Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2023

Britain’s 17th century repeats: first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dominic Sandbrook on the parallels between Britain in the 1600s and today:

King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.

A sunny Wednesday in early June 1665, and Samuel Pepys was suffering in the heat. It was “the hottest day that ever I felt in my life”, he confided to his diary, “and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England”.

Pepys spent some of the day strolling with friends in the New Exchange, a shopping arcade on the south side of the Strand, before repairing to Vauxhall’s Spring Gardens, where he “walked an hour or two with great pleasure”. There was something on his mind, though. For as long as he could remember, relations with England’s neighbours had been distinctly fraught, and Lord Sandwich’s fleet was currently engaged in a struggle with the Dutch. London simmered with rumours about the outcome of the battle, but there was no certainty: as Pepys put it, “ill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without ground”.

By evening, “weary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weather”, the diarist had returned to his house in the City. The day had been pleasant enough, but now something else was troubling him. In Drury Lane, he had seen “two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there”. Pepys knew immediately what that meant. Plague — the first sign of the epidemic that would kill an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of the capital’s population, in the next 18 months. To calm his nerves, he noted: “I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and [chew], which took away the apprehension.”

Reading Pepys’s diary, you sometimes forget that he was born almost four centuries ago. In many respects he was utterly different from us, with assumptions and anxieties we can scarcely understand; and yet often he feels almost thrillingly contemporary, as if you might bump into him in the street tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, you merely have to re-read that diary entry, and you might be looking in a mirror: the stifling heat, the fears of disease, the foreign wars, the fake news.

The past is never just a mirror, of course, and it’s the height of narcissism to cast our predecessors as mere foreshadowings of ourselves. But there are times when, for obvious reasons, a particular historical moment catches the imagination — as is the case today with Pepys’s moment, the mid-17th century.

Just look, for example, at the titles in Britain’s bookshops. For a long time, commercial publishers were terrified of the 17th century. The Stuarts weren’t as sexy as the Tudors, and the age of Oliver Cromwell seemed too dark, too violent, too religious, too complicated for ordinary readers. Why read about perhaps the most significant moment in all our history — the titanic revolutionary conflict of the 1640s and 1650s, when armies surged across the map of our islands, a king was tried and executed, and a farmer from East Anglia tried to turn Britain into a religious commonwealth — when you could read yet another book about Catherine Howard?

And then, as if responding to some subterranean shift in the cultural landscape, something changed. The last few years alone have given us excellent books on Cromwell by Paul Lay and Ronald Hutton, as well as Anna Keay’s dazzling social history of Britain in the 1650s, and Malcolm Gaskill’s haunting account of witchcraft among the settlers who tried to build a new England on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Robert Harris’s most recent blockbuster, Act of Oblivion, follows the hunt for Charles I’s Parliamentarian killers from England to America.

Even politicians are at it. In the Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s new novel The Winding Stair, which charts the bitter feud between Sir Francis Bacon, father of the Scientific Revolution, and Sir Edward Coke, the most influential jurist of the early modern era, we appear to be plunged back into the world of early 17th-century Jacobean England. But right from the first few pages, the parallels are obvious. Among his characters, for example, is James I, a man with “bulging, expressive eyes” and an “awkward gait”, who “dresses finely, yet somehow manages to look ill-kempt”, and always “loves to display his learning with a classical or biblical line”. Even if you didn’t know that Norman had been at Eton with Boris Johnson, worked for him as a junior minister and eventually released a blistering public letter calling for his removal, you’d probably spot the parallel.

June 20, 2023

QotD: When kings and emperors become gods

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nothing in ancient religion strikes my students as so utterly strange and foreign as that idea [of divinized kings and emperors]. The usual first response of the modern student is to treat the thing like a sham – surely the king knows he is not divine or invested with some mystical power, so this most all be a con-job aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of the king. But as we’ve seen, the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry, and it is possible to cross that line. It is not necessary to assume that it was all an intentional sham.

Divine rulership was not universal however – it was subject to cultural context. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was the Living Horus, a physical incarnation of the divine; when he died he became Osiris, the ruler over the underworld. The mystery of the duality whereby a Pharaoh was both a specific person (and might be a different person in the future) but also the same god each time seems to owe something to the multipart Egyptian conception of the soul. Naram-Sin, an Akkadian King (2254-2218 B.C.) represents himself as divine (shown by his having horns) on his victory stele; future kings of Akkad followed suit in claiming a form of divinity, albeit a lesser one than the big-time great gods.

But in Mesopotamia, the rulers of Akkad were the exception; other Mesopotamian kings (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc) did not claim to be gods – even very great kings (at least while alive – declaring a legendary ruler a god is rather more like a divine founder figure). Hammurabi (king of Babylon, c.1810-c.1750 B.C.) is shown in his royal artwork very much a man – albeit one who receives his mandate to rule from the gods Shamash and Marduk. Crucially, and I want to stress this, the Achaemenid kings of Persia were not considered gods (except inasmuch as some of them also occupied the position of Pharaoh of Egypt; it’s not clear how seriously they took this – less seriously than Alexander and Ptolemy, quite clearly). The assumption that the Persians practiced a divine kingship is mostly a product of Greek misunderstandings of Persian court ritual, magnified in the popular culture by centuries of using the Persian “other” as a mirror and (usually false) contrast for European cultures.

But the practice that my students often find most confusing is that of the Roman emperors. To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus – the first emperor – received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family).

I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical – and to some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. But I think it is possible to view this relationship outside of that cynicism through the lens of the ideas and rules we’ve laid out.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.

