Good Boy

The May edition of the BBC History Magazine carries a portrait of King Charles I on the front cover. To the left of his head the text runs Sorcery in the Civil War, followed by smaller font announcing How King Charles I used witchcraft as a weapon in his clash with parliament.

This is bold stuff indeed, certainly enough to draw the curious inside the covers, anyone beguiled by the suggestion that a British king resorted to witchcraft, especially the only Anglican saint. It might be an excellent editorial hook but, if you do look inside, you are bound to be disappointed; for the whole thing is utterly misleading, grounds for possible prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act!

The story is not about the king at all – it’s about a dog. Specifically it’s about Boy, the poodle that once belonged to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king’s nephew and the leading commander of the Royal cavalry during the English Civil War. In The Prince and the Devil Dog Mark Stoyle, professor of history at Southampton University, examines some of the myths that attached themselves to the poor beast. It has nothing at all to do with Charles but it’s still a jolly good tale about a tail!

Legends still cling to Boy even so far as the present day, some repeated by Terry Deary in The Slimy Stuarts, part of his Horrible Histories series, amusing interpretations of the past for children. There is even confusion over exactly what kind of dog Boy was. In Cromwell, a biopic starring Richard Harris, he is shown as a toy, as if a fighting prince would carry a lapdog into battle! No, though we can’t be precise, Boy was clearly some kind of hunting poodle, more akin to the standard breeds of today. In contemporary engravings he is shown on the ground just to the front of the mounted Rupert.

The interesting thing is that though pamphlets favourable to the parliamentary cause were quick to attribute a satanic quality to the king’s dashing cavalry commander, it was the royalists themselves who brought Boy into the picture in an attempt to poke fun at the superstitious gullibility of the other side. John Cleveland, a Royalist poet and polemicist, penned some verses in late 1642, claiming that the Roundheads all believed in Prince Rupert’s magical powers, and that Boy was his familiar spirit, the demonic shape-shifter that Satan grants to his acolytes. The concept was certainly familiar enough to those reared on traditional fears about witchcraft.

Cleveland had some fun with this, saying that Rupert taught Boy to cock his leg every time the name of John Pym, the leading Parliamentarian, was mentioned. It was a satire suggesting that the Parliamentary party were all superstitious fools, but it came to be regarded by subsequent generations of historians as a true insight into their beliefs, a myth that made it so far into modern English schoolrooms by way of the Horrible Histories.

Cleveland’s satire was such a hit on the Royalist side that by the beginning of 1643, as Stoyle says, they were even drinking toasts to Boy’s health. One anonymous Royalist writer went so far to compose a whole pamphlet about the dog, entitled Observations upon Prince Rupert’s White Dog Called Boy. It was written in the form of a letter, a parody of the canting style favoured by the Puritans, supposedly from a spy in Oxford, the royalist capital, who detailed Boy’s various ‘powers.’ To give a little extra bite the author claimed that Boy was not a real dog at all but a “handsome white woman” in the shape of a dog, a source of sexual favours for the Prince.

It was now that Boy really achieved prominence on both sides, the most familiar familiar England ever produced. It was a huge laugh, a piece of Cavalier condescension at the expense of their opponents, going so far to create a permanent image of the Roundheads. But poor Boy, or Girl, depending on your point of view, came to a sad end, all his powers notwithstanding. He was among the many Cavaliers who fell in July 1644 at the Battle of Marston Moor not far from the city of York. In revenge for the previous mockery Parliamentary writers wrote gleefully of his death.

But Cleveland, and Boy, have had the more lasting revenge, still colouring popular views of their unattractive opponents so far as the present day, still showing the Roundheads as literal-minded, superstitious and joyless fanatics. Well done Boy!

Tepid Priest

There are some people in public life who would do very well to issue apologies in advance of anything that they might say or write. Perhaps something of a blanket nature would serve, something to cover every contingency. It might proceed as follows: “I apologise for each and every statement that I will ever make, not having said the things I’m supposed to have said, or having the things I have said misinterpreted by the press, because I did not really say that, meaning to say something else.”

