History Today 03-2016

THE MURDER
OF JAMES I
RISE AND FALL OF

A CARIBBEAN KING
March 2016
Vol 66 Issue 3
PLAGUE
&
PREJUDICE
From Ancient Greece to AIDS. How do
societies deal with the threat of disease?
Art of history:
Asa Briggs at the
National Portrait
Gallery in 1999.
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editor Kate Wiles
Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
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Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde
Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge
Professor Richard Bessel University of York
Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter
Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor
of the Open University
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen
Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex
Juliet Gardiner Historian and author
Tom Holland Historian and author
Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South
Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary,
University of London
Professor Geoffrey Parker
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston
London School of Economics
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
Professor Ulinka Rublack
St 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
FROM THE EDITOR

ASA BRIGGS has been a supporter of and adviser and friend to History Today
since it was founded in 1951. As he approaches 95, he is understandably less
mobile than in his globe-trotting days, when he earned the nickname Lord Briggs
of Heathrow, yet he remains sharp. Though pre-eminently a social historian,
principally of the Victorian age, Briggs long career has been marked by an
extraordinary breadth of interests: he played a major role in the establishment
of Britains new universities, Sussex in particular, and the Open University; he
was the official historian of the BBC; he has written incisively on Intelligence,
with insights gained when working as a young officer at Bletchley Park during
the Second World War; and, long before it became fashionable, he took a keen
interest in Chinese history and culture, attested to by his vast collection of
political figurines brought back from his many visits there.
Few, however, even his closest colleagues, knew about Briggs the poet,
though he had been composing verse since his days at Keighley Boys Grammar
School in Yorkshire. One hundred of his poems are collected in Far Beyond the
Pennine Way, published by EER. I will let others appraise the literary quality of
Briggs work, but they display a deep and perceptive engagement with the past
going back to the authors youth. One poem from December 1936, The Armies
of Islam, is frighteningly prescient, while the aspiring historians meditations
on the Italian-imposed exile of Ethiopias Haile Selassie (May they give back to
him his rightful home) and the rise of the European dictatorships reveal a youth
engaged with a world in grave crisis. Most striking is his response to the bombing
of Guernica (Briggs got to know Basque child refugees in Keighley):
Let us prepare for action; by Gods grace
Even for war, so that it may never again be said
That England shrinks in cowardice, timid, afraid.
No appeaser he.
Over eight decades Briggs sustains an engagement with the world and its past,
reflected in verse composed in Shanghai, Beijing, Portugal, California, Montana,
the West Indies and, of course, Yorkshire. Few people in their mid 90s have new
sides to display, but then Briggs has always surprised us.
Paul Lay
Total Average Net Circulation
18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
2 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016
HistoryMatters
Language and Unity Watlington Hoard Cecil Rhodes Annual Awards
Stewart McCain
Should One Nation

Mean One Language?
David Camerons desire for immigrants
to learn English is part of a debate dating
back to the origins of the modern state.
Teaching the
natives: The School
Master, a French
illustration,
c.1860.
FRANCE, 1794. With the Reign of

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

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

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

of shame in speaking ones native
tongue.
Throughout 19th-century Europe,
nationalists pursued linguistic unity
with similar vigour and this has often
manifested itself in state-sponsored
discrimination. Linguistic minorities,
especially Polish speakers, in the
second German Reich suffered under
Bismarcks Kulturkampf during the
final decades of the 19th century, an
experience similar to those enduring
Without knowledge of the

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

observing that language policies have
often not worked quite as politicians
hoped. France only achieved a real
degree of linguistic unification after
the Second World War, revealing the
limited ability of the state to impose
its will in matters of language. Efforts
under Napoleon to create a monolingual legal system were opposed
by legal officials who continued to
communicate with locals in regional
languages in order to be understood.
Grgoire, like many contemporaries,
hoped that large-scale conscription
to the French-speaking army would
assimilate the rural population, but
when veterans returned home they
often returned to the local dialect
under pressure from families and
friends. Even the French school
system, universal and free at primary
level after 1881, was less important
than urbanisation and the development of transport links in the
countryside. Discriminatory policies
in Russia and Germany were often
counter-productive, strengthening
the appeal of minority identities and
stimulating opposition. The history
of language and the state in Europe
shows how the social and economic
context influenced the linguistic
choices of individuals far more than
narrow government interventions.
Stewart McCain is Lecturer in History at St Marys
University, Twickenham.
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
Evidence of an
Anglo-Saxon
Alliance
A newly found hoard offers
insights into an England
threatened by Vikings.
Rory Naismith
THE Watlington hoard, found in Oxfordshire in 2015, is a gift to the historian. It
dates from the 870s: a decade which
saw Alfred the Great face and, after
some near misses, stave off a Viking
invasion of Wessex. These years also
witnessed the rule of Ceolwulf II, the last
self-styled king of the Mercians, a powerful people originally based in the West
Midlands, who had been the major force
between the Thames and the Humber
for two centuries. Most of the narrative
built around these two figures comes
from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which
focuses on an account of Alfreds war
with the Vikings, as might be expected
from a text put together by scholars
in Wessex in the decades after the
ultimate West-Saxon victory. But the
Chronicles coherence and focus comes
at the expense of breadth and it skates
around some of the messier realities.
Ceolwulf II, in particular, receives rough
treatment. Appointed by the Vikings in
874 and losing half his territory to the
invaders in 877, the Chronicle writes him
off as a foolish kings thegn.
The coins from Watlington provide
an important new perspective on the
situation as it developed during these
crucial years. Ceolwulf II functioned as
fully as any king, issuing charters and
coins, including many in the new hoard,
which is a time capsule from the late
870s, containing silver pennies produced
at locations across southern England,
in the names of both West-Saxon
and Mercian rulers. However, it was
probably put together by one of the
Viking raiders. Silver ingots and other
silver objects, as well as a piece of gold
bullion, were found in the hoard and
the coins include specimens from continental Europe: features characteristic
of precious metal collections gathered
HISTORYMATTERS
and concealed by Vikings, rather than

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

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

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

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

Kings College London.
HISTORYMATTERS
Longman-History Today Awards

David Cesarani was among those honoured at this years event.
DAVID CESARANI, the distinguished
historian of the Holocaust, the Middle
East and Anglo-Jewish politics and
culture who died in October, was
awarded the Longman-History Today
Trustees Award for 2016. It was received
on his behalf by Dawn Waterman, his
wife, at a reception held at the Law
Society in London on January 12th.
Cesarani was an indefatigable
champion of public history, who was
determined that the Holocaust should
be understood in all its complexity by
the British public. A widely admired
head of the Wiener Library and a noted
broadcaster and writer, what is now
sadly his valedictory work, The Final
Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-49 was
published by Macmillan in January.
The Longman-History Today Book
Prize, awarded for a first or second work
of scholarship deserving of a wider audience, with a prize of 2,000, went to
Sarah Helm for If This is a Woman Inside
Ravensbrck: Hitlers Concentration Camp
for Women (Little, Brown). It was compared by the judges Professor Jeremy
Black of Exeter University, Professor
Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University
of London and Taylor Downing, author
and film-maker to a mirror, broken
into thousands of pieces and meticulously and miraculously restored. An
outstanding piece of scholarship and
historical retrieval. It is reviewed by
Taylor Downing on page 63. Ruth Scurrs
widely acclaimed John Aubrey: My Life
(Chatto & Windus) was highly commended among a strong field.
The Longman-History Today Historical Picture Researcher of the Year
prize is given to a researcher who has
done outstanding work to enhance a
text with a creative, imaginative and
wide-ranging selection of images. The
prize for 2016 and 500 was awarded
to Maria Ranauro for her work on
Alexandra Harris book Weatherland:
Writers and Artists Under English Skies
(Thames & Hudson). An imaginative and
beautifully curated selection of images,
it was likened by the judges History
Today picture researcher Mel Haselden
and editor Paul Lay to a walk through
Rhodes Must
Fall? A Question
of When Not If
The British Empire is not the
first nor last great power
to see its icons crumble.
Alex von Tunzelmann
a remarkable exhibition.
The History Today Digital Award
and 250 went to the Legacy of British
Slave-ownership project based at
University College London, which, with
both local and global reach, reminds us
that slave-ownership played a crucial
role in British history.
The Undergraduate Dissertation
Award, worth 250 and given in
association with the Royal Historical
Association, was presented to Cora
Salkovskis from the University of Oxford
for Psychiatric Photography and Control
in the Benevolent Asylum of Holloway:
the Construction of Image, Identity and
Narrative in Photographs of Female in the
Late 19th-century Asylum. The judges
Professor John Henderson of Birkbeck
University of London and Dr Lars Fischer
of University College London thought
it an outstanding piece of work reflecting remarkable sensitivity.
Distinguished:
the LongmanHistory Today
Trustees Award
is accepted
by Dawn
Waterman on
behalf of David
Cesarani as
History Today
editor Paul Lay
looks on.
Below: the
shortlisted
books.
OUR WORLD was shaped by empires.

Its languages, cultures, infrastructures,
maps and monuments mark the
movements of power across its surface.
It was said that the British Empire
turned one quarter of the world pink,
the colour that designated its colonial
possessions in imperial atlases. Parts of
North America, Australia, New Zealand
and Africa were named Jamestown, Victoria, Wellington and Livingstone. Nor
was the British lion the only conquering
beast to mark its territory. Alexander
the Great named most of the cities he
founded Alexandria. Several Roman
towns were called Caesarea. Columbus named Caribbean islands La Isla
Espaola and Juana. German imperialists
created Caprivi and Schuckmannsburg
in Namibia. The Belgian Congo had a
Lopoldville, an lisabethville and a Baudoinville. These places were littered with
monuments to the greatness of their
conquerors: names, public institutions,
parks, places of worship and statues.
As the controversy over the statue
of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford
shows, imperial legacies may be contested many generations later. For all
the talk now that Rhodes was a man of
his time, he was profoundly controversial when he was alive: loathed by
the peoples whose lands he colonised
and by his rivals the Boers, disdained by
many in Britain, who feared his amorality and megalomania. He oversaw war,
plunder, civil injustice and the deaths
of thousands of Africans. He was also a
generous and transformative benefactor
to Oxford University. In recognition of
this last fact, since 1911 a rather mousy
statue of him has stood above Oriels
main entrance. The students running
the Rhodes Must Fall campaign have
called for its removal to a museum,
HISTORYMATTERS
Statues are not history they are

political symbols, which drift in
or out of favour along with
political and aesthetic tastes
where they feel it might appear less
like a relic for uncritical veneration.
There are options less polarising
than keeping the statue as it is or
taking it away; it could be imaginatively altered or given a new inscription. Oriel responded to Rhodes
Must Fall in December 2015 with an
impeccably balanced statement pledging six months of discussion. Then, in
January this year, the college suddenly
announced that the statue would stay
reportedly in response to wealthy
alumni threatening to withdraw bequests worth up to 100 million. There
has been a backlash against Rhodes
Must Fall, led by F.W. de Klerk, the last
leader of apartheid South Africa; Tony
Abbott, former prime minister of Australia; and Lord Patten, chancellor of
Here today: the

statue of Rhodes
at Oriel College.
Oxford University. The students have

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

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

The World According to the Movies (Atlantic Books,
2015). She is writing a history of the Suez Crisis.
MonthsPast
MARCH
By Richard Cavendish
MARCH 2nd 1316
Robert II of
Scots is born
THE FIRST OF THE Stewart kings of
Scotland and later of England owed
his throne to the fact that his mother,
Marjorie, was the eldest daughter of
Robert the Bruce, who was King of Scots
as Robert I from 1306. The Stewarts,
who were crucial Bruce allies, were the
hereditary High Stewards of Scotland
and Marjorie was the wife of Walter the
Steward. Their son was allegedly born at
Paisley Abbey, west of Glasgow, which
his family had founded. His 19-year-old
mother, heavily pregnant, was out riding
near the abbey when she fell off her
horse and went into premature labour.
She was carried into the abbey where
she gave birth to a boy, by an early form
of caesarean section, which the child
survived, but she did not.
Some historians doubt this story,
but there is no doubt at all that Scottish
history at this stage was chaotically
complicated and it would take the baby
Robert more than 50 years to reach
the throne. He was heir presumptive
to Robert the Bruce, who had no male
heirs, but in 1324 Bruce had a son named
David, who under a peace treaty with
the English in 1328 was married at the
age of four to the seven-year-old sister
of Edward III of England. A year later, on
Bruces death, he succeeded as David II
King of Scots. Meanwhile, Roberts father
Walter had died in 1326, which made the
ten-year old Robert the High Steward
of Scotland. The Scottish parliament
now declared him heir presumptive to
David II.
In the 1330s the English renewed
their attempts to take over Scotland,
the French interfered as allies against
the English and powerful Scots barons
vied for control. Edward Balliol seized
the Scottish throne with English support
and held sway for a time and in 1334
Stewart steward:
Robert II in a
16th-century
engraving.
young King Davids guardians sent him

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

obstructed attempts to secure Davids
release. He was presumably suspicious
of Davids English connections and
regular amicable visits to the English
court. David had been finding it so hard
to raise the money to pay his ransom
that in 1363 he suggested recognising
a son of Edward III as the official heir
to the Scottish throne, if the English
would cancel the remaining payments.
The Scottish parliament flatly refused to
accept any such deal and, when David
died in 1371, aged 46, the 54-year-old
Robert succeeded him as the nearest
male heir.
King at last, Robert now began a
successful reign. He knew how Scottish
politics worked and he used effective
methods to win over foes and keep
the loyalty of Stewart supporters with
grants of land, titles and official positions. He seems to have encouraged
the chroniclers to praise Robert the
Bruces achievements, to reflect well on
the Stewarts. His keen appetite for sex
had supplied him with a small army of
children by two wives and numerous
mistresses. There are said to have been
more than 21 of them altogether.
The oldest of the children were now
grown-up and well able to help. The
oldest son, John, now in his thirties High
Steward and Earl of Carrick, was the
official heir to the throne and supervised
much of the running of the regime.
The next son, Robert, Earl of Fife, was
also active and a third son, Alexander,
known as the Wolf of Badenoch, was
the governments principal figure in the
Highlands. Daughters came in handy for
marrying to leading families to secure
their backing. Isabella, for example, was
married to one of the Douglases and
Margaret to the Lord of the Isles.
Robert was 74 when he died at the
castle he had built for himself at Dundonald, near Kilmarnock, and was buried
at Scone. His eldest son John succeeded
him as Robert III and the Stewart line
was established for centuries to come.
MARCH 22nd 1916
The end of
imperial
China
CHINA HAD BEEN ruled for centuries
by successive dynasties of emperors,
but by the later 19th century their
day seemed to be almost done. The
country was run on Confucian principles, which did not value change
and progress, but stressed stability
and peaceful harmony under rulers
who enjoyed the mandate of heaven.
As the western powers and Japan
increasingly interfered in China,
however, the divine mandate seemed
to have been forfeited. Even the
formidable Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi
felt forced to make concessions to the
foreigners before her death in 1908
and a rebellion against her successor
in 1911 turned China into a republic.
An assembly of delegates declared
Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang Party, provisional president
of the republic, but he soon found

himself in conflict with a powerful
figure called Yuan Shikai. Yuan had
started his career in the army and
shown himself exceptionally competent, self-confident and ambitious. He
had then risen to high positions under
the Empress Dowager. He was now in
command of the countrys principal
military force and early in 1912 Sun
Yat-sen, fearing civil war, made a deal
with him. Yuan ordered the six-yearold emperor to abdicate, which he did,
Sun resigned as president and Yuan
replaced him the following day. Yuan
was acceptable to the conservatives
in China, and crucially to the army.
Now at the age of 53 it was his job to
stop the country falling apart.
The government had run out of
money, the Chinese provinces were
largely under the control of local
warlords and the republics national
assembly spent its time arguing and
quarrelling. The Kuomintang, which
had a majority in the assembly,
kept opposing Yuans plans until he
allegedly organised the murder of the
partys chairman. Effectively silencing
High churchman:
John Keble in 1863.
MARCH 29th 1866
John Keble dies in

Bournemouth
Anti-imperialist:
Yuan Shikai
photographed
in 1915.
CLERGYMAN, theologian and poet,

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

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

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

murdered by his favourite, the Duke
of Buckingham, may have been a
false one but it was widely believed
and helped to justify the execution
of Charles I. Alastair Bellany and
Thomas Cogswell explain.
HE VETERAN DIPLOMAT Sir Balthazar

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

of Buckingham, by
Michiel Jansz van
Miereveld, 1625-26.
Murderer
most
eminent
FRUSTRATED AT THEIR inability to persuade Charles I to

agree to a negotiated settlement after the second Civil War,
the House of Commons voted in early January 1648 to end
talks with the king. The House appointed a committee to
draft a declaration justifying this dramatic decision that

Royalists feared would make a Bonfire of Monarchy.
When it appeared in February 1648, the Declaration explained why Parliament felt compelled to end negotiations
with the king, rehearsing the various proposed settlements
that Charles had rejected and assembling a laundry list of
his numerous crimes, most of them committed during
THE STUARTS
the Civil Wars. But the Declaration led the attack
on Charles with a new twist on an old accusation.
Even before the final draft had been approved, the
Venetian ambassador had heard the reports: the
Declaration would charge either that Charles I
had hastened the death of his father by poison or
that Buckingham attempted it with his consent.
James I had died at his palace at Theobalds in
late March 1625. At the time he had first fallen
ill, earlier that month, the court was tense,
shaken by ongoing arguments between the king,
the prince and Buckingham over foreign policy
and unnerved by a steady succession of fatal
illnesses among the English and Scottish elite.
As James sickened, the level of anxiety rose yet
further with the death of his cousin, the Marquis
of Hamilton, whose corpse began to swell and
discolour shortly after his death. A medical report
ruled out foul play, but the dramatic post-mortem
symptoms encouraged anxious whispers that the
marquis had been poisoned.
T FIRST, few were seriously worried

about the king. His physicians diagnosed tertian fever, which (if properly
handled) would pose little danger. After
several bed-ridden weeks, James finally seemed
on the mend. Then the Earl of Kellie reported
from court that something odd had happened
that was here much disliked. On the night of
March 21st and 22nd, Buckingham placed a plaster
on the kings chest, after which his Majesty was
extremely sick, and gave him something to drink,
all without the consent or knowledge of any
of the doctours. James condition immediately
deteriorated and the frightened doctors and courtiers in the sickroom exchanged angry recriminations. Five days later, James was dead. Reports of
Buckinghams medical dabbling and the ensuing
recriminations circulated both inside and outside
the court, but soon began to subside. A year later,
however, they would make a startling and more
public return. In late April 1626, as the Parliament-men were preparing for Buckinghams impeachment, a sensational new account of James
last days, published in a pamphlet ostensibly from
Frankfurt, was scattered around Londons streets.
Its author was George Eglisham, a Scottish
Catholic physician and poet and a skilled polemicist. Eglisham had lost his post as one of James Is
extraordinary [i.e. unpaid] doctors early in March 1625,
after he had tried to orchestrate Hamiltons deathbed conversion to Rome. Eglisham then fled to Brussels, where his
old connections in the Spanish administration encouraged
him to publish, in Latin, German and English editions, his
lurid accusations about the practice of poisoning in the
Court of England. Printed in Brussels but carrying a fake
Frankfurt imprint, the English edition was called The Forerunner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham.
The Forerunner vividly portrayed Buckinghams systematic murder of a host of rival courtiers, using a cunning
poison designed by a sinister poisonmonger-mountebank.
This poison, Eglisham avowed, had caused the startling
James I, by Daniel
Mytens, 1621.
distortion of Hamiltons corpse, which began to swell