June 16, 2023

Blackadder at 40

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West remembers his first encounter with the brilliant, devious, and hilarious Edmund Blackadder:

What do these famous figures from British history all have in common? Elizabeth I, George III, George IV, Victoria and Albert, the Duke of Wellington, Dr Samuel Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Douglas Haig, Richard III, er Richard IV, William Pitt the Younger, William Pitt the Even Younger …

They’re all, of course, characters in the greatest tale of our island story, a giant rollercoaster of a comedy in four sizzling chapters, one that was first shown 40 years ago today.

New British stamps issued on the 40th anniversary of the BBC comedy series Blackadder

I was probably always going to love history — my dad was obsessed with it — but Blackadder helped imprint the idea that the past can be one great black comedy. History is funny because people’s behaviour is often quite irrational, or spiteful, or motivated by petty reasons that contrast with their high-minded principles — and no doubt we will seem the same to future generations, too.

That was the whole idea behind Blackadder because, as creator Richard Curtis points out in a documentary screened tonight on Gold, he’s “a modern person in the stupidity of ancient times”.

Yet when the idea was first proposed by Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, they were advised that there are two sitcom premises that can never work — shows set in heaven and hell, or those in historical settings. And Blackadder was lucky to survive its first season.

Atkinson and Curtis had met at Oxford, going on to work together on Not the Nine O’Clock News, where they’d met producer John Lloyd. The two men were inspired by Fawlty Towers, but were also determined to avoid any comparison with John Cleese and Connie Booth’s great creation, so decided on a setting as far removed from a south coast hotel as possible.

Aired on 15 June, 1983, The Black Adder was quite lavish. There were location shots in places like Alnwick Castle and huge amounts spent on costumes and horses. Curtis says that one of the hats Atkinson wore was worth more than he was paid for writing the episode. It featured such big names as Brian Blessed and Peter Cook, the godfather of alternative comedy whose presence granted the show its place in the apostolic succession. But, while the first series has its moments, it was flawed; the original Blackadder was a weasel-like and pathetic figure, and less clever than his sidekick Baldrick. The comedy didn’t exactly work.

I was fortunate enough to encounter the second series, set in Elizabethan England, before I saw any of the first series. The original has its funny moments, but Ed is quite correct that it’s less than the sum of its parts. Brian Blessed steals every scene he’s in (as always), and Peter Cook’s portrayal of Richard III is great. The rest … is kinda funny if you know a bit of the history. Thankfully, there was more to come.

Blackadder II aired at the start of January 1986, and had a much smaller budget and a simpler set up — and it was far, far funnier, the protagonist no longer a conniving weasel but a court sycophant with Baldrick and Percy as comedy punchbags.

“Well, it is said, Percy, that civilised man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that through learned discourse he may rise above the savage and closer to God. Personally, however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me I’m best.”

(Fans of comedy shows who quote the lines endlessly can become quite tedious but, well, tough.)

Or: “The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr. Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy?”

Towards Baldrick he is somewhat more indulgent, telling him that “Thinking is so important“.

“I’ve been in your service since I was two and a half my Lord,” his dogsbody protests upon being thrown out: “Well that is why I am so utterly sick of the sight of you.”

Elton also thought the medieval era to be too squalid and wanted Season 2 set in the “sexier” Elizabethan era (and indeed Edmund’s outfit is rather sexy, as Percy might put it).

May 27, 2023

Communism, Democracy, Monarchy? Any form of government is inherently tyrannical once it gets big enough

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’ve mentioned now and again, although I’m philosophically libertarian, I also describe myself as a “weak monarchist” … it’s not that I want a return to spurred-and-booted aristos literally lording it over everyone else, but that the central institution of the monarchy tends to tamp down some of the worst excesses of various flavours of democracy. Presidential systems put a temporary monarch on top, but a temporary monarch with real, day-to-day powers that can be — and often are — exercised to the detriment of some or all of the population. Constitutional monarchy reserves a few rarely used (and rarely needed) powers to the monarch, but delegates the vast majority of the grubby day-to-day governing stuff to grubby elected politicians. This neat division of powers progressively fails as governments attempt to take on more power to interfere in the lives of ordinary people … and that process went into overdrive with the pandemic lockdowns and so much arbitrary power put not into the hands of elected officials (who at least theoretically have to answer to the voters every now and again) but to the already bloated civil service and their extended families of government-funded but “independent” organizations delegated powers to do all sorts of mischief.

All that said, I don’t think I quite fit into Theophilus Chilton‘s group of former-libertarians-turned-monarchists, if only because I’ve always preferred keeping the monarchy in place:

One of the greatest ironies of modern non-mainstream politics in the West is the tendency on the part of libertarians (whose whole ideology supposedly centers upon the maximization of personal freedom) to eventually find their way into supporting much more authoritarian ideologies on the dissident and reactionary Right. Indeed, this is the general route that my own political convictions have taken – from libertarianism to monarchism. Many libertarians would recoil in horror at the thought, yet given the number of former libertarians in neoreaction and in the dissident Right in general, it obviously happens quite often. One of the reasons I would suggest for this is that the foibles and failures of democracy – the governing system most often associated with the libertarian view of freedom – are becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful observers. The old propaganda used to prop up the democratic dogma in Western nations is becoming increasingly stale and unconvincing. It becomes more and more apparent that democracy does not equal freedom, just as it is becoming apparent that “freedom” is not always and in every sense something that is conducive to good government and stable society.

