My Brief Encounters was published by Chambers in 2007 with great expectations. Sales and Marketing were sure it would do well. Indeed Waterstones was sure it would do well and placed it on their 'We Recommend' list for 2008 -
'Edwin Moore's quirky collection of a hundred encounters between (mostly) important historical figures is a gem of a book. Where else could you get concise enlightening accounts of Henry VIII wrestling with Francis I, Geronimo surrendering to General Miles, Ernest Hemingway presenting Fidel Castro with a fishing trophy or (as seen on the books cover) a baby-faced Bill Clinton shaking hands with John F Kennedy. A marvellous 'little window on human history. ' - Dominic Kennerk, Waterstones's Product Planning and Promotions Co-ordinator (From the Waterstones's 'We Recommend' list for 2008)'
Some excellent reviews followed -
'Witty, light and packed with information -- The Sunday Herald
'In 1936, in the wake of winning a clutch of gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, the great athlete Jesse Owens was snubbed by an imperious leader, on racial grounds. Popular belief would have it that the leader was Hitler, who is said to have stormed off, furious to see a black man beating European athletes. In fact the man in question was President Roosevelt, who worried that paying attention to Owens' triumphs might be a vote loser. Although Owens and the German Chancellor never talked, Owens claimed that Hitler greeted him with an enthusiastic wave. Such near-misses, shakings of hands and ships-in-the-night meetings are the subject of Brief Encounters – Meetings between mostly remarkable people, a likeable new book by Edwin Moore (Chambers £7.99). Flicking through the index, you will find some expected encounters (Dante stares at Beatrice, Corday stabs Marat, The Beatles strum along to a Charlie Rich record round at Elvis's house), and the book's intriguing and memorable cover shows a baby-faced Bill Clinton manfully gripping the hand of JFK. But Moore has navigated past some of the more obvious collisions, collusions and confrontations of history (there is no Dr Livingstone, I presume) and much of the book's pleasure derives from lesser known incidents.
Inevitably, some of the accounts of earlier meetings are somewhat sketchy but Moore offers some piquant speculation, laced with humour (the book is tagged Reference / Humour, rather than History and this feels right, but the book, though wry and opinionated, never stoops to wackiness). I was intrigued to discover that, though Attila the Hun did die on his wedding night, it was not in drunken and lecherous debauchery, as his enemies maintained, but supposedly because he was generally a simple and clean-living man who had a few too many which brought on a particularly bad nosebleed.
Moore's book is full of such tales – it would be wrong of me to steal the tastiest morsels of his research and pepper this article with them, but look out for a subsidiary reason for the Gunpowder Plot (too many dour and powerful Scots in Parliament); a great meeting of great beards, as Castro wins the Hemingway prize for sea-fishing; Dali bringing a skeptical Freud round to the art of the surrealists; Buffalo Bill's wife claiming an aged Queen Victoria had propositioned him; Oscar Wilde getting a kiss from Walt Whitman, while Walter Scott was more taken with Burns's charismatic eyes. This is an enjoyable and vigorous rattle through some fascinating and believable yarns. My only quibble is that it's a little on the short side – let's have Volume 2 please Chambers! - Roddy Lumsden, www.Books from Scotland.com'
But alas no great sales followed - and no further exposure. Like all failed authors, I take refuge in happenstance. One of my other books - Lemmings Don’t Leap - sold well but the sales tapered off, so it too was remaindered. A few months after the book was remaindered, it was featured in the popular Channel 4 show, One Born Every Minute, in an episode in which a mother read and extract (about polar bears being black) to her daughter. Suddenly everyone was looking for it on Amazon and I sold my stock on Amazon as collectable signed copies. If all this had happened before it got remaindered - well who knows.
Anyhoo I am putting Brief Encounters online, here. Enjoy! If there is sufficient interest in an actual book I will prepare a Print on Demand. You can drop me a message at damnyouebay@gmail.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Edwin Moore@GlasgowAlbum. Oh and my Glasgow Album is definitely worth a look (has become quite popular) -
http://glasgowalbum.blogspot.co.uk
The book is still (January 2016) in print in South Korea in a very pretty illustrated edition. See these splendid pics -
The expanded edition would include such wonders as Rudolf Steiner advising Franz Kafka against eating eggs, Thomas Cromwell giving English sweeties to Pope Leo X, Elvis Presley buying April Ashley a drink, etc, etc
All great stuff, to go with the great stuff in the original. And so without further ado -
100
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
When
Kennedy met Clinton and Other Strange Meetings
INTRODUCTION
There
have been three broad rules for inclusion within this book: (a) the
persons meeting should be well-known; (b) they should meet only once
in glancing, ship-in-the-night fashion; (c) the meeting should have
some real significance.
In
practice, however, I have decided that (a) in a few entries, we can
live with the name of one of the participants being not commonly
known. for example, Billie Holiday is a well-kent name, though Abel
Meerapol is not, but the meeting is too good not to have; (b)
occasionally the participants are allowed to have met more than once,
for example, Tom Cribb and Tom Molineaux fought twice, but it is
their bloody 39-round encounter in 1810 that matters, and though the
great atheist Robert Ingersoll served under Lew Wallace during the
American Civil War, their later chance encounter on a train is too
good to omit; (c) the meeting need not be of earth-shattering
significance if it is sufficiently interesting; for example, the
delightful encounter in 1900 between the American novelist Winston
Churchill and the now better-known Winston S. Churchill.Also, it
should be a given that we are sure that an encounter actually took
place, but I am compelled to make one exception:the strange and
fascinating LA-wasteland case of L Ron Hubbard and Aleister Crowley.
What was allthatabout?The truth is, I spent too much time researching
that alleged encounter to give it up and, to paraphrasethe great
ex-Bonzo Neil Innes, I suffered to put that entry together and now
it's your turn.
Some
wonderful encounters didn't get in because, alas, we can say with
some certainty that there was no meeting. In these web-reliant days,
grizzled oldies will tell you young 'uns to check printed sources.
Well, an article in the archive of a prominent Scottish newspaper
will inform you that Oscar Wilde once gave Edwin Moore his coat
because the man was cold, and being that Edwin Moore myself, I can
say with certainty that Oscar Wilde never gave me his coat - and I am
not yet into my 12th decade, either. And never mind newspapers:
despite what a few biographers will tell you, Marlene Dietrich does
not act with Garbo in Pabst's 1926 movieJoyless Street- Dietrich was
home nursing her child - nor, despite the movieGordon of Khartoum.did
the Mahdi and General Gordon ever meet (though, improbable as it
seems, they corresponded, as one crabby Victorian gentleman to
another). And despite Sir Walter Scott, Richard the Lionheart never
did meet Saladin, though Saladin once sent him peaches and snow.
However, Richard did meet Saladin's brother, and an intriguing
meeting it was too. That meeting is in this book, along with 99 other
meetings that offer little windows on human history.
The
diligent reader will discover that cross referencing could have been
more exhaustive. To have added all relevant cross references would
have devoured too muchspace, but you can always play a variant of the
Kevin Bacon game, and see how many odd links you can make between
people: Nessie, for example (though admittedly not a person) links St
Columba (died 597) and Aleister Crowley (died 1947), and James
Boswell pops up everywhere among his contemporaries, whether having a
fling with Rousseau's mistress in 1766, visiting Flora MacDonald in
1773, or interviewing the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant in 1776.
That
space factor means that a lot of desirable but peripheral stuff has
had to go: in one entry alone,1887:Queen Victoria meets
Black Elk,out has gone Buffalo Bill's manager kicking off Glasgow
Celtic's worst-ever home defeat (beaten 8-0 by the mighty Dumbarton),
Annie Oakley observing that if her aim had been worse - while
shooting the ash from a cigarette held in the hand of the future
Kaiser Wilhelm - history might have been better; Queen Victoria
tellling Annie she was 'a very, very clever little girl, and Sitting
Bull calling herWatanya Cecilia, 'Miss Sure Shot'.
If
you like that sort of thing, you will love this book: here you will
find the creator of Biggles and Worrals interviewing Lawrence of
Arabia for a mechanic's job; a puzzled Persian emperor wondering who
these smug Spartans are; Wittgenstein shaking a poker in the presence
of Karl Popper; Pocahontas being unimpressed by James I; Jackie
Kennedy popping downstairs to meet Princess Diana; Lew Wallace
pardoning Billy the Kid;and much more. As Donald Rumsfeld (who almost
got in the book, and was pushed out by George Bush) would perhaps put
it, this is stuff as it happened, and we are all interested in stuff.
Finally,
thank you (once more) to my brilliant editor, Liam Rodger, without
whose skill and many helpful suggestions this book would have been a
horrendous struggle; Alice Goldie and Mike Munro, for their many
helpful comments on the text; Maureen of Caledonia Books in Glasgow,
for her generous help in finding books for me to scavenge upon; and
Merlin Holland for his valuable comments on Oscar Wilde meeting Walt
Whitman.
Headword
List for First Edition
c.
540 BC:Cyrus the Greatmeets the Spartan Embassy
336
BC: Alexander meets Diogenes
327
BC:Alexander meets the naked philosophers
c.
264 BC:Ashoka possibly meetsNigrodha
52
BC: Vercingetorix surrenders to Caesar
385:
Maximus executes Priscillian
452:Pope
Leo I persuadesAttila the Hun
c.
563:Columba preaches to Bridei, King of the Picts
1050:Macbeth
meets Pope Leo IX
c.
1052:Edward the Confessor meets William the Bastard
1192:Richard
the Lionheart meets Saladin's brother
1274:Dante
meets Beatrice twice
1520:Henry
VIII wrestles Francis I
1521:
Martin Luther and Frederick the Wise see each other at the Diet of
Worms
1529:
Zwingli and Luther argue about Communion
1553:
Calvin denounces Michael Servetus
1556:
John Dee interrogates John Philpott
1593:Elizabeth
I meets Grace O'Malley
1605:
King James I interrogates Guy Fawkes
1617:
Pocahontas is unimpressed by James I
1653:
George Fox reduces Oliver Cromwell to tears
1671:Colonel
Blood meets King Charles II
1675:
Aurangzeb executesGuru Tegh Bahadur
1746:Bonnie
Prince Charlie meets Lord Lovat
1746:
Flora MacDonald helps Bonnie Prince Charlie escape
1773:
Dr Johnson visits Flora MacDonald
1747:J
S Bach meets Frederick the Great
1752:Casanova
meets Madame de Pompadour
1764:
Boswell meets Voltaire
1766:Erasmus
Darwin entices Rousseau with a flower
1774:
Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette
1774:
Joseph Priestley meets Antoine Lavoisier
1775:
Robespierre makes a speech in the rain to Louis XVI
1776:
Dr Johnson has dinner with John Wilkes
1777:
the Marquis de Sade insultsCount Mirabeau
1777:
Patrick Ferguson decides not to shoot George Washington
1781:
Benjamin Franklin meets Catherine Dashkova
1792:
Joseph Brant meets George Washington
1786:
Walter Scott meets Robert Burns
1788:
Olaudah Equiano presents a petition to Queen Charlotte
1793:
Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat
1797:
Napoleon invites Tom Paine to dinner
1805:
Sir ArthurWellesley meets Nelson
1810:Tom
Molineaux fights Tom Cribb
1812:Beethoven
meets Goethe
1814:Harriette
Wilson meets Lord Byron
1817:Benjamin
Haydon hosts the 'Immortal Dinner'
1822:
San Martin and Simon Bolivar meet behind closed doors
1827:Schubert
visits Beethoven on his deathbed
1840
Sir Moses Montefiore meets SultanAbdlmecid
1842:Edgar
Allan Poe meets Charles Dickens
1854:
John Lang meets Lakshmibai
1855:
James Barry is nasty to Florence Nightingale
1855:
Mary Seacole gets a Bed for the Night from Florence Nightingale
1855:Robert
Browning is unentranced by Daniel Dunglas Home
1856:
Lola Montez tries to horsewhip Henry Seekamp
1860:
Richard Burton meets Brigham Young
1863:
John Wilkes Booth refuses to meet Abraham Lincoln
1864:
Garibaldi plants a tree for the Tennysons
1876:
Robert Ingersoll inspires Lew Wallace
1879:
Lew Wallace promises to pardon Billy the Kid
1882:Oscar
Wilde meets Walt Whitman
1886:
Geronimo surrenders toGeneral Miles
1887:Queen
Victoria meets Black Elk
1889:
Nellie Bly Meets Jules Verne
1890:
Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement share a room
1900:Winston
Churchill meets Winston S. Churchill
1906:
Mark Twain meets Maxim Gorky
1910:
Arnold Bax meets Patrick Pearse
1914:
Pancho Villa shares a photo opportunity with Emiliano Zapata
1914:
Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke Ferdinand and his Duchess
1918:
Fanny Kaplan shoots Lenin
1920:
Bertrand Russell meets Lenin
1923:
Thomas Hardy entertains the Prince of Wales
1927:
the Einsteins visit the Freuds
1931:
Gandhi meets Chaplin
1933:
Giussepe Zangara shoots at President FranklinRoosevelt
1936:Adolf
Hitler waves to Jesse Owens
1937:
The Windsors meet Hitler
1938:
Salvador Dali sketches Sigmund Freud
1939:
Abel Meeropol sings 'Strange Fruit' to Billie Holliday
1946:Beryl
Formby tells Daniel Malan to piss off
1946:
Wittgenstein possibly waves a poker atPopper
1956
Eric Newby meets Wilfred Thesiger
1958:
Luis Bunuel asks Alec Guinness to be his lead actor
1963:
Bill Clinton meets President John F Kennedy
1965:
Elvis Presley jams with the Beatles
1978:
Alec Guinness has lunch with M
1985:Jackie
Kennedy meets Princess Diana
1985:
Kurt Waldheim punches John Simpson
2000:
George W. Bush meets Sami Al-Arian
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
THE
ENTRIES
ANCIENT
AND MEDIEVAL MEETINGS
1
c.
540 BC: Cyrus the Great doesn't know what to make of the Spartan
Embassy
Around
540 BC, the Greek state of Sparta sent an embassy to the court
of the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great. This was a busy time for
Cyrus, whose main thoughts were on expanding his empire. One aspect
of this expansion was of particular concern to the Spartans, who had
agreed an alliance with the powerful Greek colony on the Asian
mainland, Lydia. King Croesus, who decided to attack Cyrus in 547 BC
after receiving the gloriously ambiguous message from the Delphic
oracle that if he attacked Cyrus, a great empire would be destroyed,
ruled Lydia. He attacked, and Cyrus defeated Croesus and
absorbed the Greek colony into the Persian empire (though now
conquered, the Greek colonists would remain in Asia Minor for around
another 2500 years, until the secular Turkish rule of Kemal Ataturk).
This
Persian victory was not good news for the Spartans, who, instead of
aiding the Lydians, had decided to occupy themselves by attacking an
old enemy, the Greek state of Argos, which they duly subdued. The
Spartans forced their new subjects to shave their heads as a mark of
submission, and vowed themselves to let their own hair grow long.
Long hair was considered woefully effeminate in Greek culture, but
the Spartans didn't care - they had no need to prove their
manhood to anyone (as their boyfriends would of course testify,
homosexual acts as such being not necessarily effeminate).
The
Spartan embassy was sent to Cyrus as a mark of both reproof and as a
thinly veiled threat: mess again with Greeks and you might have to
mess with us. The encounter is recorded much later (c. 430 BC) by the
Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus has not always been seen as
unvaryingly reliable, but there is no reason to doubt his account of
what happened at this clash of cultures. Cyrus seems to have been
baffled by these very un-Greek like emissaries, clad in vermillion
cloaks and wearing their hair long and oiled. He asked some
Greeks at his court 'Who are the Spartans?, but was not much
interested in the answer. The Spartans were clearly weird - as his
courtiers would have confirmed - but, however warlike, not of great
import to the conqueror of great cities such as Babylon.
The
Spartans, for their part, were probably blissfully unaware on their
voyage home that the great king had very likely already forgotten
this eccentric embassy. For the Spartans, as for all Greeks, Asia was
where Troy fell to the Spartan king Menelaus and his cast of heroes,
as recorded by Homer in the Iliad,
humanity's great epic poem of war. They were going home to their city
from a land they had once subdued in blood and fire, home to a Sparta
dominated by the tomb of Menelaus and his troublesome wife, Helen (in
actual fact, the Homeric heroes and beauties were a different group
of Greeks to the Spartans, who were late incomers into the region.
but such awkward details rarely disrupt the flow of national or
regional myths). The knowledge that Troy's destruction was
little thought of or even known of in the land of Cyrus, was quite
probably not one that could be comfortably absorbed into the Spartan
consciousness.
What
Happened Next
Western
historians have tended to portray the Greeks as 'folks like us', good
democratic westerners in embryo, in contrast to the Persians, who are
the very prototype of an evil eastern empire, but this is a
sloppy reinvention of the past. Cyrus was tolerant of his subject's
customs and religions and established sound laws, whereas the
Spartans regarded the ritualised killing of subject Greeks as a
socially beneficent activity. While the Greeks in general may often
seem quite like us (if we disregard the Taliban-like sexual
apartheid), the Spartans were just different, and were regarded as
such by their fellow Greeks. Moderns may feel more in tune with
Sparta with regard to some aspects of relations between men and women
- tales of the loose behaviour of Spartan women, who were
educated, and exercised openly, were passed around in
hushed tones among scandalised non-Spartans - but in truth Sparta
was a deeply alien, violent culture.
As
Tom Holland says in Persian
Fire,
(2005), the question, 'Who are the Spartans?', asked once in
derision, could have been asked again later by many
Persians, but in fear; perhaps most dramatically at Thermopylae in
480, where an astonished Persian scout watched the 300
Spartans comb each other's hair in calm disregard of what would soon
be streaming up the pass towards them. The Persian invader, Xerxes,
offered good terms for surrender of arms: the Spartan general
Leonidas said in return: 'come and get them'.
Also
standing with the Spartans in the pass were about 300 of their
own serfs (helots), around 400 Thebans, and 700 Thespians. The
Thespians can perhaps be seen as 'acting Spartans' (sorry) - the
majority of them certainly fought and died as bravely, but it is
those chilling Spartans whom everyone remembers: as Holland says:
'Shielded behind their mountain frontiers, self-sufficient,
xenophobic and suspicious, the Spartans took but never gave, spied
but never revealed'.
2
336
BC: Alexander meets Diogenes (who is not in the least impressed)
Not
long before his death at the age of 32, Alexander the Great - after
having conquered the known world - is said to have wept that there
were no more worlds to conquer; the cynic philosopher Diogenes, in
contrast, believed that nothing was of much importance, certainly not
human vanity and ambition. The two men were contemporaries, so
obviously it would have been interesting if men with two
such contrasting world views had met, and the historian Plutarch
indeed records just such a meeting. Meetings of this kind between
'great' men and philosophical individuals are said - mostly wishfully
- to occur in all societies, but there is a consensus that
Plutarch is here recording something that did actually happen.
Myths
about Alexander sprang up during his lifetime, or were invented over
the following centuries. The earliest source, for example,
for Alexander's tears at running out of worlds to conquer is a late
one, the 3rd century AD philosopher Aelian, and he seems
to be misquoting a remark of Alexander's that was recorded by
Plutarch: when he heard a philosopher say that there were an infinite
number of universes, Alexander - perhaps shedding a tear as he spoke
- remarked that 'There are so many worlds, and I have not
yet conquered even one'.
Diogenes
was described by Plato as 'Socrates gone mad', in that he took the
scepticism associated with Socrates to extremes and willfully
challenged authority and custom. but Diogenes and his
admirers disagreed: they saw his position as entirely rational.
Custom may dictate that it is not polite to eat in the marketplace,
but the proscription is irrational: if you are hungry while in the
marketplace. why should you not eat in the marketplace? Your
appetites, even your sexual ones (as he is said to have
publicly demonstrated in what was certainly a step too far for those
in his presence), are no one's business but your own.
Alexander
came to Corinth in 336 BC. Corinth was the centre of his recently
assassinated father's Hellenic confederacy, and the young king (aged
20) had serious business to settle. He had to bind the fractious
Hellenic world under his leadership and also prepare for a difficult
campaign against the Persians. Yet he also wanted to meet the old
cynic Diogenes, who was then about 70, living in a barrel, and quite
possibly plagued by fetching young women as in the 1882
painting by John William Waterhouse (Waterhouse's painting also
depicts a lamp, which Diogenes carried in order to fruitlessly
look for an honest man, and a bunch of the onions he had for
dinner).
The
meeting fulfilled all expectations: Alexander asked Diogenes if there
was anything he could do for him, and Diogenes asked him to stop
blocking the sun's rays. Alexander's henchmen were reported to be
outraged by this disrespect, then astonished when Alexander said if
he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes.
What
Happened Next
Alexander
defeated the Persians, and established an empire stretching from
Greece to India, an empire obtained and ruled with the
characteristic ruthlessness of a despot, tempered occasionally with
assiduously publicized acts of generosity. The practical
request given by Diogenes became Alexander's symbolic image - a young
man whose exploits blotted out the sun. Diogenes died in Corinth in
the same year as Alexander, 323 BC, indeed supposedly on the same day
in June.
Alexander
and Diogenes helped to colour in each other's iconic image. Different
as they were, they were also very much alike in one thing,
their perception of the world they inhabited as being a world
stretching far beyond the world of Greek history and
culture. Diogenes is claimed to have been quite possibly the
first individual to truly think of himself - or at least to declare
himself - as a citizen of the world, and Alexander is seen by some as
establishing the first world empire, though Cyrus the Great (see c.
540 BC: Cyrus the Great doesn't know what to make of the Spartan
Embassy) has
a good claim to have been there first; certainly Alexander saw
Cyrus as some sort of precursor, and is claimed to have ordered the
restoration of Cyrus' tomb (a claim that remains archaeologically
unproven).
Neither
cynic nor conqueror had that irritating (only ancient, of course)
Greek cast of mind which saw different peoples as necessarily
barbarians, 'barbarian' meaning someone who literally talked rubbish,
'bar bar). Alexander seems to have thought of the people he
conquered - or slaughtered - as being pretty much like his Greek
subjects, and Diogenes thought of everyone as equally deluded,
whether Greek or barbarian. See
327
BC: Alexander meets the naked philosophers
3
327
BC: Alexander meets the naked philosophers
In
the summer of 327 BC, Alexander the Great led his army towards India.
The army was bloated with booty from years of campaigning, most
recently in Afghanistan, so bloated that before reaching the Khyber
Pass Alexander destroyed his own loot and the loot of his friends -
and ordered his men to do the same. The invasion had to be seen
to have higher aims than just self-enrichment.
Like
many large-scale butchers of humanity, Alexander took great
care to burnish his public image (see 336
BC: Alexander meets Diogenes),
and asserted that his empire was of great benefit to those who
submitted to his rule. Carried along in his court were various
tame philosophers who were expected to portray the course of conquest
in a high-minded rhetorical frame. The philosophers included three
big hitters: the renowned sceptic Pyrrho; Anaxarchus, who is supposed
by some to have recommended that Alexander be worshipped as a god
(Cicero says Anaxarchus subsequently annoyed a tyrant who had him
pestled to death in a large mortar); and Onesicritus, a
former pupil of Diogenes.
After
a rebellion against Alexander by a local Indian prince, Plutarch
records that he interrogated 10 wise men who had apparently
encouraged the rebellion. These men were obviously regarded by the
natives as holy and, disconcertingly, travelled about in the nude.
Alexander
gave the strange men 10 questions to answer: getting one wrong
question meant they all would die. The 10 questions and answers
became famous and may belong originally to the realm of proverbial
wisdom. Number 3 is one of the best known: 'what is the
craftiest animal?'; the answer being 'the one that has not been found
by man yet'. Alexander was impressed with the answer, rewarded the 10
men and gave them their freedom, and asked Onesicritus - as
a follower of Greece's most eccentric sage, he must have seemed
appropriate - to find out more (some sources say
Alexander actually executed these annoying sages, but packing them
off with gifts is more typical of what Alexander wanted people to
think of him).
The
name given by the Greeks to these wandering holy men was
'gymnosophist', from 'gymnos', naked, and 'sophist', knowledge, but
establishing just who these 'gymnosophists' actually were turns out
to be not an easy question to answer definitively. Though sometimes
also referred to as 'Brahmans' by Greek contemporaries
and later historians it now seems very likely that the
gymnosophists were either Ajikvas or Jains: these and other
long-established religious groups such as Buddhists had many sects,
but were usually both ascetic and vegetarian, and believed that
violence was counter-productive.
The
Greeks were fascinated by the parallels between these holy men and
their own traditions. Greeks too liked nudity if it was among
young men, especially at athletic exercises or contests,
and Onesicritus was able to tell the holy men that many Greeks
back home held the same or similar beliefs: 200 years previously
Pythgaoras had taught the transmigration of souls, and had
been a vegetarian (indeed Onesicritus' own master Diogenes had been a
vegetarian). Pythagoras and Indian wise men such as the Buddha
had been contemporaries (and were also contemporaries of Zoroaster,
Lao-Tzu and Confucius among others - it was a heady age), so
naturally people theorised that ideas had moved from east to west or
west to east, but possibly all were drawing on older beliefs and
practices (see c.
260 BC: Ashoka meets Nigrodha).
What
Happened Next
After
an unprecedented mutiny from his men (possibly still sore at having
had to destroy their loot) Alexander headed home in 325 BC, but
didn't make it. He died of fever in Babylon in 323 BC.
The philosophers returned home with confirmation of an ancient
parallel world in which men thought much the same as men in civilised
Greece. As Tristram Stuart says in The
Bloodless Revolution
(2006), the impact of Indian religious and philosophical traditions
on the west was to deepen much later, and the traditions were highly
influential on Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau.
Vegetarianism, for example, could by the 17th century be seen as a
way of life with a long philosophical tradition behind it.
The
gymnosophist approach to clothes (seen as a bad thing) made a
surprising comeback in the late 19th and early 20th century, with a
growing interest in naturism in the west, an interest that grew
despite the differences in climate between India and Europe. The
movement inspired a lot of dippy (in every sense) movies showing
happy, naked young Aryans throwing beachballs at each other, but
actually seems to have began among Brits living in India, who in 1891
founded a group called 'the Fellowship for the Naked Trust'. The
founder of the wiccan religion, Gerald Gardner, was a prominent
member of the New Gymnosophist Society, and established a
club in the 1920s especially for wiccan gymnosophists where they
could perform their rituals 'sky-clad', a term borrowed from Indian
ascetics. Such western interpretations of gymnosophy (for better or
worse) laid the foundations for the hippy era of the 1960s.
4
c.
264 BC: Ashoka the Great is converted to pacifism by Nigrodha
Ashoka
the Great, who was to be the last Mauryan emperor in India, succeeded
to the throne c. 268 BC after a protracted and bloody dynastic
struggle against rival claimants. The details of these conflicts
cannot be verified, and may have been exaggerated subsequently by
Buddhist writers seeking to emphasize the contrast between the
pre-Buddhist Ashoka and the later convert, but it seems likely that
there was much bloodshed; even if he did not kill precisely 99 of his
100 brothers, or personally behead 500 enemies, the Mauryan empire
was undoubtedly a great prize of war, and fighting must have been
bloody (the exploits of the converted Ashoka were also suspiciously
immense: the scribes claimed he built 84,000 monasteries and 84.000
stupas)
The
aftermath of the Battle of Kalinga - in which Ashoka either crushed a
revolt or annexed a neighbour - undoubtedly affected him deeply.
According to his own testimony, the war cost the lives of over
100,000 Kalinga men, women and children, and also 10,000 of his
own men, and he had inscriptions carved into rocks and onto pillars
erected throughout the Mauryan empire proclaiming his edicts (the
significance of the pillars was only rediscovered in the 19th
century), explaining that his remorse led to embrace of the practice
of 'dhamma', the way of the Buddha, a way consisting of compassion to
others, to all life.
The
importance and unique nature of the edicts is undisputed: here a
monarch addresses his people, tells them he has been a bad man, and
now wishes to become moral, and to spread his influence through
good works rather than evil acts, such as war.
Capital punishment was abolished, prisoners were treated kindly,
and laws were passed to protect animals. The empire would
co-exist peacefully with its neighbours, and justice would
be fair. The edicts are also the earliest recorded writings on
Buddhism.
It
has long been accepted by scholars that there are effectively
two Ashokas, the Ashoka of history and the Ashoka of Buddhist
scripture. Both are present in the edicts, but how and when Ashoka
became a Buddhist remains unconfirmed. One commonly repeated
story is that after the Battle of Kalinga he met the novice Buddhist
monk Nigrodha, who converted him with a sermon on 'heedfulness', and
although it does seem that there was no dramatic conversion -
according to the edicts he had begun studying Buddhism years
previously - it seems reasonable to suppose that a good teacher
persuaded the emperor to finally embrace Buddhism and become as an
edict says, a 'lay follower of Buddhism'. Both history and
Buddhist scripture place the final embrace of religion after Kalinga,
and though we do not have transcripts of their meeting, some sort of
an encounter with a Buddhist scholar seems certain, and that
scholar may well have been a bright novice called Nigrodha.
What
Happened Next
Ashoka
has been described by Richard Gombrich as 'the most important
Buddhist layman in history', Buddhism was to all but die out in
India, and only revived under the British in the 19th and
20th centuries. It was British scholars who returned to India
knowledge of its greatest king (Ashoka was not finally confirmed as
the author of the edicts until 1915), and the wheel of Dhamma carved
on one of his great pillars now appears in the centre of the Indian
flag. Thanks to Ashoka, Buddhism spread far and wide in the years of
his reign (which ended about 239 BC). He sent missionaries to all the
known world (even possibly to Britain), and the religion made a
significant impact outside of India, most notably perhaps, in
Sri Lanka Thailand and China. HG Wells wrote of Ashoka: 'In the
history of the world there have been thousands of kings and emperors
who called themselves 'their highnesses,' 'their majesties,' and
'their exalted majesties' and so on. They shone for a brief moment,
and as quickly disappeared. But Ashoka shines and shines brightly
like a bright star, even unto this day'.
5
52
BC: Vercingetorix the Gaul surrenders to Caesar
In
52 BC, as the Battle of Alesia loomed, Julius Caesar was
48 years old and, if he survived the battle, very much the
coming man: an experienced soldier, a skilled debater and
well-connected politician, he was sought after as an ally,
and feared as an enemy. After being appointed
Proconsular Governor of Transalpine Gaul in 58 BC what is now
southern France, he had begun the Gallic Wars, a series of conflicts
which led to the conquest of all Gaul lands; all of western Europe
from the Rhine to the Atlantic was annexed to the Roman Empire
(Caesar's own third-person account of the Gallic Wars, his
Commentaries,
is both the essential guide to the wars and a classic of Latin
prose) .
Skillfully
exploiting inter-tribal divisions, Caesar had managed to bring the
Gauls into subjugation, and even had time to take two hard whacks at
the Britons across the Channel in 55 and 56 BC. The 55 BC
expedition was very nearly a disaster - Caesar had the luck that
Napoleon regarded as the sine qua non of generalship - but
added, as intended, great glory to the name of Caesar.
As
Life
of Brian
memorably shows, Roman rule was never really appreciated by the
subjugated, and especially not in Gaul. Better roads and all the
other things 'the Romans did for us' never quite made up for the
arrogant governors, the ever-present garrisons of trained killers,
the bullying traders with senatorial connections, or the taxes. The
Gaul uprisings began in 58 BC, with the final revolt in 52
BC being led by a young nobleman (he may have been only 17) called
Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix managed to unite large numbers of
Gauls, but a hard-pressed Caesar managed to defeat the rebels at the
battle of Alesia. According to popular legend, Vercingetorix
surrendered in a theatrical manner, riding into Caesar's camp to
kneel at his feet in person. illustrations of the great Gaul laying
down his sword in front of a suitably impressed Caesar still feature
in French schoolbooks (in Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield,
Vercingetorix throws his sword on Caesar's feet). Caesar's own
account is, alas, altogether more restrained, as this Victorian
translation of his account shows: 'Vercingetorix, having convened a
council the following day, declares, “That he had undertaken that
war, not on account of his own exigencies, but on account of the
general freedom; and since he must yield to fortune, he offered
himself to them for either purpose, whether they should wish to atone
to the Romans by his death, or surrender him alive. Ambassadors are
sent to Caesar on this subject. He orders their arms to be
surrendered, and their chieftains delivered up. He seated himself at
the head of the lines in front of the camp, the Gallic chieftains are
brought before him. They surrender Vercingetorix, and lay down their
arms'. The victory was a calamity for the Gauls: according to one
estimate, a million died, a million became slaves, and the remaining
five or so million became Roman subjects.
What
Happened Next
Caesar
does seem to have admired Vercingetorix as a leader of men, and
he and other Romans most definitely admired the fighting qualities of
the Gauls. Indeed, many Gauls had fought on Caesar's side,
either for tribal reasons or simply because they wanted to pick
a winner. The independent, martial qualities of the Gauls had been
admired for centuries: the 3rd century Roman sculpture,
'the Dying Gaul', itself a copy of a Greek original. was one of the
most copied sculptures in antiquity. Vercingetorix was taken to
Rome, paraded in front of the mob, jailed, then executed in 46 BC,
probably with a garrote, and possibly not to universal approval
in the city. Caesar himself was assassinated two years later.
The
more romantic version of the encounter was the one that prevailed,
despite the brutal end of the story. In1865, Napoleon III
had a huge statue (over 20 feet tall and still standing) of the great
hero erected at the site of the Battle of Alesia. The statue shows
Vercingetroix with a moustache, despite the fact that contemporary
coins show his upper lip hairless. Napoleon III was well-whiskered,
so the inference is that the sculptor wanted to identify his master
with the ancient hero. This sort of thing still goes on: a
statue of Mel Gibson dressed up in Braveheart garb, purporting to be
a representation of William Wallace, was erected in Stirling in 1997
(and is now kept behind bars after being regularly vandalised).
Napoleon
III did eventually die in exile like his hero - but in Chislehurst
rather than Rome.
6
385:
Maximus executes Priscillian for his beliefs
As
a critic of the film Gladiator
observed,
Maximus seems a bit of an over the-top name even for a Roman emperor.
Yet someone called Maximus was indeed a Roman emperor (if not
the only one) of his day, and like the (fictional) Russell
Crowe character, Magnus Maximus was a Spaniard who was popular with
his troops. In 383, he was proclaimed emperor in Britain by his
legions, defeated the western emperor Gratian in Paris, crossed
the Alps, but eventually surrendered to Theodosius the 'Great'
in 388, who promptly executed him (Theodosius was the last emperor to
rule over both the western and eastern parts of the empire).
From
our modern perspective, Maximus in himself seems a figure of little
historical significance, being simply one of a series of
military commanders who fought for control of the Roman empire
in the 4th century. but he does have a remarkable claim to fame
- or at least infamy - in that he was the first Christian ruler to
execute a Christian for his beliefs. The Christian he executed
was another Spaniard, an ascetic intellectual called Priscillian,
described by his near-contemporary Sulpicius Severus, the biographer
of St Martin of Tours, as 'a man of noble birth, of great
riches, bold, restless, eloquent, learned through much reading, very
ready at debate and discussion' (Catholic
Encyclopedia
translation).
Priscillan
had many admirers and became Bishop of Avila, but also had many
theological (and more clearly orthodox) enemies. Prompted by the
persecution of his followers, Priscillian appealed to Maximus at
Trier for imperial protection but ended up accused by a civil court
of sorcery. St Martin of Tours was so shocked by the vehemence of the
language used against Priscillian and the Priscillians, as his
followers were now called, that he also appealed to Maximus, calling
on him not to shed the blood of the accused. But after Martin left
the city, and Priscillian was found guilty, he and several followers
were beheaded on the direct orders of Maximus, who seems to have had
it in for the unorthodox, possibly as a means of currying
favour with the Church. Priscillan and the others were the
first Christians ever to be executed by Christians.
The
executions were quickly condemned by the Pope and by Bishop Ambrose
of Milan; and when in 400, the Council of Toledo re-examined the
case, they found little of substance against him, and several leading
Priscillians, including two bishops, were reconciled to the Church.
What
Happened Next
Maximus,
despite his efforts for the Church, was soon forgotten after his
execution in 388, though his descendants are quite interesting:
one presumed great-grandson, Petronius Maximus, was very briefly
emperor before being stoned to death in 455, and his daughter may
have been married to the British king Vortigern, according to the
Pillar of Eliseg in Denbighshire.
Priscillian
was clearly a very gifted man. A definitive account of his beliefs
has long been problematic: as with many subsequent 'heretics' we now
know his beliefs primarily from his persecutors (Priscillian's
earliest writings were, astonishingly. rediscovered in 1885). Despite
the anxious efforts at reconciliation on the part of the Church in
his day, it seems probable that at least some of his
beliefs derive from distinctly heterodox Manichaean or Gnostic
traditions (Gnostics saw the creation as a flawed, even evil work,
rather than, as the orthodox required, the beneficent
creation of a loving God). The most notable ex-Manichaean of the day
was Augustine, but it seems there were many inside and out of the
church who regarded themselves as orthodox but sympathised with
the inspirational asceticism of men such as Priscillian (and women
too: Priscillian's followers included many women, who were
regarded as equals within the movement, a feature also of many
Gnostic groups).
Priscillian
continued to be venerated by many Christians in Spain, particularly
in Galicia, a cause of great concern to Leo I (see 452: Pope
Leo I persuades Attila the Hun). His
body was brought back from Trier, and it has been suggested that the
human remains discovered at Santiago de Compostela in
the 8th century are in fact Priscillian's, and not those of St James.
Gnosticism - in the form of Catharism - was to resurface centuries
later in Provence, and was suppressed by the Church with great
ferocity during the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-1255. But by then,
the world had got used to the spectacle of Christians slaughtering
Christians.