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

this white powder, this white powder! would to God I
had never taken it, it will cost my life. Buckingham then
applied a plaster to James chest and his Maiesty grew faint,
short breathed and in great agony. The king died shortly
afterwards and, when Buckingham asked the attending
physicians to certify that he had given the King a good and
safe medicine, they declined. Meanwhile, the kings body
and head swelled above measure.
This cunning work of Habsburg-sponsored disinformation was designed to embroil English domestic politics in
conflict and it succeeded all too well. For three days in late
April 1626 Parliament interrogated the royal physicians
about the events in James sickroom. Although one doctor
reported that James had reacted to Buckinghams remedies
Eglishams allegations of
poisoning were to tarnish
Buckinghams reputation
for the rest of his life
Balthasar Gerbier by Paulus Pontius, after Antony van Dyck, 1634.
by asking will you murder me and slay me?, the testimony only made things murkier, for it revealed that many
had sampled Buckinghams potion and that the dukes
servant, Mr Baker, had eaten some of the plaster. Nevertheless Buckingham had clearly acted without the doctors
approval and with no consideration for the suitability and
timing of his remedies, which had been prepared at his
request by an obscure physician from Essex. The hearings
also unearthed hints of Buckinghams relationship with
Piers Butler, an eccentric Irishman who reportedly distilled
poison from toads. Some in the Commons thought the
evidence would support a murder conviction, but the
House charged Buckingham only with a transcendent
presumption of dangerous consequence in offering
medicine to the king against the physicians orders.
Eglisham's pamphlet, 1626.
ORCED TO DEFEND himself, Buckingham explained that James had commanded me to send for
that physic, that he had refused to apply it until two
sick children and Sir James Palmer had first tested
it and that, when some began accusing him, the dying
king had announced none but devils would speak of any
such thing. The effectiveness of Buckinghams testimony,
however, was undercut a week later when Charles dissolved
the Parliament before the Lords had fully considered the
impeachment charges. Eglishams allegations of poisoning
were to tarnish Buckinghams reputation for the rest of his
life. Indeed, after John Felton assassinated Buckingham in
1628, one well-placed observer reported that the assassin
had claimed Eglishams tract as one of his motivations.
When Parliament revived Eglishams 1626 accusations
in 1648, however, their target was not the long-dead
Buckingham, but Charles I. The Forerunner had not directly
implicated Charles in Buckinghams crimes, but Eglisham
had appealed to the young king for justice against his fathers murderer and Charles steadfast defence of Buckingham in 1626 inevitably raised awkward questions. In May
1626 Charles had briefly imprisoned two Parliament-men
because he thought they had hinted at his involvement in
THE STUARTS
James murder and if he were not tender of this point of
the death of his father, a councillor explained, he was not
worthy to wear the crown. Charles soon released both men,
but contemporaries continued to ponder, albeit quietly, his
possible involvement. One man, writing shortly after the
dissolution of Parliament, brooded over the 1626 proceedings and The Forerunner before concluding that Charles, if
nothing else, was an accomplice after the fact because he
had clearly dissolved the session to protect Buckingham
from justice.
Eglishams charges long survived in the underground
manuscript news culture, but late in 1642, shortly after the
first Civil War began, possibly as many as six editions of The
Forerunner were published in London. This revival included
a clever reworking, called Strange Apparitions, which
imagined a dramatic confrontation between the ghosts
of James, Buckingham and Eglisham. The old king at first
refused to believe that his favourite had murdered him, but
Buckingham eventually confessed, provocatively adding
that soon Time shall produce the names of the others involved in James murder. These works and later allusions to
them helped stiffen the resolve of Parliaments supporters
and their continued use horrified royalist commentators.
The revival of Eglishams charges early in 1648, however,
took them in a far more radical direction.
Chief among the crimes enumerated by Parliaments
Declaration of February 1648 was Charles Is response to
Parliaments inquest held in 1626 into the Death of His
Royal Father. The Declaration claimed that when Parliament was about to deliver its verdict against Buckingham,
Charles had dissolved the session before Justice could be
done. Since the king had never launched his own inquiry
into James death, the Declaration now concluded that we
leave the world to judge where the guilt of this remains.
Parliament ordered that 5,600 copies of the Declaration
be distributed across the realm and onto the Continent.
Preachers reportedly read from the text in their pulpits. To
second the Declaration, a radical London printer issued an
abridged version of Eglishams Forerunner, now highlighting James Is alleged protestation that if His owne sonne
should commit Murther ... he would not spare him, but
would have him dye for it. To help contemporaries imagine
the inevitable next step, printers issued the first English
translations of Vindicae Contra Tyrannos, the controversial
1579 Huguenot justification for the deposition of wicked
rulers. The implication of these publications was clear.
Charles I was probably involved in his fathers death and
parricide was an unforgivable crime.
OYALISTS FULLY appreciated the danger posed by

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

publications was clear. Charles I
was likely involved in his fathers
death and parricide was an
unforgiveable crime
Anthony Weldon's
pamphlet of 1650.
coordinating their efforts from exile, the Royalists mounted

an impressive campaign of refutation.
Their newsbooks reacted immediately. One denounced
the Declaration and its poison-pointed arrows, to murder
Majesty withall. Another announced that Parliaments sole
goal was to render his Majesty odious by charging him
with being accessary to [James] Death. A third rudely responded by urging the authors of the tract to kiss my bum.
One of the most effective short responses, one that claimed
to stop the mouths of all Divelish Detractors, appeared in
Mercurius Elencticus. It demanded that Parliament print all
the testimony from the 1626 investigations, which would
prove that James had insisted on the irregular treatments,
that John Baker had eaten part of the plaster and that James
Palmer (among others) had drunk the potion. Moreover the
newsbook urged readers to interrogate Palmer and Baker
themselves and provided their addresses. To counteract
Eglishams melodrama, the newsbook employed its own
Commons had charged Buckingham and not Charles and

that they had accused the duke only of Misdeameanour
and a transcedent Presumption, and not of Treason. Hyde
stressed similar points. Buckinghams ague remedies were
the kind that ordinary people believed to do much good
and that doctors knew can do no hurt. Hyde insisted, too,
that there was nothing administered to the King, without
the privity of the Physicians and His own Importunate
desire and Command. As for Eglisham, he was an infamous
... Papist with an ambition to be taken notice of as an
Enemy to the Duke. Hyde added that Eglisham had eventually confessed his Villainy and died with great penitence.
Finally, all of these Royalist responses stressed that, when
the doctors had opened James corpse for embalming, they
found no evidence of poison: Eglishams claim of tell-tale
swellings was false.
The Royalist campaign against the Declaration was
highly sophisticated and it revealed how seriously they took
the reinvention of these old allegations about James death.
But in the radicalised landscape of 1648, the allegations
were beyond effective rebuttal. A petition from Leicestershire later that year simply assumed that the Declaration
had declared Charles to be guilty of the death of King
James, while another from Rutland flatly charged the
king with the death of his father. As radicals in the army
brooded over the blood guilt of Charles Stuart, the Declaration powerfully suggested that the king had more than just
his subjects blood on his hands.
T
high pathos. James had died in Buckinghams arms, it
reported, and afterwards the duke was so overcome with
tears that Palmer had to take the Dukes hand in his, and
with his Fingers closed up the Kings eyes. Nicholas thought
this account so powerful that he arranged for it to be reprinted in Dutch and French.
More detailed responses soon appeared in longer
books. Dr George Bate, who had attended Charles, directly
attacked Eglisham as a man of a cracked Brain and bad
Reputation and he stressed that, since Eglisham was
a Papist, his malicious motives were abundantly clear.
Bate pronounced Buckinghams treatments innocent and
delivered out of a good affection and he ascribed James
death to the fever which had ravaged an aged man who
kept an Ill Diet and had an evill constitution. For his part,
Secretary Nicholas emphasised the evidence from 1626, especially Buckinghams answer to his impeachment, which
he challenged Parliament to reprint, and reiterated that the
Charles I, by
Gerrit van
Honthorst, 1628.
ALK OF THE MURDER of James I continued in

the run-up to Prides Purge and Charles Is trial. A
radical newsbook noted in September 1648 that
Parliament had charged Charles with all the blood
that had been shed by this War and then added the death
of his father King James, too. When the army justified its
intervention to prevent Parliament from reopening dealings with the king, it took the claims of the Declaration as
part of its warrant and, in December, the Parliament-men
that were left after the purge led by Colonel Pride all swore
to their faith in the document. Another late 1648 tract
charged Charles of dissolving the 1626 session, lest his
fathers death should be inquired into (fearing that himself
might be found too much concerned in it). Not surprisingly,
many observers assumed that a charge of Murder and
Parricide would appear in the indictment being drawn up
against the king. Fragmentary evidence suggests that some
involved in framing the indictment were eager to blacken
him, what we can and thus to include a review of his entire
reign. Eventually, the High Court of Justice opted for a
much briefer document, focusing on Charles actions in the
1640s. But the murder of James I had not been forgotten.
At his trial, Charles refused to recognise the courts
authority or to offer a plea, thus negating the prosecutions
requirement to fully present its case. Shortly after Charles
execution, John Cook, the High Courts prosecutor, published King Charls His Case, which contained the speech
he had intended to make if the king had entered a plea.
His book revealed that Cook had planned to discuss the
Death of King James to aggravate the charge of tyranny
against Charles. Following the script set out by the 1648
Declaration, Cook noted that Charles had no justice to do
justice even to his own Father. He had dissolved the 1626
Parliament in order to protect Buckingham and would
THE STUARTS
never suffer any legal inquiry to be made for his Fathers
death. Cook then put the case to his readers that there
is one accused upon strong presumptions at the least, for
poisoning that Kings Father and yet the King protects
him from justice. What could explain this? Clearly Charles
had acted to conceal a Murder and this strongly implies a
guilt thereof and so he was probably a kind of Accessory
to the fact.
TORIES OF James Is murder were to long outlive

his son. The partisans of the new English republic
appropriated Eglishams charges in their propaganda
campaign to tarnish monarchy. Eikon Alethine, a
response to Charles bestselling Eikon
Basilike, dismissed the dead kings
alleged commitment to justice by
reminding readers of the dissolving
the Parliament, for questioning the
Duke of Buckingham for poisoning his
Father, when he was bound by all ties
of justice and Nature, to have heard
them. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton
cited Charles actions in 1626 to protect
Buckingham when he was charged with
no less than poisoning the deceased
King his Father. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton likened Charles to
Nero: thus, just as the emperor had killed
his mother with a sword, Charles did
the same with poison to his father. Sir
Anthony Weldon, John Hall, Sir Edward
Peyton, William Lilly, Sir Arthur Wilson
and the newsbook editor extraordinaire,
Marchamont Nedham all took James
murder and Charles involvement in it as
a given and they played endless variations
on Eglishams themes, which soon became
the leitmotif of their collective project to
vilify the entire Stuart dynasty. In this black
legend of the Stuart family, Mary Stuart
had murdered her husband; James I had killed his eldest
son, Henry; and Charles I had poisoned his father. This trail
of murder had provoked Gods righteous anger against the
English and Scottish monarchy. As the preface to Weldons
book warned, those who still supported the Stuarts should
take heed how they side with this bloody House, lest they
be found opposers of Gods purpose, which doubtless is, to
lay aside that Family.
A SYSTEMATIC ROYALIST counterattack was hampered
by the Cromwellian regimes tightened control over the
presses, but Sir William Sandersons massive Compleat
History of Mary and her son James, published in 1656,
vigorously refuted Eglisham and his later admirers. The
Marquis of Hamilton, Sanderson insisted, had died not from
poison but from excessive drinking and a late night meal of
Mushroom Salads. Sanderson took great pains to dissect
what had really happened in James sickroom, emphasising the harmless nature of Buckinghams remedies and
James determination to try them. He referred readers with
any lingering doubts to Baker and Palmer, who could still
be examined, with very great satisfaction, to clear that
calmny. The Forerunner itself, he observed, at the first
George Eglisham's
pamphlet, Strange
Apparitions, 1642.
sight is frivolous, but thorough investigation revealed it to

be malacious and unworthy of even fleeting attention. By
noting Eglishams Catholicism, Sanderson, like Bate and
Hyde in 1648, stressed that a revolution driven mostly by
Scripture-quoting Protestant radicals was in fact based on a
work of popish disinformation.
The Restoration of Charles II drove stories of James Is
murder underground, though it continued to fascinate
historians into the 19th century. The eminent Victorian
scholar S.R. Gardiner had little patience for the tale,
however, dismissing Eglishams accusations as worthless.
His brusque dismissal of the storys significance has cast
a long shadow over subsequent scholarship, but Gardiners verdict rested in
part on a small tract published by Dr
Norman Chevers, a physician based in
Calcutta, who had become interested
in James death. Gardiner approvingly
cited Chevers scientific conclusion
that Eglishams accusation amounts
to absolute falsehood, but he ignored
Chevers other major argument:
although James I had not been murdered, there was an important history
to be written about the belief that
he had. Chevers had thus called for
a close scrutiny into all that relates
to the Eglisham pamphlets, for this
little tract was nothing less than the
spark igniting that train which exploded in the Great Rebellion and in
the death of King Charles the First
upon a scaffold at Whitehall.
Chevers overstated his case,
but he had an important point to
make. Talk and writing about the
murder of James I exacerbated the
political tensions of the 1620s and
the revolutionary dynamics of the
1640s and early 1650s. Contemporaries took it seriously
and so it is long past time that historians did so, too. The
Forerunner did not cause the English Revolution, but its
history does help us better understand the forces that did.
Balthazar Gerbier was a notoriously slippery character,
trusted by virtually none of his contemporaries, but, like
Norman Chevers, he knew that The Forerunner of Revenge
was a libel more eminent than the rest.
Alastair Bellany is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.
Thomas Cogswell is Professor of History at UC Riverside.
FURTHER READING
Alastair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King
James I (Yale, 2015).
Michael Braddick, God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History
of the English Civil Wars (Allen Lane, 2008).
Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642
(Oxford University Press, 2014).
Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English
Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).
XXXXXXXX
CONSUMERISM
The notion that Greed is Good was not born in

the 1980s, nor even in the 20th century.
Frank Trentmann traces the roots of todays
rampant consumer culture to the imperial
ambitions of the great European powers.
E LIVE IN A WORLD overflowing with things. British

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

Lascar Row antique
market, Hong Kong.
XXXXXXXX
CONSUMERISM
Trend spotters and futurologists claim to see signs of a shift from
stuff to fluff, with possessions giving way to experiences. But this is
fantasy, not history. The historical evidence points to a relentless human
appetite for more and more. How did this desire to accumulate become
so powerful, not just in the affluent North but increasingly in developing
countries, too? Is it a desire for ostentation, a need to emulate the rich?
Did an obsession with stuff begin in the 1950s? No. Consumption had
begun its ascent well before governments started to count GDP. And
to reduce it all to a frivolous desire for unnecessary stuff is equally
unhelpful, because it makes the whole phenomenon look ephemeral,
something that would stop naturally, if only people came to their senses.
For the rise of consumption is anything but frivolous and, to come to
grips with it, we need to understand its history. Consumerism created
a new material world which transformed power, nature and society,
redefining who we are and how we live.
Thirty years ago historians such as Neil McKendrick looked for the
birth of consumer society in 18th-century Britain. It set off a race
among specialists to claim the first date for their own period, finding
stirrings in Renaissance Italy and even late medieval England. But consumption was not simply born. It had enormous momentum. This dynamism changed dramatically between the 15th and the 20th century.
A first major change occurred between the 15th and 18th centuries,
when a new culture took shape which prized private comfort and the
pursuit of the new. Possessions, refinement and comfort were already on
the rise in Renaissance Italy and late Ming China. In 1475, for example,
the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi ordered 400 glass beakers from
the Venetian island of Murano, while 16th-century China was awash
with books, porcelain cups and embroideries. Yet dominant values also
A Cloudburst of
Material Possessions,
Leonardo da Vinci,
c. 1510.
restrained consumption in these prosperous societies. Big spending was

fine in Renaissance Italy, if it paid for public banquets and family chapels
that demonstrated ones civic virtue, less so for private pleasure. In late
Ming China, the elite prized antiques, not novelties. Courtesans were
known for their plain robes and many merchants oriented themselves
towards the official scholar elite, the art of the zither and calligraphy.
T WAS IN north-west Europe, in the Netherlands and Britain, that a

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

appliance store buying a new wall oven,
1956; blue and white Chinese mustard pot
with Dutch silver mounts, Chongzheng,
1635-40; US advertisement for food items,
1951; Ming Dynasty vase, c.17th century.
XXXXXXXX
CONSUMERISM
American patriots threw tea

into Boston harbour in 1773
but after independence was
secured they bought more
goods than ever before
Right: a sack-back
dress, England, 1750s.
Below: Dutch spice
box by Samuel van
Eenhoorn,
c.1680-85.
Markets do not operate in a vacuum. They need a culture in which to

thrive. It was a new curiosity and appreciation of things that stimulated
them. In ancient times material things had been accused of corrupting
the soul and estranging the individual from his true self, the life of the
spirit. In his Republic (c.380 bc), Plato traced the decline of a virtuous,
frugal city as its citizens became corrupted by a lust for luxury that drove
them to war and conquest. Eventually, the desires of the flesh would
turn strong citizens into weak brutes, incapable of defending their state.
In his lectures in Amsterdam in the 1630s, by contrast, the polymath Caspar Barlaeus explained how trade taught people to appreciate
objects and how a greater understanding of the material world would
help people work and live together. Goods and goodness advanced hand
in hand. In the early 16th century, Dutch ships brought back with them
cabinets of nutmeg, creatures such as armadillos and other exotic things,
admired especially by artisans and students.
NLIGHTENMENT thinkers tore up Platos script and reunited

