Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga - Spectator Coffee House, October 12, 2020

Bruce Gilley and the ‘problems of anti-colonialism’ saga
By Patrick West


Most of us are familiar with the climate of censure and censorship we now live in. People are 'cancelled' and 'no-platformed' for having inappropriate opinions on matters of race and gender, and reprimanded for using the wrong pronoun when referring to transgender men and women. But there are worrying signs that this tendency to shut down those with the 'wrong views' has strayed into the world of books and publishing.

Bruce Gilley, an Oxford-educated professor, is being cancelled for the second time in three years, having a book withdrawn after an online campaign against him. 'The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empire' was due to be the first volume in a 'problems of anti-colonialism' series. Now it won't see the light of day: the book has been scrapped following a petition set up by a Maoist philosopher, calling on publisher Rowman & Littlefield to rethink its decision to release the book. According to Gilley, who was first targeted by campaigners unhappy at his 2017 paper 'The Case for Colonialism', the 'snowballing' of the petition online was enough for the project to be ditched without explanation.

Gilley is not alone. In July, historian David Starkey said sorry after saying in an interview that slavery was not akin to genocide as 'so many damn blacks' had survived. He was right to apologise. But doing so was not enough. As a result of his comment, and the furore that ensued, HarperCollins said it would no longer publish any more of his books. This came a few months after Hachette dropped plans to publish Woody Allen's memoir Apropos of Nothing, following accusations that he molested his daughter as a child (which he denies).

But while there are, of course, plausible arguments to be made criticising Gilley, Starkey and Allen, I can't be alone in thinking it a pity that their writings may no longer see the light of day. While Starkey's recent comments were wrong, his work on the Tudors has been vital to our understanding of this period in England's history. Should we not be able to learn from his knowledge, even if we don't agree with everything he says?

As for Gilley, while his arguments against colonialism go against the grain of mainstream academic opinion, should he not be entitled to make the argument as to why, for all the bad things that happened under colonialism, there were upsides? After all, isn't the purpose of a good book to challenge our assumptions, rather than to simply confirm what we thought all along?

Yet in the world of publishing, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two hurdles an author must overcome to get their work published. Firstly, it must be good enough. Fair enough. And secondly, the author must hold the right opinions and say the right things. Even high-profile authors are not immune to the second of these criteria. This summer, several staff members at Hachette threatened to down tools and refuse to work on Rowling’s new book, ‘The Ickabog’, because they didn't like all of her views. On that occasion, the publisher admirably stuck up to those staff members. Yet authors without the loyal following Rowling has are more vulnerable to these attempts at silencing writers.

And while the Twitter mob might not like it, the merits of publishing Rowling are clear: her latest novel which was attacked for being 'transphobic' has since shot to the top of the bestseller charts. So although some publishers are clearly fearful of the mob, toeing the line out of fear and expedience of the financial consequences should they be accused of racism or sexism, more need to take up the old newspaper mantra: publish and be damned.

Trekking - The TLS, September 25, 2020

 

 WALKING THE GREAT NORTH LINE 

From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to discover the mysteries of our ancient past 

ROBERT TWIGGER 

320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20. 

The route Robert Twigger takes in this rambling adventure may seem unconventional, but it is guided by a neat idea. One day, having noticed that a straight line from Hengistbury Head in Dorset to Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast passes through no fewer than forty-two sites stretching back to prehistory – including Old Sarum, Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor – he sets out on a pilgrimage along this novel pathway. A question forever hovers in the background: does this alignment exist by accident, or by design? 

Luxuriating in the quotidian aspects of walking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, Twigger sees his trek as a homage to the ancients, to “my freedom to do as I pleased, sleep and walk where I pleased. And freedom also includes not paying for things that are ours by rights, by the rights of ancient England”. “I was fondly hoping to develop ideas about England’s ‘primitive’ past”, he writes, “and to point out that ancient man was just as intelligent as us.” 

Part poet, part pub philosopher, he is sometimes friendly and open, discussing Jack Kerouac with fellow trekkers, for example; at other times, he is a misanthrope who enjoys being alone and unhappy, mired in bad weather, suffering from blisters and getting lost. In perhaps an accidental allusion to the eternal monomyth, he seems to be on his own Hero’s Journey: he grows dispirited as he zigzags through the Peak District, facing false starts, disenchantments and deliverances – he is frustrated by barbed wire and blocked passages, but elsewhere discovers an “island with a single small oak ... made for a great seat, a regal seat, a poet warrior’s seat” – while repeatedly vowing never to forget the pain of walking. 

