History Today 08-2014

FIRST WORLD WAR
Why Britain FOUGHT
ROMAN CLASS STRUGGLE

From Caesar to CAESAR
August 2014
Vol 64 Issue 8
The Day Washington
BURNED
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Deputy Editor Charlotte Crow
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Brothers in arms:
Private Lay (seated)
with unknown
comrade, c.1916.
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde
Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge
Professor Richard Bessel University of York
Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter
Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor
of the Open University
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen
Professor David Ellwood
University of Bologna
Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex
Juliet Gardiner Historian and author
Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South
Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary,
University of London
Professor Geoffrey Parker
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston
London School of Economics
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
University of London
Dr David Starkey
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter
Professor Chris Wrigley
University of Nottingham
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2 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014
FROM THE EDITOR

THE CENTENARY of the outbreak of the First World War has raised a number
of questions, many of them seeking the answer of who should bear ultimate
responsibility for the carnage that followed. But another kind of question arose at
one of the first of a number of public Great War debates I have attended this year,
held in February at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. Where are
the black faces? asked a man in the audience, a film-maker of African heritage, who
pointed out that, of 100 or so people in the room, he and an elderly Asian man were
the only ones from ethnic minorities.
His point is an important one, for around one and a half million Indians Hindu,
Muslim and Sikh served the British Empire during the war and as many as two
million Africans were involved as soldiers and labourers. The next few years present a
real opportunity, already grasped in part, to tell their story and paint a more detailed,
more accurate story of the global nature of the conflict. But we should be careful,
whatever our background, of identifying too closely with those who simply bear a
physical resemblance to us, for history is more than skin deep.
I cannot, for example, get closer physically to the Great War than the man seated
in the photograph above, my paternal grandfather, with whom I share a quarter of
my genes. Private Nicholas Neil Lay volunteered for the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry,
lying about his age, as did so many, in order to go to France in search of his father,
who had already taken the kings shilling. He was later transferred to the Hampshire
Regiment and fought at the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres, before coming
home alive as 88 per cent of all British soldiers did, including his father apparently
without trauma but bearing a shrapnel wound on his neck as a reminder.
There is a family resemblance, especially to my father, but it is important to
recognise how different my grandfathers generation was from ours. Their world was
much harder, with little in the way of welfare and relatively primitive health care;
it would take another war to deliver a National Health Service. Attitudes to pain,
to suffering, to hardship were different, more stoic, as were notions of honour and
patriotism. There were far fewer distractions and there was greater moral certainty,
on religion, race and gender. Amid the commemorations of August 1914 we must
remember that even those combatants who look like us are a distant world away.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
FO Females Army Cuts Britain and Crimea Kenneth Clark
Opening the Doors of Diplomacy

The Foreign Office was
long a bastion of male
chauvinism. Only during
the Second World War did
women diplomats begin to
make their mark.
Helen McCarthy
IN HER interwar classic, Three
Guineas, Virginia Woolf imagined the
following scene. The daughter of an
educated man, in the course of conversation with a brother or male acquaintance, raises the possibility that
newly enfranchised women should
now be admitted to all professions,
including those still reserved for men:
We on our side of the table become
aware at once of some strong emotion
on your side arising from some motive
below the level of conscious thought...
The physical symptoms are unmistakable. Nerves erect themselves; fingers
automatically tighten upon spoon or
cigarette; a glance at the private
psychometer shows that the emotional
temperature has risen from ten to
twenty degrees above normal.
Woolf was not present at the proceedings of the departmental committee
convened by the British Foreign Office
in 1934 to consider womens suitability for diplomatic careers. Had she
been, she would have felt little need to
reconsider her analysis of the masculine instinct to preserve its professional privileges. Feminist efforts to
unlock the doors of the Foreign Office
were met with fierce resistance from
its long-time incumbents, who were
profoundly disturbed by the prospect of a feminine invasion of their
club-like world. Only the large-scale
mobilisation of women on the home
and fighting fronts during the Second
Locked out: a
Punch cartoon of
1936 reflects on
the barriers to
female diplomats.
World War was sufficient to force a

change to the masculine status quo.
In 1946 women finally became eligible
for posts in the British Diplomatic
Service.
The strength of feeling on the
part of men in the Foreign Office
stemmed from the perceived threat
posed by women diplomats to the
social and sexual order underpinning
the modern diplomatic profession. In
the 19th century diplomacy evolved
into a well-defined career for elite
men accompanied by dutiful and loyal
Feminist efforts to unlock the

doors of the Foreign Office were
met with fierce resistance from
its long-time incumbents
spouses. By the interwar years women

were employed as typists and in
lower-grade clerical roles in embassies,
but never as the professional equals
of men.
This state of affairs clearly suited
Foreign Office authorities, who only
reluctantly agreed to consider the
possibility of appointing female
diplomats following pressure from
feminists and professional womens
societies. The head of the Foreign
Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, made
his position clear. Such a move would
not be in the interests of the women
themselves, nor in the interest of His
Majestys Service; and it would be
damaging to the prestige of His Majestys Government in foreign countries.
In 1933 Vansittart handed the task of
preparing the Foreign Office case to
an assistant under-secretary, Charles
Howard Smith, who swiftly pledged to
gather all the ammunition I can get.
This did not prove difficult. Of 51
ambassadors canvassed for their opinions, only three were in favour of employing women. The heads of the Consular Service, whose officers worked in
less salubrious surroundings in remote
outposts or port towns, were even
more emphatically opposed.
Their combined evidence advanced
three main arguments. The first dwelt
on the practical difficulties of posting
women to countries where their status
was low. In Vansittarts words: It is a
false argument to say that, because we
treat women as equal in this country,
an Englishwoman abroad will be so
treated by foreigners. She will not.
The ambassador to Berlin, Sir Eric
Phipps, reinforced the point, noting
that Nazi officials would probably feel
that they themselves were not being
taken sufficiently seriously for being
asked to receive her.
The second argument centred on
the rough and tumble of the port,
where consular officers could be
called upon to placate violent and
AUGUST 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
inebriated sailors, deal with outbreaks

of venereal disease on merchant ships,
or investigate allegations of homosexual crime at sea. Such tasks were
obviously unsuitable for women.
The third argument focused on
marital status. A single woman, it was
suggested, was of dramatically lower
value than a male diplomat, who came
with a spouse in tow. The ambassador
to Buenos Aires, Sir Henry Chilton,
speculated that a femme sole as Ambassadress would do no more than 50 per
cent of the work done by my wife and
myself. Conversely, a married woman
presented the thorny problem of the
The sacrifices of
women on the
home front made it
impossible to deny
renewed feminist
demands for equality
diplomatic husband: if he shunned the
part of trailing spouse, then her resignation became inevitable but, if he
accompanied her en poste, the chances
were he would quickly make himself a
nuisance to the work of the embassy.
These arguments were skilfully
marshalled by Howard Smith, who
ensured the committee did not see
the more rabidly misogynistic comments of ambassadors like Sir Joseph
Addison, who confessed that he would
rather die than see England with 400
MPs, 15 Cabinet Ministers, 10 High
Court Judges, 6 Permanent UnderSecretaries and 8 Ambassadors, all
of the female sex and running the
country on the famous intuition
lines. In truth, beliefs about womens
supposed temperamental shortcomings were widely held. Many ambassadors noted a tendency towards sentimentality, while one official, David
Scott, expressed the view that women
were only too apt to espouse causes,
and would be even if fully trained. It
was a matter of their very nature.
In 1934 the committee found in
favour of maintaining the status quo,
yet just over a decade later women
were representing Britain as diplomats
in their own right. What happened
to effect this dramatic reversal? Put

simply, the answer was the war. Manpower shortages forced the Foreign
Office, alongside other Whitehall
departments, to post women overseas
to carry out responsible political work.
This included (among others) the
traveller Freya Stark in Egypt and Iraq,
the Persian scholar Nancy Lambton
in Tehran, Canadian-born Mary
McGeachy in Washington DC and
the journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann
in Switzerland. Their professional
competence destroyed much of the
Foreign Office case against women,
while the sacrifices of ordinary women
on the home front made it impossible
to deny renewed feminist demands
for equality in all areas of public life,
including that of diplomacy.
Woolfs psychometer, however,
still ran high even after 1946. Alongside a marriage bar, which stayed in
place until 1973, postwar female recruits encountered hostile department
heads in London and were denied overseas postings by sceptical ambassadors.
The Foreign Office today is a far more
welcoming place, yet women remain
outnumbered by men in the most
senior grades to the level of three to
one. The battle for the Foreign Office
may be over, but it is not yet history.
Helen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in History at
Queen Mary, University of London and the author
of Women of the World: the Rise of the Female
Diplomat (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
The New
Contemptibles?
Neglected by politicians,
todays British army bears
an alarming resemblance to
the force of 1914.
Allan Mallinson
GIVING EVIDENCE in June this year
before the Public Accounts Committee
on the plans for Army 2020, in which
30,000 territorials will replace 20,000
regulars, the Chief of the General
Staff, Sir Peter Wall, was asked what
contingency plans there were in case
enough territorials couldnt be recruited.
He replied that to sustain operations
the army might have to recall former
regulars to the colours.
We have been here before: in August
1914. Then, as now, the British army
relied wholly on volunteers, whereas
every major power in Europe (and most
minor ones) had conscription. The advantage of conscription was that it not
only produced large, ready armies, but
also a pool of trained reservist manpower, topped up annually when the
conscript intake of two or three years
before returned to civilian life.
Reflecting on this disparity in a
lecture at the Royal United Services
Institution in December 1920, the Chief
of the Imperial General Staff, Field
Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, declared:
There are a great many advantages in a
voluntary army; there are a great many
disadvantages. But whatever the advantages,
and whatever the disadvantages, there is this
constant factor in a voluntary army: it solves
no military problem alone none In 1914, if
we take that year, there was not one single
campaign that the wit of man could imagine
where the right answer was: Six Regular
divisions and fourteen Territorials.
Yet in 1914, the then Major-General
Wilson, as Director of Military Operations, had been content to send just four
of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF)
six divisions to fight on the left wing of
the French army (of some 90 divisions)
along the Belgian border. Either his eyes
HISTORYMATTERS
had been opened by the experience

of four years of needless losses or he
was attempting to pull the wool over
the eyes of those in the audience who
might question his earlier judgement.
Unfortunately there is no record of the
subsequent discussion.
Wilsons defence would have been
that his preferred solution was to send
every soldier in the UK regular and
territorial to France at once, for he
believed there was no realistic threat
of invasion and that the scales of the
French and German armies were so
finely balanced that the British contribution could be decisive.
He may have been right, but he
would have been trying to fashion
a coat from cloth that was available
but beyond his pocket. The Territorial
Forces (TF) raison dtre was home
territorial defence. There was
nothing to stop a territorial volunteering for service overseas, but he couldnt
be compelled. That was the deal. Why
14 divisions of territorials? Because 14
was the maximum that could be raised
from the money voted by Parliament
and because the county TF associations
were a powerful lobby with no wish to
see their power reduced.
Strictly, too, the BEF of August
1914 was not all-regular. The first
requirement of the army in Britain
was to keep the overseas garrisons up
to strength. Each infantry regiment
therefore comprised two regular battalions (some regiments had four) and
the one stationed at home sent drafts
periodically to the other overseas,
which meant the home battalion was
invariably under-strength. When mobilised for war the home battalion relied
on the recall of regular reservists; men
who had completed their service and
retained a seven-year reserve liability
after discharge. In August 1914 these
reservists, mobilised in a masterful programme that was completed in three
days, comprised 60 per cent of the BEF.
Their fitness, efficiency and enthusiasm
were variable, though they did, on the
whole, perform well.
Wilson could only send four regular
divisions to France because in 1912
the Committee of Imperial Defence
had recommended that, in spite of
Then, as now, the British army

relied wholly on volunteers,
whereas every major power in
Europe had conscription
Bound for the
front: soldiers of
the BEF share a
railway carriage
with horses,
August 1914.
the 14 TF divisions and the might of the

Royal Navy, two regular divisions would
remain in these islands until the TF was
fully mobilised or the threat of invasion
was demonstrably nil. In the event, just
four infantry divisions (and the cavalry
division) around 80,000 combatants
would find themselves facing several
times their number of Germans in their
first encounter of the war, at Mons on
August 23rd. A fifth division, sent out
hurriedly, was caught on the hop a few
days later at Le Cateau in the middle of
the BEFs fighting retreat; a sixth joined
during the counter-attack on the Marne
in early September and was cut up in the
battle to take the heights on the River
Aisne; a seventh a scratch division
made up of regular troops pulled back
from various overseas garrisons joined
a few weeks later; and an eighth

arrived in November as the fighting
intensified around Ypres. Three more
divisions from overseas garrisons
would arrive (as well as hastily formed
divisions of the Indian army) until there
were no more regulars to send.
All of these divisions had been
committed to battle piecemeal, instead
of en masse as some, notably Churchill
and Haig, had advocated (see Churchills Plan to Win the First World War,
History Today, December 2013) and by
the end of November the old regular
army was a shadow of its former self.
Wilsons plan broke Clausewitzs first
principle of war: The first rule is therefore to enter the field with an army as
strong as possible.
The Kaiser can be forgiven for (reputedly) calling the BEF a contemptible little army; he protested after the
war that he had not, but that he might
have described it as contemptibly little
an indisputable description of a tiny,
if highly trained, army seeking to influence a war between two nations with
universal adult male conscription.
There had been voices in Britain
calling for conscription. The National
Service League, founded in February
1902 in the later stages of the Boer
War (a shock to the armys prestige), argued for compulsory military
training for men aged between 18 and
30 for the purpose of home defence.
Under the presidency of the former
Commander-in-Chief, Lord Roberts,
membership of the league reached
60,000 in 1910. Churchill, by then
Home Secretary, expressed some
private, if guarded, support, as did
the Chancellor, Lloyd George, who
preferred a militia system on the Swiss
model, implying a less aggressive
stance than full-blown conscription;
but the voluntary principle prevailed.
Haldane, the great reforming Secretary
of State for War, even turned the old
militia service in which could still
in theory be compulsory through the
militia ballot into an all-volunteer
force to provide battle-casualty replacements for the regulars, renaming
it the Special Reserve (SR). In August
1914 this worked reasonably well,
especially with officers, who had
HISTORYMATTERS
joined the SR through the school and

university officer training corps. Both
Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon
joined regular battalions of the Royal
Welch Fusiliers as SR officers.
When it was realised on the first
day of the war that a far larger army
would be needed than the 14 divisions of
the TF Field Marshal Lord Kitchener,
appointed war minister on August 5th,
decided arbitrarily to raise in stages a
citizen-volunteer army that by 1917
would number some 800,000, albeit
without the men, the system or the materiel to train, equip and lead them.
Losses among the regulars in 1914 and
then among the territorials who were
sent to France to reinforce them led in
1916 to the introduction of conscription.
Britain had had to fashion an army
from scratch, while at the same time
fighting the enemy, unlike the Continental powers, who could mobilise huge
numbers of reservists, while continuing
to prepare those nearing conscript age.
Even the United States, whose army
at the beginning of 1917 numbered just
80,000, had a million and a half men in
France 18 months later. They were able
to do so because the task of the 80,000
regulars was first to build an army and
only then to fight. The British army, on
the other hand, was knocked off balance
in the first month of fighting and did
not regain it until the summer of 1918,
when conscription and experience at last
fashioned a strong instrument.
The lesson of 1914, wrote Lloyd
George, is that minority governments
can be distracted by peripheral matters:
During the eight years that preceded the
war, the Cabinet devoted a ridiculously small
percentage of its time to a consideration
of foreign affairs Education, Temperance,
Land Taxation, culminating in the most
serious constitutional crisis since the Reform
Bill the Parliament Act Home Rule, and
the Disestablishment of the Church in Wales:
these subjects challenged an infinite variety
of human interests, sentiment and emotion.
Today free schools, HS2, another Heathrow and much else are subjects that
similarly challenge an infinite variety of
human interests, sentiment and emotion.
Allan Mallinsons latest book is 1914: Fight the

