Blood and Freedom

This is a piece I recently had published in the English Standard under a different heading. It's attracted a bit of interest so I thought I would publish it here also, just for the record. It touches on themes that I have already raised in discussion with Nobby on my Restrain of Appeals article (25 January), though it puts the figure of Henry VIII as king in a more focused light.

At the conclusion Chapter XVIII of A Child’s History of England Charles Dickens expressed his disapproval of Henry VIII in very clear terms: “The plain truth is, that he was a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England.”

This is a view that must have coloured many little minds, for the book, which first appeared in serial form in Household Words in the early 1850s, was on the curricula of English schools right through to the Second World War. We now have a slightly more nuanced view of this Tudor giant, but the image of him as a boorish tyrant still informs a lot of popular culture. The truth, rarely pure and never simple, is that Henry in a very real sense was the first true ‘sovereign’ in English history.

I’ll clarify this point a little later but first a word or two on the context of his reign, on the political forces that shaped his style as a ruler. Yes, he was a particularly dominant figure, more so than any of his predecessors on the throne. His more tyrannical actions are explained in large parts by the shallow roots of the Tudor dynasty, planted with uncertainty after a long and bloody dynastic war. It could be dangerous to be alive in his reign, chiefly for those unfortunate enough to have a better claim to the throne, something they were well-advised to keep quiet about.

Henry had one overriding obsession: to secure the future of his line and, in the circumstances of the time, he believed it essential that he had a son. A daughter simply would not do. We can look forward to the reign of Elizabeth, one of the most successful monarchs ever, but Henry could only look back to the example of Matilda, the daughter and heir of Henry I, whose rightful claim was usurped by her cousin Stephen, a preamble to a lengthy civil war.

When Henry came to the throne England had two separate legal systems – the common law of the land and the canon law of the church. Two sets of laws meant two sets of courts, with the ultimate arbiter in all matters affecting canon law being the Vatican. This included all family law, issues pertaining to wills and, of course, marriage and divorce. This was the basis of Papal power in England, which by the early middle ages was considerable.

Although Henry had several children by his first queen, Catherine of Aragon, only their daughter Mary had survived infancy. By the 1520s, on the threshold of middle age, he believed it imperative that the marriage to Catherine, no longer capable of bearing children, be dissolved. An appeal had to be made to Rome. It might have been a relatively simple matter but for one thing – the pope of the day, Clement VII, was in the power of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who just happened to be Catherine’s nephew. The ensuing English Reformation began, therefore, as a matter of dynastic politics.

I hinted above that prior to the reign of Henry English kings had never been fully sovereign. The country, like today, was part of a wider union, subject to the authority of the Universal Church. It was a dangerous thing for an English king to challenge the power of the pope, as Henry II and his son John discovered to their cost.

There is much debate in the press today about the repatriation of powers from Europe, with Prime Minister David Cameron making vague nods in this general direction. But Henry did not talk; he acted. Exasperated by the delays caused in the settlement of his marital affairs, he effectively brought to an end the duality in English law; he ended the power of Rome.

With the aid of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister at the time, Parliament was persuaded to pass the Act of Restraint of Appeals in 1533, a measure I touched on here earlier this year. This had the effect of ending all appeals to Rome, allowing matters to be settled on the spot, declaring to the world that England was an empire, not subject to the rule of a foreign princes or courts

This Act is one of the most significant in English history, going far beyond offering Henry, as head on an independent English Church, a way of breaking the Roman logjam. It was a declaration of political sovereignty, an Act of Parliament rather than a royal proclamation. It was so successful that even during the Catholic reaction of Henry’s daughter, Mary, it was never repealed. For all her orthodoxy Mary remained Supreme Head of the Church, effectively the Pope in England. There were no more appeals to the Papal Curia, no more foreign laws.

Now think of us today, think of the steady erosion of our national sovereignty, think of us subject to the legal vagaries of the European Court of Human Rights, which recently ruled that we could not deport a foreign terrorist, a man with no connection to this country, a man who is a positive threat to our national security.