An inveterate grumbler, Twigger is seldom a bore, however, and this melancholy, elegiac and meandering book is strangely satisfactory. It doesn’t matter that the original conceit, the supposed line from north to south, retreats into irrelevance (Twigger reluctantly concedes that he “had a correlation. Nothing more”), it is just good to be in his company as he walks and reflects on such esoteric subjects as shamanism, Continental philosophy, church porches, land ownership, autobiography, family history and the stressful and sometimes soul-destroying nature of modernity. 

Patrick West

England’s soft underbelly - The Critic, August 5, 2020

England’s soft underbelly

Patrick West reviews The Channel, by Charlie Connelly


The English Channel occupies a strangely ambivalent position in the national mythology of England. On the one hand, it stands for the indefatigability of the nation, the ultimate moat that has protected this sceptred isle from being successfully invaded by a foreign army in nearly a thousand years. On the other hand, it has been viewed as England’s soft underbelly, the potential means through which this country could be overrun by foreigners: concerned coverage of illegal immigrants crossing it in recent years betrays this latter concern.

As a resident of Deal at the eastern mouth of the Channel, Charlie Connelly will be familiar with constant local television news coverage of immigrants and asylum-seekers trying to make their way from Calais to Dover (I, too, live in Deal). Hence East Kent residents can tend to be more overtly patriotic, or certainly vigilant as to the numbers of incomers from the continent.

It was on Walmer Beach in Deal, after all, where Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain took place in 55BC (his original plan to land at Dover was foiled by fierce resistance of the natives; few things change). Yet later Celts and then Anglo-Saxons were far more likely to view the Channel as a positive conduit of communication: “The notion of the Channel as a moat cutting us from the foreigners across the water is a recent development, dating back roughly as far as the eighteenth century.” The medieval scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth enthused how the “straits of the south” would “allow one to sail to Gaul”.

While Connelly adroitly places this stretch of water in its historical and cultural context, The Channel is for the most part a jaunty travel guide around the towns of France and Britain towards the eastern part of the water, and a multi-biographical guide to the characters who brought fame and repute to it.

The author is blessed with a bounty of characters from whom and source material from which to choose. An opening chapter, which charts the history of cross-Channel ferry crossings, cites the 1909 poem “A Channel Passage” by Rupert Brooke, in which he compared the nausea of a stormy voyage to France to his troubled love life. “The damned ship lurched and slithered,” he wrote. “Quiet and quick my cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing — you!”

Later on the author visits Brighton, a once small town originally popularised in the eighteenth century by Martha Gunn, the figure who was responsible for creating the notion that sea water and sea air were good for one’s health. Her Brighton contemporary, the physician Richard Russell, was an even more fanatical seaside devotee, instructing his patients to drink a pint of sea water at least once a day. Dr Johnson was less enthusiastic about the Sussex town, writing in 1776: “It is a country so truly desolate that if one had the mind to hang oneself in desperation at being obliged to live there it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.”

Connelly is judicious in the time and space he allots to both French and British towns. His chapter on Calais reminds us how this used to be a resort people visited, rather than just travelled through. The section on Dieppe brings more light relief, in reminding us in the nineteenth century it became a magnet for artists such as Turner, Delacroix, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Braquet and Sickert. The disgraced Oscar Wilde had a miserable time in Dieppe, with the former inmate of Reading Gaol being widely ostracised. More curiously, Ho Chi Minh worked on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry after the First World War, before returning to Vietnam in 1923.

Connelly tries to restore repute to Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the balloonist who made the first aerial crossing between England and France in January 1783, and in doing so became the first man to see Dover Castle and the walls of Calais as if they were features on a map. Connelly contrasts the brilliant Blanchard with Louis Bleriot, who became the first man to fly over the Channel 1909 by sheer luck. Bleriot was a terrible pilot, who by 1905 had already walked away from 40 crashes. Even his famous flight of 1909 did not “touch down” by Dover Castle but literally crashed down by it.

It remains just about in the national memory that Matthew Webb was the first person to swim the Channel, in 1875; he fortified himself for his feat with eggs, bacon, half a pint of beer and a jug of claret. Webb was a lousy showman who fell into penury and would die eight years later trying to swim the rapids of Niagara Falls.

A swimmer who came after him was the epitome of heroic failure, the Glaswegian Jabez Wolfe, who tried and failed to swim the Channel 22 times. Undoubtedly the saddest fate among the cast assembled here was that which befell the first woman to fly the Channel, Harriet Quimby, on 16 April, 1912. Her feat would surely have made global newspaper headlines had the Titanic not sunk the night before. She died in a plane crash in Boston less than three months later.

