History Today - February 2016 (Gnv46)

February 2016
Vol 66 Issue 2
France Loses
its Head
The French Revolution explained
Britains Failures in
the Middle East
When Gay Was Not Good
The Origins of the
English Kingdom
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editor Kate Wiles
Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte
Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
CONTACTS
History Today is published monthly by
History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn
London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810
enquiries@historytoday.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Tel: 020 3219 7813/4
subscribe@historytoday.com
ADVERTISING
Lisa Martin, Portman Media
Tel: 020 7079 9361
lisamartin@portmanmedia.co.uk
Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321.
To new worlds:
Embarkation of the
Pilgrims, 1620 by
Robert Walter Weir,
1857.
FROM THE EDITOR
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 Johns College, Cambridge
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
University of London
Dr David Starkey
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter
Professor Chris Wrigley
University of Nottingham
All written material, unless otherwise stated,
is the copyright of History Today
THIS MONTH, in the second in our series of major articles on great historical events,
David Andress surveys the French Revolution with the help of the History Today
archive. The extraordinary narrative that unfolds during the late 18th century is
seen traditionally as the beginning of modern history. Why, though, did it happen
in France and not, say, in comparable European polities such as Britain or Spain?
Demography may help us answer that question.
During the turbulent 17th century, almost 400,000 people left Britain and Ireland
for North America. Though the figures are harder to verify, even more left the Iberian
peninsula for Central and South America from the 1500s onwards. Around 250,000
Dutch went in the opposite direction, settling trading stations in South-east Asia
with an almost manic energy. Such vigour, recklessness even, is a characteristic
of the young and ambitious, keen to turn their backs on the constrictions of their
homeland, to embrace new political and religious ideas and forge a more nourishing
existence in new territories far away, even at the risk of hardship and death. Tim
Blanning, in The Pursuit of Glory (2008), his masterly study of Europe from the Peace
of Westphalia to Waterloo, quotes one such adventurer, John Dunlap, publisher of
the Declaration of Independence, who wrote from the newly independent US to his
brother-in-law in Ulster in 1785:
People with a family advanced in life find great difficulties in emigration, but the young
men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick
as possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good
conduct and industry as in America.
Curiously, among the great nations of early modern Europe, only the inhabitants of
France seemed reluctant to embrace such adventure. There were around 15 people
from Britain and Ireland in North America during the 17th century for every French
man or woman. As a consequence, as Blanning points out, Britains revolution took
place in North America at the end of the 18th century and those of Spain in Central
and South America during the 19th. In France, by contrast, the energies of its
frustrated, alienated and energetic young people were turned on the patrie.
Paul Lay
Total Average Net Circulation
18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
2 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016
HistoryMatters
British Empire Peace of Westphalia Roman Beauty Pilgrims
Britains Willing Imperialists

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

advice for any researcher. Modern historians of British imperial culture may
yet be guilty of underestimating the
sheer differentness of 19th-century
Britain. Lytton Stracheys observation
that the history of the Victorian Age
will never be written: we know too
much about it is surely relevant here.
Strachey was writing long before the
advent of digital archives; when historians can read Victorian newspapers
from the comfort of their offices, the
period can feel dangerously familiar.
Since before the turn of the millennium, important historical works have
questioned whether ordinary British
people were ever truly enthusiastic
about imperialism. In their 1993
Global reach:
Allegory of the
British Empire
Strangling the
World, Italian,
1878.
study, British Imperialism, P.J. Cain and

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

Project (2009) takes a similar view,
pointing out that Victorian celebrations of imperialism, however
eyecatching, were lost in the mass of
non-imperial production. Jonathan
Roses The Intellectual Life of the British
Working Classes (2001) argues that
working-class memoirs tend to display
apathy, even antipathy, towards
matters imperial.
Goldhagens thoughts are of
special relevance here. He argues that
so firmly was antisemitism rooted in
precisely because they are taken for

granted, often are not expressed in a
manner commensurate with their prominence and significance or, when uttered,
seen as worthy by others to be noted and
recorded.
It is high time that scholars

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

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

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

because it suits the narrative of existing international law and
international relations as Whiggish, evolutionary processes
international system.
The idea that Westphalia paved
the way for an international system of
sovereign states relies on the argument
that the treaties dismantled the twin
supreme authorities of the Catholic
Church and the Holy Roman Empire.
Yet there was nothing particularly new
or groundbreaking in the treaties that
caused this: Protestantism had been
recognised by the Empire as early as
1532 in the Treaty of Nuremberg. Though
the Catholic Churchs political authority
was certainly declining throughout the
early modern period, there is nothing
to suggest that Westphalia provided
the ultimate turning point. Similarly, the
idea that the Holy Roman Empire was
replaced by a network of independent
states after 1648 is exaggerated. The
Peace of Westphalia officially gave
imperial princely states the power
to sign treaties, but this had already
been widely practised for at least a
half century before. Brandenburg, for
example, had independently formed an
alliance with the Netherlands in 1605.

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

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

Science at Trinity College Dublin and a member
of the Graduate Institute of International and
Development Studies, Geneva.
HISTORYMATTERS
The Make-up of Rome

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

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

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

Perfumes in the Roman World (Tempus, 2007).
HISTORYMATTERS
Miniature
depicting a
funeral at the
beginning of
the Office of the
Dead. Needle
holes indicate 12
pilgrim tokens
were sewn onto
the previous
folio. Horae, mid15th century.
Tokens of Affection
What do pilgrim badges tell us
about emotion in the Middle Ages?
Diane Heath
HOW CAN dirty marks in an old book
help us access a medieval readers emotions? Why is it important that we try to
establish such connections? The history
of emotions is a new field but one that
encourages a wider public engagement
with history. Emotions are accessible:
we all understand and experience anger,
pity, love and hate. These feelings help
us make links to those who previously
expressed them and open up new pathways to understand how people in the
past felt about their world. Historians
search literary and documentary evidence for publicly expressed emotions,
if not interior feelings. Public emotions
are revealed in the rhetoric of medieval
writers, who were trained to express
pathos to their readership and so
inspire emotional responses by making
clear their own feelings, which were
considered just as important as putting
forward rational arguments. Yet what
about those non-literate people who
were barely or never recorded? How
might we learn about their feelings?
Medieval pilgrimage was a significant source of material objects that
address emotion. The historian Brian
Spencer was the first to point out the
importance of pilgrim badges or tokens
as a means to explore medieval ritual,
practice and belief. Inexpensive metal
badges (sometimes gold ones, too)

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

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

Christ Church University. The Medieval Canterbury
Weekend runs from April 1st to 3rd, 2016.
MonthsPast
FEBRUARY
By Richard Cavendish
FEBRUARY 18th 1516
Bloody Mary born at

Greenwich Palace
BORN AT ABOUT four oclock that
Monday morning, Mary Tudor was the
first surviving child of Henry VIII and his
Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon. He
was 24 years old, she was 30, they had
been married for six years and she had
suffered a succession of miscarriages and
stillbirths. Although Henry had hoped for
a son and heir, Marys safe arrival was a
relief. As Henry said: By the grace of God
the sons will follow.
The relief was not only his. The christening in the nearby friary church two
days later to the sound of trumpets and
the proclamations of heralds drew an
impressive turn-out of supportive
English nobility. Accompanied by the
Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the
Countess of Surrey carried the baby to
the font beneath a canopy borne by four
knights. Cardinal Wolsey, the Duchess of
Heir hunters:
Philip II and Mary I,
1558 by Hans
Eworth, 16th
century.
Norfolk and the Countesses of Salisbury

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

Disaster struck in the 1530s. No more
royal children had arrived and Henry
desperately needed a son and heir. He
had also fallen in love with Anne Boleyn,
who refused to bed him unless he
married her. In what his subjects called
the kings Great Matter, he decided
to have his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon annulled. She resisted as best
she could, with the support of the pope,
who refused to invalidate the marriage, but Henry broke with Rome and
declared the English church a separate
entity, with himself as its Supreme Head.
In 1533 the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Thomas Cranmer, formally proclaimed
the marriage to Catherine of Aragon null
and void and Henry proceeded to marry
Anne Boleyn.
Mary, who was now 17, was considered illegitimate. No longer a princess,
she was henceforth the Lady Mary.
She was a devout Roman Catholic and
strongly disapproved of the Protestant
regime headed by her young halfbrother Edward VI from 1547 to his
death in 1553. With the armed support
of prominent Catholics she succeeded
to the throne, determined to restore
Catholicism and obedience to the pope.
It was now Marys turn to need an
heir and, aged 37, in 1554 she married a
Catholic prince, Philip of Spain, which
incidentally made her officially Queen of
Naples and Jerusalem. Philip was 26 and
not a popular figure in England. Protestants were being ruthlessly persecuted
for heresy and over 250 were burned at
the stake during Marys five-year reign,
which would earn her the nickname
Bloody Mary. She more than once
fancied herself pregnant by Philip, but
turned out not to be, which made her
miserably unhappy. Ill with dropsy and
fever, she died in St Jamess Palace in
London in 1558, aged 42, and was buried
in Westminster Abbey. Her successor
was her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth,
an incomparably greater monarch than
poor Mary could ever have been.
FEBRUARY 24th 616
Death of
King Ethelbert
of Kent
ETHELBERT was the first English
king to be converted to Christianity,
which proved to be a crucial event in
the development of English national
identity. In 597 a Roman monk called
Augustine arrived in Kent as leader of
a group of missionaries sent by Pope
Gregory the Great. There were plenty
of Christians in Britain already and
had been ever since Roman and early
Celtic times, before the country was
invaded from the mid-fifth century
onwards by pagan English of various
Germanic tribes, who in time set up
small kingdoms.
Augustines mission was not to
establish British Christianity, but
Roman Catholic Christianity.
Ethelberts wife, Bertha, was a
daughter of the Merovingian Frankish
king in what is now France. She was
a Christian and it was a condition of

the marriage that she would be free
to practise her religion. Ethelbert
evidently considered that an acceptable price for a close connection with
the most powerful ruler in western
Europe.
The details and dates are often uncertain, but Bertha brought a bishop
with her from France as her
chaplain and presumably
she had her own Christian
retinue as well. For worship
she restored the ancient
church of St Martin of Tours,
which dated back to Roman
times. Ethelbert had consequently been in close touch
with Christianity and he
soon accepted it for himself.
His household followed suit
and pagans lower down the
social scale in Kent found it in
their interest to be baptised
in numbers in the local rivers. Ethelbert now presided over the creation
of a law code which gave the Roman
church a secure place in the kingdom.
Augustine was made Archbishop of
Convert king:
statue of
Ethelbert at
Canterbury
Cathedral, Kent.
FEBRUARY 20th 1816
Premiere of
The Barber of
Seville
FAT, LAZY AND WITTY, Gioachino
Rossini was born in Pesaro in Italy in
1792. His father and mother were professional musicians and he was a child
prodigy. He played various instruments
and, until his voice broke, he earned
money as a singer. In time he would
compose some 40 operas, often written
at astonishing speed. He is quoted as
once saying that he could set the laundry
bill to music if he needed to.
Rossinis most popular opera, Il
barbiere di Siviglia was written in less than
three weeks. Based on a French comedy
by Pierre Beaumarchais, it was at first
called Almaviva. The central character is
a barber named Figaro and the heroine
is Rosina, a beautiful rich girl who is the
Rotund wit: a
caricature of
Gioachino Rossini
and a score for Il
barbiere di Siviglia,
19th century.
ward of an elderly doctor called Bartolo.

A young aristocrat, Count Almaviva,
has fallen in love with Rosina and hires
Figaro to help him win her, which he
duly does. Rosina soon returns
the English on the popes orders and

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

farcical complications the two are
allowed to marry when Almaviva bribes
Bartolo with Rosinas dowry.
The premiere at the Teatro Argentina
in Rome did not go well. A rival Italian
composer, Giovanni Paisiello, had already
based a popular opera called Il Barbiere
di Siviglia on the Beaumarchais play and
too many of the audience in Rome for
Rossinis version were Paisiello enthusiasts, who had gone to the premiere
to disrupt it. They shouted and hissed
throughout, while one of the singers fell
over and bloodied his nose and a cat
came casually on and wandered about
the stage.
The second performance, however, was
a triumph and all Italy went Rossini-mad
and would remain so. At the age of 37
in 1829, rich and famous at home and
abroad, Rossini virtually retired and
wrote no more operas, though nobody
knows why. He spent his last years living
it up in France and died at his villa at
Passy, near Paris, in 1868. He was 76.
N
A kerosene
delivery cart in
the United Arab
Emirates, 1971.
MIDDLE EAST
ELSON received intelligence on July 28th, 1798

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

the end of Empire in the
Middle East did not mean
permanent withdrawal
Learning
lessons in the
MIDDLE
EAST
The history of Britains foreign policy in the Middle

East is largely a litany of failure, of self-inflicted wounds
that are still felt today. Peter Mangold considers what
British diplomats and politicians have failed to learn.
Colonel Gadaffis Libya and now ISIS. Britain is building a

new military base in Bahrain this year.
British fears and emotions run high in the Middle East.
The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, became a vital route to
India and gained a symbolic significance in the British
imagination, which, by the mid-20th century, made it peculiarly hard to relinquish. It was no accident that the biggest
crisis of the end of Empire, the Suez Crisis of 1956, centred
on the canals nationalisation. Oil evoked even more
emotive reactions. No Cyprus, Prime Minister Anthony
Eden declared in 1955, no certain facilities to protect our
supply of oil. No oil: unemployment and hunger in Britain.
It is as simple as that. Fear of a British 9/11 underlay Tony
Blairs intervention in Iraq in 2003. Prime Minister David
Cameron has referred to ISIS as an existential threat.
THE NUMBER OF British mistakes and failures in the
Middle East is striking. British policy in the region has been
remarkably accident-prone, resulting in a series of official
enquiries. The first of these was into the surrender in 1916
of some 13,000 British and Indian troops at Kut-al-Amarah,
in what was then Mesopotamia. In the interwar years there
were enquiries into disturbances in Palestine. The Iraq
invasion of 2003 sparked a raft of enquiries, including the
long-awaited Chilcot report.
The cost of Britains self-inflicted wounds in the Middle
East has been high. The heaviest brunt has been born
within the region, where the impact of decisions made
nearly a century ago, over Palestine and Iraq, along with
the consequences of the 2003 Iraq War, are still working
themselves out. From the British perspective, the pursuit of
certain policies has undermined its position in and beyond
the Middle East. Suez drove Britain and France apart, with
Britain embracing its special relationship with Washington with new urgency, while France turned away from the
Entente Cordiale towards West Germany. The consequences
of this would be played out in de Gaulles two vetoes, in
MIDDLE EAST
1963 and 1967, of Britains application to join the European

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

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

the Middle East was hydra-headed. In
1916, 18 different authorities needed to be
consulted about decisions on the region
Battle of the Nile,
1st August 1798 at
10pm by Thomas
Luny, 1834.
Empire was a difficult task, conducted under unpropitious

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

of India, despite having no experience of operations on this
scale, was responsible for the campaign and was anxious for
it to continue, so as to avoid India being overshadowed by
the European fighting. The result was the disaster at Kut-alAmarah, the worst British military humiliation since defeat
by George Washingtons forces at Yorktown in 1781. The
8,000-strong British-Indian garrison in the town of Kut
was besieged by Ottoman troops, with the survivors imprisoned at Aleppo. As the subsequent commission of enquiry
noted, the scope of the object of the mission was never
sufficiently defined in advance.
No lessons were learned. The advance was resumed in
1917, despite the fact that it had no real strategic rationale
in the larger context of the war. It was only once Baghdad
had been taken that the War Cabinet set up a Mesopotamia Administration Committee to consider the problems
raised by occupation of the two Turkish provinces of Basra
and Baghdad, which were serious. Antipathy between the
minority Sunni and majority Shia population, along with
tribal and clan rivalries, meant that a unified and cohesive
government was almost impossible. But the British then
proceeded to compound the difficulties at the end of the
war with a dash to Mosul, which was believed to have
The opening of
the Suez Canal,
Port Said, 1869.
valuable oilfields. Officials subsequently debated whether

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

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

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

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

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

Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1956;
King Feisal of Iraq, 1921;
King Farouk of Egypt, 1939.
Below: Lord Curzon, Secretary

of State for Foreign Affairs from
1919 to 1923.
Right: The Balfour Declaration,
signed by Arthur James Balfour
in 1917.
Egypt had become the lightning rod for British anger at the
loss of Empire and great power status, with Nasser in Egypt
as its focus. This meant that, as far as British ministers were
concerned, the crisis had become dangerously personalised.
Getting rid of him, like getting rid of Saddam Hussein
in 2003, became an overriding imperative. It drove and
distorted policy. Dissenting views, whether from the US
or from British officials, were either excluded or ignored.
In consequence, the impracticalities of trying to put the
imperial clock back by reinvading Egypt the dubious
international legality of the operations, the transparency
of the charade of Britain and France intervening to separate
Egyptian and Israeli forces after an Israeli attack, the political risks for Britains being seen to cooperate with Israel,
not to mention the lack of any exit strategy were either
downplayed or glossed over.
A
Anthony Eden
(centre), General
Bernard Cyril
Freyberg (left) and
Sir Miles Lampson
(right) welcome
troops at Suez,
1940.
Soviets were making inroads in Egypt and Syria. Britain was

