Quite an important date

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, the decisive encounter between William III who had been invited by the English Parliament to reign together with his wife, Mary II and Mary's father, James II, the second Stuart to be deposed by an "unruly" parliament.

The battle, won by William and his rather mixed both from a religious and national point of view forces, marked the end of James's own attempts to reclaim the throne though as every school child ought to know the attempts by Jacobites to restore the Stuarts continued well into the following century.

This site has all the details.

Is it an important enough date to be remembered by all, not just the people of Ulster (on both sides)? Well, probably, as the end of James's campaign established the king who was there at parliament's behest. Then again, it is the third of those dates: 1688 is the Glorious Revolution, 1689 is the Bill of Rights and only then do we come to 1690.

Thoughts on a sick bed

Driven to a sick bed by an extremely nasty cold, Tory Historian applied the best medicine possible: a reading and re-reading of old-time favourites, in this case, John Buchan’s “The Power-House”. (Here it is on line but it is the sort of book one might want to read either in bed or curled up in an armchair.)

“The Power-House” is one of TH’s favourites, combining as it does a jig-saw puzzle beginning with a desperate cat-and-mouse game at the end. The chase before safety and subsequent confrontation takes place in London, which is a particularly attractive aspect of the novel as the movements of the hero, his friend, the Labour MP and of the villains can be followed on Tory Historian’s mental map.

The theme is an international conspiracy, created by a super-intelligent but utterly amoral man who is contemptuous of the inadequate knowledge and compromises that underpin civilization as we know it, that is the western variety. The various aspects of that conspiracy: crime, disorder, anarchist outrages, the odd revolution appear to most observers as independent events.

This theme was much favoured before, during and after the First World War. “The Power-House” was serialized in 1913 and came out as a book in 1916. The theme crops up in “The Three Hostages”, a post-war Hannay adventure and in the writings of many other authors of the period, as well as films such as the Dr Mabuse series. [Tory Historian recommends reading the books and seeing the films, not finding out the plots ahead.]

There is some sense in the theme in that the events of the twentieth century proved how thin that layer of civilization really was. But the ideologies that undermined and destroyed it, that plunged many parts of the world into anarchy and monstrous oppression, were not particularly romantic and had no ultra-intelligent guiding spirit behind them.

Sadly, as one looks at Nazism and Communism, the twin evils of the modern world, one must recall Hannah Arendt’s description of the Eichman trial: evil is banal. That is, of course, why reading Buchan is such joy.

233 years ago

July 4, 1776 Philadelphia

Declaration of Independence adopted by the Continental Congress

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Would this be the same Falstaff?

Tory Historian is used to being puzzled by critics’ comments about some film or play and wondering whether they had seen the same one. Usually, one can dismiss such discrepancies by assuming that the critic in question is probably quoting some semi-literate hand-out written by a PR person who had most certainly not seen the work in question.

However, when it comes to serious historians writing about very well known plays and characters in a way that suggests there is a certain lack of understanding, the puzzlement increases.

Tory Historian is reading a book about that Whig stronghold, the Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field. (Know thine enemy.)

She describes the “cultural wars” (an anachronism, of course, but one can see why Ms Field is using it) around the theatre and gives a detailed though to some extent imagined account of a group visit to a performance at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields of a play that has Sir John Falstaff in it. As this could be one of three, a little more explanation would be useful but the documents she quotes, including a poem by Matthew Prior, refer merely to the actor Betterton playing the fat knight.

Then Ms Field explicates:

It is significant that the Kit-Cats so honoured Falstaff, a character moderating tragedy with comic excess and abundance, resilient in his frivolity, regenerative in his adaptability and a patriotic nobleman who fondly mentors young Hal, the future King of England. Falstaff could be viewed as a hero of English paternalism and materialism, while his love of food and drink was a straightforward connection to Kit-Cat dining.

Her only other quotation from Kit-Cat writing refers to Falstaff’s girth and is clearly jocular. The rest of her analysis is, if one may put it that way, tosh. Even allowing for the inexplicable opinion present in some Eng. Lit. specialists that Falstaff is the real hero of the two Henry IV plays and his rejection by Henry V is a tragedy, this makes very little sense.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Falstaff is the patron of English drunkards through the ages who think there is something wrong with eating as well as drinking. He consumes but two anchovies with a prodigious amount of sack.

He is actually a Knight of the Shire, which is not quite the same as a nobleman but we can let that one pass. But patriotic? Falstaff? The man who never fights if there is any running away to do, who desecrates Harry Hotspur’s body in order to claim the reward, the man who can mentor Hal merely in drinking, wenching, lying and cheating?