Good Fight Britain, the Army and the Coming
of the First World War (Bantam Press, 2013).
Pitted Against
the Bear
Britain and Russia came

close to blows over Crimea
in the 18th century.
Jeremy Black
THE BRITISH FORCES sent to the Black

Sea during the Crimean and Russian
civil wars would not have been the first
had the government of William Pitt the
Younger had its way in 1791. Benefiting from divisions among the Crimean
Tatars, Catherine the Great had annexed
Crimea eight years earlier, only for the
Ottoman Sultan, the overlord of the
Crimean khanate, to launch a war of
reconquest in 1787. Repulsing the Turkish
attack, the Russians went on to make
major gains. Concerned about a threat
to the balance of power, Britain, which
had allied with Prussia in 1787, pressed
Russia and its ally Austria to end the war
without making territorial gains. Austria
agreed, but Russia refused.
In 1791 the crisis centred on Russian
determination to retain the fortress of
Ochavov (stormed by Potemkin in 1788)
and its lands between the rivers Bug
and Dniester, consolidating control over
Crimea.
Britain prepared for action, with
fleets in the Baltic and Black seas and
with a Prussian army on the Russian
frontier. Efforts were made to create an
international league, including Poland,
Sweden and Holland.
On March 28th, 1791 the British

government asked Parliament for
funds for naval armaments. The next
day it won majorities in both Houses,
but the cohesion of the ministry was
damaged by the debates. Meanwhile,
public agitation in favour of Russia and
against war developed, encouraged
both by the Russian envoy, Count Vorontsov, and by the Russia Company,
which acted as a powerful lobby.
It was difficult for the ministry to
justify a policy designed to intimidate
Russia just short of going to war and
to retain Prussia as an ally, while restraining it militarily. The governments
majority began to crumble in April,
over a range of concerns affecting
parliamentarians, including the loss
of Russian trade, the costs of war and
geopolitical considerations. In the Lords
the Duke of Richmond told the Foreign
Secretary, the Duke of Leeds, that the
country would not support confrontation with Russia, but Leeds wanted to
press on. In contrast, Pitt was affected
by the opposition in the Commons,
which saw him change policy to one
of conciliation and compromise. Leeds
resigned in disgust. By abandoning his
policy, Pitt rode out the political storm.
Britain was marginalised in the RussoTurkish Treaty of Jassy (1792). The
Russians gained Ochakov and territory
up to the Dniester. The annexation
of Crimea was accepted. The Eastern
Question had emerged.
Jeremy Blacks most recent book is The Power

of Knowledge: How Information and Technology
Made the Modern World (Yale, 2014).
The Political
Warrior Mowing
Down the
Russian Trade,
a satire on Pitts
foreign policy
from 1791.
A vision in tweed:
Kenneth Clark
filming an episode
of Civilisation in
the Lake District.
In Defence of Civilisation
Plans to remake the landmark BBC TV series raise

challenging questions about contemporary pieties.
Michael Prodger
HOW OFTEN has Lord Hall paused to
regret announcing that the BBC intends
to remake Kenneth Clarks Civilisation?
The notion becomes more fraught
with difficulty at every turn. Set aside
the question as to whether a modern
Civilisation is a good idea and still Halls
problems, or rather those of his commissioning editors, multiply.
First shown in 1969 in 12 episodes,
Civilisation focused exclusively on western
Europe. It is inconceivable that todays
BBC could make a series that excluded
the cultures of the Far East, India, Africa
and Central and South America. So is
one that paid little attention to women.
Or indeed one that started, as Clarks did,
with the disarming statement: What is
civilisation? I dont know but I think I
can recognise it when I see it.
Early attacks on Clark were instigated by his ideological opposite John
Berger and they hit home. The way that
Clark has been wilfully misinterpreted
is, however, also a measure of changed
times and contemporary pieties. His
omission of other cultures was not
because he thought them inferior but
because, as he admitted, he didnt
know much about them. He did not
suppose that anyone could be so obtuse
as to think I had forgotten about the
great civilisations of the pre-Christian
era and the east, but people did. It is

worth noting that he hardly mentioned
Spain Velzquez, Goya et al in the
series because he thought the countrys
contribution to culture too slight: One
asks what Spain has done to enlarge the
human mind and pull mankind a few
steps up the hill. It is also forgotten that
the series had the all-important subtitle;
A personal view by Kenneth Clark.
Halls greatest problem though
If you are going to make grand

statements then it is best to
be able to back them up and
Kenneth Clark could
is who should play the Clark role.
Immediately after the BBC announcement, the retiring novelist Kathy Lette
unhelpfully whipped up a petition signed
by the likes of Helena Kennedy, Shami
Chakrabarti, Tracy Chevalier and Sandi
Toksvig instructing Hall not to plump for
a man. Mary Beard is their poster girl,
though what attributes she would bring
to a discussion of 19th-century Paris
or pre-Columbian Peru was not made
clear. Among other widely tipped names
Neil MacGregor and Simon Schama
stand out. Pick a woman and Hall will be
accused of pandering to feminists, pick
MacGregor and he will be demonstrat-
ing patrician tendencies; pick Schama

and it will show a lack of imagination.
And why no black or Indian presenter?
Clark may have been derided for his
tweediness and his plummy tones but
he had a breadth of expertise that is
unrivalled today. By 28 he was Keeper of
the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean and, three years later, Director of
the National Gallery and Surveyor of the
Kings Pictures. Civilisation was far from
his only foray into television; he presented more than 50 programmes, including
a series on Japanese art.
Indeed it was the gift of a set of
Japanese prints from his father, heir to a
textile fortune and supposedly the man
who broke the bank at Monte Carlo,
that first fired Clarks interest in art. His
tastes were far from Eurocentric. His
grand generalisations (One fancies that
Nordic man took a long time to emerge
from the primeval forest or I suppose its
debatable how far Elizabethan England
can be called civilised) may now seem
laughably de haut en bas but they were
born from a lifetime of study: Clark was
66 when he made Civilisation. If you are
going to make grand statements then it
is best to be able to back them up and
Kenneth Clark could.
Although his books are no longer
required reading, they were groundbreaking in condensing vast genres for
the first time. Like those of his hero
Ruskin, they were readable in a way that
subsequent art history often is not.
In one sense, though, Halls initiative
seems apposite. Civilisation was first
aired while both the Cold War and the
Vietnam wars were in full swing and only
a year after the vnements in Paris and
the assassination of Martin Luther King.
So, when Clark said of the fall of the
Roman Empire that It does seem hard
to believe that western civilisation could
ever vanish and yet, you know, it has
happened once, his words had a contemporary relevance. And when David
Attenborough, then controller of BBC2,
asked him to create the series he had
no clear idea of what civilisation meant
except that: I thought it was preferable
to barbarism, and fancied that now was
the moment to say so. Different times
perhaps but it is worth saying it again.
Michael Prodger is a senior research fellow at

the University of Buckingham.
MonthsPast
AUGUST
By Richard Cavendish
AUGUST 1st, 1464
The death of
Cosimo de Medici
By the end of the 14th century the
city-state of Florence had built up a
profitable textile industry with a flourishing export trade and had become a
major banking centre, lending money
to businessmen, kings and lords, popes
and senior clergy. The city and its
surrounding territory was an independent republic governed by its wealthiest
families through the Signoria, the city
council, behind a faade of democracy.
The Medicis, originally Tuscan peasantry,
worked their way up into the rich elite
and Cosimo the Elder, as he was known,
would make himself the effective ruler
of Florence and one of the key figures of
the Italian Renaissance.
Cosimo was the elder son and
successor of Giovanni di Bicci de Medici,
who founded the Medici Bank in the
1390s, opened branches in Rome, Venice
and Naples and went on to take charge
of the Vaticans finances. He died in
1429, when Cosimo was 39. Cosimo
was a brilliant businessman who made
a colossal fortune in banking and also
adroitly built up Medici political power
in Florence. In 1433 some of his rivals had
him arrested and charged with trying
to elevate himself above the status of
an ordinary citizen, which in supposedly democratic Florence could carry
the death penalty. Imprisoned in a tiny
dungeon, Cosimo contrived to make
sure that his food was not poisoned
and quietly bribed enough members of
the Signoria to reduce the sentence to
banishment for five years.
Cosimo went to Padua and soon
moved on to Venice, where he and his
money were warmly received. He had
taken his bank with him and the effect
on the economy of Florence was so
severe that the banishment was cancelled and Cosimo returned to Florence
in 1434. He then had his opponents
banished in their turn and made sure
that they never returned.
Renaissance man:
Cosimo the Elder
by Pontormo,
c.1520.
Cosimos huge wealth and his

combination of open-handed generosity and shrewd bribery took him to the
top of Florentine society. He took care
never to behave like a despot and his
simple, straightforward manner helped
to endear him to many citizens. So
did his generous gifts to churches, the
religious orders and other good causes.
He gained the support of the majority
of the Signoria, who considered him the
most influential figure in helping them
to retain their privileged position in the
city. Pope Pius II, who knew him well,
said that political matters were settled
at Cosimos house; he chose who should
fill public positions; he decided peace
and war; and he was virtually king of
Florence.
Another factor was Cosimos exaltation of Florentine prestige through his
encouragement of scholars and artists.
From his boyhood he had been interested in the new humanism, the study of
the literature, learning and philosophy of
Ancient Greece and Rome. He lavished

money on the Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino and financed his
translation of the entire works of Plato.
They became close friends and enjoyed
discussing philosophy together. He also
backed the scholar Poggio Bracciolino,
who travelled about rediscovering longlost classical manuscripts, and Cosimo
built up his own library of books and
Greek, Latin and Hebrew documents,
which he had translated.
Cosimo also commissioned work
from the citys architects and artists. The
Medici Palace, where he lived with his
wife Contessina and his slavemistress Maddalena (he bought her in
Venice), was designed by Michelozzo
de Bartolozzi and built in Florence from
the 1440s. Cosimo had already paid
Michelozzo to rebuild the monastery
of San Marco, where he had his own
private cell and held deep theological
discussions with the prior, the future
St Antonio Pierozzi. He paid Filippo
Brunelleschi to rebuild the Medici
familys parish church of San Lorenzo.
Others he backed included Michelangelo,
the sculptors Donatello and Ghiberti and
the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. He is on
record as saying that his two supreme
pleasures in life were making and spending money and that spending it was
even more satisfying than making it.
In his later years Cosimo suffered
badly from gout, arthritis and bladder
problems. Ficino recorded that when
Cosimos wife reproached him for
spending so much time sitting in a chair
with his eyes closed, doing nothing, he
replied that when they moved to their
country estates she took plenty of time
over her preparations and he equally
needed time to prepare for his journey
to a country from which he would not
return. He was 74 when he died at his
country house at Careggi. His body was
taken to Florence and huge crowds
filled the streets as he was buried in the
church of San Lorenzo, where his tomb
can still be seen. Carved on it by order
of the Signoria were the words Pater
Patriae, Father of the Country.
AUGUST 21st, 1614
Death of Countess
Elizabeth Bathory
She has been described as the most

vicious female serial killer in all recorded history. Where fact ends and
fiction begins in her horrible story is
now impossible to determine, but in
her fame as a legendary vampire she
is outrivalled only by Count Dracula.
Born in 1560, she was endowed with
looks, wealth, an excellent education
and a stellar social position as one
of the Bathory family, who ruled Transylvania as a virtually independent
principality within the kingdom of
Hungary.
When she was 11 or 12 Elizabeth
was betrothed to Ferenc Ndasdy of
another aristocratic Hungarian family,
but a year or two later she had a baby
by a lower-order lover. Ndasdy was
reported to have had him castrated and then torn to pieces by dogs.
The child, a daughter, was quietly
hidden from view and Elizabeth and
Ndasdy were married in 1575 when
she was 14. Because Elizabeth socially
outranked her husband, she kept the
surname Bathory, which he added
to his own. The young couple lived