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

Arabia and the Gulf, where by 1957 Kuwait was
providing around half of British oil, as well as
amassing large sterling reserves. The security of
Gulf oil supplies was judged to require a regional base. The
place chosen was Aden, the only sovereign British territory
in the region. Securing it in an era when Cairo radios
nationalist messages could be heard in even the remotest
parts of Arabia, represented a challenge which was not fully
confronted in London. Once again an overriding imperative
was allowed to ride roughshod over inconvenient facts.
Officials tried to square the circle. The Governor of Aden,
Sir William Luce, put forward a far-sighted proposal in
1958 for an early merger between protectorates and colony.
The new state, in a treaty relationship with Britain, would
acquire independence within ten years, with provision
for the maintenance of the base. Ministers, however,
regarded this as too risky. What they failed to appreciate
was that so were the alternatives. This was certainly true
of the chosen option: a federation between Aden and
MIDDLE EAST
its tribal hinterland. It had some advantages, not least the
fact that the protectorate rulers, who would constitute the
majority in the South Arabian Federation, were friendly
to Britain, while political activists in the more developed
port of Aden were not. This was a shotgun marriage.
Charles Johnson, who succeeded Luce as governor, wrote
of bringing together not only urban and rural but different
centuries as well; modern Glasgow say and the 18th-century
Highlands. Lack of knowledge of the area among politicians meant that the federations flaws were not properly
appreciated in London.
Ministers and officials compounded their difficulties
in at least two ways. Although ready to invest heavily in
The course of recent Middle Eastern

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

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

In Iran the British had got too close to the Shah, avoiding
contacts with opposition figures, which they knew, thanks
to Britains long history of intervening in Iranian affairs,
would be unpopular with him. Britains one advantage was
in the field of signals intelligence (SIGINT), with Egyptian
ciphers known to have been broken.
RITISH POLICY in the Middle East since the First

World War has been, to say the least, challenging.
Britains informal empire in the Middle East
reached its apogee when its global power was
already well into decline. As Commander Hogarth of the
Arab Bureau in Cairo warned in 1920:
The Empire has reached its maximum and begun the descent.
There is no more expansion in us ... and that being so we make
but a poor Best of the Arab Countries.
Against this background it was a tall order to try to create a
stable new order in place of the Ottoman Empire. Managing
the complex political, strategic and psychological adjustments entailed in the precipitous decline of British power
in the Middle East after the Second World War proved unexpectedly painful. The subsequent instability of the region
has, as most recently evident in Iraq and Syria, created a
new set of difficulties.
The British compounded their own problems. Policymaking was often vitiated by a lack of intellectual rigour.
Problems were not thought through, whether because
ministers were distracted, as during the First World War,
or because the machinery of government was inadequately
coordinated and at times short-circuited. Experts were not
infallible, as evidenced by Lampsons wartime handling of
King Farouk. Nevertheless, the key mistakes were made by
Firefighters pull
water hoses next
to burning oil
wells at Greater
Burhan Oil Field,
Kuwait, 1991.
those ministers in London who either failed to consult or

ignored expert advice. This was most true of Suez and the
2003 Iraq War. In the run up to the Iraq conflict the Foreign
Office sent an official to explain some of the complexities
of Iraq to the prime minister, Tony Blair. Thats all history,
came his reply. This is about the future.
In his 1967 account of the Suez Crisis, Anthony Nutting,
minister of state at the Foreign Office, drew his title, No End
of a Lesson, from Rudyard Kiplings poem The Lesson,
written after the Boer War:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and Again.
Learning lessons has not been a strong point of British
policy-making in the Middle East, yet those lessons are
certainly there to be learned.
Peter Mangold is a former member of the BBC World Service and Foreign
Commonwealth Office Research Department. He is an Academic Visitor at
St Antony's College, Oxford. His history of Britain and the Middle East will be
published by I.B. Tauris in 2016.
FURTHER READING
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the
Modern Middle East, 1914-1922 (Penguin, 1999).
Keith Kyle, Suez (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).
Peter Hinchcliffe, John T. Ducker and Maria Holt,
Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden
(I.B.Tauris, 2006).
InFocus
Attlee On His Way 1945
HE FIFTH OF JULY 1945, polling day, and Clement

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

including Attlee, it seems, expected a Conservative victory,
in spite of memories of the unemployment, the means test
and appeasement in the 1930s. The impact of Ernest Bevin,
who, as wartime minister of labour, had mobilised the
nations manpower on the understanding that the status of
the workers must henceforth be transformed, was not appreciated. Neither was Beveridges Report of 1942, with his
A decent, patriotic
man of notoriously
few words, Attlee was
not a formulator of
new initiatives but
a brisk dispatcher of
business who could
deploy a ruthless
streak when it counted
Five Giants to be laid low: want, disease, ignorance, squalor,

idleness. The Gallup polls might have been predicting a
Labour win for years but they were a novelty and ignored.
Many years after his 146-seat victory Attlee was asked
what his emotions had been on becoming prime minister.
His answer was totally in character: Just to know that
there were jobs that were to be done. There were indeed.
Two days later he was at the Potsdam Conference alongside
Harry Truman and Josef Stalin, where ruthless Soviet

ambition was obvious. The surrender of Japan in August
signalled the end of the war, but also triggered the abrupt
end of the Lend-Lease agreement with the US. Britains
financial carpet had been whipped from under her feet by
American politicians disinclined to be generous to a country
gone socialist, but which was also still an Empire.
ROGER HUDSON
The FRENCH
REVOLUTION
A Complete History?
In the second of our occasional series in which leading historians
tell the story of major events with reference to articles from
the archive of History Today, David Andress offers a compelling
account of this tumultuous period.
FRENCH REVOLUTION
HAT THE FRENCH REVOLUTION was depends, perhaps

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

Bastille, July 14th,
1789. Contemporary
coloured engraving.
FRENCH REVOLUTION
A complete history of the French Revolution can only be a review of
events so disturbing to their contemporaries and so central to modern
politics that assigning them a fixed significance continues to elude
us. If that seems disappointing, it should not be, because history is not
about settled questions (for those, a mere chronicle will suffice). Rather,
we should see in the endlessly disturbed waters of debate on this subject
a better reflection of the unsettled, unfinished nature of society today
and a stronger reason to continue debating it into the future.
Historians in the last 40 years have tended to move away from thinking
about social class as a cause of conflict: the evidence for a strong capitalist bourgeoisie before 1789 was always thin and faded away under
detailed inspection. (See Maurice Cranston for a bicentennial reflection
on 1789.) This has opened the field to revived interest in the worldview
of elite individuals ministers themselves and the 144 noblemen invited
in 1787 to form an Assembly of Notables to approve royal reforms. Many
of these rejected the proposals, using an intriguing cocktail of reasons
that both defended their privileged place in the state and talked of the
wider interests of the nation against the crown.
THERE IS A straightforward explanation for the events that became

the Revolution: the French state was lurching towards bankruptcy.
Burdened with massive debts accumulated
N SO DOING and in continued defiance
through military expenditure in the Seven
of royal plans by Frances network of high
This feature contains links (marked
Years War and the War of American Indecourts, the parlements, over the next year
pendence, unable to raise enough in taxathe elite attracted a great deal of support
in red) to related articles from our
tion to pay down the debts, coming danfrom the public. That public was an unmeasextensive archive. They are available at:
gerously close to borrowing more simply
urable mix of the two or three per cent of
www.historytoday.com/frenchrevolution
to keep the governments candles lit, Louis
the country who were nobles and clergy,
XVIs ministers were, by the mid-1780s, in
another few per cent who made up a wider
dire straits. (See Peter Burley for an exploration of French finances.)
educated and propertied class of commoners and a more visible public of
They could simply have repudiated the debts, either by blatantly
urban protesters who supported their local institutions with vociferous
cancelling them or through forms of restructuring that many states,
protest. This was particularly notable in the summer of 1788, when royal
including France itself, had used on occasion in previous centuries. The
despotism seemed to take a leap forward, abolishing the parlements and
revolutionary situation arose precisely because ministers felt compelled
seeking to implement changes without them.
not to do this. The influence of a culture of Enlightenment, a belief in
By the end of that year, the public had fractured dramatically. Its
the value of public debate and of public opinion as a worthy judge of
voice and real looming bankruptcy had forced the crown to give in and
state actions, hovered in their minds. So, too, did the knowledge that
restore the parlements. A national consultative Estates General was to
the idea of state bankruptcy had already been branded as a hallmark of
be held, the first since 1614, to address grievances and pave the way for
evil despotism in the writings of eminent commentators. (See J.L Carr
reform. The judges in the senior Paris parlement had greeted news of
for a 1965 overview of cultural change in this period.)
this event, which the nation had cried out for, with a pronouncement
that it should meet in three equal chambers, with two reserved for the
This insight allows us to see another dimension of the traditional
nobility and clergy. Thus the wider public, the so-called Third Estate,
debate between the social and the political origins of the Revolution.
Opening of the Estates General at Versailles, May 5th 1789, by Isidore Stanislas Helman, 18th century.
Heads of two of the king's

guards, killed at Versailles on
October 5th, 1789, are carried
through Paris. Coloured
engraving, 18th century.
hope and dread. It began with communities gathering to take part

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

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

direct action. Some claimed they had a licence to fulfil
the demands they had made in their cahiers, others voiced
the need for justice or simple material need. Tax offices,
monastic granaries, noble game reserves, enclosed commons and
document rooms of local chateaux all experienced popular wrath
up and down the country in sporadic and spontaneous movements. Had it been only a little more consistent, this activity would
have been recognised as a mass movement. Many elite observers at the
time wrote it off as delusional and it introduced another dimension of
complexity to the political landscape: soon, town populations would
be forming militias to defend themselves against a peasantry whose
motivations they could not decipher and would not trust.
It was in the shadow of all this that the Estates General met at Versailles in early May and for the first month of its existence remained
entirely deadlocked. The majority of noble deputies were convinced
their social identity was at stake in the pretentions of the Third Estate
and resisted all moves to meet together as the latter demanded. Only
after the Third had vowed in June to proceed alone, declaring itself the
National Assembly and pledging to write a new constitution, did privileged resistance crumble. In early July a sudden spark of royal despotism
took its place and Louis XVI was persuaded by his family to sack the
popular minister Necker and bring in a hard-line ministry that could,
they thought, crush the Assembly.
News of this, as well as rumours of menacing troop movements,
sparked the uprising of the Parisian population on July 12th that, within
48 hours, had formed a citizens militia, seized state armouries and
besieged the Bastille to secure its stocks of gunpowder. News of this
rising caused dread in the National Assembly and only unequivocal word
that it had been done on their behalf, which arrived after the fall of the
Bastille, broke the immense tension with near hysterical relief. The king
arrived at their meeting hall on the 15th to pledge to work with them.
This and a ceremonial royal visit to Paris on the 17th, where Louis was
greeted by the citys new revolutionary authorities, cemented a sense
of epoch-making change. But the first counter-revolutionary aristocrats, including the kings brother Artois, had already fled the country,
becoming the migrs whose threat would haunt the coming years.
Like other aspects of revolutionary action across the country, the
extent to which different groups and social constituencies acted both
independently towards similar ideals, yet at potential cross-purposes,
was remarkable. Soon the Parisian leaders were trying to disarm the
FRENCH REVOLUTION
less reliable (that is, poorer) elements of their militia, while
across France the Great Fear broke out. Rumours of aristocratically sponsored brigandage, crop-burning and general marauding almost entirely false flashed around the nation, mobilising communities (and thus sparking further rumours) and also
bounced back to Versailles, creating the impression of a universal
collapse of order. In a moderately desperate attempt to regain the
political initiative, leading reformers in the Assembly proposed
that at least some feudal and other privileges should be ended.
As a result of this, the Night of 4th August saw an emotional
crescendo of proposals from nobles, clerics and commoners, sacrificing church income, noble tax exemptions, feudal rights and
all the geographical distinctions that had privileged different
communities and regions against each other. It redefined the
nation as a community equal in civic identity and set the stage
for the truly momentous Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen a few weeks later. It also proved cripplingly disappointing to the rural population, whose feudal burdens, despite
apparent abolition, were largely slated instead to be redeemed
at the ludicrous price of a lump sum of 20 years dues.
Louis XVI by AntoineFranois Callet, 1779.
UGUST 4TH was a decisive high point in revolutionary

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

orders of the Estates General:
the clergy, the nobility and the
common people, 1789.
The Siege of the Bastille by Claude Cholat, 1789.
becoming a dense network of correspondence and political identity but

one built, paradoxically, on the idea of politics without party.
The notion, central to their identity, that Jacobins were simply patriots and that it was their enemies who formed a faction was echoed in
the wider assumptions structuring the revolutionised nation. A tax-paying male electorate of several million active citizens was established
and structures of local government, administration and the judiciary
from the village upwards were made elective. Nobody, however, was
permitted to publicly stand for election this was too divisive. Rather,
in interminable processes, electors nominated lengthy lists of individuals they thought worthy for various roles, only finding out at the end
whether any had achieved a majority of votes or were indeed willing to
serve. It was little wonder, in hindsight, that initially healthy levels of
voter participation plunged, after several different elections stretching
into 1791, towards a small minority of persistent activists.
HESE IDEAS OF SIMPLE, patriotic public spirit existed alongside not just reactionaries and Jacobins, but a huge spectrum
of vociferous press and public debate, marked by the refusal
to recognise that there was anything like a spectrum of positions involved. The constant cry was of what all the good citizens must
think, feel, want or fear and any differing suggestions were denounced,
loudly, as unpatriotic, aristocratic, counter-revolutionary. Even voices
that were clearly radical in their advocacy of popular engagement could
be damned as aristocratic by seeing them as disorganisers, fomenting
chaos through which the migrs would triumph. Fear of gens malintentionns ill-intentioned people of unknown identity and dread
motive was everywhere.
As such acrimony flourished, major political decisions fuelled it
further. From early 1790, authorities had begun to inventory surplus

religious buildings for sale, leading to the wholesale abolition of monasticism, as new rules for the state-funded church were finalised that June.
The Civil Constitution of the Clergy split that body almost down the
middle and with it much of the general population. The new structure
explicitly denied the authority of the pope in ways that fuelled fears of
a secret anti-religious (possibly Protestant, Masonic, Jewish) agenda
behind the whole Revolution. Many priests scorned such views, seeing
a church which was renewed and cleansed of plutocratic excesses. But
many others clung to them, as parishioners clung to actual churches
now threatened with closure through structural rationalisation and
to the educational and charitable services of monks and nuns. Riotous
protest, amounting almost to insurrection in some regions, increased
and meshed too easily with groups of real counter-revolutionary agents.
Rural discontent in general rose through the second half of 1790
as the population absorbed the news that legislation demanded they
redeem their feudal dues at great cost and in some regions peasants had
to endure landlords lumping abolished tithes into their rents. This was
sanctioned by the National Assembly, presumably believing that money
left in the hands of peasants would be wasted. While this helped to
aggravate the rising levels of protest around religion, in the cities revolutionary leaders also faced growing radical pressure, as club organisation
spread from the prosperous ranks of Jacobins down to more popular
societies, with low subscriptions and mixed-sex membership. In Paris
and Lyon in particular, networks of clubs grew up that saw the shadow
of counter-revolution in everything that was not uncompromisingly
anti-aristocratic and made this known vehemently in the press and in
public demonstrations.
Two events in 1791 shattered the idea of a swift final resolution
FRENCH REVOLUTION
to the constitutional travails of the country. In January almost half of
all priests refused to take a loyalty oath, imposed to try to end dissent
over the Civil Constitution. In some regions, notably the north-west,
refusal ran at over 80 per cent. Non-juring priests became a new category of revolutionary enemy and a dissident refractory church now
competed openly for popular loyalties with the constitutional clergy
appointed to replace them. Violence accompanied the split everywhere
priests, old and new, were dragged from pulpits, a few were even
shot at, while in Paris furious crowds inflicted humiliating beatings on
nuns, with salacious press commentary. As with every other problem
of public life notably rising inflation in the assignat paper currency
introduced on the collateral of the churchs lands counter-revolution was blamed automatically for this situation and actual counterrevolutionaries strove to take advantage of it. (See Gemma Betros for
an overview of this critical issue.)
T THE VERY TOP of politics, the religious crisis engaged the

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

to Fight and a Citizen Carrying the
Declaration of the Rights of Man by
the Lesueur Brothers; The Seizing of
the Tuileries Palace by Jean DuplessisBertaux; and a cartoon showing
Mirabeau presiding over the Jacobins.
All 18th century.
had known that he had perjured himself and was working with the
queen and the migrs to bring about an armed congress of European
powers to free him from revolutionary shackles.
HE AGENDA OF THE newly elected Legislative Assembly, that

