionable, he took a keen interest in Chinese history and culture, attested to by his vast collection of political figurines brought back from his many visits there. Few, however, even his closest colleagues, knew about Briggs the poet, though he had been composing verse since his days at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School in Yorkshire. One hundred of his poems are collected in Far Beyond the Pennine Way, published by EER. I will let others appraise the literary quality of Briggs’ work, but they display a deep and perceptive engagement with the past going back to the author’s youth. One poem from December 1936, ‘The Armies of Islam’, is frighteningly prescient, while the aspiring historian’s meditations on the Italian-imposed exile of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie (‘May they give back to him his rightful home’) and the rise of the European dictatorships reveal a youth engaged with a world in grave crisis. Most striking is his response to the bombing of Guernica (Briggs got to know Basque child refugees in Keighley): Let us prepare for action; by God’s grace Even for war, so that it may never again be said That England shrinks in cowardice, timid, afraid. No appeaser he. Over eight decades Briggs sustains an engagement with the world and its past, reflected in verse composed in Shanghai, Beijing, Portugal, California, Montana, the West Indies and, of course, Yorkshire. Few people in their mid 90s have new sides to display, but then Briggs has always surprised us.

Paul Lay Total Average Net Circulation 18,556 Jan-Dec 2014

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HistoryMatters

Language and Unity • Watlington Hoard • Cecil Rhodes • Annual Awards

Stewart McCain

Should One Nation Mean One Language? David Cameron’s desire for immigrants to learn English is part of a debate dating back to the origins of the modern state.

Teaching the natives: The School Master, a French illustration, c.1860.

FRANCE, 1794. With the Reign of Terror in full swing, France at war with every other major European power and civil war raging in the western provinces, the deputies of the National Convention took time to consider a matter of crucial importance: the language of their fellow citizens. At the time, the majority of the population spoke little or no French, communicating instead through regional languages and dialects. The leaders of the revolution feared that without linguistic unity the fledgling Republic would be swept aside by a wave of counter-revolution and foreign invasion. The fears of the revolutionaries offer telling parallels with contemporary debates in the UK about the links between language and citizenship. Critics of mass immigration warn of dangerous, ghettoised minorities that threaten the cohesion and security of wider society. Migrants, they insist, must integrate themselves, above all by learning English. This is a favoured theme of British Prime Minister David Cameron, as seen in recent comments on the language of immigrants, especially Muslim women. The government plans to increase funding for schools teaching English to immigrants, but also requires that those entering the country to live with their spouse learn English under threat of losing the right to remain in the UK. The premier’s desire to build an ‘integrated and cohesive One Nation country’ resonates with the views expressed over 200 years ago in a very different context by Bertrand Barère, a member of the French National Convention and the ruling Committee of Public Safety in 1794, for whom linguistic diversity was a grave threat. By linking an ignorance of English to backwardness, patriarchal oppression

of women and the threat of violent extremism, Cameron echoes Barère, who claimed that ‘to leave citizens in ignorance of the national language is to betray the fatherland, it is to leave the stream of enlightenment poisoned or blocked in its path’. Concerns about the linguistic unity of nations have a long and often murky past. Just like Cameron, the revolutionaries sought to impose the use of their national language on those who did not speak it. As the abbé Henri Grégoire, Barère’s colleague in the National Convention, remarked, the aim was to ‘annihilate’ other languages and ‘universalise’

The leaders of the revolution feared that without linguistic unity the fledgling Republic would be swept aside French. Schools were the favoured means of achieving this and primary school teachers were obliged to instruct their students in the national language. During the 19th century a variety of unpleasant measures were developed in French classrooms to ensure the language took hold, most notably the use of the infamous ‘symbol’, the French counterpart to the ‘Welsh Not’. This involved the use of a ticket, ribbon or other token, which would be given to the first child to speak in their native tongue. The student would keep this object, sometimes grasping it arm extended, until another child used the language and the token could be passed on, with a punishment distributed to whoever was left holding it at the end of the day. This practice was intended not only to make sure children practised MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3

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their French, but to impart a sense of shame in speaking one’s native tongue. Throughout 19th-century Europe, nationalists pursued linguistic unity with similar vigour and this has often manifested itself in state-sponsored discrimination. Linguistic minorities, especially Polish speakers, in the second German Reich suffered under Bismarck’s Kulturkampf during the final decades of the 19th century, an experience similar to those enduring

Without knowledge of the common language, individuals are denied access to the choices enjoyed by the majority Russification under Tsars Alexander II and Alexander III at roughly the same time. As in France, this involved the imposition of the national language in schools and also the restriction of civic rights and freedoms for linguistic minorities. This is not just about tolerance or intolerance of minorities; it also touches on questions of individual freedom and citizenship raised during the French Revolution. Cameron insists that teaching English to immigrants is also about individual freedom, that without knowledge of the common language, individuals are denied access to the choices enjoyed by the majority. The abbé Grégoire’s opposition to linguistic diversity in France had similar roots. Grégoire feared that the interests and rights of ordinary people would never be recognised unless they could read and write enough French to participate in politics. As Grégoire argued in his speech before the Convention in 1794, the collective rights of minorities to have their culture respected conflicted with the rights of individuals to participate fully in society. These individual rights could be secured only through the intervention of the state. The UK today is not Revolutionary France, nor is it Tsarist Russia or Germany under Bismarck, but these historical experiences can illuminate our current debate about the relationship between language and citizen4 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

ship. Most pertinently, it is worth observing that language policies have often not worked quite as politicians hoped. France only achieved a real degree of linguistic unification after the Second World War, revealing the limited ability of the state to impose its will in matters of language. Efforts under Napoleon to create a monolingual legal system were opposed by legal officials who continued to communicate with locals in regional languages in order to be understood. Grégoire, like many contemporaries, hoped that large-scale conscription to the French-speaking army would assimilate the rural population, but when veterans returned home they often returned to the local dialect under pressure from families and friends. Even the French school system, universal and free at primary level after 1881, was less important than urbanisation and the development of transport links in the countryside. Discriminatory policies in Russia and Germany were often counter-productive, strengthening the appeal of minority identities and stimulating opposition. The history of language and the state in Europe shows how the social and economic context influenced the linguistic choices of individuals far more than narrow government interventions. Stewart McCain is Lecturer in History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Evidence of an Anglo-Saxon Alliance A newly found hoard offers insights into an England threatened by Vikings. Rory Naismith THE Watlington hoard, found in Oxfordshire in 2015, is a gift to the historian. It dates from the 870s: a decade which saw Alfred the Great face and, after some near misses, stave off a Viking invasion of Wessex. These years also witnessed the rule of Ceolwulf II, the last self-styled king of the Mercians, a powerful people originally based in the West Midlands, who had been the major force between the Thames and the Humber for two centuries. Most of the narrative built around these two figures comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which focuses on an account of Alfred’s war with the Vikings, as might be expected from a text put together by scholars in Wessex in the decades after the ultimate West-Saxon victory. But the Chronicle’s coherence and focus comes at the expense of breadth and it skates around some of the messier realities. Ceolwulf II, in particular, receives rough treatment. Appointed by the Vikings in 874 and losing half his territory to the invaders in 877, the Chronicle writes him off as a ‘foolish king’s thegn’. The coins from Watlington provide an important new perspective on the situation as it developed during these crucial years. Ceolwulf II functioned as fully as any king, issuing charters and coins, including many in the new hoard, which is a time capsule from the late 870s, containing silver pennies produced at locations across southern England, in the names of both West-Saxon and Mercian rulers. However, it was probably put together by one of the Viking raiders. Silver ingots and other silver objects, as well as a piece of gold bullion, were found in the hoard and the coins include specimens from continental Europe: features characteristic of precious metal collections gathered

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and concealed by Vikings, rather than the English. Watlington is a long way from areas settled by the Vikings, so the hoard may represent the accumulated wealth of a member of the Viking army, buried towards the end of its ultimately unsuccessful campaign in Wessex. While the hoard’s assembly and concealment are a matter of conjecture, the evidence it presents for the coinage of the 870s offers firmer ground. The hoard contains silver pennies (over 180 in total) of Alfred and Ceolwulf II. All seem to date to about the mid-870s and after. This was a period of rapid evolution for the coinage of Mercia and Wessex. The two kingdoms had shared a currency since Wessex, under Alfred’s brother and predecessor Æthelred I (865-71), adopted the established Mercian ‘Lunettes’ design in the mid860s. This move is symptomatic of the political status quo at the time: Wessex and Mercia were rivals and allies rather than adversaries. Æthelred I may have wanted to benefit from the tendency for Mercian ‘Lunettes’ pennies to contain less silver, which made it difficult for West-Saxon coins to circulate competitively alongside them. By the time Burgred, king of the Mercians (r.854-74), was forced into exile by the Vikings, this process of debasement had reached a low point. But the monetary entente cordiale between Mercia and Wessex still held. Alfred and Ceolwulf II, Burgred’s successor, undertook to restore the quality of the coinage. Several new designs were tried out. Most specimens (including the bulk of the hoard) belong to a group known to scholars as the ‘Cross and Lozenge’ type. This featured an elaborate cross enclosed within a lozenge on the reverse, paired with a handsome bust of the king, inspired by Roman coins. Among the most interesting of the other designs was one which again placed a bust on the obverse, but with a different reverse, which showed two emperors enthroned side by side. The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon manufacturers drew this from Roman coins of the fourth and fifth centuries, issued when emperors shared power. In the context of the rapprochement between Mercia and Wessex, it is unlikely that this image was without resonance; the

two emperors might have evoked the co-operation between Alfred and Ceolwulf II. Until the discovery of the Watlington hoard, just two specimens of this coinage had been found, one each for Alfred and Ceolwulf II. It had seemed possible that this coinage might even have been some sort of limited edition; a rarity for the Anglo-Saxons. But Watlington has added over a dozen more specimens, by a number of new moneyers and diverse in style; an indication that, although this may have been a short-lived coinage, it was produced on

Precious metal: treasures from the Watlington hoard.

The Watlington hoard offers an increasingly clear window onto the interaction of Mercia, Wessex and the Vikings a significant scale. The coinage with the two emperors stands out as a substantive as well as symbolic segment of the coinage of the 870s. One central question historians and numismatists will consider is what kind of infrastructure lies behind the coinage. Most pennies from the ninth century carry the name of the man who made the coin, the moneyer, as well as that of the king under whom he worked. It is rare for coins of this period, however, to carry an explicit reference to where they were made. Canterbury and London were both mint-towns, but which coins

belong to each and which might be the work of moneyers based elsewhere? Did moneyers move between different places, or did kings share the services of moneyers in major centres such as London? The coins in the Watlington hoard may give fresh answers to these questions and the nuts and bolts of the monetary system which emerge could speak volumes about the organisation and economic geography of ninth-century England. A larger issue which will have to be revisited is the relationship between money and politics. Who chose to use images such as the two emperors: one or both kings, or local authorities such as the moneyers? Who chose how to title the kings on their coins? Alfred, for instance, was referred to as rex Anglo[rum] ‘king of the Angles/English’ on some of the ‘Two Emperors’ pennies, and as rex S[axonum et] M[erciorum], ‘king of the Saxons and the Mercians’, on others: both are highly loaded titles, making statements about the status of the two kingdoms. The Watlington hoard offers an increasingly clear window onto the interaction of Mercia, Wessex and the Vikings, as well as the local articulation of political and economic power. One can only look forward to what else will be seen by gazing through it.

Rory Naismith is Lecturer in Medieval History at King’s College London. MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Longman-History Today Awards David Cesarani was among those honoured at this year’s event. DAVID CESARANI, the distinguished historian of the Holocaust, the Middle East and Anglo-Jewish politics and culture who died in October, was awarded the Longman-History Today Trustees Award for 2016. It was received on his behalf by Dawn Waterman, his wife, at a reception held at the Law Society in London on January 12th. Cesarani was an indefatigable champion of public history, who was determined that the Holocaust should be understood in all its complexity by the British public. A widely admired head of the Wiener Library and a noted broadcaster and writer, what is now sadly his valedictory work, The Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-49 was published by Macmillan in January. The Longman-History Today Book Prize, awarded for a first or second work of scholarship deserving of a wider audience, with a prize of £2,000, went to Sarah Helm for If This is a Woman – Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (Little, Brown). It was compared by the judges – Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London and Taylor Downing, author and film-maker – to ‘a mirror, broken into thousands of pieces and meticulously and miraculously restored. An outstanding piece of scholarship and historical retrieval’. It is reviewed by Taylor Downing on page 63. Ruth Scurr’s widely acclaimed John Aubrey: My Life (Chatto & Windus) was highly commended among a strong field. The Longman-History Today Historical Picture Researcher of the Year prize is given to a researcher who has done outstanding work to enhance a text with a creative, imaginative and wide-ranging selection of images. The prize for 2016 and £500 was awarded to Maria Ranauro for her work on Alexandra Harris’ book Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson). An imaginative and beautifully curated selection of images, it was likened by the judges – History Today picture researcher Mel Haselden and editor Paul Lay – to a walk through 6 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Rhodes Must Fall? A Question of When Not If The British Empire is not the first – nor last – great power to see its icons crumble. Alex von Tunzelmann

a remarkable exhibition. The History Today Digital Award and £250 went to the Legacy of British Slave-ownership project based at University College London, which, with both local and global reach, reminds us that slave-ownership played a crucial role in British history. The Undergraduate Dissertation Award, worth £250 and given in association with the Royal Historical Association, was presented to Cora Salkovskis from the University of Oxford for Psychiatric Photography and Control in the ‘Benevolent Asylum’ of Holloway: the Construction of Image, Identity and Narrative in Photographs of Female in the Late 19th-century Asylum. The judges – Professor John Henderson of Birkbeck University of London and Dr Lars Fischer of University College London – thought it ‘an outstanding piece of work reflecting remarkable sensitivity’.

Distinguished: the LongmanHistory Today Trustees Award is accepted by Dawn Waterman on behalf of David Cesarani as History Today editor Paul Lay looks on. Below: the shortlisted books.

OUR WORLD was shaped by empires. Its languages, cultures, infrastructures, maps and monuments mark the movements of power across its surface. It was said that the British Empire turned one quarter of the world pink, the colour that designated its colonial possessions in imperial atlases. Parts of North America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa were named Jamestown, Victoria, Wellington and Livingstone. Nor was the British lion the only conquering beast to mark its territory. Alexander the Great named most of the cities he founded Alexandria. Several Roman towns were called Caesarea. Columbus named Caribbean islands La Isla Española and Juana. German imperialists created Caprivi and Schuckmannsburg in Namibia. The Belgian Congo had a Léopoldville, an Élisabethville and a Baudoinville. These places were littered with monuments to the greatness of their conquerors: names, public institutions, parks, places of worship and statues. As the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford shows, imperial legacies may be contested many generations later. For all the talk now that Rhodes was a ‘man of his time’, he was profoundly controversial when he was alive: loathed by the peoples whose lands he colonised and by his rivals the Boers, disdained by many in Britain, who feared his amorality and megalomania. He oversaw war, plunder, civil injustice and the deaths of thousands of Africans. He was also a generous and transformative benefactor to Oxford University. In recognition of this last fact, since 1911 a rather mousy statue of him has stood above Oriel’s main entrance. The students running the Rhodes Must Fall campaign have called for its removal to a museum,

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Statues are not history … they are political symbols, which drift in or out of favour along with political and aesthetic tastes where they feel it might appear less like a relic for uncritical veneration. There are options less polarising than keeping the statue as it is or taking it away; it could be imaginatively altered or given a new inscription. Oriel responded to Rhodes Must Fall in December 2015 with an impeccably balanced statement pledging six months of discussion. Then, in January this year, the college suddenly announced that the statue would stay – reportedly in response to wealthy alumni threatening to withdraw bequests worth up to £100 million. There has been a backlash against Rhodes Must Fall, led by F.W. de Klerk, the last leader of apartheid South Africa; Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia; and Lord Patten, chancellor of

Here today: the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College.

Oxford University. The students have been accused of vandalism, political correctness and trying to obscure historical facts that they do not like. Whatever the rights or wrongs of removing the statue, it is misleading to suggest the campaigners want to obscure the facts about Rhodes. Their objection is born of remembering those facts all too vividly. Statues are not history in the sense of having significant pedagogical value. They are political symbols, which drift in or out of favour along with political and aesthetic tastes. The protesters who hauled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003 did not deny or diminish the history of Iraq. They remembered Saddam’s legacy; for that reason, they rejected his glorification. Many in the West cheered when rebels in Hungary tore down Stalin’s statue in 1956 and when those in Ukraine knocked over several of Lenin in 2013-14. The history of the Soviet Union and its satellites may still be told and freely debated regardless of the loss of these monuments. The continuing memorialisation of the Confederacy is controversial in the US. Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida was originally whites-only: its name honoured a slave-owning Confederate general who was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By 2014 its students were mostly AfricanAmerican and its board elected to change the name to Westside High. New Orleans recently voted to remove four statues of Confederate generals. It could follow the example of Delhi, Moscow and Budapest, which have created ‘graveyards’ for the monuments of past regimes. The stone countenances of party apparatchiks and colonial bureaucrats slowly erode when exposed to the elements, or are swallowed up by tangles of overgrowing plants. The grand bronze of Queen Victoria, which once sat under a canopy in Charing Cross, Lahore (now Pakistan) presides over a collection of nicknacks under strip lighting in a back room of the Lahore Museum. Schoolchildren sprawl across the Great White Queen’s lap to take selfies. Some cities still bear the imperial

mark: Abbottabad in Pakistan, Livingstone in Zambia, Brazzaville in Congo. If the residents are content with these names, they need not change. Others have. Alexandria Arachiosa is now Kandahar. Juana is Cuba. Léopoldville is Kinshasa. Southern Rhodesia, named for Cecil Rhodes, is Zimbabwe. The history of the British Raj did not vanish when Calcutta decided to spell its name Kolkata; neither the Empire’s critics nor its defenders can achieve that. In Russia, St Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad, then St Petersburg again. A campaign now aims to restore Volgograd’s former name, Stalingrad, changed by Khrushchev in 1961 as part of his de-Stalinisation programme. New statues of Stalin went up last year in several Russian towns. His portraits hang in streets in Donetsk (formerly Stalino). The rehabilitation of Stalin is a disquieting trend, yet, like the others before them, these new monuments will probably not last forever. In much of the criticism of Rhodes Must Fall, the question echoes: where will it stop? Who will be next? Cromwell, Clive, even Churchill? The answer is that it will not stop. Future generations can and will interrogate the past. Whatever happens to Rhodes’ statue, it is a sign of healthy public engagement with history that there is such a vigorous debate. Monuments to historical figures and regimes stand not by divine right, but by the grace of those who live alongside them. No vision of the past can be set permanently in stone. Sixty-three years before Cecil Rhodes went up to Oriel, Percy Shelley matriculated at University College next door. His poem Ozymandias describes a traveller in an empty desert who comes across two ‘trunkless legs’ and a ‘shattered visage’ of a statue, with the inscription: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The British Empire was not the first and will not be the last great power to see its icons crumble. In the historical longview, as Ozymandias fell, so Rhodes will fall. It is only a question of when.

Alex von Tunzelmann‘s latest book is Reel History: The World According to the Movies (Atlantic Books, 2015). She is writing a history of the Suez Crisis. MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

MARCH

By Richard Cavendish

MARCH 2nd 1316

Robert II of Scots is born THE FIRST OF THE Stewart kings of Scotland and later of England owed his throne to the fact that his mother, Marjorie, was the eldest daughter of Robert the Bruce, who was King of Scots as Robert I from 1306. The Stewarts, who were crucial Bruce allies, were the hereditary High Stewards of Scotland and Marjorie was the wife of Walter the Steward. Their son was allegedly born at Paisley Abbey, west of Glasgow, which his family had founded. His 19-year-old mother, heavily pregnant, was out riding near the abbey when she fell off her horse and went into premature labour. She was carried into the abbey where she gave birth to a boy, by an early form of caesarean section, which the child survived, but she did not. Some historians doubt this story, but there is no doubt at all that Scottish history at this stage was chaotically complicated and it would take the baby Robert more than 50 years to reach the throne. He was heir presumptive to Robert the Bruce, who had no male heirs, but in 1324 Bruce had a son named David, who under a peace treaty with the English in 1328 was married at the age of four to the seven-year-old sister of Edward III of England. A year later, on Bruce’s death, he succeeded as David II King of Scots. Meanwhile, Robert’s father Walter had died in 1326, which made the ten-year old Robert the High Steward of Scotland. The Scottish parliament now declared him heir presumptive to David II. In the 1330s the English renewed their attempts to take over Scotland, the French interfered as allies against the English and powerful Scots barons vied for control. Edward Balliol seized the Scottish throne with English support and held sway for a time and in 1334 8 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Stewart steward: Robert II in a 16th-century engraving.

young King David’s guardians sent him to France for safety. He returned to Scotland in 1341, but in 1346, leading a punitive raid into England, he was wounded and captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, west of Durham. Robert the Steward was there apparently, but ran away. That could scarcely have pleased David, who was taken to London and kept prisoner in the Tower and later at royal residences in England. Held in comfortable conditions, he came to like and admire his brother-in-law Edward III. In 1357 the English offered to release him in return for a massive ransom of 10,000 marks a year every year for ten years. He accepted the offer and returned to Scotland. Robert the Steward had meanwhile served as regent in some of the years of David’s absence. Scottish chroniclers disagreed about his competence or lack of it, but he seems mainly to have

protected his own interests and obstructed attempts to secure David’s release. He was presumably suspicious of David’s English connections and regular amicable visits to the English court. David had been finding it so hard to raise the money to pay his ransom that in 1363 he suggested recognising a son of Edward III as the official heir to the Scottish throne, if the English would cancel the remaining payments. The Scottish parliament flatly refused to accept any such deal and, when David died in 1371, aged 46, the 54-year-old Robert succeeded him as the nearest male heir. King at last, Robert now began a successful reign. He knew how Scottish politics worked and he used effective methods to win over foes and keep the loyalty of Stewart supporters with grants of land, titles and official positions. He seems to have encouraged the chroniclers to praise Robert the Bruce’s achievements, to reflect well on the Stewarts. His keen appetite for sex had supplied him with a small army of children by two wives and numerous mistresses. There are said to have been more than 21 of them altogether. The oldest of the children were now grown-up and well able to help. The oldest son, John, now in his thirties High Steward and Earl of Carrick, was the official heir to the throne and supervised much of the running of the regime. The next son, Robert, Earl of Fife, was also active and a third son, Alexander, known as the Wolf of Badenoch, was the government’s principal figure in the Highlands. Daughters came in handy for marrying to leading families to secure their backing. Isabella, for example, was married to one of the Douglases and Margaret to the Lord of the Isles. Robert was 74 when he died at the castle he had built for himself at Dundonald, near Kilmarnock, and was buried at Scone. His eldest son John succeeded him as Robert III and the Stewart line was established for centuries to come.

MARCH 22nd 1916

The end of imperial China CHINA HAD BEEN ruled for centuries by successive dynasties of emperors, but by the later 19th century their day seemed to be almost done. The country was run on Confucian principles, which did not value change and progress, but stressed stability and peaceful harmony under rulers who enjoyed the mandate of heaven. As the western powers and Japan increasingly interfered in China, however, the divine mandate seemed to have been forfeited. Even the formidable Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi felt forced to make concessions to the foreigners before her death in 1908 and a rebellion against her successor in 1911 turned China into a republic. An assembly of delegates declared Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang Party, provisional president

of the republic, but he soon found himself in conflict with a powerful figure called Yuan Shikai. Yuan had started his career in the army and shown himself exceptionally competent, self-confident and ambitious. He had then risen to high positions under the Empress Dowager. He was now in command of the country’s principal military force and early in 1912 Sun Yat-sen, fearing civil war, made a deal with him. Yuan ordered the six-yearold emperor to abdicate, which he did, Sun resigned as president and Yuan replaced him the following day. Yuan was acceptable to the conservatives in China, and crucially to the army. Now at the age of 53 it was his job to stop the country falling apart. The government had run out of money, the Chinese provinces were largely under the control of local warlords and the republic’s national assembly spent its time arguing and quarrelling. The Kuomintang, which had a majority in the assembly, kept opposing Yuan’s plans until he allegedly organised the murder of the party’s chairman. Effectively silencing

High churchman: John Keble in 1863.

MARCH 29th 1866

John Keble dies in Bournemouth

Anti-imperialist: Yuan Shikai photographed in 1915.

CLERGYMAN, theologian and poet, Keble was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, which developed at the university in the 1830s in response to fears that the Whig government intended to disestablish the Church of England and gravely weaken it. The movement’s leader, John Henry Newman of Oriel College, traced it back to Keble’s sermon on ‘national apostasy’ in the university church in 1833. Keble, too, was a fellow of Oriel. In 1827 he had published The Christian Year, a popular volume of poems for Sundays and festivals and he was Oxford’s professor of poetry in 1831-41. Newman and his followers published Ninety Tracts for the Times, which earned them the name Tractarians. They were high churchmen who believed the Roman Catholic traditions of the Church of England were being wrongly overlooked. It was in their view a truly ‘catholic’ body, stemming directly from Jesus’ original disciples. They disapproved of moves afoot to allow Nonconformists to study at Oxford. They published

the assembly, he operated increasingly as a dictator with military support and in 1913 a rebellion broke out against him in the southern provinces, which he put down by force. Sun Yat-sen prudently withdrew to Japan while Yuan’s regime continued in power in Beijing and in 1915 he proclaimed a new Chinese empire with himself as emperor. That was too much even for his conservative and military supporters and opinion turned against him. Armed rebellions broke out in the provinces and in March 1916 he abolished his new empire. He remained president of the republic, or so he maintained, until he died three months later in Beijing, at the age of 56. There would be more civil war until Sun Yat-sen formed an alliance with the Communist Party and made himself effectively the ruler of China until his death in 1925.

English translations of early Christian theologians and Keble issued a translation of the Psalms in 1839. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and would become cardinal, but Keble and others remained in the Church of England. As Anglo-Catholics they would have a lasting influence on the Anglican church at home and abroad. After 1841 Keble retired to his country vicarage in the village of Hursley, near Winchester. He wrote tracts and hymns, but took his clerical duties seriously and once said that, if the Church of England collapsed, it would be found in his parish. He was a complicated character, shy and reserved, but also forcefully strong-minded. A friend described his sermons as having an ‘affectionate almost plaintive earnestness’. He was buried at Hursley after his death on a trip to Bournemouth and his wife Charlotte died a few weeks later and was buried with him. They had no children. Keble College at Oxford was named in his honour, when it was founded in 1869. MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 9

THE STUARTS

The accusation that James I was murdered by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, may have been a false one but it was widely believed and helped to justify the execution of Charles I. Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell explain.