The Channel, The Remarkable Men and Women Who Made It the Most Fascinating Waterway in the World, by Charlie Connelly
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99

Holland Park must not fall - Spectator Coffee House, June 25, 2020

Holland Park must not fall

Patrick West


he latest victim in this summer's mania could be the name of one of London's best-known and wealthiest areas: Holland Park, in the west of the capital.

A monument in the park itself, of the 19th-century politician Henry Vassall-Fox, the third Baron Holland, was splattered with red paint on Wednesday. After, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea suggested that the park, underground station and entire district could end up being renamed.

The park and neighbourhood was named after Henry Fox, the first Baron Holland. His descendent, the third Baron, technically owned slaves and dozens of plantations in Jamaica through his wife's estate. Hence this weeks' desecration, with a cardboard sign left perched in the bronze statue's arms reading 'I owned 401 slaves.'

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea now says that the statue could be placed under review as part of a 'conversation about the figures we see in our public realm'. A spokesman said: 'In London we must oppose racism in all its forms and we fully support everyone's right to protest peacefully. The Mayor of London has launched his London-wide public realm review and we expect this to consider station names, statues and street names.'

But not for the first time among the iconoclasts and policy makers, there is a large degree of historical ignorance afoot. While Henry Vassall-Fox was indeed a plantation owner through marriage, he consistently and actively opposed slavery. As a statesman in the Lords from 1796 until his death in 1840 he helped to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself in most of the colonies as part of the 1807 and 1833 governments (Vassall-Fox was Lord Privy Seal from 1806 to 1807, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between 1830 and 1834).

The Foxes were one the most prominent Whigs of their time, and Henry was a nephew of the great Whig orator Charles Henry Fox. From an early age he imbibed his uncle's progressive politics. In 1791, Henry travelled to continental Europe, meeting Talleyrand and Lafayette in Paris, and he became a great sympathiser for French reformers and a lifelong supporter of better Anglo-French relations.

He was not merely a progressive politician – he was sometimes considered a radical. During a debate on the union with Ireland in 1800, he moved for the reconsideration of the two acts barring Roman Catholics from sitting in parliament, which, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was 'the first time Catholic emancipation had been raised.'

He became known for his many protests he entered in the House of Lords. One protest made in 1801, on a bill for suppressing rebellion in Ireland, was considered so subversive that the Lords ordered it to be struck from the record. He continued to speak for Catholic emancipation until this was realised in 1829 and he also supported bills to remove the civil disabilities of Jews. And while he did receive financial reward under the 1837 Slave Compensation Act, he had campaigned for abolition in the full knowledge that he would lose income from his plantations.

A primary school in Notting Hill Gate was named after his sister, Caroline. I attended Fox Primary School in the 1980s and grew up and lived in the Holland Park area, one road parallel to Holland Park Avenue. Back then, as is the case today, the neighbourhood was known for its affluence. But it's worth remembering that 'Holland Park' was also associated with the inner-city, left-wing politics of that era, owing to the enormous, progressive comprehensive school that bore its name.

Holland Park School, now a top-rated posh academy, was a very different prospect in the 1980s. Its intake was predominantly working-class teenagers from what were then the rough-and-ready areas of Ladbroke Grove and Shepherd's Bush. To associate 'Holland Park' entirely with slavery is to ignore the area's post-war experiment in comprehensive education and the progressive politics of the Fox dynasty.

Yes, Henry Vassall-Fox did technically own slaves, but he was far from a villain. He was a radical progressive of his time, and even today his politics would be considered liberal. In conclusion? 'Holland Park' must stay.

Borders - The TLS, May 15, 2020

THE ATLAS OF UNUSUAL BORDERS

Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities 

ZORAN NOKOLIĆ 

255pp. 

HarperCollins. £14.99. 

Given that Russia, the US and the UK have extended or threatened to harden their borders in recent years, while the EU has simultaneously sought to render its internal borders increasingly irrelevant, the matter of national boundaries remains as pertinent as ever. Although they often shift conspicuously, there have always been esoteric anomalies, and Zoran Nikolić’s engrossing guide takes readers into some truly strange territories. 

