History Today 08-2016

Puritan Prankster 

The Power of the Witch

The funny side of Cromwell

Challenging ugly stereotypes  August  Vol  Issue 

Rio

The Old World battle   foor a New World ci   f city ty

FROM THE EDITOR Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager  Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Contributin g Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant  Rhys Griffiths  Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager  Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant  Ava Bushell  Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today  is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected]

SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected]  ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 3859 7093 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3787 9001 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246-580)

is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscr iption records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex  Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Tom Holland Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of London Professor Geoffrey Parker Ohio State University Professor Paul Preston London School of Economics Professor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National University Professor Ulinka Rublack St John’s College, Cambridge Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London Dr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today

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THE WORD ‘HISTORIC’ is bandied around a lot, but June 23rd, 2016, the day that the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU), was deserving of such an epithet, as the country divided politically along geographical lines ominously similar to those of 1638. I spent the following day, just hours after the result had been announced, at a conference in London devoted to public history. The mood was sombre. It is no secret that a majority of academic historians in the UK were in favour of remaining in the EU. In May 2015, History Today attempted to kick start a debate on Britain’s place in Europe, publishing an article by David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge and a key member of the Eurosceptic 1638 0r 2016? A map of the EU referendum results, with areas that voted Leave in blue. group, Historians for Britain. The response was extraordinary. Almost 300 historians signed an open letter taking issue with Abulafia, arguing that Britain’s past can only be understood in the context of its continuous interaction with Europe, implying that the UK’s future would be richer, in more ways than one, if it remained a member of the EU. Some historians, such as Peter Frankopan and Lucy Inglis, accused both sides of parochialism, but the debate was by and large closed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but might it have been better if the debate among historians had been more sustained? As someone who voted Remain, I felt that a more nuanced conversation among historians of multiple perspectives and specialisations would have been a good thing and might have led to a higher level of public debate. And there were historians, albeit mainly well-established men, willing to make an articulate case for Leave: as well as Abulafia, these included Noel Malcolm, Robert Tombs, Jeremy Black and Andrew Roberts. In the days immediately before the referendum, a number of distinguished historians assembled in Downing Street in support of the Remain campaign at the invitation of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then went on to publish an open letter in the Guardian . Some historians have since spoken of their regret at becoming so close to a government they were hardly enamoured with, while others have told me that, despite supporting the Remain campaign, they withheld their signature. Historians should speak truth to power, not for it. Ironically, perhaps tragically, the debate about the UK’s place in Europe has become more nuanced, more illuminating since the referendum, as the UK enters uncharted and perilous waters. Historians will have a major role to play in that future – see Peter Mandler’s excellent dissection of the state of our nations published in Dissent  magazine  magazine soon after the referendum result. But in a less deferential, more divided age, historians must learn once again to show, not tell.

Paul Lay

FROM THE EDITOR Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager  Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Contributin g Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant  Rhys Griffiths  Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager  Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant  Ava Bushell  Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today  is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected]

SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected]  ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 3859 7093 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3787 9001 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246-580)

is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscr iption records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex  Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Tom Holland Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of London Professor Geoffrey Parker Ohio State University Professor Paul Preston London School of Economics Professor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National University Professor Ulinka Rublack St John’s College, Cambridge Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London Dr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today

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THE WORD ‘HISTORIC’ is bandied around a lot, but June 23rd, 2016, the day that the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU), was deserving of such an epithet, as the country divided politically along geographical lines ominously similar to those of 1638. I spent the following day, just hours after the result had been announced, at a conference in London devoted to public history. The mood was sombre. It is no secret that a majority of academic historians in the UK were in favour of remaining in the EU. In May 2015, History Today attempted to kick start a debate on Britain’s place in Europe, publishing an article by David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge and a key member of the Eurosceptic 1638 0r 2016? A map of the EU referendum results, with areas that voted Leave in blue. group, Historians for Britain. The response was extraordinary. Almost 300 historians signed an open letter taking issue with Abulafia, arguing that Britain’s past can only be understood in the context of its continuous interaction with Europe, implying that the UK’s future would be richer, in more ways than one, if it remained a member of the EU. Some historians, such as Peter Frankopan and Lucy Inglis, accused both sides of parochialism, but the debate was by and large closed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but might it have been better if the debate among historians had been more sustained? As someone who voted Remain, I felt that a more nuanced conversation among historians of multiple perspectives and specialisations would have been a good thing and might have led to a higher level of public debate. And there were historians, albeit mainly well-established men, willing to make an articulate case for Leave: as well as Abulafia, these included Noel Malcolm, Robert Tombs, Jeremy Black and Andrew Roberts. In the days immediately before the referendum, a number of distinguished historians assembled in Downing Street in support of the Remain campaign at the invitation of George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then went on to publish an open letter in the Guardian . Some historians have since spoken of their regret at becoming so close to a government they were hardly enamoured with, while others have told me that, despite supporting the Remain campaign, they withheld their signature. Historians should speak truth to power, not for it. Ironically, perhaps tragically, the debate about the UK’s place in Europe has become more nuanced, more illuminating since the referendum, as the UK enters uncharted and perilous waters. Historians will have a major role to play in that future – see Peter Mandler’s excellent dissection of the state of our nations published in Dissent  magazine  magazine soon after the referendum result. But in a less deferential, more divided age, historians must learn once again to show, not tell.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters Northern Ireland • Victorian Dining • Levison • Counterfactualism

Well over 200,000 Irishmen, from both  political traditions traditions and all walks of life,   fought in the the First World War 

Breaking the Peace After the UK voted to leave Europe, Northern Ireland’s fragile relationship with both its past and its neighbour is once again to the fore. Edward Madigan THE IMPERFECT but generally stable peace process in Northern Ireland has trundled on since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and Islamic fundamentalism and right-wing extremism are now usually regarded as more serious threats to British security than Irish republicanism. It has thus been quite easy over the past few years to forget just how devastating the conflict we still euphemistically refer to as ‘the Troubles’ actually was. In strictly military terms, the war in Northern Ireland could accurately be regarded as a low-intensity conflict, yet between 1969 and the Provisional IRA ceasefire of 1994, over 3,500 people lost their lives as a direct result of violence in Northern Ireland or emanating from the region.

United by conflict: members of the Irish Defence Force (left) and the British Army at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin,  July 2014.

The story of the Northern Irish conflict is one of cruelly unexpected death, widespread bereavement and lives blighted by fear, anger and bitterness. But it is also a story of a remarkably resilient people, whose desire for peace led them ultimately to reconsider their attachment to the past and embrace compromise and reconciliation. With the stability of the peace process now undermined by the result of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union, it is worth briefly reflecting on the role played by history in the dynamics of the conflict. Rigid, exclusive and often highly territorial understandings of the past directly fuelled the violence that erupted so catastrophically in 1969 and the polarisation and cultural entrenchment that would mark the next few decades.

On the one hand, nationalists regarded themselves as heirs to an ancient Gaelic culture, whose ancestors had been systemically dispossessed, marginalised, exploited and murdered by colonists from the neighbouring island. For their part, many Ulster unionists were proud of a history of colonial settlement dating back to the early 17th century, in which industrious, god-fearing Scottish Presbyterians and English Anglicans carved out a niche of British civilisation in an otherwise wild and inhospitable corner of Ireland. Importantly, the memory of suffering and victimhood experienced over the centuries by the communities that clung to these narratives helped sustain them. The historical episode that has had by far the greatest influence on the perpetuation of divided identities in Northern Ireland is the First World War. Well over 200,000 Irishmen, from both political traditions and all walks of life, fought in the war and at least 35,000 of them died as a result of military service. While Unionist and Nationalist soldiers rarely fought together, they shared similar experiences of violence, loss and deprivation on the Western Front and elsewhere. Yet the Easter Rising of April 1916 and the social and cultural forces it unleashed would fundamentally transform the country to which many Irish veterans returned in 1919. Ultimately, the Rising, the subsequent War of Independence and the partition of the island would ensure that the ways in which AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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the two communities engaged with the memory of the First World War were very different indeed. For Ulster Unionist men and women, the memory of the Great War in general and the Battle of the Somme in particular took on an almost sacred significance over the course of the 20th century. The blood sacrifice of the 36th (Ulster) Division was regarded as having purchased the right of the six counties to remain within the United Kingdom, while the rest of the island seceded. Commemoration of the war is thus not simply an element of Unionist culture, it is absolutely central to the way many Unionists understand themselves and their place in the world. Among the nationalist population, memory of the war has always been more complex and generally more muted. We should remember that major Armistice Day ceremonies were held in Dublin, Cork and Limerick and poppies were quite commonly worn in the Free State between the wars. There can be no doubt, however, that in independent Ireland there has always been greater emphasis on the rebels of Easter 1916 and the men who served in the IRA during the War of Independence than on the those who fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. By the 1980s, there was little room in the popular or official imagination for anyone who did anything other than fight against the British in 1916 or the years afterwards. The situation today could hardly be more different. The historical amnesia regarding the Irish experience of the First World War among the nationalist population has been almost completely reversed and people from disparate communities come together to commemorate it in a way that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. An ironic but very positive situation has thus emerged, in which a shared memory of the most violent conflict in British and Irish history has been used to help people move beyond the violence and discord of the more recent past. This was very much the approach when the Island of Ireland Peace Park was opened by the Irish President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth in WestFlanders in 1998 and during the British state visit to Ireland in 2011, when the Queen showed a remarkable willingness to engage with the troubled history of Anglo-Irish relations. Most recently, the dedication in July 2014 of a Cross of Sacrifice in honour of the Irish and British  HIST ORY TODAY  AUGUST 

dead of the Great War at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin marked a milestone in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. The event saw Irishmen serving in both the Irish Defence Forces and the British Army come together to pay tribute to the dead of the Great War in a cemetery that has long been associated with those who struggled to end British rule in Ireland.

 A shared memory of the most violent conflict in British and Irish history has been used to help people move beyond the violence and discord of the more recent past  This process of using more inclusive historical narratives to move away from a conflict that was shaped by understandings of the past will not be  jeopardised by the UK’s break with the European Union. Peace in Northern Ireland depends, above all, on the desire for peace, which certainly remains. The climate of uncertainty that now pervades these islands should nonetheless remind us that lives are potentially at stake and that the stability of the peace process should never be taken for granted.

Edward Madigan is a Lecturer in Public History and First World War Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.  Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

 A Varied Diet  A Victorian restaurant critic explored the cuisine of London, including its sole vegetarian restaurant.  Joss Bassett LIEUTENANTCOLONEL Nathaniel Newnham-Davis is l ittle known today but, after serving in South Africa, China and India, he became a top restaurant critic in London during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, he was highly influential: praised by the New York Times during his life and admired after by the likes of Elizabeth David. So respected and well-connected was Newnham-Davis, he was often a guest at private dinners of the most prestigious chefs of the day. Newnham-Davis published three restaurant guide books that went into many editions. The Gourmet’s Guide to London, published in 1914, followed his similar guide to Europe and replaced his first book, Dinner and Diners , of 1899. The guide is a rich source of material, providing a window into the restaurant scene of Victorian and Edwardian London. It is all the better as a historical source, as he was fair and impartial. If his experience was bad, he would simply omit the restaurant from his reviews, as it was not ‘fair to condemn any restaurant … on one trial’, but neither would he risk returning and ‘being badly treated on a second occasion’. Newnham-Davis reveals a world that, over 100 years later, is at once both different and recognisable to us. His reviews and essays cover some 25 classes of restaurants and the great and the good of the culinary world, many of whom, like the renowned chef Auguste Escoffier, he knew personally. We learn of pubs, chop houses, oyster houses, a chain which is a forerunner to Pret a Manger, the restaurants of Soho and the West End and those offering Chinese, Indian, German, French, Austrian and  Jewish cuisine. There are reports of grand dining rooms of hotels, tea gardens, artists’ rooms, the pioneers of clean kitchens and French fries and even a lunchtime interview with the female

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Healthy option: Eustace Miles in his restaurant at Charing Cross.

chef who ran the Cavendish Hotel’s kitchen, staffed by women, and who invented Edward VII’s favourite pie. One of the more curious, and certainly humorous, of Newnham-Davis’ entries is the chapter on the Eustace Miles Restaurant, founded by a British tennis world champion and his wife. It was a rarity we seldom think of as existing then: a vegetarian restaurant. In 1878 there was only one vegetarian restaurant in the UK but, as the vegetarian movement, which was as much about a way of life and social change as about not eating meat, began to find new ground in London among white-collar workers during the 1880s (historically its home was the working classes of Manchester), the number of vegetarian restaurants grew to 52. Of these, 34 were in London; still not many among the swathe of food offerings the capital boasted. Many looked on the junior bank clerks, dressmakers and shop assistants dining in them as oddities. Newnham-Davis only dined at Eustace Miles after recommending it to an old Indian Army general, a man distrusting of anything ‘new’, who asked his advice on where to dine with his

We learn of pubs, chop houses, oyster houses, a chain which is a forerunner to Pret a Manger, the restaurants of Soho and the West End and those offering Chinese, Indian, German, French, Austrian and  Jewish cuisine nephew and his new wife, a vegetarian. Newnham-Davis recounts that the general uttered the word ‘vegetarian’ with the same ‘tone of astonished disgust as he would have employed’ had she been ‘a militant suffragette’. Today we would certainly recognise the health benefits of the dishes on offer. Just as we might find symbols or other indicators on our menu, informing us if the dish is gluten free or has GM ingredients, the menu at Eustace Miles had letter annotations such as ‘N.N.’

meaning ‘Very Nourishing’ and ‘ F.U.’ meaning ‘free from uric acid’. The latter, as Newnham-Davis wryly comments, would be of great use to those suffering from gout. We might also recognise the seating style. As is a growing trend in many new London restaurants, diners sat at any table, even if al ready occupied. Less recognisable would be the exercise classes the proprietor advertised in his restaurant and held in the rooms above. Newnham-Davis had mixed feelings about the food itself. Some dishes he thought impressive while others, such as the stuffed marrow, were watery and flavourless. None could lure him from the ‘errors of flesh-eating’ and ‘creamy salmon and plump quails’. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that it provided a good quality cheap meal for its clientele (a half crown set menu was available) and offered health benefits; after all, the owner was a champion sportsman. He did say, however, that he would love to see the old general’s face when he read the menu and hear his undoubtedly noteworthy remarks upon it.  Joss Bassett writes on food, drink and culture and

is managing editor of ingoodtaste.com AUGUST 

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Last testament: Wilhelm Levison and the book he was preparing at the time of his death in 1947.

Crossing the Continent  The medievalist Wilhelm Levison was a living embodiment of the deep links between Britain, Germany and a wider Europe.  James Palmer IN THE WAKE OF THE EU referendum, my mind keeps returning to Wilhelm Levison’s magisterial England and the Continent in the Eighth Century , published just after the end of the Second World War. Its preface reads: ‘May these pages, in their small way, contribute to join again broken links, when the works of peace have resumed their place lost in the turmoil of war’. The challenges we face now are not as great as those faced then. But, as it feels that those l inks are again strained, we naturally turn to reflect on how common cause can be maintained and new ways forward set out. A respected medieval scholar, Levison taught at the University of Bonn and worked for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. As he was Jewish, he was unable to teach after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. His former colleagues helped him to escape to England in the Spring of 1939, where he was able to take up a position at Durham University. In 1942, Maurice Powicke invited him to Oxford to give the Ford Lectures the following year. They would become England and the Continent . What is striking now about Levison’s lectures is how, despite their explicit political setting, they are first and fore-

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most works of sober scholarship rather than a polemic. He did not portray the early medieval past as a utopian vision of pan-European co-operation to contrast with the conflicts of his own time. Indeed, he argued against transposing ‘the opinions and controversies of later times into the past’. Quoting Spinoza, he urged people to understand human action, not to ridicule it, lament it, or curse it. The sentiment remains valuable. A sense of a common European culture was central to Levison’s vision. This culture was rooted in Christianity and Latin learning and it meant that there was always a core body of belief and books people had, whatever their differences. Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries was coming to terms with the slow political fragmentation of the Roman Empire and the new divisions and cultural revolutions it had triggered. In the 1930s, Henri Pirenne had argued that it was the shattering of the Mediterranean world following the Arab conquests in the 630s and 640s that had paved the way for new political and economic centres to emerge in the north. For Levison this provided some of the backdrop to a series of enterprises which included Pope Gregory the Great sending

Roman missionaries to the pagan English of Kent, arriving in 597. A century or so later, English missionaries, including St Willibrord ‘Apostle of the Frisians’ (d. 739) and St Boniface ‘Apostle of the Germans’ (d. 754), contributed to the exporting of new versions of Christian culture to what is now the Netherlands and Germany. These ventures in turn inspired the Christian empire of Charlemagne (d. 814), a diverse political and cultural world held together by shared belief and learning. England and the Continent  was personal in many ways, especially in the emphasis Levison gave to intellectual exchange between the English and German regions. English and German culture owed significant debts to the Irish, too, whose books and treatises spread quickly across the West, thanks to the desire of Irish monks from the seventh century onwards to set up monasteries overseas or to teach abroad. The North Sea was also alive with trade and travel. And, if the Mediterranean world seemed less coherent in 800 than it had in 400, this did not prevent the movement of people and ideas between the Latin, Byzantine and Arab centres. Historical scholarship in Levison’s time was dominated by ideas of nations and peoples; he, however, recognised the importance of people crossing boundaries, ultimately helping to shape a connected Europe. Addressing his English audience in 1943, Levison concluded with an appeal to remember Europe’s common heritage and the role migrants had played in shaping it. He quoted the Swiss scholar  Jacob Burckhardt, who said ‘a truly rich nation becomes rich by accepting much from others and developing it’. His final words he took from a Latin poet: ‘Now  joined is what before were separate worlds’. Levison died aged 70 in 1947 when only the first seeds of peace had been planted. He inspired 70 years of writing on the early Middle Ages, in which scholars across Europe sought to understand the world he sketched. One can hope that, from these foundations, new histories will be able to again join links broken in recent times.

 James Palmer is Reader in Mediaeval History at the University of St Andrews.

RIO DE JANEIRO

 HI STORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Rio de Janeiro and Botafogo Bay. Inset: view of Rio de Janeiro, 1600, coloured engraving by Willem Blaeu.

Origins of   WHEN THE JESUIT PRIEST FERNÃO CARDIM arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1584, he found a scene ‘that appears to have been devised by the supreme painter and architect of the world, Our Lord God’.

The city was barely a generation old, a cluster of wattle-and-daub shacks huddled around a fortified hill hil l on the western shore of the t he Guanabara

Bay, home to around 750 individuals. Although it was a long time before Rio would attain preeminence in Brazil, its foundation was nevertheless a global event. It encompassed battles between civilisations, wars of religion, reli gion, contests for resources and transoceanic migration. It marked the earliest

extension into the western hemisphere of the imperial rivalries that would shape the history of the globe. It also als o helped to ensure the development of Brazil as a contiguous country. By David Gelber 

RIO DE JANEIRO

The settlement of Europeans around Guanabara Bay began in 1555, some 55 years after the Portuguese had first set foot in Brazil. The narrow shores of the bay, between the Atlantic and the looming granite mass of the Serra do Mar mountain range, had been occupied for centuries by Neolithic Tupi peoples. Scattered throughout Brazil, they pursued a semi-nomadic existence in tribes of different sizes, cultivating the land for as long as it could sustain them, hunting and fishing and thinking nothing of baring their entire bodies. ‘They seem to be such innocent people … Any stamp we wish may be easily printed on them’, Pero Vaz de Caminha, a voyager in the first Portuguese fleet to visit Brazil, wrote to King Manuel I in 1500. It was not long before the Portuguese discovered that they were also inveterate warriors, locked in insoluble feuds with each other and capable of turning their ire on interlopers, too. Most shocking of all was the revelation that they practised cannibalism on their enemies. Although Caminha commended the ‘great plenty’ of Brazil, the Portuguese were slow to take an interest in the country. Under the Treaty of Tordesillas, the audacious division of the globe between Spain and Portugal by Pope Alexander VI in 1494, the coast of Brazil belonged to the latter. Early visits, however, yielded no evidence of precious meta ls or the kinds of spices that, carried out of Asia in Portuguese carracks, had turned Lisbon into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. The principal attraction was the brazilwood trees that grew along the Atlantic coast, a relation of the sappan wood trees of Asia, which produced a coveted red dye. The Portuguese crown soon claimed a monopoly over  HI STORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Map of Brazil from Cosmographie Universelle by Universelle  by Guillaume le Testu, 1555.

the import of brazilwood. Since these trees grew abundantly along the coast, those licensed to export them could send ships to gather logs without needing to settle there. Otherwise, exports from Brazil were limited to parrots, monkeys and the odd native: popular ornaments at court and in noble households. THE FAILURE OF THE PORTUGUESE to establish a presence in Brazil enabled ships from other nations, principally France, to plunder its coast. By the 1510s, and possibly earlier still, mariners from Brittany and Normandy were visiting Brazil to collect wood, offering the native nativess trinkets, metal tools and weapons in exchange for their labour. In the 1520s these activitiess increased: in the first half of 1529 alone, some 200 tons of brazilactivitie wood arrived in the port of Honfleur. Over time, French merchants also began to export the pepper-like berry of the Schinus terebinthifolia plant. Although such voyages were private ventures, the French crown, in principle, had few qualms about them, since France did not recognise the Treaty of Tordesillas. As French visits grew more flagrant, the Portuguese took counter measures, appealing to Francis I to prevent encroachments and sending

Carving depicting the trade of wood from Brazil, c.1550.

patrols along Brazil’s coast. The most notable of these was led by Mar tim Afonso de Sousa, from 1530 to 1532. During the course of this mission, he spent three months in Guanabara Bay. This was not the first documented European visit to the bay. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan had paused there during his circumnavigation of the world to resupply and repair his ships, taking advantage of the natural shelter the bay provided behind the pyramid bulk of the Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain). There are suggestions of earlier visits, too: tr adition holds that Amerigo Vespucci stopped there on January 1st, 1502 during his third voyage of exploration, christening the bay (which he mistook for the mouth of a river) Rio de Janeiro, though evidence for this is sparse. French vessels had almost certainly visited, too.

