A Great Parliamentarian; a Great Englishman

History's judgement on Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury has not been kind, that much is true, though I would urge anyone interested in a more balanced and objective view to have a look at The First Earl of Shaftesbury by K. H. D. Halley, still (she says) the best biography on the Whig leader.

One thing should be made absolutely plain: the Popish Plot was indeed a groundless conspiracy, during which innocent people lost their lives. For men like Titus Oates it was no more than an opportunity to seek recognition and riches by defaming and maligning Catholics. Shaftesbury stands guilty by association, and by the use he made of Oates and his slanders. But it is crucially important to understand that Shaftesbury's hostility to Catholicism was first and foremost political not confessional in nature.

Earlier in his career he had advised Charles to stand by the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 because it extended freedom of conscience to Protestant dissenters, even though it was criticised in Parliament for its supposed sympathy for Catholics. His hostility towards Catholicism grew in intensity as it was perceived more and more as a political threat to the English constitution, a threat to the liberty of Parliament that Shaftesbury valued most highly. I can find no better clue to Shaftesbury's whole attitude at the time of the Popish Plot than the observation of one MP who said "Papists are enemies not because they are erroneous in religion but because their principles are destructive to the government."

You see, there is a well-established tendency to look at this whole period of English history as merely one of hysteria and anti-Catholic bigotry. There is, however, quite another dimension which is almost completely overlooked. Forget Oates and his ghastly associates; look more closely at the Parliamentary debates. It is there you will discover some of the real substance. I’ve gone through all of the exchanges made during the Exclusion Crisis point by point, line by line. In one session on 27 April 1679 Sir Henry Capel observed;

From Popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary power...Formerly the crown of Spain, and now France supports this root of popery among us; but lay popery flat, and there's an end of arbitrary government and power. It is a mere chimera or notion without popery.

The long-term danger, as Shaftesbury and his party believed, came from the France of Louis XIV. But even at home he was mindful of the misuse of power in parts of the United Kingdom; for Britain had its very own Louis in the person of John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, Charles' Secretary of State for Scotland, who ruled the northern kingdom with powers akin to that of a Roman proconsul. Here is part of Shaftesbury's speech from the debate of March 1679;

Popery and slavery, like two sisters, go hand in hand; sometimes one goes first, and sometimes the other, in a door; but the other is always following close at hand. In England popery was to have brought in slavery; in Scotland, slavery before and popery to follow...Scotland has outdone all the eastern and southern countries, in having their lives, liberties and estates sequestered to the will and pleasure of those that govern.

So, you see, for him the greatest risk was to liberty, from whatever direction it came. Yes, his understanding of liberty is far narrower than our own; and yes again, he was not a democrat, in the sense that we understand the term. He was, rather, a great Parliamentarian, one of the greatest in English history, and as such stands comparison with John Pym and John Hampden, and I have chosen these parallels with care.

Many of Shaftesbury's contemporaries satirised him as 'Lord Shiftsbury' because he changed political clothes so often: first a supporter of Charles I during the English Civil War and then a supporter of Parliament; a supporter of Cromwell, and then an opponent; a supporter of Charles II and then an opponent. Yet there is a consistent thread through all of these shifts and changes: a steadfast support for parliamentary process and constitutional liberty. He never attached himself to any regime that that set itself against frequent parliaments. He only moved into permanent opposition after James duke of York, a man he never had any time for, was known to have converted to Catholicism. He may have feared Catholic absolutism; he feared James even more: "...heady, violent and bloody, who easily believes the rashest and worst councils to be the most sincere and hearty." And those familiar with James as king will recognise how accurate this assessment was to be.

No democrat, then, but a party leader; one who was prepared to extend the debate on the future of the constitution into the public arena, using all the means at his disposal. He did so because he was ever more aware of the impotence of Parliament in isolation from the people. Petitions, pamphlets, parades, electioneering; simple messages for even simpler people; it was all part of the process of engagement. It was the beginning, in essence, of the modern political world, in all of its good and bad forms.

His success here must surely be measured by the fact that the Tories, his great rivals, began to adopt the same methods. It was indeed a high risk strategy: in the end he lost everything, dying as an outcast and an exile. But he had fought with single-minded determination for what he believed to be the highest principles of all. And as for his place in history, I think there is a good argument for rooting the Glorious Revolution in the Exclusion debates. Moreover, there is at least one modern historian who has argued that Locke's dissertations on government were first written, not as a retrospective justification of the events of 1688, but as Exclusionist tracts in defence of Shaftesbury.

The One Who Survived

Catherine Parr was probably the most intelligent of Henry VIII’s six wives; she was certainly the most literate. She financed the translation of Erasmus' Paraphrases of the Gospels, choosing the translators for each book, and may very well have translated The Boke of St Matthew herself. She certainly translated John Fisher's Psalms or Prayers. Her greatest achievement, though, was in writing Lamentations of a Sinner, the first work every published by a Queen of England, and the first in prose to be published by a woman in the sixteenth century.

Catherine was also a figure of some political influence. It was largely thanks to her that Princess Mary was brought back into the line of succession. She was trusted enough by Henry to have diplomatic conversations with the ambassadors of the Emperor Charles in the interest of improving Anglo-Imperial relations. When Henry went campaigning against France in 1544 he appointed Catherine Regent-General. She was highly adept in the arts of governance, even being bold enough to countermand an order from the King over military supplies.

So, in all, much more than the most married English Queen!

Of Whigs and Tories

In October 1678 a magistrate by the name of Edmund Berry Godfrey was murdered. The crime, never solved, was to turn into one of the most explosive in English history. Godfrey, a figure of little real significance in himself, had been delegated by the government to investigate the accusations of one Titus Oates, a wholly disreputable character, that Catholics, a passive and quiescent minority in England, were conspiring to assassinate Charles II. But the accusations, seemingly given substance by the murder of Godfrey, served a political purpose; served to point to the fact that James, duke of York, the king's brother and heir, was himself a Catholic. Soon he became, in the eyes of some, the principal beneficiary of the alleged scheme to murder his brother. It was the beginning of a wave of political hysteria now known as the Popish Plot.