My purpose with this essay is not to seek to convince my libertarian or classically liberal readers to become monarchists. This may well end up being where they land, politically and ideologically speaking, but their experiences and growth may move them in other directions. What I do want to do is to try to get them started on that path by pointing out that democracy is not any better than other forms of government and may indeed be worse in some areas that we can see empirically. I want to plant a seed of doubt and encourage it to grow. If the thoughtful libertarian is to be convinced, it must be by convincing himself or herself.

Please note that throughout this article, I will refer to “democracy” in a general sense to refer to any modern popular form of government. This includes the sort of representative republican system (formerly) typified by the American government which, while not directly democratic, was still essentially democratic in its overall form and complexion.

Personal Freedom

One of the obvious objections which libertarians and other classical liberals have against monarchy (and other authoritarian governing systems in general) is that the unification of power into the hands of a single executive makes it prone to abuse and to the removal or suppression of the freedoms of the citizenry. Typically, they will envision a monarchy as some kind of police state where citizens who step out of line are severely punished and every aspect of life is closely watched and regulated by the government. This, in turn, leads to a somewhat jaundiced view of history, especially that of the much-excoriated “Dark Ages”, believed to have been a dystopia of violence and tyranny.

This view of the relevant history is, however, untrue and generally relies upon a false epistemic dichotomy that is sadly very common within libertarianism. This is the failure to distinguish between “strong government” and “big government”, the two of which are usually confounded in the classical liberal’s mind. The former term refers to the capacity of the executive to exercise power within his sphere of activity, while the latter describes the extent of the sphere of activity itself. A ruler may be strong in the sense of being decisive and effective in what he does, yet find the area in which he can legitimately act to be circumscribed by law or custom. Among most historical Western monarchies, while kings often ruled “strongly”, they were not able to rule intrusively. Their subjects were often left with a relatively wide degree of latitude in their personal and economic affairs, and the restraints of custom and social structure tended to be more constraining than the actual deeds of their king himself.

Let us contrast this with the various democracies we see in the West, both the United States and others. How much do they really respect personal freedoms? In other words, how much do they really embody the “small government” ideal desired by libertarians and other classical liberals? The answer is: not much at all. Western man lives in democracies in which he can be arrested for tweeting “hate speech” on social media. His everyday life is overseen, administered, and commandeered by a body of regulations enforced by entirely unaccountable bureaucrats who have the capacity to trap him into Kafkaesque nightmares of life-altering tribulation. Every aspect of his food, his clothing, his home, his transportation, his workplace – all controlled by the government he (wrongly) believes he elected freely. If he has any kind of well-paying job or business enterprise, he will be paying a tax rate that ancient absolute monarchs would have blushed to even suggest exacting from their subjects. Democratic governments – supposedly by and for the people – intrude into every area of his life (big government) and do so through robust and often corrupt police state apparatuses which are literally willing to break down his door and possibly shoot him and his family for even minor infractions.

So please, let us dispense with the notion that democracy protects personal freedom.

May 11, 2023

London’s return to normality after Coronation Day

Filed under: Britain, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts his third and final day in London covering the Coronation, the rather impressive clean-up efforts afterwards and the damp squib of the third day, “The Big Help Out”:

Monday was a holiday in the U.K., too, it’s important to note. A “bank holiday”, in the local jargon, which had been declared as part of the official period of celebration. There were still lots of people working, of course. Restaurant staff and taxi drivers and all the rest. But there were a lot of people who could have been volunteering. And I didn’t see any. Not a one.

I’d gone looking, too. There was a website for the so-called Big Help Out, where you could put in your address and what kind of volunteering you were interested in, and find local opportunities. I used my hotel address and selected every possible category of volunteerism, and was offered … not much. I broadened the search area and … still not much. I could download a few kits to collect some signatures for petitions. I was invited to pick up some trash in my local park, whichever park that was, and just as a solo effort. I was asked to fill out some surveys about nature and wildlife for some local conservation groups. And that all sounds … uhh … worthwhile. But this wasn’t what I had in mind, I admit. No group activities? No community activism?

It seemed odd especially because the entire point of Sunday’s events, the Big Lunches, had been bringing people together. To celebrate. It seemed fitting and appropriate for those same people to then get together the next day and contribute something. But no. No one seemed interested. I didn’t have as much time to wander the city on Monday as I’d had on Sunday, but I still had a few hours, and I didn’t see anything. It was quiet.

This had been foreseen as being a problem. Even before I’d flown over, as part of my research, I’d come across this article in The Guardian, warning three weeks ago that volunteerism was at a crisis point in the U.K., was trending further down, and had been for years. It’s not that anyone seemed to think that the idea of the Big Help Out was bad. It’s just that no one seemed to think many people would actually show up.

Some events certainly seemed to go off as planned. Mainly the ones where royals or other VIPs attended. The BBC reported that the Prince and Princess of Wales, and their children, helped improve a Scouts facility. The prime minister and his wife prepared and served food to the elderly. The BBC also reported that 55,000 events were planned across the U.K. I truly and sincerely hope they did well, and that good things were accomplished in communities and for people that needed the help. But I can only tell you what I saw, as I’ve done in my other dispatches, and I didn’t see anything in London on Monday. I asked around a bit, and people either just shrugged it off and went about their day or hadn’t heard of The Big Help Out at all. They’d sure as hell heard of The Big Lunches, though.

Again, probably not a shock that an invitation to party got a better response than an invite to help out. But still.