A

FONSO’S BROTHER, Pero Lopes, recorded in his diar y how the Portuguese put ashore there in April 1531. Over the following three months they created a stronghold and constructed two brigantines. Four of the party were sent to explore the interior. They returned after two months, having travelled 450 miles inland, bringing with them ‘a great king, lord of all those lands’, who signalled that gold and silver were to be found near the River Paraguay. The fleet departed at the beginning of August. Afonso sent notice to  João III of his sojourn, informing him of the ‘great abundance of wood’ in Guanabara Bay. Afonso’s expedition heralded a new phase of European activity in Brazil: a shift from maritime to continental engagement. João III adopted a programme in 1532 to colonise Brazil through grants of territories (known as captaincies) to prospectors. In return for wide-ranging economic and political powers, they would be required to populate and develop the lands in their bailiwicks at their own expense. In a letter to Manuel’s successor, João III, the diplomat and scholar Diogo de Gouveia, one of the originators of the strategy, suggested that multiple Portuguese plantations would deter French raiders, facilitate the defence of the land and defuse claims that, since Brazil was effectively unoccupied, the principle of uti possidetis (‘as you possess’, that the possessor at the end of a conflict keeps the territory or property) d id not apply. Some

seven or eight towns, he insisted, would suffice ‘to prevent the land from being parted with’. During the 1530s Brazil was carved up into 15 horizontal strips of land, a crude partition that took no account of physical reality. Each strip was roughly 150 miles in breadth, stretching from the coast to an indeterminate point inland. These territories were apportioned to 12 grantees: mostly courtiers, soldiers and adventurers. Afonso received the captaincies of Rio de Janeiro and São Vicente in the south of Brazil. Only two of the 15 captaincies flourished in the short term: Pernambuco in the north-east, thanks to its relative proximity to Europe and the energetic leadership of its governor, Duarte Coelho, who introduced sugar plantations, and São Vicente. The remainder were blighted by absent leadership, meagre resources and attacks by natives, who, in response to attempts to drive them from the land and enslave them, laid waste to sugar mills and slaughtered settlers with arrows and wooden clubs. In 1548, one resident warned João III: ‘If Your Majesty does not succour these captaincies soon not only will we lose our lives and goods but Your Majesty will lose the land.’ At the same time, French competition was depressing brazilwood prices on the European market and affecting royal income. By the middle of the 16th century, the crown’s profits from its Asian empire had passed their peak. Of necessity, the Americas were gradually assuming a more important place in the calculations of the royal counting house. In December 1548 the king sent Tomé de Sousa, a veteran of Portuguese campaigns against the Moors, to the abandoned north-east captaincy of Bahia as governor-general of Brazil, with instructions to establish a fortified city, suppress native uprisings and drive out foreign ‘pirates’. The intention was not to supplant the territorial captains but to provide a more robust military presence in Brazil. Tomé de Sousa’s arrival coincided with the introduction into the country of the Jesuits, whom, it was hoped, would proselytise their beliefs to heathen tribes. While Afonso’s captaincy of São Vicente developed under his lieutenant Bras Cubas, his dominion of Rio was neglected. In spite of the enthusiasm he had shown for Guanabara Bay when he had anchored there, Afonso – who was sent by João III to India in 1534 and never returned to Brazil – made no attempt to populate it. The mountains that girdled the bay constricted access to the hinterland and the tight coastal plain was blanketed with salt marshes, which inhibited large-scale agriculture. There was little land for pasture and the harvesting of the one commodity that proliferated was a jealously guarded royal prerogative. The growing Portuguese presence in the north-east in the 1530s and 1540s deflected French ships towards Rio. In 1537, after allying with João III against Emperor Charles V, the French king Francis I had temporarily prohibited Norman and Breton navigation to Brazil. The interdict was lifted in 1540 and by the end of the decade some seven or eight French ships a year were appearing in Rio and its environs to collect wood. In 1550, Pero de Gois, captain-general of the coast, described Rio as ‘now the main stopover for pirates’. Guanabara Bay and much of the surrounding region were occupied by the Tupinambá people, w ith whom French traders established good relations. Mutual self-interest bridged the chasm between cultures: the French needed manpower to fell and carry brazilwood trees; the Tupinambá wanted European weaponry to defeat tribal enemies. In 1554 various Frenchmen assisted the Tupinambá in ousting their AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

RIO DE JANEIRO admiral of Brittany, which brought him into contact with merchants and sailors involved in the Brazil trade. Over the next three years, he developed a plan to create a French enclave in Guanabara Bay. Gaspard de Coligny, admiral of France, offered active support. Although Henry II did not endorse the expedition publicly, he provided two ships and 10,000 livres and licensed the release of prisoners to join it. In subsequent years, French ambassadors in Lisbon were careful to inform the king of Portuguese fleets travelling to Brazil, suggesting that he maintain an interest in the venture. The project has sometimes been cast as an attempt to implant a province in the New World, where Huguenots could escape persecution and set to work rescuing pagan souls. There is no evidence that this was its purpose: even though several Protestants travelled in Villegagnon’s fleet, the party did not contain a single Protestant minister. Rather, Villegagnon and his backers in the ports of northern France expected to profit from the enterprise by securing the main source of brazilwood and opening up South America to exploration. For Villegagnon, there was the added attraction of fixing his place in French history as the country’s first conquistador. On the king’s part, a French colony in Brazil would provide a base from which to harass Spanish ships and serve as a standing retort to Iberian claims of sovereignty over the New World.

 Above: João III of Portugal by Cristovao Lopes, 16th century. Opposite: naval battle between the Portuguese and French in the seas off the Potiguaran Territories by Theodore de Bry, 1592.

rivals, the Temiminós, from the Ilha de Paranapuã (now Ilha do Govenador), the largest island in Guanabara Bay. A number of French factors (known as truchements) lived permanently among the Tupinambá, preparing cargoes and acting as interpreters. When Pero de Gois visited Guanabara Bay in 1550, he found two Frenchmen living in one of the 20 or more Tupinambá villages on its margins; in 1554 Hans Staden, a German gunner in Portuguese service who had been captured by the Tupinambá, encountered a Frenchmen who had been ‘adopted’ by a native chief. The French showed little interest in converting the Tupinambá to Christianity. Indeed, truchements  embraced indigenous mores, fathering children with native women and even, it was alleged, practising cannibalism (Montaigne’s celebrated essay ‘Of Cannibals’ was based on the testimony of a Frenchmen who had lived in Guanabara Bay). Merchants in northern France made no secret of their undertakings in the Americas. To welcome the visit of Henry II in 1550, the city of Rouen staged a Brazil-themed pageant. A meadow was transformed into a jungle, with parakeets, monkeys and brazilwood trees. A mock battle was then fought, involving some 50 natives brought to France, who participated ‘without in any way covering the part that nature intended’. Decades of navigation to Brazil prepared the ground for one of the most outlandish imperial projects of the 16th century: the founding in 1555 of a French colony in the middle of the Guanabara Bay. The enterprise, which became known as France Antarctique, was the inspiration of Nicolas de Villegagnon, a soldier and adventurer who had fought the Ottomans in Hungary and North Africa and commanded the fleet that conveyed Mary, Queen of Scots from Dumbarton to France in 1548 in the face of the English navy. In around 1552 he was appointed vice HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

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ILLEGAGNON SET OUT FROM Le Havre in July 1555 with two ships and up to 600 men (few, if any, women travelled). After a tempestuous crossing, he reached the coast of Brazil in early November. The party stopped briefly at Cabo Frio, a popular resort for French loggers, before continuing to Guanabara Bay, which it entered unopposed. Nicholas Barré, a pilot of one of the ships, observed that the bay ‘is naturally beautiful and easy to defend, by reason of the narrowness of the entrance, which is shut on both sides by two high mountains’. He noted that the natives lit bonfires to greet the fleet. André Thevet, a Franciscan friar who would publish the first eyewitness account of Brazil, described how, ‘having knowledge of our coming’, the natives had ‘strewed and decked’ the shore ‘with leaves, and boughs of trees, and sweet smelling herbs’. Despite the welcome he received, Villegagnon entertained doubts about the reliability of these allies. After spending two months surveying the bay, he resolved to establish his settlement on the Ilha de Serigipe, one of several islands in the middle of it. Around 220 metres in length, it had the convenience of being easily defended: it was surrounded by rocks that prevented large ships from landing and boasted a commanding view of the approach to the bay. Its situation also restricted opportunities for desertion. On the other hand, the absence of fresh water and land for planting crops made frequent trips to the mainland and trade with its inhabitants unavoidable. With the help of native labour (including prisoners enslaved by the Tupinambá), Villegagnon erected ramparts and for tifications around the island. The structure was named Fort Coligny, in honour of the French admiral, who was later sent the tongue of a captured whale in appreciation of his patronage. Further bulwarks were built on the small hills at either end of the island to house artillery pieces. Villegagnon constructed his own residence in the centre of the island. Although timber and stone were used for some of the defences, most houses were built using native wattle-and-daub techniques. A cistern was sunk into the ground, but the Rio Carioca, near Praia do Flamengo on the western shore, remained the main source of water. The garrison-like character of the new colony was not conducive to

‘Having knowledge of our coming’, the natives had ‘strewed and decked’ the shore ‘with leaves, and boughs of trees, and sweet smelling herbs’  its long-term survival. Villegagnon’s failure to grant land to migrants prevented them from developing an attachment to their new country. Nor were the settlers prepared for the hardships that confronted them. The French had brought wheat seed and vine stock from Europe but most attempts to cultivate them failed. They were forced to fall back on indigenous staples, such as manioc, and whatever provisions they could obtain by barter w ith the natives and from visiting French vessels. The heat was devitalising and the swarms of mosquitoes that clouded the island laid many low.

These difficulties were compounded by Villegagnon’s own conduct. Migrants complained of the ‘incredible toil to which they were subjected’ in building Fort Coligny, which was still under construction when more immigrants arrived in early 1557, while Villegagnon promenaded in fine silks and jewels. More serious still was the arbitrary nature of his regime. As beleaguered as many of the Portuguese captaincies were, they at least had the semblance of governing structures. France Antarctique, on the other hand, was a private venture under the absolute rule of its commander, who authorised corporal punishment for minor misdemeanours, imposed laws at will and forbade colonists from leaving the fort without his permission. Particularly grievous was his prohibition in early 1556, upon pain of death, of relationships between Frenchmen and native women. AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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News of the establishment of a French colony in Rio was greeted with outrage in Lisbon. João III sent protests to Henry II 

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Left: Martim de Sousa, from Lendas da India by Gaspar Correia, c.1858-63. Below: reconstruction of a Brazilian village from the Royal Entry Festival of Henry II, French, 16th century. Opposite: José de Anchieta, lithograph, 16th century.

This struck at a long-standing custom practised by truchements and precipitated a conspiracy to assassinate Villegagnon. It was led – according to Barré – by a truchement   who had lived in Rio for seven years ‘in the most filthy and Epicurean manner of life … without God, without faith, without law’. The plot was discovered by Villegagnon’s bodyguards before it could be put into action. At least one conspirator was hanged and several others were condemned to slavery. A number of other individuals, including several craftsmen, fled to the mainland, establishing a community close to a Tupinambá hamlet at Flamengo (in his book Thevet called it ‘Henriville’).

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HE ARRIVAL IN MARCH  of reinforcements did not improve matters. The previous year, Villegagnon had sent his nephew Bois-le-Comte back to France to obtain assistance. Coligny entrusted the task of mustering new émigrés to Philippe de Corguilleray, a Protestant noblemen, who drafted several Calvinist theologians into the contingent. They included Jean de Léry, who published his own portrait of France Antarctique in 1578. Sectarian fissures emerged at the Pentecost celebrations of 1557. A debate over the Eucharist erupted and Villegagnon threw his weight behind the Catholic orthodoxy. In October a group of Protestants, prevented by Villegagnon from pursuing their faith and finding their rations restricted, abandoned Fort Coligny for Flamengo, where they lived alongside the Tupinambá, who, according to Léry, ‘were beyond comparison, more humane to us than he’. A number of them returned to Europe in early 1558 on a French merchant vessel, but three Calvinists who went back to Fort Coligny were drowned as heretics by Villegagnon. By 1559 the admiral, whom Léry denounced as the ‘Cain of America’, was back in France, having entrusted his authority to Bois-le-Comte. He never returned to Brazil. News of the establishment of a French colony in Rio was greeted with outrage in Lisbon. João III sent protests to Henry II. Nevertheless, the Portuguese were slow to take advantage of the disarray in the French camp. Tomé de Sousa’s successor as governor general, Duarte da Costa, was ineffectual and divisive. In 1556 the royal justice Mem de Sá was appointed to replace him. Although he would prove a much more capable figure, it was two years before he arrived in Brazil. Native revolts continued to plague many captaincies. These problems took on a new dimension as the Jesuits intensified their activities. Their opposition to the enslavement of natives had infuriated settlers in the developed captaincies of the north-east, forcing them to divert their activities southwards. During the late 1550s, Jesuits in the neighbouring captaincy of Espírito Santo converted the Temiminós, who had been driven out of Guanabara Bay, to Christianity. In São Vicente, they managed to catechise the Tupiniquim, with whose help they established in 1554 the town of São Paulo on the Piratininga plateau, driving out the Tupinambá. Such triumphs begat difficulties. The shift in the balance of power in the south-east provoked an insurrection among the Tupinambá, which the French fanned. Growing Jesuit influence in Espírito Santo and São Vicente, and the attendant unrest, focused Portuguese attentions on Rio. The idea of establishing a second royal city in the south-east of the county had already been mooted by Tomé de Sousa, who in 1553 urged João III to build a

‘fine and noble settlement’ there under a crown officer. But during the second half of the 1550s, Rio came to represent the third point of a Portuguese triangle in the south-east. The Jesuit Quiricio Caxa believed that the conquest of Rio would ‘open the door for the king of Portugal to increase his spiritual and temporal power’. His colleague Manuel de Nobrega wrote repeatedly of the need for a Portuguese city in Guanabara Bay to protect Espírito Santo and São Vicente. The other major influence in training Portuguese sights on Rio was the Sá dynasty. Mem de Sá finally arrived in Brazil at the start of 1558, armed with instructions to expel the French from the Guanabara Bay. He rapidly appreciated the importance of Rio ‘for the security of the whole of Brazil’, both because of the threat posed by the French and because of its proximity to the Spanish colonies around the River Plate. Various kinsmen followed Mem to Brazil, drawn by the prospect of glory and land, which the ungoverned spaces of Rio seemed to offer. They included his son Fernão and his young cousin Estácio (sometimes referred to as his nephew). Another relation, Salvador Correia de Sá, would serve as the first Portuguese governor of Rio following its conquest; his descendants would dominate it for the best part of a century. As well as sharing an interest in capturing Rio, the Jesuits and the Sás depended on each other more broadly. As governorgeneral, Mem looked to Nobrega and another experienced Jesuit, José de Anchieta, for counsel. The Jesuits also assisted by co-opting catechised natives to fight for the Portuguese. The Jesuits, in turn, so ught the governor-general’s help in extending their activities into new areas. The influence that these two groups managed to exercise over policy speaks to the frailty of wider political institutions in Brazil at this time.

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T TOOK FULLY NINE YEARS for Mem to bring Guanabara Bay under his control. In June 1558, he confessed in a letter to  João III’s widow, Queen Catarina, who was acting as regent on behalf of her infant grandson King Sebastião, of his ignorance of the strength of Villegagnon’s colony, explaining that he had attempted to capture a French boat to ‘find out the truth about how many men they have and what their intentions are’. Information eventually came from a French defector, Jean Cointa. Even so, er uptions of violence in other parts of the country deprived Mem of the men he needed to launch a sustained campaign in Rio. Time and again, he was forced to plead for reinforcements from Portugal. In September 1559 two Portuguese carracks set off from Lisbon under the command of Bartolomeu de Vasconcelos da Cunha. His orders were to rendezvous with Mem in Bahia and then proceed to Rio, where he was to ‘destroy what they found there and expel the French’. He arrived in Bahia in November. Since Vasconcelos brought few fighting men, Mem was forced to conscript local residents into the army. The squadron left Bahia in mid-January 1560, having been joined by eight further vessels. It arrived at the bar of Guanabara Bay on March 15th. Mem de Sá sent a demand to Fort Coligny to surrender. The defenders sent a contemptuous dismissal. In response, Mem ordered an all-out assault, despite Vasconcelos’s conviction that it was ‘impregnable’. The fortress was bombarded for more than 12 hours, forcing its residents and the ‘many pagan tribesmen’ in their ranks, ‘each one as well armed as the French’, to break out. While some fought the invaders at close quarters, the majority escaped to the mainland, taking with them AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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This page: a ‘Brazilian from  America’, Habitus praecipuorum popularum, 16th century. Opposite: ‘The Execution of an Enemy by the Topinambous Indians’ by Theodore de Bry, 1562.

whatever weapons they could seize. Within two days, the island had fallen. Some 75 Frenchmen were taken prisoner, along with a further 40 from a captured ship. Although the Portuguese managed to expel the French from Fort Coligny, the status quo ante soon reasserted itself in Guanabara Bay. Nobrega’s claim that Rio had been purged of all ‘Lutherans’ had little truth to it: French escapees were welcomed into Tupinambá settlements at Uruçumirim (now Morro de Gloria) and Ilha de Paranapuã. The Portuguese, meanwhile, withdrew. Instead of occupying the French bastion, Mem de Sá razed it. When Queen Catarina censured him for this, he protested that he had too few soldiers to garrison it and needed  H ISTORY TODAY  AUGUST 

to preserve men to quell revolts in São Vicente. By June 1560 he was urging her to send further assistance, claiming that unless Guanabara Bay was permanently occupied, Villegagnon would enlist the Turkish sultan’s aid to recover it and give him all the wood he needed for his navy. Within the bay itself, the French and Tupinambá maintained a guerrilla campaign against their Portuguese neighbours, while French traders continued to live there unmolested. In 1561 a group of French and Tupinambá attacked Espirito Santo. The following year some seven French ships put in at Rio. In 1564 São Paulo itself came under su stained attack. To add weight to his appeals, Mem sent Estácio, who had fought in the campaign of 1560, back to court to solicit aid. He finally left Lisbon in

late 1563 at the head of a new fleet. He stopped en route in Bahia and in Espírito Santo, where the Temiminó chief, Arariboia, who had converted to Christianity, supplied him with fighting men. He reached Guanabara Bay in April 1564 and managed to capture a French ship anchored in the bay. After coming under attack, he retreated to São Vicente. With the help of Nobrega, he gathered veterans of the wars against the Tupinambá for another attempt on Guanabara Bay. He was joined on his mission by Anchieta, a number of Temiminó and some Tupiniquim.

Estácio de Sá’s return to Rio in 1565 marked the start of a new

Mem and Estácio were admitted into the Order of Christ.

In May 1566 three galleys under Cristóvão de Barros left Lisbon. They reached Bahia in August, where Mem supplied six further ships. In November, the relief force, now commanded by Mem, departed for Guanabara Bay. On January 18th, 1567 it anchored off the Pão de Açúcar and Mem and Estácio united their forces. Two days later – the feast day of St Sebastian – they attacked the stronghold of Uruçumirim, where the French and Tupinambá had built a for tress ‘on lofty crags … with ample cannon at their disposal’. After a day of fierce fighting, the Portuguese

prevailed: according to Mem numerous Tupinambá and French were killed and ten of the latter were captured. The Portuguese victory came at a cost, however. Like the

Christian martyr he revered, Estácio was struck by an arrow and died the following month.

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SECOND BATTLE WAS FOUGHT a few days later on the Ilha de Paranapuã, where the Por-

tuguese faced 1,000 Tupinambá and French.

Here too – ‘ by dint of immense efforts and even greater risk’, according to Mem – they triumphed. A final confrontation took place at the stockade that Estácio had built on the peninsula of São João, to which some French and Tupinambá had fled. The defenders capitulated immediately on condition that their lives were spared. Guanabara Bay was finally in Portuguese hands.

Estácio’s body was buried in the settlement he had founded. Afterwards, Mem ordered the relocation of the city to the Morro de São Januario, a hill on the western side of the bay. There, the instr uments of government that Estácio had established were given physical form: behind ditches and ramparts, Mem erected a castle with ‘plentiful cannon’, a city hall, a court, a jail, a cathedral and a Jesuit church. The model for this ‘large and noble settlement’, Portuguese strategy. Rather than striking the enemy directly, he sought to establish a beachhead on the fr inges of the bay from which to launch operations against the French and Tupinambá. Estácio and his two or three hundred followers arrived in Rio in torrential rain on March 1st, landing on a beach pinched between the Pão de Açúcar and the Morro Cara de Cão on the peninsula of São João. The mountainous terrain and seclusion from the rest of the mainland – save for a single approach – offered some security. On the other hand, land for planting was scarce.

