History Today 12-2014

December 2014
Vol 64 Issue 12
MURDER
in the
Cathedral
Why the Church of
Henry VIII faked a City
merchants suicide
WAR TOYS THEN AND NOW

How playing soldiers helps children
to understand the past
BLACK DEATH TO EBOLA

Is quarantine any more effective
today than it was in the Middle Ages?
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Publishing Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte
Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Chairman
Simon Biltcliffe
CONTACTS
History Today is published monthly by
History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn,
London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810
enquiries@historytoday.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Tel: 020 3219 7813/4
subscribe@historytoday.com
ADVERTISING
Lisa Martin, Portman Media
Tel: 020 7079 9361
lisamartin@portmanmedia.co.uk
Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321.
Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.
Distributed by MarketForce 020 3148 3539 (UK &
RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America).
History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246580) is published monthly by History Today Ltd,
GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA,
17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals
postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional
mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes
to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft
PA 19032. Subscription records are maintained
at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn,
London WC1V 7QH, UK.
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde
Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge
Professor Richard Bessel University of York
Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter
Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor
of the Open University
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen
Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex
Juliet Gardiner Historian and author
Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South
Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary,
University of London
Professor Geoffrey Parker
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston
London School of Economics
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
University of London
Dr David Starkey
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter
Professor Chris Wrigley
University of Nottingham
All written material, unless otherwise stated,
is the copyright of History Today
Total Average Net Circulation

19,551 Jan-Dec 2013
2 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014
FROM THE EDITOR
No more heroes:
Gillian Wearings
A Real Birmingham
Family.
THE FIRST STATUE of Horatio Nelson was erected not in Londons Trafalgar Square
but in Birmingham, in 1809. It has been fiddled with and moved since then and now
stands between Selfridges and the spruced up Bull Ring shopping centre. Nelson was
born in Norfolk, a long way from Birmingham, a city with little maritime heritage,
but he made a splash when he visited the bustling town, as it then was, in August
1802, enough to inspire the locals to raise 2,500 to commemorate his heroics.
Brummies are famously self-deprecating, which may be why it took until 1956
for the second city to celebrate heroes of its own. That year, a gilded bronze statue,
known locally as the Golden Boys, was unveiled in honour of three great pioneers
of the Industrial Revolution: William Murdoch, James Watt and Matthew Boulton.
Murdoch and Watt were Scots, who came to live and work in Birmingham in the 18th
century, pioneering the use of steam engines and gas lighting, among numerous other
advances. Boulton, a native of the city, was the business brains, the entrepreneur,
whose Soho Manufactory, in the Handsworth area of the city, built the products that
the likes of Watt and Murdoch devised. Boultons home nearby, Soho House, hosted
the Lunar Society, the dinner club attended by Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin
and Joseph Priestley, which gave voice to the Midlands Enlightenment.
It seems right that we celebrate such figures, though there is much less eagerness
today to vaunt the military, despite Britains seemingly endless participation in
conflict. Even scientists are relatively undersung; there is a park bench statue in
Manchester, raised in 2001, of Alan Turing, the computing genius whose cracking
of German wartime codes was of immeasurable worth, though his homosexuality
and its persecution, thankfully unthinkable today, at least in the civilised world,
often seems of greater import. The shift in attitudes away from the great and good is
underlined by a prominent new statue in Birmingham, the work of Gillian Wearing.
A Real Birmingham Family depicts local sisters Roma and Emma Jones and their
young sons Kyan and Shaye. It celebrates what they are ordinary rather than what
they have achieved. Perhaps the most significant thing about the statue is that it was
not, as once so many things were, Made in Birmingham, but in China.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Exodus Happiness Hogarth Hitler
Deliverance: Battle
at the Milvian
Bridge by Pieter
Lastman, 17th
century.
Let My
People Go!
Hollywood offers a new

version of the Exodus story,
the Wests most enduring
political narrative.
John Coffey
THE RELEASE of Ridley Scotts Hollywood blockbuster, Exodus: Gods and
Kings (2014), highlights the enduring
appeal of the Old Testaments most
spectacular story. Yet few appreciate
the extraordinary reception history of
Exodus. From Constantine to Martin
Luther King, it has been among the
most potent narratives in the western
political imagination.
The early Christians adopted a
spiritual or typological reading of

Exodus. Humans were in Egyptian
bondage to sin; Christ was a new
Moses who redeemed his people
from slavery; the Passover
was a type of Calvary, where
he shed his blood; the passage
through the Red Sea symbolised
deliverance from the Pharaoh
Satan; the Wilderness was a
picture of this life, with its
wanderings and woes; death was
crossing the Jordan; the Land of
Canaan was an earthly foreshadowing of Heaven. This has remained the
primary meaning of Exodus in Christian liturgy, hymnody and preaching.
In the fourth century, however,
Christians started to read Exodus
politically. The dramatic conversion
of the Emperor Constantine rescued
the early Church from the Diocletian
persecution. Eusebius of Caesarea
hailed Constantine as a new Moses.

His victory at the Milvian Bridge in
ad 312 was another crossing of the
Red Sea. He was leading the new Israel
to a Promised Land of milk and honey.
For centuries to come, Christian rulers
and their propagandists would enlist
Exodus to burnish their image. Even
Machiavelli would end The Prince
(1513) by calling on the Medici to play
the part of Moses and liberate Italy
from the barbarian yoke.
In the Protestant Reformation,
with its relentless appeal to the Bible,
there was a sharp intensification
of Exodus politics. Martin Luther
was presented as a latter-day Moses,
delivering the Church from popish
bondage. Calvinists developed a
particularly close identification with
the oppressed children of Israel and
in the 1550s and 1560s they became
embroiled in a series of uprisings in
France, the Netherlands and Scotland.
During the Dutch Revolt, William
of Orange was portrayed as Moses
and the Exodus story was used as
patriotic scripture in sermons, songs,
engravings, paintings and the stage.
As Elizabeth I brought the Marian
persecution to an end and
John Knox led the Scottish
Reformation, the title page
of the Geneva Bible of 1560
bore a striking image of the
Israelites pinned against
the Red Sea by Pharaohs
horses and chariots, with
Jehovahs pillar of cloud in
the distance. The Exodus
was being used to forge a
Protestant national identity. After the
Spanish Armada was scattered by a
terrible storm in 1588, the commemorative medal bore a text from the
song of Moses and Miriam at the Red
Sea: Jehovah blew with his wind and
they were scattered.
In the English Revolution of the
mid-17th century Exodus was mobilised on a grand scale by the parlia-
In the Reformation,
with its relentless
appeal to the Bible,
there was a sharp
intensification of
Exodus politics
DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
mentarians. Oliver Cromwell told Parliament in 1654 that the deliverance of

the Hebrews offered the only parallel
to Englands experience during the
Civil Wars. England had been liberated
from civil and ecclesiastical bondage
and was making its painful progress
through the Wilderness towards the
Promised Land. The Royalist riposte to
Puritan Exodus politics was displayed
in a medal struck to celebrate the
Restoration: Charles II appears as the
young prince of Egypt returning to
smite the Puritan taskmasters. When
his brother, the Roman Catholic James
II, was removed from the throne in
1688, there was a new wave of Exodus
sermons, now praising William and
Mary as Moses and Miriam.
In the American Revolution, Exodus
was cited once again to justify political
revolt. Tom Paine dubbed George
III the sullen tempered Pharaoh of
Britain. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin suggested Moses at the
Red Sea as a design for the Great Seal
of the United States. This Exodus rhetoric backfired. American complaints
about metaphorical enslavement by
the British drew unwelcome attention
to the all-too-literal enslavement of
black bodies. Anti-slavery voices in
both Britain and the US denounced
the hypocrisy of white America. Black
writers on both sides of the Atlantic
now seized on the Exodus story, locating themselves within it as the new
children of Israel. For the first time in
history, writes the historian John Saillant, slaves had a book on their side.
In the decades to come, Exodus
would be a key text for Anglo-American abolitionists and black preachers
and activists, powerfully informing
Protestant debates over slavery. The
leaders of slave revolts hoped to
re-enact the Exodus. Escape from
the Southern states to the North
was imagined as a flight from Egypt.
Harriet Tubman, a conductor on the
Underground Railroad, was celebrated
as a black Moses. Spirituals such as Go
Down Moses described America as
Egyptland and told old Pharaoh, Let
my people go!. Ironically, Southern
Confederates denounced Abraham
Lincoln as a Pharaoh, but his Emancipation Proclamation was welcomed by
blacks as a Mosaic deliverance.
Like the Israelites, however,

African-Americans discovered that
liberation could be a false dawn. Segregationist America could still seem
like Egyptland, a Wilderness, a land of
wanderings. Only in the marches and
rallies of the Civil Rights Movement
did black Americans acquire a new
sense of momentum. On the night
before his assassination, Martin Luther
King electrified an audience gathered
in a Memphis church by speaking as
Moses to his people:
Weve got some difficult days ahead. But
it doesnt matter with me now. Because
Ive been to the mountaintop And Ive
looked over. And Ive seen the promised
land. I may not get there with you. But I
want you to know tonight, that we, as a
people will get to the promised land.
When Barack Obama ran for the
presidency four decades later, he would
tell black audiences that the Joshua
Generation was ready to complete
what the Moses Generation had
begun. The heirs of Emancipation and
the Civil Rights Movement were finally
poised to possess the land of Canaan, or
at least the White House. As in the days
of Constantine, Exodus inspired visions
of deliverance and empowerment.
John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History
at the University of Leicester and the author of
Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from
John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr (Oxford
University Press, 2014).
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
The Changing
Nature of
Happiness
Revisiting one of the first
historical studies in the
developing science of
well-being.
Sandie McHugh and
Jerome Carson
THE current preoccupation with
happiness, manifested, for example,
in the Office of National Statistics
now adding questions on happiness
to their household surveys, is not as
recent as many experts would have
us believe. Indeed Darrin McMahon
provides a scholarly historical overview
of the field of happiness in his book,
Happiness: A History (2006). McMahon
traces the origins of the concept back
to Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and
others and on through the centuries
to the more recent involvement in the
field of happiness of economists and
psychologists, rather than philosophers
and theologians. Our own interest in
the topic was partly stimulated by our
discovery of one of the first purportedly scientific studies of happiness,
conducted as part of Mass Observations Worktown, in the Lancashire
town of Bolton in 1938. We describe
the background to the 1938 study and
then contrast the findings from this
with our own replication of the original
Worktown study. We end by making
some general observations on the
concept of happiness.
An ugly place, said J.B. Priestley of
Bolton and contemporary photographs
show a smoggy industrial town, its
skyline dominated by tall chimneys.
Despite the depression of the 1930s,
Bolton still had 200 cotton mills,
engineering and mining industries
and its unemployed rate of 15 per cent
was lower than many other declining
industrial centres. Public works, such as
the construction of Le Mans Crescent,
an extension to the town hall and the
building of some new housing eased
the effect of contracting industries.
So, with beautiful countryside on the
HISTORYMATTERS
doorstep, it was not all industrial toil

and gloom. The expansion of pleasure
opportunities in the interwar period
benefited those with a little cash to
spare: the first Butlins holiday camp
opened in 1936. Bolton boasted six
dance halls, 300 pubs, 47 cinemas and a
freestyle wrestling stadium within a fivemile radius of the town centre. From
1933 special Dance Trains transported
Boltonians for a day trip or evening at
Blackpools Tower Ballroom to let their
hair down. Mills had staggered closures,
enabling the workforce to decamp to
Blackpool to enjoy its seaside attractions.
Mass Observation had a team based
there in 1937. Closer to home, the 200
churches and chapels in Bolton not
only provided religious services, but also
social activities and events.
Mass Observation ran a series of
competitions to solicit the views and
attitudes of ordinary people. On March
28th, 1938 people in Bolton were invited
to give their opinion on happiness
and the 226 letter writers were sent a
questionnaire. Ten qualities of life were
specified and correspondents ranked
them in order of importance. They were
asked if it was easier to be happier in
Blackpool or Bolton, at weekends or
midweek, how often they were happy
and whether luck played a part.
In February 2014 the Bolton News
invited readers to take part in a web
survey, a re-run of this competition. The
original questionnaire was adapted to be
more representative of discourse in 2014,
while retaining as much of the original
meaning as possible. In 21st-century
Bolton, service, hi-tech, electronics and
data processing have largely replaced
heavy industry. Warburtons bakers,
founded in 1876, have their headquarters
in the town, but textiles and paper manufacture remain very small scale. Today
Boltonians enjoy a material standard of
living, consumer products and leisure
opportunities that residents in 1938
would find astonishing. Globalisation
and technological advances have transformed personal communication. Higher
standards of housing, a universal benefit
system, the NHS and access to education from primary to university level are
now available to ordinary people. These
welcome improvements bring different
challenges and some commentators
Feet off the

ground: holidaymakers enjoy
a heatwave on
Blackpool beach,
1934.
claim people have become alienated

consumer junkies, with the good life
bringing unsustainable debt burdens and
stress for some. The debate continues
about the essence of happiness and the
effect of technological and economic
change on well-being.
What did happiness mean to Bolton
in 1938 and has its meaning changed
in 76 years? The majority in 1938 were
happiest in Bolton, whereas in 2014 63
per cent are happier away from the
town. The growth in the popularity of
weekends is reflected in the increase
What did happiness mean to

Bolton in 1938 and has this
changed in 76 years?
from around a quarter (1938) to 41 per
cent of residents reporting weekends as
a happier time for them. The majority at
both dates (56 per cent in 2014) stated
their happiness was the same at weekends or weekdays. As to the role of luck,
in 1938 20 per cent believed that it did
influence happiness, increasing to 42 per
cent in 2014. Although economic security
was ranked top in 1938, respondents
were under no illusion that by itself
material wealth would bring happiness.
Many of the letters refer to enough to
meet everyday needs. In 2014 76 per

cent of respondents said no when
asked if happiness was linked to material possessions. The main differences
in 2014 from 1938 were in the position
of religion, leisure and good humour.
Politics and leadership are ranked low
in importance in both periods.
What do we know about these
residents? Most were employed (70 per
cent in 1938, 67 per cent in 2014) and
there were more women (59 per cent
in 1939, 65 per cent in 2014).
The Mass Observation happiness
competition was completed against a
background of what we now recognise
as momentous world events, as Hitler
drove into Vienna and Franco gained
the upper hand in Spain. Elsewhere,
Walt Disney released the first featurelength cartoon film and nearby Preston
North End won the FA Cup. How
much external matters affect happiness is difficult to ascertain. The overall
impression from the correspondence
in 1938 is that happiness factors were
rooted in everyday lives at home and
within the community. In 2014 many
comments value family and friends,
with good humour and leisure time
also ranked highly.
The Mass Observation team did
not appreciate the significance of its
work. The Worktown Archive gives
us insights into everyday life in the
wonderful letters many people wrote
at the time. Boltonians then rated
security, knowledge and religion as
the most important contributors to
their happiness. Some 76 years later,
good humour and more leisure were
rated above security. The most striking
difference was the decline in the
perceived importance of religion, which
dropped from third to last on our list. It
is mirrored in declining church attendance. Happiness is, of course, more
complex than the Mass Observation
team realised. They neglected the
importance of relationships, along with
social and cultural factors. However, its
early research was among the first in
developing a science of happiness and
for that we must be grateful.
Sandie McHugh is Research Associate in

psychology at the University of Bolton, where
Jerome Carson is Professor of Psychology.
HISTORYMATTERS
Hogarths
New Britain
The painters reaction to

the Jacobite Rebellion is
more than mere satire.
Jacqueline Riding
IN THE winter of 1745 Prince Charles
Edward Stuarts attempt to overthrow
the House of Hanover and restore the
House of Stuart to the thrones of Great
Britain and Ireland seemed unstoppable. On September 21st the only British
troops available to crush the nascent
rebellion in Scotland were routed by a
predominantly Highland Jacobite army
at the Battle of Prestonpans. By late
November Bonnie Prince Charlie and his
troops had marched south to Manchester, while two armies commanded
by Prince William Augustus, Duke of
Cumberland and Field Marshal George
Wade were attempting to stop their
advance. On December 4th Charles and
his army entered Derby, about 120 miles
north of London. Two days later, on
what became known as Black Friday,
news reached the capital. Orders were
issued that all Grenadier Guards should
march immediately to the encampment
at Finchley Common. If Cumberland and
Wade failed in their task, these troops
would be the last barrier between the
Stuart prince and London.
This is the starting point for William
Hogarths The March of the Guards to
Finchley. However, it is not intended
as an accurate depiction of events on
Black Friday; there is an element of
satire, directed chiefly at an unprepared
British government and army, within
the chaotic scene at Tottenham Court
turnpike. But satire is not Hogarths sole
aim. After all, it was painted between
1749 and 1750, in the knowledge of the
defeat and aftermath of the rebellion,
when the old Highland clan system, seen
as the lifeblood of the Stuart cause in
Scotland, was dismantled. The Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748 ended
hostilities between Britain and France,
so that no French-sponsored attempt
to restore the Stuarts was now likely.
The treaty also specified that the Stuarts,
Charles (then in Paris) in particular,
should be expelled from French territory.
By 1750, then, the Jacobite threat seemed

to have passed.
A commentary originally in French,
written by Hogarths friend Andr
Rouquet, offers an alternative view of
the mayhem within the composition:
extremely different; they are even of opposite

Parties, for the one disposes of Works in
favour of the Government, and the other
against it.
Discipline is less observed in the principal

Design, but if you complain of this I must
ingenuously inform you, that Order and
Subordination belong only to Slaves; for what
every where else is called Licentiousness,
assumes here the venerable Name of Liberty.
The display of collective and individual
unruliness is symbolic of the liberties of
the British people. The orderly column of
grenadiers seen marching northwards
in the distance, shows that boisterous
Britons will become disciplined defenders
of their liberties when the need arises.
Yet despite the crushing of the 45

and the treaty with France, Hogarth
signals to his countrymen to remain
vigilant. Beneath the sign of the Adam
and Eve tavern, to the left, a different
sort of serpent, in the guise of a foppish
Frenchman, whispers of an imminent
invasion to an ecstatic or demented Jacobite sympathiser. To the right of these
conspirators, in the central foreground
of the composition, is a young grenadier.
According to Rouquet:
he is accompanied, or rather seized and beset
by two Women, one of whom is a BalladSinger, and the other a News-Hawker; they
are both with Child, and claim this Hero as
the Father and except this Circumstance they
have nothing in common, for their Figures,
their Humours, their Characters appear
Call to liberty:
The March of the
Guards to Finchley.
The woman standing to the left gazes

up at him with doleful eyes, hand placed
on her swollen belly. Her song sheet,
next to a print of the Duke of Cumberland, reads God Save our Noble King.
She is a supporter of the Protestant
settlement, embodied by the House of
Hanover. The other woman, her face
contorted in zealous rage, grasps the
grenadiers arm with her left hand, while
raising a rolled-up newspaper with the
other. The Jacobite Journal protrudes from
her knapsack and a cross is visible on
her back. She is a Catholic supporter of
the Stuarts. In turn the young grenadier is a representation of the
new nation of Great Britain,
with the Union flag just behind
him. Collectively, this group
symbolises the dynastic struggle
for the soul of this fledgling
state. The Jacobite wields the
Remembrancer, an anti-government paper, which serves as
a reminder of Britains former
loyalty to her. The fact that she
is about to assault the grenadier
with it demonstrates that she is
willing to use violence and force
to assert her rights over him.
The younger woman simply and
tearfully indicates to the future
and their unborn child.
After the 45 Prince Charles
continued to liaise with Jacobites in
Britain and, in the year that Hogarth
was completing his March to Finchley,
he made a secret visit to London to
discuss a new campaign. Standing near
the Kings Head tavern (right), in the
shadow of the sign depicting Charles
II, is a tall, pale young gentleman who
gazes northward, oblivious of the rabble
around him. Perhaps this figure is a
covert allusion to another Charles Stuart,
still determined to return from exile.
But he may be too late. Despite the
haranguing Jacobite, the young Briton
and his comely mistress appear to be
moving forward together in step: Britain
has already made up its mind.
Jacqueline Riding is author of the forthcoming

Jacobites (Bloomsbury, 2015).
HISTORYMATTERS
Fhrer fake: Hitler

leaves what is not
Landsberg Prison.
Calling time on Hitlers Hoax

A 90-year-old photograph
of the future dictator
soon after leaving prison
still manages to fool the
worlds media outlets.
Roger Moorhouse
IT IS one of the most famous images of
Adolf Hitlers much-documented life.
The future dictator of Germany poses
rather stiffly by the running board of
a Mercedes, in a buttoned and belted
mackintosh, his hair slicked across his
head, his trademark toothbrush moustache neatly clipped. Behind him stands
a dark medieval gateway.
The picture was taken 90 years
ago, on December 20th, 1924, to mark
Hitlers release from Landsberg Prison
in Bavaria, where he had spent nine
months of a five-year sentence for
treason and where he had penned his
manifesto-cum-autobiography, Mein
Kampf. Taken by Hitlers photographer,
Heinrich Hoffmann, it was intended to
announce his release to Germany and
the wider world, to proclaim that Hitler
was back.
Circulated to the worlds press that
day, the picture carried the caption
Hitler leaving Landsberg Prison,
written by Hoffmann himself. It quickly
became a well-known image, with

Hitler even re-enacting the scene for
Hoffmann after his appointment as
Chancellor in 1933. Yet, as so often, the
picture is not all that it seems.
Landsberg fortress still stands today
and is still a prison, but it has never had
a grand medieval gate like the one in
the picture; indeed, it was only opened
in 1910. The gate shown is, in fact, the
elegant late-Gothic Bayertor, southern-most entrance to the old town of
Landsberg, a kilometre away across the
River Lech. Why, then, the switch?
The story goes that Hoffmann, who
had travelled from Munich to collect
In an age when the vast majority of

politicians were blissfully ignorant
of such apparently ephemeral
matters, Hoffmans picture marked
the dawning of a new era
Hitler upon his release, had naturally
wanted to record the event for posterity, but had been forbidden from doing
so by a prison guard, who threatened
to confiscate his camera if he persisted.
Frustrated, Hoffmann drove the short
distance to the Bayertor and got Hitler
to pose for the photo there. As he con-
fessed in his later memoir, he made the

decision simply because the location offered something of the fortress
atmosphere.
The worlds press swallowed the
deception wholesale, with some
even embellishing the story with
headlines such as The Fortress Gate
has Opened, even though the real
fortress had no gate at all. Ever since,
journalists, historians, archivists and
students have followed suit, taking
Hoffmanns caption at face value and
erroneously assuming that the fortress-like gateway in the background
of the photograph is the entrance to
the prison.
It is a minor point, of course; a
small corrective to an infinitely larger
and more important story. But it does,
nonetheless, illustrate a key aspect of
that wider tale. It shows Hitler, and
Hoffmann, not only as being acutely
aware of the political importance of
the image, but moreover willing to
bend the truth in the process. In an age
when the vast majority of politicians
were blissfully ignorant of such apparently ephemeral matters, Hoffmanns
picture marked the dawning of a new
era. It was the opening salvo in a concerted campaign of what we would
today call image management, by
which Hitler and Hoffmann meticulously crafted the public image of the
Fhrer. It was a campaign that would
continue throughout the 1920s and on
to the very last days of the Third Reich.
Whats most remarkable, perhaps,
is that the petty fiction that Hoffmann
concocted that December day in 1924
is still with us, trotted out by editors
and picture archives the world over
and still repeated ad nauseam on the
myriad pages of the Internet. Perhaps
now, 90 years on, it is finally time to
consign this small piece of Nazi propaganda to the dustbin of history.
Roger Moorhouse is the author of His Struggle:

Adolf Hitler in Landsberg, 1924 (Endeavour Press,
2014).
MonthsPast
DECEMBER
By Richard Cavendish
DECEMBER 31st 1514
Andreas Vesalius
born in Brussels
The great Renaissance scientist is
regarded as the founder of the modern
study of human anatomy. His name
in Flemish was Andries Van Wesel.
The Brussels in which he grew up and
went to school, in the former duchy
of Brabant, was ruled by the Spanish
Habsburgs and his father was pharmacist, or drug specialist, to the Emperor
Charles V. At 15, in 1529 he was sent to
the University of Louvain and at 19 in
1533 he went to the medical school at
the University of Paris, where he studied
human bones from cemeteries and
dissected some human bodies. He went
back to Louvain in 1536 and then in the
following year to Italy and the University of Padua, which had a tradition of
encouraging freedom of thought and
experiment. Copernicus had studied
there and later Galileo was professor of
mathematics. William Harvey, discoverer
of the circulation of the blood, was one
of its graduates in medicine.
Vesalius made such an impression
in Padua that the day after receiving his
doctorate in medicine he was appointed
to lecture on surgery and anatomy. He
dissected human cadavers and created
anatomical charts of the human body
to help his students. The parts of the
body were labelled in a mixture of
Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew. He
also published a textbook on dissection
and a book on an improved method
of blood-letting, then widely used in
medical treatment. His appointment
to the medical faculty was renewed in
1539 with a substantial increase in his
salary and a note that his students held
him in profound admiration. A judge in
the criminal court in Padua had become
so interested in Vesalius work that he
started supplying him with the bodies
of executed criminals, which gave the
anatomist more corpses to work on.
Sometimes a prisoners execution was
delayed to suit Vesalius workload.
Vesalius was coming to see that

current theory was far too heavily dependent on Galen, the Greek anatomist
of the second century ad, who had
been physician to the Roman emperors
Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus.
Galen had learned much from treating
injured gladiators and had dissected the
bodies of animals, but dissecting human
bodies was forbidden in the Roman
Empire. Galen was a pagan, but he
believed there was only one God, which
helped to make his books accepted as
authoritative all through the Christian
centuries in the Middle Ages.
Vesalius dissections convinced him
that much of Galens teaching about
human bodies had been based on dissections of monkeys and was misleading.
He once remarked that very little was
being currently offered to students of
In the raw: an
illustration from
Vesalius De
humani corporis
fabrica libri septem,
Basel, 1543.
anatomy that could not be better taught

by a butcher in his shop. In 1542 he went
to Venice to oversee, probably in Titians
studio, the preparation of drawings to
illustrate what proved to be his huge
major work, De humani corporis fabrica libri
septem (Seven Books on the Structure of
the Human Body), which was published
in 1543. The Fabrica dealt with the bones,
the muscles, the nervous system, the
liver and kidneys, the heart and the
blood vessels, the reproductive organs,
the skull and the brain. After some
initial doubts, it was hugely admired
and frequently reprinted, as a far more
accurate and comprehensive treatment
of human anatomy than any previous
work. He presented a copy to Charles V,
who appointed him as a physician to the
imperial court.
In 1544 Vesalius married Anne von
Hamme, who came from a rich Brussels
family and bore him a daughter. His
position at Charles Vs court was a mixed
blessing, involving him in wearisome
consultations with the emperor and
other patients about boring routine
ailments, but after Charles abdicated in
1555 Vesalius went to be a court physician to Philip II of Spain in Madrid. He
took every opportunity he could to teach
anatomy and carry out post-mortems
and, serving with the imperial army,
he introduced effective new surgical
techniques to treat wounds. Such was
his reputation that when Henry II of
France was severely injured in the head
in a joust in 1559 it was Vesalius who
was summoned urgently to take charge,
though he was not able to save the
kings life.
Vesalius decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1564, going by
way of Venice and Cyprus. It is not clear
whether he reached Palestine or not,
but either on the way there or on the
way back he fell so seriously ill that he
was put ashore on the Greek island of
Zakinthos, then under Venetian control.
He died there in 1564, aged 49, and it
was probably there that he was buried.
There is no report of anyone attempting
to dissect him.
DECEMBER 8th 1864
The Clifton Suspension

Bridge opened
Isambard Kingdom Brunel has been
described as a titan in an age of titans.
He built the Great Western Railway as
well as the first transatlantic steamship and later the biggest ship in the
world. He designed railway stations,
docks, tunnels and bridges and his
Above and
beyond: the
opening of the
Clifton Suspension
Bridge, Illustrated
London News,
December 17th,
1864.
best works have a magical blend of

efficiency and beauty. That is true
of his spectacular bridge across the
Avon Gorge west of Bristol, with the
river rolling 245ft (75m) below at high
water. It is somehow not surprising
that it is a magnet for suicides.
A competition to design a bridge
across the gorge was announced in
1829. Brunel, then in his early twenties, hastened to submit designs. The
competition was judged by Thomas
Telford, another engineering titan,
who rejected all the entries and said
that Brunels proposed spans for
the bridge were far too long to be
practical. He was asked for a design
of his own instead, but it was much
too expensive and a new competition
with different judges was held in 1831.
To his delight, Brunel was declared
the winner.
Work on the bridge did not properly begin until 1836 because of shortage
of money and other complications.
To carry building materials across, an
iron bar 1,000ft-long was fixed over
the gorge with a basket suspended
beneath it. On its first trial the bar fell
into the river. When it was fixed up
again, according to one story, Brunel
insisted on riding across in the basket
and when it got stuck halfway over

he somehow clawed himself up to the
bar and freed it. The basket, it is said,
became a magnet for daringly romantic proposals of marriage.
The towers at each end of the
bridge were built, but money ran out
again and work stopped in 1843. It
was still not completed when Brunel
died in 1859 at the age of 53. The
Institution of Civil Engineers decided
that completing the bridge would
be the best possible tribute to his
memory. Fresh money was raised
and the bridge was finished at last
in 1864. A crowd of around 150,000
people gathered to watch the formal
opening ceremony, with a massive
procession of soldiers marching out
from the centre of Bristol played
along by 16 bands with flags flying
everywhere.
Between the two towers, which
stand 85ft (26m) high, the bridge has
a span of roughly 700ft (214m), which
is far longer than Telfords suggested
maximum. Although it was intended
for horse-drawn traffic, it was so efficiently designed that it now carries
more than 10,000 vehicles a day, as
well as cyclists and pedestrians. It is
run by a charitable trust.
seen in English-made films, Fire Over