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HE VETERAN DIPLOMAT Sir Balthazar Gerbier addressed a short treatise to Prince Charles in June 1648, explaining why things had gone so badly wrong for the Stuarts. The dynasty, he noted, had been beset by dangerously scandalous tracts penned by ‘spirits of Delusion’. He thought that among those ‘Libels’ was ‘one more Eminent than the rest’, a short tract from 1626, in which an ‘inraged Scotsman, Eglesham, a professor of Phisick’ had made ‘a report of the practice of Poisoning in the Court of England’. At first glance, it seems puzzling that, at the height of the crisis of the English Revolution, Gerbier’s attentions should be focused on a pamphlet that was now more than two decades old. Modern scholars have scarcely noticed George Eglisham’s The Forerunner of Revenge. Its most sensational allegation – that the king’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham had poisoned James I – seems preposterous. Yet Gerbier believed that Eglisham, that ‘inraged Scotsman’, had inflicted serious damage on royal authority and that he was continuing to do so years later. Most contemporaries knew of the charge and a significant number of them believed it. There was no denying its potency. It had played a central role in the impeachment of Buckingham in 1626 and helped inspire and justify his assassination in 1628. Most remarkable – and clearly to the fore in Gerbier’s meditations – was the charge’s resurrection in early 1648, when Parliament had reworked Eglisham’s accusations to implicate Charles I in his father’s murder. This allegation about the death of James I haunted the prolonged political turmoil in 1648 that culminated in Charles I’s trial and execution in January 1649. The alleged murder of one king helped contemporaries imagine and justify the beheading of another.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by Michiel Jansz van Miereveld, 1625-26.

Murderer most eminent

FRUSTRATED AT THEIR inability to persuade Charles I to agree to a negotiated settlement after the second Civil War, the House of Commons voted in early January 1648 to end talks with the king. The House appointed a committee to

draft a declaration justifying this dramatic decision that Royalists feared would make a ‘Bonfire of Monarchy’. When it appeared in February 1648, the Declaration explained why Parliament felt compelled to end negotiations with the king, rehearsing the various proposed settlements that Charles had rejected and assembling a laundry list of his numerous crimes, most of them committed during MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 11

THE STUARTS the Civil Wars. But the Declaration led the attack on Charles with a new twist on an old accusation. Even before the final draft had been approved, the Venetian ambassador had heard the reports: the Declaration would charge either that Charles I had ‘hastened the death of his father by poison or that Buckingham attempted it with his consent’. James I had died at his palace at Theobalds in late March 1625. At the time he had first fallen ill, earlier that month, the court was tense, shaken by ongoing arguments between the king, the prince and Buckingham over foreign policy and unnerved by a steady succession of fatal illnesses among the English and Scottish elite. As James sickened, the level of anxiety rose yet further with the death of his cousin, the Marquis of Hamilton, whose corpse began to swell and discolour shortly after his death. A medical report ruled out foul play, but the dramatic post-mortem symptoms encouraged anxious whispers that the marquis had been poisoned.

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T FIRST, few were seriously worried about the king. His physicians diagnosed tertian fever, which (if properly handled) would pose little danger. After several bed-ridden weeks, James finally seemed on the mend. Then the Earl of Kellie reported from court that something odd had happened that was ‘here much disliked’. On the night of March 21st and 22nd, Buckingham placed a plaster on the king’s chest, ‘after which his Majesty was extremely sick’, and gave him something to drink, all ‘without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctours’. James’ condition immediately deteriorated and the frightened doctors and courtiers in the sickroom exchanged angry recriminations. Five days later, James was dead. Reports of Buckingham’s medical dabbling and the ensuing recriminations circulated both inside and outside the court, but soon began to subside. A year later, however, they would make a startling and more public return. In late April 1626, as the Parliament-men were preparing for Buckingham’s impeachment, a sensational new account of James’ last days, published in a pamphlet ostensibly from Frankfurt, was scattered around London’s streets. Its author was George Eglisham, a Scottish Catholic physician and poet and a skilled polemicist. Eglisham had lost his post as one of James I’s extraordinary [i.e. unpaid] doctors early in March 1625, after he had tried to orchestrate Hamilton’s deathbed conversion to Rome. Eglisham then fled to Brussels, where his old connections in the Spanish administration encouraged him to publish, in Latin, German and English editions, his lurid accusations about ‘the practice of poisoning in the Court of England’. Printed in Brussels but carrying a fake Frankfurt imprint, the English edition was called The Forerunner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham. The Forerunner vividly portrayed Buckingham’s systematic murder of a host of rival courtiers, using a cunning poison designed by a sinister ‘poisonmonger-mountebank’. This poison, Eglisham avowed, had caused the startling 12 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

James I, by Daniel Mytens, 1621.

distortion of Hamilton’s corpse, which ‘began to swell in such sort that his thighs were as big as six times their natural proportion, [and] his belly … as big as the belly of an ox’, while blisters, ‘some white, some black, some red, some yellow, some green, some blue’, covered his skin and ‘blood mixed with froth of divers colors a yard high’ poured from his mouth and nose. Eglisham reworked the murky rumours about James’ final days into a murder allegation: Buckingham had quarrelled with James over foreign policy and needed the king out of the way. As James lay in his sickbed, Buckingham had waited until the doctors were at dinner and then given the king a glass of wine with a white powder in it. Overcome

with ‘many soundings and pains’, James exclaimed: ‘O this white powder, this white powder! would to God I had never taken it, it will cost my life.’ Buckingham then applied a plaster to James’ chest and ‘his Maiesty grew faint, short breathed and in great agony’. The king died shortly afterwards and, when Buckingham asked the attending physicians to certify that he had given the King ‘a good and safe medicine’, they declined. Meanwhile, ‘the kings body and head swelled above measure’. This cunning work of Habsburg-sponsored disinformation was designed to embroil English domestic politics in conflict and it succeeded all too well. For three days in late April 1626 Parliament interrogated the royal physicians about the events in James’ sickroom. Although one doctor reported that James had reacted to Buckingham’s remedies

Eglisham’s allegations of poisoning were to tarnish Buckingham’s reputation for the rest of his life

Balthasar Gerbier by Paulus Pontius, after Antony van Dyck, 1634.

by asking ‘will you murder me and slay me?’, the testimony only made things murkier, for it revealed that many had sampled Buckingham’s potion and that the duke’s servant, Mr Baker, had eaten some of the plaster. Nevertheless Buckingham had clearly acted without the doctors’ approval and with no consideration for the suitability and timing of his remedies, which had been prepared at his request by an obscure physician from Essex. The hearings also unearthed hints of Buckingham’s relationship with Piers Butler, an eccentric Irishman who reportedly distilled poison from toads. Some in the Commons thought the evidence would support a murder conviction, but the House charged Buckingham only with a ‘transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’ in offering medicine to the king against the physicians’ orders.

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Eglisham's pamphlet, 1626.

ORCED TO DEFEND himself, Buckingham explained that James had ‘commanded me to send for that physic’, that he had refused to apply it until two sick children and Sir James Palmer had first tested it and that, when some began accusing him, the dying king had announced ‘none but devils would speak of any such thing’. The effectiveness of Buckingham’s testimony, however, was undercut a week later when Charles dissolved the Parliament before the Lords had fully considered the impeachment charges. Eglisham’s allegations of poisoning were to tarnish Buckingham’s reputation for the rest of his life. Indeed, after John Felton assassinated Buckingham in 1628, one well-placed observer reported that the assassin had claimed Eglisham’s tract as one of his motivations. When Parliament revived Eglisham’s 1626 accusations in 1648, however, their target was not the long-dead Buckingham, but Charles I. The Forerunner had not directly implicated Charles in Buckingham’s crimes, but Eglisham had appealed to the young king for justice against his father’s murderer and Charles’ steadfast defence of Buckingham in 1626 inevitably raised awkward questions. In May 1626 Charles had briefly imprisoned two Parliament-men because he thought they had hinted at his involvement in MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 13

THE STUARTS James’ murder and ‘if he were not tender of this point of the death of his father’, a councillor explained, ‘he was not worthy to wear the crown’. Charles soon released both men, but contemporaries continued to ponder, albeit quietly, his possible involvement. One man, writing shortly after the dissolution of Parliament, brooded over the 1626 proceedings and The Forerunner before concluding that Charles, if nothing else, was an accomplice after the fact because he had clearly dissolved the session to protect Buckingham from justice. Eglisham’s charges long survived in the ‘underground’ manuscript news culture, but late in 1642, shortly after the first Civil War began, possibly as many as six editions of The Forerunner were published in London. This revival included a clever reworking, called Strange Apparitions, which imagined a dramatic confrontation between the ghosts of James, Buckingham and Eglisham. The old king at first refused to believe that his favourite had murdered him, but Buckingham eventually confessed, provocatively adding that soon ‘Time shall produce’ the names of the others involved in James’ murder. These works and later allusions to them helped stiffen the resolve of Parliament’s supporters and their continued use horrified royalist commentators. The revival of Eglisham’s charges early in 1648, however, took them in a far more radical direction. Chief among the crimes enumerated by Parliament’s Declaration of February 1648 was Charles I’s response to Parliament’s inquest held in 1626 into ‘the Death of His Royal Father’. The Declaration claimed that when Parliament was about to deliver its verdict against Buckingham, Charles had dissolved the session before ‘Justice could be done’. Since the king had never launched his own inquiry into James’ death, the Declaration now concluded that ‘we leave the world … to judge where the guilt of this remains’. Parliament ordered that 5,600 copies of the Declaration be distributed across the realm and onto the Continent. Preachers reportedly read from the text in their pulpits. To second the Declaration, a radical London printer issued an abridged version of Eglisham’s Forerunner, now highlighting James I’s alleged protestation that ‘if His owne sonne should commit Murther ... he would not spare him, but would have him dye for it’. To help contemporaries imagine the inevitable next step, printers issued the first English translations of Vindicae Contra Tyrannos, the controversial 1579 Huguenot justification for the deposition of wicked rulers. The implication of these publications was clear. Charles I was probably involved in his father’s death and parricide was an unforgivable crime.

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OYALISTS FULLY appreciated the danger posed by the Declaration’s claims about James I’s murder. One writer rebuked the parliamentarians that ‘if any thing must doe your feat of dis-uniting the hearts of this Kingdom from his Majesty’ it ‘is that which concerned the death of the late king’. The impact on foreign opinion was potentially even more disastrous; Secretary of State Sir Edward Nicholas fretted that ‘nothing in that libel did leave a worse impression among strangers than the particular malicious and false aspersion concerning the death of King James’. While the Royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus urged its readers to ‘shut your eyes’ and ‘stop your eares’ against the Declaration, a much better response was to attack it and, with Nicholas and Sir Edward Hyde

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The implication of these publications was clear. Charles I was likely involved in his father’s death and parricide was an unforgiveable crime Anthony Weldon's pamphlet of 1650.

coordinating their efforts from exile, the Royalists mounted an impressive campaign of refutation. Their newsbooks reacted immediately. One denounced the Declaration and ‘its poison-pointed arrows, to murder Majesty withall’. Another announced that Parliament’s sole goal was to ‘render his Majesty odious’ by charging him with being ‘accessary to [James’] Death’. A third rudely responded by urging the authors of the tract to ‘kiss my bum’. One of the most effective short responses, one that claimed to ‘stop the mouths of all Divelish Detractors’, appeared in Mercurius Elencticus. It demanded that Parliament print all the testimony from the 1626 investigations, which would prove that James had insisted on the irregular treatments, that John Baker had eaten part of the plaster and that James Palmer (among others) had drunk the potion. Moreover the newsbook urged readers to interrogate Palmer and Baker themselves and provided their addresses. To counteract Eglisham’s melodrama, the newsbook employed its own

Commons had charged Buckingham and not Charles and that they had accused the duke ‘only of Misdeameanour and a transcedent Presumption, and not of Treason’. Hyde stressed similar points. Buckingham’s ague remedies were the kind that ordinary people believed ‘to do much good’ and that doctors knew ‘can do no hurt’. Hyde insisted, too, that ‘there was nothing administered to the King, without the privity of the Physicians and His own Importunate desire and Command’. As for Eglisham, he was an ‘infamous ... Papist’ with ‘an ambition to be taken notice of as an Enemy to the Duke’. Hyde added that Eglisham had eventually confessed his ‘Villainy’ and died with ‘great penitence’. Finally, all of these Royalist responses stressed that, when the doctors had opened James’ corpse for embalming, they found no evidence of poison: Eglisham’s claim of tell-tale swellings was false. The Royalist campaign against the Declaration was highly sophisticated and it revealed how seriously they took the reinvention of these old allegations about James’ death. But in the radicalised landscape of 1648, the allegations were beyond effective rebuttal. A petition from Leicestershire later that year simply assumed that the Declaration had declared Charles ‘to be guilty of the death of King James’, while another from Rutland flatly charged the king with ‘the death of his father’. As radicals in the army brooded over the blood guilt of Charles Stuart, the Declaration powerfully suggested that the king had more than just his subjects’ blood on his hands.

T high pathos. James had died in Buckingham’s arms, it reported, and afterwards the duke was so overcome with tears that Palmer had to take ‘the Dukes hand in his, and with his Fingers closed up the Kings eyes’. Nicholas thought this account so powerful that he arranged for it to be reprinted in Dutch and French. More detailed responses soon appeared in longer books. Dr George Bate, who had attended Charles, directly attacked Eglisham as ‘a man of a cracked Brain’ and ‘bad … Reputation’ and he stressed that, since Eglisham was ‘a Papist’, his malicious motives were abundantly clear. Bate pronounced Buckingham’s treatments ‘innocent’ and delivered ‘out of a good affection’ and he ascribed James’ death to the fever which had ravaged ‘an aged man’ who ‘kept an Ill Diet’ and had ‘an evill constitution’. For his part, Secretary Nicholas emphasised the evidence from 1626, especially Buckingham’s answer to his impeachment, which he challenged Parliament to reprint, and reiterated that the

Charles I, by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1628.

ALK OF THE MURDER of James I continued in the run-up to Pride’s Purge and Charles I’s trial. A radical newsbook noted in September 1648 that Parliament had charged Charles ‘with all the blood that had been shed by this War’ and then added ‘the death of his father King James’, too. When the army justified its intervention to prevent Parliament from reopening dealings with the king, it took the claims of the Declaration as part of its warrant and, in December, the Parliament-men that were left after the purge led by Colonel Pride all swore to their faith in the document. Another late 1648 tract charged Charles of dissolving the 1626 session, ‘lest his fathers death should be inquired into (fearing that himself might be found too much concerned in it)’. Not surprisingly, many observers assumed that a charge of ‘Murder and Parricide’ would appear in the indictment being drawn up against the king. Fragmentary evidence suggests that some involved in framing the indictment were eager ‘to blacken him, what we can’ and thus to include a review of his entire reign. Eventually, the High Court of Justice opted for a much briefer document, focusing on Charles’ actions in the 1640s. But the murder of James I had not been forgotten. At his trial, Charles refused to recognise the court’s authority or to offer a plea, thus negating the prosecution’s requirement to fully present its case. Shortly after Charles’ execution, John Cook, the High Court’s prosecutor, published King Charls His Case, which contained the speech he had intended to make if the king had entered a plea. His book revealed that Cook had planned to discuss ‘the Death of King James’ to aggravate the charge of tyranny against Charles. Following the script set out by the 1648 Declaration, Cook noted that Charles had ‘no justice to do justice’ even ‘to his own Father’. He had dissolved the 1626 Parliament in order to protect Buckingham ‘and would MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 15

THE STUARTS never suffer any legal inquiry to be made for his Fathers death’. Cook then put the case to his readers that ‘there is one accused upon strong presumptions at the least, for poisoning that Kings Father’ and yet ‘the King protects him from justice’. What could explain this? Clearly Charles had acted ‘to conceal a Murder’ and this ‘strongly implies a guilt thereof ’ and so he was probably ‘a kind of Accessory to the fact’.

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TORIES OF James I’s murder were to long outlive his son. The partisans of the new English republic appropriated Eglisham’s charges in their propaganda campaign to tarnish monarchy. Eikon Alethine, a response to Charles’ bestselling Eikon Basilike, dismissed the dead king’s alleged commitment to justice by reminding readers of ‘the dissolving the Parliament, for questioning the Duke of Buckingham for poisoning his Father, when he was bound by all ties of justice and Nature, to have heard them’. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton cited Charles’ actions in 1626 to protect Buckingham when he was charged with ‘no less than poisoning the deceased King his Father’. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton likened Charles to Nero: thus, just as the emperor had killed his mother with a sword, ‘Charles did the same with poison to his father’. Sir Anthony Weldon, John Hall, Sir Edward Peyton, William Lilly, Sir Arthur Wilson and the newsbook editor extraordinaire, Marchamont Nedham all took James’ murder and Charles’ involvement in it as a given and they played endless variations on Eglisham’s themes, which soon became the leitmotif of their collective project to vilify the entire Stuart dynasty. In this black legend of the Stuart family, Mary Stuart had murdered her husband; James I had killed his eldest son, Henry; and Charles I had poisoned his father. This trail of murder had provoked God’s righteous anger against the English and Scottish monarchy. As the preface to Weldon’s book warned, those who still supported the Stuarts should ‘take heed how they side with this bloody House, lest they be found opposers of Gods purpose, which doubtless is, to lay aside that Family’. A SYSTEMATIC ROYALIST counterattack was hampered by the Cromwellian regime’s tightened control over the presses, but Sir William Sanderson’s massive Compleat History of Mary and her son James, published in 1656, vigorously refuted Eglisham and his later admirers. The Marquis of Hamilton, Sanderson insisted, had died not from poison but from excessive drinking and a late night meal of ‘Mushroom Salads’. Sanderson took great pains to dissect what had really happened in James’ sickroom, emphasising the harmless nature of Buckingham’s remedies and James’ determination to try them. He referred readers with any lingering doubts to Baker and Palmer, who could still be ‘examined, with very great satisfaction, to clear that calmny’. The Forerunner itself, he observed, ‘at the first 16 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

George Eglisham's pamphlet, Strange Apparitions, 1642.

sight is frivolous’, but thorough investigation revealed it to be ‘malacious’ and unworthy of even fleeting attention. By noting Eglisham’s Catholicism, Sanderson, like Bate and Hyde in 1648, stressed that a revolution driven mostly by Scripture-quoting Protestant radicals was in fact based on a work of ‘popish’ disinformation. The Restoration of Charles II drove stories of James I’s murder underground, though it continued to fascinate historians into the 19th century. The eminent Victorian scholar S.R. Gardiner had little patience for the tale, however, dismissing Eglisham’s accusations as ‘worthless’. His brusque dismissal of the story’s significance has cast a long shadow over subsequent scholarship, but Gardiner’s verdict rested in part on a small tract published by Dr Norman Chevers, a physician based in Calcutta, who had become interested in James’ death. Gardiner approvingly cited Chevers’ scientific conclusion that Eglisham’s accusation ‘amounts to absolute falsehood’, but he ignored Chevers’ other major argument: although James I had not been murdered, there was an important history to be written about the belief that he had. Chevers had thus called for ‘a close scrutiny into all that relates to the Eglisham pamphlets’, for this little tract was nothing less than ‘the spark igniting that train which exploded in the Great Rebellion and in the death of King Charles the First upon a scaffold at Whitehall’. Chevers overstated his case, but he had an important point to make. Talk and writing about the murder of James I exacerbated the political tensions of the 1620s and the revolutionary dynamics of the 1640s and early 1650s. Contemporaries took it seriously and so it is long past time that historians did so, too. The Forerunner did not cause the English Revolution, but its history does help us better understand the forces that did. Balthazar Gerbier was a notoriously slippery character, trusted by virtually none of his contemporaries, but, like Norman Chevers, he knew that The Forerunner of Revenge was a libel ‘more eminent than the rest’. Alastair Bellany is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Thomas Cogswell is Professor of History at UC Riverside.

FURTHER READING Alastair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (Yale, 2015). Michael Braddick, God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (Allen Lane, 2008). Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).

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CONSUMERISM

The notion that ‘Greed is Good’ was not born in the 1980s, nor even in the 20th century. Frank Trentmann traces the roots of today’s rampant consumer culture to the imperial ambitions of the great European powers.

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E LIVE IN A WORLD overflowing with things. British wardrobes are bursting with over six billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per person. It has become usual to replace dresses and jackets every two to three years and there is nothing peculiarly Anglo-American or neoliberal about this growing mountain of stuff. Swedes, often held up as paragons of thrift and simple living, bought five times as many appliances and three times as many clothes in 2007 as they did in 1995. Even these figures reveal only so much. Imagine walking out of a shop not just with a new tablet device or a pair of trainers but with all the oil, aluminium and other materials needed to make them and you would be carrying an additional 300 shopping bags every week.

Fituvreies cen

Stuff of

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Junk shop in Upper Lascar Row antique market, Hong Kong. MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 19

XXXXXXXX CONSUMERISM Trend spotters and futurologists claim to see signs of a shift from stuff to fluff, with possessions giving way to experiences. But this is fantasy, not history. The historical evidence points to a relentless human appetite for more and more. How did this desire to accumulate become so powerful, not just in the affluent North but increasingly in developing countries, too? Is it a desire for ostentation, a need to emulate the rich? Did an obsession with stuff begin in the 1950s? No. Consumption had begun its ascent well before governments started to count GDP. And to reduce it all to a frivolous desire for ‘unnecessary’ stuff is equally unhelpful, because it makes the whole phenomenon look ephemeral, something that would stop naturally, if only people came to their senses. For the rise of consumption is anything but frivolous and, to come to grips with it, we need to understand its history. Consumerism created a new material world which transformed power, nature and society, redefining who we are and how we live. Thirty years ago historians such as Neil McKendrick looked for the ‘birth’ of consumer society in 18th-century Britain. It set off a race among specialists to claim the first date for their own period, finding stirrings in Renaissance Italy and even late medieval England. But consumption was not simply ‘born’. It had enormous momentum. This dynamism changed dramatically between the 15th and the 20th century. A first major change occurred between the 15th and 18th centuries, when a new culture took shape which prized private comfort and the pursuit of the new. Possessions, refinement and comfort were already on the rise in Renaissance Italy and late Ming China. In 1475, for example, the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi ordered 400 glass beakers from the Venetian island of Murano, while 16th-century China was awash with books, porcelain cups and embroideries. Yet dominant values also

A Cloudburst of Material Possessions, Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1510.

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restrained consumption in these prosperous societies. Big spending was fine in Renaissance Italy, if it paid for public banquets and family chapels that demonstrated one’s civic virtue, less so for private pleasure. In late Ming China, the elite prized antiques, not novelties. Courtesans were known for their plain robes and many merchants oriented themselves towards the official scholar elite, the art of the zither and calligraphy.

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T WAS IN north-west Europe, in the Netherlands and Britain, that a more dynamic and innovative culture of consumption broke through in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trade and the unparalleled spread of towns and cities helped: in England and Wales in 1800, one in five people lived in towns with populations of more than 10,000; in 1500, it had been fewer than one in 30. Cities favoured consumption not only because they stimulated spending, having a greater number of shops, but also because clothes and accessories were visible ways to signal one’s status and respectability. Still, urbanisation was at best an enabling factor, for Northern Italy had cities and even the lower Yangzi had some towns. What proved decisive was a cultural and institutional environment that was more open and inviting to the world of things. The Netherlands and Britain developed an unprecedented craving for exotic products from distant places. Tobacco, tea, cotton and porcelain changed how Dutch and Britons ate and drank, smelled and felt. By the late 18th century, cotton gowns and tea kettles had found their way even into the homes of the urban poor. This wave of new goods spread more easily through these two countries, unimpeded by the restrictions and customs that stood in the way elsewhere. In Germany, by contrast, goods faced a maze of customs barriers, guilds and suspicion by the male elite: women sporting fashionable neckerchiefs were fined or ostracised.

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Clockwise from above: couple in a US appliance store buying a new wall oven, 1956; blue and white Chinese mustard pot with Dutch silver mounts, Chongzheng, 1635-40; US advertisement for food items, 1951; Ming Dynasty vase, c.17th century.

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XXXXXXXX CONSUMERISM

American patriots threw tea into Boston harbour in 1773 … but after independence was secured they bought more goods than ever before

Right: a sack-back dress, England, 1750s. Below: Dutch spice box by Samuel van Eenhoorn, c.1680-85.

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Markets do not operate in a vacuum. They need a culture in which to thrive. It was a new curiosity and appreciation of things that stimulated them. In ancient times material things had been accused of corrupting the soul and estranging the individual from his true self, the life of the spirit. In his Republic (c.380 bc), Plato traced the decline of a virtuous, frugal city as its citizens became corrupted by a lust for luxury that drove them to war and conquest. Eventually, the desires of the flesh would turn strong citizens into weak brutes, incapable of defending their state. In his lectures in Amsterdam in the 1630s, by contrast, the polymath Caspar Barlaeus explained how trade taught people to appreciate objects and how a greater understanding of the material world would help people work and live together. Goods and goodness advanced hand in hand. In the early 16th century, Dutch ships brought back with them cabinets of nutmeg, creatures such as armadillos and other exotic things, admired especially by artisans and students.