in the Ndasdy castles in Hungary at
Srvr and Csetje (now in Slovakia),
but Ferenc was an ambitious soldier
and was often away. Elizabeth ran the
estates, took various lovers and bore
her husband four children. She was 43
when he died in 1604.
Word was beginning to spread
about her sadistic activities. It was
said that she enjoyed torturing and
killing young girls. At first they were
servants at her castles, daughters of
Blood countess:
Elizabeth Bathory,
anonymous
portrait,
17th century.
Blown away:
a scene from
The Wizard of Oz.
AUGUST 12th, 1939
Somewhere Over
the Rainbow
Premiered at Graumans Chinese Theatre
in Los Angeles, The Wizard of Oz was one
of the best-loved Hollywood films ever
made. It was the most expensive movie
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had produced

to date and it made an international
star of Judy Garland, who had begun life
with the not wildly glamorous name of
Frances Gumm, but endowed with a
compelling singing voice. MGM signed
her aged 13 in 1935 and did its utmost
to pretend that she was still a young
teenager when she played the role of
the films 12-year-old heroine, Dorothy
Gale, who with her dog Toto is blown
away by a whirlwind to Oz in Munchkin
Land. Following the yellow brick road to
find the Wizard of Oz, who she hopes
will use his magic to send her home, she
falls in with the Scarecrow, Tin Man and
Cowardly Lion (played by Ray Bolger,
Jack Haley and Bert Lahr, respectively),
who also need the Wizards help. The
travellers are welcomed to Munchkin
Land by its inhabitants, the Munchkins,
played by an assortment of dwarfs.
the local peasants, but later they included girls sent to her by local gentry
families to learn good manners. She
believed that drinking the blood of
young girls would preserve her youthfulness and her looks. Witnesses
told of her stabbing victims or biting
their breasts, hands, faces and arms,
cutting them with scissors, sticking
needles into their lips or burning
them with red-hot irons, coins or
keys. Some were beaten to death and
some were starved. The story that
Elizabeth used to bathe in their blood
seems to have been added later on.
A Lutheran minister went to the
Hungarian authorities, who eventually began an investigation in 1610.
In December of that year Elizabeth
was arrested and so were four of her
favourite servants and intimates, who
were accused of being her accomplices. They were tried and found guilty.
Three of them were executed and the
fourth was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Elizabeth herself was not put on
trial, because of her familys standing,
but she was shut up in Csetje Castle,
held in solitary confinement in a room
whose windows were walled up. She
was 54 when she died there in 1614.
The Wizard turns out to be a fake and

Dorothy eventually returns home by
clapping her hands three times and
saying Theres no place like home.
Work on the film started in 1938. The
producer was Mervyn LeRoy and the
principal director Victor Fleming. The
script, by many different writers, was
based on a novel written for children
years before by Frank Baum. The songs
had music by Harold Arlen and words by
E.Y. Harburg. Besides Somewhere Over
the Rainbow, which won an Academy
Award and which Judy Garland would
have to sing to audiences on demand for
years, the songs included Were Off to
See the Wizard and Follow the Yellow
Brick Road.
Sadly, there was to be no place like
home for Garland herself. Her life was a
miserable progression through mental
problems, addiction to alcohol and drugs,
failed relationships, suicide attempts and
desperate unhappiness until death freed
her when she was 47 in 1969.
ROME
The Many
and the Few
T.P. Wiseman looks at how Roman republican ideals and the
struggle between optimates and populares shaped the lives
and legacies of the Roman imperator, Augustus, and his
designated successor, Tiberius.
WO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, on August 18th, ad 14, at the

town of Nola, about 20 miles east of Naples, Caesar Augustus
lay dying. He was lucid enough to have a long private talk
with his adopted son and heir, Tiberius, who had been
urgently called back across the Adriatic from his military command.
There can have been only one subject for their discussion: how Rome
and its empire were now to be governed.
Augustus biographer Suetonius, a scrupulous and well-informed
author, does not speculate on what was said, but adds this comment:
I know it is commonly believed that when Tiberius had left after this
confidential talk, Augustus personal staff heard him say: Poor Roman
people, to be under such slow-moving jaws!
From his access to the imperial archives, Suetonius also knew that
Augustus private letters to Tiberius gave a more favourable view of
him. He quotes a selection of passages, including these two:
Please look after yourself. If we heard you were ill it would be the death of
your mother and me, and the Roman people would be risking the whole of
their empire.
I pray the gods, if they dont simply hate the Roman people, to preserve
you for us and allow you good health, now and always.
Modern readers may find the phraseology surprising. Surely Augustus
was an emperor and Tiberius his successor? What did the Roman
people have to do with it?
They had everything to do with it. The term emperor, when used
of either Augustus or Tiberius, is a deeply misleading anachronism. To
understand why, we need to go back three centuries.
IN THE THIRD CENTURY bc, the earliest for which we have reliable
information, the Roman people and the Roman republic were
synonymous. All Roman citizens were equal, as established in the
beginning by Romulus. Political authority and military command,
even when held by descendants of old aristocratic families, were for
the benefit of and in the control of the populus Romanus.
It was the war with Hannibal (218-201 bc) that undermined the
egalitarian ideal. Romes two most disastrous defeats were the fault of
popular commanders (Flaminius and Varro), while the men responsible both for the patient defensive strategy that prevented Hannibal
The Great Cameo of France was carved in

the reign of Tiberius, ad c.23, and shows
him enthroned, while Augustus, veiled and
crowned, floats above.
ROME
from winning and for the bold aggression that finally
defeated him (respectively, Fabius Maximus and
Cornelius Scipio) were patricians of the old nobility.
The Senate took credit for Romes new position as the
superpower of the western Mediterranean and it was
another aristocrat, Aemilius Paullus, who conquered
Macedon and in 167 bc led the last of Alexander the
Greats successors in a Roman triumph.
The profits of empire exacerbated the difference
in wealth between the top and the bottom of Roman
society and by the second half of the second century bc
there were many among the senatorial aristocracy
arrogant enough to believe that the republic was for
their benefit alone. When legally elected tribunes of
the plebs were murdered with impunity for carrying
legislation against the political and economic interests
of the aristocratic elite, as happened in 133, 121, 100 and
88 bc, the politics of the republic were fatally polarised
and political assassination led directly to civil war.
E ARE uniquely well informed about

this catastrophic period thanks to the
surviving speeches, dialogues and
letters of Cicero (106-43 bc), for whom
ideological confrontation was an inevitable fact. In
this state, he said, there have always been two sorts
of politician, by name and by nature respectively
populares and optimates; the former speak and act for
the many [multitudo], the latter for the elite [optimus
quisque]. What Cicero called the elite was described
more precisely by his younger contemporary, the historian Sallust, as a few powerful men (pauci potentes).
In Ciceros time the populares had a formidable
champion in Julius Caesar. When he crossed the
Rubicon and marched on Rome in 49 bc his wellpublicised aim was to free the Roman people from
their oppression by a clique of a few men. Victorious
in the civil war, he pardoned his defeated enemies and
dismissed his bodyguard, relying on the oath sworn
by all senators to protect his safety. The optimate clique broke their
oath and killed him on the Ides of March, 44 bc. The Roman people
called for vengeance and rioted at his funeral.
Caesar had no son, but had adopted in his will his great-nephew
Octavius, a young man now receiving a military and oratorical education in Greece. The question was whether Octavius would accept the
inheritance, the name Caesar and the duty of vengeance? He did. In
his own words, listing his achievements nearly 60 years later:
At the age of 19, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I
raised an army by which I freed the republic from its oppression by
a dominant clique.
The echo of Caesars declaration is unmistakable and now this
young man was Caesar, too. (Modern authors tend to call him Octavi-
The Century That Changed Rome

49 bc
Julius Caesars
march on Rome
44 bc
Julius Caesar
murdered
42 bc
Assassins defeated
at Philippi
Augustus wearing
an imperial crown of
honour made from oak
leaves, first century bc.
an, but that was a name he never used.) The Roman people elected
him, along with two older colleagues, to a special five-year supreme
command, in order to destroy the assassins and their allies. That was
largely achieved at Philippi (42 bc) and the last diehard optimates
were defeated in Sicily six years later. Meanwhile the dead Caesar was
officially deified as Divus Iulius.
It is important to understand that to call the forces of the assassins
Brutus and Cassius the republicans, as some modern authors do, is to
accept the optimates tendentious definition of what the republic was
or should be. Like his father, the young Caesar was the champion of
the populus Romanus. It was in that capacity that he went on to fight
his ex-triumviral colleague Marcus Antonius, who had allied himself
with Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt. Their defeat and suicide in 30 bc
left Augustus the undisputed master of the Roman world.
30 bc
Defeat of Marcus
Antonius and
Cleopatra
23 bc
Caesar Augustus
receives tribunician
authority
17 bc
Adoption of
Gaius Caesar and
Lucius Caesar
Left: Mosaics from Caesarea in North

Africa show Romans working the land,
1st-2nd century ad.
Below: Gold aureus of imperator Caesar,
28 bc (the year before he took the
name Augustus). On the reverse is the
legend: He has restored to the people
of Rome their laws and their rights.
The position of Augustus was unique and his

authority went unchallenged, but he was not
an emperor
After the necessary mopping-up operations, in 28 bc Octavius
restored laws and justice to the Roman people, as one of his coin
issues phrased it, and the proper constitutional working of the
republic resumed. The peoples vote decided elections to magistracies
and legislation: if the magistrates elected and the laws passed were
those that Caesar wanted, that was fine by the Roman people. He was
their man, keeping the aristocrats in check; he was the son of Divus
Iulius; from 27 bc he was Caesar Augustus, the honorific extra
name suggesting divinely-approved authority; and from
23 bc he had the full powers of a tribune of the plebs,
symbolising his role as protector of the people.
THE POSITION OF AUGUSTUS WAS UNIQUE and
his authority went unchallenged, but he was not
an emperor. His title, imperator, meant commander and the armies he commanded were
those voted to him by the Roman people, not
for life but for renewable fixed terms. The people
could pull the plug on him at any time, but if they
did they would be back with an oligarchy and the
resumption of civil war.
2 bc
Caesar Augustus
as pater patriae
ad 4
Adoption of
Tiberius Caesar
ad 14
Death of Caesar
Augustus
Augustus and his wife Livia had no

children, but he had a daughter, Julia, and
Livia two sons by their previous marriages. Julia (I never forget that I am Caesars
daughter!) was married to Marcus Agrippa,
Augustus oldest friend and most trusted
ally, and bore him two sons, whom Augustus
then adopted as his own: they became Gaius
Caesar and Lucius Caesar. Augustus stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus, Livias boys, were
20 years older and soon commanding armies
of conquest in Germany and the Balkans,
though Drusus died young in 9 bc.
Tiberius father had been a patrician
senator who served under Julius Caesar but
later voted in favour of an optimate proposal that the assassins should be rewarded
for their deed. Perhaps the Roman people
remembered this; certainly they did not like
Tiberius. Haughty, taciturn, grimly dutiful,
he was a Roman aristocrat of the old school.
RESTORED TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY

after the civil wars, the stability of the republic depended on the unofficial influence of one man. How could it
be expressed in constitutional terms? Greeks simply assumed it was a
monarchy and addressed Augustus as basileu, roughly your majesty.
That was impossible for Romans: their last king had been driven
out 500 years before and the republic was defined by the absence of
royal power. What they called him was Caesar his family name, of
course, but one with a unique resonance. In his fathers case,
that uniqueness was expressed by his unprecedented
status as a god and his temple that looked down the
length of the Roman Forum. Everyone knew that
when the time came, Augustus, too, would be
posthumously deified. But in the meantime
he was just a princeps, a leading citizen.
In 2 bc, 40 years after the battle of Philippi, the Roman plebs wanted to honour their
protector, then in his 61st year, in a special
ceremony. Augustus said no: such a proposal
would have to come from the whole citizen
body, the Senate included. And so it did. He
recorded it as the culminating item in his list of
achievements:
ad 26
Tiberius Caesar
retires to Capri
ad 37
Death of Tiberius
Caesar
ad 41
Assassination
of Caligula
Right: The altar of

Augustan Peace,
the Ara Pacis, was
commissioned
by the Senate to
honour the return
of Augustus from
war and the
achievements
of the JulioClaudian dynasty.
This procession
of dignitaries
accompanies the
emperor.
Below: a Roman
casts a vote on a
coin of c.63 bc.
From the Archive
More on
Ancient Rome
www.historytoday.
com/roman-empire
While I was holding my 13th consulship [in 2 bc], the Senate, the
equestrian order and the entire Roman people hailed me as Father of our
country [pater patriae].
The spokesman in the Senate house was a senior ex-consul who had
fought for the assassins at Philippi. Suetonius, who had an intimate
knowledge of the documents, quotes him as speaking for the Senate
in consensus with the Roman people and gives Augustus exact
words in reply:
Now I have achieved all I prayed for. I have only this to ask of the immortal gods, that I may be allowed to carry this consensus of yours through
to my lifes end.
If the long ideological stand-off between the many and the few
was really over, it was only because of Augustus constant presence
and unique prestige. In that sense, he was indeed the father of his
country but what would happen when he died?
In 2 bc Gaius Caesar was 18, his brother
Lucius 15. A letter from Augustus to Gaius
in ad 1 happens to be quoted by a later
author. It shows that Augustus expected
the two of them to understand their
responsibilities and in due course take
over his own position (statio) in the
republic. Not an easy job, especially
for young men enjoying popular adulation, but in the end they were never
tested. Lucius died in ad 2, Gaius in ad
4. Augustus was devastated, but there
was no alternative. He adopted Tiberius as
his son and heir.
HE PEOPLE hated Tiberius till the day he died. Not for what
he did on the contrary, he wore himself out commanding
their armies and securing their empire but for what he
was: unsociable, unglamorous and uncharismatic. Now the
patrician Tiberius Claudius was to bear the talismanic name of Caesar.
What did Divus Iulius think of such a development? The following
year there were earthquakes, the Tiber flooded the city and when the
corn supply failed, too, there was famine that lasted for several years.
Augustus is said to have contemplated suicide, but he knew that
Tiberius, loyal, efficient and dutiful, was his only option, if his own
demise was not to trigger off a power struggle that could bring back
the nightmare of civil war.
So there was plenty for the two men to talk about that day at Nola
in August ad 14 and for Tiberius to think about on the long walk back
to Rome behind the coffin. There was no constitutional problem. The
previous year Tiberius had been voted the same executive powers as
Augustus, on the same fixed-term basis, so he had the authority to
look after national security in the short term. But would he take
over Augustus role in the broader sense, guiding the republic by letting his views be known, protecting the people
against the free play of aristocratic competition? That
was what everyone wanted to know.
They found out on September 17th, at the first
meeting of the Senate after Augustus funeral and
deification (Divus Augustus joined Divus Iulius
among the gods) and after the necessary days of
mourning. Tiberius made it clear that he did not plan
to emulate Augustus style of rule. He expected the
Senate and magistrates to govern on their own responsibility. The senators were horrified. They had got used to
policy being made by the princeps and his advisers and they
ROME
assumed that Tiberius would succeed Augustus as the unofficial head
of state. But he was an old-fashioned optimate who took it for granted
that the republic could govern itself.
After a difficult, unstructured and bad-tempered debate, he
eventually agreed to accept an undefined responsibility, until I come
to the time when you may think it right to give my old age a rest.
Twelve years later, at the age of 67, Tiberius himself decided that the
time had come and retired to Capri.
The republic could not govern itself. Tiberius was still imperator,
military commander-in-chief (on the same fixed-term renewable
basis), and the man in charge in Rome, Tiberius deputy in all but
name had a very un-republican responsibility. He was Sejanus, the
commander of the Praetorian Guard, which Tiberius had quartered
in purpose-built barracks just outside the old city wall. The Guards
job was to protect the Roman people; they swore allegiance to Caesar
and that was what it meant. But effectively they were the garrison of
Being Caesar did not yet mean

