Conservative History Journal

First a notice of what promises to be an interesting talk at the British Library about the other Charters. It is called Statutes, Constitutions and a Golden Bull: Early European Parallels to Magna Carta. The Golden Bull has been mentioned on this blog before but the others,the Statute of Pamiers (1212, the Constitutions of Melfi (1231) and the imperial land peace of Mainz (1235) sound very interesting as well. If humanly possible, I shall be there and report on the event.

Meanwhile, I have been reminded by a blog reader of the chapter on King John (An Awful King) and the Magna Charter in that best of all history books, 1066 And All That. (Here is an excellent history quiz published in the Guardian that is taken from the test papers of that fine book; here is the text of the book but I would still recommend that people acquire a paper edition for the illustrations if nothing else.)

Meanwhile, what do the authors say in Chapter 19?

1. That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason - (except the Common People).
2. That everyone should be free - (except the Common People).
3. That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the Realm - (except the Common People).
4. That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome mediaeval official known as the King's Person all over the country.
5. That 'no person should be fined to his utter ruin' - (except the King's Person).
6. That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.

The last word belongs to Christie. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when she could not know if she or her family and friends would survive for long, she inscribed a copy of Sad Cypress: “Wars may come and wars may go, but MURDER goes on forever!”

Martin Edwards’s role in publishing and publicizing the series cannot be overestimated. He has chosen the books, provided highly knowledgeable introductions to a number of them and edited collections of short stories. While doing all that he has been writing his own books and running a blog about detective fiction that is to be recommended to anyone who is even half-way interested in the subject. His greatest achievement to date, however, is this massive volume, a history of the Detection Club in the thirties and forties, a collection of biographies of the extraordinary people who were its members and, incidentally, a history of the genre in the period. That is what I call a useful book.

The rest of this posting is here and the details of the book are:

Martin Edwards:                     The Golden Age of Murder

The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story

2015                                        London

                                                HarperCollinsPublishers

And here is Dorothy L. Sayers with Eric the Skull:

I. FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. We have granted also, and given to all the Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever, these Liberties under-written, to have and to hold to them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever.

IX. THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs.

XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Working on that article about the under-appreciated Lady Knightley, whose activity sends me into complete exhaustion, I have been reading Conservative Women by G. E. Maguire, published in 1998 at an early stage of studies devoted to the subject. Dr Maguire cautions against the assumption that is still widespread despite studies like hers that the movement for women's political involvement and suffragism were entirely on the left. I have no doubt that the forthcoming film Suffragette will uphold that hoary old tenet.

If we look at the history of women's rights, we find the following:

The Primrose League, a Conservative organization, was the first political group to admit women, Conservatives like Lord robert Cecil, the Earl of Lytton, Lady Selborne and Lady Betty Balfour worked tirelessly for somen's suffraage - sometimes even uniting their efforts with those of the Pankhursts or Millicent Fawcett.

It was a Conservative dominated coalition government that gave women over thirty the vote in 1918 and an entirely Conservative one that gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men in 1928.

The first woman member of Parliament, Lady Astor, was a Conservative. It was Harold Macmillan's government that introduced equal pay for teachers and non-industrial civil servants. Later, Edward Heath ordered the formation of the Cripps Committee whose job was to examine the legal disabilities against women and recommend legislation to remove them. Finally, and most obviously, the Conservatives were the first and, to this day, the only, party to choose a woman leader.

Women have mobilized in mass numbers since the days of the Primrose League for the Conservative Party. it has been estimated that, if women had not been given the vote, the Labour Party would have been in power almost continuously since 1945. It would not be going too far to say that women have provided the basis for Conservative Party dominance in the twentieth century.