Feuillant leaders hoped to use to stabilise the country, soon
instead became dominated by the continued echoes of the
kings flight. Radical Jacobins, led by the Parisian journalist
Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and men who had risen through the politics of
their local regions in the turbulent revolutionary years, presented an
uncompromising challenge to the idea that the king, as head of the
executive branch, would be allowed to peaceably set policy. It took less
than two months to push him into vetoing measures against migr
nobles and refractory priests and by the end of the year the Brissotins
were actively calling for a war against the German powers sheltering
the Revolutions enemies.
Maximilien Robespierre, who had built a reputation as an incorruptible spokesman for the oppressed people in the National Assembly,
was in these months almost a lone voice warning of the dangers of
war. Where Brissotins asserted the invincibility of free men in combat
against the slaves of tyranny, he saw an unprepared nation being
hurried towards a death-trap. As more conservative figures came around
to the war agenda, seeking to use it to stamp authority on the turbulent
people, and as the royal couple and their allies increasingly plotted to
use war to bring the Revolution down, Robespierres suspicions were
all too well-founded. The drumbeat of hostilities became irresistible,
however, and on April 20th France declared war on Austria, the leader,
under the Habsburg emperor, of the Holy Roman Empire.
The period of the spring and early summer of 1792 was a turningpoint for future politics, beyond the simple, albeit critical, fact of
movement from peace to war. The Brissotins in the Assembly had been
seeking not merely influence for their views, but power, and specifically to install their friends as royal ministers. They succeeded in this
Robespierre, an incorruptible
spokesman for the oppressed
people, was a lone voice warning
of the dangers of war
a month before the declaration of war, but this meant that they took
the blame from forces to their left as the war proved to go very badly.
Robespierres analysis, that there was some nefarious intent beneath
their martial ardour, gained currency especially with the Parisian local
Sections. In these neighbourhood committees, some were increasingly
accepting the newly minted identity of sans-culottes: radical popular
patriots, not the friends of the people the Brissotins claimed to be, but
the people themselves.
Through May and June, as French armies failed to make advances
and the unthinkable prospect of an enemy invasion loomed, Brissotins
both assailed the sinister influence of an Austrian Committee inside the
Court and called for more decisive royal action. The Assembly produced
further emergency measures but ministers despaired as Louis refused
to sanction them. In mid-June the Brissotin ministers were dismissed
after openly warning that the king was heading down a disastrous path,
but their supporters in the Assembly continued to harass their Feuillant
successors. (See M.J. Sydenham for a further traumatic episode when
the king was confronted by protesters in his own palace.) By early July,
with Prussia entering the war, the Assembly was driven to create and
enact a measure to declare The Fatherland in Danger, mobilising the
National Guard and taking powers to override the royal veto powers
FRENCH REVOLUTION
The Terrible Night in Paris,
10th August 1792.
which, having never been formally sanctioned by the king, were unconstitutional in their essence.
In the second half of July, with ardently patriotic militiamen from
around the country beginning to gather in the capital as a fdr force
for its defence, the Brissotin leadership sought desperately to stabilise
the situation. Fatally for its political future, it negotiated secretly with
the king for a return to power, while publicly warning of the risks of a
decisive move against Louis. This would damn it forever in more radical
eyes. Momentum among the sans-culottes and the fdrs for action was
rising, especially after word that the enemys Brunswick Manifesto had
threatened to raze Paris, if the king were harmed. On August 9th, the
Assembly refused to rule on Parisian petitions to topple the king and on
that same day forces in the capital formed an Insurrectional Commune,
which on August 10th ordered an advance by several columns of National
Guards on the Tuileries Palace.
HE KING, primarily concerned for his familys safety, surrendered into the custody of the Legislative Assembly before
any overt confrontation, but his garrison of Swiss Guards, left
behind without orders, refused Parisians demands to lay down
their arms. Someone fired a first shot and a battle erupted that turned
into a slaughter. Some 300 insurgents were shot down but the Swiss
were overwhelmed, with hundreds killed on the spot and dozens more
hunted down and butchered as they tried to flee through neighbouring
streets. Crowds invaded the palace, hauling out royal finery to burn in
massive bonfires. The Assembly decreed the king suspended, but in
truth the monarchy had clearly been toppled.
That fact was reinforced by the purge of the administration that
followed: in many ways more rapid and decisive than the changes of
1789, which had often left old authorities effectively intact for months.
Now royalists of every stripe were driven from office and many found
themselves in custody. In Paris, the prisons swelled with hundreds of
new suspects and a new tribunal began work a week after the Tuileries
events, sentencing some of the more egregious counter-revolutionaries to death. This was not fast enough for many local sans-culottes:
politicians and press warned of catastrophic subversion in the city as
enemy armies drew near, besieging Verdun, the last fortress before the
capital, at the start of September. Between September 2nd and 5th, in
the region of 1,500 people were killed in the Parisian prisons in what
almost all revolutionary observers at the time agreed was a regrettable
necessity. The great majority of those killed were ordinary criminals,
defined as brigands available for aristocratic subversion; the rest were
a selection of those priests, nobles and officials recently rounded up.
It is important to recognise the selective element in these September Massacres. They became the iconic moment of
popular savagery in counter-revolutionary
retellings and for Brissotins, who came to
believe Robespierre had tried to dispose
of their leaders through them. But most
counter-revolutionary prisoners survived
the massacres, having had their case files
reviewed and sometimes having been
questioned for hours by ad-hoc tribunals
in each prison. The princesse de Lamballe,
Marie Antoinettes favourite, was indeed
decapitated but did not suffer the sexual
mutilations of many accounts and was
almost the only woman to die. There is very little truly contemporary
evidence for the many scenes of sadism later alleged to have taken
place it is true that victims were mostly hacked to death in very bloody
processes but accounts of actual torture from immediate witnesses are
essentially absent.
N A SOCIETY that recoils from all face-to-face violence, it may seem

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

The survey of the revolution continues in the February digital edition of
History Today, which traces the development of the Terror, culminating
in the events of 9 Thermidor and the struggle of surviving republicans to
rebuild a stable state between the twin threats of radicalism and royalism.
The digital edition is free to print subscribers. To download the digital
edition visit www.historytoday.com/app
XXXXXXXXXX
| BAGEHOT
Calms not lifes crown, though calm is well.
Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But tis not what youth desires.
Matthew Arnold
IN A TIME OF POLITICAL TENSION across Britain, Europe

and the US, when rival parties see society through their
ideological lenses, it is worth recalling the views of the
Victorian writer, banker and economist Walter Bagehot
(1826-77). As the author of The English Constitution (1867),
which dissected the structure of British government, and
Lombard Street (1873), a timeless analysis of the workings
of finance, he saw politics from the outside. As the editor of
the Economist and shadow chancellor to both Liberal and
Tory administrations, he was also well placed to see it from
the inside. Much, of course, has changed politically and
constitutionally since his lifetime, not least in the size and
scope of Britains government. Yet many of the issues that
he addressed continue to excite division, from party rivalries to relations with Europe, from constitutional reform to
economic crises.
Walter Bagehot,
mezzotint by Norman
Hirst, 19th century.
As politics in Britain, Europe and the US descends into

fragmentation and bitter division, Frank Prochaska
commends the civilising voice of Walter Bagehot.
Educate! Educate! Educate!

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

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

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

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

O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah, still awhile, the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again!
Frank Prochaska is a member of Somerville and Wolfson colleges at the
University of Oxford.
MakingHistory
The public expects historians to deliver authoritative accounts of the past, yet different
conclusions can be drawn from the same sources, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.
A Question of Interpretation
I RECENTLY READ an amateur review
of a history book with which I am
familiar, which stated: It is just an
interpretation. The phrase has stayed
with me, my mind lingering on the
injustice of the just. What could the
writer possibly mean by this attempted insult? By interpretation did he or
she really mean speculation? For an
interpretation is based on evidence.
What do the public think history as
a discipline, as a subject is? Is anyone
under any illusions that what historians write is ever anything but an
interpretation?
In the term before Christmas I was
teaching first-year undergraduates.
At the end of each term those who
have been lecturing and tutoring get
together with each student to talk
about how it has gone. They are bright
students who made great progress,
but a repeating theme that emerged
from this general round-up was the
need for them to develop their own
voices in the midst of the historical
argument: to imagine, with each essay,
that they take their seat at the dinner
table of historians who have written in
that field and then join in the debate.
This is no new counsel. I remember a
comment written on one of my undergraduate history essays at Oxford by
my then-tutor, Susan Brigden, with
her characteristic elegance of phrase:
Dont bow with such becoming submission to the secondary authorities.
History is debate, history is discussion, history is a conversation. Hugh
Trevor-Roper wrote in 1957, history
that is not controversial is dead
history. While some of this controversy comes from the pronouncements
of historians as public intellectuals
addressing the present day, much of it
comes from them arguing with each
other. The collective noun for historians is honestly an argumentation.
This is not in contradiction to
saying that historians aim at truth.

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

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

conclusions they reach may differ. This
is because we are all different people;
our context, our formation, our
insights are different and the histories
we write are personal. If it were not so,
there would be little point training up
more students to be historians.
This is still a pursuit of truth. In
each examination of a problem, even
if new facts are not discovered, a new
insight might be brought. The experience of the historians life might help
her spot a previously missed connection, previous errors might be cleared
up and some facts shown not to be
facts. The historian might provide a
context that gives a much needed,
less partisan slant on an issue. There
are reasons why one interpretation
might be more plausible than another.
But they are all still interpretations:
the best informed, most thoroughly
considered, factual of interpretations,
but interpretations nonetheless.
Even history that hides its workings
(or to misuse Gibbon, its nice and
secret springs) and presents itself as
narrative for historians are always
storytellers rests on interpretation.
Does this clash with a public
expectation that historians will tell
an unfettered, impartial and objective
truth? Is an historians public credibility to make authoritative statements
about what happened in the past
undermined by the contingent nature
of history?
I do not think so. The truth is what
we must always seek. It is not possible
to be both an historian and a liar.
But what we arrive at is, ultimately,
informed, epistemic, honest opinion:
just an interpretation.
Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the history faculty
at the New College of the Humanities, London
and author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and
Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015) .
HOMOSEXUALITY
Mannequins on
Carnaby Street,
London, March
1966.
A new normal
During the 1950s and 1960s, debates over the legality
and morality of homosexuality drove gay men and
doctors to desperate and dangerous measures in their
search for a cure, writes John-Pierre Joyce.
N THE EVENING OF September 5th, 1957

viewers in ITVs Granada (North-west) and
Rediffusion (London) regions were presented
with an unusual spectacle. An anonymous
doctor, seated in shadow, his back to the camera, admitted
on live television to being a homosexual. When asked if
he would prefer to be normal, the doctor responded: Oh
yes, I would. If there was a guaranteed cure a hope that I
could become an ordinary normal person I would certainly
welcome it. I think all homosexuals would like to be cured.
The doctors comments reflected the attitudes of the
medical profession towards homosexuality in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. The programme broadcast at 10:30pm
and preceded by a warning about its controversial nature
was a discussion and debate about the Wolfenden Report,
which had been published that day. The report was the
result of a three-year investigation by a Home and Scottish
Office-appointed committee chaired by John Wolfenden
into the twin problems of homosexuality and prostitution.
While proposing tighter controls on street prostitution, it
recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual acts
between consenting males over the age of 21.

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

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

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

had no curative effect and, indeed, increased the inverted
drive. Such views led to the abandonment of treatment by
means of hormone injections, which had been prescribed
for the mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing as
a condition of his probation order, following his conviction
for gross indecency in 1952.
Doctors turned instead to increasingly fashionable
behaviour therapy. The theory behind it was simple. Homosexuality, explained Clifford Allen in his 1958 book Homosexuality: Its Nature, Causation and Treatment, was the result
of either hostility to the mother or father, or else excessive
affection for one or other parent during infancy and childhood. The homosexual, he argued, must be made to realise
that he is not irrevocably homosexual, but has drifted into
such behaviour. Curing the fear of the female or fixation
with the male was just a matter of emotional re-education;
learning to be straight and unlearning to be gay. This could
be achieved through either lengthy psychoanalysis or shortterm (and cheaper) courses of aversive conditioning.
Early forms of aversion therapy had been developed
in the United States in the 1940s to treat alcoholism and
by the early 1960s it was being used in Britain to treat
homosexuality. One of its earliest exponents was Basil
James, who described the treatment of a 40-year-old man at
Glenside Hospital, Bristol, in an article in the British Medical
Journal (BMJ) in March 1962:
The treatment was carried out in a darkened single room and
during this time no food or drink was allowed. At regular twohour intervals he was given an emetic dose of apomorphine
HOMOSEXUALITY
This time, a card was placed in the patients room with
carefully selected photographs of sexually attractive
young women pasted onto it. Each morning the patient
was injected with testosterone and told to go to his room
when he felt any sexual excitement. There, he was given a
record-player and records of a female vocalist whose performance is generally recognised as sexy.
Basil claimed success. In a follow-up letter to the BMJ
he reported that the patient has had no recurrence of his
homosexual drives and was now courting a woman. He
did, though, concede that the mans considerable physical
satisfaction with his girlfriend did not have the same emotional component as his homosexual experiences and he
occasionally found himself admiring pretty boys.
HE DRUG AND ALCOHOL-INDUCED method of

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

was shone on a piece of card
on which were pasted several
photographs of nude men
by injections followed by 2 oz of brandy. On each occasion
when nausea was felt, a strong light was shone on a large piece
of card on which were pasted several photographs of nude or
near-nude men. Thereafter a tape was played twice over every
two hours during the period of nausea. This began with an
explanation of his homosexual attraction along the lines of
father-deprivation. The adverse effect of this on him and its
consequent social repercussions was then described in slow and
graphic terms ending with words such as sickening, nauseating, etc., followed by the noise of someone vomiting.
After 24 hours the treatment was started again and the
following night the patient was woken up every two hours
and made to listen to a record which congratulated him on
what he was doing and explained what would happen if his
homosexuality was reversed. On the third, fourth and fifth
days of treatment, positive conditioning was introduced.
Top: an article on
homosexuality in
the Daily Mirror,
April 15th, 1965.
Above left: John
Wolfenden, 1961.
Above right: Alan
Turing, 1951.
William (Billy) Clegg-Hill, a captain in the Royal Tank

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

Demanding aversion therapy and even bringing his own
stash of nude male photographs, he was admitted to
Banstead Hospital in Surrey for a course of positive and
negative aversive conditioning. The treatment began with
an effort to stimulate heterosexual desires:
The patient was directed into a small room, having a three by
three feet floor area which was completely covered by an electrical grid. The door was closed and all lights switched off. In front
of the patient, at head height, was a picture of an attractive,
scantily dressed female, which was visible only when illuminated by the operation of a switch by the psychologist. The
patient was supplied with tissues and instructed to masturbate
in the darkness, using whatever fantasy he desired. He should,
however, keep his eyes open, look ahead of him, and report
now when he felt that orgasm was being reached. This served
as the cue to illuminate the female picture, which remained
illuminated until the patient reported finished immediately
following ejaculation.
By the 16th session, the patient had still not learned normal
sexual desires so negative conditioning was applied. As in
the chemical treatment of the early 1960s, the patient was
shown male nude photographs (his own), but with a new
twist. Each time the pictures were lit up, the patient was
given a shock on his bare feet through the floor grid. Reminiscent of Pavlovs experiments on dogs in the 1900s, the
patient was very soon reporting sensations of electric shock
when the picture was illuminated, irrespective of whether
shock actually followed. After three sessions he was masturbating 100 per cent to heterosexual fantasies.
This apparent success was not to last. After a week out
of hospital, the patient reported slipping back into his
old ways. He became extremely emotional, accusing the
Top: members
of the Gay
Liberation
Movement,
London, July 4th,
1977.
Above: US gay
rights activist
Craig Rodwell,
1969.
psychologists of a complete lack of understanding of him

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

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

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

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

the 1960s gave way to the
scepticism and assertiveness
of movements such as the Gay
Liberation Front
Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, finally
implementing the main recommendation of the Wolfenden
Report: that sex between consenting adult men over 21
should no longer be a criminal offence. The fear of arrest
and prosecution and the need to seek a cure for their
illegal behaviour was at once removed for millions of men.
Under-21s remained outside the law and feelings of
shame and denial persisted for many. Aversion therapy
continued to be available to those who wanted it, but as
trust in the scientific certainties of the 1960s gave way to
the scepticism and assertiveness of social movements, such
as the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s, gay men learned
not to change, but to be more comfortable with themselves.
Eventually, even doctors shifted their opinions. Writing in
the British Journal of Hospital Medicine in February 1970,
John Bancroft conceded that:
If the patient does not wish to lose his homosexuality or to
become more heterosexual, then there is little point in advising
him to do so. It should be made clear that a person can still
have homosexual tendencies and be a likeable, decent person.
It should be stressed that homosexuality is a normal variant of
sexual behaviour.
John-Pierre Joyce is a writer, journalist and teacher. He is currently working
on a gay history of Britain, 1957-1970.
FURTHER READING
Michael Schofield, Sociological Aspects of Homosexuality:
A Comparative Study of Three Types of Homosexuals
(Longman, 1965).
Bryan Magee, One in Twenty (Secker & Warburg, 1966).
Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Post-War Britain (Fourth Estate, 1996).
Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British
Homosexuality, 1895-1995 (HarperCollins, 1997).
XXXXXXXXXXX
ENERGY
Drilling and
Disaster in
the North Sea
Klaus Dodds looks back 50 years to a crucial and
ultimately tragic moment in the UKs exploitation
of its oil and gas resources.
Makeshift: the Sea