Nikolić mentions a few curiosities that the general reader might already be familiar with: the artificial Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania; the Armenian enclave of Nagorn-Karabakh, situated in Azerbaijan; and the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast. But these examples are positively conventional compared to other geographic peculiarities on parade here. These include counterenclaves such as the UAE village of Nahwa, located inside the Oman enclave of Madha, which is itself inside the UAE. Perhaps the bestknown such instance is the collection of Belgian enclaves inside the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, which themselves contain ten Dutch counter-enclaves. Here it is possible to cross a national border by moving from one end of a restaurant to the other. 

While boundary anomalies and enclaves are problematic in Cyprus, which contains pieces of land that remain part of the UK, they are less a problem in the Schengen area of Europe, where what belongs to which country increasingly doesn’t matter. The twin towns of Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany and Słubice in Poland, and Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden, are increasingly merging. The latter two reside in different time zones; as a result, it is possible for a ball to leave the ground on the border golf course in one hour and land an hour earlier. 

The reasons for such curiosities are manifold. The situation in Baarle-Nassau was the result of an accumulation of divisions, contracts and exchanges. The two islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede, separated by less than four kilometres, are a day apart because they sit on either side of the International Date Line. Pheasant Island in the Moselle River between France and Spain has changed hands more than 700 times, because a late-seventeenth century peace treaty between the countries decrees that France should own it for one half of the year and Spain for the other half. 

The book isn’t entirely satisfactory, however. The origins of the oddities often remain unclear – the reader is left in the dark as to why, for example, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast should be sovereign French territory. Nonetheless, it is on the whole a fascinating achievement from (fittingly) a former Yugoslav national.

Patrick West

The Spectator, November 17, 2018

Spiked, November 11, 2017

Remember, the past is a foreign country
It’s wrong to judge people of the past by today’s moral standards.

The Catholic Herald, September 30, 2016

The 'rational' revolution that became unhinged

The French Revolution
By Ian Davidson, Profile, £25

In the popular imagination, the French Revolution was a bloody episode that witnessed France’s dishevelled and impoverished rise up against a hated and spoilt aristocracy, whose heads they proceeded to chop off. It’s a narrative laid down by Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and the stories of the Scarlet Pimpernell, and later cemented on stage in Les Misérables. It’s a perception that Ian Davidson seeks to challenge and dismantle. 

As every schoolboy learnt, the Revolution’s origins lay in middle-class discontent. It had begun as a bourgeois protest against the inequity of the tax regime, from which the nobility had earned outrageous exemptions under the centralising reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV as a compensation for their loss of powers. Middle-class anger was also fuelled by the fact that they were effectively barred from taking posts in the army and the Church, the two traditional avenues of advancement in France. It was the muscle-flexing bourgeoisie, in the guise of the Third Estate, who forced the hand of the nobility and king. They initially sought mere reform, not revolution or regicide. 

Alas, as Edmund Burke predicted, and as history has a nasty habit of reminding us, circumstance and human avarice inevitably caused matters to spiral out of control. Louis XVI was a spineless, vacillating king who had the capacity to alienate even sympathetic factions with his dithering and lack of scruples. The French state was already in financial dire straits, and the emergency measures adopted by revolutionaries only made things worse. France happened to be hit by food shortages, antagonising the sans-culottes, whom Maximilien Robespierre mistakenly hoped to both use and contain. 

The fanatics and anti-clerical elements eventually took control. Hence, the enduring image we have today of the Revolution is that of aristocrats in tumbrils being taken to their appointment with Madame Guillotine. 

Davidson is the former Paris correspondent of the Financial Times, so it’s no surprise that The French Revolution should be written with authority, clarity and journalistic immediacy. The Revolution as remembered today, with its Terror and mass beheadings, only took place between 1793 and 1794. And even then, the Revolutionaries spoke not for France as a whole; most of the rest of the country was appalled by the increasing fanaticism and anti-clericalism of the protagonists in Paris. The counter-revolution in the Vendée of 1793, writes Davidson, was not so much an overt pro-royalist or pro-Catholic affair, as a revolt against the centralism and militant secularism found in the capital.

The frustrated and educated French middle-class, who had set the Revolution in motion, were well-versed in the philosophy of their home-grown Enlightenment, so there was always the chance that a simple reformist urge was going to assume an ideological bent. And when a movement becomes an ideology, it will inexorably drift ever more to the extremes, as protagonists each seek to prove how more pure and righteous they are. 

The worst types will always rise to the top in such scenarios – in this case, Robespierre and the awful Jean-Paul Marat. The first was a lawyer and the second a journalist. Indeed, so many of the Revolutionaries came from these two professions: the two types that are perhaps least-well suited to running a country, governed as they are by arrogance and resentment. 