It is a general rule that a second is lessfamous than a first. However, this is not the case when it comes to the first and second women to serve in a Conservative cabinet. The second woman was of course Margaret Thatcher whose name is (almost) universally known. The same cannot be said of the first woman to hold cabinet rank in a Conservative government, for few people today have heard of Florence Gertrude Horsbrugh, who was Minister of Education almost twenty years before Lady Thatcher made her cabinet debut. While some writers such as Pamela Brooks and G.E. Maguire have shown at least some recognition of her importance, overall she has received surprisingly little attention by historians of the Conservative party or scholars of Scottish and British politics, with many omitting her entirely. Yet in her day Florence Horsbrugh was arguably the best known woman MP in the UK and she is deserving of being even more widely known.

As a public figure, Florence Horsbrugh enjoyed the advantage of a resonant, well-modulated voice and a tall, dignified bearing. At a time when women were often reluctant to smoke in public she became noticeable ‘puffing briskly at a cigarette held levelly between the lips’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 1/4). Despite a reputation for being severe in the manner of a Scottish schoolmistress, she was a good-humoured woman who enjoyed political controversy; she once described herself as ‘representative of all the maiden aunts in Britain’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 2/12). Although it was claimed in her obituary (The Times, 8 Dec 1969) that she had ‘achieved many victories for feminism’, these successes were of a minor or largely nominal character; for example, in 1936 she was the first woman to move the address in reply to the speech from the throne. In fact she was a beneficiary of gains made by women before and during the First World War rather than an active worker for women's causes.

Martin Edwards's book that is undoubtedly seminal in the study of detective fiction, The Golden Age of Murder, is proving to be as fascinating as it is important. Yes, TH managed to borrow a copy from London Library within two weeks of publication. There is already a queue forming for it among that august institution's members but returning it in time will not be a problem.

Actually, the book needs a proper long review and it shall be done but first, an interesting point analyzed by Mr Edwards and that is the concept of "justified murder" in the writings of the Golden Age authors. It was Julian Symons who was largely responsible for the literary assumption that traditional detective fiction was somehow inferior to the more recent crime books, not least in its social and political conservatism and refusal to look beyond accepted norms in life and writing. (This is a rough and not entirely fair summary but then Symons was not entirely fair to many of the writers he had analyzed.)

There have, of course, been critics who have shown that view to be nonsensical but, unfortunately, the more popular books on the subject, including, sad to say, one by the late, lamented Baroness James, have stuck to a limited view, which ignored most of the writers of the period and a good many books and themes.

The Golden Age of Murder is a study of the Detection Club and its members about whom Mr Edwards has unearthed an astonishing amount of information as well as a study of their writings, which are, as anyone who has bothered to read at all widely knows, considerably more complex and varied in attitude than popular opinion would have it.

So we come to "justified murder", theoretically an anathema to detective fiction writers but a surprisingly frequent theme. It is inevitable that people who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about crime, especially murder, who are also fascinated by real-life crime, especially the unsolved or dubious cases, should sooner or later turn to the question of whether murder can ever be justified. In addition, the mid and late thirties saw the growth and strengthening of extremely unpleasant dictators and the appearance of would-be dictators in other countries, even Britain.

Then again, as this blog has pointed out before, a true conservative would dislike those dictators, real or tin-pot as radical, statist and socialist but that gets us on to the "are fascists right-wing?" discussion, which will, undoubtedly come up again.

Hitler and Mussolini came to power or held on to power through revolutionary means (despite those elections in Germany in 1932 and 1933), changing the political and constitutional structures of their countries as well as attempting to change the social ones. In this they did not succeed nearly as well as their contemporary Joseph Stalin did but none of them can be called conservative or reactionary. By the time Dictator's Way was written (late 1937 or early 1938 as the book came out in 1938) Mosley had put himself outside the political establishment and the couple of disdainful references to him in the book sum up quite well the general attitude towards him. The Labour Party and the trade unions, on the other hand, were by this time an integral part of that establishment and it was hardly radical to support them.