matter with mind. Things enriched the person, state and society.
Consumption now became a civilising mission, even a divine
duty. The scientist Robert Boyle observed in 1655 that God had
furnished man with a multiplicity of desires. Greedy appetites were
not bad: they inspired people to be inquisitive and enterprising. The
pursuit of goods gave them a more exquisite admiration of the omniscient Author. A century later, David Hume, in his Essays, added that
modest luxury was a source of wealth, culture and national strength:
where there is no demand for such superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public. Slothful
members, he pointed out, made poor citizens and poor soldiers.
Neither the American nor the French revolutions were able to stem
the growing moral and material tide that lifted consumption to new
heights. American patriots threw tea into Boston harbour in 1773 and
sported home-spun clothes, but after independence was secured they
bought more goods than ever before. Nor did socialists and nationalists
manage to muster much resistance in the centuries to come. More often
than not, they co-opted consumption for their own ends. For economists in 19th-century Germany, productive consumption strengthened
the nation. Later, anti-colonial nationalists rallied to national goods as
weapons of freedom. In the 1930s the Soviet Union handed out gramophones, Boston suits and crpe de Chine dresses to heroic workers, in
addition to the complete works of Marx and Engels.
THE RISING TIDE of consumption involved much more than fashionable clothes or shopping. Gas, water and electricity created entirely
new ideas of a civilised way of life. In 1800 Paris and London made do
with a few thousand oil lamps in the streets. By 1907 they had 54,000
and 77,000 gas lights respectively. Paris in 1914 was 70 times brighter
than during the 1848 revolution. The lament in August 1914 by Edward
Grey, the British foreign secretary, that the lamps were going out all over
Europe, would have been meaningless two or three generations earlier.
The use of water reached entirely new levels once water-carriers gave
way to networks that delivered the necessity on tap, day and night. On
the eve of the First World War, a tenant in a Brooklyn tenement typically used 39 gallons of water a day; on the wealthier Upper West Side,
it was five times that. Not all cities used that much water. Hangzhou in
China still only piped water to one per cent of its inhabitants in 1931.
In Italy during the 1950s many towns that enjoyed piped water lacked
a sewage system. Still, across the globe, networks did elevate ideas of
what a civilised way of life should look like, with more frequent baths,
heating and, in the last few decades, air conditioning.
In the home, expanding water, gas and electricity networks opened
the door to an invasion of new appliances such as gas-heaters, toasters,
vacuum cleaners and a whole range of other kitchen gadgets. The home
was getting crowded. In the 1920s, modernists such as the German
XXXXXXXXXX
architect Bruno Taut declared a war on stuff, the many mirrors, throws
and doilies, curtains over curtains, pillows on top of pillows photos
and souvenirs on display, consoles crowded with trinkets. Women had
become slaves to dusting, he lamented, and needed to be liberated. Still
homes filled up with objects not only in the United States, Argentina
and Britain, the richest societies of the age, and not just among their
bourgeoisie. By the 1870s, the homes of textile workers in Christiana
(now Oslo) proudly displayed lace curtains, sofas, clocks and pictures.
These were golden years for home decorators, but their success was
possible only because ideals of refinement and possession fell on receptive ears. What animated this material pull? Objects were important allies for projects of improvement. Means of self-improvement
mirrors, soap, fine cutlery and dress were markers of character and
discipline. Perhaps most importantly, they were the ties of family life.
The popular American guide The House Beautiful (1881) urged young
couples setting up home to look at the living room as an important
agent in the education of life. Dcor and objects expressed a familys
soul. In an age of industry, objects also attracted new interest as material
survivors of a bygone age, putting urban dwellers in spiritual touch with
their forefathers, the countryside and the past. Nostalgia spawned a new
cult of the collector and the yard sale, which has been with us ever since.
Tellingly, one of the biggest junk snuppers was Henry Ford, creator of
the Model T automobile and father of standardised production, who
assembled a museum filled with the common objects of the common
man, which is still open to the public today in Dearborn, outside Detroit.
Consumption came to be about much more than the individual and
the home. In the West, the late 19th century witnessed the public apotheosis of the consumer. Though a century earlier, in the Wealth of Nations
(1776), Adam Smith had declared that consumption was the sole end of
all production, that had been about it for the next century. It was the
political economists W.S. Jevons and Carl Menger who, in the 1870s,
with their insights into utility theory, made the consumer the creator of
value. It was a historic shift. To consume used to mean to waste or to
finish something, hence the English double meaning of consumption
as the wasting disease (tuberculosis). Now, to consume was good. Simon
Patten, the leading US economist and head of the Wharton School of
Business, told a Philadelphia congregation in 1913: I tell my students
to spend all that they have and borrow more and spend that It is no
evidence of loose morality when a stenographer, earning eight or ten
dollars a week, appears dressed in clothing that takes nearly all of her
earnings to buy. Quite the contrary, he said, it was a sign of her growing
moral development. It signalled her ambition to her employer. A welldressed working girl is the backbone of many a happy home that is
prospering under the influence that she is exerting over the household.
Above: Wardian case containing ferns, used as a

window decoration, British, c.1875.
Below: Paulig advertisement featuring Finnish 'Paula'
girl in traditional Sksmki dress, 1926.
Y 1900 everyone was talking about the consumer: radicals and

women reformers as well as liberals. The 19th century has been
the century of producers, Charles Gide, the leader of the French
co-operative movement, told students in 1898. Let us hope that
the 20th century will be that of consumers. May their kingdom come!
Buyers leagues sprang up in New York, Paris, Berlin and many other
cities, where they rallied housewives to use the power of their purse to
boycott sweatshops and improve labour conditions. To live is to buy.
Buying is power. Power is duty, was their motto. Consumption was
becoming an essential part of citizenship.
In the conventional view, the modern advance of consumption proceeds in stages from elite luxury to middle-class comfort to a rise in
the standard of living for all. Living standards in the West had reached
new heights by 1900. Although hunger would continue to strike poorer
regions in Europe and in wars to come, most bellies were fuller. Clothes
were replaced more often and increasingly bought ready-made. In Philadelphia in 1919 social reformers formulated an annual requirement
for a fair standard of clothing, which included nine stockings, two
XXXXXXXX
CONSUMERISM
petticoats and a skirt for women and 12 socks, six collars, a suit and one
pair of extra trousers for men. Such riches would have been inconceivable a century earlier.
The rise of consumption, however, cannot be told as a story of
western progress and liberty. The rise in popular consumption and the
discovery of the citizen-consumer in late 19th-century Europe and the
United States coincided with the rise of the new imperialism in Africa
and Asia. How did consumption affect imperialism and vice versa?
This is a big historical question. It is also one on which contemporary theorists of imperialism had virtually nothing to say. For Joseph
Schumpeter, writing in 1919, imperialist conquest was the reflex of an
atavistic aristocracy that was desperate to hold on to feudal power and
the glory of a bygone age. Others blamed aggressive nationalism. Two
decades earlier, J. A. Hobson, who mused about the citizen-consumer
in British politics, blamed the new imperialism on finance capitalism.
Consumers featured, if at all, as victims of
a jingoist conspiracy. As an independent
factor in colonialism, consumption was
conspicuous by its absence.
In reality, consumption and colonialism
had been entangled since the 16th century.
The European taste for coffee, cane sugar,
tobacco and cocoa flourished thanks to
the violent transplantation of plants and
people. With the slave trade and sugar
and coffee plantations in the New World
and, from the 1840s, with tea plantations
in India, European empires completely
altered food, taste and eating habits. Initially considered a beverage more suited
for pigs than for humans, as the Italian
Girolamo Benzoni put it in the 1550s,
cocoa, for example, had become a highly
desirable elite drink a century later and by
1900 had conquered the masses.
We tend to picture this movement as an
Atlantic crossing, with slaves forcibly moved
East to West to produce the commodities
that then flowed West to East. But a second
path went from North to South and was
especially important for Central and Latin
America. In the Spanish empire, Jesuits
Pears' soap advert, 1890s.
moved cacao plantations from their original Mexican sites to Caracas (Venezuela)
and the Guayas Basin (Ecuador). Cocoa became a popular drink in
Guatemala and Nicaragua. The second drink of choice was mate,
made from the evergreen holly Ilex paraguariensis. Jesuits turned the
caffeine-containing leaf into a plantation crop. In Buenos Aires it was
just as exotic as tea or coffee was perceived in London and Paris. Like
its fellow exotic beverages, it encouraged similar social rituals and
accessories. Drinkers passed the often ornate silver gourds around and
shared the bombilla, or straw.
One reason Europeans had so little to say in 1900 about the longer
history of consumption on the African continent was that it had by
then become commonplace among critics of empire to portray Africa
as a kind of virgin territory that had suddenly become a cheap dumping
ground for western gin and guns. Authentic Africans, in this view,
were by nature herdsmen and should return to a life unspoiled by alien
commercial temptations.
In truth, Africans were discriminating consumers before the European colonisers arrived with their Maxim guns. By the late 16th century,
the Portuguese were shipping half a million manilas (bracelets) to the
Gold Coast a year. In southern central Nigeria, people started wearing

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

by missionaries faith in the civilising force of commerce and
Christianity. Spiritual rebirth
and a new lifestyle were part of the same
package. The same Gospel which had
taught them they were spiritually miserable, blind, and naked, wrote Robert Moffat,
a veteran of the London Missionary Society
(LMS) in Africa in 1842, discovered to them
also that they needed reform externally,
and thus prepared their minds to adopt
those modes of comfort, cleanliness and
convenience which they had been accustomed to view only as the peculiarities of
a strange people. Saving souls was thus an
excellent commercial proposition: it would
win new customers for British goods.
Sierra Leone, the British colony founded
for freed slaves, was held up as an example
of the wonderful change that would occur
once people started accumulating things
rather than people. Mr Ferguson, the head
of the medical department in the colony,
noted in the 1830s, how the grade of liberated Africans was manifest in their houses
and interiors. The highest grade lived in comfortable two-storey stone
houses built from their earnings. Here they enjoyed mahogany chairs,
tables, sofas and four-post bedsteads and floor cloths. Liberated Africans had a great love of money, he wrote. But this was not a bad thing.
Unlike the sordid miser, they devoted their income to the increase of
domestic comforts and the improvement of their outward appearance
of respectability. There is not a more quiet, inoffensive, and goodhumoured population on the face of the earth.
The pursuit of possessions destabilised traditional power structures.
In the Ashanti kingdom (Ghana) slaves and taxes were the sinews of
power. The more slaves, the higher an individuals rank. The expansion of
the rubber and cocoa trade undermined this order. New men emerged
who looked to Britain and British goods for their trade and identity. As
slaves were losing their value and chiefs came to be toppled more frequently, rulers started to accumulate possessions as a kind of pension
plan. In 1910 the Ashanti Council of Chiefs finally agreed that a chief
could hold onto two thirds of all property accrued during his term in
office, rather than, as in the past, passing them on to his successor.
XXXXXXXXXX
Clockwise from
left: Chinese plaque
depicting interior
with figures,
c.1770-75, from the
collection of Jean
Theodore Royer;
Dutch silver spice
box in shape of The
Mauritius, c.1600;
vase attributed to
Drie Posteleyne
Astonne, c. 1740.
XXXXXXXX
CONSUMERISM
Mazawattee Cocoa advertisement, British, 1890s.
It was another victory for the dominion of things.

In many ways, Africans did exactly what the early Victorian missionaries had preached: they traded more and showed a growing demand for
foreign goods. The Ashanti, for example, shifted from harvesting the
kola nut to the more profitable cultivation of cocoa. The problem was
that by the 1870s and 1880s African competitors and consumers were
threatening Europeans sense of their own superiority.
As markers of status and identity, consumer goods proved especially sensitive, as they narrowed the visible gap between colonial
master and subject. One colonial official complained of Swahili
clad in fezes with coloured shirts and bow ties, blue serge suits, wearing
shoes and socks a monocle, and smoking cigarettes in long, gold-tipped
cigarette-holders even worse perhaps are the gentlemen who have taken
to soft hats and heavy boots.
As an observer in 1930s northern Rhodesia noted, many Europeans
were less courteous to well-dressed Africans than to those in rags, for
they resent and fear the implied claim to a civilised status. In West
Africa, Britain started to seize trade from locals from the 1880s with
the help of gunboats. In northern Nigeria, in 1904, it imposed caravan
tolls to squeeze out local traders and turn weavers into cotton growers
for factories in Lancashire.
T WAS IN THIS increasingly racialised climate of the new imperialism, from the 1880s to the 1910s, that exotic products like cocoa and
coffee were becoming genuine mass products consumed by all Europeans, rich and poor. In an influential study on race and gender, Anne
McClintock has presented branded goods in these years as vehicles of
commodity racism that carried race into the home and peoples daily
lives. Clearly, there were some advertisements that were visibly racist,
such as the Pears Soap advertisement of a white boy scrubbing a black
boy to white purity and progress. What is more surprising, however, is
how rare exotic images of plantations or Africans were in British and
European advertisements of exotic goods like cocoa and coffee. After
1900, Cadburys cocoa was celebrated as the standard English article
and the good Old English Cocoa. Where people appeared, they were
white English scientists in testing rooms and white women workers in
Bournville. It was they who guaranteed Cadburys authentic quality,
what made it a perfect food, free of foreign substances. A British consumer would have been forgiven for thinking that cocoa grew not in
tropical climes, but near Birmingham.
The ability to extract the butter from cocoa pioneered by the Dutch
a generation earlier and the addition of milk did turn cocoa more into a
hybrid manufactured food, with cocoa powder and chocolate bars made
in Europe. Still, the disappearance of exotic associations is striking.

Cadbury was not peculiar. Tobler emblazoned its Swiss chocolate first
with an eagle, then with the Matterhorn. Germans sipped Rheinland
Kaffee. In the United States, coffee was advertised as New Orleans,
marking the national point of entry rather than the place of origin.
Since the 1920s, the Finnish Paulig company has even sponsored Paula
girls in traditional Sksmki dress, who travel the country to show
people how to prepare proper Finnish coffee. Colonial goods remained
more visible in France, where coffee from its colonies benefitted from
preferential taxes and African street sellers of chocolate kept racial
associations in the public eye. Even here, though, the origin and place
of its producers was eventually driven out of the picture. The Banania
brand was a drink made of chocolate and banana flour, sourced in the
French Antilles and based on a Nicaraguan recipe. In the First World
War, Banania adverts replaced Antilles women with Senegalese soldiers
fighting for the mother country.
THE MAKE-OVER OF coffee and cocoa involved a historic change in the
creation of value and taste in the age of empire. In the 16th and 17th
centuries these new products had derived their value and attraction
from being exotic, with their origins in distant places. Scholars and
travellers made them valuable and desirable by surrounding them with
their knowledge of distant cultures, medicine and forms of preparation.
By contrast, late 19th-century cocoa powder, labelled with British shepherds or sailors, chocolate bars with the Matterhorn and Rheinland or
New Orleans coffee played on familiar associations and sold strange
products by domesticating them. Interestingly, it was at the same time
that Europeans lost their appetite for consumer boycotts against slavegrown products from distant places. When newspapers in 1904-9 revealed Cadburys exploitation of slaves in So Tom and Prncipe, the
Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea British consumers went on
sipping their cocoa regardless. Consumer anger was now directed at local
sweatshops and child labour around the corner, not at abuses in distant
colonies. The promotion of consumers in the West and their demotion
in Africa were two sides in a widening geopolitical divide of fortunes.
By 1900, Europeans and their cousins across the seas held the global
reins of consumer culture more firmly in their hands than ever before.
Industry and income lifted European demand to unrivalled heights. A
civilised norm of comforts and conveniences had been firmly established, even if less fortunate groups had yet to reach it in reality. The rise
of the mass market, however, was not entirely a western liberal success
story. It rested on imperial foundations.
Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London and the author
of The Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth
Century to the Twenty-First (Allen Lane, 2016).
FURTHER READING
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a
Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of 18th-century England (Indiana
University Press, 1982).
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (University of California
Press, 1988).
John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(Routledge, 1993).
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995).
Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of
Consumption (OUP, 2012).
Out
of the
Eleanor Parker is inspired by a visit to a village church in Oxfordshire that bears witness to one
of the most turbulent and transformative periods in English history.
HIS YEAR sees the 950th

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

century, either Leofric, Earl of Mercia,
or Harold Godwinson, who by 1066
owned the estate of Langford. Both
Leofric and Harold are known to have
given generous gifts to churches, including crucifixion scenes that may have
resembled those at Langford.
Harold was noted for his devotion
to the Black Rood of Waltham Abbey,
a life-size figure of Christ made of
black marble. A legend recorded in the
12th-century chronicle of the abbey
claims that Harold, on his way to Hastings in 1066, stopped at Waltham to
pray before the Black Rood. The king
Langford church is a
monument to lfsige, the
survivor making his way
in a changing world
prostrated himself in prayer before
Christ and the marble figure bowed
its head in grief, knowing what the
outcome of the battle would be.
I was reminded of this story at
Langford as I looked up at the headless
figure of Christ, imposing and stately
despite the damage it has suffered,
and it was tempting to imagine Harold
coming here, too. Langfords Saxon
roods survived the Conquest when
many did not, perhaps because they
Soul survivors:
Christ with the
Virgin and St John
at Langford.
formed part of a church built by a man

who was himself an English survivor.
In the decade or so after Hastings, the
church was rebuilt by the local landowner, lfsige of Faringdon. He was
an Englishman who not only survived
but prospered after the Conquest: in
the years between 1066 and the
Domesday survey he increased his
estates by service to the new king,
until he held lands in Oxfordshire,
Berkshire and Gloucestershire.
lfsige rebuilt the church at
Langford in a style as much Saxon as
Norman, with a massive central tower
(older than the Tower of London, as
my guide proudly informed me). He
built at a moment of transition, before
new architectural fashions had taken
hold, and nearly a thousand years later
his tower stands as a tribute to his
ambition and success. Was he trying to
make his mark by building this church,
attempting to impress his new lords?
For some historians a degree of suspicion attaches to those, like lfsige,
who did well out of the Conquest and
there is a tendency to talk about them
as collaborators, even traitors, but
we should not be quick to judge. The
stones in the tower of Langford were
laid in a time of uncertainty, when no
one could predict what would happen
five years on, let alone 950.
Significant anniversaries offer an
opportunity to re-examine particular
historical moments, but there can be
a danger of over-simplifying, focusing
on a single date at the expense of what
came before and after. Langford offers
an antidote: with its exquisite roods,
it bears testimony to the artistic and
cultural sophistication of late AngloSaxon England, but it is also a monument to lfsige, the survivor, making
his way in a changing world.
Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog
at aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk.
InFocus
Forth Railway Bridge, 1888
NE OF THE worlds most famous shapes edges

towards completion in 1888, although the first
train will not cross the Forth Bridge for two
more years. It owes its muscular appearance to
an engineering tragedy 30 miles or so to the north, when
the bridge over the Firth of Tay collapsed in 1879, killing all
73 people on a train that was crossing it during a storm.
Parliament cautioned the North British Railway, responsible for the Tay Bridge and now prime mover of the projected
Firth of Forth Bridge, that the latter should gain the confidence of the public, and enjoy a reputation of being not
only the biggest but also the stiffest bridge in the world.
That is what its designers, John Fowler and Benjamin

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

the Forth Railway Bridge the
supremist specimen of ugliness
on steel, chemicals and electricity, giving birth to the internal combustion engine and radio. It was the strength and
flexibility of steel that made possible the massive cantilever
construction, with its upper lattice girders in tension and
its lower tubular members in compression. In turn, the
cantilever principle allowed the growing structure to be
self-supporting, so that it did not require temporary falsework timbering. Various cranes can be clearly seen on the
structure in the photograph, used to hoist up components
and supplies from ships and barges beneath. The arms (not
yet constructed when this photograph was taken) projecting horizontally from the lozenge-shaped cantilevers were
strong enough, 100 unsupported feet out, to accommodate

three-ton cranes. Though many rivets had to be fitted
by hand, there were also William Arrols giant hydraulic
riveting machines, supplied from oil-fired rivet-heating furnaces, which could even operate inside the cantilever tubes,
some 12 feet in diameter, moving up as the tubes extended.
More than 50,000 tons of steel plate was rolled to shape
and then held together with eight million rivets. At the
busiest time, 4,600 men and boys worked on the bridge, a
boy throwing the glowing rivets to each three-man team.
There were problems caused by the flexing of the long
tubes, by the force of the wind and by the steel expanding
as it was heated by the sun: one degree Fahrenheit brought
a contraction or expansion of an eighth of an inch. When
the temperature reached 60 degrees on the west side on a
sunny afternoon, key junction bolts could be inserted there,
but bolt holes on the east side only coincided after fires
were started inside the tubes.
The Prince of Wales hammered home the last gilded
rivet in March 1890, but by December there was a Scotlandwide railway strike, precipitated in large part by the extra
traffic generated by the bridge causing huge congestion and
delays, which greatly added to the hours railwaymen had to
work, though they were paid according to the hours scheduled in the published timetables. Only in July 1891 was it
agreed to purchase land so the line could be quadrupled
either side of Edinburghs Waverley Station.
The bridge cost 3,227,000 to build, while a 14-year
restoration completed in 2011 cost 130,000,000. This
included painting it with 250,000 litres of glass-flake
epoxy resin as used on North-Sea oil rigs, expected to last
at least 20 years and so putting a stop to the bridge being
used as a tired simile for any unending job. These figures
pale before the 2010 estimate of 2.3 billion for the new
replacement road bridge, not yet completed.
ROGER HUDSON
EPIDEMICS
Plague victims in Perugia. Miniature from the manuscript of the vernacular text La Franceschina, Italy, 16th century.
Plague and prejudice