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NLIGHTENMENT thinkers tore up Plato’s script and reunited matter with mind. Things enriched the person, state and society. Consumption now became a civilising mission, even a divine duty. The scientist Robert Boyle observed in 1655 that God had furnished man with ‘a multiplicity of desires’. ‘Greedy appetites’ were not bad: they inspired people to be inquisitive and enterprising. The pursuit of goods gave them a ‘more exquisite admiration of the omniscient Author’. A century later, David Hume, in his Essays, added that modest luxury was a source of wealth, culture and national strength: where ‘there is no demand for such superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public’. ‘Slothful members’, he pointed out, made poor citizens and poor soldiers. Neither the American nor the French revolutions were able to stem the growing moral and material tide that lifted consumption to new heights. American patriots threw tea into Boston harbour in 1773 and sported home-spun clothes, but after independence was secured they bought more goods than ever before. Nor did socialists and nationalists manage to muster much resistance in the centuries to come. More often than not, they co-opted consumption for their own ends. For economists in 19th-century Germany, productive consumption strengthened the nation. Later, anti-colonial nationalists rallied to ‘national goods’ as weapons of freedom. In the 1930s the Soviet Union handed out gramophones, Boston suits and crêpe de Chine dresses to heroic workers, in addition to the complete works of Marx and Engels. THE RISING TIDE of consumption involved much more than fashionable clothes or shopping. Gas, water and electricity created entirely new ideas of a ‘civilised’ way of life. In 1800 Paris and London made do with a few thousand oil lamps in the streets. By 1907 they had 54,000 and 77,000 gas lights respectively. Paris in 1914 was 70 times brighter than during the 1848 revolution. The lament in August 1914 by Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, that the lamps were going out all over Europe, would have been meaningless two or three generations earlier. The use of water reached entirely new levels once water-carriers gave way to networks that delivered the necessity on tap, day and night. On the eve of the First World War, a tenant in a Brooklyn tenement typically used 39 gallons of water a day; on the wealthier Upper West Side, it was five times that. Not all cities used that much water. Hangzhou in China still only piped water to one per cent of its inhabitants in 1931. In Italy during the 1950s many towns that enjoyed piped water lacked a sewage system. Still, across the globe, networks did elevate ideas of what a ‘civilised’ way of life should look like, with more frequent baths, heating and, in the last few decades, air conditioning. In the home, expanding water, gas and electricity networks opened the door to an invasion of new appliances such as gas-heaters, toasters, vacuum cleaners and a whole range of other kitchen gadgets. The home was getting crowded. In the 1920s, modernists such as the German

XXXXXXXXXX architect Bruno Taut declared a war on stuff, the many ‘mirrors, throws and doilies, curtains over curtains, pillows on top of pillows … photos and souvenirs on display, consoles crowded with trinkets’. Women had become slaves to dusting, he lamented, and needed to be liberated. Still homes filled up with objects not only in the United States, Argentina and Britain, the richest societies of the age, and not just among their bourgeoisie. By the 1870s, the homes of textile workers in Christiana (now Oslo) proudly displayed lace curtains, sofas, clocks and pictures. These were golden years for home decorators, but their success was possible only because ideals of refinement and possession fell on receptive ears. What animated this material pull? Objects were important allies for projects of improvement. Means of self-improvement – mirrors, soap, fine cutlery and dress – were markers of character and discipline. Perhaps most importantly, they were the ties of family life. The popular American guide The House Beautiful (1881) urged young couples setting up home to look at the living room as an ‘important agent in the education of life’. Décor and objects expressed a family’s soul. In an age of industry, objects also attracted new interest as material survivors of a bygone age, putting urban dwellers in spiritual touch with their forefathers, the countryside and the past. Nostalgia spawned a new cult of the collector and the yard sale, which has been with us ever since. Tellingly, one of the biggest ‘junk snuppers’ was Henry Ford, creator of the Model T automobile and father of standardised production, who assembled a museum filled with the common objects of the common man, which is still open to the public today in Dearborn, outside Detroit. Consumption came to be about much more than the individual and the home. In the West, the late 19th century witnessed the public apotheosis of the consumer. Though a century earlier, in the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith had declared that ‘consumption was the sole end of all production’, that had been about it for the next century. It was the political economists W.S. Jevons and Carl Menger who, in the 1870s, with their insights into utility theory, made the consumer the creator of value. It was a historic shift. To ‘consume’ used to mean to ‘waste’ or to ‘finish’ something, hence the English double meaning of consumption as the wasting disease (tuberculosis). Now, to consume was good. Simon Patten, the leading US economist and head of the Wharton School of Business, told a Philadelphia congregation in 1913: ‘I tell my students to spend all that they have and borrow more and spend that … It is no evidence of loose morality when a stenographer, earning eight or ten dollars a week, appears dressed in clothing that takes nearly all of her earnings to buy.’ Quite the contrary, he said, it was ‘a sign of her growing moral development’. It signalled her ambition to her employer. A ‘welldressed working girl … is the backbone of many a happy home that is prospering under the influence that she is exerting over the household’.

Above: Wardian case containing ferns, used as a window decoration, British, c.1875. Below: Paulig advertisement featuring Finnish 'Paula' girl in traditional Sääksmäki dress, 1926.

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Y 1900 everyone was talking about the consumer: radicals and women reformers as well as liberals. ‘The 19th century has been the century of producers,’ Charles Gide, the leader of the French co-operative movement, told students in 1898. ‘Let us hope that the 20th century will be that of consumers. May their kingdom come!’ Buyers’ leagues sprang up in New York, Paris, Berlin and many other cities, where they rallied housewives to use the power of their purse to boycott sweatshops and improve labour conditions. ‘To live is to buy. Buying is power. Power is duty’, was their motto. Consumption was becoming an essential part of citizenship. In the conventional view, the modern advance of consumption proceeds in stages from elite luxury to middle-class comfort to a rise in the standard of living for all. Living standards in the West had reached new heights by 1900. Although hunger would continue to strike poorer regions in Europe and in wars to come, most bellies were fuller. Clothes were replaced more often and increasingly bought ready-made. In Philadelphia in 1919 social reformers formulated an annual requirement for a ‘fair standard of clothing’, which included nine stockings, two

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 23

XXXXXXXX CONSUMERISM petticoats and a skirt for women and 12 socks, six collars, a suit and one pair of extra trousers for men. Such riches would have been inconceivable a century earlier. The rise of consumption, however, cannot be told as a story of western progress and liberty. The rise in popular consumption and the discovery of the citizen-consumer in late 19th-century Europe and the United States coincided with the rise of the new imperialism in Africa and Asia. How did consumption affect imperialism and vice versa? This is a big historical question. It is also one on which contemporary theorists of imperialism had virtually nothing to say. For Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1919, imperialist conquest was the reflex of an ‘atavistic’ aristocracy that was desperate to hold on to feudal power and the glory of a bygone age. Others blamed aggressive nationalism. Two decades earlier, J. A. Hobson, who mused about the ‘citizen-consumer’ in British politics, blamed the new imperialism on finance capitalism. Consumers featured, if at all, as victims of a jingoist conspiracy. As an independent factor in colonialism, consumption was conspicuous by its absence. In reality, consumption and colonialism had been entangled since the 16th century. The European taste for coffee, cane sugar, tobacco and cocoa flourished thanks to the violent transplantation of plants and people. With the slave trade and sugar and coffee plantations in the New World and, from the 1840s, with tea plantations in India, European empires completely altered food, taste and eating habits. Initially considered a ‘beverage more suited for pigs than for humans’, as the Italian Girolamo Benzoni put it in the 1550s, cocoa, for example, had become a highly desirable elite drink a century later and by 1900 had conquered the masses. We tend to picture this movement as an Atlantic crossing, with slaves forcibly moved East to West to produce the commodities that then flowed West to East. But a second path went from North to South and was especially important for Central and Latin America. In the Spanish empire, Jesuits Pears' soap advert, 1890s. moved cacao plantations from their original Mexican sites to Caracas (Venezuela) and the Guayas Basin (Ecuador). Cocoa became a popular drink in Guatemala and Nicaragua. The second drink of choice was mate, made from the evergreen holly Ilex paraguariensis. Jesuits turned the caffeine-containing leaf into a plantation crop. In Buenos Aires it was just as exotic as tea or coffee was perceived in London and Paris. Like its fellow exotic beverages, it encouraged similar social rituals and accessories. Drinkers passed the often ornate silver gourds around and shared the bombilla, or straw. One reason Europeans had so little to say in 1900 about the longer history of consumption on the African continent was that it had by then become commonplace among critics of empire to portray Africa as a kind of virgin territory that had suddenly become a cheap dumping ground for western gin and guns. ‘Authentic’ Africans, in this view, were by nature herdsmen and should return to a life unspoiled by alien commercial temptations. In truth, Africans were discriminating consumers before the European colonisers arrived with their Maxim guns. By the late 16th century, the Portuguese were shipping half a million manilas (bracelets) to the 24 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Gold Coast a year. In southern central Nigeria, people started wearing Holland linen in 1600. A century later, French and British cargo for Africa included hats, smoking pipes and, especially, textiles. In 1850 Britain alone sent 17 million yards of fabric to West Africa. In East Africa, at the foothills of the Kilimanjaro, peasants in the 1860s insisted on being paid in cash by Europeans. Each tribe, one explorer noted, ‘must have its own particular cotton, and its own chosen tint, colour, and size among beads … Worse still, the fashions are just as changeable’ as in England. Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 did not stop the slave trade by France and other countries, but it set in motion a process later followed by the American Civil War, the formal end of Russian serfdom in 1861 and the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in 1886 and 1888. This had major repercussions for the terms of consumption in indigenous societies. Britain’s attack on slavery redefined the order of things: people were no longer possessions that could be traded like other goods. Status and power came to reside in the ownership of objects rather than people.

A

BOLITION was complemented by missionaries’ faith in the civilising force of commerce and Christianity. Spiritual rebirth and a new lifestyle were part of the same package. ‘The same Gospel which had taught them they were spiritually miserable, blind, and naked’, wrote Robert Moffat, a veteran of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Africa in 1842, ‘discovered to them also that they needed reform externally, and thus prepared their minds to adopt those modes of comfort, cleanliness and convenience which they had been accustomed to view only as the peculiarities of a strange people’. Saving souls was thus an excellent commercial proposition: it would win new customers for British goods. Sierra Leone, the British colony founded for freed slaves, was held up as an example of the wonderful change that would occur once people started accumulating things rather than people. Mr Ferguson, the head of the medical department in the colony, noted in the 1830s, how ‘the grade’ of liberated Africans was manifest in their houses and interiors. The highest grade lived in comfortable two-storey stone houses built from their earnings. Here they enjoyed ‘mahogany chairs, tables, sofas and four-post bedsteads … and floor cloths’. Liberated Africans had a ‘great love of money’, he wrote. But this was not a bad thing. Unlike the ‘sordid’ miser, they devoted their income to ‘the increase of domestic comforts and the improvement of their outward appearance of respectability’. There ‘is not a more quiet, inoffensive, and goodhumoured population on the face of the earth’. The pursuit of possessions destabilised traditional power structures. In the Ashanti kingdom (Ghana) slaves and taxes were the sinews of power. The more slaves, the higher an individual’s rank. The expansion of the rubber and cocoa trade undermined this order. ‘New men’ emerged who looked to Britain and British goods for their trade and identity. As slaves were losing their value and chiefs came to be toppled more frequently, rulers started to accumulate possessions as a kind of pension plan. In 1910 the Ashanti Council of Chiefs finally agreed that a chief could hold onto two thirds of all property accrued during his term in office, rather than, as in the past, passing them on to his successor.

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Clockwise from left: Chinese plaque depicting interior with figures, c.1770-75, from the collection of Jean Theodore Royer; Dutch silver spice box in shape of The Mauritius, c.1600; vase attributed to Drie Posteleyne Astonne, c. 1740.

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 25

XXXXXXXX CONSUMERISM

Mazawattee Cocoa advertisement, British, 1890s.

It was another victory for the dominion of things. In many ways, Africans did exactly what the early Victorian missionaries had preached: they traded more and showed a growing demand for foreign goods. The Ashanti, for example, shifted from harvesting the kola nut to the more profitable cultivation of cocoa. The problem was that by the 1870s and 1880s African competitors and consumers were threatening Europeans’ sense of their own superiority. As markers of status and identity, consumer goods proved especially sensitive, as they narrowed the visible gap between colonial master and subject. One colonial official complained of Swahili clad in fezes with coloured shirts and bow ties, blue serge suits, wearing shoes and socks … a monocle, and smoking cigarettes in long, gold-tipped cigarette-holders … even worse perhaps are the gentlemen who have taken to soft hats and heavy boots. As an observer in 1930s northern Rhodesia noted, many Europeans were less courteous to well-dressed Africans than to those in rags, ‘for they resent and fear the implied claim to a civilised status’. In West Africa, Britain started to seize trade from locals from the 1880s with the help of gunboats. In northern Nigeria, in 1904, it imposed caravan tolls to squeeze out local traders and turn weavers into cotton growers for factories in Lancashire.

I

T WAS IN THIS increasingly racialised climate of the new imperialism, from the 1880s to the 1910s, that exotic products like cocoa and coffee were becoming genuine mass products consumed by all Europeans, rich and poor. In an influential study on race and gender, Anne McClintock has presented branded goods in these years as vehicles of ‘commodity racism’ that carried race into the home and people’s daily lives. Clearly, there were some advertisements that were visibly racist, such as the Pear’s Soap advertisement of a white boy scrubbing a black boy to white purity and progress. What is more surprising, however, is how rare exotic images of plantations or Africans were in British and European advertisements of exotic goods like cocoa and coffee. After 1900, Cadbury’s cocoa was celebrated as ‘the standard English article’ and ‘the good Old English Cocoa’. Where people appeared, they were white English scientists in testing rooms and white women workers in Bournville. It was they who guaranteed Cadbury’s ‘authentic’ quality, what made it a ‘perfect food’, free of ‘foreign substances’. A British consumer would have been forgiven for thinking that cocoa grew not in tropical climes, but near Birmingham. The ability to extract the butter from cocoa – pioneered by the Dutch a generation earlier – and the addition of milk did turn cocoa more into a hybrid manufactured food, with cocoa powder and chocolate bars made 26 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

in Europe. Still, the disappearance of exotic associations is striking. Cadbury was not peculiar. Tobler emblazoned its Swiss chocolate first with an eagle, then with the Matterhorn. Germans sipped ‘Rheinland Kaffee’. In the United States, coffee was advertised as ‘New Orleans’, marking the national point of entry rather than the place of origin. Since the 1920s, the Finnish Paulig company has even sponsored ‘Paula’ girls in traditional Sääksmäki dress, who travel the country to show people how to prepare proper ‘Finnish’ coffee. Colonial goods remained more visible in France, where coffee from its colonies benefitted from preferential taxes and African street sellers of chocolate kept racial associations in the public eye. Even here, though, the origin and place of its producers was eventually driven out of the picture. The Banania brand was a drink made of chocolate and banana flour, sourced in the French Antilles and based on a Nicaraguan recipe. In the First World War, Banania adverts replaced Antilles women with Senegalese soldiers fighting for the mother country. THE MAKE-OVER OF coffee and cocoa involved a historic change in the creation of value and taste in the age of empire. In the 16th and 17th centuries these new products had derived their value and attraction from being exotic, with their origins in distant places. Scholars and travellers made them valuable and desirable by surrounding them with their knowledge of distant cultures, medicine and forms of preparation. By contrast, late 19th-century cocoa powder, labelled with British shepherds or sailors, chocolate bars with the Matterhorn and ‘Rheinland’ or ‘New Orleans’ coffee played on familiar associations and sold ‘strange’ products by domesticating them. Interestingly, it was at the same time that Europeans lost their appetite for consumer boycotts against slavegrown products from distant places. When newspapers in 1904-9 revealed Cadbury’s exploitation of slaves in São Tomé and Príncipe, the Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea British consumers went on sipping their cocoa regardless. Consumer anger was now directed at local sweatshops and child labour around the corner, not at abuses in distant colonies. The promotion of consumers in the West and their demotion in Africa were two sides in a widening geopolitical divide of fortunes. By 1900, Europeans and their cousins across the seas held the global reins of consumer culture more firmly in their hands than ever before. Industry and income lifted European demand to unrivalled heights. A ‘civilised’ norm of comforts and conveniences had been firmly established, even if less fortunate groups had yet to reach it in reality. The rise of the mass market, however, was not entirely a western liberal success story. It rested on imperial foundations. Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London and the author of The Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (Allen Lane, 2016).

FURTHER READING Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of 18th-century England (Indiana University Press, 1982). Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (University of California Press, 1988). John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (Routledge, 1993). Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995). Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (OUP, 2012).

Out of the Eleanor Parker is inspired by a visit to a village church in Oxfordshire that bears witness to one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in English history.

HIS YEAR sees the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. The single date 1066, as shorthand for everything that happened at the Norman Conquest, occupies a unique place in English history. It is one of the few dates fixed in the collective memory and we shall hear plenty this year about the invasion as a watershed moment that changed England for ever. Behind that story of change and loss lie many individual examples of adaptation and survival in the decades after the Norman Conquest. These stories cannot be illustrated with vivid snapshots from the Bayeux Tapestry, nor easily commemorated with round-number anniversaries, but they should be remembered this year nonetheless. There are ways to catch a glimpse of them and I recently visited a church in Oxfordshire that bears witness to this period of transition. Langford, lying to the west of Oxford, is a pretty village built of Cotswold stone and it does not advertise its treasure of a church; you have to know what you are looking for, if you go in search of it, but it is worth finding. It possesses two extraordinary Anglo-Saxon carvings of the Crucifixion, both dating probably to the 10th or 11th century. One, now mounted on the side of the porch, is an almost life-size image of Christ. He is dressed in a long belted robe, his arms outstretched; the figure has lost its head, but hands and robe are beautifully carved. The other, smaller carving, above the door of the porch, shows the Virgin and St John at the foot of the cross, two dignified figures standing below a painfully contorted Christ. These fine carvings presumably belonged to a pre-Conquest church on the site and must have been commissioned by a wealthy patron: plausibly, by one of the earls who held

these lands in the first half of the 11th century, either Leofric, Earl of Mercia, or Harold Godwinson, who by 1066 owned the estate of Langford. Both Leofric and Harold are known to have given generous gifts to churches, including crucifixion scenes that may have resembled those at Langford. Harold was noted for his devotion to the Black Rood of Waltham Abbey, a life-size figure of Christ made of black marble. A legend recorded in the 12th-century chronicle of the abbey claims that Harold, on his way to Hastings in 1066, stopped at Waltham to pray before the Black Rood. The king

Langford church is a monument to Ӕlfsige, the survivor making his way in a changing world prostrated himself in prayer before Christ and the marble figure bowed its head in grief, knowing what the outcome of the battle would be. I was reminded of this story at Langford as I looked up at the headless figure of Christ, imposing and stately despite the damage it has suffered, and it was tempting to imagine Harold coming here, too. Langford’s Saxon roods survived the Conquest when many did not, perhaps because they Soul survivors: Christ with the Virgin and St John at Langford.

formed part of a church built by a man who was himself an English survivor. In the decade or so after Hastings, the church was rebuilt by the local landowner, Ælfsige of Faringdon. He was an Englishman who not only survived but prospered after the Conquest: in the years between 1066 and the Domesday survey he increased his estates by service to the new king, until he held lands in Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Gloucestershire. Ælfsige rebuilt the church at Langford in a style as much Saxon as Norman, with a massive central tower (older than the Tower of London, as my guide proudly informed me). He built at a moment of transition, before new architectural fashions had taken hold, and nearly a thousand years later his tower stands as a tribute to his ambition and success. Was he trying to make his mark by building this church, attempting to impress his new lords? For some historians a degree of suspicion attaches to those, like Ælfsige, who did well out of the Conquest and there is a tendency to talk about them as collaborators, even traitors, but we should not be quick to judge. The stones in the tower of Langford were laid in a time of uncertainty, when no one could predict what would happen five years on, let alone 950. Significant anniversaries offer an opportunity to re-examine particular historical moments, but there can be a danger of over-simplifying, focusing on a single date at the expense of what came before and after. Langford offers an antidote: with its exquisite roods, it bears testimony to the artistic and cultural sophistication of late AngloSaxon England, but it is also a monument to Ælfsige, the survivor, making his way in a changing world. Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog at aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk. MARCH 2014 HISTORY TODAY 27

InFocus

Forth Railway Bridge, 1888

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NE OF THE world’s most famous shapes edges towards completion in 1888, although the first train will not cross the Forth Bridge for two more years. It owes its muscular appearance to an engineering tragedy 30 miles or so to the north, when the bridge over the Firth of Tay collapsed in 1879, killing all 73 people on a train that was crossing it during a storm. Parliament cautioned the North British Railway, responsible for the Tay Bridge and now prime mover of the projected Firth of Forth Bridge, that the latter ‘should gain the confidence of the public, and enjoy a reputation of being not only the biggest but also the stiffest bridge in the world’. 28 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

That is what its designers, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, aimed for, using novel techniques and materials, so that the main east coast railway line could continue directly northwards from Edinburgh to Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth and beyond. Unlike Tower Bridge, which followed it four years later, dressed up in Gothic trim to complement the neighbouring Tower of London, it left its structure undisguised. This earns it plaudits nowadays for its ‘truth to materials’, though at the time, William Morris called it ‘the supremist specimen of ugliness’. The first Industrial Revolution, based on steam power, cotton and iron, was now superseded by the second, relying

At the time, William Morris called the Forth Railway Bridge ‘the supremist specimen of ugliness’

on steel, chemicals and electricity, giving birth to the internal combustion engine and radio. It was the strength and flexibility of steel that made possible the massive cantilever construction, with its upper lattice girders in tension and its lower tubular members in compression. In turn, the cantilever principle allowed the growing structure to be self-supporting, so that it did not require temporary ‘falsework’ timbering. Various cranes can be clearly seen on the structure in the photograph, used to hoist up components and supplies from ships and barges beneath. The arms (not yet constructed when this photograph was taken) projecting horizontally from the lozenge-shaped cantilevers were

strong enough, 100 unsupported feet out, to accommodate three-ton cranes. Though many rivets had to be fitted by hand, there were also William Arrol’s giant hydraulic riveting machines, supplied from oil-fired rivet-heating furnaces, which could even operate inside the cantilever tubes, some 12 feet in diameter, moving up as the tubes extended. More than 50,000 tons of steel plate was rolled to shape and then held together with eight million rivets. At the busiest time, 4,600 men and boys worked on the bridge, a boy throwing the glowing rivets to each three-man team. There were problems caused by the flexing of the long tubes, by the force of the wind and by the steel expanding as it was heated by the sun: one degree Fahrenheit brought a contraction or expansion of an eighth of an inch. When the temperature reached 60 degrees on the west side on a sunny afternoon, key junction bolts could be inserted there, but bolt holes on the east side only coincided after fires were started inside the tubes. The Prince of Wales hammered home the last gilded rivet in March 1890, but by December there was a Scotlandwide railway strike, precipitated in large part by the extra traffic generated by the bridge causing huge congestion and delays, which greatly added to the hours railwaymen had to work, though they were paid according to the hours scheduled in the published timetables. Only in July 1891 was it agreed to purchase land so the line could be quadrupled either side of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. The bridge cost £3,227,000 to build, while a 14-year restoration completed in 2011 cost £130,000,000. This included painting it with 250,000 litres of glass-flake epoxy resin as used on North-Sea oil rigs, expected to last at least 20 years and so putting a stop to the bridge being used as a tired simile for any unending job. These figures pale before the 2010 estimate of £2.3 billion for the new replacement road bridge, not yet completed. ROGER HUDSON

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 29

EPIDEMICS

Plague victims in Perugia. Miniature from the manuscript of the vernacular text La Franceschina, Italy, 16th century.

Plague and prejudice Epidemics spread mistrust, as communities seek to blame their plight on outsiders or those at the margins of society. Or so it is believed. Yet, argues Samuel Cohn, the historical record reveals that such outbreaks of disease are more likely to bring people together than force them apart and when anger does arise, it is often targeted at insiders.

A

FTER MORE THAN half a century without a major epidemic in the West, the shock of the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the early 1980s triggered sudden interest in the socio-psychological reactions to disease. A wide range of commentators across scholarly disciplines and the popular press searched for historical parallels to AIDS and readily found them. Their message tended towards the simplistic, the anachronistic and the one-dimensional, resisting almost any attempt to detect change over time or find significant differences between epidemic diseases. In his study Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (1989), the prominent Italian historian of early modern Europe, Carlo Ginzburg, concluded that: ‘The prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged.’ Cultural historians Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman claim that ‘blaming has always been

a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable’. The historian of medicine Roy Porter agreed with Susan Sontag that when ‘there is no cure to hand’ and the ‘aetiology ... is obscure ... deadly diseases spawn sinister connotations’. More recently, from Haiti, which endured a devastating earthquake followed by an outbreak of cholera in 2010, Paul Farmer in Haiti After the Earthquake (2011) proclaimed: ‘Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics.’ Across time, space and disease, epidemics, particularly those deemed new, lacking tested cures or effective prevention, ‘became fodder’ for all ‘sorts of irrational hatreds and prejudice’. This irrationality was supposedly directed towards the victims of epidemics or ‘others’: the poor, the outcast, the Jew, the foreigner. Assertions that epidemics’ social toxins – their negative effect on social relations MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 31

EPIDEMICS

– were more explosive when diseases were mysterious meant that diseases before the laboratory revolution of the 1870s, before the Scientific Revolution and certainly before Fracastoro’s mid 16th-century notion of germs should have been the most violent, with the greatest blame heaped on the victims of disease or minorities. Yet an examination of the historical record of epidemics fails to support these assertions. The most frequently cited example from antiquity of a mysterious disease sparking blame and violence is the fifth-century bc Plague of Athens. Yet any notion of such violence derives from just one tentative line in Thucydides, when inhabitants of Piraeus ‘even said that the Peloponnesians had put poison in their cisterns’. No more is heard of it when the plague reached the densely populated upper city of Athens, levelling the population by a third, where Thucydides begins his description of the plague’s socio-psychological effects. Blame does not, however, disappear entirely from Thucydides’ account. When the epidemic flared again a year later in 430, the Athenians did not blame outsiders or victims but their own leader Pericles and his stubborn continuance of the devastating war with the Spartans. Those searching for blame and violence connected to epidemics spend little time on antiquity, leaving the impression that outbreaks were then rare. Yet, despite the survival of less than a quarter of Livy’s History of Rome (35 of 142 books), the author mentions 57 epidemics, of which modern historians have recalled only two or three. In recounting these, 32 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Livy portrays another side to the social and psychological consequences of epidemics that do not sit well with the current post-AIDS view. Instead of dividing societies, with one class or group blaming another, these epidemics often ended bitter rivalries between warring neighbours or between the plebs and senatorial classes and brought societies together, at least temporarily. Compassion, not hate, was a side effect of epidemics. In 399 bc, for example, a bitter winter followed by a summer heatwave produced a severe epidemic in Rome, fatal to humans and beasts alike and for which no cures could be found. The senate voted to consult the Sibylline Books, as was usual in times of crisis, and this led to the creation of a new sort of banquet, the lectisternium, which was open to the masses: Throughout the City the front gates of the houses were thrown open and all sorts of things [were] placed for general use in the open courts; all comers, whether acquaintances or strangers, were invited to share the hospitality. Men who had been enemies held friendly and sociable conversations with each other and abstained from all litigation, the manacles even were removed from prisoners during this period, and afterwards it seemed an act of impiety that men to whom the gods had brought such relief should be put in chains again. On at least three occasions the lectisternium was repeated during the fourth century bc, when particularly fatal and mysterious epidemics

Clockwise from left: Plague in an Ancient City, by Michael Sweerts, c.1652; burning of Jews, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493; smallpox quarantine station in Hawaii, by Paul Emmert, 1853.

struck Rome. To end these scourges, the government bequeathed largesse on the population, with extended work-free holidays. Other plagues succeeded in ending class conflict between plebeians and the senatorial classes, as in 433-2 bc, when masses and elites ‘crowded before shrines, and everywhere prostrate matrons swept the floors of temples with their hair’. Fearing famine would follow pestilence, governments emptied their coffers to pay for foreign shipments of grain.

