Conservative History Journal

Tory Historian spent an hour or so last Thursday in the National Portrait Gallery, which is open late on Thursdays and Fridays. On the top floor the small room that is given over to temporary exhibitions on one theme is filled with images of Charles I before his execution, during it and as the glorious martyr afterwards. The exhibition is on till mid-December and is well worth seeing.

The Parliamentarians probably over-reached themselves when they tried, condemned and executed the King, thus turning a problematic and not very popular former ruler into a martyr for all times. (Tory Historian seems to recall talk of the same thing happening with Saddam Hussein after his execution but it has not. That man was beyond simply unpopular – he was hated in a way Charles I was not except by very few.)

There is deliberately very little about Charles and his Scottish wars or disagreements with Parliament or, for that matter, the religious, constitutional and political problems he allowed to grow in the years before the Civil War. Many of the portraits that relate to the period can be seen in the large room devoted to the subject.

The theme in the special exhibition is the fascinating one of propaganda and the way opinion can be swayed. Charles was not a popular king but the notion of raising Parliamentary rebellion may not have appealed to many people either. Still, there had been rebellions before – some successful, some not so much.

The issue here was the trial and execution. Charles was actually put on trial and accused of being “a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the commonwealth of England”. This was the shattering new idea that the squires of England, who sat in that Parliament thought of: that the king could be tried because there was a law and a constitutional order that was superior to him.

New ideas are not necessarily popular and this one was not, followed as it was by King Charles’s apparently noble martyrdom during trial and at the execution. The subsequent oppressive rule by Parliament did not endear the cause to people and the Royalists profited by it.

Etchings and woodcuts of Charles’s execution, real and imaginary, were widely available, though their production and distribution was actually banned in the country. They were brought in from the Continent, many, interestingly enough, from Holland, a country that had only recently emerged from its own war against the King of Spain.

As the notes to the exhibition say:

Royalist propaganda avoided difficult political and constitutional issues and focused attention on a sympathetic image of a devoted king suffering for his people.

Once again apologies for light posting. Other preoccupations, including dental appointments have been eating into time. Matters will improve. Well they can scarcely get worse.

In the meantime there is only about 30 minutes left to remember the birthday in 1866 of one of the most delightful children's writers, Beatrix Potter. There can be no question but that what she wrote was masterful conservative tracts encased in easily understood stories with enchanting illustrations. Anyone who thinks otherwise should compare the lives of Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit or find out what nearly happened to silly Jemima Puddleduck who was saved in time by the wise and traditionally minded dog, Shep.

Tory Historian was once wandering round the National Portrait Gallery - the theme of tomorrow's blog - on a quiet day when the keeper of the Early Twentieth Century Gallery was predisposed to chat. He was eloquent in his admiration for Beatrix Potter and compared her very favourably with all the swaggering First World War generals and officers.

Tory Historian is back in harness after a gap when time had to be devoted to a serious piece of work. An interesting anniversary needs to be noted. As Historic-UK.com points out for July 22, on this day in 1946 bread rationing was introduced in Britain, more than a year after the war ended. Unlike other European countries, this one managed to get through the six years of war without bread rationing and a year after the end it was introduced. How is one to explain this/

The website says rather blandly: "The shortage is blamed upon a poor harvest and drought." Hmm. Not on the socialist government that was in charge of the country?

This is not an anniversary any conservative can relish but neither can any historian ignore the beignning of the French Revolution, an event that changed the history of Western Europe and, in its wake, probably most of the world, whether for better of worse, we can argue about.

As the complete quotation from "A Tale of Two Cities" sums up:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we
were all going the other way.

Tory Historian has something of an interest in popular and children's literature of the past and never ceases to marvel at the high quality of writing. Take Sexton Blake, the Sherlock Holmes for the masses (though, let's face it, Holmes was very popular, as well). As this website rightly says, Blake was a publishing phenomenon for most of the twentieth century.

He was quite clearly a more exciting imitation of Sherlock Holmes, what with living in Baker Street and having a housekeeper called Mrs Bardell (a touch of Dickens there) and that assistant, Tinker, who starts off as a young lad but grows up and drives cars and flies aeroplanes. The adventures are truly bad - Blake is always described as being incredibly brilliant, much ahead of anyone in the world in his ability to think and understand but invariably finds themselves in messy situations almost anyone could have foreseen. But the escapes are always exciting. One can quite see why the short stories and books are so popular.

Tory Historian has just acquired a 1960 edition of a 1920 story, complete with typical 1960s cover of a really bad and irrelevant photograph. What was it about paperback publishers of those years that made them go for that rubbish by way of cover illustration?

The novel was called "The Mystery Box" in the first place and "The Case of the Bismarck Memoirs" in the reprint. What struck Tory Historian is the language of this book that was aimed at the popular market. Would any really popular writer (and I don't mean Booker Prize winners) nowadays get away with writing like this:

Blake nodded and continued his examination. The discovery of the ecutcheon and the coat of arms had stimulated his interest:ut rather suggested that the unknown person who had once owned this flask was connected with some honoured and titled family. The flask itself was too exquisitely designed and the engraving too costly for it to have been bought at an ordinary shop; it had no doubt been specially designed bor the person whose initials it bore: or he may have received it as a present.

Colin Jones in his book, “Paris – Biography of a City”, already mentioned once by Tory Historian, describes an interesting example of a misunderstanding arising from best intentions.

By 1814 Napoleon had become largely unpopular in Paris (and probably in the rest of the country), not least because of the constant economic crisis, caused partly by the strict control he imposed on such things as bread prices and tried to impose on British imports and partly by the expense of his endless military campaign. (The strength of his secret police and the iron control of all publications and organizations did not help either.)