E

STÁCIO IMMEDIATELY ERECTED fences to deter attackers. Within months he had built earthwork and wooden fortifica-

tions, watchtowers and wattle-and-daub houses, ‘never resting day or night … always being the first to begin work’, according to Anchieta. Although the new settlement was little more than a military encampment at first, Estácio garlanded it with the trappings of a city,

as one Portuguese described it, seems to have been the city of Bahia, which was similarly built on high ground overlooking the bay. Mem also made grants of land to his followers, including one to the Temiminó chief Arariboia. In spite of the praise heaped on it, the new city was crude even by Brazilian standards. There was little formal planning of the kind found in Spanish colonial cities and few buildings were even made of stone.

Mem departed from Rio in May 1568, leaving his cousin Salvador Correia as royal governor. His assertion that the land was in ‘peace and quiet’ was largely borne out: although the French and Tupinambá main-

tained a presence in Cabo Frio until 1574, they never again seriously threatened Rio. Within a few years, Salvador Correia – who created an estate on the Ilha de Paranapuã – had begun the cultivation of sugar. For a brief period in the 1570s, the city served as the capital of the whole of the south of Brazil. It was two centuries before it again acquired a comparable status. Its importance, however, was no longer in doubt.

both to lift the morale of his followers and to certify its legitimacy. He christened the new settlement Cidade de São Sebastião de Rio de

David Gelber is managing editor of The Court Historian, the journal of the Society for

 Janeiro, in honour of St Sebastian and his namesake the king. A coat of arms was awarded, a municipal council was set up, grants of land

Court Studies.

were made and civic officers were appointed. Estácio also ordered the

construction of a chapel dedicated to St Sebastian. The settlers had

FURTHER READING

some success in cultivating foodstuffs but also relied on products they brought with them and periodic foraging raids on Tupinambá villages. The new city sustained itself for two years, surviving regular attacks by land and canoe. As before, only the intervention of the metropolis broke the deadlock. After witnessing the birth of the settlement, An-

Leslie Bethell (ed), Colonial Brazil (Cambridge, 1987).

chieta had departed for Bahia to inform Mem of developments. The governor-general again requested forces from Portugal. In late 1565 the slow process of forming a fleet began once again. To spur their efforts,

C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825 (Pelican, 1969).  Alida C. Metcalf , Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil 1500-1600 (University of Texas, 2005).  Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called  America (University of California, 1990).

AUGUST 

HISTORY TODAY  

TheMap Turin Papyrus Map, c.1150 �� DISCOVERED NEAR modern Luxor (ancient Thebes) between 1814 and 1821 by agents of Bernadino Drovetti, the French Consul General in Egypt, this is considered one of the oldest known topographical, geographical and geological maps. It survives in fragments but, when recombined, it is about 280cm w ide (just one fragment is pictured here). It was produced around 1150 �� by a wellknown Scribe of the Tomb, Amennakhte, in preparation for a quarrying expedition by Ramesses IV and predates the next oldest known geological map by some 2,900 years. It is held in the Turin Museum in northern Italy. It shows a 15km-stretch of the Wadi Hammamat, the ‘Valley of Many Baths’, oriented with south and the source of the Nile at the top. Shown on this por tion of the map are a quarry for bekhen stone, a prized blue-green material used to carve statues of gods and pharaohs, and a gold mine. Nestled at the foot of some hills (stylised cones with pink, wavy flanks) to the north are four small houses for gold-workers, which are close to a temple to the god Amun. The map also shows the locations of various rock types, including gold-bearing quartz, which is represented by three pinkish stripes on the hill at the top, above the gold mine. Inscriptions elsewhere describe the purpose and destination of the quarried stone. Kate Wiles �� HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST ����

AUGUST ���� HISTORY TODAY  ��

XXXXXXXXXXX REVOLUTION | CULTURAL

Looking back on the Great Leap Forward Frank Dikötter explains how the

gradual opening of Chinese archives has revealed the appalling truth about Chairman Mao’s genocidal rule. IN THE People’s Republic of China, archives do not belong to the people, they belong to the Communist Party. They are often housed in a special building on the local party committee premises, which are generally set among lush and lovingly manicured grounds guarded by military personnel. Access would have been unthinkable until a decade or so ago, but over the past few years a quiet revolution has been taking place, as increasing quantities of documents

Blood on the tracks: a portrait of Mao adorns a freight train in Yuhsien County, Shansi Province, May 5th, 1958.

older than 30 years have become available for consultation to professional historians armed with a letter of recommendation. The extent and quality of the material varies from place to place, but there is enough to transform our understanding of the Maoist era. Take, for instance, the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, when Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

| CULTURAL REVOLUTION

to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected. A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine. My study, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastro phe (2010), relies on hundreds of hitherto unseen party archives, including: secret reports from the Public Security Bureau; detailed minutes of top party meetings; unexpunged versions of leadership speeches; sur veys of working conditions in the countryside; investigations into cases of mass murder; confessions of leaders responsible for the deaths of millions of people; inquiries compiled by special teams sent in to discover the extent of the catastrophe in the last stages of the Great Leap Forward; general reports on peasant resistance during the collectivisation campaign; secret police opinion surveys; letters of complaint written by ordinary people; and much more. What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.

‘liberation’ in 1949, showing how power seized with violence could only be maintained with violence. Up to a million people described as enemies of the people fell victim to a killing frenzy, in which ordinary citizens were encouraged to take part. In remote villages bystanders were sometimes allowed to cut the flesh from the dead and take it back home. The party itself decreed quotas for the killings, but these were often exceeded when mass murder was driven by personal vendettas and lineage feuds. Fresh evidence is also being unearthed on the land reform that transformed the countryside in the early 1950s. In many villages there were no ‘landlords’ set against ‘poor peasants’ but, rather, closely knit communities that  jealously protected their land from the prying eyes of outsiders – the state in particular. By implicating everybody in ‘accusation meetings’ – during which village leaders were humiliated, tortured and executed while their land and other assets were redistributed to party activists recruited from local thugs and paupers – the communists turned the power structure upside down. Liu Shaoqi, the party’s second-in-command, had a hard time reining in the violence, as a missive from the Hebei archives shows: ‘When it comes to the ways in which people are killed, some are buried alive, some are executed, some are cut to pieces, and among those who are strangled or mangled to death, some of the bodies are hung from trees or doors.’

What comes out of this massive dossier is a tale of horror. Mao emerges as one of history’s greatest mass murderers

 A murderous frenzy The discriminate killing of ‘slackers’, ‘weaklings’ or otherwise unproductive elements increased the overall food supply for those who contributed to the regime through their labour. As report after report shows, food was also used as a weapon. Throughout the country those who were too ill to work were routinely cut off from the food supply. The sick, vulnerable and elderly were banned from the canteen, as cadres found inspiration in Lenin’s dictum: ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ As the minutes of leadership meetings show, Mao was aware of the extent of the famine. At a secret gathering that took place in Shanghai on March 25th , 1959, Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all grain. He announced that: ‘When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’ Other key events of the Maoist era are also being revisited thanks to party archives, more often than not by Chinese historians themselves. Yang Kuisong, a historian based in Shanghai, has cast new light on the terror that followed  HISTORY TODAY 

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The long road to transparency There is hardly a topic that is not being explored thanks to fresh archival evidence, although the Cultural Revolution, for the greatest part, remains off limits. Even as vast masses of original party documents are gradually being declassified, much of the crucial evidence remains safely locked away, including most of the Central Party Archives in Beijing. A tantalising glimpse of the wealth of material that might one day become available is offered in Gao Wenqian’s extraordinary biography of Zhou Enlai, first premier of the People’s Republic. Gao, a p arty historian who worked with a team in the Central Archives in Beijing on an official biography of Zhou for many years, smuggled his notes out of the archives before absconding to the United States in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The premier portrayed in the ground-breaking biography Gao subsequently published is not the suave, well-mannered diplomat we are used to, but instead a devious figure, always willing to turn against his own friends in order to further his career. Gao describes him as Mao’s ‘faithful dog’. And Zhou was not only unique in his willingness to endure humiliation at the hands of his master as a way of surviving politically the many purges initiated by Mao: he acquiesced, as Gao puts it, in carrying Mao’s ‘execution knife’. Why are these sensitive archives being declassified? A short answer is the general feeling of goodwill and transparency that emerged before the Beijing Olympics of 2008. This has since tightened noticeably. Let us hope it returns. Frank Dikötter  is the author of

The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976  (Bloomsbury, 2016). His major survey of the Cultural Revolution will appear in the September issue of History Today .

 ADAM SMITH

The Prophet of 

Profit  Jonathan Conlin considers the life and thought of Adam Smith, father of modern economics, and the competing claims for his legacy.

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NE MORNING in January 1778, 54-year-old Adam Smith left his home in Edinburgh’s Canongate and walked up the Royal Mile to the Customs House in Exchange Square. It was his first week at work as a commissioner of customs. Inside he was confronted with a large board listing all the contraband goods it was now his duty to track down and destroy. For centuries men of business, struggling in the face of foreign competition, had lobbied their r ulers to introduce such restrictions on foreign imports. They argued that, without such import bans, tariffs and ‘bounties’ ( state subsidies), the economies of other nations would prosper at the expense of their own. The commissioners of customs not only collected these tariffs, they prosecuted those who attempted to import goods in defiance of such bans. There is something strange about the idea of Smith, the renowned father of free market economics, joining the customs service. Smith opposed protectionism, as well as guilds and other institutions which, he believed, restricted the movement of workers from one trade to another. If these barriers were removed, Smith insisted, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market would lead each to specialise in the trade they were best suited for, improving quality,

Statue of Adam Smith on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh.

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 ADAM SMITH a cravat, a pair of ruffles, or a pocket hanker-chief which was not prohibited to be worn or used in Great Britain’. ‘I wished to set an example’, he continued, ‘and burnt them all’, cheekily advising Eden against examining ‘either your own or Mrs Edens apparel or household furniture, least you be brought into a scrape of the same kind’. Though intended as a humorous dig, Smith could not help but draw a lesson: trade prohibitions always fail to produce the intended effects, to prevent the consumption of foreign articles where those goods were cheaper or better than those produced at home. Prohibited goods still entered the country, albeit as contraband carried by smugglers, on which the customs collected no dues. Not only that, but Smith’s French ruffles ended up costing him more, to compensate the smugglers for the extra costs incurred by their need to keep out of sight.

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Portrait of Adam Smith by John Kay. Engraving, 1790.

encouraging innovation, lowering prices and raising living standards for all. The power to direct how humans invested their time, effort and money was a despotic infringement of ‘natural liberty’ and no ruler could be trusted to use that power wisely. Smith did not have to look far for examples of the futility of restrictions on trade. Standing in the Customs House that morning, he glanced down from the board to inspect his own attire. As he later wrote to the MP and Lord of Trade William Eden, Smith found ‘that I had scarce a stock,

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Below: Glasgow University, from Theatrum Scotiae

by John Slezer, 1697. Right: Scholars at a Lecture, engraving by William Hogarth, 1736.

ROSECUTING SMUGGLERS must have been an unpleasant duty for the new commissioner. Smith considered smugglers to be honest men criminalised by imprudent legislation. One regulation intended to boost English wool production had made its export a crime punishable by death. ‘Like the law of Draco’, Smith thundered, ‘these laws may be said to be all written in blood.’ Protectionism assumed international trade to be a game of beggar-thy-neighbour. It encouraged European nations to stake exclusive claims to large sections of the globe for exploitation by incompetent, monopolistic trading companies, such as the East India Company. An imperial system founded on protectionist tariffs fostered untold violence, slavery and destruction. Smith, a fervent anti-imperialist, saw conflicts like the Seven Years War (1756-63) between Britain and France as opportunities

for greedy men of business. In 1776, just as the American War of Independence began, Smith would even urge British ministers to abandon their North American colonies without a fight. Tellingly, the conflict had been triggered by the introduction of new tariffs on American trade, which were intended to help the struggling East India Company. Such restrictive policies had made life difficult for Smith’s colleagues in Boston.

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HOSE WHO HAVE READ Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) must acknowledge the difficulty of presenting him as a friend of big business: did he not preach against that ‘mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be the rulers of mankind’? Certainly, by the time Smith’s profile appeared on the Bank of England’s £20 note in 2007, it was clear that his mantle was no longer the uncontested property of free marketeers. Focus shifted to Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). This

study of psychology and morality had been sidelined until then, on the basis that it h ad been superseded or simply contradicted by his more celebrated Wealth of Nations. As a consequence, identifying Smith’s political heirs became something of a challenge. As Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown spoke of his pride in representing Smith’s home town of Kirkcaldy as its Member of Parliament. In 2010 the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a CNN reporter that he carried a copy of The Theory of Moral Sentiments wherever he went. From Thatcherite totem, Smith had, it appeared, supplanted Mao’s Little Red Book as the bedside reading of China’s Communist elite. As the Bank of England prepares to take Smith off its £20 note, are we any closer to pinning this Scottish thinker down?

By the time Smith’s profile appeared on a new £20 note in 2007, it was clear that his mantle was no longer the uncontested  property of Thatcherite   free marketeers

PHILOSOPHERS ARE MADE, not born, at least according to Smith. A philosopher and a ‘common street porter’ might display ‘the most dissimilar characters’, he noted, but the differences in personality, income and talent resulted ‘not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education’. One boy did not become a philosopher because of his extraordinary brain, nor did the other become a porter because he had been born with a muscular physique suitable for carrying things around. The philosopher might insist that he became a philosopher because he was born more intelligent than the porter, but that was mere vanity. Whenever asked to write about his own life Smith was nothing if not humble, showing scant interest in ‘that worst of all subjects, ones self ’. In Smith’s day, as now, the main determinant of a child’s future fortune was its parents’ income, not its own intelligence or ‘genius’. This is not something we find easy to admit. We like to think that the philosopher and the porter truly fit their respective positions in society. An appetite for this pleasing idea of fitness thus suits the aforementioned vanity. In Smith’s case, it does seem as if ‘habit, custom and education’ played a greater role than nature. Luck played a part as well. Whether it was the shift from feudal pastoralism to intensive farming or that from cottage industry to factory production, Kirkcaldy had much to teach an observant young man. Kirkcaldy now has a population of 46,000, largely supported by linoleum production. The city gained administrative independence in 1644 when Charles I made it a royal burgh, freeing it from the control of the local feudal landlord, the abbey of Dunfermline. Elsewhere in Scotland, however, the medieval system of feudal land tenure persisted, notably among the Highland clans. They were governed by ties of personal loyalty to the clan chief, not contract. Farmers and shepherds followed their chief into battle. The clans rose in support of AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

 ADAM SMITH the Jacobite challenger to the British throne, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1745. The following year, they were mown down by the professional troops of George II at the Battle of Culloden. Kirkcaldy, free of feudal ties, prospered. Alongside sheep-herding, forestry and agriculture, proto-industrialisation developed, as farmers took in flax to work into linen in their spare time. Nail works and shipyards sprang up and both local and international trade blossomed. Smith’s father was well placed to observe all this activity. Indeed, it was his duty to do so, as customs officer for Kirkcaldy. The elder Smith was secretary to the 3rd Earl of Loudoun, whose support had doubtless helped him secure a post in the customs. Patronage tied father and son in service to a particular segment of the Scottish landowning aristocracy, whose earls and dukes supported the 1707 Union between the Scottish and English monarchies. Although England’s fashionable elite soon came to romanticise the vanishing world of the clans, Smith recognised that the Union was a measure from which Scotland had derived ‘infinite Good’. Education, too, was important in shaping Smith’s development. Kirkcaldy’s town council had built a two-room school in 1723. The system of parish schools found across Scotland, as well as its fine ancient universities, reflected a widespread respect for education, sufficient to lead almost all Scottish parents to make the necessary financial and other sacrifices – including the loss of their child’s labour, a valuable commodity in itself – to send their children to school for a few years. Smith learned reading, writing and arithmetic at school, as well as Latin and some Greek and was set on a path to brilliant and highly original insights into the human condition.

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N THCENTURY EDITION of the Encheiridion survives with Smith’s name on it. Compiled by a pupil of the first-century Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the Encheiridion  or ‘Handbook’ teaches us to rid ourselves of any fantasy that we have power over our bodies, our possessions or other external things, when we only actually have power to control our inner state. We achieve true freedom and tranquillity through self-knowledge, by silencing the desires that threaten to enslave us and by achieving mastery of our emotions. The Stoics and other great philosophers of antiquity were lifelong companions for Smith. In 1737, aged 14, Smith entered the University of Glasgow. He was heavily influenced by his professor of moral philosophy, an Ulster Presbyterian named Francis Hutcheson, who formed part of the so-called New Light movement within Presbyterianism. It sought to  HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Below: Portrait of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Mezzotint by David Martin after  Allan Ramsay’s portrait, 1766:

soften the harsh, Calvinist view of human nature, which had been the hallmark of Scottish presbyterianism. Hutcheson’s lectures encouraged Smith to view human nature as a worthy focus of study, as something with its own structure, rather than something condemned to sinful disorder. Human nature was a network of ‘springs’, ‘parts’ and ‘appetites’ and Hutcheson saw reason and a moral sense as examples of these, along with ‘interest’ (the care of our own well-being, including financial well-being) and the ‘passions’, or emotions. Hutcheson identified a ‘wonderful

 Alongside ‘habits and customs’, such as patronage, education was equally important in shaping Smith’s development 

set of divine commandments revealed to certain prophets by God, as the Ten Commandments had been revealed to Moses. Whether this nature revealed the mind of a divine creator was not an urgent question for Smith, who had been unnerved by the outspoken disdain f or ‘revealed’ religion of his compatriot, the historian and philosopher David Hume.

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natural contagiousness’, which led us to share our emotions with our fellow humans. After completing his studies in Oxford, Smith returned to Kirkcaldy and delivered a series of well-received lectures on rhetoric in nearby Edinburgh. Such intellectual diversions, together with the reforms introduced at Glasgow University by Hutcheson (who lectured in English, rather than in the usual Latin), catered to a new appetite for philosophising among the elite and middling rank. Speculation, which had once seemed dangerously heretical (or simply dull), now provided men – even women – w ith food for polite conversation at tea tables and in coffee houses. Appointed to a professorship at Glasgow in 1751, Smith picked up where Hutcheson left off and managed to persuade a number of aristocrats to send their boys to university, which was no longer the preserve of those destined for the law or the Church. Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments appeared in 1759. In it, Smith sought to classify the full gamut of human emotions and to identify the mechanism by which humans determine whether an action or individual is good or bad. Smith finds this mechanism in the behaviour of his fellow man, in instincts established by nature, rather than in a

 Above: the appearance of utility can make any machine hard to resist. Trade card of Dudley Adams, maker of scientific instruments, c.1750.

MITH’S ETHICS are founded on ‘sympathy’, which is often understood as an emotion in itself – just as sorrow is expressed in response to the suffering of others. For Smith, however, sympathy is not an emotion but rather the means by which we become aware of emotions. According to Smith, we do not feel sympathy for someone else; we have, or experience, all kinds of emotion by means of sympathy. Smith insists that this sympathy lies within the reach of all. ‘ The greatest ruffian’, he writes, ‘the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.’ This is because sharing passions, or emotions, sympathetically brings pleasure, even when the emotion being shared seems unpleasant, as with grief. This longing to share our emotions is challenged, however, by the obvious fact that we can never feel quite the same ‘pitch’ of emotion as each other. As a result, Smith explains, each of us learns from a young age to adjust the pitch of our emotions to a level that we know others will sympathise or ‘go along with’. This level varies from emotion to emotion, in a fashion that is conducive to the good order of society. Those derived from the body, for example, like lust and hunger, are not easily shared by others. We, therefore, do not express them much, knowing that it is unlikely that anyone else will go along with us. But, even when there is nobody present to go along with our emotions, Smith points to a ‘man within the breast’, an invisible observer who serves as the impartial spectator to our actions, a tribunal or court whose  judgments we can never escape. In Smith’s account of human society this negotiation of emotions is a constant among humans. Such haggling could be described as a kind of marketplace of emotions, but Smith prefers a musical metaphor: though actor and spectator could never achieve the same pitch of emotion, ‘there may be concord, and this is all that is wanted or required’. Our inability to sympathise fully with another could be taken as evidence of humanity’s irredeemably sinful nature, though in Smith’s hands, this apparent failure contributes ‘to the harmony of society’. Smith thus constructs an ethics without recourse to an authority, like a personified God, or an abstract concept, such as fitness or utility, and demonstrates it using homespun, everyday examples. As Smith’s friend and contemporary, the politician Edmund Burke, noted in his review of The Theory of Moral Sentiments: The illustrations are numerous and happy, and shew the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing.