He also considers the monarchy as an institution from a Canadian constitutional perspective and I find I largely agree with his conclusions:

If I was starting a country from scratch, I would never decide that the logical thing to do would be to invest our notion of sovereignty and much of our government’s powers in an old man who lives in a castle on an island across the ocean. No one would. It’s absurd. But … it works? And, more to the point, I have zero faith — absolutely zero — that we’d ever be able to replace what we currently have with something that functioned at least as well. That has to be the minimum bar. And look around, at the state of things in Canada right now, and for the foreseeable future. Does anyone think we’re going to be in a place to design a new Canadian republic from scratch without just epically screwing it up? Julie Payette, President of Canada, anyone? David Johnston, Eminent President?

We all know that’s exactly who we’d end up with, right? Would we just skip a lot of fuss and bother and just make the president whomever happens to be the youngest (or oldest, or median) member of the Trudeau Foundation board of directors at any given moment? Alternate between astronauts and retired Supreme Court justices? Tack it on as a side gig for whomever happens to be hosting The National that week?

If you think I’m being unduly flippant or sarcastic, I beg you: imagine the president we’d end up with if we locked Justin Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre and Jagmeet Singh in a room together until they could sort it out. If ever. And then tell me you don’t find yourself reconsidering whatever thoughts you may have re: Charles over in Blighty.

I’m a pretty luke-warm monarchist, to be honest, but the thought of the great and the good of Canada running a republic has me singing “God Save the King” at a high volume. His Majesty King Charles III will almost certainly never achieve the personal popularity of her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and that’s okay. As long as he manages to follow the model of his mother and keep his trap shut about political matters in any of his various realms, the better we’ll all feel about keeping the monarchy going a bit longer.

May 9, 2023

The Republicans’ moment in the sun rain

Filed under: Britain — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I joked on Coronation Day that the only people not trying to have a good experience there were the British republicans, but they did get a bit more attention due to their proximity to the Royal Procession than they normally manage:

I mentioned before that it was a happy crowd, with high spirits. The crowd didn’t strike me as remarkable, which is to say, there wasn’t anything particularly notable about it. It was mixed. You’d find every age group and colour there, as well as a smattering of obvious tourists. Lots of people had little Union Jacks they would wave or tuck into the brims of hats or under backpack straps. Some wore full-sized flags as capes. A few young men, who’d obviously been drinking either since early that morning or perhaps the night before, were there in cheap royalty costumes — robes and plastic crowns. The way they were going, I had doubts they’d last much longer. One in particular seemed a bit wobbly on his feet.

One young woman with them had somehow attached a frisbee to her head, in delightfully mockery of the absurd hats women seem to love wearing to royal events. It made me laugh. So begins and ends The Line‘s coronation-related hat commentary.

One of a collection of photos from Kim du Toit’s post-coronation post showing many (perhaps most) of the Republican protestors along the parade route.
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2023/05/08/monday-funnies-post-coronation-edition/

Quite near to the front of the viewing area, just off to the left of Nelson’s Column, was a group of a few dozen republican protesters. I have to remind my North American readers — I don’t mean U.S. Republicans, the of-late MAGA-infused husk of the once Grand Old Party. These are British republicans, an arguably even more baffling breed: these are the people that want Britain to be a republic. They too were a mixed group, but as I wandered over to join them, I did note something interesting. I had expected them to be younger and more ethnically diverse than the rest of the crowd. They weren’t. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that they were less diverse, but my sense was that, at least in terms of the age of the crowd of protesters, maybe they were a touch older than the rest? In any case, it would have been a near-run thing, but that was one of the only things that really jumped out at me about the protest. My assumption that they’d be younger, more diverse, more obviously progressive was wrong. If they’d dropped their yellow flags and banners and quit their chanting of “NOT MY KING!”, they’d have blended in with the rest.

It started to rain around this time. It’s England, of course it was raining. I’d come prepared with a rain jacket so wasn’t deterred, but the rain did have one admittedly lousy impact. Umbrellas. I’d been gradually able to work my way up quite close to the front of the crowd — I’d stuck close to the republicans and it seems that many people tried to give them a wide berth, and I’d been able to shuffle my way gradually forward. Nelson’s Column was to the right, behind me. To my right and front was Admiralty Arch. And off in the distance, but not too far, was Westminster Abbey itself. It was a pretty perfect place to view the procession.

But for the umbrellas. Once they opened up, all one could see was umbrellas.

And that’s how it stayed, to be honest. Troops began to march past in perfect ranks. Bands struck up patriotic songs. The crowd cheered and more than a few sang. One loud female voice — a surprisingly lovely one — struck up The Star Spangled Banner — which was either some kind of deliberate prank or just a very historically confused soul getting caught up in the moment. I heard the clopping of hooves and the crowd went absolutely wild, and suddenly, thousands of arms shot up into the air holding smartphones, every person present seeking a better angle for their videos. The arms and the umbrellas made it virtually impossible to see a damn thing. (See this video by a New York Times team: they must have been standing within 50 feet of where I was, a bit off to my left. You’ll see what I mean.)

That was from Matt Gurney’s sleep-deprived view of the procession from The Line (that’s not editorializing on my part — he hadn’t slept on the plane from Toronto and got to London at 7am on Coronation Day). In what seemed like a useful break in the public celebrations, he snuck away to get some sustenance and be out of the rain for a bit. When he returned it was lowlight time for the Republicans:

After I’d polished off the pint, I headed back out, back to the square, and that’s where things got interesting. I figured I’d get back to my former spot near the chanting republicans, and did so, no problem. But I noticed there suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of cops around … all heading that way. As in: right toward me, and the chanting people I was standing near. Oops. I left, working my way around the crowd, heading back the way I came from my hotel, and found myself actually facing a rank of advancing cops. Oops again. One had a badge that said inspector, and I walked right up and told him I was a Canadian journalist just watching things. He grinned at me and said, “Alright, mate, come this way,” and had a security guard walk me through the police. I thus ended up missing what has proven to be a controversial event and perhaps the only unhappy moment I know of during the coronation, at least in my area: a bunch of the chanting republicans were arrested just moments after I got out of dodge, and then large metal screen barriers were thrown up, closing off the square due to, apparently, overcrowding. People could leave but no one new could enter.