James himself, a stiff and unapproachable figure, had many political enemies, chief among whom was Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury, a brilliant if rather unprincipled figure. A friend of John Locke, the philosopher, he was quite capable of changing political colours with ease. During the Civil War between the King’s father and Parliament he had initially been a supporter of the royalists before switching to the parliamentary side, and then back to the royalists before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Opportunist he may have been but he was one of the most skilful parliamentarians in English history, one who continued to be distrustful of royal absolutism. His politics were given an added piquancy by the fact that he loathed James, perceiving him, and his faith, as a danger to the liberties of England.

Catholicism, though long of little real political consequence in England, was associated with Continental absolutism, personified above all in the figure of Louis XIV, the king's cousin. The fact that James had converted to Catholicism was seen by many as a direct threat to the future security and integrity of England. As the accusations revealed by Oates gained ground, in Parliament a faction around Shaftesbury began to agitate for the exclusion of James from the succession, to be replaced by James, duke of Monmouth, Charles' illegitimate but Protestant son.

This faction, loosely defined, but containing some supporters of the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, was initially referred to as the ‘Country Party’, meaning that they represented the interests of the nation as a whole, as opposed to the 'Court Party' behind the king. As a badge of their unity Shaftesbury and his supporters adopted a green ribbon, and were subsequently organised in the Green Ribbon Club, which had regular meetings at the King's Head Tavern in London.

But their enemies, those who supported James and the legitimate succession, had another name for them - the Whigs. This label was new to English politics, an import from Scotland, where it was used to refer to extreme Presbyterians, disruptive, seditious and rebellious dissidents. In Parliament the opponents of Shaftesbury, headed by George Saville, marquis of Halifax, were accorded an equally derogatory label - they were described as Tories, after a group of Irish brigands. Both terms were to stick, and although intended as insults adopted by the groups in question. It was the beginning of English party politics and a two-sided contest that was to dominate Parliament right up to the twentieth century, by which time the Whigs had become the Liberals and the Tories the Conservatives.

It should be stressed, though, that in the context of the seventeenth century 'party' was a very loose term with none of its contemporary associations. There was no membership, there was no authority and there was no ideological discipline; it was merely a collection of like-minded individuals. The Whigs, though strong in Parliament, had no real organisational coherence. Although they could win elections they made little progress against the obduracy of the court, as Charles, while bending with the wind, even exiling his brother for a time, refused to concede to their principal demand. In the end, after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament of 1681, the high-water mark of the Exclusion Crisis, the Whigs simply imploded. But an idea, an attitude and a style had entered the politics of the land, one that would never go away.

Venerable History

The History of the English Church and People has a clear polemical and didactic purpose. Bede sets out, not just to tell the story of the English, but to advance his views on politics and religion. In political terms he is a partisan of his native Northumbria, amplifying its role in English history over and above that of Mercia, its great southern rival. He takes greater pains in describing events of the seventh century, when Northumbria was the dominant Anglo-Saxon power, than the eighth, when it was not. The only criticism he ventures of his native Northumbria comes in writing about the death of King Ecgfrith in fighting the Picts at Nechtansmere in 685.


This defeat Bede attributes God's vengeance for the Northumbrian attack on the Irish in the previous year. For while Bede is loyal to Northumbria he shows an even greater attachment to the Irish and the Irish Celtic missionaries, whom he considers to be far more effective and dedicated than their rather complacent English counterparts.


His final preoccupation is over the precise date of Easter, which he writes about at length. It is here, and only here, that he ventures some criticism of St Cuthbert and the Irish missionaries, who celebrated the event, according to Bede, at the 'wrong' time. In the end he is pleased to note that the Irish Church was saved from error by accepting the 'correct' date for Easter. And for men like Bede this was no trivial matter.

Finding King Richard

Last November I wrote a piece headed My Kingdom for a Gun; finding Bosworth Field, focusing on the attempt to pinpoint the precise location of this seminal battle. According to the latest reports the task is all but complete. A thumbnail-sized silver gilt boar has been uncovered by the archaeological team. The boar-badge was, of course, the personal emblem of Richard III, the last English king to be killed in battle, and is thought to have been worn by one of his close retainers at the spot where he fell.

The evidence uncovered in the fields straddling Fen Lane in the Leicestershire parish of Upton also includes the badges of the supporters of both Richard and Henry Tudor, as well as twenty-eight lumps of roundshot, in a site that is nearly two miles south-west of what has traditionally been regarded as the centre of the battle.

Frank Baldwin, chairman of the Battlefields Trust charity, has described the discovery as “important to us as Schliemann discovering Troy.” My reaction was that he was, perhaps, allowing himself to be carried away by boyish enthusiasm, but I quite agree with Professor Richard Holmes, a historian for whom I have considerable respect, that “this is certainly the most important discovery about Bosworth in my lifetime.”

On Richard himself my feelings are somewhat ambivalent. I do not share the enthusiasm of the Ricardians for the ‘lost cause’ of their hero king. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard duke of York, were indeed murdered on the orders of their uncle; they were simply too dangerous to remain alive. Moreover, I can’t but admire the Tudor dynasty that brought us in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I two of the greatest monarchs in English history.

Still, the romantic in me regrets the loss of the old England, the England of the Plantagenets, the England of Richard III, an enduringly fascinating man for all of his brief flight with destiny.

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth

King of Sex

Charles II’s notorious carnal appetites impacted on popular consciousness at the time, with far greater consequence than any caused by past royal misconduct. In the course of research I carried out on this period I came across some truly hilarious-and unpublished-satires, one in which the king is depicted running around the streets of London-'Mercy, help!' the king cried, 'What is wrong, your Majesty; have the Dutch invaded?' 'No; for the love of God, fetch me a midwife.'

Politically speaking, though, the impact of Charles' affairs was far from amusing, because of the circumstances of the time and the nature of the reign. Charles had no legitimate offspring, but many bastards. Normally this would not have been any great problem, as no illegitimate son would have expected to succeed. It became a problem when Charles' designated heir, his brother James, Duke of York converted to Catholicism, and those opposed to him awakened the ambitions of the vain and mercurial James, Duke of Monmouth, the bastard-in-chief.