Gem in position in
the North Sea.
JUST OVER 50 YEARS AGO a converted steel barge

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

of the photographs of it. Weighing in at over 5,000 tons
and standing around 15 metres above the waterline, it was
considered to be suitable for North Sea conditions. The rig
was towed to Block 48/6 in June 1965.
Interest in the potential of North Sea oil and gas goes
back to the 1850s. While offshore oil and gas technology
was extremely rudimentary even in the 1950s, the legal and
political conditions enabling offshore exploitation were also
a work in progress. One major stumbling block was uncertainty over the extent of the sovereign rights of coastal
states. The 1958 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
established the rights of coastal states to enjoy sovereignty
over the resources on the continental shelf, extending
| ENERGY
XXXXXXXXXX
some 200 nautical miles from the coastal baseline. With

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

1973-4 unfolded,
rising oil prices
made the North
Sea an attractive
alternative for UK
governments
Transformation
The idea that vast quantities of North Sea oil and gas were
going to transform the lives of British citizens and the
financial coffers of the UK government appeared to be
dashed. Oil and gas would flow from the North Sea, but it
was going to be an expensive, challenging and often
dangerous business. New legislation, such as the 1971
Mineral Workings (Offshore Installations) Act, was

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

Harold at Hastings in 1066 and conquered the
English kingdom. This was the second time in 50
years that the realm had succumbed to external
attack, the first being the Danish king Cnuts conquest of
1016. Two points about these conquests are as important as
they are easily overlooked. The first is that contemporaries
regarded Cnut and William as conquerors not merely of an
expanse of land, but of what Latin texts call a regnum and
King Harold is
killed. Detail
from the Bayeux
Tapestry, late 11th
century.
Old English ones a rice both words can be translated as

kingdom. The second is that both in 1016 and in 1066 the
kingdom continued as a political unit, despite the change
in ruling dynasty. It did not fragment, lose its identity, or
become subsumed into the other territories of its conquerors. These observations prompt questions. What did this
11th-century English kingdom comprise? How had it come
into being? And how had it become sufficiently robust and
coherent that it could endure repeated conquest?
ENGLISH KINGDOM
Writers of the 11th century referred to the English
kingdom in Latin as the regnum of Anglia, or, in the
vernacular, as the rice of Englaland. It is clear that these
words denoted a territory of broadly similar size and shape
to what we think of as England, distinct from Wales and
stretching from the Channel to somewhere north of York.
Anglia and Englaland could, however, refer to areas larger
or smaller than modern England. Thus, for example, the
Domesday survey of 1086 was said to describe the whole of
Anglia or Englaland, but it covered only the land from the
Channel to the Tees (excluding Wales), an area that I call
Domesday Anglia. Similarly, a royal document issued a few
years later mentioned land north of the Tyne, and south
of the Tyne, and in Anglia. This would suggest that Anglia
ended somewhere short of the Tyne, quite possibly at the
Tees. On the other hand, however, an English chronicle recounts that in 1091 Malcolm III, King of Scots, went out of
Scotland into Lothian in Englaland, thereby indicating that
Englaland could encompass the area around what is now
Edinburgh. We even find a forerunner of the still-prevalent
practice of conflating England with the island of Britain:
thelweard, a late tenth-century chronicler, narrated the
ancient Britons defeat, then declared that Britannia is now
called Anglia, taking the name of the victors.
MID THESE apparent contradictions, the claim

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

held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Below: the Firth of Forth, the frontier between the English and the Picts.
of the English kingdom. This distinction explains the

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

probably did not extend across all of modern
England, it was different from anything that
had gone before. In the late ninth century
there had been no political unit of remotely similar size and
shape. Much of the north and east of the future English
kingdom was under the domination of various Scandinavian potentates, who had destroyed the former East Anglian
and Northumbrian kingdoms and seized the eastern part of
the Midland kingdom of Mercia. The kingdom of Wessex,
ruled by the Cerdicing dynasty, managed (just) to resist
the Viking onslaught, but until the late ninth century its
power was largely confined to south of the Thames. The
West Saxon king Alfred, now often called the Great, gained
While the 11th-century English kingdom probably did not extend across all
of modern England, it was different from anything that had gone before
Old English, using the term Englaland, its earliest known
appearance. Given the significance of the so-called West
Lothian Question in current Anglo-Scottish relations, the
context is ironic.
By the tenth century, the Scottish kings had considerable power in Lothian, but there remained a perception that
the Forth separated the English from the Scots; for centuries afterwards, the word Scotia was used to refer specifically to the land north of the Forth. Furthermore, while
the Tweed came to be recognised as the border between
the English and Scottish kingdoms during the 12th century,
at least some of those dwelling to its north continued to
see themselves as English. Thus Adam of Dryburgh, a late
12th-century monk, wrote that he lived in the land of the
English [terra Anglorum] and in the kingdom of the Scots
[regno Scotorum].
Adams comment demonstrates that the land inhabited
by the English was not necessarily the same as the territory
some degree of domination over the western remnant of

Mercia in the 880s, but even then his kingdom was vastly
smaller than the one that would exist by the 11th century.
During the first half of the tenth century, Alfreds
successors gradually extended their power northwards, encompassing all of what would become the English kingdom
and, indeed, the rest of Britain. Much is uncertain about
the events of this period, but the precise sequence of kings,
campaigns and battles need not concern us here. Suffice it
to say that Alfreds successors killed, expelled or subjugated
the principal Scandinavian potentates based in East Anglia,
the East Midlands and Northumbria. They also made the
leading figures of Wales and northern Britain acknowledge
their superiority. thelstan had such rulers meet him at
Eamont (Cumbria) in 927 and, for a time, the Cerdicings
assemblies were attended by men from across the island.
The geographical extension of the Cerdicings power was
neither smooth nor inexorable. Thus, for example, York
ENGLISH KINGDOM
changed hands several times between the 920s and 950s
and Scandinavian domination in the East Midlands was
temporarily re-established in the 940s. Even when the final
Scandinavian king to base himself at York, Erik Haraldson,
was killed in 954, contemporaries could not have been
sure that he would be the last. As it turned out, though, the
Cerdicings were not (so far as we know) involved in major
armed conflict for over 30 years thereafter. There were
renewed Scandinavian attacks from the 980s, which culminated in Cnuts conquest of 1016, but the intervening three
decades of relative calm were highly significant. This period
was crucial to the development of the English kingdom as a
coherent territorial unit.
Below: a coin minted in the

name of Olaf Guthfrithson,
a Scandanavian who ruled
at York, c.940.
Bottom: Domesday Book,
1086.
E HAVE ALREADY seen that some people in

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

carry a legend stating its location of issue and the moneyer
responsible, but would otherwise look the same, whether it
came from London, Exeter, York or Chester (to name but a
few major minting places). The second crucial point is that
the design in use was changed frequently and coin hoards
imply that old types were systematically withdrawn from
circulation. It is quite likely that kings sought to ban the
use of obsolete coins and that they achieved considerable
The inference that the 11th-century kingdom was perceived to end at the
Tees is strengthened by accounts of the construction of Durham Cathedral
success. There was thus uniformity in production and something approaching uniformity in the circulating currency
between the Channel and the Tees. Coins were by no means
unknown elsewhere in Britain, but they were rarer and
were imported from various places. Consequently, there
was nothing like the standardised currency that circulated
in Domesday Anglia.
The system of shires, hundreds and wapentakes meant
that, within Domesday Anglia, there were standardised
administrative structures through which kings could
implement their commands. The 11th-century kings used
this apparatus to impinge routinely upon the lives of even
quite ordinary people, notably through taxation, judicial
organisation and the regulation of the circulating currency.
Moreover, the features outlined above marked Domesday
Anglia as a unit that was distinct from the rest of Britain
and ruled in a relatively uniform way. There is therefore a
clear explanation for why people in the 11th century could
regard this area as the full extent of the English kingdom.
Such structures did not, however, merely serve to define
the kingdom. They also gave it the institutional coherence
that enabled it to outlast repeated conquest.
Many historians have written about 11th-century shires,
hundreds and wapentakes, although few have discussed
their importance in the kingdoms definition. Another
Durham
Cathedral,
construction
of which began
in 1093.
neglected issue is the question of when this administrative

apparatus became important to the Cerdicings power. It is
often assumed that in Wessex itself they had ruled through
shires and hundreds since some indeterminate point in
the distant past and swiftly replicated this system as they
pushed northwards. There may be an element of truth in
this: Berkshire, Wiltshire and other shires south of the
Thames are mentioned in ninth-century sources and some
of the Domesday hundreds of this area may well perpetuate
districts that had been recognisable for centuries. There is,
however, little to suggest that ninth-century shires, or (if
they existed) hundreds, already served the functions that
they did in the 11th century, or that kings routinely used
them to impose their will.
The first evidence that hundreds and wapentakes were
important to royal rule comes in the mid-10th century.
By the end of King Edgars reign (95975), they existed
right across Domesday Anglia and from then on they are
ubiquitous in royal legislation. By contrast, there is just one
reference to hundreds in the legislation of King Edmund
(93946) and none in the fairly voluminous ordinances
of his predecessors. This suggests that, whatever earlier
existence hundreds may have had, they were not especially
significant to the Cerdicings.
A similar point can be made about shires. Edgar is
ENGLISH KINGDOM
Edgar was the first king who had both the desire and the ability to
impose numismatic uniformity between the Channel and the Tees
the first king known to have ordered the regular holding
of shire assemblies and soon afterwards we get our earliest
definite accounts of their being held. This is unlikely to be
coincidental and implies (at the very least) that shire meetings became much more widespread and routine around
this time. It was probably not until the 11th century that
Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire operated as shires, but such
units had been established across much of the Midlands (as
King Edgar
(bottom, centre)
offering a charter
to Christ, 966.
well as in the south) by the 980s at the latest.

The proposition that shires, hundreds and wapentakes first became important around the third quarter of
the 10th century is based on the silence of earlier texts.
Historians are rightly cautious about such arguments; that
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is well
known. There are, however, two reasons for accepting
the argument from silence here. The first is that we are to
a large extent dealing not with absent sources, but with

silent sources. There is plenty of surviving legislation from
before Edmunds reign and the lack of references to hundreds would be very odd if these were already central to the
Cerdicings power. The second key consideration is coins.
Surviving coins are plentiful from throughout the 10th and
11th centuries, which allows us to see that uniformity in
production and circulation began in Edgars reign. Previously, coins of contrasting designs were struck in different
regions and the circulating currency was correspondingly
varied. Edgar was evidently the first king who had both the
desire and the ability to impose numismatic uniformity
between the Channel and the Tees. That this major reform
was implemented in his reign should give us confidence
that key elements of local administration were likewise
standardised around the same time. This hypothesis would
also fit with the political context of the period; the prolonged respite from external attack after 954 would have
been a propitious time to effect substantial administrative
change. There are, therefore, good grounds to conclude
that the features that defined the English kingdom of the
11th century date only from around the third quarter
of the previous one.
ANY historians, notably Patrick

Wormald, have explained the
English kingdoms formation
by arguing that Alfred and
his successors were aiming to achieve
English unification. If this was their goal,
they did not succeed; we have already
seen that the English kingdom of the
11th century (and later) did not include
all those seen at the time as English. It is,
however, doubtful whether the Cerdicings
were engaged on a unification project. No contemporary source expressly states, or hints, that
they were seeking to execute such a plan.
The main reasons why the Cerdicings extended their
power northwards were probably more prosaic. In part,
they were almost certainly inspired by the things that
made most medieval kings want to expand their territories,
especially the prospect of land and treasure. In addition,
however, they probably wanted to obtain security from
the Scandinavians who had gravely threatened Wessex in
the ninth century. This would explain why they killed or
expelled the principal Scandinavian potentates based in
Britain, but generally left in place the other leading figures
on the island, providing the latter acknowledged Cerdicing
superiority.
North of the Tees, there had been little Scandinavian
settlement and the Cerdicings were content to establish
relatively loose client relationships with the bishops of
Chester-le-Street (who moved their seat to Durham in
995) and an English dynasty based at Bamburgh. Providing
such figures could be induced (by intimidation or otherwise) to give the Cerdicings enemies no assistance, there
was little reason to depose them. This did, however, mean
that Cerdicing power was less direct than further south.
In turn, this probably explains why the administrative
reforms that gave Domesday Anglia its coherence stopped
at the Tees.
Insofar as any grand idea inspired the Cerdicings to
Coin of King
Edgar's reformed
type, minted in
the 970s.
expand, a vision of domination over the whole of Britain

was probably more important than some notion of English
unity. There were venerable precedents for the idea that
one man might enjoy hegemony throughout the island.
Indeed, Bede had described the power of certain seventhcentury Northumbrian kings in such terms and titles like
rex Britanniae (king of Britain) had occasionally been
used in eighth-century Mercia. thelstan swiftly adopted
similar styles after the Eamont meeting of 927 and Edgar,
too, was widely celebrated as king of the whole island.
For the Cerdicings, this idea seemingly held considerable
allure.
Claims to supremacy over the whole island should not
be dismissed as bombast, even though the Cerdicings
hegemony over the other kings in Britain was loose and intermittent. Before the administrative reforms of the mid10th century it is likely that the Cerdicings had few means
with which to impinge routinely on the lives of the general
populace in any part of Britain. Throughout the island their
power was based on a mix of personal relationships with
powerful people. The intensity of Cerdicing domination
will have decreased with distance from Wessex,
but it never quite disappeared and there was
probably no sharp dividing line to separate the
future Domesday Anglia from the rest of
the island. As such, contemporaries may
well have had little difficulty in conceiving of Britain as a unitary realm.
In and after the 11th century,
however, claims to rulership over the
whole of Britain became less common in
royal titulature. They did not disappear
and thelweards conflation of Britain
and England had a long future, but by
William the Conquerors reign the normal
kingly style was rex Anglorum (king of the
English). This shift to more modest royal titles
was not precipitated by some prolonged collapse
of thelstan and Edgars island-wide hegemony, which
had always been episodic. Rather, the administrative
changes of the late tenth century had so intensified and
standardised the Cerdicings power within one part of
Britain the future Domesday Anglia that it became
increasingly difficult to think of the island as a single
realm. It is most unlikely that the Cerdicings intended
(or anticipated) that administrative reform should eclipse
their kingship of Britain, but this was one of its effects.
The mid- to late-10th century Cerdicing kings established
the framework for what would be an enduring English
kingdom. But in doing so, they forfeited the possibility of a
unitary realm of Britain.
George Molyneaux is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
FURTHER READING
James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (Hambledon &
London, 2000).
Rees Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in
the British Isles, 1093-1343 (Oxford University Press, 2000).
George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in
the Tenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2015).
XXXXXXXXXXX
BEN BARKA
| MEHDI
WHEN THE Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka flew

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

Barka photographed
in the early 1960s.
The Ben
Barka
Affair
After the kidnapping of Moroccan revolutionary
Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965, the fingers of blame
pointed in several directions. The details of what
happened are still not known, writes Martin Evans.
| MEHDI BEN BARKA
XXXXXXXXXX
Oufkir and stubbornly refused to deport him.