My sense, as I walked away, was that there was no reason to arrest anyone. (And as I said, this is proving controversial.) I hadn’t seen anything getting out of hand. There had been some chanting and counter-chanting and even some heckling back and forth, but it had all seemed in good enough spirits. Even some of the boos sent at the republicans — two young men with flags had been hamming it up in the main crowd, apart from the main blob of republicans — had seemed in good humour. I don’t know what the police saw or knew. But I couldn’t tell you why they’d moved then and not before, or later. As for overcrowding, I don’t think so. The square really wasn’t all that full. It seemed less full at that moment than it had been when the procession had passed on the way to the abbey. But the barriers seemed to go up quickly, everywhere. Literally everywhere.

And though I was glad to have avoided getting caught up in the Cops vs. Chanting Republicans, I was now on the wrong side of the barriers.

In The Critic, Kittie Helmick recounts finding herself in the vicinity of the “NOT MY KING!” group:

“You seem to find this whole thing rather amusing,” snapped a short angry man with a Not My King sign, about half an hour into the Republic protest against the coronation of King Charles III. I must admit I did. Kettled into a small enclave just off Trafalgar Square, an angry swell of old school socialists, Twitter anarchists, Lib Dem mums, eccentric vicars, boomer hippies, blue haired students and Covid conspiracists had somehow found themselves part of the coronation spectacle. Before the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the full shouty brunt of British republicanism was aimed at a bewildered stream of Chinese tourists and young families out for a day in London.

The survival of the British monarchy is one of the great wonders of modern history. Spending the morning of the coronation with Republic, it began to seem less mysterious. Despite everything in recent years, the Monarchy is still liked more than most of our institutions and probably every one of our elected politicians. No one gathered there could really explain why. The arguments were articulated in between the shouty chanting: things about “modern Democracy” and a “family of Lizards”, none of which quite landed the blow as the day unfolded around us.

Somewhere beyond the crowds, towards Westminster Abbey, an ageing, eccentric dandyish farmer, who secretly wants to be King of Transylvania, was being anointed in holy oil and crowned by an Archbishop wearing hearing aids in a seven hundred year old chair vandalised by 18th century schoolboys. All the while this ceremony was being fawned over across the world by everyone from Kay Burley to one of the world’s most remote tribes. None of it made sense, and that is precisely the point.

Earlier that morning, the CEO of Republic Graham Smith, a man not even the protestors could name, achieved the greatest success of his kind since Cromwell, by being arrested at the hands of the jobsworth Met. For a brief moment, a shiver of excitement spread through the protest. Whilst the country was entranced by a fugue of sombre ritual and Zadok the Priest, Republic were experiencing their own desired reality unfold on the streets of London. Here was a police state enforcing the will of a “politically illiterate” nation brainwashed by bunting and tabloid journalism. The mask was finally off. The incoherent gaggle of shouty slogans and reddit thread arguments made sense. The fight was here and now.

Except that was all a fantasy too. As stupid as the arrests were, nothing could disguise the fact this was a fringe event for a movement that just can’t seem to take off — a Coronation curio to gawp at. “They’re a bunch of wronguns, aren’t they?” said one bored steward to me as we watched a man larping Les Miserables as he chanted Not My King at a trio of giggling Chinese students. The deeper I dug into the many arguments and protestations offered as an alternative to the “fairytale” of monarchy, the more the core transgressive energy of British republicanism revealed itself. It is itself strangely twee and fantastical. Rid us of the Royals, and everything will become better. Gone will be the “psychological baggage” of Britain’s past holding us back. Democracy will triumph. The crown jewels will be sold off and spent on food banks. The plebs will not worship hereditary blood, but NHS rainbows. Britain will become less racist, elitist and classist. The left might even win an election. We could have a poet president like Ireland, a Lineker or a Stormzy shaking hands with the American president.

May 6, 2023

Face-palm-worthy Coronations of the past

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m sure almost everyone — except the tiny number of Republicans in England — hopes for a smooth and spectacular Coronation for His Majesty King Charles III, there are plenty of examples of past Coronations that were anything but:

The Imperial State Crown, worn by the British monarch in the royal procession following the Coronation and at the opening of Parliament.
Wikimedia Commons.

Whereas so many traditions are 19th-century inventions, as any student of history knows, the coronation of Britain’s monarch is a rare example of a truly ancient custom, dating to the 10th century in its structure and with origins stretching back further, to the Romans and even Hebrews. As Tom Holland said on yesterday’s The Rest is History, it is like going to a zoo and seeing a woolly mammoth.

It is a sacred moment when the sovereign becomes God’s anointed, an almost unique state ceremony in a secular world. The custom originates with the late Roman emperors, associated with Constantine the Great and certainly established by the mid-fifth century in Constantinople. In the West, and following the fall of that half of the empire, barbarian leaders were eager to imitate imperial styles (a bit like today). Germanic and Celtic tribes had ceremonies for new leaders in which particular swords were displayed, a feature of later rites, but as they developed the practice of kingship, so their rituals began to imitate the Roman form.