Beyond this Charles' affairs did indeed have consequences for the well-being of his dynasty, for the simple reason that he quite often allowed sexual attraction to translate directly into political power. Barbara Villiers was to be the first and greatest example of the 'political mistress' and the 'mistress of politics', far more powerful in every way than Charles own queen, Catherine of Braganza. Her influence was such that she created her own political circle at court, interfered constantly in matters of state; so powerful that she was even courted by foreign ambassadors. Charles was frightened of her, frightened of her temper.

In one of his diary enties Samuel Pepys noted "...the king doth mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thought of business...my Lady Castlemaine [Villiers] rules him...She hath all the tricks..." This liaison was in many ways to set the tone for Restoration politics, secret and manipulative, one that inevitably produced an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. Villiers, in the style of Salome, even managed to engineer the downfall of one of Charles' ablest and longest-serving advisors, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, whose head was effectively presented to her on a plate.

Villiers had been bad, but her eventual replacement, Louise de Keroualle was, if anything, even worse; for she was little better than a French agent, put in Charles' bed by his cousin, Louis XIV. Her rise coincides with the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles promised to convert to Catholicism in return for a French subsidy. It was not long after this, with the steadying influence of Clarendon gone, that a new mood of parliamentary suspicion emerged; suspicion of the throne, suspicion of Catholicism, and suspicion of Keroualle, or 'dearest Fubs', as Charles liked to call her.

Fubs conspired against all those in the court opposed to the French connection, including Lord Halifax. With the onset of the anti-Catholic crisis of the late 1670s, known as the Popish Plot, a document circulated specifically aimed at Fubs, with the title Articles of High Treason and other High Crimes. Parliament began to investigate the matter but Charles promptly ordered a dissolution.

So, yes, Charles' extra-marital relationships did weaken the authority and the majesty of the crown. It was of no matter when his lovers were, like Nell Gwynn, women of little consequence or influence. It most assuredly did matter when it came to intelligent and the strong-willed individuals, like Villiers and Keroualle. It was all to be part of government by intrigue and cabal; government, in other words, without responsibility. For many, moreover-setting the politics to one side-it made the monarchy look ridiculous, which allows me to finish with some verses drawn yet another anonymous satire;

As Nero once, with harp in hand survyed
His flaming Rome, and as that burned, he played,
So our great prince, when the Dutch fleet arrived,
Saw his ships burned and, as they burned, he swived.
So kind was he in our extremist need,
He would those flames extinguish with his seed.

Ferthu hal, Eadgyth

Princess Eadgyth-or Edith-of Wessex, daughter of Edward the Elder, granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and half-sister of Athelstan, the first king of all England, has come home after a thousand years, or at least part of her has. Fragments of her body arrived this week at Bristol University, where tests are expected to confirm that the woman found in a lead coffin inside a stone sarcophagus at Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany is the princess who left this country more than a millennium ago to marry Otto the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor.

The existing monument at Magdeburg was built centuries after her death in 946 and was believed to be empty. However, when the sarcophagus was opened in 2008 it was found to contain a beautifully preserved coffin with an inscription saying that she had been reburied in 1510. Instead of bits and pieces, the usual fate of remains after this remove of time, the coffin contained the body of a woman of the right age. Professor Mark Horton has said that the tests on the enamel from her teeth, and on bone fragments, will reveal if she was brought up in Wessex and Mercia.

This for me is such exciting news. We owe so much to the House of Wessex; we owe our language and our law to Alfred and his successors; we owe them England itself. But sadly the Saxon kings of old have left little trace, buried under time and circumstances. Athelstan has a tomb at Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire, but it’s thought to be empty. There were excavations in pursuit of Alfred at Winchester but nothing was ever found.

But now we have Eadygth, a link with the past, a link with one of the greatest phases in our national story. Health to your spirit, dear lady.

Not Mysterious

Sadly, John Toland was a man not of his time; a man who advocated principles of virtue in duty had little place in the England of Robert Walpole, governed by cynicism and self-interest. His intellectual reputation, moreover, was subsequently eclipsed by the likes of John Locke and David Hume, and still more by Montesquieu and the French radical thinkers. Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France wrote dismissively of Toland and his fellows- "Who, born within the last 40 years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?"

In Christianity not Mysterious, the book for which he is best know, he laid down a challenge not just to the authority of the established church, but to all inherited and unquestioned authority. It was thus as radical politically and philosophically, as it was theologically. This, and his political views, has given him an afterlife that could never have been dreamed of by Burke. It has even been argued that he was the 'first Marxist' because of his views on the relationship between matter and motion.

Bit by bit Toland's views grew more radical. His opposition to hierarchy in the church also led to opposition to hierarchy in the state; bishops and kings, in other words, were as bad as each other, and monarchy had no God-given sanction as a form of government. In his 1704 Letters to Serena-in which he coins the expression 'pantheism'-he carefully analyses the manner in which truth is arrived at, and why people are prone, as the Marxists might express it, to forms of 'false consciousness.'

In politics his most radical proposition was that liberty was a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Political institutions should be designed to guarantee freedom, not simply to establish order. For Toland, reason and tolerance were the twin pillars of the good society. This was Whigism at its most intellectually refined, the very antithesis of the Tory belief in sacred authority in both church and state. Toland's belief in the need for perfect equality among free-born citizens was extended to the Jewish community, tolerated, but still outsiders in early eighteenth century England. In his 1714 Reasons for Naturalising the Jews he was the first to advocate full citizenship and equal rights for Jewish people.

Toland's world was not all detached intellectual speculation, though. There was also an incendiary element to his political pamphleteering, and he was not beyond whipping up some of the baser anti-Catholic sentiments of the day in his attacks on the Jacobites. He also produced some highly controversial polemics, including the Treatise of Three Imposters, in which Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all condemned as the three great political frauds.