Why was Ben Barkas disappearance such a scandal?
Born in Rabat in 1920 (his father was a civil servant and
the first Moroccan to graduate in maths), Ben Barka was a
founder member of Istiqlal (Independence), the nationalist
movement that grew rapidly in the late 1940s. From the
beginning he stood out as a formidable activist. Meeting
him in 1954 the US journalist Marvine Howe, covering the
Moroccan crisis for the BBC, was impressed by his boundless energy and capacity to absorb new ideas rapidly. She
later recalled how, placed under house arrest in the Sahara
and High Atlas for three years, he used his incarceration not
only to perfect his English and Arabic and
learn Berber, but also to take a correspondence course in political economy.
Ben Barka took up a leadership role
following independence in March 1956.
Elected as president of the new National
Assembly, he wanted to transform the
lives of ordinary Moroccans and launched
campaigns to promote mass literacy and
to modernise agriculture. But by the
late 1950s Ben Barka was disenchanted by the power struggle between the
monarch, Mohammed V and Istiqlal. For
him the monarchy was too conservative,
Istiqlal too timid. He was especially frustrated by Istiqlals
unwillingness to embrace the socialist doctrines that were
challenging elites elsewhere in the Arab World and so he,
along with other young activists, broke away to found the
National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP) in 1959. Demanding agrarian reform, an end to the vestiges of French
rule and solidarity with liberation movements throughout
the world, the UNFP proclaimed itself to be revolutionary
and in this respect Ben Barka was inspired by the on-going
war of decolonisation led by the National Liberation Front
(FLN) against France in neighbouring Algeria. In particular,
he was inspired by Frantz Fanon, the theoretician of the
Algerian revolution, who saw the FLN struggle in global
terms, the spark for one vast uprising of the wretched of
the earth that would overthrow colonialism and neocolonialism everywhere.
The truth of
what happened
to Ben Barka is
still not known.
In France the
case is still under
investigation
Going global
Mohammed V died unexpectedly in 1961, leaving the
monarchy vulnerable. His son, Hassan II, was just 32 and he
assumed the throne of a country beset with social unrest,
poverty and spiralling unemployment. Sensing his moment
had come, Ben Barka became more strident in his opposition to the monarchy, which he attacked as feudal and
pro-Western, words that struck a chord with the younger
generation, especially with the Moroccan National Students Union, which called for the abolition of the regime.
Hassan II saw Ben Barka as the chief threat to his fledgling power. The UNFP had to be broken and Ben Barka was
confronted with constant police intimidation, including
a failed assassination attempt in November 1962. By the
summer of 1963 he had been forced into exile as 5,000
UNFP militants were arrested and in the ensuing trial 11
party leaders, including Ben Barka, were condemned to
death in March 1964 for allegedly plotting to kill Hassan II.
The accusation of treachery was intensified by Ben Barkas

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

Tannhauser in the robes of a Teutonic
Knight, Codex Manesse, c.1310.
HE ARMY of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem was annihilated at the Horns of Hattin on July 4th, 1187. The defeat was
almost total and the survivors few. In the following months
the crusader states crumbled. The victor in this hard-fought
struggle was the Kurdish ruler Saladin and by October of the same year
the holy city of Jerusalem was in his hands.
When news of these events reached western Christendom, the
papacys reaction was immediate: a new campaign was launched to
wrest back control of Jerusalem. Rulers from across Europe responded
to the call, their armies were marshalled and set out for the East. The
meeting point for these forces was the recently conquered, now Muslimheld, city of Acre, which became the first major arena in which these
incoming forces (now known as the Third Crusade) would test their
mettle against Saladin.
Legend reports that among the besieging Christian forces at Acre
was a group of pilgrims from the north German cities of Bremen and
Lbeck, who had created a small hospice for the care of pilgrims under
the shade of a ships sail. In its humble origins, this pious, self-sacrificing establishment could not have been less auspicious. Nevertheless,
within 50 years it was on its way to becoming one of the mightiest
religious orders in Christendom. By 1240 it was a fully fledged military
order of the Catholic Church (established on the pattern of the Knights
Templar and Hospitaller) and its forces were active in many theatres of
war, especially the eastern Mediterranean, Prussia and Livonia (now
Latvia). During this same period, it had acquired a solid economic base
with great estates stretching from Germany to the Italian peninsula.
In later centuries it would play a defining role in shaping the history of
Eastern Europe and the Baltic.
The Teutonic Knights rapid rise from obscurity to great power is
remarkable not just for its speed, but also because within it lies the
rags-to-riches tale of one of the most dynamic individuals of the 13th
century: Herman von Salza. Born into a simple knightly family, by the
end of his life Herman would be the master of the Teutonic Knights, the
confidant of popes, kings and emperors and the defender of hundreds
of miles of Christendoms frontier lands. In the centuries to come, the
orders historians and propagandists would rhapsodise about Herman
TEUTONIC KNIGHTS
Right: a 19th-century
statue of Salza at
Malbork, Poland.
and the dramatic transformation the order underwent during his time
as leader. One commentator observed that, when he became master in
1210, the order could arm and equip no more than ten brother knights,
yet by the time of his death in 1239 it could muster 2,000 brothers. Even
making allowance for hyperbole, Hermans impact was considerable.
How did he do it?
The Teutonic Knights were not the first military order to rise to
prominence during the Middle Ages. By the time of their foundation
in 1190, both the Templars and the Hospitallers were already huge international orders and the foundations of their growth were, moreover,
broadly similar. To listen to many modern fantasies about the Knights
Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights, one might think that the
roots of their military muscle and financial clout were bound up with
their possession of mighty religious relics such as the Holy Grail or their
shadowy status as some form of secret society. Such wild claims appeal
to conspiracy theorists, but they have no foundation in the sources.
All three of these orders grew and maintained themselves in a
manner similar to that of a modern charity. That is not to say that their
goals and vocation bore relation to anything that might be deemed
worthy of charity status today. Rather, it was in their reliance upon donations and public support. Like modern charities, the military orders
The military orders prosperity was

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

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

from William of Tyre's Estoire d'Outremer, 12th century.
Frederick II, illustration

from De arte Venandi cum
avibus, c.1220-1250.
had acquired a military role in 1198 at the

behest of the leaders of a German crusade,
which had reached the East in the previous
year. The order had a handful of small properties, though these scarcely represented
the launchpad required for future growth.
The Teutonic Order did, however, possess
a number of potential advantages. From the
outset it had been closely allied with the
German imperial house. Duke Frederick
of Swabia (son of the late emperor, Frederick Barbarossa) participated in the siege
of Acre during the Third Crusade and was
evidently so impressed by the work of the
small German hospital that, when he fell
terminally ill, he asked to be buried there.
He also wrote to his brother, Emperor
Henry VI, praising the order, creating a
vital avenue to the seat of imperial power.
From the beginning, the order had friends
in high places. Many of those who had
advocated the orders militarisation were
among the most powerful in the German
empire. German influence was also growing
in the eastern Mediterranean. Between
1190 and 1227 no less than three major
German crusades reached the Holy Land,
seeking to rebuild the slowly recovering
kingdom of Jerusalem and there were
many smaller expeditions. Frederick II, the
German emperor, became King of Jerusalem in 1225, a title that he and his successors held until 1267.
Europe. The steady annual flow of wealth from the commanderies remained, however, the backbone of its economic power.
This, then, was the model which Herman sought to imitate. The
real trick was to capture the attention of Europes elites. This was a
difficult task, given that the Hospitallers and Templars were already
firmly entrenched across the West and that they received the lions
share of donations from those who wished to support both the defence
of the Holy Land and, in the case of the Hospitallers, the provision
of medical care in the crusader states. So, as with other charities and
businesses, Hermans task was to find a new niche for his order. His
success in this challenge was founded upon his ability to harness the
orders existing strengths.
When Herman first became master, there was little to suggest that
the Teutonic Order was destined for anything other than mediocrity. Though it had been founded as a charitable, medical institution, it
ERMANS GENIUS was to develop

these relationships. He worked
hard to strengthen the orders
relations with the German emperors. This was a time when the imperial
throne was contested between the Hohenstaufen and Welf families and Herman
proved willing to support whichever faction
was in the ascendancy, if it meant that they
would back his cause. He also travelled at length around Germany and
other kingdoms in western Europe, building relations with the dukes
of Austria and the landgraves of Thuringia, along with many other aristocratic families. The donations began to roll in. In this task, Herman
was assisted by the fact that neither the Templars nor the Hospitallers
had ever managed to gain much of a foothold in Germany. Their support
base lay in France, Italy, England and northern Spain. Thus, there was
potential for Hermans order to expand with only limited competition
from the other orders.
A key moment in this process, when Herman demonstrated dramatically both his own abilities and those of his order, was the Fifth Crusade
(1217-21). Like many others, this crusade represented yet another effort
to regain Jerusalem by first attacking Egypt. The campaigns battle plan
was founded on the strategic logic of first seizing the Nile delta and then
using its colossal wealth (derived from the fertile delta and the trade
TEUTONIC KNIGHTS
income from the Silk Roads and the trans-Saharan gold routes) to fund
the permanent reconquest of the Holy Land. That was the idea, but the
campaign was a disaster. For 15 months the large Christian army rotted
outside the port city of Damietta on Egypts northern coast, which
eventually fell in November 1219. Its subsequent attempts to strike
inland towards Cairo met with catastrophe.
cation and invading Fredericks kingdom of Sicily. Frederick by this stage

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

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

established new settlements and forts and waged
war against the local pagan tribes
large estates across Germany and other parts of western Europe. Herman
had erected a mighty edifice and the order would continue to grow
and expand, particularly in Prussia and Livonia, for centuries to come.
Within this process he had proven himself to be one of the most
brilliant diplomats of his age. The tools he used to dramatically enlarge
his order were inspired by the preceding orders, the Templars and Hospitallers. He saw clearly that it was the support of patrons which made
or broke such institutions. Some potential benefactors were approached
for money, others were cajoled into taking a crusading vow and marching to their aid. In this search for patronage the Teutonic Knights cultivated a carefully manicured public image, seeking to persuade donors
of their virtues and achievements. Some of the stories they told when
garnering aid have survived in the pages of the orders histories and it is
not difficult to see their potential for drumming up support.
Pope Gregory IX, a miniature from a 14th-century Italian manuscript.
up the River Vistula, established new settlements and forts and waged
war against the local pagan tribes.
Herman himself was rarely at the frontier. He left the military conquest of Prussia to his able deputy, Herman Balk. Herman von Salzas
skill remained that of diplomacy and he used it to great effect in 1237,
securing another major territorial advance for the Teutonic Knights in
Livonia on the Baltic coast. Livonia had been seized decades previously
by German crusaders and missionaries, who, in the early stages of their
conquest, had established a military order called the Swordbrethren.
It had proved to be an enthusiastic campaigner and conqueror, joining
the local bishop and the citizens of the main city, Riga, as one of Livonias rulers.
Nevertheless, by the 1230s complaints were being made to the
papacy about the conduct of the Swordbrethren, especially their attempts to take control of neighbouring Estonia. The order managed
to clear itself of these charges, but almost immediately afterwards,
in 1236, it suffered a major defeat at the battle of Saule, probably at a
location in modern Lithuania. It was at this moment that Herman, ever
the opportunist, made the suggestion to the papacy that perhaps the
Swordbrethren should be incorporated into the Teutonic Order. Pope
Gregory agreed and the Teutonic Order duly acquired another major
territorial stake in a frontier province.
When Herman fell ill and died in 1239 he had left his successors a
substantial legacy. By this stage the order was an active presence in
the Holy Land, with major fortifications and estates in the kingdom of
Jerusalem and Armenia. It was consolidating a strong position in Prussia
and now held much of Livonia. In addition, the Teutonic Knights had
NE LATER CHRONICLER told the story of a young man

who went out in search of his father, who had been fighting with the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. He was initially
unsuccessful in his search, but one day his diligence was
rewarded when he passed a graveyard that was being consecrated by a
bishop. Unexpectedly, a grave opened and a corpse leapt out. The corpse
told anyone within earshot that he had once been a sinner condemned
to Hell, but that through fighting for God with the Teutonic Knights he
had earned his salvation. The bishop then blessed him and he returned
to the ground, while the young man suddenly realised that he had seen
his father. The chronicles message could not be more clear: that whatever sins his readers may have committed in their past life, they will be
rewarded with salvation if they come armed and willing to the orders
defence. It was a powerful message and one that would have appealed
to noble and commoner alike. We should envisage stories of this kind
being told by the orders members across Germany and other parts of
Christendom, seeking recruits and aid. Certainly many responded to
their call.
Hermans life reads like a how to guide in building a military order,
but his was not a complete success. Looking back on his considerable
achievements, the case could be made that he had gone too far. By
the time of his death in 1239 the order may have grown greatly in size
but it was also vulnerable. Five years later, in 1244, the order suffered
reverses in all three of its major frontier zones: Prussia (in rebellion from
1243), the Holy Land (reeling from a defeat suffered at the hands of the
Egyptians in 1244) and Livonia (routed by the Rus to the north-east in
1242). In the wake of these disasters the orders future was hanging by
a thread and it took decades of hard campaigning for his successors to
regain their former strength. The order was simply not strong enough to
reinforce multiple frontiers simultaneously. Perhaps this legacy reveals
the weakness of Hermans determination to expand his order and is the
underside of his unstinted ambition.
Ultimately, these issues would be overcome. The orders growth
continued into the 14th and 15th centuries and Herman von Salza had
laid the foundations for one of the most powerful military orders in
medieval Europe.
Nicholas Morton is Senior Lecturer in History at Nottingham Trent University and the
author of The Medieval Military Orders 1120-1314 (Routledge, 2012).
FURTHER READING
Nicholas Morton, The Teutonic Knights in the Holy Land, 1190-1291
(Boydell, 2009).
Jonthan Riley-Smith, The Crusades (third edition, Bloomsbury, 2014).
William Urban, The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (Greenhill
Books, 2003).
REVIEWS
John Morrill relishes a tale about the murder of James I

David Brady seeks out Samuel Pepys Clare Mulley admires Alan Turing
Intelligence
hub: GCHQ,
Cheltenham.
SIGNPOSTS
Secrets Made Public
Andrew Lycett uncovers the intriguing, labyrinthine paths to publication

of the histories of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Special Operations Executive.
THERE IS no better place to start
a survey of intelligence literature
than the official accounts both
comprehensive and readable of
the two main secret services.
Christopher Andrew, who
pioneered intelligence history
studies at Cambridge University,
wrote the MI5 book (The Defence
of the Realm: The Authorized
History of MI5, 2009), while
Keith Jeffery, from Queens
University, Belfast, was entrusted with MI6 (MI6: The History
of the Secret Intelligence Service
1909-1949, which was published

in 2010).
However there is not (and do
not expect) an official history
of GCHQ, Britains other main
espionage agency. Signals intelligence and cryptanalysis are still
considered too sensitive. So, for
as good a summary as is possible,
reach for GCHQ by Richard
Aldrich (2010).
These books show the influence of three major developments in the late 20th century.
The first was the publication in
1974 of The Ultra Secret by F.W.

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

appeared without reference to
ULTRA. As soon as ULTRA could
be mentioned, the history of the
Second World War became more
interesting, a trend maintained
by the second development,
the publication in 1984 of The
Missing Dimension: Governments
and Intelligence Communities in
the 20th Century. This collection
of essays, edited by Christopher
Andrew and David Dilks, aimed
to use details of clandestine
operations to tell a fuller version
of episodes such as that of the
British in Ireland.
A third spur was the Waldegrave initiative on open government in the early 1990s, when
John Majors government sought
to speed up the release of official
documents into the National
Archives. Peter Hennessy has
written in these pages how he
could not have produced The
Secret State: Whitehall and the
Cold War (2002), his study of the
governments nuclear planning,
without this development
(which also fostered the climate
for the official MI5 and MI6
histories).
There had been literature
about intelligence for at least a
century beforehand. The origins
of the British penchant for
spy fiction lie before the First
World War, when writers such
as William Le Queux stoked up
fears of German conspiracies.
The two World Wars and
the intervening years spawned
sometimes fanciful accounts of
intelligence operations, ranging
from Basil Thomsons Queer
People (1922) to Greek Memories
(1932) by Compton McKenzie.