7
452: Pope
Leo I persuades Attila the Hun not to attack Rome
The
first Pope to receive the honorific 'Great', Leo I is described by
the Catholic Encyclopedia as one of the most significant and
important Popes in antiquity. Born in 400, by the time he
became Pope Leo I in 440 he had already become renowned for his zeal
in combating the many heterodox Christians who continued to
aggravate the Church hierarchy by clinging to or even promulgating
unapproved beliefs. Leo I was notable in particular for his
campaigns against the followers of Pelagius (a very British heretic,
Pelagius rejected original sin), and against Manicheans
and Priscillians (see 385:
Maximus executes Priscillian).
The
5th century was a time of great upheaval for the Roman Empire: Rome
itself had been captured in 410 by Alaric, leader of the Visigoths.
and territory was continuingly slipping from Roman control as the
supposed barbarians moved in (the taking of Rome by Alaric used
to be described as a 'sack', but in fact Alaric, who was an Arian
Christian, and his army, behaved very moderately, especially compared
to Roman armies). Despite all this turmoil of people and armies,
Leo I was unstinting in his efforts to give dissident Christians a
hard time. Earthly powers rose and fell, but what really
mattered was making sure that it was one's own theological
interpretation that survived.
In
452, however, Leo I had to face up to a very pressing temporal
matter: Attila the Hun and his forces had been wreaking havoc
in Northern Italy, razing at least one city to the ground. Attila was
dubbed the 'Scourge of God' by the Romans, and was undoubtedly a
fearsome opponent, though it seems possible that he was not quite the
monster he has been portrayed as in European culture. A reliable
description of the man by the Greek historian Priscus portrays a man
of moderate tastes: 'In everything. . .he showed himself temperate;
his cup was of wood, while to the guests were given goblets of gold
and silver. His dress, too, was quite simple, affecting only to be
clean. The sword he carried at his side, the latchets of his Scythian
shoes, the bridle of his horse were not adorned, like those of the
other Scythians, with gold or gems or anything costly'.
Leo
I was part of an embassy sent, at the request of Rome's feeble
emperor Valentinian III, to meet with Attila (whose empire was
actually the largest in Europe). near Mantua, and plead for an end to
the invasion. The Roman Catholic church has always given the Pope
sole credit for Attila's surprising agreement to spare Rome (with the
help of Saints Peter and Paul who Raphael depicts in a 1512 Vatican
fresco as hovering menacingly above the meeting). There is no
consensus among secular historians as to why Attila left. There is
little doubt that Leo I was by far the most significant figure on the
Roman side, yet it seems implausible that he could have had any
really persuasive arguments to put forward to a man who had calmly
watched as towns and cities were burned at his command. Alaric had
died shortly after taking Rome, and it has been suggested that Attila
feared some sort of curse coming upon him if he attacked Rome, but
fear of more natural horrors such as plague, famine were likely more
persuasive factors. More recently, it has been suggested that
Rome's eastern emperor at Constantinople, Marcian, whom historians
have tended to portray as being a largely aloof observer of the
trouble in the west, may in fact at this time have posed more
problems for Attila than has formerly seemed to be the case.
What
Happened Next
For
whatever reason, Attila withdrew and died the following year, dying
after (says Priscus) a nosebleed caused by a wedding night
drinking session (he was not much of a drinker, but something about
the new wife seems to have caused him to over-indulge). A less
unusual account of his death is that it was engineered by Marcian in
some way. The Hun empire subsequently fell in discord and Attila
became a figure of legend in medieval epics. Leo II carried on
enthusiastically pursuing heretics until his death in 461. He is
buried in the Vatican, whose power he did so much to consolidate and
expand.
8
c.
563: Columba preaches to Bridei, King of the Picts (and tells
Nessie to behave)
The
traditional version of Christianity's introduction to Scotland has
been that the religion was brought by Saint Ninian, a Cumbrian whose
dates are unclear. He is believed to have begun his mission in the
390s. In fact, there must have been earlier Christians in Scotland,
possibly serving on Hadrian's Wall - as in WH Auden's poem 'Roman
Wall Blues' - 'Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish / There'd be no
more kissing if he had his wish') - or trading with the Picts and
other natives, but Ninian's seems to have been the first episcopally
licensed mission north of the Wall (or possibly not, as one scholar
has speculated that 'Ninian' may not have existed and be simply a
careless scribe's spelling mistake for a later Irish saint, Finnian).
The
Abbot Finnian of Clonard certainly existed, as did Columba, and
the latter started what in publishing history is the first copyright
war, after he illegally copied one of Finnian's prized
psalters. This theft of what we now call 'intellectual property
rights' led to the Battle of Cooldrevny in 561, in which
3000 warriors may have died. Overcome with remorse, Columba left
Ireland to preach the gospel to the Picts, and landed on Iona in
563. Iona was a good strategic base for these missionaries,
halfway between the territory of the Scots of Dalriadia (the Scots
were of course invaders from Ireland) and the great Pictish lands to
the east.
Possibly
while on a journey to Inverness to meet the Pictish king Bridei,
Columba's biographer Adamnan (writing 100 years after the event) says
Columba and his men came across Picts burying a man by the river
Ness, who had been killed by a monster in the river. Columba then
sent one of his own (doubtless eager) men into the river as bait: the
monster promptly attacked but as promptly fled when Columba ordered
it to leave his follower alone. This account is of doubtful
historical merit as (a) Nessie, who was presumably on her way
into or out of Loch Ness, seems shy and peaceful, and has never
attacked anyone else; (b) Adamnan records so many miracles performed
by Columba - drawing water from a rock like Moses, multiplying fishes
like Jesus, and even driving a demon out of a milk pail - that they
all seem a trifle devalued.
Bridei's
home was possibly a small fort on the site of the present Inverness
Castle, or maybe on a ridge overlooking the Beauly Firth. Not
much is known of him: he seems to have been monarch of both
northern and southern Picts, and a note in the annals of Ulster
credits him with having halted or delayed Scottish incursions. The
Venerable Bede suggests (about 200 years later) that Bridei gifted
Iona to Columba, who converted the king to Christianity. The gift of
Iona is not mentioned by Adamnan, who suggests that Bridei was at
first hostile to Columba, then friendly, after of course a miracle.
Neither does Adamnan claim that Bridei was converted by Columba,
which is perhaps surprising given the much more improbable things
that are recorded in his biography. Bridei may well have been a
Christian already.
What
Happened Next
Columba
died peacefully in Iona in 597. His legacy was huge. Iona became one
of the most important missionary centres in Europe and is now a place
of pilgrimage itself. Bridei died around 585, possibly while
fighting fellow Picts. By the 10th century, the Pictish kingdoms had
been absorbed by the Scots invaders and their strange language
forgotten. By the time of the Scottish Wars of Independence, the
Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 could boast of the genocide of the
Picts. But by the 19th century, the Picts were fully absorbed back
into the North British mainstream, as can be seen in a charming
painting by William Hole (in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
depicting Columba converting Bridei. As Lloyd Laing points out in his
Celtic Britain (1979), the work is a mixture of elements which are
very diverse in time and space: Bridei wears a 2nd-century armlet, an
8th-century brooch - and an 8th-century BC Italian helmet. One of
Columba's team carries a 12th-century crozier, while a Pict holds a
shield which could in his time be over 2000 years old; and as
Laing says, 'all are set in a rocky scene taken straight from an
18th-century antiquary's druid scrapbook. Yet . . .there is nothing
in this picture that jars on the eye'. Bridei and Columba have here
entered the world of Celtic myth.
9
1050: Macbeth
goes on a pilgrimage and meets Pope Leo IX
Thanks
to Shakespeare's play of c. 1605, Macbeth is regarded as one of the
great villains of history. Shakespeare took his Macbeth from
Holinshed's Chronicles;
Holinshed in turn took his information from Hector Boece's Scotorum
Historiae
(1527). Boece is a notoriously unreliable source and was
writing in any case to bolster the claim of James I to the Scottish
throne, while Shakespeare was obliged to flatter his descendant James
VI, who became James I of England in 1603 (it was claimed that both
Jamies were descended from Banquo, but Banquo may never have
existed).
The
character and reign of the real Macbeth was quite different, however.
After defeating Duncan I in battle in 1040 (Duncan may well
have been a young warrior rather than Shakespeare's saintly old
buffer), Macbeth, king of Moray, became king of all Scotland. The
11th century was a tough time to be a Scottish monarch. Apart from
incessant struggle against rival claimants to the throne, and with
many minor powers all with quite literal axes to grind, the
kingdom also lay open to attacks from the Orkney Vikings in the north
(though Earl Thorfinn was an ally of Macbeth's, such alliances could
dissolve with opportunity), and from the Northumbrian kingdom in the
south. It may seem odd to think of Macbeth as a player on
the European stage, never mind undertake a pilgrimage to Rome, but
such was the case. Europe was undergoing dramatic shifts of power;
the pathways of dynastic struggle ran across the Atlantic and North
Sea as well as by land, and Scotland was by no mans a negligible
state. Macbeth was the first, but not the last, Scottish monarch to
take Norman knights into his service.
Pope
Leo IX became Pope in 1049 and was also acquainted with Norman
power, but with the receiving end of that power. Norman invaders were
causing great strife in Southern Italy and Sicily, and the new Pope
did what he could to alleviate the strife. It was also a tough time
to be a Pope. Macbeth travelled to Rome in 1050, scattering
money 'like seed' to the poor, it was said. There is no record of his
conversation with Pope Leo IX; doubtless, as the 1913 edition of the
Catholic
Encyclopedia
delicately puts it, he 'may be thought to have exposed the needs
of his soul to that tender father'. The 1913 Catholic
Encyclopedia
is not known for its forthright criticism of the papacy, but even by
its own standards, the description of Leo IX is highly
reverential: in childhood he was 'saintly', and he had trouble
reading from a book that turned out to be stolen.
The
historical Leo IX excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople not
long before he died, thus causing an un-healable rift between the
Catholics and the Orthodox, and was much more like the powerful
lord portrayed by Kingsley Amis in his fine story about Macbeth's
meeting with the Holy Father, 'Affairs of Death'. As is the case with
George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman
novels, it is often to the fiction writers we turn for the best
insights into historical figures, and Amis' version of the encounter
is a compelling one. His Leo IX is a steely character, looking
for gifts from his northern visitor. Macbeth is a sad man, haunted by
guilt over the blood on his hands, but also keen to tell the Pope
that now 'Scotland is safe and at peace. This has not been
customary'. Indeed it was not customary, and Macbeth's rule was
popular. Thanks to his deals, promises and threats, the realm
lived free from war while he ruled (It is possible that Macbeth
visited Rome twice, and Amis sets the meeting in 1053 rather than the
documented date of 1050).
What
Happened Next
Leo
IX led an army against the Normans in 1053, was defeated. and died a
broken (or at least very frustrated) man in 1054. Macbeth had a
good innings for a medieval Scottish king, reigning for 17 years
before being killed in battle in 1057 against Duncan's son, Malcolm
III. In a development still not really understood, Macbeth's stepson
Lulach took the throne. Lulach's father had been killed by Macbeth
and it is possible he fought in alliance with Malcolm; in any case,
Malcolm ambushed and killed him in 1058. Scottish history at this
time begins to resemble a series of The
Sopranos,
with Macbeth's rule being looked back to as a time of peace and
plenty. Macbeth may be one of the many Scottish (and Norwegian and
Irish) kings buried on Iona.
See
also 1052: Edward
the Confessor meets William the Bastard
10
c.
1052: Edward the Confessor meets William the Bastard
Despite
being King of England for 14 years (1052-1066), and becoming a saint
in 1161, after which date he became known as Edward the Confessor,
the early life of Edward remains aggravatingly obscure, shrouded in
the myth-making which followed the Norman Conquest and his later
canonisation. It seems clear, however, that his accession to the
throne was popular, particularly as he was preceded by his unpopular
high-taxing half-brother Harthacanute, described brusquely in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as having 'never accomplished anything kingly'.
Edward, according to the Chronicle, was a highly popular successor
with the people of London, who acclaimed him as king before
Harthacanute was buried.
As
was the case with Scotland, which also enjoyed unusual peace in the
early 1050s, thanks to Macbeth (see 1050:
Macbeth goes on a pilgrimage and meets Pope Leo IX),
there were many eyes on the throne. The English throne also enjoyed a
special prestige: in an era of fast-risen freebooters, men who were
often barely a sword's length away from the family cowshed, the
English crown shone as the symbol of a dynasty that reached back into
the 6th century, almost to the twilight of the Roman Empire, a
dynasty which included such heroes as Alfred the Great in its line.
To follow as king in that ancient succession was to achieve glory
indeed.
Around
about 1052, Edward received a visit from William the Bastard,
ruler of Normandy since 1045. We have no record of the meeting,
which may have been in the previous year, and there has never been
any independent confirmation of William's claim - a claim made much
later, in 1066 after Edward's death - that Edward had named him his
successor. Though the claim seems farfetched, it is certainly
the case that Norman influence was growing in England under Edward's
reign. Not long before William's visit, after a group of Normans were
killed in a brawl at Dover, Edward, in an unsaintly gesture, had
ordered Earl Godwin to punish the people of Dover. Godwin refused to
attack his fellow Saxons and was exiled. Thus we do know that Edward
could favour Normans, and Normans made good allies. Dangerous allies
of course, but no more or less trustworthy than Saxon allies. It is
often forgotten that there were already Norman settlers in England.
including some clergy, and indeed Edward's own Norman nephew, the
Earl of Hereford, who was to become better known under the wonderful
name of Ralph the Timid after his knights failed to break a Saxon
shield wall (Ralph built the first castles in England).
Edward
died in a fog of claim and counter claim. Godwin's son Harold of
Wessex claimed that Edward had nominated him on his deathbed,
William got the Pope's approval for his story of the 1052 meeting.
William also claimed that Harold - while a 'guest' of William's
after being shipwrecked - had sworn to support the Norman's
claim.
What
Happened Next
Edward
died in January 1066, William invaded on 28 September, just three
days after Harold destroyed a large Norwegian army led by their giant
king Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge (on being told that Harald
came to conquer England, Harold promised him seven feet of soil, a
promise he kept). This was to be the last Viking invasion
of England. Harold advanced south, bringing his exhausted forces into
battle at Hastings on 14 October. The fight was a close one but ended
with Harold's death. William was crowned King of England on Christmas
Day. The consequences of the Norman Conquest are much debated, but it
seems perverse to see an event that brought so much destruction as
anything but a catastrophe. Subsequent English rebellions
were crushed with the utmost severity, During the 'Harrying of the
North' in 1069-70, William's forces slaughtered everything they could
from the Humber to the Tyne, and some historians estimate that over
England as a whole, in the period 1066-1075, perhaps a fifth of the
population died.
The
Bayeux Tapestry (which was likely completed in the late 1070s, and is
actually an embroidery rather than a tapestry), was
probably commissioned by William's half-brother Bishop Odo.
Formerly seen as a fairly uncomplicated piece of Norman propaganda,
it is now seen as a much more complex work with hidden meanings.
it was probably in fact made in England by English seamstresses, and
the scene depicting a mother and her child fleeing a house being
burned by Norman soldiers, is an odd scene for a work supposedly
celebrating the Conquest. The Tapestry does not show Edward and
William meeting: instead Harold is dispatched by Edward to tell
William that he has been chosen by Edward as the next king of
England: Harold is then depicted as a brave ally of William's - in
one scene he pulls two Norman knights from quicksand -
and in another scene he is shown making an oath over a saint's
relics.
Whatever
the oath may have been, the stories within the Bayeux Tapestry are
clearly open to interpretation.
11
1192: Richard
the Lionheart meets Saladin's brother
The
First Crusade to 'free' the Holy Land was launched in 1095 by Pope
Urban II. From the outset, the Crusade was seen as a way of achieving
earthly as well as spiritual gain: someone, after all, would
have to take over once the Holy Land had been cleansed of unbelievers
and their Muslim rulers. Many of the sweeping statements that used to
be made about the Crusades are now commonly disputed. It used to be
said, for example, that Europe had a surplus of younger sons trained
in war and the Crusades were a good way of using them up. This view
no longer seems valid. The old view of a monolithic Islam has also
largely been dispensed with. When the Crusaders invaded, they found a
Muslim world that was torn apart by the great sectarian divide
between Sunni and Shia, a world, indeed, with some leaders who
initially seemed to have hoped that the Crusaders could be allies
against fellow Muslims.
Since
the 18th century, western historians, and novelists such as Sir
Walter Scott, have portrayed the Crusades as a clash between brutal
and largely uncultured barbarians from the west on the one hand, and
an older, more tolerant Muslim civilisation on the other. This is
still not a greatly contested view, certainly not between Protestant
and secular historians. though perhaps it has led to an over-rosy
view of some Muslim rulers, such as the great Kurd Saladin. Saladin's
main opponent in legend (and at least partly in history) was of
course Richard I of England, the so-called Lionheart. The two were
opponents during the Third Crusade of 1189-1192, and never actually
met despite their wonderfully flowery exchanges in
Scott's novel The Talisman (Richard's wife Berengaria, forced
to stay in her tent, sounds the only dissident note in the book:
'This superstitious observance of Oriental reverence to the fair sex
called forth from Queen Berengaria some criticisms very unfavourable
to Saladin and his country'.
Richard
had arrived in the Holy Land trailing a reputation for brutality, and
reinforced it by killing over 2700 Muslim hostages in 1191 after
the capture of Acre. For some reason, however, Saladin took to
Richard, as many people did. During one battle, he sent Richard
two horses when his own was killed under him. He also once sent him
sherbet when he was sick and offered him his personal physician. The
two were also linked in a surprising way by the dreaded Shia Assassin
sect: Assassins made at least two attempts on Saladin's life, and one
of the Assassins who killed Conrad I of Jerusalem claimed
Richard had paid for the murder (the case against Richard is
unproven).
Richard
then proposed - out of the blue - an aristocratic compromise solution
to Saladin, that would bring about an end to the Crusades: a marriage
between the families. Saladin's brother, Al-Adil, could marry
Richard's sister Joanna. Joanna had been Queen of Sicily, and when
her husband died, the new king, Tancred, imprisoned her. But when
Joanna's scary brother turned up in Sicily in 1190, he released her.
Al-Adil and Richard met, but while Joanna loved her brother. she had
no intention of marrying a Muslim, nor did Al-Adil want a Christian
wife. It is probable also that Al-Adil knew of the widely believed
story attached to both Richard and Joanna, that their mother Eleanor
of Aquitaine was, as a member of the Angevin dynasty, descended from
the Devil and that occult powers ran in the family. Al-Adil was
possibly not all that pious, but there was no chance of a wedding
here. Marriage to a Christian descended from Satan was bad enough;
the rumoured ability of a recent forebear to fly in and out of
windows was very likely a dealbreaker.
An
unenthusiastic Al-Adil reported back to his big brother, who
mischievously kept Richard waiting for six weeks before
replying that the marriage was a great idea and should take place
immediately. Richard, facing outright rebellion from his beloved
sister. then asked Saladin if his niece Eleanor, the 'Fair Maid
of Brittany' would do, and Saladin decided he had had enough. Richard
and Saladin would never be in-laws.
What
Happened Next
Saladin
died in 1193. Al-Adil skillfully brokered peace among Saladin's
succession-squabbling nephews, and ended up ruling Egypt and Syria
for many years. and also established good relations with the crusader
kingdoms. Al-Adil has never really had due credit from posterity,
either from Arab historians, who perhaps feel one Kurdish hero is
enough, or from western historians,. who perhaps feel one Muslim hero
is enough. Joanna married Raymond VI of Toulouse in 1196. The
marriage was not a happy one, and Joanna, pregnant with a second
child travelled to seek Richard's protection in 1199, but found him
dead of a crossbow wound in Chalus. She (and the baby) died in
childbirth at Rouen. Her surviving son became Raymond VII of
Toulouse, who. like his father before him, was forced to take part in
the merciless Albigensian Crusade against his Cathar subjects. The
Albigensian Crusade in southern France was fought with greater
ferocity than the crusades against the Muslims. The Cathars were
accused of being devil-worshippers, appropriate subjects, it
was said, for an Angevin descendant.
12
1274:
Dante trembles when he sees Beatrice
The
first meeting in 1274 was when he was nine and she was
eight. This meeting is best described in his own words, as
translated here by Rossetti, from Vita
Nuova
(c. 1293), literally 'New Love', a collection of short prose
pieces and poems on courtly love: 'Nine times already since my birth
had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame point almost,
as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious Lady
of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was
called Beatrice. . .and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth
year. Her dress, on that day, was of a most noble colour, a
subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as
best suited with her very tender age. At that moment, I say
most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its
dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble
so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith;
and in trembling it said these words: 'Ecce deus fortior me, qui
veniens dominabitur mihi' [Here is a deity stronger than I; who,
coming, shall rule over me].
The
nine-year-old Dante sounds not quite like our own dear modern
nine-year-olds perhaps, but it needs to be pointed out here that
Dante is not so much recounting something autobiographical, as a
modern would, but is instead exploring the nature of both earthly and
divine love. They met again nine years later, and again it has
to be Dante's description as translated by Rossetti: 'And passing
through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood
sorely abashed: and. . .saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I
seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness.
. . betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to
thinking of this most courteous lady, thinking of whom I was
overtaken by a pleasant slumber, wherein a marvellous vision was
presented to me: for there appeared to be in my room a mist of
the colour of fire, within the which I discerned the figure
of a lord of terrible aspect to such as should gaze upon him,
but who seemed therewithal to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel
to see. Speaking he said many things, among the which I
could understand but few; and of these, this: 'Ego dominus tuus'
[I am your Lord] In his arms it seemed to me that a person was
sleeping, covered only with a blood-coloured cloth; upon whom looking
very attentively, I knew that it was the lady of the salutation
who had deigned the day before to salute me. And he who
held her held also in his hand a thing that was burning in
flames; and he said to me, 'Vide cor tuum' ['behold thy heart'].
Suspicious
commentators have noted that Dante seems to have liked things to
happen in nines, and as Renaissance Florence was after all not that
big a place, he should surely have seen his beloved Beatrice
more than twice in nine years. But as every woman knows, men see what
they want to see in women, and perhaps he was only recording the
moments of vision.
It
is the second meeting that appeals to modern sensibilities, and is
perhaps most commonly imagined as depicted in that
Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece Dante
and Beatrice
(1883), by Henry Holiday. It is a very fine painting, though Dante
looks a bit older than the teenager he was (a digression may be
permitted here: Kitty Lushington was the model for the maidservant in
the painting, and Kitty was also to be the inspiration for one of
Virginia Woolf's best-loved characters, Clarissa Dalloway - not
a lot of people know this, but you can therefore see what the young
Mrs Dalloway looked like in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, where
the painting hangs). The encounter between Dante and Beatrice
also features in a Florentine scene in the film Hannibal
(2001), in which a sonnet from Vita
Nuova
is sung in a street performance of an opera supposedly based on the
book.
What
Happened Next
Dante
married a woman called Gemma in 1285, by whom he had four children;
Beatrice married a banker called Simone in 1287. Asked how he coped
with life after her marriage, Dante replied 'Ladies, the end of my
love was indeed the greeting of this lady. . .in that greeting lay my
beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires.' Beatrice died in
1290, aged 24, but reappears, famously and wondrously, in Dante's
masterwork, one of the greatest of all poems, the Divine
Comedy (1308-1321),
as Dante's guide into Paradise towards 'The Love which moves
the sun and the other stars'.
RENAISSANCE
AND BAROQUE ENCOUNTERS (16TH
AND 17TH
CENTURIES)
13
1520: Henry
VIII wrestles Francis I
The
image traditionally favoured by king and dictators is of a figure so
large it complements or even competes with the sun (see 336
BC: Alexander meets Diogenes),
an image evoked perfectly in
A Man for All Seasons
(1966), in which Robert Shaw's Henry VIII blocks out the sun when he
appears to Paul Scofield's Thomas More. Henry has had a bad
press from posterity's novelists and historians, largely because he
deserves one. One of the few real intellectuals to inherit the
English throne (or any throne) he was genuinely interested in
science and all aspects of learning, and corresponded with the
great humanist Erasmus while still a youth; and although he
almost certainly did not compose 'Greensleeves', as used to be
believed, he was an accomplished musician and composer.
But
from an early age, this royal paragon was also fascinated with war,
and with the age's ritualised substitute for war, tournaments (and
was a very keen hunter). and fought a war with France 1512-14. Henry
was 23 when the war began, and his kingdom was a member of the Holy
League, an alliance against Francis I's France (Henry didn't get much
out of the conflict, except for a resounding victory over the Scots
at Flodden in 1513). By 1520, Henry's realm of England was a
growing power in Europe, courted cautiously by the two main forces in
Europe, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V (the son of Philip the
Handsome and Joanna the Mad), and Francis I, the latter being
also a young man flexing his imperial muscles.
England's
diplomacy during this period has come in for some recent revision.
Cardinal Wolsey used to be seen as the dominant player on the
English side, 'the King's ruler', it used to be said, but there
now seems to be pretty much a consensus that Henry was happy to let
Wolsey, who became a cardinal in 1515, take the public credit for
English policy - for as long as the policy suited Henry. England had
a population much smaller than France's, a national income a great
deal lower than the Hapsburg's, yet Wolsey and the King somehow
enabled England to, as several historians have said, punch well above
its weight.
Peace
was finally made with France, and the two young lions agreed to meet
in June 1520 at what has come to be called the 'Field of the Cloth of
Gold', near Calais (as pedants never tire of saying, strictly
it should be called Field of Cloth of Gold). It was so called
because of the large amount of gold cloth on display, on both
costumes and tents. The event lasted a month. The proclaimed
intention was to strengthen the bonds between England and France, who
were neighbours and should be friends in a rapidly changing world.
With the old certainties failing, and with the Ottomans encroaching
on Christendom, why should old enemies not become friends? Two 12
foot paintings - now at Hampton Court - were made to record the
meeting, one showing Henry embarking for France, the
other (a much-pondered painting) showing details of the place
and the events.
Everything
about the meeting was designed - by Wolsey, who had become a
papal legate in 1518 - not to cause offence to either side
(Calais was English territory). An ad hoc 300-foot long palace
was built, with 30-foot (mostly cloth) walls; fountains flowed with
wine; dozens of priests tended to the gathering's spiritual needs
where required; over 2000 sheep were eaten, the finest
choristers sang; knights jousted; and Francis and Henry
wrestled. The latter encounter was not planned, and Wolsey would
certainly not have wanted it. It was a definite mistake: to have
two burly young and ambitious kings wrestling in front of their
watchful courts, indeed in front of beady eyes from every court
in Europe, was to court misfortune. Francis succeeded in pinning
Henry to the ground; Henry rose white-faced and all the fun was over.
What
Happened Next
The
Field of the Cloth of Gold represents what may well be
proportionately the biggest outlay in diplomatic expenditure for the
least result, effectively a silly and hugely expensive interlude.
England and France were back at war within two years, after Wolsey
arranged an alliance with Charles. Henry's soldiers raided France in
1522 and 1523, and he suggested to Charles that they carve up
France between them, after Charles captured Francis. Charles was not
interested. Pope Clement VII then persuaded Henry into an alliance -
the League of Cognac - against Charles, but Henry's war chest was
already running out at this point. England was an important player in
European affairs, that was now clear, but not one wealthy enough to
sustain a European war.
14
1521:
Martin Luther and Frederick the Wise see each other at
the Diet of Worms
The
1520s was a very busy decade for world history. The decade begins
with such events as the first passage through the straits of Magellan
and the Field of Cloth of Gold (see 1520: Henry VIII wrestles
Francis I) and, in 1521, The Diet of Worms. The words ‘Diet of
Worms’ have resulted in centuries of giggles among English
speakers, as in Hamlet’s quip (Shakespeare loved a bad pun)
‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet’. The Diet was a general
assembly of the ruling estates of the Holy Roman Empire, presided
over by the Emperor Charles V (by this point in history, the empire
was as Voltaire was to describe it, neither holy, nor roman nor
really an empire).
The
main purpose of the Diet was to rein in Martin Luther and the growing
Protestant demand for church reformation. In 1520, Pope Leo X had
issued a demand that Luther retract his theses attacking the selling
of indulgences, and Luther was called before the assembly to retract
the heretical errors in his displayed books. It was Luther’s good
fortune (or perhaps providence) that there were other major issues
facing the European powers at the time, and present also at the Diet
was Luther’s temporal lord, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III,
‘Frederick the Wise’. Frederick was the founder of the University
of Wittenberg (Shakespeare makes Hamlet a student at this humanist
institution), where Luther taught, and, though a quite
traditional Catholic (he owned over 19,000 relics, including straw
from Jesus’ manger) Frederick was becoming increasingly convinced
of the need for some measure of reform. He had also obtained a
guarantee that Luther would have safe passage to and from the
assembly.
The
two men did not actually speak to each other, but when Luther was
called upon to speak it is inconceivable that they did not exchange
looks. Frederick would later say that he found Luther ‘too bold’.
And while Luther probably did not actually say ‘Here I stand. I can
do no other’, his bravery and articulacy seemed plain enough to
most observers, Luther told the assembly that if his work was
not 'from God' then it would perish soon enough, without the Diet's
aid. He clearly impressed Frederick despite his 'boldness'- if
he had not, then that would have been Luther's last public appearance
until brought to the stake.
What
Happened Next
All
concerned knew that the safe conduct for Luther was pretty
worthless, and when Luther left the assembly he was abducted by
a gang of armed men. When the artist Albrecht Durer (who was to
remain a Catholic) heard the news he exclaimed that if Luther was
dead, there would be no one to explain the gospel. But Luther was not
dead. He had been abducted by Frederick’s men and spent a year in
safety, disguised as a knight (Frederick never visited Luther,
possibly fearing being told off for his beloved relic collection).
The rest of the 1520s brought disorder on an unprecedented scale:
peasant armies expecting the end of the world ravaged Germany, and in
1527 Rome was ecumenically sacked by Charles V’s army of Spanish
Catholics and German Lutherans. Charles himself was horrified by the
sack, but by then it was clear that the old Europe was breaking up in
a manner unforeseen at the start of the 1520s. See also 1529:
Zwingli and Luther argue about Communion.
15
1529:
Zwingli and Luther argue about Communion
By
1529, the Protestant Reformation had major strongholds in both
Germany and Switzerland, one of them being Zurich, where
Zwingli was effectively both temporal and spiritual leader. Most
reformers were content with being the power behind the throne (or
civil power) but Zwingli was more content to be seen to be wielding
the power: Zurich was to be a theocracy. Zwingli’s theology is
now seen as fairly complex in detail, but for contemporaries, what
really mattered was that he had come independently to the same
conclusions about the state of the Church as Luther, and he quickly
acquired a large following in Zurich, his influence spreading rapidly
to several other Swiss cantons.
There
was, however, a bitter difference between the two men over the
nature of the Last Supper and the meaning of Holy Communion: Luther
believed Christ was present during communion, whereas Zwingli saw
communion as a memorial ceremony. Philip, Landgrave of Hesse - like
many Protestant secular leaders - believed it would be a very good
thing if the two great reformers could meet and settle their
differences, thus establishing a united front of Protestant states
against the Catholic menace.
Philip
organised a meeting which was held at Marburg in 1529. The meeting
was a disaster. Luther was never a trimmer (see 1521: Martin
Luther and Frederick the Wise see each other at the Diet of
Worms) and was in no mood to compromise his beliefs for the sake of
an earthly alliance, especially one forcing him to embrace the views
of a ‘fanatic’, as he called him, like Zwingli. For his part,
Zwingli saw Luther as still essentially wedded to Catholic doctrine,
a man unwilling to see where his arguments necessarily led. They
didn't agree, and didn’t like each other (Luther later went so far
as to call Zwingli a ‘devil’). There was to be no alliance of the
disparate German and Swiss states.
What
Happened Next
Marburg
was a political, spiritual and intellectual failure, but led directly
to the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which was presented to the
Emperor Charles V. The Augsburg Confession - the primary
Lutheran confession of faith - solved the Marburg problem by getting
Luther to write the confession but not taking him to Augsburg (he was
kept secure at Coburg castle). Charles V had many problems at this
time: his own army of Spanish Catholics and German Lutherans had
sacked Rome itself in an orgy of rape and murder in 1527, and the
Ottomans were encroaching on the empire; the Turks had besieged
Vienna just a few months previously. In 1531, matters were
simplified a bit when Zwingli fell in battle against the Catholic
cantons. The future of Protestantism in Switzerland was to lie with
neither Zwingli nor Luther, but with Calvin (see 1553:
Calvin denounces Michael Servetus).
16
1553:
Calvin denounces Michael Servetus
The
physician and philosopher Michael Servetus arrived in Geneva in 1553,
a city dominated by the reformer John Calvin. There has been
some debate as to whether or not Servetus and Calvin had met before:
some accounts says they met briefly in Paris in either 1534 or 1536,
other accounts say he was invited by Calvin to meet up so that
Calvin could demonstrate the falsity of his beliefs but Servetus
failed to show up. They certainly corresponded, but Calvin made plain
that their views were incompatible.
Above
all, Servetus held highly unorthodox views on the godhead and did not
believe in the trinity as understood by both Catholics and
Protestants. As Thomas Jefferson said, Servetus could not find in
Euclid ‘ the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one,
and one is three’. Servetus had been working as a physician in Lyon
(and discovered the pulmonary circulation of blood). where he
conformed outwardly to Catholic practice, but was denounced to the
Inquisition and escaped - the Lyon authorities later settled for
burning him in effigy instead,
In
1553, while on the run from the Inquisition, Servetus, for reasons
that remain inexplicable. arrived in Geneva and went to hear Calvin
preach. Possibly he felt that a face-to-face discussion with the
fierce reformer would settle their differences. Calvin spotted
Servetus in the congregation, which suggests they had met previously,
but Geneva, like all godly places, was a city crawling with spies and
informers and it is likely that a prominent intellectual dissident
such as Servetus would have been identified within hours of stepping
in to the city. Calvin certainly knew what the man looked like.
Calvin then personally denounced Servetus and arranged for his
arrest. Calvin had already said that if Servetus ever came to
Geneva he would make sure the heretic died there.
Calvin
is alleged to have visited Servetus in his cell on the day of his
execution and to have ‘disputed’ theology with him. We know
that Servetus was badly treated in the run-up to the stake, and was
in terrible condition, so if this meeting did take place it will
have been one of the most cruel and grotesque 'disputations' in
history until the Stalinist era. Calvin is supposed to have asked the
city magistrates for beheading rather burning, but was ‘overruled’.
Green word was used for the burning, so that Servetus’ agony would
be prolonged.
What
Happened Next
The
historian Edward Gibbon said ‘I am more deeply scandalised at the
single execution of Servetus than at the hecatombs which have blazed
in the autos-da-fé of Spain and Portugal". Servetus was
burned for two main reasons: Calvin wanted to impress on his rivals
in Geneva that he was a hard man with hard remedies, and he also
wanted to show Catholics and Protestants everywhere that
Calvinists would not flinch from burning heretics who did not believe
in the Trinity. Gibbon believed that personal malice against Servetus
was also a factor, and despite the best efforts of Calvin’s
apologists, then and later, his reputation has never recovered from
the burning of Servetus. Within weeks of the execution, Protestant
intellectuals were expressing their horror at Calvin's act, and in
1554 a historically significant pamphlet was published in Basle
arguing against the punishment of 'heretics'.
17
1556:
John Dee interrogates John Philpott
The
magician and scientist John Dee (1527-1609) has long been an object
of fascination both to his contemporaries and to posterity. There
have been several valiant attempts by scholars to establish Dee as a
pivotal figure in the history of science, as an innovator in
mathematics and astronomy in particular, and to consequently play
down his rather sinister experiments in the occult; after all, even
Isaac Newton (and it has been argued that Dee is in some small
way a precursor of Newton) had his flaky side, wasting years of
his life on what we now see as eccentric theological speculation. But
it is Dee the alchemist and conjurer, the negotiator with angels and
demons, who survives in popular tradition (as does the relationship
between Dee and his assistant, the medium Edward Kelley, who
persuaded Dee that an angel wanted them to share Dee's young wife).
Dee
was described by Elizabeth I as 'my philosopher', but this
philosopher had an earlier, much less well-known and rather horrible
career in the dark art of interrogation, as one of Bishop Bonner's
assistants during the reign of Elizabeth's predecessor, Mary I. The
'Marian Persecution' resulted in the execution of around 300
Protestants. Dee himself had gone into Bonner's custody in August
1555 as a suspected heretic, yet quickly, and mysteriously,
emerged from detention to become one of Bonner's chaplains, in
which capacity he helped interrogate the cleric John Philpott.
Philpott was a clever man, a Latin poet and Hebraist, and while well
known for being outspoken, was also popular; altogether an uncommon
assortment of traits in any period.
While
awaiting trial in November 1555 at the Bishop's palace at St
Paul's, Philpott and other suspects were held in a windowless
coalhouse; a tactic designed to remind them of their fate if they did
not recant.
Philpott
was taken to face Bonner and other senior clerics on 19 November.
Dee was one of the interrogators. No official account of the
questioning survives, but Philpott's own account was smuggled
out and has been preserved. He clearly held his own against both
Bonner and Dee, and when Dee left the room at one point, Philpott
called after him: 'Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach
men in the matters of my faith. Though you be learned in other things
more than I, yet in divinity I have been longer practiced than
you'. As Dee's biographer Benjamin Wolley points out, this is
a fairly clear reference to Dee's reputation as a
magician. That Dee's experiments in the occult were known to his
masters became certain shortly, when Bonner, in response to a letter
from Philpott being being found on another religious
dissident, asked fellow bishops, with the clunking irony of the
eternal oppressor, 'is this not an honest man to belie me, and to
call my chaplain a great conjuror?'.
On
18 December Philpott was taken to the stake at Smithfield. He recited
a few psalms, tipped the executioners. and seems to have died as
calmly in the flames as any man possibly could.