His republican sympathies were also evidenced by his editing of the writings of some of the great radicals of the 1650s, including James Harrington, Algernon Sydney, Edmund Ludlow and John Milton. In his support for the Hanoverian monarchy he somewhat moderated his republican sentiments; though his ideal kingship was one that would work towards achieving civic virtue and social harmony, a 'just liberty' and the 'preservation and improvement of our reason.' But George I and the greedy oligarchy behind Walpole were about as far from Toland's ideal as it is possible to get. In many ways he was indeed a man born both too late and too early.

Making Martyrs

One aspect of the career of Sir Thomas More-Saint Thomas More-that tends to escape popular attention was his enthusiasm for the persecution of heretics, because it is not at all in accordance with the saintly 'Man for all Seasons.'

In religious and intellectual terms More was highly orthodox. The primary message of Utopia, for example, is the need for order and discipline, not liberty. The society described is totalitarian, about as far removed from present day ideals of freedom as it is possible to get. This is a world where attempts to discuss public policy outwith officially allowed forums are punishable by death.

So, More placed great value on the attainment of harmony and on a strict hierarchy of order. All challenges to uniformity and hierarchy were perceived as dangers; and in practical terms the greatest danger, as he saw it, was the challenge that heretics posed to the established faith. The most important thing of all for More was to maintain the unity of Christendom. The Lutheran Reformation, with all of the prospects of fragmentation and discord, was for him a feared and fearful thing.

His own personal counter-attack began in the manner that one would expect from a writer. He assisted Henry VIII with the production of the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a polemical response to Martin Luther's On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. When Luther replied with Contre Henricum Regem Anglie, with all of the venom and vulgarity of which he was capable, More was given the task of firing off a counter-broadside, which he did in Responsio ad Lutherum. Just as violent and as vulgar as Luther, this book deepened More's commitment to the forms of order and discipline outlined in Utopia. Heresy was a disease, a threat to the peace and unity of both church and society.

More was more than a writer: he was a lawyer, a political and one of the King's chief councillors, so he was able to give his hatred of heresy some practical direction. His early actions included aiding Cardinal Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching. Further literary polemics appeared under his name; but his greatest opportunity came in October 1529, when he was appointed Lord Chancellor of England.

The task before him was simple enough "Now seeing that the king's gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth...to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection."

Heresy was a cancer, and could only be stopped by burning, of books and of people. In June 1530 it was decreed that offenders were to be brought before the King's Council, rather than being examined by their bishops, the practice hitherto. Actions taken by the Council got ever more severe. In 1531, one Richard Bayfield, a book pedlar, was burned at Smithfield. Further burnings followed. In The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, yet another polemic, More took particular delight in the execution Sir Thomas Hitton, describing him as "the devil's stinking martyr". The extraordinary persecution only came to a (temporary) stop when More resigned as Lord Chancellor in May 1532. It was the end of Utopia.

Art and Power

All official art contains an element of propaganda. Let me give you a specific example. If I mention the name of the English king Henry VIII does this conjure up a specific image in your mind? Yes? Well, if it does, I think I can probably guarantee that it is the same confident and bull-like presentation that most people have: a man of boundless arrogance and limitless self-regard. This is the image that has made its way into popular culture, and possibly makes Henry one of the most recognised monarchs in all of history. In my estimation this puts Hans Holbein in the first rank of 'propaganda' painters. His paintings are not about people: they are about power.

It was Thomas Cromwell, the great Machiavellian, who first detected Holbeins's potential as the 'official' artist of the Reformed party in England, commissioning him to create anti-papal illustrations for books and pamphlets. In 1536 Holbein reached the very top of his profession, when he was appointed as the King's Painter. All images for public consumption were now his responsibility, and he depicted the Tudors very much in the fashion desired by the king, including the huge mural he painted in the palace of Whitehall. But of course being the painter of the rich and powerful also had dangers. Flattery and magnification became second nature to Holbein, who even did his best with the unprepossessing Anne of Cleves, Henry's mail-order bride. The gap between the 'ideal' and the reality was to lead to the fall of Cromwell, and the partial reversal of the English Reformation. Such is the power of art!

The Last Invasion of England

So, do you know when that was, the last serious military invasion of England? There are various dates that could be suggested, all later, incidentally, than the most obvious-that of the Normans in 1066. The one less obvious, the one I intend to discuss here, was the incursion of the Jacobite army of Charles Edward Stuart, coming over the border from Scotland in the November, 1745.

The amazing thing about this episode is that an army of poorly equipped Highland irregulars, with virtually no artillery or cavalry support, advanced as far south as Derby. There a war council was held and it was decided that that the adventure had to be aborted. The Highlanders returned north, with only the Young Pretender in dissent.

And so another of the great 'what ifs' was born, one that has exercised the wit and imagination of generations of armchair Jacobites. Oh, if only the army had gone on, if only London had been taken the King-the Pretender's father, languishing in Rome-would have come into his own again. It's nonsense, of course. Even if London had been taken the English people would never have accepted the Stuarts back on the throne, carried there against the will of the Parliament and the people on the bayonets of a ragged Highland army.

The point is that the invasion itself was never more than a 'reconnaissance in strength'. In Edinburgh the Highland chiefs had been seduced by Charles' lavish promise of English support and a French invasion. The latter alone should have given them reason to pause, the very idea that the English would accept anything from the French!

The reason the western route was chosen was not just to avoid Wade's far stronger army at Newcastle but because this was where it was felt that the greatest pockets of Stuart loyalty were to be found, in Wales and the West Country, harking back to the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. The Pretender, in other words, was following the same path as his great uncle, Charles II, in the invasion of 1651 and for precisely the same reasons. But Charles II came with fifteen thousand men; the Pretender had barely five.

Thanks largely to the skilled generalship of Lord George Murray the Jacobite Army made it as far as Derby; but by then the illusion was gone: the French did not come and, beyond a small force raised in Manchester, the English did not rise. With regiments of the British Army arriving back from Flanders in ever increasing numbers the Highlanders could either return to Scotland and wait there for the French, or stay in England and face annihilation at the hands of Wade and Cumberland. So, back north they went.