England and A Yank at Oxford. He was
determined to get Clark Gable for the
crucial role of Rhett Butler and succeeded after negotiations with his fatherin-law, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, which
lent him Gable and contributed over
$1 million to the budget in return for a

half share of the profits. The principal
director was Victor Fleming, though after
a time he collapsed from exhaustion.
Filming lasted from January 1939,
when the scene of the burning of Atlanta
was shot, to the end of June, with
post-production work running on into
November. Selznick said the responses
from preview audiences were probably
the most amazing any picture had ever
received. The premiere in Atlanta drew a
million people to the city and in 1940 the
film won a then record haul of Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, Best
Actress for Vivien Leigh, Best Director
for Fleming and Best Supporting Actress
for Hattie McDaniel, the first ever Oscar
for a black American actor, who played
Scarletts maid Mammy. It is estimated
that in its first four years in the US Gone
With the Wind sold 60 million tickets to
the equivalent of half the population.
DECEMBER 15th 1939
Premiere of Gone
With the Wind
Clothed in superlatives, it is one of the
best-loved films ever made and still reportedly, after allowing for inflation, the
most profitable. Sidney Howards script
was so long that the movie would have
lasted more than six hours and even
revised by an army of writers it ran well
over three hours and had to be shown
with an interval.
Margaret Mitchells Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel of the Deep South
and the American Civil War came out
in 1936. The film rights were snapped
up by the Hollywood producer David
O. Selznick. Hundreds of women were
considered to play the heroine, Scarlett
OHara, until Selznick settled on the
22-year-old Vivien Leigh, who he had
Burning desire:
1939 US poster
for Gone With
the Wind.
RICHARD HUNNE
Death at
St Pauls
Richard Dale investigates the mysterious death of Richard

Hunne, one of the most notorious episodes of the English
Reformation, and reveals what really happened in Lollards
Tower by old St Pauls half a millennium ago this month.
IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, early in the morning

of Monday December 4th, 1514, an assistant gaoler
named Peter Turner entered the cathedral close of
the old St Pauls. He was to attend to the one inmate
then held in Lollards Tower, the Bishop of Londons prison,
which adjoined the cathedral. In the company of two
church officials, Turner ascended the winding stone staircase and unlocked the cell door. There he found the prisoner
hanging by his own belt with his face to the wall.
The body was that of Richard Hunne, a liveryman of the
Merchant Taylors Company, a prosperous London citizen,
highly respected within his community and among his
fellow tradesmen. His death while in the custody of the
bishop, Richard Fitzjames, spread alarm among the London
populace, where anti-clerical feelings were already running
high. There were rumours of foul play but the Church
authorities insisted that Hunne had committed suicide

(felo de se) and in order to lay the matter to rest the bishop
decided to try Hunnes corpse on a charge of heresy.
The trial was held over several days in the week beginning December 11th. Witnesses were called and the prize
exhibit displayed for all to see was Hunnes Wycliffe Bible,
with its notorious prologue that cast doubt on the miracle
of the sacrament of the altar. On Saturday December 16th
Fitzjames pronounced a verdict of guilty against the body of
Hunne and a mandate requesting the Crown to implement
punishment was dispatched to Westminster Palace. On December 20th the remains of the convicted man were carried
to Smithfield and consigned to the flames.
However, the furore unleashed by Hunnes suspicious
death would not die down. The Lord Mayor, George
Monoux, had instructed the coroner to empanel a jury to
The Murder of
Richard Hunne in
a woodcut from
a 16th-century
edition of John
Foxes Acts and
Monuments.
investigate the cause of death and 24 citizens from local

wards were duly sworn in. After examining the body in
situ and receiving evidence from witnesses, including a
confession from one Charles Joseph, a church official in
the employ of the Bishops Chancellor, Dr Horsey, they
concluded that Hunne had been murdered and the body
hung up to look like suicide. The alleged perpetrators were
Horsey, Joseph and the prison gaoler, John Spalding, against
whom indictments were issued. But there was a further
unspoken implication: that none other than the Bishop
of London, Fitzjames, had been the prime mover in the
murder of Hunne.
SO GREAT WAS THE threat to the churchs reputation that
Fitzjames appealed to Thomas Wolsey, the newly appointed
Archbishop of York, to halt legal proceedings against his
Old St Pauls,
destroyed in the
Great Fire of
1666. Its spire had
collapsed during a
storm in 1561.
chancellor and have the case examined by independent

councillors. Henry VIII became involved and called a series
of conferences to discuss the case and the wider issues
of clerical privilege and the jurisdiction of church courts.
The final conference at Baynards Castle was attended by
councillors, judges, bishops and Members of Parliament and
presided over by the king.
A compromise was eventually reached, whereby Horsey
submitted himself before the Court of Kings Bench on a
charge of murder. By acknowledging the authority of the
royal courts, the Church opened the way for the king to
instruct his Attorney General to accept Horseys plea of
not guilty and to dismiss the case against all three accused.
Horsey was then removed from London to Exeter, where he
lived out his years in exile.
Hunnes clash with the Church authorities had begun
RICHARD HUNNE
Baynards Castle,
site of Henry VIIIs
final conference
on the Hunne
case. Engraving,
17th century.
in 1511 with the death of his five-week-old son, Stephen.

When he took the corpse for burial to St Mary Matfellon in
Whitechapel, the parson, Thomas Dryfield, demanded as
his traditional mortuary fee the most valuable possession
of the deceased, in this case the infants christening robe.
Hunne refused to comply with the request, arguing that a
deceased infant could own nothing and that the robe was
rightfully his fathers property.
On April 26th, 1512 Hunne was cited before the
Archbishops Court of Audience in Lambeth. This was was
presided over by the future Bishop of London Cuthbert
Tunstall, who upheld Dryfields claim and required Hunne
either to surrender his dead sons gown or else to pay its
estimated value of six shillings and eightpence, roughly
equivalent to ten times the daily wage of a skilled artisan.
Hunne remained obdurate. On December 27th, 1512 he
and some friends attended the church of St Mary Matfellon

to celebrate the feast of St John the Evangelist, December
27th. The service was being conducted by parson Dryfields
chaplain, Henry Marshall, and when the chaplain saw
Hunne he denounced him, stopped the service and refused
to continue until Hunne and his party had left, which they
did. However, Hunne immediately brought an action for
slander against Marshall in the Court of Kings Bench.
The suit was heard on January 25th, 1513, but then adjourned until April. It was at this point that Hunne brought
into play his heavy artillery: a writ of praemunire that cited
as co-defendants, Dryfield, his chaplain, Marshall, and
Joseph. Tunstall, though not named, would also be implicated if the suit progressed. To issue a writ of praemunire was
daring enough but to target the archbishops own judicial
representative was breathtaking in its effrontery.
The Great Act of Praemunire had been put on the statute

book in the reign of Richard II (r.1377-99). Its original
purpose was to restrict the Popes jurisdiction in England.
More recently it had been invoked to challenge the right of
ecclesiastical courts to hear cases that should more properly
be heard by the royal courts.
HE CASE WAS FIRST HEARD in the court of

Kings Bench at Westminster Hall in the spring
of 1513. Both this suit and the slander case were
repeatedly adjourned until after Hunnes death, so
that the legal questions raised remained undecided.
In October 1514 Hunne was arrested on suspicion of
heresy and imprisoned in Lollards Tower. On Saturday
December 2nd he was taken upriver to Fitzjames country
residence, Fulham Palace, and there examined by the
bishop in his chapel. He was required to answer to a number
of charges, including his reported objection to the payment
of tithes and his support for the views of a neighbour,
Joan Baker, who had been found guilty of heresy. At the
end of his examination Hunne did not recant by signing a
declaration nor did he admit the charges against him. He
did however acknowledge in his own writing that he had
spoken inadvisedly and submitted himself to his lords
charitable and favourable correction. After this inconclusive
It seemed clear to the jury

that, if Hunne had not killed
himself, he must have been
murdered and the murder
scene then arranged to give the
appearance of a suicide
hearing Hunne was taken back to Lollards Tower, where he
was found hanging on the Monday morning.
It was obvious to the jurymen, when they examined the
corpse hanging in Lollards Tower, that Hunne could not
have killed himself. The noose was too small to accommodate the head; marks on his wrists showed that his hands
had been tied; the serrations round the neck had been
caused by some metal object and not by a silken belt; the
body was clean (without any drivelling or splurging in any
place of his body), which was inconsistent with death by
hanging; and the chair from which Hunne would have had
to jump was too precariously placed on the bed to allow
anybody to stand on it. There was a lot of blood lying in one
corner of the cell and on the left side of Hunnes discarded
jacket there were two great streams of blood. Yet the face,
doublet, collar and shirt of the corpse were clear, except for
a couple of drops of blood from each nostril. Furthermore,
a candle that on the Sunday night had been left burning on
top of the stocks had been snuffed out, even though it was
seven or eight feet from the body.
The jury were struck by one other curious aspect of the
corpse: his head [was] fair combed, and his bonnet right
sitting upon his head, with his eyes and mouth fair closed,
without any staring, gaping or frowning. Evidently the
body had been touched up.
Top: Lollard John

Wycliffe (1320-84),
engraving, 1550.
Above: a mother
and child at a
christening, c.1595.
It seemed clear to the jury that, if

Hunne had not killed himself, he must
have been murdered and the murder
scene arranged to give the appearance
of suicide:
Whereby it appeareth plainly to us all

that the neck of Hunne was broken, and the great plenty of
blood was shed before he was hanged. Wherefore all we find,
by God and all our consciences, that Richard Hunne was murdered. Also we acquit the said Richard Hunne of his own death.
The question for the jury then was who murdered Hunne?
The answer appeared to be straightforward, because Joseph
made the following confession while being held in the
Tower of London:
RICHARD HUNNE
Also Charles Joseph saith that, when Richard Hunne was slain,
John Bellringer [Spalding] bare up the stairs into the Lollards
Tower a wax candle, having the keys of the doors hanging
on his arm. And I, Charles, went next to him, and Master
Chancellor came up last. And when all we came up, we found
Hunne lying on his bed. And then Master Chancellor said, Lay
hands on the thief! And so we all three murdered Hunne. And
then I, Charles, put the girdle about Hunnes neck. And then
John Bellringer and I, Charles, did heave up Hunne, and Master
Chancellor pulled the girdle over the staple.
And so Hunne was hanged.
Relying mainly on Josephs testimony,
the jury in their final verdict concluded that Horsey, Joseph and Spalding,
otherwise known as John Bellringer, had
indeed broken the neck of Hunne and
hung him up by his own girdle.
The single most important

document on the subject
of judicial torture by the
Church is the decree Ad
Extirpanda issued by Pope
Innocent IV in 1252
HE VIEW favoured by contemporary opinion and by most

modern historians that Hunne
was murdered by church officials appears
persuasive. But the key question is this: why on
earth would the Church authorities wish to kill
him? First, it appears that the praemunire
suit, to be heard in the January term of the
court of Kings Bench, was about to fail. If
true, Hunnes untimely death deprived
the church of its victory. Second, Bishop
Fitzjames and his chancellor already
had Hunne in their power because
there was enough available evidence
against him to secure a conviction on
a charge of heresy. Again, the church
was robbed of its prey. As Thomas More
later pointed out, Horsey had no need
to commit murder when he was already
in a position to bring Hunne to shame
and peradventure to shameful death also.
Indeed, the testimony of witnesses
indicates that the chancellor was concerned
that Hunne might be tempted to commit suicide
after his examination at Fulham. Far from wishing
Hunne dead, he took precautions against any attempt at
self-harm because he wanted his prisoner kept alive. On the
Sunday preceding Hunnes death Turner, the junior gaoler,
was for the first time locked into the prison cell while the
inmate ate his dinner and, as a further safeguard, Spalding,
when put in charge of the prisoner that same afternoon,
was instructed by the chancellor to bring him neither shirt,
cap, kerchief or any other thing but that I see it before it
come to him.
Why did the bishop and his chancellor want to keep
Hunne alive? Surely it was because they believed that
Hunne had powerful confederates. Certainly, the merchant
taylor was comfortably off, possessing tenements and
other property that may have amounted to some 600.
But what man, especially a man of business, would sink his
wealth into costly and dangerous legal actions against
the Church? There was not one suit but three, of which
the libel and praemunire cases were adjourned time and
again, no doubt at great cost to the plaintiff. The expense of
attorneys, pleadings, writs and other legal fees over several

years must have been a heavy burden even for someone in
Hunnes position. Was it credible that a man with a young
family and the ambition to expand his business would pour
his money away in such a manner?
A clue to the churchs suspicions on this score is
provided in the testimony of Josephs servant, Julian
Littel. According to him, Joseph complained that were it
not for Hunnes death I could bring my Lord of London
[Fitzjames] to the doors of heretics in
London, both of men and women, that be
worth 1,000. At another time he said
that he had in mind as potential suspects
the best in London. From this it seems
that Joseph had been led to believe that
Hunne could be made to expose heretics
in high places, which would offer the
prospect of hefty summoners fees.
ALL THIS supports the view that Fitzjames and his chancellor wanted Hunne
alive so that he could be interrogated
about his supposed confederates and backers. But if
Hunne did not commit suicide, as the coroners
jury proved beyond doubt he could not, and
if he was not murdered by Horsey and his
junior officials, as seems totally improbable, what happened in Lollards Tower
that fateful night?
To answer that question it is
necessary to look closely at the canon
law of torture. The single most important document on the subject of
judicial torture by the church is the
decree Ad Extirpanda issued by Pope
Innocent IV in 1252:
Cuthbert Tunstall,
Wolseys judicial
representative,
17th-century
illustration.
In addition, the official or rector should

obtain from all heretics he has captured
a confession by force without injuring
the body or causing the danger of death,
for they are indeed thieves and murderers of
souls and apostates from the sacraments of God
and of the Christian faith. They should confess to
their own errors and accuse other heretics whom they
know, as well as their accomplices, fellow-believers, receivers,
and defenders, just as rogues and thieves [fures et latrones] of
worldly goods are made to accuse their accomplices and confess
the evils which they had committed.
Ad Extirpanda therefore permitted the introduction of
torture into the process of investigating heretics, particularly where the objective was to identify the accuseds
accomplices. The significance of the language of Ad Extirpanda becomes apparent when viewed in the light of the
words used by Joseph in his confession:
And when all we came up, we found Hunne lying on his bed.
And then Master Chancellor said, Lay hands on the thief!
The curious characterisation of the suspect heretic as a
thief has caused puzzlement among some commentators.
But, if Horsey was intending to torture Hunne in accordance with the papal decree Ad Extirpanda, the word thief
would be entirely apt and fitting. Indeed, the language
used here provides a crucial clue to what really happened in

Lollards Tower.
Once it is recognised that Horsey and his two church
officers were intent on torturing Hunne, much else falls
into place, especially if reference is made to the relevant
canon law. After the papal promulgation of 1252 the
medieval canon lawyers and jurists developed a richly
documented jurisprudence of judicial torture with its own
rules, treatises and learned doctors of law. Many of the
rules were designed to limit the obvious abuses to which
indiscriminate torture could give rise and to protect the
rights of the accused.
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in

a contemporary portrait.
IRST AND FOREMOST torture, being a last resort,

can only be used if the truth of the facts cannot be
otherwise elicited. This means that if the accused has
already confessed or if sufficient credible witnesses
have already proved his guilt he cannot then be tortured.
Second, there must be half-proof against the accused or
what we would call probable cause before resort can be had
to duress.
If these basic principles are applied to the judicial proceedings against Hunne they are found to fit exactly. Hunne
was subjected to a preliminary examination in Fulham,
where sufficient evidence was produced by his bishop to
establish a strong prima facie case against him on a charge
of heresy. However, full proof supported by witnesses was
not offered. Furthermore, while Hunne submitted himself
to his bishops correction, thereby conceding the strength
of the charges he faced, he made no formal signed confession of his guilt. Here then were the precise circumstances
in which torture could be justified in canon law.
Other canonical rules are also significant. The interrogating judge (in this case Horsey) must not administer torture
by his own hands but through junior officials (generally
two). Hence the need for the presence of three men in Lollards Tower; one to preside as judge, another to hold down
the accused and the third to administer the torture (Josephs role). The torture should not take place on a feast day
such as Sunday: Hunnes ordeal began just after midnight
on the Monday morning. Furthermore, the accused must
fast for nine or ten hours before torture; hence Horseys
command on the Sunday, to the effect that Hunne should
have no supper that night:
And after dinner, when the Bellringer fetched out the boy
[Turner] the Bellringer said to the same boy Come no more
hither with meat for him [Hunne] until tomorrow at noon, for
Master Chancellor hath commanded that he shall have but one
meal a day.
Finally, according to jurists, the accused should also be
warned beforehand of the torture that is planned for him.
This would account for an incident that is recorded in the
coroners report:
Moreover, it is well proved that before Hunnes death the said
chancellor came up into the said Lollards Tower and kneeled
down before Hunne, holding up his hands to him, praying
him of forgiveness for all that he had done to him, and must
do to him.
Henry VIII before Parliament early in his reign, from the

Wriothesley Garter Book. Wolsey, as Archbishop of York,
is to his right wearing a cardinals hat.
The circumstantial detail points overwhelmingly to a plan

to torture Hunne that went horribly wrong. But how can
one reconcile this with Josephs apparent confession to
RICHARD HUNNE
examination in Fulham. But Hunne was not permitted to
sign a formal confession because this would undermine the
canonical case for torture.
murder, made first to his servant, Littel, and later, when

under interrogation in the Tower of London. Littel gave
testimony as follows:
Then Charles [Joseph] said to Julian I have destroyed Richard

Hunne! Alas, Master, said Julian. How? He was called a honest
man! Charles answered, I put a wire in his nose!
There are two interesting points to be made about this testimony of Josephs servant. First of all, Joseph was not reported to have said that he intended to kill Hunne, only that he
had done so by putting a wire up his nose. Second, Littels
statement shows that Joseph was extremely upset over
the killing: he was reported as saying that he would forego
100, if what had happened could be undone. He went on
to complain that Hunnes death had deprived him of the
opportunity to turn in other wealthy persons suspected of
heresy. For Joseph, Hunnes death was a disaster.
Fitzjames accused Joseph of making a false confession
in the Tower. But why would his summoner falsely admit
to (joint) murder rather than to administering a form of
torture that went wrong? The answer, surely, is simple.
Under canon law someone who tortures an accused party

may be held guilty of a capital offence if the victim dies
as a consequence. The Church could also be expected to
close ranks against the man who directly implemented the
torture. On the other hand, by claiming that he and the
bishops chancellor jointly murdered Hunne he would bring
himself under the protection of the Church. After all, the
Church authorities could not allow the bishops deputy to
be convicted of a murder that would cast suspicion on the
Bishop of London himself.
It is now possible to reconstruct the events that led up
to the death of Hunne. Bishop Fitzjames and his chancellor
became convinced that Hunnes apparently single-handed
legal assault on the Church was actively backed by other
significant figures in the City. They therefore decided to
extract from their prisoner, under duress, the identity of
his confederates. After Horseys expertise in canon law
had been called upon, it was decided to establish a prima
facie case against the suspect heretic during a preliminary
Prisoners in the
stocks in Lollards
Tower, from
Foxes Acts and
Monuments, 1563.
N SUNDAY December 3rd Horsey, having

kneeled before Hunne and prayed forgiveness
for what he must do to him, made sure that his
prisoner fasted after his midday meal. Because
Hunne would by now be aware that something unpleasant was in store, he was subjected to a regime that might
today be described as a suicide watch. That evening he was
left lying on his bed with his hands bound. Shortly after
midnight Joseph and Spalding met up with Horsey and
the three of them climbed the stairs of Lollards Tower,
their way lit by a single candle. On entering the cell Horsey
proclaimed the papal authority for his actions by calling out
(in English, for the benefit of his collaborators) Lay hands
on the thief. It was then an easy matter for Joseph to heat a
wire in the candle flame and insert it into Hunnes nose.
The three conspirators would have been unaware of
elementary medical facts about the circulation of blood and
the presence of blood vessels in the upper nasal passages.
They must therefore have been shocked when Hunne
experienced a catastrophic posterior nasal haemorrhage,
the more so as they found themselves powerless to staunch
the resulting flow of blood (the tell-tale evidence of this
haemorrhage in the hanging corpse was the presence of
small streams of blood from both nostrils.) In his weakened
condition Hunne, it may be surmised, died of loss of blood:
much of it pouring over his clothes and the cell floor but a
great deal also being absorbed down his throat. The trauma
would be even greater if the wire had pierced the cribriform
plate located between the upper nasal passages and the
brain. It would probably have taken some time for Hunne to
die and the conspirators must have been in a state of panic.
The extent of that panic is difficult to exaggerate.
To spill blood was a grave canonical sin but to kill a man
under torture was unpardonable. It would also be a public
relations disaster for the Church, if the truth ever got out.
The decision was therefore taken to clear up the blood
(some of it missed in the dim candlelight), break Hunnes
neck and then hang him up by his own belt to make it look
like suicide. As a final gesture of remorse the conspirators
combed the victims hair, placed his cap neatly on his head
and closed his eyes. They knew they had done him a great
wrong and, in a macabre acknowledgement of their fault,
they gave Hunne in death a degree of dignity that they had
denied him in life.
Richard Dale is an economist and barrister who was recently elected a fellow
of the Royal Historical Society.
FURTHER READING
Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Clarendon
Press, 1989).
Richard Dale, The Death of an Alleged Heretic,
Richard Hunne (d.1514) Explained, Reformation and
Renaissance Review, vol 15, no 2 (Maney, 2013).
Arthur Ogle, The Tragedy of the Lollards Tower (Oxford
| MONARCHS
IN THE FRANTIC atmosphere that accompanied the run-up to September 2014s Scottish
referendum, Westminster MPs of all stripes,
scrabbling for every possible means to prevent
Scotlands secession from the UK, reached for
the nuclear option. A statement from Elizabeth II in support of the union would, they
said, make all the difference. One politician
remarked that such a pronouncement would
be welcomed by the people of both England
and Scotland, adding that I dont think it would
be improper. Royal sources disagreed, gently
deprecating the possibility and stressing that
even suggesting that the Queen could intervene
was to misunderstand her constitutional role:
she would always remain neutral and could not
possibly take sides.
Four days before the referendum, after
attending her usual Sunday morning service
at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral, the Queens
pronouncement came as a moment of carefully
choreographed spontaneity. The pack of waiting
journalists normally kept at a safe, 200-yard
distance was beckoned closer by a police sergeant as the Queen, instead of passing the small
crowd of royal-watchers outside the church,
stopped and exchanged some brief words with
a few of them (equal numbers Scottish and
English, it was noted). She was lovely, gushed
one lady, and she hoped everybody would think
very carefully about the referendum this week.
Elizabeths off-the-cuff remark immediately became front-page news: Queens stark
warning over Scottish independence vote. Yet
the moment itself took on a curiously unreal
quality. What the Queen had actually said remained unclear, while the reported source the
lady quoted had asked not to be named faded
out of the picture. Asked to comment, palace adThomas Penn and his colleagues have embarked on a project
visors demurred, saying that they would never
talk about a private exchange and that, if the
to publish a series of short biographies of Englands and,
Queen had said anything, it had been completesubsequently, Britains monarchs. Why is the study of kings
ly spontaneous and in response to a remark
and queens still relevant in our less than deferential age?
from the crowd. As the details evaporated, the
episode took on its own momentum: less a personal intervention on the Queens part than the
Boy king: Edward
collective expression of a desperate nations hopes.
aura of ancient permanence that allowed government, in
VI aged nine, in
The British monarchy is an institution that retains
its shadows, to get on with the business of evolving and
an anonymous
enormous power, even if for centuries that power has
modernising. Bagehots conclusion, that Britain was a monportrait of 1547.
been largely symbolic. In the words of the Victorian
archy disguised as a republic, was one that the 15th-century
journalist and constitutionalist Walter Bagehot, the
jurist Sir John Fortescue, seeking a solution to the cataCrowns pomp and circumstance act as a visual symbol
strophic inanities of Henry VIs reign four centuries before
of national unity, exerting an imaginative attraction
Bagehot wrote, might have recognised.
on peoples minds. It was, presumably, this precise
In the eyes of unswerving republicans, all this is anathquality that Westminsters MPs were trying to invoke in
ema. For them, Bagehots ancient and ever-altering contheir efforts to involve the Queen in the referendum of
stitution is responsible for the perpetuation of an antique
September 2014. Monarchy, Bagehot added, makes for a
ruling structure that has retarded the emergence of a truly
deferential community, a people dazzled by the mystic
modern national identity; responsible, too, as Tom Nairn
awe of their sovereign. But such symbolic powers,
has dyspeptically (and hilariously) detailed, for a national
he noted, had a very real purpose: it was the Crowns
culture of servility and grovelling, especially when, in the
Portraits
of Power
physical proximity of a royal person, dream and reality

dissolve in a hopeless mix-up. But even the likes of Nairn,
when examining the nature of the British state, find that
they can hardly relegate monarchy to the margins: indeed,
they are constrained to place it at the centre of the picture.
King in all but name
These are just some of the reasons why the new Penguin
Monarchs series seems particularly germane. It comprises
45 mini-biographies, from Athelstan, first king of the
English to Elizabeth II (and including that
frustrated monarch, Oliver Cromwell, who
was forced to take on only the trappings of
kingship after his own army officers threatened to shoot him in the head, if he accepted
the Crown itself).
Bringing together some of the countrys
most acclaimed historians and talented
new writers, we asked them to tackle their
monarch in 25,000 words whether it be the
vast bulk of Henry VIII, or his son Edward
VI, who died at the age of 15 having spent his
slight six years on the throne growing up in the shadow of
factional intrigue. In the preface to his biography of Charles
I, Mark Kishlansky sums up the challenge perfectly. The
prospect of distilling Charles with whom I have lived
more years than I care to remember was, he writes,
terrifying, in that it forced him to think afresh about his
subject, with both an economy of style and an economy
of perspective.
The first five Penguin Monarchs, published this December, recast their subjects in a new and unexpected
light, giving the reader an entry point into a life, a reign
and an age. Stephen Alford reminds us that of all the Tudor
monarchs, it was only Edward VI, Henry VIIIs long-awaited
son and heir, who was ever expected at birth to rule and
reveals a boy king whose voice developed a true kingly register and who kept his own private chronicle. At the other
extreme, in 1936 the future George VI reacted to the news
of his playboy brother Edward VIIIs abdication with horror:
Thats a dreadful thing to hear. None of us wants that, I
least of all. Inarticulate, stammering and with an aversion
to appearing in public, he nevertheless gritted his teeth
and got on with the business of being king through the war
years. So extraordinary in his ordinariness was he, writes
Philip Ziegler, that his daughter, Elizabeth II, inherited
from him a throne as secure as any in the world.
But, of course, and as David Cannadine emphasises in
his George V, the king has two bodies: the monarch is not
just an individual but an institution, temporarily embodied in one particular sovereign. Taken together, these 45
biographies will trace the story sometimes evolutionary,
sometimes revolutionary of Englands, then Britains
monarchy, revealing the impact of individual agency (or
lack of it) through periods of strength and intense vulnerability; underscoring the randomness of dynastic succession
(clearly illustrated in these first five lives, four of whom, as
younger sons, were never supposed to inherit the throne);
and illuminating the Crowns age-old and often tensionladen relationship with Parliament and with the laws of
The monarchy is
an institution that
retains enormous
power, even if for
centuries it has been
largely symbolic
On the Website
A Guide to British
Monarchs
www.historytoday.com/
monarchs
England, by which, as Sir John Fortescue was among the

earliest to stress, the monarchy was bound.
All this is evident in the lives of the two monarchs
that bookend the high watermark of English royal
supremacy: Henry VIII and Charles I, both of whom
believed that their will was law and who attempted to
enforce that will in very different ways. As John Guy
shows, Henry VIII, in his quest for fame, used Parliament
and the courts to achieve his break with Rome, dissolve
the monasteries, make himself supreme head of the
English Church and turn England into an empire.
A century later, Parliament was rather less complaisant and rather more powerful when Charles I
constantly impecunious, carrying the whiff
of Catholicism and possessed of the belief that
kingliness was next to godliness attempted to
rule more or less by decree. In 1642 he remarked
querulously that Parliament had taken the government all in pieces and I may say it is almost off
the hinges. That same year England dissolved into
civil war and Charles became a factional leader, at
war with Parliament and his own people. Almost
50 years later, following regicide, republic and restoration, Parliament issued its response to Stuart absolutism:
the 1689 Bill of Rights, which set England and Britain on
the path of constitutional monarchy.
Collective dream
Since that time the monarchy has at times struggled to
retain its relevance and its political neutrality. David
Cannadine notes how Bagehot, despite his best efforts,
could not really articulate what powers the Crown
actually exerted and, into the bargain, described Queen
Victoria and her heir, Edward VII, in distinctly secular
terms as a retired widow and an unemployed youth.
Bagehots irreverence echoed the spirit of the age: in the
following decade the statesman Joseph Chamberlain
confidently predicted that for the British state the republic must come. Some half-century on, as Cannadine
recounts, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith returned from
a summer visit to George V at Balmoral complaining that
the place reeks of Toryism. However, that same king,
though fighting against the dying of the imperial light
Remember, Mr Gandhi, I wont have any attacks on my
Empire, he admonished the Indian rebel leader in 1932
was also remarkably successful in co-opting the first
Labour government into the culture and processes of the
British constitution, a position from which Labour has
subsequently scarcely deviated.
Today the monarchy remains at the heart of the
British constitution and of the collective dream of
English and British nationhood, as it has been for well
over a thousand years. As well as delighting and surprising readers, we hope that Penguin Monarchs will enable
them to think afresh about the history and the continued significance of this national institution.
Thomas Penn is the author of Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England
(Penguin, 2012). The first five books in the Penguin Monarchs series are
published by Allen Lane on December 4th.
More than Childs