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S WITH ANTIQUITY, so with the Middle Ages, a single episode, the Black Death, has fixed impressions of the social toxins aroused by a pandemic. Unlike Thucydides’ one-liner about possible biological warfare, however, accusations against Jews, beggars at Narbonne and Catalans in Sicily at the time of the Black Death fill hundreds of chronicles. Archival evidence points to over 1,000 Jewish communities annihilated between 1348 and 1350: men, women and children were burnt on islands or in synagogues, accused of poisoning wells to end Christendom. The enormity of the Black Death’s social toxins appears to be unique, not only to the Middle Ages, but to European, even world history. Yet historians have failed to mention just how short-lived these extreme reactions were. While waves of persecution against Jews continued through the late Middle Ages and early modern period, pre-modern plagues no longer triggered massacres of Jews or any other ‘others’. Beginning around 1530, however, a second wave of plague accusations arose in Toulouse, Geneva, Lyon, Nîmes, Rouen, Paris, Turin, Milan, Palermo and smaller towns and villages. Yet the trials, tortures and executions of supposed plague-spreaders that followed cannot compare in scale, numbers, murders, or destruction with those seen during the Black Death, or with the 19th- and early 20th-century riots sparked by cholera in Europe, plague in India or smallpox in North America. Moreover, these early modern plague persecutions do not follow the reputed patterns of governments, elites or the rabble hysterically victimising suspected populations of foreigners, Jews or the poor. From the surviving trial transcripts produced at Milan in 1630 and immortalised in Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi, those initiating

the charges were poor women and the accused were insiders rather than outsiders: usually native Milanese men, including property-owning artisans, wealthy bankers and aristocrats. Some historians have seen syphilis rather than plague as early modern Europe’s great disease of phobia and blame. Not only was it new to Europe, it was sexually transmitted, making it the perfect antecedent of AIDS. But where is the evidence that it encouraged blame or social violence? For the most part, scholars can point only to the names used to label the disease: Neapolitans called it malfrancese, the French, the mal de Naples and so on. Despite such names, no one has found a single source describing an early modern syphilis riot or a mass attack on those known, or supposed, to have spread the disease: mainly, foreign armies and prostitutes. Instead, texts such as De morbo gallico by Gabriel Falloppio, chair of medicine at Padua, expressed sympathy for Naples’ ‘most beautiful girls’, ‘propelled’ by poverty into ‘secret prostitution’. Nor did Falloppio or other 16th-century commentators blame the French, despite the standard name – morbus Gallicus – appearing in medical texts until the 17th century. In one of the most widely circulated medical tracts of the 16th century, De guaiaici medicina et morbo gallico (1519), Ulrich von Hutten explained why he used the term and

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 33

EPIDEMICS immediately apologised: I do not ‘bear any grudge against a most renowned nation which is, perhaps, the most civilised and hospitable now in existence’. Two decades later, the Florentine statesman and historian Francesco Guicciardini called the disease malfrancese, but insisted that it was necessary to ‘remove the shame of the name “franzese”’, arguing that the disease had been brought from Spain and not France to Naples. He then added that the disease was ‘not exactly of that nation’ either; instead, it came from the West Indies, but he did not blame any Indian or his Italian hero Christopher Columbus ‘for making the wonderful discovery of the New World’. The physician Falloppio went further, seeing the disease springing not entirely from outside invaders but from malpractice within: unwittingly, Neapolitan bakers were partially to blame because they contaminated their bread with gypsum, thus weakening Naples’ population and contributing to the spread of the disease. The mid-16th-century Venetian physician Bernardino Tomitano also looked inward, placing the blame for the spread of syphilis in the 1530s on his own Venetian merchants, who carried it into Eastern Europe.

'Troubles in Astrakhan', Le Petit Journal of August 6th, 1892, illustrated by Henri Meyer.

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HE PATTERNS of hatred and mythologies of blame caused by epidemics changed in the 19th century with cholera. Unlike with previous diseases, including the Black Death, the hate and violence cholera provoked spread across linguistic and political borders, touching almost every country in Europe. Across strikingly different cultures, economies and regimes, the content and character of the conspiracies, the divisions by social class and the targets of rioters’ wrath were uncannily similar. Without any obvious communication among rioters from New York City to Asiatic Russia, cholera’s conspiracies repeated stories of elites masterminding a Malthusian cull of the poor, with health boards, doctors, pharmacists, nurses and government officials as the agents. Myths of poisoned wells and other sources reach back to antiquity and can be seen during the Middle Ages and early modern period, as with the slaughter of Jews and lepers in 1319-21. But unlike these massacres, 19th- and 20th-century cholera riots rarely targeted Jews or other marginal groups (and never lepers). Popular rage turned not towards the ‘other’, but against the dominant classes, especially medical professionals, local policemen and governors. When cholera spread beyond the Ganges in 1817 into the Near East and up the Volga to reach Astrakhan in 1823, it was a new disease. Yet no reports of conspiracies or riots have yet to surface from this period. Rather, social violence followed cholera during its second tour up the Volga, when disease and hate spread in tandem throughout Europe. During cholera’s next five waves, from 1830 into the 20th century, the same myths of health workers and the state inventing the disease to kill off the poor recurred in parts of Russia and Italy long after the disease’s means of transmission were known and understood. During the 1890s, cholera riots appear to have spread more widely than ever before in Eastern Europe and Russia – into Persia, Syria and Egypt – with the estimated numbers of rioters reaching new peaks. At Astrakhan in 1892, rumours spread that the sick were being carted to hospitals to be buried alive, igniting a crowd of 10,000 to besiege the cholera hospital. Instead of attacking the disease’s victims, the protesters saw themselves as ‘liberators’, freeing the afflicted from the clutches of supposed hospital death camps. The crowd next marched to the governor’s house and burnt it to the ground. A month later, Asiatic Sarts living in and around Tashkent claimed that cholera was the work of Russian doctors poisoning them. Five thousand, ‘driven to madness over the reported cruelties to cholera patients’, invaded the Russian quarter of the city. 34 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

During the 1890s, cholera riots appear to have spread more widely than ever before in Eastern Europe and Russia Armed with revolvers and daggers, they plundered shops and stoned ‘all citizens in their way’. They destroyed the residence of the deputy governor and chased him through the streets, trampling, stoning, beating him to death, ‘mutilating his features beyond recognition’. Eventually, Cossacks quelled the revolt after killing 70 and wounding hundreds. Between these two events numerous smaller but deadly cholera riots swept down the Volga. Cholera riots became especially widespread in Italy. In the first and most studied wave in 1835-6, social violence was confined almost entirely to Sicily. That was far from the case during Italy’s last major cholera epidemic, of 1910-11, even though mortality rates were a fraction of previous outbreaks and despite the fact that the disease’s water-bound transmission had been known for half a century. At Massafra in Puglia,

for instance, the old cholera myths of hospitals as death chambers for the poor persisted. Crowds of around 3,000 stormed the cholera hospital and ‘liberated’ the patients, whom they paraded triumphantly through the streets. Prominent government officials and doctors were killed, nurses were thrown out of windows, equipment was smashed and the hospital set ablaze. The incident that gained most publicity occurred at Verbicaro, a town of 6,000 north of Cosenza in Calabria. At the end of August 1911, 1,200 ‘rebels’ attacked the town hall while the mayor was convening a meeting. The first to be seized was a clerk, who several months earlier had been involved in drafting the town’s census. A woman struck his head with a stick, another shot him and a third hacked his head off with a pruning knife. The attack was not random. Harking back to a basic plot of cholera conspiracies, the peasants believed the census was the town’s first step in selecting those ‘for the sacrifice’ to ease Italy’s overpopulation. Armed with spades, knives, sticks and agricultural implements, women, boys and men knocked down telegraph poles, cut the wires, wrecked the town hall, burnt its archives, the court house, the telegraph office and the mayor’s house and released prisoners from gaol. The mayor, a town clerk and a judge fled. A group of 11, including three women, caught the clerk and ‘hacked him to pieces’. On reaching the train station, the judge ‘died of fright’. Fearing reprisals, half of Verbicaro’s population fled to the mountains, leaving cholera corpses strewn through streets. The mayor escaped, but two days later was ordered to return and was immediately murdered, repeating the fate of his grandfather, mayor of Verbicaro in 1857, when a previous cholera uprising swept through town.

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Top: Verbicaro, Calabria. Above: a costume designed to protect doctors from plague, French, 1720.

OUTHERN ITALIAN TOWNS were not the only ones to have been afflicted by cholera’s social toxins. Large-scale cholera riots, for instance, had erupted in Tuscany’s industrial port of Livorno in 1857 and 1893. In 1911, similar riots spread through seaside resorts outside Rome at Ansio, Nettuno and Terracina. The authorities in Segni, southwest of Rome, which experienced just five cholera cases, requisitioned a hospital and lazzaretto to quarantine suspected cases. Immediately ‘the idea spread among ignorant people’ that the authorities, municipal and national, had planned a ‘massacre of the innocents’ to poison the town. ‘A mob’ of 3,000 marched on the town hall demanding the release of cholera patients, stoned carabinieri and battered down the town hall’s door, ‘intending to sack and destroy the place, and murder the mayor and health workers’, who they accused of inventing the disease. The papers reported women as being ‘particularly ferocious’. One seized a carabiniere, threw him to the ground and stomped on him. Another grabbed the municipal flag and shouted: ‘To the hospital.’ The ‘mob’, heeding her command, surged through town, crying ‘Death to the doctors and nurses’. They succeeded in removing the cholera patients from the hospital, carrying them ‘in a procession to their homes’. We can reach some conclusion from these examples. First, even though a nexus of hate driven by epidemics may have been on the rise in the 16th and early 17th centuries, with the trials of supposed plague spreaders, they were short-lived and mild in comparison to what followed with the much more widespread social unrest from cholera in 19th- and early-20th-century Europe. Second, with cholera the unrest was more than principally an urban phenomenon confined to ten or so cities. In the British Isles for the 13-month period, December 1831 to January 1833, for instance, I have found 72 cholera riots, many with crowds in the thousands, that MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 35

EPIDEMICS

Above: 'Microcosm dedicated to the London Water Companies', Thomas McLean, 1828. Below: Smallpox immunisation certificate, Cuba, 1902.

attacked physicians and destroyed cholera hospitals. In Ireland and Scotland in particular, these occurred not only in the principal cities but in small towns and villages such as Ardee, Kilkenny, Killineer, Ballina in Ireland and Paisley, Wick, Pathhead (Kirkcaldy), Leith and Ivergordon in Scotland. Third, scientific discoveries of cholera’s bacterial agent and mechanisms of transmission did not end or even dampen cholera’s social violence or the mythologies that fuelled it in and around the large and sophisticated cities of western Europe. In Russia and Italy these riots continued into the 20th century, becoming as widespread and frequent as they had been in the 1830s. Finally, comparison of epidemics shows that the social configurations of hate were not one-dimensional or static across time and place as the recent literature inspired by the AIDS experience would have us believe. Responses to cholera differed markedly from the slaughter of Jews during the Black Death or the 16th- and 17th-century plague trials, which reveal a wide variety of perpetrators and victims. Instead of blaming and scapegoating the poor, Jews, foreigners and other marginal populations, cholera’s mythologies of hate funnelled blame and violence in the opposite direction: marginal groups such as Asiatic Sarts in Russian cities, impoverished Irish women and boys in New York, Liverpool and Glasgow, peasants, fig-growers and unemployed fishermen in Puglia and women and children in other Italian towns targeted physicians, pharmacists, nurses, mayors and other government officials as the ones purposely spreading the disease. Nor have such conspiracy theories connected with epidemics disappeared, as attested by attacks in 2014 on the Red Cross in West Africa, accused of inventing the Ebola virus, or more recently with charges that a biotech company had purposely released the superbugs causing the Zika virus in Brazil to reduce global population. 36 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

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URIOUSLY, THE ONE DISEASE of the late 19th- and early 20th-century to correspond most closely with the current view of big epidemics triggering blame against ‘the other’ did produce the most widespread and frequent social violence in US history: smallpox. Yet historians have hardly recognised its social toxins, especially after the few anti-inoculation riots of the colonial period. As with cholera, smallpox produced mass revolts in which the poor and immigrants railed against health boards and municipal governments, as seen in three large riots and a series of smaller ones in Milwaukee from September 28th to December 31st, 1894, or one comprised of Mexican immigrants at Laredo, Texas in March 1899. But from

dockers, labourers and cartmen supported the protest with a general strike. Journalists and intellectuals joined in, decrying the government’s needless and abusive quarantines, body searches and destruction of homes and religious shrines. Rather than tearing Indian societies apart, the plague united groups across class and castes and Hindus with Muslims against the backward and oppressive health measures of the British.

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the epidemic of 1881 to the second decade of the 20th century, smallpox sparked numerous grizzly acts of inhumanity against the victims of this disease. Those perpetrating the violence were white, propertied farmers and business men – ‘the better sort of citizens’ – and their targets were Amerindians and recent immigrants – Chinese, Bohemians, ‘tramps’ – but, above all, blacks. Time allows only two interconnected examples. There are many more: Top: Walter Reed Hospital flu ward, Washington, DC, 1918. Above: Cholera treatment centre, Haiti, December 2010.

April 3 [1896]. William Haley, colored, is in the Memphis hospital … He was badly beaten about the head and arms and wounded with bullets in three places. Smallpox originated in Haley’s house several months ago and for this he was whitecapped by a mob of twenty persons, clubbed with guns and shot, before the eyes of his wife and children. The epidemic spread from Memphis to Bessemer, Alabama. A pesthouse was erected for the patients, nine tenths of whom were ‘negroes’. A mob, ‘composed of white farmers living in the neighborhood’ came at night ‘and riddled [the patients] with bullets’. Asked to justify their crime, they replied that ‘this is the best and quickest means of ridding the town of smallpox’. Other epidemics of the late 19th and early 20th century had more complex alignments between perpetrators and their targets, such as the plague riots in India, which produced general strikes and crowds even larger than those of cholera riots in Russia. Indian protests, however, often had a clear political agenda. British doctors and soldiers strip-searching young Indian girls for signs of plague sparked the Bombay riot of the Julai weavers in March 1898. Soon after, 15,000

OT ALL EPIDEMICS of the modern period produced blame, hate or collective violence. Yellow Fever in the United States and the Great Influenza of 1918-20 throughout the world remained mysterious in their modes of transmission and their causal agents far longer than cholera, killed millions more and could possess frightening, disgusting signs and symptoms. Yet neither sparked large-scale collective violence or widespread blame of others, whether the impoverished or the elites. Instead, as with epidemics in antiquity, they brought societies together across race, ethnicity and class, even within contexts of rising social, political and racial tensions, as with the Yellow Fever outbreak in New Orleans in 1853, which arose on the eve of the Civil War, when regional and racial antagonisms were sharpening. The city’s blacks, believed to have had greater immunity to the disease, crossed class and racial lines to nurse stricken whites and, in turn, the white middle classes praised them for their bravery. In El Paso, Texas in October 1918, at the height of the Great Influenza, anti-Mexican sentiment had been brewing thanks to Zapata’s incursions on US soil and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet debutante ladies, for the first time in their lives, crossed into the city’s poorest Mexican neighbourhoods where influenza cases were at their highest and risked their lives, sweeping floors, setting up soup kitchens and treating the dangerously ill. The extraordinary variety of reactions to the hazards and shocks of epidemic disease defy the widespread, one-dimensional views that have become dominant since the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Curiously, activists’ and scholars’ understanding of the psychological, social and political effects of HIV/AIDS itself began to shift in the 1990s from one that stressed hate, violence and blame to one in praise of the way in which the disease inspired volunteerism, community organisation, self-sacrifice and compassion. Instead of retelling stories of discrimination in jobs, education and housing or the homophobic pronouncements of right-wing politicians and television evangelists, the literature began to emphasise the political gains won by lesbians and gays, sex workers and, in Africa, women, and how AIDS reshaped more progressive doctorpatient relations and redefined the family. This shift, however, has yet to inspire scholars to revisit the long history of epidemics. This second, more nuanced and positive (though hardly rosy) view of AIDS forms a new template to rewind the movie reel (de rérouler à reculons), as the great French medievalist Marc Bloch once put it, for understanding the distant past from the perspective of the present. Samuel Cohn is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.

FURTHER READING Michael Holland, Geoffrey Gill and Sean Burrell, eds. Cholera and Conflict: 19th Century Cholera in Britain and its Social Consequences (Medical Museum Publishing, 2009). Samuel Cohn, ‘Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S’, Historical Research, 85 (2012). R.P. Duncan-Jones, ‘The impact of the Antonine plague’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, ix (1996), 108–36. Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera 1823-1832 (Madison, 1965). MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 37

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| HAITI Caribbean king: Henry Christophe, by Richard Evans, 1816.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE wrote to his fellow abolitionist Zachary Macaulay on January 7th, 1815 about a letter he had received unexpectedly. It weighed 85 ounces, so Wilberforce was relieved that the post office had waived the due postage of nearly £38 in favour of a more modest seven shillings. The letter was from Haiti, once the French colony of Saint Domingue, but then marking a decade of independence after its successful slave revolution. The country had been split in two by civil war soon after gaining its freedom, with the north declaring itself a kingdom. Wilberforce’s correspondent was its secretary of state and bore the title of Duc de Limonade. He was writing on behalf of his king, Henry Christophe, who wanted to open a dialogue of mutual support with the abolitionists. Wilberforce was beside himself: ‘How strikingly do we see the just and good dispensations of Providence produced by ways’, he wrote, ‘in which at the time we little see the point to which we are tending!’ Haiti, having thrown off the yoke of slavery, could shine a new light on the abolitionist cause. Emancipation would mean the march of civilisation rather than a descent into anarchy and, for Wilberforce, the regal Henry was the figure to prove it. Rise of a royal Henry Christophe obscured his origins but the official Almanach Royal d’Hayti records his birth in Grenada in October 1767. During the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) the island had been captured by the British from the French and, during Henry’s rule, his supporters in Britain frequently pointed to his English ‘roots’. Despite being a French-speaker, Christophe himself always pointedly spelled his name ‘Henry’ rather than ‘Henri’. According to Haitian folklore he came to Saint Domingue in the service of a French naval officer and served in the colonial army of Comte d’Estaing, who was sent to aid the American revolutionaries at the siege of Savannah in 1779. At the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, in 1791, Christophe was working at the Hotel Couronne in Cap Français, Saint Domingue’s most prosperous port. He was a ‘free black’, or gen de couleur, a group which made up a sizeable minority in a population dominated by almost half a million slaves. He joined the city militia but soon threw in his lot with Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who became the leader of the revolt. After a revolutionary Girondin governor declared Saint Domingue’s slaves free – an act that triggered emancipation across the entire French empire – L’Ouverture returned to the French fold and aimed his guns at the British, who had also invaded the island. Having forced them out and liberated the slaves on the Spanish half of the island, L’Ouverture declared himself governor for life, ruling on behalf of the French Republic. A more pragmatic Napoleon might have been content to let L’Ouverture rule as his representative, but instead he determined to rid himself of the ‘gilded Africans’ and 38 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

King Henry of Haiti Amid the instability of post-revolutionary Haiti, torn between Britain and France, Henry Christophe rose from lowly roots to become its ruler. Paul Clammer remembers his vital role in shaping a new kingdom.

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re-impose metropolitan rule. Taking advantage of a period of peace between France and Britain, he sent an army of over 16,000 men to the island in 1802, led by General Victoire Leclerc, husband of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline. When Leclerc arrived at Cap Français in early 1802, Christophe, now commander of the city, denied him permission to land. The fleet’s arrival had been preceded by rumours that the French intended to re-introduce slavery to Saint Domingue and L’Ouverture’s army saw itself as the main defender of republican liberty. When Leclerc protested that the refusal to welcome the French was an act of defiance against the Republic, Christophe snorted that ‘the very mention of rebellion is an argument for our resistance’ and drove the point home by burning the city to the ground and retreating with his army to the interior. The ensuing war was devastating. The French army was crippled by yellow fever and bloody massacres were perpetrated by both sides. When L’Ouverture sued for peace, he was betrayed and sent to France to die in a prison in the Jura. Only in the later stages of the war did independence become an explicit aim, with the ‘indigenous army’ commanded by the ex-slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines gaining a decisive victory over the French at the Battle of Vertières in November 1803. With the French finally gone, Dessalines led Haiti to independence on New Year’s Day, 1804. Dessalines’ defence One of Dessalines’ first acts was to kill those French who still remained in Haiti; those left were declared to be black by the new constitution, regardless of their colour. Christophe was Dessalines’ right-hand man and led an expedition to conquer Spanish Santo Domingo that, despite failing, cemented Christophe’s position as commanderin-chief of the Haitian army. Together they forced free labourers back onto plantations to restore sugar exports and began building a chain of forts to defend Haiti against future invasion. Dessalines had crowned himself emperor a few months after Napoleon had done the same, but he faced trouble in his own court. In early 1806 he was assassinated in a conspiracy led by a rival general, Alexandre Pétion. As Dessalines’ natural successor, Christophe ordered elections, confident that the prize of the new presidency was his. So it proved, but manoeuvring in the capital Port-au-Prince while Christophe was absent saw the president reduced to a figurehead, subservient to a senate dominated by Pétion. An outraged Christophe marched his army to the gates of the capital but failed to capture it. He retreated to Cap Français to set up a new capital and obsessed over what he saw as his natural right to rule over the whole country. Both sides appealed to the British for support. Christophe threw his ports open to British merchants and recruited an emigré French journalist in London, Jean-Gabriel Peltier, to lobby the British government for diplomatic recognition. Several former Royal Navy officers even helped establish a navy for Christophe. This was not without complications, however, as his admiral, Thomas Goodall, was captured by the British and sent to trial

Christophe decided that a kingdom would bring Haiti the respect and recognition it deserved

in Portsmouth for allegedly serving a foreign power: his acquittal hinged in part on uncertainty over whether Haiti was truly an independent country or still officially a colony of the hated French. It took three years of intermittent war with Pétion for Christophe to consolidate his rule in the north, by which time his ambition had long outgrown the rank of mere president. Instead he decided that a kingdom would bring Haiti the respect and international recognition it deserved. A new constitution was drawn up and in 1807, in front of a hastily created nobility of princes, dukes and barons, he was crowned Henry I. At his coronation banquet (attended by several Royal Navy officers) he took his place as a first among royal equals, raising a toast to his ‘dear brother, George the Third’. Royal rule One of the first acts of Christophe’s monarchy was to commission a series of palaces, most notably his royal residence at Milot, a day’s ride away from the capital. This grand confection was a tropical Versailles in the Caribbean, called Sans Souci, possibly named for Christophe’s rival during the revolutionary war, a Congo-born general of the same name, who Christophe had had killed during a parley. Over 900 metres above it on a mountain peak perched the Citadelle la Ferrière, armed with cannons captured from the French, British and Spanish and garrisoning 5,000 soldiers (it is now Haiti’s only World Heritage site). Christophe’s agents in London spent money like oligarchs. Newspapers of the time were agog with reports of the extravagant carriages he ordered and the exquisite dresses he bought for the queen and princesses, though an incident when his coronation garb was briefly seized by customs for duty avoidance (the cargo had been labelled ‘upholstery’ for export) threatened to tarnish his image. Christophe considered himself a patron of the arts. During the revolution he had unsuccessfully tried to ransom a group of Polish soldiers for the return of his cherished orchestra from the French in Cap Français. Now, the Gazette Royale d’Hayti announced his regular attendance at operas, often written for him by Juste Chanlatte, the Comte de Rosiers. An even more energetic writer was (Baron) Pompée Valentin Vastey, Christophe’s chief propagandist. Vastey wrote for an international audience and his broadsides, The Colonial System Unveiled and Political Reflections, remain eloquent manifestos for anticolonialism and racial equality. ‘Have we not erected impregnable fortresses according to all the rules of art, in places almost inaccessible, where obstacles were to be surmounted with labours worthy of the majesty of Rome?’, he wrote of the nation of ex-slaves. ‘Have we not built palaces and public edifices, which do honour to our country and excite the applause of strangers?’ Hanging on the walls of those palaces were portraits created at the recently founded Royal Academy. One of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s apprentices, Richard Evans, was employed to train Haitian artists and he painted portraits of Christophe and the prince royal, which were subsequently presented to Wilberforce and exhibited in London. Wilberforce was an enthusiastic supporter, but it was Thomas Clarkson who became counsellor to the king. MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 39

| HAITI on grand projects. Christophe’s spies were everywhere and the most minor infractions were punished severely. His end was swift. In August 1820 Christophe suffered a massive stroke while attending mass, which left him almost paralysed. He had created no council to advise him properly or manage a succession. When his army mutinied six weeks later in Saint-Marc, Christophe was unable to command an adequate response. The Duc de Marmelade, Jean-Pierre Richard, governor of Cape Henry, denounced the king and led his own soldiers in revolt. Too late, Christophe realised that without his force of personality his regime was a hollowed-out shell. Self-mythologising to the end, he dispatched his honour guard one last time, then retreated to his chamber and shot himself through the heart. Ransacked and looted Prince Jacques and several loyal nobles were bayoneted to death and their bodies left to rot. Sans Souci was ransacked and stripped of its finery and the Citadelle was searched for Christophe’s gold. That same crown, labelled as ‘upholstery’ to avoid customs duty in London, was said to have been bought by an American speculator who was recommended to ‘pop the bauble into a crucible’ as his part of the loot. President Boyer of the Republic marched a force up from Port-au-Prince and declared the country reunified after 13 years of division. Richard was executed soon after. The widowed queen and the two princesses fared better; they were given passports to leave the country and sailed for England where they were hosted by Thomas Clarkson.

Together the abolitionists helped send teachers, farmers and missionaries to the kingdom, while British merchants grew fat on the sugar and coffee once again flowing out of Cap Français, re-christened Cape Henry. Christophe wrote to Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, who lamented the advent of old age: ‘Were I five and twenty as I was when I embarked with Captain Cook, I am very sure I should not lose a day in embarking for Hayti. To see a set of human beings emerging from slavery, and making rapid strides towards the perfection of civilisation, must I think be the most delightful of food for contemplation.’

Charted territory: French map of Haiti, 1789.