Confused? No more confused than Rowan Williams, our present Archbishop of Canterbury, as woolly-minded a man as you are ever likely to come across, one thing at one minute, another thing at the next. To me he is an ass, yes, an ass, no better living example of the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, the creature that died of hunger and thirst because when placed midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water it could not make up its mind between the one and the other.

Archbishop Williams cannot make up his mind about freemasons. He once described this apron-wearing fraternity as having rituals that were “satanically inspired”, that it was incompatible with Christianity and that he would refuse to appoint any member of the ‘brotherhood’ to the clergy, hardly surprising given their Robespierre-like attachment to a nebulous ‘Supreme Being,’ to say nothing of their bloodthirsty oaths! But it was all a big mistake, you see, and he did not really mean to say what he said and was profusely sorry for being found out.

That was a few years ago though the fog in the befuddled prelate’s mind is still to clear. I read in the Sunday press despite misgivings blah blah blah he recently appointed the Reverend Jonathan Baker, a senior Mason, as Bishop of Ebbsfleet. The poor old Archbishop, there are only two things wrong with him: everything he says and everything he does. No sooner was the news of this out than concerns over this latest volte-face were openly expressed, yea even so high as the General Synod.

Ebbsfleet, as we should now call him, or Brother Bishop Ebbsfleet, saw nothing at all wrong with being a Freemason and a senior cleric, nothing at all, at least until last weekend, when he decided that he was leaving the boys only club to concentrate on, to use his words, the “particular charism (sic) of episcopal ministry.” I hope he keeps those secrets, though, just to save the dear man from having his throat cut.

So Freemasons adhering to “satanically inspired” rituals can rise so far in the Episcopacy in the bright new Church of England that has such a man like Rowan Williams at the head of it. Remember this is the same man who said that ‘certain aspects’ of Sharia law seemed ‘unavoidable’ in the United Kingdom. One law for everybody, he continued, was “a bit of a danger.” Yes, over a thousand years of progress in our common law was “a bit of a danger.” Of course that was all a mistake too; he said what he said but he didn’t really say what he said, or what he said was not meant in the way that he said it. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what he means?

Humour aside I can’t be neutral here. I grew up in the Church of England; it’s part of the fabric of this nation, part of its identity, part of my identity. I no longer attend but I have a deep and abiding affection for the institution and its history. To see a man like Rowan Williams in the office of Saint Augustine, to see this inconsistent, confused, wretched hyper-liberal and moral relativist in such a position is tragic. Before this turbulently tepid priest finally departs we may find that he has done as much damage to the Episcopacy as Oliver Cromwell.

Freedom in love

I love poetry as I love words. Poetry is language at its purest, the rise and fall of words, of assonance and of dissonance, the simple music that lies at the heart of expression. I can't write poetry, it's a talent beyond me, but I simply can't imagine life without it, I can't imagine not appreciating the beauty of the music of the spheres. To have no understanding or appreciation of poetry is, so far as I am concerned, to have lead in the soul.

I can still recite the poems I learned in early school, still be thrilled by those wonderful verses. There are so many poets I admire, both ancient and modern. There is no point in listing them all but Catullus, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Lovelace, Rochester Dryden, Pope, Keats, Swinburne, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Yeats, Rilke, Rupert Brooke, T. S Elliot, Stevie Smith and Philip Larkin all come high, though none higher than the sublime John Donne.

But it was Richard Lovelace that I was thinking of recently, the seventeenth century Cavalier poet, specifically of To Althea From Prison, one of the most moving poems ever written, a great tribute to love and to loyalty, the love of a man for a woman, the loyalty of a subject to his king. I find it impossible to say just how much these verses move me, particularly the last. If I have freedom in my love and in my soul am free, angels alone that sore above enjoy such liberty. Is there any finer sentiment than that? God bless your memory, Richard Lovelace, and God bless the memory of King Charles the Martyr.