The whole thing was just a desperate gamble by a fantasist and a dreamer. Recreated as a heroic figure of a lost and romantic cause by balladeers and writers like Sir Walter Scott, Charles' selfish irresponsibility was instrumental in bringing a rapid close to an ancient way of life. Praised in song and glamorised on shortbread tins his true legacy was ruined cottages and empty glens.

Boozy Britain

The English are supposedly sinking in a sea of booze and bad behaviour, the nadir of Tony Blair’s attempt top create what he called a ‘café culture.’ Actually, not that much has changed, and these things, and the moral and social concerns they raise, tend to move in distinct historical cycles. In the early seventeenth century Parliament passed no less than four statutes against drunkenness in a short twenty-year period.

However, the first great moral panic over patterns of alcohol consumption came with the emergence of the Gin Craze in the first half of the eighteenth century, so vividly illustrated in William Hogarth's print, with its depiction of decay, violence, death, suicide, corruption and infanticide. The damage caused by rivers of cheap gin was only really brought under control with the introduction of legislation in 1751, the same year that Hogarth's print appeared.

Gin Lane made an immediate impact on popular consciousness, on a public that was well-versed with the horrors of the gin cult, which included the case of Judith Defour, tried at the Old Bailey in 1734 for murdering her own child to sell its clothes to obtain more of the spirit. But Hogarth, it tends to be overlooked, was aiming his criticism not at alcohol consumption as such, but specifically at the cult of gin, considered to be a feminised drinking culture, symbolised by Mother Gin or Madam Geneva. At the same time as Gin Lane he also produced Beer Street, with lusty Englishmen drinking from foaming tankards! One version of this has a weedy Frenchman being manhandled by a strapping English artisan carrying a jug of beer.

Public drunkenness was frowned upon, rather than consumption in large quantities of the 'right kind' of alcohol, particularly by men, which was rather expected. The real change in attitude comes with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It was one thing for agricultural labourers to consume huge quantities of beer and cider, and quite another for those charged with minding machinery to do so.

Urbanisation, moreover, made drunkenness a much more serious social issue, just as it had during the London Gin Craze, because concentrated heavy drinking could easily become a major problem of public order. It is only really from this time that tea-drinking was prompted as an alternative, and more wholesome, cult for the great British masses. Concerns about drinking, and the occasional moral panic this induced, resulted in stronger and stronger systems of licensing control. But, yes, nothing much changes. The British have always been drunkards; the British always will be drunkards. No Continental cafe culture for us, thank you very much!

Coming to London in 1700

Imagine yourself, if you will, as a traveller coming to London in the early 1700s. The first thing you would notice is the almost constant pealing of church bells. They were rung not just to summon the faithful, but to alert the community to a hanging-a popular spectator sport-or to a death, when it would toll nine times for a man, six for a woman and three for a child, followed even more sombrely by one stroke for each year she or he had lived. The bell was also a prompt for the 'searchers', the old crones employed by the parish "to repair to the place where the dead corps lies, and by view of the same, and other enquiries, to examine by what disease or casualty the corps died." They were on the look-out chiefly for signs of the plague, and their instant 'diagnosis' would then appear in the London Bills of Mortality.

London by 1700, with half-a-million people, was the largest city in Europe, and with no sanitary arrangements whatsoever. Those approaching from the countryside were first alerted to its presence by smell before sight. Heaps of human sewage was deposited by 'night-soil' men by the roadside. Walking through the streets the traveller had to be constantly alert to the sudden emptying of chamber pots out or windows into the 'kennels', or open-drains running down the middle of the street. Jonathan Swift describes these delightful depositories being blocked with "Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud, Dead Cats, and Turnip-Tops." If this was not bad enough our lucky traveller would have to breathe in air thick with sulphurous smoke from domestic fires and industrial furnaces. Those living near graveyards would also have to endure the stink of decaying corpses, buried just below the surface.

Having survived the baptism of stink and smoke, the said traveller was highly likely to contract some fatal disease soon after arrival. Malaria was commonplace, as was typhoid from the contaminated water-supply. Contaminated food was a major cause of dysentery. Poor personal hygiene meant that most people, high and low, had fleas and lice, even to be found in the gentleman's periwig. Smallpox was also rife-so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis, which was all too common among certain sections of the community. Tuberculosis, also common, was the cause of endless spitting and retching, both indoors and out. One in three babies died before the age of two; and of those who survived, half were dead before the age of fifteen. A great many of these unfortunates simply died of ignorance, with mothers using dirty coins to sooth the pains of teething, and forcing babies to eat solids.

Our traveller would have to find some means of supporting herself or himself quickly, for life was hard and there was no allowance for failure. Suicide was common, and the details of the deaths were eagerly reported by the hack press of Grub Street-"Yesterday morning a woman near White-chappel, who workt to a throwster in those parts, and earned 8 shillings a week, hanged herself in her lodging; but nobody can guess at the reason of her despair."

Welcome to London!

They Called her Babylon

Here is a story about one of my favourite English heroines

Old Lathom House, situated near Ormskirk in Lancashire, has long gone. In the seventeenth century, during the time of the English Civil War, it was the stronghold of the Stanley earls of Derby. The defences were formidable. There was a moat eighteen meters wide and eight meters deep. Within its confines there was a wall eight meters thick, punctuated by nine towers, one flanking the other. In each of these towers there were six pieces of ordnance, three looking in one direction, and three in the other. In the centre, protected by the moat and the walls, stood the main keep, known as the Eagle Tower. But Lathom had a defence more formidable than stones, guns and towers: it had Charlotte de la Tremoüille, Countess of Derby.

In 1644, during the height of the struggle between King and Parliament, James, the seventh earl of Derby, a committed royalist, was ordered to secure the Isle of Man, a hereditary possession of his family. He left Lathom, a royalist island in a puritan sea, in the care of his wife, Charlotte. For the Parliamentary army this was an opportunity, an opportunity to clear Lancashire of the last remaining royalist strongpoint. The task was given to Sir Thomas Fairfax, Black Tom. As he advanced towards Lathom with a force of some two thousand men, equipped with a siege train, the Countess was denounced in sulphuric terms by a puritan minister in Wigan, drawing his text from the Book of Jeremiah:

Put yourself in array against Babylon round about; all ye that bend bow shoot at her; spare no arrows; for she has sinned against the Lord.