WAR TOYS
Do war toys encourage violent behaviour and make conflict

more acceptable? Or do they offer genuine insight into
military history? Philip Kirby, Sean Carter and
Tara Woodyer examine the evidence.
Play?
Left: Playing with

toy soldiers in the
uniforms of the
American Civil
War, 1961.
Top: a British
advertisement
for Hamleys
Patriotic Mascot
Figures, 1915.
WRITER all but forgotten today, E.J. Hawley,

published a short story in 1902, The Toy Soldier:
A Childrens Peace Story. In the tale, an aunt
comes across her nephew, Bertie, playing with
a toy British soldier and an enemy Boer. Bertie delights in
imagining the former killing the latter, reflecting a patriotism that had reached its zenith with the mass celebration
following the Relief of Mafeking two years earlier. That
victory in the Boer War, which challenged perceptions of
Britains status as the worlds most powerful country, had
made a hero of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the
Boy Scout movement. In the story Bertie creates his own
imperial hero, valiantly protecting the British Empire from
its foes. To complete the scene, Bertie insists on burying
the fallen Boer. His aunt agrees to play along, but only if
she can appear as pastor at the funeral. Bertie agrees and
his aunt eulogises, reminding her nephew of the Boers humanity by providing the latter with a touching back story:
This man, whom we have just buried, lived in a farmhouse
on the veldt. He was a very good husband and father. All his
children loved him very much. When he went away to the war
his little girl threw her arms around his neck and hugged him
tight, and said she hated war because it took father away. Then
her mother cried, and said she hoped father would come back
again for, if not, who was to see to the farm, and get food for the
children to eat? The eldest boy, who was named Bertie, after an
English man who had been kind to the farmer, stood very quiet
and still, and when his turn came to say good-bye, he clenched
his little hand and vowed that if ever he became a man he
would not let people fight.
WAR TOYS
Later that evening, Bertie, profoundly affected by his
aunts words, asks whether the Boer can be brought back to
life and returned to his loving family. And, because this is a
game, he can.
Just over a decade later, in 1914, and with another, far
more catastrophic conflict on the horizon, the National
Peace Council published a letter in a London morning
newspaper. Quoted in Antonia Frasers A History of Toys
(1966), the Council argued that there are grave objections
to presenting our boys with regiments of fighting men,
batteries of guns, and squadrons of Dreadnoughts [battleships]. To counter this:
At the Childrens Welfare Exhibition [held in Londons
Olympia Exhibition Hall], the Peace Council will make an
alternative suggestion to parents in the shape of an exhibition
of peace toys. In front of a specially-painted representation of
the Peace Palace at the Hague will be grouped, not miniature
soldiers but miniature civilians, not guns but ploughs and the
tools of industry Boys, the Council admits, naturally love
fighting and all the panoply of war but that is no reason for
encouraging, and perhaps giving permanent form to, their
primitive instincts.
Action Man
figures in a range
of British and
German uniforms
of the Second
World War, 1970s.
There is little record today of how contemporary readers

reacted to either Hawleys story or the Councils request,
but a few years later the latter was mocked in a short story
by the English satirist, Saki (H.H. Munro). In his story,
The Toys of Peace (1919), an uncle presents his nephews
with miniature models of the utilitarian philosopher and

reformer John Stuart Mill, municipal dustbins and the
Manchester branch of the Young Womens Christian Association, all in an effort to instil civic, rather than military
virtues. Left to their own devices, however, the children
soon circumvent their uncles noble intentions. The dustbins are punctured to accommodate cannon, Mill becomes
Maurice de Saxe the 18th century marshal general of
France, whom the children have recently learnt about at
school and the Young Womens Christian Association is
the scene of a bloodbath, in which a hundred of the women
are killed and the rest enslaved by Louis XIV. The experiment has failed, bemoans the uncle to his sister: We have
begun too late.
Sakis satire, though, was tragically ironic. By the time
of its publication, the author was dead: having refused a
commission, he served in the ranks and was killed by a
sniper at the Somme in 1916. The debate between Saki
and the Peace Council, however, endured. It was, in many
ways, the first episode in a series of moral panics that have
defined the war play debate for the last hundred years. At
various intervals, from the First World War to Vietnam to
the War on Terror, questions have been asked of the effect
that violent games have on the minds of (most frequently) young boys. Does violent play prefigure violent lives?
Do toy guns eventually become real guns? Perhaps less
drastically, does war play teach children military history in
particular kinds of ways?
GI Joe figures in
US navy and army
uniforms, 1960s.
NE WAY TO approach this history, at least

that of the latter part of the 20th century, is
through GI Joe, the action figure known in the
UK as Action Man and one of the most successful toys of all time. Introduced in the US in 1964 and in the
UK two years later, its history mirrors that of mid-to-late
20th century western military conflicts. At first, both
versions were based upon Second World War troops; GI
Joe represented the four branches of the US armed forces
the army, airforce, navy and marines and Action Man
appeared in regular army-cut denim. Later, other uniforms
were introduced, as US and UK forces engaged in differing
conflicts around the globe. Perhaps the most clear-cut
link to a contemporary military operation was Action
Mans SAS outfit, introduced just four months after the
1980 Iranian Embassy Siege, when the Special Air Service
shifted from the shadows into the full glare of publicity.
John Newsinger, the author of Dangerous Men: The SAS and
Popular Culture (1997), has traced the contribution of the
mainstream media in forming the widespread image of the
SAS. The Action Man incarnation, for children especially,
was part of this process.
Bob Brechin, the chief designer at Palitoy (the makers of
Action Man), has also spoken of the intersection between
his product and contemporary geopolitics. Brechin suggests
that one of the reasons why the Falklands War of 1982
never featured in Action Mans final years was because
of the recentness of that conflict and the well-publicised
deaths of British servicemen in the campaign. In this way,
the SAS was a safer commercial bet, because its exploits at
the Iranian Embassy had been extremely successful and
had resulted in no (British) deaths. The same was true of
the Second World War, the good war, which continually
provided Action Man with commercially successful outfits
and paraphernalia. In Brechins opinion, at least part of the
popularity of this range came from the fact that the Second
World War has been sustained in the popular consciousness
in a variety of ways: from films, to television series, to books.
It provides a set of durable stories from which producers of
such media can draw, knowing that their productions will
find a receptive audience.
T
Action Man in a
Special Air Service
outfit released
following the
Iranian Embassy
siege of 1980.
HERE IS ALSO evidence that Action Man taught

young boys about war in particular ways. Men who
later joined the British army have reflected that one
of the ways in which they were introduced to this
career path was through play with Action Man. The detail
of the early models is also one of the reasons that they are
so popular among collectors today; they depicted accurately
everything from uniforms, to medals, to the exact weapons
that soldiers, during particular eras, would have carried. It is
well established that one of the earliest ways children come
to understand the world is through play and in this way
toys like Action Man are crucial in developing knowledge of
war, nationalism and the military. From personal experience, Airfix models have served as introductions to topics
as diverse as the Korean War (MIG fighter-jet), the Tudors
(the Mary Rose) and, especially, the Second World War (an
assortment of soldiers and planes). Playing with British- and
US-themed Action Man models also taught much about who
the good guys and bad guys of international politics were
(and they were always guys not girls).
WAR TOYS
Classic Airfix
model kits of
Second World
War planes: Curtis
Helldiver (above)
and a Spitfire.
Across the Atlantic, GI Joe was also seeing a shift in his

military credentials around the same time as Action Man
was being re-evaluated in the wake of the Iranian Embassy
siege. The large and vociferous anti-Vietnam peace movement had adversely affected GI Joes sales during the 1970s,
as much of the US became disillusioned with conflict and
its devastating effect on young lives. To combat this ennui,
the designers of GI Joe introduced a more action-orientated
range, which dispensed with the figures military characteristics in favour of a new Adventure-Team approach. This
included, among other outfits, a scuba costume, with
which the more pacifistic figurine could explore the oceans,
harming no one in the process (except the occasional shark).
The message was clear: there were plenty of ways to keep
young boys entertained, ways that did not require violence.
The Adventure-Team range, though, was a commercial
failure and within a few years Hasbro, GI Joes makers,
had reintroduced more militaristic qualities to the toys,
including new uniforms and weapons. Perhaps, as Saki said,
they had started too late; children were already accustomed
to the more militaristic version of GI Joe. And G. Wayne
Miller, in Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between GI Joe, Barbie
and the Companies that Make Them (1998), has mapped this
shift onto the presidential administrations of the time.
For him, the figure was altered in direct response to the

Reagan era, losing the pacific qualities it possessed under
the less belligerent policies of Jimmy Carter and becoming more bellicose as Reagan dramatically expanded Cold
War military programmes, such as the Star Wars missile
defence system. We might recall here, too, Reagans stated
ambition to rid the US of its Vietnam Syndrome, a broad,
public malaise toward future wars, triggered by the massive
unpopularity of that previous conflict. GI Joe and other military toys were one way in which the syndrome played out.
HERE IS AN interesting comparison to be made

here with perhaps the most famous childrens toy
of all and certainly one of the most commercially
successful Lego. Founded in Denmark in 1932 by
Ole Kirk Kristiansen, Lego has always attempted to adhere
to the principles of pacifism. To this day Lego refuses to
produce models of contemporary military hardware. Unlike
the GI Joe and Action Man ranges, there are no Lego tanks,
warplanes or modern weapons and one of the earliest
incarnations of the toy even attempted to teach children
about traffic safety. In recent years this rule has been
somewhat relaxed and Lego ranges related to cinema tie-ins
such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the Lone Ranger have
Legos war toys

are futuristic or
fantasy based:
a Galaxy Squad
Bug Obliterator
(left); a Galaxy
Squad Galactic
Titan (top); a
Mindstorms robot
(right).
all been released. Toys in these ranges come replete with

blasters, swords and revolvers, respectively, but these are
fantasy and/or historical weapons, rather than contemporary armaments. The Lego policeman, for example, despite
being modelled on US officers (who are armed), carries no
weapon; rather, he possesses only an identification badge
and a pair of handcuffs.
Perhaps sensing an opportunity in the market, the
British-based toy designer, Character Group, has recently
introduced a Lego-compatible range of toys of their own.
Designed in conjunction with Her Majestys Armed Forces
(HMAF), these include miniature rocket launchers, combat
vehicles and artillery and are modelled on actual soldiers
and materiel employed in the theatres of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Some of the controversies that have surrounded
this range, though, perhaps explain one of the reasons
why Lego have been reticent to replicate existing military
hardware in its product lines. In 2012 Character introduced the RAF Reaper Aircraft & Remote Pilot, which
consists of a Reaper drone and ground-control station. We
might recall here, too, Airfixs model of a ruined Afghan
To this day
Lego refuses to
produce models
of contemporary
military hardware
Single Storey Dwelling (presumably wrecked by Coalition bombardment). It is perhaps an oversimplification to

suggest that, because these toys are inspired by these wars,
they necessarily naturalise the same for children. Such an
assertion ignores the fact that children do not necessarily
play with toys as intended. While children may militarise
non-military toys, as Saki suggested, the reverse is also
true. In this way, future research might approach childrens
war play ethnographically, to understand not just some
of the messages that are being relayed by certain toys, but
how children actually play with them.
Building upon the historical success of Action Man,
Character has also introduced an action figure based
upon serving British soldiers. These can be bought in
a variety of uniforms, from standard infantryman, to
commando, to paratrooper. A selection of vehicles can be
acquired, too, including an attack helicopter, fast-pursuit
battle tank and 105mm field gun. Again, given the reticence of Action Mans designers to engage with contemporary conflicts such as the Falklands, it is perhaps surprising
that this range has been released (and to some commercial
success). But what does this trend mean? Has militarism
expanded in Britain in recent years? Perhaps, as the Help
for Heroes charity and the widespread media coverage
WAR TOYS
COMPUTER GAMES have perhaps a particular ability to
educate indirectly on matters of war and geopolitics. This is
because their universes can be extremely detailed; unlike
traditional toy soldiers, they leave little to the imagination. More than with any other medium, computer games
provide the player with the feeling of actually being there.
One of the most popular Second World War-themed games,
Medal of Honor (which runs to 12 instalments), allows
players to cycle through a myriad of different weapons
from Browning rifles, to Thompson submachine guns, to
Webley revolvers and campaigns from Pearl Harbor, to
D-Day, to the Battle of the Bulge with a level of detail
impossible for all but the most ardent collector of material
toy soldiers and weapons-enthusiasts of the Second World
War. Moreover, special attention is paid to ensuring that
the weapons not only look, but also sound exactly as they
would have done during the 1940s. It is this immersive
quality that perhaps inculcates war more deeply in the
minds of those that play such games. While they are mostly
targeted at teenagers and young adults (the Call of Duty
series is rated for 16-year-olds and above), younger children
often play such games.
A Daily Mirror
cartoon of December
1917 comments upon
the way in which
war toys adapt
to the realities of
conflict.
of Royal Wootton Bassett repatriation ceremonies attest.

Perhaps, too, realistic conflict has simply become more
accepted in childrens culture. Contemporary video games
contain a graphic and immersive realisation of war previously unattainable.
THE LABOUR MP Keith Vaz sponsored an Early Day
Motion in the UK Parliament in 2012 to provide for closer
scrutiny of aggressive first-person shooter video games. He
was reacting, in part, to the claims of Anders Breivik, the
far-right fanatic who murdered 77 of his fellow Norwegians
in 2011. Breivik claimed that, before his killing spree, he
had trained on the computer game Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare 2, using the game to, in his words, develop target
acquisition. This instalment in the Call of Duty series was
also controversial for other reasons, featuring, as it did,
a mission that necessitated the player murdering several
hostages, an action that maintained, for the purposes of
the game, the cover of a double agent. While the mission
could be skipped without penalty, there was no way for the
mission itself to be completed without killing the civilians.
Games, of course, have always, intentionally or otherwise, promoted war and violence. Chess is an abstract
representation of a battlefield that has been used to
teach military strategy for centuries. Originating in India
around the sixth century, chess was based upon an earlier
game of strategy called chaturanga, a Sanskrit word for
battle formation first mentioned in the Indian epic poem,
Mahabharata.
From its beginning chess was entwined with martial
practice, being both a form of entertainment and a didactic
tool for teaching battle tactics (centuries later Peter the
Great would take chess sets on his military campaigns).
More recently, the game has been entwined with conflict
in other ways. During the Cold War, in 1972, the match
of the century, which took place in the Icelandic capital
Reykjavik between the Soviet Unions Boris Spassky and
the United States Bobby Fischer, served as a proxy for the
wider ideological clash between the superpowers. Fischer
triumphed, having been persuaded to compete by, among
others, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.
HIS ASPECT OF the debate over the interface

between virtual and actual warfare was crystallised by one of the more famous soldiers of recent
years: Prince Harry of Wales. Returning from a
three month deployment in Afghanistan in late January,
2013, the prince was asked for his reflections upon his experiences as an Apache helicopter pilot. In a series of interviews he spoke of his satisfaction at being on active duty. In
particular he cited his ability to play computer games as an
Boris Spassky
(left) and Bobby
Fischer contest a
virtual Cold War,
Reykjavik, 1972.
advantage in the fighting that he had undertaken: Im one

of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox,
so with my thumbs [on the trigger] I like to think that Im
probably quite useful. He then continued to say that, if the
Taliban were a threat to him or his comrades, he would have
no hesitation in taking them out of the game.
The princes reference was hardly novel; the British army
itself has endorsed the kind of connection that he made.
More than with any other medium, computer games provide the player
with the feeling of actually being there
In 2009 it introduced a recruiting campaign called Start
Thinking Soldier, which involved playing through a set of
virtual missions to see whether one had the right stuff to
enlist in the armed forces. This followed a similar approach
in the US, where the military introduced a recruitment
tool, Americas Army, which required comparable actions
from its users. The principle demographic targeted by
military recruiters is also, of course, the leading consumer
of computer games, which makes this strategy logical.
That the controls of Apache helicopters and Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles are broadly similar to those of, among other
consoles, the PlayStation (indeed, the former are often
designed with this in mind), only makes this overlap more
useful to western militaries.
OMPARED TO GAMES LIKE CHESS, though, what

is notable about virtual games is how they create
hyper-realistic worlds. As the geographer Derek
Gregory has suggested: Video games do not stage
violence as passive spectacle; they are profoundly immersive, drawing players in to their virtual worlds. Apache
helicopters, such as Prince Harrys, recreate just such an
experience, with a zoomed video display of the target and
controls akin to a games console. The princes comparison
of war with computer games, then, might be read less as a
A screen shot
from Call of
Duty: Black Ops
highlights the
immersive,
graphic quality of
the modern video
war game.
suggestion that western soldiers are becoming increasingly

divorced from fighting (although this may be true, too) and
more as evidence that the experience of computer games is
perhaps being replicated by militaries to facilitate easier and
simpler killing of increasingly distanced enemies.
We have come a long way from E.J. Hawley and the
attempt to humanise the little toy Boer, but the subject
of war toys is no less emotive. With the advent of digital
games, the issues addressed here will continue to increase
in complexity.
Philip Kirby is Associate Research Fellow in Geography at the University of
Exeter, where Sean Carter is Senior Lecturer in Geography. Tara Woodyer
is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Portsmouth.
For more on the teams project, a collaboration between the University of
Portsmouth and the University of Exeter funded by the Economic and Social
Research Council, see www.ludicgeopolitics.wordpress.com
FURTHER READING
Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (Hamlyn, 1966).
G. Wayne Miller, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between GI Joe,
Barbie and the Companies that Make Them (Time, 1998).
Saki, The Complete Short Stories (Penguin Classics, 2000).
InFocus
A Distant Corner of the

Eastern Front, 1914
WO JEWS stand disconsolately among the ashes of

wooden houses burnt to the ground in their Galician
town in 1914, only brick chimney stacks left standing.
The photograph was probably taken in August or September during or shortly after what was known as the Battle
of Galicia, which ended in a crushing Russian victory over the
Austro-Hungarians.
Today, many would be hard put to say where Galicia was
find Krakow and let your finger run eastwards across the map
to Tarnopol (Ternopil). Until 1772 it was in southern Poland,
but when Prussia, Russia and Austria set about partitioning
that country, it fell to Austria, becoming the northernmost
province of its empire. After the dual monarchy of AustriaHungary was established in 1867, Galicia came under the part
administered by Austria, though bordering on Hungary to the
south. There seem to have been larger numbers of Poles than of
Ruthenes Catholic Ukrainians, as distinct from the Orthodox
Ukrainians of the Russian empire and about 12 per cent of
the population were Jews. It was the most populous and the
poorest province of Austria, probably also in Europe as a whole.
Unsurprisingly, there was mass emigration to Vienna, the US,
Canada and Brazil from the 1880s; surprisingly, the Austrians
allowed Galicia a good measure of autonomy, not enforcing the
speaking of German, allowing a local assembly and administration, though not encouraging investment or industry.
For Galicias Jews the arrival of the

Russian soldiery was a disaster,
since they came with the tradition
of the pogrom
Jews were emancipated in 1867, so gaining the right to own
land and the lifting of restrictions on what occupations they
could follow. By 1914 one fifth of large Galician estates were
Jewish-owned. The Polish intelligentsia and landowners were
in the ascendant and the Jews were aligned with them, not
the Ukrainians, at least until 1900 when Polish antisemitism
began to grow, while the Ukrainians got less Russophile.
The Austrians made a fundamental strategic error in 1914
by committing 19 divisions to an attack on Serbia, when they
should have been concentrating on the threat from Russia in
Galicia. The first Russian thrusts there were thrown back amid
widespread confusion and incompetence on both sides. But by
September there were 35 Russian divisions facing 20 Austrian;
Russian victory was assured when the eastern Galician city
of Lemberg (or Lvov, Lviv or Lwow) fell on September 10th.
There were 324,000 Austrian casualties, including much of the
professional officer corps, and 130,000 prisoners, with many
Austrian soldiers of Slav origin happy to surrender. Przemsyl
was the last Austrian stronghold, only falling the following

March, with the surrender of a further 117,000 men. The
Austrian army never recovered from these blows. Russia
may also have lost a quarter of a million men but had much
greater reserves of manpower and the victory in Galicia
softened the massive blow it had received at the same time
from the Germans at Tannenberg and then at the Masurian
Lakes in East Prussia.
For Galicias Jews the arrival of the Russian soldiery was
a disaster, since they came with the tradition of the pogrom

firmly embedded among them. Tens of thousands of Jews
became refugees, trying to escape murder, rape and pillage.
The days when they had helped the Poles to run Galicia,
managing their estates, inns, distilleries, breweries, mills
and saw mills, were over and did not return in 1918. After a
brief war with the short-lived Ukrainian republic, re-emergent Poland took back Galicia. But this was an increasingly
antisemitic Poland, with Jews banned from holding govern-
ment posts and their chances of education restricted. What

followed after 1939 needs no retelling.
And what of Galicia today? Radek Sikorski, Polands
former foreign minister, reports that in 2008 President
Putin suggested to Poland that Ukraine is an artificial
country and Lwow is a Polish city and why dont we just sort
it out together? The Poles made it clear to the Russians:
We wanted nothing to do with this.
ROGER HUDSON
WARTIME COLLABORATION
Stepan Bandera as
a student in Stryy,
Ukraine alongside his
graduation certificate.
Collaborator.
(No longer a dirty word?)

The crisis in Ukraine has revealed to the world the divisions that exist throughout
Europe about how the Second World War is remembered. Gareth Pritchard and
Desislava Gancheva look at the controversial debate around wartime collaboration.
CROSS SWATHES of Europe a sustained campaign is now being waged to rehabilitate the
memory of individuals and organisations who,
during the Second World War, collaborated with
the forces of Nazi Germany. This has led to bitter controversies, sometimes between states, sometimes between
different political and ethnic groups within states. The
rehabilitation of collaborators and war criminals is closely
connected to the rise in popularity of extreme nationalist
parties, but in some countries it has become a mainstream
phenomenon, embraced by governments. It is also linked to
the growth of racism and antisemitism in Europe.
The country in which debates about the memory of

wartime collaboration are currently most contentious is
Ukraine. The most prominent collaborator at the heart of
these debates is Stepan Bandera. During the 1940s Bandera
was the leader of a radical nationalist party called the
Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Until 1941
he worked closely with the Nazis, but then fell out favour
with them shortly after the German invasion of Ukraine.
After putting him in a concentration camp for three years,
the Nazis renewed their alliance with Bandera in 1944. He
survived the war and was eventually killed by KGB agents
in Munich in 1959.
Above: A
monument to
Stepan Bandera is
unveiled in Lviv,
Ukraine.
Above right:
Ukrainians,
dressed in the
uniform of the
Galician SS,
mark the 70th
anniversary of
the divisions
founding,
July 21st, 2013.
Galician
volunteers of the
Waffen SS on the
Eastern Front,
c.1943.
In recent years, Bandera has become a rallying symbol

for Ukrainian nationalists. In 2010 the then president
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, awarded Bandera the
title Hero of the Ukraine. He was stripped of the title by
Yushchenkos successor, Viktor Yanukovych. Nonetheless,
numerous statues of Bandera have been erected in western
Ukraine. Every year, on January 1st, a torchlit parade is held
in Kiev to celebrate Banderas birthday and in 2014 the
event was attended by approximately 15,000 people. There
have even been attempts to rename Lviv International
Airport in Banderas honour.
EFORE 2014 Bandera was little known in the

West, but the current crisis in Ukraine has changed
that. During the Maidan protest movement that
toppled Yanukovych, one of the most prominent
faces on the demonstrations that took place in Kiev and
other cities in western Ukraine was that of Bandera.
Photographs and pictures of him were carried frequently
by anti-Yanukovych protestors. After taking control of the
city hall in Kiev, the demonstrators hung a giant portrait of
Bandera in the columned central hall of the building.
Bandera is just one of several controversial individuals
and organisations whose memory is celebrated by Ukrainian
nationalists. During the protests of January and February
The rehabilitation in Ukraine

of Bandera, the OUN, the UPA
and the Galician SS Division
is part of a much wider
phenomenon
2014, the crowds rallied behind the flags and slogans of
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). During the Second
World War the UPA fought against both the occupying
Germans and pro-Soviet partisans and then against the Red
Army. The UPA also participated in ethnic cleansing and the
mass killings of civilians, above all of Jews and Poles. Some
Ukrainian nationalists also celebrate the memory of the
Galician Division of the Waffen SS, which was established
in 1943, units of which also participated in atrocities
against Jews and Poles.
Stepan Bandera, the fighters of the UPA and the soldiers
of the Galician Division are not seen as heroes by all
Ukrainians. Particularly in the Russophone eastern and
southern regions of Ukraine, Bandera and other wartime
Ukrainian nationalists are regarded as collaborators who
murdered thousands of Soviet citizens. The fact that some
nationalists in Kiev and western Ukraine openly celebrate
his memory is one of the reasons why the post-Yanukovych
authorities are viewed with hostility by some people in the
Russophone regions. Pro-Russian activists frequently
denounce the Ukrainian nationalists as fascists and
Banderites.
Conflicting attitudes to the war are also an important
reason for the tensions between the post-Yanukovych
regime in Kiev and the Russian government. Most Russians
still refer to the Second World War as the Great Patriotic
War and see it as a war of liberation against the Nazi invaders. The memory of the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens who
perished during the war and, in particular, the eight to 13
million Red Army soldiers who were killed, remains sacrosanct. From the point of view of most Russians, Stepan
Bandera was a fascist collaborator and the public celebration
of his memory is regarded as deeply offensive.
Duce had not been as entirely bad as the history

books would have us believe. There have also been
local controversies on the issue of the Fascist past.
In August 2012 a publicly funded mausoleum was
opened in Affile near Rome to the memory of
Rodolfo Graziani, the Fascist commander. In 2013
the municipal authorities in Brescia decided to
restore a Fascist-era statue to its original position.
All such attempts to normalise the Fascist past
have been denounced by liberal and left-wing
politicians, Holocaust survivors and veterans of
the Italian partisan movement.
The rehabilitation in Ukraine of Bandera, the OUN, the

UPA and the Galician SS Division is part of a much wider
phenomenon. In Belgium, for example, the rehabilitation of
Flemish wartime collaborators was always a demand popular
on the extreme fringes of the Flemish nationalist movement. In 2011, however, all the mainstream Flemish parties
with the sole exception of the Flemish Greens supported
a motion advocating an amnesty for those who collaborated
with the Nazis during the occupation of 1940-44. This did
not go down well with French-speaking Walloons and their
political representatives, who still regard those who collaborated with the Nazis as fascists and traitors.
In Italy some politicians, of whom Silvio Berlusconi is
most prominent, have long advocated what they consider a
more balanced view of the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. In January 2013 there was a high-profile controversy
after Berlusconi made a speech in which he said that the
For the Motherland, For Honour,