When love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my gates;
And my divine ALTHEA brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lye tangled in her haire,
And fetterd to her eye,
The birds, that wanton in the aire,
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying THAMES,
Our carelesse heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty griefe in wine we steepe,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deepe,
Know no such libertie.

When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetnes, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King.
When I shall voyce aloud, how good
He is, how great should be,
Inlarged winds, that curle the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls doe not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Mindes innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedome in my love,
And in my soule am free,
Angels alone that sore above
Enjoy such liberty.

Blade Horror

I acquired an early fascination for ghost and horror stories, a delight to read, a greater delight to thrill. I loved reading tales that heightened my senses, tales that amplified every little creak, every unsettling noise made by settlement, by the night and by the wind. At school after lights out I used to read aloud by torchlight to the other girls in my dormitory, all sharing a shivery thrill.

But when I became an adult I put aside childish things and imagined fears. I still love Gothic fiction, the stories of people like M R James or Sheridan Le Fanu, but they have lost the visceral power they possessed on first acquaintance. I’m an adult now; fiction no longer has the same scary energy.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There is a genre of neo-gothic in which I have recaptured something of the fascination and thrill of fear. I can think of two novels in particular that caught past moods, that challenged me on the simple level of instinct, that place where rationality gives way to more atavistic emotions. There is Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game, both of which terrified me into the old ‘only a story’ frame of mind.

Now they have been joined by a third – Apostle Rising by Richard Godwin. I had no previous acquaintance with the work of Godwin, a writer, I’ve since discovered, of short stories. This is his first novel, a detective story that is so much more than a detective story. Normally I’m not that sympathetic to the crime genre, having quickly read and just as quickly forgotten some of the Rebus stories of Ian Rankin. But Apostle Rising gripped me from beginning to end with its imaginative plotting and clever writing. I try hard to avoid clichés and hyperbole but this book is a tour de force, subtle and horrifying at the same time.

It’s a story of evil. It’s a story of two detectives, Chief Inspector Frank Castle and Detective Inspector Jacki Stone, and their encounter with evil, their encounter with its insidious power, which takes the former in particular to the gate of self-destruction. It’s the story of a cult, of religious mania, of copycat killings, of parallel murders, politicians at the top of the tree and prostitutes at the bottom.

I can’t be sure if this was in the author’s mind but the killings, often carried out in tandem, had overtones of the Manson family and Helter-skelter and the earlier Whitechapel Murders of Jack the Ripper. Some of the details, the horror of the crimes, are so vivid, so graphic in description that I found myself skipping before my imagination went into overdrive!

Godwin has a compelling style, lucid, limpid to a superb degree, prose at its purest. Most of the chapters are short, sometimes no more than a page or so, with hooks that pull one forward. Those passages in italics, which reveal the workings of the killer’s mind, full of apocalyptic, manic and semi-poetic meanderings, make for incredible reading. There are all sorts of unusual twists and turns. I was particularly intrigued by the references to Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Richmond Park and hunting. If you want to find out anymore you will just have to read it yourself!

Apostle Rising is a book full of memorable characters and memorable incidents, a well-crafted puzzle in what I see as the best tradition of gothic fiction. It carried me along simply by its own momentum, by the way it’s shaped and by the clarity of the writing.

The only criticisms I have are on minor points of detail. It thought that some of the police work was not as careful as it might have been, particularly in relation to the final political victims. The last one should have been under closer observation, given his connections with the penultimate victim. Also I was surprised by the way in which Karl Black, the villain-in-chief, a wholly malevolent individual, the novel’s Hannibal Lector, was finally pinned down by the confession, offstage, of his principal collaborator, Jonas Wilkes, who had hitherto shown no sign of co-operating with the police. No explanation for his change of mind is offered.