Epidemics spread mistrust, as communities seek to blame their plight on outsiders or
those at the margins of society. Or so it is believed. Yet, argues Samuel Cohn, the historical
record reveals that such outbreaks of disease are more likely to bring people together than
force them apart and when anger does arise, it is often targeted at insiders.
FTER MORE THAN half a century without a major epidemic

in the West, the shock of the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the early
1980s triggered sudden interest in the socio-psychological
reactions to disease. A wide range of commentators across
scholarly disciplines and the popular press searched for historical parallels to AIDS and readily found them. Their message tended towards
the simplistic, the anachronistic and the one-dimensional, resisting
almost any attempt to detect change over time or find significant differences between epidemic diseases. In his study Ecstasies: Deciphering the
Witches Sabbath (1989), the prominent Italian historian of early modern
Europe, Carlo Ginzburg, concluded that: The prodigious trauma of
great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears,
hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged. Cultural historians
Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman claim that blaming has always been
a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable. The historian of medicine Roy
Porter agreed with Susan Sontag that when there is no cure to hand
and the aetiology ... is obscure ... deadly diseases spawn sinister connotations. More recently, from Haiti, which endured a devastating
earthquake followed by an outbreak of cholera in 2010, Paul Farmer
in Haiti After the Earthquake (2011) proclaimed: Blame was, after all, a
calling card of all transnational epidemics.
Across time, space and disease, epidemics, particularly those
deemed new, lacking tested cures or effective prevention, became
fodder for all sorts of irrational hatreds and prejudice. This irrationality was supposedly directed towards the victims of epidemics or
others: the poor, the outcast, the Jew, the foreigner. Assertions that
epidemics social toxins their negative effect on social relations
EPIDEMICS
were more explosive when diseases were mysterious meant that

diseases before the laboratory revolution of the 1870s, before the Scientific Revolution and certainly before Fracastoros mid 16th-century
notion of germs should have been the most violent, with the greatest
blame heaped on the victims of disease or minorities. Yet an examination
of the historical record of epidemics fails to support these assertions. The
most frequently cited example from antiquity of a mysterious disease
sparking blame and violence is the fifth-century bc Plague of Athens.
Yet any notion of such violence derives from just one tentative line in
Thucydides, when inhabitants of Piraeus even said that the Peloponnesians had put poison in their cisterns. No more is heard of it when the
plague reached the densely populated upper city of Athens, levelling the
population by a third, where Thucydides begins his description of the
plagues socio-psychological effects. Blame does not, however, disappear
entirely from Thucydides account. When the epidemic flared again a
year later in 430, the Athenians did not blame outsiders or victims but
their own leader Pericles and his stubborn continuance of the devastating
war with the Spartans.
Those searching for blame and violence connected to epidemics spend
little time on antiquity, leaving the impression that outbreaks were then
rare. Yet, despite the survival of less than a quarter of Livys History of
Rome (35 of 142 books), the author mentions 57 epidemics, of which
modern historians have recalled only two or three. In recounting these,
Livy portrays another side to the social and psychological consequences of epidemics that do not sit well with the current post-AIDS view.
Instead of dividing societies, with one class or group blaming another,
these epidemics often ended bitter rivalries between warring neighbours or between the plebs and senatorial classes and brought societies
together, at least temporarily. Compassion, not hate, was a side effect of
epidemics. In 399 bc, for example, a bitter winter followed by a summer
heatwave produced a severe epidemic in Rome, fatal to humans and
beasts alike and for which no cures could be found. The senate voted to
consult the Sibylline Books, as was usual in times of crisis, and this led
to the creation of a new sort of banquet, the lectisternium, which was
open to the masses:
Throughout the City the front gates of the houses were thrown open and
all sorts of things [were] placed for general use in the open courts; all
comers, whether acquaintances or strangers, were invited to share the
hospitality. Men who had been enemies held friendly and sociable conversations with each other and abstained from all litigation, the manacles
even were removed from prisoners during this period, and afterwards it
seemed an act of impiety that men to whom the gods had brought such
relief should be put in chains again.
On at least three occasions the lectisternium was repeated during the
fourth century bc, when particularly fatal and mysterious epidemics
Clockwise from
left: Plague in an
Ancient City, by
Michael Sweerts,
c.1652; burning
of Jews, from
the Nuremberg
Chronicle, 1493;
smallpox quarantine station in
Hawaii, by Paul
Emmert, 1853.
struck Rome. To end these scourges, the government

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

Ages, a single episode, the Black Death,
has fixed impressions of the social toxins
aroused by a pandemic. Unlike Thucydides
one-liner about possible biological warfare, however,
accusations against Jews, beggars at Narbonne and Catalans in Sicily at
the time of the Black Death fill hundreds of chronicles. Archival evidence points to over 1,000 Jewish communities annihilated between
1348 and 1350: men, women and children were burnt on islands or in
synagogues, accused of poisoning wells to end Christendom. The enormity of the Black Deaths social toxins appears to be unique, not only
to the Middle Ages, but to European, even world history. Yet historians
have failed to mention just how short-lived these extreme reactions
were. While waves of persecution against Jews continued through the
late Middle Ages and early modern period, pre-modern plagues no longer
triggered massacres of Jews or any other others.
Beginning around 1530, however, a second wave of plague accusations arose in Toulouse, Geneva, Lyon, Nmes, Rouen, Paris, Turin,
Milan, Palermo and smaller towns and villages. Yet the trials, tortures
and executions of supposed plague-spreaders that followed cannot
compare in scale, numbers, murders, or destruction with those seen
during the Black Death, or with the 19th- and early 20th-century riots
sparked by cholera in Europe, plague in India or smallpox in North
America. Moreover, these early modern plague persecutions do not
follow the reputed patterns of governments, elites or the rabble hysterically victimising suspected populations of foreigners, Jews or the
poor. From the surviving trial transcripts produced at Milan in 1630
and immortalised in Manzonis novel I promessi sposi, those initiating
the charges were poor women and the accused were insiders rather than
outsiders: usually native Milanese men, including property-owning
artisans, wealthy bankers and aristocrats.
Some historians have seen syphilis rather than plague as early
modern Europes great disease of phobia and blame. Not only was it
new to Europe, it was sexually transmitted, making it the perfect antecedent of AIDS. But where is the evidence that it encouraged blame
or social violence? For the most part, scholars can point only to the
names used to label the disease: Neapolitans called it malfrancese, the
French, the mal de Naples and so on. Despite such names, no one has
found a single source describing an early modern syphilis riot or a mass
attack on those known, or supposed, to have spread the disease: mainly,
foreign armies and prostitutes. Instead, texts such as De morbo gallico by
Gabriel Falloppio, chair of medicine at Padua, expressed sympathy for
Naples most beautiful girls, propelled by poverty into secret prostitution. Nor did Falloppio or other 16th-century commentators blame
the French, despite the standard name morbus Gallicus appearing in
medical texts until the 17th century. In one of the most widely circulated medical tracts of the 16th century, De guaiaici medicina et morbo
gallico (1519), Ulrich von Hutten explained why he used the term and
EPIDEMICS
immediately apologised: I do not bear any grudge against a
most renowned nation which is, perhaps, the most civilised
and hospitable now in existence. Two decades later, the Florentine statesman and historian Francesco Guicciardini called
the disease malfrancese, but insisted that it was necessary to
remove the shame of the name franzese, arguing that the
disease had been brought from Spain and not France to Naples.
He then added that the disease was not exactly of that nation
either; instead, it came from the West Indies, but he did not
blame any Indian or his Italian hero Christopher Columbus
for making the wonderful discovery of the New World. The
physician Falloppio went further, seeing the disease springing not entirely from outside invaders but from malpractice
within: unwittingly, Neapolitan bakers were partially to blame
because they contaminated their bread with gypsum, thus
weakening Naples population and contributing to the spread
of the disease. The mid-16th-century Venetian physician Bernardino Tomitano also looked inward, placing the blame for
the spread of syphilis in the 1530s on his own Venetian merchants, who carried it into Eastern Europe.
'Troubles in Astrakhan', Le Petit Journal of

August 6th, 1892, illustrated by Henri Meyer.
HE PATTERNS of hatred and mythologies of blame

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

appear to have spread more
widely than ever before in
Eastern Europe and Russia
Armed with revolvers and daggers, they plundered shops and stoned all
citizens in their way. They destroyed the residence of the deputy governor and chased him through the streets, trampling, stoning, beating
him to death, mutilating his features beyond recognition. Eventually,
Cossacks quelled the revolt after killing 70 and wounding hundreds.
Between these two events numerous smaller but deadly cholera riots
swept down the Volga.
Cholera riots became especially widespread in Italy. In the first and
most studied wave in 1835-6, social violence was confined almost entirely
to Sicily. That was far from the case during Italys last major cholera
epidemic, of 1910-11, even though mortality rates were a fraction of
previous outbreaks and despite the fact that the diseases water-bound
transmission had been known for half a century. At Massafra in Puglia,
for instance, the old cholera myths of hospitals as death chambers for
the poor persisted. Crowds of around 3,000 stormed the cholera hospital
and liberated the patients, whom they paraded triumphantly through
the streets. Prominent government officials and doctors were killed,
nurses were thrown out of windows, equipment was smashed and the
hospital set ablaze.
The incident that gained most publicity occurred at Verbicaro, a
town of 6,000 north of Cosenza in Calabria. At the end of August 1911,
1,200 rebels attacked the town hall while the mayor was convening a
meeting. The first to be seized was a clerk, who several months earlier
had been involved in drafting the towns census. A woman struck his
head with a stick, another shot him and a third hacked his head off with
a pruning knife. The attack was not random. Harking back to a basic plot
of cholera conspiracies, the peasants believed the census was the towns
first step in selecting those for the sacrifice to ease Italys overpopulation. Armed with spades, knives, sticks and agricultural implements,
women, boys and men knocked down telegraph poles, cut the wires,
wrecked the town hall, burnt its archives, the court house, the telegraph
office and the mayors house and released prisoners from
gaol. The mayor, a town clerk and a judge fled. A group of 11,
including three women, caught the clerk and hacked him
to pieces. On reaching the train station, the judge died of
fright. Fearing reprisals, half of Verbicaros population fled
to the mountains, leaving cholera corpses strewn through
streets. The mayor escaped, but two days later was ordered
to return and was immediately murdered, repeating the
fate of his grandfather, mayor of Verbicaro in 1857, when a
previous cholera uprising swept through town.
Top: Verbicaro,
Calabria.
Above: a costume
designed to
protect doctors
from plague,
French, 1720.
OUTHERN ITALIAN TOWNS were not the only

ones to have been afflicted by choleras social
toxins. Large-scale cholera riots, for instance, had
erupted in Tuscanys industrial port of Livorno in
1857 and 1893. In 1911, similar riots spread through seaside
resorts outside Rome at Ansio, Nettuno and Terracina. The
authorities in Segni, southwest of Rome, which experienced just five cholera cases, requisitioned a hospital and
lazzaretto to quarantine suspected cases. Immediately the
idea spread among ignorant people that the authorities,
municipal and national, had planned a massacre of the innocents to poison the town. A mob of 3,000 marched on
the town hall demanding the release of cholera patients,
stoned carabinieri and battered down the town halls door,
intending to sack and destroy the place, and murder the
mayor and health workers, who they accused of inventing the disease. The papers reported women as being particularly ferocious. One seized a carabiniere, threw him
to the ground and stomped on him. Another grabbed the
municipal flag and shouted: To the hospital. The mob,
heeding her command, surged through town, crying Death
to the doctors and nurses. They succeeded in removing
the cholera patients from the hospital, carrying them in a
procession to their homes.
We can reach some conclusion from these examples.
First, even though a nexus of hate driven by epidemics may
have been on the rise in the 16th and early 17th centuries,
with the trials of supposed plague spreaders, they were short-lived and
mild in comparison to what followed with the much more widespread
social unrest from cholera in 19th- and early-20th-century Europe.
Second, with cholera the unrest was more than principally an urban
phenomenon confined to ten or so cities. In the British Isles for the
13-month period, December 1831 to January 1833, for instance, I have
found 72 cholera riots, many with crowds in the thousands, that
EPIDEMICS
Above: 'Microcosm dedicated to the London Water Companies', Thomas McLean, 1828. Below: Smallpox immunisation certificate, Cuba, 1902.
attacked physicians and destroyed cholera hospitals. In Ireland and

Scotland in particular, these occurred not only in the principal cities but
in small towns and villages such as Ardee, Kilkenny, Killineer, Ballina in
Ireland and Paisley, Wick, Pathhead (Kirkcaldy), Leith and Ivergordon
in Scotland. Third, scientific discoveries of choleras bacterial agent
and mechanisms of transmission did not end or even dampen choleras
social violence or the mythologies that fuelled it in and around the large
and sophisticated cities of western Europe. In Russia and Italy these
riots continued into the 20th century, becoming as widespread and
frequent as they had been in the 1830s. Finally, comparison of epidemics
shows that the social configurations of hate were not one-dimensional
or static across time and place as the recent literature inspired by the
AIDS experience would have us believe. Responses to cholera differed
markedly from the slaughter of Jews during the Black Death or the
16th- and 17th-century plague trials, which reveal a wide variety of
perpetrators and victims. Instead of blaming and scapegoating the poor,
Jews, foreigners and other marginal populations, choleras mythologies
of hate funnelled blame and violence in the opposite direction: marginal
groups such as Asiatic Sarts in Russian cities, impoverished Irish women
and boys in New York, Liverpool and Glasgow, peasants, fig-growers
and unemployed fishermen in Puglia and women and children in other
Italian towns targeted physicians, pharmacists, nurses, mayors and other
government officials as the ones purposely spreading the disease. Nor
have such conspiracy theories connected with epidemics disappeared, as
attested by attacks in 2014 on the Red Cross in West Africa, accused of
inventing the Ebola virus, or more recently with charges that a biotech
company had purposely released the superbugs causing the Zika virus
in Brazil to reduce global population.
URIOUSLY, THE ONE DISEASE of the late 19th- and early

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

strike. Journalists and intellectuals joined in, decrying the governments needless and abusive quarantines, body searches and destruction
of homes and religious shrines. Rather than tearing Indian societies
apart, the plague united groups across class and castes and Hindus
with Muslims against the backward and oppressive health measures
of the British.
the epidemic of 1881 to the second decade of

the 20th century, smallpox sparked numerous
grizzly acts of inhumanity against the victims
of this disease. Those perpetrating the violence
were white, propertied farmers and business
men the better sort of citizens and their
targets were Amerindians and recent immigrants Chinese, Bohemians,
tramps but, above all, blacks. Time allows only two interconnected
examples. There are many more:
Top: Walter Reed
Hospital flu ward,
Washington, DC, 1918.
Above: Cholera treatment centre, Haiti,
December 2010.
April 3 [1896]. William Haley, colored, is in the Memphis hospital He

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

hate or collective violence. Yellow Fever in the United States
and the Great Influenza of 1918-20 throughout the world
remained mysterious in their modes of transmission and their
causal agents far longer than cholera, killed millions more and could
possess frightening, disgusting signs and symptoms. Yet neither sparked
large-scale collective violence or widespread blame of others, whether
the impoverished or the elites. Instead, as with epidemics in antiquity,
they brought societies together across race, ethnicity and class, even
within contexts of rising social, political and racial tensions, as with the
Yellow Fever outbreak in New Orleans in 1853, which arose on the eve
of the Civil War, when regional and racial antagonisms were sharpening.
The citys blacks, believed to have had greater immunity to the disease,
crossed class and racial lines to nurse stricken whites and, in turn, the
white middle classes praised them for their bravery. In El Paso, Texas in
October 1918, at the height of the Great Influenza, anti-Mexican sentiment had been brewing thanks to Zapatas incursions on US soil and the
rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet debutante ladies, for the first time in their
lives, crossed into the citys poorest Mexican neighbourhoods where
influenza cases were at their highest and risked their lives, sweeping
floors, setting up soup kitchens and treating the dangerously ill.
The extraordinary variety of reactions to the hazards and shocks of
epidemic disease defy the widespread, one-dimensional views that have
become dominant since the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Curiously, activists
and scholars understanding of the psychological, social and political
effects of HIV/AIDS itself began to shift in the 1990s from one that
stressed hate, violence and blame to one in praise of the way in which
the disease inspired volunteerism, community organisation, self-sacrifice and compassion. Instead of retelling stories of discrimination in
jobs, education and housing or the homophobic pronouncements of
right-wing politicians and television evangelists, the literature began
to emphasise the political gains won by lesbians and gays, sex workers
and, in Africa, women, and how AIDS reshaped more progressive doctorpatient relations and redefined the family. This shift, however, has yet
to inspire scholars to revisit the long history of epidemics. This second,
more nuanced and positive (though hardly rosy) view of AIDS forms a
new template to rewind the movie reel (de rrouler reculons), as the
great French medievalist Marc Bloch once put it, for understanding the
distant past from the perspective of the present.
Samuel Cohn is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow.
FURTHER READING
Michael Holland, Geoffrey Gill and Sean Burrell, eds. Cholera and
Conflict: 19th Century Cholera in Britain and its Social Consequences
(Medical Museum Publishing, 2009).
Samuel Cohn, Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from
the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S, Historical Research, 85 (2012).
R.P. Duncan-Jones, The impact of the Antonine plague, Journal of
Roman Archaeology, ix (1996), 10836.
Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera 1823-1832 (Madison,
1965).
XXXXXXXXXX
| HAITI
Caribbean king:
Henry Christophe, by
Richard Evans, 1816.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE wrote to his fellow abolitionist

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

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

acquittal hinged in part on uncertainty over whether Haiti
was truly an independent country or still officially a colony
of the hated French.
It took three years of intermittent war with Ption for
Christophe to consolidate his rule in the north, by which
time his ambition had long outgrown the rank of mere
president. Instead he decided that a kingdom would bring
Haiti the respect and international recognition it deserved.
A new constitution was drawn up and in 1807, in front of
a hastily created nobility of princes, dukes and barons, he
was crowned Henry I. At his coronation banquet (attended
by several Royal Navy officers) he took his place as a first
among royal equals, raising a toast to his dear brother,
George the Third.
Royal rule
One of the first acts of Christophes monarchy was to commission a series of palaces, most notably his royal residence
at Milot, a days ride away from the capital. This grand
confection was a tropical Versailles in the Caribbean, called
Sans Souci, possibly named for Christophes rival during the
revolutionary war, a Congo-born general of the same name,
who Christophe had had killed during a parley. Over 900
metres above it on a mountain peak perched the Citadelle
la Ferrire, armed with cannons captured from the French,
British and Spanish and garrisoning 5,000 soldiers (it is now
Haitis only World Heritage site).
Christophes agents in London spent money like
oligarchs. Newspapers of the time were agog with reports
of the extravagant carriages he ordered and the exquisite
dresses he bought for the queen and princesses, though
an incident when his coronation garb was briefly seized by
customs for duty avoidance (the cargo had been labelled
upholstery for export) threatened to tarnish his image.
Christophe considered himself a patron of the arts.
During the revolution he had unsuccessfully tried to
ransom a group of Polish soldiers for the return of his cherished orchestra from the French in Cap Franais. Now,
the Gazette Royale dHayti announced his regular attendance at operas, often written for him by Juste Chanlatte,
the Comte de Rosiers. An even more energetic writer
was (Baron) Pompe Valentin Vastey, Christophes chief
propagandist. Vastey wrote for an international audience
and his broadsides, The Colonial System Unveiled and
Political Reflections, remain eloquent manifestos for anticolonialism and racial equality. Have we not erected
impregnable fortresses according to all the rules of art,
in places almost inaccessible, where obstacles were to
be surmounted with labours worthy of the majesty of
Rome?, he wrote of the nation of ex-slaves. Have we
not built palaces and public edifices, which do honour to
our country and excite the applause of strangers?
Hanging on the walls of those palaces were portraits
created at the recently founded Royal Academy. One of
Sir Thomas Lawrences apprentices, Richard Evans, was
employed to train Haitian artists and he painted portraits of
Christophe and the prince royal, which were subsequently
presented to Wilberforce and exhibited in London.
Wilberforce was an enthusiastic supporter, but it was
Thomas Clarkson who became counsellor to the king.
| HAITI
on grand projects. Christophes spies were
everywhere and the most minor infractions
were punished severely.
His end was swift. In August 1820 Christophe suffered a massive stroke while attending
mass, which left him almost paralysed. He
had created no council to advise him properly
or manage a succession. When his army
mutinied six weeks later in Saint-Marc, Christophe was unable to command an adequate
response. The Duc de Marmelade, Jean-Pierre
Richard, governor of Cape Henry, denounced
the king and led his own soldiers in revolt.
Too late, Christophe realised that without
his force of personality his regime was a
hollowed-out shell. Self-mythologising to the
end, he dispatched his honour guard one last
time, then retreated to his chamber and shot
himself through the heart.
Ransacked and looted
Prince Jacques and several loyal nobles were
bayoneted to death and their bodies left to
rot. Sans Souci was ransacked and stripped of
its finery and the Citadelle was searched for Christophes
gold. That same crown, labelled as upholstery to avoid
customs duty in London, was said to have been bought by
an American speculator who was recommended to pop the
bauble into a crucible as his part of the loot.
President Boyer of the Republic marched a force up from
Port-au-Prince and declared the country reunified after
13 years of division. Richard was executed soon after. The
widowed queen and the two princesses fared better; they
were given passports to leave the country and sailed for
England where they were hosted by Thomas Clarkson.
Together the abolitionists helped send teachers, farmers

and missionaries to the kingdom, while British merchants
grew fat on the sugar and coffee once again flowing out of
Cap Franais, re-christened Cape Henry. Christophe wrote
to Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, who
lamented the advent of old age: Were I five and twenty as
I was when I embarked with Captain Cook, I am very sure
I should not lose a day in embarking for Hayti. To see a set
of human beings emerging from slavery, and making rapid
strides towards the perfection of civilisation, must I think
be the most delightful of food for contemplation.
Charted territory:
French map of
Haiti, 1789.
Illusions and delusions