being an emperor. There was
no palace, no regalia, no
elaborate protocol
Rome and in ad 29 Sejanus, in his masters interests, used them to

destroy the peoples favourites, Augustus granddaughter Agrippina
the Elder and two of her three sons, Nero and Drusus.
The people longed for Tiberius to die. When eventually he did,
aged 77 in ad 37, and his coffin was brought up the Via Appia to Rome
just like Augustus 23 years before, they greeted it not with sorrow
but with joy. Tiberium in Tiberim, they shouted, into the Tiber with
Tiberius. The dying Augustus foreboding had turned out all too true.
EING CAESAR did not yet mean being an emperor. There was
no palace, no regalia, no elaborate protocol. Things began to
change with Tiberius successor, Agrippinas surviving son,
Gaius Caesar, nicknamed Caligula. Extravagant, irresponsible and sadistic, Gaius flaunted his power like a despot and expected
to be worshipped as a god in his lifetime. In ad 41, after four years in
power, he was killed by a group of Guards officers who were sickened
by his behaviour. The Senate took the opportunity to announce that
the tyranny of the Caesars was over and the temples of Divus Iulius
and Divus Augustus would be demolished.
That idea lasted about 24 hours. The Guards rank and file, less
idealistic than their officers, found themselves a Caesar to swear
allegiance to: Caligulas uncle Claudius. We happen to have a wellinformed narrative of the events by an eyewitness (reported by the
Jewish historian Josephus as an example of Gods providence, because
if Caligula had lived he would have turned the Temple at Jerusalem
into a cult centre for his own divinity); and what this source tells us is
that the Roman people were shocked at Caligulas murder and had no
sympathy at all with the Senates ambition to turn back the clock:
The people resented the Senate. They regarded the imperatores as a curb
on its rapacity and a protection for themselves. They were delighted at the
seizure of Claudius, believing that if he came to power he would save them
from the sort of evil strife there had been in the days of Pompeius.
Pompeius, Pompey the Great, had commanded the optimate forces
against Julius Caesar in the civil war of 49-48 bc. Ninety years later
the Roman people still knew what was at stake.
Julius Caesar and his son Caesar Augustus had tamed the oligarchs.
Now, the only way of protecting the victory of the populares was to
formalise the position of Caesar in an acknowledged dynastic monarchy. Claudius, not a Caesar by birth or adoption, was the first to bear
the name as a title to be held by the imperator, commander-in-chief
of the legions and therefore of everything else. What it meant was
the end of an ideology. There was no escape from evil strife, but
now it was simply a power struggle, the murderous intrigue or armed
conflict of rivals competing for the position of emperor. The many
had prevailed against the few, but at what a price!
T.P Wiseman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Exeter and the author of The Death
of Caligula (Liverpool University Press, 2013).
FURTHER READING
T.P. Wiseman, Remembering the Roman People (OUP, 2009).
Alison E. Cooley, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation and
Commentary (Cambridge, 2009).
Barbara Levick, Augustus: Image and Substance (Longman, 2010).
Tiberius, successor
designate of
Augustus.
Karl Galinsky, Augustus: Introduction to the Life of an Emperor

(Cambridge, 2012).
Barbara Levick, Tiberius the Politician (Routledge, 1999).
Robin Seager, Tiberius (Blackwell, 2004).
| SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN
Dreadnoughts
without Wheels
Stephen Cooper and Ashley Cooper find
parallels between the Schleswig-Holstein question
and more recent European interventions.
THE BRITISH prime minister Lord Palmerston is said to
have remarked in the early 1860s that only three men
in Europe had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein
Question: one (Prince Albert) was dead, the second (a
Danish statesman) was in an asylum and the third (himself)
had forgotten it. The Question concerned the governance
of Schleswig and Holstein, two duchies occupying the
southern half of the Jutland peninsula between Denmark
and Prussia, which were ruled by the King of Denmark in a
personal union. Whereas the northern part of Schleswig
Brigands dividing
the spoil, a Punch
cartoon of 1864
shows Prussia
taking the lions
share.
was Danish-speaking, the people in the southern part, and

in almost the whole of Holstein, spoke German. Holstein
was also a member of the German Confederation, the polity
established in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon. Prussia
was the de facto military agent of the Confederation.
There was nothing particularly complicated about this
form of government. The medieval Holy Roman Empire had
been a patchwork of competing jurisdictions and loyalties
and Hanover had been ruled by the kings of England in a
personal union between 1714 and 1837; but, during the 19th
century, a number of factors cast doubt on the survival of
the ancient constitution of Schleswig and Holstein. The
first was the increasing likelihood that at some future date
the person who succeeded to the kingdom of Denmark
would not also succeed as duke in the duchies. The second
was the increasing desire among many in Holstein and

some in Schleswig to shake off Danish rule and seek closer
union with the German Confederation. This coincided with
a general impulse throughout Europe towards the creation
and consolidation of nation states. However, it was difficult
to know how the other Great Powers who had settled the
affairs of Europe in 1815 would react
to any expansion of Germany. Similar
anxieties were expressed in relation to
German reunification in 1990.
During the rule of the Danish king
Christian VIII (1839-48) it became
increasingly clear that, although he
had an heir, the future Frederick VII,
the latter was unlikely to produce one
himself. Furthermore, although there
were more distant claimants to the
throne, these would be ineligible to
succeed to the duchies, where Salic
law applied. Shortly after Frederick VII
came to the throne in 1848 there was
an uprising in the duchies against the
Danish king, which was supported by
the German Confederation. Prussia
led an invasion in response, while the
other Great Powers Britain, France,
Russia and even German-speaking
Austria took the side of Denmark and
made warlike threats. Under pressure,
Prussia withdrew and the Treaty of
London of 1852 (in which Palmerston
played a leading role) saw the duchies
restored to Danish rule, subject to the
proviso that they should continue to be
governed separately from the Danish
kingdom.
The death of Frederick VII in 1863
precipitated a second and deeper crisis. The different inheritance laws prevailing in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein
meant that only a male from the Oldenburg dynasty could
succeed in Denmark, but that any new ruler of the duchies
had to come from the Schauenberg family. So, whereas
Christian IX (1863-1906) succeeded without objection as
king of Denmark, it was Duke Frederick of Augustenborg
who was entitled to succeed as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein;
and Duke Frederick did indeed claim this right, though
his father had once waived it. Moreover, he was known to
favour closer links with the German Confederation.
Christian IX confirmed a new constitution, incorporating Schleswig into his kingdom. This contravened the
provisions of the Treaty of London and Prussia was now
joined by Austria in lending military support to the duchies.
War followed in 1864. Prussia and Austria quickly occupied
the duchies, at one stage overrunning the whole of Jutland,
to the great concern of other European powers. There was
a brief pause and a further period of fighting; but then Bismarck, the minister-president of Prussia, dictated peace.
At the Treaty of Vienna on August 1st, 1864 Denmark
agreed to cede Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia and
Austria. The age-old Question had been resolved.
The Jutland
peninsula
in 1864,
following the
settlement.
Drawing the line

The crisis in Schleswig-Holstein has some resonance with
recent events in Syria, when the US and the UK both made
vain threats to intervene. In 1863, Lord Palmerston made
a speech in Parliament in which he drew a red line under
Schleswig-Holstein, declaring that, if Prussia and Austria
were to try to take those provinces by force,
it would not be Denmark alone with which
they would have to contend.
The Danes took him seriously. On February 11th, 1864 they appealed for help, relying
both on this speech and an old treaty of 1720,
but Palmerston sat on his hands. In June
1864 he made a further statement to the
Commons, focusing this time on Denmark
itself, rather than the duchies, saying that
Britain would not go to war with the German
powers unless the existence of Denmark
as an independent power was at stake or
its capital was threatened. Yet, when the
Prussians and Austrians did invade Jutland
and a majority of the British Cabinet voted to
send the Royal Navy to defend Copenhagen,
Palmerston still sent no assistance. Later he
argued that he had never meant to imply
that British assistance would be provided to
the Danes, but rather that Denmark might
not find itself alone, because the French and
the Russians might help it. But this attempt
to spin his own words convinced no one.
Disraeli remarked that no one in Denmark
was blaming France or Russia for betraying them: on the contrary, they all blamed
Palmerston.
In any event, Palmerstons threats were
not even issued with the backing of his
own governing party, let alone the country,
where sympathies were keenly divided. At the top, Queen
Victoria was strongly opposed to intervention: after all,
her late husband Prince Albert had been German and her
daughter Victoria had married into the Prussian royal family
in 1859, though the Prince of Wales had married
into the Danish in 1863.
Why did Palmerston, already internationally famous for
gun-boat diplomacy, send not a single frigate to help the
Danes? Essentially, because there was nothing the British
could do militarily to alter the situation. Britain was a world
power but it was no superpower: it had the largest navy by
far, but lacked the capacity to put boots on the ground in
sufficient numbers to assist the Danes; and the Prussians in
particular were fully aware of this. Their strategist, General
von Moltke, said that England was as powerless on the
Continent as it was presumptuous. On another occasion
Bismarck remarked that Dreadnoughts have no wheels.
There are parallels here, too, with August 1914, when
Germany discounted British military intervention, but with
much more catastrophic results for all concerned.
Stephen Cooper is a retired solicitor and historian.

Ashley Cooper resumed his interest in history after retirement from business.
AUGUST 1914
The Shadows
Lengthen
The Concert of Europe, the diplomatic
model championed by Britain in the
run-up to the First World War, was
doomed by the actions of competing
nationalisms. Britains entry into the
conflict became inevitable, despite its
lack of military preparation, as
Vernon Bogdanor explains.
Prince Lichnowsky, Imperial German

Ambassador to the Court of St James,
begged his government to accept
Britains offer of mediation in the
Austro-Serbian dispute. He left London
on August 4th, saluted by a military
guard of honour.
HE FIRST WORLD WAR was, so the American diplomat George Kennan declared, the great seminal
catastrophe of the 20th century. It had two basic
causes. The first was the clash in the Balkans
between Slav nationalism and the decaying Austro-Hungarian empire. The second and perhaps more fundamental
cause was the rise of German power and the difficulty of
containing it by peaceful means.
AUGUST 1914
German reunification came in the wake of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870. The significance of that conflict had
been noticed by Benjamin Disraeli, who as Leader of the
Opposition told the House of Commons in February 1871:
This war represents the German revolution, a greater political
event than the French Revolution of last century The
balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country
which suffers most, and feels the effects of this great change
most, is England.
Germany had been unified by Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck. The great conservative statesman tamed
German nationalism and kept it within bounds. Bismarck
was a master of restraint and gave Europe a generation of
peace, which by 1914 had come to be taken for granted. It
is often said that if Bismarck had been chancellor in 1914
there would not have been a war, but perhaps an international system that depends for its success upon one genius
is not, in the last resort, a very stable one. Bismarcks unscrupulous, authoritarian methods were later to be adopted
by those who lacked his genius or indeed his restraint.
HE GROWTH OF German power posed a challenge

to an international system based on the Concert of
Europe, developed at the Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleon, whereby members
could call a conference to resolve diplomatic issues, a
system Britain, and particularly the Liberals in government
in 1914, were committed to defend. Sir Edward Grey had
been foreign secretary since 1905, a position he retained
until 1916, the longest continuous tenure in modern times.
He was a right-leaning Liberal who found himself subject
to more criticism from his own backbenchers than from
Conservative opponents. In his handling of foreign policy
his critics alleged that Grey had abandoned the idea of the
Bismarck, at the
height of his
powers, pulls
cultural figures
and politicians,
including Disraeli,
into his orbit.
German
caricature, 1878.
Concert of Europe and was worshipping what John Bright

had called the foul idol of the balance of power. They
suggested that he was making Britain part of an alliance
system, the Triple Entente, with France and Russia and
that he was concealing his policies from Parliament, the
public and even from Cabinet colleagues. By helping to
divide Europe into two armed camps he was increasing the
likelihood of war.
ON HIS APPOINTMENT in December 1905 Grey had
indeed maintained the loose Anglo-French entente of
1904, which the Conservatives of the previous government
had negotiated. He extended that policy by negotiating
an entente with Frances ally, Russia, in 1907. In 1905
France was embroiled in a conflict with Germany over rival
claims in Morocco. The French had essentially said to Lord
Grey, foreign secretary since 1905,