This is minor stuff, though, and if you think I’ve given the game away by naming names think again; this book will keep you guessing to the end and beyond. And just pray that you never meet Blade.

Interview with an Imp

What follows is copy of an interview with me carried out by Tony Berkman who runs Blog Catologue, a blogger community (blog.blogcatalog.com/.../an-interview-with-anastasia-fitzgerald-beaumont-a- woman-of-purpose-vision-intellect-playfulness/). It was fun to think about some of these things, fun to answer Tony’s questions. My answers may give you a little more insight into my character. :-)

He’s all right! Aren’t you, cat? Poor cat! Poor slob! Poor slob without a name! The way I see it I haven’t got the right to give him one. We don’t belong to each other. We just took up one day by the river. I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I’m not sure where that is but I know what it is like. It’s like Tiffany’s. -

Holly Golightly


Tony: What is the one thing you wish everyone would understand about you?

Anastasia: That my bite really is much worse than my bark.

Tony: Your are an avid reader. In a book review, on GoodReads, you wrote that “…. Holly Golightly, a free spirit, [is] the one figure in literature that I identify more with than any other, the delightful, effervescent, wonderful Holly, always travelling and never arriving.”
Would you mind being more specific about why you relate to Holly Golightly? Is it the fact that she was rebelling against what “traditional” women were supposed to be doing during that time period?

Anastasia: Yes, in part, but there is more. I see Holly as someone totally unique, a force for freedom, not simply rebellion. It’s easy to be a rebel; freedom is a far greater challenge. She stands, if you like as a case sui generis, a totally unique human being, always pursuing her own star. And what a star it is. I can’t imagine other lives not being enriched and enhanced by contact, even of the briefest, with someone like Holly. When Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published it must have caused a sensation simply because she was so untypical, but she hasn’t dated, she’s just as relevant today as she was then, a character who shows that life is simply for living, living in the best and most meaningful way that one can.

Tony: It must have been a tremendous sensation. Your perspective is very interesting and adds more depth to what I perceived her to be. What else is there about her nature that you find so compelling?

Anastasia: She is my avatar, the ultimate imp. She is timeless. If Nietzsche invented the Superman Capote invented the Superwoman.

Tony: Your blog Ana the Imp covers a broad range of topics. You say it’s about ”anything from art to witchraft.” Recent posts you’ve had some movie reviews, some fun political commentary, to covering your feelings about watching the wedding of William and Kate , with your mother. Much of what you write seems riddled with a rye sense of humour especially when you disagree with another’s position. After recent voting you came home to see what the buzz was like on Twitter and you played with other’s online in a somewhat mischievous way. It seemed somewhat like a cat playing with some yarn? Are you mischievous and rebellious by nature?

Anastasia: Yes, I am, I always have been. I was an incredible handful at school, as I feel sure my teachers would tell you, even going right back to primary/grade school. I simply refused to take anything for granted, questioning absolutely everything, especially if it was a contention backed up by no more than the mistress or master’s authority. I really like pulling tails, not to let people rest easy on false and unexamined assumptions. Mischief and humour, I find, are often the best weapons at my disposal.

Tony: You currently live in London. Have you lived in London your entire life?

Anastasia: No, I was born in the county of Surrey, where I spent my early years. From the age of eleven to eighteen I was away at boarding school for most of the time, in High Wycombe in the county of Buckinghamshire.

Tony: Your blog’s subtitle is “This is a tale of succubus,” the Title is “Ana the Imp“? Would you mind describing where your desire to name your blog came from or your vision for your blog?

Anastasia: It suited my nature. Ana is simple enough; it’s just an abbreviation of my first name. An imp is just a mischievous little devil, without malevolence, an appellation which seemed to fit my character so exactly. The ‘tale of a succubus’ reference comes from All Along the Crooked Way, a song by Inkubus Sukkubus, my favourite band. A succubus, incidentally, is not quite so benign. No, she is a female demon who comes in the night to suck all the sexual energy out of men, another dimension to my character.