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

desire to cultivate their land can be seen
as the final act of the Haitian Revolution
The British press patronised them for the way their courtly
demeanour overcame both their fall from grace and
African origins and after three years they left England to
join the circuit of ex-royalty, criss-crossing Europe from
opera season to spa town, before finally settling in Pisa.
Marie-Louise outlived her daughters and, despite pleas to
return to her homeland, died in exile in 1851.
Christophes overthrow, and his peoples desire to
cultivate their land undisturbed after years of slavery, can be
seen as the final act of the Haitian Revolution. In the 20th
century, writers from Derek Walcott to Aim Csaire have
used his tragedy to impart lessons for countries struggling
to emerge from imperial rule. Yet, for Wilberforce at least,
he remained a great man, intent on improving his people,
but [furnishing] a striking instance of the truth, that by too
earnestly pursuing a good object you directly defeat it.
Paul Clammer is the author of Haiti: The Bradt Travel Guide (2012) and is
researching a biography of Henry Christophe.
EDMUND IRONSIDE
The
Brief but
Brilliant
Reign of
Edmund
Ironside
Though he was king for just
222 days, the life and legacy of
Edmund II, who ascended to the
English throne 1,000 years ago
this year, remain impressive,
claims David McDermott.
HE ACCOMPLISHMENTS of some are

praised without reason, while those of
others are consigned undeservedly to
obscurity. One of the occupants of the
latter, unenviable position is Edmund II Ironside,
who ascended the English throne 1,000 years ago
this April. Although he was held in high regard
during the 11th and 12th centuries, Edmund, who
was given the nickname Ironside by the AngloSaxon Chronicle in recognition of his bravery,
has since been eclipsed by those who came
immediately before and after him. The brevity of
Edmunds kingship a mere 222 days goes a long
way to explain why his reign is frequently treated
as either an epilogue to that of thelred or a
prologue to that of Cnut. The millennial anniversary of Edmunds accession is an opportunity to
redress the balance and, in so doing, relate the
extraordinary story of a successful, energetic and
indomitable warrior-king and understand better
EDMUND IRONSIDE
the extraordinary period of English history that Edmund
inhabited, albeit briefly.
Edmund Ironside was born around 989 to thelred II,
better known as the Unready and his first wife lfgifu,
the daughter of the Northumbrian Earl Thored. There was
nothing inevitable about the theling (prince) becoming
king. Edmund had two older brothers and in the following
years thelred would produce at least three other sons by
lfgifu and two by his second wife, Emma of Normandy,
all of whom had a claim to the throne. For much of his life
Edmund may have been seen as insurance for a smooth
succession.
With the death of his brother Athelstan in 1015,
the second eldest brother having already died, Edmund
became the senior theling and soon exhibited the force
of will which was to characterise his kingship. Between
late August and early September 1015 he rebelled against
thelred by marrying the widow of the executed thegn
(noble) Sigeferth, contrary to the kings wishes.
DMUNDS ACTION was illegal, as was releasing

the widow from Malmesbury, where thelred had
confined her. Edmund compounded his crime by
travelling to territories in the East Midlands previously possessed by Sigeferth and his brother Morcar, which
thelred had confiscated, and took them for himself. In
marrying against thelreds will and seizing the dead
thegns properties Edmund may have been seeking to
demonstrate his authority, ally himself with an influential
Mercian family and provide himself with a power base from
which to exert his claims to the throne.
Edmund broke off his rebellion to return to London
when he discovered that the Danish king Cnut had landed
at Sandwich in Kent and was rampaging through Warwickshire. Despite breaking several of thelreds laws, Edmund
appears to have gone unpunished, leaving him free to
demonstrate his potential as a military leader. Between the
end of his rebellion and becoming king, Edmund assembled
three armies against Cnut but, while he was successful in
raising troops, none took to the field. Edmund removed his
first army upon discovering that his brother-in-law, Ealdorman Eadric of Mercia, intended to betray him to the Danes.
Edmunds second army disbanded when thelred and the
garrison of London did not meet its request to accompany
them into battle and the third army dispersed when the
king, who this time had joined them, learned of a plot to
betray him and so returned to the safety of London.
The dismissal of one army did not deter Edmund from
raising another, nor did it weaken his resolve against
Cnut. Intent on continuing English opposition to Danish
attempts at conquest, Edmund formed an alliance with
another of his brothers-in-law, Earl Uhtred of Northumbria.
Together they attacked those towns which, according to
the Anglo-Norman historian William of Malmesbury, had
gone over to Cnut. When the Danish king attacked Uhtreds
territories, however, the earl abandoned his campaign with
Edmund and negotiated a settlement with Cnut.
Deprived of his ally, Edmund returned to London where,
on April 23rd, 1016, thelred died. Edmund was elected
king by those members of the witan (royal council) who
were in the city and its chief citizens but he did nor remain
within its walls for long. Anticipating the Danish siege of
the city, Edmund left London before their arrival in early
Above, Cnut,
depicted
on the Great
West Window
of Canterbury
Cathedral, 15th
century.
Previous page:
the genealogical
roll of the kings
of England,
c.1300-40.
May and went to Wessex, the traditional seat of his familys

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

in the western marches of Wessex, close to the shared
borders of Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire, may
indicate that the eastern parts of the region favoured Cnut.
Further evidence that the loyalties of the English nobility
were divided emerges from the composition of Cnuts
Despite the absence of an undisputed

victor, the Anglo-Norman historians,
in their attempts to promote Edmund
as a hero, awarded him a moral victory
The mortuary
chest of Edmund
Ironside, at
Winchester
Cathedral.
forces. The Chronicle records that the Danes were supported by the otherwise unknown lfmr Darling and Ealdorman Eadric, who had defected to Cnut after failing to betray
Edmund. To this list of named defectors John of Worcester
adds that of lfgar son of Meaw (seagull). The presence of
lgar has particular significance, for he held several estates
in counties that also contributed troops to Edmunds army.
If lfgar recruited from these areas, it illustrates further
the divisions which existed among the Wessex nobility
and highlights the fact that there were elements of English
resistance to Edmunds rule.
WO ANGLO-NORMAN accounts of the battle

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

superhuman strength, but it is more likely that William
concocted the story to justify the use of the word Ironside
as referring to Edmunds great strength of mind and body.
Neither army at Sherston appears to have emerged the
outright winner, with both sides withdrawing from combat
at nightfall, after inflicting what the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle describes as great slaughter upon each
other. Despite the absence of an undisputed victor at
Sherston the Anglo-Norman historians, in their attempts to promote Edmund as an English hero, awarded
him a moral victory. William of Malmesbury has the
renegade West Saxons, perhaps impressed by Edmunds
performance in the battle, acknowledge him as their
rightful lord. The account is unique to William and
therefore suspect but the repeated references in the
primary sources to Edmund raising armies in Wessex
indicates that, as a result of his conduct at Sherston,
Edmunds position in the region became more secure.
Cnuts alleged behaviour after the battle also reflects
well on Edmund. According to John of Worcester, Cnut
ordered his men to leave their camp in silence under
the cover of darkness to renew the siege of London. The
manner of the withdrawal looks suspiciously like an
attempt to avoid further engagement with the English.
Sherston was a pivotal moment for Edmund Ironside,
enhancing his reputation as a military leader, establishing him as an effective counter-force to Cnuts attempts
at conquest and cementing his authority as king.
THE INCONCLUSIVE outcome of Sherston does not
seem to have diluted Edmunds desire to confront Cnut.
He assembled another army and pursued the Danes
to London. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, commissioned by Cnuts widow to promote the Danish cause,
describes the English army as immense, indicating that far
from damaging his popularity, Sherston had enhanced it.
With an army recruited in Wessex, Edmund cannily kept to
the north of the Thames and remained undiscovered until
he descended upon the city from the direction of what is
now Tottenham.
As he neared the citys walls, Edmund would have
encountered the moat, which the Danes had dug earlier
in May, that surrounded the three sides of London not
protected by the Thames. How Edmund freed London
is not known; the Chronicle records that he rescued the
inhabitants and drove the Danes to their ships. He may
have successfully negotiated the siege works and fought off
the Danes but a reference in the Chronicle to any fighting
is absent. William of Malmesbury could be nearer to the
truth with his claim that when they heard of Edmunds
approach the Danes raced to their ships. Edmunds ability
to instil terror in the hearts of his enemies was likely to be
the product of Williams imagination; Cnut was unlikely
to be able to conduct a siege and fight Edmund simultaneously and so saw retreat as his best option. If the account of
William of Malmesbury is reliable, Edmund may have relieved London without delivering a blow against the Danes.
Edmund did not remain in London for long. After two
days he rode to Brentford in pursuit of the Danes, which
suggests that he had intelligence of their whereabouts.
Brentford, just nine miles to the west of London and on
a Roman road, may have been chosen by Cnut as a base
EDMUND IRONSIDE
installed a contingent of troops to prevent the Danes from
from which to continue his attempt to take the city. The
re-occupying Brentford. Upon hearing of Edmunds advance
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Edmund crossed the
into Kent the Danes, at least according to the Chronicle,
Thames at Brentford and fought the Danes, suggesting that
fled before him.
the engagement occurred on the southern bank. However,
The news of Edmunds imminent arrival seems to have
action could have been more widespread. The Anglosplit Cnuts forces, with the Danish riders going west
Norman narrative of Henry of Huntingdon has Edmund
only to be met by Edmund at Otford in Kent. Unable to
wage battle at Brentford, indicating that there was fighting
withstand the English assault, the Danes fled east towards
on both sides of the Thames. The possibility that Edmund
Sheppey, pursued by Edmund. Yet instead of pressing his
fought on both banks of the river has some support from a
advantage, Edmund appears to have been persuaded by
source that dates to within a couple of years of the battle.
Eadric to allow the Danes to cross the Medway at Aylesford
The Kntsdrpa, written to praise Cnut, credits the Danish
and make good their escape. For not destroying the Danes
king with causing a considerable amount of destruction
at Brentford. It is to be expected that
a poem created to compliment Cnut
would exaggerate his achievements, but
EDGAR
SWEIN Forkbeard
it is possible that it records an aspect of
King of England 957-75
King of Denmark 986-1014
King of England 1013-14
the battle that has been omitted by the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The apparently
conflicting accounts of where fighting
occurred at Brentford can be reconciled if
LFGIFU = THELRED II
Emma
CNUT
lfgifu
=
=
=
of York
King of England
of Normandy
King of England
of Northants
they are combined, with the Danes being
978-1016
1016-35
dislodged by force from their position in
King
of Denmark
Brentford. Fighting spread to the south1018-35
ern bank of the Thames when Edmunds
King of Norway
forces pursued them.
1030-5
WITH THE EXCEPTION OF Cnuts
thelstan
EDMUND
Edwig
Swein
HARTHACNUT
HAROLD
praise-poem, the contemporary accounts
died 1014
Ironside
died 1035 King of England
King of Denmark
of the Battle of Brentford unanimously
King of England
1035-42
1035-40
award victory to Edmund Ironside but
1016
King of England
his success was hard won. Many of the
1040-2
sources report that part of Edmunds
army drowned when it overtook the rest
of his forces. Their deaths may have been
The genealogies
when he had the chance, Edmund was criticised by the
the result of carelessness, but the Chronicle also reports
of the English
Chronicle for having made a no more unwise decision.
that the men were eager for loot. The alleged greed of these
and Danish royal
With the benefit of hindsight, William of Malmesbury
troops suggests that they did not belong among Edmunds
families.
summarised the effect of Edmund permitting the Danes to
regular recruits but were mercenaries. A passage in the
depart unscathed as a disaster for himself and England.
Kntsdrpa referring to Cnut taking the lives of Frisians
may even explain where they originated. The possibility
that the English army at Brentford contained mercenaries
DMUND RETURNED to Wessex, where he remained
cannot be corroborated, but if Edmund had employed such
until hearing the Danes had pillaged Mercia. He
men he could be said to have adopted the policy of kings
appears to have raised another army quickly and
Alfred and thelred, both of whom had swords-for-hire in
seems to have known the location of the Danes, for
their service. The affect of Brentford on Edmunds forces
the Chronicle records that he followed them returning to
can be inferred from him returning to Wessex to recruit
their ships, overtook them and confronted their army in
another army. It is probable that the losses incurred from
Essex on October 18th at Assandun, possibly Ashingdon
accidental drowning and actual fighting depleted Edmunds
or Ashdon. Edmunds army may have been the largest he
troops to such a degree that he was compelled to replace
assembled, evidence that he had support from outside
them. In his absence, however, the Danes resumed their
Wessex. Among those killed at Assandun were Ulfcytel of
siege of London, perhaps making the Battle of Brentford
East Anglia and Ealdorman Godwine of Lindsey. At some
only a qualified English success.
point in the battle, Eadric deserted Edmund, accompanied
While Edmund was in Wessex, the Danes encountered
by his followers and that section of the army under his
fierce resistance from the Londoners and consequently
command. Eadrics departure sparked a series of English
abandoned their siege in order to pursue a raid in neighdesertions, which were probably significant in contributing
bouring Mercia, possibly in early September. Laden with
to Edmunds sole defeat. The fighting only came to an end,
plunder, the Danes divided their forces: their ships sailed
according to the Encomium, when it became too dark for
along the River Medway, while the Danish horsemen,
the Danes to pursue the fleeing English. The Chronicles
accompanying their stolen herds, travelled by land. As
description of the English dead as all the nobility of the
Cnuts army made its way into Kent, Edmund returned
English race is an exaggeration but it does suggest that
from Wessex, crossing the Thames at Brentford in pursuit.
Edmunds losses were perceived to be profound and, despite
The absence of any reference to Edmund encountering
his determination to continue the war, Edmunds ability to
resistance at the river crossing may indicate that he had
campaign against Cnut may have been compromised.
in London, but this is improbable as the Danes had established their winter quarters in the city. Henry of Huntingdon has Edmund die in Oxford, though it is unlikely that
Edmund would be in a part of the country recently ceded
to Cnut, especially one in which Eadric wielded power. It
is more probable that Edmund died in Wessex, perhaps at a
royal manor close to Glastonbury, where he was buried.
Cnut presents a
cross to the New
Minster Abbey,
Winchester,
manuscript,
c.1020.
Defeated but not deterred, Edmund withdrew to

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

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

Department of History at the University of Winchester.
FURTHER READING
M. Swanton (trans), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (Phoenix
Press, 2000).
A. Campbell (trans), Encomium Reginae (Royal Historical
Society, 1949).
Ryan Lavelle, thelred II: King of the English 978-1016
(History Press, 2002).
M.K. Lawson, Cnut: Englands Viking King (History Press,
2004).
Ann Williams, thelred the Unready: The Ill-Counselled King
(Hambledon and London, 2003).
| COMETS
FOR CENTURIES comets were believed to be harbingers
of doom and destruction: the very fact that they could not
be predicted meant that they were interpreted as signs
and portents. But in 1705 the astronomer Edmond Halley
turned comets into common or garden objects orbiting
the sun by claiming to have identified one which reappeared every 75 years or so and announcing that it would
return in 1758. The prediction was taken up by Newton in
the second edition of his Principia (1713) and Halley later
revised it to late 1758 or early 1759.
We are used to seeing lists of all the occasions on which
the comet we now know as Halleys has appeared (at the
Battle of Hastings in 1066, for example) and so, at first
sight, Halleys prediction looks pretty straightforward:
perhaps he just looked at a list of comets through history
and recognised a pattern? Not so: comets which are visible
to the naked eye are common; there is one every year or
so. The time it takes Halleys Comet to orbit the sun varies
between 74 and 79 years, so there is no simple pattern to
its reappearance. Halleys prediction required two things.
First, he needed to be able to accurately identify a particular comet by its unique path through the sky. Because
there were only sound measurements of the comet's path
from its last three appearances, only these could be used as
evidence. Second, his prediction required an explanation
as to why the comets return seemed so irregular. Halley
argued that the comet was slowed down or speeded up
XXXXXXXXXXX
The first
return of
Halleys
Comet
Halleys Comet will not be visible again until 2061.
But how did scientists discover how to accurately
predict its return, asks David Wootton?
Down to Earth:
Comet over
Nuremberg, 1680,
by Johann Jakob
von Sandrart.
depending on how close it passed to Jupiter and the