The Faber Book of Espionage
(1993), edited by Nigel West, is a
treasure trove of such memoirs,
offering extracts, fictional
and factual, from Somerset
Maugham, Samuel Hoare,
Dennis Wheatley, Dusko Popov,
Monty Woodhouse and many
others, neatly packaged with
biographical information.
Nigel West was one of the first
historians to question official
intelligence narratives. His
studies of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and
the Special Operations Executive
(SOE), mainly from the 1980s,
still surprise with their revelations. West also edited The Guy
Liddell Diaries (2005), one of the
few private journals of an intelligence officer to have worked in
publishing terms.
At the same time came the
work of more consciously radical
writers such as Stephen Dorrill,
author of The Silent Conspiracy
As soon as ULTRA
could be mentioned,
the history of the
Second World War
became much more
interesting
(1993), and Jonathan Bloch and
Patrick Fitzgerald, with British
Intelligence and Covert Action:
Africa, Middle East and Europe
since 1945 (1983). This has since
been largely superseded by
Calder Waltons Empire of Secrets
(2013). The Bloch and Fitzgerald
book had an introduction by
Philip Agee, a former CIA employee who left and denounced
the service before going on to
write Inside the Company: CIA
Diary (1975). American and other
foreign intelligence agencies lie
outside the scope of this piece,
but when examining the CIA,
The Agency: The Rise & Decline of
the CIA by John Ranelagh (1987)
remains a good round-up.
Biography is an enduring
branch of writing on intelligence.
A couple of good, unusual lives
of spies are Richard Meinertzhagen by Mark Crocker (1989) and
Colonel Z (1984), about Colonel

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

that Changed the Course of the
First World War
James Wyllie and
Michael McKinley
Ebury Press 352pp 20
I AM NATURALLY suspicious
of any book that sells itself by
claiming to tell the story of a
secret unit that changed the
course of the First World War.
One wonders, however, why
the stories told here in racy,
journalistic tone by Wyllie and
McKinley have not before
been been brought together in a
single volume.
What is so
enjoyable about
much First World
War spying is
that it was so
amateurish
Much that they have to say
about Room 40, the secret
codebreaking operation at
the Admiralty led by Admiral
Blinker Hall and his eccentric team of cryptanalysts, is
familiar. The coup in finding
three sets of German naval code
books, the failures in processing intelligence at the Battles
of Dogger Bank and Jutland,
the triumph of decoding the
Zimmerman Telegram, are all
familiar.
The work of Military Intelligence 1(b) at the War Office
under Malcolm Hay is less well
known. As is the codebreaking of
Ferdinand Tuohy on the Western

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

Decoded
Dermot Turing
The History Press 320pp 20
FEW LIVES provide a more

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

coding notes to friends without
considering how many hours they
take to decipher.
Turing is best known for his
work designing the mechanical
nemesis to the Nazis Enigma
coding machine during the Second
World War. Reportedly only two
mathematicians believed Enigma
could be defeated. Birch thought
it could be broken because it had
to be broken and Turing thought it
could be broken because it would
be so interesting to break it. Break
it he famously did, helping to turn
the tide of the war. But Turings
interest in intelligence went much
further than ciphers. In 1947 he
produced a paper on Intelligent
Machinery, in which he proposed
engineering a brain which is
more or less without a body. It
is tempting to imagine that this
brilliant intellectual, who pitched
his own brain against a regime
built upon biological prejudice
and who later suffered so much
as a result of Britains inability to
tolerate human diversity, might
have yearned for a more cerebral,
less physical world. But Turing, a
man of many passions, was not
so binary in his thinking. He loved
recondite puzzles, long-distance
running, human decency and men.
Unlike previous biographers,
Dermot Turing neither ignores
nor elevates the importance of
his uncles sexuality. Joan Clarke
is dealt with in less than three
pages, though she gets more
attention than any individual male
romance. The dominant passion
in his life was his ideas, Dermot
Turing insists. It is those for which
he should be remembered. Yet
this is not an academic book and
should perhaps be read with a
glass of wine at hand. The style is
personable. There are some lists
and overlong quotes, but not too
much maths, and regular stylistic
flourishes. Those hoping for new
revelations about Alan Turings
personal life or final confirmation
of the circumstances of death
will be disappointed. For anyone
seeking a more nuanced picture of
the human side of Turing, however,
this book makes a useful and
sometimes poignant contribution.
Clare Mulley
Americas Dreyfus
The Case Nixon Rigged
Joan Brady
Skyscraper Publications 387pp 20
THE INFAMIES of the British

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

data for transmission to Soviet
agents. From a dumb-waiter
shaft in a relatives home,
Chambers produced handwritten notes and papers he claimed
Hiss wife had retyped. A month
on, surrounded by HUAC staff,
Chambers exhumed 35mm
film rolls from a pumpkin on
his Maryland farm. Hiss denied
giving Chambers these materials and was indicted for perjury
(the statute of limitations for
espionage had expired). After
the first trials divided jury, Hiss
was convicted in a second trial.
Judges rejected subsequent
mistrial appeals. Russian testimony repudiating Hiss complicity seemed controverted by
decrypted Soviet cables linking
him with Communist cells and
agents. Hiss died unvindicated
in 1996.
Bradys strength lies in her
narrative skill, which renders
the frame-up convincing. She
relates how Hiss, eager to clear
his name, was entrapped by
Nixon. Chambers, a fantasist
of 50 aliases and countless
conflicting fables, said everything HUAC wanted, lest he be
charged with sodomy and child
abuse. The months before Hiss
indictment enabled Chambers to
amend original and concoct new
charges, in line with innocuous
publicly available or worthless
for espionage dumb-waiter
and pumpkin data, whose significance Nixon ballyhooed.
Chambers updated manifold
sworn assertions that he had
defected from Communism in
1937, to 1938, to fit data purportedly received from Hiss. Hence
Chambers recall of Hiss homes
changed radically in contents,
colour and layout. So, too, his
memories of times with Hiss,
previously vague and falsified,
gained accuracy through FBI
coaching on friends, neighbours,
children, servants, dinner guests,
holidays, pets, purchases, commuting, furniture
There there was the affair
of the notorious typewriter,
tracked down by Hiss defence
team and impounded by the FBI.
After years of neglected decay
REVIEWS
it turned up in court in pristine
condition. Neither jury knew
this was not Hiss typewriter.
It wasnt old enough. None
of the boring documents had
been typed on it, Nixon later
boasted. We built one in the
Hiss case. Nor were jurors told
that transmitting retyped documents was nonsensical, because
easily doctored. Traceable to
their author, they also violated
basic espionage safeguards;
Hiss would have been insane to
transmit handwritten notes.
Chambers testified that he
often collected data from Hiss
at home. Why would a highly
intelligent, long-time agent defy
strictly imposed safety rules and
neglect elementary precautions
to protect himself? Why would
Soviet spymasters continue to
use Hiss after Chambers defection, as alleged, and why would
Hiss continue to assist them?
Since at least 1941 both Hiss and
the Soviets would have known
the risks of exposure and done
their utmost to prevent it.
Before the Hiss trials, the
mass of misinformation and
innuendo in Nixons press releases, twisting the facts beyond
recognition, persuaded many of
his guilt. We won the Hiss case
in the [news]papers, bragged
Nixon. I had him convicted
before he got to the grand jury.
Ronald Reagan posthumously
awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984
for having stood alone against
the face of evil. Thus was
sanctified Orwells 1984 dictum:
If all others accepted the lie,
then the lie passed into history
and became truth. Lying comes
easily to you, Hiss lawyer chastised oft-perjured Chambers, I
believe so, agreed Chambers.
Loathed by Time magazine
colleagues for falsifying foreign
dispatches, Chambers habitually
replied: Truth doesnt matter.
So he and Nixon destroyed Hiss
and crippled public trust. Not a
single human being, concludes
Brady, has corroborated Chambers tale of Alger the spy. The
FBI tried and failed and hid its
failure.
David Lowenthal
Arcadian Nights
The Greek Myths Reimagined

John Spurling
Duckworth-Overlook 320pp 19.99
The Greek Epic Cycle and

its Ancient Reception
A Companion
Edited by Marco Fantuzzi &
Christos Tsagalis
Cambridge University Press 678pp 120
BOOKS ON the myths of ancient

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

... but still only a
mere skimming
off the top of the
full monty of the
ancient Greek
pantheon
So, why tell them again, these

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

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

James I
Alastair Bellany &
Thomas Cogswell
Yale University Press 664pp 30
I HAVE BEEN studying Stuart

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

a grand narrative of the 17th
century, as the high road to religious and civil liberties and the
allegation has become a footnote in textbooks and Eglisham
a lost name.
Cogswell and Bellany are
accomplished storytellers and
their collaboration is much more
than the sum of their considerable parts. Modern security
services on the trail of a terrorist
network and its sympathisers
could not have been more
thorough in their investigations
or in their careful sifting of the
evidence. This is an astonishing detective work. It is also a
magnificent piece of political
reconstruction, locating each
twist and turn in the plot within
a fully international, as well as
national, series of contexts. It
is a major contribution to the
history of print culture and
to the complex interaction of
underground printing and the
This is an
astonishing
detective work
... a magnificent
piece of political
reconstruction
even more radical circulation
of manuscripts. It does what
the best history does in that it
recreates the mental world of
the past and shows how the
historian must engage with and
seek to understand the dross of
the particular, the contingent,
the specifics of the past and not
just extract the residual gold
of whatever it is in the past
that inhabits the present. This
book does more than anything
published in the past 20 years
to explain why Charles I never
really had a chance and indeed
why there was a civil war. It does
so with a delight in storytelling
that is truly infectious. Wolf Hall
meets Scandinavian noir: a great
way to spend cosy evenings in
whatever weather the New Year
hurls at us.
John Morrill
Spain
The Centre of the World

1519-1682
Robert Goodwin
Bloomsbury Press 608pp 30
WRITTEN IN swashbuckling
style by honorary Sevillian Robert
Goodwin, Spain: the Centre of the
World 1519-1682 is the story of the
rise and fall of Spains Habsburg
rulers from the early glories of Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V, to its
agonising decline under Philips III
and IV.
Part I, Gold, marches us assuredly through historical events,
lingering only for those telling
anecdotes which give a sense of
the very real human beings who
led the Old World and the New at
this crucial juncture in history. All
the hubris, heroism, self-sacrifice
and venality we perceive in our
modern politicians and royals are
to be found in abundance here,
as Goodwin combs the archives
for the gossip and glamour which
inevitably attached to those monstres sacrs, Ferdinand and Isabella,
Charles V and Philip II, or their
rivals, Henry VIII and Francis I. We
get to know their obsessions and
foibles through spouses, attendants, artists, poets, commanders,
and a legion of hangers-on.
The authors engaging, opinionated approach, combined with
his passion for the rambunctious
exploits of the poet Garcilaso
and that supreme chronicler of
the Indies, Fernndez de Oviedo,
manages to embrace discussion
of the labyrinthine Castilian legal
system, or the niceties of European
banking topics not normally
guaranteed to enthrall, but
thoroughly absorbing here thanks to his brisk incorporation

of punchy quotations into the
text, unobtrusively relegating the
apparatus of academic reference
to extensive, specialist endnotes.
In similar style, Part II, Glitter,
charts the 17th-century desengao
(disillusionment) of the Baroque
via the endemic favouritism and
corruption of the courts of Philips
III and IV (madness, profligacy,
homosexual intrigue, murder!) and
the outpourings of that dazzling
array of writers, poets, artists and
sculptors (Cervantes, Caldern,
Lope de Vega, Velzquez, Zurbarn,
et al) who constitute Spains
miraculous Golden Age of arts and
letters, giving us a host of treasures: Las Meninas, or that great
European archetype, Don Juan and
the incomparable Don Quixote,
whom Goodwin tackles head on.
All human life is there, as the
saying goes: surely no reader can
remain indifferent to the folly of
the Prince of Wales (later Charles I)
and his reckless pursuit of the
Spanish Infanta as he arrives
unannounced at the Court of Philip
IV, or to the pain of Charles V,
bitten on his arthritic knuckle by a
mosquito so that unable to endure
it, he gently scratched himself until
both his hand and forearm became
inflamed, or fail to be intrigued by
comments that his mother, Juana
the Mad, urinates more often than
ever seen in any other person
and eats on the floor. Indeed, the
corporeal nature of much of what
Goodwin has to say takes the book
into the realm of the medieval
Carnival: the two facing pages,
where he describes the eucharistic
mystique surrounding a monarchs
consumption of bread and wine,
followed by an analysis of the
transcendent nature of the role of
the Camarero Mayor (Groom of the
Stool), is brilliant and hilarious.
In this impassioned, ribald and
thrilling book, Goodwins ambition
is not merely to document the
decline of the largest empire the
world had ever seen, but to peer
into its soul as its glory slides from
underneath it, its rulers clinging
somehow to their illusions as its
artists and commentators lambast
this folly.
David McGrath
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
Bitter Freedom
Ireland in a Revolutionary
World, 1918-1923
Maurice Walsh
Faber & Faber 544pp 16.99
THE IRISH are by no means

the only people afflicted with
a generally inward-looking
understanding of their past;
modern history and, perhaps,
especially the history of modern
Europe, tends to be nationcentric and there is nothing
unusually parochial about Irish
historiography. It should also be
remembered that some of the
most insightful books on the
birth of the Irish state have been
written from a narrowly Irish or
Anglo-Irish perspective. Charles
Townshends recent The Republic,
an excellent, argument-driven
account of the Irish struggle for
independence that doesnt give
much of a thought to comparisons between Ireland and
Bitter Freedom
seeks to place
Ireland in the
global disorder
born of the
terrible slaughter
of total war
other emerging nation-states,
provides a good case in point.
Yet, in order to gain a full understanding of the Anglo-Irish War,
comparisons between events
in Ireland after the Armistice
and nationalist protest and
paramilitary conflicts across
Naseby, hastily renamed the Royal Charles,

when Charles II was conveyed from exile in the
Netherlands to England. The Royal Charles is represented by one of several models of ships drawn
from the collections of the NMM; Charles II by a
large, looming, and lubricious portrait.
We all keep anniversaries of one kind or
another. Pepys was cut for the stone, or underwent a lithotomy as we might now say, in the
summer of 1658. He marked forever afterwards
the anniversary of his successful survival of
this serious procedure. Pepys had endured great
chronic pain, but the agony and danger of the
operation, without anaesthetic or antisepsis,
are almost unimaginable for anyone today. An
assortment of fearsome-looking surgical instruments is on display. Pepys retained his billiard
ball-sized stone as a souvenir, in a specially made
box, for the rest of his life.
It is notoriously difficult to adequately convey momentous events
that are abstract by scale and by time.
Pepys lived through the Great Plague
of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666,
providing a vivid account of both in
his Diary. Entirely because of this
journal, everyone interested in the
history of the 17th century knows
something of Pepys. You may have
dipped into the scholarly edition produced in the 1970s, which revealed
his reprehensible pursuit of many
women. This side of Pepys character
is ignored by the curators, except for
Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution
a few exhibits about the actresses
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF of the restoration theatre. Surely
Runs until March 28th, 2016
the Bibliotheque National Franaise
could be prevailed upon to lend a copy
of the little erotic book Lescole des filles that both
The show begins with a nave painting of
intrigued and shamed Pepys?
a grisly spectacle that turned the world on its
The elephant-sized lacuna in the exhibition
head. Playing truant from St Pauls on January
is the Diary. The exhibits are well worth seeing,
30th, 1649, Pepys went to join the crowds
around the scaffold at the execution of Charles I. but can they really convey enough about Pepys
world and his place in it? His Diary covers
Pepys complained that he could not get a good
approximately eight years of his life, so the
view and that he needed to pee. Near this
exhibition and publication do fill in the gaps in
painting are relics, including the Blood Royal of
his early and later years. When Pepys left his
the King Martyr. The Royal Collection has lent
collections to Magdalene, his old Cambridge
a copy of Eikon Basilike, the self-justifying book
College, he included a clause that the items
attributed posthumously to the king; it is shown
must never leave. To this day his Diary and other
alongside the Puritans answer, Eikonoklastes,
speedily written in October 1649 by John Milton. material remain in the colleges Bibliotheca
Pepysiana. So, go to Greenwich to see the show,
Pepys went on to the Puritan university,
preferably arriving by water, but next time you
where he shared in his youth the turbulent opare in Cambridge visit Magdalene to enjoy the
timism of the Commonwealth. He had trimmed
these opinions by the time Oliver Cromwell died documents themselves.
David Brady
in 1658, to be replaced as Lord Protector by his
son. The unfortunate Richard Cromwell lasted
Catalogue: Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution
less than a year. Pepys, under the patronage of
Margarette Lincoln (Ed.) Thames & Hudson
224pp 29.95
his cousin Edward Montagu, was aboard the
THERE IS an ancient Chinese curse (probably
neither ancient nor Chinese): May you live in
interesting times. It must have been pronounced over Pepys in his cradle. The momentous events of his life are traversed in Samuel
Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution, now showing at
the National Maritime Museum (NMM).
The Navy made Pepys and, in return, Pepys
made the Navy. The connection has led
Margarette Lincoln and other NMM curators to
produce this major exhibition. Pepys the man
was revealed by Claire Tomalin in her authoritative 2002 biography. Tomalin provides a short
preface to the excellent publication which
accompanies this show.
Credit must go to the in-house exhibition
design team, who have conjured-up a series of
vaguely 17th-century rooms within the gallery.
REVIEWS
Central Europe and in Britains
other overseas possessions,
notably Iraq, Egypt and India,
are not simply desirable, they
are arguably indispensable. For
without at least considering
postwar violence elsewhere,
the historian cannot properly
contextualise the break-up
of the United Kingdom in the
aftermath of the Great War. Nor,
crucially, can they effectively
address the question of what
was distinctively Irish about the
Irish Revolution.
When considered solely in the
context of what was then the
United Kingdom, for example,
the IRAs guerrilla campaign and
the counter-insurgency policies
pursued by the Crown Forces
in 1920 and 1921 seem like an
aberration. If examined alongside outbreaks of paramilitary
fighting in Finland, Lithuania or
A vivid account of
the most turbulent,
transformative
period in the
history of the
United Kingdom
Poland during roughly the same
period, however, the situation in
Ireland, dire as it was, begins to
look quite consistent with the
global phenomenon of antiimperial violence that stemmed
from the world war.
All of this being the case,
Maurice Walshs Bitter Freedom,
a text that seeks to place
Ireland in the global disorder
born of the terrible slaughter
of total war, should be warmly
welcomed. Unfortunately, the
book falls somewhat short of its
promise to properly consider
events in a global context.
Thus, while postwar turmoil
in continental Europe and the
Middle East is briefly alluded to,
the conflicts that occurred in
these regions are not evaluated
in a way that sheds new light
on social, military or political
dynamics in Ireland from 1918 to
1923. Hence Walsh acknowledges
that the fundamental difference
between nationalist movements

in Central Europe and in Ireland
is that in the former case the
imperial regimes against which
these movements had railed
were destroyed as a result of
the Great War. In Ireland, by
contrast, Sinn Fin and the IRA
faced a British state and Empire
that had emerged victorious in
1918 and initially held the moral
high ground in the eyes of the
international community.
Pushing this point further
and exploring the fact that, in
Ireland, each side had an established and recognised adversary
with which they could negotiate
could potentially have taken
the author into interesting new
territory. No such enquiries are
made, however, and Walshs
commentary on international
affairs is largely confined to
colourful observations on the
emergence of the US as the cultural and political superpower of
the 20th century.
Yet, while those looking for a
genuinely fresh contribution to
the scholarly pool of knowledge
on the Irish Revolution may be
disappointed, there is still much
to admire in Bitter Freedom.
Walsh certainly writes well,
possessing a keen eye for the
dramatic and the personal. He
also offers some very perceptive commentary on a range of
specifically Irish themes, including class tensions within the
nationalist community and the
generational divide between the
older, more traditional Home
Rulers and the brash, invariably
young and modern-looking
Republicans. The chapter on the
Royal Irish Constabulary, which
highlights the complex, outsider
status occupied by Irish policemen and reminds us that they
served as the model for colonial,
paramilitary police forces across
the British Empire, is particularly
illuminating. Ultimately, Bitter
Freedom promises more than it
delivers, but nonetheless provides a vivid and highly engaging
account of events in Ireland
during the most turbulent and
transformative period in the
history of the United Kingdom.
Edward Madigan
The Cambridge
Companion to John F.
Kennedy
Andrew Hoberek (Ed.)
Cambridge University Press 286pp 17.99
WHENEVER a new study of