When Fairfax arrived before the Lathom in late February 1644 Charlotte had no more than three-hundred men within, some professional soldiers, others not. In a deliberate attempt to conceal the weakness of the defence, the Countess prevaricated when Fairfax called upon her to surrender Lathom on terms. But in the end she called defiance after the latest parley and exchange of proposals;

That she refused this offer, and was truly happy that hers had been refused, protesting that she would rather hazard her life than offer the like again; and that, though a woman and a stranger, divorced from her friends and robbed of her estate she was ready to receive the utmost violence, trusting in God both for protection and deliverance.

With the siege beginning in earnest, the Lathom garrison, as weak as it was, did not await events. Rather repeated surprise sorties were launched against the attackers and the artillery emplacements. In the meantime the Stanley gamekeepers found a new role as expert snipers, shooting from the towers, killing and demoralising the parliamentary soldiers.

At the end of March, Fairfax, whose bombardment made as little impression as his calls for surrender, left for Yorkshire, delegating the furtherance of the siege to Colonel Alexander Rigby, the MP for Wigan, and a fanatical puritan. Although the artillery assault began in real earnest Lathom and Charlotte remained defiant and determined. On 25 April a frustrated Rigby issued yet another summons, the occasion for the Countess’s finest moment;

On Thursday he sends his last message, as he calls it, a furious denunciation to her ladyship to yield up Lathom House, and all the persons, and goods, and arms within it, into his hands, to receive the mercy of the parliament and to return answer the next day by two o’clock. Her ladyship having read this, with a brave indignation calls for the drum, and tells him that, ‘a due reward for his pains is to be hanged up at her gates; but’ sys she, ‘thou art but a foolish instrument of a traitor’s pride; carry this answer back to Rigby’ (with a noble scorn tearing the paper in his sight), ‘and tell that insolent rebel, he shall neither have persons, goods, nor house; when our strength and provision is spent, we shall find a fire more merciful than Rigby’s, and then, if the providence of God prevent it not, my goods and house shall burn in his sight; and myself, children, and soldiers, rather than fall into his hands, will seal our religion and loyalty in the same flame’, which being spoken aloud in her soldier’s hearing they broke into shouts and acclimations of joy, all closing with this general voice, ‘we shall die for his majesty and your honour-God save the king!

This was followed early next morning by yet another sortie, when a battery was captured. By now, acting on the pleadings of the Earl of Derby, Prince Rupert, on his way to York with the main royalist army, diverted to Lathom in late May. Rigby, aware of his approach, withdrew having seen yet another plea for surrender rejected. Having delayed his retreat for too long he was routed at Bolton by Rupert. Afterwards his colours were sent to Charlotte as a trophy.

Bless your memory, my dear lady, and may your name last forever.

My Kingdom for a Gun: Finding Bosworth Field

Battlefields are notoriously difficult to pinpoint for the simple reason that the action often took place over a widely scattered area and because of subsequent agricultural development. Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, arguably the most famous battle in English history, the dusk of the Plantagenets and the dawn of the Tudors, has presented particular difficulties. In the 1970s the County Council officially designated the site to be in the vicinity of Market Bosworth, building the heritage centre on Ambion Hill, where Richard III charged into death and immortality, following a report by David Williams, a historian. But it now seems that it’s all wrong, that the wandering battlefield may at last have found a permanent and true home some two miles to the south-west of the present site.

After a three-year archaeological investigation headed by Glenn Foard on behalf of the Battlefields Trust, significant battle debris has been found in an area to the north-east of Stoke Golding, though the exact location is still being kept secret. The finds include some obvious things, the kind of things one would expect, like the remains of swords and buckles, but there is also a higher than expected proportion of cannonballs and lead shot of various calibres from handguns.

The whole thing is still to be subject to peer review, but it looks quite promising. For me the particular point of interest is the suggestion that firepower played an important part in the conflict, distancing Bosworth from the other flashpoints of the Wars of the Roses, making it the first modern battle in English history.

The work of Foard’s team has been praised, amongst others, by Jon Humble of English Heritage, who said;

This is the second epic victory on Bosworth’s history-steeped soil. It has taken more than 500 years to reveal one of Leicestershire’s greatest and most elusive secrets, but this is a world-class example of what can be received through archaeological research.

Professor Richard Holmes of the Battlefields Trust added his own praise;

There is still much more to discover, but at last we have a site that goes beyond scholarly speculation and passionate local controversy. We can now see where those round-shot thudded into Leicestershire soil when Richard Plantagenet was still King of England and Henry Tudor was a mere pretender. We are given to using expressions like exciting and ground breaking too easily, but no historical discovery has elated me more than this one, and I have seldom felt more conscious of being able to touch the past

King Richard may not have found a horse but perhaps he has at last found a home.

I would like to add my own forlorn plea to this story: Bosworth was not, as so often said, the end of the Wars of the Roses. Conflict and subversion continued through a good part of the reign of Henry VII, from the Battle of Stoke to the rising of Perkin Warbeck. In a sense the dynastic dispute only really ended in 1509 with the accession of Henry VIII, whose blood combined the strains of Lancaster and York.

Thomas Charnock-an Elizabethan Magus

Another fascinating discovery of mine, the story of Thomas Charnock, an alchemist and magus from the Tudor age!

I garnered what follows from The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age by Frances Yates, Mystic Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture edited by S. Linden. There is also a useful article entitled Base Matter into Gold by Jonathan Hughes in the August 2005 edition of History Today. Hey, I even dipped into Charnock's own notes! For those who have neither the time nor the inclination for this then there are some pertinent extracts in Alchemical Fragments Copied from Thomas Charnock's Own Handriting by Elias Ashmole.