That is not to say that the picture Smith presented was entirely positive. He notes, for example, that our tendency to revere the wealthy can skew our moral compass. Smith travelled to France in 1764, accompanying the son of the Duke of Buccleuch on the traditional Grand AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

 ADAM SMITH Tour. Hume, who was working as secretary to the British ambassador in Paris, introduced Smith to the salons of the French Enlightenment. The Theory of Moral Sentiments had been translated into French, compensating somewhat for Smith’s poor command of the language. ‘We have nothing to compare with him’, wrote Voltaire, ‘and I am embarrassed for my dear compatriots.’ Although we cannot be sure that Smith met Jean  Jacques Rousseau, he certainly engaged with the great French philosopher’s Discourse on Inequality (1755). Whereas Smith had argued that humans were naturally

‘We have nothing to compare with him,’ wrote the famous French philosopher Voltaire, ‘and I am embarrassed for my dear compatriots’  dependent on one another and that each of us constructs a ‘self ’ through interaction with others, Rousseau saw this interdependence as the root of such ‘evils’ as private property. By luring us into the pursuit of consumerism, the commercial society condemns us to sacrifice our happiness in the pursuit of pleasures that are forever beyond our reach. Smith always struggled to achieve a balance between restless acquisitiveness and the Stoic pursuit of tranquillity.

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HYSICIAN TO Louis XV, François Quesnay’s attempt to capture an entire national economy in the form of his Tableau Economique exhilarated Smith. Although such models are now the stock in trade of economists, Quesnay’s was the first of its kind. Had Quesnay lived, Smith would have dedicated The Wealth of Nations to him. But his admiration was tempered by Smith’s criticism of the tendency of Quesnay and his followers, the Physiocrats, also known as les économistes, to fall in love with their tidy models and to seek to impose their policies on the people by a well-meaning, if nonetheless despotic, abuse of royal authority. As Smith noted in the 1790 edition of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, such a ‘Man of System ... seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board’, when the reality was that, ‘in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own’. His excursion to France, as well as a series of short stays in London, allowed Smith to test and develop the ideas he would advance in The Wealth of Nations. In contrast to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, this book was clearly structured as a scientific treatise, with an opening ‘ Introduction and Plan’, as well as extensive footnotes and an appendix containing figures on the herring fishing industry. It sketched out a model of socioeconomic development, but it was not a tale of natural rights, social contracts and the balance of trade, but of natural instincts, above all that uniquely human ‘disposition to truck, barter and exchange’. He believed that the specialisation of labour drove this Progress of Opulence: a group of craftsmen can increase their workshop’s daily output, if each focuses on a single  HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Title page of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd edition, 1761.

stage in the process of manufacturing a pin. Though the pin factory was depicted on the current £20 note, Smith did not see this par ticular observation as a novel one. Even more striking is the offhand way Smith introduces his metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’. This describes how the free interaction of a crowd of individuals, each bent on their own interest, can end up allocating the economy’s resources – capital, machinery, the workers themselves – for the overall benefit of the society. A higher intelligence which seems to be making decisions in a disinterested manner emerges from a crowd of ‘dumb’ agents who have no intention to serve the common good. Later ages saw this ‘hand’ as Smith’s greatest achievement and employed it to argue against any state intervention in the economy. Yet the term appears just once in The Wealth of Nations’  947 pages. The phrase may even have been intended as a kind of

FOR SMITH it is not human intellect which acts, but nature which leads, through a rather untidy if ultimately benevolent jumble of instincts and appetites. Seen in this way, Smith’s thought does not sit all that comfortably within the Enlightenment project, which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant defined in 1784 as one in which humans free themselves from prejudices and come to think and act for themselves. Nor does it fit that model of rational economic man ( homo economicus ) with which 20th-century economists populated their models. Rather than condemning the sage of Kirkcaldy to oblivion, however, his thought has never seemed more relevant. Smith’s interest in the irrational manner in which we express resentment (punishing others for unfair behaviour, for example, even when doing so carries a cost to ourselves) appeals to game theorists and behavioural economists today. Meanwhile neuroscientists investigate our brains’ mirror neurons, which invite comparisons with Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’. Since Smith’s concept of the invisible hand helped inspire Charles Darw in’s discovery of natural selection, it is unsurprising that Smith’s account of the evolution of human society and ethics appeals to Dar win’s 21st-century heirs. But what of the globalised, free-trading consumer society in which we find ourselves today? How well did Smith understand what he was letting us in f or? Smith recognised that consumerism arouses insatiable demands and that the specialisation of labour can lead to monotonous, robotic toil. Though the progress of opulence brings real gains in security, it can unleash new anxieties, rather than that Stoic tranquillity which made true happiness possible. Smith’s response to these unintended consequences was not to advocate flight into some idyllic, presocial state that probably never existed outside Rousseau’s overheated imagination. By cultivating our impartial spectator, however, and by ensuring that the ‘monopolising spirit’ of those ‘men of business’ disturbs nobody but themselves, Smith says that these anxieties can be controlled. Like all great thinkers, therefore, Smith’s legacy is not a policy shopping list to be claimed by Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown, Wen Jiabao or any other politician, but a set of tools for thinking about human psychology and society as well as economics. In a complex, networked world, Smith’s recognition of the important role played by the unexpected, the unintended and the simply messy is surely an asset.  Jonathan Conlin teaches modern British history at the University of Southampton. His biography of Adam Smith is published by Reaktion as part of their ‘Critical Lives’ series.

FURTHER READING Top: unnecessary items are made necessary in a consumer society.  A nécéssaire , or tweezer case. French, c.1765.  Above: title page of The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

 joke at the expense of the chess-playing Man of System. It was as if, in admiring an intricate watch mechanism, we presumed that the watch-hands had the ‘desire or intention’ to show the hour, ‘when we know that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do’. Whether contemplating the workings of our own emotions, an economy or even a constitution, Smith constantly reminds his readers to be sceptical of tidy explanatory mechanisms.

 Jerry Evensky, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Knud Haakonssen, The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith. An Enlightened Life (Penguin, 2010).

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HISTORY TODAY  

MakingHistory Archives are one thing, the public another and connecting the two is one of a historian's hardest challenges, as  Suzannah Lipscomb knows from experience.

In Praise of the Go-Between IN RECENT WEEKS I have gone from reading 16th-century manuscripts in a French provincial archive to speaking at two literary festivals. The close  juxtaposition of these two ends of the historian’s spectrum has made me reflect on the nature of history as a discipline. The sort of raw data historians dredge up from archives requires many filters and processes to become the finished product: a book, a television documentary, a literary festival talk. Extracting that raw data and conveying it in meaningful terms to an audience require very different skill-sets. Yet both are essential. Finding treasures in the archives is the essence of historical research, while, as G.M. Trevelyan put it: ‘If historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is useless except insofar as it educates themselves.’ This is why at my college we are starting an MA in Historical Research and Public History. Both of these subjects come under the historian’s purview. Nevertheless, they are different and it is easy for historians to get lost in one or the other. Public historians can be irritated by academic historians who get caught up in the minutiae and cannot see the wood for the trees, who cannot communicate and write in impenetrable prose, or who squander their material by failing to convey the importance of their subjects. In turn, academic historians can be frustrated by media-savvy popular historians who come and prey on the material they have acquired through long hours trawling through archives, painstakingly deciphering ancient handwriting, or slogging through useless document after useless document in order to harvest some hardwon fruit, which the popular historian  HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

then serves up as a trifle for public consumption. It feels as if there is a rift in the discipline between those who feel that they are doing the serious archival work, while others are pinching their glory; and those who write historical bestsellers and feel that those who fail to write readable books about history are derelict in their duty. Sometimes trying to bridge the gulf between the two ends of the spectrum feels like

The raw data historians dredge up from archives requires many filters to become the finished product  doing the splits. I am working on a book about Huguenot women in early modern France. In certain towns where they established control, the Huguenots set up a sort of moral court – the consistory – and its records have proved a rich source for social and gender history. In my recent archival trip, I was chasing up leads on ‘my’ women, or the men associated with them, in other docu A Huguenot brought to life:  Jeanne III d'Albret, Queen of Navarre.  Attributed to Francois Clouet, 1570.

ments, such as town council records, baptismal registers and criminal court minutes. These were all thrillingly substantial tomes of yellowing parchment, bound in vellum and inscribed in beautiful (if sometimes near-illegible) secretary hand. Yet, while everyone can understand the thrill of touching old manuscripts, explaining the value of my recent archival foraging is harder. I was looking through the registers, for example, to try to find out the names of some of the women who have hitherto only been identified as ‘the wife of so -and-so’, or if certain couples had a child, or whether various marriages were enacted: that is, details that were really important in the lives of those individuals who lived them and whose world I am trying to bring to life, but which are, now, admittedly, esoteric. This is not, I hope, just a piece of virtue-signalling. I want to identify the problem: how to take that kind of raw data and transform it into history that can move and educate the public? And the verdict: how blooming hard it is to be a historian. It is difficult to move from those lovely pieces of 16th-century parchment not only to making a story, but to making an argument that says something of import and says it in a way that the world can comprehend. Those who think of history as much more of a soft, easily accessible discipline than, say, physics or chemistry should be warned that it is not as easy as it looks. There is a rift between the two ends of the spectrum, but it seems to me that the very business of being a historian lies in that space. We are go-betweens. Suzannah Lipscomb  is Head of the history faculty at the New College of the Humanities, London and author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII  (Head of Zeus, 2015) .

WARTIME BROADCASTING

What role was the BBC to play if the cold war became hot? For the first time, the corporation has given detailed access to its plans for a Wartime Broadcasting Service following a nuclear attack. Paul Reynolds reveals its secrets.

The BBC Book of War A

RMAGEDDON MIGHT HAVE BEEN looming but, in its plans for nuclear war, the BBC was properly prudent with public money. Staff designated to go down into the bunkers from which a Wartime Broadcasting Service (WTBS) would operate were not to be given any special payment but could withdraw up to £250 cash in advance of salary. A special form was provided for this purpose, which the staff had to sign. They were then to leave their families behind. The BBC’s Director-General, curiously, was not one of those staff. In the final version of the plan the BBC team would have been led by the Controller of Radio 4, perhaps because WTBS would have been a radio-only service. But the names of some of those who were listed in earlier versions have survived in the files. In 1972, four of the most

 Above left: BBC Wartime Broadcasting Instruction Book, 1988-89.  Above right: Broadcasting House, London. 1950s.

senior staff due to go into the BBC headquarters bunker under the BBC Engineering Training Department at Wood Norton in Worcestershire included Grace Wyndham Goldie, who pioneered television coverage of general elections. Among the ‘first Alternatives’ were the sports broadcaster and BBC executive Peter Dimmock and Paul Fox, then Controller of BBC1. A memo in 1964 named three BBC staff to go to the Prime Minister’s bunker at Corsham in Wiltshire (codenamed Turnstile and later known as ‘Maggie’s bunker’). One of them was Alasdair Milne, subsequently Director-General, who clashed with the Thatcher administration and was forced to resign in 1 987. Such bureaucratic procedures were the results of years of planning, which are contained in a series of BBC War Books, the last of which was produced in 1988 in a thick red binder. The cold war came to an end AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WARTIME BROADCASTING

Clockwise from above: Grace Wyndham Goldie, c.1955; Huw Wheldon in his office at BBC TV Centre, February 26th, 1965; Wood Norton, May 25th, 1956.

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down to the BBC’s Written Archives Centre near the Monitoring Service at Caversham, north of Reading. The safes were opened for a Radio 4 programme on WTBS in 2008. The BBC War Books in them were briefly described in the programme but only now have they been opened up.

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HE FIRST BBC War Book of the cold war was produced in 1950, but it was the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 that increased the tempo and further editions then came out in 1972, 1976, 1984 and, finally, in 1988. Certainly, despite what Margaret Salmon said in 1990, the BBC took the whole operation very seriously: the terms of its charter made it responsible for WTBS. The BBC terminology for nuclear war is typically delicate. It is described as a ‘nuclear exchange’ and even WTBS is referred to in BBC-speak as Deferred Facilities. Hodder’s job description as Special Assistant to the head of personnel and, later, Manager, Special Duties hid his double-hatted role. Wearing one, he was in charge of planning for WTBS and, wearing the other, he was the liaison with the Security Service, MI5, which had vetted large numbers of BBC staff for years. His MI5 role was revealed by the Observer  in 1985 but, by Hodder’s day, vetting had been reduced to a handful of key staff, including those who would operate WTBS. The 1988 BBC War Book was compiled by Hodder’s predecessor, Ronnie Stonham, a retired brigadier, who also oversaw the reduction in MI5’s BBC role. Hodder had drafted another edition when the whole project came to an end. The War Book is a testament to BBC planning. It was distributed in secret to 129 BBC recipients, all of whom were listed under myriad BBC acronyms. Copy 29 was a spare and this is the one that survives in the archive. It follows the government presumption that there would be a Time of Tension (the TOT) for several weeks before any ‘nuclear exchange’ and that during this period there would be time for BBC plans to be put into operation. The TOT was known more formally as the Precautionary Stage and declaration of it by the Cabinet would have kicked off the implementation of all government plans. The view among many sceptical BBC news staff, however, was that no such orderly time-frame would be available. ‘It would probably have been done on the hoof’, remarked a former senior BBC editor, Roy Walters.

The BBC War Book follows the presumption that there would be a ‘Time of Tension’ for several weeks before any ‘nuclear exchange’  shortly afterwards and the WTBS was stood d own in 1992. Steve Mitchell, then a senior BBC news editor, attended the final meeting of the committee which oversaw the planning. ‘I went along probably because nobody else in the news department wanted to go’, he recalled. ‘The committee was being wound up and I got the impression that some of its members were rather sad about this. They had devoted a lot of their time to it. A BBC drinks trolley was wheeled in and we toasted the demise of WTBS.’ Mitchell’s quizzical attitude was reflected elsewhere. In the BBC papers there is a brief entry which states that the files are empty between 1964 and 1972 because Huw Wheldon, Managing Director of Television, ‘refused to take any part in matters dealing with war time broadcasting’. In 1990, a member of the BBC’s board of management commented to Michael Hodder, the BBC official in charge of the plan: ‘We all think that what you are doing is a joke.’ By then, of course, the cold war was coming to an end. Margaret Salmon, the BBC’s Head of Administration, told Hodder that, when WTBS ended, he should destroy the War Books and their associated files, which were held in two safes in his office. But Hodder quietly disregarded Salmon’s proposal. ‘I like history. I can’t destroy it. I knew this would be of interest at a later date’, he said. So one night he loaded up a lorry at Broadcasting House and had the two safes taken

The government had its own War Book, detailing the actions to be taken by government departments, which can be seen in the National Archives in Kew. The BBC’s role was a vital part of government plans and a chapter in the latter’s book summarises how the WTBS would function. The bunkers from which the government hoped to carry on at least the vestiges of authority – eight in England and one each in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – had each been equipped with a broadcasting studio. One of the bunkers, at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex, is preserved as a museum and the BBC studio there is intact, complete with a mannequin of Mrs Thatcher broadcasting. Kelvedon Hatch has a diagram showing how the complex was protected by air filters and a Faraday Cage, a wire mesh designed to stop the electromagnetic pulse produced by a nuclear explosion, which would otherwise destroy all electrical equipment. The BBC teams in the bunkers would work alongside government officials under ministers restyled as Regional Commissioners. The pre-digital studio requirements were listed down to the exact number of male and female connection plugs and quarter-inch tape needed. The War Book also refers to the stockpiling of ‘diverse recorded programmes and music’ for the WTBS. These included a collection of cassette tapes of old radio programmes, including the Goon Show, Just AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WARTIME BROADCASTING

Rooms in the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker Museum, Essex. Clockwise from left: computer room, typewriter room, radio room and a bedroom with an illustrative mannequin.

‘The other thing I remember clearly is coming away in deep gloom and a feeling of certainty that nuclear war was going to happen very soon’   HISTORY TODAY  AUGUST 

a Minute and Round the Horne , kept in a grey locker at Wood Norton. It

was realised, however, that the tapes would be no good in the case of a nuclear attack because radios would probably be dependent on batteries, which would need conserving for whatever news and information broadcasts might be made. Such broadcasts would not necessarily have been continuous. People might be told, for example, to tune in at a particular time. The system had some flexibility, as each bunker could broadcast to its regional area through manned local transmitters, which were given some fallout protection and diesel generators. During the TOT, television would continue for as long as possible, with the BBC and ITV joining services if necessary, using a procedure still secret. Radios 1 and 2 might combine, as might Radios 3 and 4, and finally there would simply be one radio service (known as Radio 10, from the numbers of the reg ular stations added together). Local radio, along with all independent radio stations, would have joined either during the TOT or at the start of WTBS. The BBC World Service was separate and somewhat neglected. It was allocated a studio in the prime minister’s bunker but the Foreign Office, which funded the service, never provided any equipment or staffing. The Foreign Office was not even represented at Wood Norton. BBC Monitoring would continue at ‘certain other government centres’, still kept secret, in order to try to find out what Soviet and other broadcasters were saying. Choosing staff to go into the underground studios was a sensitive matter, reflected in the changing language used to describe the process. In early versions of the War Book and in associated BBC memos, words like ‘assigned’ and ‘designated’ were used. Minutes of a planning committee meeting in 1964 refer to staff being informed of their nomination to serve in the regional seats of government and says that they should have a short ‘indoctrination course’. The 1976 War Book states that some senior staff had been ‘informed’ that they would be ‘required’ to serve in a war emergency (without being told what they were to do). Later, in less authoritarian times, the phrasing softened. Staff were now ‘invited’ to play their part and there was a more open acceptance that, as Huw Wheldon did, they might refuse. It was all left rather vague in a typically British way. There were planning sessions and seminars for those who accepted. They were also subject to what the War Book

called ‘certain inquiries’; that is, they were vetted: 50 to 70 journalists were on the list. They had to keep their potential role secret, e ven from immediate families. Hodder had a place at Wood Norton to help supervise the operation, though he did not tell his wife. One of the journalists was Bob Doran, an ideal candidate from the BBC’s point of view: as yet unmarried, he was an experienced editor in the radio newsroom. He attended one of the seminars in the 1980s. ‘I was one of the Dr Strangelove quota’, he says, recalling the moment in Stanley Kubrick’s film when Dr Strangelove all too eagerly described how well-matched couples would be sent below ground in a nuclear war and emerge having produced a new super race. BBC plans did not allow for this. ‘My clearest memory is of a discussion about whether people with spouses could bring them along’, Doran says. ‘The other thing I remember clearly is coming away in deep gloom and a feeling of certainty that nuclear war was going to happen very soon.’

A

GOVERNMENTRUN Joint Control Group, in which the BBC was represented, would, when it felt that TOT might become a time of war, issue codewords for action by all government departments. The codewords for BBC action are blacked out in the War Book for some unknown reason. One did slip through: the codeword for authorising a national warning was ‘Falsetto’, also used to confirm an all-clear. After the decision by the Joint Control Group, those BBC staff ‘required’ to fill emergency posts would be asked if they were ‘willing to fulfil’ emergency duties. This rather civilised offer meant that they could change their minds at the last minute. It is possible, however, that by then the government would have given itself powers to direct labour, so the choice might not have been available. In the regional bunkers, there would be five BBC staff members and at the BBC HQ at Wood Norton there would be around 90. These included engineers, announcers, 12 news editors and sub-editors and ‘two nominations from Religious Broadcasting’, whose role might be guessed at but is not laid out. On receipt by the BBC of another government codeword, the willing staff would be assembled in points across the country and be given the first of two letters by ‘dispersal officers’. Letter Number One would tell them that they had been ‘chosen for AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WARTIME BROADCASTING

Crowds in front of the Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate, November 11th, 1989.

emergency duties’. The letter said: ‘Only your wife and any dependent members of your household should be told in confidence of these plans.’ This is underlined. Families would not be allowed into the bunkers.

T

HERE IS A VAGUE PROMISE in the War Book that the ‘invitation procedure’, when staff were originally selected, would include information that the BBC would ‘look after immediate families remaining in their homes’ or ‘assist with finance to move to a selected area of the UK’. Families might, for example, have been offered places in the existing accommodation block, above ground, at Wood Norton. What else the BBC might have offered is not stated. It was at this stage that the chosen staff could fill in Form A to get their £250. They were told that they would get official transport to their posts ‘should it be necessary to ask you to move’. It was all very polite. If they took their own car, they would require official permission and they would not be able to park it at their destination. As for kit, ‘informal clothing only will be necessary’. The letter advised them that facilities for entertainment would be ‘limited’, so they should bring reading material and ‘small recreational items’. One bag was allowed. They should also carry their BBC ID. Apart from shavers, no electrical equipment was permitted. The letter, staff were told, should be destroyed after reading. If war loomed even closer, Letter Number Two would be delivered, again after a codeword had been issued. This letter stated: ‘You have been selected for emergency duty and you will be going to ...’. The bunker’s name would be fi lled in at the time. Delicately, the letter also said: ‘The length of your stay cannot be foreseen, but it might be several weeks.’ Staff were advised to take clothes, soap and towels for 30 days. The BBC had costed all this, including the salary advances. The cash needed, according to the 1988 edition, was to be £97,250. The food in the bunkers (free of charge) would be in packs, with three meals in each, and with five daily menus. This would provide, it was said, 2,200-2,400 calories per day, with a vitamin supplement. Disposable cutlery would be used to save on water. Staff were advised to take their own food as well. Sleeping would be communal, though suitably segregated, and there would a ‘quiet room’, which could be used for religious services.  HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Sectional drawing displayed on the wall at Kelvedon Hatch Museum, showing its protective air filters and Faraday Cage.