For Freedom, a
Soviet propaganda
poster of 1941.
TTEMPTS TO RESTORE the public

reputation of wartime collaborators
are particularly common in the former
Communist countries of East-Central
Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic. In Latvia,
for example, an annual parade is held on March
16th to commemorate the Latvian Legion of the
Waffen SS. Though the parade is not an official
event, it has been attended by members of the
Latvian parliament. In 2012 the President of
Latvia, Andris Brzi, publicly defended the
annual parade. Similar events are held in the
two other Baltic states, Estonia and Lithuania.
In all three, such commemorations have led to
political controversy. Jewish groups have vigorously protested against the celebration of military units that included many men who, before
they joined the Waffen SS, were members of
nationalist militias that carried out massacres
of Jews. Ethnic Russians who live in the Baltic
states have also condemned the rehabilitation
of collaborators and there have been sharp
diplomatic protests from the Kremlin.
In Slovakia, the figure at the heart of
controversies about the Second World War is
Jozef Tiso. A Roman Catholic priest who led a
puppet government in Bratislava from 1939 to
1945, Tiso was responsible for the deportation
of tens of thousands of Jews to the Nazi death
camps. Tiso is viewed with sympathy, even
enthusiasm, by many Slovak nationalists.
In November 2013 an open admirer of Tiso,
Marian Kotleba, became regional governor of the province
of Bansk Bystrica, after winning 55 per cent of the vote. In
2008 the then Archbishop of Trvana, Jn Sokol, held a mass
to commemorate Tiso. Attempts have been made to raise
money to turn Tisos birthplace into a museum and to erect
other public monuments in his honour. But Tisos memory
is deeply controversial. The campaign to rehabilitate Tiso is
viewed with repugnance by members of Slovakias Jewish,
Hungarian and Roma minorities, as well as left-wing and
liberal Slovaks.
APART FROM UKRAINE, the country in which the rehabilitation of such figures has gone furthest is Hungary. The
man whose reputation is at the centre of this process is
Mikls Horthy. From March 1920 to October 1944 Admiral
Horthy was the self-styled regent of Hungary and the
dominant figure in Hungarian politics. An authoritarian
Left: Italian foreign minister Count
Ciano (left) dines with Hungarian leader
Admiral Horthy after a deer shoot at
Gdll, Hungary, December 1938.
Below: a German army newspaper
featuring Mussolini and Rodolfo
Graziani, 1943.
nationalist, Horthy imposed a brutal white terror on

socialists and communists. He was also a virulent antisemite; in September 1920 Horthys regime introduced
restrictions on the number of Jewish students allowed into
universities, Europes first piece of antisemitic legislation
in the interwar period. Further anti-Jewish laws followed in
1938 and 1939. During the war Horthy was an ally of Hitler
and Hungarian troops participated in the invasion of the
Soviet Union. In March 1944 Hungary was occupied by the
German army but Horthy remained in power. By October
1944, when Horthy was deposed, over
400,000 Hungarian Jews had been
deported to the death camps with the
active support of the Hungarian state.
In recent years vigorous efforts
have been made to portray Horthy
as a patriot and a wise statesman,
who led Hungary through a difficult
period in its history. One of the main
groups that is set on rehabilitating him
is the extreme nationalist political
party, Jobbik. Since 2010, however, Horthys most powerful patron has been the right-wing government of Victor
Orbn. As Nora Berend noted in History Today in March
2014, Orbn has thrown the weight of the Hungarian state
behind a systematic campaign to manipulate history in
order to strengthen the ties of national belonging. Central
to this campaign is the rehabilitation of Horthy. Statues of
him have been erected in Budapest, Cskak, Kereki and
elsewhere. In 2012 the main square of a town near Budapest
was renamed in his honour. The work of Horthy-era writers,
including the fascist and war criminal Jzsef Nyr, has
been incorporated into the school curriculum. In the official

discourse of the Hungarian government, the role of Horthy
and of the Hungarian state in the persecution and deportation of Jews is downplayed, while the victimhood of
Hungary is stressed.
Though Orbns doctored version of Hungarys history is
popular with sections of the public, it is also deeply divisive.
There was a clash between the Hungarian and Romanian
governments over plans to bury the remains of Jzsef Nyr
near the town of his birth, Jimbor, which was then part of
the Kingdom of Hungary but is now located
inside the borders of Romania. Jewish organisations, including the World Jewish Congress and
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, have condemned
Orbns historical revisionism, which they see
as closely connected to the rise of antisemitism in Hungary. High-profile figures in the
arts have also made their feelings known. Imre
Kertsz, the Nobel prize-winning author and
Holocaust survivor, has taken a strong public
stance against Orbns revision of Hungarian
history. As a result, Kertsz has been vilified by Hungarian
nationalists. Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace
Prize, returned an award that had been given to him by the
Hungarian state as a protest against what he sees as the
white-washing of a tragic and criminal episode in Hungarys past. The historian Randolph L. Braham, one of the
worlds leading authorities on the Holocaust in Hungary,
has also strongly condemned the Hungarian governments
cowardly attempt to detract attention from the Horthy
regimes involvement in the destruction of the Jews.
There are several factors that explain the growth of
Vigorous efforts have

been made to portray
Horthy as a patriot who
led Hungary through a
difficult period
Above: Red Army soldiers liberate a

village near Moscow, December 1941.
Right: Slovak leader Josef Tiso shakes
hands with German foreign minister
Ribbentrop as Hitler looks on, East
Prussia, 1941.
Second World War revisionism in contemporary Europe,

not least the growing popularity of extreme nationalist
political parties: as well as Jobbik in Hungary, there is
the Attack Party in Bulgaria, Golden Dawn in Greece and
Svoboda in Ukraine, which are often in the forefront of
campaigns to rehabilitate wartime collaborators. Their popularity is in turn connected to economic hardship, cynicism
about mainstream political elites and increasing racism
against ethnic minorities and immigrants. In almost all
those countries where there are strong campaigns to rehabilitate collaborators, there has also been a marked increase
in racist discourse and racially motivated violence. The
group that has suffered most at the hands of extreme rightwing nationalists has been the Roma, but other minority
communities including Jews have also been targeted.
ET ECONOMIC HARDSHIP and the rising popularity of extreme nationalism can provide us with
only a partial explanation for this phenomenon.
In the Belgian region of Flanders, where Second
World War revisionism is now mainstream, the Flemish
nationalist party Vlaams Belang, which traditionally was
the most bellicose advocate of the rehabilitation of wartime
collaborators, performed poorly in the federal elections of
2010 and even worse in the local elections of 2012 and the
European elections of May 2014. Flanders is not only one
of the richest parts of Europe, it is also wealthier than the
French-speaking region of Wallonia. Despite the fact that
many French-speaking Belgians also collaborated with the
Nazis during the occupation, the majority of francophone
Belgians unlike their Flemish compatriots are opposed
to any rehabilitation of wartime collaborators. In Bulgaria,
which is the poorest member state of the EU, revisionism of

the type seen in Flanders is weaker. Though there is a movement in Bulgaria to rehabilitate 1940s-era collaborators,
such as Hristo Lukov, it is limited to the extremist fringe of
Bulgarian politics.
An underlying cause of revisionism is the resurgence of
radical ethnic nationalism in post-Cold War Europe. At the
heart of all nationalisms are national narratives: collective
stories about how the nation came into being and what the
nation has accomplished. In almost all these narratives,
recurring themes are the heroism of the nation (as exemplified in the deeds of particular heroes, usually in the struggle
against national enemies) and its victimhood at the hands
of other nations. These national narratives are now being
rewritten. In East-Central Europe and the Balkans, official
Communist interpretations of national histories collapsed
with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the pro-Soviet
regimes. Ever since, different political and ethnic groups
have been competing with each other to determine which
historical figures are assigned the role of heroes and which
are cast in the role of villains. In some parts of western
Europe, rising scepticism about the project of European integration and the concomitant growth of nationalism, have
likewise destabilised traditional narratives of the recent
past, in particular of the Second World War.
IN MANY COUNTRIES, however, constructing a usable national narrative of the war is problematic, especially for conservative governments. In Hungary, for instance, wartime
resistance to the Germans was minimal and collaboration was widespread. In Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia,
Lithuania, Slovakia and Ukraine many people actively
Revisionists argue that the

men who served with the
Latvian Division were patriots
who allied themselves with the
Nazis for patriotic reasons
Veterans of the
Latvian Division
of the Waffen SS
are among those
marching through
the capital Riga,
March 16th, 2014.
resisted the Nazis, but the majority of those who did so

fought with the Communist-led partisans or served directly
in the ranks of the Red Army. By contrast, nationalists and
conservative elites in the region collaborated actively with
the Nazis and in some cases took up arms to fight in German
uniforms. The major point of friction everywhere was the
ideological divide between those who saw the Soviets as the
primary threat and those who regarded the Nazis as their
main enemies. However, other ideological factors were also
important. Many of the ultra-nationalists who collaborated
with the Germans in Croatia, Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltic
states and elsewhere were also racists and antisemites, who
participated actively in the killing of Jews and other ethnic
minorities.
N ORDER TO create a usable past, contemporary conservative nationalists need to fashion narratives that both
delegitimise the Nazi-resisters on the one hand, while detoxifying the memory of Nazi collaborators on the other.
A variety of tactics are employed to this end. One tactic
is to deny, minimise or simply ignore the collaboration of
wartime nationalists. A second is to vilify those who fought
against the Nazis. In Italy, for example, Giampaolo Pansas
book Il Sangue dei vinti (Blood of the Losers; 2003), which
attacked the heroic idea of the Italian resistance movement, sold 350,000 copies in its first year of publication.
In 2008, criminal investigators in Lithuania threatened to
take action against two elderly Holocaust survivors, who
had escaped the Vilnius ghetto and joined the Soviet-backed

partisans. According to the investigators, the pair had been
involved in an attack on a village in which civilians had
been killed. In 2011 Lithuanian officials demanded that
Israeli police investigate an 86-year old Holocaust survivor
and former partisan on the grounds that he had libelled
national heroes.
THE MOST IMPORTANT tactic of those who seek to rehabilitate collaborators is to argue that Communism and Nazism
were both totalitarian and genocidal systems, the crimes of
which were equally evil. From this perspective, choosing to
fight with the Nazis against the Communists
was not necessarily morally worse than choosing (as Roosevelt and Churchill did) to fight
with Stalin against Hitler. Under some circumstances, claim revisionists, the decision to make
a temporary alliance with the Nazis against the
threat of Communism was understandable,
even commendable. Revisionists thus argue
that the men who served with the Latvian or
Galician divisions of the Waffen SS were simply
patriots, who allied themselves with the Nazis
for patriotic reasons and not out of ideological
sympathy. Their goal was simply to defend their
countries from invasion by the Red Army. Fighting in German uniforms with German weapons
was the only way to do this. Similar arguments
have been used by revisionists to exculpate
Bandera, Horthy, Tiso and other politicians who
sided with the Nazis.
Two academics, Dovid Katz and Danny BenMoshe, initiated the Seventy Years Declaration
on the Anniversary of the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee in 2012 to protest against
attempts by several European states to draw a moral equivalence between the crimes of Nazism and of Communism.
The declaration was signed by 70 prominent politicians
from across Europe. As we approach the 70th anniversary
of the end of the Second World War, the passage of time is
making its legacy more not less divisive.
Gareth Pritchard is a lecturer in modern history at the University of Adelaide.
Desislava Gancheva is a graduate of the University of Adelaide.
FURTHER READING
L. Fekete, Pedlars of Hate, The Violent Impact of the
European Far Right (Institute of Race Relations, 2012).
C. Hale, Hitlers Foreign Executioners: Europes Dirty Secret
(History Press, 2011).
O. Luminet, The Interplay between Collective
Memory and the Erosion of Nation States, Memory
Studies vol 5, no 1 (Sage, 2012).
A. Mammone, et al (eds), Mapping the Extreme Right in
Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2012).
D. Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History
in Contemporary Ukraine (Central European University,
2007).
R. Wodak, J.E. Richardson (eds), Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge, 2013).
MakingHistory
Historians should adhere to a rigorous code of professional practice if they are to avoid the kinds of
careless mistakes that bring their professional integrity into question, says Suzannah Lipscomb.
The Errors of Our Ways

I RECENTLY READ the film critic
Mark Kermodes book, Hatchet Job, an
examination of the devastating review,
in which he mentions that some critics
admit to reviewing films they havent
seen. Kermode, rightly, regards this as
a breach of professional integrity.
During the summer, I was researching and writing a new book. This
meant reading or re-reading much of
the secondary literature in my field
and heading to the archives to consult
primary sources. I was also reading
books to review. This combined exposure to historiography old and new, in
the light of a renewed familiarity with
the primary sources, was a chastening
experience. I discovered a string of
notable errors or sloppy thinking.
Some were errors that historians
had picked up from each other without
checking the primary evidence. For
example, a crop of Tudor historians
from Elton onwards have noted that in
the month of December 1546 Henry
VIIIs Privy Council met at the London
home of Edward Seymour, Earl of
Hertford, sometimes given as Somerset House (though Hertford wasnt
yet Duke of Somerset). The reason this
is important is because it is claimed
that this indicates that Hertford, as
the leader of a reformist faction at
court, was consolidating his power.
This misinformation derives from the
Holy Roman ambassador, Franois
Van der Delft, but a quick look at the
minutes of the Privy Council shows
that between December 8th, 1546 and
January 2nd, 1547 the Privy Council
met at Ely Place in Holborn, the town
house of Thomas Wriothesley, Lord
Chancellor and not one of the leaders
of the supposed reformist faction.
Such an unchecked error makes a
crucial difference to a reading of the
last months of Henry VIII.
In the works of some historians, I
also found footnotes with archival call
references that were patently wrong.
are just bad history and we need practices that safeguard against human
error. I thought I would presumptuously suggest a Code of Conduct for
how historians should use evidence:
I tended to assume this was a case of a

change in the referencing system, but
some works are too recent for that to
apply and others have specific slips,
like dates that are not quite right, as if
misremembered; as if someones gone
home and made them up.
Historians are humans;

we make mistakes. But
some of these instances
are just bad history
Even more invidious than simple
error was the way that evidence was,
at times, misused: cited out of context
in a way that distorted the reading;
used to confirm pre-existing biases;
or treated with increasing certainty
without additional corroboration. At
a recent history festival, a scientist
asked me if historians triangulate:
if we look specifically for data or
evidence that might undermine our
hypotheses, as well as confirm them;
I replied that I sincerely hoped so.
Historians are humans; we make
mistakes. But some of these instances
Penning the truth:
Saint Jerome in
his Study (detail)
by Caravaggio,
c.1606.
Use evidence to support your interpretation and seek to understand that

evidence correctly.
Do not wilfully present evidence
out of context, especially not in such
a way that the lack of context will
render the meaning of the evidence
different, unclear or manipulable.
Do not cite evidence from sources
that you elsewhere discount.
At best, do not waste a readers time
on unsubstantiated sources.
At least flag up evidence that is
drawn from such sources; do not use
it silently.
Triangulate; search ardently for
evidence that might undermine, as
well as corroborate, your hypothesis.
Avoid assumption creep: do not
allow assertions to move from possibly to probably to definitely; do not
build more elaborate layers of interpretation on a foundation that is rocky.
Do not rely on the secondary assertions of other historians; ad fontes! Go
back to the original sources.
Guard against confirmation bias;
interrogate the facts anew and bring
a fresh analysis to them; do not mould
the facts to your interpretation.
Root out and resolve any internal
inconsistencies in your argument.
Cite sources so that they can be
traced, with page numbers, archival
call numbers and publication details.
Our professional integrity as historians
relies on our adherence to standards
such as these.
Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New
College of the Humanities, London.
CONGRESS OF VIENNA
Allegory of the First
Partition of Poland,
1772, after Gustave
Moreau.
Vladimir Putin is by no
means the first Russian
leader to threaten his
neighbours with force
and annexations. Two
centuries ago European
statesmen faced a similar
predicament. Only then
it was Poland at stake, not
Ukraine, as Mark Jarrett
explains.
Hard and Soft Power
INCE THE 16TH CENTURY Poland had been an elective monarchy. Its nobility enjoyed great license their golden freedoms
but Polands elected monarchs failed to establish the golden
pillars of ancien rgime monarchy: a centralised bureaucracy, a
standing army and increased taxes. Foreign powers even put forward
their own candidates in Polish royal elections. In the election contest of
1764 Catherine the Great of Russia sponsored her former lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski. Russian troops, invited by the wealthy Czartoryski
family, kept in the distance but close enough to influence Polish electors.
After his elevation to the Crown, Poniatowski refused to perform the
Tsarinas bidding. At the same time he proved unable to push much
needed reforms through the Polish parliament, the Sejm. A group of

dissatisfied nobles rebelled and even attempted to kidnap the king to
remove him from Russian influence. Russian forces then intervened.
In 1771 Catherine reached an agreement with Frederick the Great of
Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria: each would take a slice of Poland,
thereby preserving the balance of power between themselves.
When Russia became involved in a war with Ottoman Turkey, the
Polish king took the opportunity to introduce the acclaimed Constitution of May 3rd, 1791: to this day a Polish national holiday. But Russia
soon defeated the Turks and conservative nobles backed by Catherine
the Great rebelled against the new constitution and invited Russian
CONGRESS OF VIENNA
to procure the assent of the rest of Europe to lend legitimacy to their
decisions. But their plan foundered when they failed to reach agreement
during their negotiations in Paris and London before the Congress assembled. The chief stumbling block was the future of Poland.
HE SUDDEN COLLAPSE of the French imperium had placed

the fate of the infant Duchy of Warsaw in doubt. The Tsar made
known his general intention to restore Poland, although he kept
the precise details of his plan shrouded in mystery. On the way
to Vienna he even met with leading Polish nobles at Czartoryskis estate
at Puawy in eastern Poland. At the same time, to win the adherence of
Prussia to the new coalition against France, the Tsar had promised to
restore Prussia to its former dimensions. But, if Russia were not to return
part of Poland to Prussia, where was the Tsar going to find sufficient territory to return Prussia to its former size? The answer was in Saxony, an
independent kingdom across Prussias south-western border. Since the
Saxon king had remained loyal to France long after other German princes
had deserted, the Tsar argued that he had forfeited all rights to his throne.
Saxony would therefore be awarded to Prussia in compensation for
the latters loss of its former Polish territories.
Those lands would in turn form the kernel of Stanislaw
Poniatowski, last
a resurrected Kingdom of Poland, to be ruled King of Poland, by
over directly by the Tsar, but with its own Marcello Bacciarelli,
constitution, national legislature, laws and 18th century.
Tsar Alexander I,
by Baron Gerard,
1814.
intervention. After initial resistance, the Polish

monarch reluctantly deserted the reformers to
avoid the destruction of his country. The outcome
was the further loss of territories to Russia and
Prussia in a second partition. Polish reformers were shocked and immediately began preparing for a new confrontation. Tadeusz Kociuszko
raised the banner of insurrection in 1794 but, after an initial victory,
Polish forces were crushed. What was left of Poland disappeared in the
third and final partition of 1795. What was in 1770 the second largest
country in Europe had been erased from the map.
Only 12 years later Napoleon vanquished Prussia at the Battle of Jena
and created the Duchy of Warsaw out of the Prussian slice of Poland. In
1809 the Austrians challenged Napoleon and were similarly defeated.
Napoleon took most of the Austrian slice of Poland, including Krakow,
and added it to the Duchy of Warsaw. Most Poles consequently favoured
an alliance with Napoleonic France against the three partitioning
powers, although Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski placed his faith in his
friend, Tsar Alexander I, who promised to restore Polish independence.
THESE EVENTS SET THE STAGE for the major confrontation at the
Vienna Congress. The Congress was publicly announced in Article 32 of
the First Peace of Paris, concluded between France and the allied powers
in May 1814 after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. In this treaty
the new boundaries of France were set; the purpose of the forthcoming
Congress was therefore to deal with territories beyond French borders.
The plan of the great powers in summoning the Congress was transparent to all: to settle first all outstanding issues on their own and then
The Battle of Jena,

October 14th, 1806,
aquatint by Edme
Boviney.
Napoleon vanquished
Prussia at the Battle of
Jena and created the
Duchy of Warsaw out of
Prussias slice of Poland
army, separate from Russia. Curiously, the

Russian slice of Poland was not to be immediately joined to the new Polish Kingdom
(made up of the former Prussian and Austrian shares), although there were plans to
do so at a later date.
The other allied statesmen were far
from pleased with the Tsars agenda. Prince
Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian
foreign minister, was utterly opposed to
Alexanders acquisition of Poland, which would have given Russia
control of the heights above the main invasion route to Vienna, incited
unrest among those Poles still under Austrian rule and turned Prussia
into a Russian vassal state. The interests of Britain were less directly
affected. Nonetheless, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary,
also feared the growth of Russian power and the potential discord that
the Tsars scheme might cause between Austria and Prussia. The Polish-Saxon question bedevilled the talks in Paris and London throughout
the long, hot summer of 1814. In early September the allied monarchs
and statesmen began arriving in Vienna, yet the problem of how to
reconstruct Central Europe remained unresolved.
FROM SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER Castlereagh and Metternich
worked closely with the Prussian minister, Prince Karl August von
Hardenberg, to limit Russian gains in Poland. Why was Hardenberg
willing to cooperate with Austria and Britain when the Tsar had already
promised all of Saxony to Prussia? The answer seems to be that Hardenberg wanted Metternichs support on German questions, especially
the creation of a new confederation uniting all the German states for
purposes of defence. Cooperation with Austria and Britain also seemed
to offer the pleasing prospect of gains in both Saxony and Poland.
From a balance-of-power perspective,

Austria, Britain and Prussia banded together because they believed that Russia had
become too strong. Castlereagh served as
their main spokesman in a series of private
audiences with Alexander I in September
and October. The British foreign secretary
argued that Russian acquisition of Poland
would deprive Prussia of a defensible frontier, violate the sanctity of existing treaties
and stir discontent among the Poles. The Tsar insisted, however, that
he had a genuine moral obligation to the Polish nation. Prince Adam
Czartoryski, who accompanied the Tsar to the Congress, and even the
aging Kociuszko, both saw the Tsar as Polands last, best hope. The other
powers offered them only an assurance of dismemberment.
HE HARVARD POLITICAL SCIENTIST Joseph Nye defines

hard power as the use of force or payment to affect others
to achieve desired outcomes in other words, power resting
on either military or economic resources and he defines soft
power as the ability to get what you want by the co-optive means of
framing the agenda, persuading and eliciting positive attraction. In a
graphic illustration of Nyes concept of hard power the application of
military or economic force the Tsar taunted Castlereagh with the fact
that Russian troops were already in occupation of Polish territories (as
Stalin was to do in 1945). The Emperor, Castlereagh reported back to
London, insinuated that this question could only end in one way as he
was in possession. Castlereagh disclaimed all intention of dislodging the
Russians by force, but told the Tsar that he believed his aim was not to
possess Poland as a conqueror but to govern the Poles as a legitimate sovereign with the sanction of Europe. Clearly Castlereagh was skilfully
CONGRESS OF VIENNA
attempting to deploy the instruments of soft power attractiveness
and persuasion, with the sanction of Europe to counter the Tsars
hard power of military force.
ETTERNICH, CASTLEREAGH AND HARDENBERG met at

Castlereaghs apartments on the Minoritenplatz on October
23rd. Metternich had only just consented to the Prussian
annexation of all of Saxony. The three statesmen agreed to
offer the Tsar an independent Poland, knowing full well he would refuse.
Then they planned to propose that the Tsar should be given Polish
territory up to the River Vistula, including Warsaw, but no further;
about half the territory he claimed. Metternich acted as their representative the next day, when he informed Alexander that Austria might
also create its own Polish kingdom in the south. The Tsar reacted
with indignation.
The collaboration of Metternich and Castlereagh with Hardenberg
ultimately failed because the Prussian ruler, King Frederick William II,
still felt beholden to the Tsar for the liberation of his territories from Napoleon. On November 5th the king summoned Hardenberg and ordered
him to cease all resistance to the Tsar. Five days later the Russians turned
the military occupation of Saxony over to the Prussians. The united front
of Prussia, Austria and Britain collapsed like a house of cards.
On the surface, allied strategy in these three months appears to
have been a classic exercise in the balance of power. Even though the
Tsar had already offered Prussia all of Saxony and even though Britain
had no direct interest in the dispute, Hardenberg and Castlereagh had
joined forces with Metternich because they feared the growing power
of Russia. But, despite appearances, it seems obvious that there was
really no chance at all that these powers would ever use military force
to expel Russia from Poland. So the contest really devolved into one of
soft versus hard power.
In the next phase of the negotiation the ministers shifted their focus
to Saxony. Neither Castlereagh nor Metternich was now willing to hand
over all of the Saxon kingdom to Prussia and in early December both
rescinded their earlier offers to Hardenberg. Austria and Prussia also
began quietly preparing for the almost unthinkable possibility of war.
Castlereagh explained the Austrian viewpoint to the British Cabinet:
It is the deliberate opinion of many of their officers, and ministers,
that, rather than have the Russians at Craco[w] and the Prussians at
Dresde[n], they had better risk a war with what they can get.
ON DECEMBER 5TH Hardenberg sent a message to the military reformer General Gneisenau, himself of Saxon origin, that it would be
better to have a new war than that Prussia, after such glorious deeds
and so many sacrifices, should come out of the affair badly. Castlereagh
addressed the British Cabinet the same day, weighing the prospects for
maintaining peace: My opinion is, that as Europe is more extensively
armed than at any former period, [this disagreement] may suddenly end
in war. Three weeks later he again explained that the Prussians were
organising their army for the field This may be all menace to sustain
their negotiation, but they may also meditate some sudden effort, in
conjunction with Russia, to coerce Austria and place themselves in a
situation to dictate their own terms on all other points. Meanwhile
the Grand Duke Constantine, the younger brother of the Tsar, issued a
stirring proclamation to the Polish army to take up arms in the defence
of your country and the preservation of your political existence.
Were all of these steps mere sabre-rattling? Were military leaders
just taking reasonable precautions, or was there a genuine risk of conflict? Most historians concur that, despite the display, war was unlikely.
By mid-December Russia, Britain and Austria were all making overtures to the French delegation. Since the goal of Talleyrand, the French
foreign minister, had always been to maintain the King of Saxony on
Castlereagh, Hardenberg
and Metternich in an
engraving of 1815 by
Bollinger.
Take what you want

but leave us peace:
Kaiser Franz II and Tsar
Alexander I with a French
diplomat in a caricature
by Delaunois, 1815.
his throne, he gravitated to the side of

Austria and Britain. Prussian and Russian
ministers introduced the idea of moving
the King of Saxony to a principality on the
Rhine so that he might keep a kingdom,
while Saxony was transferred to Prussia.
This Rhineland proposal was submitted to Castlereagh on December
20th. On the same day, the allies agreed to establish a Statistical Committee to resolve their deepening disagreements over population sizes.
Formal conferences of the four allied powers to determine the fates
of Saxony and Poland opened at Metternichs offices on the Ballhausplatz on December 29th. Castlereagh and Metternich pushed for the
immediate entry of France into the deliberations. At the session of
the 30th Metternich suggested that the permission of the King of
Saxony would be needed before dividing up his kingdom. This was all
too much for Hardenberg to bear. Only three weeks earlier, Metternich
himself had been offering all of Saxony to Prussia. Hardenberg angrily
announced that any refusal to recognise Prussian acquisition of Saxony

would be tantamount to an act of war. It was, in Castlereaghs words, a
most alarming and unheard-of menace.
The result of Hardenbergs angry outburst was the secret treaty of
January 3rd, 1815: a defensive alliance between Britain, Austria and
France. It is certainly remarkable that, after 20 years of war, both Britain
and Austria were now willing to unite with their former adversary. Castlereagh himself drew up the treaty on New Years Eve. Some historians
argue that news of this treaty forced the Russians and Prussians to back
down in a classic case of coercive diplomacy. Castlereagh himself lent
credence to this interpretation of events in a later letter to the Cabinet.
But the reality was different. The conclusion of this treaty an ostensible exercise of hard power simply cannot account for the resolution of
the crisis. The new alliance was purely defensive in nature: in the event
that any of its signatories were attacked in completing or enforcing the
Peace of Paris, the other parties were obliged to come to its aid. There
is no evidence, however, that either Russia or Prussia ever planned to
move beyond the borders of Poland and Saxony to attack the signatories of the Triple Alliance. The treaty was thus a dead letter from the
It is certainly remarkable that after