Charnock was born in about 1524 and died in 1581. He spent most of his life in Comberwich, a small village near the port of Bristol in the west of England. His unpublished notebooks are useful, not just for an understanding of Elizabethan attitudes towards alchemy in general, but for the insight they give to Charnock's life and thoughts. Apart from the usual preoccupations of his profession, he also had an amateur interest in Atlantic exploration, and in his study he had an astrolobe, maps, a globe and other navigational instruments. He rather quaintly described the difficulties he found in trying to decipher Medieval English texts on alchemy, which were as harde to my understanding as yff I had harde one rede a booke off the language off the natione which dwell in the fourth parte off the worlde named America.:))

His uncle, also called Thomas Charnock, had been an alchemist, as well as the confessor to Henry VII. Thomas' interest in the subject appears to have been stimulated when he inherited his uncle's books while in his teens. Although he married in 1562, and had two children, he preferred the life of scholarly solitude, made clear in the preamble of the treatise he wrote for Elizabeth I. He says that his pursuit of the philosopher's stone has in large measure been impeded by 'worldly necessities', and that the said stone is reserved for men who have the gift of 'solitariness.' He took this seriously enough to ask Elizabeth to allow him to carry on his experiments in the Tower of London, or another 'solitary place.' This was probably stimulated by the hostility of his neighbours, which forced him to barricade himself in his cottage. His appeal to the Queen was ignored.

His work was tiresome and demanding, requiring him, amongst other things, to keep a fire burning at a constant temperature. Quite often he would wake up in the night, troubled that things were not going well. Concerns over servants, fires, and the cost of fuel were steady preoccupations. He was also pursued by fairly constant bad luck "God send me better fortune or else I am clean discouraged and will turn from philosophy to husbandry and go and get me unto the plough." When England went to war with France in 1557 the local Justice of the Peace, who seems to have been a personal enemy, made sure that poor Thomas was forced into service. In frustration, he took a hatchet to his equipment, smashing glasses and pots alike. Nothing daunted, he was back at his experiments seven years later.

It seems obvious from the hostility he engendered locally that his neighbours had deep superstitious fears, which Carnock did much to encourage, describing himself as a magus as well as a philosopher, who had mastery of "dark and misty terms." After his death it was reported that no-one would live in his former cottage, which was "troublesome and haunted by spirits and that its owner had a reputation as a troublesome person and a conjurer."

Charnock himself was always aware of the ambiguity of his art, warning that Roger Bacon, the founder of English alchemy, had come dangerously close to to the occult, and had ultimately been unsuccessful in his quest for the stone because the Devil was his familiar. His own search for the stone proceeded in the face of one failure after another. Even so, he kept his fires burning for three years constantly, which "brought him more joy than any worldly goods." Though he constantly bemoans the frustrations of his quest, he warms any independent reader not to be deceived by surface appearances, and that he deals in allegories and veiled truths. His victory, if it can be so described, was in simple perseverance; in the pursuit of a 'truth' that remained constantly elusive. In his notebooks he might be said to have penned his own epitaph;

Here Charnock changeth to a better cheere

For the sorrow that he hath suffred many a year.

Poor man!

Praising Magna Carta

Let's strip away the verbiage and get to the heart of Magna Carta, the one core principle that might be said to have survived all others, not for a particular few but for everyone. It is this;

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled or in any other way ruined, not will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.

This is now at the centre of our common law; but it is more than that. It sets limits to royal power, and is thus the first clear challenge to absolutism, a challenge renewed time and again.

Yes, the Charter was overturned almost immediately, but as a set of ideas it did not go away, and was reissued in 1217 and again in a more definitive form by Henry III in 1225. Even the Battle of Evesham, and the defeat of the baronial rebellion, did not shift Magna Carta from its central position in the political life of England. During the reign of Edward I it was used to focus opposition to the king's financial exactions. Edward was thus obliged to acknowledge that he was bound by its provisions. When Parliament began to take shape as a permanent part of the English political landscape it took it upon itself the task of seeking reconfirmation and clarification of the document. Often sessions would begin with a public reading and a reaffirmation of the Charter.

So, how did this work in practice? It meant that all statues conflicting with this political keystone were declared invalid. In 1369, during the reign of Edward III it was declared that "If any Statute be made to the contrary it shall be holden for none." The provisions of the Charter were also extended during this reign in the so-called 'Six Statutes', which served to define law as 'due process.' The third of these extended the protection offered by Magna Carta by changing the wording 'no free man' to 'no man'.

Although it slipped into the background to some degree during the period of Tudor absolutism, it became a central platform in the seventeenth century opposition to the rule of the Stuarts. And here we enter the realm of the 'ancient constitution', as defined by Sir Edward Coke, amongst others, later to find its fullest expression in the Declaration of Rights after the Glorious Revolution. It makes no matter here that we are dealing with what was effectively evolving political mythology, a useful adjutant to the Whig interpretation of history, King John's Charter had ramifications well beyond its limited feudal origins. In one of history's many ironies it was the Tories in the eighteenth century who rallied behind Magna Carta in their defiance of the Whig oligarchy, forcing Sir Robert Walpole to stress the superiority of the post-1688 constitution.

But for many, in both England and the American colonies, Magna Carta was reinterpreted as a challenge to narrow parliamentary absolutism. One radical, Arthur Beardmore, arrested for seditious libel in 1762, arranged to be apprehended while teaching Magna Carta to his young son, becoming a hero in the process, the subject of a popular print. John Wilkes, likewise imprisoned for seditious libel, also invoked Magna Carta, "that glorious inheritance, that distinguishing characteristic of the Englishman."

While it is true that the Charter, and the mythology of the 'ancient constitution', became less and less relevant during the great age of Victorian reform, it acquired a fresh significance across the Atlantic. The 1225 version of the Charter was published in Philadelphia in 1687, part of a tract written by William Penn. After the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, lawyers turned to Magna Carta to justify Colonial defiance of George III, the new King John. The First Continental Congress declared that the colonists were doing "as Englishmen their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties." In 1775 Massachusetts adopted as its state seal an image of a patriot holding a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other; and the Founding Fathers went on to place the document above statute law in the Constitution. Due process was also to be incorporated in the Bill of Rights of 1791.