The problem with the French is that they are too logical and literal-minded. That is the source of their genius, but it’s also their downfall. Shortly before his death, Robespierre famously pronounced: “Virtue, without which Terror is fatal; Terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of Virtue.” It took a special kind of embittered Frenchmen, in thrall to ideology and reason, to utter these chilling words. 

The Revolution could never settle down into the messy Anglo-Saxon compromise between monarchy, church, state and democracy. The French had to take reform to its last, logical, legalistic, rational conclusion, in which the new religion of laïcité (secularity) would trump all. This has been the poisonous legacy of the Revolution, writes Davidson, which was “for a long time disastrous for the polity and the society of France”. The rival claims between Church and state were only officially resolved in the Concordat of 1905, which enshrined laïcité, but this was less a peace treaty and more of an armistice. 

One could argue that the doctrine of laïcité continues to cast a disastrous shadow, as witnessed with the French state’s war on Islamic dress, which has backfired terribly, alienating an already volatile Islamic underclass. No wonder the Church in France doesn’t support the ban on burkinis: it has been besieged by the literal-minded, secularising militants of the French state for more than two centuries now. Why would it support what the late, somewhat enigmatic Fr Jean-Marie Charles-Roux called “the regicidal state”?

Patrick West

The Catholic Herald, June 3, 2016

An anti-Establishment take on the 1916 Rising
1916: Ireland's Revolutionary Tradition
By Kieran Allen, Pluto Press, £12.99

Perspectives on the Easter Rising tend to assume two forms these days. On the one hand, they depict and revere the 1916 insurrection as a foundation myth of the modern Irish state. On the other, they regard it as a bloody betrayal of constitutionalism which left the island physically and emotionally divided. Kieran Allen takes a third position. He believes that the events in the Dublin GPO and elsewhere throughout Ireland were indeed a blow for Irish freedom, the culmination of Ireland’s revolutionary tradition – but that this tradition was betrayed by the Irish themselves. 

Allen, previously author of Austerity Ireland, is very much of the hard leftist tradition that is antagonistic towards nationalism, religion and capitalism. He has little sympathy for today’s Irish politicians who invoke the spirit of 1916. “The current Irish state is not a product of the Rising – it owes its existence to the counter-revolution of 1923,” he writes.

The IRA and the Republican movement’s failure to support the Labour movement in the crucial years from 1916 to 1923, focusing instead solely on military strategy, fatally compromised the revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle against the British. “The Free State, however, offered its population one compensation for the dashed hopes of the revolutionary years – strict Catholic morality.” Allen speaks about religion as if it is imposed unwillingly from above, as though working-class individuals have no free will of their own. 

There is much rhetoric here, too, about “the Establishment”, “privilege” and “elites”. But the author is no Dave O’Spart and this book has many surprises. Allen demolishes the myth that the “good old IRA fought a fair, clean fight unlike the ‘terrorists’ of the Provos” between 1918 and 1923. The old IRA shot police officers in cold blood and executed informers. I didn’t know, either, that a soviet was established in Limerick in April 1919. 

We should have more books like this. For a tenured sociologist, Allen writes with a rare lucidity. And when it comes to history as blessed by politicians and the Establishment, a counter-narrative is always welcome.

Patrick West

The Catholic Herald, April 15, 2016

Review of 'The Seven' by Ruth Dudley Edwards

The Catholic Herald, April 1, 2016

The Catholic Herald, January 29, 2016

The Catholic Herald, October 16, 2015

in Spiked, October 9, 2015

The slave trade was not my fault
We can’t apologise for crimes we didn’t commit – or celebrate victories we didn't achieve.

in Spiked, June 26, 2015

Should the confederate flag come with a trigger warning?
Destroying symbols won't change the past

in The Catholic Herald, May 5, 2015

in The Catholic Herald, March 13, 2015

in The Catholic Herald, January 30, 2015

Does Ireland owe Oliver Cromwell an apology?

Cromwell was Framed: Ireland 1649

By Tom Reilly, Chronos, £14.99

Of Oliver Cromwell, Ireland’s pre-eminent historian Roy Foster once wrote: “Few men’s footprints have been so deeply imprinted upon Irish history and historiography.” It could be added, too, that no historical character has come to personify more English misrule and callousness in Ireland, not least within the nationalist narrative.