What
Happened Next
The
period during which Philpott was martyred was one of great
significance in British and Reformation history. His terrible
death is one of many described in Foxe's
Book of Martyrs (1563).
It is fair to say that not all of the martyrs were universally
attractive or admirable figures - though none deserved their fate -
but there were also many, such as Philpott, who were good as well as
principled men, willing to endure a truly awful death for what
they believed in. Dee, in contrast, went on to become an
influential establishment figure during the reign of Elizabeth,
a reign that officially celebrated the memory of men such as
Philpott. but allowed shadowy men such as Dee to prosper under a
regime in which it was now the turn of Roman Catholics to be tortured
and executed. The story of these two parallel lives was to become a
common story in successive centuries: as revolutions came and went,
martyrs would be created, while those who served the persecutors
well would often find themselves - and their appalling skills -
quietly welcomed by the guardians of the new regimes.
18
1593: Elizabeth
I meets Grace O'Malley the Pirate
'To
promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above
any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God.
. . the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice' said
John Knox in 1558. He had of course, Mary, Queen of Scots in
mind, but the polemic as badly timed as, in the following
year, Protestant Elizabeth ascended the English throne.
Knox
spoke for many men - then and now - but Elizabeth and Mary were by no
mean the only strong women in positions of authority throughout
Europe. Grace (or Grainne} O'Malley is described in the Dictionary of
National Biography as a 'chieftain's wife and pirate'. It is of
course the latter career designation that attracts the eye, but
the wives of clan chiefs and lords were often more than capable
of running the family business when the men were posted missing.
The
O’Malley family base was in Mayo. By the time
Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney (who created the Irish
county system) visited her in 1577 she had already outlived one
husband (an O’Flaherty) and was described by Sidney as a most
famous femynyne sea captain’. Her second husband was a Burke,
and Sidney sardonically noted who was the dominant force in the
marriage: when they met, O’Malley ‘brought with her husband, for
she was as well by sea as by land well more than Mrs Mate with him’.
Grace
had a fleet of several galleys and several hundred men to sail them.
Piracy was undoubtedly part of the O’Malley family income, but
the family was hardly unique; similar families with similar
bases had been raiding up and down the west coast of Britain. from as
far north as Barra, for centuries. Much of the piratical activity
would amount in daily practice to a tax on passing boats, but Grace
was clearly not a woman to be trifled with.
Neither
was Elizabeth to be trifled with, as the kings of Europe were
learning. The two came together when O’Malley’s son (by her
second husband). Theobald Burke was arrested under suspicion of
rebellious activity. Grace (who had herself been jailed for
two years not long before) went to London and pleaded her case with
Elizabeth, as one abused woman to another. The meeting was a great
success. Not only was Theobald’s release granted, Grace also
pointed out that as a widow, under the ancient Irish laws she had no
claim on her late husband’s land; she asked that Elizabeth grant
her this maintenance under English common law, and Elizabeth agreed.
What
Happened Next
Elizabeth's
administrators in Ireland dragged their heels in carrying out their
orders, so Grace made a quick return visit in 1595 to complain, after
which it all went smoothly for her. Our knowledge of Grace is
derived almost entirely from English historical records. Contemporary
Irish historians had no interest in her, and many of the stories
subsequently told about her in Ireland (and about the meeting with
Elizabeth) are clearly much later fantasies. The DNB gives
Grace’s dates as f. 1577-1597 and she may have outlived Elizabeth,
who died in 1603. Theobald, whose pleasing nickname was ‘Tibbot
of the Ships’, fought for Elizabeth against the Spanish at Kinsale
in 1599, and became 1st Viscount Mayo in 1627.
19
1605:
King James I interrogates Guy Fawkes
The
intention of the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was
to blow up parliament and create a state of chaos in which Roman
Catholics would be restored to power in England. If successful, the
conspiracy would have resulted in perhaps the biggest man-made
explosion in history to that date. The plot was exposed by the Roman
Catholic Lord Monteagle, who was warned off going to parliament
by a relative among the conspirators, who were all quickly arrested.
Fawkes was arrested in the cellar beneath the House of Lords with a
ton of gunpowder at his back.
He
was taken to King James’ bedchamber at 1 o’clock in the morning
where he calmly faced down the king and his ministers, saying plainly
that he wanted to kill the king and destroy parliament. James asked
Fawkes why he was so keen on killing him, and Fawkes replied
that the king had been excommunicated by the Pope, and that dangerous
diseases required ‘desperate remedies’. For good measure, Fawkes
told the Scottish king and his courtiers that one of his aims had
been to ‘blow the Scots back to Scotland’, a detail that was
suppressed by the government at the time as it could only have
encouraged sympathy for Fawkes among the English, many of whom
regarded the Scots who accompanied James as a grim lot, extreme both
in corruption and in their Protestantism. Fawkes’ one regret
was that the scheme failed. Robert Cecil described Fawkes at the
meeting thus: "He carrieth himself without any feare or
perturbation ...; under all this action he is noe more dismayed, nay
scarce any more troubled than if he was taken for a poor robbery upon
the highway. . . he is ready to die, and rather wisheth 10,000
deaths, than willingly to accuse his master or any other’.
A
thoroughly spooked James then granted permission for torture to be
used on Fawkes, instructing the interrogators thus: ‘The gentler
tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad maiora
tenditur [and thus by steps extended to greater ones], and so God
speed your good work’.
What
Happened Next
The
torture Fawkes received on the rack was terrible - we have the
signature of his first name ‘Guido’ after torture and
the comparison with earlier examples of his writing are shocking. He
was hung, and as the 1911 Britannica says, ‘the usual barbarities
practiced upon him after he had been cut down from the gallows were
inflicted on a body from which all life had already fled’. As for
James, he confirmed his public reputation for cowardice by going into
seclusion for a while.
It
has been (cautiously) argued that the plot may be seen as a partial
success in that it possibly prevented further anti-Catholic
legislation, but in truth the Catholic-Protestant question was
already becoming part of other questions relating to Britain’s
governance, and the lasting effect of the plot was to delay Catholic
emancipation until the 19th century.
20
1617:
Pocahontas is unimpressed by James I
Hollywood
does not always get history wrong - but when it is wrong it can
be spectacularly wrong. An example of spectacularly wrong history is
Disney’s Pocahontas
(1995). The film caters both to new stereotypes by portraying the
Indians as nature-friendly ecowarriors and to old stereotypes by
portraying the English as utterly malignant (Captain John Smith here
becomes an all-American blond surfer dude, one of the film’s
many imbecilities).
The
maddening thing about the Disney version is that the true story of
Pocahontas is fascinating. ‘Pocahontas’ may be just a nickname
meaning ‘spoiled child’ (her real name was Matoaka) and we
know little of her early life. She was the daughter of a Powhatan
chief, and it is now generally agreed that John Smith’s story
of being saved from execution by Pocahontas in 1607 is not
verifiable. The earliest written source for the incident is in
a letter from Smith to Queen Anne in 1616 (‘she hazarded the
beating out of her own brains to save mine’). the year that
Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe arrived in London (it is
improbable that Pocahontas and Smith were ever lovers, and they most
certainly never married each other).
The
trip was a great social success. A Dutch artist engraved a portrait
of Pocahontas, the inscription of which describes her as Matoaka,
alias Rebecca (her Christian name), and as the daughter of a powerful
prince. She was clearly regarded as a high personage by London
society. She was received at Whitehall by Queen Anne, and the Bishop
of London had the Rolfes to dinner at Lambeth Palace. Samuel Purchas
noted that the Bishop 'entertained her with festival state and
pomp beyond what I have seen in his great hospitalitie afforded to
other ladies’.
She
was introduced to King James at a Ben Jonson masque, at which she was
observed to have a seat appropriate to her royal status. The
Pocahontas party were taken aback to be told they had just been
introduced to the king. Pocahontas was clearly surprised that such an
unprepossessing individual could be King of England, an opinion,
to be fair, that was shared by many of the English themselves. At
least everyone seems to have been reasonably sober on this occasion;
at another royal masque, three of Queen Anne’s ladies were
too drunk to stand and another spilt custard on the king.
Tomocomo,
a Powhatan priest accompanying Pocahontas, confirmed to John Smith
that King James was not quite the thing with this splendidly peevish
comment: ‘you gave Powhatan a white dog, which Powhatan fed as
himself, but your King gave me nothing, and I am better than your
white dog’.
What
Happened Next
Pocahontas
lamented to John Smith that she had been told he was dead: ‘your
countrymen’ she added, ‘lie much’. She was not the last
colonial subject to make this comment, but was possibly the
first. In 1617 she and Rolfe headed for home, but she died on board
the ship, and is buried in St George’s Church, Gravesend. Her last
words were that ‘all must die’, and she was content that her
‘childe liveth’. Their descendants were known as the ‘red
Rolfes’ (George Bush is not one of them as is often asserted,
though he is related to her descendants).
21
1653:
George Fox reduces Oliver Cromwell to tears
George
Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, was born in 1624, the son
of a weaver. Apprenticed to a livestock dealer, he acquired, he tells
us, a reputation for fair dealing: ‘A good deal went through my
hands. . .People had generally a love to me for my innocency and
honesty." In 1643, ‘at the command of God’ Fox
‘left my relations and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with
old or young.’ There followed several years of wandering and
seeking spiritual counsel (the advice received from one priest was to
take up smoking).
Fox
began to receive internal revelations from God, what he called
‘openings’, such as hearing a voice which said, ` There is
one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.' “And when
I heard it my heart did leap for joy."’As the 1911 Britannica
says,
‘it would be here out of place to follow with any minuteness the
details of his subsequent imprisonments’. He was imprisoned many
times for expressing his views forcibly in the street or in church,
but his force of character was such that even those who jailed him
(including the Sheriff of Nottingham), were often sympathetic.
In
1652, several of Fox’s followers formed the nucleus of the
so-called ‘Quaker’ movement in Preston and the movement grew
rapidly. In 1653, Fox was arrested for the umpteenth time, but on
this occasion was taken to meet the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
The 1650s had become an age of many plots involving many groups and
many charismatic leaders with agendas ranging from restoration
of the monarchy to the abolition of private property. Fox was
attracting large crowds wherever he went. Cromwell was possibly more
curious than suspicious, and the meeting was quite an emotional one.
Fox confirmed the peaceful nature of the movement, and asked Cromwell
to listen to the voice of God: ‘As I was turning, he caught me by
the hand, and with tears in his eyes said, "Come again to my
house; for if thou and I were but an hour of a day together, we
should be nearer one to the other"; adding that he wished me no
more ill than he did to his own soul. I told him if he did he wronged
his own soul; and admonished him to hearken to God's voice, that he
might stand in his counsel, and obey it; and if he did so, that would
keep him from hardness of heart; but if he did not hear God's voice,
his heart would be hardened. He said it was true’.
What
Happened Next
The
possibility that Cromwell could have become a Quaker was never very
likely. Though this was an age of dramatic conversions, there were no
more tears on Cromwell’s part when they met again. in 1656, Fox
seeking toleration for his persecuted Quakers, urged Cromwell not to
think of the crown but to lay down his worldly power at the feet of
the Lord. It was clearly another meeting of mutual liking, but
not one of minds. They met again just before Cromwell died, in 1658 -
Fox wrote that he looked like a ‘dead man’.
22
1671:
Colonel Blood meets King Charles II
Colonel
Thomas Blood, says the DNB with typical understatement, lived a
life with ‘few parallels’. He was born around 1617, in Meath,
say some sources, but he is also claimed by county Clare (several
Clare Bloods. including the Colonel, have been Justices of the Peace;
his uncle - or maybe father - was called Neptune Blood). Blood
did military service in Ireland and England during the Civil War,
although which side he fought on, and for how long, remains unclear.
His ‘colonelcy’ may have been self-awarded. By 1651, he had a
Lancashire wife (and six children) and lands in both countries. He
spent most of the 1650s in Ireland, and was regarded as a good
Protestant landowner and Cromwellian loyalist.
The
Restoration of 1660 saw many of Cromwell’s supporters lose assets
to triumphant Royalists, and by 1662 Blood was involved with other
malcontents in a bodged plot to capture Dublin Castle. The plot was
structured like an Ealing comedy (and would make a great movie). As
George MacDonald Fraser says in The
Pyrates
(1983), ‘Not many adventurers, planning to seize Dublin
Castle, would have tried to divert the guards by hurling loaves of
bread at them, in the hope that while they scrambled for food, Blood
and his associates could sally in and seize the fortress’.
Blood
escaped to England, where he associated with fellow nonconformists
and conspirators: his attachment to the Fifth Monarchy movement in
particular - Fifth Monarchists believed Jesus was returning to rule
mankind soon - was sincere, indeed one of the few certainties
about the man's beliefs. In 1667, he rescued a friend being escorted
to prison, killed several troopers, and then hid out for a few quiet
years, practising as a physician in Kent .
In
1670, he abducted the Duke of Ormonde in St James’s Street, but
Ormonde escaped. To quote Fraser again, ‘only a perverted artist,
bent on the fairly straightforward task of assassinating the Duke of
Ormonde, would have tried to do it by taking his victim on horseback
to Tyburn with the intention of hanging him from the public gallows’
(Ormonde’s son publicly accused the Duke of Buckingham, a protector
of nonconformists, of hiring Blood to kill his father)
The
following year, Blood carried out one of the most audacious thefts in
history: disguised as a clergyman, he was flukily caught leaving
the Tower of London with the Crown Jewels (one of his accomplices was
a noted Fifth Monarchy man). Blood was imprisoned - in the
Tower - and refused to speak with anyone but the king. Charles II
went to see him, and after the meeting, to general amazement, not
only pardoned Blood but gave him a pension.
What
Happened Next
Exactly
what Blood said to Charles is unknown, which is why the preceding
paragraph is so short, but it must have been persuasive. Certainly
Blood was, by now, privy to many dark secrets of both state and
dissident groups. In 1672, the government was to issue a 'declaration
of indulgence' for nonconformists, who were everywhere and a great
nuisance, especially with the Dutch war looming. Charles
may have been the ‘merry monarch’, but he was equally
certainly nobody’s fool and clearly decided a live Blood was of
more use to him than a dead one, which Blood became in 1680, dying of
natural causes aged 62. He was dug up again soon after burial,
probably by someone checking he was really there, and really dead.
23
1675:
Aurangzeb executes Guru Tegh Bahadur
Born
in 1618, Aurangzeb ascended to the Mughal throne in 1658, with what
has been described as ‘feigned reluctance’, after defeating his
brothers in a succession struggle, he kept his father, the fifth
Mughal, (Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal) confined until he died
in 1666.
Aurangzeb
is a hero to many Sunni Muslims, who regard him as a strong ruler who
was preceded and followed by weak ones. a man who did not seek much
in the way of accommodation with his Hindu subjects, but instead
encouraged conversion to Islam and had no qualms about destroying
Hindu temples. He also didn't think much of Muslims who differed from
the views he espoused, and when he captured Hyderabad in 1687 he
stabled his horses in the Shia mosques.
Any
encounter between Aurangzeb and Guru Tegh Bahadur. the ninth of
Sikhism’s ten gurus, was never going to be a meeting of like-minded
individuals. Tegh Bahadur received both religious and martial
training in childhood. After several years of fighting the Mughals,
In 1656 he chose the contemplative life and spent several years in
retreat, and then in missionary work. News of Muslims converting to
Sikhism as a result of Tegh Bhadur's influence infuriated Aurangzeb,
who in 1675 had the Sikh guru brought to Delhi in chains.
The
interrogation of Tegh Bahadur by Aurangzeb was brutal. He challenged
the guru to perform a miracle to prove he was a prophet of God, and
when Tegh Bahadur refused, saying that he was not a conjuror but
a man of God, Aurangzeb told him that if he did not convert he would
be tortured to death. Tegh Bahadur insisted in return that there
could be no compulsion in religion - an Islamic precept - and
defended the right of the individual to choose which religion to
follow. Kept in an iron cage and starved, Tegh Bahadur was
forced to watch as his friends were savagely tortured and killed,
before he himself was publicly beheaded.
What
Happened Next
Bahadur’s
martyrdom is quite possibly unique, in that he died not just for
Sikhism, but for the rights of others to practice their religion. It
has long been recognised as a pivotal self-sacrifice in the
history of humanity. The butchering of the ninth guru earned
Aurangzeb the undying hatred of the Sikhs all across the North Indian
plain, a costly hatred: Aurangzeb ruled for 46 years, but spent the
last 26 years of his life constantly at war with Hindus and Sikhs,
until his death in 1707. As Bamber Gascoigne says in The
Great Moghuls
(1971), the 16th-century Mughal ruler Akbar, who sought
reconciliation between all religions (and became a vegetarian late in
life) ‘disrupted the Muslim community by recognising that
India was not a Muslim country. Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving
as if it were’.
ENLIGHTENMENT
ENCOUNTERS (18TH
CENTURY)
24
1746:
Bonnie Prince Charlie gets advice from Lord Lovat after Culloden
The
second Jacobite uprising began in 1745 when the Young Pretender
Charles Edward Stuart - Bonnie Prince Charlie - landed in the
Hebrides and began gathering support for his rebellion against George
II. One of the great Highland lords that Charlie wanted to be sure
was onside was Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. Fraser, otherwise known as
‘the fox’, was - in a crowded field - possibly the most untrusted
man in Scotland. He eventually became the 11th Lord Lovat in
1733 after decades of villainy, including kidnapping and forcing a
(latter annulled) marriage on his cousin. He had converted to
Catholicism before the first Jacobite Rising in 1715, in which he
skillfully avoided taking sides until it was clear the Jacobites
would lose, after which he helped himself to their lands.
In
1739, Lovat had promised his support to Charlie if the French would
join in, but when French ships were spotted off the Firth of Forth,
he instead took to his bed. After the Jacobite victory at
Prestonpans, the old rogue mustered men at last for Charlie,
telling loyalists it was all his son’s doing. Several
reference sources still assert that Lovat was present when the
Jacobites were finally beaten at Culloden, but this was not so. His
own judgment on the battle cannot be improved upon: ‘none but a mad
fool would have fought that day’.
Charlie
and Lovat finally met as Charlie retreated, when Lovat took him in
for a fast-food dinner and some fatherly advice, and with a straight
face recommended the 'try again' example of Bruce and the spider to
the Prince. Charlie's response is not recorded, but one was not
needed; Lovat was just making one last attempt at diplomatic
reconciliation in his usual duplicitous manner. Both men were
well aware that the rising was a close-run thing, and both also
knew full well that if Lovat had put his weight behind the campaign
it might have succeeded. Long presented in popular mythology as an
England-Scotland game, the ‘Forty-Five’ was a more complex
affair: for many Scottish Protestants, the rising brought the threat
of Catholic domination, while many English Tories still regarded the
Hanoverians as usurpers. It was not to be, and the game was up
for both the young prince and the old fox. Charlie fled and
eventually escaped to France while Lovat, realising he could not
scheme his way out of this one, also fled and was caught hiding in a
tree trunk.
What
Happened Next
The
great artist William Hogarth - an old acquaintance of Lovat, who was
as equally at home in London as in Inverness - drew a much-admired
portrait of Lovat on his way to the Tower, a portrait which catches
the charm and menace of the man. Found guilty by his peers, after a
trial in which he conducted his defence with lordly panache, his
closing words were ‘I wish you an eternal farewell. We shall
not meet again in the same place; I am sure of that’. In
1747, the 80-year-old rebel became the last man to be publicly
beheaded in Britain. He died well, quoting Horace’s ‘Dulce et
Decorum’ ode, 'It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country'.
His death was preceded by that of several spectators who were crushed
when a stand collapsed. The no-longer Bonnie Prince Charlie died 41
years later aged 68. And in 1944, the 15th Lord Lovat (and his piper)
led the British commandos ashore on D-day. See also 1746:
Bonnie Prince Charlie meets Flora MacDonald
25
1746: Flora MacDonald helps
Bonnie Prince Charlie escape
The
tale of how Flora MacDonald helped rescue Bonnie Prince Charlie after
the collapse of the Jacobite rising (see 1746:Bonnie
Prince Charlie gets advice from Lord Lovat after Culloden)
has often been told in books and movies, and is one of those rare
stories in which little is gained by embellishment.
Charlie had found temporary
refuge in South Uist, where Flora was visiting her brother.
Flora opened the door one day to find one of her kinsmen standing
there equipped with a prince and a plan: Charlie would be taken to
safety disguised as Flora’s maid. Accounts of the meeting differ,
but it seems clear that contrary to legend, Flora was not an
enthusiastic Jacobite, and it also seems to have been Charlie's
personal plea that swayed Flora. She agreed to help the Prince out of
charity (and later told the Hanoverian Prince Frederick she would
have helped him in just the same fashion). The two of them
certainly hit it off. Charlie wanted to hide a pair of pistols in his
petticoat and when Flora pointed out that this would cause problems
if he was searched, he replied: ‘If we shall happen to meet with
any that will go so narrowly to work in searching as what you mean,
they will certainly discover me at any rate’.
Flora’s stepfather, a tough
soldier called One-Eyed Hugh, was a militia captain in command of the
Benbecula-South Uist crossing, and he let his stepdaughter and her
odd new companion - ‘one Bettie Burke, an Irish girl, who, she
tells me, is a good spinster’ - travel to Skye. Hugh was
probably sympathetic to the Jacobites, and was certainly taking a
risk here - he probably saw it as a calculated risk that could
be made to pay off in the end. The Skye clan chiefs had shrewdly kept
out of the rising, and in characteristic clan fashion the Skye
MacLeods inflicted some of the worst atrocities of the rising’s
aftermath on the Jacobite MacLeods of Raasay.
Charlie
escaped in a French ship and Flora was taken prisoner, but treated
well. As the DNB points out, the Gaelic oral traditions of the
Highlands largely ignored Flora’s story. Intriguingly, Irish
historians had similarly ignored a Celtic heroine of another
stamp (see 1593: Elizabeth
I meets Grace O'Malley the pirate),
but from July 1747 - when Flora was released and given £1500
raised for her in London - her reputation as a heroine to just about
everyone in England was secure.
What Happened Next
Flora married
a kinsman, a farmer called Allan, commonly described as a personable
chap, but not much of a businessman, who had a farm in Flodigarry on
Skye. They had seven children between 1751 and 1766, and were visited
by Johnson and Boswell in 1773; see 1773:
Dr Johnson and Boswell stay with Flora MacDonald
26
1747:
Frederick the Great shows J S Bach his piano
The
meeting in Potsdam, in 1747, between the 62-year-old composer and
organist, J S Bach, and the 35-year-old Frederick II of Prussia
(known also as the ‘Great’), has not been seen as of much
importance to biographers of Frederick the Great, and in at least one
major biography is skated thinly over in a footnote. For James R
Gaines (former editor of Time Magazine), however, the encounter was
of great significance - Frederick, a representative of the new ‘Age
of Reason’, meeting Bach, a representative of the dying ‘Age
of Faith’. Indeed, Gaines wrote a book to explain the
significance of the meeting as he saw it: Evening
in the Palace of Reason
(2005).
Whatever
the epochal implications may be, the background to the meeting is
clear enough. Frederick employed Bach’s son, Carl Bach, as a court
musician. Carl was the future of music, the servant of an
enlightened despot, a despot who believed in the distant,
non-intervening god of deism rather than the loving, involved god of
theism, and corresponded with - and was adored by - philosophes
such as Voltaire. JS Bach was the past of music, a church organist
who belonged firmly to a receding age which still believed in a
loving deity who took an interest in humanity, and was adored in turn
by His creation. It was Carl’s duty to write music that would
appeal to his employer, and it was the father’s duty to write
music that would appeal to his God. It does seem reasonable,
therefore, to see the meeting as representing to some
extent a conflict of cultures and belief systems.
On
the strictly musical (as opposed to symbolic) level, Frederick
will certainly have seen his servant’s father as a relic, but an
interesting one, being a renowned master of the old art of
counterpoint, and Frederick - a competent composer himself -
wanted to test the old man’s skills by giving him a theme to
improvise on. It is also fair to assume that like all musicians in
all periods, Frederick will have also wanted to show the old-timer
his new pianoforte. Frederick asked Bach to turn the theme into a
six-part fugue. (The 20th-century
composer Schoenberg saw this as a spiteful request on Frederick’s
part, an almost impossible task designed to embarrass the old master
of the unfashionable art of counterpoint.)
What
Happened Next
The
work produced by Bach (in a fortnight!) in response to
Frederick’s test was the Musical
Offering,
a high point in western music, a work of great beauty and also one
that contains many teasing intellectual riddles (one reviewer of
Gaines' book thanked him for not calling it The Bach Code).
Annoyingly, we don’t know what Frederick thought of the work.
Probably not much, and he was off to war again soon anyway. Bach’s
music slipped into obscurity, reviving dramatically when Mendelssohn
conducted a performance of the St
Matthew Passion
in 1829 (observing that it had been left to a Jew to restore the
greatest piece of Christian music). From that point on, Bach has been
seen as one of the greatest composers of all time, while Frederick is
largely remembered as the creator of Germany (to be fair, he made
some progressive changes, such as abolishing torture).
27
1752:
Casanova meets Madame de Pompadour
Chapter
VII of Casanova’s memoirs begins with the beguiling heading ‘My
Blunders in the French language’, it being an eternal requirement
of foreign wits visiting Paris (see, for example, the Sarah
Jessica Parker character in an episode of Sex
and the City),
to show how inferior Parisians make even sophisticates feel.
Casanova
- who had a knack of getting to know everybody who mattered - got
himself invited to see an Italian opera at Fontainebleau, where he
would be able to hobnob with the court, and found himself sitting
under Madame de Pompadour’s box. Pompadour was a former courtesan
and lover of Louis XV, so was one of the most influential people in
France. Casanova was a womaniser, spy, a freemason and a magician,
and was to be imprisoned for witchcraft in 1755 in Venice (he was not
just a sycophant; Casanova really needed
friends in high places).
One
of the opera singers sang a bit shrilly, and Casanova snorted with
laughter, as a Venetian would. One of Pompadour’s companions
(dressed as a knight of the Order of the Holy Ghost), sardonically
enquired of Casanova what country he came from, to which Casanova
replied ‘Venice’. The knight then said he himself had laughed in
Venice during operas, to which Casanova said no one would have
objected. Perhaps this was not the wittiest of exchanges, but it
amused Pompadour (maybe you had to be there) who asked Casanova if he
was indeed from Venice ‘down there’: Casanova replied that
Venice was ‘up’ in relation to Paris, and there followed much
jolly banter in the courtly box as to whether Venice was up or down
in relation to Paris. Casanova was right, the court agreed.
Casanova
was careful not to laugh any more, but blew his nose ‘often’,
attracting the attention again of the knight, who turned out to be
Marshall Richelieu (grandnephew of the Cardinal). Richelieu suggested
that a window might be open, and Casanova - by now struggling a bit
in this epic contest of wit - mispronounced a French word in reply,
and the court fell about laughing, in the traditional French response
to mispronunciation. Casanova made a quick recovery with an
off-colour crack about an actresses’ legs, which included (he
honestly records) an unintentional but fitting pun, thus establishing
him as a formidable wit. He became a popular figure about town,
and. as he proudly said, his 'jeu de mots' became 'celebrated’.
Such were the joys of the Ancien Regime.
What
Happened Next
Casanova's
encounter with Pompadour is irresistibly reminiscent of the
Monty Python Oscar Wilde sketch. They bumped into each other later,
in 1757, after Casanova returned to Paris having escaped from
prison in Venice. Casanova records that the ‘fair marquise’ asked
how his exile was and hoped that he would stay in France, indeed
would help him stay. Casanova stammered his gratitude. Casanova at
this time was busy with various madcap schemes, including
inventing the state lottery, and eventually fled France in 1760
to escape his debtors. He may have written part of the libretto for
Mozart’s Don
Juan
in 1787, and developed a taste for dressing up in women’s clothes
(his great and only love, Henriette, was also very likely a spy and
liked to dress up as a man).
28
1764:
Boswell gets Voltaire out of bed
James
Boswell is now best remembered for his remarkable biography of Dr
Johnson, and for his licentious (and long suppressed) memoirs.
In his own day, however, Boswell was one of Europe’s prime gossips
and a serial visitor to famous personages.
A
few months after his famous May 1763 encounter with Johnson, in which
Boswell demonstrated his formidable talent for absorbing insult, the
young Scot set off to tour Europe (for two and a half years)
and in December 1764 visited first Rousseau and then Voltaire (he
usually introduced himself to foreigners as ‘a Scot of
ancient family’. Voltaire, at this point 68 years old and
one of the acknowledged sages of Europe, was used to receiving
visitors at his estate of Ferney; and he seems to have been both
amused and exasperated by this curious (in all senses) visitor, who
had made him get out of bed. Said Boswell: ‘He was not in spirits,
nor I neither’.
They
talked of Scotland, and agreed the Scots were not painters. Said the
sage:’ to paint well it is necessary to have warm feet. It's hard
to paint when your feet are cold.' They talked of Dr Johnson,
and the imperturbable Boswell told Voltaire that he planned to visit
the Hebrides with Dr Johnson: ‘ I mentioned our design to Voltaire.
He looked at me, as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and
said, "You do not insist on my accompanying you?" ‘No,
sir.’ ‘Then I am very willing you should go.’
As
a devout Christian, Johnson loathed Voltaire’s deist views:
Voltaire in return, says Boswell, had described Johnson, ‘affecting
the English mode of expression’, as a ‘superstitious dog’.
Boswell, anxious to reconcile the two great men (see also 1776:
Dr Johnson has dinner with John Wilkes),
passed on Johnson's observation that Frederick the Great's prose was
‘poor stuff. He writes just as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy
to do’ (Frederick was better at music; see 1747: J S Bach meets
Frederick the Great). Voltaire (who had issues with Frederick) was
delighted with this comment and described Johnson as ‘an honest
fellow!’ For all their differences, Johnson ’s novel
Rasselas,
and Voltaire’s novel Candide,
are strikingly similar in their pessimism.
By
this point, Boswell’s charm had obviously won over Voltaire,
and he was invited to stay the night. The next day they had an
emotional exchange over God and the afterlife: Voltaire saying: I’
suffer much. But I suffer with patience and resignation; not as a
Christian - but as a man’.
What
Happened Next
Discovering
his mother’s death in a Paris newspaper, Boswell returned to
Britain in 1766, bringing with him Rousseau’s mistress, Therese Le
Vasseur, to reunite her with Rousseau, then living in England.
Boswell and Therese had an ‘affair' on the trip home; consisting of
13 acts of sex, after which Theresa - records Boswell with a total
lack of embarrassment - told him he was useless in bed and offered
him lessons. Boswell dropped her off at David Hume’s, then the next
day took her to Rousseau. Voltaire and Rousseau didn't
care for each other in life but were united in death, both eventually
being buried in the Pantheon (see also 1777:
the Marquis de Sade insults Count Mirabeau; 1766: Erasmus
Darwin entices Rousseau with a flower).
29
1766:
Erasmus Darwin entices Rousseau with a flower
In
1762, the French government ordered the burning of Rousseau’s
educational treatise Emile.
The argument of Emile
was
that children could grow up without vice, if they were protected from
the evils man had created. This was clearly seditious, and Rousseau
fled to Berne, and when the Swiss banished him, he fled to England in
1766.
His
English exile had been encouraged and facilitated by David Hume, who
asked friends at court to get Rousseau a royal pension and also
persuaded a friend to give him an empty mansion, Wooton Hall, to live
in.
Despite
this support, Rousseau was not the happiest of philosophers at the
time, as he had begun to suspect that the English (led by the Scot
Hume) were laughing at him. The paranoia led him to write to an
astonished Hume saying’ You brought me to England, apparently to
procure a refuge for me, and in reality to dishonour me’.
The
physician/philosopher Erasmus Darwin desperately wanted to meet
Rousseau, but realising that a formal introduction would be tricky,
came up with a highly engaging ploy that worked. Knowing that
Rousseau liked to sit in a terraced cave by the mansion,
engaged in his now customary melancholy brooding, Darwin
sauntered up to the cave one morning and began examining a flower in
front of the cave. After a while, a curious Rousseau emerged from the
darkness, and the two chatted amiably about botany, which was. like
education, a shared obsession. Darwin was extremely interested in the
sex life of plants, indeed wrote a poem about the subject, ‘The
Love of the Plants’, and it is likely that he shared his thoughts
on the subject with Rousseau.
The
meeting was short, but Darwin had done what no other Brit at this
time seems to have managed, and established a friendly relationship -
continued through letters - with Rousseau. The correspondence has,
sadly, been lost. Rousseau’s cultural influence is undisputed,
but Darwin’s influence has only recently been acknowledged,
particularly through his founding of the Lunar Society,
which had an immense effect on British intellectual life and culture,
from industrialisation to the abolition of slavery.
Inspired
by Rousseau, Darwin built a small botanic garden (almost the only
thing Rousseau liked about England were the gardens) that was praised
by Anna Seward thus: ‘not only with trees of various growth
did he adorn the borders of the fountain, the brook and the lakes,
but with various classes of plants, uniting the Linnean science with
the charm of landscape’
What
Happened Next
Rousseau
returned incognito to France the following year, married his mistress
(see 1764:
Boswell meets Voltaire)
and continued to inspire and infuriate his contemporaries. Darwin
continued networking, producing ideas and some terrible verse. He was
of course the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a believer in
evolution. He added E
conchis omnia
(‘Everything from shells’) to the family coat of arms, but was
forced to remove it by the Church. Darwin’s propagation of the
theory was not helped by his verse: ‘imperious man, who rules the
bestial crowd. . . Arose from rudiments of form and sense, /An
embryon point or microscopic ens!’ His grandson argued rather
better - and in prose. . .
30
1773:
Dr Johnson and Boswell stay with Flora MacDonald
Lauded
throughout the English-speaking world as a heroine (see 1746: Flora
MacDonald helps Bonnie Prince Charlie escape) Flora MacDonald found
life as the wife of a not very competent farmer to be a struggle,
particularly with seven children to bring up.
In
1773, Flora and her husband were visited by the great English
writer Dr Johnson, who was on his tour of the Hebrides (for a
Gallic, as opposed to Gaelic, view of this trip see:
1764:
Boswell gets Voltaire out of bed).
Being a staunch Tory with Jacobite sympathies, Johnson was
predisposed to adore Flora, and indeed it was rumoured that in
1745-1746 Johnson had taken part in the Jacobite rising in some way
(it is not likely that he did). Boswell and Johnson arrived at the
Kingsburgh house of Allan and Flora, where Flora welcomed them:
Boswell admired Allan (“a gallant highlander”) and was captivated
by the 51-year-old Flora, as most men were: “here appeared the lady
of the house, the celebrated Miss Flora MacDonald. She is a little
woman, of a genteel appearance, and uncommonly mild and well bred. To
see Dr Samuel Johnson, the great champion of the English Tories,
salute Miss Flora MacDonald in the isle of Sky [sic], was a striking
sight; for though somewhat congenial in their notions, it was very
improbable they should meet here.” With great charm, she told
Johnson (then in his mid-sixties) that she had heard that Boswell was
travelling to Skye, and had “a young English buck with him”.
Johnson
was accorded the honour of sleeping in the bed Prince Charlie had
slept in the night he stayed at Kingsburgh in 1746. Boswell noted:
“To see Dr Samuel Johnson lying in that bed, in the isle of Sky, in
the house of Miss Flora MacDonald, struck me with such a group of
ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they passed through
the mind. He smiled and said, ‘I have had no ambitious thoughts in
it’.”
What
Happened Next
In 1774,
Flora and Allan emigrated to North Carolina, and when the
American Revolution broke out they raised Highlanders to fight for
George III. Both Allan and Flora, like most Loyalists, suffered
much hardship after the rebels won, and they returned to Skye, where
Flora died in 1790, aged 68. Dr Johnson said of her that her name
“will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be
virtues, mentioned with honour.’
31
1774:
Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette
There
has never have been a solid historical consensus as to whether the
great Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke should be regarded as a
radical or a conservative, and his own contemporaries often couldn’t
decide either. Whatever his politics, he was certainly a
romantic: his description, in Reflections
on the Revolution in France
(1790) of encountering the 19-year-old Marie-Antoinette in the
glorious flesh demands to be quoted at length:
‘It
is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France,
then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this
orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I
saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated
sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star,
full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what
a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and
that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to
those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever
be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such
disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of
men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must
have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that
threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of
sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory
of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold
that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept
alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom....’
Burke
was clearly utterly smitten, and his contemporaries seized upon this
extract to have a go at him; an admirer of Burke’s called it simple
‘foppery’ and Tom Paine. in his response to Burke’s
reflections, Rights
of Man
(1791), noted with calm disdain that Burke ‘pities the plumage, but
forgets the dying bird’ (see also 1819:
William Cobbett digs up Tom Paine
).
What
Happened Next
Burke
was writing before Marie-Antoinette’s execution in 1793, and she
died bravely. Her husband had been guillotined in January, and she
had suffered much in jail; even her 8-year-old son had been taken
from her (he died in 1795) and she said that she had come to realise
that suffering is what makes you what you are. She went to the
scaffold in October, apologising for stepping on the executioner’s
foot. And she never at any point in her life said ‘let them
cake’ when told the poor had no bread. See also 1775:
Robespierre makes a speech in the rain to Louis XVI.
32
1774:
Joseph Priestley discusses dephlogisticated air with Antoine
Lavoisier
Priestley
was born in 1733 in Leeds into a strongly nonconformist
family. By 20, he could read many languages, including Hebrew and
Arabic, and in 1755 became a minister. Priestley had been
brought up a Calvinist, but, like many nonconformists of his time
gradually abandoned that stark doctrine. His studies in electricity
(encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, who became a lifelong friend) led
to him becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1766, and the
publication of his History
of Electricity
in 1767.
Priestley
gave up being a clergyman in 1773 - he decided he could serve God
better through science - and went to work for the Earl of Shelbourne,
who was happy to fund Priestley’s research in return for services
as child’s tutor, librarian and ‘literary companion’, in which
latter capacity he accompanied Shelbourne to France in 1774.