So his first defeat in 1814 caused distress only because for the first time since the seventeenth century Paris was invaded by foreigners. Otherwise, Parisians were not all that bothered by l’Empereur’s exile. Here is where a certain misunderstanding arose, as Professor Jones describes.

When the allied troops had entered Paris for the first time in 1814, many of them wore a white cockade to signify their peaceful intentions towards Parisians. Thinking that they would show the invaders their appreciation for this gesture, many Parisians wore the white cockade in return. However, Bourbon sympathizers among the troops imagined that by wearing these cockades, the Parisians were showing their undying support for the Bourbon cause (white being the monarchy’s ceremonial colour). This misunderstanding led the allies to imagine that Paris was massively pro-Bourbon and pro-Restoration. The years after 1815 would show how wrong this was. Indeed the regimes which followed Napoleon produced a nostalgia for his rule which his rule had done relatively little to justify.

... a book that looks extremely interesting: "Between the Thin Blue Lines", edited by Jean M. Lucas. It is a story of the rise, powerful presence and gradual decline of the Conservative Party Agents. Not only do I intend to read it immediately but I shall be looking for someone to review it for the Conservative History Journal.

In the meantime, the book is published by Trafford Publishing, a Canadian firm, and is available in Britain from Miss Lucas herself (jeanlucas_AT_uwclub.net).

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

This question has been exercising various people's minds ever since it has been decreed by the literary powers that be that Buchan is rather an inferior writer. There is no explanation why people still enjoy reading him and why his books keep being reprinted but that sort of thing does not bother the powers that be.

Tory Historian is a Buchan fan as has been explained before. Tory Historian is also a fan of Gertrude Himmelfarb's the redoubtable historian of political, social and liteary ideas. (She is also the sister of Milton Himmelfarb, wife of Irving Kristol and mother of William Kristol. What on earth did all these people have on their cornflakes? A remarkable family.)

The point is that Gertrude Himmelfarb has written a fascinating essay on John Buchan. Published in "Victorian Minds" in 1968 as "John Buchan - the Last Victorian", it was reprinted in 2006 in "The Moral Imagination" as "John Buchan: an Untimely Appreciation". It is an interesting and well-argued essay even if Tory Historian does not agree with everything in it.

Naturally enough, the question of anti-semitism comes up (just after the question of racism, a slightly more complex issue) and, on the whole, Professor Himmelfarb finds that though there is a certain amount of passive anti-semitism in the novels, as was common in those halcyon pre-Nazi days, Jews are not necessarily the villains and, anyway, there are various extenuating circumstances.

There were, in fact, Jewish rag dealers and pawnbrokers, Jewish Communists and financiers in England at the time, an England that was far more ethnically homogenous than it is now.

Yet it is disconcerting to find that the plot of one of his most successful novels, Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), centers [sic] upon an international conspiracy devised by Jewish anarchists and Jewish financiers led by a "little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake" who is avenging himslef for centuries of persecution.

Not one, not two but three books on the go. One was lent Tory Historian by a friend in Paris, whence the book bag came back with more volumes in it than it had departed with. It is a collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens, erstwhile left-wing and now rather right-wing though not precisely conservative scourge of all and sundry.

Entitled "Love, Poverty and War", it is well worth reading for the evisceration of Michael Moore if nothing else. But, as it happens there are numerous fascinating pieces, not least on Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, David Irving and Mel Gibson. Sometimes Hitchens goes strangely astray in making serious errors of omission and commission. But mostly it is pure unadulterated intellectual joy. Not for those with weak nerves.

For serious reading there is Mitzi Auchterlonie's "Conservative Suffragists", a seriously underrated subject so far. In general, not enough has been written about women in the Conservative Party and on that side of the political divide, though in many ways they achieved more than their much-trumpeted colleagues on the left. This book should balance matters out somewhat. There will be another posting about it.

Finally, a book acquired today: "The Letters of Julian Maclaren-Ross", launched, very appropriately, in the upstairs bar of the Wheasheaf pub in North Soho (and no, there is no such place as NoHo in London). The whole event was organized by the excellent Sohemian Society, one that all conservatives, liberal conservatives and, dare one say it, libertarians should pay attention to.

Fans of Anthony Powell will recall that Julian Maclaren-Ross, who appears a good deal in Powell's memoirs, was also the inspiration for X. Trapnel in the last trilogy of the "Dance to the Music of Time".

In Paris Tory Historian was told by two separate and very different people, both of whom are Parisians, that Sarkozy’s most popular move was his marriage to Carla Bruni. Oddly enough, our own media seems to think otherwise.

Indeed, Peter Allen of the Daily Telegraph has found an article with a delightfully historic parallel: “Carla Bruni is ‘modern day Marie Antoinette’”. Well, not quite, one has to say, if one remembers the scandalous and scurrilous stories that circulated about that silly and unhappy queen.

It seems that Nicolas Domenach, author of the article “Enough is enough” in the magazine Marianne is not one of the French First Lady’s fans.

After referring to the wives of past presidents, Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterand, Mr Domenach said of the Sarkozys: "They are always pawing each other in public, which might be normal for newly-weds, but he is the president and she is the first lady - and they are not exactly young! The endless photos of Carla cosying up to Nicolas have become nothing more than a
vulgar charade.

"Quite frankly it's overkill and we can't take any more. She is not so much a perfume but a very strong air freshener that we use to cover up unpleasant smells in public places."

The brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons westward into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh; it is now considered doubtful whether this was a Good Thing. Memorable among the Saxon warriors were Hengist and his wife (?or horse), Horsa. Hengist made himself King in the South. Thus Hengist was the first English King and his wife (or horse), Horsa, the first English Queen (or horse). The country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons and was therefore renamed England, and thus (naturally) soon became C. of E. This was a Good Thing, because previously the Saxons had worshipped some dreadful gods of their own called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

King Alfred was the first Good King, with the exception of Good King Wenceslas, who, though he looked 4th, really came first (it is not known, however, what King Wenceslas was King of). Alfred ought never to be confused with King Arthur, equally memorable but probably non-existent and therefore perhaps less important historically (unless he did exist).

The trip to Paris was very enjoyable, with plenty of excellent food and drink but also many long walks through Parisian arrondissements. In between all this activity the reading matter was a book by Professor Colin Jones, entitled "Paris - Biography of a City".

It is an excellent introduction to the history of this fascinating city and any comparison one might make with a "biography" of London gives one furiously to think as a certain Belgian detective used to say.

One interesting aspect of Professor Jones's book is the reminder that Parisian history has been fierce and violent throughout most of its existence. More so than that of London, whether one looks at the City or London as it expanded. There are many dark aspects to London's history but the almost continuous sequence of riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, not to mention civil wars that fill Parisian history since the early middle ages far overwhelms our own peccadillos.

It is also worth recalling that Paris was often not just in opposition to the ruler or the many rulers but also in opposition to the rest of the country that occasionally took its revenge. For all of that, Henri IV was right: Paris was worth a Mass. or as "1066 and All That" has it: Paris is rather a mess.

A short break in postings while Tory Historian travels to France to investigate ... well, many things, though not necessary historical ones. However, staying in the Marais district in Paris should yield some adequate photographs for this blog. Back on Saturday evening.

In the meantime, let us remember that tomorrow is the anniversary of the start of the Korean War, that sometimes appears to be the forgotten war of the twentieth century in Britain. Too many people know nothing about it, not even the fact that British forces took a very active part in it.

To be quite precise, the question should be what is it about Ayn Rand’s followers? Supposedly libertarian, freedom loving, objectivist individuals they tend to be the angriest, most intolerant branch of the right or the conservative movement both in Britain and in America (and probably everywhere else, if they exist).

I was a little stunned by the reaction some Randroids (oops, one mustn’t call them that as they get really upset) displayed at Bill Buckley’s death. There was gloating and rejoicing around because the “evil genius” of the right had finally gone. Why? Because as editor of National Review, he published Whittaker Chambers’s rather negative review of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

The story is that Rand had not bothered to read the review but proclaimed a kind of furious fatwa on it and on Chambers, one that her followers have faithfully adhered to ever since. What annoyed her more than anything, or would have done, if she had bothered to read the review, was Chambers’s conclusion that over the whole novel there hangs the miasma of fascistic intolerance and one hears a voice cry “Into the gas chamber, go”.

As a matter of fact, this is not inaccurate and Chambers had very finely tuned antennae for this sort of thing. Rand is intolerant of anyone who is too weak to enter her particular brand of utopia. What will happen to those? Chambers’s conclusion is not wrong.

The hatred for Chambers and Buckley has persisted to the point when Libertarians of the Randian persuasion were seen dancing metaphorically on the latter’s grave. Weird.

Now I have picked up traces of another bitter row. There has been a certain amount of unexplained movement around the conservative film site Libertas. The man, who under the moniker Dirty Harry has been the main blogger on it for a couple of years, has gone and set up his own extremely lively conservative film blog, Dirty Harry’s Place. (Highly recommended, incidentally, for anyone interested in film and shenanigans around it.)

Libertas, meanwhile, is being reclaimed by the founders Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, also founders of the conservative Liberty film festival. So far, the result of that has been twofold. One is that the blog is not updated as regularly as it was under Dirty Harry (and how I understand that problem) and the other is a mega-row on the subject of Libertas and its two founders, now main authors, on its readers’ forum.

I shall pass over the apparent dislike Apuzzo and Murty have engendered in their readers and viewers of the film festival because I know nothing about the truth of it. What was extraordinary is the venom brought out by Apuzzo’s casually critical reference to Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” and Randroids. The posting was about yet another delay in the filming of that book but Apuzzo was less than complimentary about novel and author.

That was enough to invoke howls of rage and cries of betrayal both on Libertas and on Dirty Harry’s Place. If they could, they would boil Jason Apuzzo in oil. But why?

Why cannot one criticize Ayn Rand exactly the same way as one criticizes other authors one agrees with in general terms but not in every way?

For what it is worth, here are my views on the subject: I have never managed to get through her novels, which are turgid and verbose. I know other people find them wonderfully inspiring but there is no accounting for tastes. The idea that they are among the greatest in modern literature with Mikhail Bulgakov, Anthony Powell or Robert Musil out there, strikes me as ludicrous.

I have, however, read a number of Rand’s essays and agreed with almost everything she said. In fact, let me go further. I agree with all the main ideas but find some of the details worrisome. In particular, I find the intolerance, clear in her writings and even clearer in her followers, deeply unpleasant and frightening. But much of her analysis of socialism and hypocritical corporatism is absolutely accurate and it would do our politicians a good deal of good to read those essays.

The point is that her ideas are very simple and straightforward. This makes her very popular and turns her followers into fanatics; it also makes her essays, after a while, uninteresting. When you read the fifth one and find that the same half a dozen ideas are being churned out in exactly the same way, you find yourself putting the book aside with qualified admiration.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?

Every now and then the Daily Telegraph publishes some truly important stories. Yesterday was such a day when we could read that Dante's "infernal crimes" were now forgiven. Actually, the sub-editor got a little carried away there. It is true that Dante Alighieri was sentence to death in 1302 but it was merely the outcome of the civil war in Florence turning against him and his side.

Dante was born into a noble Florentine family in 1265 and found himself embroiled in a struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy for control of the city. He is likely to have fought in decisive battles for the city's independence and became a Prior, one of six city leaders, in 1300.