So it would take a brave soul to take to task the perception that Cromwell was villainy personified. It would be even braver for an Irishman to do so, let alone a native of Drogheda. But this has been the ambition of amateur historian Tom Reilly, who hails from the town that lives on in infamy, in which 3,000 men, women and children were butchered in 1649 at the behest of the future Lord Protector.

The fable of Drogheda, Reilly maintains, was created by Cromwell’s enemy propagandists seeking to “bind the various confederate/royalist factions together” and has been regurgitated over the centuries by Irish nationalists and republicans, and by the Church, each for their own means. Reilly dismisses the “non-primary, post-Restoration” sources of Church historians, with their “disreputable” motives and “baseless allegations”.

“To me, Cromwell was framed and I believe that this book proves it,” the author declares. “Therefore, I have a moral obligation, indeed I am duty-bound by history, to play my part in an attempt to overturn one of the greatest historical miscarriages of justice ever.” 

Although the author concedes it likely that parliamentary forces would have, and probably did, kill armed civilians, “no primary document whatsoever exists that provides details of the deaths of persons not at arms”. As a consequence, “we, the Irish nation, owe Cromwell an apology for destroying his reputation over the last 365 years”.

Reilly finds no recorded incident of strife between the military and civilian occupants of Drogheda in the two years preceding the 1649 slaughter. Rather, the New Model Army enjoyed “cordial relations with the civilian population of Drogheda”. 

He also notes that, while in 1641 there were 3,000 people living in the town, in 1659 that number had risen to 3,500. “If the civilian inhabitants had been practically wiped out, it is very unlikely that within a 10 year period the town’s population would have replenished itself.”

When Cromwell arrived in Ringsend, Co Dublin, on July 15 1649, he was “warmly welcomed by both the civilian and military populations of Dublin”. Cromwell was a fair fellow who had nothing against the Irish as a nation. 

On the contrary, on the march to Drogheda, when he discovered two of his men had stolen hens from an old woman, he had them hanged. “As for the people,” Cromwell once wrote, “what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach; but think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suffer for the same.”

Nonetheless, Cromwell was a foe of the Catholic clergy, whom he blamed for stirring the impressionable natives into insurgency in 1641. It was the Catholic Church that was to blame for the “horrid massacres”, as Cromwell put it, of that year.

The author has certainly received much attention from compatriots over the years for his attempts to rehabilitate Cromwell. Yet his revisionism would have been even more contentious, say, 50 years ago, when the nationalist narrative and the Church were mostly immune to criticism. Indeed, his invective against the Catholic Church is far from daring. It’s quite in keeping with the anti-clerical mood that has become voguish in the past 20 years in Ireland.

It’s true that history is always moulded and distorted for contemporary purposes, not least in Ireland. And it’s always valuable – imperative, even – to question orthodoxies, as Reilly has sought to do. Yet his demographic study of Drogheda is dubious. In 1641, as he himself admits, Catholics outnumbered Protestants by five to one. In 1659, the undiminished population of the town was mostly Protestant. One can only assume that some ethnic cleansing and re-settlement occurred.

Cromwell was Framed can at times be tedious, pedantic and self-regarding, with much of it written in the first person. Reilly is also over-indulgent on his subject who, he concludes, “was tender towards children ... a family man who had a high moral threshold ... acutely aware of the folly that such action would be dastardly deeds that he clearly abhorred”.

Such an obsequious assessment of a man who “only” hated Catholics and killed armed civilians sails close to the kind of   “he loved his mum” hagiography beloved of people who write about East End gangsters. Cromwell might not have been the butcher and bogeyman of legend, but he was an anti-Catholic religious fundamentalist, nonetheless. Still, for those interested in the subject, and what really happened in 1649, Cromwell was Framed is worth a peek.

Patrick West

in The Catholic Herald, October 3, 2014

 

The Middle Ages make us look uncivilised

 

We're told the medieval era was full of flat-earthers, witch-drowning and deaths by Iron Maiden. But that's pure fiction, says Patrick West

It’s customary among journalists today to describe barbaric and senseless behaviour as “medieval”, and the reaction to recent beheadings at the hands of Islamists in the Middle East has been no exception. In the Times Matthew Syed applied the word to Islamic fundamentalists’ treatment of women, while a Daily Express headline spoke of “The chilling medieval society Isis extremists seek to impose in Iraq”. Perhaps Pulp Fiction is to blame. In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Marcellus Wallace famously exclaims: “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass”, reinforcing the cliché of the Middle Ages as an era of savagery. Still, today’s hacks do history no favours by repeating this lazy and misguided stereotype.