Priestley
was now an established natural philosopher, and it was
inevitable that he would meet up with Lavoisier, the great French
chemist. Priestley (who became a ‘lunatic’ when he joined
the Lunar Society - see 1766:
Erasmus Darwin entices Rousseau with a flower)
may not have been the first thinker to appreciate that the
world was interconnected through animal and plant life, but his
work on just how it was interconnected was new: ‘the injury which
is continually done to the atmosphere by [animals is] in part at
least, repaired by the vegetable creation’, and the meeting with
Lavoisier in Paris was to be of great importance in establishing our
knowledge of how all living things are linked through respiration.
Our modern debate about ecology, about climate change, is founded
upon the discussion between these two men.
The
previous year, Lavoisier had begun experimenting on the calcination
of tin and lead, and had discovered that air itself was responsible
for the increase in weight of the metals. But what was it in air that
caused this increase? Priestley told Lavoisier that he had
produced a pure form of air, ‘ an air five or six times as good as
common air’. He thought he had discovered what he called
‘dephlogisticated air’, phlogiston being a theoretical substance
supposedly released during combustion. What he had actually
discovered was oxygen.
What
Happened Next
Lavoisier
realised Priestley was on to something and in 1775 gave Priestley’s
discovery the name ‘oxygen’. Lavoisier, like Priestley, was
a friend of Franklin, and used his political influence and scientific
knowledge (his work on gunpowder was crucial) to help the American
Revolution. As farmer-general of taxes, he also developed French
agriculture. Come the French Revolution, Marat (see 1793:
Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat
) who disliked Lavoisier, ensured he ended up on the guillotine in
1794. The mathematician Lagrange pointed out that it took an instant
to strike off a head that a ‘hundred years may not produce.’
Priestley stayed a believer in both Phlogiston and revolution
for the rest of his life: his defence of the French Revolution, in
reply to Burke (see 1774: Edmund Burke is enraptured by
Marie-Antoinette) resulted in a Birmingham mob burning his house. He
moved to Pennsylvania, where he died in 1804, confidently awaiting
Christ’s Second Coming.
33
1775:
Robespierre makes a speech in the rain to Louis XVI
In
her great novel A
Place of Greater Safety
(1992), Hilary Mantel describes one of the most haunting scenes
in the history of the 18th century: the schoolboy Robespierre
standing in the rain waiting for the coach carrying Louis XVI and
Marie-Antoinette to arrive at the gates of the school,
Louis-Le-Grand, in order to receive an address on behalf of the staff
and pupils.
Robespierre
had arrived at the school from provincial Arras thanks to a
scholarship and the boy’s seriousness of purpose made a great
impression on his teachers, one of them calling him ‘my Roman’.
The ‘Roman’ was the obvious representative to make a speech to
the king, but someone’s timing was out. For two hours, the boy
waited and waited, getting wetter and wetter. The coach finally
arrived and stopped beside the shivering boy who knelt and read out
the speech of welcome to the king. What Louis said or even looked
like at this moment is impossible to say, as although the coach door
was open, the curtains were kept firmly closed. Louis received the
speech in silence; and when it was over, the coach drove off
(this does put Louis in a poor light, but he was a shy monarch).
There
was to be no further encounter until the king’s trial, and
Louis - warm and safe as he was behind his coach curtains - was to
have no visual memory of the boy who was to grow into the man who was
to send him and his loved ones to the scaffold in 1793.
Robespierre argued at the trial of ‘citizen Louis Capet’ that the
purpose of the trial was not to pass sentence on an individual but to
protect the state. The ‘fatal truth’ was that Capet should die to
protect the lives of thousands of virtuous French citizens: Louis had
to die in order that the Revolution should live.
Robespierre
was against capital punishment in principle. but the ‘incorruptible’
one was prepared to make the noble sacrifice of accepting
purely temporary exemptions to that principle for the sake of the
state. Robespierre did not attend the execution of the ex-monarch he
once loyally addressed in the rain, but stayed home. As the coach
carrying the ex-king passed his residence, Robespierre shooed a young
girl in his house away from the window. closed the shutters and told
the child that something was happening ‘which you should not see’.
What
Happened Next
Thousands
were to die during Robespierre’s Terror, until the wave of killing
consumed the man himself. Those who escaped by fluke include the
Marquis de Sade and Tom Paine (see 1777:
the Marquis de Sade insults Count Mirabeau; 1819: William Cobbet
digs up Tom Paine
). Then Napoleon happened, and then Louis’s Bourbon dynasty was
restored, having, as Talleyrand said, forgotten nothing and learned
nothing. See also 1774:
Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette.
34
1776:
Dr Johnson has dinner with John Wilkes
Dr
Johnson was one of the great moralists of 18th-century England: a
staunch Tory, conservative in his religion and politics, and
passionately opposed to slavery, one of his many reasons for
disliking Americans. John Wilkes was one the leading radicals of the
age, a Whig, and a notorious libertine to boot. The
ever-inquisitive James Boswell was friends with them both: as he
said: 'Two men more different could perhaps not be selected out of
all mankind'. They had even attacked one another with real
dislike in print, and he decided to orchestrate a meeting between the
two by arranging that they should sit beside each other at a dinner
party at a friend’s house.
Boswell
sly prepared - ‘negotiated’ as he put it - Johnson for the
encounter by telling him that their host might have radical friends
present: ‘I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.’
Johnson said ‘And if Jack Wilkes SHOULD be there,
what is that to ME, Sir? My dear friend, let us have no more of this.
I am sorry to be angry with you; but really it is treating me
strangely to talk to me as if I could not meet any company whatever,
occasionally.’
At
the friend’s house, Johnson was disconcerted to find himself
surrounded by radicals and ‘patriots’ (‘Patriotism is the last
refuge of a scoundrel’, as he once noted), but when they were
called into dinner, Boswell says Wilkes 'placed himself next to Dr.
Johnson, and behaved to him with so much attention and politeness,
that he gained upon him insensibly. No man eat more heartily than
Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate. Mr. Wilkes was
very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. ‘Pray give me
leave, Sir:—It is better here—A little of the brown—Some fat,
Sir—A little of the stuffing—Some gravy—Let me have the
pleasure of giving you some butter—Allow me to recommend a squeeze
of this orange;—or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.’—‘Sir,
Sir, I am obliged to you, Sir,’ cried Johnson, bowing, and turning
his head to him with a look for some time of ‘surly virtue,’ but,
in a short while, of complacency'.
The
two even discovered a mutual antipathy to Scots, England then - as at
some other times - being run by unpopular Scots. Boswell
records: JOHNSON (to Mr. Wilkes) ‘You must know, Sir, I lately
took my friend Boswell and shewed him genuine civilised life in
an English provincial town. I turned him loose at Lichfield, my
native city, that he might see for once real civility: for you know
he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in
London.’WILKES. ‘Except when he is with grave, sober, decent
people like you and me.’ JOHNSON. (smiling,) ‘And we ashamed of
him.’
What
Happened Next
The
roguish radical and his new Tory friend were to bump into each other
again years later, again under Boswell’s eye, and again they got
on. Boswell’s experiment in matching opposites had worked, as long
as the experiment was not extended too long. Wilkes. for example,
does not seem to have shared Johnson’s visceral disgust at slavery
- Johnson once drank a toast to the next slave rebellion - and in an
odd twist of fate the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth,
a passionate defender of slavery, was named after him. See
also 1764:
Boswell gets Voltaire out of bed;
1773:
Dr Johnson visits Flora MacDonald
.
35
1777:
Patrick Ferguson is told he decided not to shoot George Washington
The
young British major (accompanied by three riflemen) scouting the
American lines by the Brandywine creek, was a Scots Greys
officer called Patrick Ferguson. Ferguson and his men were armed with
the rifle he had invented, the world’s first breech-loading rifle.
Two
horsemen appeared riding towards Ferguson’s hidden group, one
a decoratively clad hussar, the other a senior American officer.
Ferguson’s first thought was to shoot the two men, but feeling this
was a ‘disgusting’ idea emerged from cover and called on the
hussar, who was nearest, to dismount. The hussar and his companion
instead rode for the safety of their lines. Ferguson and his men
could each get off six accurately aimed rounds a minute and could
certainly have killed both men, but instead Ferguson let the tempting
figure of the senior officer go. He later said: ‘As I was with the
distance, at which in the quickest firing, I could have lodged a half
dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach, I had only
to determine, but it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an
unoffending individual who was acquitting himself coolly of his duty,
and so I let him alone’.
Later,
Ferguson was wounded during the Brandywine battle, and was told in
hospital that the officer he had let live was George Washington. The
story remained unconfirmed for a long time, thanks to the presence of
the mysterious hussar. There were no hussars with the American
forces, but it now seems that the ‘hussar’ was actually a Polish
count called Pulaski (recruited in Paris by Benjamin Franklin), who
was serving as Washington’s aide-de-camp. Washington had been out
inspecting his lines, and he may well have been the man whom Ferguson
declined to kill (Ferguson's rifle was described as a
‘barbarous’ weapon and was not adopted by the army).
Ferguson
was a product of the Scottish Enlightenment: his family lived on
Edinburgh’s High St, and knew everybody who mattered, from
the philosopher David Hume to the painter Allan Ramsay, but his
decision to spare Washington was based on a chivalric soldier's
ethic; at Waterloo, Wellington declined a similar opportunity to
shell Napoleon (this attitude died out).
What
Happened Next
What
if Ferguson had shot Washington? This is one of the great ‘what
ifs’ of history. Many Americans still believe that the failure of
the Revolution would have been a disaster for humanity. What seems
more likely is that American slaves would have gained their freedom
without a civil war, colonial expansion into Indian lands would have
halted, and North America would be all Canada, which may
possibly be boring but hardly a disaster for humanity. As for that
gallant officer Ferguson, he was killed at the Battle of Kings
Mountain in 1780; he was the only regular officer from either side
present and was possibly the only non-American combatant. His
body was stripped and urinated on by the Patriot militia before being
passed to his orderly for cleansing and burial; they also mutilated
and later killed some of the loyalist prisoners. Ferguson was
buried beside his female servant and companion, ‘Virginia Sal’,
described as a ‘buxom redhead’; Sal was killed while tending the
wounded and is, alas, not mentioned on Ferguson's headstone. See
also 1797:
Napoleon invites Tom Paine to dinner.
36
1777:
the Marquis de Sade insults Count Mirabeau
In
1777, the young Count Mirabeau was an ex-soldier with a
reputation for indiscipline and intrigue who had run off with another
man’s wife, and was imprisoned in Vincennes prison. In prison with
him was another nobleman, one with a much worse reputation, the
Marquis de Sade. De Sade was known to have (accidentally) poisoned
prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish Fly (don’t try
this at home), had engaged in just about every vice known to even
French society, and was seen as a serious menace to the public.
The
two men met and hated each other. De Sade, who seems to have fought
with everyone in prison and tried to instigate a prison revolt,
insulted Mirabeau in some way, and the two stayed apart. Vincennes
was a tough prison even for aristocrats who could normally buy
favours in jail. Normally the two quarrelsome aristos would have paid
off a warder and settled their dispute with a duel, but in Vincennes
all they could do was avoid each other, apart from the occasional
glare.
In
their separate cells, they wrote fiction to pass the time. The
fiction, depending on personal viewpoint, falls into the
category of either erotica or pornography. It is fair to say that the
fictions of both were pretty scabrous, and it is quite possible that
their proximity to, and extreme dislike of each other, may have
been an initial spur leading to greater excess (it is
implausible that each did not know what the other was writing about).
Over
the next ten years or so, De Sade produced The
100 Days of Sodom,
a heroic attempt at cataloguing every perversion known to man.
Justine,
Crimes of Passion
and a philosophical treatise in praise of atheism, Dialogue
Between a Priest and a Dying Man. Mirabeau
was released in 1780, and his own writing was a bit more
moderate. The works include Erotica
Biblion
and Letters
to Sophie,
Sophie being his pet name for the woman he had run off with (the real
Sophie, ungallantly dismissed by the 1911 Britannica
as ‘rather common’, committed suicide).
What
Happened Next
Mirabeau
became one of France’s leading orators, and a leading (if also
corrupt) moderate during the French Revolution. He was interred with
great pomp in the Pantheon after his death in 1791, then dug up three
years later and reinterred elsewhere when his duplicity became
apparent. De Sade transferred to the Bastille in 1784, and from
thence to Charenton Asylum just before the storming of the Bastille
in July, 1789. Given his freedom by the French Revolution, he was
appointed a judge and a member of the National Convention but was
imprisoned again - for being moderate in his desire to punish - and
missed the guillotine by a fluke. Napoleon called for his
arrest in 1801, and he returned to Charenton, where he put on plays,
dying there in 1814.
37
1781:
Benjamin Franklin invites Catherine Dashkova to join the American
Philosophical Society
She
was 37 and from the Old World; he was 75 and from the New World.
Catherine Dashkova was born a countess in Russia, had married (at 15)
a prince, and at the age of 18 may have played a part in the coup
which brought Catherine the Great to the throne in 1762. Franklin was
one of the world’s leading statesmen: a diplomat, scientist,
inventor, and author.
Yet
they had more than in common than it seems. Catherine had been a
sickly child and became a voracious reader. There is no doubt
about her intelligence and breadth of knowledge, and as she did not
quite get on with the Empress - she despised the talentless male
favourites the empress liked to decorate her court with, and also
seems to have been peeved at not being appointed colonel of the
Imperial Guard - she went to Europe for a few years, became a
friend of Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire (and
later sent her son to Edinburgh University). She had a degree in
mathematics and also wrote plays. This was not of course on the same
scale as the frighteningly multitalented genius Franklin, but
was closer in intellectual achievement to Franklin than most men
could aspire to, then or now.
Catrherine
and Franklin met in Paris and took to each other straight away.
While older men have of course been known to ‘take’ to
younger women, Franklin’s later invitation to Catherine to join the
American Philosophical Society in 1789 was not given lightly (it
would be another 80 years before another women was invited). This was
the only time they met, though they were to exchange a few
affectionate letters and notes over the years, and Catherine
reciprocated Franklin’s invitation later in 1789 by arranging for
him to join the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg (she
founded the Academy, and was its first president) : ‘I was greatly
surprised, when reviewing the list of its members some days ago, I
did not find your name in the number. I hastened therefore to acquire
this honour for the academy. . . I shall always recollect with pride
the advantage I had to be personally noticed by you’.
What
Happened Next
Catherine
returned to Russia in 1782, the year after meeting Franklin, to a
temporarily warm welcome from the equally intellectually curious (if
not intellectually equal) empress. Catherine the Great died in
1796, and the new emperor meanly imposed village exile on Dashkova so
that she could ‘think about 1762’. After another coup, she was
allowed back to Moscow, and died in 1810. Her Memoirs
were published in London in 1840. The brief encounter between
Catherine and Franklin was actually of lasting international
importance. Catherine knew that Russia had to modernise, and she
channelled the works of Franklin and other Enlightenment thinkers
throughout the country’s institutions, thus having a deep influence
on many practical aspects of Russian life, most significantly perhaps
on the development of the Imperial Navy. Russia subsequently became
an important ally of the new US state (Dashkov relations were still
actively promoting US-Russia entente in the 1860s) and the lines of
intellectual and political influence laid by Dashkova played an
important part in the success of the Union during the Civil War,
during which the Russian fleet acted - astonishing as it
seems - as a de facto Pacific fleet for the Union, preserving its
west flank from naval attack.
38
1786:
Walter Scott is impressed by the eyes of Robert Burns
Burns
was born and brought up on an Ayrshire farm. The family was not poor,
but at 16, Burns was his father’s principal labourer. While working
on the farm, he ‘listened to the birds, and frequently turned
out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs or frighten
them to another station’. As the 1911 DNB poetically puts it,
‘Auroral visions were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if
not in joy, "behind his plough upon the mountain side”; but
the swarm of his many-coloured fancies was again made grey by the
atra cura [’dark care’] of unsuccessful toils’ (Burns has
always attracted this kind of commentary; and there are few mountains
in Ayrshire).
Burns
was on the point of departing for Jamaica, there to work as a slave
overseer in one of the horrendous Scottish slave plantations, when
he achieved instant success in 1786 with the publication of his
great ‘Kilmarnock’ edition of verse. Burns imagined his
new popularity not reaching him in Jamaica thus: ‘twas a
delicious idea that I would be called a clever fellow, even though it
should never reach my ears a poor Negro-driver’. (Note that it is
the ‘Negro-driver’ who is poor, not the Negro).
In
Edinburgh, Burns was patronised (in every sense) by the aristocracy,
notably the Earl of Glencairn, who introduced the brilliant young
poet to his circle of friends. One shy young boy present at one of
these gatherings was Walter Scott, then aged 15, who later
remembered the scene thus: ‘I was a lad of fifteen when he came to
Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in his poetry, and
would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day with
several gentlemen of literary reputation. . . Of course we youngsters
sat silent, looked, and listened.. .. I remember. .. his shedding
tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his
dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a
child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not
clownish.. .. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any
of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his
lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and
temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed
when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye
in a human head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence,
without the least intrusive forwardness. . .having twenty times the
abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Fergusson he talked of them
with too much humility as his models. He was much caressed in
Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were extremely
trifling’.
What
Happened Next
The
success of his poems persuaded Burns to stay in Scotland. He later
wrote a much-quoted poem on the horrors of slavery in 1792, ‘The
Slave’s Lament’, which may not be a great poem but is certainly
an effective piece of ant-slavery propaganda. Yet the blunt truth is
that Burns was only a few years previously on the verge of becoming a
slave boss, and he rarely touched on the subject of slavery at any
other time (in comparison, Williiam Creech, the publisher of the
Edinburgh edition of his poems, was an active anti-slavery
campaigner; the horrors of the Scottish salve plantations were
well-known in Scotland). Scott’s description of Burns makes it
clear that he was highly sentimental, but we know that slavemasters
could weep over verse and still flog slaves. The truth is that until
the novelist James Robertson began writing about the subject - see
Joseph
Knight
(2004) - the existence of the Scottish slave plantations had been
largely undiscussed, indeed largely unknown in Scotland.
39
1788:
Olaudah Equiano presents a petition to Queen Charlotte
Olaudah
Equiano was a freed slave who had suffered much hardship in his early
life, eventually buying his freedom in 1766, aged 21. He became
involved in the anti-slavery movement in England and was appointed
Commissary of Provisions and Stores (making him probably Britain’s
first high-level black civil servant) for the ill-starred Sierra
Leone project which the government set up in the hope of resettling
freed Africans back in Africa. Equiano discovered wholesale
corruption in the project, and despite the backing of the Navy Board,
was sacked in 1787 (he was subsequently vindicated).
As
Equiano tells us in his memoir, The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African
(1789), in 1788 he presented a petition on Africa’s plight to Queen
Charlotte which was ‘received most graciously by her Majesty’.
Equiano’s memoir was in fact well subscribed before publication,
and two of the subscribers were Charlotte’s sons, the Prince of
Wales and the Duke of York. Equiano was not an insignificant figure
in 1788: he was popular, well-connected, sought after as an
acquaintance, and recognised as a gentleman of culture and learning
(qualities not always present among Georgian gentlemen).
The
petition (reprinted in the memoir) is of great significance as
previous anti-slavery petitions to the Royal family had not been so
graciously received. Thanks to campaigners such as Wilberforce,
Clarkson and Granville Sharp, the climate was changing: Equiano was
an African who had been sold into slavery, but he was also clearly an
English gentleman whose words could not be ignored: ‘I supplicate
your Majesty's compassion for millions of my African countrymen, who
groan under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies. . .by your
Majesty's benevolent influence, a period may now be put to their
misery; and they may be raised from the condition of brutes, to
which they are at present degraded, to the rights and situation of
freemen’.
What
Happened Next
Equiano’s
assertion that he was born in Africa, and taken across the Atlantic
as a child has become a matter of some debate. It seems likely that
he was born in South Carolina, but when contemporary pro-slavery
interests tried to discredit Equiano, the tactic failed. If Equiano
had conflated the experience of others with his own, then it was no
big deal to the British people, who were inexorably turning against
slavery. Equiano became a rich man, married and had two children. The
black population of London was actually not that insignificant, and
they didn't go away: like Equiano, they married white women and their
descendants are often unaware of their African ancestry (in 1817,
Jane Austen made no great issue of introducing a ‘half-mulatto’
heiress into her unfinished novel Sanditon).
And in a final twist to the encounter between Equiano and Charlotte,
Queen Charlotte herself is often said to be of African descent (as of
course, going further back, we all are).
40
1792:
Joseph Brant rejects a bribe from George Washington
The
meeting between George Washington and the Mohawk chief James Brant,
otherwise known as Thayendanegea (the name means ‘he who places two
bets’) has caused much amusement to subsequent commentators. As has
been gleefully noted, one was a well-travelled and sophisticated
gentleman with high social connections, whose portrait was painted by
George Romney, and the other was George Washington. And while they
were both freemasons, Brant had been handed his apron by George
III.
When
Brant first visited London in 1776, he was interviewed by
James Boswell (always watching for the man of the hour) for
the London
Magazine. Brant’s
society friends were horrified to hear he was staying at an inn
called The Swan With Two Necks, and tried to get him to
move, but he was happy to remain at the Swan where he was
treated with ‘much kindness’. Brant was by no means an oddity in
London: many American Indians and blacks visited and often settled in
England, where they found the white neighbours friendlier than the
ones back home.
Brant
returned to America and led the Mohawk warriors in the bloody war
against the rebels. The fighting was brutal, and Brant’s Mohawks
committed atrocities, though he himself seems innocent of war crimes.
Atrocities were common during the war, and Brant, like many leaders
on both sides, sought to prevent unnecessary killing. The Mohawk
attacks were subsequently used by Americans to justify punitive
expeditions against Indians, but in fact the patriot
militia often slaughtered defenceless loyalists and their
Indian allies (especially in the war's immediate aftermath).
After
the rebel victory in 1783, Brant told the British secretary of
state that when he 'joined the English in the beginning of the war,
it was purely on account of my forefathers' engagements with the
king. I always looked upon these engagements, or covenants between
the king and the Indian nations, as a sacred thing: therefore, I was
not to be frightened by the threats of the rebels at that time; I
assure you I had no other view in it, and this was my real case from
the beginning'.
In
1792, Brant was invited to meet Washington in Philadelphia:
Washington hoped that Brant would use his good influence to broker
peace with the Indian nations now fighting the Americans
along the Ohio river. Washington offered Brant lands and a pension,
which Brant immediately rejected as an obvious bribe. Brant was being
given an impossible task, as he well knew. Few of the Indians were
natural allies, the British were being duplicitous, and everyone knew
that Washington was just buying time; the expansion into Indian lands
that had been one of the stated aims of the Revolution would continue
no matter what.
What
Happened Next
Brant
took ill and his mission was delayed. He did his best to work out a
compromise agreement between the Indians and the Americans, but
negotiations ended when the Indian alliance demanded the withdrawal
of Americans to behind the Ohio river: war followed, and the Indians
were heavily defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Brant,
a devout Anglican, and a hero of Canada, died in 1807. See 1777:
Patrick Ferguson is told he decided not to shoot George Washington;
1887: Queen
Victoria tells Black Elk what would happen if the Lakota were
her subjects
41
1793:
Charlotte Corday assassinates Marat
Charlotte
Corday was born into a minor aristocratic family and educated in a
convent. Like many other young idealists, she became a supporter of
the French Revolution in its early stages, seeing it as a benevolent
process for social change. She belonged to the moderate Girondin
faction of the Revolution, and would have agreed with Wordsworth’s
friend Beaupuy, whom Wordsworth describes in The
Prelude as
pointing to a hungry girl, saying ‘Tis against that/ Which we are
fighting.’
However,
the ‘September Massacres’, an indiscriminate slaughter of
royalists ordered by Danton in 1792, in which thousands of men, women
and children were butchered, transformed the views of moderates
such as Corday. To quote Wordsworth again: ‘I thought of those
September massacres. . ./And felt and touched them, a substantial
dread’. The Revolution had become monstrous.
Corday
resolved to kill Jean-Paul Marat, one of the leading lights of the
Terror. Like most advocates of terror, Marat liked compiling lists of
his enemies, and Corday requested a meeting offering to inform on
disaffected Girondins. Corday purchased a knife and wrote a
justification for her plan to kill Marat, addressed to the
people of France, for her action. On the evening of 13 July, Marat,
as had become customary due to a bad skin condition, received Corday
in his bathtub, and began writing down the names of the supposed
traitors as she recited them. Then Corday brought out her knife and
stabbed him in the chest. He called out, À moi, ma chère
amie!’ - ‘Help me, my dear friend!’ - before dying.
Jacques-Louis David’s painting of this moment, The Death of Marat,
became, and remains one of the iconic depictions of
revolutionary terror: the saint-like Marat hangs over the side of the
bath with the list in his hand; he has died while working for the
people, murdered by an enemy of the people. Corday is excluded from
the painting. In a much later painting by a lesser talent, Paul
Baudry, Corday is portrayed as a dignified, virginal
tyrannicide, standing over the slumped, scabrous corpse of Marat.
What
Happened Next
Corday’s
trial was problematic for the regime: she was young, attractive,
articulate, and many French people were cheering her (quietly). The
Tribunal tried to solve the problem by ordering her defence
counsel to enter a plea of insanity which reduced the proceedings to
a farce. Corday defiantly declared she had killed not a man but
a wild beast, and that she had killed him that others might
live - a sharp and provocative jibe at the rhetoric of revolutionary
martyrdom. Corday was guillotined and the executioner's
assistant stunned the watching, and by now pretty hardened crowd, by
slapping Corday’s detached head. Thousands more Girondins, and
other moderates and royalists, were to die in further Jacobin purges.
See also 1774:
Edmund Burke is enraptured by Marie-Antoinette; 1774: Joseph
Priestley meets Antoine Lavoisier
42
1797:
Napoleon invites Tom Paine to dinner and asks him how to invade
England
As
Bart Simpson says, America recognises three just wars:
the American Revolution, WWII and the Star Wars trilogy. The argument
that the American Revolution was a ‘good war’ is more debatable
than it once was (See 1777:
Patrick Ferguson is told he decided not to shoot George Washington),
but what is clear is that the English radical Tom Paine’s
contribution to its success has been largely written out of American
history.
The
man Teddy Roosevelt was to call a ‘filthy little atheist’ was
also the man whose pamphlet, The
American Crisis,
was ordered by George Washington to be read to his troops before the
Battle of Trenton: ‘These are the times that try men's souls. The
summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink
from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman’. With magnificent
language such as this, Tom Paine inspired the American
revolutionaries to continue their rebellion against the crown when
all seemed lost.
Paine
became a French citizen in 1792 and a member of the national
convention, narrowly escaping the guillotine during the Terror. By
1797, Paine was a weary man, and somehow came to the conclusion that
France should take war to England and ‘free’ the English people.
Napoleon, fresh from his Italian campaign, called on Paine to invite
him to dinner (there is no record of the dinner taking place)
and sound him out on the practicalities of a cross-channel
invasion. Napoleon introduced himself to Paine as a
staunch republican and a defender of equality - indeed, he claimed
that he slept with Paine’s The
Rights of Man
under his pillow (we know from another source that Napoleon also
slept with the faux-celtic works of ‘Ossian’ under his pillow,
but pillows were large in those days). He also said that he wanted a
golden statue to be built of Paine in honour of his influence on the
age, and invited him to suggest ways of invading England. Paine, one
hopes not too much swayed by the offer of a golden statue, then wrote
a couple of essays on how to organise the invasion, which was to
include a thousand gunboats.
He
wrote to Jefferson later, ‘the intention of the expedition was to
give the people of England an opportunity of forming a government for
themselves, and thereby bring peace’. As one of Paine’s early
biographers pointed out, one of the suggested landing points for the
expedition was in his home county of Norfolk. The Thetford-born Paine
may have been indulging in 'a happy vision of standing once more in
Thetford and proclaiming liberty throughout the land'
What
Happened Next
As
Admiral Jervis is supposed to have said. ‘I do not say, my Lords,
that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by
sea’. Napoleon invaded Egypt instead, and in September 1798, Paine,
now exasperated by the Americans, published a plan in a French
newspaper for the conquest of America. Paine returned to America in
1802, and was unsurprisingly booed in New York for his
political and religious opinions (he had matrimonial issues also):
even his friend Jefferson was cool. Paine died in 1809 and was buried
in New Rochelle. In 1819, the English radical William Cobbett dug his
bones up and took them back to England, prompting this vicious
epigram from Byron:
In
digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will.
Cobbett has done well:
You
visit him on earth again,
He'll
visit you in hell.
Paine's
bones subsequently disappeared, though the jawbone was said to
be in Brighton in the 1930s. A gold-coloured statue of Paine
(holding The
Rights of Man
upside down for some reason) was erected in Thetford in 1964.
REGENCY
AND VICTORIAN ENCOUNTERS (19TH
CENTURY)
43
1805:
Sir Arthur Wellesley sees two sides of Nelson
The
Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson feature in everyone’s list
of famous Englishmen (though the Duke was born in Ireland), and
they did once meet, while Wellington was still Sir Arthur Wellesley.
In
1834, in the presence of some friends who had been discussing
the ‘egotism and vanity’ of Nelson, Wellington recollected their
meeting in September, 1805, in a waiting room at the Colonial Office,
14 Downing St. Both men were waiting to see Lord Castlereagh.
Secretary for War. Wellelsey had just come back from nine years
hard campaigning in India, and Nelson had returned from giving the
French fleet a hard time in the West Indies. Said Wellington: ‘Lord
Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I
myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for,
perhaps, an hour. It was soon after I returned from India. I went to
the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into the
little waiting-room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to
see the Secretary of State, a gentleman, whom, from his likeness to
his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord
Nelson. He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into
conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was
almost all on his side and all about himself, and in, really, a style
so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose
something that I happened to say made him guess that I was somebody,
and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the
office keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a
different man, both in manner and matter. All that I had thought a
charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this
country and the probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good
sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that
surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our
interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a
statesman. . . and certainly, for the last half or three-quarters of
an hour, I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested
me more. Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and
admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have
had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other
people have had; but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was
really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete
metamorphosis I never saw’.
What
Happened Next
Given
that Wellington himself was described as a man for whom ‘no dose of
flattery was too strong for him to swallow’, some contemporaries
felt that his initial view of Nelson as a man with a high conceit of
himself was a bit rich, but posterity has been kinder to
Wellington - who is still seen as an unquestionably great man
with minor faults - than to Nelson, a man over whose reputation
hangs the shadow of what Wordsworth called the ‘great crime’
of the handing over of radicals in Naples in 1799 for torture and
execution, a shadow which has lengthened over the years - see Barry
Unsworth's novel Losing
Nelson
(1999).
44
1810:
Tom Molineaux fights Tom Cribb
The
circumstances under which the black American boxer Tom Molineaux came
to England remain obscure, and indeed he remains a little-known
figure in history. Having somehow won his freedom in America, he
arrived in England in 1810, where he was taken under the wing of
another black American boxer Bill Richmond, who owned a
pub and boxing academy near Leicester Square. Richmond had been
narrowly beaten by the great English boxer, Tom Cribb, and was quick
to see Molineaux’s potential, arranging a prize fight with Cribb in
December 1810. Curiously, Cribb was nicknamed the ‘Black Diamond’,
an epithet that was often to be given subsequently to black sportsmen
- Cribb got it because he used to be a coalman.
It
is difficult now to appreciate just how very popular prize fights
were in England (think Strictly Come Dancing and Manchester United v
Liverpool combined) at the time and the fight was effectively for the
world championship, the best bare-knuckle boxer in England being
obviously the best boxer in the world. The English cheerfully
adopted their favourite boxers as symbols of national patriotism in
the struggle against Napoleon, including not just blacks such as
Molineaux but other non-anglos such as the great Jewish boxer (and
former champion) Daniel Mendoza also, as this popular ballad shows:
Mendoza,
Gully, MOLINEAUX,
Each
nature’s weapon wield,
Who
each at Boney would stand true,
And
never to him yield.
The
two men faced each other in December, 1810, in a contest that lasted
33 brutal rounds. The best description of the fight is in George
MacDonald Fraser’s 1997 novel Black
Ajax,
which pulls the contemporary accounts into one compelling narrative.
At the end of each round, the boxer had to come up 'to scratch’,
indicating readiness to continue, and after 28 rounds Cribb -
sensationally - failed to come up, but was saved by completely bogus
complaints from his seconds. Cribb was also helpless against the
ropes on one occasion, when someone cut them. Molineaux should have
won the fight, but was defeated after 33 hard-fought rounds of hard
battering.
A
justifiably aggrieved Molineaux obtained a rematch, but had his jaw
fractured in the 9th round, and collapsed in the 11th,
in front of a wildly partisan crowd desperate for the Englishman to
win a clear victory.
What
Happened Next
Molineaux’s
fall from world-class boxer to freak show exhibit was a sad one, His
formidable physique and skill wilted as he drank his way round series
upon series of grim exhibition bouts, and he lost the support of the
long-suffering Richmond. In 1819, in his mid-30s, the man who
may have been the best heavyweight boxer ever died in Galway in the
bandroom of the East Middlesex regiment, cared for by two of the
regiment’s black soldiers. On a happier note, Richmond (whose
nickname was ‘The Black Terror’), who should also be better
known, became a much-respected figure about London (he was a fine
cricketer and friend of Byron). and was a page, with Cribb, at the
coronation of George IV in 1821. It was not an easy role; Cribb and
Richmond had to watch out for George's wife, Caroline, a
potential gatecrasher who was barred from the ceremony. Richmond died
in 1829 after an evening spent with Cribb. (Several reference
sources confidently state that Richmond was the American
patriot Nathan Hale’s executioner in 1776 - when Richmond would
have been 13.)
45
1812:
Beethoven meets Goethe and snubs the Austrian Empress
The
German poet and philosopher Goethe loved many women, and although the
woman he finally married seemed to contemporaries to be a
pretty face with a pretty vacant head, most of the woman he admired
were clever as well as good-looking. It was through the child of
one of those women that the giant of German letters met Beethoven,
the giant of German music. The mutual friend was a young woman called
Bettina Brentano, and it has been conjectured that she may in fact
have been Goethe’s daughter: their relationship certainly
seems to have been an intense but platonic one: she once fell asleep
in his lap. Goethe never knew quite what to make of her (and neither
did Napoleon, who definitely wasn't her dad).
In
1812, all three were present at the Teplitz Spa, and Bettina
introduced the two. Love was in the air. Spas were sites of raised
emotion (as lovers of Persuasion
know). and it was while at the spa that Beethoven wrote his
mysterious ‘Letter to the Immortal Beloved’, which was
found in a drawer after his death in 1827. Bettina had earlier, in
1810, introduced Beethoven to her relation Antonie Brentano, who is
considered by many to be one of the likeliest suspects for the
'Immortal Beloved’ .
In
one of these scenes that are rather too good to be true (and although
recorded by Bettina, some feel it is too good to be true), Beethoven
and Goethe were strolling arm-in-arm when they encountered the
Empress of Austria and a gaggle of Dukes coming in their direction.
Beethoven - who had been holding forth on the superiority of men of
genius to men of birth - told Goethe to keep his arm locked with his:
‘They must make room for us. not we for them’. But Goethe’s day
job, after all, had been as a courtier, and he found this impossible
to do.
Goethe
took out his arm, took off his hat, and bowed to the
Empress. Beethoven crossed his arms and kept walking, the Dukes
parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. After Goethe had
bowed his way out, Beethoven told him he had waited for him because
he honoured, indeed revered, Goethe for his mind, and told him off
for bowing to talentless aristocrats. The scene has become emblematic
of the emerging new age of Romantic genius trampling on outdated
mores, and a splendid contemporary picture called The
Incident in Teplitz
depicts the scene in that light: Goethe bows reverentially, while
Beethoven strides away with his head held high.
What
Happened Next
Goethe
wrote home that Beethoven was ‘turbulent’; Beethoven told his
publisher that Goethe was too enamoured of courts. Years later,
Beethoven wrote to Goethe, but the latter did not reply. Apart from
genius, they had little in common. Bettina became quite radical in
her politics, and befriended Karl Marx in 1842. A utopian commune
established by Germans in Texas in 1847-8 was named 'Bettina' after
her. The communists got on well with the Comanches - who found the
commune useful for surgery, and also a handy dumping ground for
unwanted captives - but the communists did not get on with each
other. Several Bettinans became leading Texans. This has nothing to
do with Beethoven and Goethe of course, but is fascinating. There
were so many Germans about in Texas in the 1840s that some companies
of Texas Rangers were comprised wholly of Germans, which is possibly
even more irrelevant, but makes one long for westerns - featuring
German Marxists - which were never made.
See
also 1827:Schubert
visits Beethoven on his deathbed.
46
1814:
Harriette Wilson chats up Lord Byron
Harriette
Wilson was a Regency courtesan and her Memoirs
(1825) has one of the best opening lines ever: ’I shall not say why
and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of
Craven’. Her first glimpse of Lord Byron, described by his
ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to
know’, was at a masquerade. Harriette wandered into a ‘quiet
room’ which was 'entirely deserted, save by one solitary
individual. . . his bright penetrating eyes seemed earnestly fixed, I
could not discover on what. “Surely he sees beyond this gay scene
into some other world, which is hidden from the rest of mankind”,
thought I, being impressed, for the first time in my life, with an
idea that I was in the presence of a supernatural being. His attitude
was graceful in the extreme. His whole countenance so bright, severe,
and beautiful, that I should have been afraid to love him’.
Harriette
watched the beautiful stranger for another ‘ten minutes’ (it was
a quiet room) before asking him ‘I entreat you to gratify my
curiosity. Who and what are you, who appear to me a being too bright
and too severe to dwell among us?’