was a right-leaning Liberal who
found himself subject to more criticism
from his own backbenchers than from
Conservative opponents
Lansdowne, Greys Conservative predecessor: Suppose this
conflict leads to war if you are to support us, let us consult
together on naval matters to consider how your support can
be made effective. The Conservatives had responded that,
while they would discuss contingency plans, they could not
make any commitments.
Grey continued the naval conversations and extended
them to include military dialogue. He informed the prime
minister, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, and two senior

ministers of these talks, but not the rest of the Cabinet.
Nevertheless, Britain could not be committed to military
action without the approval of both Cabinet and Parliament. In November 1912, at the insistence of the Cabinet,
there was an exchange of letters between Grey and the
French ambassador, Paul Cambon, making it explicit that
Britain was under no commitment, except to consult, were
France to be threatened. In 1914, furthermore, the French
never suggested that Britain was under any sort of obligation to support them, only that it would be the honourable
course of action.
The Moroccan conflict was settled peacefully at the conference of Algeciras in 1906. A further crisis over Morocco
broke out in 1911, which seemed, for a time, as if it might
lead to war. But this was not, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor,
the first stage to world war but rather a last episode in an
age of European rivalries in Africa, which had been running
for the previous 40 years.
Imperial conflicts could be, and were, contained by the
great powers. The world war was caused by conflicts, not in
Africa or Asia, but in Europe and specifically in the Balkans.
The cause lay, not in rival imperialisms, but rival nationalisms. In the Balkans the Slavs were seeking what Germany,
Italy and Hungary had recently achieved, the realisation of

their national aspirations. In their way stood the Ottoman
Empire and the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The latter was dominated by the Germans and Hungarians.
The Slavs living within it were subordinate and the empire
stood in the way of their national aspirations, in particular
the aspirations of the southern Slavs.
I
Edward Grey, 1st
Viscount Grey of
Fallodon, 1914.
Sketch by George
Fiddes Watt for
a portrait
commissioned by
the Foreign Office.
N 1908 A DRESS REHEARSAL for the Sarajevo crisis

occurred, when Austria-Hungary converted its occupation
of the Slav provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which it
had administered since the Treaty of Berlin in 1878) into
an annexation. It had been agreed at Berlin that the occupation would be temporary and that the provinces would be
returned to the Ottoman Empire once order and prosperity
had been restored. The annexation, therefore, was a breach
of the treaty and of international law. It would have significant consequences. The first was that it made non-Slav rule
in Bosnia appear permanent, since the Austro-Hungarian
Empire was far more durable than the Ottoman Empire.
The annexation was a particular blow to the independent
south Slav state of Serbia, which objected. Second, the
annexation made the southern Slav issue an international
problem, since it involved Serbias ally, Russia, which saw
itself as the protector of the Slavs. In March 1909
Austria demanded, under threat of war, that Serbia
accept the annexation, while Germany told Russia
that, in case of war, it would take Austrias side.
Britain helped persuade Serbia and Russia to back
down. The great powers accepted the annexation.
The Kaiser, unwisely perhaps, boasted in Vienna in
1910 that he had come to Austrias side as a knight in
shining armour.
The annexation of Bosnia pitted two rival nationalisms against each other in south-eastern Europe: Slav
nationalism, seeking to unite all the southern Slavs in
a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia; and German nationalism, seeking to expand eastwards. It was this tension
between the two that was to lead to a world war.
After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Europe, as in 1908, appeared to be
divided into two camps. But in 1914, by contrast with
1908-9, Russia refused to back down, largely because
it considered the existence of Serbia as an independent
state to be at risk. Russia has, in consequence, been
fingered by some historians as primarily responsible for
the war. But of course war can always be avoided if the
potential victim always backs down.
The crisis of 1914 came at a time when it seemed
as if Europe was settling down. After the first Balkan
war of 1912, which almost ended Turkish rule in
Europe, Grey sponsored a Conference of Ambassadors
in London to secure a negotiated peace between the
great powers. It has not been sufficiently noted that,
strikingly, on most contentious issues, Grey took the
side of Austro-Hungary and therefore of Germany.
He helped to ensure that the borders of a new non-Slav
state, Albania, made a buffer between Austria and the
Slavs, denying Serbia access to the Adriatic. When in
1913 Serbias ally, the tiny state of Montenegro, captured and sought to annex the strategic city of Scutari
(now Shkoder), allocated to Albania at the conference,
Grey refused to oppose Austrian action to remove
AUGUST 1914
the Montenegrins. Instead he joined the powers in a naval
demonstration, compelling Montenegro to withdraw.
Grey defended this policy in the House of Commons by
arguing that the Albanian population of Scutari was mainly
Catholic and Muslim, rather than Slav, and that its people
had the same right of self-determination as the Slavs. But
he had other reasons for supporting Austria, which he did
not express publicly. The first was that concessions by Serbia
and Montenegro were necessary to keep the peace and the
need for peace outweighed the wishes of the ententes.
The second was to show Germany that its fears of encirclement by hostile powers were baseless. The ententes, Grey
believed, did not commit Britain to supporting Russia or
its allies in the Balkans. Britain would take the side of
Austria-Hungary and of Germany, if that was required.
ESPITE THE ALLEGATIONS of his Liberal critics,

Grey was a true believer in the Gladstonian
concept of the Concert of Europe and after 1918
was to prove an ardent supporter of the League of
Nations. He had hoped that the settlement at the London
Conference might prove the prelude both to dtente with
Germany and also to a true and permanent Concert, based
on the conference approach to diplomacy. Reporting the
outcome of the London Conference on May 10th, 1913,
the radical journal The Nation stated: The credit belongs in
equal parts to the statesmen of Germany and Sir Edward
Grey. They have found at last a consciousness of their
common duties. There might evolve from this temporary
association some permanent machinery of legislation
some sort of proto-League of Nations, perhaps. Grey
certainly hoped so. By December 15th, 1913, he told the
Commons: Nothing more than a memory is left of the old
Anglo-German antagonism.
Yet the London Conference proved to be not the
beginning of a new Concert of Europe, but its end. It was
not to be renewed until after the fall of Communism in
1989. For Greys conception was hardly representative. In
Austria-Hungary different voices were to be heard, voices
worried by threatened encroachments on the empire. The
Balkan wars had increased Serbias territory and also its
population, from 3 to 4.5 million. Austria regarded Serbia as
an irredentist threat to the Slavs in the empire. In November 1913 the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count
Berchtold, told a colleague:
The solution of the South Slav issue ... in face of the tenacity and
confidence with which Serbia is pursuing the idea of a Greater
Serbia, can only be by force. It will either almost completely
destroy the present state of Serbia or shake Austria-Hungary to
its foundations.
In fact it would do both.
THE TRIGGER WAS the assassination of the heir to the
Austrio-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914.
He was killed by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. The killer
and his fellow conspirators had obtained their weapons
from Serbia and they had been aided by renegade members
of the Serb armed forces, seeking to embarrass their own
government, which they saw as insufficiently militant. The
Serb government was almost certainly not involved.
For a month after the assassination nothing seemed to
happen, though on July 5th Germany had given Austria-
A priest blesses
allied soldiers
from France,
Great Britain and
Russia, French
postcard of 1914.
Hungary carte blanche to do with Serbia as it wished.

Austria-Hungary would not need German support to
crush a small state like Serbia, but its assurances were
needed in case Russia should intervene. There was then
already a fear that a war with Serbia could not be localised.
Indeed on July 7th the German Chancellor, Bethmann
Hollweg, told his secretary that an action against Serbia
can lead to a world war.
On July 23rd Austria presented its terms to Serbia, with a
48-hour time-limit demanding unconditional acceptance; in
effect an ultimatum. Grey told the Austrian ambassador in
London, Albert Count von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein,
that the note was the most formidable document that was
ever addressed from one state to another. The demands
were framed so as to ensure rejection and provide a pretext
for military action; although Serbia sent a conciliatory reply,
Austria-Hungary broke off diplomatic relations. It was clear
that war was threatened in the Balkans and that it might
spread. It was at this point that the European crisis came
before the British Cabinet, at the end of a long discussion
about Ulster. The atmosphere was graphically described by
Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time:
The discussion had reached its
inconclusive end, and the Cabinet
was about to separate, when the quiet
grave tones of Sir Edward Greys
voice were heard reading a document
which had just been brought to
him from the Foreign Office. It was
the Austrian note to Serbia. He had
been reading or speaking for several
minutes before I could disengage my
mind from the tedious and bewildering debate which had just closed. We
were all very tired, but gradually as
the phrases and sentences followed
one another, impressions of a wholly
different character began to form in
my mind. This note was clearly an
ultimatum, but it was an ultimatum
such as had never been penned in
modern times. As the reading proceeded it seemed absolutely impossible that any State in the world could
accept it, or that any acceptance,
however abject, would satisfy the
aggressor. The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back
into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began
immediately but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow
upon the map of Europe.
Nevertheless, even if the war spread, it did not seem that
Britain need be involved in this obscure squabble. On the
evening of July 24th the prime minister, Herbert Asquith,
told his girlfriend, Venetia Stanley, that: Happily there
seems to be no reason why we should be anything more
than spectators [in any European conflict]. Just five days
before Britain entered the war the Manchester Guardian
declared on July 30th, 1914: We care as little for Belgrade as
Belgrade does for Manchester.
Grey followed the same conciliatory policy he had
pursued after the first Balkan war and sought to recreate
the Conference of Ambassadors. Russia responded that it
Europe takes
sides, August
1914.
In rejecting the conference proposal,

Germany and Austria-Hungary
consciously accepted the risk of
a Continental War
would prefer direct talks with Austria-Hungary; but, if that
were not possible, it would attend a conference. The Austrians rejected both direct talks and the conference, as did
Germany, on the grounds that it would amount to a court of
arbitration against Austria, which was entitled to settle its
dispute with Serbia in its own way. Germany argued that in
such a conference it would be Austrias only defender.
In fact Grey might well have taken the Austrian side at
such a conference as he had done in 1912-13. He would
have been aiming to exert his influence to achieve a
peaceful solution and that would require Serbian concessions. He produced a formula to the effect that the
powers would examine how Serbia can fully satisfy Austria
without impairing Serbias sovereign rights or independence. Russian support for Serbia would have been limited,
since it could hardly have condoned regicide, especially as
Tsar Nicholas IIs grandfather had himself been assassinated in 1881 by terrorists.
Rejection of Greys proposal seems conclusive in the
debate on responsibility for the war. For it took from his
hands a lever with which he could have persuaded Russia
not to mobilise. Had such a conference taken place,
Churchill wrote, there would have been no war. Mere
acceptance of the principle of a conference of the Central
Powers would have instantly relieved the tension. Grey
declared that he would accept any proposal for peaceful
mediation offered by Germany or Austria-Hungary. He

repeatedly invited Germany to make proposals of its own,
but there was no response.
In his 2012 book, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark
argues that the Austrians could not have defended their
interests in the absence of any international legal bodies
capable of arbitrating in such cases, and the impossibility
in the current international climate of enforcing the future
compliance of Belgrade. But there was in fact such a body
the Court of Arbitration at The Hague, established in 1899.
The Tsar proposed that the dispute be put to The Hague, but
Austria refused. Had it accepted, Britain would have put its
weight behind enforcement and it would have been difficult for the Russians to resist such pressure against a state
accused of being involved in regicide.
It is difficult to see what Austria-Hungary and Germany
could have lost by agreeing to a conference, or by arbitration. Had agreement not been reached, they would have
been in a strong position to use force against Serbia. A
war against Serbia, under such circumstances, might well
have been localised. In rejecting the conference proposal,
Germany and Austria-Hungary consciously accepted the
risk of a Continental war in order to reduce Serbia to a
vassal state, if not to annex its territory, or to allow other
states to do so.
N JULY 29TH Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg

strove to secure British neutrality, offering
to guarantee the territorial integrity both of
France and Belgium, but not the French colonies, nor, more importantly, the neutrality of Belgium.
Asquith told the Commons on August 6th that for
Britain to have accepted neutrality on such a basis would
have been contemptible. It was being asked to agree to
AUGUST 1914
If a great power could simply

ignore the neutral status of
a small country to which it
had pledged its word, Europe
would not be safe
the disposal of the colonies of an ally and to bargain away

Belgian neutrality, thus becoming, in effect, an accomplice to a German invasion. So if, as proved to be the case,
Belgium was to ask for British support to protect its neutrality, the reply would be that it had already been
bargained away. In return for betraying Belgium, Britain
would secure a promise from Germany to respect British
neutrality and independence, a guarantee given at the
very same time as Germany was proposing to violate the
neutrality and independence of another power that it had
promised to respect.
Nevertheless, the Liberal Cabinet was deeply divided
over the threat of war. Grey, Asquith and some senior colleagues, including Churchill, the Lord Chancellor, Haldane
and the India Secretary, Lord Crewe, believed that Britain
was bound in honour to support France. The majority of
the Cabinet did not. Nor did most Liberal backbenchers.
However, the invasion of Belgium was to transform Liberal
opinion. At around this time, Grey recalls in his memoirs:
A very active Liberal member came up to me in the lobby and
told me that he wished me to understand that under no circumstances whatever ought this country to take part in the war,
if it came. I answered pretty roughly to the effect that I hoped
we should not be involved in war, but that it was nonsense to
say that there were no circumstances conceivable in which we
ought to go to war. Under no circumstances whatever was the
Germany violates
Belgium in a
French postcard
of 1914.
retort. Suppose Germany violates the neutrality of Belgium?