History has been reversed. We are far more in thrall to the new Roman power than we ever were to the old. How I admire the audacity of Bluff King Hal. For me he is not a blot of blood and grease on the history of England. He is, rather, an avatar of freedom.

The Price of Freedom

I’ve been keeping a close eye on political events in Egypt, an interest spurred by my visit to the country last November. Some news I get via email from people I met while I was there, people with hopes of a better future, mired ever deeper in doubt, especially now that the Islamists have come out of the parliamentary elections as the dominant force, commanding two-thirds of the representation.

A presidential election is scheduled for sometime this year but in the meantime the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) remains in control. The generals may eventually slip into the background, but I don’t think the military will ever relinquish power; I don’t think it will ever give up its role as king maker, one that it has held ever since Nasser’s coup in 1952.

On the streets, still punctuated with violent discontent, the word is that the very models of modern major generals have struck up a clandestine deal with the Islamists. In parliament the liberals, those with the confidence of the street protesters, are fighting a kind of gallant rear guard action. Legislation has been proposed that that would exclude the army from oversight of any future elections. I guess it’s unlikely to succeed, unless the Freedom and Justice Party, the main Islamist force, decide to break their links with the soldiers

The real victim here in the complex game of political poker is Egypt’s ancient but vulnerable minority of Coptic Christians. Incidents of sectarian violence, in part encouraged by the military, have been steadily increasing since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak last year. Under attack from the extremist Salifist movement, with the army offering intermittent protection at best, the community is going through one of the most apprehensive stages of its history. There is little doubt that they are being singled out as a scapegoat. Thousands have left the country; millions have no choice but to remain.

Freedom is not for free, said one of the banners held up in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year. How ironic it is that the secularist dictatorships, the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, the last still holding on, offered the greatest protection to the Christians of the Middle East. Now the Copts are indeed discovering that freedom is not for free. It has a price, one being negotiated at their expense.

Blair was Bush’s Barney

No sooner had I seen one movie about a British Prime Minister when along comes another! Actually, The Ghost, directed by Roman Polanski and based Robert Harris’ novel of the same name (he also wrote the screenplay), pre-dates The Iron Lady by more than a year. I haven’t read the novel so I had no compelling reason to go and see the movie and one compelling reason against – I’m really not that keen on Ewan McGregor as an actor. It was a close friend who urged me to watch it and I’m so glad she did.

It works perfectly; a lean, taught and brooding thriller. It’s not just in the story line, descending ever deeper into a sense of menace, but the general atmosphere, the setting and the unrelenting bleakness of the weather. Most of it is supposedly set in Martha’s Vineyard (actually it’s Germany’s even bleaker Baltic coast), though the upmarket resort seems more akin to a wind-swept Devil’s Island! The devil it contains is a certain Adam Lang, a former British Prime Minister, played with languid elegance by Pierce Brosnan, another actor I had mistakenly considered to be largely second rate.

If you’ve seen it you will know exactly who Lang is based on, even so far as his Scottish-derived name – this is a portrait of Tony Blair. We have him in all of his slick, cosmopolitan shallowness; glib, insincere and somehow unreal. It’s good to have Brosnan in the part, not even pretending to have a British accent, because it makes the rootlessness of the real thing all the more believable.

Lang may have been the great deceiver as PM but he wants his place in history. He writes his memoirs, only he can’t write for toffee; his words are as leaden as the weather. So into the picture comes Ewan McGregor, a professional ghost-writer only ever named as the Ghost. He is the Ghost of a Ghost, in that the previous Ghost died under mysterious circumstances.

Into Lang’s world Ghost is thrown, with troubles from the outset. The manuscript of Lang’s memoirs is kept locked away in a seafront house, a modernist pile that makes Hitler’s bunker look cosy by comparison. Here he meets Lang’s personal assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall) and his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), soon to experience all the latent tension between the two. The latter, in one of the best lines in the film, describes the whole setting as being like Shangri-La in reverse.

No sooner has the writer begun his task, and met his disagreeable client, than the problems begin. There are problems in the memoir, shot through not just with bad prose but inconsistencies and contradictions. There are problems in the wider world, where Lang finds himself in danger of being indicted for war crimes; and here we are dealing with matters pertaining to rendition and torture.

There is a deep sense of foreboding to the whole thing, a mystery never quite explained, a truth never quite attained. Polanski, himself in exile, directs with commensurate skill, creating a a toxic mix of character and situation. One simply knows there is no happy ending to come.

There is certainly no happy ending for the Ghost. To kill one Ghost is a misfortune; to kill two looks like carelessness! The poor chap, mowed down in the street, got far too close to the truth of Lang’s shady and disreputable past. I could not help thinking of the real-life Doctor David Kelly, whose ‘suicide’ was triggered after he supped too close to a coterie of devils. Ghost uncovers evidence that shows why Lang, when Prime Minister, slavishly followed an American line in international affairs; why, to slip from fiction to fact, Blair was really Bush’s dog. Come to think of it, Barney was a Scottie too!

The Ghost is both an enjoyable thriller and a parody, a send-up of Tony Blair and all his works by Harris (clearly a man disabused of an illusion), who consigns him and his awful wife to a kind of hell. I personally can see Blair and Cherie in Celebrity Big Brother, one that never ends, one from which there is no egress. That should be their Sartre-like fate: No Exit! Do I think Blair’s own memoir, A Journey, was ghosted? No, it’s too badly written for that.

Bad Hair Day

How much do you think was spent in ‘liberating’ Iraq? Personally I have no idea but I guess it was an astronomical figure. Then there are the lives, the people that cannot be replaced. I remember a few years ago the parents of a British officer killed in one of the many terrorist incidents that followed the ‘liberation’ of 2003 comforting themselves that his death was not in vain, that he had died, as they put it, ‘helping the people of Iraq’. We helped the people of Iraq alright, Britain and America; we helped to take them from the first to the ninth circle of hell.

This brave new ‘democracy’ isn’t often in the news at the moment. We hear of the occasional terrorist outrage but not much more. But the outrages are not just perpetrated by Al-Qaeda operatives; they are also perpetrated at the behest of the state in acts of medieval barbarism.

Last month Iraq’s interior ministry decided that a haircut was worthy of death. Well, that’s been the practical result of the announcement that the ‘emo’ style was a sign of devil worship, one that the country’s ‘Moral Police’ (yes, they do have a ‘Moral’ police force) has pledged to eliminate. In the wake of this some ninety students have been stoned to death by religious extremists. It’s all part of a wider campaign against people who have adopted what officials call ‘strange’ or Western appearances.

Recently armed men in civilian clothing kidnapped dozens of teenagers judged abnormal in appearance. Taken to secluded spots, they were then stoned to death, their bodies disposed of in garbage dumpsters across Baghdad, according to information given by activists to the Cairo-based al-Akhbar website. The details are grim. One individual who managed to escape says that concrete blocks were first thrown at the victim’s arms, then his legs and finally his head. If death does not ensue the whole process is repeated.

I read an article in the Sunday press, saying that the ‘Moral Police’ have been granted permission by the Ministry of Education to enter schools in the capital to pinpoint students bold or foolhardy enough to adopt an emo look. The suspicion is that the authorities and the extremists are working in harmony in acts of fashion genocide. The victims are young, teenagers mostly. People have been arrested not just because of their haircuts but for something as trivial as wearing jeans.

Yes, that’s the brave new Iraq, a country with forms of murderous intolerance that would have shocked the Spanish Inquisition. Saddam Hussein was bad but what has followed seems to me to be so much worse. My, how we have ‘helped’ the people of Iraq; how well-spent or money was; how well-sacrificed the lives of our soldiers.

The Monster of the Idea

In Danton, the 1983 biopic based on the life the French revolutionary, the eponymous hero, standing on the threshold of execution, says that “Everything might go on fine if I could give my legs to that cripple Couthon and my balls to Robespierre.”

George Couthon, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, the dictatorial body that presided over the Reign of Terror, was indeed a cripple. Maximilian Robespierre, likewise a member of the Committee of Public Safety and Danton’s nemesis, was the Revolution’s virginal ascetic, the virtuous ‘sea-green incorruptible.’

Put another way: sans balls! He was not as other men; he was not as the sybaritic Danton, perfect in his imperfections. I wish I could be sure that Danton actually said those words, that they did not simply emerge as a piece of poetic licence; for they really do, in all their crudity, cut to the heart of the matter and the man; they cut to the heart of the high priest of the cult of virtue. Personally I can think of no better epitaph.

These thoughts were brought on by my reading over the weekend of Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, a new treatment by Peter McPhee, professor of history at the University of Melbourne and a specialist on France. I think I must be the last person to be reviewing a book on Robespierre, for I have no sympathy whatsoever for the subject, the first of history’s modern fanatics. I’ll try my hardest to be fair but do treat my words with a modicum of caution!

I can certainly be fair to McPhee, whose work is balanced, lucid and scholarly. Any biography of Robespierre presents difficulties because he left little in the way of personal introspection, anything that would give a clue to his psychological makeup. But the author builds up a careful portrait, drawing on what contemporary evidence is available.

The chapters on his early life and schooling are good, showing the boy as the father of the man. Robespierre was one of the brightest pupils at Louis-le-Grand, the leading school in France at the time, where he immersed himself in the Roman classicists, particularly Cicero. He also read deeply into the work of Montesquieu and Rousseau.

Virtue and what it means to be virtuous was to emerge as the leading theme of Robespierre’s life. In 1789 he wrote the duty of rulers was “to lead men to happiness through virtue, and to virtue through legislation.” There is an echo here of the American Declaration of Independence, which, among other things, defines the pursuit of happiness to be an inherent right. But America was fortunate enough to escape real definitions of happiness and how the elusive creature was to be caught; France did not. The chimera was to be conjured up in the so-called Republic of Virtue, Robespierre’s legacy to history.

The paradox is that by any measure Robespierre began as a decent human being, genuinely concerned with the various abuses suffered by ordinary people under the old political order. Though of the left he began his career as a moderate. He was opposed to the declaration of war against Austria in April, 1792, a step urged on by the Girondins, and he was initially opposed to the overthrow of the monarchy later that same year. He also argued against the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention after the political mood had turned against them. But as the climate turned radical Robespierre turned more radical. A member of the Mountain in the Convention, he was, for a time, their Mohammad.

Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death, upon which the above named movie was based, has some fascination exchanges between Danton and Robespierre. Picture the scene: it’s the spring of 1794, the height of the Reign of Terror. Danton argues that enough is enough, that the Revolution is drowning in blood. In response Robespierre says that the social revolution isn’t over yet and he who makes half a revolution digs his own grave. For him Terror had become the emanation of virtue, the only certain way that France could attain revolutionary happiness.

McPhee does a superb job in sailing through these stormy waters. He shows a man who came to believe that the destiny of the Revolution ran through his own person. For him patriotism was a black and white issue, with good revolutionaries on one side and evil counter-revolutionaries on the other. In other words, by 1794, Robespierre was no longer capable of discriminating between dissent and treason. Not even friendship got in the way. This absence of subtlety was to consume Camille Desmoulins, once his most intimate associate, insofar as this priggish man could be close to any individual.

Blind fanaticism was the corruption at the heart of virtue. The decisive moment here, the moment that foretold Robespierre’s doom, was the French victory over the Austrians at the battle of Fleurus in June 1794. All at once the military crisis had passed; France was no longer in danger; the justification for the Terror was over.

There are deeper issues here, things the author does not touch, largely, I suspect, because they are beyond the provenance of history, more a mater of philosophical and psychological speculation. What, in the end, would a true Republic of Virtue look like? Could this political Garden of Eden exist beyond the pages of Rousseau and the mind of Robespierre? My own answer is simple enough; that the Terror was to disguise the impossibility of Virtue; it was compensation for frustrated dreams of purity. As I once wrote in a review of Danton’s Death, Robespierre was the monster of the idea, a prototype for others to come. He is the one historical figure for whom I have a particular loathing. McPhee did well to steer me calmly through a rocky life.

Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony!

I wrote an article a few years ago, a comment on a ‘trending’ campaign on Twitter directed against an English journalist. I opened as follows;

I love old horror movies, really old ones, the old black and white flicks with people like Boris Karloff. I’m sure people will have seen some of the original Frankenstein movies. Quite often there are scenes of indignant mobs out with flaming torches, hunting down the monster. But that’s so old-fashioned, don’t you agree? The mob is still with us of course, but it has long since lost the torches. Now it expresses its righteous indignation on the internet, haunting down the creatures that have happened to offend, hunting in a mood of outrage; hunting like a pack.

It’s true; the mass expression of a two-minute hate (yes, the analogy is appropriate) against Joseph Kony, head of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is the latest example. Angelina Jolie has joined in, saying that she does not know anyone who does not hate Joseph Kony. All this flaming passion and outrage was sparked by Kony2012, a YouTube video broadcast last Thursday, one sponsored by a charity called Invisible Children.

The aim was to make Kony ‘famous’. This man carried out a war of terror in northern Uganda for decades, with an army made up in part of kidnapped children, an army responsible for the most nauseating atrocities. No need to make him famous, because he was already infamous. But ‘famous’ he has become in the lights of Kony2012, with over fifty million views of the video. People in the States were encouraged to put up posters in cities across the nation, thus making the fight against Kony and the LRA a matter of ‘national interest’ in Washington. That, so the film makers believe, will ensure that US military ‘advisors’ are sent to Africa to aid in the hunt for Kony.

I wonder if these people understand the potential damage they have done; I wonder if they understand anything at all about the present political situation in Uganda? Ugandan bloggers and journalists, outraged by this moral imperialism, are saying that the film may very well serve to resurrect Kony and the LRA from a long decline. Javie Ssozi, a leading Ugandan blogger, has said that suggesting that the answer is more military action is wrong.

Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.

The other thing worth pointing out is that the picture painted of Kony and Uganda by the film is six or seven years out of date. Kony is no longer in the country but hiding away in the jungles of neighbouring states. Documentary filmmakers have a responsibility to tell the truth as honestly as they can; otherwise they risk sinking into the mire of propaganda. Kony2012, with its inaccuracies and patronising view of Ugandans and Uganda, has done nothing more than whip up mass hysteria, the sort of thing that would have been understood by the yellow press of old. Remember the Maine! Remember Joseph Kony! – what’s the difference?

Do not misunderstand me; I think Kony is a boil on the backside of humanity, but this campaign is all surface and no substance; it rose quickly and it will die just as quickly, when the mob turns to some other fashionable trend. There have been people highlighting the Kony problem for years, with a lot more sobriety and a lot more effect. Sending in US troops would be like setting an elephant off in pursuit of the ants, and we surely all know the outcome with that.

Who are these Invisible Children people; what’s their motivation? Is it altruism, a concern for suffering humanity? No, the organisation seems to be a money-spinning operation feeding off pure emotion. I read in the Telegraph that of over $9million it spent in 2001 less than half went on helping people on the ground. The rest apparently went on “awareness programmes and products”, as well as management and media; in other words, a lot of self-promotion.

A spokesman for the Ugandan government, also pointing out that the war is no longer in the country, said that Kony2012 (it really should be Kony2006) is creating a wholly misleading impression, allowing Invisible Children to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda. It’s clearly been a great success, playing on emotions rather than reason. But it really is time for the hate fest to end.

An English Faust

I’m completely beguiled by witchcraft and magic, by the search for deeper, sometimes darker, forms of knowledge and understanding. I’ve read deeply into lots of sources, including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum – the Hammer of the Witches, a medieval treatise based on misconception and misunderstanding, but one that was to have dire consequences for so many people, particularly women. I’m captivated also by the Faust legend, another dangerous quest.

There is an odd ambiguity in the medieval and early modern understanding of witchcraft and magic. Witchcraft was disapproved of as malevolent magic, though magic, in the form of alchemy, was a reasonably respectable if occasionally risky occupation. It would have been lethal for a woman to set herself up as an alchemist or a magus, for the simple reason that accusations of witchcraft and demonology would quickly follow. Men were on slightly more certain territory, though they, too, were in danger of slipping over boundaries. It was all a matter, you see, of perception…and politics!

Dr Faustus is the stuff of legend; but Dr John Dee is the stuff of English history. His is a fascinating story, one that embraces science and magic, high politics and low comedy. It’s a story long waiting to be told in full. Now it has, admirably, by Glynn Parry in The Arch-Conjurer of England: John Dee.

Conventionally Dee was a scientist living in Tudor England, a man with a brilliant scholarly mind who set off in pursuit of some rather dubious notions. He really stands on the cusp of a great change, a time when superstition, giving way to reason, was still fighting a determined rearguard action. In a profession like his one really needed powerful protectors to avoid accusations of black magic, and as Glynn shows, Dee’s protectors included some of the most powerful in Elizabethan England. His patrons went as high as the Queen herself, taking along William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, her chief minister, and Francis Walsingham, her spy master, on the way.

Dee claimed to be able to foretell the future, a skill particularly desired by those in power. He also had a practical political use as a kind of counter-magus! In 1558 when Elizabeth came to the throne in succession to her Catholic sister, Mary, there were many dangers for the nascent Protestant queen. In France Nostradamus, the court magician of Catherine de Medici, predicted all sorts of dire things for England. Dee was hired to give a different spin and cast a better horoscope!

Dee was clearly a reasonably astute politician himself, at least on occasion. His best ‘prophecies’, in other words, were tailored to support policy drifts, which included casting positive auspices on Robert Dudley’s campaign in support of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish, and Cecil’s campaign against the perceived Catholic threat. This was wizardry as a handmaiden to statecraft!

Alas, poor Doctor Dee, astute but not astute enough. He slipped and slipped badly - he made one political contact, one magical contact and one prediction too far. The political contact was a disreputable Polish nobleman by the name of Albrecht Laski. Believing that this man was favoured by the Queen, Dee then hired one Edmund Kelley, a ‘scryer’ who claimed to be able to talk to angels, to back up his prophecy that Laski would be king of Poland. Here Dee took his eye off the political ball; for the player to watch was not Elizabeth but Burleigh, who had no intention of advancing the Catholic Laski’s political ambitions. Down came the house, magic and all.

Now on Continental exile, Dee’s story slips from Faustian tragedy to Rabelaisian comedy. The fraudulent Kelley persuaded him that the only way for him to retain his magical powers was for the two to indulge in a spot of wife swapping. Dee agreed, sufficient proof, if any is needed, that even the most sophisticated minds are not free from risible forms of folly.

Parry has done splendid work in placing Dee, the man, the myth and the magic, in the wider stage of Elizabethan court politics. It explains why his little vessel was subject to such vagaries, moved along in one direction or another by changes in the wind. He also proves one thing that I’ve long believed – that innocence often goes hand in hind with scholarly curiosity, and, goodness, what an innocent Dee was.

There was one nugget of information which I fount wholly delightful. It was Dee who coined the term ‘British Empire’, though with all of his other prophecies this showed no great prescience on his part. His British Empire grew from the spurious contention that King Arthur, no less, had once planted colonies in the Americas. I can just see it - an Elizabethan Englishman in the Colonial Court of King Arthur!

Parry has brought our home-grown Faust out of the shadows. His scholarly efforts are commendable, and weighty. I could only wish that he had carried them a tad more lightly; the long passages from Dee’s own writings are crushingly dull. Still, if you are interested in the occult and the place of prediction in politics, if you are interested in the highs and the lows of an Elizabethan life, then I think you will enjoy this book. I did.