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

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

Thomas Dixon
Oxford University Press 456pp 25
I BEGIN THIS review with a

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

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

India, Satyajit Ray said:
Its a very, very complex,
mixed kind of thing
Reflecting on the museums demise in a
thoughtful introduction to the lavish catalogue
of Tate Britains exhibition Artist and Empire,
Alison Smith, the gallerys lead curator of
19th-century British art, observes that Britain
has never had a museum of Empire, whether at
Londons Imperial Institute, established after
the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, or

its successor, the now-defunct Commonwealth
Institute. In Britain the art of Empire is generally presented in an illustrative and non-artistic
way, in institutions governed by such disciplines
as history, natural history, geography, archaeology and anthropology, she notes. Thus, much of
what is displayed in Artist and Empire comes not
from art galleries but from institutions such as
the National Maritime Museum: In evoking the
memory of the imperial museum, this exhibition retains something of the polyglot culture
that sustained the British Empire in the past and
remains its most positive legacy.
The range geographical, chronological and
cultural is inevitably very broad, covering maps
such as Matthew Flinders chart of the coast of
Terra Australis 1798-1803 (which defined Australia), botanical drawings from India and tribal
objects from Africa (including Benin bronzes),
as well as history paintings such as The Death of
General James Wolfe by Benjamin West (1779),
the Tates portrait of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, in
Arab dress, by Augustus John (1919) and artworks created as recently as 2015; for example,
Andrew Gilberts satirical installation with
dummies of British soldiers as exotic as the Zulu
warriors they are marching to attack.
Walter Cranes world map of 1886, Imperial
Federation, highlights the Empires complexity.
At first glance, it looks like a straightforward
celebration of imperialism, depicting the global
spread of British dominion in pink, with a logo of
Britannia at the bottom, sitting on the shoulders
of the mythical figure of Atlas surrounded by
stereotypical scenes of white-settler and native
colonial life: three female figures at the top
hold banners reading Freedom, Fraternity and
Federation. Closer inspection, however, reveals
that the females are wearing Phyrgian caps,
standing for revolutionary liberty, while some
of the scenes, such as a bare-breasted Aboriginal
woman proudly holding up a boomerang and
a turbaned Indian porter, bent low beneath a
heavy load, offer a less-than-imperial message.
Crane, who was a socialist, created the map to
promote a single federated state among the colonies of the Empire as an alternative to colonial
imperialism.
Artist and Empire is an exhibition without a
thesis and is the better for it. It contains something for all tastes, whether the visitor prefers
military heroism or subaltern studies. Overall it
shows that British imperial exploitation could
enrich the cultural experience of both the coloniser and the colonised.
Andrew Robinson
Catalogue: Artist and Empire, Alison Smith et al.
Tate Publishing 256pp 29.99
REVIEWS
At the heart of Dixons study
is the shift in British emotional
cultures, from sensibility to
stoicism and back again. While
Protestant reformers understood weeping as a Catholic
emotional indulgence, it was
not until the late 19th century
that the stiff upper lip took
precedence over the sentimental
in British culture. Even then, it
was only among certain social
groups. The growth of Empire
and the the 20th centurys two
world wars helped to spread a
repressive emotional culture
from public schools, those
incubators of imperial administrators, politicians and military
leaders, to wider British society.
As Britain defined itself against
the supposedly emotional
subject peoples of Empire and
attempted to manage mass
death in wartime, stoicism and
restraint became aligned with
British culture. Giving rein to
ones emotions, particularly
tears, was seen as a sign of
regrettable weakness.
Giving rein to
ones emotions,
particularly tears,
was seen as a sign
of regrettable
weakness
However, one of the many
pleasures of Dixons book is
the range of examples that he
uses to show us how this story
of weeping and the emotional
cultures framed by it is never absolute. One fascinating story is
of First World War soldiers who,
fresh from the horror of the
trenches, packed into theatres
to weep over a sentimental play
about fairies. Near the height of
the cult of stoicism, when the
bereaved were being advised
to control their grief, combatants were finding an emotional
release in the darkness of the
theatre. A robust fondness for
the pleasures of a good cry
never, it appears, entirely disappeared from British culture.
Lucy Noakes
Coney Island
Visions of an American
Dreamland 1861-2008
Robin Jaffee Frank (Ed.)
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and
Yale University Press 286pp 35
CONEY ISLAND is a small strip of

land in the south-western corner
of Brooklyn, a beach-side community abutting the Atlantic Ocean.
From the 1840s, with the arrival of
a regular ferryboat service from the
city, Coney Island established itself
as a resort and a playground. By
the end of the 1860s it had become
a thriving, thronging place for
entertainments and amusements:
from shooting galleries, carnivals,
fortune-tellers, and freak- and
animal shows, to galleries of ferrotypes, viewing towers, telescopes
and fantastic architectural follies
such as the Elephant Hotel (built in
the shape of an elephant), as well
as (inevitably) brothels, gambling
dens, dance halls, tattoo shops and
saloons. The poet J.P. Sweet called
Coney The Peoples Paradise;
other writers dubbed it Sodom by
the Sea.
This fully and beautifully illustrated book forms a catalogue of
paintings, photographs, film and
ephemera from an exhibition of
the same name, which opened
at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art in January 2015
and is touring through 2016. The
exhibition includes works by major
artists from the 1860s to 2008 and
charts the rise, fall and rebirth of
the island, documenting changes
in fashion, taste, politics, sexual
mores and popular culture, telling
a story of a unique piece of land
that is a microcosm of the history
of the modern US itself. In one of
the excellent essays, which chart,
analyse and contextualise the
images, Robin Jaffee Frank notes
that Coney Island was not merely

a place, but a collective soul of a
nation.
Early images, such as William
Merrit Chases At the Shore (1884),
bring the gaze of the Impressionist avant-garde to bear on
an America emerging from the
Civil War confident and hopeful,
seeing shimmering seas, bustling
beaches and chattering tourists
in a way strangely reminiscent of
Manets Paris. Later pieces, such
as Reginald Marshs expressionist
Wonderland Circus: Sideshow Coney
Island (1930), depict thronging
crowds groping each other in the
harsh, electric lights of the strip,
kicking litter and discarded food,
as club promoters bark invitations
and salacious women twist their
hips, as if to lead grubby, bawdy
sailors away. Through the 1940s,
photographs by Weegee, Morris
Engel and others show Coneys
heyday as a place of rollercoasters,
candyfloss and beach-side leisure;
romance, laughter and fun.
By the 1950s, Diane Arbus
turned her uncanny lens onto
the increasingly lurid attractions
and, into the 1980s, when Coney
Island had become (according to
The New York Times) disfigured,
Jean-Michel Basquiat depicted its
Luna Park, in an allegory of biblical
fall, a lost Eden, covered in graffiti
but still thronging with life. Even
as Coney declined, its deep and
rich history ensured it remained
a draw for travellers looking for
romance and adventure; the old
New York from the days before
the dying decades of the 20th
century sucked the soul from the
city. With the support and love of
a small community of performers,
artists, historians and architectural heritage organisations, Coney
resisted the looming threats of
gentrification and the storm forces
of 2012s Hurricane Sandy and just
managed to survive. It remains
today, under the constant vigilance
of community groups such as the
Coney Island Hysterical Society, a
vibrant, diverse and thrilling draw.
This book and its accompanying
exhibition serve as a testament to
its cultures and are an important
read for anyone who wants to
truly understand modern America.
Matt Lodder
Going to the Palais
A Social and Cultural History

of Dancing and Dance Halls in
Britain, 1918-1960
James Nott
Oxford University Press 327pp 65
FROM THE 1920S to the 1950s, the

dance hall (or palais de dance
as it was often more grandly
called) was an integral part
of British popular culture, the
second biggest entertainment
industry after the cinema, with
an estimated weekly attendance
of four million. In his exhaustively
researched, authoritative and
consistently fascinating book,
James Nott has produced the
first social, cultural and economic
history of dance and dance halls
in Britain between 1918 and 1960.
He tackles the subject thematically, dividing his discussion into
three sections. The first traces
the expansion of the dance hall
industry and the creation of a
mass audience for dancing. An
explosion of interest in dancing,
particularly among the working
classes after the First World War,
led to a demand for purposebuilt dance halls. By 1939 all
major cities had a palais. During
the Second World War dancing
boomed and dance halls helped
maintain morale. Against a background of full employment, the
dance hall enjoyed a golden age
in the 1950s, before experiencing
a rapid decline in the 1960s after
the rocknroll revolution and the
rise of nightclubs and discotheques challenged the supremacy
of the palais.
The regular dance hall
patrons, like the most assiduous cinema-goers, were mainly
REVIEWS
young, more often female than
male and usually working class.
In his second section, Nott charts
the role of the dance hall in
the social life of the young and
the development of a distinct
dance culture of their own. He
stresses the importance of the
dance hall in the lives of women,
for whom it was an arena of
freedom and equality, vital to
their growing emancipation and
self-confidence. The dance hall
also became synonymous with
romance. As one sociologist
observed in 1943: Dancing is one
of the recognised ways in which
boys and girls expect to find their
future partner.
It was these factors behind
the popularity of the dance halls
that alarmed middle-class moralists and caused periodic moral
panics. These are covered in the
third section of the book, which
examines the fears that dance
halls encouraged promiscuity
in young women and feminised
young men, while promoting
The first social,

cultural and
economic history
of the dance hall ...
authoritative and
fascinating
drug use, violence and hooliganism. Most interesting of all,
the dance hall became a focus
for racial prejudice, as many of
the popular dance forms derived
from black American culture and
reinforced pre-existing racial
stereotypes. The dance hall
became the first popular venue
where the increasingly multiracial nature of British society
became apparent. The arrival in
wartime of African-American
G.I.s was a precursor to the era
of mass non-white immigration after the war. In its range
of topics, density of assembled
evidence and consistent subtlety
of argument, this book is set to
become the definitive account
of dance halls in 20th century
Britain.
Jeffrey Richards
American Hippies
W. J. Rorabaugh
Cambridge University Press 239pp 17.99
UNFORTUNATELY for the

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

lazy? Rorabaughs book is a concise
study surveying the counterculture
(he uses the definite article), but
his probing of the hippies reveals
no hidden depths. While sympathetic to his subject, Rorabaugh
acknowledges that hippies were
not always right on by contemporary standards, so to what extent
are the hippies responsible for the
progressive standards by which we
now judge them poorly?
With reason, the author claims
that hippie scepticism about government has gradually become the
dominant view. Their distrust of
authority arguably paved the way
for our cynical world. Environmental consciousness might be said to
have its roots with the movement,
but so, too, did the negative and
hindering perceptions of the
Unfortunately
for the hippies,
posterity favours
those who provide
articulate accounts
of themselves
po-faced eco-warrior. Then theres
alternative medicine. Rorabaugh
suggests two stand-out examples
of the movements legacy: rural
communes and, less convincingly, the mindset that allowed J.K.
Rowling to create Harry Potter.
This is an earnest, uncynical
study of a movement that has
aged badly. The media ignored
important aspects of hippie
culture to focus on the surface,
argues Rorabaugh, and hippies
were famously inarticulate, leaving
them as sitting ducks; indeed,
when Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion
chronicled the freaks, they did
so from the outside. But cynicism
is inevitable and where better to
look than the Wikipedia page of
Lysergic Lenin and Yippies founder
Jerry Rubin:
Jerry Clyde Rubin (July 14, 1938
November 28, 1994) was an American
social activist, anti-war leader, and
counterculture icon during the 1960s
and 1970s. During the 1980s, he
became a successful businessman.
Rhys Griffiths
CONTRIBUTORS
David Brady is a freelance
lecturer, researcher and writer.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis
Professor of Greek Culture
Emeritus at the University of
Cambridge.
Taylor Downing is author of
Secret Warriors: Key Scientists,
Code-Breakers and Propagandists
of the Great War (Little, Brown,
2014).
Rhys Griffiths is Editorial
Assistant at History Today.
Matt Lodder is a lecturer in
Contemporary Art and Director
of American Studies at the
University of Essex.
David Lowenthals The Past
is a Foreign Country Revisited
was published by Cambridge
University Press in 2015.
Andrew Lycett has published a
number of notable biographies,
including of Muammar Gaddafi,
Ian Fleming, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and Wilkie Collins.
David McGrath is Visiting
Scholar at Kings College
London, specialising in Golden
Age Spanish Literature.
Edward Madigan is Lecturer in
Public History and First World
War Studies at Royal Holloway,
University of London.
Iwan Morgan is Professor of
United States Studies at Kings
College London.
John Morrill is General Editor of
the new five-volume edition of
all Oliver Cromwells recorded
words for OUP.
Clare Mulley is author of The
Spy Who Loved: the Secrets and
Lives of Britains First Female
Special Agent of WWII (Pan, 2013).
Lucy Noakes is Reader in
History at the University of
Brighton.
Jeffrey Richards is Emeritus
Professor of Cultural History at
the University of Lancaster.
Andrew Robinson is the
author of India: A Short History
(Thames & Hudson, 2014) and
biographer of Satyajit Ray and
Rabindranath Tagore.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Political Asylums
Stuart M. Archers excellent
article on shell shock (The
Racket and the Fear, January
2016) highlights the complexity
of human suffering in the First
World War. Matters were even
more politically convoluted in
Ireland, then part of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland. Despite a long history
of rebellion against British rule,
over 200,000 Irish soldiers
served in British forces in the
First World War and up to 35,000
died in it.
Many of these Irish men
believed that Home Rule was
imminent and that serving in
the British army was good for
Irish nationalism. In the midst
of the conflict, however, there
came the Easter Rising of April
1916. It was a military failure but
a key episode in the story of Irish
independence.
In the meantime, increasing
numbers of Irish soldiers were
being sent home with shell
shock. A dedicated hospital was
opened on the grounds of a large
asylum in Dublin on June 16th,
1916, just two months after
the Easter Rising. This 32-bed
establishment operated until
December 23rd, 1919 and 362
soldiers were treated, a majority
of whom returned home without
ever being formally certified
insane.
Case histories from the
archives are stark. Private JK (age
19) was blown up and buried
for 36 hours near Ypres and
presented with hair loss, tremor,
depression and headache. He
slept badly and is disturbed by
dreams. Gunner MN (age 35)
was admitted in 1919 with shell
shock after a head injury, having
lost himself completely for a
time.
Treatment was based on
rest and recuperation. Soldiers
were taken out on trips and
singers and drama groups visited.
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
Additional treatments included

hot and cold baths, bromides
(sedatives), antipyrin (antiinflammatory) and caffeine
(the soldiers favourite).
Despite this relatively
enlightened approach, political
problems persisted. Many of
Irelands asylums had strong
anti-British sympathies and
some staff of the Richmond
Asylum refused to work in the
War Hospital.
More broadly, the Irish soldiers who served in the British
forces in the First World War
tended to be written out of Irish
history until the recent anniversary of the start of the conflict.
Their stories, including those
with shell shock, are only now
emerging.
Brendan Kelly
Trinity College Dublin
Chronic Error
The article on shell shock has a
photo (p.16) with an inscription
transcribed in the caption as
chronic movements due to shell
shock.
Yet the first word is surely
not chronic: it appears to be
choricc, presumably an error for
choric, which translates as like
a chorus, including dancing, and
derives from the same Greek root
as the first part of choreography.
Paul Bennett
Manchester
Bishops Move
The cartoon, The Bishop and his
Clarke, which illustrates the
article Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Britain (December
2015), benefits from some explanation as regards The Bishop.
The first volume of Burkes
Royal Families of the World notes
that Frederick, the second son
of George III and later Duke of
York, was born on August 16th,
1763 and was elected (effectively
by his father) as Prince-Bishop
of Osnabrck on February 27th,
Connect with us on Twitter

twitter.com/historytoday
1764 (when he was six months

old), thereby enjoying the
benefits of the prince-bishopric
until that part of Europe was
reorganised by Napoleon.
Under the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia, the Prince-Bishopric
of Osnabrck was to alternate
between Catholic and Protestant office holders. By naming
his infant son as prince-bishop,
George III gained effective
control of that territory on a
long-term basis.
Brian F. Hubka
Calgary, Canada
London Bias
With reference to David Wallers
article Technology Capital Then
and Now (November 2015),
Roman chariots and wagons
had a standard axle length and
so paved Roman roads were
based on two lines of carefully
laid stone slabs on which the
wheels of the horse-drawn carts
were aligned. This seems to be
what Waller is describing for the
Wandsworth to Croydon route
of 1802-3. In Coalbrookdale the
carts delivering the coal, iron ore
and limestone to the Quakerdeveloped ironworks had iron
wheels by 1720 and by 1785 there
were 20 miles of iron rails for
them to run on and the wheels
had flanges. In 1802 Richard
Trevithick developed and
demonstrated his high pressure,
compact steam engine powering
a locomotive running up and
down on these rails.
The word spread through the
Quaker network and Edward
Pease, involved in discussions
about a canal from Stockton
to Darlington to transport the
coal to the port to be shipped
to London, proposed that they
develop a railway instead, which
after a good number of years of
discussion and eventual approval, got built (and yes, George
Stephenson was its engineer).
It was called The Quaker Line
because of the social trajectory