So, you see, Magna Carta has a historical relevance well beyond defining the selfish rights of thirteenth century barons.

The Dorsetshire Eel

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the founder of English Whigism, better known to his enemies as 'little sincerity' or the 'Dorsetshire eel'! I have lived with this man for so long that I feel that I have a closer understanding of him and his motives than I could ever wish. Who can possible forget John Dryden's sketch of the restless little nobleman in "Absalom and Achitophel";


Of these false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles or place;
In power unpleased, impatient if disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, worked out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for the calm unfit,
Would steer to nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bonds divide...
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin, or to rule the state.

Sad to say, it is almost impossible to provide a counter-balance to all this hostility, to see the world through Shaftesbury's eyes; for, fearful of prosecution by the government of Charles II, he destroyed most of his papers prior to his exile and death in 1683. Even Whig historians like Gilbert Burnet and T. B. Macaulay could think of few good things to say about him. For Macaulay he was "first a member of the most corrupt administration, then the leader of the most violent opposition of the century."

Can any defence be made of him? Well, yes, it can. He was extraordinarily able, dedicated, single-minded and hard-working. These qualities can be seen both in his work as a government minister and in his conduct throughout the Exclusion Crisis. He was also to be the first true 'party' leader in English history, the man who virtually called the Whigs into being. It was he, in this regard, who might be said to have turned politics away from the practice of elites into the arena of public debate. Yes, he was unscrupulous; yes, he was prepared to use disreputable methods and rely on disreputable people, like the truly loathsome Titus Oates.

But, you see, Shaftesbury believed that England was faced with a terrible threat, and that desperate times demanded desperate remedies. For him Catholicism was a political rather than a religious danger; a faith that rested in the forms of despotism practiced on the Continent by the likes of Louis XIV. If he was unscrupulous he had learned the technique from the Stuarts; from Charles II, a king who effectively 'sold' England in the secret Treaty of Dover, and James his Catholic brother and designated successor, rigid and doctrinaire to a quite unacceptable degree. Shaftesbury's anger was born of just frustration: that the People, that Parliament itself, had no effective say over the supreme governance of the realm. His Whigs were violent, but their violence was born of political and constitutional imbalance.

So, what is Shaftesbury's case, his final defence? It's the defence of history, the defence, it might even be said, of liberty itself; that there should be an effective challenge to absolutism; that the people have a right to decide on their forms of government; that all power should not be concentrated by sacred and received right alone; that politics is a public act, not a private conspiracy. His best epitaph was that penned by John Locke, his friend and associate. For him Shaftesbury was a "Vigorous and indefatigable champion of civil and ecclesiastical liberty." And who can say better than that?

Was Hobbes an Atheist?

Well, many of his contemporaries certainly thought so. In October 1666 a committee of the House of Commons was empowered to examine the views expressed in Leviathan as part of the preparations for a bill intended to make hereesy a crime. Some even went so far as to suggest that Hobbes' doctrines were responsible for the Great Fire of London!

His books were either banned or burnt, and the Catholic church placed De Cive on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1654. He was regularly attacked in the press of the day, which delighted in detailing the torments he would suffer in the after-life for his apparent lack of belief. It was his rationalism and materialism that tended to disturb people most; even God is reduced to a material level. Archbishop Tenison was to say of him "Yet for the very handsomeness in dressing his Opinions, as the matter stands, he is to be reproved; because by that means, the poyson which he hath intermixed with them is with the more readiness and danger swallowed."

His views were certainly unsettling in an age not noted for latitude in matters of faith and belief: that there was no personal Satan; that the Pentateuch and many other books of the Bible were revisions or compilations from earlier sources; that few miracles could be credited after the Testament period; that witchcraft was a myth; and that religion was often confused with superstition. He was, as one writer has noted, 'anti-ecclesiastical, anti-clerical, anti-enthusiastic, anti-theology, anti-creeds and anti-inspiration.'

So, was he an atheist? All I can really say here is that the evidence suggests not; and in his personal life he adhered to the Anglican Church, which, in any case, was for him a necessary instrument of Leviathan. He believed in God as First Cause, but denied most of the manifestations and attributes accorded to Him by organised religion; even holiness, goodness and blessedness, which in the Hobbesian view are all unknowable facts. His God, such as He is, is distant, cold, intellectual amd essentially unknowable. What did he really believe? That is a question that can only be answered by God…and by Hobbes!

Kings, Heretics and Witches

Heretics had to burn in England, yes, but why and for what reason? The timing of the introduction of De Heretico Comburendo in 1401, the law that allowed for this practice, hitherto unknown, intrigued me.

The facts are, I suppose, quite simple: the passing of this rather extreme measure at that particular point in English history had a little to do with religion and a lot to do with politics. You see, Henry IV had only two years before the introduction of De Heretico Comburendo deposed his cousin Richard from the throne of England in highly controversial circumstances. There were other people, moreover, who had a claim to the throne just as good if not better than he did himself. He was thus open to challenge and was to spend virtually the whole of his reign defending himself against conspiracy, plot and treason in all of their many forms.

The one thing he needed was support, the support of the church above all. So, on the advice of Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, worried by the growth of Lollardy, a crypto-Protestant heresy, Henry decided that the flames would have to be lit. Rather burn heretics than lose the crown of England.

Henry’s second wife, Joanna of Navarre, probably unknown to most people who read this, has the right to be know as the only Queen Consort to be accused and condemned as a witch. Yes, she was. When Henry V, her step-son, succeeded to the throne in 1413he was anxious to renew the struggle with France, in the long conflict subsequently known as the Hundred Years War. Joanna, the daughter of Charles the Bad of Navarre, had relatives in the French service and refused to agree the king’s request for money. She subsequently found herself accused of attempting to poison the King by malificia. She was convicted, her lands seized and Henry got his money…and his war.

One does not execute royal witches, oh no. Joanna was kept, rather, in Pevensey Castle, and subsequently released after the death of Henry in 1422. Witch or not she is buried alongside her husband, Henry IV, in Canterbury Cathedral.