His stint in power came to a bad end, however, when forces loyal to the pope seized power and put him on trial. When he did not appear, he was banished for two years and given a 5,000 florin fine. When he did not pay, he was condemned to death by burning.

Tory Historian found the following wonderful quotation by the great German statesman, Otto von Bismarck:

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

Thomas Jefferson maintained that

The loss of the Battle of Waterloo was the salvation of France.

The story of the Staute of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States of America for the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, is long and complicated. Wikipedia gives a good summary as does the National Park Service.

Tory Historian's first sight of it in real life, as opposed to pictures, newsreeels and the unforgettable sequence in Hitchcock's 1942 film "Saboteur" (not to be confused with the earlier "Sabotage", a rather poor version of Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent") was a couple of years after 9/11. A walk along the river bank from Ground Zero was the right preparation for the sight of that statue rising, apparently, from the sea. It was the correct sequence - from despair to hope.

As far as this blog is concerned, what we are noting here is that today is the anniversary of the statue's actual arrival in New York Harbour in 1885 on board the French frigate Isère. Any reader who has not yet seen it is in for a tremendous experience, especially if he or she will include a trip to Ellis Island and a long visit to the museum there, which gives an engrossing account of those arrivals from the Old World.

After an hour or two one can look up and across to the Manhattan skyline and think - this is what those people built when they were no longer tired, poor or huddled masses.

Here is a less frequently seen picture of the D-Day invasion. Paras on their way.

Well, to be quite precise, time for another quote from the great Lord Acton. This one is extraordinarily apt for all ages:

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.

Ronald Porter is a regular contributor to the Conservative History Journal and I am delighted to be able to put his review of Brenton's play about Harold Macmillan on the blog. I hope this might become a new departure for other contributors as well.

NEVER SO GOOD [By Howard Brenton ]

Lyttelton Theatre

Reviewed by Ronald Porter.

It has taken a little time to recover from the trip back in time but Tory Historian has now returned to the twenty-first century, ready to discuss both the production and the history as presented in the plays, which is very different from the history as it happened though, curiously, the overall pattern is not inaccurate.

(Tory Historian has finally worked out that Prince John, Henry V’s younger brother and later the Duke of Bedford, was not murdered spectacularly and bloodily by Joan La Pucelle but was actually the man who had her tried and executed. Furthermore, he died in his bed, which is quite an extraordinary idea, and was the founder of the University of Caen and a man who commissioned some of the finest illuminated manuscripts of the period. This is not a side of the man that is made at all clear in the Histories. One wonders whether the stylized appearance of Olivier’s Henry V, based largely on the “Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry”, did not also take some ideas from the “Bedford Book of Hours”.)

Anyway, back to the Histories as written by Old Will and performed by the renewed Royal Shakespeare Company. First things first: the series was superlative. The whole ensemble performed extraordinarily well, doubling, tripling and quadrupling parts, as it is usually the case with the long sequence that has several hundred characters. Some of the actors are heading into the great Shakespearian league in Tory Historian’s opinion. Jonathan Slinger (Richard II and Richard III, as well as other parts), Geoffrey Streatfeild (Hal, Henry V, Suffolk and smaller parts), Chuk Iwuji (Henry VI, Montjoy and others), Patrice Naiambana (a superlative Warwick and other characters) are stars to be watched. They are not the only ones.

The use of vertical and horizontal space, the speed of action and movement on and off the stage, the fantastic acrobatics on ladders and ropes and the imaginative use of very limited scenery – mostly a couple of large gates, one above the other, and the occasional bed for carousing or dying – made those long, complicated plays engrossing.

Let us hope the RSC has thought of filming the sequence and the DVDs will be available though they will be no substitute for the excitement of being there.

The plays, while they follow events as they happened after a fashion, do play fast and loose with dates, ages of characters and, above all, time lags. It is hard to work out from Henry VI that the Wars of the Roses took up something like thirty years, depending on what you consider to be the end.

But, of course, they are not really history, despite the fact that so many people think them to be just that. The general pattern of what happened is there but, more importantly several themes are worked out, more obviously in the first tetralogy or Richard II to Henry V, which was written some years after the Henry VI and Richard III sequence.

The questions are about the inevitable tension between legitimacy, loyalty and fitness to govern. In what circumstances can one rebel against an anointed monarch? When he is unfit to wear the crown? When he is a usurper?

There is also the overriding concept of England and Englishness, whether in John of Gaunt’s famous speech, Mowbray’s despair at having to leave his country and forget his language, Bolingbroke’s return from exile, Henry V’s battle cry or poor Henry VI’s unaffected pleasure at being back in his own land, despite the danger that surrounds him.

England is special, being an English king is a terrible responsibility and the tensions are never fully sorted out, not even in the character of the hero, Henry V. The notion is that they will be reconciled in Henry VII but that is Tudor propaganda. There was no legitimacy in Henry’s claim and his army of French invaders supported by rebels against the anointed king triumphed through force and treachery against a ruler who then had to be shown to be unfit to rule retrospectively.

Shakespeare takes no real sides though he seems to have been antagonistic to high churchmen, most of whom are villainous intriguers. How much of the trouble in Henry VI might have been avoided if the Bishop of Winchester (a scheming Beaufort), later a cardinal, had not been so intent on establishing his power over the young king and thwarting his uncles?

One of the best scenes in this production is the death of Cardinal Beaufort in Henry VI Part II, where his prayers for God’s mercy are silenced by the ghost of the murdered Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the King’s uncle. With those two powerful personalities out of the way the fun between the Yorkists and Lancastrians begins.