Illusions and delusions Christophe’s popularity in Britain was illusory. He always had a patrician character (the few surviving letters to his son and wife frequently berate them for alleged failings of character), but given the free reign of absolute monarchy, this tipped increasingly into tyranny. Christophe’s kingdom was governed through the heavy hand of his Code Henry, a formidable book of law that covered everything from the status of children born out of wedlock to the correct planting of trees. Where his British abolitionist supporters saw a legal and moral framework necessary to push the country towards ‘western civilisation’, his people saw their lives codified in a way that betrayed the original promise of the revolution. They resented the fact that the plantation remained at the centre of the country’s economic system. The hated whip of the colonial slave driver may have been banned, but labour was still enforced and their freedom of movement restricted. People regularly slipped across the border to where land had been nationalised and they were free to raise their own crops without any state interference. The rules of the Code Henry were enforced by the Royal Dahomets, a police force comprised of freed African slaves landed in the kingdom, bound by their loyalty to an emancipator king even as he forced his people to work unrewarded

Christophe’s overthrow and his people’s desire to cultivate their land can be seen as the final act of the Haitian Revolution

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The British press patronised them for the way their courtly demeanour overcame both their fall from grace and African origins and after three years they left England to join the circuit of ex-royalty, criss-crossing Europe from opera season to spa town, before finally settling in Pisa. Marie-Louise outlived her daughters and, despite pleas to return to her homeland, died in exile in 1851. Christophe’s overthrow, and his people’s desire to cultivate their land undisturbed after years of slavery, can be seen as the final act of the Haitian Revolution. In the 20th century, writers from Derek Walcott to Aimé Césaire have used his ‘tragedy’ to impart lessons for countries struggling to emerge from imperial rule. Yet, for Wilberforce at least, he remained a great man, ‘intent on improving his people, but [furnishing] a striking instance of the truth, that by too earnestly pursuing a good object you directly defeat it’. Paul Clammer is the author of Haiti: The Bradt Travel Guide (2012) and is researching a biography of Henry Christophe.

EDMUND IRONSIDE

The Brief but Brilliant Reign of Edmund Ironside Though he was king for just 222 days, the life and legacy of Edmund II, who ascended to the English throne 1,000 years ago this year, remain impressive, claims David McDermott.

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HE ACCOMPLISHMENTS of some are praised without reason, while those of others are consigned undeservedly to obscurity. One of the occupants of the latter, unenviable position is Edmund II Ironside, who ascended the English throne 1,000 years ago this April. Although he was held in high regard during the 11th and 12th centuries, Edmund, who was given the nickname ‘Ironside’ by the AngloSaxon Chronicle in recognition of his bravery, has since been eclipsed by those who came immediately before and after him. The brevity of Edmund’s kingship – a mere 222 days – goes a long way to explain why his reign is frequently treated as either an epilogue to that of Æthelred or a prologue to that of Cnut. The millennial anniversary of Edmund’s accession is an opportunity to redress the balance and, in so doing, relate the extraordinary story of a successful, energetic and indomitable warrior-king and understand better MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 41

EDMUND IRONSIDE the extraordinary period of English history that Edmund inhabited, albeit briefly. Edmund Ironside was born around 989 to Æthelred II, better known as ‘the Unready’ and his first wife Ælfgifu, the daughter of the Northumbrian Earl Thored. There was nothing inevitable about the ætheling (prince) becoming king. Edmund had two older brothers and in the following years Æthelred would produce at least three other sons by Ælfgifu and two by his second wife, Emma of Normandy, all of whom had a claim to the throne. For much of his life Edmund may have been seen as insurance for a smooth succession. With the death of his brother Athelstan in 1015, the second eldest brother having already died, Edmund became the senior ætheling and soon exhibited the force of will which was to characterise his kingship. Between late August and early September 1015 he rebelled against Æthelred by marrying the widow of the executed thegn (noble) Sigeferth, contrary to the king’s wishes.

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DMUND’S ACTION was illegal, as was releasing the widow from Malmesbury, where Æthelred had confined her. Edmund compounded his crime by travelling to territories in the East Midlands previously possessed by Sigeferth and his brother Morcar, which Æthelred had confiscated, and took them for himself. In marrying against Æthelred’s will and seizing the dead thegns’ properties Edmund may have been seeking to demonstrate his authority, ally himself with an influential Mercian family and provide himself with a power base from which to exert his claims to the throne. Edmund broke off his rebellion to return to London when he discovered that the Danish king Cnut had landed at Sandwich in Kent and was rampaging through Warwickshire. Despite breaking several of Æthelred’s laws, Edmund appears to have gone unpunished, leaving him free to demonstrate his potential as a military leader. Between the end of his rebellion and becoming king, Edmund assembled three armies against Cnut but, while he was successful in raising troops, none took to the field. Edmund removed his first army upon discovering that his brother-in-law, Ealdorman Eadric of Mercia, intended to betray him to the Danes. Edmund’s second army disbanded when Æthelred and the garrison of London did not meet its request to accompany them into battle and the third army dispersed when the king, who this time had joined them, learned of a plot to betray him and so returned to the safety of London. The dismissal of one army did not deter Edmund from raising another, nor did it weaken his resolve against Cnut. Intent on continuing English opposition to Danish attempts at conquest, Edmund formed an alliance with another of his brothers-in-law, Earl Uhtred of Northumbria. Together they attacked those towns which, according to the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury, had gone over to Cnut. When the Danish king attacked Uhtred’s territories, however, the earl abandoned his campaign with Edmund and negotiated a settlement with Cnut. Deprived of his ally, Edmund returned to London where, on April 23rd, 1016, Æthelred died. Edmund was elected king by those members of the witan (royal council) who were in the city and its chief citizens but he did nor remain within its walls for long. Anticipating the Danish siege of the city, Edmund left London before their arrival in early

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Above, Cnut, depicted on the Great West Window of Canterbury Cathedral, 15th century. Previous page: the genealogical roll of the kings of England, c.1300-40.

May and went to Wessex, the traditional seat of his family’s power, where he sought to exert his authority and raise support for his campaign against Cnut. Edmund spent approximately two months in Wessex where he soon showed himself to be an energetic military leader. The first of Edmund’s battles in Wessex was fought at Penselwood in Dorset, close to the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire. According to John of Worcester’s 12th-century Chronicle, Cnut abandoned his siege of London to follow Edmund hastily into Wessex, leaving the English king little time to raise an army. The contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not record the outcome of the battle, but Anglo-Norman historians, writing more than a century after the events they claim to record, are unanimous in awarding the victory of Penselwood to the English. In making Edmund victorious, the Anglo-Norman historians, as self-appointed apologists for pre-Norman England, may have been trying to repair the damage done to Anglo-Saxon pride in the wake of Hastings. The impression created in the Chronicle is that Edmund was eager for another encounter with Cnut, for the account of the second battle, at Sherston on June 26th, follows

immediately that of Penselwood. The position of Sherston in the western marches of Wessex, close to the shared borders of Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire, may indicate that the eastern parts of the region favoured Cnut. Further evidence that the loyalties of the English nobility were divided emerges from the composition of Cnut’s

Despite the absence of an undisputed victor, the Anglo-Norman historians, in their attempts to promote Edmund as a hero, awarded him a moral victory The mortuary chest of Edmund Ironside, at Winchester Cathedral.

forces. The Chronicle records that the Danes were supported by the otherwise unknown Ælfmær Darling and Ealdorman Eadric, who had defected to Cnut after failing to betray Edmund. To this list of named defectors John of Worcester adds that of Ælfgar son of ‘Meaw’ (seagull). The presence of Ælgar has particular significance, for he held several estates in counties that also contributed troops to Edmund’s army. If Ælfgar recruited from these areas, it illustrates further the divisions which existed among the Wessex nobility and highlights the fact that there were elements of English resistance to Edmund’s rule.

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WO ANGLO-NORMAN accounts of the battle indicate the extent to which Edmund’s reputation had grown by the 12th century. John of Worcester has Edmund arrange his troops according to the terrain and give them a rousing exhortation but his flattering depiction of Edmund’s generalship is taken from the Roman writer Sallust. It is probable that John of Worcester knew nothing more about Sherston than is contained in the sparse account in the Chronicle and that the details from Sallust were plagiarised to enliven the narrative and demonstrate John’s erudition. The most remarkable tale about Edmund’s conduct at Sherston comes from William of Malmesbury. Edmund, seeing his brother-in-law Eadric fighting with the Danes, hurled a spear at the treacherous ealdorman but missed its intended target, striking the man standing next to Eadric and transfixing a second Viking.

To accomplish such a feat Edmund would have needed superhuman strength, but it is more likely that William concocted the story to justify the use of the word ‘Ironside’ as referring to Edmund’s ‘great strength of mind and body’. Neither army at Sherston appears to have emerged the outright winner, with both sides withdrawing from combat at nightfall, after inflicting what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes as ‘great slaughter’ upon each other. Despite the absence of an undisputed victor at Sherston the Anglo-Norman historians, in their attempts to promote Edmund as an English hero, awarded him a moral victory. William of Malmesbury has the renegade West Saxons, perhaps impressed by Edmund’s performance in the battle, acknowledge him as their rightful lord. The account is unique to William – and therefore suspect – but the repeated references in the primary sources to Edmund raising armies in Wessex indicates that, as a result of his conduct at Sherston, Edmund’s position in the region became more secure. Cnut’s alleged behaviour after the battle also reflects well on Edmund. According to John of Worcester, Cnut ordered his men to leave their camp in silence under the cover of darkness to renew the siege of London. The manner of the withdrawal looks suspiciously like an attempt to avoid further engagement with the English. Sherston was a pivotal moment for Edmund Ironside, enhancing his reputation as a military leader, establishing him as an effective counter-force to Cnut’s attempts at conquest and cementing his authority as king. THE INCONCLUSIVE outcome of Sherston does not seem to have diluted Edmund’s desire to confront Cnut. He assembled another army and pursued the Danes to London. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, commissioned by Cnut’s widow to promote the Danish cause, describes the English army as ‘immense’, indicating that far from damaging his popularity, Sherston had enhanced it. With an army recruited in Wessex, Edmund cannily kept to the north of the Thames and remained undiscovered until he descended upon the city from the direction of what is now Tottenham. As he neared the city’s walls, Edmund would have encountered the moat, which the Danes had dug earlier in May, that surrounded the three sides of London not protected by the Thames. How Edmund freed London is not known; the Chronicle records that he rescued the inhabitants and drove the Danes to their ships. He may have successfully negotiated the siege works and fought off the Danes but a reference in the Chronicle to any fighting is absent. William of Malmesbury could be nearer to the truth with his claim that when they heard of Edmund’s approach the Danes raced to their ships. Edmund’s ability to instil terror in the hearts of his enemies was likely to be the product of William’s imagination; Cnut was unlikely to be able to conduct a siege and fight Edmund simultaneously and so saw retreat as his best option. If the account of William of Malmesbury is reliable, Edmund may have relieved London without delivering a blow against the Danes. Edmund did not remain in London for long. After two days he rode to Brentford in pursuit of the Danes, which suggests that he had intelligence of their whereabouts. Brentford, just nine miles to the west of London and on a Roman road, may have been chosen by Cnut as a base MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 43

EDMUND IRONSIDE installed a contingent of troops to prevent the Danes from from which to continue his attempt to take the city. The re-occupying Brentford. Upon hearing of Edmund’s advance Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Edmund crossed the into Kent the Danes, at least according to the Chronicle, Thames at Brentford and fought the Danes, suggesting that fled before him. the engagement occurred on the southern bank. However, The news of Edmund’s imminent arrival seems to have action could have been more widespread. The Anglosplit Cnut’s forces, with the Danish riders going west Norman narrative of Henry of Huntingdon has Edmund only to be met by Edmund at Otford in Kent. Unable to wage battle ‘at Brentford’, indicating that there was fighting withstand the English assault, the Danes fled east towards on both sides of the Thames. The possibility that Edmund Sheppey, pursued by Edmund. Yet instead of pressing his fought on both banks of the river has some support from a advantage, Edmund appears to have been persuaded by source that dates to within a couple of years of the battle. Eadric to allow the Danes to cross the Medway at Aylesford The Knútsdrápa, written to praise Cnut, credits the Danish and make good their escape. For not destroying the Danes king with causing a considerable amount of destruction at Brentford. It is to be expected that a poem created to compliment Cnut would exaggerate his achievements, but EDGAR SWEIN Forkbeard it is possible that it records an aspect of King of England 957-75 King of Denmark 986-1014 King of England 1013-14 the battle that has been omitted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The apparently conflicting accounts of where fighting occurred at Brentford can be reconciled if ÆLFGIFU = ÆTHELRED II Emma CNUT Ælfgifu = = = of York King of England of Normandy King of England of Northants they are combined, with the Danes being 978-1016 1016-35 dislodged by force from their position in King of Denmark Brentford. Fighting spread to the south1018-35 ern bank of the Thames when Edmund’s King of Norway forces pursued them. 1030-5 WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Cnut’s Æthelstan EDMUND Edwig Swein HARTHACNUT HAROLD praise-poem, the contemporary accounts died 1014 Ironside died 1035 King of England King of Denmark of the Battle of Brentford unanimously King of England 1035-42 1035-40 award victory to Edmund Ironside but 1016 King of England his success was hard won. Many of the 1040-2 sources report that part of Edmund’s army drowned when it overtook the rest of his forces. Their deaths may have been The genealogies when he had the chance, Edmund was criticised by the the result of carelessness, but the Chronicle also reports of the English Chronicle for having made a ‘no more unwise decision’. that the men were eager for loot. The alleged greed of these and Danish royal With the benefit of hindsight, William of Malmesbury troops suggests that they did not belong among Edmund’s families. summarised the effect of Edmund permitting the Danes to regular recruits but were mercenaries. A passage in the depart unscathed as a ‘disaster for himself and England’. Knútsdrápa referring to Cnut taking the lives of Frisians may even explain where they originated. The possibility that the English army at Brentford contained mercenaries DMUND RETURNED to Wessex, where he remained cannot be corroborated, but if Edmund had employed such until hearing the Danes had pillaged Mercia. He men he could be said to have adopted the policy of kings appears to have raised another army quickly and Alfred and Æthelred, both of whom had swords-for-hire in seems to have known the location of the Danes, for their service. The affect of Brentford on Edmund’s forces the Chronicle records that he followed them returning to can be inferred from him returning to Wessex to recruit their ships, overtook them and confronted their army in another army. It is probable that the losses incurred from Essex on October 18th at Assandun, possibly Ashingdon accidental drowning and actual fighting depleted Edmund’s or Ashdon. Edmund’s army may have been the largest he troops to such a degree that he was compelled to replace assembled, evidence that he had support from outside them. In his absence, however, the Danes resumed their Wessex. Among those killed at Assandun were Ulfcytel of siege of London, perhaps making the Battle of Brentford East Anglia and Ealdorman Godwine of Lindsey. At some only a qualified English success. point in the battle, Eadric deserted Edmund, accompanied While Edmund was in Wessex, the Danes encountered by his followers and that section of the army under his fierce resistance from the Londoners and consequently command. Eadric’s departure sparked a series of English abandoned their siege in order to pursue a raid in neighdesertions, which were probably significant in contributing bouring Mercia, possibly in early September. Laden with to Edmund’s sole defeat. The fighting only came to an end, plunder, the Danes divided their forces: their ships sailed according to the Encomium, when it became too dark for along the River Medway, while the Danish horsemen, the Danes to pursue the fleeing English. The Chronicle’s accompanying their stolen herds, travelled by land. As description of the English dead as ‘all the nobility of the Cnut’s army made its way into Kent, Edmund returned English race’ is an exaggeration but it does suggest that from Wessex, crossing the Thames at Brentford in pursuit. Edmund’s losses were perceived to be profound and, despite The absence of any reference to Edmund encountering his determination to continue the war, Edmund’s ability to resistance at the river crossing may indicate that he had campaign against Cnut may have been compromised.

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in London, but this is improbable as the Danes had established their winter quarters in the city. Henry of Huntingdon has Edmund die in Oxford, though it is unlikely that Edmund would be in a part of the country recently ceded to Cnut, especially one in which Eadric wielded power. It is more probable that Edmund died in Wessex, perhaps at a royal manor close to Glastonbury, where he was buried.

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Cnut presents a cross to the New Minster Abbey, Winchester, manuscript, c.1020.

Defeated but not deterred, Edmund withdrew to Gloucestershire intent on raising yet another army but his plans were forestalled by Eadric, who advised him to begin peace negotiations with Cnut, who had followed Edmund into Gloucestershire. Initially unwilling, Edmund was eventually persuaded by his counsellors’ unanimous support for talks to begin. Cnut, according to the Encomium, also desired peace. Unable to win a war of attrition, Cnut agreed to meet Edmund on Alney, then an island in the Severn next to the village of Deerhurst. There, Edmund and Cnut agreed to become partners and pledge-brothers. It was also determined that Edmund should rule in Wessex, while Cnut was to have the rest of England, though it is likely that such a division was intended to be temporary, with the death of Edmund or Cnut releasing the other from their promises. In retaining Wessex, the richest region of the country, Edmund had the better part of the arrangement. Edmund had little time to enjoy the peace, dying soon afterwards on St Andrew’s Day, November 30th, though it is unsure where. John of Worcester places Edmund’s death

HE CHRONICLE does not explain how Edmund died, but the Anglo-Norman narratives have increasingly fantastical accounts, all of which implicate Eadric. William of Malmesbury alleges that Eadric persuaded Edmund’s chamberlains to drive an iron hook into the king’s ‘hinder parts’ when answering the call of nature, while Henry of Huntingdon has Eadric make his son hide in a privy and strike a knife into Edmund’s ‘private parts’. The most gruesome story comes from Geoffrei Gaimar, who has Edmund skewered on the toilet by ‘the-bow-that-never-misses’. Wherever and however he died, Edmund was laid to rest beside his grandfather, King Edgar, before the high altar. Their tombs, along with others, were destroyed in the Reformation but it is just possible that Cnut had Edmund translated to Winchester, where his remains may rest in one of several ossuaries. The brevity of Edmund’s reign has led to him being overlooked, but he should be accorded the recognition that is rightfully his. In the space of six months he proved himself to be a talented military leader, possessed of an indomitable will. He summoned five armies, relieved the siege of London and won all but one of his engagements against the Danes. His single defeat was the result not of incompetence but betrayal. Edmund did not live long enough to enact any laws, reform the Church or transform the country’s military structures, but his brief reign saw the reappearance of something that had been absent in Anglo-Saxon England for several generations: a dynamic, resolute and successful warrior-king. Edmund also left a lasting legacy. Through his grand-daughter Margaret, Queen of Scots, his greatgreat grandson was Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England. Elizabeth II, descended from the Plantagenet Edward II, is therefore also a descendant of Edmund. Several rulers are known to history as ‘the Great’ or ‘the Magnificent’ but, of all English kings, only Edmund II has had his bravery and strength of will immortalised with the unique soubriquet ‘Ironside’.

David McDermott is a PhD candidate and a part-time lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Winchester.

FURTHER READING M. Swanton (trans), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (Phoenix Press, 2000). A. Campbell (trans), Encomium Reginae (Royal Historical Society, 1949). Ryan Lavelle, Æthelred II: King of the English 978-1016 (History Press, 2002). M.K. Lawson, Cnut: England’s Viking King (History Press, 2004). Ann Williams, Æthelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King (Hambledon and London, 2003). MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 45

| COMETS FOR CENTURIES comets were believed to be harbingers of doom and destruction: the very fact that they could not be predicted meant that they were interpreted as signs and portents. But in 1705 the astronomer Edmond Halley turned comets into common or garden objects orbiting the sun by claiming to have identified one which reappeared every 75 years or so and announcing that it would return in 1758. The prediction was taken up by Newton in the second edition of his Principia (1713) and Halley later revised it to late 1758 or early 1759. We are used to seeing lists of all the occasions on which the comet we now know as ‘Halley’s’ has appeared (at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, for example) and so, at first sight, Halley’s prediction looks pretty straightforward: perhaps he just looked at a list of comets through history and recognised a pattern? Not so: comets which are visible to the naked eye are common; there is one every year or so. The time it takes Halley’s Comet to orbit the sun varies between 74 and 79 years, so there is no simple pattern to its reappearance. Halley’s prediction required two things. First, he needed to be able to accurately identify a particular comet by its unique path through the sky. Because there were only sound measurements of the comet's path from its last three appearances, only these could be used as evidence. Second, his prediction required an explanation as to why the comet’s return seemed so irregular. Halley argued that the comet was slowed down or speeded up

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The first return of Halley’s Comet Halley’s Comet will not be visible again until 2061. But how did scientists discover how to accurately predict its return, asks David Wootton? Down to Earth: Comet over Nuremberg, 1680, by Johann Jakob von Sandrart.

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depending on how close it passed to Jupiter and the other planets. As a consequence, he recognised that he could only make a very rough estimation of when it would next appear. In 1758 a team of French astronomers – Alexis Clairaut, Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute (a woman) – set out to improve on Halley’s prediction by laboriously calculating the relative positions of the sun, the comet and Jupiter, not just when the comet was close to Jupiter but throughout its orbit. (This is a three-body problem – the location of Jupiter has a continuous slight, but not insignificant, effect on both the location of the sun and the comet.) They calculated that the comet would make its nearest approach to the sun in mid-April 1759, give or take a month. They were right, it reached perihelion (the point at which it comes closest to the sun) in mid-March. On January 21st it was observed with the naked eye by the French astronomer Charles Messier, but he kept his discovery secret until April 7th, only announcing it when this sighting was confirmed by another report, dating from as early as Christmas Day 1758, by a German amateur with a telescope. Halley was vindicated. But it was not just Halley who was vindicated; it was also, more importantly, Newton. His Principia reaches its final climax with the claim that the orbits of comets obey his laws of gravitation. The return of Halley’s Comet was confirmation that Newton’s theory worked and, at the same time, was a refutation of alternative theories. If the comet had simply obeyed Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, it would have returned at precisely regular intervals. René Descartes had imagined comets bouncing off the whirlpools that surrounded every star, travelling through space from solar system to solar system, never to return or retrace their routes. There were still Cartesians to be found in 1759; had Halley’s Comet returned a few decades earlier we would celebrate it as decisive refutation of the Cartesian theory.

a curved path as they neared the sun and claimed that this path was, like the path of a projectile, a parabola; but he did not imagine that comets follow the curve on and on until they orbit the sun. An extraordinarily bright comet appeared in 1680 and headed straight for the sun and, of course, became invisible as it got close to it. Shortly afterwards another comet appeared heading away from the sun on a roughly parallel course. But were these two comets? John Flamsteed in England and Georg Samuel Doerfel in Germany suggested that the second comet was the same as the first, now returning after circling around the sun. Newton at first rejected this suggestion as paradoxical but, as he developed his theory of gravity, he quickly adopted it and in the first edition of Principia (1687) the parabolic path of the comet of 1680 around the sun (calculated using data purloined from Flamsteed) became the final flourish with which he demonstrated his theory of gravity, although he made no attempt to predict when the comet would return. In the third edition he adopted a mistaken prediction by Halley, that it would return every 575 years; in fact it will not return for another 9,000 years. Theory before fact? The return of Halley’s Comet thus illustrates two important principles: the first is that all observations are theoryrelated. Nobody could see that Halley’s Comet returns every 75 years or so before Newton’s theory of gravity helped them interpret the evidence. As Thomas Kuhn said: ‘The so-called facts prove[d] never to be mere facts, independent of existing belief and theory.’ Second, this does not mean a single fact may not be enough to refute a well-established theory. I stress this because the modern history of science is wedded to what is called the Duhem-Quine thesis, according to which facts can never refute theories. The return of Halley’s Comet was an effective refutation of both Kepler and Descartes. Cartesians had developed elaborate theories which successfully predicted the movement of the planets by claiming they were carried along like driftwood in a whirlpool, but these theories could not explain how the path of a comet could be so different from that of a nearby planet – both should be carried along together. Newton was not right (as Einstein would show), but his theory worked well and none of the others did. Thus the return of Halley’s Comet is not only a refutation of Cartesianism, it is also a refutation of the Duhem-Quine thesis. As Karl Popper insisted in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), facts can disprove theories. The Cartesians knew they had lost the argument; unfortunately modern historians of science (who claim that arguments can never be won or lost by appeals to the evidence) are not so perceptive. In the years after 1680 it became apparent to Newton that he could formulate a new science. What we need now is a new history of science; one that acknowledges the significance of the return of Halley’s Comet.

What we need is a new history of science; one that acknowledges the significance of the return of Halley’s Comet

In the heavens Before 1680 the prevailing assumption was that comets have short lives. According to Aristotle, comets were phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, along with rainbows, meteors and the Northern Lights. Often credited as the first to mount a systematic attack on this view was the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe who, after the appearance of the Great Comet in 1577, showed that it was in the heavens and that, as it could move through the heavens, it must have been cutting through the solid spheres which, according to Aristotelian philosophers, carried the planets. Later, Kepler assumed that comets travelled in straight lines. Although he showed that planets move not in circles but ellipses, it never occurred to him that comets, too, might orbit the sun (despite the fact that he invented the very language we use to discuss the subject: the words orbit and perihelion are his coinings). In 1664 Giovanni Domenico Cassini argued that the path of one comet suggested that it was in orbit around the star Sirius and thought this might explain why comets swam into sight and then disappeared, seemingly forever. Johannes Hevelius suggested in 1688 that comets followed

David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. His latest book is The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Allen Lane, 2015). MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 47

KIBBO KIFT

The Strange Tale of the Kibbo Kift Kindred The Boy Scout movement produced a little-known offshoot of ‘intellectual Barbarians’, whose charismatic leader had dreams of overcoming the existential crises of the 20th century, writes Annebella Pollen.

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S PART OF A TRANCHE of MI5 documents recently released by the National Archives to mark the centenary of the First World War, secret correspondence concerning investigations into ‘Red Boy Scouts’ came to light. Who were these scouts suspected of communist sympathies? One particular figure under scrutiny, John Hargrave, described in official papers as a ‘half-caste Hungarian’, stands out. Hargrave was born in 1894 to Gordon Hargrave, a Quaker and professional landscape painter, and Babette (neé Bing) of HungarianJewish descent. He enjoyed little in the way of formal education but showed great aptitude for drawing from an early age and, while still in his teens, began to sell cartoons to newspapers and illustrate books professionally, a career that would continue his whole life. Hargrave joined the Boy Scouts in 1910, a year after the movement was founded, discovering a second passion. Hargrave’s enthusiasm for the outdoor aspect of scouting – the camping, primitivist play and campfire ceremony that went under the heading of ‘woodcraft’ – far outweighed his interest in the other concerns of Robert Baden-Powell’s new organisation: those of paramilitary drill and preparedness, empire-building and Christianity. Hargrave identified more with the ideas of the artist, novelist and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, whose system of socalled primitive training for boys, modelled on a mythical ideal of a heroic Native American and infused with fantasy and romance, predated the Boy Scouts but was adopted, if not plagiarised, by the organisation. 48 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Top: John Hargrave, 1929. Above: Hargrave as White Fox Spirit Chief with children at Dexter Farm Tribal Training Camp II, 1928. Photo by Angus McBean. Right: a Kinsman on a rocky peak, Switzerland, 1930, also by McBean.

Scout patrol groups led by Hargrave were marked by his experimental, mystical, Seton-inspired methods and his first full-length publication, Lonecraft, prepared in 1913 while he was still a teenager, was rich in songs inspired by Native Americans, sign language and nature lore. Illustrated throughout with Hargrave’s distinctive line drawings, Lonecraft demonstrated to senior Scout leaders his communications skills and abilities and he was appointed as

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KIBBO KIFT staff artist in 1914. While happily accepting this prestigious position, Hargrave would later reflect that he was inspired to write Lonecraft because he felt that scouting was already drifting away from the woodcraft trail and was becoming too concerned with bugle-blowing, military parades and indoor activities more suited to Sunday school.