There were some nuclear, biological and chemical suits for people venturing out after the ‘nuclear exchange’, but not enough for all. Planning for a post-nuclear attack world was minimal.

B

ROADCAST WARNINGS of a nuclear attack would have come from the BBC headquarters bunker at Wood Norton. It was the entry point for air attack notifications relayed to it from the nerve centre of the British system at High Wycombe and from the US Ballistic Missile Early Warning System in Colorado. Peter Donaldson, a Radio 4 newsreader with a known and trusted voice, recorded the most recent warning announcement. Afterwards, Hodder said, they rewarded themselves with a bottle of whisky. The recording was played to acclaim at Donaldson’s funeral last year. It began: This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.

The planning proceeded steadily over the years, with one or two ups and downs. In 1986, the Home Office minister David Mellor got ratty with the BBC for its alleged slowness in converting Wood Norton, which was being paid for by the government. For its part, the BBC felt that the funds were being drip-fed, which delayed the work, and construction stretched over a period of about ten years, again a sign that perhaps not everyone felt that this was a priority. Wood Norton was only completed in 1988, three years after Mikhail Gorbachev took over as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and eased cold war tensions. It replaced a strengthened studio and a dormitory for 12, known as the Stronghold, under Broadcasting House in London, so deep that people in it could hear London Underground trains. It was a relic of the war and

Government’. The formal assurance refers to a 1962 agreement between the BBC and the government. Such ambiguities can lead to controversy and a story in the Observer  suggested that the BBC had handed over its independence to the government. This story led to a question in Parliament in 1986 from the Labour MP Tony Banks, a former broadcasting union leader. Banks asked about any ‘arrangements’ between the BBC and the government in times of national crisis. The Home Office minister Giles Shaw replied that in the 1962 agreement the BBC, while reasserting its independence, had agreed to the arrangement which Shaw then restated in the language of the War Book. He added that the government was updating its policy, implying that the 1962 arrangement was out of date. The BBC of 1986 was rather upset to discover that it had been party to the 1962 agreement. Hodgson wrote a memo saying that she could find ‘no trace of any such formal understanding’. The Deputy DirectorGeneral Alan Protheroe was liv id. ‘I have never heard of such an undertaking. I would expect the BBC Board to say it would act responsibly. Consultation most certainly does not mean compliance’, he wrote. Fortunately, the Home Office did not seek a confrontation. An official wrote to the BBC that the 1962 approach was no longer relevant to ‘modern circumstances’. One chapter of the 1988 edition of the BBC War Book, dealing with relations between the BBC and the government, has been removed on advice from the Cabinet Office. The reason is not known, but it is likely that the previous reference to 1962 had been shelved and that a more flexible arrangement had been agreed. Did the WTBS ever come close to being activated? Only in theory. During one NATO exercise known as Wintex, in 1989, there was a scenario in which the Russians were supporting the Serbs in a crisis over Kosovo and this developed into a Russian attack on the north of Norway with a NATO response and descent into general war. Roy Walters was one of the BBC staff on the exercise, who was l ocated in a complex under Whitehall. ‘At one stage, we had to tell people whether to leave or stay in

‘This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted ... Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes’  was not strong enough for a nucle ar age. It was also in the w rong place, as London would have been a main target. Remains of the complex were found by demolition crews when they pulled down parts of Broadcasting House in 2006 for rebuilding. It is clear that, once a nuclear attack had taken place and the WTBS was (presumably) functioning, the government would have the final and probably the only say on what was broadcast. Hodder said that it was the Central Office of Information that would ‘control information on the WTBS’. The title ‘Wartime Broadcasting Serv ice’ is therefore significant. It is not the BBC Wartime Broadcasting Ser vice. The War Book does not go into what kind of information might be broadcast. There was no provision, for example, for a n overground force of reporters and editors. That would depend on events at the time. There was a serious difficulty over the question of censorship during the TOT. During this period, the BBC and ITV would continue to function. The problem arose because in post-1950 versions of the War Book there is a paragraph headed ‘Position of the BBC’ during the Precautionary Stage. In the 1975 edition, for example, it is stated that the government ‘do not intend to impose any censorship’ during the TOT. The reason for this is stated in the subsequent paragraph. It says that the Corporation had given a formal assurance that it would act ‘w ith a full sense of responsibility and in close consultation with Her Majesty’s

London’, he recalled. ‘My main conclusion was how expendable England was to be.’ Hodder said that the exercise did result in the theoretical activation of WTBS but nobody told the BBC at the time. He f ound out about it only when he spoke to the Home Office later. The only time the use of WTBS crossed his mind was, again in 1989, when news came of the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘I was concerned at once that the Soviets might react badly and that we should prepare. However my contact in government did not think so and so we dropped it.’ Paul Reynolds is a former BBC diplomatic and foreign correspondent.

FURTHER READING Paul Ozorak, Underground Structures of the Cold War: The World Below ( subbrit.org.uk).  Jean Seaton, Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 (Profile, 2015).  Asa Briggs, The BBC: the First 50 Years (OUP, 1985).  Alban Webb London Calling: Britain, The BBC World Service and the Cold War  (Bloomsbury, 2014).

AUGUST 

HISTORY TODAY  

WITCHES

Poor, old and ugly? While 16th- and 17th-century English pamphleteers portrayed those accused of witchcraft as impoverished and elderly, court records suggest that it was just as likely to be powerful women who stood trial, argues Annabel Gregory.

A

S HENRY GOODCOLE, chaplain at Newgate prison, left the latest hanging at Tyburn in 1621, he heard ballads about the executed witch already being sung in the streets of London: ballads which, he said, were full of inventions. He knew the facts about poor old Elizabeth Sawyer ( ‘crooked and deformed’) and he wrote a pamphlet setting these out. His ‘facts’, however, were mostly acquired not from the evidence presented at the trial, but from interrogations which he had conducted himself in the prison chapel after she had been convicted of murder by witchcraft. His interrogations started with the question: ‘By what means came you to have acquaintance with the Devil?’ and continued in the same vein. She confessed to him that she had sold her soul to the devil. But he admitted that it was only ‘with great labour’ that he got a confession out of her at all. Goodcole was convinced of Sawyer’s guilt, yet neither

‘Elizabeth Sawyer, executed in the year 1621 for Witchcraft’, frontispiece of a pamphlet by Henry Goodcole, 1621.

the judge nor jury had been so sure. It was only after the examining magistrate suggested that the woman be searched for witch’s marks – signs that familiar spirits had sucked on her body as a reward for committing evil deeds – that the jury found her guilty, convinced by what the searchers had found. Goodcole had a line in sensationalist pamphlets about notorious crimes. His bestseller was Heavens speedie hue and cry sent after lust and murther … , which went through three impressions. His pamphlet about Sawyer became the source for a play by Dekker, Ford and Rowley, published the same year, The Witch of Edmonton. Pamphlets and ballads were the main sources of news in this era before newspapers. Even people unable to read could listen to the ballads being sung in the market place with new words to old tunes. The pamphlets were at least as sensationalist as the most extreme tabloids today, with the same moralising tone. Those about witchcraft played on the stereotype of the English witch: a poor, old, ugly and cantankerous woman with no husband to keep her in order. Refused alms by a neighbour, she might send her animal familiar to kill or maim him or his cattle, or at least stop the butter churning. The familiar – perhaps a cat or a toad – would have a name like Piggin or Pyewackett and be rewarded by suckling teats in hidden parts of her body. Literary authors as well as pamphleteers reiterated the assumption that it was poor, ugly w idows who were accused of witchcraft. Yet, in reality, married women were at least as likely to be targeted as widows, which raises AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WITCHES

Pamphlets provide our image of the early modern witch, as almost all witness testimony for criminal courts was thrown away when trials finished

the question: were suspects of witchcraft really the marginal, helpless creatures that authors made out? The animal familiar, the most ignominious aspect of the witch stereotype, appears in virtually every pamphlet account (apart from those that focus on spirit possession) but only rarely in more reliable sources, such as court transcriptions. The pamphlets cover only a small sample, as little as ten per cent, of around 1,000 w itch trials between the mid16th century and the beginning of the 18th, when murder by witchcraft was a capital crime, punishable by hanging. Yet it is the pamphlets that provide our image of the early modern English witch, as almost all witness testimony for the criminal (Assize) courts was thrown away when trials finished and other sources provide minimal information. Such tracts are the basis for Tracy Borman’s Witches: A Tale of Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction (2013), as well as a BBC documentary commemorating the 400th anniversary in 2012 of the trial of witches from Pendle in Lancashire. Some of these witchcraft pamphlets do, nevertheless, give a greater semblance of reliability than those dealing with other crimes, such as murder, because they include some transcripts of trial documents. The authors were concerned not only with maximising sales but also defending the legal procedure. This was partly because witchcraft was notoriously difficult to prove and partly because such trials were still seen as somewhat novel. Before the middle of the 16th century, as on most occasions since, people had less extreme means of dealing with bewitchment than capital punishment.  H ISTORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Detail showing the prison and courthouse from The Ypres Tower at Rye, by Anthony van Dyck, 1630s.

T

HE MOST FAMOUS English witchcraft trial, that of the Pendle witches, also appears to be the most well documented. In the book-length account by the court clerk Thomas Potts, he makes great show of only including ‘matter of record’, but manipulates the material to support his argument. This was a mass trial by English standards, with a high proportion of executions. Of the 17 people p rosecuted, ten were hanged (another died in prison). One of the judges asked Potts to write an account, perhaps to justify the execution rate, which normally only amounted to a quarter of prosecutions. There was also concern over claims of a miscarriage of justice, mentioned by Potts, in another case linked to the Pendle trial. The fame of the Pendle case is due in large part to Potts’ melodramatic portrayal of the two stereotypically elderly and poor suspects: Chattox, ‘a very old, w ithered, spent and decrepit creature’, and Old Demdyke, ‘this sink of villany’. Their crimes, as he says, were well suited to the wild landscape in which they lived. What the latter’s daughter, Elizabeth (‘O Barbarous and inhumane Monster’), lacked in age she made up for in ugliness with one eye above the other, one looking down, the other up. These women begged from their neighbours and threatened them, if refused. They also provided charms to cure the bewitched. Their familiar

spirits, Fancie, Tibb and Ball, variously took the shapes of dog, boy, man, cat, hare and bear. Other suspects from the trial who did not conform to the stereotype are mostly kept in the background, as in other pamphlets. Despite Potts’ claims to veracity, he leaves out much of the evidence of independent witnesses and focuses instead on examinations of the suspects and Elizabeth’s youngest daughter. Even these documents he edits, continually repeating bits of them ad nauseam (to quote Marion Gibson, the prime analyst of these texts). By this means he contrives to shine a spotlight on familiars on the one hand and, on the other, on an alleged conspiracy to blow up Lancaster Castle. Potts links this allegation several times with the GunTop: title page from A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch, 1643. Bottom: The Witch of Edmonton, a Tragi-Comedy, play based on the Elizabeth Sawyer case.

powder Plot of 1605. Protestant fears of terrorism were easily sparked in a county notorious for its many Catholics (including the main suspects in this case) and this allegation was extremely flimsy. It was made by the young son of Elizabeth and was not corroborated by anyone else. Potts claims that Elizabeth confessed to orchestrating the plot but in fact she denied any knowledge of it. The formal charges against the accused include neither this conspiracy nor the familiars, just the bewitching to death of particular people. S pirit familiars are mentioned by only one independent witness. All the others gave the usual story of an altercation with the accused, followed by somebody in their household suffering for it. The same is true of an account of a trial in St Osyth, Essex, which includes a fascinating full transcription of the evidence of witnesses. It is in the examinations of the accused that familiars appear. Potts focused so much on familiar spirits because they offered the strongest possible evidence of guilt. Checking for teats on the suspect’s body usually resulted in something incriminating being found. In the St Osyth case, the examining magistrate shamelessly bullied the suspects into admitting to having familiar spirits. Similar admissions were extracted by Matthew Hopkins, the ‘Witchfinder General’, who used sleep-deprivation techniques in his private enterprise witch-hunt during the Civil Wars.

N

OT ALL THE LEGAL EVIDENCE for the Assize courts was destroyed: some for the northern counties survives after the mid-17th century. These testimonies are tantalisingly brief; too brief to have formed the basis for pamphlet stories. Yet many of them are long enough to convey the terror sometimes experienced by the witches’ victims, induced not by familiar spirits, which are not mentioned in any of these cases, but by the witch herself, appearing to her vic tims in spirit form, through closed windows or doors: Morpeth 1673. She did see t he said Margaret Milburne, widow, standing on an oat skep [container] at her bed feet, thinking she was pulling her heart with something like a thread. Upon which this informer called on her master’s daughter that lay by her, who called of other people out of the room below. Who coming up found this informer in a swoon, who continued not able to speak for 3 or 4 hours.

Sometimes the witch has changed into the shape of an animal such as a cat, hare or bee: Newcastle 1663. The said cat did violently leap about her neck and shoulders, and was so ponderous that she was not able to support it … [she] was so infirm and disenabled that the power of both body and tongue were taken from her … this informer verily believes that the said cat which appeared to her was Dorothy Stranger [the accused], and none else.

In the witchcraft pamphlets, by contrast, there are only one or two instances of such hauntings by w itches. Potts says shape-changing by humans is impossible (echoing  James I’s work on witchcraft, Daemonologie, as he often does). He refers to a suspect turning into a dog in a case, not at Pendle, that was discovered to be fraudulent. Potts pokes fun at the fraudster’s attempt to create a believable case, pointing out that the latter fails to provide the suspects with familiar spirits. This, he says, would have helped the  jury form their judgment. AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WITCHES The suspects in these late 17th-century cases are generally not stereotypical figures. Wives outnumber widows by three to one and suspects are often described as taking part in the everyday activities of the community: dealing in barrels, selling cherries, caring for a grandchild, for example. They are sometimes said to gain power over their victims, as in the following overheard interchange between mother and daughter:

Signature of Anne Taylor and mark of Susan Swaffer.

If thou canst but get young Thomas Haigh to buy thee threepennyworth of indigo, and look him in the face when he gives it thee, and touch his locks, we shall have power enough to take life.

Potts refers to getting power once in the Pendle case, but there is a significant difference: when the suspect touches a victim, it is the suspect’s familiar who gains the power, not the suspect. The testimonies of the late 17th-century Assize cases suggest that suspects were more empowered than those in the pamphlet accounts. They have power in themselves to change shape, haunt and kill with witchcraft. Suspects in the pamphlets are at least as evil but the power is not really in them, it is in the familiar spirits whom they feed and who sometimes, but not always, do the suspect’s bidding. The latter scenario fits with an idea that authors constantly reiterate, that women are more easily seduced by the devil than men because they are the weaker sex. It was not her power that was being demonstrated but that of the devil. But this fits not at all with the accounts of witches in the late 17th-century cases: why would they need animal familiars if they could change into the shapes of animals themselves?

W

E NEED NOT RELY entirely on such brief testimony for more direct evidence of witch beliefs. There is one detailed case from southern England that has much in common with the late 17th-century Assize cases but little in common with the pamphlet accounts. The accused woman in this case, Anne Taylor, appeared to one of her v ictims in spirit form and had no animal f amiliars. Her accusers saw Taylor as a threat because she had more substantive concerns than simply seeking revenge for being refused a penny or some pins, as in many of the pamphlet accounts. While she did not fit the stereotype, being young and married to a gentleman, she was a healer who inherited skills from her mother, which was true of many suspects in other cases, and an outspoken one at that. The case does not lack spirits but they are similar to the fairies described in cases in Scotland: they were morally ambivalent, sometimes helpful, sometimes vindictive. Note that in the Taylor case, as in all others around this date, all the witnesses are for the prosecution so we do not hear the voices of the suspects’ allies. Taylor’s case was tried in 1607-9 in Rye in Sussex, a backwater of the English legal system. It was one of the Cinque Ports, where the king’s justices had no authority to try crimes (hence the survival of its records). Rye had been one of the major ports on the south coast in the mid-16th century but was by this time in decline. The judges were the town’s mayor and aldermen. Taylor was accused of bewitching the previous mayor by his widow, who was now wife of the current mayor. In 1607 rumours spread around Rye of spirits playing  HI STORY TODAY  AUGUST 

Thomas Hamon, Mayor of Rye, 1605-17, from a brass in Rye Church.

puck-like practical jokes; gripping limbs until they went numb; and blowing up a cannon together with the town’s gunner. Alarmed by this spirit invasion, the magistrates interrogated the main source of the rumours, Susan Swaffer, the wife of a poor sawyer (a person who saws wood). She said four spirits – two men and two women – had appeared to her, offering to help her find treasure in the garden of her landlady, Anne Taylor. Her search proved fruitless, even with Taylor’s assistance. The magistrates let her talk, asking few questions. When they interrogated Anne, they asked her to comment on the points made by Susan, which on the whole she refused to do. Susan must have been relieved to have Anne Taylor help her deal with the spirits, for Anne and her mother, old Widow Bennett, were reputed to be ‘cunning folk’ (from con, ‘to know’). Such people often used spirits to help cure illnesses, find lost or stolen goods or make predictions. Unlike the stereotype of ‘ white witches’, neither of these Protestant women used charms or amulets; they prescribed ointments and medicines and used a simple form of astrology, involving good and evil days, to predict the outcome of illnesses. However, the Bennett women were rather too much given to predicting people’s deaths for the peace of mind of some of their neighbours. Their immediate neighbour,

Details from ‘Plot of the Town of Rye, 1591’.

Master Clement Whitfield, gentleman, said that when his wife was ill back in 1603, Anne and her mother ‘did enquire in what manner my wife did fare’; they said they ‘knew her disease, and that it would cost her her life’. This must have been alarming behaviour in people on whom you relied for cures. So alarming, indeed, that Mistress Whitfield started hallucinating: my wife when she lay sick [did say] that Goody Bennett and her daughter Annis had bewitched her, and I could not persuade her to the contrary … for many times she did awake me suddenly in my sleep, and said to me, ‘Look, husband, where  Anne Bennett stands at my bed’s head, and she hath set me my time how long I shall live.’ 

His wife died in 1604. Particularly alarming for the associates of the mayor, Thomas Hamon, was Anne’s prediction when he suddenly fell ill in July 1607, that ‘he was taken in such sort, and in such a bad day and ill hour, as he would never escape the same’ and that he would die as a result of a spirit gripping his body very tightly. Within days, Hamon was dead. Were Anne or her mother, who had been so interested in Hamon’s death, responsible for it? Swaffer was indicted for entertaining spirits that December and subsequently convicted. The death sentence AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

WITCHES was reprieved because she was pregnant. Anne’s indictment for aiding and abetting Susan did not proceed to trial because she had fled to Kent, beyond the jurisdiction of the Rye court.

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HE SWAFFERS WERE recent incomers to Rye but Taylor came from a well-established local family of butchers, the Bennetts. Protestants – if somewhat unconventional – since before the Reformation, they and their fellow artisans – ‘very simple and … of small substance’ – were something of a thorn in the side of the more traditionalist merchant elite. By the middle of the century, however, in a time of prosperity, Anne’s grandfather was successful enough to join the aldermanic bench. There was no love lost between Anne and the mayor’s family. Hamon’s widow reported that she often cursed them both and she allegedly said, among other derogatory comments, that: It were no matter if the divell did fetch away his body … to be an example for others, for she doubted that the divell had his soul already, for that he was an evil liver.

Anne’s antipathy to Hamon may have seemed particularly challenging to the merchant elite, because it reflected the views of others in the town. Hamon was not popular. As most of the population and the corporation itself got poorer, the rich, curiously, seemed not to have been badly affected. Indeed Hamon and other rich inhabitants were buying up the town’s assets. An extraordinary incident had triggered outbursts against Hamon ten years earlier, in 1597, a year of dearth Left: ‘The Cat Sathan’ from the first surviving witchcraft pamphlet, 1566. Right: The Somerset House Conference, 1604,

throughout the country, following several bad harvests. His stepson, an impoverished tailor named Simon Duron, had been twice convicted by the magistrates of theft and on the second conviction was hanged; a sentence that was unheard of in this small town. A couple of days after Duron’s first trial, a fisherman declared that he ‘wished that Master Mayor [Hamon] were hanged’ and a master fisherman standing nearby endorsed his opinion, saying ‘diverse were of that mind, if they durst say so much’. Taylor said later that Hamon had taken against Duron’s Huguenot refugee mother: ‘He had misused his other wif e [Catherine Duron] greatly, which [I know] very well …’ Taylor was not just outspoken but experienced extraordinary good fortune which, in suspicious minds, could have pointed to supernatural powers. She had been heavily indebted following the death of her father and brother during the plague epidemic of 1596, yet the women of the family not only survived this, but she contracted an advantageous marriage in 1603 to a Kentish gentleman, George Taylor. Anne Taylor was saved from hanging thanks to the intervention of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Henry  HISTORY TODAY  AUGUST 

with Henry Howard seated on the right, second from bottom. Unknown artist.