[…]

Athelstan, the first king of England, had been crowned in 925 at Kingston, a spot where seven kings of England had been enthroned. Perhaps the most notorious was Edwig, a 16-year-old whose proto-rock star qualities were not appreciated at the time of his coronation in 955. Indeed he failed to turn up, and when Bishop Dunstan marched to the king’s nearby quarters to drag him along, he found the teenager in bed with a “strumpet” and the strumpet’s mother.

However, Edwig died four years later, and Dunstan was elevated to Canterbury, became a saint and, through chronicles recorded by churchmen, got his version of history.

This reign might seem impossibly distant and obscure, yet it was under Edwig’s brother Edgar that the current coronation format was established. Edgar was a powerful king, and the last of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to live a happily Viking-free existence. His coronation on 11 May 973 was an illustration of his strength, and also his aspirations. Held at Bath, most likely because of its association with Rome, it involved a bishop placing the crown on the king’s head, in the Carolingian style, and would become the template for the ceremony for his direct descendent Charles III.

But not all coronations would run so smoothly. After Edgar’s death his elder son Edward was killed in possibly nefarious circumstances, and his stepmother placed her son Ethelred on the throne. Ethelred’s reign was plagued by disaster, and it was later said in the chronicles — the medieval equivalent of “and then the whole bus clapped” Twitter tales — that Bishop Dunstan lambasted the boy-king for “the sin of your shameful mother and the sin of the men who shared in her wicked plot” and that it “shall not be blotted out except by the shedding of much blood of your miserable subjects”.

This would have been merely awkward, whereas many coronations ended in riot or bloodshed. The most notorious incident in English history occurred on Christmas Day 1066: Duke William got off to a bad start PR-wise when his nervous Norman guards mistook cheers for booing and began attacking the crowd, before setting fire to buildings.

[…]

Perhaps the most scandalous coronation took place at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1308. The young queen, Isabella, was the 12-year-old daughter of France’s King Philippe Le Bel, and had inherited her father’s good looks, with thick blonde hair and large blue, unblinking eyes. Her husband, Edward II, was a somewhat boneheaded man of 24 years whose idea of entertainment was watching court fools fall off tables.

It was a fairy tale coronation for the young girl, apart from a plaster wall collapsing, bringing down the high altar and killing a member of the audience, and the fact that her husband was gay and spent the afternoon fondling his lover Piers Gaveston, while ignoring her. Isabella’s two uncles, who had made the trip from France, were furious at the behaviour of their new English in-law, though perhaps not surprised.

[…]

One of the most disastrous coronations occurred during the Hundred Years’ War. Inspired by Joan of Arc, in 1429 the French had beaten the English at the Battle at Patay, after which their leader Charles VII entered Reims and was crowned at the spot where the kings of France had been enthroned for almost a thousand years. In response, on 26 December 1431 the English had their candidate, the 10-year-old Henry VI, crowned King of France at Notre-Dame in Paris, where one road was turned into a river of wine filled with mermaids, and Christmas plays were performed on an outdoor stage.

Unfortunately, the coronation was a complete mess. The entire service was in English, the weather was freezing, the event rushed, too packed, filled with pickpockets, and worst of all the English made such bad food that even the sick and destitute at the Hotel-Dieu complained they had never tasted anything so vile.

Coronation Weekend

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jago Hazzard
Published 5 May 2023

For us train nerds, “Coronation” means something very different.

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May 3, 2023

The History of the Hawaiian Luau

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Pacific, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 May 2023
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May 1, 2023

Britain’s first embassy to India

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, C.C. Corn reviews Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das, a look at the first, halting steps of the East India Company at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir early in the seventeenth century:

The late Sir Christopher Meyer, the closest thing modern British diplomacy has produced to a public figure, enjoyed comparing his trade to prostitution. Both are ancient trades, and neither enjoys a wholly favourable reputation. Any modern diplomat will discreetly confirm that the profession is far from the anodyne, flag-emoji civility and coyly embarrassed glamour they project on Twitter.

Whilst none of our modern representatives are working in quite the same conditions as their predecessor Sir Thomas Roe, they may well find uncanny parallels with his unfortunate mission.

The fledgling and precarious East India Company, founded in 1600, had sent representatives to the Mughal court before, but they were mere merchants and messengers. The stern rebuff they received called for a formal representative of the King.

After the company persuaded James I of the necessity, Thomas Roe (a well-connected MP, friend to John Donne and Ben Jonson, and already an experienced traveller after an attempt to reach the legendary El Dorado) was dispatched to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615. He remained there until 1619, in an embassy that the cultural historian, Nandini Das, describes in Courting India as “infuriatingly unproductive”.

The company kept rigorous records, and Roe meticulously kept a daily diary. Professor Das uses these and the reports of other English travellers to narrate Roe’s journey, as well as contemporary literature and, more importantly, their Indian equivalents. It is not so much the diplomatic success that fascinates Das about Roe’s embassy, but the mindset of the early modern encounter between England and India.

In a boom time for histories of British colonialism, this is an intelligent and gripping book with a thoughtful awareness of human relationships and frailties, and a model approach to early modern cross-cultural encounters.

The privations suffered by Roe’s embassy are striking. Only three in ten people had a chance of coming home alive from the voyage to India. Das’s recreation of the journey out is as intense and claustrophobic as Das Boot, with rotten medicine, cruel maritime punishments and untrained boys acting as surgeons. Dead bodies onboard would have their toes gnawed off by rats within hours.