Which side is Old Will on? An interesting question, given the circumstances in which the plays were written and given the final one with the fantastically evil, hunchbacked Richard at the heart of it. The problem is that Richard the Monster is an inexplicable and unusual character, who suddenly morphs from Richard the loyal son of the Duke of York, member of a warm and affectionate family, brave and talented soldier. Towards the end of Henry VI Part III and in Richard III the clever, complex plays become crude propaganda.

Even then Shakespeare’s genius shines through. Richard is a favourite part for actors, most of whom seem to be able to find much that is human and, if not admirable, then attractive. After all, even according to the text, the hunchbacked, crippled monster excites loyalty in men and love in women. Famously, Richard wonders about that himself while spurring himself on to greater nastiness.

It’s not as if the series was particularly pro-Lancastrian. Quite clearly, they are usurpers who have cheerfully executed everyone who stood in their way and who supported the rightful king or his heir, imprisoning said heir, Mortimer, for life; when the Duke of York explains his claim to the throne, Warwick and Salisbury easily accept them and Henry VI finds them hard to refute.

Nor are the Yorkists particularly unpleasant in their behaviour except the boys to Lord Clifford who had tormented their father and, worst of all, murdered their much loved younger brother, a child who would have been spared by anyone except a man demented by his father’s death in battle years before that.

The Rutland episode in Henry VI Part III is very peculiar. Easily the most brutal and revolting in the whole sequence, it trumps the infamous murder of the young princes in the Tower. Presumably, it is not so well known because the three parts of Henry VI are performed rarely whereas Richard III is fairly frequently.

Lord Clifford maddened by the death of his father in battle finds the Duke of York’s youngest son, a child who is hiding with his tutor after what is presumably the Battle of Wakefield, and cuts his throat. Subsequently, the Duke is captured (in fact, he was killed in battle) and tormented by Clifford and other Lancastrians before being murdered. Part of the torment is Queen Margaret producing a napkin, which she had dipped in Rutland’s blood, and rubbing it into York’s face.

Before his death the Duke, naturally enough, curses the She-Wolf of France and expresses the hope that she would experience a torment that equals his on learning of Rutland’s death. Unusually, she does not remember this curse when her own son is killed after the Battle of Tewkesbury.

When the three brothers learn of this monstrous behaviour they, particularly Richard, go into a frenzy of rage. The deliberate murder of a child is horrific.

The general effect is to turn the audience into Yorkists, even if they were not that before. In fact, one wonders whether there is not an academic dissertation to be written that would prove Shakespeare, the Warwickshire man, to have been a secret supporter of the Yorkist cause. (Just joking.)

The point is that the episode never happened. It did not simply happen otherwise; nor is there a question mark over it as there is one over the unexplained disappearance of the two princes. There simply was no such event and could not have been.

Edmund, Earl of Rutland was not the youngest son of the Duke of York – that was Richard. He did take part in the Battle of Wakefield and seems to have been killed afterwards by Lord Clifford but he was seventeen, old enough to be a soldier. His head went up on the gates of York together with those of his father and his uncle, the Earl of Salisbury. It was George and Richard who were little boys and had to be sent away to safety after the battle, which temporarily put paid to Yorkist hopes and ambitions.

Why did Shakespeare invent something so utterly nasty against the Lancastrians? There seems no explanation.

While we are on the subject of unexplained matters, one cannot help wondering about the fascination usurpers and usurpation exerted over Shakespeare. Of course, there is plenty of dramatic tension in the subject but there was also plenty of danger in writing about it in Tudor times. What, one wonders, did Queen Elizabeth and her various courtiers make of these discussions about legitimacy?

What did they make of a later play, also about usurpation and legitimacy, the very popular Hamlet? And what did King Jamie make of yet another play on that theme, Macbeth, with its uncanny description of what we would now call a totalitarian state?

Or were rulers then, as they are now, so thick-skinned that nothing short of a rebels’ standard, a sword or an axe brought their attention to these matters? One can believe that about James but Elizabeth? Surely not.

Tory Historian is taking a trip into the fifteenth century this week-end. It is very conveniently to be found at the Roundhouse in North London. Tonight it is Shakespeare's "Richard II" (well, all right, parts of the fourteenth as well) and tomorrow the two parts of "Henry IV".

As described earlier, "Henry V" had to be seen out of sequence, as tickets for tomorrow evening's performance had already been sold out. That means a break tomorrow evening and the three parts of "Henry VI" on Saturday.

"Richard III" will be given a miss. It is not a particularly good play - far less subtle than the others, being straightforward Tudor propaganda, as Tory Historian has discussed once before. It is a historical travesty and a terrible calumny on a king who was reasonably successful and reasonably popular.

Instead, a re-reading of Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" is called for as well as, possibly, some of the new and more accurate books on the subject. If only there were time to read all that is needed.

Incidentally, Richard II ascends the throne as a child though not as a baby, which is the fate of Henry VI. Much trouble comes from these unhappy inheritances. Setting aside the question of who murdered the princes in the Tower and the problem of their legitimacy, it is quite clear that Richard III is right in thinking that a child ruling England at that time was a recipe for a disaster.

Further reports from the late Plantagenet reign will follow.

Two separate events in my life in the last week or so have coalesced in one theme. Things happen like that sometimes. The first was a double book launch at the Social Affairs Unit of Peter Whittle’s “Look At Me – Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain” and of Lincoln Allison’s “Disrespect – or how the wrong kind of niceness is making us weak and unhappy”.

Both books are about the modern world and of the many ills that have befallen it, thus being slightly outside this blog’s scope (though not totally so) but another interesting event was a visit to the exhibition, now closed, at the Courtauld Galleries that was about Renoir’s painting “La Loge” and various social and artistic matters surrounding it.