other planets. As a consequence, he recognised that he
could only make a very rough estimation of when it
would next appear.
In 1758 a team of French astronomers Alexis Clairaut,
Joseph Lalande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute (a woman)
set out to improve on Halleys prediction by laboriously
calculating the relative positions of the sun, the comet and
Jupiter, not just when the comet was close to Jupiter but
throughout its orbit. (This is a three-body problem the
location of Jupiter has a continuous slight, but not insignificant, effect on both the location of the sun and the comet.)
They calculated that the comet would make its nearest
approach to the sun in mid-April 1759, give or take a month.
They were right, it reached perihelion (the point at which it
comes closest to the sun) in mid-March. On January 21st it
was observed with the naked eye by the French astronomer
Charles Messier, but he kept his discovery secret until April
7th, only announcing it when this sighting was confirmed
by another report, dating from as early as Christmas Day
1758, by a German amateur with a telescope. Halley was
vindicated.
But it was not just Halley who was vindicated; it was
also, more importantly, Newton. His Principia reaches its
final climax with the claim that the orbits of comets obey
his laws of gravitation. The return of Halleys Comet was
confirmation that Newtons theory worked and, at the
same time, was a refutation of alternative theories. If the
comet had simply obeyed Johannes Keplers laws
of planetary motion, it would have returned at
precisely regular intervals. Ren Descartes had
imagined comets bouncing off the whirlpools that
surrounded every star, travelling through space
from solar system to solar system, never to return
or retrace their routes. There were still Cartesians
to be found in 1759; had Halleys Comet returned
a few decades earlier we would celebrate it as
decisive refutation of the Cartesian theory.
a curved path as they neared the sun and claimed that this
path was, like the path of a projectile, a parabola; but he did
not imagine that comets follow the curve on and on until
they orbit the sun.
An extraordinarily bright comet appeared in 1680 and
headed straight for the sun and, of course, became invisible
as it got close to it. Shortly afterwards another comet
appeared heading away from the sun on a roughly parallel
course. But were these two comets? John Flamsteed in
England and Georg Samuel Doerfel in Germany suggested
that the second comet was the same as the first, now
returning after circling around the sun. Newton at first
rejected this suggestion as paradoxical but, as he developed
his theory of gravity, he quickly adopted it and in the first
edition of Principia (1687) the parabolic path of the comet
of 1680 around the sun (calculated using data purloined
from Flamsteed) became the final flourish with which he
demonstrated his theory of gravity, although he made no
attempt to predict when the comet would return. In the
third edition he adopted a mistaken prediction by Halley,
that it would return every 575 years; in fact it will not
return for another 9,000 years.
Theory before fact?
The return of Halleys Comet thus illustrates two important
principles: the first is that all observations are theoryrelated. Nobody could see that Halleys Comet returns every
75 years or so before Newtons theory of gravity helped
them interpret the evidence. As Thomas Kuhn said:
The so-called facts prove[d] never to be mere facts,
independent of existing belief and theory. Second,
this does not mean a single fact may not be enough
to refute a well-established theory. I stress this
because the modern history of science is wedded to
what is called the Duhem-Quine thesis, according
to which facts can never refute theories. The return
of Halleys Comet was an effective refutation of
both Kepler and Descartes. Cartesians had developed elaborate theories which successfully predicted the movement of the planets by claiming they
were carried along like driftwood in a whirlpool, but
these theories could not explain how the path of a
comet could be so different from that of a nearby planet
both should be carried along together.
Newton was not right (as Einstein would show), but his
theory worked well and none of the others did. Thus the
return of Halleys Comet is not only a refutation of Cartesianism, it is also a refutation of the Duhem-Quine thesis.
As Karl Popper insisted in The Logic of Scientific Discovery
(1934), facts can disprove theories. The Cartesians knew
they had lost the argument; unfortunately modern historians of science (who claim that arguments can never be won
or lost by appeals to the evidence) are not so perceptive. In
the years after 1680 it became apparent to Newton that he
could formulate a new science. What we need now is a new
history of science; one that acknowledges the significance
of the return of Halleys Comet.
What we need is
a new history of
science; one that
acknowledges the
significance of the
return of Halleys
Comet
In the heavens
Before 1680 the prevailing assumption was that
comets have short lives. According to Aristotle,
comets were phenomena in the upper atmosphere of the
Earth, along with rainbows, meteors and the Northern
Lights. Often credited as the first to mount a systematic
attack on this view was the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe
who, after the appearance of the Great Comet in 1577,
showed that it was in the heavens and that, as it could move
through the heavens, it must have been cutting through
the solid spheres which, according to Aristotelian philosophers, carried the planets. Later, Kepler assumed that
comets travelled in straight lines. Although he showed that
planets move not in circles but ellipses, it never occurred
to him that comets, too, might orbit the sun (despite the
fact that he invented the very language we use to discuss
the subject: the words orbit and perihelion are his coinings).
In 1664 Giovanni Domenico Cassini argued that the path
of one comet suggested that it was in orbit around the
star Sirius and thought this might explain why comets
swam into sight and then disappeared, seemingly forever.
Johannes Hevelius suggested in 1688 that comets followed
David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York.

His latest book is The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific
Revolution (Allen Lane, 2015).
KIBBO KIFT
The
Strange
Tale of the
Kibbo Kift
Kindred
The Boy Scout movement produced a
little-known offshoot of intellectual
Barbarians, whose charismatic
leader had dreams of overcoming the
existential crises of the 20th century,
writes Annebella Pollen.
S PART OF A TRANCHE of MI5 documents

recently released by the National Archives to
mark the centenary of the First World War, secret
correspondence concerning investigations into
Red Boy Scouts came to light. Who were these scouts
suspected of communist sympathies? One particular figure
under scrutiny, John Hargrave, described in official papers
as a half-caste Hungarian, stands out. Hargrave was born
in 1894 to Gordon Hargrave, a Quaker and professional
landscape painter, and Babette (ne Bing) of HungarianJewish descent. He enjoyed little in the way of formal
education but showed great aptitude for drawing from an
early age and, while still in his teens, began to sell cartoons
to newspapers and illustrate books professionally, a career
that would continue his whole life. Hargrave joined the Boy
Scouts in 1910, a year after the movement was founded,
discovering a second passion.
Hargraves enthusiasm for the outdoor aspect of
scouting the camping, primitivist play and campfire
ceremony that went under the heading of woodcraft far
outweighed his interest in the other concerns of Robert
Baden-Powells new organisation: those of paramilitary drill
and preparedness, empire-building and Christianity. Hargrave identified more with the ideas of the artist, novelist
and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, whose system of socalled primitive training for boys, modelled on a mythical
ideal of a heroic Native American and infused with fantasy
and romance, predated the Boy Scouts but was adopted, if
not plagiarised, by the organisation.
Top: John Hargrave, 1929. Above: Hargrave as White Fox Spirit Chief with children
at Dexter Farm Tribal Training Camp II, 1928. Photo by Angus McBean. Right: a
Kinsman on a rocky peak, Switzerland, 1930, also by McBean.
Scout patrol groups led by Hargrave were marked by his

experimental, mystical, Seton-inspired methods and his
first full-length publication, Lonecraft, prepared in 1913
while he was still a teenager, was rich in songs inspired by
Native Americans, sign language and nature lore. Illustrated throughout with Hargraves distinctive line drawings,
Lonecraft demonstrated to senior Scout leaders his communications skills and abilities and he was appointed as
KIBBO KIFT
staff artist in 1914. While happily accepting this prestigious
position, Hargrave would later reflect that he was inspired
to write Lonecraft because he felt that scouting was already
drifting away from the woodcraft trail and was becoming
too concerned with bugle-blowing, military parades and
indoor activities more suited to Sunday school.
ARGRAVES CONVICTION that the Scouts were

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

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

the Scouts that Hargrave had
surely engineered took place
in 1921. He was, in his own
words, excommunicated. BadenPowell would later characterise Hargrave in private correspondence as a
clever young fellow in a way, good at
writing and sketching, but eccentric,
swollen-headed, communistic. For
conservatives such as Baden-Powell
and his correspondent, the colonial
administrator Lord Syndenham, the
spectre of Hargraves political leanings
hung over him like an ominous red
cloud. This association, however,
did him no harm among his socialist
colleagues. The accelerating clash
and final expulsion had done much
to raise Hargraves profile and many
left the Scouts to follow him, often
bringing their troop of children along,
too. In the months and years spent
establishing the woodcraft kindred before the split was
made final, Hargrave had established his reputation as, and
strengthened his connections with, progressive thinkers
and social reformers. These were variously regrouped into
active members and advisers in the formation of his new
organisation, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.
What was the Kibbo Kift? Hargrave asserted in typically
flamboyant style that such a question was ultimately
unanswerable, yet it was one that needed to be asked again
and again by group members as well as strangers. Beginning
with the challenge of their unfamiliar name taken from
an antiquarian dictionary of colloquial Cheshire terminology and meaning proof of strength and continuing
For conservatives
such as BadenPowell, the spectre
of Hargraves
political leanings
hung over him
like an ominous
red cloud
Kathleen Milnes
(Blue Falcon), a
Kinlog illustration,
1928-9.
KIBBO KIFT
Chickadee totem,
c.1928.
into their outlandish visual style and

remarkably diverse and ever-shifting
purposes and practices, the Kibbo
Kifts sometimes bewildering aims and
methods ranged across health and handicraft, pacifism and propaganda, myth
and magic, education and economics.
Kibbo Kift was always much more than
an all-ages, co-educational alternative
to the Scouts. The wide range of the
groups interests and the large scale
of its ambition was necessitated, they
believed, by the peculiar conditions of
their time: dynamic new dreams were
needed to overcome the nightmares of
20th-century existence.
From the earliest days of the Kibbo
Kift, its ambitions were far reaching.
There were pledges to counteract
the ill effects of industrialisation and
overcrowding by establishing open-air
camping and woodcraft opportunities to inculcate physical, mental and
spiritual development in children; to
foster craft training and to reorganise
industry along non-competitive lines;
to establish family groups trained in
woodcraft principles in order to create
a heritage of health; to aim for international disarmament, an international educational policy,
international freedom of trade, an international currency
system, the abolition of secret treaties and the establishment of a World Council, including every civilised and
primitive nation or race.
HE ambitious policies of the Kibbo Kift represented a vast global project more suited to agreements between governments than a few hundred
part-time reformers, or what one former member
would snootily dismiss as clerks, minor civil servants,
garage hands and teachers living in the Home Counties.
The establishment of a League of Nations Union, as well as
H.G. Wells more far-reaching call for a World State, were
key touchstones for Kibbo Kift policies that left behind the
imperialism of the Scouts and aimed for a new worldview,
indeed, for nothing less than a World Culture which will
digest the narrow nationalisms and make a common ligature between the races.
How could this be achieved? The Kibbo Kift was ambitious but lacked all means to implement its ideas. Membership numbers were small and resources few. Kinsfolk were
earnest but ultimately amateur. Hargrave had previously
developed detailed and refined methods in his writings for
woodcraft training and camp life and so the practices of
the Kibbo Kift emerged as something of a hybrid, where
serious political ambitions for world peace and world
leadership mingled awkwardly with totem poles, archery
and hiking. The social and political purpose of the Kibbo
Kifts outdoor methods, archaic language and picturesque
ceremony was not at all clear to those who encountered
the organisation for the first time. While it undoubtedly
engendered a mystique that prompted curiosity, Hargrave
and other members were also regularly required to explain
and defend its purpose and ultimate aims. Hargrave argued

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

could be brought about by outdoor pursuits and arts and
crafts was partly resolved by Hargraves introduction in
1924 to the new economic theory of social credit. Developed by a British engineer, Major C.H. Douglas, the theory
was based on the principle that societys production and
consumption were out of balance and that the total cost of
wages was always lower than the collective cost of goods
produced. Social credit aimed to create a better balance
between production and consumption by bridging the difference. It aimed to give consumers more purchasing power
through the adoption of a National Dividend, payable to
each and every citizen. It also demanded the readjustment
in the price of goods to reflect more fairly their production values and it argued that control of finance should
be wrested from bankers, who profited unfairly from the
current arrangements.
Hargraves exposure to economics was to transform
the Kibbo Kift. At first the recommendation that it will be
well if Kinsfolk keep abreast of the evolution of economic ideas was merely one of many activities encouraged,
from the study of prehistoric remains and the writing
KIBBO KIFT
of mummers plays to the making of Indian teepees. Economic theory came to form an increasingly dominant role
in the Kibbo Kift during the latter half of the 1920s, leading
to serious rifts among the membership. For many Kinsfolk,
who had joined because they were attracted to the outdoor
life, the shift to a more political focus was unwelcome. To
some members, however, its addition helped resolve one of
the Kibbo Kifts key shortcomings: how exactly were they
to solve the manifold social problems of the world? The
addition of an economic theory itself sufficiently new and
unorthodox to fit with Kinsfolks largely oppositional interests provided one answer. As Hargrave put it during this
period: The Kin came to see itself not as a mere camping
and rambling club, but as an instrument
having internal incubational and external
operative function.
THROUGHOUT the 1920s the Kibbo Kift

continued to camp and hike in typically
flamboyant and ceremonial style, but the
economic crisis at the end of the decade as
well as dwindling membership prompted a
radical rethink. A scheme for a fundamental
re-organisation was announced in 1931.
As part of this, all archaic terminology was
dropped. Kin roles that had been mythically styled as Scribe and Tallykeeper were
renamed more prosaically as General Secretary and General Treasurer. Personal totem
poles and the Native American-inspired cry
of How! were abandoned. No ceremonial
outfits were permitted and the hooded camp
costume was redesigned along sharper,
more military lines. Hargrave called this
process the beginning of normalisation. He
declared that the new scheme:
Y 1932, every one of these promises had been

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

fantastic aspects ... that confused and bemused the ordinary
citizen, slowed down recruiting, and eventually tended to
produce nothing but a clique, a little coterie of Kin-companions,
without significance, and a sheer waste of time and energy.
The Kindred changes ... illogically, inconsistently, as it may

seem, with the non-logical forces of Life and Death. What it was
yesterday it is not to-day; and what it is to-day it cannot be tomorrow. Its continuity and stability are here, in the cradle-bed
of the emotions.
The organisation was transformed. Within a year the Kibbo

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

his diverse, if ultimately unsuccessful projects: a powerful
belief in the supremacy of his singular vision, whatever the
shape of the organisation built around it.
We the Kibbo Kift are determined that we will not organise

a new movement, we will not have a great Headquarters in
London we will not set down and define in writing our aims
and methods. We will not have factory-made medals and
badges, protected, registered and patented, we will not have
bands and bugles and parades, we will not march about the
streets
Spirit Mask,
c.1928.
Annebella Pollens book The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual

Barbarians is published by Donlon Books. Her co-curated exhibition of the
same name is at Whitechapel Gallery, London until March 13th, 2016.
FURTHER READING
Mary Davis, Fashioning a New World: A History of the Woodcraft Folk (Holyoake Books, 2000).
John Hargrave, The Great War Brings It Home: The Natural
Reconstruction of an Unnatural Existence (Constable, 1919).
Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of
Civilisation, 1919-1939 (Penguin, 2009).
John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth
Movements 1883-1940 (Croom Helm, 1977).
REVIEWS
Tim Stanley revels in the rise and fall of the Julio-Claudians

Judith Flanders enjoys Dutch urban culture Eleri Lynn on fashion victims
CICEROS reputation was not

high early in the 20th century,
but things have changed substantially in recent years. This
development has been driven less
by biographical approaches than
by a range of new approaches to
the corpus of his writings, which
have revealed their seriousness
and originality and, by so doing,
illuminated the intellectual and
social culture of the late Roman
Republic more broadly.
Ciceros speeches kept their
place on university curricula
more robustly than his other
writings and it is perhaps
unsurprising that work on
the speeches led the charge
in Ciceros re-evaluation. Ann
Vasalys Representations: Images
of the World in Ciceronian
Oratory (1992) was a milestone
in reading Ciceros speeches in
their social and physical contexts.
Anthony Corbeills Controlling
Laughter: Political Humour in the
Late Roman Republic (1996) and
Cynthia Damons The Mask of the
Parasite: a Pathology of Roman
Patronage (1997) engage extensively with Ciceros speeches in
their exploration of Roman social
practices. Brian Krostenkos
Cicero, Catullus and the Language
of Social Performance (2001) and
Sarah Stroups Catullus, Cicero
and a Society of Patrons: the
Generation of the Text (2010) place
Cicero within the intellectual
context of the late Republic, with
its combination of patronage,
reciprocity and competition, and
Jon Halls Ciceros Use of Judicial
Theatre (2014) explores performative aspects of his rhetoric.
xxxxxxxxxx
Bust of Marcus
Tullius Cicero
(106-43 bc),
1st century bc.
SIGNPOSTS
The Power of Rhetoric

Catherine Steel traces the incredible longevity
of Ciceros great corpus of works, the study of
which has helped to illuminate the intellectual
and social culture of the late Roman Republic.
Ciceros role in creating his

own biographical tradition has
been a particular focus, notably
in John Dugans Making a New
Man: Ciceronian Self-fashioning
in the Rhetorical Works (2005),
while Ingo Gildenhards Creative
Eloquence: the Construction of
Reality in Ciceros Speeches (2010)
attempts to extract recurrent
sociological and theological
constructions underpinning
the oratorical corpus. This work
stands alongside studies focused
wholly on rhetoric. Wilfried
Strohs influential Taxis und
Taktik: die advokatische Dispositionskunst in Ciceros Gerichtsreden
(1975) was followed by James
Mays Trials of Character: the
Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos
(1988) and Christopher Craigs
analysis of Ciceronian techniques
of argument in Form as Argument
in Ciceros Speeches: a Study of
Dilemma (1993). Bruce Friers The
Rise of the Roman Jurists: Studies
in Ciceros Pro Caecina (1985) examined the relationship between
Ciceros oratory and Roman legal
practice. Andrew Riggsbys Crime
and Community in Ciceronian
Rome (1999) extended the inquiry
to criminal law, as well as reviewing the role of political factionalism in determining jury verdicts.
He concluded that Roman jurors
were influenced primarily by
intricate questions of law. Underpinning this has been a renewed
interest in the traditional
commentary format, with more
philologically focussed editions,
such as Dominic Berrys on Pro
Sulla (1996), Andrew Dycks on
Pro Caelio (2013) and Luca Grillos
on De Prouinciis Consularibus
(2015), now supplemented
by historically driven editions
(particularly in Oxford University
Press Clarendon Ancient History
series), including Robert Kasters
Pro Sestio (2006) and by Lynn
Fotheringhams exploration of
Ciceronian syntax in her edition
of Pro Milone (2013).
A further impetus to the
study of Ciceros speeches has
been increased interest in oratory
as part of Roman political life.
Fergus Millars The Crowd in
Rome in the Late Republic (1998)
argued for the importance of the
Roman people in political
decision-making and highlighted
the role of public meetings
and the speeches given there.
Millars work has been the object
of intense discussion, to which
Karl-Joachim Hlkeskamps
Reconstructing the Roman Republic (2010) is an invaluable guide;
Ciceros speeches, as the only
If Ciceros
reputation was
not high early in
the 20th century,
that has changed
substantially
surviving examples of political
oratory from the Roman Republic, are important pieces of evidence for this debate, particularly
in Robert Morstein-Marxs Mass
Oratory and Political Power in the
Late Roman Republic (2004). As
yet there has not been any major
reassessment of Ciceros importance as a political figure.
Ciceros treatises have
emerged decisively from a long
period in which they were largely
viewed as sources for lost Hellenistic philosophy. The essays
by Beard and by Schofield in the
1986 edition of the Journal of
Roman Studies, on De Diuinatione, and Jonathan Powells 1988
commentary on De Senectute
were important moments in
shifting perceptions in anglophone scholarship. Ciceros originality as a philosopher has been
a recurrent topic: important con-
tributions include Matthew Foxs