Howard, Earl of Northampton, a member of James I’s Privy Council. As a representative of the government, he sought to challenge the ancient privileges of the Cinque Ports and stop the magistrates from trying any capital crimes. Northampton failed in this endeavour but at Taylor’s trial the magistrates, clearly fearing further intervention if she were convicted, chose one of her friends to be foreman of the jury. She was acquitted of bewitching Hamon to death. Susan Swaffer was pardoned in 1611. After the trial, George Taylor was made a freeman of the town and was then employed, along with the vicar, to represent the town in some negotiations over the silting up of the harbour.

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NNE TAYLOR was totally unlike what we think of as a typical w itch; a poor, old woman living on the margins of society. She seems to have been targeted because of her influence in the town. Evidence from other local sources mined by Malcolm Gaskill suggests that many other suspects were not like the stereotype either. Some had allies, as in the Rye case (among the artisans and more radical Protestants), and in other towns witchcraft accusations sometimes reflected factional conflicts. Pamphleteers helped propagate the stereotype of the witch. Salacious tales of familiars helped sell the publications, offering the opportunity to recount details that were elicited when a suspect was interrogated. As well as their names, there were the shapes in which the familiars appeared, their colour, gender, how and where they were fed and who gave them to the suspect. Value was added if the suspect also admitted that she had sold her soul to the devil. I do not mean to imply that the concept of the animal familiar was alien to w itnesses and suspects: it is mentioned in enough different sources to indicate that it was a genuine part of English popular lore. But a desire for profit, or the need to legitimate a contentious legal process, influenced the slant given to a pamphleteer’s story. The surviving trial evidence gives us a very different image of women accused of witchcraft from that given in the pamphlets. The w itnesses were no doubt familiar with the idea that it was women’s weakness that made them susceptible to seduction by the devil, but the evidence suggests that, in practice, when confronted by a suspect, they usually saw not a feeble old hag in thrall to her familiars but a woman who, in her own self, exerted power in the community.

 Annabel Gregory is the author of Rye Spirits: Faith, Faction and Fairies in a Seventeenth Century English Town (The Hedge Press, 2013).

FURTHER READING Philip C. Almond, The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill (I.B. Tauris, 2012). Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Clement Whitfield’s letter of accusation against Anne Taylor, 1604.

Marion Gibson (ed), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing  (Routledge, 2000).  J.A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England (Hamish Hamilton, 1996).

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HISTORY TODAY  

CROMWELL

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LTHOUGH OLIVER CROMWELL is one of the best known figures in British history, his character is full of contradictions and ambiguities and, at times, he seems to have revelled in keeping his contemporaries – and future generations – guessing. To take but one example: although it seems odd for the quintessential puritan to be indulging in such activities, many stories survive of Cromwell’s involvement in jests and practical jokes. The New Model Army colonel, Edmund Ludlow, remembered a meeting between army officers and republicans in the summer of 1648, when Cromwell suddenly ‘took up a cushion and flung it at my head, and then ran down the stairs’. According to Colonel Isaac Ewer, at the all-important moment when Charles I’s death warrant was signed in January 1649: ‘I did see a pen in Mr Cromwell’s hand, and he marked Mr [Henry] Marten in the face with it, and Mr Marten did the like to him.’ Another story, relating to the hours before the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650, describes Cromwell stopping his horse to laugh at some soldiers playing with a cream tub – a game that ended with the tub up-ended on the head of one of the soldiers. Similar stories crop up elsewhere. The wedding of Cromwell’s daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, in 1646 witnessed ‘Noll’s military rude way of spoiling the custard, and like a Jack Pudding throwing it upon one another, which was ended in the more manly game of buffeting with cushions, and flinging them up and down the room’. Similarly, at a feast for MPs in February 1657, ‘his highness’s frolics’ were said to include smearing sweetmeats into ladies’ dresses and the throwing of napkins. Despite his forbidding exterior, Cromwell seems to have delighted in custard pies and pillow fights. THERE IS, HOWEVER, a catch. These stories are not contemporary with Cromwell and this makes them suspect. The last two mentioned here, concerning Elizabeth Claypole’s wedding and the feast for Parliament, come from a less than promising source, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel , a satirical account of the homeliness of the protectoral court, published in 1664. Ewer’s ink-flicking episode was not in print until after the Restoration; Ludlow’s story appears in his Memoirs, written in exile after 1660 and published, with considerable revision, after his death in 1698; and the cream tub incident occurs in the memoirs of John Hodgson, also penned after 1660. As a result, most historians have tended to ignore these, and other, examples

The Laughing  Roundhead Behind the serious face of the Lord Protector lay a man with a taste for terrible puns and unseemly practical jokes. Patrick Little explores the inside jokes and pillow fights of Oliver Cromwell and his inner circle.  HI STORY TODAY  AUGUST 

 Allegory on Oliver Cromwell, Victor in the English Civil War , engraving by Crispijn van de Passe, 17th century. AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

CROMWELL Elizabeth Cromwell, Mrs Claypole, by  John Michael Wright, 1658.

not easily deciphered. Occasionally, however, we can catch glimpses of this private world. Cromwell constantly teased Colonel Richard Norton about his phenomenal workload in Hampshire, writing in March 1648 that he should ‘be a little honest, and attend your charge’ as an MP at Westminster. By April 1650 he had christened him ‘idle Dick Norton’. There are hints of a similar running joke between Cromwell and his cousin, the shrewd lawyer Oliver St John. This time the  joke appears to be that one or both of them was hopelessly forgetful. As early as 1638 Cromwell wrote to Mrs St John that her husband ‘is not a man of his word! He promised to write’; in 1643 he said St John’s demands had led to ‘forgetfulness’ of his own affairs; and in 1 648 he commented, pointedly, ‘I hope I do often remember you’.

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of Cromwell’s puerile sense of humour or dismiss them as uncorroborated and fanciful. Apart from anything else, such buffoonery does not fit with the accepted image of Cromwell as the godly general and serious-minded politician.

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HEN UNCOVERING Cromwell’s sense of humour, we are perhaps on surer ground reading his own words. The humour used in his private letters is normally fairly staid, but on occasion it, too, can raise an eyebrow. He was capable of treating religion – the thing closest to his heart – with a lack of reverence that seems odd to modern eyes. In a letter to his daughter, Bridget Ireton, of October 25th, 1646, Cromwell mentions the efforts of another daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, in seeking after God and adds ‘thus to be a seeker is to be the best sect next to a finder; and such as one shall ever y faithful humble seeker be at the end. Happy seeker, happy finder!’ This is an awful pun, which turns on the word ‘Seeker’ being the name of a contemporary religious group. It suggests that Cromwellian humour was pretty bovine. The same might be said of his constant use of nicknames. All the Cromwell children had their own nicknames: Dick, Harry, Betty, Biddy, Fanny and so on and this led to further puns. To cite an example, in the early 1650s Cromwell sent messages to Bridget through her second husband, Charles Fleetwood, punning on her nickname: ‘Bid her beware’ and ‘Bid her be cheerful’. This banter was extended to other friends and relatives as well. Cromwell’s letter to Colonel Robert Hammond of November 1648 reveals the prevalence of nicknames in their political circle. Sir Henry Vane  junior is referred to as ‘my brother Heron’ and Cromwell signs himself ‘Heron’s brother’; other nicknames include ‘my wise friend’ ( possibly William Pierrepont), ‘Sir Roger’ (John Lambert?) and ‘ brother Fountain’ (Cromwell himself?). These are in-jokes, whose precise meaning is  HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

ROMWELL’S LETTERS, which reveal his intimacy with a circle of radicals and revolutionaries in the later 1640s, are matched by other evidence of his relationship with his closest advisers in the later 1650s. In 1657 Cromwell had private meetings with important members of the protectoral regime, including Lord Broghill, John Thurloe, Sir Charles Wolseley, William Pierrepont and Bulstrode Whitelocke, and these often became more informal affairs ‘and laying aside his greatness, he would be exceeding familiar with them, and by way of diversion would make verses with them, and every one must try his fancy’. These parties had a close parallel in the activities approved by Whitelocke for his entourage when ambassador to Sweden in 1653-4; ‘for diversion in these long winter nights’, his gentlemen held ‘disputations in Latin, and declamations’ on certain serious and comic themes. Cromwell’s delight in wit and sophistication may also provide a link with those literary figures he patronised as protector, especially John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, George Wither and Edmund Waller. A pleasure in language also comes through in Cromwell’s speeches. At Putney in October 1647 he responded sarcastically to radical Leveller demands by reminding them that if they tried to ‘jump out of all engagements’ they might have to make ‘a very great jump’, like that of a man from a scaffold. In his speech to Parliament on January 22nd, 1655, Cromwell is again facetious about religion: in this case, Catholicism and the Anglican Church, whose followers he describes in cod-Latin as ‘those men that live upon their mumpsimus and sumpsimus, their names and their service books’. In a similar vein, on April 21st, 1657, Cromwell told a committee of parliamentarians of his support for the ‘triers and ejectors’ who sought to root out remaining royalist clergymen and attacked the old way of certifying ministers: ‘If any man could understand Latin and Greek, it was as if he spake Welsh, he was sure to be admitted.’ Having made what, to a committee made up mostly of Englishmen, was a fairly decent joke, Cromwell then went for a further laugh by elaborating on the Welsh language, ‘which I think in those days went for Hebrew with a great many’. We are not far from Shakespeare’s Welsh captain, Fluellin, here. The national stereotype is given a further edge by the

 Apart from anything else, such buffoonery does not fit with the accepted image of Cromwell as the godly general and seriousminded politician

Clockwise from right: Edmund Ludlow, engraving from his  Memoirs, 1698-9; statue of a little boy from a fountain at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire; ‘Take Away that Bauble, Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament, Comic History of England’, etching by John Leech, 1850.

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CROMWELL Beads’ for the pro-Catholic Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Cottington. Their jokes ranged from puns to gender-reversal to surprising crudities. In November 1636, for example, the archbishop commented on the courtly ambition of the groom of the stool, the Earl of Holland, that ‘a man that eats moderately may go to stool as well after sixteen dishes as after forty’. This rather surprising crudity among the higher echelons of the Caroline court remind us that the sense of humour of early 17th-century elites was, by later standards, very broad and rather basic. It has been argued that the distinction between high and low culture was something that developed only later in the 17th century. ‘Jest books’, recounting practical jokes and clever one-liners, were best-sellers in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and monarchs up to and including Charles I retained professional fools. The 1650s saw a fashion for ‘drolleries’, performances of rustic buffoonery for an educated merchant and gentry audience, many of which made it into print. Such forms began to decline under Charles II and soon became deeply unfashionable, as new standards of social decorum affected everyt hing from table manners to toilet habits and rules of etiquette emphasised the distance between the gentle and the vulgar. The first awakenings of this prudishness might be the cause of those later works purporting to give details of Cromwell’s practical joking, which expected the reader not to laugh but to disapprove.

Y  Above: Oliver St John, by Pieter Nason, 1652. Below, right: scene from The Pantomime of Oliver Cromwell: Or, Harlequin Charley Over the Water, and the Maid of Patty’s Mill, 19th century.

well-known loyalty of the Welsh to the Anglican Church during the civil wars and, indeed, by the presence of two prominent Welshmen, John Glynne and Philip Jones. The connection with Fluellin reminds us that Cromwell was very much part of a wider contemporary culture. Born on April 25th, 1599, his 17th birthday came just two days after Shakespeare’s death; and he was nearly 25 when James I died. This was a period noted for boisterous comedies on the stage, for nonsense, parody and other conceits on the printed page; where students at Cambridge (where Cromwell certainly studied) and the Inns of Court (where he probably did not) put on productions that provoked the ire of their seniors and shocked Continental observers. There were strong links between literary and semi-literary comedy and the verbal humour used in private correspondence. It is a curious thought that Cromwell’s fondness of puns, nicknames and in-jokes was one of the few things he shared w ith the Stuart monarchs and their courts. In 1623 Charles I as Prince of Wales, with his companion George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, kept James I informed of their adventures on the Continent with a series of letters addressed to ‘Dear Dad and Gossip’; and signed themselves as ‘your boys’ or ‘your baby’, in the case of the prince, and ‘ your humble slave and dog’, in the case of Buckingham. For Charles and James alike, Buckingham was always ‘Steenie’. The correspondence of Archbishop Laud and Viscount Wentworth during the 1630s shows a similar lack of inhibition. Nicknames reappear, including the waspish use of ‘Lady Mora’, the spirit of delay, for the lord treasurer Lord Weston, and variously ‘your Spaniard’ and ‘the  HI STORY TODAY  AUGUST 

ET TWO FURTHER PIECES of evidence of Cromwell’s sense of humour suggest that the Restoration stories may not be fabricated after all. First, in a letter of December 1657, Samuel Pepys recounted a scene at Whitehall after the arrest of a number of Jesuit priests, ‘whose copes and other popish vestments the protector made some of his gentlemen put on, to the causing of abundance of mirth’. Pepys, as cousin and secretary to the admiral and councillor Edward Montagu, was very much part of the court circle and there is no reason to doubt his story. Furthermore, it was not an isolated incident. In 1643 the Catholic chapel at Somerset House (official

It is a curious thought that Cromwell’s fondness of puns, nicknames and in-jokes was one of the few things he shared with the Stuart monarchs and their courts

‘The Coronation of Oliver Cromwell’, satirical etching and engraving, 1653-54.

residence of Queen Henrietta Maria) was desecrated by a gang who dressed up in the vestments of the Capuchin Friars and mocked their religion. Among the ringleaders were a number of MPs, including Henry Marten. In another story, this time from the summer of 1649, George Wither, a poet who had just been made a trustee for the sale of the late king’s goods, dressed up in the coronation robes, exposing them to ‘contempt and laughter’. Interestingly, Wither’s aider and abettor in this was also Henry Marten. And we have already come across Marten as the man said to have engaged in the ink fight with Cromwell during the signing of the king’s death warrant. The second reliable source for our understanding of Cromwell’s sense of humour is also contemporary: the manuscript notebook of Richard Symonds, a royalist resident in London during the 1650s, who died immediately after the Restoration. According to Symonds, the wedding of Cromwell’s younger daughter, Frances, to Robert Rich, in November 1657 was followed by ‘much mirth and frolics’, during which the protector ‘threw about sack posset [a sticky drink] among all the ladies to soil their rich clothes … and also wet sweetmeats, and daubed all the stools where they were to sit with wet sweetmeats, and pulled off Rich his peruque [wig], and would have thrown it into the fire, but did not, yet he sat upon it’. This bears striking similarities to the story of h igh-jinks

at Elizabeth Claypole’s wedding over a decade before, not to mention the smearing of the ladies’ dresses in February 1657. Satirical fancy dress parties, ink-flicking, food throwing: it seems such behaviour cannot be dismissed so easily after all. But then Oliver Cromwell was an enigmatic and ambiguous character, a man who even contemporaries found hard to pin down. Did he also have the last laugh? Patrick Little is a Senior Research

Fellow at the History of Parliament Trust and a Vice-President of the Cromwell Association.

FURTHER READING Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print (Cambridge, 2000). Roy Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All but Name 1653-1658 (Sutton, 1997). Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate  (Manchester, 2003). Patrick Little, (ed), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan 2008).

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HISTORY TODAY  

Portrait of the Author as a Historian The leading light of the French  Annales school revolutionised the writing of history by imbuing it with wider, holistic, narratives and literary flair, says Alexander Lee.

Braudel in the l’habit vert of the  Académie française, 1985.

No. Fernand Braudel Born: August 24th, 1902,

Luméville-en-Ornois, France. Died: November 27th, 1985, Cluses, France.  HISTORY TODAY  AUGUST 

FERNAND BRAUDEL’S The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II  (1949) deserves its reputation as a landmark of historical scholarship. Pouring scorn on ‘event-based’ approaches to history, it attacked the priority which French scholars had previously given to politics, diplomacy and war as having an excessively narrow understanding of time. While there was no doubting that events ( événements) had a significance of sorts, Braudel argued that they were merely ‘surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs’. Men were, he believed, not so much independent actors, capable of steering their own course, as flotsam and jetsam, borne along by the current of their ‘collective destinies’. It was only by studying the slow and almost imperceptible history of humanity in relation to its geographical and climactic surroundings that even the greatest civilisation, let alone the greatest events, could be appreciated. And it was by focusing on the Mediterranean as a distinct space, with its own distinct time, that Braudel succeeded in re-conceptualising the whole history of 16th-century Spain. Not without reason did Hugh TrevorRoper describe the The Mediterranean as ‘the culminating product of the  Annales school’. As an exposition of the importance of the longue durée it has no equal. Its passionate appeal for historians to reach out beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to engage with the social sciences could be taken as representative of all that the ‘French historical revolution’ sought to achieve. But appearances can be deceptive. Despite The Mediterranean’s reputation, Braudel’s approach was quite different from that adopted by the founders of the Annales school. Whereas Lucien Febvre was a voluntarist, captivated by mentalités, for example, Braudel was a determinist, unenamoured by systems of thought or belief. The reason for this apparent divergence is that Braudel came to write The Mediterranean not so much in the guise of a historian pursuing an argument with unrelenting logical fervour, as in that of a novelist. Indeed, it is telling that, while one American critic condemned Braudel for having ‘mistaken a poetic response to the past for an historical problem’, Braudel had no compunction about describing himself as an écrivain rather than as an historien in the preface to the first edition of his work.

There was little in Braudel’s early life to prepare him for what was to become the Annales school and even less to point him towards the Mediterranean. Born not amid the salty spray of the sea or the dusty air of the library, but in the fields of Lorraine, he was always proud of coming from ‘peasant stock’. He was, to be sure, not insensitive to the natural world but, seeing that the countryside of eastern France was ‘full of military recollections’, his imagination was fired by battles and wars more than anything else and his heart swelled with French national pride. Fields of childhood

Enrolling to study history at the Sorbonne in 1920, he took these early prejudices with him. Though he was introduced to economic history by Henri Hauser (1886-1946) and learned much about historical methodology, he seems to have been almost untouched by the wider shifts in historical thinking at the time. Despite his interest in the positivism of the early Marxist, Alphonse Aulard (1849-1928), for example, he remained tied to the fields of his childhood and stuck doggedly to dry, familiar forms of political history. His thesis, published in pamphlet form in 1922, was a rather predictable study of the first three years of the French Revolution in Bar-le-Duc. When the awakening came it was not of the intellect but of the imagination. Taking up a teaching position in Algeria in 1923, he experienced his new environ ment in a manner comparable to that of many other French literary figures who took up life in the colonies at the same time. Able at last to see France from a distance, Braudel, like André Malraux, cast off his patriotism and opened his heart to wider possibilities. But like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, he also fell in love with the landscape, enchanted not only by the smell of the souks, the narrow streets and the scorching heat, but also by the romance of the desert and by the vast, rolling rhythms of the sea. His outlook changed. Exploring ports and cities, where the Ottoman and Christian world had once met, he found that he could imagine ‘the Mediterranean of the 16th century’ all too easily and was thrilled to discover in records of ‘ships, bills of landing [and] business deals’ a bustling marketplace of many nations, united, divided, shaped and sustained by the waves. Inspired, in 1927 he began writing a doctoral thesis on Philip II and Spanish policy in the Mediterranean.

But, as his choice of subject suggested, his literary imagination was still far ahead of his scholarly inclinations. While assiduous in his use of archives, his approach was still lamentably traditional and his concerns remained firmly with diplomatic history. It was a chance encounter with Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) in Algiers in 1930 that allowed Braudel to take the next step. Pirenne’s work had been founded on the belief that socio-economic, cultural and religious movements were the result of profound underlying causes invisible to particularist approaches to history and he had earned a measure of renown for postulating that the origins of the European Middle Ages were to be found in differences in the pace of trade

Its originality stemmed not so much from his scholarship as from his willingness to think and write like a novelist and state formation between the Muslim and Christian sides of the Mediterranean. But it was not Pirenne’s historical insights that captivated Braudel, so much as his literary sensibilities. Pirenne spoke of history as an adventure, rather than as a subject for research, and of the sea as a character, with its own personality and voice, rather than as a setting for human drama. It was after this, Braudel’s wife later recalled, ‘that he began to dream of the Mediterranean in itself, of its ancient and fabulous history, so much more colourful and exciting in the imagination than the sad personality of Philip II’. Mediterranean time

But it was only after spending two years teaching at the University of São Paolo in Brazil that the imaginative insights of the novelist manqué  were honed into a daring new approach to historical scholarship. Quite by chance, Braudel found himself aboard the same ship as Febvre and, before they reached port, a father-son relationship had developed between them. Although he was never to embrace all of the older man’s views, he

was persuaded of the need to integrate history with the other human sciences and to acknowledge the Mediterranean’s own unique ‘time’. It was with this that The Mediterranean  came into being. He now had in mind not the dry, lifeless study of Spanish politics he had planned when he had embarked on his doctoral studies, but ‘a fantastic phantasmagoria of colours, of countries, of men, of great events, and little anecdotes’, bound together by threads of shared experience and given life by vast movements of the natural world. When he came to write the work in mind, it was still in the manner of a novelist rather than of a historian proper. Called up for military service during the Munich Crisis, he was in the field when France fell to Nazi Germany and was taken captive. Imprisoned first in Mainz, then at Oflag XC in Lübeck, he discovered in his dreams of the Mediterranean a means of shutting out the soul-destroying news that filtered through the wire fence and of rationalising the dizzying whirl of war and politics to which he had fallen victim. Scribbling his thoughts in countless school notebooks that were smuggled out to Febvre, he wrote furiously, as a novelist might write, without access to archives or libraries, but carried along by the great sweep of his story and sustained by the driving force of his own cathartic eloquence. When Braudel was liberated in May 1945, he hurried to Paris. Staying at Febvre’s, he worked feverishly on his thesis, buoyed by pent-up excitement, and within two years he was able to defend the work before an all-star cast of French historians. All but one acclaimed it as a triumph. Bowled over by his daring sweep and its mastery of detail, they recognised it immediately as a masterpiece, as do most professional historians today. But its originality and its brilliance stemmed not so much from his scholarship as from his w illingness to think and write like a novelist. And, though the Mediterranean remains a classic study of the longue durée and environmental history, its true importance lies not in its elucidation of the  Annales school’s approach but in its demonstration of the power of the literary imagination.  Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of

the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His book The Ugly Renaissance  is published by Arrow.