In India, the English sailors excelled themselves as uncouth Brits abroad: drinking, fighting and baiting local customs, such as killing a calf. A chaplain was notorious for “drunkenly dodging brothel-keepers and engaging in half-naked brawls”. For most of his time, Roe — seeking to keep costs down — lived with merchants and factors already in India, in a cramped, filthy, dangerous house.

April 30, 2023

David Howarth’s history of the East India Company

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, India — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Robert Lyman reviews David Howarth’s recent work Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company:

It is the human detail of the EIC and the ultimate triumph of its trading endeavours despite the best efforts of Portugal, the Dutch Republic and of the vicissitudes of Neptune that holds great fascination for me, and which is the triumph of Howarth’s intimate and intricate portrayal of the EIC in the first century of its existence. His great achievement is both to bring the dusty tomes of the Company back to life, not just to humanise one of the greatest trading ventures of all of human history, but to interpret the early years of the Company (his book spans 1600 to 1688, though most of the narrative is pre-1650) as a peculiarly human rather than an institutional endeavour. Is this important? Yes. Humans have agency; institutions consume or act upon the determining agency of human beings, not the other way around. Too much of modern (post 1880) history is based upon determining the perspective of organisations and movements (as interpreted by later historians, many with their own ideological baggage) rather than of actual, real live people making decisions for themselves in the peculiar and particular context of their lives and times.

The means through which Howarth paints his story is by the decisions, actions and activities of actual people, some influential decision-makers and many others who were not, all of which makes up a remarkably vivid tapestry of human intercourse. Each chapter, for instance, is constructed around a person or group of people. One powerfully tells the story of the men of the Peppercorn, an EIC East Indiaman, as it seeks out the riches of a world on the extreme periphery of the consciousness of most Europeans. The ultimate triumph of European expansion into Asia is not difficult to comprehend. Europe was pursuing an adventure, aggressively, relentlessly and determinedly, to bring the riches of the world back to its own shores. At no time did the Chinese, Japanese, Indians or inhabitants of the Spice Islands return the favour. The energetic persistence of Sir Thomas Roe, for instance, the Company’s ambassador to the Mughal court (1615-1619), is easily compared to the intellectual (and alcoholic) indolence of the Great Mughal with whom Roe was attempting to interact. Roe was there, in India: Europeans were interested in the “East” and with travelling to the other side of the world for purposes of human engagement, adventure, patriotism and, yes, greed and selfish self-interest. The Great Mughal, by contrast, was also driven by greed and self-interest, but he just wasn’t interested in exploring. He certainly wasn’t interested in Europe. He was already, in his view, at the top of the human tree and had no need for either the ideas or the money of the red-haired barbarians who came from across the sea, a sea that incidentally few Mughal emperors had (amazingly) ever even seen. Fascinatingly, the Mughal shared with King James I an abhorrence with “trade”, though James knew he needed grubby merchants like Sir John Lyman [the reviewer’s ancestor] as they gave him coin. It wasn’t just about the merchants: Kings and governments needed the money that the merchants delivered by the bucket load because they couldn’t create it themselves. Howarth astutely observes that the “EIC belonged to the globe of politics as much as it did to the sphere of commerce”. Indeed, something of a symbiosis between the two in Tudor and Stewart England created a sense of nationhood – in the face of the resistance of others, in Europe and further afield – for the first time. The Mughal Empire was ultimately swallowed up as a result of a dynamism by European politicians and merchants working in unison which it never bothered to replicate by undergoing the reverse journey.

And power? No. Howarth is remarkably clear that the primary task of the EIC was to make money, not to accrue territory, create power in foreign territories or aggrandise native populations. The role of the executive arm of the EIC (its ships, sailors and factors) was to make money for its investors, many of whom were the very merchant adventurers in the little ships travelling east over vast oceans. The great game of mercantile expansion took place because those who had most to lose were also sailing the ships, negotiating with foreign emissaries, fighting the Portuguese and the Dutch and placing their lives on the line. Amazingly, in 1570 England had only 58,000 tons of marine tonnage compared with Spain’s 300,000, and was very definitely the minnow in the rush to conquer the seas. The men who built and sailed its boats came from a long way behind, and yet in time were to build a seagoing commercial empire which more than rivalled all its competition. Its early growth was fuelled by the wealth provided by spice rather than slaves and, in contradistinction to what some modern historical moralists are keen to tell us, by a “reluctance to use violence and vigilance to avoid land commitments”. Indeed, unlike that of the Dutch, and despite what one might assume if we were to read the British national anthem back into history, “expansion in England happened with no appeal whatever to national glory”.

The amazing thing about the EIC was just how chaotic and disorganised it was. There was nothing inevitable about its rise as a monolithic mercantile overlord destined for instance, in the due course of time, to rule India. Second guessing history is only possible for historians able to look backwards and identify trends and features, convictions that didn’t exist for those when history was happening trying to make their way through the fog of an uncertain and troublesome future. The EIC proved simply to be better organised than the Portuguese, and not distracted as the Dutch were in their long war against Spain. Luck and serendipity played as much a role on the eventual survival of the EIC as did its ability to raise massive amounts of money from venturers in England (every raise or round of financing was heavily over-subscribed) for its adventures and to recruit adventurers to take its ships to sea. The EIC was phenomenally successful in raising voluntary capital to fund its ventures relative to other European states. By comparison, “although Iberian barns might have looked well built and better stocked, once they were given a good kick the rusted hinges flew off”.