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

Mary Beard
Profile Books 606pp 25
MARY BEARD traces the history

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

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

existential threat to the Roman
state or a convenient way to
add lustre to the year of Ciceros
consulship? Beard sets out the
evidence economically, introduces some telling analogies
with recent political experience
and leaves it to the reader to
decide.
From Cicero and Catiline,
Beard travels back in time to
the origins of Rome and to a
period when the literary record
offers markedly little by way of
authentic evidence. Yet there
is a story to tell here. For the
legends of Aeneas and Ascanius,
of Romulus and Remus tell us a
great deal about how those who
developed them conceived of
the city of Rome and the many
different peoples who came to
settle there. Archaeology, too,
offers some fascinating insights:
an early Roman cremation urn in
the shape of a hut is a wonderful
complement to Virgils description of Aeneas stooping to enter
the house of King Evander on
the Palatine.
SPQR is essentially a political
and military history. Two of
the 12 chapters concentrate
on issues of social history and
Beards expertise as a religious
historian informs and enlivens
many sections of the narrative,
but her principal focus is on the
rise of Rome, the citys internal
political struggles, the acquisition and management of empire
and the changes that empire
brought to the city itself. Along
the way there is a consistently
spirited narrative of the Roman
Republic and, in particular, of
the great names associated
with its final century: Sulla,
Marius, Caesar, Pompey and,
of course, Cicero. Yet there are
also splendid stories from the
margins. I particularly relished
the actor on stage in Ascoli
Piceno at the outbreak of the
Social War, who was confronted
with an audience that would
have made the Glasgow Empire
look hospitable.
Beards approach to the
rule of the emperors is rather
different. Eschewing a continuous narrative from one reign
REVIEWS
to another, she investigates the
dynamics of a system. Those
seduced by the wilder chapters of Suetonius Lives of the
Twelve Emperors might regard
the imperial government as a
gaudily dysfunctional mess;
Beard instead stresses stability
and continuity both at home
and abroad. She is especially
interesting on how a tiny cadre
of resident administrators could
hold distant and expansive provinces together and how crucial
to the success of the system was
the collaboration of local elites
themselves, who were set on
becoming Roman. The letters of
Pliny to the emperor Trajan on
the governance of the province
of Bithynia reveal a dutiful public
servant seeking guidance on
everything from public building
programmes to how to deal with
a new religious grouping called
the Christians.
This is a long work but it does
not feel that way. I sat down and
read the first 200 pages in one
This is a long work

but it does not feel
that way ...
I read the first two
hundred pages in
one contented fivehour stretch
contented five-hour stretch. The
text is generously illustrated and
Beard has a fine eye for those
monuments and inscriptions
that carry far more than their
own weight. Maps place early
Rome amid its neighbours, set
out the dimensions of the city
in the imperial period and show
the extent of the Empire at its
height. While SPQR is in itself a
thoroughly satisfying account, it
never shies away from uncertainty or pretends to have the
last word. Those for whom this
represents the first of many
steps in Roman history will
welcome the detailed guide to
further reading and the timeline
that follow the final chapter.
Matthew Leigh
Augustus
The Biography
Jochen Bleicken
(Translated by Anthea Bell)
Allen Lane 771pp 30
BY THE TIME Octavian entered

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

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

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

House of Caesar
Tom Holland
Little, Brown 512pp 25
IN Terence Rattigans play,

The Browning Version, a school
teacher makes this case for
studying the classics: How can
we mould civilised beings if we
no longer believe in civilisation?
Reading Tom Hollands Dynasty,
I wonder if ancient Rome is
rather less useful than Rattigan
thought.
It is a catalogue of depravity:
assassinations, adulteries,
tortures and syphilitic lunacy.
It is also very funny. Holland
recounts how Nero tried to
murder his mother with a
collapsing boat. The roof fell in
all right, but Agrippina survived.
REVIEWS
A friend splashing about in the
water cried out I am Agrippina! to attract rescue and was
promptly clubbed to death with
oars and poles. The real Agrippina swam to shore, crawled
home and sent a letter to Nero,
telling him what happened. A
little while later, soldiers arrived
to finish off the job. Strike my
belly!, she demanded. Agrippina
went the way of heroes: looking
her murderer in the eye.
What on Earth is the student
supposed to learn from this?
If you are going to kill your
mother, do not scrimp on the
boat building? Looking back on
my own schooldays, I suspect
that all Latin exposed me to was
complicated vocab and pure
filth. The lives of the Caesars
were pornographic in their
sexual and violent content, a
tribute not to civilisation but
to the old adage that power
corrupts.
Then again, Holland does
a good job of explaining his
characters rationale and they
were idealistic about their civic
identity. Rome was their home
and there was no place quite like
it and everything the emperors
did was somehow a reflection of
its glory. Where else in the world
was ruled by a living god? After
Nero disembowelled his mother,
he was treated like a victor in a
great war parades and games
followed. Why? Because the
murder was so audacious, so
outrageous. So very Roman. If
might did not necessarily make
right, it did confer awesomeness.
Holland writes of gladiatorial
combat: The excitement that
spectators took in watching
trained warriors fight for their
lives was all the greater for
knowing themselves to be the
masters.
In this context, Caligulas
Looney Tune antics do not seem
nearly so unhinged. To Holland,
he was simply the most honest
of the emperors, the one who
bothered least to pretend he
was an equal with the Senate: It
was an honesty, though, as pitiless as the African sun. Caligula
parodied the moral pretentions
of the Roman aristocracy; he
EXHIBITION
into their still life paintings, including Chinese
porcelain, shells from the Indian and Pacific
oceans and pepper from the East Indies, reflecting the success of the Dutch maritime trade as
one of the drivers of the Republics economic
prosperity, coinciding with the heights of Dutch
painting. Jan van der Heydens Room Corner with
Rarities illustrates the arrival of these exotic,
Asian art forms and curiosities.
One of the most popular luxury goods to be
exported in the Golden Age was blue and white
porcelain that originated mainly from the kilns
of Jingdezhen in China and later from Arita in
Japan. Being thinner, smoother and lighter than
earthenware produced in the Netherlands, it
influenced the creation of Delft Blue, which
was a cheaper earthenware imitation of porcelain, coated with white enamel and painted with
cobalt blue decorations. Polychrome
Japanese porcelain was imported
by VOC officials returning to their
homelands in the 17th century, with
Kakiemon porcelain being favoured
among the Dutch elite. Several fine
examples are on display, highlighted
by a pouring jug with a golden lid,
bearing the owners coat of arms
(inset).
Dutch household interiors and
furnishings were also influenced
by Asian designs and fashions of
the time, as were personal clothing
and accessories, such as the Japanese-style dressing gown, the rok.
Asia in Amsterdam
This garment came to the NetherThe Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age
lands through VOC officials, who had
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, until June 5th, 2016
been presented with them by the
shogun on their annual court visit,
illustrated in Michiel van Musschers portrait of
Amsterdam played a central role in this story as
VOC director and burgomaster of Amsterdam,
the capital city of the Netherlands became the
Johannes Hudde. These gowns were prized by
marketplace for Asian luxury goods to Europe.
the Dutch for their exotic beauty and comfort.
Asia in Amsterdam was on display at the
The Asia in the Dutch Interior gallery presents
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until January 2016.
Now it is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, two large painted and embroidered Indian cotton
chintz Palampores from the Peabody Essex MuMassachusetts, which has an extensive Asian
seums Veldman-Eecen collection and an Indian
export art collection. Like Amsterdam, Salem
quilted bedcover bearing heraldic decoration in
was an important international trading hub.
the form of the arms of the city of Amsterdam,
Dutch still lifes and portraits of citizens who
displayed without glass casings and tilted at an
had themselves painted among their newly acquired items of Asian luxury provide an effective angle to allow the viewer to observe the motifs
close-up, providing a greater sense of impact.
contextual background, bringing the objects
This exhibition of Asian treasures provides a
to life. For example, fashionable men had their
portraits paintedwearing a silk Japanese skirt, a celebration of the connections between Netherlands and Asia offering a fresh perspective on the
long loose-fitting silk coat such as the one worn
Dutch Golden Age.
by Amsterdam pharmacist Johannes Hudde in
Jasleen Kandhari
his portrait by Michiel van Musscher in 1686.
The Golden Age Dutch artists such as Rembrandt, Willem Kalf, Jan Steen and Pieter Claesz
Exhibition address: Peabody Essex Museum, East India
also incorporated Asian luxury goods and designs Square (161 Essex St) Salem, Massachusetts 01970, USA
AT THE START of the Dutch Golden Age, merchants from the worlds first multinational, the
Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) used their business
acumen to establish lucrative trade agreements
with Asia, resulting in the trade of exotic treasures from Asia including porcelain, lacquerware,
ivory and silk to the Dutch Republic, where
these forms of design and materials had not been
seen before and, therefore, were considered to be
prized items of exquisite quality and fascination.
Asia in Amsterdam showcases the sensation that
these luxury items created through 170 works of
art from India, China, Japan and Batavia from 60
collections, while presenting the history behind
this first global market and the impact they had
on Dutch art and culture in the 17th century and
how they inspired Dutch artists and makers.
REVIEWS
rubbed their noses in their
hypocrisies. To the people he
offered spectacle and money. On
return from campaign he stood
in the street and threw out gold
and silver coins: In the resulting
stampede, huge numbers were
crushed to death including
over two hundred women and
a eunuch. His rule was, as Plato
forewarned, a tyranny of the
appetites. It is what happens
when a mob endorses a dictator
who gives them what they want
until their bellies explode.
Some of Hollands characterisations surprise. I came to quite
like Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso,
the arrogant governor of Syria,
who was accused by the Roman
mob of killing their beloved
Germanicus, nephew of Emperor
Tiberius. Piso loathed Germanicus because he regarded his
monarchical style as unrepublican and his sympathy for local
culture as unRoman. But he was
almost certainly innocent of
the princes death and Tiberius
failure to save him was a heavy,
personal betrayal. Discovering
that the Senate was against him,
the poor man went home and
slit his own throat. Indeed, if the
student is to learn anything from
the classics, then it is not how to
live but how to die: with gusto
and deny the public their sordid
execution. The discovery that
Holland is particularly good at
writing about violent decadents
comes as no surprise. The only
question is what he could possibly turn his hand to next. I seem
to remember from school that
Jacobean drama was suitably
bloody. The veneer of civilisation
was just as thin then, too.
This is a thrilling book by one
of the countrys best popular
historians. Hollands secret
is that he started his career
writing fiction and he brings to
his histories a flare for narrative
and character. He has always
chosen subjects that suit his
style well, ranging from the birth
of Islam to the foundation of the
Medieval church. He likes wide
open spaces and epic conflagrations. There is something genuinely breathtaking to his prose.
Tim Stanley
Roman Law in the

State of Nature
The Classical Foundations of

Hugo Grotius Natural Law
Benjamin Straumann
Cambridge University Press 286pp 65
THIS NEW STUDY explores the

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

captain Jacob van Heemskerck of
the Santa Catarina, a Portuguese
carrack, in the straits of Singapore.
In doing so, Grotius provided one
of the most influential theories of
international law, which aimed to
establish a lasting and universally
binding international order.
Grotius argued that the state of
nature prevailed on the high seas,
where no sovereign power ruled to
enforce the law. The sea, according
to Grotius, was free and only governed by the norms of natural law.
Therefore, it was crucial to demonstrate the obligatory force of the
precepts of natural law. Straumann
shows in great detail how Ciceros
arguments regarding justice and
natural law proved to become the
most important source for Grotius
natural law doctrine. The underlying concern was whether there
could be an international order
which was universally accepted
and how it should be maintained.
This led Grotius to use Ciceros De
Ciceros arguments
regarding justice
and natural law
became ... the most
important source
for Grotius
Inventione to show the conformity
of punishment with natural law.
This was highly disputed terrain,
since the political implications
were huge. The concept of punishment in the state of nature of
the high seas enabled Grotius to
justify that the Dutch had a right
to punish the Portuguese for their
previous acts against them. When
he turned his attention to the issue
of punishment in interstate relations more generally in The Rights
of War and Peace, he like Cicero
before him related punishment
to the concept of justice, since it
is a reaction to a wrong that has
been done. However, is the legitimate execution of punishment
among states as straightforward
as Grotius and Cicero presumed?
The Portuguese certainly thought
differently.
Peter Schrder
Dutch Art and Urban

Cultures, 1200-1700
Elisabeth de Bivre
Yale University Press 492pp 40
THE Netherlands are of interest

historically in a manner disproportionate to their geographical
size or population. The seeds of
modern democratic, elected political bodies, were first sown in
the Dutch and, later, the Batavian Republics. The entrenchment
of a middle-class elite from the
17th century created a society
ruled by merchants, manufacturers and professional administrators rather than aristocratic
landowners, revolving around a
court and ruler. The expansion
of the Dutch Empire, from the
16th-century Compagnie van
Verre and 17th-century Dutch
East India Company, and the
financial structures that were
developed in its wake, including
the Amsterdam stock exchange,
were engines in the development of capitalism.
Owing to these profound
political and economic developments, it is easy to consider
Dutch culture, too, as a monolith, a single entity with single
aims and intentions. Yet, as
Elisabeth de Bivre shows in this
original and enlightening book,
nothing could be further from
reality. Pace Svetlana Alpers and
Simon Schama, whose works
explain Dutch culture as a
unifying expression of the new
Republics sense of purpose, de
Bivres exploration of the art of
the Dutch republic shows how
places as little as 50 kilometres
apart had quite different aims,
expressed in quite different
methods and manners.
REVIEWS
It was only in the 19th century
that the federated states of the
United Provinces devolved into a
centralised monarchy and only in
the 19th century, too, that ideas
of modern nationhood became
part of the critical dialogue of
the times. Even as the art of the
Dutch Golden Age was being
rediscovered by collectors,
the American Civil War and its
aftermath were reinforcing the
notion of a republican, protestant, unifying art.
De Bivre instead lays out, in
seven chapters, the art of seven
cities in the northern Netherlands, showing how it reflected
each community and its values.
(Utrecht, the single city outside
of this geographical remit, is an
exception that is included somewhat awkwardly.)
De Bivre is too intelligent
for simplistic arguments and
she makes ample space for the
cross-fertilisation that enriches
Dutch art. Jan Steen, for
example, worked in several of
the cities under discussion. When
living in Haarlem, the only city
according to de Bivre where the
depiction of laughter, considered
un-aristocratic elsewhere, was
popular, Steens canvases depicted unbridled pleasure, whereas
in the painters Delft years, his
de Bivre ... makes

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

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

in the German Historical
Imagination, 1860-1930
Martin A. Ruehl
Cambridge University Press 317pp 65
THE DECADES following the

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

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

and Present
Alison Matthews David
Bloomsbury 225pp 25
FASHION VICTIMS by Alison

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

arsenic used to dye Victorian
fabrics a fashionable green. We
also learn that Mad-hatters are
so-called because of the mercury
used in the millinery process. Lewis
Carrolls own Mad Hatter shows
the signs of mercury poisoning:
anxiety, trembling and erratic
behaviour. Even today, historic
millinery has the potential to harm
handlers, especially conservators
who steam hats for display. The
V&A in London keeps all its felted
hats in special mylar bags marked
with skull and crossbones.
The horrors of fashions darker
side are not confined to history,
however. The final chapter
reminds us not to judge fashions
past victims harshly, or think
smugly that the modern world
has solved these dangers, with
sad case studies reminding us that
danger might be a little too close
for comfort. In 2012 a highly fashionable studded peplum belt was
An accessible,
thoughtful study
of how fashion has
been responsible for
death and injury
through the ages
discovered to be radioactive. The
studs contained cobalt-60, which
can cause lasting damage to the
internal organs. The belt had been
widely available: sold in 14 different
countries and stocked by major
online retailers. David also makes
the important point that fashions
real victims are usually the workers
who are exposed to the harsher
realities of its manufacture: the
toxins, the machines, the sweatshop conditions and the sheer hard
labour. She draws thoughtful comparisons between 19th-century
England and modern India and
warns that globalisation and
the mass market has distanced
us from the manufacture of the
clothes that we wear, with the risk
that many of us are, in fact, more
ignorant of fashions dangers than
at any time in the past.
Eleri Lynn
Speer
Hitlers Architect
Martin Kitchen
Yale University Press 440pp 20
IN 1953, while incarcerated in

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

Sauckel, was executed, Speer
was given 20 years.
Emerging from Spandau in
1966, Speer set about wooing
a generation of journalists and
historians: portraying himself as
the Good Nazi, an urbane eyewitness to world-changing
events. He was not only saving
his own neck, he also provided
a living alibi for the German
people, confirming their comforting belief that guilt was
confined only to a small clique of
psychopaths and fanatics.
Only a few contemporary
commentators saw through
Speers web of evasions, fibs and
half-truths. His principal
English-language biographers
until now Gitta Sereny and
Joachim Fest did not; both,
for differing reasons, fell for
his mendacious charm. Martin
Kitchens new biography, therefore, is something of a landmark.
It is a thoughtful and thoroughgoing demolition of the Speer
myth.
Although Speer
expressed an
abstract sense of
his own guilt ... he
claimed to have
been at one remove
from the horrific
realities of Nazi
rule ... to have been
ignorant of the
Holocaust
Kitchen is brilliant and
brutal, exposing every aspect
of his subjects story to stern
scrutiny. He begins at the very
start, showing that even Speers
tale of his birth was a lie. He
goes on to claim that his lonely
emotionally impoverished
subject lacked imagination and
originality as an architect; and
his rise to prominence was the
result of ambition, sycophancy
and a prudent ability to delegate
to more talented underlings.
REVIEWS
Speer, Kitchen argues, was
myth-making even at the
time, colluding with Hitler, for
instance, in the lie that the new
Reich Chancellery took only a
year to construct, when it had
in truth taken a lot longer. He
also cooked the figures systematically when he was Minister
for Armaments, putting an
undeserved gloss on his efforts
to rationalise armaments production. Most damning, Kitchen
repeats and elaborates upon the
most grievous and long-standing accusations against Speer;
that he not only knew about the
Holocaust and the exploitation
of forced labourers by the Third
Reich, but that he was intimately involved in both processes.
Speer long protested his
innocence, but as Hitlers
architect of choice he masterminded building projects that
were explicitly predicated on
the removal and extermination
of alien races. Ignorance of the
wider context of Nazi policy is a
logical impossibility. As Minister
for Armaments, meanwhile, he
had as many as half a million
concentration camp inmates
working directly for him, and
is known at the very least
to have visited the notorious
Dora-Mittelbau camp. There can
be little doubt, therefore, that
Speer had blood on his hands.
In truth, there is not much
that is genuinely new about
Martin Kitchens Speer; he draws
liberally on the work of other
historians, closer to the coalface,
who have published partial
accounts and micro-studies. He
is not even the first Englishlanguage biographer to challenge Speers lies; that honour
fell to Dan van der Vat in 1997.
But there is no sin in synthesis.
Kitchens book is well researched
and well written and is a worthy
addition to the ranks of Speer
biographies, not least as a
convincing rebuttal of some
of the myopic enthusiasms of
his predecessors. Kitchen has
taken a wrecking ball to Speers
mendacious and meticulously
created self-image. And about
time, too.
Roger Moorhouse
2016 BOOK PRIZE WINNER

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

Light
Perspectives on Film
Preservation and Restoration
Edited by Rajesh Devraj
Film Heritage Foundation (Mumbai) 136pp 29.99
EVERY artistic medium raises

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

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

Simon Bradley
Profile Books 645pp 25
SIMON BRADLEY had little

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

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

inventive ways
to deter fellow
travellers from
sharing the
compartment was
to hold a screaming
baby up to the
window
also no refreshments on trains.
Saloons for the royal family
were the first to gain toilets in
1848-50 and dining rooms, then
both spread gradually to lower
classes. Another inconvenience
was fitting gentlemens tall
hats into the confined compartments: they were strung on
cords across the ceiling. Women,
of course, wore their hats, but
more difficult to pack in, indeed
to get through the doors, were
their massive crinolines, which
must have deterred unwanted
fellow travellers from sharing
the compartments. There were
other inventive ways to do this,
REVIEWS
like holding a screaming baby to
the window.
Passengers put up with
inconveniences and risk of
accidents for the advantages of
rail travel, including, according to taste, travel abroad,
excursions to view hangings, to
race meetings or for non-stop
boozing. Trains brought many
social changes: diets became
more varied when fresh fish
could be transported inland and
fish and chips was invented in
Lancashire in the 1860s; cheap
meat, bananas and other new
foods were imported as rail,
steamships and refrigeration
spread through the world.
Theatre companies and orchestras could tour widely. Railway
timetables imposed Greenwich
time upon reluctant districts,
long accustomed to measuring
their own time: Plymouth was
20 minutes behind London
until the Time Act of 1880
imposed uniformity. Rail even
changed language, inspiring
now-familiar phrases: running
out of steam, letting off steam,
on the right lines.
The story is more mundane
once the great days of constructing railways, bridges, grand
stations Brunel is Bradleys
hero passed. Through the
20th century, rail travel became
efficient but duller, with the
coming of open carriages and
the noise of mobile phones,
microwaved food and sandwiches not restaurant cars,
but indispensable. It is hard to
imagine a more comprehensive
account of their history, including, as Bradley does, the designers and builders of the railways,
the workers and their unions,
the managers and mismanagers, as the system moved from
multiple competing companies,
to mergers, then nationalisation, to privatisation, all with
their different disadvantages
and much else there is no space
to describe. Some of the detail
is excessive for those of us who
are not passionate railway buffs
and the writing is sometimes
stilted, but it is a remarkable
achievement.
Pat Thane
Redbrick
A Social and Architectural