For a moment he paused, like one who, running at speed, finds
himself suddenly confronted with an obstacle, unexpected and
unforeseen. Then he said with emphasis, She wont do it. I
dont say she will, but supposing she does? She wont do it, he
repeated, confidently, and with that assurance he left me.
HAD BELGIUM NOT BEEN INVADED, the Liberals could
not have led Britain into war. They had 261 seats in the
Commons out of 670, some distance from an overall majority, but they were supported by the Irish Parliamentary
Party, which had 84 seats and Labour
with 37. The Conservative opposition
had 288 seats and there were three
vacancies. Neither the Irish nor Labour
would have supported a war before the
invasion of Belgium. Nor would most
Liberal MPs. On August 2nd, two days
before Britain declared war, Asquith
noted: A good three-quarters of our
own party in the House of Commons
for absolute non-interference at any
price. There would almost certainly have been a split in the Liberal
Party, with the majority opposed to
intervention. But, as Asquith wrote to
Venetia Stanley when he learned of
the ultimatum to Belgium, this simplifies matters so we sent the Germans
an ultimatum to expire at midnight.
The guarantee of Belgium, recognising Belgian independence, was a
collective one signed by the powers
in 1831. Every signatory had the legal
right to enforce it, but there was
no legal obligation on any single guarantor to act. As the
Cabinet recognised, the matter was one of policy not of
obligation. But, in practice, no British government could
conceivably have accepted the invasion of Belgium.
The 20th century has seen numerous atrocities and they
have perhaps dulled our sensibilities so that it is difficult to
appreciate the sense of moral outrage caused by the invasion, which, apart from the breach of a treaty, was an act of
unprovoked aggression against a small power. There was a
general feeling that, if a great power could simply ignore the
neutral status of a small country to which it had pledged its
word, Europe would not be safe; and in 1914 no government
that had failed to help Belgium could have survived in the
House of Commons.
Indeed opinion was nearly unanimous. The Left had
argued that Germany was not as bad as it had been painted
by Conservatives and that Britain should make more effort
to secure dtente. Grey had come to agree with them. But
the invasion of Belgium seemed to show that Germany was
far worse than anyone had thought.
On August 3rd, after Grey addressed the Commons, the
leader of the Conservative opposition spoke to support the
war. He was followed by the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, who to everyones surprise spoke
in favour of the war because of the need to defend small
nationalities. Redmond said that: There never was that
he believed was the universal sentiment of Ireland a juster
war, or one in which higher and nobler principles and issues

were at stake. Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour
Party, and Keir Hardie then spoke against the war, but they
were repudiated by their parliamentary colleagues. Only
four of the 37 Labour MPs refused to support the war and
MacDonald resigned his leadership.
George V who as Asquith once said was
rather like the man in the tube summed
up the general opinion when he told the
American Ambassador, My God, Mr Page,
what else could we do?
Grey has been attacked by historians
for two contradictory reasons. First, that
he allowed France and Russia to believe
that he would support them, so preventing conciliation. Yet France and Russia
made their dispositions while still quite
uncertain as to what Britain would do; and
in any case France made no provision for
the appearance of a British Expeditionary
Force on the Continent. Second, that he
did not warn Germany in advance that
Britain would go to war if Belgium were
invaded. In fact he did tell the German
ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, that Britain could not let France
disappear as a great power. The trouble
was that no one in Berlin listened to the
ambassador. Even so, no one with the
slightest familiarity with Britain could
have any doubt on this matter. In 1912 a
German correspondent in Britain asked
J.A. Spender, editor of the Westminster
Gazette, whether Britain would join in a
war if France were threatened. Spender replied: My
dear Sir, you have lived in England for ten years and you
know the English people. Can you really see them sitting
still while the German army wiped out the French and
planted itself on the French coast?
RITAINS DECISION to go to war was based not

simply on morality, in terms of upholding Belgian
neutrality, but also on self-interest. Most British
politicians and, one suspects, the British people,
felt that to allow Germany to conquer France and Belgium
would compromise British independence so that it would
become a vassal state of Germany. The same judgement
would have been made had the ententes not existed, had
there been no military or naval conversations and regardless of who was foreign secretary. The achievement of
Asquith and Grey was to bring a united country into the
war. A Conservative government facing opposition from
the Left would have found it more difficult.
Grey alone among the diplomats of 1914 sought peace
in the sense of making concrete proposals that might have
prevented war. He could do this precisely because Britain
had no interest in the quarrel between Austria-Hungary and
Serbia and no territorial demands upon any other power.
There was, however, a disconnection between British
foreign policy and defence policy under the Liberals. If, in
practice, Britain could not allow France to be defeated, then
she might have done better to draw the conclusion that
The international
treaty of 1839,
signed in London,
assuring Belgian
neutrality.
the entente should in fact become a formal alliance. In his

book, The Pity of War (1999), Niall Ferguson criticises Grey
for turning a Continental war into a world war, implying
that Britain was not part of the Continent. But, if it could
not afford to allow France to be defeated, then Britain was
in fact a Continental power. Its security depended not only
on mastery of the seas but on what happened in Europe.
If Britain wanted influence on the Continent, it needed not just a strong navy but
a strong army. Instead, it had what Lord
Kitchener contemptuously called a town
clerks army. A strong army would have
meant conscription and that was almost
certainly politically impossible in the years
before 1914. It was, as Grey declared in
1914, unnatural. Only a strong Continental
commitment would have deterred Germany
in 1914, yet the Liberals had followed a
policy of limited liability, since they did not
believe that Germany was fundamentally an
aggressive power.
The nations slithered over the brink into
the boiling cauldron of war without any trace
of apprehension or dismay, declared Lloyd
George in his war memoirs, a view endorsed
by Christopher Clark. In reality, the war came
about as a result of the actions of politicians
and diplomats, in particular the leaders of
Austria-Hungary and Germany, who made
decisions that they knew might involve more
than a localised war.
Britain went to war not because it was prepared to accept German domination of Europe,
but because it was so ill-prepared to resist that
domination, it found that it could be resisted
only by war. Indeed the threat of German domination could
only be ended by two world wars. That resistance finally
triumphed in April 1945 when two extra-European powers
the United States and the Soviet Union joined hands at
Torgau, cutting Hitlers Reich in two. This ended the final
German bid for power in Europe. It also ended the era of European supremacy in world affairs. We are still living with
the consequences.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at Kings College London.
He is currently writing a book on British political history from 1895 to 1914.
FURTHER READING
T.G. Otte, The July Crisis: The Worlds Descent into War
(Cambridge University Press, 2014).
H. Strachan, To Arms (OUP, 2001).
M. Macmillan, The War that Ended Peace: How Europe
Abandoned Peace for the First World War (Profile, 2013).
R.C.K. Ensor, England 1870-1914 (OUP, 1936).
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to
War in 1914 (Allen Lane, 2012).
Edward Grey, Twenty Five Years 1892-1916 (Hodder and
Stoughton, 1925).
AUGUST 1914
When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914

there was no outbreak of jingoism and no immediate
rush to enlist. What Anthony Fletcher finds instead,
in letters, diaries and newspapers, is a people who had
little comprehension of the profound changes to come.
A New Moral Order

The 1st Life Guards prepare to leave Hyde

Park Barracks for Mons on August 15th in a
photograph by Christina Broom, Britains
first female press photographer.
EOPLE TALKED ABOUT the Great War before Britain

had even declared war on Germany in August 1914. On
the 2nd Robert Saunders, a schoolmaster at Fletching
in Sussex, told his son living abroad about the war
plans being made in southern England: Everything
points to the Great War, so long expected, being upon us, so you
can picture the restless excitement among all classes. Winifred
Tower, at Cowes for the annual yachting festival, left a vivid
diary account of her state of mind on the day, August 4th, that
war was actually declared on Germany. She had been to a Red
Cross meeting and the territorials there were mobilising. The
declaration at midnight was almost a relief:
But it was impossible to believe that the Day had actually come.
We had talked about it, argued about its possibilities, volumes
had been written about it, it had been a sort of nightmare, always
hanging over us, and yet I dont suppose many of us thought that
it would become a reality in our time and that we were destined
to live in the stirring days of our history suddenly it seemed
like a bad dream that we should wake from to find our world
unchanged.
This article explores the many emotions apprehension,

anxiety, shock, disorientation and fear experienced by the
British people in a month when family and personal lives
were ripped apart by an unprecedented international crisis.
Investigating the national mood, it argues that already, in
August 1914, a new moral order was replacing the carelessness of the long Edwardian peace. The outline and chief
features of this new moral order, fully apparent by the end
of the year, were being established.
The jingoism and war fever of August 1914 have been
shown to be a myth. The crowds outside Buckingham
Palace in the first week of the month were mostly
middle-class young men in straw boaters, drawn there by
uncertainty and the search for news. The ultimatum to
Germany expired on the evening of the day after a Bank Holiday. This
was picnicking time in the London parks. More people were out on
the streets than usual in other towns, too. Vera Brittain recorded that
she was part of an excited little group, which gathered on August
4th to watch the territorials mobilise at Buxton in Derbyshire. But for
Top: A page from the Bystander of

August 5th offers an idyllic scene
from Cowes yachting festival.
Above: The Birmingham Evening
Despatch, August 4th.
Right: a London crowd cheers the
declaration of war.
AUGUST 1914
Left: Territorial soldier on

duty outside a school in Kings
Cross, London during the first
week of the war.
Below: Territorials of the
Artists Rifles being signed up
in Deans Yard, Westminster
soon after war was declared.
Below left: Territorial call up
papers dated August 5th.
many, like the MP Holcombe Ingelby, that day was sombre. Because of
Belgium, he declared to his son, we must go the whole hog in fact
we are in for the biggest thing in wars that the world has ever seen.
How people discovered that Britain was at war depended on where
they were. Alice Remington, in a Lancashire village, heard the noise of
lorries going down the main road with lots of men in them. The news
drifted through that all these lorries were going overseas and then
it brought the war home. Many heard about the declaration of war
from the shouts of newsboys. A notice on the church board announced
the war, recalled Grace Whitham, a mill worker in North Yorkshire.
George Ewart Evans discovered his country was at war when a motor
car, with a newspaper placard blaring out WAR DECLARED, passed
through his South Wales village. At first rural England remained quiet
but anxious. Everyone restless and ready to discuss war news on the
slightest provocation, noted Robert Saunders in Sussex on August
15th. Poor Mr Fenner, he reported, was awfully cut up as they came
round and commandeered his black horse Kitty.
THERE WAS VIRTUALLY no opposition to the war. The general commitment meant that those who had reservations quickly put them to
one side. The simple Suffolker doesnt panic, wrote Rudyard Kipling,
away from home on holiday, he just carries on all serene. Each

evening, recounted Robert Saunders at Fletching, the doctor and his
wife come in to compare notes and discuss the war generally. The
strong lead given by the national press was important in rallying the
middle and upper classes. The centre pages of The Times on August 7th
were taken up by a powerfully argued leading article, In Battle Array.
Kitcheners Call to Arms was prominently displayed under the royal
crest. The famous words Your King and Country need you were beginning to be burned into the minds of all men over 19 and under 30.
It is striking how clear-headed people were about the perils of war.
Newspapers in northern and midland towns were gloomy about a collapse of credit and trade. There was some panic in London. The Daily
Mail reported a rush to buy food, clearing out many shops on August
3rd. One London lady noted in her diary how the well-to-do people
there had lost their heads: They are buying enormous stores of food,
as if for siege provisions taxis today are laden some of the big
stores have run out of fish. On August 4th the artist Augustus John
urged his partner to get in at once a supply of flour and potted goods,
tea etc for a month or two. It looks as if well need them. Urban and
rural industries suffered dislocation. There was immediate depression
in the three main industries of Cornwall, china clay, tin mining and
AUGUST 1914
was entirely predictable that it took men time
to turn their shock into decision making. The
consequences of enlistment for individuals,
families and careers were far reaching.
Impetuosity was most common among very
young men. Graham Greenwell was 18 that
month and had just left Winchester, planning
to go up to Christ Church, Oxford in October.
Instead he joined the Public Schools Camp at
Tidworth on Salisbury Plain. On a Sunday break
from training he walked over for a meal with friends at the Dog and
Whistle pub in the village of Netheravon, telling his mother everyone was most respectful to the Kings uniform. Wilbert Spencer
enlisted on impulse, on his way home from school at Dulwich College
to Highgate. His father, a professional man, seeing his sons insistence on leaving school early, persuaded him to take a crash course at
Sandhurst. My word you do have to drill smartly here, Wilbert wrote
to his parents on August 14th. But he found life there very healthy
and extraordinarily interesting. He needed his dressing gown, he
added, and sent a kiss to his baby sister. Lance Spicer, 21 years old, was
accosted early in August by a woman in Jermyn Street in Londons
West End and felt a pin being stuck into the lapel of my jacket. He
looked down and found a white feather on me, which hastened his
plans for getting a commission.
Prognostications about how long the war would last were rare
in August. Harold Cousins wrote in his diary on the 9th: England
now involved in what will probably be known as the First World
War of 1914 probably 1915. For the whole idea of trench warfare
simply had not yet entered British consciousness. The letters of Clare
Howard, to her fianc Reggie Trench, who was training officers for
the Western Front in Richmond Park and on Wimbledon Common,
Left: Members of
the public watch
soldiers drilling
in a Hull street,
August 1914.
Below: London
buses with their
tops removed are
adapted for use as
transport vehicles,
August 1914.
fishing. On August 12th the author and joiner George Sturt commented on his business difficulties at Farnham in Surrey, through
disruption of supplies and commandeering of horses.
The chronology of recruitment tells a different tale from the conventional story of a rush to the colours, for it was only 100,000 men
that Kitchener asked for on August 7th. Many found it hard to decide
quickly on how to act. George Singles, a regular soldier working at the
Whitehall recruiting office, noted that straggling volunteers were all
September 1914 became the strongest

recruitment month, not just in 1914,
but during the whole war
grumbling as most of them had to leave good jobs. The lowest daily
national returns were August 22nd and 23rd, at which time many
still believed 100,000 men was the total required. On the 25th it was
announced that objective had been almost reached.
HERE WAS LITTLE bad news in the press during the first
three weeks of the war. It was the Mons Despatch, in The
Times of August 25th, that electrified the nation. I have seen
the broken bits of many regiments, wrote Arthur Moore.
We have to face the fact that the British Expeditionary Force, which
bore the great weight of the blow, has suffered terrible losses and
requires immediate and immense reinforcement. This had an instant
effect. On the 29th The Times carried Kitcheners appeal for a further
100,000 men. Two days later daily enlistment topped 20,000 in a
single day for the first time. September 1914 became the strongest
recruitment month, not just in 1914, but during the whole war. It
August 1914: The Month That Changed the World