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ARGRAVE’S CONVICTION that the Scouts were following the wrong path was consolidated by his experience in the First World War. Much to his own surprise, given his Quaker roots, Hargrave signed up to serve in a non-combatant position as a stretcher-bearer in the Royal Army Medical Corps. The devastating loss of life he observed first-hand during the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915 would have a deep and lasting effect on his understanding of the world. The consequences of Hargrave’s war experiences would also affect his relationship with the Scouts. When Hargrave returned to scouting, invalided after his war service, he found it wholly in the hands of older ex-military men with far too little of the woodcraft aspect remaining. As he put it: ‘The backwoodsmanship had gone. In its place one found the curate, the squire, and Major Toothbrush. The boy had been taken into the woods by his Wicked Uncles, folded in the Union Jack, and smothered.’ Hargrave was welcomed back in 1917 with a senior position in the organisation, as Commissioner for Woodcraft and Camping. As he surmised, the promotion had been intended to achieve ‘the effect of bridling a spirited horse’. The result was quite the opposite. Hargrave wrote many independently minded articles for scouting papers, promoting woodcraft training. His articles in the postwar years grew publicly critical of the direction of the Scout movement and even became daringly disloyal about the Chief Scout, Baden-Powell, himself. Hargrave published his most ambitious book to date, The Great War Brings it Home: The Natural Reconstruction of an Unnatural Existence in 1919. It added practical detail and philosophical underpinning to much that was familiar from his previous books on primitive methods of camp life and ceremony. What distinguished this work, however, was its ferocious political critique of the mechanised modern city and the ‘over-civilised’ inhabitants of 20th-century urban cultures. ‘Civilisation’ was singled out as the cause of a cultural disease that had been brought to a climax by the Great War. Across nearly 400 sprawling and indigestible pages, Hargrave set about proposing solutions. He bemoaned the fact that the youngest, fittest and finest men had been slaughtered on the battlefield. He concluded that there were but two possible methods of future redemption: to train the children of the slain and to cultivate new physically, mentally and spiritually fit and trained clusters of men and women to evolve a new kind of human race. Hargrave defended his approach by recourse to history: ‘Every effete civilisation must crumble away. The only hope is that a new and virile offshoot may arise to strike out a line of its own.’ He continued: ‘Nowadays, owing to the fact that modern civilisation has penetrated throughout the world, there are no “Barbarians” to sweep us away. Therefore the cure must be applied internally – and we must produce the “Barbarian” stock ourselves.’ Hargrave claimed in his 1919 book that he had no interest in establishing his own organisation but, in that same year, he covertly strengthened his plans to do just that.

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Ernest Thompson Seton, early 20th century.

Together with a group of close friends he began to plan ways to redefine the woodcraft element of the scout movement. By 1920 Hargrave had begun to categorise ‘the woodcraft kindred’ within the Scouts as a ‘movement within a movement’. Twinned with his increasingly uncompromising and subversive articles in scouting magazines, however, it became clear that this aim was untenable: public spats ensued with senior officials, on and off the page, all the way up to Baden-Powell. Hargrave later reflected: ‘I was slanged up hill and down dale as a “dangerous man”, as a “pantheist”, as an “atheist”, as a “fool” and a “knave”. It was splendid.’ The scale of support from left-wing groups, who opposed imperialism and militarism in the Scouts, also troubled the organisation’s senior members. Hargrave was reported to MI5 as non-patriotic by Hubert S. Martin, the International Commissioner of the Boy Scout Association and regular informant of Major W.A. Phillips, a senior intelligence officer. In Martin’s view, the woodcraft movement was ‘communist in its aims’, noting that Scout officers ‘believe them to be in relation with the young communist movement emanating from Moscow’.

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HE formal expulsion from the Scouts that Hargrave had surely engineered took place in 1921. He was, in his own words, ‘excommunicated’. BadenPowell would later characterise Hargrave in private correspondence as ‘a clever young fellow in a way, good at writing and sketching, but eccentric, swollen-headed, communistic’. For conservatives such as Baden-Powell and his correspondent, the colonial administrator Lord Syndenham, the spectre of Hargrave’s political leanings hung over him like an ominous red cloud. This association, however, did him no harm among his socialist colleagues. The accelerating clash and final expulsion had done much to raise Hargrave’s profile and many left the Scouts to follow him, often bringing their troop of children along, too. In the months and years spent establishing the ‘woodcraft kindred’ before the split was made final, Hargrave had established his reputation as, and strengthened his connections with, progressive thinkers and social reformers. These were variously regrouped into active members and advisers in the formation of his new organisation, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. What was the Kibbo Kift? Hargrave asserted in typically flamboyant style that such a question was ultimately unanswerable, yet it was one that needed to be asked again and again by group members as well as strangers. Beginning with the challenge of their unfamiliar name – taken from an antiquarian dictionary of colloquial Cheshire terminology and meaning ‘proof of strength’ – and continuing

For conservatives such as BadenPowell, the spectre of Hargrave’s political leanings hung over him like an ominous red cloud

Kathleen Milnes (Blue Falcon), a Kinlog illustration, 1928-9.

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KIBBO KIFT Chickadee totem, c.1928.

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into their outlandish visual style and remarkably diverse and ever-shifting purposes and practices, the Kibbo Kift’s sometimes bewildering aims and methods ranged across health and handicraft, pacifism and propaganda, myth and magic, education and economics. Kibbo Kift was always much more than an all-ages, co-educational alternative to the Scouts. The wide range of the group’s interests and the large scale of its ambition was necessitated, they believed, by the peculiar conditions of their time: dynamic new dreams were needed to overcome the nightmares of 20th-century existence. From the earliest days of the Kibbo Kift, its ambitions were far reaching. There were pledges ‘to counteract the ill effects of industrialisation and overcrowding’ by establishing open-air camping and woodcraft opportunities to inculcate physical, mental and spiritual development in children; to foster craft training and to reorganise industry along non-competitive lines; to establish family groups trained in woodcraft principles in order to create ‘a heritage of health’; to aim for international disarmament, an international educational policy, international freedom of trade, an international currency system, the abolition of secret treaties and the establishment of a World Council, including ‘every civilised and primitive nation or race’.

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HE ambitious policies of the Kibbo Kift represented a vast global project more suited to agreements between governments than a few hundred part-time reformers, or what one former member would snootily dismiss as ‘clerks, minor civil servants, garage hands and teachers living in the Home Counties’. The establishment of a League of Nations Union, as well as H.G. Wells’ more far-reaching call for a World State, were key touchstones for Kibbo Kift policies that left behind the imperialism of the Scouts and aimed for a new worldview, indeed, for nothing less than ‘a World Culture which will digest the narrow nationalisms and make a common ligature between the races’. How could this be achieved? The Kibbo Kift was ambitious but lacked all means to implement its ideas. Membership numbers were small and resources few. Kinsfolk were earnest but ultimately amateur. Hargrave had previously developed detailed and refined methods in his writings for woodcraft training and camp life and so the practices of the Kibbo Kift emerged as something of a hybrid, where serious political ambitions for world peace and world leadership mingled awkwardly with totem poles, archery and hiking. The social and political purpose of the Kibbo Kift’s outdoor methods, archaic language and picturesque ceremony was not at all clear to those who encountered the organisation for the first time. While it undoubtedly engendered a mystique that prompted curiosity, Hargrave and other members were also regularly required to explain

and defend its purpose and ultimate aims. Hargrave argued that ‘woodcraft lore and handicraft is not merely a pastime or a sport with The Kindred. It is a way of life and a method of self-training’. He continued: It is a necessary break-away, a ritualistic exodus, from Metropolitan standards of civilisation, from pavements, sky-signs, shops, noise, glitter, smoke … More than that, it is a preparation for active service in the World; a drawing apart for a time to allow body, mind and spirit to regain equipoise.’ Members wondered if their camp, hike and craft activities could bring the effects promised, but Hargrave reassured them, claiming ‘one of the greatest movements in human affairs came into active operation towards the close of 1920’. The Kibbo Kift attracted an impressive range of campaigners, writers, politicians and visionaries, who lent their endorsement to the group. Its advisory council boasted Nobel laureates (Rabindranath Tagore and Maurice Maeterlinck), Liberal and Labour Members of Parliament (Norman Angell and Herbert Dunnico), former suffragettes (Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence), eminent scientists (J. Arthur Thompson and Julian Huxley) and progressive thinkers in general (Havelock Ellis and Patrick Geddes). The most impressive of all the names was H.G. Wells, who at the time was Britain’s most famous novelist. Together, the council’s assembled authority displayed the Kibbo Kift’s intellectual and political allegiances and legitimised the organisation’s ambitions. Above: the remodelled Kibbo Kift uniform, marking a shift in the organisation’s identity, 1931. Right: Green shirts graffiti, 1937.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE of how radical social reform could be brought about by outdoor pursuits and arts and crafts was partly resolved by Hargrave’s introduction in 1924 to the new economic theory of social credit. Developed by a British engineer, Major C.H. Douglas, the theory was based on the principle that society’s production and consumption were out of balance and that the total cost of wages was always lower than the collective cost of goods produced. Social credit aimed to create a better balance between production and consumption by bridging the difference. It aimed to give consumers more purchasing power through the adoption of a National Dividend, payable to each and every citizen. It also demanded the readjustment in the price of goods to reflect more fairly their production values and it argued that control of finance should be wrested from bankers, who profited unfairly from the current arrangements. Hargrave’s exposure to economics was to transform the Kibbo Kift. At first the recommendation that ‘it will be well if Kinsfolk keep abreast of the evolution of economic ideas’ was merely one of many activities encouraged, from the study of prehistoric remains and the writing MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 53

KIBBO KIFT of mummers’ plays to the making of ‘Indian teepees’. Economic theory came to form an increasingly dominant role in the Kibbo Kift during the latter half of the 1920s, leading to serious rifts among the membership. For many Kinsfolk, who had joined because they were attracted to the outdoor life, the shift to a more political focus was unwelcome. To some members, however, its addition helped resolve one of the Kibbo Kift’s key shortcomings: how exactly were they to solve the manifold social problems of the world? The addition of an economic theory – itself sufficiently new and unorthodox to fit with Kinsfolk’s largely oppositional interests – provided one answer. As Hargrave put it during this period: ‘The Kin came to see itself not as a mere camping and rambling club, but as an instrument having internal incubational and external operative function.’

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THROUGHOUT the 1920s the Kibbo Kift continued to camp and hike in typically flamboyant and ceremonial style, but the economic crisis at the end of the decade – as well as dwindling membership – prompted a radical rethink. A scheme for a fundamental re-organisation was announced in 1931. As part of this, all archaic terminology was dropped. Kin roles that had been mythically styled as Scribe and Tallykeeper were renamed more prosaically as General Secretary and General Treasurer. Personal totem poles and the Native American-inspired cry of ‘How!’ were abandoned. No ceremonial outfits were permitted and the hooded camp costume was redesigned along sharper, more military lines. Hargrave called this process the beginning of ‘normalisation’. He declared that the new scheme:

Y 1932, every one of these promises had been broken and yet, to Hargrave, continuity remained, even with the transformation to full political status as the Social Credit Party, which is what the remains of the Kibbo Kift would eventually become in the late 1930s. Although the Green Shirts and Social Credit Party groups still camped at annual National Assemblies throughout the 1930s, their methods moved towards more explicitly political forms of expression, including graffiti, throwing bricks and firing arrows through the windows of 10 and 11 Downing Street and burning effigies of Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England. This shift was not just a product of Hargrave’s particular personality traits; many peace movements constructed in the utopian moment after the Great War shifted to a more hard-line position by the 1930s, following the dramatic economic turbulence of the 1920s and the rise internationally of political extremism. Hargrave’s dizzying policy shifts, outlandish belief systems and regular rebranding meant his post-Kibbo Kift enterprises were always on a precarious footing. When the Public Order Act of 1937 banned political uniforms, this precipitated the terminal decline of what few elements remained from the covenant of 1920. Hargrave’s last stand in politics, as a parliamentary candidate for Stoke Newington in the 1950 General Election, resulted in a lost deposit. He closed down what remained of his movement the following year stating that it ‘must vanish’. Hargrave had written in 1927 that:

Sweeps aside all hindrances – all those ‘strange’, ‘queer’ and ‘fantastic’ aspects ... that confused and bemused the ordinary citizen, slowed down recruiting, and eventually tended to produce nothing but a clique, a little coterie of Kin-companions, without significance, and a sheer waste of time and energy.

The Kindred changes ... illogically, inconsistently, as it may seem, with the non-logical forces of Life and Death. What it was yesterday it is not to-day; and what it is to-day it cannot be tomorrow. Its continuity and stability are here, in the cradle-bed of the emotions.

The organisation was transformed. Within a year the Kibbo Kift was almost unrecognisable; a year after that, following further standardisation of policy and presentation, it had effectively ceased to exist. Nothing but the colour of the costume remained in the beret, military shirt and grey trousers of the street-marching organisation, now known as the Green Shirts, who paraded with drums and flags through city centres nationwide, demanding the National Dividend. In 1920, while still in formation and a thorn in the side of the Scout movement, Kibbo Kift had set out a manifesto of everything they did not want to be, inspired by the organisation they wished to break apart. Hargrave summarised it thus:

For Hargrave, a kernel remained in place across each of his diverse, if ultimately unsuccessful projects: a powerful belief in the supremacy of his singular vision, whatever the shape of the organisation built around it.

We – the Kibbo Kift – are determined that we will not organise a new movement, we will not have a great Headquarters in London … we will not set down and define in writing our ‘aims and methods’. We will not have factory-made medals and badges, protected, registered and patented, we will not have bands and bugles and parades, we will not march about the streets … 54 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Spirit Mask, c.1928.

Annebella Pollen’s book The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians is published by Donlon Books. Her co-curated exhibition of the same name is at Whitechapel Gallery, London until March 13th, 2016.

FURTHER READING Mary Davis, Fashioning a New World: A History of the Woodcraft Folk (Holyoake Books, 2000). John Hargrave, The Great War Brings It Home: The Natural Reconstruction of an Unnatural Existence (Constable, 1919). Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919-1939 (Penguin, 2009). John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements 1883-1940 (Croom Helm, 1977).

REVIEWS

Tim Stanley revels in the rise and fall of the Julio-Claudians Judith Flanders enjoys Dutch urban culture • Eleri Lynn on fashion victims

CICERO’S reputation was not high early in the 20th century, but things have changed substantially in recent years. This development has been driven less by biographical approaches than by a range of new approaches to the corpus of his writings, which have revealed their seriousness and originality and, by so doing, illuminated the intellectual and social culture of the late Roman Republic more broadly. Cicero’s speeches kept their place on university curricula more robustly than his other writings and it is perhaps unsurprising that work on the speeches led the charge in Cicero’s re-evaluation. Ann Vasaly’s Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (1992) was a milestone in reading Cicero’s speeches in their social and physical contexts. Anthony Corbeill’s Controlling Laughter: Political Humour in the Late Roman Republic (1996) and Cynthia Damon’s The Mask of the Parasite: a Pathology of Roman Patronage (1997) engage extensively with Cicero’s speeches in their exploration of Roman social practices. Brian Krostenko’s Cicero, Catullus and the Language of Social Performance (2001) and Sarah Stroup’s Catullus, Cicero and a Society of Patrons: the Generation of the Text (2010) place Cicero within the intellectual context of the late Republic, with its combination of patronage, reciprocity and competition, and Jon Hall’s Cicero’s Use of Judicial Theatre (2014) explores performative aspects of his rhetoric. 56 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

xxxxxxxxxx Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 bc), 1st century bc.

SIGNPOSTS

The Power of Rhetoric Catherine Steel traces the incredible longevity of Cicero’s great corpus of works, the study of which has helped to illuminate the intellectual and social culture of the late Roman Republic.

Cicero’s role in creating his own biographical tradition has been a particular focus, notably in John Dugan’s Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-fashioning in the Rhetorical Works (2005), while Ingo Gildenhard’s Creative Eloquence: the Construction of Reality in Cicero’s Speeches (2010) attempts to extract recurrent sociological and theological constructions underpinning the oratorical corpus. This work stands alongside studies focused wholly on rhetoric. Wilfried Stroh’s influential Taxis und Taktik: die advokatische Dispositionskunst in Ciceros Gerichtsreden (1975) was followed by James May’s Trials of Character: the Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (1988) and Christopher Craig’s analysis of Ciceronian techniques of argument in Form as Argument in Cicero’s Speeches: a Study of Dilemma (1993). Bruce Frier’s The Rise of the Roman Jurists: Studies in Cicero’s Pro Caecina (1985) examined the relationship between Cicero’s oratory and Roman legal practice. Andrew Riggsby’s Crime and Community in Ciceronian Rome (1999) extended the inquiry to criminal law, as well as reviewing the role of political factionalism in determining jury verdicts. He concluded that Roman jurors were influenced primarily by intricate questions of law. Underpinning this has been a renewed interest in the traditional commentary format, with more philologically focussed editions, such as Dominic Berry’s on Pro Sulla (1996), Andrew Dyck’s on Pro Caelio (2013) and Luca Grillo’s

on De Prouinciis Consularibus (2015), now supplemented by historically driven editions (particularly in Oxford University Press’ Clarendon Ancient History series), including Robert Kaster’s Pro Sestio (2006) and by Lynn Fotheringham’s exploration of Ciceronian syntax in her edition of Pro Milone (2013). A further impetus to the study of Cicero’s speeches has been increased interest in oratory as part of Roman political life. Fergus Millar’s The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (1998) argued for the importance of the Roman people in political decision-making and highlighted the role of public meetings and the speeches given there. Millar’s work has been the object of intense discussion, to which Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp’s Reconstructing the Roman Republic (2010) is an invaluable guide; Cicero’s speeches, as the only

If Cicero’s reputation was not high early in the 20th century, that has changed substantially surviving examples of political oratory from the Roman Republic, are important pieces of evidence for this debate, particularly in Robert Morstein-Marx’s Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (2004). As yet there has not been any major reassessment of Cicero’s importance as a political figure. Cicero’s treatises have emerged decisively from a long period in which they were largely viewed as sources for lost Hellenistic philosophy. The essays by Beard and by Schofield in the 1986 edition of the Journal of Roman Studies, on De Diuinatione, and Jonathan Powell’s 1988 commentary on De Senectute were important moments in shifting perceptions in anglophone scholarship. Cicero’s originality as a philosopher has been a recurrent topic: important con-

tributions include Matthew Fox’s Cicero’s Philosophy of History (2007). For the links between Cicero’s treatises and his intellectual activity, there is Yelena Baraz’ A Written Republic: Cicero’s Philosophical Politics (2012). This has many points of contact with recent work on the speeches and, in general, the generic boundaries between different parts of the Ciceronian corpus are being crossed increasingly in the belief that it operates in many respects as a single entity. Cicero’s political philosophy and, in particular, his analysis of the Roman res publica at a time of crisis has been the object of particular attention. Cicero’s works play a prominent part in Dean Hammer’s Roman Political Thought: From Cicero to Augustine (2014). Jed Atkins’ Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason (2013) offers a sustained re-reading of Cicero’s De Re Publica and De Legibus. Joy Connolly, in The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (2007) and The Life of Roman Republicanism (2015), puts forward a sustained argument for the relevance of Cicero’s model of debate in contemporary democracies. Finally, Cicero’s letters, whose text was placed on a secure foundation in the editions of Shackleton Bailey from the 1960s onwards, have been explored as texts as conscious of their persuasive and autobiographical potential as any of Cicero’s other writings. Jon Hall demonstrated how they function as means of communication within the elite in Politeness and Politics in Cicero’s Letters (2009) and Sean Connell’s Philosophical Life in Cicero’s Letters (2014) draws on the upsurge of interest in Cicero’s philosophical writing to show how philosophy is embedded in his correspondence. Peter White’s Cicero in Letters: Epistolary Relations in the Late Republic (2010) is a major overview of the entire corpus, with insights into the extent to which it is the product of editorial intervention by the (postCiceronian) creator(s) of the different collections of letters. Catherine Steel

SPQR

A History of Ancient Rome Mary Beard Profile Books 606pp £25

MARY BEARD traces the history of Rome’s first millennium from its notional foundation by Romulus in 753 bc to Caracalla’s decision in ad 212 to extend citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. This is, by any standard, a grand narrative and one that few current scholars would have the confidence to offer. Beard, however, does so with brio and is a singularly engaging guide. Many will have reason to feel gratitude to the

Beard traces the history of Rome’s first millennium ... with brio and is a singularly engaging guide author for a thoroughly enlightening and consistently enjoyable work. SPQR begins not at the very beginning but in the 63 bc consulship of the great orator Cicero and in the throes of his struggle to put down the rebellion of Catiline. To Beard, this episode encapsulates much of the crisis of the final years of the Roman Republic, but it also exemplifies the questions that the historian must confront: was Catiline the decadent aristocrat and public enemy of Cicero’s imagination or the champion of the downtrodden that he claimed to be?

Was the Catilinarian revolt an existential threat to the Roman state or a convenient way to add lustre to the year of Cicero’s consulship? Beard sets out the evidence economically, introduces some telling analogies with recent political experience and leaves it to the reader to decide. From Cicero and Catiline, Beard travels back in time to the origins of Rome and to a period when the literary record offers markedly little by way of authentic evidence. Yet there is a story to tell here. For the legends of Aeneas and Ascanius, of Romulus and Remus tell us a great deal about how those who developed them conceived of the city of Rome and the many different peoples who came to settle there. Archaeology, too, offers some fascinating insights: an early Roman cremation urn in the shape of a hut is a wonderful complement to Virgil’s description of Aeneas stooping to enter the house of King Evander on the Palatine. SPQR is essentially a political and military history. Two of the 12 chapters concentrate on issues of social history and Beard’s expertise as a religious historian informs and enlivens many sections of the narrative, but her principal focus is on the rise of Rome, the city’s internal political struggles, the acquisition and management of empire and the changes that empire brought to the city itself. Along the way there is a consistently spirited narrative of the Roman Republic and, in particular, of the great names associated with its final century: Sulla, Marius, Caesar, Pompey and, of course, Cicero. Yet there are also splendid stories from the margins. I particularly relished the actor on stage in Ascoli Piceno at the outbreak of the Social War, who was confronted with an audience that would have made the Glasgow Empire look hospitable. Beard’s approach to the rule of the emperors is rather different. Eschewing a continuous narrative from one reign MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS to another, she investigates the dynamics of a system. Those seduced by the wilder chapters of Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Emperors might regard the imperial government as a gaudily dysfunctional mess; Beard instead stresses stability and continuity both at home and abroad. She is especially interesting on how a tiny cadre of resident administrators could hold distant and expansive provinces together and how crucial to the success of the system was the collaboration of local elites themselves, who were set on becoming Roman. The letters of Pliny to the emperor Trajan on the governance of the province of Bithynia reveal a dutiful public servant seeking guidance on everything from public building programmes to how to deal with a new religious grouping called the Christians. This is a long work but it does not feel that way. I sat down and read the first 200 pages in one

This is a long work but it does not feel that way ... I read the first two hundred pages in one contented fivehour stretch contented five-hour stretch. The text is generously illustrated and Beard has a fine eye for those monuments and inscriptions that carry far more than their own weight. Maps place early Rome amid its neighbours, set out the dimensions of the city in the imperial period and show the extent of the Empire at its height. While SPQR is in itself a thoroughly satisfying account, it never shies away from uncertainty or pretends to have the last word. Those for whom this represents the first of many steps in Roman history will welcome the detailed guide to further reading and the timeline that follow the final chapter. Matthew Leigh 58 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Augustus

The Biography Jochen Bleicken (Translated by Anthea Bell) Allen Lane 771pp £30

BY THE TIME Octavian entered the city of Alexandria in 30 bc, his great rival was already dead: ‘a Roman by a Roman valiantly vanquish’d’, as Shakespeare’s Antony would later put it, clearly deluded from loss of blood. With Antony gone, Octavian became supreme master of the Roman world, a position he would retain entirely unchallenged for the next 40 years. In early 27 bc, he was granted the honorific title by which he is still known today: Augustus, the venerable one. Augustus’ achievements during his four decades in power were vast: he dramatically expanded the Empire, adding territory in both Europe and Africa, established Rome’s first standing army and negotiated peace settlements with some of its longest-standing enemies; he reformed the Roman constitution and completed one of the largest building programmes in the history of the city, boasting later that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Despite all this, Augustus remains a strangely impenetrable character. ‘His life’, Bleicken writes, ‘seems to have been lived entirely on stage, in a performance showing what Augustus wished to present, but not who and what he really was’. For Bleicken, the only way to ‘gain access’ to Augustus is to consider ‘the complex of events that trace the stages of his own political career’, which in turn

allows one to ‘interpret what is said about his person’. At this point, we might ask whether Augustus: The Biography is actually a biography at all and the book does not in fact read like one. In the first six chapters we spend as much time with Antony as we do with Octavian, while the longest chapter of the book focuses on the Roman expansion into Germania, a series of campaigns in which Augustus himself played absolutely no part. Regardless of all this, much of Augustus: The Biography makes for compelling reading. In the first seven chapters, we trace the ascent of Octavian in the years following the death of Caesar and the subsequent collapse of the Republic. Those who know their Shakespeare will recognise a good number of the characters here, while the sheer brutality of the period – and of Octavian himself (‘the most ferocious bloodhound of the civil war’) – contributes to a narrative that is both horrifying and absorbing. Once Octavian has become Augustus, Bleicken takes a break from the narrative to undertake a broader survey of Augustus’ 40 years in power. The choice of topics here is actually rather eclectic, including foreign policy, the administration of the provinces, the organisation of the Roman army, changes in Roman society and so on. One thing we never find out, however, is the organising principle behind these chapters: why these topics, and not others? In addition to this, it occasionally feels as if Bleicken has much more to say than space will allow, with some topics being treated in less depth than one would perhaps have liked. When discussing the construction of the Forum Augustum, for example, Bleicken only mentions in passing that the owners of the land on which the Forum was to be built ‘obstinately refused to sell a larger area’ to Augustus. Surely Augustus could have insisted that the land was sold to him? If so, why didn’t he? Bleicken does not tell us, although the answer would tell us something quite interesting about how Augustus operated as princeps.