History of Britains Civic
Universities
William Whyte
Oxford University Press 416pp 65
RICH, varied and amusing, this

is the most tasty of fruit cakes,
served up with wonderful quotes
and plenty of well-chosen
illustrations. Whyte, Professor of
Social and Architectural History at
Oxford, focuses not on Oxbridge
but on what became, he argues,
the ballast and driver of the British
higher education system. Whyte
moves from London and new
early 19th-century institutions
across the Empire, notably Kings
College Windsor, Nova Scotia,
[One] university
was founded in a
disused asylum,
with laboratories
converted out of
padded cells and
a dining room
that had been a
mortuary
which are presented as providing a
background for the civic universities founded from the late 19th
century. The Redbricks are seen
as the great influence for what
came later. Whyte suggests that
they were the largest individual influence on the creation of
new universities in the 1950s and
1960s and the model to which the
polytechnics came to cleave. For
Whyte, this is not simply a story

about England. He locates the
foundation of new universities in
Ireland in the 1840s and Wales in
the 1880s as part of the development and extends his account to
Dundee. He correctly argues that
this is a subject that has been understudied, or at least at the level
of his scale and ambition. Given
what he has to cover it is not
surprising that, at times, the result
is somewhat thin and the conclusions pushed too far. Nevertheless,
the range is tremendous, from
student politics to graduate unemployment, Joseph Chamberlain to
Andrew Davies and, less happily, a
series of administrative acronyms
that will fill many academics with
despair.
The overall tone is positive,
albeit tempered. Whyte argues
that the story of these innovative
institutions is, repeatedly, a heroic
one of obstacles overcome. He
presents the Redbricks as opening
up universities to the middle
classes and thus helping effect a
social revolution, albeit being far
less successful for the poor.
The issues of improvement and
performance are addressed. Beginning as an academic at Durham
in 1980, I was told by the senior
professor, Reg Ward, that the
university, like, he said Oxbridge,
underperformed: We take good
people and do not do enough
with them. Ward, who meant
the students not, as he could
have done, the staff, contrasted
this situation with over-performing universities, which achieved
more. This contrast is one that
has been apparent throughout.
Whyte clothes it in institutional
detail and is especially good on the
architecture involved, supporting
this with effective photographs.
He finds a characteristic feature
that of a unified, comprehensive
institution, in contrast to the
collegiate pattern. He has a turn
for the amusing: The University of
Liverpool was founded in a disused
lunatic asylum, with laboratories
converted out of old padded cells
and a dining room that had begun
life as a mortuary. Whyte deserves
congratulation for his thoughtful,
perceptive and witty work.
Jeremy Black
CONTRIBUTORS
Henk de Berg is Professor of
German at the University of
Sheffield.
Jeremy Black is author of The
City on a Hill: A History of the
University of Exeter (2015).
Taylor Downings most
recent book is Secret Warriors:
Key Scientists, Code-Breakers &
Propagandists of the Great War
(Little, Brown, 2014).
Judith Flanders is author of The
Making of Home: The 500-Year
Story of How Our Houses Became
Homes (Atlantic Books, 2014).
Jasleen Kandhari is tutor in
Asian art history and textiles
for the Department of
Continuing Education at
the University of Oxford.
Matthew Leigh is Professor
of Classical Languages and
Literature at the University of
Oxford.
Eleri Lynn is Curator of
Collections at Historic Royal
Palaces and curated the V&As
exhibition, Undressed: 350 Years
of Underwear in Fashion.
Roger Moorhouse is author of
The Devils Alliance: Hitlers Pact
With Stalin, 1939-1941 (Bodley
Head, 2014).
Andrew Robinson is author of
Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye
(I.B. Tauris, 2004).
Peter Schrder is Senior
Lecturer in European Social and
Political Studies at University
College London.
Tim Stanley is the author
of Citizen Hollywood: How the
Collaboration Between LA and DC
Revolutionised American Politics
(Dunne Books, 2014).
Catherine Steel is Professor
of Classics at the University of
Glasgow.
Pat Thane is Professor of
Contemporary History at Kings
College London.
Chris Tudor is founder of
Massolit, an online education
provider specialising in the
teaching of humanities in
schools (www.massolit.co.uk).
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Lively Liverpool
Andrew Griffiths is right to pose
the question as to whether ordinary Britons were willing imperialists (History Matters, February
2016). Two oft-quoted comments
about the people of Liverpool
in the 18th century seem to add
weight to his comments, namely:
Almost every man in Liverpool is
a merchant, and he who cannot
send a bale, will send a band box
and a reference to their indiscriminate rage for commerce and
for getting money at all events.
Both of the above quotations
refer to Liverpool at the time
of the slave trade, but my own
research suggests they were
equally applicable in the years
after abolition and perhaps
suggest two additional questions
that Griffiths should ask. First,
was the trading by ordinary
Britons motivated by imperial
ambitions or simply the more
basic commercial instinct of
making money? Second, when
did the head long rush for trade
and Empire begin?
If the commercial insatiability of Liverpool was mirrored in
other ports, then capital from
every town in Britain would
follow the profits (or hoped-for
profits) that could be earned
in these commercial centres.
Likewise, it is accepted that the
meteoric growth in international
trade was a Victorian phenomenon and yet as early as 1823 two
out of every three ships entering
New York, including the US
coastal trade, originated from
Liverpool. This level of trade
did not materialise overnight
and would have started to build
exponentially from the end of
the War of 1812 and the wider
Napoleonic Wars.
Imperialists or money-makers, Georgian or Victorians, it is a
fascinating area of research that
will benefit from more work.
David P. Hearn
Wallasey, Merseyside
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
More Defiant
In your November issue the
InFocus article by Roger Hudson
writes off the Boulton Paul
Defiant as a sitting duck. In
its defence it was designed as
a bomber-destroyer but in the
dark days of Dunkirk, with backs
to the wall, it was pressed into
service as a front-line interceptor. Although never intended to
take on fighters in a front-line
role it acquitted itself well. On
May 28th, 1940 10 Defiants were
attacked by 30 German Me109
fighters. They shot down six for
the loss of three Defiants. On
their best day over the beaches,
on May 29th, they accounted for
37 German aircraft. Withdrawn
into their intended role, they
accounted for more German
bombers in the 1940-41 Winter
Blitz than any other night
fighter. Once superseded in this
role by more modern types such
as the Beaufighter, the Defiant
continued to give sterling service
as a trainer, target tug, electronic
warfare and air-sea rescue craft.
And they did have forward armament. If required the turret could
shoot its four machine guns
through 360 degrees.
If you are looking for a turkey
I suggest you take a look at
Britains other turret fighter, the
Blackburn Roc, which proved so
slow it could not catch up with
the bombers it was supposed to
shoot down and ended its brief
career parked around the perimeter of airfields to provide static
anti-aircraft defence.
Paul Bennett
Manchester
Further Reading
The article on shell shock in the
January 2016 issue (The Racket
and the Fear) was very interesting. May I refer readers wishing
to read further on this subject
to the Journal of Contemporary
Historys January 2000 issue on
the subject guest edited by Jay
Connect with us on Twitter

twitter.com/historytoday
Winter, and to the articles in our

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

The article on Attlee (InFocus,
February) reminded me of the
time he came to Edinburgh and
addressed a small crowd from
the steps outside the Church
of Scotland Assembly Hall (the
famous 39 Steps). A man stood
right behind him and, from my
position, I spotted that every
word spoken by Attlee was being
passed on to him by this shadowy
individual. Spin is not new.
Rev Bill Shackleton
Glasgow
Borrowed Cultures
In his article Romance and the
Romany (January), it is surprising that Jeremy Harte makes
no mention of George Borrow,
whose Lavengro (Romany for
tongue-master) appeared in
1851. In this semi-autobiographical work Borrow describes
various early meetings with
gypsies in Britain, as a result of
which he became interested in
their language, where he found
many similarities with other
languages with which he had
become familiar.
Subsequent to further meetings with gypsies while working
in Russia for the Bible Society
(Borrow was an ardent Protestant), he compiled a dictionary of
Romany, published in 1835, and
went on to document yet more
meetings with gypsies in Zincali
(1841), an account of gypsies in
Spain, which took place when
he was travelling in Iberia and
North Africa, again for the Bible
Society. These experiences gave

rise to another work, The Romany
Rye, which appeared in 1857.
Borrow was an inveterate
traveller and prodigious learner
of languages. During his childhood in Ireland, where his father
was garrisoned, he picked up
Irish Gaelic and later taught
himself Welsh, an unusual accomplishment for an Englishman
of the time. When he journeyed
around Wales, his mastery of the
language allowed him to discover
and then reveal much of the local
culture and history in his book
Wild Wales (1862), which is still
an exciting read. He is particularly compelling on the poetry
of Dafydd ap Gwilym, whom he
compares to Milton.
Borrow never settled down
to any real occupation and
resented the lack of recognition
he thought his work deserved.
Fortunately, interest in this
talented and idiosyncratic writer
is beginning to revive.
Colin Sowden
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire
Father Fiction
It is not a surprise to hear
Joseph Haydn called the father
of the symphony (Months
Past, January), but he was not.
About 1740 G.M. Monn, a
Viennese composer, had written
a symphony, with an allegro,
aria, minuet and final allegro.
Others who were in on its birth
included C.P.E. Bach, Karl Frederich Abel, Johann Stamitz and
George Matthias, all belonging
to the Mannheim and Viennese
school. Stamitz wrote dozens
of symphonies before his death
in 1757 the accredited date of
Haydns First Symphony is 1759
(although some musicologists
claim it is 1757).
There were also many others
and this long-standing myth
ought to be squashed.
Ernest H. Jackson
Vallensbaek, Denmark
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Coming Next Month

The Curious Case of
Roger Casement
A knighted protestant British diplomat

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

pioneered by the Portuguese at their North African port of Ceuta in
1415. In subsequent centuries, other major European powers followed
suit, using transportation both for the purposes of punishment and
settlement, establishing a large European presence across the world. The
impact of such migration routes is still felt today, says Clare Anderson,
who traces punitive passages from the 15th century until the 1960s.
Shakespeare Off the Map
Subscribe
www.historytoday.com/subscribe
Shakespeare was no good with a map. His plays feature a litany of

grievous geographical errors, including the seacoast of Bohemia and a
nautical voyage between the landlocked cities of Verona and Milan. Yet
he wrote at a time when, in England, historical and geographical
knowledge was more accessible than ever. Did the playwright not care
about geographical accuracy or did he do it on purpose? Dominic Green
argues that it was the latter.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, InFocus, From the
Januarys Prize Crossword
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The April issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK

on March 24th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winner for January is Eduardo Villamor, Ann Arbor,

Michigan, USA.
EDITORS LETTER: 2 Jane Bown/National Portrait Gallery, London. HISTORY MATTERS:

3 Bridgeman Images; 5 Portable Antiquities Scheme (Creative Commons); 6 Photographs by Dean
Nicholas; 7 Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Shutterstock. MONTHS PAST: 8 Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy;
9 top Alamy; bottom Bridgeman Images. MURDERER MOST EMINENT: 11 Art Gallery of South
Australia, Adelaide. South Australian Government Grant, 1967; 12 and 13 top National Portrait Gallery,
London; 13 bottom and 14 The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; 15 National Portrait Gallery,
London; 16 The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. FIVE CENTURIES OF STUFF: 18-19 Paul
Rushton/Alamy; 20 Royal Collection Trust Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images; 21
clockwise from top left: Couple, mustard pot and hands Bridgeman Images; Ming vase Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford/Bridgeman Images; 22 top Fashion Museum, Bath/Bridgeman Images; bottom
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 23 top Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom Paulig Group, Helsinki; 24
The Advertising Archives; 25 Images Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; 26 The Advertising Archives. OUT
OF THE MARGINS: 27 Eleanor Parker. INFOCUS: 28-29 Hulton Archive/Getty Images. PLAGUE AND
PREJUDICE: 31 Bridgeman Images; 32 Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images; 33
top akg-images; bottom Hawaiian Historical Society, collection #5410; 34 Bridgeman Images; 35
top Alamy; bottom Bibliothque Nationale, Paris/Bridgeman Images; 36 top Bridgeman Images;
bottom New York Historical Society/Bridgeman Images; 37 top Bridgeman Images; bottom PA
images. KING HENRY OF HAITI: 38 ILN/Mary Evans Picture Library; 40 Bridgeman Images. EDMUND
IRONSIDE: 41 Royal MS 14 B VI, f.4r and Royal MS 14 B VI, f.3r British Library; 42 Bridgeman Images;
43 courtesy Winchester Cathedral; 44 HT Archive; 45 MS Stowe 944, f.6, The Art Archive.THE
FIRST RETURN OF HALLEYS COMET: 46 akg-images. KIBBO KIFT KINDRED: 48 top Kibbo Kift
Foundation, courtesy of Judge Smith; bottom Stanley Dixon collection, thanks to Gill Dixon. Courtesy
of Tim Turner; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 49 Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of
London School of Economics Library; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 50 Lebrecht
Photo Library; 51 Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of Judge Smith; 52 Kibbo Kift Foundation/Museum
of London. Photography by John Chase; 53 top and bottom Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy LSE
Library; Photography by Paul Knight for Donlon Books; 54 Kibbo Kift Foundation/Museum of London;
Photography by John Chase. REVIEWS: 56 Musei Capitolini, Rome/Bridgeman Images; 59 Mounted
ewer and basin. Jingdezhen, China, late 16th century. Private collection. Photo by Laura Wulf. COMING
NEXT MONTH: 69 Getty Images. PASTIMES: 70 top English Credulity or the Invisible Ghost, c.1762;
middle Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1539; bottom Poseidon holding a trident. Corinthian
plaque, 550-525 BC. All images Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71
Alamy. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been
unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.
Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
1 Which was the only South-east
Asian state to avoid European
colonial rule during the 19th and
20th centuries?
22 The Generation of 98 was an

intellectual movement in which
country?
23 What did Martin Luther nail to
the door of All Saints Church,
Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517?
2 Who is the only divorcee to have

become British Prime Minister?
3 To what destination did the
London Necropolis Railway run?
24 The Nootka Sound Controversy

of 1789 was a near-conflict
between which two nations over a
harbour on Vancouver Island?
4 Founded as a state-owned
Soviet enterprise, what is Melodiya?
25 The Piasts were which countrys

first royal dynasty?
17 Once under British control, the
Mosquito Coast spanned which
two modern countries?
10 The Fatal Vespers of October

1623 was considered a sign of
Gods judgement against who?
18 Which anatomically inspired

nickname did Oliver Cromwell and
the 1st Duke of Wellington share?
11 Whose companions were listed

on the Battle Abbey Roll?
19 The fictional character of slave

Kunta Kinte was first popularised in
which novel?
12 When were frogmen, divers

who attached explosives to enemy
ships, first deployed?
13 Which festival did John Christie
found in 1934?
6 Who was the Flanders Mare?
7 The purported existence of what
attracted mass interest in Londons
Cock Lane in 1762?
8 Who, according to T.S. Eliot,
wrote the first, the longest, and
the best of modern English
detective novels?
14 C.J. Rouget de Lisle wrote the

words to which revolutionary
hymn in Strasbourg in 1792?
15 Ceded in 1999, what was the
last European colony in Asia?
16 Which European power ceded
control of it?
20 The Essex town of Thaxted was

an important medieval centre for
manufacture of what?
21 The Isthmian Games were held
in honour of which Greek god?
ANSWERS
9 Which mystic religious sect was

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

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

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

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 March 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

FRIEDRICH ENGELS
Friedrich Engels
(1820-95)
Stanley Baldwin
(1867-1947)
German philosopher and

industrialist, lived at different
times with two sisters as did
Three times British prime minister,

the only premier to serve under
three monarchs, whose first Lord
of the Admiralty was
John Collier
(1850-1934)
Leo Amery
(1873-1955)
English Pre-Raphaelite artist,

writer and portrait painter,
whose subjects included ...
Whose son, John Amery,

was a Nazi sympathiser and was
executed for treason in 1945 by
Angela Thirkell
(1890-1961)
English novelist, who set many of
her novels in Anthony Trollopes
fictional county Barsetshire and who
was first cousin once removed to
Albert Pierrepoint
(1905-92)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
Hangman and publican, who executed

over 400 people but began his working
life in a cotton mill, as did
MESMERISM
FromtheArchive
Many assumptions and values separate us from the Victorians, but belief in the supernatural is not
one of them, argues Simone Natale.
The Science of the Supernatural

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

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

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

scientific fact.
The questioning and inventive
gaze of historians such as Porter has
had a powerful impact on the way we
imagine modern and contemporary
societies and particularly the Victorian
age, often characterised as one of
supernatural and occult explorations.
In looking for the significance of this
body of work, however, we should not
imply that such explorations pertain
to a distant past. I am often asked why
spiritualism was so prominent in the
19th century and is so insignificant
today. I answer that this is simply not
true. Polls and social studies show that
belief in the supernatural is still widespread in many societies. Religious
faiths, drawing directly from spiritualisms doctrine, continue to attract
millions of believers in countries
such as Brazil. The present interest in
Victorian culture tells us something
about ourselves: we are intrigued by
Victorian society and culture because
it reflects elements of our own.
Simone Natale is the author of Supernatural
Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the
Rise of Modern Media Culture (Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2016).
VOLUME 35 ISSUE 9 SEPT 1985

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THE MURDER

RISE AND FALL OF

Publisher Andy Patterson

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

FROM THE EDITOR

2 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Language and Unity Watlington Hoard Cecil Rhodes Annual Awards

Should One Nation

FRANCE, 1794. With the Reign of

of women and the threat of violent

The leaders of the

their French, but to impart a sense

Without knowledge of the

ship. Most pertinently, it is worth

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

and concealed by Vikings, rather than

two emperors might have evoked

The Watlington hoard offers an

belong to each and which might be

Rory Naismith is Lecturer in Medieval History at

Longman-History Today Awards

OUR WORLD was shaped by empires.

Statues are not history they are

Here today: the

Oxford University. The students have

mark: Abbottabad in Pakistan, Livingstone in Zambia, Brazzaville in Congo.

Alex von Tunzelmanns latest book is Reel History:

MARCH 2nd 1316

young King Davids guardians sent him

protected his own interests and

MARCH 22nd 1916

of the republic, but he soon found

MARCH 29th 1866

John Keble dies in

CLERGYMAN, theologian and poet,

the assembly, he operated

English translations of early Christian

The accusation that James I was

HE VETERAN DIPLOMAT Sir Balthazar

George Villiers, Duke

FRUSTRATED AT THEIR inability to persuade Charles I to

draft a declaration justifying this dramatic decision that

T FIRST, few were seriously worried

distortion of Hamiltons corpse, which began to swell

with many soundings and pains, James exclaimed: O

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

Eglisham's pamphlet, 1626.

OYALISTS FULLY appreciated the danger posed by

14 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

The implication of these

coordinating their efforts from exile, the Royalists mounted

Commons had charged Buckingham and not Charles and

ALK OF THE MURDER of James I continued in

TORIES OF James Is murder were to long outlive

sight is frivolous, but thorough investigation revealed it to

The notion that Greed is Good was not born in

E LIVE IN A WORLD overflowing with things. British

18 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

Junk shop in Upper

20 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

restrained consumption in these prosperous societies. Big spending was

T WAS IN north-west Europe, in the Netherlands and Britain, that a

Clockwise from above: couple in a US

MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 21