Tory Historian, naturally, wishes to congratulate the Conservative Party on its victory and, more specifically, the new Members of Parliament and the slowly emerging members of the Cabinet. TH is convinced that Lady Knightley, a great heroine of this blog, would have been delighted to find that a third of those now in the House of Commons are women and several Cabinet members are. When the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (CUWFA) was founded in 1908 and she became its first President, this could not have been even a distant dream. But she would not have been too surprised to find out that the first sitting woman MP was a Conservative as was the first woman Prime Minister.

Tory Historian has been a little busy and has therefore been remiss in welcoming the new Princess of Cambridge. Of course, TH is delighted that she will be known as Princess Charlotte - an excellent name that has not been used by the royal family for a little while,perhaps because of the sad fate of an earlier princess of that name, daughter of George IV. Let us not forget, though, how popular she was.

Working on an article about Lady Knightley, Dame of the Primrose League, Conservative suffragist and an important political activist (mentioned on this blog here, here and here), I am re-reading Mitzi Auchterlonie's excellent Conservative Suffragists. Repeatedly she discusses the difference between the Conservative women's approach to the question of suffrage and of female participation in active politics and that of the Liberals' (other parties at that point not being important enough to discuss in detail).

These paragraphs sum up the different approach and the advantages and disadvantages of both.

The Primrose League was considerably more successful in bringing women into the political realm than its rivals. The fact that women and men worked side by side was a restraining factor but also a liberating one - although the League women were pressured into a position of self-censorship on issues like female suffrage they were able to demonstrate heir competence in  political work, with the result that the men became increasingly dependent on their support.

Single-sex organisations gave Liberal women the freedom to discuss and pursue their own political interests, but they experienced more diviseness and arguably were no less marginalised by their party than Conservative women. The choices that women made about how they wanted to pursue their political activities were influenced by many factors but they invariably centred on whether their party or their concerns as women came frist. It could be argued that the pursuit of a self-consciously separate 'feminist' agenda was not necessarily a better strategy than the encouragement of a more 'domestic-centred politics' within the mainstream, if the latter ultimately led to a greater 'feminisation' of the political discourse.

Those of us who complained in the past that detective stories are not taken seriously enough in this country or the US (two countries that have been in the forefront of producing the actual literature) ought to be pleased with the amount of academic interest displayed in the genre in the last couple of decades. All Tory Historian can say is that one must beware of what one wishes for as it might just come true.

The rest of this long posting is on the secondary Conservative History blog.

This is the day that all conservatives in the Anglosphere, with a small or large c, celebrate, even if they do not approve of everything the great Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield did. April 19, the anniversary of his death, was for a long time celebrated as Primrose Day, that being, allegedly, his favourite flower.

Out of that grew the Primrose League, the country's first popular political movement and the first political organization in which women played an important role. It is time to reconsider all these matters and, perhaps, revive and rethink those ideas and discussions. That would make a splendid change from the present election campaign.

Happy Primrose Day to all.

They tend not to deal with history, which is a pity as the Conservative Party and the conservative movement in Britain and the Anglosphere have a fine history but for all of that we need to congratulate Conservative Home on its 10th birthday. On to the next decade, chaps and, um, one or two chapesses. Perhaps, we could see some improvement in that? Just a thought. Think of all those feisty women in the Conservative Party from the Primrose League on.

In one of his administrative rather than military phases, the first consul predicted that the Code Napoléon would be remembered long after his victories were forgotten. In the Prussian Rhenish provinces the Code lasted until 1900, and it still forms the basis of much of European jurisprudence today, a legal system that has already established its legislative primacy over British domestic law-making. As the authors of the 1993 edition of the legal textbook French Administrative Law point out: 'Napoleon may perhaps be thought of as the principal .... inspiration of the European Court [of Justice], which is itself buttressed by the principles of administrative law that his own institution, the Conseil d'Etat, has evolved during the last 190 years.