In the final chapters of the book, Bleicken covers the series of campaigns in Germania, already mentioned, as well as the struggle for the succession. The former reminds us of Bleicken’s talents as a military historian, while the latter is as readable as anything else in the book, aided in this case by some rather juicy anecdotes from Suetonius. Augustus: The Biography is a richly detailed, often compelling, account of the rise of Octavian and the foundation of the Roman Empire. While there is still a sense that we never get to know the ‘real’ Augustus, there is fortunately plenty more to this book and to the period than the man at the centre of it all. Chris Tudor

Dynasty

The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar Tom Holland Little, Brown 512pp £25

IN Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version, a school teacher makes this case for studying the classics: ‘How can we mould civilised beings if we no longer believe in civilisation?’ Reading Tom Holland’s Dynasty, I wonder if ancient Rome is rather less useful than Rattigan thought. It is a catalogue of depravity: assassinations, adulteries, tortures and syphilitic lunacy. It is also very funny. Holland recounts how Nero tried to murder his mother with a collapsing boat. The roof fell in all right, but Agrippina survived.

REVIEWS A friend splashing about in the water cried out ‘I am Agrippina!’ to attract rescue – and was promptly ‘clubbed to death with oars and poles’. The real Agrippina swam to shore, crawled home and sent a letter to Nero, telling him what happened. A little while later, soldiers arrived to finish off the job. ‘Strike my belly!’, she demanded. Agrippina went the way of heroes: looking her murderer in the eye. What on Earth is the student supposed to learn from this? If you are going to kill your mother, do not scrimp on the boat building? Looking back on my own schooldays, I suspect that all Latin exposed me to was complicated vocab and pure filth. The lives of the Caesars were pornographic in their sexual and violent content, a tribute not to civilisation but to the old adage that power corrupts. Then again, Holland does a good job of explaining his characters’ rationale – and they were idealistic about their civic identity. Rome was their home and there was no place quite like it and everything the emperors did was somehow a reflection of its glory. Where else in the world was ruled by a living god? After Nero disembowelled his mother, he was treated like a victor in a great war – parades and games followed. Why? Because the murder was so audacious, so outrageous. So very Roman. If might did not necessarily make right, it did confer awesomeness. Holland writes of gladiatorial combat: ‘The excitement that spectators took in watching trained warriors fight for their lives was all the greater for knowing themselves to be the masters.’ In this context, Caligula’s Looney Tune antics do not seem nearly so unhinged. To Holland, he was simply the most honest of the emperors, the one who bothered least to pretend he was an equal with the Senate: ‘It was an honesty, though, as pitiless as the African sun.’ Caligula parodied the moral pretentions of the Roman aristocracy; he

EXHIBITION into their still life paintings, including Chinese porcelain, shells from the Indian and Pacific oceans and pepper from the East Indies, reflecting the success of the Dutch maritime trade as one of the drivers of the Republic’s economic prosperity, coinciding with the heights of Dutch painting. Jan van der Heyden’s Room Corner with Rarities illustrates the arrival of these exotic, Asian art forms and curiosities. One of the most popular luxury goods to be exported in the Golden Age was blue and white porcelain that originated mainly from the kilns of Jingdezhen in China and later from Arita in Japan. Being thinner, smoother and lighter than earthenware produced in the Netherlands, it influenced the creation of ‘Delft Blue’, which was a cheaper earthenware imitation of porcelain, coated with white enamel and painted with cobalt blue decorations. Polychrome Japanese porcelain was imported by VOC officials returning to their homelands in the 17th century, with Kakiemon porcelain being favoured among the Dutch elite. Several fine examples are on display, highlighted by a pouring jug with a golden lid, bearing the owner’s coat of arms (inset). Dutch household interiors and furnishings were also influenced by Asian designs and fashions of the time, as were personal clothing and accessories, such as the Japanese-style dressing gown, the rok. Asia in Amsterdam This garment came to the NetherThe Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age lands through VOC officials, who had Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, until June 5th, 2016 been presented with them by the shogun on their annual court visit, illustrated in Michiel van Musscher’s portrait of Amsterdam played a central role in this story as VOC director and burgomaster of Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands became the Johannes Hudde. These gowns were prized by marketplace for Asian luxury goods to Europe. the Dutch for their exotic beauty and comfort. Asia in Amsterdam was on display at the The Asia in the Dutch Interior gallery presents Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until January 2016. Now it is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, two large painted and embroidered Indian cotton chintz Palampores from the Peabody Essex MuMassachusetts, which has an extensive Asian seum’s Veldman-Eecen collection and an Indian export art collection. Like Amsterdam, Salem quilted bedcover bearing heraldic decoration in was an important international trading hub. the form of the arms of the city of Amsterdam, Dutch still lifes and portraits of citizens who displayed without glass casings and tilted at an had themselves painted among their newly acquired items of Asian luxury provide an effective angle to allow the viewer to observe the motifs close-up, providing a greater sense of impact. contextual background, bringing the objects This exhibition of Asian treasures provides a to life. For example, fashionable men had their portraits painted wearing a silk ‘Japanese skirt’, a celebration of the connections between Netherlands and Asia offering a fresh perspective on the long loose-fitting silk coat such as the one worn Dutch Golden Age. by Amsterdam pharmacist Johannes Hudde in Jasleen Kandhari his portrait by Michiel van Musscher in 1686. The Golden Age Dutch artists such as Rembrandt, Willem Kalf, Jan Steen and Pieter Claesz Exhibition address: Peabody Essex Museum, East India also incorporated Asian luxury goods and designs Square (161 Essex St) Salem, Massachusetts 01970, USA AT THE START of the Dutch Golden Age, merchants from the ‘world’s first multinational’, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) used their business acumen to establish lucrative trade agreements with Asia, resulting in the trade of exotic treasures from Asia including porcelain, lacquerware, ivory and silk to the Dutch Republic, where these forms of design and materials had not been seen before and, therefore, were considered to be prized items of exquisite quality and fascination. Asia in Amsterdam showcases the sensation that these luxury items created through 170 works of art from India, China, Japan and Batavia from 60 collections, while presenting the history behind this first global market and the impact they had on Dutch art and culture in the 17th century and how they inspired Dutch artists and makers.

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS rubbed their noses in their hypocrisies. To the people he offered spectacle and money. On return from campaign he stood in the street and threw out gold and silver coins: ‘In the resulting stampede, huge numbers were crushed to death – including over two hundred women and a eunuch.’ His rule was, as Plato forewarned, a tyranny of the appetites. It is what happens when a mob endorses a dictator who gives them what they want until their bellies explode. Some of Holland’s characterisations surprise. I came to quite like Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the arrogant governor of Syria, who was accused by the Roman mob of killing their beloved Germanicus, nephew of Emperor Tiberius. Piso loathed Germanicus because he regarded his monarchical style as unrepublican and his sympathy for local culture as unRoman. But he was almost certainly innocent of the prince’s death and Tiberius’ failure to save him was a heavy, personal betrayal. Discovering that the Senate was against him, the poor man went home and slit his own throat. Indeed, if the student is to learn anything from the classics, then it is not how to live but how to die: with gusto and deny the public their sordid execution. The discovery that Holland is particularly good at writing about violent decadents comes as no surprise. The only question is what he could possibly turn his hand to next. I seem to remember from school that Jacobean drama was suitably bloody. The veneer of civilisation was just as thin then, too. This is a thrilling book by one of the country’s best popular historians. Holland’s secret is that he started his career writing fiction and he brings to his histories a flare for narrative and character. He has always chosen subjects that suit his style well, ranging from the birth of Islam to the foundation of the Medieval church. He likes wide open spaces and epic conflagrations. There is something genuinely breathtaking to his prose. Tim Stanley 60 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Roman Law in the State of Nature

The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law Benjamin Straumann Cambridge University Press 286pp £65

THIS NEW STUDY explores the influence of Roman law on Hugo Grotius’ political thought. The Dutchman Grotius (1583-1645) is best known for his The Rights of War and Peace, published in 1625. Grotius’ significant influence on the development of international law is undisputed and existing scholarship has investigated his works from almost every possible perspective. The more surprising it seems, then, that the Roman legacy and, in particular, the significant influence of Cicero’s writings on Grotius, have been neglected. Straumann addresses this issue masterfully in his competent and original interpretation. His command of the ancient and early modern material is exemplary. Grotius’ doctrine of natural law was intended to support the claims of the Dutch against the Spanish and Portuguese in East Asia. The expanding commercial empire of the protestant United Provinces challenged the dominance of these Catholic powers. The parallels between the Roman imperialism and the Dutch expansion in the East Indies made Roman political and legal theory particularly attractive for Grotius. The original trigger for Grotius’ involvement with questions of how to deal with the antagonisms of competing states was a somewhat banal incident. Grotius was asked

to justify the capture by the Dutch captain Jacob van Heemskerck of the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese carrack, in the straits of Singapore. In doing so, Grotius provided one of the most influential theories of international law, which aimed to establish a lasting and universally binding international order. Grotius argued that the state of nature prevailed on the high seas, where no sovereign power ruled to enforce the law. The sea, according to Grotius, was free and only governed by the norms of natural law. Therefore, it was crucial to demonstrate the obligatory force of the precepts of natural law. Straumann shows in great detail how Cicero’s arguments regarding justice and natural law proved to become ‘the most important source’ for Grotius’ natural law doctrine. The underlying concern was whether there could be an international order which was universally accepted and how it should be maintained. This led Grotius to use ‘Cicero’s De

Cicero’s arguments regarding justice and natural law became ... the most important source for Grotius Inventione to show the conformity of punishment with natural law’. This was highly disputed terrain, since the political implications were huge. The concept of punishment in the state of nature of the high seas enabled Grotius to justify that the Dutch had a right to punish the Portuguese for their previous acts against them. When he turned his attention to the issue of punishment in interstate relations more generally in The Rights of War and Peace, he – like Cicero before him – related punishment to the concept of justice, since it is a reaction to a wrong that has been done. However, is the legitimate execution of punishment among states as straightforward as Grotius and Cicero presumed? The Portuguese certainly thought differently. Peter Schröder

Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200-1700 Elisabeth de Bièvre

Yale University Press 492pp £40

THE Netherlands are of interest historically in a manner disproportionate to their geographical size or population. The seeds of modern democratic, elected political bodies, were first sown in the Dutch and, later, the Batavian Republics. The entrenchment of a middle-class elite from the 17th century created a society ruled by merchants, manufacturers and professional administrators rather than aristocratic landowners, revolving around a court and ruler. The expansion of the Dutch Empire, from the 16th-century Compagnie van Verre and 17th-century Dutch East India Company, and the financial structures that were developed in its wake, including the Amsterdam stock exchange, were engines in the development of capitalism. Owing to these profound political and economic developments, it is easy to consider Dutch culture, too, as a monolith, a single entity with single aims and intentions. Yet, as Elisabeth de Bièvre shows in this original and enlightening book, nothing could be further from reality. Pace Svetlana Alpers and Simon Schama, whose works explain Dutch culture as a unifying expression of the new Republic’s sense of purpose, de Bièvre’s exploration of the art of the Dutch republic shows how places as little as 50 kilometres apart had quite different aims, expressed in quite different methods and manners.

REVIEWS It was only in the 19th century that the federated states of the United Provinces devolved into a centralised monarchy and only in the 19th century, too, that ideas of modern ‘nationhood’ became part of the critical dialogue of the times. Even as the art of the Dutch Golden Age was being rediscovered by collectors, the American Civil War and its aftermath were reinforcing the notion of a republican, protestant, unifying art. De Bièvre instead lays out, in seven chapters, the art of seven cities in the northern Netherlands, showing how it reflected each community and its values. (Utrecht, the single city outside of this geographical remit, is an exception that is included somewhat awkwardly.) De Bièvre is too intelligent for simplistic arguments and she makes ample space for the cross-fertilisation that enriches Dutch art. Jan Steen, for example, worked in several of the cities under discussion. When living in Haarlem, the only city according to de Bièvre where the depiction of laughter, considered un-aristocratic elsewhere, was popular, Steen’s canvases depicted unbridled pleasure, whereas in the painter’s Delft years, his

de Bièvre ... makes ample space for the cross-fertilisation that enriches Dutch art ... painting in meticulous detail that is too often depicted in only the broadest of strokes output became more rectilinear, more ordered. Like Rembrandt, Steen put his characters into historical costumes, but his, in Haarlem, were for comedic purposes, while Rembrandt, in Amsterdam, followed the local tradition of serious history paintings.

Other specialisms are more general. Still lives of fish were a Hague speciality, while Dordrecht, famous for horse breeding, produced more equestrian images than anywhere except the Hague, with its aristocratic patrons. Dordrecht houses, unusually in the Low Countries, had cellars and paintings of interiors showing staircases and up-down axes come almost exclusively from that city. Delft, built on grid-arranged polderland, was, unsurprisingly, the home of geometrical art, of straight lines, deep perspective and rectilinear cityscapes. Amsterdam, reliant on the graintrade, enjoyed images of the biblical Joseph, who stored grain in Egypt against the coming famine. Leiden, home of the university, eschewed the frivolity of flowers in its vanitas images, preferring skulls and hourglasses, even as Dordrechters, with their river geography, painted fog to symbolise the ephemerality of human existence. Of course, not every artist can be so neatly categorised and de Bièvre acknowledges this, if only in passing. Jacques de Gheyn, known for his botanical and zoological drawings in the Leiden style, won the patronage of Prince Maurits in the Hague precisely for these exotica, while Rembrandt’s Ganymede, a symbolic depiction of Willem II created in Amsterdam, is, owing to the anomalies of style, analysed in the Hague chapter. De Bièvre’s chosen structure does not permit a fully developed discussion of these, nor does it give her the freedom to explore the theoretical underpinnings of her otherwise persuasive and exemplary suggestions. But to say, at the end of a densely argued 400 pages, that one wishes for more, is simply to say that Dutch Art and Urban Cultures, 1200-1700 is a book as rich and rewarding as the art it describes, painting in meticulous detail a world that is too often depicted only in the broadest of brushstrokes. Judith Flanders

The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930 Martin A. Ruehl

Cambridge University Press 317pp £65

THE DECADES following the Middle Ages were a curious mix. Aesthetically beautiful, they were also immoral – the envy only of such anti-social elements as Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in The Third Man, who famously declares: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ This is hardly an era to elevate to a position of unmitigated adoration, one would think. Yet Martin Ruehl shows that this is precisely what happened in the German-speaking world between 1860 and 1930. Starting with the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilisation of the Renaissance (1860) viewed early modern Italy as the ‘mother of modernity’, the German historical imagination came to construct the Renaissance as, in Ruehl’s words, ‘an intellectual and cultural revolution that fundamentally transformed man’s understanding of his place in the natural as well as the social world and gave birth to the central values (rationalism, secularism, individualism), ideologies (humanism, republicanism) and institutions

(capitalism, the centralised nation-state) of modern Europe’. The main actors behind this process of appropriation were members of the middle class for whom this secular and individualistic Quattrocento – as opposed to the religious and collectivist Middle Ages – ‘served as a genealogy and legitimisation of their own emancipatory efforts’. Nietzsche radicalised Burckhardt’s approach by overemphasising its anti-democratic dimension, while subsequent writers, such as Thomas Mann and Ernst Kantorowicz, transformed it in the context of their own cultural and political convictions. A special case was the historian Hans Baron: his concept of ‘civic humanism’ became influential only when it was adopted by English-speaking historians such as J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. Ruehl has written a lucid, intelligent and erudite study that, moreover, is beautifully illustrated. Its one significant weakness is its scope. Nearly half the book deals with Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Mann, while the other half is devoted to Kantorowicz and Baron, leaving only the introduction and conclusion for the many other historians, thinkers and writers who contributed to the debate. This is not the most secure foundation for a study that generalises across almost three quarters of a century of ‘the German historical imagination’. After the Second World War, the Renaissance lost its importance in German-language historiography. Today, Ruehl writes, all that is left of its appeal is the spectre of its main protagonists, such as the Borgias, while Renaissance studies have now been subsumed under ‘medieval and early modern history’. There was no need to end the book on this negative note. In 2011 a major study appeared which once again cast the Renaissance as the mother of modernity. The author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which had a strong impact in Germany, was the literary scholar and historian Stephen Greenblatt. His most important point of reference was Burckhardt. Henk de Berg MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

Fashion Victims

The Dangers of Dress Past and Present Alison Matthews David Bloomsbury 225pp £25

FASHION VICTIMS by Alison Matthews David is a beautifully illustrated, accessible and highly thoughtful study of how fashion has been responsible for death and injury through the ages. It takes a fascinating look at the poisons and hazardous chemicals that were used to dye and treat fabrics and at styles of clothing that were dangerous to the wearer in their pursuit of fashionable extremes. The book recounts infamous stories, such as that of Isadora Duncan, the American dancer, who, in September 1927, stepped into her sports car in Nice only to be strangled to death as her long shawl got caught in the wheels as she sped away. The author looks, too, at another dangerous fashion, the cage-crinoline, the massive petticoat that held out the light fabrics so fashionable in the mid-19th century. This extreme bell-shaped skirt was vulnerable to getting caught under the wheels of carriages or catching fire when the wearer stood too close to the ubiquitous open fires and candles of the Victorian home. More than 3,000 deaths by fire were reported in one year, many caused by clothing ignition. Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters both died at a Halloween ball at Drummaconor House in November 1871, when one sister’s skirt caught light after brushing the open fire while dancing and the other sister’s was set alight trying to save her sibling. There were also less obvious dangers lurking within the warp 62 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

and weft of clothing, such as the arsenic used to dye Victorian fabrics a fashionable green. We also learn that ‘Mad-hatters’ are so-called because of the mercury used in the millinery process. Lewis Carroll’s own Mad Hatter shows the signs of mercury poisoning: anxiety, trembling and erratic behaviour. Even today, historic millinery has the potential to harm handlers, especially conservators who steam hats for display. The V&A in London keeps all its felted hats in special mylar bags marked with skull and crossbones. The horrors of fashion’s darker side are not confined to history, however. The final chapter reminds us not to judge fashion’s past victims harshly, or think smugly that the modern world has solved these dangers, with sad case studies reminding us that danger might be a little too close for comfort. In 2012 a highly fashionable studded peplum belt was

An accessible, thoughtful study of how fashion has been responsible for death and injury through the ages discovered to be radioactive. The studs contained cobalt-60, which can cause lasting damage to the internal organs. The belt had been widely available: sold in 14 different countries and stocked by major online retailers. David also makes the important point that fashion’s real victims are usually the workers who are exposed to the harsher realities of its manufacture: the toxins, the machines, the sweatshop conditions and the sheer hard labour. She draws thoughtful comparisons between 19th-century England and modern India and warns that globalisation and the mass market has distanced us from the manufacture of the clothes that we wear, with the risk that many of us are, in fact, more ignorant of fashion’s dangers than at any time in the past. Eleri Lynn

Speer

Hitler’s Architect Martin Kitchen Yale University Press 440pp £20

IN 1953, while incarcerated in Spandau prison, Albert Speer replied to a letter from his daughter demanding to know how he could have served the odious Nazi regime; he wrote that ‘the immensity of the crime precludes any attempt at self-justification’. It was an odd response from someone who would spend half of his life dissembling, obfuscating and desperately seeking to justify himself. Nonetheless, it was – perhaps – a momentary spasm of honesty from Hitler’s most controversial minister. As this excellent new biography shows, Speer was a master of constructing his own narrative. At Nuremberg, he propagated an image of himself as a technocrat: someone intoxicated by his proximity to Hitler, yet at one remove from the horrific realities of Nazi rule. Though he expressed an abstract sense of guilt for his actions, he nonetheless claimed to have been ignorant of the Holocaust and of the maltreatment of the legions of forced labourers in his charge. Speer had his critics. One former confidant was shocked by his ability to ‘do a double somersault from a standing position’; Hermann Göring was disgusted that he could stoop so low to ‘save his lousy neck’. But, save his neck he did, seducing the Nuremberg judges with his dubious show of contrition and his measured, bourgeois

civility. Though his deputy, Fritz Sauckel, was executed, Speer was given 20 years. Emerging from Spandau in 1966, Speer set about wooing a generation of journalists and historians: portraying himself as ‘the Good Nazi’, an urbane eyewitness to world-changing events. He was not only saving his own neck, he also provided a living alibi for the German people, confirming their comforting belief that guilt was confined only to a small clique of psychopaths and fanatics. Only a few contemporary commentators saw through Speer’s web of evasions, fibs and half-truths. His principal English-language biographers until now – Gitta Sereny and Joachim Fest – did not; both, for differing reasons, fell for his mendacious charm. Martin Kitchen’s new biography, therefore, is something of a landmark. It is a thoughtful and thoroughgoing demolition of the Speer ‘myth’.

Although Speer expressed an abstract sense of his own guilt ... he claimed to have been at one remove from the horrific realities of Nazi rule ... to have been ignorant of the Holocaust Kitchen is brilliant and brutal, exposing every aspect of his subject’s story to stern scrutiny. He begins at the very start, showing that even Speer’s tale of his birth was a lie. He goes on to claim that his ‘lonely … emotionally impoverished’ subject lacked imagination and originality as an architect; and his rise to prominence was the result of ambition, sycophancy and a prudent ability to delegate to more talented underlings.

REVIEWS Speer, Kitchen argues, was myth-making even at the time, colluding with Hitler, for instance, in the lie that the new Reich Chancellery took only a year to construct, when it had in truth taken a lot longer. He also cooked the figures systematically when he was Minister for Armaments, putting an undeserved gloss on his efforts to rationalise armaments production. Most damning, Kitchen repeats and elaborates upon the most grievous and long-standing accusations against Speer; that he not only knew about the Holocaust and the exploitation of forced labourers by the Third Reich, but that he was intimately involved in both processes. Speer long protested his innocence, but as Hitler’s architect of choice he masterminded building projects that were explicitly predicated on the removal and extermination of ‘alien races’. Ignorance of the wider context of Nazi policy is a logical impossibility. As Minister for Armaments, meanwhile, he had as many as half a million concentration camp inmates working directly for him, and is known – at the very least – to have visited the notorious Dora-Mittelbau camp. There can be little doubt, therefore, that Speer had blood on his hands. In truth, there is not much that is genuinely new about Martin Kitchen’s Speer; he draws liberally on the work of other historians, closer to the coalface, who have published partial accounts and micro-studies. He is not even the first Englishlanguage biographer to challenge Speer’s lies; that honour fell to Dan van der Vat in 1997. But there is no sin in synthesis. Kitchen’s book is well researched and well written and is a worthy addition to the ranks of Speer biographies, not least as a convincing rebuttal of some of the myopic enthusiasms of his predecessors. Kitchen has taken a wrecking ball to Speer’s mendacious and meticulously created self-image. And about time, too. Roger Moorhouse

2016 BOOK PRIZE WINNER THE PUBLISHING BOOM in Holocaust Studies de Gaulle’s niece, who had worked with the continues. After the publication of several titles French resistance. It was not intended as an last year, there is also the late David Cesarani’s extermination camp for Jews but as a punishFinal Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-1949, ment centre for those who opposed the Nazis, just published. So it is not surprising that two ranging from political prisoners to ‘internal Holocaust books were selected for the shortlist enemies’, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose of the 2016 Longman-History Today book prize. intense form of non-conformism makes a reNikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: The History of the markable story of resistance. Along with them, Nazi Concentration Camps is a great feat of scholthousands of ‘asocials’ were sent to the camp, arship. Although encyclopedic in its scope, it is including gypsies, vagrants, lesbians and prostistill very human in its storytelling, making the tutes. As the war progressed, tens of thousands horror it relates both personal and accessible. of Slavs and Russians were brought in and about However, the winner of this year’s prize was 60,000 women died at Ravensbrück through Sarah Helm for her extraordinary account of starvation, disease, cold and from beatings. the only Nazi concentration camp exclusively Organised killings began on a relatively small for women, Ravensbrück. The scale in 1941, with shoottitle is a variation of the title of ings and fatal injections. Primo Levi’s book on his time In the autumn of 1944 a in Auschwitz. Ravensbrück has gas chamber was built on often been marginalised or Himmler’s orders and up even ignored by mainstream to 2,000 women a month (male) historians. Helm was a were gassed. Many women, journalist who, in 2005, pubproviding slave labour for lished A Life in Secrets, a bioga nearby Siemens electrical raphy of Vera Atkins of the factory, died from sheer exex SOE. At the end of the war haustion. However, the many Atkins visited Ravensbrück accounts of women rallying to to seek out the fate of the help each are a reminder of the female SOE agents who had power of good in a world of evil. ended up there, including Helm does not demonise the Violette Szabo and Odette guards, although some of them, Sansom. Atkins had a both male and female, were apap brown cardboard box of notes pallingly cruel and many, like relating to Ravensbrück and Irma Grese, a local girl, were If This Is A Woman this started Helm on a 10-year ‘taught’ at Ravensbrück and Inside Ravensbrück – Hitler’s quest to discover the full went on to Auschwitz. The Concentration Camp for story of this forgotten camp. story of Johanna Langefeld, Women During this time she travelled head guard, provides the Sarah Helm across Europe and Russia and spine to the first half of the Little, Brown 748pp £16.99 interviewed several survivors. book, trying to behave reaShe also tracked down dozens sonably towards her prisonof unpublished memoirs and talked with the ers. In 1942 she was transferred to Auschwitz. sons and daughters of inmates. Her replacement, Maria Mandl, was known to The result is what Helm describes as a ‘bioghave kicked a woman to death during a roll call. raphy’ of the camp. Initially built for 2,000 prisAfter the war, Ravensbrück fell into the oners on a site personally selected by Heinrich Soviet zone that later formed East Germany. The camp became a shrine for Communist resistance to Hitler in the East but, out of sight, it was almost forgotten in the West. Even the transcripts of the trials of guards held in Hamburg were closed for 30 years. Only in the 1990s did a group of mostly female German historians begin to look again at the camp’s history. Sarah Helm has taken this a considerable step further in Himmler, Ravensbrück was opened in May 1939. writing her ‘biography’ of the camp. It not only fills a gap in Holocaust history but it is an utterly By the time of its capture by the Soviets in April compelling read and a deserving winner of this 1945 about 130,000 women had passed through its gates. Many of the women were distinguished year’s Longman-History Today book prize. scientists, doctors and writers, including General Taylor Downing

An extraordinary account of the Nazi concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS darkness. Second, they can make film preservation copies and allow the originals to degrade. Third, they can preserve the originals in appropriate storage and also make digital preservation copies. Finally, archivists could make digital preservation copies and allow the originals to degrade. Not too surprisingly, Walsh favours the third option, despite its greater expense, because:

From Darkness into Light

Perspectives on Film Preservation and Restoration Edited by Rajesh Devraj Film Heritage Foundation (Mumbai) 136pp £29.99