April 26, 2023

Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation Chicken

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Apr 2023
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April 21, 2023

Localism versus centralism

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton offers some support to localism as an antidote to the centralization of powers we’ve seen in every western nation since the early “nation state” era at the end of the Middle Ages:

Cropped image of a Hans Holbein the Younger portrait of King Henry VIII at Petworth House.
Photo by Hans Bernhard via Wikimedia Commons.

The history of the West has, among other things, included a long, drawn-out conflict between two functional organizing principles – localism and centralization. The former involves the devolution of power to more narrowly defined provincial, parochial centers, while the later involves the concentration of power into the hands of an absolutist system. The tendency toward centralization began as far back as the high Middle Ages, during which the English and French monarchies began the reduction of aristocratic privileges and local divisions and the folding of this power into the rising bureaucratic state with a permanently established capital city and rapacious desire for provincial monies and personnel. The trend towards the development of absolute monarchy continued through the Baroque period, and the replacement of divinely-sanctioned kingship with popular forms of government (republicanism, democracy, communism) did not abate the process, but merely redirected power into different hands. The ultimate form of centralization, not yet come to pass, would be the sort of borderless one-world government desired by today’s globalists, whether they be neoconservatives or neoliberals, which would involve the ultimate consolidation of all power everywhere into one or a few hands in some place like Geneva or New York City.

[…]

The historical transition from localism to centralization in medieval Europe was seen in the decline of aristocratic rights and the institution of peer kingship, and their replacement with consolidated administrative control over a much larger and generally contiguous geographic area. This control was manifested in the person of the absolute monarch, and was exercised through an impersonal, disinterested bureaucratic apparatus which came to demand a greater and greater share of the national wealth to cover its expenses. This process, I believe, can ultimately be traced back to the strengthening of English and French royal power beginning in the 13th century, especially under Philip IV of France. Its fruition came (while monarchy still exercised effectual power in Europe) in the 17th-18th centuries before being undermined by Enlightenment and democratic dogmas which merely transferred the centralizing power to demagogues claiming to speak “for the people.”

Under the old aristocratic system, executive power formed a distributed system and rested on local nobility ruling over a local population with whom they were knowledgeable and on generally good terms. Despite the jaundiced modern view that feudalism was always “tyrannical” and “oppressive,” the fact is that most aristocrats in that era were genuinely devoted to the welfare of the commoners in their land, and it was the responsibility of the nobility to dispense justice and to right wrongs. The picture presented in Kipling’s poem “Norman and Saxon” most likely serves as a fair reflection of the relationship between lord and commoner. Kingship certainly existed, but the king was viewed as a “first among equals”, one who was the prime lord over his vassals, but who could also himself be a vassal of other kings of equal power and authority (as many of the earlier Plantagenet kings were to the Kings of France, by virtue of their holding fiefs as Dukes of Aquitaine).

False impressions about the role of the aristocracy generally correlate with false impressions about serfdom, the dominant labor relationship of the time. Contrary to popular notions, serfdom was generally not some cruel form of slavery that destroyed human dignity. Indeed, many serfs had liberties approach those of freemen, could transfer allegiances between nobles, enjoyed dozens of feast days (which were effectively vacation days to be devoted to family and community), and could even take themselves off to one of the many free cities which existed and be reasonably sure of not being compelled to return to their former master unless their case was especially egregious.

However, under centralization, the nobility was generally reduced to being ornaments of the royal court, their judicial and administrative functions removed and replaced by a bureaucracy personally loyal to the king. This, in effect, served to remove opportunities for serfs and other commoners to “get away” from the rule of a bad king. Whereas before, a serf could at least hope for the opportunity to flee a bad ruler and seek shelter with a good one, under the uniform rule of the absolute monarch, this was no longer an option unless the commoner wished to flee his entire nation and culture completely. Likewise, the ever-increasing regulation of his daily life by the bureaucracy followed him everywhere he went. By the end of the period, the centralization of power and the rise of crony capitalism led to the destruction of serfdom and the rise of wage capitalism, acting to reduce serfs and freemen alike to the status of cogs in profit-generating machines. The rise of absolute monarchy, part and parcel with the appearance of bureaucracy and the professionalization of military power, led directly to the rise of the modern managerial state.

March 28, 2023

QotD: In praise of aristocracy and monarchy

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the “upper” house of Britain’s Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate their identity with the people or the masses. (It is strange, by the way, how rarely leftists who are in favor of confiscatory economic policies are condemned as populist, when they appeal mainly to envy, spite, and resentment, those most delightful of all human emotions.)

Speaking for myself — the only person for whom I am fully entitled to speak — I would rather be ruled (at least in the modern world) by the Duke of Northumberland than by Mr. McDonnell; and this is for perfectly rational reasons and not, as might be supposed, from any feeling of nostalgia for a world we have lost.

Unlike Mr. McDonnell, the Duke of Northumberland does not feel that he has to make the world anew, all within his lifetime — or rather within his political lifetime, a period that is even shorter. He knows that the world did not begin with him and will not end with him. As the latest scion of an ancient dynasty going back centuries, he is but the temporary guardian of what he has inherited, which he has a duty to pass on. Moreover, as someone whose privileges are inherited, he knows that his power (such as it is) is fragile in the modern world. He must exercise it with care, discretion, and consideration.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Appeal of Inherited Power”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-29.

March 11, 2023

Why Japan Surrendered in WW2: Stalin or the Bomb?

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 10 Mar 2023
It’s common wisdom that the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese surrender at the end of the 2nd World War. However, there has been a fierce historical debate if this narrative omits the role of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 — or if this invasion was actually the main cause for the surrender.
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