20 years of war, both Britain and
Austria were willing to unite with
their former adversary, France
Contemporary souvenir
of the gathering of
statesmen at the
Congress of Vienna.
start. Meanwhile, Hardenberg had already

come to terms with the sacrifice of much
of Saxony a fortnight earlier. In his diary
on December 21st the Prussian chancellor
had scribbled: We are ready to cede a great part of Saxony. Finally, the
treaty remained secret. Rumours of its existence abounded but were
never officially confirmed. All this runs against the essence of coercive
diplomacy, a form of hard power requiring a credible threat to be conveyed to an adversary to influence its behaviour. British Cabinet minister
Lord Mulgrave expressed it best: I know not why it should have been
made, or kept secret if it were meant as a check to their pretensions,
it seems to me that it ought to have been avowed; kept secret it leads
to nothing but action which we want to avoid.
LTHOUGH THE secret alliance of January 3rd, 1815 did not

lead to the resolution of the Polish-Saxon question, it coincided with other factors that did. What finally resolved it
was not the threat of hard power embodied in the secret
treaty, but the impact of several soft power influences on the Tsar,
who now made fresh concessions. First, the Tsar clearly did not wish to
antagonise his former allies for the sake of Prussia. Russia, Castlereagh
wrote to London, will not encourage Prussia to resist now that she has
secured her own arrangement in Poland. Second, the Tsar wanted to
court the friendship of the German middle states; third, the Tsar looked
to Britain to pay the Russian debt to Dutch bankers. Overshadowing
all considerations was the Tsars increasing religiosity. Alexander now
pictured himself as the saviour of all humanity. On December 31st,
CONGRESS OF VIENNA
while Castlereagh was drafting the secret alliance, the Tsar was writing
an appeal to other European sovereigns, which would lead to the Holy
Alliance. The Russian Emperor was hoping to unite all sovereigns and
their peoples in a spirit of Christian brotherhood. Against these lofty
concerns the future boundaries of Prussia paled into insignificance.
One might say that Prussia lacked the hard power resources of
Russia and was therefore forced to succumb to allied demands. At the
same time, the soft power attractions of legitimacy and the sanction of
Europe did have an impact, especially on the Tsars impressionable mind.
HIS BRINGS US to the third and oft-neglected final phase of

the negotiation. Although war between the allies had been
avoided, the Prussians had backed down and the Tsar had made
concessions, the Congress still required another month of hard
bargaining. The statesmen were trying to strike the best balance they
could in terms of the hard power resource of population, which they
saw as the key to future military strength.
As early as January 5th, Castlereagh had drawn up an entirely new
plan for the reconstruction of Prussia, restoring it to its former size
while awarding it only a part of Saxony. Castlereagh revealed his skill
as a negotiator by opposing extremes on
all sides. His efforts provide a remarkable picture of balance-of-power diplomacy in action. Still believing in the
need to strengthen Prussia in northern
Germany, the foreign secretary insisted
that the Prussians should be awarded
two fifths of Saxony as well as territories along the Elbe and on the Rhine.
Castlereagh even insisted, over Austrian
objections, that the fortresses of Erfurt
and Torgau be handed over to Prussia.
The Prussians obstinately maintained
their Rhineland proposal, to no avail.
The Austrians offered to return part of
their Polish territory to Russia so that
the latter might, in turn, give more of
Poland to Prussia, instead of Saxony.
The British and French members of the
From the Archive
Statistical Committee recommended
More on the Congress
a different approach: Prussia would be
of Vienna
given, as Castlereagh had suggested,
the fortresses of Torgau and Erfurt, and
congressofvienna
another 900,000 inhabitants. The Prussians were willing to surrender the Saxon
capital of Dresden, but they were determined to make a last stand to
acquire Leipzig, scene of the decisive victory over Napoleon the year
before. This final dispute was only resolved when the Tsar, still in a
conciliatory mood, consented, at Castlereaghs urging, to make further
concessions in Poland. Hanover and the Netherlands, under British pressure, also turned over additional slices of territory to Prussia. A fund was
created, wrote Castlereagh, to operate a salutary reduction in favour
of Saxony. The labours of the Statistical Committee greatly assisted in
the final push. Populations of districts were added and subtracted in
mechanical fashion to attain the desired results and a final agreement
on the reconstruction of Central Europe was at long last achieved in
early February, just before Castlereaghs departure for London.
Although the Prussians did not receive all of Saxony and their territories remained dispersed, they gained a large arc stretching across
northern Germany. Their position in the Rhineland made them part of
the new barrier of states around France, much as Pitt and Castlereagh
had intended, and actually thrust Prussia westward, setting the stage
for later German unification under Prussian leadership. Meanwhile,

Russia annexed most of the Duchy of Warsaw but made several other
last-minute concessions, giving up not only Posen and Thorn but also
the ancient royal capital of Krakow, which became a free city.
HAT DO THESE NEGOTIATIONS REVEAL about the

workings of hard and soft power? At Vienna, much
as today, the possession of substantial hard power resources furnished the credentials for membership in the
exclusive club of great powers. The negotiations at Vienna highlighted
the determination of those powers to reach major decisions by themselves without consulting the lesser states and with little concern for
the wishes of the subject populations actually involved.
At the same time, hard power resources alone were not decisive.
Certainly, Russia set the agenda and dictated the outcome in Poland.
This was truly an exercise of hard power. With fewer hard power
resources, Prussia met with less success.
Russian president
But the fact is that Russia made some
Vladimir Putin chairs a
concessions in Poland, while Prussia still
security council meeting
took a large slice of Saxony and obtained
at the Kremlin, June 2014.
further compensation elsewhere. In the
end, soft power considerations reduced
the impact of hard power and opened
the door to a compromise solution.
By the beginning of February 1815
the interplay of soft and hard power,
expertly applied by the statesmen at
Vienna, had performed its work. The
allies were once again united and ready
to meet a new challenge when Napoleon
escaped from Elba and returned to the
Tuileries Palace in Paris in early March.
Does this episode offer any lessons
for dealing with the likes of President
Putin today? As in both 1814 and 1945,
the western powers may not be in a position to apply their own military force
effectively to the region between Russia
and the rest of Europe. The main instruments of foreign policy at their
disposal appear to be the hard power measures of offering arms to
Ukraine and applying economic sanctions against Russia, combined
with the soft power tools of diplomacy, publicity and persuasion. It
remains to be seen whether, given time and perseverance, Putin can
be persuaded to make concessions as Alexander once was. The current
Russian leader seems to lack the same devotion to European ideals as
the former Tsar. But, as at the Vienna Congress, it may be in the exercise
of soft power that the best hope of restraining Russia still lies.
Mark Jarrett is the author of The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power
Diplomacy after Napoleon (I.B. Tauris, 2013).
FURTHER READING
Enno Kraehe, Metternichs German Policy, vol ii, The Congress of
Vienna (Princeton University Press, 1983).
Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (Perseus Books, 2011).
Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after
Napoleon (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the
Congress of Vienna (HarperCollins, 2007).
| EBOLA
WITH UNCLAIMED Ebola victims on the streets of
towns and villages in West Africa, orphans ostracised
and abandoned and an ever-increasing death toll, it is
inevitable that comparisons are made with past epidemics. Public statements from frustrated aid agencies and
health officials on the current and potential impact of
this epidemic are increasingly echoed by western political rhetoric, tinged with a xenophobic edge. In such a
context, historical references, however misconstrued,
are unsurprising, as age-old practices of mass isolation
and quarantine, with all their medieval connotations,
are given a 21st-century repackaging.
Quarantine never left the lexicon of available public
health measures and it returned to the public eye
during the SARS crisis of 2003. But such a controversial
measure, the temporary isolation of suspected carriers
of a disease, merits further analysis in terms of past
practice, along with perceived and actual effectiveness.
In West Africa today there are many kinds of quarantine in place. Most drastic have been attempts at placing
entire neighbourhoods and districts under lockdown.
Given the media presence, Freetown and Monrovia,
capitals of Sierra Leone and Liberia, respectively, have
produced particularly vivid examples, although large
rural areas, notably those abutting the borders around
Guinea, have been equally dramatic. More broadly still,
some airlines have suspended flights to the region, a
trend that, if it continues, would resemble an international quarantine over affected West Africa. Beyond the
impracticality of such measures, as well as the human
and economic implications, there are numerous historical precedents that indicate why such actions may be
counter-productive in containing Ebola.
More harm than good
There is limited and far from definitive research on
quarantine effectiveness and far too many other factors
at play that are difficult to ascertain from the historical record. Yet while present understanding about the
pathology and transmission of hostile pathogens is far
advanced on centuries past, there are some basic conclusions that can be made. For example, it is fairly certain
that isolating a healthy population alongside an unhealthy population risks causing more harm than good,
especially when access to food, water and medical care
is taken into account. For quarantine to be successful, it
requires perfect compliance and transmission without
symptoms. In the case of Ebola, the former is highly
unlikely and the latter is simply not the case.
Easier to trace are the economic and social consequences of isolating large numbers of people in the
interest of public health. Mass quarantine inevitably
spreads mistrust and historically has been open to abuse.
Such perceptions are amplified when seemingly healthy
individuals are targeted or stigmatised, particularly
when already marginalised or economically disadvantaged. Compounding a tricky equation in determining
the public good is the experience of quarantine being periodically used as a convenient policing or political tool.
While the term quarantine originates from the time
Gold, fire
and gallows:
quarantine
in history
As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues
its dreadful march, Duncan McLean looks at the
600-year-old practice of isolating individuals and
communities in order to bring an end to epidemics
and assesses the effectiveness of such measures.
Plague on their
houses: 14th-century
English engraving on
the Black Death.
of the Black Death, the application of what amounted to

quarantine laws has existed at least since the Plague of
Justinian in the sixth century ad. Earlier still, the Old Testament and the writings of Hippocrates refer to measures
aimed at avoiding contact with those who are ill, or with
the potential to become so. This is an important question of
semantics that needs clarification, particularly as isolation
and quarantine are at times used interchangeably. Isolation
refers to the medical seclusion of individuals already infected with a contagious disease, as opposed to restricting the
movement of those who pose an unconfirmed risk.
Despite hazy explanations over the spread of disease,
medical confinement of the ill had been established long
before the second plague pandemic emerged in the Mediterranean in 1348. An obvious example is documented
through the establishment of leprosaria, or leper colonies,
around 19,000 of which are estimated to have existed in
Europe by the 13th century. Long-term isolation of the
unclean was expected to reduce the risk of contagion, even
if the nature of transmission was misunderstood. Indeed it
was not until the 20th century that the infectious nature
of Hansens Disease (historic leprosy) was definitively
established.
The great contribution of the Black Death as regards
disease control was the formal, if frequently ad hoc,
establishment of control measures in an attempt to limit
exposure to infectious disease. So while many leprosaria
were being transformed into lazarettos or pest houses for
those dying of plague, broader preventative measures were
introduced to limit the impact of the disease.
The Italian model of plague control, essentially the first health boards, subsequently
replicated elsewhere in Europe, eventually
came to deal with matters such as sanitation,
destruction of clothing, fumigation and the
collection and burial of corpses.
The modern understanding of quarantine dates from the actions of one of these
preventative initiatives, that of the Rector
of the Venetian colony of Ragusa (modern
Dubrovnik) in 1377. All ships coming from
suspected plague sites were required to anchor outside the
port harbour for 30 days while awaiting clearance to dock.
Later expanded to 40 days (quaranta), land travellers were
also included. The basis of the duration is open to historical
debate, possibly related to the Hippocratic precepts for
the recovery or death from acute illness, or in reference
to biblical events. Regardless, the dual objective was clear:
protection of health along with safeguarding the network
of trade on which the regions wealth depended.
Closely related to the development of quarantine was
that of the cordon sanitaire. Protective lines would be established, often by armed guards, designed to keep an epidemic
in or out of a specified area. An oft-repeated example of
this practice was the voluntary isolation of the Derbyshire
village of Eyam during a plague outbreak in late 17thcentury England. External supplies were left at stone
boundary points in exchange for disinfected coins. Eventually three quarters of its 350 inhabitants would perish.
Plague did not spread to the surrounding district. More
The dual objective

of quarantine was
the protection of
health along with
safeguarding the
network of trade
ambitiously, the Habsburgs maintained an armed cordon

sanitaire between Austria and the Ottoman Empire for a
century up until 1871, an action which they credited for
the absence of plague in their territory.
Whether in reference to those specific examples or
more generally, it is notoriously difficult to evaluate
preventative measures such as quarantine or a cordon
sanitaire in restricting the spread of plague. Despite
generally being based on the false hypothesis of pestilential air being responsible for all communicable
disease, miasmatic theory at least served to reduce airborne infections. However, ignorance about the role of
either rats or fleas meant that the benefits of quarantine
risked being incidental.
Towards a turning point
Attempts at isolating plague victims and their families
in homes until death or recovery, or barring entry and
exit en masse, ran contrary to the ancient maxim of Cito,
Longe, Tarde (Leave quickly, go far away and come back
slowly), assuming one possessed the means. Consequently, it is unsurprising that draconian measures were
necessary to enforce plague regulations, quarantinerelated and otherwise. Essential tools in the arsenal
included funds to pay administrative costs, fire to burn
dubious goods and purify the atmosphere and gallows to
maintain order: gold, fire, and gallows, as a Sicilian physician astutely summarised during an outbreak in 1576.
Given the choice of starving under isolation, the loss
of all worldly possessions for fear of contamination, or condemnation to a near certain death in
a pest house, resistance to plague regulations was
inevitable. Initially, minorities were targeted as
harbingers of disease, pogroms against Jews having
been well documented. The risk of disorder and
breakdown eventually turned towards the regulations themselves and the authorities who espoused
them, at times more dangerous than the disease
itself. More ominously still, without reasonable
compliance with quarantine measures, attempts at
evasion actually facilitated the spread of plague.
As the practice of quarantine spread, both in the Old
World and New, a gamut of illnesses was added to the
list of those surveyed. Typhus and smallpox were seen as
threatening to the lucrative Slave Trade, especially after
17th-century epidemics occurred in Havana, Cartagena,
Rio de Janeiro and Portobello. Smuggling and bribery
increased as vessels attempted to circumvent quarantine
regulations. Falsified bills of health were likewise prized
as a means to avoid weeks at harbour in pestilential ships.
With racist constructs having determined yellow
fever as a threat to white populations, quarantine
became standard practice in cities and plantations of
the western hemisphere, mirroring developments in
Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe. In the US, repeated outbreaks of yellow fever led to federal quarantine
legislation in 1878. The Yellow Jack flag had long since
become ubiquitous in port cities, notably those receiving
seaborne traffic originating in the West Indies.
It was the waves of 19th-century cholera epidemics
| EBOLA
that led to an increase in quarantine regulations. Transport
technology was already reducing travel time, whether by
land or by sea, facilitating the speed at which new pathogens could interact with susceptible hosts. As the administrative and bureaucratic branches of the state grew larger,
recourse to quarantine was reinforced as a first line of
defence. Perceptions of quarantine as a nuisance, open to
abuse, gave way to calls for standardisation, a frequent subject of debate in international sanitary conferences scattered over the course of the century.
Politics was never far from the surface, a notable
example being the quarantine debates around the opening
of the Suez Canal in 1869. French and British prerogatives
had more to do with securing regional hegemony than
limiting the spread of infectious disease. The more subtle
and nefarious side of quarantine regulations can be
seen in an increase in police powers and suspension of
personal liberties. If the French Revolution propagated
ideas of individual rights, strict sanitary measures were a
convenient tool unleashed on undesirables. Immigrants were frequently seen
as a menace, although marginalised
populations generally, be they beggars,
prostitutes or the unwashed masses,
were considered a threat to healthy
urban populations.
A turning point in the application
of quarantine came with the advent of
germ theory in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. This did not remove population restrictions from public health
initiatives but it did prompt greater
nuance. Debate over quarantine efficacy
by contagionists and anti-contagionists became irrelevant, at least as far the mosquito or cholera bacillus was
concerned, and individual patterns of disease propagation
could be addressed separately. Lazarettos were transformed into health stations, not just symbolically but in
practical terms, as the distinction between stages of illness
became apparent.
By the time of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 many
of the old quarantine measures were considered outdated
and eventual attempts at halting transmission came too
late. The chaos that followed the First World War, with
millions of troops and refugees returning home, provided
ideal conditions for the spread of the virus. More striking
was the resurgence of quarantine measures during the
2003 SARS crisis. Despite the evolution in transport
technologies, or perhaps because of them, the traditional
system of quarantining the potentially ill returned, along
with the medical isolation of the sick. Punishment for
breaking quarantine went so far as the death penalty in
China, while familiar complaints of discrimination and
stigmatisation were widespread.
In describing the experience of immigrants with infectious disease to the US, medical scholar Howard Markel
writes that medical scapegoating may be transformed
into a mentality of quarantine. Not only is disease the
enemy but so are the human beings that are potentially
infected. While efforts understandably focus on halting
an epidemic, this is often done at the neglect of those
with the most acute medical needs. This seems a particularly apt description of the current Ebola epidemic in West
Africa. Medical needs are obviously not ignored entirely;
the infection of at least 400 health workers provides
depressing evidence of those most at risk (beyond family
members of the victims themselves). But the broader
emphasis has clearly been on halting the epidemic, even
if such efforts are counter-productive.
Protection?
Rubber boots at
a Mdecins Sans
Frontires medical
centre, Monrovia,
October 18th,
2014.
From the Archive

More on
disease
disease
Stigmatism and discrimination

Under such circumstances the concept of quarantine has
returned to prominence. Yet if the measure has historic
benefits it has remained a pillar of disease control over
600 years there is a dark side to it. Stigmatisation and
discrimination accompany quarantine measures. And
the greater the mistrust of the health authorities, the
greater the chance individuals will evade quarantine and
surveillance measures, inadvertently contributing to the
spread of disease. Such suspicions manifested themselves
most clearly with the murder of a health
team in southern Guinea this September, accused of intentionally spreading
Ebola. Though quarantine is intended to
limit the breakdown of social order, the
effect can be the opposite.
Aside from the ethical and social
issues that accompany mass quarantines, repressive public health measures
in the present outbreak are also a result
of recent history. Both Liberia and Sierra
Leone have many more soldiers than
doctors, so a military response reflects
the means available, however misguided. Meanwhile, animosity towards the Guinean government from communities where the epidemic originated
certainly predates Ebola. Most telling is the need for
governments to be seen to be responding irrespective of
doubts about the effectiveness of quarantine: incurable
diseases frequently provoke an overreaction, as it is often
better to be seen do something, even if that something is
irrelevant or worse.
A similar conclusion can be drawn from the international response. Cancelling flights may reassure the public
from afar but will hinder the response on the ground,
weaken governments and slow delivery of aid. More
worryingly, the urge to flee under such circumstances
will make those infected more creative and correspondingly more difficult to track. Confusion, fear and hysteria,
whether manifested locally, internationally or through
the media, are the most difficult elements to overcome.
Quarantine is still with us. Given its checkered past,
the assumption that the indiscriminate seclusion of
healthy and sick individuals will be effective gives pause
for thought. As three West African states teeter on the
brink of economic and political collapse, controlling the
epidemic will require more than token gestures while
keeping the region quarantined at arms length.
Duncan McLean lectures in history at Charles University and at the

Anglo-American University in Prague. He worked for Mdecins Sans
Frontires for 12 years.
HENRY III
Henry III at court,
from the First
Chapter of the Holy
Spirit, 16th-century
manuscript.
A Monarch
and his
Mignons
The young men who surrounded Henry III of France
have been dismissed by some historians as effeminate,
inconsequential sycophants. Robert Knecht offers a
very different account of their activities and influence.
UCH OF THE information we have

on day-to-day life in Paris during the
troubled years of Henry IIIs reign
(1574-89) comes from the diary of the
lawyer, Pierre de LEstoile. Not content to describe
events, he was also an avid collector of pamphlets,
mostly scurrilous, which poured off the numerous
Parisian printing presses. They enable us to share
the tittle-tattle flourishing at the time and to penetrate the prejudices shaping public opinion. France
was then sharply divided by religion. Thousands of
Protestants, or Huguenots, had been massacred in
Paris and other cities in 1572, but they remained
strong in the south and west, while Paris was
fiercely Catholic. Though a Catholic himself, Henry
III lacked the means to take on the Huguenots in
an all-out war. He was accused of timidity, even of
double-dealing, by Catholic extremists, known as
Leaguers. LEstoile was a royalist, but not an uncritical admirer of the court. In particular, he shared
public hostility towards Henry IIIs small circle of
favourites, known as his mignons. On October
20th, 1577 LEstoile noted the arrival of the king at
his country residence of Ollainville with a group of
young mignons who were heavily made-up, prettily coiffured, wore brightly coloured clothes and
powdered with scent of violets and other perfumes
which they exuded in the streets, squares and
houses. Such accounts were grist to the mill of 19thcentury historians, brainwashed by Bourbon propaganda of
the previous two centuries. They saw the mignons as miserable wretches who in his [Henrys] licentious court presided over mysteries worthy of Nero or Heliogabalus. Their
way of life was described as a mix of unspeakable debauchery, false piety and sword fights. Lavisse in his Histoire de
France (1901) accused the mignons of destroying Henry IIIs
virility. More recent historians have been less severe.
THAT HENRY III SHOULD have had favourites is hardly
surprising. Monarchs were used to distributing special
favours to certain members of their entourage in return for
their loyalty and services. The first French king to do so was
Philip III, the Bold (1270-85). A long line of favourites can
be traced through the succeeding reigns until that of Louis
XIV, who had none. Henry III seems to have had more than
any other French king. They can be divided into two groups:
the first, formed in the 1570s, comprised some 20 young
men, roughly of the same age as Henry. They belonged
to families of the provincial nobility (or noblesse seconde),
which had served the crown for generations. The second
group was formed in the 1580s. It consisted of only two
HENRY III
still duc dAnjou, that the first mignon
joined his clientle. The moment of decision
was the siege of La Rochelle, the Atlantic
port which had become a Huguenot refuge
following the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. The siege became not only a
baptism of fire for Henry, who commanded
it, but also an event in which lasting friendships were formed. The contemporary writer, Brantme, described it as a
celebration of friendship. Anjous election
to the Polish throne, which gave him a
credible excuse for lifting the siege, also
provided his companions with another opportunity of gaining his friendship. Caylus,
Saint-Sulpice, Villequier, dO and Saint-Luc
all chose to share his Polish adventure. This
called for considerable courage, for Poland
was a distant country full of unknown
dangers. Duly grateful to his companions,
Henry rewarded them following his accession to the French throne in 1574.
Henry preferred indoor

pastimes, especially dancing,
and shared his mothers passion
for courtly entertainments
men, Anne de Joyeuse, baron dArques and Jean-Louis de La
Valette. They became far more powerful than their predecessors and were known as the archimignons.
The first group of mignons included Ren de Villequier,
Louis du Guast, Guy dArces, alias Livarot, Gilles de Souvr,
Paul de Saint-Mgrin and, especially, five men whom Henry
called his chre bande (dear band). These were Jacques de
Caylus, Louis de Maugiron, Franois dO, Henri de SaintSulpice and Franois de Saint-Luc. They had one thing
in common: none of them belonged to the clientle of a
powerful nobleman or, if he did, his integration was not
sufficiently firm to resist the kings blandishments. It was
during the reign of Charles IX (1559-74), while Henry was
Ball at the court of

Henry III, French
school after 1583.
E SHOULD NOT imagine,

however, in the light of the
abuse subsequently directed at the mignons, that
Henry gave them undue political authority.
On his way back from Poland to take up his
crown, he received a letter of advice from
his hugely experienced mother, Catherine
de Medici. Knowing his weaknesses, she
warned him against allowing himself to be
manipulated by others. You must be the
master,, she wrote, not just a companion.
No one should be allowed to take advantage
of his youth. He needed to attach more
value to an office than to a particular individual, otherwise his authority would be
called into question. Henry came to resent
his mothers intrusiveness, but in this
instance he took her advice. He retained
the services of men like Ren de Birague, Pomponne de
Bellivre and Nicolas de Villeroy, who had served his predecessor. The mignons were rewarded with posts of secondary
importance, close to the kings person but not crucial to the
realms administration. They joined his household as chansons, or cup-bearers. In addition to court offices, they were
given military and provincial commands, thereby exemplifying Henrys aim of creating a nobility tied exclusively to
his person.
Henrys mignons soon realised that the best way to win
and retain his favour was to model their conduct on his.
Unlike his predecessors, he was a private man, who disliked
crowds and believed that his authority would be enhanced
by distancing himself from the general mass of courtiers.
He devised an elaborate system of etiquette, which kept
them at bay. Nor was he keen on hunting. Unlike his grandfather, Francis I, who had spent much of his life travelling
across France in search of game, Henry preferred to stay in
and around Paris. He also loved to retire from court, sometimes for several weeks on end with a few close friends. He
preferred indoor pastimes, especially dancing, and shared
his mothers passion for courtly entertainments. These

offered him a pretext for dressing up. In the 1580s Henry
took to wearing black, but earlier in life he was a fop. In
1572 a Venetian observer described him as follows:
His manner of dressing and pretentious gestures make him
seem delicate and effeminate, for, in addition to rich clothes
which he wears with gold embroideries, precious stones and
pearls of great price, he gives close attention to his linen and
hair-style. He usually wears around his neck a double necklace
of amber mounted in gold which floats on his chest exuding a
pleasant scent.
In February 1577 LEstoile reported Henry as taking part
in jousts, tournaments, ballets and many masquerades
in which he usually appeared dressed as a woman. But
this was not unusual at the time. Courtiers often liked to
assume feminine disguise.
The nature of Henrys relations with his mignons has
aroused much speculation. When separated from them, he
would write to them effusively. He urged them to love him
as tenderly as he loved them. To Saint-Sulpice, he wrote:
Always love him [the king ] well, and believe that he loves
you dearly and, if possible, even more. The letter bears
the sign (:S:+=), used by lovers to express the strength of
their attachment. A letter written to Souvr in September
1577 expresses Henrys burning desire to see him soon. The
mignons, for their part, assured him of their willingness to

sacrifice their lives for him.
Are we to conclude that Henry was gay? Ren de
Lucinge, the ambassador of Savoy, wrote in 1586 that
Henry had learned the vice that nature detests from the
godless Villequier and that his cabinet had been a veritable
seraglio of every lubricious act and lewdness, a school of
sodomy, where all the filthy revels which the whole world
has known took place. But Lucinge was politically biased.
We also need to bear in mind that writing love letters
(lettres galantes) was a literary genre much in vogue at the
time. Corbinelli, the kings Italian reader, thanked a Paduan
friend for sending him a volume of love letters that he had
found most useful when advising the king and his friends
on how to compose such letters. Nor should we forget
that Henry wrote equally amorous missives to women.
Over three or four months he wrote around 40 letters to
Mademoiselle de La Mirandole, one of the queens ladies
in waiting. He wrote several times from Poland to Marie de
Clves, with whom he had fallen madly in love, dipping his
pen in his own blood.
THE IDEA THAT the mignons were effeminate fops who
minced around Henry III in fanciful attire is misleading.
Violence was the order of the day. In September 1577 Ren
de Villequier stabbed his pregnant wife to death in the
Clockwise from
top right:
contemporary
portraits of Anne,
duc de Joyeuse
and Jean Louis
de La Valette,
duc d'pernon;
'Henry III and the
Murder of Guise',
December 23rd,
1588, from Guizot's
A Popular History
of France, c.1885,
which disparages
Henry's reign.
HENRY III
Above: the siege

of La Rochelle,
commanded by
Henry while duc
d'Anjou, 1573,
tapestry, 1623.
Right: Catherine
de' Medici by
Franois Clouet
c.1570.
kings own lodging at Poitiers. He accused her of having an

affair and of seeking to poison him. A maidservant threw
herself out of a window, injuring herself badly. Villequier,
however, escaped prosecution. In 1576 the French court
began to split into two main factions, the kings and that of
his brother, the duc dAnjou. They soon came to blows. Le
Guast was fatally stabbed by armed men in his own home as
he was having his toe-nails cut by a servant. By 1578 fights
became a daily occurrence. Anjou eventually fled from the
court, whereupon the mignons started fighting among
themselves. On April 27th, Caylus, Maugiron and Livarot

met Entraguet, Ribrac and the young Schomberg near the
Porte Saint-Antoine in Paris. A pitched battle, known as the
duel des mignons, ensued in which Maugiron and Schomberg were killed. Badly wounded, Ribrac died the next day.
Livarot was kept in bed for six weeks by a head wound. Only
Entraguet escaped serious injury. Henry III was devastated
by the loss. He ordered funerals for Caylus and Maugiron,
designed to immortalise their membership of his most
intimate circle. Caylus lay in state with his face uncovered,
an honour normally reserved to persons of the highest rank.
He was soon joined by another mignon. On July 21st SaintMgrin was hacked to pieces by some 30 men as he left the
Louvre after attending the kings coucher. Henry ordered
splendid tombs for the three mignons from the sculptor
Germain Pilon. They were erected in the church of SaintPaul in the Marais and a Latin encomium by Jean Dorat was
engraved in letters of gold on the black marble base. Verses
in praise of the deceased were commissioned by Henry from
the poets Desportes and Ronsard. The funeral elegy was
spoken by Arnauld Sorbin, who had done likewise at the
funerals of Charles IX and his daughter, thereby linking the
mignons to the royal family. The church became the centre
of a veritable cult of the kings deceased favourites. The
tombs no longer exist, for they were destroyed by a Parisian
mob in 1588.
In the 1580s, as we have seen, two new mignons
appeared. They were Anne de Joyeuse, baron dArques, and
of the queens residence at Romorantin in the