Tony: Another dimension you appear to have is the need to make certain that you voice your views. This is something I have tremendous respect for. I have read some of your more serious pieces and they are brilliant. They cut through the carnage of difficult issues such as those surrounding the Middle East and the USA’s and UK’s foreign policy. Is this an ability that you have developed through your studies or have you always been able to cut through and communicate complex issues so that they are easy to digest?

Anastasia: It’s awfully kind of you to say so. I’ve always loved words, the power of words. Fortunately I’ve been able to communicate, and communicate with considerable effect, through both the written and the spoken medium. I don’t see any point in complicating issues. If I want to say something, I want to convey a message, then I do so directly without fuss or flap. I so admire the essays of George Orwell precisely because he understood the importance of a clear and uncluttered message.

Tony: Where does the imp or rebel fit into this clarity of writing style?

Anastasia: I like to take people by surprise, not always producing what is necessarily expected of me. I write, or at least I try to write in the spirit of a natural rebel.

Tony: I have noticed that. You love the monarchy yet it is a system of rules and part of you seems to be a rebel? Do you love it because it is one the thing that appears to last despite all the challenges that we face in the world?

Anastasia: I love tradition and I love my country. The monarchy for me is part of the quintessence of England, beyond all challenge; I simply could not imagine my country in its absence. As an institution it places no unduly heavy burdens on us as a people. We change and the monarchy changes with us. But it’s always there, an indication of where we have been and a sign of where we are going, an institution that unites the past, the present and the future. There is no rationality here. This is pure emotion and intuition on my part.

Tony: Your reading list shows you have read over 482 books over the past 6 years and you have another 23 upcoming books to read. To what do you attribute your deep thirst for knowledge?

Anastasia: My parents and grandparents encouraged and nurtured my curiosity and my early love of reading and of books. I was taught to read by mother before I went to my first school, so I already had a head start. I also have the ability to consume things at a terrific rate, to absorb what is important and discard what is not. The homes I have lived in, both in Surrey and London, are cluttered with all sorts of books, to which I had unlimited access.

Tony: Do you see yourself as someone who lives on the borders of society, pushing the edges to see how far you can go?

Anastasia: Yes, in American terms I suppose I’m a frontierswoman, pushing always beyond boundaries.

Tony: Do you have dreams of power and celebrity?

Anastasia: I suppose I must to some extent or other, though I would far rather have meaningful power than shallow celebrity.

Tony: What is it about history that so fascinates you to keep digging and searching?

Anastasia: I think we are all born with a particular talent; it just requires the right kind of stimulus to bring it out. As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by history, by past lives, by traces in time. It helped that my grandfather was a supreme story teller. He served as an officer in the British Indian Army both before and during the Second World War and he used to tell me the most marvellous tales of his life and times, of India and the Raj, of hunts mounted on elephants, of sahibs and memsahibs, of a life long, long past. The past for me is a foreign country, one to which I travel visa free.

Tony: You have fascinating background Would you mind sharing what is it about the “edges” such as witchcraft, imps, and succubus that attracts you?

Anastasia: It’s my attraction to the dark side. Seriously, witchcraft is an ancient tradition, one of power and wisdom, one based on sacred practices, with constant renewal in oneself and in nature. For me witchcraft is the greatest of all the religions, the veneration of the Great Mother, the veneration of Pan, the Great Father. It’s about life and love at the most sublime.

Tony: I’d like to switch from witchcraft to your doctorate. You are currently finishing your doctorate, which is self-directed study, what specifically are you studying and what do you plan for the end result?

Anastasia: My speciality is in seventeenth century England, specifically the political struggles that took place during the reign of Charles II, which saw the emergence of the Whigs and the Tories, the first English political parties. Beyond getting my degree I’m not yet settled on the outcome. I don’t want to teach, that’s certain, so I’m likely to end up in journalism…or politics.