Napoleon's programme, of a politically united Europe controlled by a centralised (French-led) bureaucracy, of careers open to talent and of a written body of laws, has defeated Wellington's assumptions of British sovereign independence, class distinctions and the supremacy of English common law based upon established, sometimes ancient, precedent. 'I wished to found a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary,' wrote Napoleon on St Helena. 'There would be but one people in Europe.' There is some irony in the fact that Waterloo was fought a mere twelve miles from Brussels, the capital of today's European Union. For, although Wellington won the battle, it is Napoleon's dream that is coming true.

First, I have to report that yesterday I went to the National Film Theatre to see a rarely (well, hardly ever) shown British film The Reluctant Widow, based on one of Georgette Heyer's Regency novels. Both Wikipedia and IMDB give a bizarre misinterpretation of what happens in the film, even calling the heroine Helena when she is Elinor. It is a little perplexing why anyone should put up a plot summary of a film they had not seen or know anything about. The summary of the book's plot shows that the film kept close to it with a few changes, some of which work and some of which are superflous.

Georgette Heyer disliked all that she heard about the film or saw when it was being made and she refused to see the finished product or sell the film rights ever again. That is a great pity as her books really cry out for dramatization. The film had all the Heyer atmosphere and characteristics as well as being highly entertaining (as are the novels). In addition, and Miss Heyer would have appreciated this, it is meticulously researched as far as design, clothes, uniforms, architecture and views of London is concerned. The Art Director responsible for that was Carmen Dillon, a woman of great stature who made her name in what was then a man's world, was the Art Director on some of the best known British films like The Importance of Being Earnest (for which she won the Best Production Design Award in Venice) and Richard III as well as winning the Oscar for the Art Direction of Hamlet, the first woman ever to do so.

The plot, which revolves round espionage during the 100 Days with an urgent despatch to the Duke of Wellington in Brussels stolen in London and having to be retrieved by the hero and, as it turns out, the heroine, inevitably takes one back to the subject of Waterloo. (Though, it would seem that the book's plot is about Wellington's plan to march in the Peninsula in 1813. Unquestionably, I shall have to read the book.)

Fortunately, there are many events and exhibitions that have to do with the anniversary and an excellent one is a free exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, entitled Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions.

As one would expect, much of the exhibition revolves round various portraits from very early ones to the famous 1844 daguerreotype. One of the big draws is the panoramic view of Wellington's state funeral in 1853 by Henry Alken and George Augustus Sala, which will be displayed in full for one hour on Thursday, June 18. At present one can see sections of it in the display case and in full on the screen above.

The funeral was watched by an estimated million and a half people and, as the notes say, reminded people of Wellington's days of glory, the somewhat more ambiguous record as a Prime Minister having been forgotten. One can draw certain parallels with the Churchill funeral of just over fifty years ago, as this blog wrote about it on the day of the anniversary. There is one important difference between the two farewells, both to great men, both symbols of their age: Wellington's victory in 1815 ushered in an age of British supremacy in the world in matters political, economic and ideological; Churchill's victory in 1945 saw the end of that age. Farewell to him was also a farewell to that.

It is Waterloo year, the first that can be fully celebrated since the year itself as 1915 was hardly a time for celebrations. Tory Historian has been doing various things: going to the National Portrait Gallery exhibition about the great Duke, watching a poor play performed with great zest in a Regency toy theatre in the British Museum where there is an exhibition about propaganda for and against Bonaparte and, as of yesterday, re-reading Andrew Roberts's wonderfully well written Napoleon and Wellington.

Mr Roberts has more recently written an admiring biography of the Emperor but he is also something of an admirer of the Duke. The people he has little time for are the Whigs and this is what he has to say about them:

The exaggerated loathing of the Whigs for the man who threatened and finally defeated their idol Napoleon was to be a constant feature throughout Wellington's career. They emerge from their story not as witty, brilliant, big-hearted Olympians of politico-social mythology, but as quotidian, nit-picking, mean-minded quasi-traitors. 

There was much more to the suffragist movement than the WSPU, which was small, less and less influential in the years before the First World War and, many said even at the time, counter-productive in its actions and attitudes.