Key works The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the  Age of Philip II (1949), Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (1955–77), The Identity of France (1986) When, in 2011, History Today conducted a survey to find the most important historian of the past 60 years, Braudel ranked fifth, a status granted in recognition of The Mediterranean . His ‘Olympian masterpiece’ was recognised as a major work on its publication in 1949. However, as Peter Burke asserted in a review of Civilisation and Capitalism in 1983, Braudel is unusual among his generation of historians, because he completed not one, but two major projects and was mid-way through a third when he died, surrounded by honours, on November 28th, 1985. The death of ‘le roi Braudel ’ was first item on the French news bulletin the following day. AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

Tom Holland on early medieval societies Eleanor Robson searches for Gertrude Bell  Alexy Karenowska sends a postcard from Palmyra

REVIEWS TH CENTURY

Full Steam  Ahead to the Modern World Ben Wilson offers an engaging, up-tempo account of the technical innovations that heralded the birth of modernity and assesses Britain’s role in this revolutionary period. THIS IS an engaging history of the capitalist world in the 1850s, which stitches together vivid stories of entrepreneurs and adventurers from the United States to New Zealand. Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World sometimes feels like an exciting Phileas Fogg travelogue, with Ben Wilson’s finger spinning round a mahogany globe in his study and us with it. But that is the strength of Heyday because, as Wilson points out, this is not a  HISTORY TODAY 

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history of the British Empire but ‘a history of Britain in the world’. The Great Exhibition of 1851 bellowed the technical innovations of the world’s first industrial nation at a moment when liberalism, free trade and internationalism were at their zenith as ideas. In practice, the gunboat spoke louder than words, but even Lord Palmerston sincerely believed that Britain’s free trade Empire was different, writing ‘we have achieved triumphs, we have

made aggressions but we have made them of a very different kind. The capital and skill of Englishmen are spread over the whole surface of the globe’. It was a German immigrant,  Julius Reuter, who made capital spread faster. Having once used carrier pigeons to exchange stock prices, Reuter seized on telegraphy and founded his news agency in London in 1851 in the year a Channel cable was laid. This was a moment akin to the birth of

the Internet, which linked the money markets of Europe in real time and provided news of wars as well as commodities. Such was the excitement in the City of London in 1851 that 200 young traders took part in an unruly game of football on the floor of the normally staid Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, in India, the civil servant, John Kaye, believed telecommunications had made Indians realise ‘the great truth that Time Is Money’ and hoped it would undermine the authority of ‘their spiritual guides’. Native peoples did not always see it that way. The brutal modernisation of India under Governor-General James Ramsey was a cause of the Indian uprising of 1857 that sent spasms of anxiety and hope around the world. Ramsey’s vast networks of railways and telegraph wires enabled the British to rule more effectively – and that, not native primitivism, made them a target. As Indian rebels blew up tracks and used telegraph cable to make bullets, John Kaye noted ‘an especial rage against the railway and the telegraph’. Modernisation also coincided with more land-grabbing from indigenous rulers and a greater sense of racial superiority over those less in command of technology. In 1857 the naturalist Brian Hodgson observed that ‘knowledge and respect’ for

Indians and their customs had given way to casual racism since he had arrived 40 years previously. ‘Now’, he lamented, ‘one hears ordinarily and from the mouths of decent folks nothing but contemptuous phrases (nigger &c) applied to the people’. Britain owed its power not only to the plundering of its Caribbean, Asian and African colonies but also to the rapacious development of the United States after 1776, which happily sold its former master whatever Britain needed to rule others. One motive for modernising India had been to make its cotton industry more productive so that Britain was less dependent on cotton from the southern slave states of America; yet, as Wilson observes, slavery was ‘reaching its grim apogee in the 1850s’. Over a billion pounds of raw cotton was still leaving the South for the 2,500 textile

Modernisation coincided with more land grabbing from indigenous rulers and a greater sense of racial superiority over those less in command of  technology factories of Lancashire by the end of the decade, a generation after the abolition of slavery in British territories. This hypocritical connection was noted by the Alabaman racial theorist, Josiah Nott, who wrote of ‘an indissoluble cord, binding the black [slave] to human progress’. The indissoluble cord between the Old World and the New became a physical reality in 1858 with the laying of an Atlantic cable by steam-powered ships. The first transatlantic message was transmitted on August 16th. It read: ‘Europe and America are united by telegraphic communication. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill to all men.’

There was little peace to be had at the end of a rifle. The British used millions of American guns to conquer and rule, tipping the balance away from once mighty armies of Chinese, Maori and Zulu warriors. After Samuel Colt exhibited his revolutionary ‘six-shooter’ at the Great Exhibition, American arms experts were brought in to oversee mass production of revolvers and rifles at the government’s arms factory at Enfield. The Times compared Colt to the inventor of vaccination, Edward Jenner, claiming that modern guns were a ‘new method of vaccination’ on ‘rude tribes’. With guns went beards, which became fashionable in the 1850s as a symbol of middle-class muscularity, from Dickens to the explorer Richard Burton; the beard was ‘decidedly un-aristocratic’, writes Wilson, ‘redolent of the hard life of the frontier’. Hence, the military ban on them was lifted in 1858 during the Crimean War, when aristocratic amateurism was being criticised for military failures. Wilson handles such cultural trends so well that it is a pity there are not more of them in his book. There should also be more consideration of religion as a motivator of entrepreneurs in an age when faith and technology still went hand in hand for millions. Heyday is part of a fashionable genre that re-assesses the impact of British power, the best known of which is Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. The strength of this magnificent book is Wilson’s awareness of ‘modernity’s close connection with barbarism’. To acknowledge that progress came at a high price for most people is not to belittle British achievements; it merely puts them into a proper historical perspective. As William Gladstone once remarked: ‘The English piously believe themselves to be a peaceful people; nobody else is of the same opinion.’ Richard Weight  Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the  Modern World by Ben Wilson Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp 

All Behind You, Winston Churchill’s Great Coalition 1940-45 Roger Hermiston  Aurum Press 406pp £20

CHURCHILL’S wartime coalition was the seedbed of postwar Britain. At home, the lesson it taught – or appeared to – was that state intervention worked. Governments could run great industries, eliminate mass unemployment and guarantee social security for all. By the end of the war there was common ground between the parties on all this, despite their competing philosophies. Hence, in large measure, Britain was governed alone these lines until the 1970s, when the

The most broadly based government inBritish history anda ministry of all the talents postwar settlement began to fall apart. ‘History’, writes Hermiston in the concluding sentence of All Behind You, Winston, ‘must surely credit that administration not only for winning the war, but also with beginning the vital work of framing the future social and political structure of Britain’. What was the secret of success? Hermiston’s title supplies the key. The government that Churchill formed in May 1940 was the most broadly based in British history and a ministry of all the talents. It was founded,

uniquely, upon an alliance between the Conservative and Labour parties. The Liberals had just a handful of posts but wielded power indirectly through two great public servants, John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. Some of the leading figures, such as Lord Woolton and John Anderson, were independents detached from party. Churchill introduced his own kitchen cabinet consisting of Brendan Bracken and Lord Beaverbrook, both Tory mavericks, and his scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann. Hermiston’s story will be familiar in outline, but he takes a firm grip on it, writes well and refreshes the narrative with a substantial helping of original research. The result is an accessible political history, enlivened by shrewd, vivid portraits of an extensive cast of characters, though the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, eludes him and remains the greyest of eminences. On the other hand, he rescues from oblivion the two women who served in the Coalition, the socialist Ellen Wilkinson and the Tory Florence Horsbrugh. Both proved capable organisers in the Blitz, though neither rose above  junior office in that overwhelmingly masculine world. Hermiston is excellent on the Labour contingent of Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton, while showing how wrong it would be to claim that they dominated the home front. The most powerful figure in domestic affairs was Anderson, Lord President and supreme co-ordinator of the war economy; most popular was the Minister of Food, Woolton, a superb communicator, trusted by the public to deliver ‘fair shares for all’. Notwithstanding the various intrigues, rivalries and feuds, Hermiston confirms the truth of the words Churchill addressed in May 1945 to a farewell gathering of ministers who had served in the coalition. History, he told them, would recognise their achievement: ‘the light will shine on every helmet’. Paul Addison AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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Heroic Failure and the British by Stephanie Barczewski Yale University Press 267pp £20

ponders the paradox that, in history, it seems that the worse a failure is, the more the British like it. Major-General Wolfe and Vice-Admiral Nelson died in victory and this was applauded, but it was sacrifice for no point at all that was adored. An STEPHANIE BARCZEWSKI

 HIS TORY TODAY  AUGUST 

ill-equipped and fatal trudge through pack ice, or a venture into mosquito-infested jungle on a blind quest was the route to a statue erected by public subscription. In the explorations for the Northwest Passage or the source of the Nile, what was respected was ‘not accomplishment, but rather the amount of suffering that an explorer was deemed to have endured, we are told’. Character mattered more than achievement to the British. Barczewski offers an entertaining re-telling of such martial failures as the Charge of the Light Brigade, but also of its more lethal predecessor at Chillianwallah in Punjab in 1849. Largely forgotten tales are welcome, such as the almost comic confection of victory from disaster out of the debacle of the Battle of New Orleans (1815), which was presented as an achievement by the elevation of two dead ‘heroes. Their memorials are in St Paul’s Cathedral. It is a clue to the meaning of

these events that no celebrated examples of heroic failure occurred in a war that the British lost and those involving exploration took place in contexts such as the Arctic, the Antarctic and interior of Africa that were not vital to the nation’s strategic interests. The Empire always triumphed in the end. Barczewski believes Britain invented heroic failure to make the evils of empire-building palatable: ‘By presenting alternative visions of empire via heroic failure, they maintained the pretence that the British Empire was about things other than power, force and domination.’ This argument is not well made. Heroic Failure is short on contemporary examples of people expressing horror over the excesses of Empire. That is unsurprising: at a time of brutality and hardship for most Britons, the suffering of natives who had resisted the ‘Onward March of Civilisation’ did not count for much. It is also

notable that natives inflicted major defeats on British forces in Sudan, Afghanistan and South Africa, before the British triumphed with superior technology. These were efficient warriors, not harmless villagers who raced at Maxim guns with pointed sticks. Wars were brutal and there was no national hand-wringing over victories achieved abroad. This is an entertaining and well-written book, but nowhere does Barczewski discuss the literary concept of tragic waste and the religious concept of triumph in death. These were most notably contributed to the national psyche by Shakespeare and Jesus respectively, neither of whom are mentioned. The emotional tones of the loss of promise and the belief that death can be conquered play through Victorian narratives of heroic failure, but here they are not emphasised.  Jad Adams

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MEDIEVAL HISTORY

England’s Most Elusive Monarch? Chris Given-Wilson tackles the first Lancastrian Plantagenet king, who was an enigma even to his contemporaries and yet, against the odds, established his dynasty and restored political stability to England.

HENRY IV (r.1399-1413) was an enigma to his contemporaries and remains so to us today. Greatly admired in his youth and greeted with acclamation on his accession, his reign disappointed. From neither of the two plays which Shakespeare wrote about him does a clear picture of the king’s character emerge. How are we to interpret this elusive monarch?  In this magnificent new study, Chris Given-Wilson gives us an account of Henry IV’s life rooted in the fullest possible trawl through the sources. Writing fluently and with verve, he takes us from Henry’s gilded youth in the 1390s as heir to the Duchy of Lancaster, through his seizure of the throne from his cousin, Richard II, to his difficult early years as a usurper king, his eventual triumph over the Percy family and, finally, to his decline and premature death in 1413. The view that Given-Wilson takes of the king is broadly favourable. While admitting that Henry made mistakes in his early years on the throne, notably in conceding too much power to the Percy family and in executing Archbishop Scrope of York,

he argues that his rule became increasingly effective from 1405, once he had militarised the royal household, elevated the royal family as an instrument of rule and built up a successful relationship with the nobility. His misfortune was to fall ill at precisely the moment when he appeared to have won a measure of security and acceptance. Yet the fact that his withdrawal

From neither of  of the two plays Shakespeare wrote about Henry IV does a clear picture of  the king’s character  emerge. How are we to interprete this elusive monarch? from government after 1409 did not result in the chaos to which a similar royal collapse led in France may, as Given-Wilson argues, be a tribute to his rule: Henry inspired loyalty and in the wider Lancastrian clan there was a willingness to put the preser-

vation of royal authority above personal interest and ambition. Given-Wilson develops these and other themes in a book that is as richly layered as it is wide-ranging. Every aspect of Henry’s kingship is considered, from war, finance and shipbuilding through to the affairs of Wales, Ireland and Aquitaine: nothing is left out. In contrast to most other writers on the king, Given-Wilson devotes as much attention to Henry’s later and less eventful years as to his earlier, more action-packed ones. He also offers a comprehensive discussion of the king’s apprenticeship under Richard II, shedding much new light on his relations with the monarch whom in 1399 he was to supplant. The inevitable price that Given-Wilson pays for the depth and detail of his coverage is a loss of focus on the king himself. His book comes across less as a royal biography than a study of the politics of the age. This is a weakness that it has in common with many of the more recent volumes in the ‘Yale English Monarchs’ series, of which it forms a part. It is almost as if today’s authors, daunted by the sheer quantity

of research which they have to take into account, find themselves incapable of producing a sharply focused study. In the case of a medieval king, the fact that he ruled as well as reigned makes it all the more difficult for the author to be selective: the whole of decision making has to be covered and there can be no artificial separation between kingship and government. Yet the king could not be the originator of every action taken in his name. So the difficult matter of agency arises, of establishing which decisions the king made himself and which were made on his behalf by ministers. Even when the source of authorisation is given in an order, it is not always easy to tell. Given-Wilson will surely be aware of these issues and to raise them is not so much to criticise his book as to point up some of the difficulties which the author of a medieval royal biography has to face. Chris Given-Wilson has produced a full and con-

Every aspect of Henry’s kingship is considered, from war, finance and shipbuilding through to the affairs of Wales, Ireland and Aquitaine, nothing is left out ... Chris Given-Wilson has produced a   full and convincing  picture of his king vincing picture of his king. In a masterly conclusion, he shows how Henry grappled with almost overwhelming odds to establish his dynasty and restore political stability to England. That his son Henry V should have succeeded him without challenge is a tribute to his success. Nigel Saul Henry IV by Chris GivenWilson Yale University Press pp  AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

REVIEWS

EARLY MEDIEVAL

The West  After the Romans Left A collection of brilliant essays from scholars across a variety of disciplines shines a bright light across a great expanse of time.

WHEN THE structures of state collapse, how are the rhythms of life to be governed? Syria provides one answer, where the current bloodbath continues to betray the eddies of shifting alliances and a variety of sectarian and ethnic groupings compete murderously to endow themselves with a sustainable legitimacy. Journalists often use ‘Medieval’ to describe the horrors unfolding in the country to the frustration of medievalists, who naturally resent its use as a synonym for ‘savage’. Nevertheless, the spectacle of civilians fleeing militias, of churches being desecrated and of warlords claiming for themselves the approval of the heavens may well serve to concentrate the mind of the historian who, reading of such things in an early medieval chronicle, is tempted to analyse them merely as tropes. The agony of Syria, although not mentioned in any of the essays in this valuable and stimulating collection, cannot help but provide a grim context for their subject matter. Does it make sense to think of seemingly interminable cycles of conflict, whether in early medieval  HIST ORY TODAY 

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Europe or in the contemporary Middle East, as mere anarchy, or in reality is violence self-regulating and self-limiting? Max Gluckman, an anthropologist writing 60 years ago on African tribal warfare, argued that it was the latter: an insight that

When the structures of state collapse ... [are] interminable cycles of conflict ... mere anarchy, or in reality is violence self-regulating and self-limiting? Michael Wallace-Hadrill then applied to the feud-ravaged age of the Merovingians. Making Early Medieval Societies takes its cue from this interaction and Stephen White provides a vigorously polemical insistence that Gluckman’s model still has relevance to the medievalist. Conrad Leyser is more guardedly sceptical; indeed, the issue serves the collection as a whole rather as a McGuffin. Most of the

essays step aside from debating what historians might learn from anthropology and instead focus on topics that owe little to Gluckman. The focus is less on how conflict came to buttress social stability than on how an institution ostensibly without armed force – the Church – succeeded in negotiating violence in the post-Roman world and embedded itself within it so deeply. ‘The aim was not to end conflict but to constrain the terms on which it could be carried out.’ In a fallen world, this was the best for which even the most self-denying Christian could hope. Essays range from the execution for sorcery of Priscillian to the evolution of attitudes in the early medieval period to divorce and from Bede’s Northumbria to post-Byzantine Italy, exploring the same essential theme: the capacity of Christian ideology to temper and regulate extremes of violence. That early medieval bishops tended to serve their own interests and that of the institution to which they belonged goes without saying; but their achievement, in the face of such convulsive circumstances, and with the background rumble

of Syria in my ears, is one that I cannot help but find impressive. ‘In acknowledging the price that was paid for the large community that the clerks of the 12th century established, which we call Europe, we need not follow Oscar Wilde’s cynic by denying its value.’ So writes R.I. Moore, who has done so much to explicate what was distinctive – indeed, revolutionary – about Latin Christendom. His essay, a survey of how ideological mutations from the 10th to the 12th century influenced and were influenced by social transformations, serves the collection as one of two superb chronological bookends. The other, Kate Cooper’s study of how Christianity, in the wake of Constantine’s conversion, changed Roman society, and was itself transformed, is similarly panoramic and concise. Conrad Leyser’s brilliant analysis of how the image of Gregory the Great was constructed and exploited in the centuries after his death, amply bridges the gap. His portrait of Gregory as a Roman aristocrat living in the shadow of what he believed to be the imminent end of the world, is powerfully sketched and provides bravura pieces of writing: ‘Storms came out of the blue in summer; a sinner’s corpse burst from its resting place, summoned as it were early to Judgement.’ Moments like this, and the skill with which Leyser traces the subsequent fashioning of Gregory into a figure who could serve as Latin Christendom’s founding father, suggest the degree to which the true patron saint of Making Early Medieval Societies is not Max Gluckman but Peter Brown. The result is something unusual in a collection of scholarly essays: a spotlight that falls, not just on isolated moments, still less on turf wars between rival academic disciplines, but sweepingly and revealingly over a great expanse of time. Tom Holland

 Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West,  eds. Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser Cambridge UP pp .

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Postcard from...

Palmyra Have the heinous crimes committed at Palmyra ushered in a greater awareness worldwide of the value of heritage and history?

 All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. T.E. Lawrence

THE WORLD is watching Palmyra. A witness to more than 2,000 years of history, this ancient settlement in the Tadmorean desert is both a cradle of myth and a place of acute reality. Before its occupation by ISIS in May 2015, though familiar to scholars of history and enthusiasts of travel, the Roman pillars of Palmyra were not generally well known.  Just a year later, the site has become a powerful symbol of what could become the most significant uplift in public awareness of the human value of cultural heritage for two generations.

A caravan city, Palmyra was built on the site of the Efqa spring, a natural water source roughly halfway between the River Euphrates and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in what is now Syria. Its advantageous position on the main trade causeway between East and West meant that Palmyra prospered in the second and third centuries . The city profited as an in-between place where Romans could purchase the exotic spices and fabrics of Parthia and Parthians could acquire the manufactured contrivances of Rome without either empire feeling they had conceded anything to the other. At the time of its foundation, Palmyra was primarily a city of Amorite customs and religion. These became infused with Hellenic and Arabic influences as a result of its growing multi-ethnic population. Indeed, perhaps more than any other archaeological site of its kind, the fabric of Palmyra reads as a history of the shared beginnings and early fusion of eastern and western cultures, styles, religions and languages. The city’s largest temple, the Temple of Baal, was inaugurated in celebration of a Babylonian festival, at a time when we know that the resident population was mainly Arabian and that Syrian deities were also worshipped. In the late Roman period, after a brief phase of self-rule under Queen Zenobia, Palmyra’s official religion became Christianity and the temple of Baal was decorated with frescoes. Jump forward just a little further, to 624, and Palmyra is an Islamic city: the temple of Baal, a mosque.