 

If only Islam in the Middle East would return to medieval values. A thousand years ago, the Muslim world was far more civilised than Christendom, with Islamic civilisation the torchbearer in the fields of chemistry, medicine and astronomy. Though relatively backwards by comparison, Christian Europe was relatively free of ISIS-style extremism and barbarism. Religious fringe movements such the Lollards in England or the Anabaptists in Germany were either short-lived, tolerated or expelled to the New World. 

 

Islamic State-style religious extremism was not a feature of the medieval era, but rather of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. It was the 16th and 17th centuries that saw Puritanism, the Inquisition, the massacre of Huguenots and Irish Catholics, witch-drowning, the burning of heretics and holy wars across Europe. The Middle Ages were relatively civilised by comparison. Indeed, medieval Canon Law stated that witches didn’t exist.

 

Of course, journalists alone aren’t wholly to blame here. We’ve all been subject to this myth of medieval barbarism ever since the Renaissance, and Europe’s consequent desire to depict the interregnum between the Fall of Rome and its rebirth as a dank and brutish time.

 

The Victorians reaffirmed this caricature in contradistinction to their own times (albeit with a large element of romanticism – hence the Gothic Revival). They created the legend that it was common belief in the Middle Ages that the world was flat. As J B  Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth, Columbus and Modern Historians (1991) explains, the Greeks determined that the Earth was a sphere by 500 BC. Most educated European maintained this to be true thereafter. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas gave the globe’s spherical nature as a standard example of scientific truth.

 

While Aquinas did ponder in his great work “whether several angels can be in the same place at the time”, neither he nor any other medieval scholar agonised over whether how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The first reference to this comes in 1618 (by a Protestant). There was no taboo on dissection in the Middle Ages (a practice imported from the Middle East), and spices weren’t added to mask the foul taste of rotten meat: such spices from the Orient were vastly expensive and instead the practice of smoking, curing and salting was widespread. That quintessentially “medieval” torture device the Iron Maiden was an 18th-century invention, the first citation of it being in 1793.

 

The Church and monks in Ireland preserved knowledge of Roman civilisation. It was the Church that helped to establish the first universities in Bologna, Oxford and Paris. The medieval era also gave us writers that are still read today: Boethius, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarch and Machiavelli. 

 

The Church was not the censorious tyrant of Hollywood legend. As the historian David Linberg writes: “The late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led.” Again, it was later, darker era that saw the Church become more intolerant: Copernicus wasn’t persecuted in the 16th century, but Galileo, in the 17th century, was.

While some Muslims and Christians are prone to dwell on the dogmatism and brutality of the Crusades, it was these adventures in the Holy Land that brought Christendom into contact with Muslim advances in science and technology – not least with what we today call Arabic numerals. The medieval epoch was a thoroughly outward looking one. In 986AD the Icelandic seafarer Bjarni Herjólfsson was the first European to spot America, while Leif Erikson was the first to set foot on it.

 

In more recent times, film and television, from Braveheart to Game of Thrones, has perpetuated the popular misunderstanding that the Middle Ages was a time of constant fighting, bloodshed, torture and execution. In reality, the most common forms of punishment in Europe were exile, public humiliation and fines. When execution did take place it was usually through hanging rather than beheading – a fate reserved only for the nobility and rarely the public spectacle of lore. In England, medieval civilisation also saw the institution of trial by jury.

 

Of course it’s easy to swing the other way, as did G K Chesterton and 19th-century anarchists, romanticising the Middle Ages, and depicting it is as an era of agrarian simplicity, freedom, chivalry and banquets. Nevertheless, to brand something abhorrent as “medieval” is a historical hangover from the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian eras. Such arrogance and lofty thinking is particularly misplaced considering the violent world we live in today or of the horrors of the last century. That which we abhor as uncivilised and abominable should really be called “Baroque” – or perhaps “20th century”.

 

Patrick West is a columnist for spiked-online.com

in The Catholic Herald, September 12, 2014

 

The Iron Duke needed a little help from his friends

 

Patrick West on a book that shows that Britain actually had a rather minor role in the great Battle of Waterloo

Waterloo

By Gordon Corrigan

Atlantic Books, £30

 

A common complaint made by First World War historians is that our perception of that conflict has become distorted by Blackadder Goes Forth. This was the 1980s comedy that reinforced the poets’ narrative that it was a needless and horrific conflict conducted with great incompetence and callousness. Yet Blackadder was equally guilty of reinforcing another stereotype: that of the Duke of Wellington being an aloof autocrat. In Blackadder the Third, set in the Regency, Stephen Fry interprets Arthur Wellesley as a overbearing bully who enjoys thrashing his servants and duels with canon (“only girls fight with swords”), and whose guiding principle for leadership is to “shout, shout and shout again”.