A
startled Byron (who had previously turned down an invitation to
meet Harriette) replied that he was merely a ‘very stupid
masquerade-companion’ and tried to escape, but Harriette was not
letting him off so easily, telling him ‘you must be Lord Byron,
whom I have never seen’. ‘And you’. said Byron, ‘are
Harriette Wilson’. They then had a pleasant time discussing
beauty: ‘Your beauty is all intellectual’ she told him -
and criticising Lady Caroline Lamb - ‘Is there any sort of
comparison to be made between you and that mad woman?” he told her,
and they parted with mutual admiration. BYRON: ‘Wherever I am, it
will console me to know that I am remembered kindly by you’,
HARRIETTE: ‘God bless you, dear Lord Byron.’
Walter
Scott described Harriette as a ‘smart, saucy girl’, which
is how most people think of her. What gets missed is that she was a
fine writer with an eye for the ridiculous. The encounter with Byron
reads very like a parody of romantic fiction, a clever
send-up of the Byronic hero, a persona assiduously cultivated by
Byron himself. She describes Byron as if he were a character in
a fashionable novel, a character that was to become one of the great
fictional stereotypes: the dark, moody stranger waiting for the love
of a good woman. . .
What
Happened Next
A
small packet of Harriette's letters to Byron were found in the 20th
century, one with this charming request: ‘ I hate to ask you for
money. . . However, I only require a little present aid, and that I
am sure you will not refuse me, as you once refused to make my
acquaintance because you held me too cheap'. No letters from
him to her survive. Byron left England for good in 1816, and died in
Missolonghi in 1824, preparing to fight for Greek independence.
Harriette died in rich obscurity around 1845. Her memoirs may have
earned her in excess of £10,000. Some men paid to be kept out. The
Duke of Wellington's reported response to Harriette's publisher,
however, 'Publish and be damned', is apocryphal.
47
1815:
Jane Austen visits the Prince Regent’s librarian
In
late 1815, Jane Austen was nursing her brother Henry through a
fever in his London house. Henry was also being attended by a royal
physician who knew that the anonymous author of Pride
and Prejudice and Mansfield
Park was
his patient’s sister. The physician delightedly informed Austen
that the Prince Regent was a lover of her books and he had taken the
liberty of telling him that Miss Austen was in London - and the
Prince had asked his librarian, Mr Clarke, to ‘wait upon’ the
author and ‘pay her every possible attention’. Mr Clarke
accordingly invited Miss Austen to visit the Prince's library at
Carlton House.
As
it happened, Miss Austen’s views on the Regent were clear: she did
not like him. and wondered at his wife Caroline 'calling
herself "attached & affectionate" to a Man whom she
must detest” The library was a different matter, however.
During
the tour Clarke mentioned that if Miss Austen had another novel
being published,. she ‘was at liberty’ to dedicate it to
the prince. At that moment, Emma was
about to be published, and after she got home, Austen wrote asking
Clarke if it was now ‘incumbent’ on her to inscribe the work to
the prince: ’I should be equally concerned to appear either
presumptuous or ungrateful'. Clarke wrote back that it was certainly
not ‘incumbent’ but he was happy to confirm permission: ’And I
also, dear Madam, wished to be allowed to ask you to delineate in
some future work the habits of life, and character, and enthusiasm of
a clergyman, who should pass his time between the metropolis and the
country, who should be something like Beattie's Minstrel - ‘Silent
when glad . . .demurely sad'. Clarke seems not to have noticed
that most clergymen in Jane Austen’s novels are suspect. Austen
wrote back: ’I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of
drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of
Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not.’
An
unperturbed Clarke replied with yet another suggestion: ‘an
historical romance illustrative of the august House of Cobourg would
just now be very interesting,' Austen responded: ’I could not. .
.write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.
. .I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first
chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and
though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I
should totally fail in any other'.
What
Happened Next
As
the novelist Reginald Hill has pointed out, Emma is
one of the great English detective stories, and this extends even to
the dedication. Austen dedicated Emma to
the Prince Regent, but in such a manner that many readers must have
got the joke: her repeated use of the words ‘His Royal Highness’,
as has been pointed out, may well have been designed to remind
readers of Caroline’s use of the same words to address her
husband. When the Regent was eventually crowned George IV in 1821,
England’s best boxers were employed to keep Caroline at bay
(see 1810:
Tom Molineaux fights Tom Cribb)
and the public sang: ‘Most gracious queen, we thee implore/ To go
away and sin no more; /Or if that effort be too great, /To go away at
any rate’.
48
1817:
Benjamin Haydon hosts the 'Immortal Dinner'
Having
moved into a new London studio in 1817, while working on his
painting, Christ’s
Entry into Jerusalem,
the painter Benjamin Haydon decided to bring a group of his friends
together for a party, with the painting functioning as a centrepiece.
Present at the dinner were Wordsworth, Keats (their faces are on two
of the figures in the painting, which now lives in an Ohio seminary),
and Charles Lamb. Also present that evening was the surgeon John
Ritchie, and the perhaps less stellar figures of Tom
Monkhouse, who was Wordsworth’s wife’s cousin, and the
deputy controller of stamps, a rather dull chap called John Kingston,
who, says Haydon, ‘the moment he was introduced he let Wordsworth
know who he officially was’, thus rather rudely informing
Wordsworth that he was meeting his boss (for the first and only
time), Wordsworth being the official distributor of stamps for
Westmorland.
‘The
Immortal Dinner’ is Haydon’s own description of the evening, and
it is only fair to say that the judgment of posterity is not one of
universal agreement that the party was that significant. never
mind ‘immortal. But this was the first time Wordsworth and Keats
met, and it seems to be the only time all the guests were present
together - and deserves special note as one of the few recorded
social occasions at which Wordsworth looked as if he were enjoying
himself.
Records
Haydon: ‘There was something interesting in seeing Wordsworth,
sitting, and Keats and Lamb, and my picture of Christ's Entry
towering up behind them, occasionally brightened by gleams of flame
that sparkled from the fire, and hearing the voice of Wordsworth
repeating Milton with an intonation like the funeral bell of St.
Paul's and the music of Handel mingled, and then Lamb's wit came
sparkling in between, and Keat's rich fancy of satyrs and fauns and
white clouds, wound up the stream of conversation’.
Keats
in fact was reciting part of ‘Endymion’ for the first time in
company (Wordsworth had read it a few days earlier and praised it
faintly). Lamb - whose sister Mary was in his care, having
killed their mother years before in one of her periodic fits of
madness - got a bit squiffy and attempted to examine the skull of
John Kingston after the latter persisted in asking daft questions
about genius. Lest there be any doubt as to the general propriety of
the evening, however, Haydon makes clear: ‘All our fun was within
bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to.
It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age. . .’ The
essential guide to Haydon’s party is Penelope Hughes-Hallett’s
The
Immortal Dinner
(2000).
What
Happened Next
Joseph
Ritchie, who was an anti-slavery campaigner, undertook an expedition
to reach central Africa from the north the following year, and died
in Murzuq in November 1819, less than two years after the party. At
Keats’ request, Ritchie took with him a copy of 'Endymion' in order
to leave it, for some mysterious poetical reason, in the Sahara.
Haydon went bankrupt in 1823 and killed himself in the hot summer of
1846.
49
1822:
San Martin and Simon Bolivar meet behind closed doors
Jose
de San Martin was born in what is now eastern Argentina in 1788 and
learned his military trade as a Spanish army officer 1808-1811 in the
brutal war against Napoleon. Deciding his talents could be better
used fighting Spanish oppression at home after Argentina had declared
its independence, he returned to Buenos Aires in 1812, where he
became commander of the army. Realising that Argentina would not be
secure unless Spanish rule ended all over South America, he took an
army across the Andes to liberate Chile (with Bernardo O’Higgins),
founded the Chile navy (with Thomas Cochrane) and became the
‘Protector’ (first President) of Peru not long before meeting
Bolivar.
The
Venezuelan Simon Bolivar had also been a busy man to the north,
becoming temporary dictator of Venezuela in 1813. Bolivar was a
ruthless man with a vicious temper; unlike San Martin, Bolivar was a
dictator by nature.
San
Martin was the liberator of the south, Bolivar the liberator of the
north. The meeting - a secret one behind closed doors - was
held in Ecuador at a time when they had Spain's mighty armies for the
taking, and the purpose of the meeting was to plan the final strategy
for the inevitable victory. The course of the meeting is still
debated, but from what we know of what was said, it is difficult to
view the great revolutionary Bolivar in anything but a bad light. San
Martin offered at first to share the leadership: when Bolivar refused
- on the grounds that his forces were the strongest . San Martin
offered to step down. This noble offer, alas. also seems to have
offended Bolivar, who probably at this point just wanted San Martin
to have never existed. San Martin, realising that Bolivar’s
intransigence was implacable, decide to turn over command to Bolivar,
left South America for good and returned to Europe, dying in France
in 1850.
What
Happened Next
Bolivar
went on to defeat the Spanish. Northern Peru was renamed Bolivia
in his honour, but the ideal of a federation of all
Spanish-speaking Americans never came to fruition and was probably
never achievable, as he recognised on his deathbed in 1830, saying
that the sole benefit of his work had been achieving independence
from Spain, but at the cost of all other forms of civilized life.
Life had become a torment, laws just bits of paper, and the
future of South America would be one of governance by petty tyrants.
Bolivar’s unhappy prophecy was pretty much fulfilled. In the
1860s/ 1870s a Chile-Peru alliance went to war with Spain, and later
with Bolivia, over bird shit, in the Guano Pacific war. Also in the
1860s, Paraguay fought one of the most disastrous wars in history,
fighting Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay at the same time (50-70%of
Paraguay’s population died). It is often suggested that much of the
post-independence strife in Latin America could have been
avoided if the meeting between San Martin and Bolivar had not
been a failure.
50
1827: Schubert
visits Beethoven on his deathbed
In
March 1827 Beethoven had been deaf for 10 years, and was now dying.
He was 56 and widely regarded as the greatest living composer, as
well as a symbol of both German culture and the Romantic movement
(see 1812:
Beethoven meets Goethe and snubs the Austrian Empress).
The young Austrian composer Franz Schubert was also living in Vienna,
but was painfully shy of making contact with the great man. Indeed,
Schubert said he had once seen him in a busy coffee house but was too
overcome to go over to him (Schubert’s brother liked to claim that
Beethoven and Schubert met several times, and there are
other unverifiable, anecdotal accounts of them meeting before 1827).
Beethoven
was dying because he had caught pneumonia, but he was dying
anyway of liver failure, indeed multiple organ failure, and possibly
also lead poisoning. He had been out in the country visiting his
brother, who, it has been said, was responsible for sending the
unwell composer back to Vienna in an open wagon (Beethoven was
actually very ill when he had arrived at the estate, where his
erratic behaviour caused great amusement to the yokels).
When
Schubert finally visited Beethoven on 19 March, he was on his
deathbed, and had only a few days to live. According to their
mutual friend Anselm Huttenbrenner, Beethoven was asked which of the
two he would like to see first: 'let Schubert come in first, he
replied. Beethoven was interested in the music being produced
by the talented young composer, and probably would have had much to
say, but sadly Schubert visited at a point where he was unable to
speak lucidly (a cigarette card company later issued cards on
Schubert’s life - which can be found the web - one of which shows a
sobbing Schubert exiting the deathbed scene).
Shortly
after Schubert left, Beethoven’s voice returned and he spoke warmly
of the Philharmonic Society of London, whose patronage had been of
such importance to him. Earlier in 1827, he had written to the
society explaining his financial problems and they sent him £100.
George Bernard Shaw later referred to this gift as ‘the only
creditable incident in English history’. The Philharmonic had
commissioned the 9th symphony and wanted a 10th from him -
practically his last words were ‘God bless them’.
What
Happened Next
‘Who
can do anything after Beethoven?’ asked Schubert. Schubert’s
music does seem to change after this point, and biographers and
musicologists agree that Beethoven’s death is pivotal in Schubert’s
life and work - though he himself had less than a year to live.
Schubert was one of the torch bearers at Beethoven's funeral,
which became a huge public event; over 20,000 people turned up to see
him interred. Schubert died of typhoid at the age of 31 in
1828. At his own request, he was buried beside Beethoven.
51
1840
Sir Moses Montefiore meets Sultan Abdülmecid to discuss the
‘Damascus Affair’
In
February 1840, a Franciscan monk called Father Thomas and his servant
went missing in Damascus and were never seen again. Their
disappearance resulted in rioting by some Christians and Muslims who
alleged that the missing men had been killed by Jews in order
to use their blood for a ritual during Passover ritual. The alleged
act of using human blood during a religious ritual is known as the
'blood libel', and has been most commonly used against Jews, though
it has also been used by fanatics to smear groups ranging from
Cathars and neopagans to a wide range of Christian and Muslim sects
that have annoyed the orthodox.
The
disappearance of the two men coincided with the recent arrival
in Damascus of a new French consul, who used his considerable
influence to persuade the Turkish governor to arrest and interrogate
local Jews. The consul did have a legal right to intervene - France
having special rights as the protector of Roman Catholics in the
region - but he was also a particularly vicious anti-semite and
the responsibility for much of what was to happen can be laid at the
door of this horrible man. Suspects were questioned, and
under torture a Jewish barber confessed to killing the two men. Two
other Jews died under torture, and another converted to Islam to
escape the terrible fate of his co-accused. Anti-Jewish riots
occurred all over the Middle East: Jews were attacked, Jewish
children were taken hostage, and synagogues were desecrated.
The
'Damascus Affair', as it began to be called, quickly attracted
world-wide attention and condemnation. After a public meeting in
London offered support to the beleaguered Jewish communities, Sir
Moses Montefiore led a delegation to Alexandria in August to
plead with Mehmet Ali, joint ruler (with the Ottoman
Sultan) of Syria, for the freedom of the remaining
accused, and for an end to be brought to the persecution. Montefiore
had been appointed Sheriff of the city of London in 1837 and
knighted by Victoria. Physically imposing at 6 foot 3, rich,
intelligent, philanthropic, well-liked and well-connected, Montefiore
seems to have been a difficult person to say 'no' to. The delegation
obtained the (reluctantly granted) release of the prisoners, but it
was not until Montefiore went on to meet with the precocious
17-year-old Ottoman ruler Sultan Abdülmecid in Constantinople,
that the persecutions ceased. Apart from bringing to a close the
disgraceful persecution of innocent subjects, Abdülmecid,
at Montefiore's request, issued a highly significant edict
attacking the blood libel itself: 'for the love we bear to
our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for
the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and
tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least
foundation in truth'.
What
Happened Next
'Normal'
sectarian strife in Syria carried on as usual - in 1860, eight
Franciscan monks in Damascus. the entire church community, were
murdered by Druze zealots (and beatified in 1921) - but the Sultan's
edict against the blood libel held. Both of those remarkable
men, Montefiore and Abdülmecid, have been largely
forgotten, as have the circumstances of the Damascus Affair
itself. Yet their encounter showed what could be achieved by
rational, liberal and principled men prepared to stand up to
murderous bigotry. The affair led, alas, to a dramatic increase in
anti-semitism everywhere, most notably in France and Russia, and when
that murderous forgery purporting to be a Jewish blueprint for world
domination, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
appeared in the early 20th century in Russia, it found fertile
ground in the new century.
The
blood libel was to re-emerge with terrible force with the rise of
Nazism in Germany, and is still propagated by some malignant clerics
in the Middle East, most notably in Saudi Arabia, where the fable
appeared as a factual description of Jewish ritual in a newspaper in
2002.
See The
Damascus Affair: 'Ritual Murder', Politics, and the Jews in
1840 (1997),
Jonathan Frankel
52
1842:
Edgar Allan Poe asks Charles Dickens to help him get published
Dickens
toured America in 1842, and Poe came to see him twice in his
Philadelphia hotel room. The meetings are felt to be a tad
disappointing by most commentators - they talked a lot about
copyright, a topic of much concern to authors but apt to drive most
people out of the room - and accounts often resort to describing what
they wore (Poe dressed in a respectable suit, Dickens went in for
raffish diamond clasps and a flashy dressing gown).
In
fact, this was an interesting encounter. The affair had started
warmly enough. When Poe requested a meeting, sending Dickens a
collection of his stories as a gift, Dickens responded warmly: ‘My
Dear Sir, I shall be very glad to see you whenever you will do me the
favour to call.’ As well as discussing copyright, they discussed
the possibility of Dickens finding a British publisher for Poe’s
short stories (this is the delicate part where one would like a
verbatim account). Dickens, whatever his actual feelings on the
subject, promised to try.
Poe’s
biographer Una Pope-Hennessy observes of the Poe and Dickens meetings
that they were ‘sterile and closed coldly. Neither seems to have
liked the other much’. Neither were in good form when they
met, but Poe was not (at any time) the most convivial of men, and
while Dickens was normally good company, promising to try to find
someone a publisher is a task not likely to end in joy. Dickens was
certainly peeved at the level of exploitation he was encountering -
the Philadelphia hotel, for example, conned him into presiding over a
reception for hundreds of guests - and Poe’s request may have
seemed to be pitched on that level. In truth, however, he was
profoundly depressed by America. He had come prepared to love America
but was deeply shocked by the reality of American slavery. He wrote:
‘This is not the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic
of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal Monarchy — even
with its sickening accompaniments of Court Circulars . . .to such a
Government as this’. His experiences were to be used in Martin
Chuzzlewit
(1843). Dickens did meet Americans he really liked, however:
Longfellow became a lifelong friend.
What
Happened Next
Not
long after returning to England, Dickens wrote to Poe that he had
delivered his stories to various publishers but they all ‘declined
the venture.’ He added, diplomatically but unconvincingly, that Poe
should not ‘suppose that I have ever thought of you but with a
pleasant recollection’. Poe did derive inspiration from Dickens. At
the urging of his children, Dickens had put the family pet raven,
Grip, into Barnaby
Rudge
(1841) and Poe criticised Dickens in a review for not using the bird
to good symbolic effect, which of course he himself was to do in his
poem ‘The Raven’ (1845). Grip was stuffed when he died (he
had two successors also called Grip) and now lives on the third floor
of the Free Library of Philadelphia, a permanent memorial to both Poe
and Dickens.
53
1854:
John Lang speaks to Lakshmibai through a curtain
Lakshmibai,
Rani of Jhansi, was a figure of some fascination to her Victorian
contemporaries and indeed to posterity. Widow and ruler of the small
north Indian kingdom of Jhansi, (her father was a Brahmin), she was
described as the ‘Indian Boudicca': attractive, intelligent,
articulate, a stateswoman, she became a symbol of resistance to the
British during the Indian Mutiny and has become a national
heroine for India.
The
Sydney-born lawyer John Lang was perhaps a much less romantic figure,
but is intriguing in his own right. Regarded as the first
Australian-born novelist, he left his native land for good in 1840,
settling in India and founding a newspaper, in which he
published his novel Mazarine
(1845).
Lakshmibai’s
husband, heir to a proud tradition of Maratha rulers, had died in
1853, and their only child was also dead. They adopted a child; the
Rajah formally acknowledged him as heir before he died. but the
Governor-General annexed the state anyway. Lakshmibai decided to
fight the British at their own game and hired John Lang in 1854
to fight her case in the courts. Lang’s enthralling account of
their meeting was first published in Dickens' Household
Words
and then in Wanderings
in India
(1859).
Lang
was delivered into Jhansi in an ‘enormous carriage’ escorted by a
large escort of spear-bearing cavalry, and then led on a white
elephant to the palace. In the palace, Lang sat in a room with a
curtain at the end, and spoke briefly to the ‘pretty child’ who
was to inherit Jhansi, and who - perhaps accidentally - opened the
curtain to reveal the Rani expressing her grievances to Lang. He only
saw her for a moment, but she clearly made an impression: the Rani
was ‘rather stout, but not too stout. Her face must have been
very handsome when she was younger [she was actually about 25 at the
time], and even now had many charms - though, according to my idea of
beauty, it was too round. The expression also was very good, and very
intelligent. The eyes were particularly fine, and the nose very
delicately shaped. She was not very fair, though she was far from
black’.
The
next 10 minutes passed with agreeable compliments from Lang to
Lakshmibai - if the Governor-General could only see her, Lang felt
‘quite sure that he would at once give Jhansi back again to be
ruled by its beautiful Queen’. The ‘beautiful Queen’
stuck to the matter at hand, and declined Lang’s suggestion that
she take a British pension, saying in words that would resonate in
Indian history: ‘Mera Jhansi nahin dengee’ (I will not give up my
Jhansi).
What
Happened Next
Lang
argued her case in London, but to no avail, and when rebellion broke
out in 1857 Jhansi became a centre of the revolt. Lakshmibai
encouraged women as well as men to take up arms against the
cow-killing imperialists, and fell in battle against the British at
Gwalior in 1858. The wrapper of the first edition of Flashman
in the Great Game
(1975), has an appealing image (by Barbosa) of Lakshmibai on her
swing - the swing was found in her battlefield tent after Gwalior,
along with her books and pictures.
54
1855:
James Barry is Nasty to Florence Nightingale
Mystery
surrounded James Barry: as the Dictionary
of National Biography
says, she ‘was probably born Margaret’, and though commonly
regarded (in public) as a male by her contemporaries, is now regarded
as female by birth. She trained in medicine and became an
experienced army surgeon and medical officer, eventually becoming a
deputy inspector of hospitals, and like Mary Seacole (see 1855:
Mary Seacole gets a Bed for the Night from Florence Nightingale
) was discouraged from travelling to the Crimea (on the grounds of
being too senior, in Barry’s case).
Barry
had influential friends, an influence possibly related to her shadowy
paternity: paternal candidates include the Earl of Buchan and the
Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda; and when she put
her case to the British commander Lord Raglan, he agreed she should
be allowed to help. Barry was based on Corfu, and
Raglan arranged for over 400 casualties to be sent to her for
treatment. The recovery rates Barry achieved were high.
In
1855 Barry spent a few months leave (at her own expense) in
Sevastopol where she met Florence Nightingale. Barry was described at
this time as an ‘intolerable bore’ who expected colleagues ‘to
listen to every quarrel he has had since coming into the service',
and there were many such quarrels. Florence later recollected their
encounter (Barry was annoyed with her about some trivial matter) with
a fair degree of fume: ‘I never had such a blackguard rating in all
my life – I who have had more than any woman – than from this
Barry sitting on his horse, while I was crossing the Hospital Square
with only my cap on in the sun. He kept me standing in the midst of
quite a crowd of soldiers, Commissariat, servants, camp followers,
etc., etc., every one of whom behaved like a gentleman during the
scolding I received while he behaved like a brute . . After he was
dead, I was told that (he) was a woman . . . I should say that (she)
was the most hardened creature I ever met.
What
Happened Next
Barry
is now seen as transgendered: she was very likely a woman by biology,
became a man by choice, and the choice benefitted both medical
science and her future patients. Barry was a very fine doctor,
though argumentative and uncommonly uncivil; indeed she had fought a
duel in 1818 (in which she and her opponent were unharmed). She
died in 1865, aged about 66. The Manchester
Guardian
obituary said - in a smug and distant tone that still survives in
British obituary writing - ‘He died about a month ago, and
upon his death was discovered to be a woman. The motives that
occasioned, and the time when commenced this singular deception are
both shrouded in mystery. But thus it stands as an indisputable fact,
that a woman was for 40 years an officer in the British service, and
fought one duel and sought many more, had pursued a legitimate
medical education, and received a regular diploma, and had acquired
almost a celebrity for skill as a surgical operator. It was a supreme
deception’. Indeed it was.
55
1855:
Robert Browning is unentranced by Daniel Dunglas Home
The
Spiritualist movement began in mid-19th century America with the
emergence of ‘mediums’ such as the Fox sisters who claimed to be
in touch with a spiritual world inhabited by nonmaterial beings. By
1853, when the song ‘Spirit Rappings’ was published, the first of
many ‘rap’ songs (‘Softly, softly, hear the rustle of the
spirits’ airy wings’), mediums were appearing all America. One of
them was a 22-year-old Scot whose family had emigrated to
Connecticut, Daniel Dunglas Home (he believed his father was an
illegitimate grandson of the Earl of Home). Home’s mother died in
1850 and his aunt threw him out of the family home because she
couldn't bear the frequent raps which now accompanied his presence.
Mediumship
became a viable career in those days, but Home, conscious of being a
gentleman, did not charge for seances; instead, in a common solution,
he received ‘gifts’. Home returned in 1855 to a Britain in which
spiritualism was a growing belief system; he found sympathetic hosts
to live with and regular seances to manage. Witnesses would also
claim they saw Home float in and out of windows.
This
brings us to what Andrew Lang, in Historical
Mysteries
(1904), called the ‘great Home-Browning problem’. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning admired Home and took her husband, Robert Browning,
to a seance (at the house of a Mr Rymer). Robert was not an admirer,
and was not amused to receive what he called ‘a kind of soft and
fleshy pat’ on his knee under the table (rumours about Home’s
sexuality abounded). A wreath of clematis floated up from the table
and landed on the head of Elizabeth, which possibly amused Robert
even less.
A
few days later, Home called on the Brownings, but as Lang says: ‘Mr.
Browning declined to notice Home; there was a scene, and Mrs Browning
(who was later a three-quarters believer in 'spirits') was
distressed’ (Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, later
wrote: ‘Mrs B. shrieks too much . . .I don't think it necessary to
say anything of her “spiritisms” - damn it".
What
Happened Next
Psychic
research, according to Gladstone, was ‘the most important work
being done in the world today’. Others disagreed. After Elizabeth
died, Robert published in 1865 a scathing attack on Home, the poem
‘Mr Sludge, the Medium’:
Oh
Lord! I little thought, sir, yesterday,
When
your departed mother spoke those words
Of
peace through me, and moved you, sir, so much,
You
gave me—(very kind it was of you)
These
shirt-studs—(better take them back again. . .
Home
retaliated by alleging that Browning was jealous because the spirits
had judged Elizabeth the better poet by awarding her the clematis
wreath. Home was later befriended by a widow who gave him a
huge sum of money, but then demanded it back when the spirits told
her to. The case went to court, where Home complained ‘I was a mere
toy to her, I felt my degradation more and more with every day that
passed’; The widow said 'I once just put my lips to his
forehead. . .But only once. You see, I am not so fond of
kissing'. The judge, describing spiritualism as
‘mischievous nonsense’, found against Home, who moved in for
a while with the future Earl of Dunraven, whose ‘loins’ he
was said to shampoo. Home married twice, and converted twice, to
Roman Catholicism (he was expelled from Rome for necromancy) and
Greek Orthodoxy, and died in France in 1886.
56
1855:
Mary Seacole gets a Bed for the Night from Florence Nightingale
When
Mary Seacole was ‘rediscovered’ in he late 20th century, she was
proclaimed as a heroine who had been written out of British history
because she was black and working-class, and therefore inferior
to the white middle-class Florence Nightingale (Mary features in this
light in Rushdie's The
Satanic Verses). The
truth is more complex. Born Mary Grant in 1805 of Scottish-Creole
parentage in Jamaica (her mother ran a boarding-house for British
officers), in 1836 she married the merchant Edwin Horatio Hamilton
Seacole, who may have been a godson of Nelson, or possibly son of
Nelson and Emma (there is no proof of either assertion).
Mary
had expertise in treating fevers, and when war broke out with Russia
in 1853, she travelled to England and offered her services to the War
Office. Her offer was rejected (because of her colour, she believed)
so she travelled to the Crimea without official backing to set up a
base near the front line. On her way she visited Florence
Nightingale at Scutari. Contrary to some sources, Mary did not ask
for a job, as she makes clear in her autobiography, Wonderful
Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands
(1857).
Mary
describes Florence thus: ‘A slight figure, in the nurses'
dress; with a pale, gentle, and withal firm face, resting lightly in
the palm of one white hand, while the other supports the elbow. .
.Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant – the greatest
sign of impatience at any time a slight, perhaps unwitting motion of
the firmly planted right foot – was Florence Nightingale – that
Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the
lips of British men until the hour of doom’. Florence said ‘in
her gentle but eminently practical and business-like way, "What
do you want, Mrs. Seacole – anything that we can do for you? If it
lies in my power, I shall be very happy." ‘ All Mary wanted
was a bed, and one was found for her in the washerwoman’s quarters
where she swapped ‘biographies’ with sick nurses and took off for
the front in the morning.
Critics
of Florence’s seemingly superior attitude to Mary forget Florence
wanted to establish nursing as a profession, whereas Mary had a
business to run as well as nurse, and was therefore muddying the
waters in Florence’s eyes. Mary’s business cards described her
Crimean base - the British Hotel - as a ‘mess-table and comfortable
quarters for sick and convalescent officers’. Unlike Florence, Mary
charged for her services, admitted tourists and served alcohol (she
used the profits to finance hospital and battlefield treatment,
however, of Russian as well as British soldiers). Florence’s
comments on Mary were mostly restrained and she praised her kindness.
Privately, however, she suggested that the British Hotel was a ‘Bad
House’, a euphemism for ‘brothel’ and she kept her nurses
away.
What
Happened Next
In
his preface to Mary’s book, The
Times
correspondent W H Russell says ‘I have witnessed her devotion and
her courage. . . I trust that England will not forget one who nursed
her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who
performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead’.
England did not immediately forget. Mary went bankrupt in 1856, but
The
Times
and Punch
publicised
the losses she sustained in her war work, and a Seacole Fund approved
by Queen Victoria was established to ensure she was reimbursed for
her losses. Victoria’s nephew Count Gleichen, whom she had treated
in the Crimea, became a friend, and made a marble bust of her. Mary
died of ‘apoplexy’ in 1881, and England gradually forgot
her.
See
also 1855:
James Barry is nasty to Florence Nightingale
57
1856:
Lola Montez tries to horsewhip Henry Seekamp
Quite
a lot seems to be known about Lola Montez (1821-1861). She was
a great beauty, as is evident from the many portraits of her to
be found in reference works, and she inherited her looks from
her Spanish father and her temper from her Irish mother. She was the
mistress of kings; she once horsewhipped a newspaperman in the
Californian gold fields and died in poverty in the nightmare
slum of Hell's Kitchen, New York.
The
preceding paragraph contains information gathered from several
reputable reference sources. Part of it is true, much of it is
false. The Sligo-born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert was indeed
very pretty. as is evident from Joseph Stieler's decorous 1848
portrait (memorably described in Royal
Flash
by that great observer, Harry Flashman, as 'wearing a
come-to-Jesus expression') Many of the other portraits of her
displayed in reference works are in fact not of Eliza at
all: the suspicion is that in the late 19th century any old portrait
of a sultry Spanish-looking woman, preferably armed with a
whip and a jaunty widebrimmed hat, would do to illustrate an article
on Lola Montez, and as is the way of things, the pictures have become
established as true likenesses over the years. She had no
Spanish ancestry, her father being a British soldier and her mother
an illegitimate member of the well-known and influential Irish Oliver
family. She was indeed the mistress of a king - mad King Ludwig of I
Bavaria - but did not die a terrible death.
Following
a teenage elopement with one of her mother's male friends, Eliza
adopted the designation 'Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer' in her
early 20s, in which incarnation she . debuted on the London stage in
1843. The performance ended in disorder after that dreadful cad
Lord Ranelagh denounced her from his box as an Irish impostor, not
Spanish. Lola had a hissy fit, stamped on her bouquet, and a
few weeks later turned up in Europe, where her 'tarantula
dance' made her famous. She had an affair with Liszt and was
part of George Sand's circle. She was also reputed to have developed
an attachment to horsewhips at this time, and indeed is supposed to
have horsewhipped a policeman who annoyed her.
She became
Ludwig's mistress in Austria in 1846, and was promoted to Countess of
Landsfeld in 1847. As often happened in Lola's life, her timing was
bad: 1848 was to be the year of revolutions in Europe, and the
subsequent forced abdication of Ludwig was probably
inevitable, even without the public outrage at his liaison
with Lola.
Lola
moved to the US in 1851, where her dancing scandalised the righteous
and delighted the others, particularly in the goldfields of
California. She moved to Australia in 1855, where her 'spider
dance' (this dance was the opening act in 1856 of the fine Theatre
Royal in Castlemaine, Victoria), in which she raised her skirt in
front in the audience - proved too daring for family audiences and
indeed for some of the 'digger' audience of goldminers (Lola liked
performing for goldminers). The diggers loved the eroticism but
were not as equally taken with Lola's willingness to trade insults
with them.
According
to some accounts, while in Lola had horsewhipped at least one
Californian newspaperman. This did not happen. She did, however,
chase one of Australia's founding fathers of journalism down the
street with a horsewhip, and if the horsewhip did not make contact,
it was not for want of trying. Henry Seekamp, a major figure in both
the history of Australian journalism and of its Labour movement, was
editor of the Ballarat
Times
and a noted supporter of the diggers in their struggle for their
right to vote and buy the land they worked on. A brave and
intelligent man, with an equally brave and intelligent wife called
Clara (who ran his paper and campaigns while he was jailed),
Seekamp is unfortunately best-remembered outside of Australia for
giving Lola a bad review, following which she chased him down the
street with a horsewhip, thankfully without catching him. The still
occasionally performed 'Lola Montes [sic] Polka', apparently
commemorates this incident.
What
Happened Next
Henry
and Clara Seekamp, probably not prompted by the attempted
horsewhipping, moved to Queensland, where Henry died in 1864, three
years after the ever-wandering Lola's death from pneumonia in
New York in 1861. Lola's career was described in the New York
Times as 'wonderfully chequered' and stories began to be spread
of a sad end in a squalid slum. In fact, she died well-cared for,
but this was not good enough for the pious, who wanted to see a
sinner brought low.
Lola
is now commonly described as a precursor of the modern,
independent woman, which may seem like just another fantasy view,
with or without horsewhip, but in fact Lola, with minimum adjustment,
is a character who would have fitted smoothly into 21st century
western society. The most famous expression associated with her,
'Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets', which may have arisen during her
Ludwig-mistress phrase, seems a fair summary of the modern woman as
defined by the advertising world (and has been used for song titles
and a 2007 movie).
58
1860:
Richard Burton jokes about wives with Brigham Young
Captain
Richard Burton has become the very model of the intrepid Victorian
explorer. By 1860 (aged 39) he had served as a soldier in India,
visited Mecca (disguised as a Pathan), searched (with Speke)
for the source of the Nile, and discovered lake Tanganyika. His
favourite disguise was as a half-Arab, half Persian, called ‘Mirza
Abdullah’, a disguise not needed when he visited America in 1860.
Burton, like many contemporaries, was fascinated by the Mormons
(specifically their adoption of polygamy), and travelled to
Salt Lake City to find out more. As an early biographer says ‘it
was natural that, after seeing the Mecca of the Mohammedans, Burton
should turn to the Mecca of the Mormons, for he was always attracted
by the centres of the various faiths’.
The
trip is described in The
City of the Saints and across the Rocky Mountains to California
(1862),
a book in which Burton is at pains to emphasise that Mormons must not
be judged by our standards. Burton went to the Tabernacle, at that
point a simple brick building. After the service he was introduced to
Brigham Young, the president of the Latter Day Saints, ‘a
farmer-like man of 45’ who clearly knew his man: when Burton asked
if he could become a Mormon (Burton collected religions), Young
replied ‘I think you’ve done that sort of thing once before,
Captain’.
They
went for a stroll and exchanged pleasantries. Burton explained he was
looking for a wife, but the Mormons had snapped them all up. Young
showed Burton the house where his wives lived, and Burton made a joke
about there being lots of water in Salt Lake City, but not ‘a drop
to drink’. Young, ‘who loved a joke as dearly as he loved his
seventeen wives burst out into hearty laughter’ (the true number of
Young's wives remains uncertain, perhaps 27; the first one was called
Mary Ann Angel). The joke was perhaps a bit daring, as Burton
will have known of Young’s brisk views on adultery: ‘Suppose you
found your brother in bed with your wife, and put a javelin through
both of them, you would be justified’.
What
Happened Next
Burton’s
account of his visit is regarded as the first balanced account of
life at Salt Lake City (a lady who had visited before him complained
bitterly that some ‘rude men’ had walked over a bridge before
her), and he asserted that, for him, polygamy made sense in that time
and place. He also received at least one proposal of marriage, which
he declined; the lady said she had refused Burton, which prompted a
terrible joke from him: 'like Miss Baxter, she 'had refused a man
before he'd axed her'. Back in England, he literally fell into the
arms of isabel Arundell, who wrote: ‘He put his arm round my waist,
and I put my head on his shoulder’, This was true love, as Burton
looked awful, having suffered over 20 bad fever attacks that left his
face a mess. When Burton died, Isabel buried him as a Catholic, to
the dismay of his friends, and burned his erotic writings. to the
dismay of erotomanes everywhere (she said she was acting under
instruction from his spirit).
59
1863:
John Wilkes Booth refuses to meet Abraham Lincoln
Abraham
Lincoln enjoyed going to the theatre, and was a regular attendee at
Ford’s Theatre in Washington, after he became president in 1860.
He was particularly fond of Shakespeare, but also derived much
pleasure from popular melodramas. On 9 November, 1863, he went to a
performance of Charles Selby’s The
Marble Heart.
The play was described by one London critic as ‘a piece perilously
elaborate in its development of sentiment and character, and
ambitious in its aim as an Art-drama of the imaginative class’, and
the lead role was performed by John Wilkes Booth, brother of the
great Shakespearian actor Edwin Booth.
Born
into a prominent acting family, he was named ‘John Wilkes’
because of a supposed family connection to the English radical (see
1776:
Dr Johnson has dinner with John Wilkes),
though he was much better looking than Wilkes, and had been billed as
‘the handsomest man in America’. He was a strong believer in the
institution of slavery, and had been briefly arrested in 1862 for his
outspoken views.