Martin Pugh, the well-known historian of popular politics and women's politics (sometimes these overlap and sometimes they are opposites) says this in the first chapter of his Women and the Women's Movement in Britain 1914 - 1959:

The important role traditionally claimed by the Pankhursts has not, so far, recovered from the careful analysis of their organization by Andrew Rosen. Their suffering and sacrifice made an indelible impression that can never be forgotten; but history is an unsentimental business, and it has clearly exploded many of the more extravagant claims made by the suffragettes.

Pankhurst claims that they had won public opinion to their side scarcely seem consistent with the antagonism towards them amongst working-class women which Jill Liddington has discussed in her valuable study of Lancashire. Nor does it square with the growing hostility of the crowds and the defeat of the Pankhurst-backed candidate at the Bow and Bromley election in 1912.

Always a small organization, the WSPU split repeatedly until it became a mere rump of personal followers of the Pankhurst family. Nor, ultimately, did militant tactics succeed in shaking the resolve of the government on women's suffrage; rather they alienated, if only temporarily, much of the support built up amongst politicians for enfranchising women.

The inclusion of the wives of workingmen - the bulk of the 8.4 million women - largely satisfied the non-Conservative politicians that there would be no additional advantage for the propertied classes. But the new electorate of women displayed an obvious bias towards age. Only the youngest of the women had been born in the late 1880s and thus reached an impressionable political age in  the Edwardian period when Liberal-Labour reformism was at its height. The great majority of women voters are likely to have formed political loyalties in a period when the choice was between Conservative and Liberal, though we must allow for the realignment of some of the most politically active women as a result of the suffrage controversies prior to the war.

Although most women electors had not voted even in a local government election before, the low turnout of 58.9 per cent in 1918 should almost certainly not be attributed to female abstention since the 12.9 million males included 3.9 million naval and military voters of whom it was reported that two thirds failed to take the chance of voting by post or by proxy.

Modern studies confirm that young voters are consistently the least likely to participate, and it thus seems very likely that abstention in 1918 was due to male behaviour rather than to the more mature female electorate. This is corroborated by many contemporary accounts which refer to the women as undemonstrative but determined in turning out to vote.

Dr John Turner has approached the 1918 election by using the evidence provided by the electoral register of 1915 and the number of men included in the 1918 register to estimate the total number of new male electors. He then examined the performance of the Labour Party's candidates and found that there was an inverse relationship between the size of the Labour poll and the proportion of new voters. In fact the greater the proportion of new male voters the less well Labour did and the greater proportion of women voters the less well Labour did.

Yet a statistical relationship is one thing: explaining it is another. This can be done at two levels. From a long-term perspective the emergence of an organised Labour Party can be seen to have been linked to the relatively prosperous, unionised and politically aware working-class communities who were already enfranchised to a great extent. Consequently the incorporation of the whole of the male working class weakened Labour's position in the short run. Similarly, women as a group were as yet relatively uninvolved in the social and institutional networks that fostered support for Labour, and their enfranchisement was unlikely, without further changes, to prove advantageous.

More immediately women appear to have reacted to the 1918 campaign in a rather striking way, as contemporaries observed. It is easy to be misled by the prominence of a small group of women activists i n the anti-war cause. To those politicians who had hoped or feared that women would want to vote for international peace and conciliation the Coupon Election came as a shock. Anti-war candidates such as Ramsay MacDonald experienced heavy defeats in their constituencies, in his case at West Leicester where the women voters were reported to be 'bloodthirsty, cursing their hate', and as posing a physical threat to pacifist politicians.

Emmeline Pethwick-Lawrence first became aware of this in 1917 when helping a peace-by-negotiation candidate at Aberdeen; the women there 'were even more embittered than the men', she wrote. Subsequently as a Labour candidate herself in Manchester in 1918 she commented:

I realised at once that my supporters were not the women - this election was their chance of 'doing their bit' and the were all for 'going over the top' to avenge their husbands and their sons. My supporters were the soldiers themselves.