Tony: I believe England needs another great female politician. You certainly would make one. Aside from your travels through history your travels have taken you to many corners of the earth. Is there a particular place or people that touched your heart the most and what was it about this place that resonated so deeply with you?

Anastasia: Yes, the people of Cambodia, the Khmers, a gentle, wonderful race. It’s difficult to believe that such horror could have been inflicted on them in the 1970s by their own political masters. Their experience has served to compound my hatred of communism, of all life-denying ideologies.

Tony: Have you thought about how you’d like to be remembered?

Anastasia: As a good friend and a unique spirit, an English version of Holly Golightly.

Tony: Well Anastasia aka Lady Holy thank you for your time and interest in sharing a glance into your life and views . I am grateful that you took your time do this for the rest of us.

Anastasia: It is always a pleasure. Thank you Tony.

Confucius the Dissident

Close to the end of last month I wrote an article on the arrest and disappearance of Ai Weiwei, a leading Chinese artist and dissident (China in Night and Fog). I now have to report on the recent disappearance of Confucius, yes, Confucius, the ancient sage whose concepts of social harmony had such appeal for the Communist authorities, always afraid of inharmonious times and inharmonious people. But the wind has changed yet again and harmony, at least in the Confucian form, is no longer quite so fashionable.

Poor Confucius, there he is, forever in and out of Chinese history, approved of at one moment, despised at the next. He was certainly the political fashion as recently as January, when a 9.5 metre statue of the old boy was installed outside the National Museum on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square looking on to the Forbidden City. He was there, stared at by Mao, making the mad Chairman leap in hell.

Confucius, you see, represented everything that Mao hated, the traditional values and the feudalism of the old China. Mao came to China, particularly in the Cultural Revolution, a little like Qui Shi Huang, the first emperor, who tried to wipe out all memory of the past by destroying books and by burning scholars alive. Confucius was the past and the past was Confucius, swept into a form of oblivion.

The recovery of memory began soon after Mao’s death in 1976. Bit by bit the sage returned, tolerated to begin with and then celebrated by a nation and a government looking for roots in the past. Just as the Germans tried to spread their cultural message across the world with Goethe Institutes, the Chinese set up their own Confucius Institutes. Abroad it was a new way of selling China, a more acceptable face than that of the malign Mao, while at home Confucian notions of harmony were a corrective to the upheaval of rapid and socially unsettling economic progress.

Not any longer. At the end of April the statue was removed under cover of dark without any explanation. The thing is Confucius is a rather awkward avatar. Oh yes, there is all that stuff about obedience and duty, of deference to the system, but that’s not the sum total of his thought. In the Confucian scheme of things governments have to be accountable to the people and, what is worse from the apparatchik’s point of view, they only have the right to rule through the exercise of ethical conduct.

Ethical conduct is now the last thing that the Communist Party wishes to be reminded of, ever fearful that it might just lose the mandate of heaven, every fearful that it’s own abysmal lack of any ethical code will become increasingly apparent, ever fearful of its own people. I see from a report in the Economist that neo-Maoist websites are crowing over the sudden removal of the “witch doctor.” But the ‘witch doctor’ has proved to be remarkably resilient. The night and the fog may have descended on him but he will re-emerge, a symbol, seemingly, not just of harmony but dissidence.

The Lost Cause

In Edinburgh there is a memorial to the Scots who fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War. You will find it in the Old Calton Burial Ground, just across from the spot where David Hume, the leading thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, happens to be interred.

It’s quite an impressive piece of work. There, at the top of a plinth, stands Abraham Lincoln in splendid isolation. At the bottom there is another statue, that of a freed slave, holding up his hands in supplication and gratitude, now a rather unfashionable nineteenth century motif. On the east face the monument carries the following inscription – “In memory of Scottish American soldiers. To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of peace – Abraham Lincoln.” Yes, it’s impressive, an impressive contribution to a post-bellum mythology.