 

We have read and heard much about the First World War in this centenary year. No doubt we will hear much about the Duke of Wellington – and Napoleon – next year: the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo. So it is timely to deflate some of the common misconceptions surrounding the Iron Duke and the battle itself.

 

Far from being the bellicose boor of Stephen Fry’s incarnation, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, was a cautious and conscientious figure, who was willing to be at one with his troops on the field of battle. “He planned meticulously and well understood the importance of logistics, of being able to feed, house, tend and transport an army,” writes Gordon Corrigan in Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and Its Armies. Wellington was a calm, methodical leader, and it was his consequent victorious track record in Iberia that had won him the position as head of the Anglo-Dutch army. 

 

Corrigan is eager to puncture another illusion: that Waterloo was essentially a British victory. The British were actually a minority in the Anglo-Dutch coalition of 110,000 men, which in turn was smaller than the 117,000 Prussian force. The Russians were to provide 150,000 and the Austrians close to 300,000, but by the time both were close enough to take part the fighting was over. Britain’s main contribution was £5m and the Royal Navy’s blockade. And at Waterloo, were it not for the late arrival of the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher, Napoleon might have triumphed. 

 

So how did this victory come to be perceived as a typically British affair? Hindsight and subsequent Anglo-German relations, argues Corrigan. The year 1815 marks the start of the British Century and the last throw of a French imperial era. Between the two world wars of the next century, and after the second, there was little incentive to credit the Germans with anything. Most books on Waterloo after 1945 were allegorical. In writing of the gallant, outnumbered and outgunned British holding the foe until the last, before defeating the mighty dictator and thus saving the world from tyranny, they actually spoke of a much more recent conflict.

 

Waterloo is not all historiography. Far from it. It’s an old-fashioned romp, in which the emphasis is on detail, tactics and character rather than theory or grand narrative. The lack of primary sources will disappoint the more rigorous reader and orthodox historian. But as this book is primarily a yarn, it doesn’t really matter.

 

Inevitably, the author compares and contrasts Napoleon and Wellington. Both were born in the same year in peripheral parts of their nations. Both were the product of feckless fathers and domineering mothers, and rose through sheer ability and minimum of patronage. But here the comparisons end. In contrast to the prudent Wellington, Bonaparte was a gambler and opportunist who was careless with the lives of his troops. 

 

Corrigan doesn’t, however, cast the battle as a simple duel. Blücher emerges not merely as a first-rate leader, but also as the most colourful of the three commanders: “A quaffer of copious quantities of gin and brandy, Blücher would swig coffee, munch raw onions and smoke a huge meerschaum pipe as he rode along”. 

 

We later learn of Blücher and Wellington’s first encounter after victory. With both generals on horseback, Blücher threw his arms about Wellesley then kissed him. We also discover that only 10 per cent of British officers had been commissioned from the ranks. The bulk of officers were of the middle classes, educated at grammar schools and the sons of professional men. More revealing still is the number of English and Irish Catholics in the British Army, making up 20 per cent by the time of Waterloo. This preponderance was due to the anti-Catholicism that had been institutionalised in 1688. 

 

While the ban on Catholics joining the Army was lifted in 1741, they were still debarred from holding any “office of profit under the crown”. But this wasn’t enforced in the Army, as long as they didn’t make ostentatious displays of their faith. As a consequence, the Army became one of the few outlets for a Catholic gentlemen. This legacy continues today: in 2012 Catholics made up slightly more than eight per cent of the population but 20 per cent of Army officers. So much for disloyal papists.

 

More sensitive readers might flinch at the passages on amputation, while perhaps the most appalling disclosure is that riflemen deliberately picke out drummer boys. They were deemed so important because when shouted orders were drowned out by ambient noise signals were given by the beat of a drum. 

 

The Battle of Waterloo is further demystified when we read of looters on the field in its aftermath. Wounded men who tried to resist thieves had their throats slit. 

 

Corrigan’s manner can be a bit gruff. There is a non-sequitur complaining about the RSPCA and a breezy comment about the French soldier’s predilection for rape sits uneasily. His use of “England” to mean Britain is felicitous to historical usage, but it’s just plain wrong to the modern ear. Nevertheless, Waterloo is a hugely enjoyable, illuminating and very gory read.