In
the course of the play, records Mary Clay, a member of Lincoln’s
party: ‘Twice Booth in uttering disagreeable threats in the play
came very near and put his finger close to Mr. Lincoln's face; when
he came a third time I was impressed by it, and said, ‘Mr. Lincoln,
he looks as if he meant that for you.’ 'Well,’ he said, ‘he
does look pretty sharp at me, doesn't he?”’ Intrigued, the
unflappable Lincoln sent an invitation backstage to Booth, inviting
him to meet up with the president after the show. Booth refused.
1863
was a busy year for Lincoln. The year began with his Emancipation
Proclamation of 1 January, freeing all slaves in Confederate
territory. And 10 days after Booth’s theatrical gestures, Lincoln
gave his speech at Gettysburg, Contemporary reaction to the
Gettysburg Address was mixed, but it was soon recognised as a
rhetorical masterpiece: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers
brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’.
Lincoln,
like Booth, was a great public speaker, but unlike Booth, when he
wrote his own material he wrote it magnificently; and if there are
any great speeches by Booth or anyone else in defence of slavery,
they remain unrecorded by posterity, in the western world at least.
What
Happened Next
If
they had met backstage, would Booth still have found it possible to
assassinate Lincoln (in the same theatre) in April 1865? The answer
is probably yes. Booth was a good hater and just a year later was
involved in a plot to kidnap the president, which could well have
succeeded. He also, with his brothers Edwin and Junius, staged a
performance of Julius Caesar to raise funds to erect a statue of
Shakespeare (still there) in Central Park. And when Booth
finally assassinated Lincoln, he is supposed to have said ‘Sic
Semper Tyrannis’ (thus ever to tyrants), referring to Brutus’
words after stabbing Caesar. Booth escaped and was later killed by
Union troops. Booth’s uncle, Algernon Booth, is the
great-great-great-grandfather of Cherie Blair.
60
1864:
Garibaldi plants a tree for the Tennysons
The
Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of the key
revolutionary figures of the 19th century. A member of the
Young Italy movement, he became the leading figure of the
‘Risorgimento’, the post-1815 ‘resurgence’ of Italian
nationalism against foreign occupation.
Garibaldi’s
mission became immensely popular in Britain, and the British
government aided his Sicilian campaign in 1860. He visited England in
March 1864 to express his gratitude to the British people. Garibaldi
fever was everywhere in Britain: the Russian exile Alexander Herzen
described it as ‘Carlyle’s hero-worship being performed before
our eyes’ Two rare dissenters were Queen Victoria, who described
the reception as ‘such follies’, and Karl Marx, who called the
Garibaldi craze ‘a miserable spectacle of imbecility’.
Garibaldi
was greeted with great enthusiasm by two packs of Garibaldi lovers:
on the one hand, were the upper classes, led by various Dukes
and Lords, who wanted him in their homes and at elaborate banquets,
while the rival team was led by assorted progressives who wanted
Garibaldi to speak at radical demonstrations.
Possibly
in search of more neutral ground, Garibaldi went to the Isle of Wight
to visit the poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had written in
praise of the great Italian hero. Tennyson was not disappointed when
he met him: ‘a noble human being’. Lady Tennyson also admired him
greatly: ‘A most striking figure in his picturesque white poncho
lined with red, his embroidered red shirt and coloured tie over it.
His face very noble, powerful, and sweet, his fore- head high and
square. Altogether he looked one of the great men of our Elizabethan
age. His manner was simple and kind’.
Garibaldi
planted a Wellingtonia tree in the Tennyson’s garden (tree-planting
had become one of his customs when visiting English people). Tennyson
mentions the tree in his poem ‘To Ulysses’: ‘Or watch the
waving pine which here/ The warrior of Caprera set, / A name that
earth will not forget/Till earth has roll’d her latest year’,
and records in a melancholy footnote characteristic of both men:
‘Garibaldi said to me, alluding to his barren island, “I wish I
had your trees”’.
At
the Tennysons, Garibaldi also met the great photographer Julia
Margaret Cameron. Cameron - entering into the theatricality of the
occasion - went down on her knees to ask Garibaldi for permission to
take his portrait. Lady Tennyson was worried that Garibaldi might
have thought Cameron was begging for money, but Garibaldi, before
whom whole villages of Italian women had kneeled, was well used to
such tributes, and accepted the gesture with aplomb (Cameron got her
sitting).
What
Happened Next
A
whole range of products were branded ‘Garibaldi’ in Britain, from
Garibaldi blouses to the still-popular Garibaldi biscuits. The
emotional outpouring that greeted Garibaldi, uniting all classes
apart, of course, from the likes of Victoria and Marx, was
unusual in Britain, one of the few comparable occasions being
Princess Diana’s death in 1997. The man himself engaged in a few
more campaigns before retiring to his treeless island of Caprera,
where he cultivated his fields until his death in 1882.
61
1871:
Wagner fails to get funding from Bismarck
It
was to be expected that a meeting between the Iron Chancellor and the
Lord of the Valkyries would be an epochal one, and so it has been
represented in many early biographies of Wagner. Wagnerians tended to
portray the meeting as one of great Aryan minds who were not just
creators of German culture and nationhood, but as repulsors of
non-German elements in the new Germany.
The
significance of the encounter was mostly for Wagner. By 1871, the
Ring Cycle was mostly complete, and that year Wagner was granted land
by the Bayreuth town council in order to establish a regular Wagner
festival in the town. Bismarck became Chancellor of the newly unified
Germany in 1871, and became a ‘Serene Highness’ as well, so this
was hardly a meeting of equals (Wagner had sent Bismarck an
embarrassing poem in his praise).
Wagner
returned from the meeting and described it to Cosima (his wife) who
recorded in her diary that it had been a great success: Richard had
been very impressed by the humility fo Bismarck, who observed to
Wagner that all he had done in public life was obtain a few
signatures and find the ; they discussed art and politics: ll was
charm and sympathy; the meeting was ‘precious’ to a satisfied
Wagner, who somehow refrained from asking for help with his great
cultural project at Bayreuth.
The
diary entry, whoever, is suspect, and has been amended at some
later date - possibly by Wagner himself. Bismarck’s own account of
the meeting is a good deal less warm than Wagner’s and the
amendments may be to designed to conceal a less than joyful first
account. Bismarck’s own account of the meeting is substantially the
same in terns of the course of the meeting, but the tone is quite
different: superior, even sarcastic. Bismarck write to a friend that
Wagner seemed to expect a duet to be played out, but went away
disappointed, without even asking for money for Bayreuth.
What
Happened Next
Under
the Nazis, this meeting was seen as a pivotal moment in the
history of German culture, but Bismarck’s disdainful account
must accurately reflect the substance of the meeting. As Wagner's
biographer Hannu Salmi says, Bismarck had merely offhandedly ‘offered
a series of compliments which he himself regarded as insignificant
mannerisms’. Wagner later wrote to Bismarck twice, in 1873 and
1875, pointing out that Bismarck could aid the rebirth of the German
spirit through the funding of Wagner’s operatic art. Bismarck did
not reply.
62
1876:
Robert Ingersoll inspires Lew Wallace
The
crowded train heading towards the 1876 Indianapolis Republican
Convention bore two renowned ex-soldiers: one of them was
Robert Ingersoll, an evangelical atheist at least as famous in
his day as Richard Dawkins is in ours, the other being Lew Wallace,
the man who was to become governor of New Mexico two years later
(see 1879:
Lew Wallace promises to pardon Billy the Kid)
Ingersoll
had served in the American Civil War under General Wallace as a
colonel at the bloody battle of Shiloh, and later distinguished
himself in mopping up Confederate guerilla bands, before being
captured. Wallace describes their later chance encounter on the train
in his preface to The
First Christmas
(1902): 'There was a knock on the door . . ., and someone called my
name. Upon answer, the door opened, and I saw Colonel Robert G
Ingersoll looking comfortable as might be considering the sultry
weather. 'Was it you who called me Colonel?' 'Yes,' he said. 'Come
in, I feel like talking.' I leaned against the cheek of the door, and
said, 'Well, if you let me dictate the subject, I will come in.'
'Certainly, that's exactly what I want.' I took seat by him, and
began: 'Is there a God?' Quick as a flash, he replied, 'I don't know:
do you?' And then I - 'Is there a Devil?' And he -'I don't know: do
you?' ‘Is there a Heaven?' 'I don't know, do you?' 'Is there a
Hell?' 'I don't know, do you?' 'Is there a Hereafter?' 'I don't know,
do you?' I finished, saying, 'There, Colonel, you have the texts. Now
go.'
And
go Ingersoll did. Ingersoll was one of the greatest orators of his
day (an engraving depicts him in scary full flow at Walt Whitman's
funeral), and here he was on his pet subject: the non-existence of
God. Ingersoll spoke for two hours, only stopping when the train
stopped. Says Wallace: ‘He surpassed himself, and that is saying a
great deal’.
Up
until that point, Wallace’s attitude to religion had been one of
‘absolute indifference’ but the weight of Ingersoll’s rhetoric
drove him to study religion - and, as he puts it ‘with
results-first, the book Ben Hur and second, a conviction
amounting to absolute belief in God and the Divinity of Christ’.
What
Happened Next
In
between dealing with dozens of bad hats as new Mexico governor,
Wallace wrote Ben-Hur:
A Tale of the Christ,
which came out in 1880 and remains in print, one of the world’s
bestsellers. It was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a
pope, and has been filmed four times (It is not the bestselling
American book ever, as is often claimed: Gone
With the Wind
outsold it in the 1930s). Robert Ingersoll died true to his atheist
principles, despite the claims of those who wish to claim him for
agnosticism. His works are all available online at the splendid
website www.infidels.org.
63
1879:
Lew Wallace promises to pardon Billy the Kid
The
Lincoln County Range War in New Mexico began in 1877 with the murder
of an English rancher called John Tunstall. By the time it ended in
1881 around 20 men had been killed, some of them by Billy the Kid,
who made the oft-quoted remarks that Tunstall ‘was the only man
that ever treated me like I was a free-born and white’ and ‘I'll
get every son-of-a-bitch who helped kill John if it's the last thing
I do’ (Tunstall’s colt is displayed at the Royal Armouries Museum
in Leeds).
This
‘war’ has always attracted a lot of interest, simply because it
encapsulates much of the dark side of American capitalism (with added
cowboys). On one side was the firm of Murphy and Dolan, known as the
'House', merchants with lucrative monopoly contracts; they
supplied Indian reservations with beef. On the other was Tunstall,
who ran a bank and merchant store with Alexander McSween: they had
the backing of the cattle baron John Chisum (played by John Wayne as
the incarnation of American individualism in the eponymous 1970
movie). Both sides used hired killers. This conflict may be the only
American epic - fact or fiction - in which the Irish are
baddies and the English are goodies.
Lincoln
County was huge, about the size of Ireland. Killings by Apaches and
other Indians were becoming rare (see 1886: Geronimo
surrenders to General Miles),
but murderous raids by white bandits were a real problem. Law
enforcement was often corrupt, with law officers in the pay of bigger
crooks. Two years into the conflict between the mercantile
factions, the new Governor Lew Wallace drew up a list (which
survives) of 36 men who should be arrested: Billy was 15th in a
ranking headed by a merciless villain called John Selman. Wallace
also declared an amnesty to be implemented if the person had
not been indicted. Billy wrote to Wallace (this letter also survives)
stating he was willing to surrender and also testify against selected
murderers (Billy had signed a peace treaty with the 'House'
killers). He acknowledged that he was not eligible for
the pardon.
Wallace
wrote in reply saying that Billy could trust him: ‘Come alone.
Don’t tell anybody - not a living soul - where you are coming or
the object’. They then had a meeting to sort out the requisite
ploys and testimonies. Said Wallace: ‘I will let you go scot-free
with a pardon in your pocket’. Billy agreed to a fake arrest - on
the understanding that a pardon would be forthcoming - and was,
accordingly, arrested and he testified in court. Alas, no pardon
came for Billy and he ended up simply walking out of jail and
riding out of town. Billy’s apologists say Wallace had no
intention of pardoning him; others blame the district attorney;
others say he just got bored. This was his first escape from the
Lincoln County jail. In the second escape in 1881 (after writing
three indignant letters to Wallace reminding him about the promised
pardon) he killed two deputies, an incident accurately depicted in
the elegiac Peckinpah movie Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid
(1973).
What
Happened Next
Wallace
had been a distinguished career soldier, and later became one of the
bestselling novelists of the age (see 1876:
Robert
Ingersoll inspires Lew Wallace).
One of the last documents Wallace signed as governor was Billy’s
death warrant. Billy was eventually shot by a former associate,
Sheriff Pat Garrett. As Wallace’s list (see above) would indicate,
Billy was not originally the worst hired gun about, and certainly not
the most famous, but his daring second escape caught the imagination
of the public, and in 1882 Garrett published a biography of
Billy (with an incredibly long title) which depicted him as the
iconic western desperado. Garrett killed Billy, but helped make him a
legend. Garrett himself was murdered in obscure circumstances in
1908.
64
1882:
Oscar Wilde gets a kiss from Walt Whitman
That Oscar
Wilde’s trip to America in 1882 was a success should not be a
surprise. The aesthetic movement was cultural flavour of the
moment; America loves big personalities, and Oscar was a huge
personality.
His
ship arrived in New York in January to a rapturous welcome probably
not matched until the Beatles flew into New York in 1964. Reporters
swarmed out in launches to meet Wilde’s ship before it landed.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience,
with its satirical portrait of the Wildean aesthete Bunthorne, had
been very popular in new York the previous year (on one surreal
occasion on the tour he addressed an audience of flower-waving
Harvard students all dressed as Bunthorne). Oscar famously
declared at New York Customs ‘I have nothing to declare except my
genius’ and in an interview said ‘I am here to diffuse beauty,
and I have no objection to saying that’.
A
few weeks after arriving, Wilde went to visit Walt Whitman in Camden.
He had described Whitman as one of his two favourite American poets
(the other was Emerson; as has been pointed out, he possibly
liked Poe better than either, but Poe was dead and so less useful for
publicity purposes: Oscar was always a shrewd marketeer).
Wilde
and Whitman gabbed away happily; Whitman was delighted to learn from
Oscar that he and his friends had taken Leaves
of Grass
(Whitman’s great 1855 poetry volume) on walks in Oxford. They
shared a bottle of home-made elderberry wine and discussed, as
Whitman told the Philadelphia
Press -
the public being interested in poets in those far-distant days -
Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne. They had ‘a jolly good time’
said Whitman, and Oscar was ‘frank and outspoken and manly’,
without any affectation at all. For his part, Wilde later described
Whitman as ‘the grandest man I have ever seen.’
Leaves
of Grass
was still a controversial book in 1882. It was banned in Boston,
causing (of course) sales to leap. Oscar’s friend AJ Symons saw a
gay subtext (as we now say) in Leaves
of Grass,
and when Wilde and Whitman parted, they exchanged a kiss which
Oscar seems to have found quite exciting: he later wrote: ‘I
have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips’. Some have
seen the kiss as a moment of awakening homosexual desire, but given
that Oscar was 27 and Whitman 62, it seems probable that
Oscar’s excitement was not really terribly sexual. Kisses between
Victorian men - and between women for that matter - see 1889:
Nellie Bly Meets Jules Verne and gets a kiss (from Mme. Verne)
- were
not necessarily seen as sexual.
What
Happened Next
Oscar
got on with his tour. Two days later, he visited the great
novelist Henry James, but it was a much less happy meeting, When
James said he missed London, Oscar (rather sniffily) said “You
care for places? The world is my home’; an inappropriate comment to
a man who was nothing if not cosmopolitan. A fuming James
decided that Wilde was ‘a fatuous fool’ and ‘a tenth-rate cad’
(James was not a man to provoke into insult). In March, Oscar wrote
to Whitman asking him to send a pamphlet for Swinburne, addressing
him as ‘My dear dear Walt’.
65
1886:
Geronimo surrenders to General Miles
The
popular image of Apaches, alas, probably remains one of squat
primitives. In fact, Apaches could be (a) huge, like the
terrifying Mangas Colorado, (b) ridiculously handsome, like the tasty
army scout Peaches. Apaches are now seen as victims: they were
singled out by the Spanish for persecution, they only fought for
their land, etc. While this is true, it has to be said that the
memoirs of Apache life that we have - such as Jason Betzinez’s I
Fought with Geronimo
(1959) - portray a culture of remarkable violence. The various
Apache bands were also riven by inter-clan feuding, and
military expeditions always found Apache recruits eager to help
attack rival bands.
Born
c. 1829, Geronimo’s original name was Goyathlay, ‘The Yawner’:
the name ‘Geronimo’ is said to derive from frightened Mexicans
invoking St Jerome when he attacked (his first wife and children were
killed by Mexicans). Apache agent John Clum described him in his
prime as ‘erect as a mountain pine. . . his stern features,
his keen piercing eye, and his proud and graceful posture combined to
create in him the model of an Apache war-chief’. By
1886, Geronimo had fought for about 40 years: he and his band of
30-odd warriors were being pursued by a quarter of the American army,
about 5000 soldiers. He sued for peace, and met General Crook under
truce. Crook had a photographer with him, and the resultant
photographs (google them) are the only known ones of Apaches dressed
to kill.
The
meeting did not end well. Geronimo ran off and peace negotiations
stalled. He finally surrendered to Crook's replacement, General
Miles, with whom Geronimo had a cautiously staged
encounter. Miles, says Geronimo, ‘told me how we could be
brothers to each other. We raised our hands to heaven and said that
the treaty was not to be broken. We took an oath not to do any wrong
to each other or to scheme against each other’. In truth, of
course, neither trusted the other. Miles had brought Geronimo
to heel with the new technology of heliograph signalling, and both
were well aware this was the end game. Miles described Geronimo as
having the 'clearest, sharpest, dark eye I think I have ever
seen, unless it was that of General Sherman
when he was at the prime of life. . . Every movement indicated
power, energy and determination. In everything he did he had a
purpose'. Said Miles to the old warrior: ‘I will take you
under Government protection; I will build you a house. . . I will
give you cattle, horses, mules, and farming implements. You will be
furnished with men to work the farm, for you yourself will not have
to work. . . If you agree to this treaty you shall see your family
within five days.’ Geronimo’s response was blunt: ‘sounds like
a story to me’.
What
Happened Next
Geronimo
was a dreadful whinger, always complaining, even when he was clearly
in the wrong, but the subsequent treatment of his band was very poor:
they were deported to Florida and eventually ended up in Fort Sill,
Oklahoma. Geronimo became much in demand at fairs, where he sold his
autograph, and rode with Quanah Parker and other Indian chiefs at
Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration in 1905 (Roosevelt met the chiefs
and gave them ‘wholesome advice’). Geronimo died in 1909 after a
drunken fall. For collectors of intriguing names, he had a son called
Robbie, a brother called Fatty, and a warrior called Fun (who shot
himself).
66
1887: Queen
Victoria tells Black Elk what would happen if the Lakota were
her subjects
Buffalo
Bill Cody first brought his Wild West Show to Britain in 1887, in
Queen Victoria's Jubilee Year. The show was a huge success, featuring
a cast of around 800 people, including Annie Oakley, Indians and
Indian fighters, cowboys, and such exotic beasts as bison,
elk and Texas longhorns. It was such a success that Cody returned in
1891-1892 (drawing £10,000 in revenue in Cardiff alone) and again in
1902 and 1904.
Remarkable
things happened during Cody's tours: when the show toured Germany,
Annie Oakley shot the ash from a cigarette in the hand of the future
Kaiser Wilhelm, and observed later in life that if her aim had
been worse, history might have been better (Victoria told Annie she
was 'a very, very clever little girl; Sitting Bull called her 'Miss
Sure Shot'). Some of the cast got lost along the way to romantic or
drunken encounters in such desolate places as Paisley and Hull,
and show members were constantly invited to take part in local
events, some of which were highly memorable in their own right:
Cody's manager, for example, was invited by Glasgow Celtic to
kick off at the start of a Scottish Cup tie against Dumbarton, the
game ending in what is still Celtic's worst-ever home defeat - by
eight goals to nil.
The
snootiest comment on the show's reception in Britain actually came
from an American, the poet James Russell Lowell, who attributed its
success to 'the dullness of the average English mind'. If so, it was
a dullness shared by Queen Victoria, who was entranced by the
Indians, in particular by the Lakota, who in turn revered her
as 'Grandmother England'. Canada was the grandmother's country, a
place of sanctuary patrolled by her soldiers who wore red coats so
the Indians could see them and know they were safe from the US
Cavalry. When Sitting Bull, who toured occasionally with the show in
the US, took his people across the border in 1877 he showed a Mountie
a medal given to an ancestor by the British for help in fighting the
Americans. For the Lakota, the British were old friends.
In
1905, during vicious divorce proceedings, Cody's wife Lulu alleged
that Victoria had made improper advances to Cody. Even in old age,
Cody was a fine-looking man, but this remarkable allegation has to be
unfounded; all observers are agreed that the man singled out by
Victoria for his looks (as testified in her diary) was that handsome
Lakota, Red Shirt, and as Black Elk notes in Black
Elk Speaks
(1932), the Lakota were much taken by her. After inviting the Lakota
to Windsor, she told Black Elk (Cody was perhaps not present)
that if the Lakota were her subjects, 'I would not let them take you
around in a show like this'.
The
1891 tour included a ceremony in Manchester to honour special
guests, the 19 surviving members of the Light Brigade. Also
present at this ceremony, though their presence was not highlighted,
were another 19 survivors, Lakota who had survived the previous
year's massacre of their kin by the 7th Cavalry at
Wounded Knee. The Lakota had been given into Cody's custody by the US
government. One of those survivors was Black Elk. who at the age of
12 had ridden beside his cousin Crazy Horse at the Little Big
Horn in 1876 in what the Lakota called the' Greasy Grass fight'
against Custer. Black Elk wrote about Wounded Knee: 'I did not
know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high
hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children
lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as
when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else
died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A
people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the
nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no centre any longer,
and the sacred tree is dead'.
What
Happened Next
Victoria's
beloved husband Prince Albert had died in 1862, and Victoria went
into a very long period of mourning that eventually affected the
popularity of the monarchy in Britain: even The
Times,
that imperious voice of the establishment, suggested that it might
now be time for the country to consider becoming a republic. Plays
and shows came by regal request to what Kipling called the
'Widow at Windsor', so when Victoria announced she would attend
Cody's show at Earl's Court there was great excitement. Her decision
to travel was possibly prompted by the thought of all those wild
animals making a mess of Windsor Park, but whatever the reason she
and her subjects thoroughly enjoyed themselves. The popularity of the
monarchy soared and talk of a republic receded. As for Black
Elk, he lived until 1950, a revered medicine man and an
acknowledged spokesmen for all Native Americans. Black
Elk Speaks
is regarded by many as a founding text of New Ageism, but despite
that doubtful endorsement, remains an enthralling, indeed
inspirational, text.
67
1889:
Nellie Bly Meets Jules Verne and gets a kiss (from Mme. Verne)
Elizabeth
Jane Cochran was born in 1864 in Pennsylvania. Her father, a judge,
died when Nellie was 4, leaving a financial mess behind him. At the
age of 18, Nellie read a piece in the Pittsburgh Dispatch saying that
women should keep to their proper ‘sphere’. She wrote a protest
letter to the editor which so impressed him, he commissioned a second
piece and hired her. She adopted the pseudonym ‘Nellie Bly’
(derived from a Stephen Foster song).
Nellie
proved to be not just a good writer but a brave investigative
reporter, and at one point was thrown out of Mexico by the government
for exposing corruption. In 1887 she was recruited by Joseph
Pulitzer for the New York World where she continued to push the
limits of what was acceptable for women reporters by getting
herself committed into a lunatic asylum to expose its horrors. And in
November 1889, in a stunt inspired by Jules Verne’s Around
the World in 80 Days
(1872), she set off from New York to travel around the world within
80 days, and in France took a detour to meet Verne. They met at
Amiens railway station, wth a translator (and Mme. Verne) in
attendance.
Verne
was amazed at how young Nellie was and asked about her route. She
said: ‘My line of travel is from New York to London, then Calais,
Brindisi, Port Said, Ismailia, Suez, Aden, Colombo, Penang,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York’ (Nellie
was travelling light - two small cases, a reliable timepiece and some
good flannel underwear).
Verne
asked why not visit Bombay, as Phineas Fogg had done: ‘‘Because
I am more anxious to save time than a young widow’, I
answered. "You may save a young widower before you return”,
replied the gallant (smiling) Verne.
Then,
in a passage somewhat startling for the modern reader, Nellie
records that Verne’s wife ‘put up her pretty face’ for a kiss.
‘I stifled a strong inclination to kiss her on the lips, they were
so sweet and red and show her how we do it in America. My
mischievousness often plays havoc with my dignity, but for once I was
able to restrain myself, and kissed her softly after her own fashion’
(see also 1882:
Oscar Wilde gets a kiss from Walt Whitman).
Says Nellie: ‘I had traveled many miles out of my way for the
privilege of meeting M. and Mme. Verne, and I felt that if I had gone
around the world for that pleasure, I should not have considered the
price too high’.
What
Happened Next
Nellie
actually did the trip in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes, a world
record, and when she arrived back in New York she had become probably
the most famous woman in the world. She was greeted with fireworks
and brass bands, but not with the financial bonus she reasonably
expected from her employer. Nellie’s experiences on her
voyage had appeared daily in the World and were followed eagerly by
much of the (lower-case) world as well as America. Nellie resigned in
indignation, but returned to the World in 1893, and became a
leading instrument of reform, exposing sweatshop oppression of women
and the struggles of unmarried mothers. She died in 1922, mourned by
thousands whose lives she had helped change for the better.
68
1890:
Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement share a room
.
. .for 10 days. which is a bit longer than our other brief encounters
but they were very busy men and did not spend much time together -
and some of the time Casement was away escorting ‘a large lot of
ivory’. The Dublin-born Casement (his family were Protestant,
but his mother secretly baptised him as a Roman Catholic at the age
of three) began working for colonial enterprises in the Congo in
1884, beginning with the Belgian King Leopold’s
International Association, and by 1890 was operating a trading
station at the port of Matadi. The Polish-born Conrad
became a British national in 1886, the year he gained his master’s
certificate. By 1890 he was an experienced seaman, and had been
shipwrecked in Sumatra. Conrad was tough - he also survived shooting
himself in the chest aged 21, in a failed suicide attempt.
Conrad
and Casement liked each other. Conrad wrote in his diary: ‘Made
the acquaintance of Mr Roger Casement, which I should consider as a
great pleasure under any circumstances and now it becomes a positive
piece of luck. Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very
sympathetic’ In the next few words, Conrad speaks of avoiding
whites ‘as much as possible’, but this is no reflection on
Casement: Conrad knew the dangers of false observation and later
wrote to Casement cautioning him against accepting false tales of
limb amputation as normal punishment among the ‘natives’).
Casement described Conrad to a friend as ‘a charming man . .
.subtle, kind and sympathetic’.
The
year they met was also the year that Conrad served as mate on Congo
steamer, a voyage that resulted years later in Heart
of Darkness (1899)
- and in the nightmare river trip in the Vietnam movie based on
that novel, Apocalypse
Now
( 1979).
What
Happened Next
The
two men later corresponded and briefly met once more, in 1903,
when Casement had a ‘delightful day’ at Conrad’s home near
Hythe. By then Conrad was one of Britain’s leading writers, while
Casement was a career diplomat. Casement’s damning report into the
horrors of Belgian administration in the Congo was published the
following year in 1904 (Conrad had earlier, in the letter quoted
above, advised Casement to reject any attempt at blaming atrocities
on Congo customs) As quite a few Irish people of his class and
caste did, Casement embraced the armed struggle of Irish
Republicanism, and was executed by the British for treason in 1916.
He had tried to recruit Irish POWs in Germany to fight the British;
only a very few signed up, and a chastened Casement returned to
Ireland, convinced the Rebellion would fail. He landed by German
submarine, and was soon captured,
Conrad
strongly disapproved of what he regarded as Casement’s treachery,
but also wrote:’ I judged that he was a man, properly
speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was
all emotion. . .A creature of sheer temperament - a truly
tragic personality'. Casement’s so-called ‘Black Diaries’, in
which he described in some detail his homosexual activities, were
long dismissed as a forgery in Ireland but are now widely
acknowledged to be genuine.
FROM
ONE WORLD WAR TO ANOTHER (20TH
CENTURY TO 1945)
69
1900:
Winston Churchill and Winston S. Churchill discuss their names
In
1900, the 26-year-old Winston Churchill was an ex-soldier with a
fine record of active service, a distinguished war reporter and had
taken part in the last British cavalry charge at Omdurman (though a
war correspondent, he rode with the Lancers) was the author of
several books, had escaped from a Boer prison camp, and had been
elected Tory MP for Oldham. Instead of going to the opening
of Parliament, however, Churchill took himself off on a speaking
tour. He needed money, and his agent promised that the tour would
earn him over £10.000 in a month (not an improbable figure. he had
already earned over £4000 that year speaking in England). He landed
in America in December 1900.
His
welcome was variable; he was drolly introduced by Mark Twain in New
York thus: ‘Mr Churchill by his father is an Englishman, by his
mother he is an American, no doubt a blend that makes a perfect man.'
but he was heckled at many events by citizens outraged at
Britain’s perceived oppression of the Boer (and the Irish).
Standing
in the wings was another Winston Churchill: Winston Churchill the
29-year-old author of the current bestselling historical novel
Richard
Carvel
(1899). The two men, alert to the possibility of book-trade
confusion, had already corresponded, with British Winston writing to
American Winston thus: ‘Mr Winston Churchill presents his
compliments to Mr Winston Churchill and begs to draw his attention to
a matter which concerns them both"). British Winston suggested
that in future he would sign his books ‘Winston S Churchill
thus happily settling the matter (British Winston’s grandson,
however, an ex-Tory MP, has also published under the name of ‘Winston
S. Churchill’)
They
finally met in Boston, inevitably being introduced: ‘Mr
Churchill, Mr Churchill’. They had dinner, and discussed American
Winston’s new novel The
Crisis
(not to be confused with British Winston’s later history The
World Crisis)
British
Winston felt there was not enough warfare in The
Crisis
for a novel about the American Civil War: ‘put more fighting
in it’, he said. A Boston
Herald
reporter asked British Winston how he was getting on with his
namesake: ‘we have become very good friends’, he replied.
‘What
Happened Next
British
Winston asked his new friend: Why don’t you go into politics? I
mean to be Prime Minister of Britain: it would be a great lark if you
were President of the United States at the same time’. American
Winston became a member of the New Hampshire legislature and even ran
for governor, but his political career never took off. None of his
novels are now in print. Churchill and Twain had an interesting
encounter on the evening Twain introduced him to New York: both men
were alpha talkers and great smokers, and retired to a room for some
private conversation. When they emerged from the room, they were
asked if they had a good time together: Churchill said ‘Yes’,
Twain (possibly still joking) said ‘I have had a smoke’.
70
1906:
Mark Twain meets Maxim Gorky and talk of making Russia free
When
the two great writers Gorky and Twain met on 11 April 1906, they
inspired a striking headline in The New York Times: GORKY AND TWAIN
PLEAD FOR REVOLUTION. Gorky had been internally exiled in Russia
for his political beliefs, and was now a prominent member of Lenin’s
faction within the Social Democratic Party, on whose behalf he
travelled to the US to raise funds.
What
was called an ‘American auxiliary movement’ to bring about
freedom in Russia was launched at a 5th Avenue dinner in honour of
Gorky, at which Gorky himself and Twain were the principal speakers.
Said Twain: Let us hope that fighting will be postponed or averted
for a while, but if it must come I am most emphatically in sympathy
with the movement now on foot in Russia to make that country free’.
Responded Gorky: ‘Mark Twain. . . is a man of force. He has always
impressed me as a blacksmith who stands at his anvil with the fire
burning and strikes hard and hits the mark every time. I come to
America expecting to find true and warm sympathisers among the
American people. . . Now is the time for the revolution. Now is the
time for the overthrow of Czardom. Now! Now! Now! But we need the
sinews of war, the blood we will give ourselves. We need money,
money, money. I come to you as a beggar that Russia may be free’.
New
York’s rich and poor eagerly donated to the Bolshevik cause, but
this unlikely idyll of Russo-American friendship quickly ran aground
on the rock of American propriety. The
New York Times
asked Mrs Gorky if she had acted in her husband's plays. ‘Long
ago’ she replied. ‘At present I am just my husband's wife,
nothing else, and I don't wish to be before the public in any other
capacity’. But the American public was shocked to discover that the
Gorkys were not legally married. They were married by Russian custom,
but that was not good enough for New York hotels. As Twain’s
patrician friend William Dean Howells said (from a lofty height):
‘The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who
was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she
were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those
aspects of human nature’. All talk of the Russian revolution
evaporated in the heat of what was called the ‘domestic interest’
of the situation.
What
Happened Next
A
few days later came news of the San Francisco earthquake, and
scandalised reports on the Gorkys ceased as the papers filled with
news of the disaster. Gorky spent the next seven years in comfortable
exile (mostly in a Capri villa of the sort later favoured by Gracie
Fields) and took revenge on New York by writing a story entitled The
City of the Yellow Devil.
See also 1900:
Winston Churchill and Winston S. Churchill discuss their names; 1920:
Lenin disappoints Bertrand Russell
71
1910:
Patrick Pearse thinks Arnold Bax is ‘one of us’
Dublin
in 1910 was a culturally vibrant city: 12 years later, in Paris, the
greatest novel of the 20th century, Joyce’s Ulysses would
be published (see 1922:
Proust, Joyce, Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Picasso share a night at the
Majestic),
and though none knew it in 1910, the setting for that novel was the
Dublin of six years ago, on 16 June 1904.
Joyce’s
earthy Dublin, however, had little in common with the popular world
of Celtic myth - a cultural phenomenon deriving its common name
from Yeats’ story collection, The
Celtic Twilight (1893). Young
romantics such as the English composer Arnold Bax were enraptured by
all things ‘Celtic’. Bax was later to be described by one Russian
critic as ‘the Celtic voice in English music’; in 1902, he
toured Ireland with his brother and wrote fey prose and poetry of the
sort indistinguishable from that produced by hundreds of other pale
young men and women throughout Britain and Ireland (one of the best
of those women poets, Fiona Macleod, was actually a man, William
Sharp, who donned a nice frock to write Celtic poetry). Much of
what we think of as ‘Celtic’ was actually invented during this
period, even, indeed, the name ‘Fiona’, which was Sharp’s
invention.
Bax
wrote under the name of ‘Dermot O’Byrne’ (he later called his
children Dermot and Maeve), and settled in Dublin, where one of his
neighbours was the poet ‘AE’, George Russell. In the manner of
the era, Russell hosted a salon in his house, where every Sunday,
intellectuals could gather and chat. Many of the guests were
prominent nationalists. One evening when Bax was present, he met
Padraig Pearse. Bax was fascinated by Pearse, who had recently
edited the Gaelic League’s newspaper, and had been doing sterling
work for years in spreading Gaelic culture and education. Pearse and
the young Englishman had a shared love of Ireland’s west country,
and when Bax left Pearse told another guest: ‘I think your friend
Arnold Bax may be one of us. I should like to see more of him’.
1910
was to be a crucial year for Pearse. By ’one of us’ Pearse
meant someone for whom Gaelic culture was tied into Irish
nationalism. For Pearse, as for many other nationalists of the
time, Irish mythological heroes such as Cuchulainn were figures
to inspire heroic acts, and religion also became an increasing
influence: nationalists should regard Christ’s sacrifice and
redemption as an example (Pearce would have loved Mel Gibson's
blood-soaked movies). As Ruth Dudley Edwards said, Pearse's
heroes 'died painful deaths’. Yeats said of him: ‘a
dangerous man; he has the vertigo of self-sacrifice’.
What
Happened Next
In
1913, Pearse became a co-founder of the Irish Volunteers, a
paramilitary organisation founded in response to the anti-home
rule Ulster Volunteers He died in the Easter Rising of 1916 and is
still regarded by many in the way he wanted - as a revolutionary
martyr. Bax later described Pearse as ‘leader of Ireland for a
week’. Bax accepted (with mixed feelings) a knighthood in
1937 and became Master of the King’s Musick in 1942. One of his
last works was a Coronation March for Elizabeth II.
72
1914:
Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke Ferdinand and his Duchess
In
one of Geoffrey Household's short stories, a man recollects how he
inadvertently caused World War I by directing the assassin Gavrilo
Princip to the exact spot where he is able to shoot Archduke Franz
Ferdinand (and his Duchess Sophia) on that June day that changed the
world forever. The actual assassination did indeed only happen
through fortuitous (as it were) circumstances. Princip
was an ill 19-year-old man with tuberculosis who was devoted to the
cause of Serb nationalism. He belonged to ‘Young Bosnia’, a group
of Serbs dedicated to the overthrow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s
rule in the Balkans, and received training in the dark arts of
sabotage and killing by the Serb secret society popularly known as
the ‘Black Hand’ (or more prosaically, ‘Union or Death’),
who provided the ordnance for the deed.
Franz
Ferdinand, in his capacity as inspector general of the imperial army.
paid an official visit to Sarajevo, and arrived in Sarajevo railway
station at 10 AM on 28 June. This is St Vitus’ Day, a day sacred to
many Serbs: exactly 525 years previously, the Serbs had suffered a
catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Ottomans at the battle of
Kosovo. The symbolic importance of the day contributed to the resolve
of a bunch of would-be assassins waiting for Ferdinand, consisting
of Princip and five others. When Ferdinand’s motorcade passed, one
of the gang threw a fizzing bomb that Ferdinand actually warded off
with his arm, and which went under the car following
before exploding. The injured were taken to hospital.
Ferdinand
and his group arrive at Sarajevo Town hall and debated what to do
next. Amazingly, Ferdinand - after trying to persuade his wife not go
along - decided they should go back long the same route and visit the
hospital where the wounded were being treated (there is a photograph
of them entering the car for the return journey). On the
way back - for reasons that are still unclear - Ferdinand’s
chauffeur took a wrong turning and managed to stop just beside a
surprised Princip who pulled out his automatic pistol - as fate would
have it, Ferdinand’s bodyguard was on the other side of the car -
and shot first Sophie and then Ferdinand, his two bullets severing
arteries in both victims. Ferdinand called to Sophie, ‘Don’t die!