There are many interesting and debatable subjects in Mr Whittle’s book – too many for this posting. (There might be a return engagement at a later stage.) He builds up structures around five people, who, he thinks, are typical of modern Britain in its self-obsession: Kayleigh, Harriet, Sue and Marc, and Jason. They are, in various ways, narcissistic, anti-social, self-centred, shallow and, without acknowledging this to themselves, unhappy.

Two questions arise inevitably: are they really typical of Britain or of the British of certain generation and are they particularly new with no antecedents. I would say not really to the first and definitely no to the second. However, the phenomenon may be more widely spread these days than before.

Mr Whittle mentions the appalling habit people have of not switching their mobiles off in places like theatres, cinemas and, I would add, exhibitions. I suspect that is thoughtlessness rather than anything sinister but there may be an element of exhibitionism there: look at me, I am so important, people want me even when I am out with my friends or family.

In that connection there is the point that a number of people go to the theatre and the opera to display themselves rather than watch the performance. Now that is definitely not new as a reading of eighteenth and nineteenth (and twentieth, for that matter) century would make it clear.

Renoir’s “La Loge” is about going to the theatre to display oneself to advantage and to see who else is present. Apparently when the painting was exhibited there were discussions as to whether the lady in it was from good society or a social climber. Unless the latter is a euphemism I’d say that she is neither but a lady of the demi-monde, who is already sizing up the next patron while the present one is also surveying the scene.

Much of the excellent exhibition is about the growth in importance, socially, of the theatre in late nineteenth century France, the people who went there and the many uses visits could be put.

There is Renoir’s other painting, “At the theatre”, sometimes known as “The first outing” which shows a young girl in a box with an older female companion, perhaps her mother or sister. The rest of the audience is a blur but there is one gentleman who is more distinct. He is quite clearly eyeing the young girl for his own purposes. Despite the prettiness of the picture, it is quite disturbing.

There are the various caricatures, sometimes directed at the aristocracy, but mostly at the middle classes, whose rather innocent attempts at entertainment that is not too expensive, are presumed to be a matter for satirical laughter.

Renoir, having painted several socially dubious pictures of the theatre also produced at least two enchanting small oil paintings of middle class couples, contentedly and companionably absorbed in the performance. They are not in the theatre to show themselves off but to watch the play.

Among other artists Mary Cassatt is represented with two pictures: one of a lady in mourning, probably a widow, who, while being watched by a gentleman in another box, is herself surveying the audience with absorptions. But the most fascinating one is “Woman with a pearl necklace” that shows a completely different female attitude.

It was assumed that the lady in question was an American visitor and there are good grounds for this assumption. She is dressed and coiffed differently from the others but above all she looks at the world differently. Neither demure nor calculating, she surveys her companions openly, as an equal. A painting like that makes one realize that the American invasion of Europe and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century must have been quite electrifying.

This week-end Tory Historian has fulfilled a long-standing ambition and visited Benjamin Franklin’s House in Craven Street, near Charing Cross Station. Well, worth a visit if you have a couple of hours to spare.

The house is as it was in the days when Franklin lived in London, trying to negotiate an agreement between the British government and the Colonies on matters to do with taxation as well as conducting scientific research, writing many things, including his Autobiography and leading and intensely busy social life.

However, there is next to no furniture. Instead of filling the house up with contemporary artefacts, the people who run it have opted for an alternative solution. They have used voices from different parts of the room, films and the presence of one actress who plays the daughter of Franklin’s landlady and the wife of the anatomist who conducted classes in the house to give a very fair idea of the great man, his many friends and interests and of the busy life of the household at the time.

Occasionally we see and hear of riots both in America and in London with the implication that in 1775 Franklin barely escaped with his life.

All in all a praiseworthy enterprise and a fascinating slice of history. Tory Historian went with a Canadian friend who was visiting London and is, like TH, something of a Franklin admirer. Sad to say, all the other people in the group were American visitors. Not that Tory Historian has any objections to American visitors, especially if they are interested in Benjamin Franklin’s stay in London but it would have been nice to see some British students of eighteenth century history. The word “students” here is used in the widest possible sense.

Franklin is as much part of our history as of America’s. He was described as a Citizen of the World, who was also a great patriot. He was, to use our own terminology, a great Anglospherist. He was desperate to avoid war between Britain and her colonies and desperately sad and angry when it became impossible. But, when the time came, he signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

Tory Historian is a confirmed Anglospherist, as any reader, however cursory, of this blog will know. Therefore, discussions about conservatism in other parts of the Anglosphere are of particular joy, though discussions about conservatism in other parts of the world are also of interest.

Firstly, Tory Historian would like to call the readers’ attention to an obituary by the great Claudio Véliz, author, among other things, of “The New World of the Gothic Fox – Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America” and of a superlative article in Quadrant that compares Gough Whitlam with General Perón, which explains why the wrecking of Argentina’s economic and political structure was not replicated in Australia.

The obituary is that of William F. Buckley, whose death was noted on this blog as well. The whole piece is worth reading but of particular interest are the last couple of paragraphs.

Professor Véliz suggests that Buckley’s fascination with sailing may well have given him a clearer understanding of natural rhythms in nature and society and reminds us of Edmund Burke’s comments on similar subjects:

Few activities establish a more intimate relationship between man and nature than sailing the high seas. Few contemporaries have been more happily and efficiently attuned to the rhythms, harmonies and dissonance of nature and the language of the sea than Bill Buckley, and few would have understood better what Edmund Burke had in mind when, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, he explained that:

“working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order. [This] political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a ermanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein … the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression … thus in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.”

Such an understanding furnishes “a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission: without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires.”

Of course, Bill Buckley could have penned this if Edmund Burke had not done it before him. William F. Buckley Jr was a Burke for our times.