August 1st
Germany
orders general
mobilisation.
Germany
declares war
on Russia.
France mobilises.
August 2nd
German
ultimatum
to Belgium.
German troops
move into
Luxembourg.
August 3rd
Germany declares
war on France.
August 4th
After an ultimatum
Britain declares war
on Germany.
Sir John Jellicoe takes
command of the British
Grand Fleet.
Sir John French takes
command of British
Expeditionary Force.
August 6th
Austria-Hungary
declares war on
Russia.
August 7th
British
Expeditionary
Force lands in
France.
August 12th
Britain and
France declare war
on AustriaHungary.
Surrey Regiment was certainly in Belgium. She

understood the developing Western Front geography from maps that quickly became available.
She checked the story of Waterloo, more than a hundred years before,
the only evidence at hand about conflict in Europe. The line of battle
was two and a half miles as compared to the 220 miles of today, Clare
believed; a million men, not 72,000 English plus 52,000 Prussians
like then, were involved this time. Yet she concluded on August 14th:
I suppose this battle will begin at any time now, thinking it might be
decisive. Following the news of the German advances through northern Belgium, on August 21st she guessed perceptively: I suppose it
cannot now be more than a day or two before our troops are engaged.
In fact, it was the next day that the first shots were fired, just outside
Casteau, north of Mons, in a conflict that was to last for four years
and nearly three months.
Herbert Trenchs
pass, August 13th.
reveal the total incomprehension about what kind of war this was
going to be. Trench digging had not yet begun on the Western Front.
The Expeditionary Force started landing in France on August 7th.
But this all remained secret from the public. The vacuum was filled
with rumours. There was a sense that the war was slowly but inevitably taking over peoples lives: Lydia Middleton, the wife of a civil
servant, declared on the 21st that it was hard to believe that the war
has only lasted for 17 days. It felt like 17 weeks at least.
Living at Orpington in Kent, Clare Howard had access to local information. She knew by the 11th of nightly troop sailings to the Continent from Dover and Newhaven. That day Reggie told her the Royal
HE STRENGTH of the Trench-Howard correspondence, 37

letters to and fro during August, is that it indicates how a
single family based in the south-east, where things moved
fastest, responded to the war. Clare echoed many women in
her initial panic at the idea of her man being in danger. Since he was
an officer in the Inns of Court Training Corps, she trusted he would
be kept to instruct recruits: Is it very cowardly of me?. As the war
took Reggie over, he gradually became more candid. Encouraging her
Red Cross work at Orpington, on August 6th he predicted: We shall
have a good deal of casualties before we are through with this show.
Within a few days, wounded Belgian soldiers were being cared for in
the 50-bed hospital Clare and her sisters had helped set up in the
Will Spencer enlisted

on impulse on his way
home from school.
Clare Howard in 1911, aged

18, in her coming out dress.
August 13th
AustroHungarian Forces
invade Serbia.
August 20th
German
occupation of
Brussels.
Reggie Trench in
1914.
Graham Greenwell
joined the Public
Schools Camp at 18.
August 23rd
Battle of Mons:
1,600 British
troops killed
or wounded.
Japan declares
war on
Germany.
August 24th
Fall of Namur:
retreat from Mons.
August 26th
Battle of
Tannenberg
begins: German
defeat of Russia.
August 28th
German cruisers
destroyed and
damaged in the
Heligoland Bight.
August 30th
The Times
Mons Despatch.
AUGUST 1914
village hall at Orpington. She worked there daily from August 12th.
In these hectic days men and women fell into traditional roles.
Females were at once the carers. The Howard girls fed the local East
Kent territorials, 90 of them just back from Salisbury Plain absolutely
done. Their captain was too hungry to eat a mutton chop. Clares
brother Edgar had gone in the ranks with them there was a large
crowd at the station to cheer them off when they were ordered to
Dover. Masculinity was suddenly at a premium. Clare was delighted
that Reggie had begun growing a moustache. Spotting him on a visit
to her home, the chauffeur there told her he had the right martial
bearing, requesting a photograph of him in uniform. Khaki fever was
beginning to turn female heads. Reggies brother Herbert crossed the
channel on an abortive motor cycle dash to assist the French army.
They were rather fed up, noted Reggie; of course they will get something if they hang about long enough but it is rather trying. He agreed
with Clare that her brother Walter, hampered by a stammer, would
find his special constable job dull and pretty long hours. Perhaps it is
the same as the rest of us, he declared, days and weeks of routine to
fit one for other duties. The watchwords were doing your bit.
rather a wrench. Mothers at Little Crosby on Merseyside were said

on the 25th to be up in arms against the idea of enlistment.
Mary, Countess of Wemyss and Lady Ettie Desborough, each
with three boys grown up or almost so, had a sad and serious confab,
trying to keep quiet and calm, on August 4th. Marys son Ego
went off to join the Gloucestershire Hussars; on the 9th she saw
them parade in the cathedral, noting in her diary how moving she
found this. It was only years later that she recalled how this was the
moment, watching the quiet earnest faces of his troop in prayer,
that it sank into my heart for the first time that they were going to
fight. She had kept a diary since she was 16 but briefly abandoned it
that month, with the explanation: shall we put it down to the war
which has caused so much misery and infinite sorrow and loss to so
many nothing seems to matter when so much is amiss. As the Prime
Minister Herbert Asquith wrote to his wife Margot on August 18th,
no one could ignore the fact that the curtain is lifted.
Early morning rides on the Cotswold edge lifted Mary Wemysss
heart: the countryside was magically silent, waving corn and
misty distances, the world had a strange unreal look. Mostly we do
Right: 11th Hussars

arrive at Le Havre
with the British
Expeditionary Force,
August 16th.
Far right: Nurses and
nuns leave the War
Office after receiving
their orders following
the outbreak of war.
From the Archive

More on the
Great War
www.historytoday.
com/first-world-war
Everyones plans are cancelled everything is suddenly

changed, recorded Beatrice Trefusis on August 5th
VERYWHERE SOME KIND OF disruption brought the war

home to the British people. Everyones plans are cancelled
everything is suddenly changed, recorded Beatrice Trefusis
in her diary in London on the 5th. In Plymouth, W. Eaves told
in a letter on the 8th of being confronted by a barbed wire entanglement and a redoubt of sandbags. Virginia Woolf, visiting Lewes
from her home at Rodmell, found sentries all over the place, which
gave a sense of martial law. An American visitor to London reported
territorials marching, confiscated horses and motor cars, long lines
of artillery and ammunition wagons with their horses picketed near.
The Bishop of Galloway circulated a prayer to be said at all masses
about the suffering and upheaval caused by the war, urging calm in
the common calamity. In Glasgow, Thomas Macmillan tossed a coin
with his brother about which of them should enlist and which stay to
care for ageing parents. A vicar in Lechlade agreed to his sons joining
the Royal Naval Division, then confessed how he found the decision
not know what the British people were thinking and feeling, but
occasionally there is a sharp insight into the emergence of patriotic
commitment. In the last two weeks of the month everyone had at
least a hazy awareness that there were countrymen now in Europe
under arms to defend their island. The poet Edward Thomas was at
Dymock in Gloucestershire in August, walking and talking with his
close friend and fellow poet, the American Robert Frost. He wrote in
his notebook on August 26th about a sky of dark rough horizontal
masses in the north-west I thought of men eastward, seeing it at
the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up till now
without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps
would do nothing to prevent it. This was when his idea of defence
of the English landscape, for which he would in time enlist, came
to him. His article This England, published in November, included
a crucial passage: All I can tell is, it seemed to me I had never loved
England or had loved it foolishly, aesthetically, like a slave, not having
realised that it was mine unless I were willing and prepared to die
rather than leave it as Belgian women and old men and children had
left their country. Something I had omitted. Something I felt had to
be done before I could look composedly again at English landscape
OME HAD experienced patriotic feelings with a surge of insistency earlier. Siegfried
Sassoon, after a cycle ride
in the sunny Kentish
countryside, volunteered on
August 1st and was in khaki by
the 3rd. The Weald, he declared,
had been the world of my youngness and while I gazed across it
now I felt prepared to do what I
could to defend it. After all, dying
for ones native land was believed
to be the most glorious thing one
could possibly do. Rupert Brooke
was a Warwickshire man. I
know the heart of England, he
told a friend on August 2nd, it
has a hedgy, warm, bountiful
dimpled air. Baby fields run up
and down the hills and the roads
wriggle with pleasure. Soon
after, he wrote an autobiographical piece, contemplating with
a tightening of his heart a raid
on the English coast. He was
coming to understand the holiness with which he perceived
the actual earth of England.
Brooke was an unusually
specific spokesman for the new
mood that was taking hold of
the nation, intent, determined,
uncompromising. He summarised it in his Five Sonnets of 1914, the
words of which, forming in his mind during August, were written
down in October and published in December:
Honour has come back, as a king to earth
And paid his subjects with a bounteous wage;
And nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
COUPLES DRAWN IN to the war badgered each other about driving
themselves too hard. Do rest when you can, Clare Howard urged
Reggie on the 3rd. I am sorry that you must work on Sunday too,
she commiserated on the 27th, but I know that you will rest as much
as you can. Besides her hospital work, working parties organised by
the womenfolk in her family started on the 14th, focused on making
vests and splint padding. It was being in it together that mattered:
Remember I love to hear how you spend every minute of your day,
Reggie insisted.
There were plenty of people longing to do something, Clares
sister told her on the 19th. So, she confessed, she cut the next
working party and went off for tennis in a nearby village. She was
back on their tennis court, after a full day of hospital scrubbing out,
the next evening. But the news over the weekend of August 22nd
and 23rd, when Reggie joined the family for tennis, left him feeling
guilty and alarmed. My weekend was simply priceless, he told Clare.
But, now Namur had fallen, it all looked very serious and think of
British
recruitment
poster compares
tranquil English
rural life with the
wreckage of a
Belgian town.
it, our men were fighting all yesterday while I

was slacking at Bark Hart that hot day and
fighting for their lives indeed.
Clare resumed her protector role: My own,
it is no good being perturbed because our
troops are fighting and you are here slaving for
the very same army all the week so think
of that, Darling, and dont think that the
fighting line is the only place where you
will be any use. Tennis, with all its
connotations of relaxed country house life,
became a kind of metaphor for the past. In
a new world young people took intensely
the seriousness of their country being at
war. Young lovers threw themselves into
unexpected roles: Reggie learnt the strong
voice he needed for the parade ground, Clare
revelled in the physical work of making
beds and cleaning wards. She even coped
with watching wounds being dressed, which
she rather disliked. Our troops have done
splendidly, Clare asserted on August 26th
in a fog of confused reports from the Front.
How awful it is now for those who are
waiting for the casualty list, she went on.
These were the personal realities of war in
London and Kent in August 1914.
The first of Rupert Brookes war sonnets
he called Peace. He felt nostalgia for careless
years gone by but no regret that peace was
over:
Now, God be thanked who has matched

us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us
from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye and
sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
He put it more starkly than most would have done. But it was Brooke,
perhaps, who best summarised Britains response to the Great War, as
people felt it in the depth of their hearts. This was a quite extraordinary month, a month unlike any before that the British had lived
through, in a country they had grown up to think of as an unthreatened green and pleasant land.
Anthony Fletchers most recent book is Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front
(Yale University Press, 2013).
FURTHER READING
D. Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (Hambledon
Continuum, 2007).
C. Pennell, A Kingdom United: British Responses to the Outbreak of the
First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012).
P. Simkins, Kitcheners Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914-1916
(Pen and Sword, 2007).
H. Strachan, The First World War: a New Illustrated History (Simon and
Schuster, 2003).
| SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE
INFORMING ELECTORS of the importance of the
opportunity now afforded them, one of Scotlands most
prominent nationalists declared that:
For the first time since the Union, they will have it in their
power to determine whether Scotland is to recover the
management of its own affairs.
At first glance we may naturally assume that this
comment relates to the independence referendum that
takes place this September, but it was actually written 121
years ago by William Mitchell, treasurer of the Scottish
Home Rule Association (SHRA). In the same piece Mitchell urged that the time had come for his fellow countrymen to throw off the shackles of the Westminster party
system and support solely those who were pledged to the
restoration of a Scottish parliament. The SHRA, formed in
1886 in the midst of an acute constitutional crisis, sought
the passage of legislation for Scotland in Scotland and
used the term Home Rule to express shortly the right
of the Scottish people to manage their own affairs. They
counselled that only a reinstated legislature could carry
out what the people of Scotland want, for the Scottish
people know their own business best.
Curious absence
That these sentiments resonate today suggests that the
modern Scottish National Party (SNP) is the inheritor
of a deep-rooted nationalist mantle. Yet the SHRA is
curiously absent from the SNPs founding narrative.
The party claims that its origins can be traced back to
several organisations advocating Home Rule for Scotland
in the 1920s and 30s. Nor does the SHRA feature in the
SNPs campaign literature. When in June the SNP leader
Alex Salmond marked the 100-day countdown to the
referendum, he pronounced that Scotland had 100 days
in which to complete a 100-year Home Rule journey,
presumably referring to the introduction in 1913 of a
Scottish Home Rule bill. To have harked back to its 1892
equivalent would have necessitated a slightly less pithy
turn of phrase: 100 days in which to complete a 122-year
Home Rule history does not have quite the same ring
to it. Although more than a century separates them, it is
by studying the language employed and the convictions
held by these two sets of nationalists that we can throw
fresh light on the history of the Home Rule campaign
and assess its true significance.
However unknowingly, the SNP and the government
it has formed borrow heavily from the same vocabulary
that informed the SHRAs actions. It is instructive to
compare their respective arguments in order to get a
sense of their consanguinity. For instance, Salmond
has alleged that: The current UK system means that
Scotland will always be an afterthought at Westminster.
The SHRAs chairman John Stuart Blackie was similarly
convinced that: To a metropolitan assembly mainly
composed of Englishmen, Scottish affairs will always be
looked upon as subordinate and secondary.
According to Salmond, it is possible to render Scotland
subject to Westminster policies against the wishes of our
democratic representatives. If so, then little has changed
A Separate
Scotland
With the independence referendum just around the

corner, Naomi Lloyd-Jones asks why the Scottish
Home Rule Association, an important precursor of
the SNP, has been largely forgotten.
Gladstone
satirised in
Punch, June 1886.
since the Association protested upon its formation against