Against the background of this extraordinary multicultural narrative, the story of Palmyra’s recent occupation by ISIS is simultaneously one of human tragedy and triumph. The site was seized and desecrated as part of the group’s campaign of cultural censorship, but far from achieving this end, their actions have catalysed the emergence of a powerful and highly visible public movement in exactly the opposite direction. The crimes committed in Palmyra in the Summer of 2015 have not only inspired the compassion of the international community, but have ushered in an era of unprecedented cultural awareness; one in which the status of a person’s or people’s ability to remain connected with their history and heritage is becoming widely recognised as a basic human right. The world has been reminded that culture is something that is not just found in the pages of books or the display cases of museums, but resides, fundamentally, in the hearts and minds of people. And not just some people, but every single human being. The role of technology in the development of this heightened awareness has been, and continues to be, a key one. Digital techniques have not only shone a spotlight on the story of Palmyra, but have been

The role of technology has been a key one ... Digital techniques have been  powerfully harnessed as a response to attempts at cultural cleansing across the world powerfully harnessed as a response to attempts at cultural cleansing across the world. This response comes both in the form of visualisation tools, which make heritage material and environments – at least to some extent – accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, and the development of techniques to aid the reconstruction or restoration of damaged or destroyed objects. Technology is able to empower individuals and communities with the ability to keep their history alive, even when separated by force from the physical objects and environments that embody it; with its help, they act on their dreams with open eyes.  Alexy Karenowska AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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THE MIDDLE EAST

 A Complex Essence of Being Lisa Cooper endeavours to capture the essence of the complicated and indomitable Gertrude Bell and assesses the lasting value of her scholarship as an expert of Middle Eastern antiquity.

THE FEMALE Lawrence of Arabia, the woman who made Iraq, the uncrowned queen of the desert: there have been many attempts to encapsulate the complex essence of Gertrude Lowthian Bell since her death in 1926 in Baghdad. Born to a wealthy industrial family, Bell transformed herself from an under-employed globetrotter into a renowned expert on Middle Eastern antiquity. During the Great War, she was plucked from Red Cross work in France to help develop the conquered Ottoman territory of Mesopotamia into the Britishmandated monarchy of Iraq. Her role in king-making done, she then managed the country’s archaeology and heritage. Bell died of an overdose of sleeping pills at 57, shortly after the opening of ‘her’ Iraq Museum. Bell was an inveterate self-documenter, a life-long diarist, correspondent and photographer and the author of several books, articles and official reports. Her digitised private archive is now at Newcastle University. Biographies abound, including Georgina Howell’s Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert  HIST ORY TODAY  AUGUST 

(2006), which is strong on Bell’s background and youth, though less comprehending of her later years; and Liora Lukitz’s more dispassionate  A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (2008). At Newcastle, Mark Jackson and Andrew Parkin have edited an excellent introduction to her

Bell comes out of this study as a serious fieldworker ... focused primarily on reconstructing the ground plans of ruined buildings life, The Extraordinary Gertrude Bell (2015). There is also a powerful documentary, Letters from Baghdad, featuring previously unseen film and photography, and Werner Herzog’s bodice-ripper movie, Queen of the Desert . Lisa Cooper’s monograph is the first to take Bell’s academic side seriously. It does not pretend to be a biography, or even a comprehensive survey of her fieldwork in Anatolia,

Syria and Mesopotamia over the period 1905–14. Rather, Cooper reconstructs two trips Bell took on horseback in 1909 and 1911, down the Euphrates from Aleppo to Baghdad and back up the Tigris to Diyarbakir in Turkey, accompanied by her trusted Armenian guide Fattuh and a small group of porters and guards. In the course of these journeys, Bell documented, planned and photographed the remains of many hundreds of ancient and medieval structures, from Hittite, Babylonian and Assyrian archaeological sites to the minarets, mosques and palaces of early Islam. A few weeks into the first expedition her party came across Ukhaidir, an extremely well-preserved castle in the Iraqi desert, seemingly never before studied. Bell systematically recorded it and then spent two years collecting comparative evidence, in Rome and back in Mesopotamia, in order to date it and understand its historical significance. She wrote up her findings in the intriguingly titled  Amurath to Amurath (1911), while the second trip produced the academically ambitious Palace and Mosque of Ukhaidir: A Study

in Early Mohammedan Architecture (1914). Meanwhile, Bell was beaten to publication by German colleagues whom she had considered friends and magnanimously swallowed what must have been a bitter disappointment. Cooper also assesses the lasting value of Bell’s work, in relation to later scholarship and to the current state of the sites and buildings she visited. Many have continued to deteriorate through natural exposure and decay. Others have fallen victim to modern development and still others, more recently, to deliberate destruction by ISIS. Thus, even if many details of her interpretations have been superseded, Bell’s systematic and crisp photographic documentation has increased in value over the years. Sadly the paper quality and (otherwise comfortable) physical size of the book do not do justice to the multitude of Bell’s photographs, especially those more panoramic in scale. Bell comes out of this study as a serious fieldworker, more architectural historian than archaeologist, focused primarily on reconstructing the ground plans of ruined buildings in order to tell a long-term story of architectural development in the Middle East, from earliest antiquity into the late first millennium . She was, Cooper shows, largely taken seriously by professional male colleagues, despite her womanhood and auto-didacticism. At least in the period to 1911, Bell’s all-consuming intellectual interests were definitively not, as is commonly assumed, merely a front for intelligence gathering. Cooper’s book opens a new chapter in the study of Bell but by no means closes it. Bell’s ambiguous imperial legacy is still felt in Baghdad today, where the Iraq Museum – in a post-Bell 1960s building – stands full of glorious finds that Bell and her successors curated, but largely empty of visitors. Eleanor Robson

In Search of Kings and Conquerors: Gertrude Bell and the Archaeology of the Middle East by Lisa Cooper I.B. Tauris pp 

REVIEWS

Sounds and Sweet Airs The Forgotten Women of Classical Music by Anna Beer Oneworld 368pp £14.99

many music lovers will want to read: a collection of eight essays each containing an outline of the life and work of a female composer, whose music, says Anna Beer, should be better known. From Francesca Caccini, born in lateTHIS IS A BOOK

Renaissance Florence, and her younger contemporary, the Venetian Barbara Strozzi, Beer moves on to the court of Louis XIV (Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre), 18th-century Vienna (Marianna von Martines), 19th-century Germany (Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann), early-20th-century France (Lili Boulanger) and the Anglo-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy, who died in 1994. All were talented, courageous women, whose work was undertaken at times and places in which, to varying degrees, musical composition was held to be an activity better suited to men: people like Caccini’s father Giulio, or Fanny Hensel’s brother, Felix Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann’s husband, Robert. Women might be admired and accepted as performers – Caccini and Strozzi were first-rate singers and Clara Schumann one of the leading pianists of her day – but perhaps less so in the composition of great symphonies and operas.

In Sounds and Sweet Airs , Beer is on a mission to celebrate her unjustifiably ‘forgotten women’. This is her recurrent theme and her eight composers provide the variations. It is hard not to applaud Beer’s motivation in embarking upon such a task. The book is aimed at a general readership and Beer includes suggestions for further reading and of works to listen to, a glossary of musical terms and a list of books and articles she has consulted. At times her argument might have come across all the more persuasively had she harnessed and applied her historical research with greater rigour. For example, she might have drawn the eight case studies together more coherently had she painted in greater detail the broad historical narrative linking them: not just the changes in sexual mores and attitudes towards women over the centuries, but the erosion of ecclesiastical authority and the emergence of ‘public’ opera

and the commercial concert, the growing international importance of music publishing and, in due course, of copyright law or the changing social profile (and expectations) of audiences at musical events. Also, was a new opera by Jacquet de la Guerre really ‘the talk of Paris’ in 1694? Here, as throughout, Beer tends to report what ‘a correspondent’, ‘a music historian’ or ‘a contemporary’ had to say while only rarely identifying her sources. At times, she verges towards political rhetoric, repeating a challenging phrase (‘Is it any surprise that …’) or peppering her prose with exhortations to the reader (‘Never forget that …’), while her penchant for the historic present can jar (‘Felix, when told, screams, falls to the floor, faints and ruptures a cranial vessel’). But don’t be put off; Sounds and Sweet Airs remains an engaging read and the book contains a powerful and timely message. Daniel Snowman

AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY  

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 ALBANIA

 Albania’s Executioner Unmasked Albania’s best-known political journalist makes a bold attempt to examine the life, crimes and legacy of Albania’s postwar dictator, Enver Hoxha.

FEW LEADERS have published as much and eliminated more people than Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator from 1944 to 1985. Hoxha published on a Churchillian scale: 7,000 pages in 13 volumes of memoirs. Simultaneously, during his rule, of Albania’s population of two million, 5,037 men and 450 women were executed; 16,788 men and 7,367 women were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment; over 70,000 people were interned in the country’s 39 prisons and 70 camps. Further, Hoxha’s legacy was a country which, by a long margin, was Europe’s poorest. Given these statistics, it is odd that no-one has written a modern as opposed to a hagiographic biography of Hoxha. Now, Blendi Fevziu, Albania’s bestknown political journalist, has made a bold attempt to examine this monster. Besides mining the many memoirs written by Hoxha’s colleagues and associates, Fevziu makes use of interviews with survivors of the camps as well as the reorganised state archives. From Fevziu’s 21st-century viewpoint, the horrors of Hoxha’s dictatorship at times sound like the medieval  HIST ORY TODAY 

AUGUST 

inquisition, not the quotidian nightmare of a few decades ago for those who survived. Hoxha was the son of an imam and spent five years studying in France. He failed his examinations and returned to Albania under Italian wartime occupation. He drifted into ownership of a tobacco shop in Tirana, just as the Yugoslav communist party, with Soviet support, introduced communism to Albania. Hoxha was anonymous in the birth of Albania’s own party, but in the

 As party Secretary, Hoxha removed almost all key   founding party members, as well as ... dissenters and opposition leaders face of factions being formed by older partisan communists, the Yugoslav ‘mid-wife’ Miladin Popović advanced the debonair Hoxha as a compromise at the party’s conference of 1943. Within a year, with the German forces abandoning

Albania, Hoxha’s rivals challenged him. Hoxha, in his self-criticism at the party conference, accepted some charges and delayed further discussion until he had assumed the prime ministership in Tirana a few days later. This manoeuvre left him time to begin purging the party. Forgotten by the Allies at the Yalta conference, Albania’s destiny was left to the Communist Party. An unstated assumption was that Albania might become part of the Yugoslav confederation, which Hoxha flirted with but then rejected in 1948. As party Secretary, Hoxha removed almost all key founding party members as well as childhood companions, dissenters and opposition leaders. This culminated in the elimination of General Mehmet Shehu, his wartime comrade-in-arms and his prime minister from 1952, who committed suicide in 1981 after permitting his son to become engaged to a woman from a dissident’s family. The cruel treatment of Shehu’s family, Hoxha’s neighbours for most of his dictatorship, is breathtaking. Fezviu describes a leader who was focused upon

vengeance, severing relations with his wartime supporters, the British, and forming serial partnerships with Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and China. Hoxha had a quixotic attitude to celebrity. One episode in this macabre story involves the novelist, Ismael Kadare, who somehow managed to avoid elimination and to live between Paris and Tirana. The two met in 1971 and Hoxha was seduced by the idea of being a character in one of Kadare’s novels. Kadare dutifully featured Hoxha in his The Winter of Great Solitude, but the novel was panned in Albania. Improbably, Hoxha defended Kadare and encouraged him to re-work it. This he did, of course, and the novel was re-titled The Great Winter . By the time of his death in 1985, Albania – allegedly a paradise on earth – was isolated and ruled by terror. We learn little in this biography about how Hoxha imitated his role model, Josef Stalin, in implementing five-year plans to create the country’s industrial and agricultural sectors. More significantly, Fevziu emphasises the importance of Yugoslavian agency on the creation of Hoxha as leader. He tacitly pursues the nationalist model championed by Hoxha himself in his books. Albania, following this thesis, had suffered countless invasions and resisted outsiders throughout its history, but in the end shaped its own destiny. Would any of Hoxha’s rivals in wartime Albania with or without outside support have been more successful in developing this impoverished country? Would any of his rivals been less repressive as leaders? These questions are left unasked. Hoxha’s ultimate achievement was his political gift to survive, holding together the disparate parts of a country forged only in 1912, a pitiless story which has left deep scars very evident in Albania today. Richard Hodges Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania

by Blendi Fevziu trans. Majlinda Nisku, edited & introduced by Robert Elsie I.B.Tauris pp 

REVIEWS

COLD WAR HISTORY

While the World Held its Breath  Jonathan Colman has produced a fine, accessible addition to the many studies of the moment when the United States and the Soviet Union came closest to nuclear war. A REFLECTION of its status as the most dangerous superpower confrontation of the nuclear era, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 stands out as one of the most studied episodes of cold war history. Nevertheless, Jonathan Colman’s study is a welcome addition to the literature. It offers an excellent introduction to anyone unfamiliar with the crisis, helped by useful appendices, biographies of key people, chronology and a selection of key documents. It will also benefit those familiar with the crisis through up-to-date engagement with still emergent scholarship on the origins and course of the crisis and a most insightful analysis of its aftermath. Following recent orthodoxy, Colman demonstrates how the Kennedy administration’s covert initiatives to undermine the Castro regime following the disastrous US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 influenced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to place nuclear

missiles in Cuba as a defensive measure to protect a socialist ally. He also confirms that Kennedy and Khrushchev were utterly determined to prevent the crisis escalating into nuclear war, which both knew would have unimaginable consequences for all mankind. Lacking the same sense of horror, Castro several times urged the Soviets to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the US, a stand that ensured Khrushchev’s decision not to consult him as the crisis played out. So if both principals were committed to maintaining peace, why did the crisis pose such a threat of horrific escalation? The answer, as both leaders well knew, lay in the danger of how a local commander might react in the event of mistaken belief of being under submarine or aircraft attack. Colman skilfully shows how Moscow and Washington eventually inched towards a settlement; all without full consultation of key allies in the Warsaw Pact and

NATO. Each side would claim strategic victory; the Americans had got the Soviets to withdraw their nuclear weapons, the Soviets had secured Kennedy’s pledge not to invade Cuba and to remove the aging Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy some six months later as a trade-off for their removal of missiles from Cuba (something the White House repeatedly denied being a quid pro quo). In political terms, however, Kennedy gained more than Khrushchev: if not removed, the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba would have undermined US credibility among allies and adversaries and harmed the president’s re-election prospects; in contrast, top Communist Party functionaries’ sense of the Soviet Union having made a climb-down was instrumental in Khrushchev’s dismissal from office in October 1964. In many ways the most interesting part of the analysis is Colman’s assessment of the very far-ranging consequences of the Cuban missile crisis. Although its peaceful resolution paved the way for a limited détente, the Soviets engaged in a crash programme of nuclear development to deal with the US in future from a position of strength. What Mao Zedong condemned as a Kremlin capitulation discredited the idea of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in parts of the communist world, helped to widen the emergent Sino-Soviet split and encouraged North Vietnam to escalate its efforts in the South. US policymakers, meanwhile, concluded from the crisis that communists did not escalate in response to their actions, a misconception that influenced their strategy in Americanising the Vietnam war in 1965. All told, therefore, Colman has produced a fine study that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Cuban missile crisis and its global, rather than solely superpower, dimensions.

CONTRIBUTORS Paul Addison is the author of several books on Churchill and on postwar Britain, including Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (Oxford, 2005).  Jad Adams’ most recent book, Women and the Vote: A World History, has just been released as a paperback by Oxford University Press. Richard Hodges is President of the American University of Rome and author of several books on the archaeology of Albania. Tom Holland‘s latest book, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar  (Little, Brown, 2015), has just come out in paperback.  Alexy Karenowska is a Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and Head of Technology at the Institute for Digital Archaeology, Oxford. Iwan Morgan is Professor of United States Studies at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London and the Chair of Council, British Institute for the Study of Iraq. Nigel Saul is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Richard Weight is a historian of modern Britain and the author of Mod: From Bebop to Britpop, Britain’s Biggest Youth Movement (Random House, 2015). Daniel Snowman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Iwan Morgan The Cuban Missile Crisis: Origins, Course, and Aftermath by Jonathan Colman Edinburgh University Press pp . AUGUST 

HISTORY TODAY  

PASTIMES

GR A ND TOUR

H I S T O R I C A L O D D I T I E S F R OM A R O U N D T H E W OR L D

The Great Pyramid of Cholula The world’s largest pyramid is not in Egypt, but is hidden beneath a hill in a small town in the central Mexican state of Puebla. Known variously as the Great Pyramid of Cholula, Pirámide Tepanapa, or, in the indigenous Nahuatl language, Tlachihualtepetl, or ‘artificial mountain’, the structure measures 400 square metres and has a total volume of 4.45 million cubic metres, almost twice that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was first constructed around 200  and expanded or rebuilt several times over the following centuries by different

 HIST ORY TODAY  AUGUST 

cultures, including the Olmecs, Toltecs and Aztecs. According to Aztec mythology, it was built by Xelhua, a giant whose daring edifice so upset the gods that they hurled fire on it. At its height over 100,000 people lived around the pyramid, although by the time the S panish arrived in 1520 it had become covered by dirt and was hidden from view, with newer temples constructed on its outskirts. Hernán Cortés and his men slaughtered many of the Cholulans, probably to scare the inhabitants of the nearby Aztec capital Tenochtitlan into submission, but, to judge by the church they built on top (still standing today), the Spanish were clearly unaware of the hill’s true nature. The pyramid was re-discovered in the late 19th century and since then archaeologists have begun to excavate the network of tunnels that run through its base. Dean Nicholas

WHERE:

 WHEN:

Puebla, Mexico

200 

Prize Crossword  ACROSS   novel by Virginia Woolf   Birger ___ , com mander of Oscarsborg Fortress   Follower of a radical thcentury visual art movement   Patrick ___ , IrishAmerican bandleader, who wrote the lyrics for ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’   Country ruled by the Somoza dymasty from  to    s’ term for genre associated with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov   Major city of ancient Greece, on the western coast of Anatolia   The Castle of  ___,  gothic novel by Horace Walpole   Karl ___ , Wehrmacht officer in command of the th Infantry Division   Birth city of Albrecht Dürer    Georgia ___ , US painter   Eponym given to racial segregation laws in US South ,  ‘Old ___’, nickname of naval officer Edward Vernon    City of Rajasthan, made capital of Mewar in   DOWN  Lord George ___ ,

Set by Richard Smyth

instigator of antiCatholic riots in    Ratko ___ b., commander of the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian wars of    Apupunchau, Inca Sun God   Susan ___ , New York born writer and thinker   Manuel ___ , military leader in the Argentine war for independence   Norwegian football club, founded    Arvo Pärt b. or Lennart Meri , for example   Fra ___ d., Renaissance painter born Guido di Petro   Dame Margaret ___ , English actor   Game originating in thcentury China, played with tiles   Knight of the Round Table   Palace of ___, ancient seat of the presidency of the Andalusian Autonomous Government ,  A member of a patrilinear clan historically dominant in central and northern India   In Greek myth, the mother of Minos   Sir Ernest ___ , author of Plain Words: a Guide to the Use of English    Margaret ___ , American anthropologist 

The winner  of this

month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by August 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

The Quiz

mission on May th, ?

 How many Catholics were killed

in the Defenestration of Prague?

material is the Throne Chair of Denmark made?

 Getafix is a fictional example of

 La Cucaracha Cariñosa The

which Celtic religious caste?

Affectionate Cockroach was the first vehicle to cross what in ?

 According to legend, of which

 The sobriquet of King Harald

‘Blåtand’ Gormsson gives its name to which technological innovation?  Which two capital cities in the

Americas were founded by indigenous peoples?  Akira Kurosawa’s  film Ran

relocates which Shakespeare play to Sengokuera Japan?  Published in , The Lusiads is a

Homeric epic describing what?  What did the Filipino adventurer

Tomás Cloma, Sr claim as ‘The Free

Territory of Freedomland’ in ?

 Jesus’ crucifixion?

 Which people, according to

Marco Polo, ‘subsist entirely upon flesh and milk’?

 David the Builder was the architect of which country’s ‘Golden Age’?

 According to Otto von Bismarck,

 With which profession did

which two things would decide the ‘questions of the day’?

Samuel ‘Uncle Sam’ Wilson make his name?

 In the AngloSaxon poem The Dream of the Rood, who narrates

 To where did Deputy Führer

  p  a   G  n  é i  r  a   D  e  h    T .        s  n  r  o  h  n   r  o  c i  n   U .       l  a  v i  r  r  a  n  o  d  e  t  s  e  r  r  a  s  a    w  e  h    d  n  a l  t  o  c  S .         g  n i  k  c  a  p  t  a  e    M .        a i   g   r  o  e   G .       d  e  fi i  c  u  r  c  s  a    w  s  u  s  e J  h  c i  h     w  n  o  s  s  o   r  c  e  h    T .        d  o  o l  b  d  n  a  n  o  r I .      s l  o    g  n  o    M  e  h    T .      s  d  n  a l  s I  y l  t  a  r  p  S  e  h    T .      y  r  e  v  o  c  s i  d  f  o  s  e    g  a  y  o  v  e  s  e  u    g  u   t  r  o    P  e  h    T .      r  a  e  L   g    n   i   K .        r  o  d  a  u  c  E     o   t i  u   Q  d  n  a    o  c i  x  e    M     y  t i   C  o  c i  x  e    M .      h  t  o  o  t  e  u l   B .      s  d i  u   r   D .      e  n  o   N .  

    S      R     E         W     S      N      A

Rudolph Hess fly on a solo peace AUGUST  HISTORY TODAY 