Sologne. One day, as the king and his mother
stood at an open window, they saw the tent and,
impressed by its magnificence, asked who might
be its owner. On learning it was La Valette, they
praised his galanterie. True or false, the story
shows how royal favour might be captured by a
would-be mignon. La Valette himself continued
to tell the story 60 years later.
Arques became duc de Joyeuse in August
1581. His elevation was a reward for loyal service
to Henry in a recent siege to which a facial scar
bore witness. As an additional reward, he was
given precedence over all other dukes and peers
save princes of the blood. La Valette became duc
dpernon one month later and was also given
precedence over other dukes and peers, placing
him on the same footing as Joyeuse. In 1582
both men were given the title of First Gentleman of the Chamber. They alone were allowed
access to the kings person without having to
wait in an antechamber for permission to enter.
They also shared the privilege of eating at the far
end of his table.
Henry wrote several times from Poland

to Marie de Clves, with whom he had
fallen madly in love, dipping his pen in
his own blood
Jean-Louis de La Valette. Their careers ran more or less
along parallel lines. Both studied at the Collge de Navarre
in Paris before taking up military careers. In 1577 Arques
served under the duc dAnjou at the siege of Issoire before
joining the court, where he was soon noticed by Henry.
La Valette was a Gascon whose father had belonged to the
noblesse seconde. He was introduced to Henry at the siege of
La Rochelle, but did not follow him to Poland. He entered
the service of the King of Navarre, but, following Henrys
return from Poland, he managed to capture his attention by
bringing him useful information about events in southwest France. But La Valettes biographer gives another
account of how he won the kings favour. He allegedly
bought a magnificent tent, which he erected within sight
Henry III, portrait

by Franois
Clouet.
ENRY CALLED DO, Joyeuse and

pernon my children and said that,
like any good parent, he needed to
marry them off. The first to be so
honoured was Joyeuse, who married Marguerite de Lorraine, the queens sister-in-law. At
the wedding in Paris on September 24th, 1581
the king gave away the bride wearing exactly
the same costume as the groom. Covered with
embroidery pearls and precious stones, it
was valued at 10,000 cus. The wedding was
followed by a series of festivities known as
the Magnificences of the duc de Joyeuse. They
included the Balet comique de la reine. LEstoile
described them as mummeries, finery, dances,
music, masks, tournaments and similar follies and superfluities. Hugely expensive, they had still not been paid for 15
years later. Writing to Joyeuses grandmother, Henry said:
If I could have made him my son I would have done so, but I am
making him my brother I love him so much that I cannot love
myself more.
Henry decided to marry pernon to one of the queens
sisters, but she was only eight years old at the time and
pernon was unwilling to wait. In August 1587 he married
Marguerite de Foix-Candale. Henry gave the bride a
necklace valued at 100,000 cus. She was the niece of Henri
de Montmorency-Damville, governor of Languedoc, and
her marriage may be seen as part of a strategy to strengthen
pernons position in the south-west. By arranging several
marriages linking the families of Joyeuse and La Valette,
Henry aimed to create a substantial family united by royal
favour. In November 1581 Joyeuses brother, Henri, married
pernons sister, Catherine, and in February 1582 pernons brother married Joyeuses aunt. The purpose of these
marriages was to build around the king a solid network
of fidlits. Not everyone, however, appreciated this
HENRY III
strategy. Franois dO ceased to be a mignon around this
time. According to Pasquier, he was dismissed by the king
on the day of the Joyeuse wedding, which had broken his
heart. By bringing the archimignons into his family Henry
hoped to silence those who complained of their sudden rise
to eminence.
Henrys joy over the marriage of Joyeuse was short-lived.
In the summer of 1587 the religious wars entered a new
phase as German troops invaded western France. The king
decided to deploy three armies. He sent Joyeuse at the head
of his best troops to fight Henry of Navarre in Guyenne,
the duc de Guise with inadequate troops to harass the
Germans, while he himself took up a position on the Loire
O
A ball at the court
of Henry III to
celebrate the
Marriage of Anne,
duc de Joyeuse to
Marguerite de
Vaudmont,
September 14th,
1581.
N 21 FEBRUARY Henry took formal leave of

Joyeuse. His effigy, exposed for three days in the
church of Saint-Jacques du Haut-Pas, drew large
crowds. On March 6th it was seated at a table
and given a meal as at a royal funeral. The funeral, which
took place next day at the church of the Grands Augustins,
was attended by a vast number of clergy, court officials,
magistrates, academics and heralds. A commemorative
medal struck in honour of the deceased carried the device:
Victimo pro salvo domino, fit in aethere sidus (Sacrificed for
the kings salvation, now a star in the firmament). A literary
campaign in his memory was designed to revive Henry IIIs
standing in public opinion, for Joyeuse had died fighting
the Huguenots. Raoul Caillet wrote a
poem comparing Henrys loss with that
of Phoebus after the fall of Phaeton. But
nothing could appease the Parisians, who
soon rebelled. As they erected barricades,
he fled from the capital, never to return.
He sealed his fate by ordering the assassination of the duc de Guise, who had
become their hero.
Hatred of the king was fuelled by
an avalanche of pamphlets: 237 were
printed in Paris in the first six months of
1589. One, entitled La Vie et faits notables
de Henri de Valois, accused the king of
siding with the heretics and of debauchery with his mignons. He was identified
with tyrants of Antiquity: Caligula,
Nero, Heliogabalus. Henry, meanwhile,
allied with the Huguenot leader, Henry
of Navarre. Jointly, they laid siege to
Paris. Henry set up his headquarters
at Saint-Cloud, from where he could
see the capital. On August 1st, 1589 a
Jacobin friar, Jacques Clment, who had
claimed to be the bearer of an important
message for the king, was admitted to his
presence, even though Henry was sitting
on his close-stool. The king ordered his
attendants to withdraw as the friar drew
closer to whisper in his ear. As he did
so, he drew a knife from his sleeve and
plunged it into the kings abdomen. Henry died a few days
later. pernon was the only mignon who witnessed the
scene. Ten years later, he was sitting next t0 Henry IV in his
carriage when he, too, was assassinated. Two regicides in
one lifetime must be a record, even for an archimignon.
Henrys joy over the marriage of Joyeuse was

short-lived. In the summer of 1587 Frances
religious wars entered a new phase
with the bulk of the army. He hoped to destroy both Guise
and Navarre, but fate dictated otherwise. Joyeuse proved
no match for Navarre, who on October 20th routed his
army at Coutras. Hundreds of noblemen died, including
Joyeuse. Guise, on the other hand, was victorious. Henry
returned to Paris in triumph, but no one was deceived. The
real victor was his enemy, the duc de Guise. The king denied
him any share in the celebrations by effectively banishing
him to his province of Champagne. He then compounded
his foolishness by giving to pernon the offices previously
held by Joyeuse. In particular, he was appointed governor
of Normandy, an office normally reserved for a prince of
the blood. pernon was extremely unpopular. Preachers
attacked him and several pamphlets denounced him as the
new Gaveston: Piers Gaveston had been the favourite of
the English king, Edward II. His murder in 1312 was now
presented as an anticipation of the fate awaiting not only
pernon, but Henry III.
Robert J. Knecht is Emeritus Professor of History in the University of

Birmingham.
FURTHER READING
Jacqueline Boucher, La cour dHenri III (Ouest-France, 1986).
From the Archive

More on
Henry III
henryIII
Pierre Chevallier, Henri III, roi Shakespearien (Fayard, 1985).

R.J.Knecht, Hero or Tyrant: Henry III King of France, 1574-89
(Ashgate, 2014).
N. Le Roux, La Faveur du roi (Champvallon, 2001).
REVIEWS
Ruth Kinna on anarchy and art Andrew Lycett praises a study of the other
Arab revolt Zareer Masani questions a neo-colonial urban history
An Outdoor
Literary Salon,
French 19thcentury illustration.
SIGNPOSTS
Books of the Year
From Pikettys trumpet-blast to the great deeds

of medieval saints, ten leading historians tell us
about their best reads from 2014.
Michael Burleigh
Justin Marozzi is both

a courageous traveller
and a fine historian,
with an in-depth
knowledge of Arabic culture.
His Baghdad: City of Peace, City
of Blood (Allen Lane) reflects
these qualities in an estimable
fashion. Starting with Caliph
Mansur in the eighth century and
ending with the recently ousted
Nouri al-Maliki government,
Marozzi describes 13 centuries
of the history of this remarkable
city without succumbing to the
tyranny of a present in which the
Iraqi capital is besieged by the
genocidal nihilists of ISIS and subjected to daily sectarian suicide
bombings. The various books by

Toby Dodge on Iraqi politics also
deserve an honourable mention
in this context, though he lacks
Marozzis gifts as a storyteller.
Michael Burleighs books include
Small Wars, Faraway Places: The
Genesis of the Modern World,
1945-1965 (Macmillan, 2012).
Kate Cooper
One of the quandaries of 2014 has been

the volatile role of
religion in global
conflict and Karen Armstrongs
Fields of Blood: Religion and the
History of Violence (Bodley Head)
puts forward a novel and illuminating thesis. The turning point,
she argues, is the 16th century,

when agrarian empires gave way
to a new kind of civilisation in
Europe. Economic prosperity
was now to be found not in the
divinely sanctioned plunder
of warrior kings, but in new
technologies and the constant
reinvestment of capital. Religion
became a matter of private conscience, uncoupled from the state
and its monopoly on violence. A
disturbing and refreshing view of
20,000 years of human society,
from stone age brain development to the peculiar cognitive
and social landscape of the age of
the Internet.
Kate Cooper is author of Band of
Angels: The Forgotten World of
Early Christian Women (Atlantic
Books, 2013).
Paul Cartledge
My favourite history
book of 2014? It is a
no-brainer: Danielle
Allens Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense
of Equality (Liveright/W.W.
Norton). Professor Allen (now
of the Institute for Advanced
Study, Princeton) is by origin a
brilliant classicist and she reads
the Declaration as if it were a
manifesto drawn up by a committee presided over by a Pericles
and drafted by a Demosthenes.
She even agonises over its punctuation. The motor that moves
America today, it has been said, is
not equality but inequality. Professor Allen aims to reverse that
unhappy thrust and, if intellectual rigour combined with political commitment and eloquence
were enough, she would surely

succeed.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis
Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus
at Cambridge.
Penelope Corfield
Thomas Pikettys
Capital in the
Twenty-First Century
(Belknap Press/
Harvard) is a major study with
significant implications for
historians. As the Marx-echoing
title suggests, it is a work of political economy with radical implications. Yet there is more. Piketty
not only analyses the comparative distribution of wealth since
the 18th century (with complex
data for historians to debate) but,
simultaneously, denounces the
current state of economics. In his
view, the discipline has atrophied
into a sterile set of mathematical
models. Instead it should re-tool
and re-integrate with economic
and social history. Pikettys
trumpet-blast constitutes one
notable sign, among many others
across the humanities and social
sciences, of a desired return to
long-term perspectives. The
diachronic is back! At last, an
intellectual shift which historians
can welcome wholeheartedly.
Penelope J. Corfields publications
include The Time and Shape of
History (Yale, 2007).
Tom Holland
The history book I

most enjoyed this
year was also my first
of 2014. I tucked into
Robert Bartletts Why Can The
Dead Do Such Great Things
REVIEWS
(Princeton University Press) on
New Years Day and could not
have hoped for a more stimulating festive read. A sweeping
study of medieval saints, covering the entire Christian world
from Late Antiquity to the Reformation, it is also a compendium
of anecdotes, such as one rarely
finds in a work of scholarship.
Whether it be St Modwenna
of Burton and her red cow, the
Bishop of Lincoln who bit off
two chunks of Mary Magdalenes
arm, or Queen Bathildis cleaning
out toilets, all of human and
much of divine life is here.
Tom Hollands latest book is
Herodotus: The Histories
(Penguin Classics, 2013).
Lucy Delap
In 2014 I have
particularly enjoyed
the provocative
questions raised
by Mo Moultons Ireland and
the Irish in Interwar England
(Cambridge University Press).
Moulton portrays the Anglo-Irish
war of 1919-21 as a civil war,
fought not only in Ireland but
also in England, and having deep
political and social repercussions for the following decades.
Barbara Taylors The Last Asylum
(Penguin) offers a very different
kind of history, in which her own
experiences as a service user of
psychiatric hospitals allows for a
wider historical look at varieties
of care for the mentally ill during
the transfer from older asylums
to new forms of community
care. Alison Lights Common
People (Fig Tree) similarly foregrounds the author through an
exploration of her own family
history. Tracing the migratory
paths taken by the English
working poor, Light illuminates
what it meant to be common
across multiple generations.
Lucy Delaps publications include
Knowing Their Place: Domestic
Service in Twentieth-Century
Britain (Oxford, 2010).
John Maddicott
Andrew M. Spencers
Nobility and Kingship in Medieval
England: The Earls and
Edward I, 12721307 (Cambridge

University Press) provides a new
and enterprising view of an old
subject by arguing, contra almost
everyone, that most of Edwards
earls were loyalists during the
great crises of his reign and
that their local power was more
dependent on the defence and
extension of jurisdictional rights
than on their use of retainers to
control the shires. More likely
to be overlooked, but equally
rewarding, is Nicholas Ormes
deftly and expertly written
The Church in Devon, 4001560
(Imprint Press): a local work but
one which exemplifies larger
and national themes as well as
illuminating the peculiarities of
its county.
John Maddicotts publications
include The Origins of the English
Parliament, 924-1327 (Oxford
Global Crisis
is truly global
... making what
usually appear
as isolated
incidents part of a
universal whole ...
Groundbreaking
and thrilling
Judith Flanders
My history read of the

year and probably of
many years to come
is Geoffrey Parkers
Global Crisis: War, Climate Change
and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century (Yale). Even as our world
has become more interconnected,
history writing is all too often
increasingly specialised, focused
on smaller and smaller chunks
of space and time. By contrast,
Global Crisis is truly global,
connecting the dots and making
what usually appear as isolated
incidents part of a universal
chain-reaction. Ground-breaking
and thrilling.
Judith Flanders latest book is The
Making of Home (Atlantic, 2014).
Peter Mandler
Peter Baldwins The

Copyright Wars: Three
Centuries of TransAtlantic Battle (Princeton University Press) traces the
swings of power and interest
between authors and their
audiences in the long struggle
between copyright and access.
It sparkles with Baldwins
characteristic qualities: caustic
and epigrammatic prose, a
forensic comparative approach to
differences between the US and
Europe, scorn for vested interests
and sloppy thinking. It has a
special relevance today when
corporate rights-owners are
seeking in law to extend their
ownership of culture in perpetuity and digital activists (and, now,
academics) are fighting for open
access.
Peter Mandler is President of the
Royal Historical Society.
Chris Wickham
John Sabapathys
Officers and Accountability in Medieval
England 1170-1300
(Oxford University Press) is a
very elegant book that comes at
how medieval administration
worked from a new direction.
How rulers kept control over
their officials wasnot a new issue
in the 12th and 13th centuries,butthe practice of holding
officials literally to account now
came into western political and
administrative life for the first
time. Rulers had been concerned
before that their officials were
just (and of course loyal), but that
they were honesthad not really
been a separate issue in their
minds. From here on it would be,
at least as an ideal. Sabapathy is
the first person to properly set
out all the implications of this.
There is a real sea-change here,
for with accountability comes,
fairly soon, the idea that one
might also seek to find ways to
improve government as well; it
would have a long future.
Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford
and author of The Inheritance of
Rome: A History of Europe from
400 to 1000 (Penguin 2009).
A Short History of the

Byzantine Empire
Dionysios Stathakopoulos
I.B. Tauris 192pp 12.99
Byzantine Matters
Averil Cameron
Princeton University Press 184pp 15.95
FOR MOST people the Byzantine

Empire is probably an unfamiliar
entity, despite its historical importance. The empire (in reality
the Roman Empire that survived
throughout the medieval period
centred on the ancient Greek
city of Byzantium; the term
Byzantine is modern) can trace
its origins to the re-founding of
Byzantium as Constantinople in
ad 324 by the Christian Roman
emperor, Constantine the Great,
and its demise to 1453, when the
city fell to the Ottoman Turks.
These two books are attractively produced short works on
the empire which aim to make it
better known and understood.
Dionysios Stathakopoulos,
lecturer in Byzantine Studies at
Kings College London, provides
a potted history of Byzantium
in eight main chapters, as well
as an introduction and a final
chapter on Aftermath and
Afterlife. This would be a suitable book for a beginner, providing political narrative as well as
focus on social, economic and
cultural developments. Footnotes are not used but there
is guidance on further reading
and a web address for fuller
bibliographies.
Averil Cameron, Professor

Emeritus of Late Antique and
Byzantine History at the University of Oxford and the first Chair
of the Society for the Promotion
of Byzantine Studies, established
in 1983, has produced a more
distinctive book, accessible but
also directed at the field itself. It
consists of five short essays on
aspects of Byzantium (Absence,
Empire, Hellenism, Art and
Orthodoxy), framed by an introduction and epilogue. Despite
the shortness and dainty size of
her book, she gives footnotes
as well as providing further
reading, reflecting the different
purpose of her work.
Both books are preoccupied
with the image of Byzantium.
Stathakopoulos declares that
his book has the modest aim
to put together a basic body of
knowledge about this state, to
challenge stereotypes about it
by providing a straightforward
and sober account and to place it
firmly in the context of both the
European and Middle Eastern
Middle Ages and observes it is
easy, even convenient to overlook it. But ... Byzantium is an indispensable and fascinating part
of European history. It needs to
be taken seriously. Cameron
is also concerned to challenge
stere0types: not just western
Orientalist views of Byzantium
but also traditional views that
have developed within Byzantine
studies. She sets out an agenda
for future study of Byzantium,
one that locates it firmly within
its Roman imperial origins and
embraces theoretical approaches to its culture.
As both authors make clear,
though, it is not that Byzantium
has received no attention at all.
For example, the work of Judith
Herrin in popularising Byzantium and challenging stereotypical views is acknowledged
and a number of recent guides
and handbooks to Byzantium
are highlighted (see also the
March 2014 Signposts article on
Byzantium by Liz James at http://
www.historytoday.com/liz-james/
short-history-byzantium). A host
of new translation series will
make the subject of Byzantium
even more accessible (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library,

Harvard University Press and
Translated Texts for Byzantinists, Liverpool University
Press). Indeed, there has been
a regular thread of interest in
Byzantium in the modern world;
it is just that perceptions of it
have tended to be loaded and
subjective. Edward Gibbon may
have taken a dim view of it in
The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire (1776-88),
but at least he saw that the
Roman Empire ended in 1453. For
Russia, which owes so much to
Byzantium since the conversion
to Orthodoxy of Vladimir of
Kiev in the tenth century, the
fate of the empire can provide
a warning about the insidious
dangers posed by the West.
Above all, it is the need to see
Byzantium is an
indispensable and
fascinating part of
European history.
It needs to be taken
seriously
Byzantium accurately that these
books avow.
It is also true, however, that
Byzantium forged a deceptive
vision of itself, as an unchanging
uniform empire. It is the stories
and images that Byzantium
created for itself that have
resulted in such a particular perception of it in the West, belying
the view of it as irrelevant. It is
the reactions that Byzantium
has elicited from others that
makes it such a fascinating
empire to study; they reveal
more about viewers preoccupations and histories than
they do about Byzantium itself.
Ultimately, it is the very unfamiliarity of Byzantium that forms
the foundation of its appeal. The
joy of discovering it for the first
time is not to be underestimated. Yes, Byzantium is important
and for all (Averil Camerons
rallying cry), but we also value
its individual specialness.
Shaun Tougher
Ten Cities That Made

An Empire
Tristram Hunt
Allen Lane 511pp 25
THE ENTICING title of this book

unfortunately turns out to be
something of a misnomer. Instead
of hearing how key urban centres
shaped the British Empire, we get
the historical equivalent of Around
The World in 80 Days: a whirlwind
tour from Boston to Dublin, eastwards through Cape Town and
the great cities of the Raj in India,
to Hong Kong and Melbourne and
finally back home to Liverpool.
The result is at best picaresque,
with some tantalising insights into
what might have been explored, if
the book had focused on half the
number of cities crammed in here.
Hunt declares at the outset that
he will avoid the extremes of Niall
Fergusons imperial triumphalism
and Richard Gotts demonisation of
empire. He cites the more nuanced
approach of Linda Colley, exploring
the complex exchanges between
colonisers and the colonised.
He rightly identifies great urban
centres as crucibles for the cosmopolitan, hybrid and often mutually beneficial results of imperial
interaction. But he falls short of the
meticulous scholarship that makes
Colleys work so illuminating.
Instead, were offered a familiar
story of how imperial trade and
administration created port-cities,
some of which, such as Bombay
and Hong Kong, have survived as
powerhouses of the post-colonial global economy. What Hunt
puts his finger on is the extent to
which the British Empire, far more
successfully than any of its rivals,
built cities that have survived and
prospered long after the end of
empire. Whether in Hong Kong,

Cape Town or Bombay, the secret
of these maximum cities has been
the institutional framework that
the British left behind: western
education, the rule of law, a
professional civil service, free press,
municipal facilities and free market
capitalism.
The relative success of these
institutions has depended upon the
enthusiasm with which they were
assimilated by indigenous elites,
but Hunt offers us little understanding of how that assimilation
occurred. His account of Hong
Kong largely ignores the rise of
Chinese entrepreneurs; likewise in
Calcutta he overlooks the anglophile Bengali cultural renaissance.
He treats the philanthropic Indian
city fathers of Bombay as passive
recipients of distant Victorian
wisdom from the likes of Florence
Nightingale, while saying nothing
of the great industrialist, Jamsetji
Tata, who created a global business
empire that is today Britains
largest manufacturing employer.
However unintentionally, this
book perpetuates a neo-colonial
view of imperial cities by focusing
on their British rulers and architects. It glosses over important
distinctions between cities like
Boston, Cape Town and Melbourne, ruled by white settlers,
and those like Bombay and Hong
Kong, where power was shared by
dynamic indigenous elites.
As a front-bench politician who
continues his academic career and
gives frequent media performances,
it is impressive that Tristram Hunt
still finds time to write books.
Unfortunately, his own imperial
overstretch shows in research
which is often sketchy and sometimes factually inaccurate. Some
errors are minor, such as the name
of the first Indian MP at Westminster, Dadabhai Naoroji, being
inverted and the description of
him as a black man being wrongly
attributed to the Liberal Lord Rosebery, instead of to the Tory Premier,
Lord Salisbury. Others are more
serious, such as the assertion that
no Indians were allowed into the
Indian Civil Service as late as 1909,
when in fact many were, starting
as early as 1864.
Zareer Masani
REVIEWS
Baghdad
City of Peace, City of Blood

Justin Marozzi
Allen Lane 459pp 25
BAGHDAD is at once familiar and

yet quintessentially unknown.
Regularly and for so long has
it made the news that we are
inured to the apparently unchanging narrative of random
violence, political corruption and
human tragedy in the city.
Justin Marozzi, a journalist
who has worked in Iraq for many
years, aims to provide historical
perspective on Baghdad. He
takes us on a lively, accessible
romp through 1,400 years of
Baghdads history, from its
foundation in ad 762 as the
capital of the Abbasid caliphate
when it was known as medinat
salam, city of peace through
the gradual waning of its power
and influence under Persian and
Ottoman rule, to its role as a
centre of global affairs from the
First World War onwards and its
current status as a city of blood.
Marozzi has a journalists eye
for a good anecdote. He berates
the great medieval geographer
Ibn Battuta as an incorrigible
gossip who couldnt resist a
scandalous story. The early
modern English merchant John
Newberry has a taste for the
dramatic. But so does Marozzi
himself. No scurrilous whisper of
palace intrigue, violent atrocity
or dissolute living is missed.
The upshot is a history of the
stories people have wanted to
tell about Baghdad, the images
that travellers have wanted to
paint of it rather than an insider
account of what it was actually
like to live in the city itself.

Any book of this scope
depends on a huge number of
sources, ranging from masterly
Arabic and Persian historical
accounts of a millennium ago to
the diaries, blogs and tweets of
the 21st century. The breadth of
Marozzis references is impressive but his apparent refusal to
engage with the reliability of
their testimony is not. Accessible, expert authorities on
classical Baghdad, such as Dmitri
Gutas and James Montgomery,
are missing from the bibliography. Conversely, he is overly
dependent on Mandate Era
authors such as Steven Longrigg
and Richard Coke. An unpleasant
whiff of their superior orientalism trickles down here, too, in
statements such as Turbulence
and turmoil were the natural
order of affairs; The Baghdadi
has long been sensitive to any
insults, real or perceived to his
religion; or reference to the
historical genius for cruelty that
Baghdads rulers had exhibited
for the past ten centuries. Such
judgments could be applied
just as well to pre-moderns
anywhere, if one thinks that it is
the historians role to articulate
them at all.
Marozzis presentation of
Baghdad as alien, corrupt and
doomed to bloodshed is curiously old-fashioned and appears to
ignore the past 30 years work in
the historical study of urbanism
and orientalism. He has missed
the opportunity to challenge
western preconceptions of the
city, rather than confirm them.
In between the sex and violence
there are hints of a more sober,
less sensationalist, history of
Baghdad. After each episode of
destruction there were periods
of rebuilding and renewal.
Despite the sporadic bouts of
interdenominational tensions,
for much of the time different
faiths rubbed along pretty well
together. Pilgrims, traders,
the intellectually curious all
found good things to say about
Baghdad and they are here in
Marozzis book, too, if one looks
hard enough for them.
Eleanor Robson
Enemy on the
Euphrates
The British Occupation of Iraq

and The Great Arab Revolt
1914-1921
Ian Rutledge
Saqi Books 471pp 20
WESTERN historians have tended

to focus on one Arab Revolt in the
early 20th century, while ignoring
another, which was bigger and, in
the opinion of the author of this
vivid book, almost as significant.
The revolt which generally
grabs the attention started in the
Hejaz, where, helped by T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Bureau in Cairo,
the Emir Hussein rose up against
the Ottomans in 1916 and marched
on Jerusalem. The lesser-known
but better supported one occurred only four years later in the
Euphrates region of what is now
Iraq, where a ragtag army of Arab
peasants and former Ottoman
soldiers, led largely by Shia notables
angry at being denied their promised independence, rebelled against
British rule.
Rutledge relates how Britains
desire to retain political control
in the new kingdom of Iraq was
motivated by its desire for secure
supplies of oil. It had gained a taste
for black gold after its discovery in
northern Iraq and southern Iran
in the first decade of the century.
Winston Churchill, First Lord of
the Admiralty, became convinced
of the arguments in favour of this
new source of energy for ships of
the Royal Navy. After the Ottomans entered the First World War
on the German side in October
1914, the Allies offered the Arabs
their freedom in return for their
support. Cue for the first
Hejazi-led Arab revolt. But European political haggling, epitomised by

the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916,
put paid to these promises.
By then the British were hooked
on oil and determined to retain
access to supplies. They arranged
for the Emir Husseins son Faisal to
be given the throne of a new state
of Iraq, which was assembled from
three former Ottoman vilayets:
Mosul, Baghdad and Basra.
As the revolt against this
renewed foreign occupation raged
in the early 1920s, the British
became seriously stretched. In a
replay of General Townshends
disastrous campaign at Kut in 1916,
they were holed up in cities and
shot at when they ventured out on
rivers. Gradually, with the support
of air strikes and soldiers from the
Indian subcontinent, they wrested
back the advantage.
Rutledge lays much of the
blame for Iraqs subsequent instability on that period. There was no
representative state formation
as King Faisal depended on British
Rutledge ...
admirably succeeds
in illuminating an
important episode
in British imperial
history
imperial muscle to shore up an
ineffectual executive dominated
by Sunnis, who made up just 19
per cent of the new countrys population. The Shia antecedents of
what soon became known as the
1920 Revolution were brushed out.
There is no doubting the seriousness of this insurrection, which at
its height involved 131,000 Arabs.
Rutledges account is enhanced
by his clear understanding of the
physical realities of the Middle East.
His populist writing style, with its
frequent recourse to the historic
present, might not please everyone, but it provides a proper sense
of urgency and engagement to
an excellently produced book that
admirably succeeds in illuminating
an important episode in British
imperial history.
Andrew Lycett
REVIEWS
FILM & EXHIBITION
India
A Short History
Andrew Robinson
Thames and Hudson 224 pp 16.95
INDIA presents its historian with

unique challenges. It is a land
of great disparity in economic
conditions. It is composed of
many linguistic groups and
diverse cultures. India has had
a long history of engagement
with the world outside. Yet, for a
people that have so much to remember, Indians maintained an
indifferent attitude to history.
Reliable chronicles before the
19th century are rare. History
scholarship was encouraged
by the British Indian state,
but the effect was not wholly
salutary. While uncovering new
evidence, both British imperialists and Indian nationalists
built stylised versions of history
to make political points. In the
20th century, the old nationalism cooled, but new nationalist
agendas emerged. Even the narratives that are free of obvious
biases disagree, often sharply, on
the link between modern India
and its past.
Writing an accessible and coherent history of India is, therefore, an ambitious task. Andrew
Robinson meets the challenge
successfully. Among recent
books written in response to a
renewed interest in the region,
India: A Short History stands out
for its distinct tone. The book
is as much an effort to present
India free of biases as it is a
personal debt to a civilisation
that has changed my life. The
authors many-sided engagement with the subcontinent
are practically invisible: that is, the sailors on the