Live for our children’, and said ‘It is nothing’ when asked if
he was in pain. They died in minutes.
What
Happened Next
At
his trial, Princip denied wanting to shoot Sophie. Her killing
was an ‘accident’. He was too young to execute, and
was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Austria-Hungary declared war on
Serbia on July 28, which led to other treaties being called in, and
so World War I began. Princip became a hero to many Serbs, and his
pistol shots set off a war in which around 15 million people died
before its end in November 1918. Princip died of his
tuberculosis earlier that year, in April.
73
1914:
Pancho Villa shares a photo opportunity with Emiliano Zapata
The
decade-long Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was bloody, with death
toll estimates ranging from between one to two million. Several
revolutionary leaders were assassinated, including the two everyone
has heard of, Zapata and Villa.
Pancho
Villa’s fearsome military abilities had taken him from
banditry and cattle rustling to major revolutionary figure in a
few short years.
The
other great revolutionary player in Mexico, the ex-sharecropper
Emiliano Zapata, was as committed to the revolution, but was
less concerned with killing people than with setting up
redistribution commissions, and had drafted a scheme for constitution
land reform, the ‘Plan de Ayala’.
Villa
may well have been the most media-savvy revolutionary of all time,
and is certainly the first to have signed exclusive contracts with
a movie company, and to have delayed a battle until the
newsreel cameras got into position. Villa and Zapata’s forces
were separated: Villa was based in the north whereas Zapata’s
Liberation Army was fighting in the south, and the lands
between the revolutionary-controlled territories were held by the
Federales, under the control of unpredictable and often highly brutal
generals.
The
two men finally met on 4 December, on the outskirts of Mexico City,
and agreed to an alliance prior to occupying the city. Villa, always
alert to a good photo opportunity, posed with Zapata in a frequently
reproduced photograph taken in the National Palace. Easily found on
the web, and replete with overt and symbolic meaning, the photograph
shows Villa sitting on the presidential throne - which Zapata
modestly declined to sit on - beaming off-camera to
his right while angled slightly towards to his left, where Zapata
bends in towards Villa. Zapata has a sombrero on his knee (one of
several splendid hats in the picture) and they are surrounded by a
mixed bag of followers whose features range from Indian to Spanish,
and who look like the mixed bag of cut-throats, intellectuals and
excitement seekers they are, the base material of revolution (Villa’s
psychopathic general Rodolfo Fierro, a truly nasty individual, is
there also).
What
Happened Next
Villa
and Zapata formed a loose alliance - all Mexican revolutionary
alliances in this period were loose - against the constitutionalist
politician Carranza, whom they accused of seeking to become dictator
(Carranza was elected president in 1915 and was assassinated in
1920). Villa - whose troops were not as disciplined as Zapata’s -
was obliged to leave Mexico City early in 1915, eventually retiring
(more or less) in 1920. He was assassinated in 1923. Zapata was
assassinated in 1919, but in the early 21st century the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation had established control of part of the
Mexico state of Chiapas, and Zapata himself has become identified
among some of his Mayan people as a divinity.
74
1918:
Fanny Kaplan shoots Lenin
Much
about Fanny Kaplan remains uncertain, even her first name. She may
have been born Vera, and was also known as Dora. She may also have
had some connection with the British secret service spy ‘Sydney
Reilly; - the notorious ‘Ace of Spies’ - but the early
20th-century revolutionary waters she inhabited were full of currents
of rumour, allegation and ad hoc alliances. Speculation apart,
however, Fanny’s political background shows her to be a classic
revolutionary of her time and place. Born in 1883 into a peasant
family, she was Jewish at a time when there were severe restrictions
on Jews in Russia, and when Jewish activists operated at every level
of resistance.
Fanny
joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was wounded in 1906 when
transporting explosives in Kiev - the explosives were to be used to
blow up a Tsarist official. She was deported to Siberia, where she
languished in ill health for 11 years, only being released after the
February Revolution of 1917, which established a Constituent
Assembly. In October, the Bolsheviks seized power, and to the
amazement of Russian progressives, the assembly that Russians had
struggled and died for over the course of many decades of great
sacrifice, was simply dissolved in January 1918 by Bolshevik diktat.
In
August 1918, Fanny - who was undoubtedly aware of precedent
(see 1793: Charlotte
Corday assassinates
Marat)
- accosted Lenin in the street. She challenged him briefly about the
Bolshevik tyranny, then shot him twice. Under interrogation, Fanny
expressed no remorse and said that Lenin had betrayed the Revolution
by dissolving the Constituent Assembly.
What
Happened Next
In
1918, revolutionary sentiment and sympathy were still factors to be
reckoned with among the new Bolshevik rulers, and Krupskaya -
Lenin’s widow - denied with tears in her eyes that Fanny had
been executed. In fact, she was shot in September and her body was
ordered to be destroyed, ‘without trace’. The attempted
assassination is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history. A dead
Lenin would almost certainly have meant the end of the Bolshevik’
grip on power, as the grip was Lenin’s iron grip. Lenin died in
1924, with one of Fanny’s bullets still in his neck. By this date,
the Revolution’s power structures - most particularly Lenin’s
Cheka, the organisation which dealt ruthlessly with perceived
subversion, were firmly in place. At the time of Fanny's
execution, the Red Army’s newspaper called for a war without mercy
and for the shedding of ‘floods’ of bourgeois blood, and in
the immediate aftermath of the execution, thousands more - many of
them old socialists - were murdered during the Red Terror. During the
Civil War period of 1918-1921, hundreds of thousands of ‘state
enemies’ were to be summarily executed. And millions more were to
die in the purges and famines of the 1920s and 1930s. See 1920:
Lenin disappoints Bertrand Russell.
75
1920:
Lenin disappoints Bertrand Russell
According
to T S Eliot’s widow Valerie, her husband was once told by a London
taxi driver: ‘Only the other evening I picked up
Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: “Well, Lord Russell, what's
it all about?”, and, do you know, he couldn't tell me’.
The anecdote, which is paid tribute to in Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976), illustrates
how the philosopher became, for many, one of the few men who seemed
to know everything.
In
1920, Russell travelled to Russia as part of a ‘fact-finding’
trade delegation. Russell was a leading pacifist and socialist, but
he found little to praise in the communist experiment taking place in
Russia. He met a ‘heartbroken’ Gorky (see 1906:
Mark Twain meets Maxim Gorky and talk of making Russia free),
who was backing the Bolsheviks because he feared what might replace
them; he begged Russell to keep in mind while making his
judgment, ‘always to emphasize what Russia has
suffered’.
Russell
also met Lenin. In his autobiography, Russell records that he found
Lenin ‘disappointing’ and glimpsed an ‘impish cruelty’ in the
man. Later, he was to go further and told Alistair Cooke that he
believed that Lenin was the most evil man he ever met: ‘He had
steady black eyes that never flickered. I hoped to make them flicker
at one point by asking him why it was thought necessary to murder
hundreds of thousands of kulaks. He quite calmly ignored the word
“murder”. He smiled and said they were a nuisance that stood in
the way of his agricultural plans’ (Six
Men,
1977).
Many
other socialists came to Soviet Russia from the 1920s to the early
1980s, prepared to see a workers’ paradise and often
came away convinced they had found it. Russell described such views
as a ‘tragic delusion’, and set out his comments in The
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1921).
It is typical of Russell’s intellectual honesty that he knew the
book would be welcomed by his political opponents in Britain, and
would cause offence to fellow socialists, but published it
anyway. Lenin’s new Russia was not a paradise, but a new variety of
hell. Said Russell: ‘the time I spent in Russia was one of
increasing nightmare, Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution,
formed the very air we breathed. There was a hypocritical pretence of
equality, and everybody was called 'tovarisch', but as Russell
pointed out, ‘comrade’ meant one thing when addressed to a
peasant, another when addressed to Lenin.
What
Happened Next
Other
British socialists visited Lenin, including H G Wells, who described
Lenin as a man who laughed a lot, but whose laugh was ‘grim’.
Russia was a despotic regime, concluded Wells. Trotsky
described Wells as ‘condescending’ and (the inevitable insult)
‘bourgeois’, but Wells and Russell are still read, and the USSR
has long gone. See 1918:
Fanny Kaplan shoots Lenin.
76
1922:
W E Johns enlists Aircraftman Ross
W
E Johns was the creator of one of the most popular figures in
children’s fiction: the pilot Biggles, hero of no fewer than 102
books (Biggles starts off in biplanes and ends up flying
jets in the 1960s). Johns had fought at Gallipoli in 1915, aged
22. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, and while
training wrote off three aircraft in three days, through no fault of
his own (it has been suggested that Johns may have destroyed 10
British aircraft in training, which would have qualified him as a
German ‘Ace’).
He
became a bomber pilot in what was now the Royal Air Force in July
1918, and was shot down in September. His observer was
killed and Johns, who somehow survived his goggles being shot to
pieces, was wounded in the leg, and only narrowly escaped execution
by firing squad. After the November Armistice, he returned to his
family - who thought he was dead - on Christmas Day.
Johns
became an RAF recruiting officer, and in 1923, in the Covent Garden
office, interviewed a man called John Hume Ross who wanted
to enlist as a mechanic. Johns quickly decided Ross was a ‘suspicious
character’. He was in poor health, had no identification, no
references, and was clearly trying to enlist under an assumed name;
Johns rejected him. ‘Ross’, however, was actually one
of the most famous men in the world: T E Lawrence, Lawrence of
Arabia. Lawrence was tired of his fame, and wanted to hide in the
RAF. For many years, it was assumed that Lawrence had managed to fool
everyone when enlisting, but in fact he had prepared his admission
into the RAF by clearing it with Air Marshall Sir Hugh Trenchard,
asking to enlist ‘in the ranks, of course. . . the newspapers used
to run after me and I like being private’. Trenchard agreed, but
wondered ‘whether it could be kept secret’.
When
Lawrence arrived to sign up, he was supposed to be met by
a chap called Dexter, who was to sign him up ‘no questions asked’.
Unfortunately, he got Johns, whose rejection was quickly
overruled: a message arrived, signed, says Johns, by ‘a very high
authority, ordering his enlistment’. Thus Lawrence of Arabia became
John Hume Ross, Aircraftman Second Class (A/C2) No. 352087.
What
Happened Next
As
Trenchard guessed, the newspapers found out. Lawrence was discharged,
then re-enlisted in the tank corps, as T E Shaw. He lasted two years,
then got back into the RAF after threatening to kill himself. At
every stage he was helped by his many admirers, ranging from
the socialist George Bernard Shaw to old imperialists such as John
Buchan. Lawrence left the RAF in 1935, and was killed a few weeks
later, in a motorcycle crash. Johns became a hugely
successful novelist and has been bizarrely caricatured - by
people who have never read the books - as a reactionary who
trivializes war. In fact, Johns portrays aerial combat as a brutal
business, and makes clear that everyone should be treated the same,
regardless of creed or colour; Biggles speaks Hindi and despises
racism. In 1940, Johns also created a heroine, Worrals of the WAAF, a
female equivalent of Biggles who takes no sexist nonsense from men,
and features in 11 novels.
77
1922:
Proust, Joyce, Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Picasso share a night at the
Majestic
In
1922, the English novelist Sydney Schiff (who wrote under the name of
Stephen Hudson) had one of the best cultural ideas of his time:
he and his wife would host a party to which would be invited the
leading cultural modernists of the day. Richard Davenport-Hines,
whose book A
Night At the Majestic: Proust & the Great Modernist Dinner Party
of 1922 (2006)
is the definitive guide to the occasion, describes the Schiffs as
‘the first celebrity stalkers’, though Proust was the main
target: Schiff rather scarily described him as the ‘only man I like
and I don’t intend to like any other’.
Schiff
was wealthy, cosmopolitan and well-connected: the party was arranged
for the Majestic hotel, Paris, 18 May, 1922 (Schiff wanted the Ritz,
but the Ritz banned music after midnight). Schiff seized the
opportunity presented by the premiere that evening of Stravinsky’s
ballet Le
Renard, performed
by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in order to stage the
gathering. Among those attending were the French novelist Marcel
Proust, Irish writer James Joyce, Russian impresario Serge
Diaghilev, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and Spanish artist Pablo
Picasso.
The
Schiffs were anxious to see if their ‘lions’ would all appear.
Diaghilev had made sure of his Ballets Russes colleagues Picasso and
Stravinsky, but Joyce and Proust were notoriously unreliable and were
not present for the dinner. Joyce arrived in time for the
coffee, apologised to the Schiffs for being late and also for having
no formal clothes. The Schiffs didn't care: Joyce’s
novel Ulysses had
been published two months earlier in Paris, and rumours about its
greatness were abundant. He could have come in dungarees, for
all the Schiffs cared, though they would have doubtless preferred him
sober. Joyce was drunk.
An
immaculately dressed Proust rolled in about 2.30 AM. He used to be
known as ‘Proust of the Ritz’, but, if not quite a recluse
now, his gadabout days were long gone. Proust and
Stravinsky began to chat, at which point a princess, annoyed by
rumours that one of Proust’s characters was based on her, flounced
out of the room. Flustered, Proust asked Stravinsky if he liked
Beethoven. ‘I detest Beethoven’ said an irritated Stravinsky, and
at this point Joyce (who had lost consciousness) began to snore
loudly.
Joyce
(when he woke up) attached himself to his fellow writer for the rest
of the evening, but as Proust’s biographer William Carter says,
‘the creators of Leopold Bloom and Charles Swann had little to say
to each other’. Later, Joyce would tell a friend that he didn't
rate Proust: ‘I have read some pages of his. I cannot see any
special talent but I am a bad critic'. Joyce’s later versions
of the encounter vary a lot; Proust never spoke of it.
Picasso and Diaghilev - sadly but perhaps wisely - don't seem to have
mingled much with others that evening.
What
Happened Next
Schiff
later tried to persuade Proust to sit for Picasso, but with no
success. Proust had only six months to live, and the time was
possibly shortened when at the end of the party Joyce - by now
thoroughly blootered - jumped into a taxi with the Schiffs and
Proust, and started smoking. Proust somehow managed to be
allergic to both smoke and fresh
air, and Joyce was not invited into Proust’s
apartment. The party was over.
78
1923:
Thomas Hardy entertains the Prince of Wales
Born
in 1840, the young Thomas Hardy watched public executions in
Dorchester, and lived to write verses about Einstein in the 1920s. In
the course of his long life, however, a life filled with many
remarkable encounters, probably the oddest happened in July 1923.
In
1923, Hardy was a bestselling novelist whom many ‘modern’ writers
and critics also rated highly, and was something of a national
institution. He corresponded with young guns such as Ezra Pound and
was visited by Lawrence of Arabia (see 1922:
W E Johns enlists Aircraftman Ross ).
At 82, he began to study Einstein and noted, in June 1923,
"Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will
be’. He already believed that necessity governed the universe, not
chance. While Edward, Prince of Wales, was visiting the English
West Country, says Hardy’s biographer Claire Tomalin, someone in
Edward’s entourage, whether through necessity or chance remains
unknown, came up with ‘the bright idea that the visit might
be more entertaining’ if the Prince had lunch at Thomas Hardy’s
house in Dorset.
This
was never going to be a jolly encounter. Florence, Hardy’s wife,
found the idea of entertaining the prince and his retinue fairly
scary, but Hardy was blasé about the whole thing, suggesting to his
sister Kate that she could hide in ‘the bedroom behind the
jessamine - you would then see him come, and go: we could probably
send you up a snack’. Edward said to Hardy: ‘My mother
tells me you have written a book called Tess
of the d’Urbervilles.
I must try to read it some time'. This seems an appallingly rude
thing to say, but Edward, like others of Victoria’s descendants,
somehow failed to inherit her ability to be at ease with others (see
1887: Queen
Victoria tells Black Elk what would happen if the Lakota were
her subjects).
Edward was not the first nor the last royal to be no gentleman. Also,
he was not a reader: when given a copy of Wuthering
Heights,
he said ‘Who is this woman Brunt?’
Edward
ascended with his valet to a bedroom and Florence looked out of a
window in time to see a scrunched up waistcoat fly out of the
bedroom They all had lunch together (Edward waistcoat-less)
under the trees, and everything went quite well - as Tomalin says,
someone had the good sense to lock up the Hardys’ bad-tempered
terrier.
The
encounter amused many contemporaries, and inspired a neat little Max
Beerbohm poem in the Hardy style: ‘A Luncheon’: ‘. . .
Yes, Sir, I’ve written several books. . .\ We are both of us aged
by our strange brief nighness \But each of us lives to tell the tale.
\Farewell, farewell, Your Royal Highness.’
What
Happened Next
The
next day, the Hardys motored over to visit the great apostle of birth
control, Marie Stopes. Hardy died in 1928, mourned by a nation.
Edward became Edward VIII but abdicated his throne in 1936 for love
of Wallis Simpson; he then became the Duke of Windsor, and possibly
also less of a Philistine, but sadly, there was no one left to pick
his company for him except Wallis. See 1937:
The Windsors meet Hitler and the Duke gives a Nazi salute
79
1927:
the Einsteins visit the Freuds
By
1927 both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud had become household
names, the pinnacles of the powerful Jewish element in
German-speaking culture: Freud, aged 70, was the world’s leading
psychologist, Einstein (a sprightly 47), was the world’s leading
physicist, indeed scientist. Albert and Elsa Einstein
heard that the Vienna-based Sigmund and Martha Freud were also in
Berlin to visit family at the end of 1926, and arranged a
visit in the New Year.
The
Einsteins stayed for two hours. Freud said afterwards to a friend
that he and Einstein had a very pleasant chat together, though
their fields of study were mutually incomprehensible: Einstein, said
Freud, understood as much about psychology as he in turn understood
about physics.
For
Einstein, in fact, psychoanalysis just didn't make sense; he didn't
see how it could be useful. Not long after the meeting, a
friend suggested to Einstein that psychoanalysis might be
useful for him, and Einstein responded with ‘regret’ that he
would not be taking up the suggestion and he would like to remain in
the ‘darkness’ of having never been psychoanalysed;
Einstein’s own son, Eduard, was mentally ill, and he and
Elsa seem never to have even considered the possibility of seeking
advice from Freud. Einstein told a friend that he had no need for
help from the ‘medical side’ for Eduard’s condition and judged
it best to ‘let nature run its course’. Freud himself had a son,
Oliver (named after Oliver Cromwell), whom he diagnosed as having
‘obsessional neurosis’.
What
Happened Next
The
two remained in contact after their 1927 meeting. Einstein was driven
out of Berlin by the Nazis in 1929, and when, in 1932, the
League of Nations asked Einstein to pick a partner with whom to
reflect on a great issue of the day, Einstein choose the question ‘Is
there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’, and
the partner he chose (as a correspondent) was Freud. Freud’s
response surprised everyone by being quite cheering: we are
aggressive so we hunger for war, but we also love, so we want peace -
and peace would win out in the end, Einstein looked to international
action and laws to solve the war problem. The discussion resulted in
a book called Why
War?, published
in 1932 by the League of Nations. The Nazis came to power in 1933,
and the book was publicly burned in the streets of Berlin. Freud was
eventually driven out of Vienna following the Nazi annexation of
Austria in 1938. See 1938:
Salvador Dali sketches Sigmund Freud.
80
1931:
Gandhi meets Chaplin in
a Christian pacifist centre
In
1930, Mahatma Gandhi defied the might of the British Empire by
publicly breaking the ‘salt law’, the British monopoly on the
Indian salt trade. Gandhi was already a world figure, with millions
of people sympathetic to his anti-colonial tactic of non-violent
civil disobedience, but the salt protest electrified public opinion
everywhere.
After
a brief imprisonment, Gandhi was unconditionally released in March
1931 (over 100,000 followers had also been arrested), and the British
government agreed a truce with Gandhi, who sailed to London to attend
a conference on India's future.
Thousands
flocked to see Gandhi, and every celebrity-hunter in the realm wanted
to speak to him. Charlie Chaplin had come to London for the
premier of his film City
Lights,
and at dinner with Winston Churchill, told him of his intention to
visit Gandhi (who was completely unaware of Chaplin and had never
seen a movie). An attendant lord snapped that Gandhi should have been
kept in jail. Chaplin responded that if so, another Gandhi would rise
to defend India (Churchill - who never liked Gandhi and argued with
him at the conference - told Chaplin sarcastically that such
views would make him a good Labour MP.
Chaplin’s
attitude towards Gandhi was in fact complex. He thought Gandhi's
magic worked better at a distance, and that it was a mistake to come
to Britain in his iconic loincloth. Chaplin was invited to meet
Gandhi, who was receiving visitors at a Christian pacifist centre in
the East End, Kingsley Hall (Gandhi wanted to live ‘among the
poor’; his spartan room at Kingsley Hall - home of the
Gandhi Foundation - can still be viewed today). Chaplin
told Gandhi that he was wholly in sympathy with him on Indian
independence, but was confused by his ‘abhorrence of machinery’.
Chaplin said that if machinery was used for the good of mankind, to
make the working life more efficient and thus release leisure
time in which people could improve their minds and ‘enjoy life’,
then it must be a good thing.
Gandhi
smiled and pointed out that machinery had made Indians dependent on
the British; it was now the ‘patriotic duty’ of Indians to weave
their own cloth, a solution obviously impracticable for Britons, but
possible for Indians; the British climate necessitated industry and
an ‘involved economy’. Independence would come through shedding
‘unnecessary things’; violence and oppression would inevitably
self-destruct. Chaplin - like many others before him - realised that
Gandhi was not just some sort of airy-fairy pontificator, but a
shrewd and highly skilled negotiator. Chaplin stayed for prayers, and
reflected on the ‘paradox’ of this religious yet ‘extremely
realistic’ man’
What
Happened Next
Gandhi
met many other notables on his 1931 visit: several bishops, lords,
his old adversary General Smuts, an east-end pearly king and queen,
George Bernard Shaw (who told Gandhi ‘I am Mahatma Minor’), and
the education reformer Maria Montessori. Chaplin’s
satire on modern industrial processes, Modern
Times (1936),
is regarded by many as deriving from Gandhi’s influence, though
Chaplin himself says his inspiration came from a Detroit
assembly-line worker’s views on the dehumanising nature of the
assembly line.
81
1933:
Giussepe Zangara shoots at President Franklin Roosevelt
Assassins
need luck (see 1914:
Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke Ferdinand),
and Giuseppe Zangara was simply very unlucky when he tried to
assassinate the newly elected president Roosevelt. Zangara
was an Italian immigrant, a bricklayer, and had become convinced that
the US president was causing him internal pains, a perhaps not
uncommon delusion at any time(Herbert Hoover had been his original
intended victim).
When
he discovered that Roosevelt was giving a speech in Miami, Zangara
joined the crowd watching the end of the parade, and stood on a chair
(Zangara was five feet tall) to get Roosevelt into the line of
fire. Roosevelt was exhausted. The American public did not know that
Roosevelt was a post-polio paraplegic, and it was only with great
difficulty that he had managed to raise himself in the car to
respond to the cheering crowd. Just after the car stopped, only yards
away from the waiting Zangara, Roosevelt slumped back in his seat,
saying to a newsreel cameraman: ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do
it’.
Zangara opened
fire and managed to get off five or six shots at his now out-of-sight
target, while struggling with members of the crowd who began tackling
him. The whole episode lasted five seconds. Roosevelt was unhit, but
five others were shot, including Mayor Cermak of Chicago. Cermak
subsequently died of his wounds, and the fact that Cermak was a noted
enemy of Al Capone led to wild speculation that he had been the real
target all along. Zangara, despite being clearly mad, was sent
to the electric chair. His last words were ‘Pusha da button’, and
he is one of the few assassins (or wannabe assassins) to feature in a
musical: Sondheim’s Assassins.
What
Could Have Happened Next?
Perhaps
the only certain answer to a ‘What if?’ question is Mao Zedong’s
response to the question: ‘what if Khrushchev had been
assassinated, not Kennedy?’ Mao said that whatever else may have
happened, he was quite sure Aristotle Onassis would not have married
Mrs Khrushchev. But while Kennedy’s vice-president - the Texan
Lyndon B Johnson - proved, improbably, to be one of the
great American reformers, it is hard to see Roosevelt’s
vice-president – another Texan, John Garner - being a similar
surprise. Roosevelt once asked Garner what he would do if the Cubans
shot an American, and Garner responded ‘depends
on the American’. This sounds witty, but Garner was probably not
intending to be witty. More chillingly, when the great black
contralto Marion Anderson sang at the White House in 1939
for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Garner is said to have
refused to clap and sat with his hands by his side. If Zangara’s
luck had been in, this man would have been US president. He was
furious when Roosevelt ran for a third term in office, and ran
unsuccessfully against him in the Democratic primary of 1940. Garner
does become president in a 1999 Superman comic, Superman:
War of the Worlds
(after Roosevelt is killed by Martians). In this unappealing parallel
universe, the British PM is Oswald Mosley.
82
1936: Adolf
Hitler waves to Jesse Owens
The
story of Jesse Owens is one of the most inspiring stories in American
history. As part of the United States team competing in the 1936
Berlin Olympics, he braved the hostility of the Nazis to triumph with
four gold medals. Hitler himself refused to shake hands with Owens,
and stormed out of the stadium in disgust at the sight of a black man
defeating the cream of the Aryan race.
Jesse
Owens was indeed an inspiring figure and did indeed win four golds
at the Berlin Olympics, but the rest of the preceding paragraph is
not true. Not only is this myth not true, it has become practically
an alternative reality to the extent that Owens eventually gave up
trying to restore the true version of events; the mythical version
was just too powerful, particularly in terms of American history. The
myth is disproved by both the contemporary Nazi record, and by Owens’
own testimony. The photographs within the official German
publications of the event, such as Olympia
1936,
actually celebrate the multiracial harmony among the athletes.
Asians, blacks and whites stand smiling side by side, and
there is even a touching photograph of Jesse Owens and the
great German athlete Luz Long lying on the grass together, the very
model of warm friendship between races, and a photograph for which it
would be difficult to find many equivalents in the US of 1936. It
could easily pass for a 60s Coke advert.
Owens’
story that Long, in a remarkable gesture of sportsmanship, noticed
that Owens technique was faulty, and advised him on how to avoid
fouling his leaps in the long jump, has been doubted, but they
obviously liked each other (and Hitler adored Long). Owens won
the long jump, and the stadium photograph shows Owens saluting with
his hand to his head while Long gives a Nazi salute a step below him.
They walked off together, arm-in-arm (during WWII Long was badly
wounded in Sicily in 1943, and died in a British hospital).
Admiration
for Owens was widespread in Germany: the Berlin crowd gave him huge
ovations, and Leni Riefenstahl - Hitler’s favourite director
- gave Owens equal godlike status with the white athletes in her
documentary, Olympia (1938). As
for Hitler’s attitude to Owens, Owens says: ‘When I passed the
Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I
think the writers showed bad taste in criticising the man of the hour
in Germany’.
What
Happened Next
Owens
has been crticised for giving conflicting accounts of what happened
in Berlin, but this is unfair: Owens found himself custodian of a
powerful myth he did not create, a myth that America was comfortable
with. The fact that the American Olympic Association cowardly dropped
two Jewish sprinters from the contest was quietly forgotten, as was
the fact that when Owens returned to the States, President Roosevelt
refused to meet him, on the grounds that honouring a black man would
lose him votes. Roosevelt, not Hitler, snubbed Jesse Owens.
83
1937:
The Windsors meet Hitler and the Duke gives a Nazi salute
Edward,
Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII in January 1936. By then,
Edward had become a bit better at interacting with his subjects
than he used to be (see 1923: Thomas
Hardy entertains the Prince of Wales),
though not everyone was happy with the appearance of this new young
king - Betjeman’s poem ‘Death of King George V’, describes
Edward VIII, the first monarch to fly, landing at London airport,
where ‘Old men who never cheated’ stare at a young man
landing ‘hatless from the air’.
The
forebodings were justified. Edward was in love with an American
divorcee, Mrs Simpson, and only ruled for 327 days, abdicating in
December with the words ‘you must believe me when I tell you that I
have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility
and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the
help and support of the woman I love’. In the streets, the children
sang: ‘Hark, the herald angels sing, / Mrs Simpson’s pinched our
king’.
The
two lovers went into exile and became Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
They became a real embarrassment to Britain in 1937, by visiting
Adolf Hitler in his Berchtesgaden retreat. The Nazi propaganda
machine gleefully publicized the visit, which managed to unite most
of British opinion - except the far right - in dismay, particularly
as the duke enthusiastically gave both ‘full’ and
‘modified’ Nazi salutes. The duke’s stated intention for
visiting Germany - to examine German solutions to unemployment - was
regarded as ludicrous by most observers, who also mostly regarded the
duke’s behaviour as naive, but it is entirely possible that in
putting himself forward as a friend of Germany, Edward was also
putting himself forward as a possible future ally of the Nazis in any
conflict with Britain. This was a view held by many in both Germany
and Britain, though it seems probable that at the meeting, Hitler and
the duke did no more than exchange banal pleasantries. The only
public comment Hitler seems to have made about the Windsors was
that Wallis would have made a ‘good queen’. Hitler probably only
said this to annoy the British. Rumours of Wallis’ infidelities
abounded, and even diehard monarchists in Britain blanched at the
thought of Wallis becoming queen. Wallis seemed to some to be rather
like a former British royal, George IV's wife Caroline
(see 1810: Tom
Molineaux fights Tom Cribb; 1815: Jane Austen visits the Prince
Regent’s librarian).
What
Happened Next
WWII
happened next, in 1939, in which context, for Britain, Edward
was a potentially major irritant. The duke was known to favour a
‘negotiated peace’ with Hitler, and was thus packed off in 1940
to become governor of the Bahamas - a position Churchill
thought was sufficiently harmless for this loose cannon. He died in
Paris in 1972; Wallis also died in Paris, in 1986.
84
1938:
Salvador Dali sketches Sigmund Freud
The
great surrealist painter Dali was obsessed with dreams and their
significance: Freud was the great explorer of the unconscious, the
man who had claimed to reveal the hidden, unconscious drives behind
our actions and beliefs, and had also unlocked the keys to the inner
landscape of the sleeping mind in The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
a book Dali studied with close attention in 1925. So although
Dali and Freud should possibly have been in touch more often, in fact
they only met once, in the unlikely setting of North London, where
the Freuds stayed briefly on arriving in London in 1938, after
fleeing Vienna in June.
Freud
received many visitors in London, though he was probably proudest to
receive officials from the Royal Society, who brought - in an
unprecedented gesture for someone who was not the monarch - the
Society’s charter for him to sign as he was too ill to travel. A
stream of writers and celebrities came to visit Freud, including HG
Wells (Freud wrote to Wells saying he was now fulfilling his
childhood fantasy of becoming an Englishman) and old friends such as
Princess Marie Bonaparte and the writer Stefan Zweig; the latter
arranged for Salvador Dali to visit Freud, and Dali came along
with his wife Gaia and the art collector Edward James, who brought
along Dali's work, The
Metamorphoses of Narcissus, a
work inspired by Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci.
The
meeting was slightly strained: Dali, who saw Freud (consciously) as a
father figure, thought Freud a bit 'cold' and may even have
been a bit in awe of Freud, who observed quietly that if Spaniards
commonly looked like Dali, it was no wonder they had a civil war. He
also told Dali that he felt the work of the surrealists
compared unfavourably with that of the old masters: when looking at
great works of the past, he said, one looks for the unconscious, but
with surrealist art, one looks for the conscious. He does seem to
have been pretty impressed with the Dali painting, however, and later
said that although he had previously dismissed surrealists as 'nuts',
Dali's visit had made him reconsider.
The
meeting also produced a masterpiece. While conversing, Dali was also
quickly and quietly sketching Freud, and he subsequently worked up
the sketch into a pen-and-ink drawing, which is proof in itself
of Dali’s real talent. Freud was dying of cancer, and he was
not shown either the sketch or the finished drawing - Zweig
felt it showed the great man's imminent death too clearly.
What
Happened Next
Freud
died in September 1939, after the family had become established at 20
Maresfield Gardens, Primrose Hill, which became the Freud family home
until Anna Freud’s death in 1982. It is now the Freud Museum, and
contains Dali’s drawing of Freud, and many fascinating artefacts -
including the famous ‘consulting couch’. See
1927:
the Einsteins visit the Freuds
85
1939:
Abel Meeropol sings 'Strange Fruit' to Billie Holliday
It
has been argued that popular song rather than cinema is the great
20th-century art form, and it is certainly the case that
the lives of many westerners are soundtracked with memories of songs,
from Chevalier and Dietrich to Andy Williams and the Stones. While it
is true that many of these songs may remind you of young and happy
moments, it is also fair to add that most of them have nothing
terribly profound to say. There are some magnificent exceptions,
however, and 'Strange Fruit', first recorded by Billie Holliday in
1939, is one such exception.
It
is still a common assumption that Billie Holliday wrote the song, or
perhaps adapted an original text, but this is not the case and
the story of the song's creation is now undisputed. (Holliday's
authorship is asserted in her 1956 ghostwritten autobiography,
Lady
Sings the Blues,
but the work was ghostwritten to the extent that she would later
claim 'I ain't never read that book').
The
original source is a poem called 'Strange Fruit', written by the
young Jewish poet and communist Abel Meeropol (who also wrote under
the name of Lewis Allan, the first names given to his still-born
children). The poem was inspired by a 1930 photograph of the
lynching of two young black men in Indiana. Copies of such
photographs from the 1920s and 1930s were very popular in the
American south, and the images can be easily found on the web. One
particularly disturbing example shows a mother and her child hanging
from a bridge. In many cases, the hanged victims are surrounded by
happy whites, smiling and waving at the camera. They sometimes have
their children with them. The horrible truth is that in large parts
of the US the hanging of black people in public was a family
occasion; lynching was part of the social fabric of the American
south in the early 20th century. 'I wrote "Strange Fruit",
said Meeropol, 'because I hate lynching, and I hate injustice, and i
hate the people who perpetuate it'.
Meeropol recognized
that he had written something that could make his fellow white
citizens more aware, and decided he had to turn it into a song, which
quickly became a popular protest song in New York (and was sung
at Madison Square Gardens by Laura Duncan), prior to Meeropol turning
up in April 1939 at a New York club frequented by Holliday
called Cafe Society. This club, founded by another Jewish socialist,
Barney Josephson, has been described as a 'milestone' in American
integration between black and white, a brave attempt at creating an
environment in which white and black could mix socially.
It
was Josephson who introduced the two: Meeropol sang the
song for Holliday who, Josephson would later say, seems at
first not to have understood 'what the hell the song was about', with
its ironic reference to 'pastoral' and the 'gallant south'. A few
days later, Meeropol returned to the club to hear Holliday sing his
masterwork: 'She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective
interpretation of the song which could jolt the audience out of its
complacency anywhere. This was exactly what I wanted the song to do
and why I wrote it. Billie Holliday's styling fulfilled the
bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have.
The audience gave a tremendous ovation'.
What
Happened Next
Released
in 1939, the record eventually sold over a million copies
and became one of the most influential protest songs ever written,
thanks to its exceptionally rare combination of potent lyrics, a
decent melodic line and a beautiful voice. Protest song became
commercial as well as an expression of idealism: the song is thus
arguably the first major popular blow for civil rights, a song
that previously non-political citizens could find themselves
humming: just what Meeropol hoped would happen.
Meeropol
also wrote (with Earl Robinson) the civil rights anthem 'The House I
Live In' in 1943, which was used for a 1945 11-minute movie of the
same name, which consisted largely of Frank Sinatra singing
about religious tolerance to (white) children. The effect of
Meeropol's song in this brief movie - the song enjoyed a
brief resurgence in the US after 9/11 - was somewhat lessened by the
removal of a stanza celebrating racial harmony (the reference to
white and black living side by side was also cut from Sinatra's first
recording of the song). The movie's distributor felt that America was
not yet ready for an explicit message on racial harmony. A furious
Meeropol had to be escorted from the cinema when he saw what been
done to his song.
In
1953, Meeropol and his wife Anne adopted Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's two children after their parents' execution for treason.
Meeropol's significance to the American civil rights movement has
been largely underplayed in the US, perhaps because it
remains too embarrassing to give due credit to a communist.
See
also 1946: Beryl
Formby tells Daniel Malan to piss off
86
1940:
Franco and Hitler confer in a train
Meetings
between dictators are unlikely to be joyous occasions for the rest of
us, but occasionally such meetings are unpleasant for at least one of
the participants, and such was the case with the notorious October
1940 meeting between Franco and Hitler on a train
stationed at Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish
border. It was the only time they met.
Hitler
had of course given Franco decisive help during the civil war; the
raid on Guernica by Nazi bombers had become (and remains) for many
one of the defining images of modern warfare (thanks in part to
Picasso’s 1937 painting). Hitler could thus reasonably feel he was
due payback from Franco.
The
dictators will have been well aware of each other's agendas and the
possibility of disastrously conflicting interests. Most
notably, Franco will have been keen to acquire France’s
colonial territories in northern Africa, which Hitler’s ally, Vichy
France, equally certainly would not want to give up.
The
meeting was thus meant to decide the extent to which Franco’s
fascist Spain would help Hitler’s Germany during WWII and
it remains a much-debated encounter. It has been argued, for example,
that Hitler may not even have really wanted Spain as a full-blown
partner: Spain had a large army but was still weak from
the aftermath of the Civil War, and if Spain came in on Hitler’s
side but was then overrun by the Allies, the Nazis would
face a strategic nightmare. Hitler may well have believed
Spanish neutrality was the best bet for him, and wanted to
keep Franco out.