EVERY artistic medium raises questions about how much of its output should be preserved and how best to do it? The problem is especially acute with cinema, because celluloid films exist in both negative and positive form, sometimes in several versions, in varying states of deterioration and require considerable space for storage, the maintenance of suitable conditions and often substantial expenditure for restoration. Moreover, films vary in historical significance and in aesthetic quality from classic to trashy. Yet these judgements take time to emerge and are occasionally reversed over time. Hence this plea from the distinguished American film director Martin Scorsese, in the opening essay of From Darkness into Light: We need to say to ourselves that the moment has come when we have to treat every last moving image as reverently and respectfully as the oldest book in the Library of Congress. In addition, the world now faces the tricky question of celluloid versus digital preservation. The head of digital collections at London’s Imperial War Museum, David Walsh, argues in another essay that today’s film archivists have four options: first, they can preserve the celluloid originals in appropriate storage, that is, low-temperature, low-humidity, 64 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

The uncertainty surrounding the reliability of digital preservation is mitigated by the fact that the original film remains the ultimate backstop in the case of failure. Other contributions consider film preservation in Russia (with some interesting reflections on Soviet censorship), Poland, Taiwan, Thailand and India. Indeed, India occupies the second half of this imaginatively illustrated book, partly because it has the largest film industry in the world but chiefly because the book’s publisher, Film Heritage Foundation, is based in Mumbai, under its founder-director, the film-maker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur. His essay is a heartfelt wake-up call to apathetic Indians to restore the best of Indian cinema, especially from 1913 up to the 1960s, before it vanishes, followed by a catalogue of 60 threatened titles including films by Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak and Raj Kapoor. Of the 1,700 Indian silent films, very few are preserved and none of them is really complete. In 2013 – when India produced 1,724 films in 32 languages – the National Film Archives of India listed just 6,000 Indian titles. Even the immortal films that put India on the global map, notably Satyajit Ray’s 1950s Apu Trilogy, were in danger of disappearance in acceptable prints until Hollywood’s Academy and New York’s Criterion Collection decided to begin Apu’s restoration in the past decade, as described in the book. That would have brought shame on the whole world. For as Scorsese once wrote: ‘Ray’s magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact will always stay with me.’ Andrew Robinson

The Railways

Nation, Network and People Simon Bradley Profile Books 645pp £25

SIMON BRADLEY had little contact with railways until he was aged 11, in the 1970s. His family travelled everywhere by car, he went to school by bus or on foot. His great-grandfather was an engine driver and perhaps some inherited instinct turned him into an avid train spotter when he went to secondary school, near Clapham Junction. This grew into an intense fascination with almost every feature of railways since their invention, giving birth to this book, with its detailed accounts of the evolution of tracks and their sleepers, of signal boxes, marshalling yards and goods sheds. Fortunately for readers who do not share this all-embracing devotion, he also has plenty to say about the human dimension of railway travel. The first British railways from the 1830s, the first in the world, were a boon for the unprecedented speed of transport of people and goods. But they were uncomfortable, especially for the poorer travellers. Railway travel was, of course, divided by class, with second class servants’ compartments provided close to their first-class masters’. At first, the Newcastle and Carlisle line offered third-class seats in the open air on top of luggage vans. These evolved into open cattle trucks, without seats, before becoming basic, crowded

versions of the posher classes, enforced by government regulation insisting on covered seats because exposed travel was dangerous. Gradually, by the later 19th century, conditions in the classes converged, unlike, as Bradley observes, other aspects of British society. Even first-class travel had considerable discomforts. Carriages did not have side corridors until they were borrowed from America in the 1880s. Passengers rode in cramped compartments with outside doors. Lighting and heating were poor and there were no lavatories. Contemporaries were reticent about the outcomes, but Bradley does his best. Gentlemen used the windows. ‘Travelling conveniences’ were sold, worn under the clothes apparently, but we are not told how or how they were unobtrusively employed. Long stops at stations enabled passengers to relieve and refresh themselves, since there were

One of the more inventive ways to deter fellow travellers from sharing the compartment was to hold a screaming baby up to the window also no refreshments on trains. Saloons for the royal family were the first to gain toilets in 1848-50 and dining rooms, then both spread gradually to lower classes. Another inconvenience was fitting gentlemen’s tall hats into the confined compartments: they were strung on cords across the ceiling. Women, of course, wore their hats, but more difficult to pack in, indeed to get through the doors, were their massive crinolines, which must have deterred unwanted fellow travellers from sharing the compartments. There were other inventive ways to do this,

REVIEWS like holding a screaming baby to the window. Passengers put up with inconveniences and risk of accidents for the advantages of rail travel, including, according to taste, travel abroad, excursions to view hangings, to race meetings or for non-stop boozing. Trains brought many social changes: diets became more varied when fresh fish could be transported inland and fish and chips was invented in Lancashire in the 1860s; cheap meat, bananas and other new foods were imported as rail, steamships and refrigeration spread through the world. Theatre companies and orchestras could tour widely. Railway timetables imposed Greenwich time upon reluctant districts, long accustomed to measuring their own time: Plymouth was 20 minutes behind London until the Time Act of 1880 imposed uniformity. Rail even changed language, inspiring now-familiar phrases: ’running out of steam’, ‘letting off steam’, ‘on the right lines’. The story is more mundane once the great days of constructing railways, bridges, grand stations – Brunel is Bradley’s hero – passed. Through the 20th century, rail travel became efficient but duller, with the coming of open carriages and the noise of mobile phones, microwaved food and sandwiches not restaurant cars, but indispensable. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive account of their history, including, as Bradley does, the designers and builders of the railways, the workers and their unions, the managers and mismanagers, as the system moved from multiple competing companies, to mergers, then nationalisation, to privatisation, all with their different disadvantages and much else there is no space to describe. Some of the detail is excessive for those of us who are not passionate railway buffs and the writing is sometimes stilted, but it is a remarkable achievement. Pat Thane

Redbrick

A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities William Whyte Oxford University Press 416pp £65

RICH, varied and amusing, this is the most tasty of fruit cakes, served up with wonderful quotes and plenty of well-chosen illustrations. Whyte, Professor of Social and Architectural History at Oxford, focuses not on Oxbridge but on what became, he argues, the ballast and driver of the British higher education system. Whyte moves from London and new early 19th-century institutions across the Empire, notably King’s College Windsor, Nova Scotia,

[One] university was founded in a disused asylum, with laboratories converted out of padded cells and a dining room that had been a mortuary which are presented as providing a background for the civic universities founded from the late 19th century. The Redbricks are seen as the great influence for what came later. Whyte suggests that they were the largest individual influence on the creation of new universities in the 1950s and 1960s and the model to which the polytechnics came to cleave. For

Whyte, this is not simply a story about England. He locates the foundation of new universities in Ireland in the 1840s and Wales in the 1880s as part of the development and extends his account to Dundee. He correctly argues that this is a subject that has been understudied, or at least at the level of his scale and ambition. Given what he has to cover it is not surprising that, at times, the result is somewhat thin and the conclusions pushed too far. Nevertheless, the range is tremendous, from student politics to graduate unemployment, Joseph Chamberlain to Andrew Davies and, less happily, a series of administrative acronyms that will fill many academics with despair. The overall tone is positive, albeit tempered. Whyte argues that the story of these innovative institutions is, repeatedly, a heroic one of obstacles overcome. He presents the Redbricks as opening up universities to the middle classes and thus helping effect a social revolution, albeit being far less successful for the poor. The issues of improvement and performance are addressed. Beginning as an academic at Durham in 1980, I was told by the senior professor, Reg Ward, that the university, like, he said Oxbridge, underperformed: ‘We take good people and do not do enough with them.’ Ward, who meant the students not, as he could have done, the staff, contrasted this situation with over-performing universities, which achieved more. This contrast is one that has been apparent throughout. Whyte clothes it in institutional detail and is especially good on the architecture involved, supporting this with effective photographs. He finds a characteristic feature that of a unified, comprehensive institution, in contrast to the collegiate pattern. He has a turn for the amusing: ‘The University of Liverpool was founded in a disused lunatic asylum, with laboratories converted out of old padded cells and a dining room that had begun life as a mortuary.’ Whyte deserves congratulation for his thoughtful, perceptive and witty work. Jeremy Black

CONTRIBUTORS Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield. Jeremy Black is author of The City on a Hill: A History of the University of Exeter (2015). Taylor Downing’s most recent book is Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code-Breakers & Propagandists of the Great War (Little, Brown, 2014). Judith Flanders is author of The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes (Atlantic Books, 2014). Jasleen Kandhari is tutor in Asian art history and textiles for the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. Matthew Leigh is Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Eleri Lynn is Curator of Collections at Historic Royal Palaces and curated the V&A’s exhibition, Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion. Roger Moorhouse is author of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact With Stalin, 1939-1941 (Bodley Head, 2014). Andrew Robinson is author of Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (I.B. Tauris, 2004). Peter Schröder is Senior Lecturer in European Social and Political Studies at University College London. Tim Stanley is the author of Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between LA and DC Revolutionised American Politics (Dunne Books, 2014). Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow. Pat Thane is Professor of Contemporary History at King’s College London. Chris Tudor is founder of Massolit, an online education provider specialising in the teaching of humanities in schools (www.massolit.co.uk).

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Lively Liverpool Andrew Griffiths is right to pose the question as to whether ordinary Britons were willing imperialists (History Matters, February 2016). Two oft-quoted comments about the people of Liverpool in the 18th century seem to add weight to his comments, namely: ‘Almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant, and he who cannot send a bale, will send a band box’ and a reference to their ‘indiscriminate rage for commerce and for getting money at all events’. Both of the above quotations refer to Liverpool at the time of the slave trade, but my own research suggests they were equally applicable in the years after abolition and perhaps suggest two additional questions that Griffiths should ask. First, was the trading by ordinary Britons motivated by imperial ambitions or simply the more basic commercial instinct of making money? Second, when did the head long rush for trade and Empire begin? If the commercial insatiability of Liverpool was mirrored in other ports, then capital from every town in Britain would follow the profits (or hoped-for profits) that could be earned in these commercial centres. Likewise, it is accepted that the meteoric growth in international trade was a Victorian phenomenon and yet as early as 1823 two out of every three ships entering New York, including the US coastal trade, originated from Liverpool. This level of trade did not materialise overnight and would have started to build exponentially from the end of the War of 1812 and the wider Napoleonic Wars. Imperialists or money-makers, Georgian or Victorians, it is a fascinating area of research that will benefit from more work. David P. Hearn Wallasey, Merseyside 66 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

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More Defiant In your November issue the InFocus article by Roger Hudson writes off the Boulton Paul Defiant as a sitting duck. In its defence it was designed as a bomber-destroyer but in the dark days of Dunkirk, with backs to the wall, it was pressed into service as a front-line interceptor. Although never intended to take on fighters in a front-line role it acquitted itself well. On May 28th, 1940 10 Defiants were attacked by 30 German Me109 fighters. They shot down six for the loss of three Defiants. On their best day over the beaches, on May 29th, they accounted for 37 German aircraft. Withdrawn into their intended role, they accounted for more German bombers in the 1940-41 Winter Blitz than any other night fighter. Once superseded in this role by more modern types such as the Beaufighter, the Defiant continued to give sterling service as a trainer, target tug, electronic warfare and air-sea rescue craft. And they did have forward armament. If required the turret could shoot its four machine guns through 360 degrees. If you are looking for a turkey I suggest you take a look at Britain’s other turret fighter, the Blackburn Roc, which proved so slow it could not catch up with the bombers it was supposed to shoot down and ended its brief career parked around the perimeter of airfields to provide static anti-aircraft defence. Paul Bennett Manchester

Further Reading The article on shell shock in the January 2016 issue (‘The Racket and the Fear’) was very interesting. May I refer readers wishing to read further on this subject to the Journal of Contemporary History’s January 2000 issue on the subject guest edited by Jay

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Winter, and to the articles in our April 2006 special issue ‘Culture and Combat Motivation’, guest edited by Catherine Merridale, including works by Hew Strachan, Edgar Jones and Alex Watson on the period and others on the wider 20th century. Jeremy Toynbee Journal of Contemporary History, London

Spin on the Steps The article on Attlee (InFocus, February) reminded me of the time he came to Edinburgh and addressed a small crowd from the steps outside the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall (the famous 39 Steps). A man stood right behind him and, from my position, I spotted that every word spoken by Attlee was being passed on to him by this shadowy individual. Spin is not new. Rev Bill Shackleton Glasgow

Borrowed Cultures In his article ‘Romance and the Romany’ (January), it is surprising that Jeremy Harte makes no mention of George Borrow, whose Lavengro (Romany for ‘tongue-master’) appeared in 1851. In this semi-autobiographical work Borrow describes various early meetings with gypsies in Britain, as a result of which he became interested in their language, where he found many similarities with other languages with which he had become familiar. Subsequent to further meetings with gypsies while working in Russia for the Bible Society (Borrow was an ardent Protestant), he compiled a dictionary of Romany, published in 1835, and went on to document yet more meetings with gypsies in Zincali (1841), an account of gypsies in Spain, which took place when he was travelling in Iberia and North Africa, again for the Bible

Society. These experiences gave rise to another work, The Romany Rye, which appeared in 1857. Borrow was an inveterate traveller and prodigious learner of languages. During his childhood in Ireland, where his father was garrisoned, he picked up Irish Gaelic and later taught himself Welsh, an unusual accomplishment for an Englishman of the time. When he journeyed around Wales, his mastery of the language allowed him to discover and then reveal much of the local culture and history in his book Wild Wales (1862), which is still an exciting read. He is particularly compelling on the poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom he compares to Milton. Borrow never settled down to any real occupation and resented the lack of recognition he thought his work deserved. Fortunately, interest in this talented and idiosyncratic writer is beginning to revive. Colin Sowden Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Father Fiction It is not a surprise to hear Joseph Haydn called ‘the father of the symphony’ (Months Past, January), but he was not. About 1740 G.M. Monn, a Viennese composer, had written a symphony, with an allegro, aria, minuet and final allegro. Others who were in on its birth included C.P.E. Bach, Karl Frederich Abel, Johann Stamitz and George Matthias, all belonging to the Mannheim and Viennese school. Stamitz wrote dozens of symphonies before his death in 1757 – the accredited date of Haydn’s First Symphony is 1759 (although some musicologists claim it is 1757). There were also many others and this long-standing myth ought to be squashed. Ernest H. Jackson Vallensbaek, Denmark

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Coming Next Month The Curious Case of Roger Casement

A knighted protestant British diplomat turned militant Irish nationalist, Roger Casement is an uneasy presence among the pantheon of Irish Republicans. ‘Raised among the Ulster landed gentry, he was not exactly a model peat-sodden revolutionary’, writes Andrew Lycett: ‘and then there is the business of his homosexuality.’ Casement was executed for treason by the British government in 1916, yet as the centenary of the Easter Rising approaches, the nature of his identity as an Irishman remains contentious.

Punishment and Population

Transporting convicts for the purpose of imperial expansion was pioneered by the Portuguese at their North African port of Ceuta in 1415. In subsequent centuries, other major European powers followed suit, using transportation both for the purposes of punishment and settlement, establishing a large European presence across the world. The impact of such migration routes is still felt today, says Clare Anderson, who traces punitive passages from the 15th century until the 1960s.

Shakespeare Off the Map

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Shakespeare was ‘no good with a map’. His plays feature a litany of grievous geographical errors, including the ‘seacoast of Bohemia’ and a nautical voyage between the landlocked cities of Verona and Milan. Yet he wrote at a time when, in England, historical and geographical knowledge was more accessible than ever. Did the playwright not care about geographical accuracy or did he do it on purpose? Dominic Green argues that it was the latter.

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, InFocus, From the

January’s Prize Crossword

Archive, Pastimes and much more.

The April issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on March 24th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for January is Eduardo Villamor, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Jane Bown/National Portrait Gallery, London. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Bridgeman Images; 5 © Portable Antiquities Scheme (Creative Commons); 6 Photographs by Dean Nicholas; 7 © Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Shutterstock. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy; 9 top © Alamy; bottom © Bridgeman Images. MURDERER MOST EMINENT: 11 © Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. South Australian Government Grant, 1967; 12 and 13 top © National Portrait Gallery, London; 13 bottom and 14 © The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; 15 © National Portrait Gallery, London; 16 © The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. FIVE CENTURIES OF STUFF: 18-19 © Paul Rushton/Alamy; 20 Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images; 21 clockwise from top left: Couple, mustard pot and hands © Bridgeman Images; Ming vase © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford/Bridgeman Images; 22 top © Fashion Museum, Bath/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 23 top © Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom © Paulig Group, Helsinki; 24 © The Advertising Archives; 25 Images © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 26 © The Advertising Archives. OUT OF THE MARGINS: 27 © Eleanor Parker. INFOCUS: 28-29 © Hulton Archive/Getty Images. PLAGUE AND PREJUDICE: 31 © Bridgeman Images; 32 © Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images; 33 top © akg-images; bottom © Hawaiian Historical Society, collection #5410; 34 © Bridgeman Images; 35 top © Alamy; bottom © Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Images; 36 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © New York Historical Society/Bridgeman Images; 37 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © PA images. KING HENRY OF HAITI: 38 © ILN/Mary Evans Picture Library; 40 © Bridgeman Images. EDMUND IRONSIDE: 41 Royal MS 14 B VI, f.4r and Royal MS 14 B VI, f.3r © British Library; 42 © Bridgeman Images; 43 courtesy Winchester Cathedral; 44 © HT Archive; 45 © MS Stowe 944, f.6, The Art Archive.THE FIRST RETURN OF HALLEY’S COMET: 46 © akg-images. KIBBO KIFT KINDRED: 48 top © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of Judge Smith; bottom Stanley Dixon collection, thanks to Gill Dixon. Courtesy of Tim Turner; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 49 © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of London School of Economics Library; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 50 © Lebrecht Photo Library; 51 © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of Judge Smith; 52 © Kibbo Kift Foundation/Museum of London. Photography by John Chase; 53 top and bottom © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy LSE Library; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 54 © Kibbo Kift Foundation/Museum of London; Photography by John Chase. REVIEWS: 56 © Musei Capitolini, Rome/Bridgeman Images; 59 Mounted ewer and basin. Jingdezhen, China, late 16th century. Private collection. Photo by Laura Wulf. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 © Getty Images. PASTIMES: 70 top English Credulity or the Invisible Ghost, c.1762; middle Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1539; bottom Poseidon holding a trident. Corinthian plaque, 550-525 BC. All images Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 © Alamy. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 Which was the only South-east Asian state to avoid European colonial rule during the 19th and 20th centuries?

22 The Generation of ’98 was an intellectual movement in which country? 23 What did Martin Luther nail to the door of All Saints’ Church, Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517?

2 Who is the only divorcee to have become British Prime Minister? 3 To what destination did the London Necropolis Railway run?

24 The Nootka Sound Controversy of 1789 was a near-conflict between which two nations over a harbour on Vancouver Island?

4 Founded as a state-owned Soviet enterprise, what is Melodiya?

25 The Piasts were which country’s first royal dynasty? 17 Once under British control, the Mosquito Coast spanned which two modern countries?

10 The Fatal Vespers of October 1623 was considered a sign of God’s judgement against who?

18 Which anatomically inspired nickname did Oliver Cromwell and the 1st Duke of Wellington share?

11 Whose companions were listed on the Battle Abbey Roll?

19 The fictional character of slave Kunta Kinte was first popularised in which novel?

12 When were frogmen, divers who attached explosives to enemy ships, first deployed? 13 Which festival did John Christie found in 1934? 6 Who was the Flanders Mare? 7 The purported existence of what attracted mass interest in London’s Cock Lane in 1762? 8 Who, according to T.S. Eliot, wrote ‘the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels’? 70 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

14 C.J. Rouget de Lisle wrote the words to which revolutionary hymn in Strasbourg in 1792? 15 Ceded in 1999, what was the last European colony in Asia? 16 Which European power ceded control of it?

20 The Essex town of Thaxted was an important medieval centre for manufacture of what? 21 The Isthmian Games were held in honour of which Greek god?

ANSWERS

9 Which mystic religious sect was founded by Henry Nicholis in the 16th century?

1.Thailand 2. Anthony Eden 3. Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey 4. A record label 5. Karl Marx 6. Anne of Cleves 7. A ghost 8. Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone) 9. The Familists 10. The Jesuits 11. William the Conqueror 12. By the Italian army during the First World War 13. Glyndebourne 14. La Marseillaise 15. Macau 16. Portugal (to China) 17. Nicaragua and Honduras 18. Nosey 19. Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley 20. Cutlery 21. Posiedon 22. Spain 23. Ninety-Five Theses 24. Spain and Britain 25. Poland

5 Which famous political theorist was once a member of the Trier Tavern Club?

Prize Crossword ACROSS 9 Element discovered in 1789 by German Martin Heinrich Klaproth (7) 10 Song written by Calixa Lavallée and Adolphe-Basile Routhier for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony in 1 Down (1,6) 11 Shelford ___ (1913-96), author of The Chindit War (1979) (7) 12 Tamil poet-musician of the seventh and eighth centuries (7) 13 Lancashire town, home to a stone-built keep, possibly Norman (9) 15 Seven-part operatic cycle by Stockhausen (1928-2007) (5) 16 ‘When we were a soft ___, in ages past and gone’ – Sir Arthur Shipley, Life (1923) (6) 19 James F __ (1879-1972), director of US war mobilisation 1943-45 (6) 21 Legendary 15th-century rebel of Redesdale (5) 22 German town, historic centre for manufacture of toys (9) 26 Percy ___ (1913-88), gardener, writer and broadcaster (7) 27 RC Robertson-___ (1901-65), cricketer and journalist (7) 29 City of Northern Italy that joined the Lombard League in 1167 (7) 30 New York ___, baseball team former known as the Highlanders (7) DOWN 1 Battle of ___, clash of December 31st, 1775, between British and

Set by Richard Smyth American forces (6) 2 Mohandas ___ (1869-1948), Indian lawyer, politician and activist (6) 3 River on which the necropolis of Thebes stood (4) 4 Geoffrey ___ (1904-78), Bradfordborn RAF officer and inventor (6) 5 English architect (1611-72), pupil of Inigo Jones (4,4) 6 Irish-American nun (1802-87), founder of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (4,6) 7 Nora ___ (1884-1951), wife of the author James Joyce (8) 8 Pat ___ (1850-1908), US lawman, killer of Billy ‘the Kid’ Bonney (7) 14 Activist (1942-89) and co-founder of Black Panther Party (4,6) 17 Charles ___ (1914-79), AngloAmerican archaeologist, author of The Stone Age of Northern Africa (1960) (8) 18 ‘The ___ came down like the wolf on the fold’ – Byron, ‘The Destruction Of Sennacherib’ (1815) (8) 20 Werner von ___ (1880-1939), Wehrmacht officer, killed at the siege of Warsaw (7) 23 Japanese city, site of a castle constructed in 1610-12 and rebuilt after the Second World War (6) 24 Where ___ Dare, 1968 war film (6) 25 ‘___, young man, and grow up with the country’ – Horace Greeley, Hints Towards Reforms (1850) (2,4) 28 Thomas ___ (1710-78), composer and musical performer (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 March 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Friedrich Engels (1820-95)

Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947)

German philosopher and industrialist, lived at different times with two sisters as did …

Three times British prime minister, the only premier to serve under three monarchs, whose first Lord of the Admiralty was …

John Collier (1850-1934)

Leo Amery (1873-1955)

English Pre-Raphaelite artist, writer and portrait painter, whose subjects included ...

Whose son, John Amery, was a Nazi sympathiser and was executed for treason in 1945 by …

Angela Thirkell (1890-1961) English novelist, who set many of her novels in Anthony Trollope’s fictional county Barsetshire and who was first cousin once removed to …

Albert Pierrepoint (1905-92)

By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Hangman and publican, who executed over 400 people but began his working life in a cotton mill, as did …

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 71

MESMERISM

FromtheArchive Many assumptions and values separate us from the Victorians, but belief in the supernatural is not one of them, argues Simone Natale.

The Science of the Supernatural IN 1985 ROY PORTER outlined the impact of mesmerism in the late-18th-century with his article ‘Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England’. Mesmerism was a theory conceived by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer. It pointed to the existence of a hidden force, animal magnetism, which binds the universe together and regulates the inner balance within the human body. A historian of medicine, Porter was drawn to this subject by Mesmer and his acolytes’ therapeutic approach. They believed that good health was related to the free flow of animal magnetism in the body and illness to its obstruction or imbalance. In highlighting the relevance of unorthodox medical practices, Porter was contributing to a direction of historical research that would flourish in the following three decades: the study of the impact and significance of ‘occult’ beliefs and practices. Works such as Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World (1985), Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits (1989) and Jeffrey Sconce’s Haunted Media (2000) have become important references for historians of religion, science, politics and media, introducing to the core of historical inquiry aspects that were often left at its margins. Porter anticipates many of the key problems that were to be discussed and questioned by these and other authors. He documents how mesmerist practitioners combined healing ‘with party-piece hypnotising tricks’ and that demonstrations of mesmerism became forms of public entertainment. In my own research, I investigated the close relationship between belief in spirits and the emergence of the modern entertainment industry in the 19th century. I have documented 72 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

how spiritualist mediums used many of the performance and promotional strategies that were being developed at the time within show business. They had managers, for example, who worked in the entertainment sector and performed in theatres and public halls before paying publics. While we tend to draw a rigid line between performances that invite us to believe and those that aim to amuse, the cases of spiritualism and, as Porter suggests, mesmerism demonstrate that belief

Belief in the supernatural is still widespread in many societies and religious faiths and entertainment may combine rather than contrast with each other. Another crucial issue stressed by Porter is mesmerism’s controversial relationship with science. He perceptively notes that ‘at heart Mesmer was an orthodox somatic physician who regarded animal magnetism as a material force equivalent to light, heat, or fire within the Newtonian laws of nature’. Notwithstanding his failure to provide evidence that could convince the scientific establishment, Mesmer’s belief in mesmeric fluids did not contrast with his commitment to science. Likewise, as authors such as John Warne Monroe and Sophie Lachapelle have shown, believers in spiritualism considered themselves to be adept to a ‘scientific religion’. They gave much emphasis to the collection of evidence supporting their claim that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead and refused to consider their doctrine as ‘supernatural’: it was only a matter of time, they pointed out, before spirit communication would

be widely accepted as a natural and scientific fact. The questioning and inventive gaze of historians such as Porter has had a powerful impact on the way we imagine modern and contemporary societies and particularly the Victorian age, often characterised as one of supernatural and occult explorations. In looking for the significance of this body of work, however, we should not imply that such explorations pertain to a distant past. I am often asked why spiritualism was so prominent in the 19th century and is so insignificant today. I answer that this is simply not true. Polls and social studies show that belief in the supernatural is still widespread in many societies. Religious faiths, drawing directly from spiritualism’s doctrine, continue to attract millions of believers in countries such as Brazil. The present interest in Victorian culture tells us something about ourselves: we are intrigued by Victorian society and culture because it reflects elements of our own. Simone Natale is the author of Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).

VOLUME 35 ISSUE 9 SEPT 1985 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta