Arise, King Dick

So now we know: the skeleton found under a municipal car park at the end of last summer really is the long lost King Richard III.  I certainly share the excitement of the archaeological team from the University of Leicester: this is indeed one of the most significant finds in recent English history, finally putting to rest a mystery half a millennium old.  DNA testing, according to investigators, puts it “beyond reasonable doubt that the individual exhumed at Grey Friars in September 2012 is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.”

I’m really am so pleased for them.  What academic would not kill for a coup like this?  It’s also pleasing that a story from English history has hit the headlines, displacing the usual tripe about talentless celebrities, even if for only the briefest of moments.  Richard Taylor, Leicester University’s deputy registrar, can be excused a spot of hyperbole – “Today we bear witness to history.”  What tremendous publicity! 

Richard was killed on 22 August, 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the Plantagenets then giving way to the Tudor parvenus.  The skeleton found in Leicester carries mementos of a fairly gruesome death, bearing ten wounds in all, eight of them to the head.  The spine also shows an abnormal curvature, proving in part Shakespeare’s contention that Richard was “deformed, unfinished”, though not nearly quite as extreme as the full description given in Richard III. 

He was only thirty-two when he died, after a mere two years on the throne, a throne he had usurped from his nephew, Edward V.  The latest plan is that his remains are to be interred at Leicester Cathedral, though some Conservative member’s of parliament have suggested that he be given a state funeral. 

My, my, this is a tricky one, given that on the balance of probability Richard was responsible for the death of Edward and his younger brother, Richard, duke of York, the tragic little princes who disappeared into the Tower of London in the summer of 1483, never to be seen again.  I can’t imagine that any of our modern royal family would welcome a state occasion given the blackness of the record.  Still, the past is the past and Richard, for all his perceived faults, was king of England.

I have to confess to being initially quite lukewarm about the Leicester investigation.  For an academic project I thought there were too many assumptions and far too much speculation.  These things are best treated in a low-key and cautious way.  But it made all the difference, I suppose, not least to the funding, that the archaeological investigation is to be the subject of a telly splash.

Ah, well, such is the reality of modern academia, almost invariably strapped for cash.  If the publicity served a greater good, so much the better.  My greater concern was the involvement of the Richard III Society in the whole project. This would be a bit like involving Doctor Goebbels in a hunt for the remains of Hitler.  Yes, this Society is a partisan organisation, absurdly so.  Richard, for them, is more sinned against than sinning.  For them the real villain of the story is his successor, Henry VII.

The involvement of this Society has come dangerously close to damaging the impartiality of the Leicester team.  From the outset they were determined to advance their own agenda.  For them the discovery of Richard would end the “enormous disparagement” of his reputation.  In what way, one has to ask?  Do bones speak?  Do they proclaim their innocence of past accusations?  I’m tempted to think that some might believe so.  All they tell us, all they can tell us, is that the King’s alleged crookbacked deformities were based on an exaggerated caricature, deformed in shape, deformed in nature.  But few serious historians would have been seduced by the legend.  Hunchbacks, with withered arms, as I wrote last year, do not generally ride into battle.

I’ve said previously that I’ve never quite understood why Richard, who ruled for only two fairly disastrous years, has excited such fascination.  He was a bad king, a bad politician and an appalling strategist.  But for his miscalculations the Lancastrian cause, comprehensively defeated in the so-called Wars of the Roses (it was the Scot Scott who gave it that title) may itself have been buried forever. 

His fall began with a crime - the murder in the Tower.  Oh, there is little doubt about that, despite the objections of the Richardians, as anyone who has the least knowledge of medieval records, like Close Rolls and Pipe Rolls, will confirm. 

These documents are an exhaustive account of royal grants and expenditure, mention often being made of the most politically insignificant people.  The Princes are there, at least until the summer of 1483, when they vanish altogether from the record, receiving no further mention.  To save himself, and to completely undercut Henry Tudor in 1485, Richard only had to produce them in public.  He could not.  He was Macbeth and they were the ghosts at his feast. 

Still, for all that, it’s a great find.  Well done, Leicester, well done the Raiders of the Lost King.  Perhaps you might now take the trouble to find him a horse.  There is a kingdom at stake.  

Richard reconstructed

England’s Odd Couple

  

 I recently watched on BBC iPlayer the third part of Simon Schama’s interesting documentary on the history of Britain, though this particular instalment was entirely devoted to English affairs.  Specifically it focused on the turbulent relationship between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Chancellor of England, Archbishop of Canterbury and eventual saint. 

I admire Schama, a reasonably decent telly historian.  Unfortunately the telly history format inevitably lends itself to silly sound bites and glib judgements.  There was one point in the narrative where the glibness was beyond silly.  It came in the aftermath of the infamous 1170 murder of Archbishop Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. 

“All our modern instincts”, the historian said, “seem to say, oh, come on, look at Henry and you find reality; the guardian of the common law, the engineer of government, the smasher of anarchy…and you’d be quite wrong.  Becket, headstrong, infuriating, over the top theatrical Becket made a huge difference.  His view of the church lasted; the Angevin Empire did not.”

Alas, Mister Schama, it is you who are quite wrong, blindingly so!  Yes, of course, the Angevin Empire, that collection of dynastic estates that stretched from England’s northern border all the way south to the Pyrenees, is long gone, but so, too, is Becket’s view of the church.  It was Henry’s view that prevailed, not that of the arrogant archbishop.

Let’s be clear about what we are dealing with here.  Oh, how I resent the skewed view of English history that over amplifies the eighth Henry over the second, a figure now virtually unknown aside from his relationship with Becket.  Henry was, in my estimation anyway, the most significant king in English history.  He was not so much the guardian as the architect of our common law.  He was certainly the great engineer of government and the smasher of anarchy.

And now Becket, what did he represent exactly?  It’s best that you free your mind from any notion that the twelfth century struggle between crown and mitre was over any deep principle of faith; that it represented a desire for religious freedom over state power.  It did not. 

England then had two laws; the law of the land and the law of the church.  Henry saw no reason why churchmen should enjoy extraordinary privileges not extended to others.  Clerics at the time, even those accused of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape, were much more leniently treated by their own courts.  We have seen, by modern example, to what ends the church will go in protecting its own.

For Becket martyrdom was the ultimate goal, the ultimate political gesture.  It certainly secured the ‘liberty’ of the church for centuries after his death – though at the cost of a growing national mood of anti-clericalism - until another Henry appeared.  Becket, as a saint, may have been a heavenly success but in the long run his cause was an earthly failure.  He most assuredly did not make a huge difference.  In the end his shrine, along with his principles, vanished in the Reformation.  Even Charles I, the only Anglican martyr, who also sacrificed himself on a point of religious principle, considered him a traitor. 

Bullying and brutal Henry may have been, but he was simply trying to redress a balance, strengthening a state that had lost so much ground during the Anarchy of Stephen and Matilda.  An over-mighty church was as bad as an over-mighty subject.  Becket, the great commoner, had the misfortune to combine both dangers.  He may have been a good subject of the Pope, but he was a bad subject of the king.  Becket, if you like, represented an extraterritorial power.  Henry represented England.  

Raiders of the Lost King

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle…and buried under council car parks.  This, according to recent speculation, was the fate of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, killed at the Battle of Bosworth in August, 1485.  Now archaeologists working in Leicester say that they may be close to finding his remains, under the said municipal car park. 

Actually what they are really saying is that they may have found part of a Franciscan foundation known as Greyfriars – dissolved and destroyed during the Reformation - , where the monarch may have been buried after his naked body had been gawped at for several days after death. 

While I have no desire to criticise the team headed by Professor Richard Buckley of Leicester University (nonsense, I do!) it all seems a tad premature.  Yes, OK, it attracts attention, though not in the best archaeological tradition.  Well, maybe we are playing at Raiders of the Lost King. 

At the risk of being accused of academic snobbishness there seems to me to be a strong element of wishful thinking and pop archaeology here, not really that surprising in that the dig is to be featured in a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary. 

On reflection that might not be that bad – after all Time Team, a Channel 4 show, is pop archaeology at its best – but for the fact the Richard III Society is also involved in this sack him up project. 

Now, the Richard III Society, as you may very well know, has an agenda, not one, I have to say, that is politically or academically disinterested.  No, for them Richard is a much misunderstood man, a black villain only in Tudor propaganda, the wicked hunchback of Shakespeare’s fertile imagination.  Their man, rather, is more sinned against than sinning. 

I’ve never quite understood why Richard, who ruled for only two fairly disastrous years, has excited such fascination.  He was a bad king, a bad politician and an appalling strategist.  But for his miscalculations the Lancastrian cause, comprehensively defeated in the so-called Wars of the Roses (it was the Scot Scott who gave it that title) may itself have been buried forever. 

His fall began with a crime - the murder in the Tower of his young nephews Edward V and Richard, duke of York.  Oh, there is no doubt about that, despite the objections of the Richard III Society, as anyone who has the least knowledge of medieval records like Close Rolls and Pipe Rolls will confirm. 

These documents are an exhaustive account of royal grants and expenditure, mention often being made of the most politically insignificant people.  The Princes are there, at least until the summer of 1483, when they vanish altogether from the record, receiving no further mention.  To save himself, and to completely undercut Henry Tudor in 1485, Richard only had to produce them in public.  He could not.  He was Banquo and they were the ghosts at his feast. 

So, let’s get back to the dig.  I read in the press that the archaeologists and their Richardian allies hope that finding the remains, if they find the remains, will help change the way the king is viewed historically.  Really?  Do bones speak?  How on earth could a few broken fragments change the past? 

The Richard III Society view is that it would end the “enormous disparagement” of his reputation.  Quite frankly that’s just nonsense.  All the dry bones could prove - if there are enough of them - is that he wasn’t a hunchback with a withered arm, but that’s a perception that has long been discarded.  Hunchbacks with withered arms don’t generally ride into battle. 

I welcome archaeology as genuine archaeology and I really do hope that Richard is found, if only to answer a long-standing mystery.  But so far as his reputation is concerned, any remains, no matter how complete, will stay stubbornly silent.  

Voices of the Past

Do you have a British coin in your purse or pocket?  If so take it out and have a look at the abbreviations around the Queen’s head.  Just before the date you will see the letters FD.  It’s a Latin abbreviation for Fidei defensor in the male and Fidei defensatrix in the female form.  It means Defender of the Faith, a title originally accorded to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 after the publication of Assertio Septem Sacramentorum – Defence of the Seven Sacraments -, a treatise rejecting the reformist teachings of Martin Luther. 

Eamon Duffy, professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, mentions it in the opening paragraph of a polemic published by the Telegraph at the weekend (The Story of the Reformation needs reforming).  Since 1558, he writes, it has meant defender of the Protestant faith. 

What he neglects to mention is that the original title was revoked by Pope Paul III in 1530 after Henry’s break with Rome.  It made no practical difference, as the style continued to be used in official documents, and was formally ratified by Act of Parliament in 1544.  Rather ironically, though she never used the title, even Bloody Mary was FD by parliamentary grant! 

That seems to me to be the whole point of the English Reformation – it was about empowerment and national sovereignty, a contention I advanced in previous articles touching on the subject.  Above all it was about breaking free from the authority of Rome, as much a temporal as a spiritual power at the time.  It really is worth stressing that Henry never abandoned Catholic orthodoxy as a personal standard of faith.  His Reformation was based wholly on the rejection of papal tutelage.

Duffy proceeds, as polemicists are wont to do, with a one-sided and historically unbalanced argument.  He is quite right to point out some of the tragic consequences of the English Reformation, a lengthy process rather than a single event.  He is right to lament the cultural vandalism that accompanied the religious and social upheaval, in the course of which so much of England’s Catholic and medieval heritage was lost. 

But he is wrong to see a process which shaped a new and greater nation as a wholly negative event.  In my own polemical style I have no hesitation at all in saying that the Reformation was a great and necessary metamorphosis.  In the place of medieval mystery plays came the dramas of Shakespeare.  In the place of Latin bibles, read and interpreted by priests, came the vernacular translations of William Tyndale followed by the King James Version, great well-springs of our language and literature.  In the place of controlled thought came free thought, the greatest legacy of all.  As the sun set on Galileo and the Catholic south it was to rise on Newton and the Protestant north. 

There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation, Duffy contends.  True; for nothing in history is truly inevitable.  That does not mean to say that there was nothing necessary about a process that swept virtually the whole of northern Europe, a process that freed the imagination from the straightjacket of traditional dogmas, a process that transformed England from an outpost of the Roman-focused medieval world to a great outward looking imperial and seafaring power. 

The professor touches on past injustices.  He touches on the anti-Catholic narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which turned the faith into the malevolent doctrine of an obscurantist and foreign power, a view entrenched in popular consciousness after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Gilbert Burnet, the seventeenth centaury divine, earns his animus as the ‘chief propagandist’ of this event, the author of the History of the Reformation, in which he describe Catholicism as tyranny.  “They hate us”, Burnet wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”

‘They’, in a general sense, is certainly a bit sweeping.  There were many English Catholics who may have taken spiritual solace from Rome but whose secular loyalty was to the land of their birth.  But always, always, we have to consider the context of the times.  Louis XIV certainly hated freemen and Protestants, as the Huguenot refugees who flooded into London prior to the Glorious Revolution would have testified.  His imperial ambitions, moreover, were a serious threat to the integrity of Protestant Europe.  This was no imagined danger. 

The professor concludes his piece by saying that the slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than “the voices of a history that England was not allowed to have.”  Would the ‘slaughtered Popish martyrs’, I wonder, include the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot?   I think it best to let that pass.  What I cannot let pass, though, is an earlier suggestion that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the horrors of Mary Tudor’s Catholic reaction, simply served as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad.  So far as Duffy is concerned it would appear that some martyrs are more equal than other martyrs, some voices more essential, some narratives more valid and some histories more complete.   

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.

Restraint of Appeals

Following my recent piece on the European Court of Human Right’s ruling that England should be a refuge for the huddled masses of foreign terrorist, yearning to breathe havoc, I read Following in Henry’s Footsteps?, a thought-provoking article by Stephen Cooper in the January issue of History Today.

We, as a nation, are the plaything of a supra-national power, a new Roman conglomerate, if you will. But this is not unique in our history; we have been here before, subject to the decrees and laws of an old Roman conglomerate.

David Cameron has talked in general terms about the repatriation of powers from Europe. Henry VIII, suffering from a little local marriage difficulty, did not just talk; he acted. He wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first queen, but in such matters the Vatican acted as the Supreme Court. Pope Clement VII was not inclined to go along with the royal wishes; he was not ‘simpatico to the direction of change’, as Tony Blair would doubtless express the point.

So, with the aid of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, the king cut the umbilical cord, the age-old link between the English and the Universal Church. He repatriated all legal powers to England in the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals. 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. How wonderful!

The thing is, you see, up to that point England effectively had two legal systems; it had ever since the Norman Conquest. There was the common law of the land and there was canon law, the 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. This was the basis of Papal power in England, which by the early middle ages was considerable.

Papal interference got so bad that, in a deeply anti-clerical mood, Parliament enacted the Statute of Provisors and Praemunire in the reign of Edward III, which attempted to curb papal interference. But the two systems still remained in place until Henry’s marriage problems saw not just a break with the Roman Church but an amalgamation of law, or, if you prefer, the repatriation of law.

The Act of Restraint of Appeals had great significance in English history, far beyond offering Henry, as head on an independent English Church, a way of ending the Roman logjam. It was a declaration of political sovereignty, an Act of Parliament rather than a royal proclamation.

The danger in this usurpation of canon powers is that Rome would place the country under an interdict, as it had in the time of Innocent III, the great medieval pontiff, which put a rebellious King John firmly in his place – the papal pocket. To prevent this, the Act allowed for imprisonment of any priest who refused to perform the sacraments. More than that, the provisions of the fourteenth century Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire was brought to bear, threatening those who invoked the authority of the Pope with confiscation of property.

The Act 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.

If only we could have a new of repatriation, an Act of Restraint of Foreign Legal Stupidity, one that would serve the same purpose, one that would end the diktats of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.

We were warned, but too few were prepared to listen, warned of the approaching flood of alien law, set to drown our own inherited traditions. In 1975 the people in this country were deceived, deliberately so. They thought they were voting for an economic union, but the small print contained so much more.

The year before the referendum on membership of what was then the European Economic Community, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, in Bulmer v Bollinger observed –“When it comes to matters with a European element the Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.”

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. Henry! Thou should be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.

King Chameleon

In so many ways Charles II was the most complex monarch England ever had, and the least principled. It’s hardly surprising when one considers that simplicity and principle, those virtuous vices, were qualities that Charles I, his father, had in abundance, qualities that all but destroyed the monarchy. There must have been points in the mid-1650s, with Cromwell’s Protectorate firmly in place, when Charles, wandering the Continent with his threadbare and impecunious court, despaired of endless exile.

But he came back in 1660, restored to the throne by his former enemies and not by his friends in the old royalist party. He came determined to rule but ever mindful that there were clear limits to his power, dangers in failing to play a complicated game, a game in which principle had no part.

The traumas of the Civil War, the death of his father, the absence of a stable guiding influence in his life, the beggary and humiliation of exile, bit deeply into his character. He was determined to survive and survival meant weighing and calculation. Oscar Wilde’s dictum about cynics may very well have been invented for Charles; for he truly was a man who knew the price of everything – and everyone – and the value of nothing.

For me John Wilmot earl of Rochester’s poetic comment, though slightly unfair, carries by far the greatest resonance;

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Long after his death Charles continued to perplex historians, who simply could not be sure of his motives. He was in the habit of telling people what they wanted to hear. Even his death-bed conversion to Catholicism gives the impression of being part of a game, undertaken for no better reason than to please his brother James!

To be fair it has to be said that, as an individual, he was a reasonably tolerant man in an intolerant age. Much given to latitude in himself, he was prone to indulge others. His tolerance went so far as to desire a measure of relief for Catholics and dissenters, still under the burden of the penal laws, evidenced by the 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. But by this time the goodwill towards the throne at the Restoration had given way to suspicion about the king’s motives and the perceived Catholic influences behind the throne. From this point forward the so-called Cavalier Parliament was to become as potentially dangerous as its old Roundhead predecessor.

Charles needed money; Parliament demanded concessions. There was one way around this deadlock: the king could go elsewhere. He did; he went to his cousin Louis XIV. Here we have the makings of the infamous Treaty of Dover in which Charles agreed to embrace Catholicism in return for a large French subsidy, enough to free him from the tutelage of Parliament.

There has been more confusion over this bargain than any other single act in English diplomatic history. Charles, it should be stressed, was obliged by its terms to make a personal declaration of faith, that’s all, but for centuries after the Whig view prevailed that he had agreed to hand over the whole realm to Catholicism. Parliament was deceived, the nation was deceived, even some of the king’s closest counsellors were deceived, so the view went. But the real truth about the Treaty of Dover was even simpler: the biggest dupe of all was Louis!

The whole process was deeply cynical in true Carolinian style. Yes, Charles was sympathetic to Catholics – he had good reason to be – but sympathy would never be allowed to conflict with self-interest. Far from returning the realm to Catholicism in the style of Mary Tudor he was never even to make the promised declaration of faith; it was merely a way of extracting maximum profit at minimum expense. It cost him little, it cost him his word, and for cynics that’s a coin of particularly low value. There are few tricks that Machiavelli could have taught this royal chameleon.

Sun in splendour

Shakespeare’s play Richard III opens with some particularly memorable lines. They are recited by Richard himself, then duke of Gloucester, the brother of Edward IV. The Wars of the Roses, the long dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York, are over; York is victorious, Lancaster broken and Edward sits securely on the throne. Richard muses;

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

I have no idea if it was Shakespeare’s intention or not - though I have a hunch that it was - but there is a play on word and image here that brings to mind a number of associations. At its simplest the sun of York is also the son of York, in that the king is the son of Richard duke of York, killed at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460. But the sun also happened to be Edward’s personal badge, acquired under a very particular set of circumstances.

We have just past the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, fought on Candlemass, 2 February, 1461. In this Edward, then earl of March, defeated a Lancastrian force headed by the earls of Pembroke and Wiltshire. Just before the battle commenced a sun dog or parhelion appeared in the sky, an optical illusion caused by icy weather, making it look as if there were three suns. In Act Two Scene One of Henry VI, Part 3 Shakespeare describes it thus;

Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever'd in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow'd some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.



It was the eighteen-year-old Edward’s Constantine the Great moment. Recognising the symbolism, he is said to have persuaded his army that it was proof that the Holy Trinity supported their cause. Thereafter he adopted the rose-en-soleil – the sun in splendour – as his personal emblem. So, he truly was the son and the sun of York!

Stamps in Time

The Royal Mail, the government agency responsible for providing a general postal service in Britain, recently issued a new set of stamps commemorating the Stuart monarchs from James I to Queen Anne. Each stamp comes with the date of the reigns of the individual kings and queens in question. But there is one small problem: an organisation with the word Royal in its title seemingly approves of rebellion!

I was hugely amused by a letter in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph from one Edward Windham-Bellord pointing out that the stamp for Charles II gives the date of his reign as 1660-1685. The reign of his royal father and predecessor is rightly given as 1625-1649. So, what happened in between, what happened between 1649 and 1660? After all, this is a question that might very well be put by any perceptive individual who does not have a detailed knowledge of English history. The answer, as I’m sure most of you will know, is that rebellion happened, civil war happened, the republic happened, Oliver Cromwell happened!

Mr Windham-Bellord’s point is one accepted by all good royalists: Charles II may not have been king de facto until 1660 but he was king de jure since 1649, “whatever Cromwell and his henchmen got up to in the interim.” Yes, this is something royals and royalists have always felt strongly about. Last century George V even refused to give his permission when Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to name one of the new dreadnaughts HMS Oliver Cromwell.

Still, much as I would like to, it’s not really possible to airbrush the old ogre out of our history, not really possible to issue a Charles II stamp dated 1649-1660, or indeed to include a Cromwell stamp within the Stuart gallery. After all this may very well have unleashed a new civil war!

Bringing Back the King

I made the point on a history network I belong to that Charles II owed his restoration in 1660 more to his former enemies than his friends. When I asked why I thought this was so I gave the following answer.

The royalist party had effectively been broken by Cromwell’s regime, reduced to an ineffectual rump. Indeed it’s possible that if Richard Cromwell had been cast in the image of his father the Protectorate might have continued for many years, until the point where the Stuarts were all but forgotten, as they were in the later Jacobite period.

The fall of Richard in the spring of 1659 brought forth the tensions and contradictions within the newly revived Commonwealth, particularly between Parliament and the New Model Army. With the political situation threatening to spiral out of control George Monck, the commander in Scotland, formerly a close political associate of Oliver Cromwell, decided to march south to restore order. Monck’s ultimate political aims were unclear but one of his early acts was to restore the MPs who had been expelled from Parliament at the time of Pride’s Purge in December 1648. This brought back many in the old Presbyterians party who had been enemies of Charles I during the First Civil War but did not want to see and end of the monarchy.

With events moving towards the Restoration, General John Lambert attempted to rally the republicans to the Good Old Cause but failed miserably. So, in the end, monarchy in the person of Charles became the most popular course. Still, Charles was always mindful that he owed his return to people like Monck and Shaftesbury, people who had fought against his cause in the past, which is precisely why the Restoration was never a complete royalist carnival. Some of the Cavaliers who had sacrificed most for the royalist cause in the past were to be disappointed by the meagre rewards they received, if they received any rewards at all.

Richard II and the limits of majesty

Richard II, son of the Black Prince, grandson and successor to Edward III, was an unusual kind of king for the day, one who clearly would have been better placed in the time of Tudor absolutism, or even in the twentieth century, as a dictatorial monarch in the fashion of, say, Alexander I of Yugoslavia or Carol II of Romania.

One can get a clear idea of how Richard’s power and majesty was perceived at the time-how, indeed, he liked it to be perceived-if one looks closely at The Wilton Diptych, where even the angels wear his personal White Hart badge. Does the arrogance of power come in any greater form? But, you see, Medieval monarchs were not meant to be dictators. They ruled by forms of consensus, not with the people at large, but with the senior nobility. For them the king, his majesty notwithstanding, occupied, in a sense, the same political position of the early Caesars, that of primus inter pares.

Richard’s problem was that alienated the one group of people on whom his power, his real power, ultimately depended. The state simply did not exist in the modern sense, and Richard had no standing army or dedicated service with which to enforce his will. Even the strongest of Medieval kings were careful to ensure that aristocracy were kept loyal to the crown; by success in war, by grants of land, or by a combination of both. Richard was not successful in war. But far more seriously, he showed that, in the exercise of pure royal power, he was prepared to dispossess even the most powerful; and none were more powerful than Henry Bolingbroke.


Richard's decision to exile his cousin and then seize the Lancastrian estates on the death of John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke’s father, certainly ended the power of a potential rival to the crown. It was a bold move, but one that alarmed the other nobles, fearful that their own lands and inheritance could be taken in such an arbitrary and vindictive manner. When Bolingbroke returned to England, it was not, so he claimed, to take the crown, but to recover what was rightfully his, a cause that could easily command wide support among his fellow peers. Against this background Richard’s power simply crumbled. He lost power; he lost majesty; he lost credibility. He could no longer be king.

The People's Queen

Considering her posthumous reputation Queen Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary, if you prefer, began her reign with a wide base of popular support, carried over from the reign of her brother, Edward VI. It’s easy to understand why. She represented stability and continuity in a period of transition and uncertainty. Protestantism was still a new and untried doctrine for the people of England.

One should always remember that the English Reformation came from above. It was from beginning to end a state-directed process, which carried most of the community, conservative and wedded to tradition, slowly and uncertainly. With the old rituals threatened there was no sure point of identity. Under Henry VIII, a schismatic rather than a heretic, people could adhere to a large degree to older Catholic practices. Under Edward VI, his son and successor, the whole thrust of Reformation took a far more Protestant direction.

In November 1547 Edward's first Parliament attacked many of the remaining traditional rituals. Henry's Act of the Six Articles was revoked, and the first steps taken towards the preparation of a new Book of Common Prayer, to replace the Catholic-inspired King's Book of 1539. As the traditional mass came under attack Mary increased the number of times that it was celebrated in her own household. Already popular as the heir-apparent, she became the focus for traditionalists and conservatives of all sorts. The more she was disapproved of at court, the more her standing increased with the people, who openly applauded her on her rides through London. There is little doubt that, on the death of Edward in 1553, Mary was carried to the throne on a great wave of popular and aristocratic approval, sweeping aside the machinations of Northumberland and the Protestant faction. Ironically, it was Mary's actions as Queen that was to give a new life to an unpopular cause.

Teacher of the Queen

Most people, I imagine, will have seen Mrs Brown, the movie with Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, which details the close relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, the favourite Highland servant of Prince Albert. Victoria, in a mood of prolonged and morbid depression after he husband’s death, took comfort in Brown’s reassuring presence. Less well know is that when Brown died in his turn the aging queen found a substitute in another menial. His name was Abdul Karim, better known as the Munshi, or teacher.

Karim arrived from India in 1887, aged twenty-four, and soon acquired the kind of dominance over the royal household previously enjoyed by John Brown, another source of discomfort and annoyance to Bertie, the Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII. He initially came as an Indian waiter, one of two selected to serve the Victoria during her Golden Jubilee, but the year after she appointed him “Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen Empress at a salary of 12 pounds per month.” In this particular capacity he began to teach the Queen Urdu, as well as introducing curry into the royal menus.

From this point his influence grew and grew. He was the subject of special favours, even being in attendance when the Queen met with foreign monarchs and prime ministers. The relationship has been given fresh significance by the discovery of a new archive of letters and photographs, as well as the Munshi’s own handwritten journal, as The Daily Telegraph reported recently.

The bond between the two was so close that it incited gossip at the time, especially after the Queen spent a night with the Munshi at Glassalt Shiel, the isolated Scottish cottage by Loch Muick that she had once shared with Brown and had not visited since his death in 1883. But the journal records a purely platonic relationship, not at all surprising considering the Queen’s age and the Munshi’s youth. At the time she insisted that all criticism of her Indian servant was based on jealousy and racial prejudice.

In retrospect it does appear unseemly for Victoria to have advanced two servants in such a fashion, a fashion that was bound to cause resentment within the royal household and speculation in the wider world beyond. But, looking at the situation with very modern eyes, it seems to me that both Brown and the Munshi filled a deep void in Victoria’s emotional life that opened after the death of Albert, a void the could not be filled by her immediate family, with whom she was always cold and formal, especially not by her wayward eldest son, whom she held partly responsible for the death of her beloved husband. The Munshi was no more than a surrogate.

A Pretty Witty King

I'm reminded by an article written by Jenny Uglow in the latest edition of the BBC History Magazine that it is almost three hundred and fifty years since the Restoration of the English monarchy in the person of Charles II, a joyful occasion after the disastrous republican and pseudo-monarchical experiment that followed the execution of his father in January 1649.

England after 1660, the England of Charles, is the time of Dryden, of Rochester, of Pepys and of Shaftesbury; the time of Titus Oates and the Popish Plot; the time of a Great Plague and a Great Fire; the time of the Great Cathedral that started its rise from the ashes like a phoenix. It's a period which has long exercised a particular fascination for me, going all the way back to my childhood.

My own particular research is concerned with the political struggles that saw the emergence of the two-party system; of the Whigs and the Tories, who were to exercise such dominance for so long, first the one and then the other. These names were actually introduced as insults by the opponents of the party in question. The Parliamentary group around Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, was originally called the Country Party, meaning that they sought to defend the interests of the country at large against the machinations of the court. Only after were they called 'Whigs', a name borrowed from a group of Presbyterian extremists and rebels in Scotland. The Whigs, never devoid of imagination, called the Court Party, those around the Marquis of Halifax who took the side of the King, Tories, after a group of Irish brigands! The labels stuck. The English have a genius, perhaps a unique one, for turning mud into a badge of pride!

So, yes, this was the time that gave us the Whigs and Tories and the political football that has been present ever since. It also gave us in Charles the so-called Merry Monarch, a serial adulterer second to none, whose mistresses often traded their favours for political influence and high titles, including Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, a wholly unscrupulous gold-digger and personal favourite of mine, who deserves to be far better remembered than the commonplace Nell Gwynn!

I have no doubt that if I had been alive then I would have been a Tory, a supporter of the King and the legitimate succession, though the succession when it came, in the shape of Charles' Catholic brother James, was to be an outright disaster. Still, I have mixed views about Charles, a man not that admirable as a man; a man whose cynicism often did not stop short at the shabbiest acts of dissimulation and betrayal, even of his closest friends and associates.

He may have been no more intelligent than his rigid and unbending father, in his own way as puritanical as the most committed roundhead, but he was certainly a lot more pragmatic, a lot more Machiavellian. His supposed agreement with Louis XIV to convert to Catholicism under the secret Treaty of Dover was little more than a vast confidence trick, a way of extorting money from his gullible French cousin, free of Parliamentary scrutiny. Even his supposed death bed conversion to Catholicism seems to me not to be entirely sincere, almost as if he was playing the literal-minded and unimaginative James in the same fashion as he had once played Louis.

In a way I suppose it is possible to excuse Charles some of his vices in that he had a long and hard apprenticeship; first the plaything of the Scots, given to more extreme forms of religious intolerance, in an early attempt to recover the throne, then the head of a threadbare court in exile, dependant on the charity of foreign princes. In the end he was restored in 1660, it must be remembered, not by his friends, not by the old royalist party, but by his former enemies, people who had previously taken the side of Parliament in the Civil Wars and after. So he had to be careful, always playing a close and not very principled game. He was a great survivor determined, as he once told his brother, never again to go on his travels. Perhaps John Wilmot earl of Rochester's poetic comment on the man is ever so slightly unfair but it is the one that for me still carries the greatest resonance;

We have a pretty witty king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Oh, he did at least one wise one: he maintained James as his legitimate successor against all the political odds. For, as he once told his brother, only half in jest, nobody was ever going to remove him in his favour, something that all heads of state-and heads of government- would do well to remember. :-))

The Man of Sorrows

When Henrietta Maria, the prospective wife of Charles I, saw his image for the first time in Van Dyke’s triple portrait she is said to have wept. It’s possible to understand why. There is something deeply melancholic in those eyes, in that face, something that might even be described as martyrdom foretold.

The royal couple were eventually married in person (there had been an earlier marriage by proxy) in June 1625, a few month after Charles’ accession to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. After some initial frigidity, they were to find a deep and lasting happiness, which at least went part of the way to balancing the troubles of Charles unhappy public life.

His was never going to be an easy task. A small, retiring, shy man who spoke with a life-long stutter, he was never meant to be king. That was a role to be played by his older brother Henry, by all accounts an intelligent and personable figure, who gave ever sign of playing the part well. But Henry died in 1612 of typhoid fever, not long before Charles’ twelfth birthday.

As far as governance is concerned, the ways of dealing with people and institutions, Charles, now heir apparent, was given next to nothing in the way of practical training and responsibility from his father, James. But he inherited one particularly dangerous dogma – that monarchs ruled by divine right, by the will of God and not by the will of profane human institutions; not by the will of Parliament.

James had been king of Scotland many years before his accession to the English throne in 1603. There he had been involved in a lengthy struggle with the church; with those, like Reverend Andrew Melville, who inclined to a Presbyterian view, a view which held the king to be just an ordinary member of the church, like any other before God. James embraced divine right, and continental forms of absolutism, as a kind of royal declaration of independence. But what worked in Scotland, with its relatively weak parliamentary tradition, was to be disastrous in England.

Divine right was never going to fit within the English constitutional framework, with assertive traditions of parliamentary self-expression going right back to the Middle Ages. James, unsurprisingly, had a less than comfortable relationship with Parliament. But for all his dogma the King was a trimmer, a pragmatist, who only pushed a point so far. Charles, in contrast, was very much a ‘man of principle’, who hid his shyness and insecurity behind a rigid protocol, behind a jealous regard for the royal dignity; and for him the royal dignity truly was bestowed by God.

The struggle between crown and Parliament was the leitmotiv of Charles’ whole reign. He began badly, so badly that he dispensed with Parliament altogether for eleven years, raising money by any means available. This worked up to a point in ordinary circumstances, but a taste of future trouble came with the attempt to extend the Ship Tax, levied in costal counties for defence purposes, to the rest of the country, leading to the famous prosecution of John Hampden. But the whole act of royal management, of royal juggling, if you will, was in danger of falling if something extraordinary happened, and the extraordinary happened: the Scots rose in rebellion over the introduction of a new Anglican-style Prayer Book. Soon after the so-called Bishops’ Wars began.

Charles had not the military resources to repel or subdue the Scots. Such force that was available collapsed in 1640. With his treasury empty the king was obliged to summon the first assembly in eleven years - the Short Parliament, which proved unwilling to grant supply until certain grievances were addressed, and after so long a gap there were many, particularly over the question of religion and church government. Parliament, dominated by puritans like John Hampden, John Pym and latterly Oliver Cromwell, was suspicious of the high Anglicanism favoured by Charles, and the Catholicism embraced by the Queen.

The Short Parliament was dismissed after a few weeks with nothing settled, but as the crown was practically bankrupt Charles had no option but to summon another- the Long Parliament, which was destined only finally to exit the stage of history twenty years later. Now things really got out of hand. No sooner was peace made with the Scots than a major rebellion broke out in Ireland; the balls came down one by one. In England Charles mismanaged Parliament so badly that he was obliged to leave London in early 1642 in the tensest of political atmospheres. After some lengthy manoeuvring by both sides, the English Civil War finally broke out later that summer.

The war, in its first stage, was to last until 1646, leaving the King totally defeated and a prisoner of his enemies. Still he refused to compromise, seeing himself as a key player, playing one side off against the other; the Scots against the English, the New Model Army, which came into existence in 1645, against the Parliament, the monarchists against the republicans. The only effect this had was to radicalise politics still further. Finally, in late 1647, the King entered into a secret compact with the Scots, who promised to send an army into England on his behalf in return for certain religious concessions. The result was the Second Civil War, defeat for the Scots and a death warrant for the King.

Charles’ execution in January 1649 was born of a kind of political necessity; the axe went through his head, it might be said, in the way that Alexander’s sword went through the Gordian Knot. The act, though, had been little better than judicial murder, a decision that could only be secured after the army purged Parliament of all those sympathetic to the King, leaving a compliant and unrepresentative Rump. It was the beginning of a constitutional nightmare, with England eventually slipping into a military dictatorship headed by Cromwell.

Charles finally achieved his martyrdom, a witness for the Anglican ideal that he held so dear. He, more than any other, surely deserved the incorruptible crown.

Losing America

A new archive of letters was discovered recently which illustrate how much personal responsibility George III bears for the loss of the American colonies. What they show in particular is the communication gap, with a king and an administration hopelessly out of touch with events in America; a king whose optimism contrasts sharply with the pessimism of the commanders on the ground.

The collection, which goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York in a series of auctions beginning in April, indicate that the commanders began to despair of victory almost as soon as the conflict began in 1775. A letter by General John Burgoyne, written in Boston on 25 June, 1775, is the earliest assessment of how bad things were. The British position is described as

…a crisis that my little reading in history cannot parallel…such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and to insure disappointment.

It was not just the pittance of troops that was a problem; it was also the kind of troops that the crown possessed. In the previous wars with the French for the control o the Continent the British had relied on the support of colonial militias, who knew the country and could make the most effective use of the terrain; skirmishers, who knew how to use hit and run tactics and fighting skills learned from the natives. On occasions these highly mobile forces were to prove superior to conventional armies, tied to roads and dependent on supply columns, as Burgoyne was to find to his own cost at Saratoga.

The collection also includes a copy of George III’s proclamation of August 1775 calling for the “suppression of rebellion and sedition”, one of only twenty in existence. Other correspondence from London emphasises just how absurdly sanguine the authorities were, continually hoping that the rebels would see their error and sue for pardon. The problem is quite clear: king and cabinet obviously saw events in America as an old-fashioned rebellion, much like that of the Scottish Jacobites earlier in the century. It was nothing of the kind: it was a revolution.

Finding King Richard

Last November I wrote a piece headed My Kingdom for a Gun; finding Bosworth Field, focusing on the attempt to pinpoint the precise location of this seminal battle. According to the latest reports the task is all but complete. A thumbnail-sized silver gilt boar has been uncovered by the archaeological team. The boar-badge was, of course, the personal emblem of Richard III, the last English king to be killed in battle, and is thought to have been worn by one of his close retainers at the spot where he fell.

The evidence uncovered in the fields straddling Fen Lane in the Leicestershire parish of Upton also includes the badges of the supporters of both Richard and Henry Tudor, as well as twenty-eight lumps of roundshot, in a site that is nearly two miles south-west of what has traditionally been regarded as the centre of the battle.

Frank Baldwin, chairman of the Battlefields Trust charity, has described the discovery as “important to us as Schliemann discovering Troy.” My reaction was that he was, perhaps, allowing himself to be carried away by boyish enthusiasm, but I quite agree with Professor Richard Holmes, a historian for whom I have considerable respect, that “this is certainly the most important discovery about Bosworth in my lifetime.”

On Richard himself my feelings are somewhat ambivalent. I do not share the enthusiasm of the Ricardians for the ‘lost cause’ of their hero king. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard duke of York, were indeed murdered on the orders of their uncle; they were simply too dangerous to remain alive. Moreover, I can’t but admire the Tudor dynasty that brought us in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I two of the greatest monarchs in English history.

Still, the romantic in me regrets the loss of the old England, the England of the Plantagenets, the England of Richard III, an enduringly fascinating man for all of his brief flight with destiny.

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth

King of Sex

Charles II’s notorious carnal appetites impacted on popular consciousness at the time, with far greater consequence than any caused by past royal misconduct. In the course of research I carried out on this period I came across some truly hilarious-and unpublished-satires, one in which the king is depicted running around the streets of London-'Mercy, help!' the king cried, 'What is wrong, your Majesty; have the Dutch invaded?' 'No; for the love of God, fetch me a midwife.'

Politically speaking, though, the impact of Charles' affairs was far from amusing, because of the circumstances of the time and the nature of the reign. Charles had no legitimate offspring, but many bastards. Normally this would not have been any great problem, as no illegitimate son would have expected to succeed. It became a problem when Charles' designated heir, his brother James, Duke of York converted to Catholicism, and those opposed to him awakened the ambitions of the vain and mercurial James, Duke of Monmouth, the bastard-in-chief.

Beyond this Charles' affairs did indeed have consequences for the well-being of his dynasty, for the simple reason that he quite often allowed sexual attraction to translate directly into political power. Barbara Villiers was to be the first and greatest example of the 'political mistress' and the 'mistress of politics', far more powerful in every way than Charles own queen, Catherine of Braganza. Her influence was such that she created her own political circle at court, interfered constantly in matters of state; so powerful that she was even courted by foreign ambassadors. Charles was frightened of her, frightened of her temper.

In one of his diary enties Samuel Pepys noted "...the king doth mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thought of business...my Lady Castlemaine [Villiers] rules him...She hath all the tricks..." This liaison was in many ways to set the tone for Restoration politics, secret and manipulative, one that inevitably produced an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. Villiers, in the style of Salome, even managed to engineer the downfall of one of Charles' ablest and longest-serving advisors, Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, whose head was effectively presented to her on a plate.

Villiers had been bad, but her eventual replacement, Louise de Keroualle was, if anything, even worse; for she was little better than a French agent, put in Charles' bed by his cousin, Louis XIV. Her rise coincides with the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles promised to convert to Catholicism in return for a French subsidy. It was not long after this, with the steadying influence of Clarendon gone, that a new mood of parliamentary suspicion emerged; suspicion of the throne, suspicion of Catholicism, and suspicion of Keroualle, or 'dearest Fubs', as Charles liked to call her.

Fubs conspired against all those in the court opposed to the French connection, including Lord Halifax. With the onset of the anti-Catholic crisis of the late 1670s, known as the Popish Plot, a document circulated specifically aimed at Fubs, with the title Articles of High Treason and other High Crimes. Parliament began to investigate the matter but Charles promptly ordered a dissolution.

So, yes, Charles' extra-marital relationships did weaken the authority and the majesty of the crown. It was of no matter when his lovers were, like Nell Gwynn, women of little consequence or influence. It most assuredly did matter when it came to intelligent and the strong-willed individuals, like Villiers and Keroualle. It was all to be part of government by intrigue and cabal; government, in other words, without responsibility. For many, moreover-setting the politics to one side-it made the monarchy look ridiculous, which allows me to finish with some verses drawn yet another anonymous satire;

As Nero once, with harp in hand survyed
His flaming Rome, and as that burned, he played,
So our great prince, when the Dutch fleet arrived,
Saw his ships burned and, as they burned, he swived.
So kind was he in our extremist need,
He would those flames extinguish with his seed.

Great, Good, and Just

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I on 30 January, 1649, a cold, tragic day in English history. Here is the poem that always comes to mind when I reflect on his murder and martyrdom

Great, Good, and Just, but I could rate
My grief with thy too rigid fate
I'd weep the world in such a strain
As it should deluge once again
But since thy loud-tongued blood demands supplies
More from Briareus' hands than Argus' eyes
I'll sing thine obsequies with trumpet sounds
And write thine epitaph with blood and wounds

The Once and Future King

We have been here before in the cycles of our history, the fag end of yet another Labour government, ever deeper into incompetence and mismanagement, ever deeper into debt. It has been proved time and again that these people are simply not fit for government; they never will be. They left the country in a mess in 1951, in 1970 and again in1979, but this is nothing compared with the horrendous mess that will be left by Brown and co.

Indeed, though still months short of a general election, it is doubtful if we have a ‘government’ any longer in the meaningful sense of the term, people who are willing and able to face up to the problems of the nation, the very real problems before us. No, we do not have a government, we have a party machine determined to hold on to power at all hazards, no matter the damage that is caused.

We have a Prime Minister, if we can call him that, the most ludicrously incompetent in our history, fiddling like Nero, pretending that the debt crisis, the horrendous debt crisis that he is responsible for, can be met with ‘efficiency savings’. He will by these means, save £3 billion, while a Golden Palace is spun out of the £655 billion that remains. Oh, what palliative treatment we will need when Nero is finally driven protesting from the stage and the New Labour circus is over. What an artist will die in Brown. What an artist indeed.

A new style of leadership is needed, a new form of government, altogether more sober and more realistic. What better model than Henry VII, the first Tudor, the five hundredth anniversary of whose death came this year? His reign had none of the drama of Henry VIII; none of the frustrated promise of Edward VI; none of the tragedy of Bloody Mary and none of the glory of Elizabeth. No, but he was still the smartest and shrewdest of them all. A careful manager, a founder of the modern English state, a believer in financial responsibility and political stability, a man who recognised that military adventures, adventures beyond our capacity, were bad for business, bad for security and bad for stability. Yes, a smart man, a shrewd man, a careful man. Altogether the best example for the difficult times ahead.