Franco
subsequently liked to claim that he had deliberately kept Spain out
of the war despite Hitler’s entreaties; but some historians argue
that Franco wanted in, as in 1940 Hitler looked a winner.
This is a busy little niche of modern history and the question will
likely be never settled. We do know it was a very hard
bargaining session, and Hitler later declared that he would rather
have three or four teeth pulled than go through another negotiating
session with Franco.
What
Happened Next
Unlike
Hitler and Franco, the train in which they met still exists, as a
museum piece. After the meeting, Franco maintained a cautiously
informal neutrality that became less cautious and more pro-Allies as
the war progressed. In 1943 he finally declared Spain’s full
neutrality, a blatant display of realpolitik. When the war ended and
the Cold War began, Franco found western powers
perfectly willing to accept him as an associate ally (his
dispatch of volunteers - the ‘Blue’ division - to
fight the Russians did him no harm in some post-war quarters (the
volunteers were recalled to Spain in 1943). Franco does have one
thing in his favour: he protected Sephardic Jews (descendants of Jews
expelled from Spain in 1492) throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. A
Spanish fascist passport meant immediate protection in Europe
throughout the war, and Franco’s policy may have saved the lives of
over 45,000 Jewish refugees.
87
1945:
L Ron Hubbard possibly meets Aleister Crowley
Religions
are often associated with deserts, and Los Angeles has long
been associated with both cultural desertification - ‘there is no
there, there ‘ (Gertrude Stein) - and the creation of cults,
religions in embryo. The black magician Aleister Crowley had mystic
communities in many places, including Los Angeles, where his devotees
included the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who, it is said, would
invoke the god Pan before rocket launches (the unwary should note
that much information on occultists - printed or on the web - is
suspect).
Crowley’s
mother called him ‘The Beast’, a title he happily adopted, as he
did with the British press’s description of him, ‘the wickedest
man in the world’ (rumours about Crowley’s awful practices
abounded, and some of them were even true). Parsons introduced a
young science fiction writer, Ron Hubbard, to the LA satanic
community. It is said that Parsons brought Hubbard and Crowley
together. The extent of any possible acquaintance is debated, and
while some believe Hubbard and Crowley definitely met - Hubbard later
described Crowley as a friend - others regard a meeting as
improbable. Several sources say they met in 1945, though it was in
January 1946 that Parsons wrote to Crowley, according to The
Sunday Times in
1969, telling him about this wonderful new novitiate called Ron
(Hubbard had maybe moved in with Parsons in May 1945; this saga is
one of unreliable narration). Parsons told Crowley he planned to
‘incarnate’ a ‘moon child’ with Hubbard’s help.
Crowley responded with this rather dubious tribute: ‘ I thought I
had the most morbid imagination but it seems I have not. I cannot
form the slightest idea what you can possibly mean’.
Adherents
of Scientology, the religion Hubbard later founded, describe
Hubbard’s venture into Crowley’s weird world as a rescue mission.
He wanted to save a young woman from the cult, while critics
of Scientology play up the association, but by April 1946
Hubbard had run off with Parsons’ girlfriend or had saved her,
depending on your point of view; and Crowley was writing to Parsons
telling him he had been conned.
What
Happened Next
Crowley
died in 1947; Parsons blew himself up in his lab in 1952;
Hubbard officially founded the Church of Scientology in 1953.
Hubbard’s son has stated that his father told him that the day
Crowley died, scientology was born. It has been claimed that Hubbard
derived inspiration from Crowley’s occult system. For example, the
Greek word ‘theta’ occurs in Crowley’s system; in scientology,
the word ‘thetan’ means (approximately) soul; and as has been
delightfully noted, ‘thetan’ sounds like ‘Satan’ said with a
lisp. Crowley was the source for the magician in the classic MR James
story, 'Casting the Runes', and appears on the cover of the Sergeant
Pepper album (Crowley has long been an important reference point for
many rock musicians; Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s home beside Loch
Ness, whose monster had been long forgotten when the Beast moved
there in 1900; see c.
563: Columba preaches to Bridei, King of the Picts (and tells
Nessie to behave)
MODERN
TIMES (20th
CENTURY FROM 1946)
88
1946:
Wittgenstein possibly waves a poker at Popper
Philosophy
belongs to the world of ideas, while waving a poker about
traditionally belongs to other spheres of human life. However, on one
famous occasion, philosophy and a poker came together.
Ludwig
Wittgenstein was one of the greatest 20th-century philosophers, and
was very likely also the only one who knew how to work a howitzer,
having served in the Austrian army in WWI (he was decorated for
bravery). Karl Popper was 13 years younger than Wittgenstein, was
also Jewish, Viennese, and a product of the fading culture of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was also a renowned
philosopher. Popper’s The
Open Society and its Enemies,
a strong defence of the virtues of western, liberal democracy, had
just been published in 1945.
Yet
they had never met before their encounter at the Cambridge Moral
Science Club - and they were never to meet again. The club was a
venue where college dons and students could meet and discuss
philosophy. On this October night the heavyweights were out in force
to hear Popper, the guest speaker, give a paper entitled ‘Are There
Philosophical Problems?’, the club’s chairman, Wittgenstein, was
present, as was Bertrand Russell (see 1920:
Bertrand Russell meets Lenin),
Popper
spoke for about 10 minutes, Wittgenstein left when Popper finished.
The essential guide to this most controversial 10 minutes in
philosophy is Wittgenstein’s
Poker (2001)
by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. The philosophical disagreement
between Wittgenstein and Popper was fundamental. For Wittgenstein,
philosophy was about the nature of language; the so-called ‘problems’
of philosophy were simply to do with misuse of language. For Popper,
philosophy was about morality, about life, how we live together.
A
rumour spread quickly that the two men had duelled with pokers:
Popper stated in his 1974 autobiography that Wittgenstein had been
waving a poker, making emphatic gesturers with it, while asking
Popper for a ‘moral rule’. Popper suggested that a good rule
would be ‘not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers’,
whereupon Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out of the
room.
What
Happened Next
Wittgenstein
died in 1951, but had already challenged Popper’s widely circulated
version of the poker evening. It seems quite possible that
Wiggenstsein did wave a poker: academics in full flow often employ
props, but it seems improbable that Wittgenstein used it in any
threatening manner. As for leaving early, he was easily bored
and often left meetings early. There have been several versions of
the poker incident from the philosophers present, and
disciples of both men inevitably became involved. The awful
implications of such basic disagreement - among such observers - with
regard to the reliability of personal testimony, are often commented
upon. Wittgenstein may share another odd connection with
Popper. Wittgenstein was at school with Hitler in Linz 1903-1904
(there has been speculation that he is the ‘Jewish boy’ mentioned
with hatred in Mein
Kampf),
and it has been suggested that Hitler - while a struggling artist -
may have benefited from a charity that Popper’s father contributed
to.
89
1946: Beryl
Formby tells Daniel Malan to piss off
George
Formby's movies were popular in England and in the USSR (he was
awarded the Stalin Prize in 1944) but perhaps not elsewhere very
much. In fact, though admittedly more watchable than Norman Wisdom
movies, which were popular in England and Albania, they are extremely
irritating, and when George gets amorous, a bit disturbing. The Fast
Show's 'Arthur Atkinson' character - with his ludicrous catchphrases
and unfunny 'business' - has made it very difficult to take the
popular entertainers of Formby's generation seriously.
But
in fact, as the playwright Dennis Potter kept insisting, British
popular music from the 20s to the 40s was as good as any popular
music anywhere, ever, and Formby was a performer of some genius. His
use of double entendres may be largely for those who like that sort
of thing, but he could entrance the demanding music hall audiences of
his day, even the fearsome Glasgow Empire.
In
1946 George and his wife Beryl (also his manager) flew to South
Africa, Beryl as usual demanding the best of everything. The
tour organizers were not sure how to promote George,
and publicized him as 'the male Gracie Fields' (over 20,000 fans
greeted them in Cape Town). The head of the National Party, Daniel
Malan (who two years later would introduce apartheid), sent the
Formbys a note telling them not to perform to coloured audiences.
Beryl tore up the note and the Formbys declared war on the National
Party, causing profound regime shock by performing 20 shows for black
audiences. Beryl was famously mean, but the Formbys took not a penny
for the shows. Crisis came when a black child came on stage at one
show and gave Beryl a box of chocolates: Beryl picked her up and
kissed her, then passed her to George, who did the same, causing an
immediate sensation. Next day Malan sent a delegation giving the
Formbys a 'final warning', and of course Beryl slammed the door in
their face. So Malan phoned Beryl and began to berate her: Beryl, at
her most magnificent, simply said 'Why don't you piss off, you
horrible little man?' and hung up. The Formbys were thrown out of
South Africa.
They
visited again in 1955 (Malan had served as prime minister 1948-54)
and defied death threats to again perform before black audiences for
free. The South African government was incensed, but there was little
they could do but fume. The Formbys had fought the rulers of South
Africa and won.
What
Happened Next
From
the inception of apartheid in 1948 to its abolition in 1991, the
South African government drew much succour from the visits of western
entertainers who were prepared to play to segregated audiences. The
Formbys visited both before and after apartheid was given legal
formulation, and demonstrated that it was possible to beard the
Beast in its lair and give succour to its victims. Alas, however,
very few of the British performers who were to tour South
Africa from then until the end of apartheid took the same defiant
stand of non-compliance with inhuman laws (Dusty Springfield
being another notable exception). The furious reactions of Malan and
his associates to the open defiance of the Formbys shows clearly how
important such gestures could be, and not just in South Africa. In
1955, Marilyn Monroe made a significant breach in the wall of
racial discrimination in the US when she persuaded the owner of
the Mocambo Hollywood nightclub to allow Ella Fitzgerald to perform
on stage - by promising to take a front table for herself every
night. In 1955, this was still a brave thing for an American white
woman to do; but Monroe, like the Formbys, was prepared to make
a stand.
See
also 1939:
Abel Meeropol sings 'Strange Fruit' to Billie Holliday.
90
1948:
Mary McCarthy reprimands Lillian Hellman
One
of the longest-running and most famous literary feuds ever was
between two writers who only met once, but fired at each other from a
distance for decades like battleships - out of sight but within
range.
The
dramatist Lillian Hellman was born in 1907, and wrote several
fine plays, such as The
Children's Hour (1934),
possibly the first Broadway play to tackle lesbianism, and The
Little Foxes (1939).
The novelist Mary McCarthy was born in 1912, and is now best
known for The
Group (1963),
a novel about the ambitions and sex lives of a group of Vassar
graduates. Both women were politically active and joined in many of
the leftist campaigns of the 1930s. and although they may have
been in the same room together at different points, their 1948
encounter is the only certain face-to-face encounter.
The
poet Stephen Spender was teaching literature at Sarah Lawrence
College in New York, and asked his (all female) students which women
writers they would like to meet. they nominated McCarthy and Hellman,
and both accepted Spender’s invitation to meet the students.
McCarthy arrived late, and stood at the back of the room (she said,
perhaps optimistically, that Hellman mistook her for a student). She
was in time to hear Hellman tell the students that the novelist
John Dos Passos had only made a short visit in 1937 to Spain during
the Spanish Civil war, and abandoned the Loyalist (socialist) cause,
because he didn’t like Spanish food. An incensed McCarthy
exploded. She later wrote that Hellman was trying to brainwash the
students, and described the comment on Dos Passos as
‘vicious’. She broke in and told the students: ‘I’ll
tell you why he broke with the loyalists, you’ll find it in his
novel, The
Adventures of a Young Man,
and it wasn’t such a clean break’. The Dos Passos novel,
detailing the progress of a young idealist disillusioned with
communism, reflects the experiences of many contemporary socialists,
such as McCarthy and George Orwell. McCarthy says Hellman began to
‘tremble. . . it was a very dramatic moment of someone being caught
red-handed’. According to Spender, the enmity between the two women
was already an old one.
What
Happened Next
Whatever
her other faults may have been, Hellman gave a magnificent
response to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952:
‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s
fashions’. But it was not just McCarthy who accused her of being
less than truthful: the accepted original, Muriel Gardiner, for
‘Julia’ in Hellman' 1973 memoir Pentimento (Jane
Fonda played Hellman in the subsequent movie, Vanessa Redgrave played
‘Julia’), said she had never even meet Hellman. The feud became
world news when McCarthy, in a 1980 episode of the Dick
Cavett Show, said of Hellman: ‘I once said in an interview
that every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and
'the'". Hellman responded with a lawsuit for libel,
but died in 1984 before the case came to court. The feud is the
subject of Nora Ephron’s musical play Imaginary
Friends (2002).
91
1956:
Eric Newby meets Wilfred Thesiger in a mountain pass in Afghanistan
In
early 1956, Eric Newby was working in the fashion industry, trying to
sell a poorly designed dress to sceptical buyers (‘’it
was not only a hideous dress; it was soaking up money like a
sponge’). Newby, a decorated veteran of both the Black
Watch and the Special Boat Squadron, enjoyed the fashion business,
but decided to accept ten years of advice to quit and resigned. He
then sent a telegram to his diplomat friend Hugh Carless, ‘CAN YOU
TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?’
Until
the 1890s, Nuristan, that part of Afghanistan enclosed by the Hindu
Kush (‘Hindu Killer’) mountains, was called Kafiristan: ‘The
Land of the Unbelievers’. The region was little known to anyone,
and had changed little since Kipling used the place for the setting
of his short story, ‘The Man Who Would be King’. Carless
said yes, and discovering that neither knew how to climb, they
went to Wales to practice; luckily the waitresses at their inn were
experienced climbers and taught them the rudiments.
The
expedition was actually quite dangerous. The mountains of the
Hindu Kush are not far off 20,000 feet high, and the locals were
possibly even more of a threat. After a harrowing session on the
mountains, they headed for Kabul by descending into the
Lower Panjshir, where the two amateurs encountered the genuine
article, the great explorer Wilfrid Thesiger. Thesiger was 46, and
Newby’s description of the man sums him up well: a ‘throwback to
the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who.
. .apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life
among primitive peoples’. In the 1930s Thesiger crossed the Arabian
Empty Quarter twice, and was the first European to traverse the
hostile Danakil country in Abyssinia. During WWII, he led SAS raids
behind German lines in North Africa.
In
exploring terms, Thesiger belongs, as Newby said, to an
older, imperialist school, a hard world in which shooting lions,
crocodiles and bandits was normal, whereas Newby is among the
first and certainly one of the finest (and funniest) of the modern,
ironic school. Yet Thesiger would have rejected Newby’s
use of the term ‘primitive peoples’, for Thesiger, the people he
preferred to be with, far from being 'primitive', were the best of
people, people for whom generosity, simplicity, and courage were
everyday virtues. Thesiger told his new companions about the
medical treatments he dispensed on his travels, which included
surgery such as finger amputations (‘hundreds’), and just a
few days previously, an eye removal. An exhausted Newby and Carless
began pumping up their airbeds on the ‘iron’ ground. Said
Thesiger: ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies’.
What
Happened Next
Newby’s account
of working as a seaman in 1938 on the last merchant sailing voyage
between Britain and Australia, The
Last Grain Race,
was to be published later in 1956, establishing him immediately as a
travel writer of note. Thesiger’s ‘God, you must be a couple of
pansies’ is the last line in Newby’s account of the Nuristan
adventure, A
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958),
which includes Thesiger's photograph of the two 'failures'. Thesiger
died in 2003, Newby in 2006.
92
1958:
Luis Bunuel asks Alec Guinness to be his lead actor
Of
the many ‘might have been’ movies in the history of the cinema,
one of the most intriguing is the movie the great Spanish director
Luis Bunuel might have made with one of England’s greatest actors,
Alec Guinness. performing the lead role in a film version of
Evelyn Waugh's dark little satire on the Los Angeles funeral
business, The
Loved One (1948).
This movie would certainly have been different from the surrealist
gem Bunuel made with Salvador Dali, Un
chien andalou (1929),
but would equally certainly have been a very interesting film.
Before
leaving for Mexico to attend the 1958 Film Festival, Alec Guinness
received the film script. Guinness
and Waugh had met three years previously at Edith Sitwell’s
reception into the Roman Catholic church (both men were themselves
converts). Waugh and Guinness took to each other, and the notoriously
foul-tempered Waugh later wrote to a friend ‘I liked Alec Guinness
so much’. The script was a Bunuel project, and had been partly
written by him, and when Guinness arrived in Mexico City Bunuel
visited him to discuss his possible involvement. Bunuel began their
meeting by telling Guinness that he had asked some critics how they
liked the music in his last film: they responded that it was
‘wonderful’. ‘I promise’, Bunuel said to Guinness, ‘there
is not one note of music in the movie’. Guinness had a similar
impish sense of humour, and described Bunuel’s film ideas about The
Loved One
as ‘very simple, true to the novel ands yet sometimes daringly odd.
. . We got on well and I was thrilled at the prospect of working with
him’.
Alas, the
film was never made; possibly, as Guinness believed, because the film
rights were not acquired in time. Instead Tony Richardson directed a
version which came out in 1965, and which few Waugh aficionados like:
as far removed, thought Guinness, ‘from the factual, debunking
spirit of Waugh as a flying saucer’.
What
Happened Next
Bunuel
and Guinness never worked together, which is a loss to cinema.
Spiritually and intellectually, they had much in common with each
other and indeed with Waugh. Religion was deeply important to all
three. Bunuel observed that he was ‘an atheist, thank God’, Waugh
- after Edith Sitwell’s reception - wrote to a friend ‘I know I
am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the faith’, a
comment that Guinness’s biographer Piers Paul Read says could
perhaps also be made of Guinness. See also 1978:
Alec Guinness has lunch with ‘M’.
93
1960: Fidel
Castro wins the Ernest Hemingway prize
In
1960, the tenth annual International Marlin Fishing Tournament earned
a place in history by being a rare example of a national
sporting competition being won by the head of the country, the
prime minister, Fidel Castro.
The
marlin competition had been founded in 1950 by Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway was a competitive soul, and as Michael Palin
observed, was ‘never really happy with any activity unless some
sort of contest was involved’. Marlin fishing was important to
Hemingway, who had moved to Cuba from Key West in 1939. The
contest was founded not long before Hemingway wrote his novel
about an old Cuban fisherman grappling with a huge marlin he has
caught - The
Old Man and the Sea (1952). In
the novel (there is a fine movie version starring Spencer Tracy and a
big fish) the old fisherman, Santiago, straps the marlin to the side
of the boat and heads back for home, fighting off sharks who strip
the marlin to the bone. The marlin would sell for a lot in the
market, but Santiago thinks no one is worthy of eating it
anyway. The duel between the man and the marlin is what matters,
not the fish’s market value.
In
1960, the tournament was named after Hemingway, a decision
Hemingway was not entirely happy about. He called the renaming ‘A
lousy posthumous tribute to a lousy living writer’. Even some great
admirers of his work had suggested that the post-war Hemingway was in
danger of becoming self-parodic - what Hemingway saw as correct
male behaviour was increasingly seen as macho posturing - and
Hemingway’s response to the renaming suggests he may not have been
unaware of the danger of his talents simply fading.
Castro
loved fishing too, and was delighted to be the (no doubt worthy)
winner of the competition, and the fact that it was now named after
Hemingway undoubtedly added flavour to the victory. He regarded
Hemingway as an inspirational figure, and described Hemingway’s
novel about the Spanish Civil war, For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),
as a key influence on the Cuban revolutionary struggle.
There
are several photographs of the awards at the end of the tournament,
and one particularly good one by the revolutionary photographer
Osvaldo Sales, showing, as, Hemingway’s niece Hilary said, the ‘two
most famous beards’ of the age together at last. The event
concluded with Hemingway presenting Castro with the winner’s
cup. It was the only time the great revolutionary met the great
writer, and it is said they exchanged ‘pleasantries’.
Hemingway, in truth, was not that sympathetic to the Cuban
revolution, but refrained from criticising Castro in public. He
regarded such behaviour as ungentlemanly, if not unmanly.
What
Happened Next
Hemingway
left Cuba in 1960, settled in Idaho, and shot himself in 1961. Castro
went to become the world’s longest-running head of state, but seems
to have won no more fishing competitions. Marlin are still fished for
by tourists in Cuba, but are nowadays tagged and released instead of
being killed.
94
1963:
Josephine Baker stands beside Martin Luther King
One
of the world’s most famous, popular and influential
American-born dancers was also a war heroine with a life
worthy of Hollywood - and being black, was pretty much
unknown in the US until the 1950s. Josephine
Baker was born in St Louis in 1906. She became a vaudeville performer
in her teens, and travelled to Paris in 1925 as a member
of La Revue Nègre. African-American jazz was popular in 1920s Paris,
and Baker quickly established herself as a popular performer on the
cabaret scene.
African
art of all kinds was sold at the time on its sensuality; Baker’s
stage performances as a dancer added wit, humour and
simple clowning to the mix; she was beautiful, clever, talented, made
people laugh, and sometimes wore a skirt made of feathers. Paris
loved her, and she soon opened her own club - Chez Josephine. She
also, in 1927, starred in a movie, La
Sirène de Tropiques (a
not highly rated film, but it does show her dancing in her prime -
early film of Baker can usually be found on YouTube).
During
WWII. Baker worked in exile for French military intelligence and in
1946 was awarded the Rosette de la Resistance and became a knight of
he Legion d’honneur. Baker retired in the mid-1950s to look after
her 12 adopted children, her ‘rainbow tribe’ (her only child was
stillborn in 1941) and fell upon hard times. She performed in
America, but resolutely refused to perform before segregated
audiences, even though she needed the money (Princess
Grace of Monaco was among her benefactors).
In
1963, Baker joined the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’
and stood beside Martin Luther King on the platform, She wore her
Free French uniform and her Legion
d’honneur medal.
Other prominent black female entertainers on the march included
Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, and Mahalia Jackson. Baker was
the only woman - white or black - given a chance to speak, as
she introduced Rosa Parks and other ‘Negro Women
Fighters for Freedom’ to the crowd, which she charmed
the crowd, as she had done throughout her career, with her humour:
standing next to Martin Luther King, she told the crowd they were
‘salt and pepper’ - just what it should be’. No one that day
put it better.
What
Happened Next
As
happened with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the American newspapers
initially largely failed to see - despite the proximity of the
Lincoln Memorial - the significance of the march, and
made little mention of any of the speeches, even King’s speech. And
while King’s speech is now remembered for ‘I have a dream’,
King, like the other speakers, was actually talking hardball for most
of the time: ‘There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America
until the Negro is granted his citizenship’. Baker died
of a stroke in 1975, and was given a state funeral in Paris. See
also also 1939:
Abel Meeropol sings 'Strange Fruit' to Billie Holliday; 1946: Beryl
Formby tells Daniel Malan to piss off
95
1963:
Bill Clinton shakes the hand of President John F Kennedy
The
16-year-old Bill Clinton went to Washington in April 1963 as a
delegate for ‘Boys Nation’, a civic training organisation set up
by the American Legion. Each delegate received a handshake from
the president, and archive film and photographs show Kennedy and the
young Clinton shaking hands and beaming at each other - an
actually quite rare example of a current US president meeting a
future one when young. Clinton’s presidential ambitions are
generally said to date from that handshake (the other great influence
on Clinton was Martin Luther King, whose ‘I have a dream’ speech
he memorised).
Kennedy
- who had recently returned from Europe - gave a speech to the boys
in the White House Rose Garden, addressing them as ‘Gentlemen’
and told them that ‘ I recently took a trip to Europe and I
was impressed once again by the strong feeling that most people have,
even though they may on occasions be critical of our policies; a
strong feeling that the United States stands for freedom, that the
promises in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence
while they may not be fully achieved we are attempting to move to the
best of our ability in that direction, that without the United States
they would not be free and with the United States they are free, and
it is the United States which stands on guard all the way from Berlin
to Saigon’.
Ronald
Reagan’s later presidential declaration that America was a ‘shining
city on a hill’ has been much mocked but - despite Kennedy’s
slight qualification that American aspirations ‘may not be fully
achieved’ - does not differ in essentials from the sentiments
expressed in the earlier speech by Kennedy. From ‘Berlin to
Saigon’, the oppressed peoples of the world look to the
United States for help and succour.
What
Happened Next
Less
than six years after the meeting in the Rose Garden, Clinton managed
to avoid being drafted into the US armed forces - like many of his
generation, Clinton believed that, despite Kennedy’s opinion,
Saigon did not need his actual presence. Kennedy and Clinton are
linked in the public mind as men who were fatally attracted to women,
but the linkage is perhaps unfair to Clinton: Kennedy was completely
obsessed with sex, and his subsequent reputation on all fronts, from
foreign policy to personal morality, has receded to the extent
that he may eventually be remembered mainly as the source for the
corrupt Mayor Quimby in The Simpsons. Novelist Norman Mailer
was obsessed with Kennedy and his women and in Harlot’s
Ghost
(1991) the narrator shares one of Kennedy's mistresses. And by a
curious coincidence, Clinton dated Barbara Davis before he married
Hillary - and Barbara was to become Mailer’s sixth wife.
96
1965:
Elvis Presley jams with the Beatles
There
have been many encounters between famous musicians that no one could
have recorded; maddeningly, there is one encounter which could have
been easily recorded, but no one bothered. In 1965, the Beatles
toured America for the second time and visited Elvis at his Bel Air
house. There had been some half-hearted attempts in the press to
present the two acts as rivals - America versus Britain and so forth
- but in fact the Beatles thought Elvis was magnificent, and Elvis,
publicly at least, expressed his admiration. Indeed, in 1964, before
their electrifying appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Sullivan read
out - to about 70 million viewers - a telegram from Elvis praising
the Beatles.
The
Beatles had tried to meet Elvis in 1964 but never quite managed
it. Elvis’ manager, Colonel Parker, who probably felt they should
know their place, apparently sent them a few Elvis souvenirs, and
that was it. It is possible Parker felt they were not quite worthy.
This was possibly Elvis’s view also. Priscilla Presley - perhaps
the best witness to an occasion which is remembered differently by
different observers - says in Elvis
by the Presleys (2005)
that when John, Paul, George and Ringo walked into the
room, Elvis remained reclining on the sofa watching the TV - with the
sound off. Elvis ‘rarely got up’, says Priscilla. The
Beatles maintained a respectful silence, expecting the ‘king’ to
get the ball rolling. Half an hour into this subdued atmosphere,
Elvis put a record on - possibly Charlie Rich - and played along,
with a bass guitar (he had been teaching himself bass, McCartney was
surprised to learn). A few more guitars appeared and the Beatles
began jamming with Elvis. There was, says Priscilla, more music than
talk. The Beatles were shy, and Elvis was not disposed to talk much.
But the music was ‘sweet’, she adds. Sadly, no one recorded
anything, no one took any pictures. At the end, the Beatles invited
Elvis to visit them at their leased house - Elvis smiled
and said ‘We’ll see’, but, adds Priscilla, ‘I knew he had no
intention of returning the visit. Elvis rarely went out in
Hollywood’.
What
Happened Next
Just
five years later, in December 1970, Elvis descended upon the White
House in a purple jump suit to meet (without an appointment)
President Nixon, and being the king, was granted an audience.
Presley’s body was getting bigger, but his career was
dwindling towards the freak-show act he would shortly become. Elvis
gave a startled Nixon a gift - a pistol - and launched into a tirade
about how British entertainers, particularly the Beatles, were
anti-American and spreading drug culture. Elvis asked the president
for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, and was later
sent an honorary one which is now on display at Graceland. Elvis
seems to have thought the badge meant he had legal powers. He died in
1977, his health ruined by junk food and substance abuse.
97
1978:
Alec Guinness has lunch with ‘M’
By
August 1978, Alec Guinness had become a grand old man of the stage,
and had also acquired a new, huge (and unwanted) fan base for
playing Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star
Wars (1977).
Guinness says that Harrison Ford referred to him as the ‘Mother
Superior’, which was perhaps affectionately meant, as
both Ford and Guinness shared a horror at the unspeakable (in every
sense) script (Ford to director George Lucas: ‘George, you can
write this shit, but you can’t say it’).
Guinness
wanted to put Star
Wars behind
him. So when the writer of spy novels (and former spy) John le
Carre discussed the televising of his novel Tinker,
Tailor, Solider, Spy
(1974), and made it plain to the BBC that only Alec Guinness could
play George Smiley, the head of the secret service in the ‘Spy
Wars’, the subsequent offer of the part was accepted. Guinness took
the role despite complaining about the ‘passive’ nature of
Smiley, and le Carre arranged to host a lunch for both Guinness and
the former head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield - claimed by some to be
the model for both Smiley (le Carre denies this) and ‘M’ in the
James Bond films.
Le
Carre described Guinness and Oldfield as ‘cuddling up and I was an
intrusion’. Guinness assumed that Oldfield was the raw
material for Smiley, and studied the spy chief closely: ‘Liked
him. A bit plumper and shorter than me. . .execrable tie, tatty
shirt, good suit, flashy cufflinks and bright orange shoes. . . Le
Carre says: ‘At the end of the lunch, Oldfield left and Guinness
watched him go down the road. . . He then says, "Do they all
wear those very vulgar cuff links?"’
The
Guinness characterisation of Smiley which emerged from the meeting
ended up a blend of elements from both Oldfield (including the orange
shoes and cuff links) and le Carre. Oldfield was an admirer of
Guinness but why he agreed to the lunch - knowing Guinness would be
studying him - is unclear. Oldfield’s spy career ended completely
two years later amid murky allegations that he bought sex from boys.
It is possible that he hoped the coming Guinness performance would
somehow submerge the grubby reality of his life.
What
Happened Next
After
the TV spy saga, Guinness returned to the grind of Star
Wars sequels,
partly because of gratitude for Lucas’ gift of a post-contract
increase in royalties. Oldfield - who died in 1981 - got what he may
be assumed to have wished for, a dignified, intelligent, portrayal of
a civilised British spy chief. But while the British secret
service is supposed to be a class act, at least one agent - Malcolm
Muggeridge - wondered if the weird set-up he had joined was a
parallel organisation, set up to protect the real secret
service. It is clear from such memoirs, and novels such as Norman
Lewis’ A
Small War Made to Order (1966),
that there was no golden ‘James Bond’ age for British espionage.
Guinness’s earlier role as the hoover salesman turned spy in the
1959 movie Our
Man in Havana,
based on the novel written by another British agent, Graham Greene -
seems closer to the mark. See also 1958:
Luis Bunuel asks Alec Guinness to be his lead actor.
98
1985:
Jackie Kennedy pops downstairs to meet Princess Diana
Princess
Diana and Jackie Kennedy had much in common. Their parents went
through bitter divorces, they each had what seemed to many to be
marriages that could be defined as ‘arranged’ to men who were 12
years older, they became much-scrutinised public figures when they
wed, and both were popular with women as well as men. And while
the family (known internally s the ‘firm’) into which Diana
married was the ancient British royal family, its latest dynasty was
the Windsor dynasty, a dynasty not actually that much older than the
Kennedy one.
In
1985, Diana and Prince Charles travelled to Washington to open a show
celebrating centuries of British upper-class art patronage. The
American socialite Bunny Melon invited the royal couple to her
Virginia estate to meet some young blood: perhaps not absolutely blue
blood, but certainly well-connected blood. John F Kennedy Jr and
Caroline Kennedy were there (Caroline and Diana may have had a
macabre connection of their own; it is possible that the same IRA
bombers who in 1975 narrowly missed murdering Sir Hugh and Lady
Antonia Fraser - and Caroline, who was staying with them - may have
also planned to kill Charles and Diana in 1983).
Jackie
left the children to mingle for a while before popping downstairs to
meet Diana. It was to be the only time these two iconic figures ever
met and while it would be nice to know what they chatted about, those
who were there are not telling (blue blood means silent tongues).
We
do know, however, that Diana admired Jackie, and Jackie, to begin
with, admired Diana, though she later described Diana as having
‘disemboweled herself in public’. The Kennedy biographer Jay
Mulvaney points out that whereas Jackie adopted a British
stiff-upper-lip approach to the fact that her husband reeked of other
women, Diana went in for an all-American public quiver. (Arguably,
however, Diana’s love life never caused a national shock comparable
to that delivered to Ireland by Jackie when she married Onassis in
1968, and grown women wept in the Irish streets at this desecration
of the Kennedy myth).
What
Happened Next
Diana
wept when Jackie died in 1994, and Mulvaney quotes Diana as
describing the older women in a letter of condolence to Caroline and
John as a ‘role model’ for bringing up children in public (John
died in a plane crash in 1999). Both Diana and Jackie were also
fashion leaders, but both also used fashion as protective armour.
Jackie’s words to a designer: ‘Protect me - I am so mercilessly
exposed and I don’t know how to cope with it’, applied to them
both.
99
1985:
Kurt Waldheim punches John Simpson in the stomach
In
1972, the respected Austrian statesman Kurt Waldheim succeed U Thant
as secretary general of the United nations, a post he held for two
terms, until 1981. He tried to stand for a third term, but his
attempt was vetoed by China.
In
1985, Waldheim began campaigning for the Austrian presidency, and
also published his memoir In
the Eye of the Storm.
The memoir concentrated on his UN role, and prompted several
journalists to begin asking questions about Waldheim’s role
in WWII, particularly his role as a counter-insurgency officer in the
Balkans, at a time when ferocious reprisals were being carried out
against Yugoslav civilians, prisoners were being tortured and
executed, and trains and trucks bore victims to death camps.
When challenged about his role in all this, Waldheim took the
line that he was a simple soldier carrying out clerical duties, and
knew nothing of any of the horrors taking place - which, as has been
said, made Waldheim the worst-informed military intelligence officer
in history.
The
presidential campaign in Austria thus attracted a lot of
international attention, and observers noted how Waldheim was being
rapturously cheered by veterans of Hitler’s war wherever he
went. John Simpson of the BBC went to one such emotionally charged
election meeting, described in his enthralling autobiography, A
Mad World, My Masters (2000).
Simpson asked Waldheim if he was going to win. Waldheim replied, yes,
the people loved him, as Simpson could see. Simpson then asked a
rather direct question: ‘Even though in today’s British press
there are accusations that you ordered the execution of several
British prisoners of war?”
Waldheim
seems to have punched Simpson in the stomach even before he finished
asking the question. Simpson had been punched in the
stomach before, in 1970, by the then British prime minister Harold
Wilson, and says Wilson’s punch was harder (it floored him, in
fact). The assault on Simpson was filmed by an American camera team
and caused a sensation in Austria. Waldheim was elected
president in 1986.
What
Happened Next
Also
in 1986, Waldheim gave one of the oddest wedding gifts in
history when Arnold Schwarzenegger, who held dual Austrian and
American citizenship, married Maria Shriver. Waldheim was invited to
the wedding, but wisely did not attend, and sent instead a
life-size papier-mâché statue of Schwarzenegger, clad in
lederhosen, carrying off Shriver, clad in a dirndl. Someone
lucky enough to see this strange object described it as ’sinister’.
Andy Warhol's diary records Schwarzenegger's delighted reaction to
the gift. Waldheim served as Austrian president until 1992, and
in 1994 the US Justice Department concluded that Waldheim had indeed
been guilty of war crimes, and barred him from the US. A few months
later, Pope John Paul II gave Waldheim a papal knighthood.
100
2000:
Sami Al-Arian promises to support George W. Bush
When
a group of hopefuls seeking the Republican candidacy for the
presidency were asked in December 1999 'What political philosopher or
thinker do you most identify with and why?’, Governor Bush
responded ‘Christ, because he changed my heart’; Bush had
become a born-again Christian in the mid-1980s.
In
March 2000, George Bush visited the key state of Florida during his
campaign to become the Republican candidate for the US presidency.
Florida is a state with a large Muslim population, and Bush was an
active seeker of Muslim votes. Most Christians - such as Bush -
are trinitarians and regard Christ as part of the godhead, the
trinity; Muslims regard Christ as a man, as a prophet, but not
divine. Republican campaigners in 2000, however - again, such as Bush
- did not dwell on theological differences, but rather on the
American 'centre-right' social values Republicans were said to share
with Muslims: pro-family, anti-gay, pro-capital punishment,
etc. Meetings between Republicans and Muslim leaders became part of
what Republicans called the ‘Muslim Outreach’. In the Republican
faith-group strategy, most Christians were seen as conservative
rather than liberal, and thus already part of the Republican bloc, as
were many Jews. The Jewish vote, however, was seen as mainly
tied to the liberal, Zionist-favouring Democrats,
thus making the Republicans the best option for the Muslim
vote.
One
of the local Muslim leaders Bush and his wife Laura met was Professor
Sami Al-Arian, and there is a charming group photograph of the Bushes
and Al-Arians in Craig Ungers’ study of the Bush/Saudi
connections, House
of Bush, House of Saud (2004).
Unger says that Al-Arian’s wife told Bush, ‘The Muslim people
support you’. Bush, whose folksy manner is a finely honed tool,
called Al-Arian’s son ‘Big Dude’, and Al-Arian vowed to
build support for Bush amongst Florida Muslims - a promise he
kept. Al-Arian was a popular figure in the Muslim community,
and spoke enthusiastically for Bush, who publicly pledged to end the
use of ‘secret evidence’ against those accused of terrorism.
What
Happened Next
In
the 2000 Presidential election Bush narrowly defeated the Democratic
challenger, Al Gore. The Florida vote was decisive, with Bush and
Gore separated by a few hundred votes. Much fuss was made over
‘chads’ - what the punches on different pieces of paper on the
ballot paper might mean - thus obscuring the fact that a Florida
exit poll suggested that Bush had got over 90% of the Muslim vote,
and it was that huge percentage which got Bush Florida, and thus the
presidency. In the American
Spectator,
the Republican strategist Grover Norquist said ‘George W. Bush was
elected President of the United States of America because of the
Muslim vote’. In May 2006, after a trial which remains
controversial, Sami Al-Arian was sentenced to 57 months in prison for
conspiring to violate federal law relating to a proscribed group
called Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Muslim who made George Bush
president was also told he would be deported after completing his
sentence (see the wikipedia entry on Sami Al-Arian.)