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

In response to those critics who
call Winston Churchill a reactionary, it should be pointed
out that the Labour Party made
him prime minister in 1940.
Perhaps today that is a widely
forgotten fact. Almost everyone
wanted Neville Chamberlain
gone after the Norway fiasco and
George VI requested a National
Unity government. Many Tories,
however, wanted Lord Halifax,
the foreign minister, to be
appointed premier. The Labour
Party announced that they would
serve under no one other than
Churchill, who wrote in his
memoirs that, for his first few
weeks as prime minister, Labour
MPs would cheer him and his
own party give him dirty looks.
Michael B. Carson
Imperial, California, USA
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Books & Publishing
Books & Publishing
Travel
AUTHORS
Please submit synopsis
plus 3 sample chapters
for consideration to:
Olympia Publishers
60 Cannon St,
London EC4N 6NP
editors@olympiapublishers.com
www.olympiapublishers.com
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Travel
Charities
Societies
Family History
Gifts
Reassuringly intelligent.
Comfortingly rational.
Coming Next Month

Positive Reactions
History appears to teach us

that, when calamity strikes,
scapegoats will be found.
The reaction to diseases, such
as HIV/AIDS, is one of fear,
that causes people to lash
out at outsiders. Yet this has
not always been the case.
Samuel Cohn surveys responses
to epidemics from ancient
Rome, where contrary to expectations the coming of the plague
brought citizens together, to 20th-century Europe, where cholera
outbreaks led to popular revolts against the authorities, rather than to
violence against its victims.
Global Marketplace
The modern world is defined by its love of consumer goods. The rise of
global consumerism, an empire of things, seems unstoppable. Yet this
is not a purely modern phenomenon. In his search for the origins of
consumerism, Frank Trentmann explores the shifting relationship
between objects and morality goods and goodness and its links to
imperialism, which whetted ever greater appetites for exotic products.
A Song of Sappho
Subscribe
www.historytoday.com/subscribe
The tenth muse and one of the few female voices to survive from
antiquity, Sapphos work spread across the ancient world, where it was
copied, disseminated and treasured, though little of it survived: the
fragile papyus on which it was recorded disintegrated and some was
even used as material for mummies. But last year, reports David Gribble,
a new poem was found, which is subtle, intimate and melancholy and
offers us a fascinating glimpse into the private longings of a woman of
the classical era, yearning for her brothers return from war.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Decembers Prize Crossword
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The March issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK

on February 18th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winner for December is Timothy Weakley, Dundee.
EDITORS LETTER: 2 Brooklyn Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS:

3 Bibliothque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 5 National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 6
akg-images; 7 Photograph by Dr Toby Huitson. Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library CCL HH/L-3-3.
Reproduced with kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury. MONTHS PAST: 8 Trustees
of the Bedford Estate, Woburn Abbey/Bridgeman Images; 9 top Alamy; bottom Lebrecht Music
& Arts. LEARNING LESSONS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: 11 PA Images; 12 top Bonhams/Bridgeman
Images; bottom map Tim Aspden; 13 top and bottom Bridgeman Images; 14, from top: map Tim
Aspden; Reza Shah PA Images; King Feisal Alamy; Gamel Abdel Nasser and King Farouk I Getty
Images; 15 top left Getty Images; top right Bridgeman Images; bottom Getty Images 16 Jim Gray/
Getty Images; 17 Per-Anders Petterson/Getty Images. INFOCUS: 18-19 Popperfoto/Getty Images.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: 20-21 and 22 Bibliothque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 23 Muse
Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 24 top and bottom Chteau de Versailles/Bridgeman Images; 25
Muse Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 26 top Bridgeman Images; bottom Chteau de Versailles/
Bridgeman Images; 27 top Muse Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 28 Bibliothque Nationale/
Bridgeman Images. THE CHAMPION OF MODERATION: 30 Bridgeman Images; MAKING HISTORY:
32 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/Bridgeman Images. A NEW NORMAL: 33 Mirrorpix/
Alamy; 34 Crown Copyright/British Library; 35 top Mirrorpix; bottom left National Portrait Gallery,
London; bottom right Alamy; 36 top Malcolm Clarke/Getty Images; bottom Fred W. McDarrah/
Getty Images. DISASTER IN THE NORTH SEA: 39 Popperfoto/Getty Images. ORIGINS OF THE
ENGLISH KINGDOM: 41 Muse de la Tapisserie, Bayeux/Bridgeman Images; 42 top thelstan, MS183,
fol 1v, courtesy The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; bottom Alamy; 43 map
Tim Aspden; 44 top The Trustees of the British Museum; bottom The Art Archive/Public Record
Office, London; 45 Alamy; 46 King Edgar, MS Cotton Vespasian A. Viii, fol 2b British Library; 47
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. THE BEN BARKA AFFAIR: 49 PA Images. THE RISE OF THE
TEUTONIC KNIGHTS: 51 and 52 akg-images; 53 Bridgeman Images; 54 Steven May/Alamy; 55
akg-images. SIGNPOSTS: 56 Adrian Sherratt/Alamy; 61 The Royal Charles carried into Dutch Waters,
12th June 1667, by Ludolf Backhuysen, 1667 National Maritime Museum. 63 A Cheetha and Stag with Two
Indian Attendants by George Stubbs, 1765 Manchester Art Gallery. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 Image
interpreted as an illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible, 1411 Bridgeman Images.
PASTIMES: 70 top The School of Athens by Raphael, c.1511. Wikimedia/Creative Commons; bottom left
detail from Codex Skylitzes, Madrid, 12th century. Wikimedia/Creative Commons; bottom right Franz
Ferdinand, c.1919, Library of Congress. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 Edward Lear Walker Art
Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images.
We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful,
please get in touch with us directly.
Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
1 Which two figures stand at the
centre of Raphaels 1509 painting
The School of Athens?
22 What name was given to

the pipeline that extended from
Liverpool to Normandy to supply
the Allied Armies in 1944?
2 Who was the first person to be

assassinated live on television?
23 John Harris published the first

what in English in 1708-10?
3 Who shot him?

24 Norman Lewis 1951 book
A Dragon Apparent describes travels
in which countries?
4 What, according to Thomas De

Quincey, were the three nuisances,
special to Greece, which repel
tourists from that country?
11 What name did Leon Trotsky

give to one who agreed with the
Communist party but who was
not a member?
18 To which philosophical
movement did Camus, de Beauvoir
and Sartre belong?
19 Who did Stefan Zweig describe
as the man with the bulldog neck
and cold, staring eyes?
12 Fourth estate was

whose phrase for the
press?
13 Built in 1872, Lord
Kelvins tide predictor was
the first what?
7 According to legend, at which

Dorset landmark was Edward the
Martyr murdered in 978?
8 Which game, originally played in
a French convent in Ulster, became
popular in England in the 1850s?
9 What name was given to Swiss
theologian Thomas Erastus 1594
doctrine advocating the subjection
of the church to the state?
14 Agostinho Neto was

the first president of which former
Portuguese colony?
15 Who patented his waterproof
cloth in 1822?
16 Martello Towers are so called
after naval defences on which
island?
17 Who published her Awful
Disclosures in 1836?
20 Where did Black Agnes

successfully defend against English
invasion in 1338?
21 The introduction of what, in
1840, ended the system of free
franking by signature?
ANSWERS
6 A Byzantine state secret, what

name was given to the liquid
naphtha compound used in battle?
10 Who was Farmer George?
1. Plato and Aristotle

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

what in London in 1652?
25 The famine years between

1695-99 in Scotland are known
as what?
Prize Crossword
ACROSS
8 Indiana city, subject of the 1929
sociological study Middletown (6)
9 Greek hero, son of Peleus (8)
10 John (1813-58), York-born
epidemiologist (4)
11/29 A ___, 1852 collection by Ivan
Turgenev (10,8)
12 1958 musical film by Vincente
Minnelli (4)
13 Mans ___ to man/Makes countless thousands mourn! Robert
Burns, 1786 (10)
17 City of Lorraine, ceded to France
in 1648 (4)
18 Rod ___ (b.1938), tennis player
named Rockhampton Rocket (5)
19 C14th emperor of Mali who built
the Great Mosque at Timbuktu (4)
21 British conductor (1912-97), born
Gyrgy Stern in Hungary (5,5)
23 Robert ___ (d.1705), civil servant
and editor of the London Gazette (4)
24 Religious office contested in
Jerusalem during Great War by Kamil
al-Husayni and Asad Shukeiri (5,5)
28 The Mighty ___, nickname of the
Welsh boxer Jimmy Wilde (18921969) (4)
29 See 11
30 City of central Italy, ruled in the
15th century by Federico da
Montefeltro (6)
DOWN
1 Ambrose Everett ___ (1824-81),
Set by Richard Smyth

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

months prize
crossword will receive
a selection of recent
history books
Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London
WC1V 7QH by February 29th or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

EDWARD LEAR
Edward Lear
(1812-88)
Arabella Hunt (1662-1705)

English singer and musician who was
employed as a lutenist at the royal
court, the subject of a painting by
English artist, musician and poet,

whose first publication was on the
subjects of parrots, an African grey
example of which was inherited by
Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio
(1571-1610)
Andrew Jackson
(1767-1845)
Italian painter who witnessed the

public execution of the Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, whose story
inspired the play Nemesis by
Seventh President of the United

States, who survived smallpox, as did
Anne of Cleves
(1515-57)
Queen of England, whose marriage
to Henry VIII was annulled, as was
the marriage of
Alfred Nobel
(1833-96)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
Swedish chemist, who died at his villa

in San Remo, Italy, as did
MARIE-LOUISE
FromtheArchive
Marie-Louise, Napoleons second, lesser-known wife, achieved great political success while exiled in
Parma. She should not be forgotten, argues Deborah Jay.
The Forgotten Archduchess

EVERYONE has heard of Josephine.
Yet it was only when Napoleon found
love with Marie-Louise, Habsburg
archduchess and daughter of his
enemy, Austrian emperor Francis II/I,
that he found true marital happiness.
Despite this, next to Josephine, MarieLouise is almost unknown. Across
History Todays extensive archives
she garners no more than a passing
mention, as in Philip Mansels 1998
profile of Napoleon.
When Josephine failed to deliver
the heir Napoleon believed
he needed, he looked to
the leading dynasties of
Europe for a second wife.
Having subdued Austria
for a second time in 1809,
he forced Emperor Francis
to surrender his eldest
daughter on pain of losing
his Habsburg throne.
Aged 18, highly educated, witty and
caring, Marie-Louise understood the
dynastic marriage market and her duty
to emperor and country. As instructed,
she set aside preconceptions about her
husband and his countrymen and,
during her tenure as empress, all
would fail to engage her on the subject
of her great-aunt Marie-Antoinette
or any other subject that might be
noxious to the Franco-Austrian alliance. She was more than a match for
her overweening husband, whose misjudgments during their years together
were already sowing his downfall.
Napoleon adored her from the
moment he set eyes on her. Unlike
Josephine, she appreciated his lovemaking and returned his affection,
treasuring his gifts, attention and
love-letters. In 1811, she produced the
yearned-for son. Napoleon Francis
was to be known as the king of Rome,
Napoleon having ejected the pope and
subsumed his capital into France.
Twice in the Spring of 1813 and
in January 1814 the French emperor

appointed his wife regent of France
before setting out for battle, so much
did he trust her good sense, integrity
and loyalty to her adopted country.
Yet all unravelled in March 1814,
when Napoleons fortunes changed
and Francis and his allies laid siege to
Paris. Rather than allowing MarieLouise to stand and confront the
invaders, Napoleons courtiers and
family urged her to flee with her
son to the Loire in accordance with
Marie-Louise proved
herself the most
enlightened sovereign
of her age
Napoleons instructions. Napoleon did
not summon Marie-Louise to him but
told her to await her fathers decision,
believing that his father-in-law was
bound to favour reunion of husband,
wife and child. Napoleon was wrong.
Marie-Louise and her son were taken
to Vienna effectively as hostages.
The Austrian Chancellor, Klemens
Metternich, ensured Marie-Louise
never received Napoleons letters and
that an attractive equerry was charged
to detach her emotionally from him.
She was forced to sit out negotiations
between the Great Powers at the
Vienna Congress, while Napoleon
prepared accommodation for her on
Elba, of which he was now king. In
the Spring of 1815, she learned that
Napoleon had escaped his kingdom,
had seized power in Paris and demanded her return. Furious at what
she perceived to be his irresponsible
behaviour and unaware of his justified
grievances, Marie-Louise declared her
detachment from his enterprise. As
the allies proclaimed victory after
Waterloo, she was rewarded by the

grant of the duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, promised her on
Napoleons first abdication in 1814.
In March 1816, she set out for Parma
with her equerry, now her chief administrator. Her son, now five, was not
allowed to accompany her, too dangerous a Bonaparte mascot to live on the
politically volatile Italian peninsula.
In Parma, living under constant threat
of eviction, Marie-Louise flouted
Austrian dictates and proved herself to
be the most enlightened sovereign of
her age, her duchies a place of refuge
for many of the political dissidents
of the Italian Risorgimento. Forced
to lead a double life, she scandalised
Europe when, upon the death of her
chief administrator, the existence of
her second secret family was revealed.
She held on to her duchies as the fires
of Italian unification became irrepressible, revolution breaking out across
Europe within three weeks of her
death. Her numerous achievements
are still celebrated today, 200 years
since she set foot in Parma.
Deborah Jay is the author of Napoleons Other
Wife (Rosas Press, 2015).
VOLUME 48 ISSUE 3 MARCH 1998

Read the original piece
at historytoday.com/fta

History Today - February 2016 (Gnv46)

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

History Today - February 2016 (Gnv46)

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

February 2016

The French Revolution explained

Publisher Andy Patterson

FROM THE EDITOR

Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

2 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

British Empire Peace of Westphalia Roman Beauty Pilgrims

Britains Willing Imperialists

whom little is known is excellent

study, British Imperialism, P.J. Cain and

contexts. John Darwins The Empire

precisely because they are taken for

It is high time that scholars

Were imperialist attitudes so

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Historians need to dispel

Westphalia is detached from its context and assigned great importance

alliance with the Netherlands in 1605.

sovereign states system, the historiography of international law and politics

Cormac Shine is a Scholar in History and Political

The Make-up of Rome

to be found in paintings, funerary reliefs

per se in the ancient world, it also

Susan Stewart is the author of Cosmetics and

badges (sometimes gold ones, too)

are some marks and holes on a blank

Diane Heath is an assistant lecturer at Canterbury

FEBRUARY 18th 1516

Bloody Mary born at

Norfolk and the Countesses of Salisbury

was often called that.

FEBRUARY 24th 616

a Christian and it was a condition of

FEBRUARY 20th 1816

ward of an elderly doctor called Bartolo.

the English on the popes orders and

Almavivas love and after all sorts of

ELSON received intelligence on July 28th, 1798

Contrary to all expectations,

The history of Britains foreign policy in the Middle

Colonel Gadaffis Libya and now ISIS. Britain is building a

1963 and 1967, of Britains application to join the European

Israel, Palestine and Iraq

The bureaucratic machine dealing with

Empire was a difficult task, conducted under unpropitious

eluding the generals on the Western Front. The government

valuable oilfields. Officials subsequently debated whether

The Balfour Declaration suffered from the problem

RITAINS other troubled creation was Iraq, a state

FEBRUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 13

Egypt and the Gulf

ASSER CAUSED A government comprised of

14 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

From top: Egyptian President

Below: Lord Curzon, Secretary

Soviets were making inroads in Egypt and Syria. Britain was

FTER SUEZ, the focus of British policy moved to

The course of recent Middle Eastern

16 HISTORY TODAY FEBRUARY 2016

gency in the neighbouring Dhofar province of Oman. Along

suppressing the dissenting views of his oriental secretary.

RITISH POLICY in the Middle East since the First

those ministers in London who either failed to consult or