deck of the warship and the two tiny figures in
a boat on the Thames to the left of the railway
bridge. A less familiar painting, The Disembarkation of Louis-Philippe at the Royal Clarence Yard,
Gosport (1844), admittedly unfinished according
to the catalogue, devotes more than half its space
to the sky and does not bother to depict the
French king. Indeed, the heads of the drowning
people in the painting selected for the exhibitions poster, The Morning after the Deluge (1843),
are little more than dots for the eyes, nose and
mouth enclosed in a circle.
One cannot help wondering whether Turners
apparent indifference to humans in the face of
nature was a product of his mighty self-absorption, verging on misanthropy, as chronicled by
Leigh. Apart from an affectionate relationship
with his father and later with Mrs Booth, the
widow from Margate with whom an incognito
Turner eventually settled in Chelsea,
the films Turner has no other deep
friendships. He was a giant among
artists, single-minded and uncompromising, extraordinarily prolific,
revolutionary in approach, consummate at his craft, clairvoyant in his
vision, writes Leigh. Yet Turner
the man was eccentric, anarchic,
vulnerable, imperfect, erratic, and
sometimes uncouth. He could be
selfish and disingenuous, mean yet
generous, and he was capable of great
passion and poetry.
Most of these characteristics
Mr Turner A film by Mike Leigh
emerge, often vividly, through TurnLate Turner Painting Set Free
ers encounters with, for example,
An exhibition at Tate Britain, until January 25th, 2015
the impecunious artist Benjamin
Haydon, the supportive Ruskin,
the privately dismissive Queen Victoria and a
portrait in the exhibition, seems shockingly
lampoon of his paintings in a popular London
small, almost wizened, compared with the
theatre. The film also offers a diverting cornucobed-ridden Turners robust appearance in the
pia of busy Victorian interiors and street scenes.
film as he utters his last words, The sun is God!,
Technology and science are woven in, too,
although these may have been an invention of
notably railways and daguerreotypes. A fascinathis admirer, John Ruskin.
ed Turner sits for his photograph, while mutterThen a second, less obvious, thought occurs.
ing that photography may replace painting. He
Why the sketchiness of the human figures, parobserves the magnetic properties of violet light
ticularly the faces, in Turners works? Leigh, in a
in the spectrum of a prism, demonstrated at his
Tate interview, states that, although Turner was
house by the indomitable Mary Somerville. Yet,
no portrait painter, in the simplest way he delineates character. But this claim remains highly for all its strength of character, the film never
gets quite to grips with the relationship between
debatable, as it was for Turners contemporaries;
the man and the art. There is barely a hint of how
hence the many paintings in the exhibition that
and why the Covent Garden-born Turner became
failed to please their patrons. Not even Turners
obsessed with sunlight, landscapes and sealarge canvases depicting classical mythology,
scapes. The focus is on the man, not his art. But
prominent in the exhibition though not in the
then, the most sublime art by Turner is unlikely
film, pay much attention to human character. In
The Fighting Temeraire (1838) and Rain, Steam and ever to divulge the mysteries of its creation.
Andrew Robinson
Speed the Great Western Railway (1844) people
STRAIGHT AFTER watching Mr Turner, Mike
Leighs engaging, if frequently unflattering, film
dramatisation of the later years of J.M.W. Turner,
I returned to the Tate Gallerys exhibition of the
painters late works, dating from after his 60th
year in 1835, hoping to see the paintings with
fresh eyes informed by the film.
Immediately obvious is that the excellent
casting of the jowly Timothy Spall as Turner
must have been strongly influenced by an 1840
portrait in the exhibition, Turner on Varnishing
Day by William Parrott. Here a stocky, top-hatted, Turner, brushes and palette in hands, intent
on putting finishing touches to a painting for a
Royal Academy exhibition, has his back to two
other watching Royal Academicians, who are
apparently gossiping about him. Turners famous
red blob spat with John Constable at a varnishing day is a highlight of the film. By contrast,
Turners 1851 death mask, placed next to this
REVIEWS
Robinson has written books on
the film-maker Satyajit Ray and
the poet-reformer Rabindranath
Tagore makes this book more
readable than the course texts
lately produced by professional
historians. In terms of coverage
and analyses of facts, it is just as
knowledgeable and authentic.
To call this book popular history
would be doing it an injustice.
In broad sweep, Robinson
covers the Indus Valley Civilisation that began around 2600 bc,
the settlements in the Gangetic
plains around 1500 bc that produced the extraordinary corpus
of hymns now known as the
Vedas, followed by chapters on
the age of Buddha, classical Hinduism, the Indo-Islamic empires,
the British colonial period and
postcolonial India. Some of this
ground would be familiar to
anyone who has already been
in contact with Indian history,
but even a specialist will enjoy
reading it. Here history is not
an arrangement of the classical, medieval and modern on a
chronological scale; rather it is
an attempt to understand why
the classical persists into the
medieval and the modern. For
example, the greatest of the
Indo-Islamic states, the Mughal
Empire, was established by a
central Asian (Mongol) warlord,
but its remarkable vitality was
owed to a successful incorporation of indigenous and Hindu
polities within the imperial
frame. Or again, in the late1700s, the British East India
Company officers designed a civil
law for Bengal after manuals
written in the era of classical
Hinduism (c. 500 ad), unwittingly incorporating classical ideas of
caste into their own legal codes.
The front cover of Robinsons
book shows Benares, one of the
oldest holy cities of the world,
while on the back cover there
appears a panoramic view of
the Bandra-Worli sea link, one
of modern Indias key engineering projects. In India: A Short
History these images come alive
as integral, but not necessarily
harmonious, parts of the Indian
world today.
Tirthankar Roy
The Indian Army on the

Western Front
George Morton-Jack
Cambridge University Press 335pp 65
THE INDIAN ARMY that arrived

in Marseilles six weeks after the
start of the war was probably the
most curious of the First World
War. In a battle for freedom the
Indian army was from a country
that was itself not free and to call
it Indian was a misnomer. The Rajs
racial theory restricted recruitment
to the so-called martial races, the
only Indians considered capable of
fighting. So the soldiers came from
a thin strip of rural communities,
generally in the north, with one
group, the much loved Gurkhas,
from Nepal, a neutral country
whose last war had been nearly a
century earlier against the British
themselves.
The British did value the fighting
qualities of these martial races but
they could not accept they could
ever become officers. To be an
officer the person had to be pure
British, one Indian parent or grandparent made the person ineligible.
Even then the British of the Home
Army were so contemptuous of
their fellow Britons in the Indian
army that they called them Hindus
and objected to any marriage
alliance between them and a Hindu
daughter. In the middle of the war,
when a British officer of the Indian
army left the front, one Home Army
senior cavalry commander wrote
that British forces in France were
well rid of a stupid old Hindu.
Modern historians have argued
that the Indians should never have
ventured west. Badly trained for
modern warfare, they could not
cope with the climate and were
so frightened by German shell fire

that they deliberately shot themselves in the hand, calf or foot to
be invalided. It has been estimated
that in the first ten days of fighting
65 per cent of all Indian wounds
were self-inflicted, much higher
than that for British forces.
Morton-Jack brings all his
forensic skills as a barrister to demolish these conclusions, showing
that in the First Battle of Ypres,
between October and November
1914, the Indians provided a vital
link that helped the Allies avoid
a disastrous defeat. Also, the
crucial decision to withdraw the
Indian battalions in late 1915 was
not because they were useless
but because they were needed to
capture Baghdad, which they did
in March 1917. Despite being used
to fight rebellious tribals on the
North-West Frontier, they adapted
well to the mud of Flanders and
their court-martial convictions for
Morton-Jack brings
all his forensic
skills as a barrister
to show that [at]
Ypres the Indians ...
helped the Allies to
avoid a disastrous
defeat
malingering were a fraction of
those for British troops.
The research cannot be faulted
but the voice we most often hear
comes from the senior ranks of the
Raj. Lower-ranked British soldiers
were not so impressed with Frank
Richards of the 2nd Royal Welch
Fusiliers in a 1933 book, concluding:
The bloody niggers were no good
at fighting. Morton-Jack dismisses
this as racist thinking but does not
fully examine whether the praise
from on high was not motivated
by the postwar imperial need of
shoring up support from Indian
collaborators, just as the nationalist
agitation was gathering strength.
Despite this, by shining the light on
a little discussed subject, this book
fills a big hole in the literature on
the war.
Mihir Bose
British Cultural
Memory and the Second
World War
Edited by Lucy Noakes
and Juliette Pattinson
Bloomsbury 218pp 16.99
THE CENTENARY of the outbreak of the First World War has

reawakened controversy about
its origins. Those of the Second
World War are less debatable,
but arguments over its legacy
continue. Once a paradigm of
British triumph, it is an event
that, to trivialise, is topped only
by Englands World Cup victory
in 1966 in evoking pride.
In recent years this view of
when Britain stood alone (if
the contribution of the Empire
troops is disregarded), a
peoples war of equal hardship
and sacrifice with class differences put aside, civilians pulling
together in a brave and feisty
example of British endurance
fortitude and unity has been
steadily chipped away. More
prominence has been given,
for example, to the treatment
of conscientious objectors, the
internment of thousands of
aliens many of them fugitives
from Nazism the embedded
nature of antisemitism, the rise
in crime, examples of official
incompetence and contumely,
sometimes even cowardice and
the way that hardship continued to fall more heavily on the
poor than the rich. The Second
World War remains a live forum
for debate about nationality,
class, governance, morality and
pragmatism.
In a series of essays Noakes
and Pattinsons volume probes
REVIEWS
the fashioning and functioning
of Britains collective memory of
a war that for decades was heralded as Britains finest hour.
The memorialisation of the war
remains complex and contested.
How was the conflict represented and how does that construction impact on the understanding of later generations?
Contributors consider
how somewhat romanticised
accounts of womens extreme
bravery in the SOE in occupied
France dominate accounts of
the Secret War in memoirs and
novels, interrogate the BBCs
website, The Peoples War,
which encourages participants
to recount their own experiences, many of which are noticeably filtered through the now
accepted narrative of the war,
be it evacuation or Dunkirk.
Yet it is around the literal
concretisation of war that
most recent controversies have
revolved. The stark bronze
construction in Whitehall, a
monument to women, unveiled
60 years after the end of the
war (and two years after one to
animals caught up in conflict had
been erected), its inscription in
ration book typeface, depicts 17
sets of uniform, hanging empty,
each representing the range of
jobs, both military and civilian,
that women undertook between
1939 and 1945. As Corinna M.
Peniston Bird points out, some
onlookers consider this cloakroom representation banal, an
inadequate recognition of the
myriad dangers and hardships
that women, both military and
civilian, faced.
But the most sensitive of
all commemorations is what
Frances Houghton entitles
The Missing Chapter, the RAF
Bomber Command Memorial unveiled by the Queen in 2012 after
a 70-year campaign by those
veterans who had been required
to implement the saturation
bombing of Germany, a strategy
that continues to raise very
uncomfortable questions about
responsibility and morality in
times of war.
The British are often accused
of being unable to let go of their
fascination with the Second

World War. This rich volume
rebuts this charge with chapters
on the obscuration of the almost
immediate postwar demise of
Empire, the failure to acknowledge the part West Indian (Caribbean), Indian and Polish troops
and even Italian and German
POWS played in Britains victory.
There is still much to enquire
into, learn from and ponder.
Juliet Gardiner
Beastly London
A History of Animals
in the City
Hannah Velten
Reaktion Press 288pp 29
ASK A Londoner today which

beasts they are nearest to and they
may well reply that you are never
more than six feet away from a rat.
Similarly, the city has no shortage
of starlings, pigeons and foxes, the
animals with which Londoners are
most familiar. By contrast, Hannah
Veltens Beastly London introduces us to a more exotic London;
a city which until recent times
was shared with the inmates of
menageries and the stock of exotic
animal dealers, in addition to the
sheep, cattle and pigs driven into
the city for market and slaughter.
Veltens sumptuously illustrated,
well-researched history of the city
is a comprehensive and accessible
account of changing and complex
animal-human relationships. While
it spans a period of almost 400
years, Veltens lively re-telling of
sources and depth of research is
particularly evident and rewarding
to the reader in those chapters that
address the Victorian era.
Thematically, the book is

arranged in the ways in which
animals were commonly categorised or encountered by Londoners.
We are introduced to animals as
livestock, working animals, sporting
animals, entertainers, strange
and alluring spectacles, and as
pampered pets, even sad strays.
The history of pet ownership is
linked to a social history of animal
welfare, criminality, consumption
and the class politics of Londons
residents. Victorian middle-class
reformers pushed for animal
protection, regulation and the
sanitisation of public spaces, such
that, in particular, the animals of
working-class Londoners became
increasingly scrutinised and
censured. It was the butchers, the
animal dealers, the dog thieves and
those who skinned cats or dogs
for a living who attracted the ire
of reformers, while the cruel social
inequality between the poorest
humans starving in tenements and
the pampered pooches of the wellheeled feasting on chops or steak
was not lost on critics. However, it
is not just the story of posh pets;
we are also introduced to Londons
working-class pet owners. Bird
fanciers gathering in pubs, artisan
pigeon fanciers and rabbit enthusiasts are some of those to be found
in this rich social history.
Beastly London boasts its
share of wild beasts and while
the study of the Victorian era is
rich, the 18th-century history is a
little sparse. That said, we learn
that, before the gardens of the
London Zoological Society catered
for genteel mid-Victorian tastes,
exotic spectacles were hosted in
taverns, coffee houses or in the
citys menageries, including at
the Tower or London. The books
greatest strength, though, is its indepth history of less remarkable or
ostentatious animals, in cats, dogs,
horses and pigs. Veltens historical
narrative is exhaustively researched
and engaging and profits fruitfully
from a skilful linking between past
and contemporary London. This
history, although deeply absorbing,
is not always an easy read. In the
history of beastly London there is
much tragedy, both animal and
human.
Christopher Plumb
Being Soviet
Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953

Timothy Johnston
Oxford University Press 294pp 61
A KEY debate in recent Soviet

historiography has concerned
the impact of Stalinist propaganda on citizens attitudes and
identities. It has tended to focus
on their resistance to authority
at one extreme and an inability
to resist Soviet models of identity at the other. Timothy Johnstons study suggests a possible
middle way, arguing that most
citizens engaged with official
rhetoric but also compared it
with other unofficial sources.
Such bricolage or fusing, he
argues, was the key tactic of
Stalinist life, more common than
either conformity or resistance.
Johnston outlines the shifts in
the rhetoric of Sovietness from
wartime to postwar Stalinism
and then presents an array of
popular responses to each ebb
and flow. While necessary to
his analysis of popular responses, the chronological survey of
Official Soviet Identity offers
little new compared with Jeffrey
Brooks earlier study of the
Stalinist press. It also tends to
flatten the complexity of Soviet
culture, especially during the
war, when official media evoked
Soviet experience in strikingly
new ways. The insistence that
Soviet identity was constructed
chiefly in relation to the West
also overlooks the MarxistLeninist narratives of domestic
progress, which had crucially
defined Soviet identity in the
previous two decades (This
post-revolutionary context is
REVIEWS
neglected in the otherwise comprehensive introduction.)
The investigation of popular
responses to these narratives
draws on a remarkably broad
range of sources: postwar and
post-Soviet interviews, citizens
diaries and letters, police
surveillance and local propagandists reports and memoirs.
While offering one of the fullest
pictures of popular attitudes in
this under-researched period,
the collation of these sources
often overlooks the significant
differences between them as
sources, especially for the Stalinist mentalit that this book also
seeks to reconstruct.
During this period, while
official media often contained
a bewildering shortage of
information and coherence, its
audience tried to dispel confusion through empirical observation, insights from other media
or speculation and rumour. As
Johnston persuasively argues,
these practices extended beyond
Stalinism, forming a consistent
response to Soviet information
hunger. However, his conclusion, that unofficial culture
inexorably overwhelmed official
culture after Stalins death and
led to the Soviet collapse, underestimates attempts to inject
greater truthfulness and debate
into post-Stalinist public life,
particularly under Khrushchev
and Gorbachev.
The books kaleidoscope
of popular narratives amply
confirms that Stalinist citizens
could be creative and far from
passive; however they were
not necessarily more coherent
or logical than the confused
media. The notions of bricolage
and fusing imply that unofficial
narratives were always more
comprehensive and insightful
than official ones. Viewing any
combinations of official and
unofficial culture also conflates
actions that were tactical to
different degrees. Was the life
and death business of information-gathering about the war
really comparable to consorting
with foreigners, as described
in the books most captivating
chapter, with Soviet sailors in
the Arctic Circle enjoying Hollywood films and jazz? These all
show that Soviet citizens could
be flexible and pragmatic, but
were they all equally important tactics for the Stalinist
habitat? At times, the vivid
picture of Stalinist life, so assiduously unearthed by the author,
spills out beyond his tight theoretical framework, suggesting
that there may be more ways
to understand the different behaviours of this eventful period.
Polly Jones
cles to Stalin memory work and

binary positions to the Stalinist
inheritance that are still with us
today. Myth, Memory, Trauma forces
the reader to rethink established
truths about de-Stalinisation. It
follows the complex twists and
turns in the dynamics of memory,
from Khrushchevs Secret Speech
in February 1956, his famous
denunciation of the Stalin cult
of personality, through to the
commemoration of the 90th
anniversary of Stalins birth in
December 1969. In the process we
explore the increase in ideological vigilance and cautious praise
for Stalin in the freeze of the late
1950s, followed in 1961 by the
revival of traumatic narratives and
attacks on cult symbols after the
22nd Party Conference. There was
no single, clear or fixed interpretation of the Stalinist past under
Khrushchev. Away from the key
Yale University Press 362pp 45
Polly Jones provides

one of the most
sophisticated and
nuanced analyses
of the complexities
of de-Stalinisation
currently available
FOR STUDENTS of Russian history

and observers of Putins Russia,
the rehabilitation of the Stalinist
past and Josef Stalins resurgent
personal popularity is a disturbing
development. Ever since Stalins
death in March 1953, his ghost has
continued to haunt contemporary
Russia. Polly Jones brilliantly researched study of de-Stalinisation
in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev
eras provides a timely reminder of
previous efforts to come to terms
with Stalinism. From the mid-1950s
until the late 1960s the Soviet
Union attempted to confront the
trauma, shame and guilt of political
terror and the suffering of a brutal
war. Jones argues that de-Stalinisation, although frequently imperfect, witnessed genuine attempts
to work through the moral and
historical complexities of Stalinism.
Although a missed opportunity,
it nevertheless revealed obsta-
moments of assault, Stalins image

was unstable, subject to inversion
and repeated reassessment. Political pressures meant negotiating
a course between narratives of
glory and guilt. In Brezhnevs
early years, pro-Stalinist sentiment
re-emerged as Soviet culture
moved away from discussion of
tragedy and trauma towards a
celebration of Stalins achievements. Only towards the end of
the 1960s was a stable discourse
reached, albeit one which left
Stalinism as an uncomfortable
and unresolved issue in collective
memory.
Jones approach combines
history and literary scholarship
and draws upon an impressive
palette of published and archival
materials, including internal party
reports, discussions about official
historiography and the correspondence of writers, journal editors
Myth, Memory, Trauma

Rethinking the Stalinist Past
in the Soviet Union, 195370
Polly Jones
and readers. Jones is at her most

fluent when analysing literary
texts, which explored the trauma
of terror and the disastrous early
months of the Great Patriotic War
and the reception of these texts by
readers and censors. These sources
move the debate from discussions
of de-Stalinisation within the elite
to popular reactions.
Polly Jones provides one of the
most sophisticated and nuanced
analyses of the complexities of
de-Stalinisation currently available.
The Soviet Union never entirely
silenced traumatic memories,
although there were strict limits in
which these could be expressed.
Indeed the notion that repressing
difficult memories was detrimental
to the collective psyche enjoyed
currency in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yet this idea coexisted with a
countervailing feeling that introspective or gloomy discussion of
war and terror was equally damaging. Although celebration of Stalins
modernising project and victorious
military leadership triumphed
in the late 1960s and currently
holds the ascendancy, it is worth
remembering, as this important
study argues, that this outcome
was by no means certain.
Robert Dale
Poor But Sexy
Culture Clashes in Europe

East And West
Agata Pyzik
Zero Books 310pp 15.99
A QUARTER of a century ago,

when the Berlin Wall fell, there
was an expectation that the Evil
Empires colonies, no longer subjugated by the yoke of statist
orthodoxy, would blithely

ascend to the Reaganomic
utopia they had been presumed
to covet. The former satellites,
the former vassal states, the
former East there was a lot
of former about would adopt
the Wests capitalist mores,
worship at the shrine of the
market, join the club called
the Free World. They would be
cured. They would normalise.
Of course, they werent
former at all. Throughout the
1990s to cross, unimpeded,
from what had been West
Germany to what had been
the DDR would have been
laughable had it not been so
pathetically tawdry. The land
of economic miracles gave way
to the land of potholes, stained
nylon shirts, Trabbies, bad diet
faces, infrastructural neglect,
neckless neo-Nazis (a Rostock
speciality): there was little sign
that the multiple legacies of
indigence and stagnation were
being addressed. The Great
Occidental Dream was as far off
as ever. The euphoria of 1989-90
had within a few years been
dented by Ostalgia - longing for
the solaces of the known in the
DDR, of no-choice, of a quiet
risk-free life, of authoritarian
certainty, of social housing and
public transport of a far higher
standard than, say, Britains.
This longing was incomprehensible to many in the
consumerist West who may,
more generally, have quite
misread the Eastern Blocs
aspirations. Maybe these heterogeneous (and ingrate) nations
didnt actually want to model
themselves on those of western
Europe. Maybe they hoped to
throw off the notion of the East
as a constantly sick place and
reconfigure themselves according to programmes of their
own. A country which has been
bullied and violated for half
a century will surely be more
likely to rediscover its identity
if it doesnt wholly appropriate
someone elses.
One of the recurrent themes
intertwined in Agata Pyziks
energetic, sprawling, densely
detailed, dauntingly well-
EXHIBITION
News From Nowhere occupies a central place
WILLIAM MORRIS did not hold his beliefs
lightly. He became a socialist desperate to find an among the exhibits. G.F. Watts magnificent
portrait underlines Morris distinction and clout.
outlet for his radicalism. In the Socialist League
Ken Loach, Edmund de Waal and Jeremy Deller
he stood at the extreme left of the political
testify to the continued resonance of Morris
spectrum. Ducking the label anarchist, Morris
aspirations. His artistic innovation is exemplified
was committed to capitalisms destruction and
by the inclusion of portraits of the friends who
advocated a form of communism which chimed
gravitated around the Red House and the objects
with the anarchism of friends like Peter Krothey produced. Notable figures from the socialist
potkin. His incredible efforts to agitate, educate
movement, including Eleanor Marx, Edward Carand organise were intended to stimulate a mass
penter and Bernard Shaw, are also present. Yet
proletarian movement, capable of emancipatErnest Belfort Bax, Morris co-author and guide
ing itself by direct action and withstanding the
to Marxs thought, is oddly absent. Also missing
militarised force against which he expected it
are the establishment targets of Morris sharp
would be pitted. These political aspirations are
critiques, whose inclusion might have provided a
described in News From Nowhere (1890), Morris
useful foil to explore his radicalism.
seductive utopian romance.
The exhibition
Morris had been inexcels in championing
cubating socialist ideas
Morris influence on
in his artistic practice,
radical women and
long before he decided
his feminist-friendly
to invest his time and
defence of the lesser
money in campaigning.
arts. However, in other
What appeared to his
respects, the treatment
friends as shocking to
of his legacy risks
give up art for politics
undercutting his fusion
was actually an attempt
of art and politics.
to come to terms with
Moreover, the focus on
the realisation that
aesthetics creates a bias
commerce made art
towards the parliamenimpossible. Art and
Anarchy and Beauty
tary left the Labour
communism were
William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960
Party, trade union and
synonymous because
National Portrait Gallery, London,
suffrage movement
making life beautifrom which Morris was
until January 11th, 2015
ful depended on the
at best semi-detached.
transformation of work
Morris devotee Guy Aldred is not represented,
through art. In place of exploitation, cultural
though he was a bearer of the communist tradiimpoverishment, mass production for profit,
tions that Morris pioneered. Nor is Colin Ward,
fashion-driven consumption and filthy, destrucdespite his anarchist contributions to urban
tive industry, Morris envisaged a world where
planning and the links he provides to contempindividuals would engage in pleasurable work:
orary radical art and protest movements.
art. In equality, art was a vehicle for inventiveThe history of the Arts and Crafts movement
supports another shift, from the creation of
social art towards the marketing of design. There
are some wonderful illustrations of the craft
principles Morris championed, notably the striking garden roller designed by Eric Gill. The joy of
making shines through these physical exhibits.
But the emphasis on Garden Cities, the postwar
design revolution and the Festival of Britain promotes a welfarist idea of art for the people, not
an activist principle of art of the people. Thus
the anarchy of individual creativity is abstracted
ness and fellowship. By reconnecting makers
from the conditions of anarchy that Morris adwith nature, it had the power to make everyday
vocated for its expression, in this otherwise rich,
life elevating. Marx talked disparagingly of the
bold and perceptive exhibition.
anarchy of production; Morris saw the transRuth Kinna
formative potential of anarchy for production.
All that would remain was art. Morris anarchic
Catalogue: Fiona McCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty.
William Morris and His Legacy 1860-1960 (NPG, 2014).
politics are boldly illuminated in this exhibition.
Art and communism

were synonymous
because making life
beautiful depended on the
transformation of work
through art
informed book, is that of this

tension between exhuming an
indigenous past and borrowing
from without in the quest for
regeneration. But in places of
ever-shifting boundaries does
indigenous signify anything
more than narrow tribalism?
Pyzik ascribes Polish racism and
xenophobia to the countrys
being untouched by cosmopolitanism. The concomitant provincialism is expressed through
a sort of officially sanctioned,
catholic folk art, flower carpets
and similar homely kitsch. This
sort of verruca-like monoculture was not always the case:
Polands national poet Adam
Mickiewicz was born in Lithuania. The remarkable painter
Bronislaw Linke had evident
affinities with both the German
Neue Sachlikeit (Dix, Scholz)
and the Dutch Magic Realists
(Willink, Ket): there is nothing
specifically Polish about his
work. Again, Stach z Warty
Szukalskis doctrines about
Poles being descended from
Easter Islanders are as dotty as
the Nazis believing their forbears came from Hyperborea;
the nationalism of opposing
nations is routinely susceptible
to kindred delusions. Nationalism is international.
It is a tired commonplace
that the socialist realist statuary of the Stalin era and that
of the Nazi regime are stylistically close; but we overlook
their equal proximity to work
that was being made in the
US, Britain and France, none of
them aesthetically preoccupied
dictatorships. The point, here
implicit in various guises, is that
no matter how isolated a regimes masters might wish it, it
will never be watertight. American and English pop music
seeped in all right. Its pretensions, which usually seemed
hollow, pompous and infantile
at home, were taken seriously
in the pleasure-starved East.
This, then, is where David
Bowie fulfilled his destiny. A
self-anointed shaman is not
without honour save in his own
country.
Jonathan Meades
Mitterrand
A Study in Ambiguity
Philip Short
Bodley Head 704pp 30
FOR THOSE on the British Left,

Franois Mitterrands victory in
May 1981 was a ray of hope. Here
was a president resolutely of the
Left, whose socialist programme,
evoking the great revolutionary
moments in French history, represented a humane alternative to
Thatchers unbridled capitalism.
I lived in France for part of the
1980s, as an undergraduate and as
a postgraduate doing research on
the Left and the Algerian War and
my hope dissipated as I learned
some uncomfortable truths. There
was, for example, Mitterrand and
Algeria. As the Minister of the
Interior in November 1954, when
confronted with revolt in Algeria,
Mitterrand had followed a policy
of repression rather than negotiation, banning the leading Algerian
nationalist party and declaring
that Algeria was France. Then, in
1956, as justice minister, Mitterrand sanctioned the guillotining of
Algerian prisoners on death row: a
point of no return that unleashed a
savage cycle of violence and
counter-violence. One Algerian
lawyer, Omar Oussedik, told me
that Mitterrand ordered the killing
of nationalist leaders in an effort to
decapitate the anti-colonial revolt.
Then there were Mitterrands
Occupation years. I learned that
he had fought in the French army
in 1940, escaped from a German
prisoner of war camp and had
been in the Resistance. However,
I also learned that he had worked
for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and
had been personally decorated by
its leader, Marshal Ptain. I learned,
too, that he had flirted with the

extreme Right in the 1930s and had
forged some dubious friendships
in post-1945 France, not least with
Ren Bousquet, the former Vichy
police chief. In 1993 Bousquet was
assassinated in the street shortly
before coming to trial for crimes
against humanity for his part in the
deportation of Jews in 1942.
By 1983, though, Mitterrand
performed an economic U-turn
that jettisoned planning and
embraced the free market. It was
a historic moment and in the
ensuing years Mitterrands real political colours became clear. He was
not an ideologue but a pragmatist,
whose goal was the retention of
power. Thus, Mitterrand cynically
encouraged the rise of the far-right
National Front knowing that it
would undermine his right-wing
challengers and on this basis he
was easily re-elected president in
Short calls for a

proper assessment
of Mitterrands
achievements ...
in particular the
way he promoted
European unity
and social justice
May 1988. Not for nothing did his
opponents call him Machiavellian.
All of these complexities are
captured in Philip Shorts compelling biography, Mitterrand: A Study
in Ambiguity. In the 1980s Short was
the BBCs correspondent in Paris,
with a close-up view of Mitterrand in action. From the start he
was fascinated by Mitterrands
unique political talents, which, in
his opinion, combined the visionary
with the pragmatic and the gifted
with the devious.
The book draws upon exhaustive research and here Short had
unique access to Mitterrands inner
circle. He interviewed friends and
relatives and in this way the book
sheds light not only on his political
beliefs but also on his complicated
private life Mitterrand had in
effect two families which until
recently was a no-go area for researchers and journalists in France.