April 25 is Anzac Day, something all Anglospherists should remember. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, Tory Historian did not get round to posting this till after the celebrations finished in the countries concerned, though it is still Friday in western Australia though only just.

Nevertheless, we must not forget the role of the Anzacs in the two world wars and subsequent battles. They have even forgiven Britain for her behaviour in the seventies when Australia's and New Zealand's economies were ruthlessly undermined to get us into the Common Market.

At least, we all hope they have forgiven us.

This is not a topic that is often covered on this blog but Tory Historian feels strongly (as do all historians) that there is a tendency around to forget that some things we experience have happened before.

A look at the BBC On This Day website will remind us that today is the anniversary of the massive IRA bomb in the City that devastated a large section of it, killing one person and injuring more than 40.

We hear a lot from the anti-terrorist squad in the police and elsewhere that it is very difficult to deal with the people who are threatening us now because they are not like the IRA in their intentions or structural set-up. Indeed, not, but then the IRA was quite unusual in both. They had a definite aim and they were organized like the army they thought themselves to be.

Other terrorist organizations in the seventies were very different, much nearer to the ones around now with many of them trained by the same people. Today is also the anniversary of the explosion in the West German embassy in Stockholm where three people were killed before and during it. Many were injured.

The embassy's staff had been taken hostage by off-shoots of the Baader-Meinhof gang, 26 of whose members were at this time imprisoned and awaiting trial. The demands for their release were not met by the West German government who had, in fact, been humiliated by this band of terrorists before. The result was the killing of two attaches and the explosion.

Eventually, members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were imprisoned and many of them committed suicide in gaol. There were so many of such gangs at the time. It would pay people to study their operation and how they were dealt with, what were the successes and failures. Above all, it is worth recalling that nihilistic, destructive, apparently aimless because the aims are so general terrorist groups are not new. It's jsut the IRA is not one of them.

Tory Historian is finding it very difficult to understand why politicians, the media and the educational establishment should suddenly start fussing about St George’s Day, when it has been little more than a source of gentle entertainment in a very typical English way in the past.

Some American bloggers are incensed that parades that have never existed before should now be cancelled not to provoke Muslim attacks. Muslims in Bradford are saying that they don’t really care and a nice parade would be just the ticket to cheer everyone up.

Radio 3 is playing English music, which is a good idea, though less well known pieces would be an even better idea but one cannot help asking why the BBC should suddenly decide to become involved with St George.

Politicians are sending round e-mails with St George’s flag, which must be the ultimate insult for that unfortunate saint.

St George is not only England’s patron saint. Here is the full list (probably):

Amersfoort, Netherlands; Aragon; agricultural workers; archers; armourers; Beirut, Lebanon; Scouts; butchers; Cappadocia; Catalonia; cavalry; chivalry; Constantinople; Corinthians (Brazilian football team); Crusaders; England; equestrians; Ethiopia; farmers; Ferrara; field workers; Genoa; Geogia; Gozo; Bulgaria; Greece; Gozo, Haldern, Germany; Heide; herpes; horsemen; horses; husbandmen; knights; lepers and leprosy; Lithuania; Lod; Malta; Modica,
Sicily; Moscow; Order of the Garter; Palestine; Palestinian Christians; plague; Portugal; Piran; Ptuj, Slovenia; Reggio Calabira; riders; saddle makers; sheep; shepherds; skin diseases; soldiers; syphilis; Teutonic Knights

Once again, Tory Historian is not travelling physically, but mentally. Reading matter for today (and the previous week or so) is Sam Tanenhous’s biography of one of the most important and enigmatic characters of the twentieth century, Whittaker Chambers.

The book that was published in the United States in 1998 finally made its way to this country last year, complete with an introduction by Mr Tanenhous that invokes some spurious parallels between events of the forties and the present. The introduction proves that Mr Tanenhous learnt nothing from his research into Chambers’s life.

One also wonders why it had to be retitled for the British reader. Instead of “Whittaker Chambers: A Biography”, it is now called “An Un-American Life: The Case of Whittaker Chambers”. Why “the case”? Do we in this country still believe that there is any doubt as to who spoke the truth in the famous Hiss-Chambers case? Or do we still credit those fraudulent charlatans who came up with ridiculous psychological explanations for Chambers’s behaviour that he explained very cogently?

Reading the biography naturally led Tory Historian back to “Witness”, that most elegiac of memoirs and discussions of the real twentieth century and a book that is indispensable reading for all who want to understand American conservatism, so much more sinewy than our own, “Odyssey of a friend”, Chambers’s letters to Bill Buckley, published by the latter in 1969.

Whittaker Chambers’s influence on Buckley and through him on the American conservative movement cannot be overestimated. This is not to say that Buckley did not have strongly held views, which he could probably argue through much better than Chambers could.

There were many disagreements between the two but they shared an almost apocalyptic vision of the struggle they felt they had to wage with Buckley, the optimist, often out in front gleefully attacking everyone in sight.

Chambers was a pessimist as all those who served the Communist cause well until they became so disillusioned that they broke their lives to escape thraldom. Other examples of this trend are Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Manés Sperber. The leading British anti-Communists had not been so strongly involved. Their opposition was more intellectual, less apocalyptic.

The battles of the late forties and early fifties; HUAC and the Senatorial hearings; the revelations of the widespread Communist conspiracy (since then proved by Soviet documents); and, most of all, the Hiss-Chambers case have all provided American conservatives with a toughness that has since weathered and triumphed over the set-backs of the sixties and seventies.

The future cannot be predicted but my guess is that Whittaker Chambers would have sounded Cassandra-like warnings during the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall and would not have been surprised by the battles we have to fight now.