We have not long passed the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, with the attack in April 1861 on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour. To mark the occasion there was an article in one of my history periodicals by Doctor Thomas E Sebrell, a specialist on the subject.

It was particularly good because it corrected several misconceptions that I had, the chief among which was that the residual sympathy for the Confederacy amongst the British manufacturing and ruling class was finally eclipsed by Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, which made intervention on behalf of the South all but impossible. The fact is that this was another ‘wrong move’ on the part of Lincoln, one in a series.

Let me begin by saying that Britain had long been in the front of the campaign against international slavery. The slave trade was abolished by Parliament in the early part of the century and slavery itself abolished throughout the Empire in the late 1830s. During the secession crisis following Lincoln’s election as President in November, 1860 any latent sympathy for the emerging Confederacy was effectively submerged by its adherence to the ‘peculiar institution.’ This changed when Lincoln announced that his chief objective was to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.

There were excellent domestic reasons for this: he did not want to alienate the border slave states, particularly Kentucky, of vital strategic importance to the Union cause, but in doing so he lost the moral high ground in Europe. In a letter to Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, said that the North aimed not at liberation but at conquest. Suspicion of Lincoln was compounded after the introduction of a naval blockade against the South, which starved British manufactures of vital cotton supplies.

It was tricky time. Lincoln may have gained Kentucky but he risked the intervention of a powerful naval adversary on behalf of the South, an intervention that was likely to carry widespread popular appeal in Britain after the Trent, a British mail packet sailing from Southampton to Cuba, was intercepted by a Union vessel on the high seas and two Confederate diplomats effectively kidnapped. Queen Victoria was even moved to write in her diary of the Yankees that “They are such ruffians.” When Prince Albert saw Palmerston and Russell’s letter demanding the release of the diplomats he remarked that this means war.

It was thanks to the Prince’s diplomatic rewording of this bristling missive, and the prompt action of Washington in releasing the Confederates, that there was no war. But sympathy for the South continued on the upswing. By December 1863 the Southern Independence Association, formed in Manchester with the intention of forcing Parliament to recognise the government of Jefferson Davis, had chapters in almost fifty cities and towns across Britain and Ireland. In Parliament over seventy MPs were known to favour the South in contrast with only seventeen for the North.

Palmerston was only waiting for the right moment, either to offering mediation with a view to recognising the Confederacy, or taking such action unilaterally. Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Maryland after the Battle of Antietam in September, 1862 stayed his hand, but then came another dangerous moment for the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln in the wake of Antietam, was widely condemned in Britain, not celebrated.

Remember, Lincoln had not abolished slavery, merely ‘freed’ the slaves who were held in those states beyond Union control. That is to say, in both the Border States and those areas of the Confederacy under the occupation of Union troops slavery remained firmly in place. Russell branded the act as a hypocritical and an illegal violation of the American constitution, which turned slavery itself into a “reward for loyalty.”

So slavery and declining sympathy for the Southern cause had nothing to do with the British reluctance to intervene. The real reason was, as Sebrell argues, quite simple; technical innovations in naval warfare, the introduction of both sides in the conflict of ironclads, had, by the summer of 1863, made the British Navy, hitherto the most powerful in the world, obsolete. A test was carried out on HMS Warrior, the most technically advanced the Royal Navy had, a huge ship itself partially ironclad, to see if it could withstand an onslaught by the squat and ugly little vessels whose prototype was the Monitor. Palmerston was told that every round from the sea monsters had penetrated the Warrior’s iron plates with ease. At that moment it was the Union, not the British, who ruled the waves. At that moment the Confederate cause in Britain was lost.

In the end all that survived was a certain nostalgia, evidenced by the free-standing statue of General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, put up in Capitol Square in Richmond, Virginia in 1875, with funds provided by his English admirers, a reminder the politics were not quite as simple as the Lincoln statue in Edinburgh would suggest.