Mitterrand was born in 1916 in
the town of Jarnac to the north of
Bordeaux and Short carefully traces
his journey from the middle-class
provinces to student life in 1930s
Paris. We then follow Mitterrand
through the intricacies of the Occupation and on into the postSecond World War Fourth
Republic, where he became the
Minister for War Veterans in 1947.
At just 30 he was the youngest
Cabinet member since the French
Revolution.
In telling this story, which is
skilfully woven into a wider history
of 20th-century France, Short
successfully gets under Mitterrands
skin; what made him tick was a
mixture of ambition, arrogance and
a visceral hatred of any punctuality.
On this basis, Short explains, when
Minister of the Interior in 1954,
Mitterrand kept Ferhat Abbas, the
Algerian nationalist leader, waiting
for an hour and a half because he
was engrossed by the cartoons
in a French newspaper. He was
also, Short rightly underlines, a
very learned man who thrived in
the company of intellectuals and
writers.
By the late 1950s his career
was in the scuppers, however. In
1958, with the return to power
of General de Gaulle, the Fourth
Republic establishment was swept
aside and Mitterrand, who lost his
seat, was one of the high profile
casualties. He was also dogged
by scandal, accused of staging an
assassination attempt on himself in
Paris in 1959 as a way of bolstering
his image on the Left.
Yet, as Short shows, two qualities kept him in the political game:
resilience and the long view. Mitterrand knew that he had to establish himself as the anti-Gaullist
figure in French politics and after
much subtle manoeuvring he was
de Gaulles principal challenger at
the 1965 presidential elections. Mitterrand lost but in forcing de Gaulle
into a second round he recovered
his political credibility. Thereafter, althoug wrong footed by the
events of May 1968, he was instrumental in establishing the Socialist
Party in 1971, which, in uniting the
non-communist Left, became a
vehicle for his political ambitions.

He was now the undisputed leader
of the Left, losing the presidential
election in 1974 but winning in 1981.
It was a case of third time lucky.
However, the high hopes of 1981
ended in scandal 14 years later. By
this point Mitterrands standing
had been damaged by revelations
about his Vichy years and by his role
in the illicit use of the state owned
oil giant Elf-Aquitaine. Under
Mitterrand Elf became a money
machine that bought influence on
the international stage through
bribery and corruption. When he
died in 1996 many in the Socialist
Party distanced themselves from
the Mitterrand legacy.
Now, Shorts book calls for a
proper assessment of Mitterrands
achievements. For Short they are on
a par with de Gaulles, in particular
the way in which he promoted
European unity and social justice. In
my opinion this is an exaggeration,
although this perceptive book underlines why historians will always
be fascinated by this complex figure,
whose story tells us so much about
the ambiguities of modern France.
Martin Evans
Queer Domesticities
Homosexuality and Home Life

in Twentieth-Century London
Matt Cook
Palgrave 344pp 60
IN THIS scholarly but immensely readable book Matt Cook

explores the domestic interiors
of homosexual men at various
times from the end of the 19th
century to the onset of AIDS and
the acceptance of gay parenting.
Trawling through diaries, auto-
biographies and self-made films,

Cook examines the multiple and
complex identities of queer men
in domestic settings to show
how they battled to preserve
their tastes in spaces which
would reflect their identities.
He places well-known men
under the spotlight in a series of
mini-biographies, of George Ives,
Joe Orton and Derek Jarman
and lesser-known men, such as
Charles Ricketts, C.R. Ashbee
and Joe Ackerley. He reveals
distinctive types of domestic
style: a separation of queer
men from families in the early
20th century, men in bedsits
in the 1950s and 1960s and the
politicisation of young gay mens
spaces from the 1970s onwards.
One of the men, George
Ives, took bachelor chambers
in Albany on Piccadilly, a place
which gained a reputation for
housing homosexual men; this
was reflected in Oscar Wildes
The Importance of Being Earnest
when Miss Prism calls Ernest
as bad as any young man who
had chambers in the Albany, or
indeed in the vicinity of Piccadilly can possibly be. Ives later
set up home with his self-selected family, including his male
servant, Kit (who may well have
been Ives lover, too), Kits wife
and two daughters and a series
of working-class young men. Of
the latter, he wrote tellingly: We
have no secrets between us.
Ackerlys quest was to
establish a bachelor home. The
rooms in his Little Venice flat
were artistic and queer-friendly,
but when this was bombed and
he moved to a dingy one-bedroomed apartment by Putney
Bridge, he was less happy.
His bid for independence was
thwarted by the intrusion of his
sister, his aunt and a dog.
Families were not always the
disapproving brood they have
been depicted as, but were often
important and supportive in a
quiet way. When Quentin Crisp
was portrayed as the lonely
queer in the TV documentary
The Naked Civil Servant, based on
his autobiography published in
1968, his family was upset by
the depiction. His niece said,
CONTRIBUTORS
Mihir Bose is an awardingwinning journalist and author.
Robert Dale is a British
Academy, Postdoctoral Fellow
at Kings College London.
Jonathan Meades is a writer,

essayist and film-maker.
Julie Peakman is the author of
The Pleasures All Mine: A History
of Perverse Sex (Reaktion 2013).
Martin Evans is Professor of

Modern European History at
Sussex University.
Christopher Plumb is author

of The Georgian Menagerie: Exotic
Animals in Eighteenth-Century
London, to be published in 2015
by I.B. Tauris.
Juliet Gardiner is a historian

and writer and a former editor
of History Today.
Andrew Robinson is the author

of The Art of Rabindranath Tagore
(Andre Deutsch, 1989).
Polly Jones is SchreckerBarbour Fellow and Associate

Professor in Russian at
University College, Oxford.
Eleanor Robson is Professor

of Ancient Near Eastern History
at University College London and
voluntary Chair of Council for
the British Institute for the Study
of Iraq.
Ruth Kinna is a historian

of ideas at Loughborough
University and is the author
of William Morris: The Art of
Socialism (University of Wales,
2000).
Zareer Masanis most recent
book is Macaulay: Britains Liberal
Imperialist (Bodley Head, 2013).
Tirthankar Roy is a professor

of economic history at the
London School of Economics
and the author of India in the
World Economy from Antiquity
to the Present (Cambridge
Andrew Lycett, co-author of

Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution
(Little, Brown, 1987), is a
biographer and commentator
on the Middle East.
Shaun Tougher is Reader

in Ancient History at Cardiff
University. His publications
include Approaches to the
Byzantine Family (Ashgate, 2013).
He had a style that he was all

alone in the world; the family
spoilt that image. His nephews
documentary about him showed
a completely different side to
him. In fact, Crisp was very much
involved in his extended familys
life and was invited to weddings
and celebrations.
Family support was not
always the case. Although
In this scholarly
but immensely
readable book
... Matt Cook
examines the
multiple and
complex identities
of queer men in
domestic settings
Joe Orton wrote letters to his

mother, she never wrote back.
In place of family, he carved
out a unique space for himself,
one which had interiority at its
heart. He and his lover, Kenneth
Halliwell, hardly ever left the
flat but spent hours together
making collages for their walls
and writing. But, perhaps, it was
the over-intimate claustrophobic atmosphere of their bedsit
which contributed to their
demise. Once Orton was getting
recognition for his plays, an
insanely jealous Halliwell took
Ortons life, then committed
suicide.
Cook has managed to capture
the heart of the home of these
gay men and brings a new
insight into gendered domestic interiors, making a firm
contribution to the history of
homosexuality.
Julie Peakman
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
Threats and Denials

Helen Castor in From the
Archive (November) rightly
emphasises the importance of
religion to Joan of Arc and her
contemporaries, but, while in her
biography Castor places Joan in
the political and military context
of late medieval France, she does
not go far enough in establishing
Joan, her exploits and her trial in
the religious context of the time.
The late 14th and early 15th
centuries had seen profound
social change after the trauma of
the Black Death, which, in part,
had led to a crisis of confidence in
the authority of a Church already
undermined by the Great Schism,
exemplified by heterodox critics
such as the Lollards and Hussites
and, less controversially, in the
growth of personal piety and the
later devotio moderna.
The threat Joan posed to
orthodoxy was her claim to be
the recipient of divine messages. If she could communicate
directly with the spiritual, then
the role of the Church as sole
mediator between God and man
was undermined. This was at the
heart of her trial and why, after
she had recanted, she relapsed
into heresy. By accepting the
authority of the Church, Joan
had to accept its ruling that her
voices were not from God. When
she realised that this shattered
the legitimacy of her actions and
her identity as one chosen to do
Gods work, she was forced to
reassert her divine inspiration
against Church orthodoxy.
For both Joan and her opponents, the matters at issue were:
what is orthodox and who had
the authority to determine it? By
putting her personal belief above
the teaching of the Church, Joan
relapsed into the error of denying
its authority and so she was a
threat to the Church and for this
she had to be burned.
Overlooking the Ancients

I enjoyed Matt Carrs article
General Shermans March to
the Sea (November), but was
Sherman really The Man Who
Invented Total War?. Once
again the ancient world seems
to have been overlooked: what
about, for example, the way that
Roman society was completely
refashioned to focus entirely on
the destruction of Carthage in
the Punic Wars? There was even
a law passed to limit the amount
of jewellery a woman could wear,
as this was deemed to impact
on both the economy and the
morale of Rome during the crisis.
Too many historians still seem to
think that history began in 1066.
David K. Warner
Havant, Hants
Rev Bill Shackleton

Burnside, Glasgow
Richard Stride
via email
House Divided
Richard Weights statement that
almost half the Scottish electorate voted to leave the Union
is seriously misleading (History
Matters, November). Out of
the total electorate 37 per cent
voted for independence.
The referendum involved
much emotional distress,
rancour and intimidation;
people were afraid to put No
posters on their cars and a friend
of mine had a brick thrown
through his house window. I
know of three cases where the
police were called to a polling
station because of intimidation
by Yes supporters. If there were
cases of intimidation by the
other side, I have yet to learn of
them. The referendum brought
an animosity which still lingers.
How anyone could think emotions would not run high shows
how little understanding the
media had about what they were
stirring up.
If a house be divided against
itself, that house cannot stand
(Mark 3:25).
Connect with us on Twitter

twitter.com/historytoday
Unjustly Ignored
I was disappointed that, as
a Professor of Womens and
Gender History, June Purvis did
not mention Millicent Garrett
Fawcett or the National Union
of Womens Suffrage Societies,
also ignored by the BBC in its
1974 drama Shoulder to Shoulder
(History Matters, November).
The NUWSS, too, played
its part in inspiring women to
campaign for votes and shape
a new idea of womanhood. It
was attractive to working- and
middle-class women and, after
1918, as the National Union of
Societies for Equal Citizenship
(NUSEC), it campaigned to open
the legal profession and the civil
service to women, for equal
access for women to divorce
and for equal suffrage (Janet
Howarth, Fawcett, Dame Millicent Garrett 18471929, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography).
Garrett Fawcetts life, biography
and autobiography raise important questions about how the
history of feminism is written.
I look forward to an article
in History Today about Garrett
Fawcett and the NUWSS.
Alys Blakeway
via email
Misattribution
Through a curious misreading
of my review in the September
issue of James Graham Wilsons
The Triumph of Improvisation,
Catherine Hale (Letters, November 2014) implies that I underestimate the role of Mikhail
Gorbachev in the transformation
of East-West relations in the
second half of the 1980s.
That will come as a surprise to
anyone who has read any of my
numerous articles on Gorbachev
or such books as The Gorbachev
Factor (1996), Seven Years that
Changed the World (2007), The
Rise and Fall of Communism
(2009) and The Myth of the Strong
Leader (2014).
Hale writes: Although Brown

mentions several names George
Shultz, George H.W. Bush and
Ronald Reagan as important
historical agents, I believe that it
is Mikhail Gorbachev who is the
prime mover. In my review, I endorsed Wilsons view that Shultz,
Reagan and Bush the elder were
the people who mattered most
on the American side. I welcomed, however, his recognition that
globally (my words) Mikhail Gorbachev was by some distance the
most important political actor in
the dramatic sequence of events
between 1985 and 1991.
More serious than her oversight is Hales attribution to me
of a statement of Wilsons which
I quoted because I disagreed with
it. After praising his book for not
being triumphalist, I regretted
the sudden change of tone in his
final paragraph. There Wilson
writes that Gorbachev did not
believe that he lost the Cold War.
But he did. And because he did,
a generation of human beings in
the United States, Russia, and
elsewhere on this planet grew
up innocent of the specter of a
nuclear holocaust.
That statement makes little
sense and I do not appreciate
being wrongly credited with
its authorship. I concluded by
contrasting Gorbachevs vision
of a transformed Russia as a
co-operative and integral part of
a common European home with
the outlook of Russian leaders
today. That development, I
noted, can hardly be divorced
from NATOs expansion into the
former Soviet Union and the
treatment of Russia as if it were,
indeed, the loser of a war. Given
the tensions, conflicts and fundamentalist extremism to be found
in the contemporary world,
it is too soon to congratulate
ourselves on having avoided the
dangers of nuclear catastrophe.
Archie Brown
St Antonys College, Oxford
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Books & Publishing
Books & Publishing
Research
Business Opportunities
Wanted
For Sale
CLASSIFIEDS For further information about advertising in our classifieds section: advertising@portmanmedia.co.uk
Travel
Societies
Gifts
Services
Health
Wanted
Reassuringly intelligent.
Comfortingly rational.
Coming Next Month

Alexander and the
Amazon
How believable is the story that,

in 330 bc, having conquered
Persia, Alexander the Great was
sought out by the imperious
Amazon queen Thalestris with
the sole intention of conceiving
his child? Despite its sensational
nature and uncertainty over
details of Thalestris existence
accounts of their union recur
without exaggeration throughout antiquity. Adrienne Mayor
considers the evidence for and
against an unlikely romance
that held legendary status in
the ancient world.
The Invention of English Fiction
Subscribe
www.historytoday.com/subscribe
Octobers Prize Crossword
Despite having a thriving literary culture, Anglo-Saxon England

appears not to have felt any need for fiction. Dating fictions
emergence to the 1150s, Laura Ashe examines the fertile conditions
for its development as a recognisable literary form and describes how,
following Abelards philosophy of interiorised morality, its advent
marked one of the greatest shifts in English society, heralding the rise
of the individual and the concept of love as an agent of self-fulfilment.
The Putney Debates
When the radical Colonel Rainborowe and General Ireton debated

the merits of universal manhood suffrage and other issues in 1647
at Putney, where the New Model Army had its headquarters, it was
emblematic of a deeper divide within the parliamentarian cause. Precipitated by the publication of the pamphlet, The Case of the Army Truly
Stated, Sarah Mortimer explores the events leading up to Putney and
how the debates pushed parliamentarian logic to near breaking point.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The January issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the

UK on December 18th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winners for October are D.R. Dare, Edinburgh; Sid Field,
Stockton-on-Tees; Stuart Glover, Bristol; Sylvia L. Lee,
Plumpton Green; Bruno Wyman, Walton-on-Thames.
EDITORS LETTER: 2 Photograph Paul Weston/Alamy HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Municipal Art Collection, Augsburg,
Germany/Bridgeman Images; 5 Getty Images; 6 The Foundling Museum, London/Bridgeman Images; 7 Getty
Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 Private Collection/Bridgeman Images; 9 top Getty Images; 9 bottom Universal History
Archive/Getty Images. DEATH AT ST PAULS: 10 The Trustees of the British Museum; 11 OShea Gallery, London/
Bridgeman Images; 12 Bridgeman Images; 13 top Bridgeman Images; 13 bottom photo Christies Images/
Bridgeman Images; 14 Bridgeman Images; 15 top National Portrait Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images; 15 bottom
Royal Collection Trust Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/Bridgeman; 16 Bridgeman Images. PORTRAITS OF
POWER: 18 Royal Collection Trust Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014/Bridgeman Images. MORE THAN CHILDS
PLAY: 20 Popperfoto/Getty Images; 21 The British Library Board; 22 Radharc Images/Alamy; 23 top Chris
Wilson/Alamy; 23 bottom Private Collection; 24 top left migrant_60/flickr/Creative Commons; 24 top right 2014
The LEGO Group; 24 middle CBW/Alamy; 25 top and middle 2014 The LEGO Group; 26 top by W.K. Haselden, 1917.
Courtesy the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent Mirrorpix; 26 bottom Interfoto/Alamy; 27 Jamaway/
Alamy. INFOCUS: 28-29 Imagno/Getty Images. COLLABORATOR: 31 ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy; 32 top
left RIA Novosti/Alamy; 32 top right photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/Press Association Images; 32 bottom Mary
Evans/Sddeutscher Zeitung; 33 Laski Diffusion/Getty Images; 34 top left AP/Press Association Images; 34 top
right VintageCorner/Alamy; 35 top left Sovfoto/Getty Images; 35 top right Interfoto/Alamy; 36 ITAR-TASS
Photo Agency/Alamy. MAKING HISTORY: 38 akg-images/MPortfolio/Electa. HARD AND SOFT POWER: 39 photo
Tarker/Bridgeman Images; 40 top Muse du Chteau de Malmaison/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 40 bottom De
Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 41 The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images; 42 top akg-images; 42
bottom Bibliothque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images; 43 akg-images/De Agostini
Picture Library; 44 Alexei Nikolsky/Getty Images. Subscriptions Ad: 45 original photograph (enhanced) George
Marks/Getty Images. GOLD, FIRE AND GALLOWS: 46 Bridgeman Images; 48 Zoom Dosso/Stringer/Getty Images. A
MONARCH AND HIS MIGNONS: 49 Muse Cond, Chantilly/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 50 De Agostini Picture
Library/Bridgeman Images; 51 left Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images; 51 top right Chteau de Beauregard/Patrick
Lorette/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 51 bottom right Chteau de Beauregard/Peter Willi/Bridgeman Images; 52
top Muse dOrbigny Bernon; 52 bottom Muse Carnavalet, Paris/Giraudon/Bridgeman Images; 53 RMN-Grand
Palais (domaine de Chantilly)/Ren-Gabriel Ojda; 54 Louvre, Paris/Bridgeman Images. REVIEWS: 55 Archives
Charmet/Bridgeman Images; 56 photo of Lucy Delap by Graham Copekoga; photo of Judith Flanders by Clive Barda;
63 William Morris by G.F. Watts, 1870 National Portrait Gallery, London. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 De Agostini
Picture Library/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 top Wellcome Images; 70 middle Library of Congress; 71 Archives
Charmet/Bridgeman Images. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have
been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.
Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
2 Which Italian patriot of the 14th
century became the subject of an
1842 opera by Richard Wagner?
3 The Prose Edda and Heimskringla,
both important works of Old Norse
literature, were written by which
Icelandic chieftain and historian?
8 Which one of ancient Romes

buildings was transformed into the
National Roman Museum in 1889?
4 Which architect, whose works

include the 1937 house Fallingwater
in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, founded
the Prairie School of architecture?
9 Which French noblewoman

stabbed the revolutionary leader
Jean-Paul Marat to death as he
was bathing in 1793?
5 Who devised the Cato Street

Conspiracy of 1828 to blow up the
British Cabinet as it dined at the
house of the Earl of Harrowsby?
6 Who was the first black
woman to become a member of
the US House of Representatives
when she was elected as a
Democrat in 1968?
7 Which Chinese feminist writer
and political activist was expelled
by the Communist Party and
imprisoned in 1959 before being
rehabilitated in 1979?
11 Who founded the Liberal

Party of Australia at the end
of the Second World War,
becoming prime minister for
the second time in 1949?
12 Which veteran British general
was defeated by a Boer force
under the command of Louis
Botha at the Battle of Colenso on
December 5th, 1899?
ANSWERS
10 In which present-day
country did the Battle of the
Thames, fought on October
5th, 1813, take place?
1. William Howard Taft (1857-1930).

2. Rienzi, or Cola di Rienzo (1313-54).
3. Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241).
4. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).
5. Arthur Thistlewood (1774-1820).
6. Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005).
7. Ding Ling (1904-86).
8. The Baths of Diocletian (built
298-306 ad).
9. Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday
dArmont (1768-93).
10. Canada.
11. Robert Menzies (1894-1978).
12. Sir Redvers Buller (1839-1908).
1 Who was the last US President

to have a beard or moustache?
Prize Crossword
Set by Richard Smyth

DOWN
1 The ___ of Nations, 1776 work by
Adam Smith (6)
2 The Guards die but do not ___
de Cambronne, at Waterloo, 1815
(attrib.) (9)
3 Moorish potentate who rebelled
against Rome in 397-98 (5)
4 Member of an early 20th-century
reform movement in the Ottoman
Empire (5,4)
5 Matthew ___ (1664-1721), English
poet and diplomat (5)
6 Town and historic borough in northeast England (9)
7 Harold Arundell ___ (1882-1947),
founder of the League of Coloured
Peoples (5)
8 French resort associated historically
with Lord Brougham (1778-1868) (6)
14 ___ Purchase, 1803 acquisition by
the US (9)
16 G.M. ___ (1876-1962), English
historian (9)
17 To be ___ is not all, but it helps
physicist Eugene Wigner (attrib.) (9)
20 ___ is a continent of energetic
mongrels H.A.L. Fisher, 1935 (6)
21 Daughter of Egeus in A Midsummer
Nights Dream (6)
23 Tree featured on the flag of
Lebanon (5)
24 No man is a hero to his ___
Mme Cornuel (5)
25 Monstrous creature in
Scandinavian folklore (5)
ACROSS
1 1986 Mafia history by Nicholas
Pileggi (7)
5 Army of the ___, eastern Union
force in the American Civil War (7)
9 ___ Theses, revolutionary
programme issued up by V.I. Lenin
in 1917 (5)
10 Pennsylvania city, formerly
known as Beesons Town (9)
11 1913 crime novel by Marie
Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (3,6)
12 Cuthbert ___ (1544-77), Roman
Catholic priest and martyr (5)
13 Surburb of Leeds, home to a
notable Norman church (4)
15 The ___ harmony of spring
Gray, 1748 (8)
18 Roscoe ___ (1887-1933), US
film director and comic actor (8)
19 Henry ___ (1773-1835), English
radical known as Orator (4)
22 17th-century leader of the
Mohegan Native American tribe (5)
24 Capital of Laos since 1563 (9)
26 London thoroughfare, formerly
the site of Newgate Prison (3,6)
27 ___ Wars, Anglo-Chinese conflicts of 1839-42 and 1856-60 (5)
28 Amelia ___ (b.1897), US aviator,
disappeared in 1937 (7)
29 Ancient Buddhist monastic
centre of NE India (7)
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 December 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

Good King Wenceslas
(c. 907-935)
Good King Wenceslas
Bohemian ruler who was the

subject of a comic epic poem,
The Christmas That Almost
Wasnt, written by ...
US screen actor, who was

born on Christmas Day,
just like ...
Isaac Newton
(1643-1727)
Ogden Nash (1902-71)

who wrote poems to accompany
the Carnival of the Animals by the
French composer Camille SaintSans, the first recording of which
features the voice of
physicist, who studied and

taught at Trinity College,
Cambridge, as did ...
John Mason Neale

(1818-66)
Nol Coward
(1899-1973)
playwright, songwriter and

wit, whose friend and fellow
martini devotee was
Humphrey Bogart
(1899-1957)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
Anglican priest, scholar and

hymn-writer, who wrote the
words to the popular carol
GIN CRAZE
FromtheArchive
Olivia Williams takes issue with some of the wilder assertions and anachronisms contained in
Thomas Maples otherwise engaging 1991 article on the 18th-century gin craze.
Spirit of the Age

THE GIN CRAZE, Londons first binge
drinking crisis, is prone to oversimplification: partly because it makes for
an irresistibly dramatic story and also
because it inspired vivid portrayals
among contemporary writers and
artists. It is all too easy to be swept
along on a wave of juniper-scented,
18th-century hysteria.
Thomas Maples wrote an entertaining overview of the period for
History Today in 1991, but there are
nuances that need restoring to the
narrative. The invention of
gin is certainly not as clear cut
as stating that we owe it to
Franciscus de la Boe, a professor
at the University of Leiden from
1658 to 1672. It was rumoured
for a long time that de la Boe
was the first to introduce
juniper berries to alcohol, in the
hope of treating kidney and bladder
complaints. However, there has yet
to be a mention of this discovery
found in his papers, which would be a
surprising omission on his part. In any
case the 1650s seem too late a date,
because even in Britain there were
already similar spirits being made on a
small scale for medicinal purposes.
That de la Boe invented gin and
Charles I promoted it in Britain seems
contradictory. Charles I did grant
a Royal Charter to the Worshipful
Company of Distillers, giving them
the power to run a monopoly of those
making Aqua Vitae, Aqua Composita
and other strong and hot waters and
that is what they made, not gin. The
company described itself as supplying those that be aged and weak in
time of sudden qualms and pangs
and the Kings ships and merchant
ships for use shipboard and for the
sale to foreign nations. The aqua vitae
often contained a range of aromatic
and expensive ingredients, including
rue, sage, lavender, thistle, valerian,
sandalwood, saffron and cinnamon, of

which juniper may have been just one.
Calling any spirits containing juniper
gin gives the wrong impression that
these spirits were recreational and
surely undermines the idea that it was
invented in Leiden.
It is tempting to interpret lively
cultural depictions of the gin craze
as fact. We have to be careful, for
example, about overstating the prevalence of Drunk for a penny/ Dead
drunk for two pence/ Clean straw for
guards on duty at St Jamess, Kensington and Whitehall for fear of rioting.

There are a few anachronisms from
Maples that need addressing, too, with
the mention of speakeasies, citizens
and the working class. None of these
are terms that 18th-century Londoners would have recognised.
Ending with the demise of gin is
not appropriate either; it just changed.
It remained popular among the
working poor for centuries to come.
One seasonally appropriate reference
to gins continued popularity
comes from 1843. Bob Cratchit,
the impoverished hero of
Charles Dickens A Christmas
Carol, puts together a festive
gin punch for his family, with
touching relish:
The invention of gin is

certainly not as clear cut
as stating that we owe it to
Franciscus de la Boe
nothing. Because the slogan features
as an evocative detail in William Hogarths Gin Lane etching, it has since
been assumed to be a general feature
of gin shops: Hogarth was apparently
inspired by one gin shop that he apparently saw in Southwark, but so far that
is all we know. There are other hints
at overstatement by Maples. The High
Constable of Holborn reported 7,066
gin shops in his patch alone, meaning
that roughly one house in every five
was waiting to relieve Londoners of
their meagre wages. However, we
cannot be certain that this was true
for all of London, as Maples asserts,
particularly as Holborn was known to
be the heart of the phenomenon.
After decades of gin-fuelled chaos
in London from the 1690s, Parliament
passed a draconian act in 1736 that
was tantamount to prohibition. It
was not that prime minister Robert
Walpole was answering his critics as
such, which Maples suggests. Walpole
himself had misgivings over the harsh
measures and doubled the number of
Turning up his cuffs as if, poor

fellow, they were capable of being
made any more shabby [he] compounded some hot mixture in a jug with
gin and lemons and stirred it round and
round and put it on the hob to simmer.
Gin was down in the 1750s, but it was
certainly not out.
Olivia Williams is the author of Gin Glorious Gin:

How Mothers Ruin Became the Spirit of London
(Headline, 2014).
VOLUME 41 ISSUE 3 1991

Read the original piece
at historytoday.com/fta

History Today 12-2014

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

History Today 12-2014

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

December 2014

WAR TOYS THEN AND NOW

BLACK DEATH TO EBOLA

Publisher Andy Patterson

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Total Average Net Circulation

2 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

FROM THE EDITOR

Hollywood offers a new

spiritual or typological reading of

hailed Constantine as a new Moses.

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3

mentarians. Oliver Cromwell told Parliament in 1654 that the deliverance of

Like the Israelites, however,

doorstep, it was not all industrial toil

Feet off the

claim people have become alienated

What did happiness mean to

meet everyday needs. In 2014 76 per

Sandie McHugh is Research Associate in

The painters reaction to

By 1750, then, the Jacobite threat seemed

extremely different; they are even of opposite

Discipline is less observed in the principal

Yet despite the crushing of the 45

The woman standing to the left gazes

Jacqueline Riding is author of the forthcoming

Fhrer fake: Hitler

Calling time on Hitlers Hoax

became a well-known image, with

In an age when the vast majority of

fessed in his later memoir, he made the

Roger Moorhouse is the author of His Struggle:

DECEMBER 31st 1514

Vesalius was coming to see that

anatomy that could not be better taught

DECEMBER 8th 1864

The Clifton Suspension

best works have a magical blend of

and when it got stuck halfway over

seen in English-made films, Fire Over

$1 million to the budget in return for a

DECEMBER 15th 1939

DECEMBER 2014 HISTORY TODAY 9

Richard Dale investigates the mysterious death of Richard

IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, early in the morning

authorities insisted that Hunne had committed suicide

investigate the cause of death and 24 citizens from local

chancellor and have the case examined by independent

in 1511 with the death of his five-week-old son, Stephen.

12 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

and some friends attended the church of St Mary Matfellon

The Great Act of Praemunire had been put on the statute

HE CASE WAS FIRST HEARD in the court of

It seemed clear to the jury

Top: Lollard John

It seemed clear to the jury that, if

Whereby it appeareth plainly to us all

The single most important

HE VIEW favoured by contemporary opinion and by most

14 HISTORY TODAY DECEMBER 2014

attorneys, pleadings, writs and other legal fees over several

In addition, the official or rector should

used here provides a crucial clue to what really happened in