No, this is not Tory Historian reporting from abroad, at least not physically so, but Tory Historian writing about conservative thinking in other countries’ history. Among these, possibly the most interesting is the case of Russia and its conservative thinkers, who have ranged from extreme theocrats to liberal conservatives like the legislator Mikhail Speransky (1772 – 1839) or the historian Boris Chicherin (1828 – 1904).

Both these gentlemen advocated as kind of rechsstaat for Russia. Their view was, and they were almost a century apart, that western-style liberal democracy was not appropriate for that country but the existing autocracy was undesirable.

The aim was a structure that was not parliamentarian but in which the rulers were subject to the law of the land. As Professor Richard Pipes, the pre-eminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, said in a recent talk he gave at the GB-Russia Society, that structure has not yet been achieved in Russia and was still highly desirable. He did not think we would see it in the immediate future.

Professor Pipes has maintained for some time that the West has a skewed idea of Russian intellectual development because it has concentrated on the liberals and the radicals – possibly a more glamorous cohort and one that has managed to install its views into Western consciousness since the 1870s.

Most recently, this fascination turned up in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant and tragic trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia”.

Tory Historian’s own view that a good deal of trouble has come from Sir Isaiah Berlin, who first popularized Herzen and his successors in the West in the twentieth century. This was real popularization. No university course on Russian history managed to get by without studying Russian Radical Thought. And Sir Isaiah’s admiration prevailed. He ignored the nastier aspects of that thought and concentrated on what he saw as the nobility of the struggle. Our perceptions of Russian history are still coloured by that.

There is more, says Professor Pipes.

In the West it is thought that Russia is a radical country. When I was at Harvard in 1948 we heard Isaiah Berlin lecture on Russian intellectual history; in time, Isaiah Berlin became a good friend of mine. Of course, his principal hero was Alexander Herzen, but others were Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and people like that.

He never lectured on the conservatives, and now we have a new play by Tom Stoppard called “The Coast of Utopia” which deals entirely with these people. But these people had minimal influence on the course of Russian history; if they did, it was in a very negative way by frightening the government and causing it to repress.

The course of Russian history for hundreds of years was determined by conservatives and there is virtually no one who deals with that subject, which is why I have made it my job to study Russian conservative thought and see how it influenced Russian thinking.

Tory Historian has not had much time recently to blog but this will be rectified from now on. And the first thing to be written about is the RSC’s production of “Henry V”, seen at the Roundhouse on Saturday.

The RSC’s sequence of the Histories or Chronicles, from Richard to Richard, comes with high praise from two seasons in Stratford and the Roundhouse, nowadays a venue mostly for rock concerts, has been turned into a copy of the Courtyard Theatre. The tickets have been flying out of the box office.

Tory Historian was intending to see the whole series in order in May but found that the “Henry V” of that week-end had sold out. So it had to be seen out of order, which does not matter so much for this play as it is a stand-alone one, despite the tiresome Chorus, who comes in at the end to mute the celebrations of victory and Henry’s marriage to the French Princes Katharine by reminding the audience that in “Henry VI” they will see all that our hero has achieved being frittered away and the country descending into chaos.

If one compares the play with the glorious Olivier film it is the Chorus that makes it much duller. Sadly, he is there in the original and was largely cut out of the film. A tiresome theatrical business and one that is not entirely comprehensible. So far as Tory Historian recalls, “Henry V” is the only play in which Shakespeare used this convention.

Otherwise, the play stands up well to the comparison, not least because of the acting. Geoffrey Streatfield, as Henry, is excellent. We may well be seeing one of the great Shakespearian actors of the generation here and one does not say that lightly.

He is a much more tense Henry than Olivier was, less broody but quicker to give in to his temper, which is only imperfectly controlled. He is also more aware of the reality behind his throne. Made during the war, Olivier’s film could not allow such doubts to be voiced, so the prayer before the battle had to be shortened. The words about not wishing to meet his Maker yet to answer for his father’s and his own crimes against the true King of England were cut out. (After all, a three and a half hour long play cannot be translated into a film easily without extensive cuts.)

Streatfield’s Henry is always aware of how his father came by the crown, which has descended to him. He is reluctant to wear it, leaves it behind several times and when it is brought to him, shies away. When wooing Katharine he very deliberately takes it off and gives it to the lady-in-waiting to hold. This is a strong and heroic character that is, nevertheless, full of worry and doubt. The knowledge that he will die young and not fulfil his potential is so much more poignant.

There is much more to say about the play and the comparisons one can make with that superb film but it will have to be left to another posting. Perhaps, as once before, it will be possible to draw together several strands through several pieces on this blog; and, perhaps, there will be contributions on the subject from our readers.

Details of the next two CHG meetings have been confirmed.



MONDAY 21 APRIL 6.30pm
Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood Speech 40 Years On
Speakers: Simon Heffer & Nicholas Hillman
Venue: Thatcher Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons

TUESDAY 17 JUNE, 6.30pm
Lloyd George & His Women
Speaker: Ffion Hague
Venue: Thatcher Room, Portcullis House, House of Commons



As a special inducement, there will be a new edition of the Conservative History Journal available by the June meeting.

There is no need to be upset by the death of an 84 year old man who has achieved much in his life, was greatly respected by millions of people around the world and who has given great pleasure to many millions.

For all of that Tory Historian was sad to hear a few days ago that the great Charlton Heston had entered into the last stages of Alzheimer's and even sadder to find this morning news of his death. Dirty Harry at Libertas gives a wonderful obituary so we need to add nothing more except to say that Heston was a true conservative - a believer in freedom and the constitution. He was also a man who was prepared to fight for what he believed in even if it threatened his career or made him a pariah in Hollywood. What a difference between that stand and that of people who prance around calling themselves courageous while repeating trendy slogans.