When Falstaff hears towards the end of Henry IV, Part II that the King is dead and his Hal will now inherit he does, indeed, hasten to Westminster but not to serve the country or the king but to leach on to England’s body politic with his deplorable friends, to get as much as he can out of his royal friend. When he is, quite properly, shown the door by the real patriot, Hal, now King of England, Falstaff collapses assuring all and sundry that he would be summoned privily later. The last thing we know of him is that he dies a broken man “babbling of green brooks”. There is no adaptability and whether one views the story as tragic or merely pathetically dramatic (in the original sense of the word “pathetic”) Ms Field’s analysis makes one wonder what else she might have got wrong.

Animals in War

Tory Historian was proceeding along Park Lane in a northerly direction and decided to cross over to have another look at the Animals in War memorial. It is, one must say, rather moving. Here are two pictures from it, both of the pack horses, looking sad and long-suffering.

Prelude to a disaster

Tory Historian cannot let this day pass without mentioning the one event of modern history that can be described as catastrophic in every way: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, backed by six co-conspirators.

That shot fired in Sarajevo has been rather dramatically described as the one that ushered in the “real” twentieth century. Certainly its outcome – the two groupings of allies going to war not only plunged Europe and, through the various empires and America’s eventual participation, the world into a horrific war but created the darkest and most savage decades of European history for many centuries.

By 1918 Germany had lost her empire and was a defeated and humiliated country; Russia was in ruins and the Ottoman Empire in pieces. Europe went on living out the consequences for the rest of the century, the Middle East is still doing it.

By an interesting coincidence, June 28 is also the day in 1919 when the next step in the twentieth century tragedy was taken – the Versailles Treaty was signed, leaving Germany with a feeling of bitterness and France with continued dissatisfaction.

What do we know and what can we prove?

Seeing Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” in its first revival since 1993 sent Tory Historian into a frenzy of musing about research, evidence and the obvious difficulty all historians face of how much of what we know we actually do know and how much of it we can prove.

This, one hastens to add, is only one of the themes in what is probably Stoppard’s most intellectual and, possibly, finest play. (An unreserved recommendation to anyone who might get a chance to see it: do so as soon as you can.)

As just about everyone knows the play shows events taking place in the same stately home in Derbyshire at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth or, in this production, the beginning of the twenty-first, the latter centred on an investigation of what happened in the former. Because we can see what “really” happened in the earlier part we can see where the later researchers, literary historians and a scientific mathematician, may be going wrong and when they begin to see the “truth”. Assuming, of course that it is the truth, something the play leaves, if not in dark, at least in crepuscular dusk.

In the modern section there are two literary historians. One is an amateur who had written a supposedly revisionist but probably quite silly book about Lady Caroline Lamb; the other a hard-nosed, arrogant and ambitious don, who is genuinely appreciative of Byron’s poetry but knows that it is the man’s private life that will bring him the fame he craves. (Actually, Byron would have understood that craving.)

Interestingly enough, it is the professional, Bernard Nightingale, who proceeds largely on his intuition that sometimes proves to be right and sometimes wrong; Hannah Jarvis, the amateur, demands a stricter standard of proof in which she is at one with the scientist Valentine, a descendant of the family we see in the earlier segments.

As we watch the two literary historians spar we realize that, as it happens, neither of them is a particularly good researcher. They seem to have little idea of where one can find information to support their assumptions apart from the accidentally preserved letter. Does an historian of literary life in the early nineteenth century really not bother to find out who edited the various London magazines?

On the other hand, as R. G. Collingwood has pointed out, among others, one cannot research without having some idea of what one is looking for, even if the subsequent research proves that idea wrong partly or in whole.

Sometimes the idea appears as happenstance. Bernard’s feeling that Byron must have stayed in Sidley Park is vindicated by Valentine mentioning that the poet is listed as a guest who shot in the game book, a valuable document that neither Bernard nor Hannah are aware of. As it happens, even the game book can be inaccurate and this we know from our view of what “really” happened in the years 1809 – 1812 in Sidley Park.

This piece of information sends Bernard into a frenzy of speculation until he comes up with an elaborate, entirely plausible but completely wrong theory about Byron’s behaviour. This theory brings him temporary fame and promises of more until Hannah, going through the garden book of the period (another valuable source of information) finds an entry about some flowers that had been sent from Martinique by the then Lady Croom's brother. This provides definite proof that Bernard’s theory is completely wrong and explains, at least partly, what happened. (The other part we shall never know as Septimus Hodge, the tutor, has burnt Byron’s note to himself without reading it.)

The point is that the entry Hannah finds would have had little significance if Bernard had not, some time previously, found several letters in a book that, at some point, belonged to Byron and drawn several entirely wrong inferences from them, which sent him scurrying to Sidley Park where she was researching the existence of a possible hermit in the artificial hermitage in the first half of the nineteenth century. Confused? Well, that’s research for you.

What do we know and what can we prove?