the practice of altering the Laws of Scotland by English
votes against the voice of Scotlands representatives.
The impetus behind both campaigns is the desire, as conveyed by the Scottish government, to attain the ability to
make our own decisions. If made on the spot and tailored
to Scottish needs, such decisions would ensure that the
countrys vast wealth and resources work much better for
everyone creating a society that reflects our hopes and
ambitions. This vision of the likely boons of independence
mirrors that articulated for Home Rule. It was contended
that they could get no genuine reforms in which they were
interested unless the Scottish people had the control of
their own affairs.
Home Rule was portrayed as a cure for a series of evils,
a means of getting rid of many grievances which the public
claim of. In addition, it could be presented as a practical arrangement that would deal effectively with National questions affecting Scotland and long ripe for settlement, which
are at present retarded in the Imperial Parliament. Simply
put, the business of Scotland could be better managed in
Scotland.
Blight of the Union
What more do we know about the SHRA and its influence
on nationalist rhetoric? Broadly speaking, it brought together those who sought to re-establish a legislature sitting in
Scotland, with full control over all purely Scotch questions,
and with an executive government responsible to it and the
crown. It condemned the deal that had done away with the
former Scottish parliament. The secretary, Charles Waddie,
lamented that the Union acts as a blight upon our national
life and dismissed the notion that anything but good came
to Scotland of being united to England as so extraordinary
as to be past belief. The Association denied that Scotland
enjoyed anything like a partnership-based relationship with
England and was adamant that the practical character of
the Scottish people enabled them, in the end, to make the
best of a bad bargain. A steady stream of propaganda poured
forth from its headquarters on Edinburghs Princes Street,
prompting one opponent to warn that these thousands of
pamphlets could revive again the almost extinct fires of ...
bitterness and jealousy.
The SHRA also sought assistance from the Liberal Party
and its organisational machinery, both at Westminster and
in Scotland. It may have styled itself as non-partisan, but the
Association consistently lobbied for the inclusion of Scottish
Home Rule on the Liberal programme. Under William
Gladstone the party invested heavily in the policy of Irish
self-government but, more crucially, Liberalism had dominated Scotland electorally since the Great Reform Act. The
SHRA publicly acknowledged that the majority of Scotsmen
were Liberals and inferred that it was therefore reasonable
to have naturally expected the solution of the Home Rule
problem to fall to the party. Moreover, it was possible to
interpret some of Gladstones most famous speeches as indicating that Scotland can have Home Rule if she desires it. It
was up to Home Rulers to furnish evidence of this desire.
They appear to have had some success in this respect. In
1889 the Scottish Liberal grandee Lord Rosebery informed
Gladstone that the cause really is stirring people and by

1892 the SHRA counted 18 sitting Liberal MPs among its
vice-presidents and another as president. SHRA members
were vocal at a rank-and-file level within the Scottish
Liberal Association (SLA), where they pressed for the
adoption of resolutions committing the caucus to the
cause. Over time these motions crept up the order paper
and in late 1888 the SLAs Executive was forced to convene
a special meeting to discuss their increasing prevalence. It
was with the executive that the grass roots campaign hit
a major stumbling block. The SLAs president, Lord Elgin,
was personally disdainful and signalled the organisations
reluctance to adopt the policy. Relations between the SHRA
and SLA deteriorated; the party was openly denounced
for betraying a trust imparted by the Scottish nation.
With the whole organisation of the Gladstonian party
set in motion to crush us, Home Rulers were left with no
choice but to agitate and organise if their influence is to be
felt in parliament. Only the SHRA could claim to be truly
national.
Much of the scorn fired at the SHRA stemmed from
what has since been labelled by historians as Unionistnationalism. Although a seemingly oxymoronic term, Unionist-nationalism has helped to make sense of the landscape of 19th-century Scottish political culture. It denotes a
belief that the Union with England enabled Scots to express
The Association protested upon its

formation against the practice of
altering the Laws of Scotland by
English votes against the voice of
Scotlands representatives
their nations distinctive attributes within a wider British
and imperial framework. As one rejoinder to the SHRA put
it: We are by no means a down-trodden race we have generally got what we wanted. It was held that by virtue of the
Parliamentary Union, Scotland has infinitely more power
than it could have in a separate parliamentary system.
The current Better Together campaign has attempted
to rejuvenate Unionist-nationalism and make it relevant
to the era of devolution. Its head, the former Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, has said that, while fiercely
proud of being Scottish, he sees the value of being part of
something bigger. The ethos of todays anti-independence
Unionist-nationalism has probably best been communicated by the Scottish Conservative Lord Strathclyde, who
proclaims:
The genius at the heart of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 is
that it allows both nations to blossom within a shared state.
The Union was not and never has been an incorporating Union
requiring Scotland to assimilate as if she were nothing more
than a northern region of England.
From the content, Strathclyde could well have been
addressing allegations made 120 years ago. His words are
easily transferrable rebuttals to Waddies complaint that
| SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE
the Incorporating Union had enabled the English to
quietly ignore the national sentiment of Scotland
and Blackies indictment that Scotland is defacto [sic]
in their estimations already the northern province of
England.
So is this a question of history repeating itself? The
SHRA certainly liked to think of itself as embod[ying]
the last in a long series of protests which have been
made by a succession of Scotsmen against the evils of
incorporation. Yet the SNP does not make the same link
to the SHRA. It is less that the Association has been consigned to history and more that it is not easily traceable,
so as to construct a continuous narrative. There is no
central repository for its material, in contrast to those
for its 1918 reincarnation and the subsequent National
Party of Scotland. Partly as a result of this, it is typically
assumed that the SHRA fell into obsolescence sometime
in the mid-1890s. However, newspaper reports show
that monthly meetings were held in late 1897, when
members bemoaned Liberal
policy that ignores the constitutional right of the Scottish
people to the making of their
own laws and should therefore
receive strenuous opposition.
Remarkably, the obsession
with the party endured into
the new century. At the 1900
general election the Association insisted that Liberalism
betrayed the best interests of
Scotland, although Waddie did
continue to seek pledges from
Liberal candidates at subsequent
by-elections. A manifesto was
issued for the 1906 contest and
it was only in 1908 that Waddie
appears to have admitted defeat.
He informed the press that the
SHRA had been allowed to
become a derelict. His explanation: The Liberal Association has taken up the matter, and it was said there was
no longer a reason for its existence.
Home Rule all round?
The irony of this reflection is borne out in the modern
Liberal Democrats decision to style themselves as the
party of Home Rule. They advocate what was once described as Home Rule All Round, suggesting that, in this
respect at least, the Liberals finally became the party
the SHRA had wanted them to be. What is now known
as the West Lothian Question was first aired during the
debates on Irish self-government, when it was stressed
that the existence of a separate Irish legislature and
simultaneous presence of Irish Members at Westminster would allow the Irish a finger in the Scottish pie,
but prevent Scots interfering in Irish affairs. The SHRA
touted the delegation to each of the British kingdoms
of the powers for its internal legislation and administration as an obvious way out of the difficulty and
avowed the problem solved. The past is always with us,
A Scottish Home
Rule campaigner
with posters
attacking the
Labour Partys
stance on the
issue, late 1940s.
but a note of caution should be sounded when seeking

to make connections. Speaking in Glasgow last autumn,
the Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams
argued that Liberals have played such an important part
in trying to create a federal Britain, crediting Gladstone
with having practically invented the concept of Home
Rule. The innovative role played by the Irish aside, it
should be noted that Gladstone sought to temper and
restrain the progress of the Home Rule movement in
Scotland. He even informed Queen Victoria that the
cause had in no way been promoted by the leaders of
the Liberal party and, to emphasise his Unionist credentials, informed her that he had incurred much obloquy
thereby.
Massive opportunity
It could equally be asserted that we must not push the
SNP-SHRA analogy too far. Home Rulers may well have
rejected the independence campaign as apostasy. The Associations vice-chairman John
Romans was by no means alone
in advising that No Scotsman,
whose opinion is worth repeating, entertains for a moment, an
approximation to repeal of the
Union. Yet so many of the examples compared here indicate
the existence of deep-seated,
long-held grievances that have
been articulated through what
is ultimately a shared nationalist discourse. It appears that
devolution failed to pacify (to
borrow a Gladstonian term)
Scottish nationalism. Home
Rule has not been the cure it
was presented as by its early
advocates. A belief persists that
the constitutional settlement
does not work and that only
fundamental change can bring national renewal. The
conviction that Scotland can be better than today is not
a new one; after all, it was the SHRA that urged:
We must secure for Scotland a yet greater future, but this
can only be done by vindicating her rights and securing to
her the legitimate control of her own affairs.
That in nationalist eyes this aim has still not been fully
achieved is indicated by Deputy First Minister Nicola
Sturgeon beseeching electors not to waste a massive
opportunity. We may ask, is the referendum therefore the logical outcome of the SHRAs desire to bring
before the people of Scotland the importance of giving
expression to their opinions? Perhaps the independence
campaign is belatedly delivering what the SHRA claimed
for the Home Rule movement; that no better opportunity is likely to be afforded them of securing their
national rights.
Naomi Lloyd-Jones is a research student in the department of history at

Kings College London.
WASHINGTON 1814
Washington
is Burning
Graeme Garrard describes the events that led to the torching of the new US capital
by British troops in August 1814 and considers the impact of the greatest disgrace
ever dealt to American arms on the US, Britain and Canada.
W
Washington in
flames, August
24th, 1814, a
contemporary
English engraving.
HEN JAMES MADISON, fourth President of

the United States and Father of the Constitution, signed a declaration of war against
Britain on June 18th, 1812 he could scarcely
have imagined that two years later he would be fleeing
from his burning capital before the invading enemy. At
the start of the War of 1812, the first the US had declared
on another nation, his friend and predecessor as president, Thomas Jefferson, had smugly declared that the war
against Britains colonies in what is today Canada would be
a mere matter of marching. As Madison abandoned the

White House on horseback with his entourage and raced
towards Virginia on August 24th, 1814 he stopped and
looked back as he beheld the ruined city of Washington.
The smoke from flames that engulfed it could be seen as far
away as Baltimore, Maryland. Although he left no personal
account of his feelings about these shattering events, the
normally imperturbable president must have been deeply
shaken by the turn they had taken, as were most Americans. What his many domestic critics had derisively
WASHINGTON 1814
39 opposition Federalists in Congress voted in favour. The
House of Representatives backed Madisons call to arms by
79 votes to 49, while the Senate narrowly voted 19 to 13 in
favour. There were serious threats of disunion from New
England, where the war was deeply unpopular.
After two years of fighting neither side had much to
show for its efforts and bloodshed. However, with the
defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon
monarchy in France early in 1814, large numbers of British
forces became available to take on the Americans. A small
force of seasoned British troops from the Duke of Wellingtons army was sent to Bermuda under General Ross,
a decorated Irish veteran of the Peninsular War, who was
given overall command of British soldiers on the east coast
of the US. They sailed towards Washington and anchored
at the town of Benedict, Maryland on the Patuxent River,
45 miles to the south of Washington, on August 19th, 1814.
Here they joined forces with a battalion of Royal Marines
under Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who commanded a
modest fleet of Royal Navy ships that had harassed and
plundered the isolated settlements
Left: Painting of
along the shores of Chesapeake Bay.
James Madison by
As a result a reward was offered in the
an unknown artist,
US of $1,000 for his head and $500
commissioned by
James Monroe for
for each of his ears.
the White House
Both Ross and Cockburn reported
in 1816.
to
Vice-Admiral
Sir Alexander
Below: Dolley
Cochrane, Commander-in-Chief of
Madison by Bass
the Royal Navys North America and
Otis, 1817.
branded Mr Madisons War had led to the only foreign

occupation of the US capital in its history. Soldiers and
marines under Major-General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral
Sir George Cockburn put Washingtons public buildings,
including the Senate, the House of Representatives, the
Library of Congress, the Treasury building, the State and
War Departments, the historic Navy Yard and the Presidents House (as the White House was then known), to the
torch. Exactly two centuries later, few people in the United
States or Britain are aware of this national humiliation, the
greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms.
HE WAR OF 1812 began when a series of provocations by the British outraged segments of
American opinion during the wars with Napoleon.
Many Americans saw an irresistible opportunity
to grab large tracts of the vast, sparsely populated British
colonies to their north while Britain was distracted fighting
the French in Europe. Some even believed that it was their
manifest destiny to unite the entire continent, from the
Arctic to the Rio Grande, under one (US) flag. On the eve
of the war John Quincy Adams wrote that the whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine
Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one
language, professing one general system of religious and
political principles. When they failed to take British North
America, they turned south and invaded Mexico instead.
Yet Americans were deeply divided on the desirability of
a second war of independence with Britain. The Congressional vote that sanctioned it was the closest formally to
lead to a declaration of war in American history. None of the
Armstrong seriously misjudged the massive symbolic

significance of the capture and burning of the young nations
capital and the effect this would have on American morale
A contemporary
French satire on
British treachery
in setting fire to
public buildings
in Washington.
It includes an
attack on their
attempt to induce
France to abolish
the slave trade,
which was seen
as a hypocritical
cover for British
colonial supremacy. General Ross
is probably the
officer standing
on the right.
West Indies Station. The energetic and headstrong Cockburn, who had fought with Nelson at the Battle of Cape St
Vincent, wrote to Cochrane on July 17th recommending an
immediate attack on the poorly defended American capital
for the greater political effect likely to result. On July 18th
Cochrane ordered his eager subordinate to destroy and lay
waste such towns and districts as you may find assailable.
Ross and Cockburn joined forces and agreed to march on
Washington under the formers command. When the cautious Cochrane ordered them to return, Cockburn defiantly
refused. There is now no choice left us. We must go on.
Ross agreed. Well, be it so! We will proceed!, the general
declared.
A short distance away in Washington, the US Secretary
of War, John Armstrong, scoffed at the idea that the British
would be foolish enough to attack the American capital,
which was virtually undefended. He was sure that they
would turn towards Baltimore instead. They will certainly
not come here!, he confidently predicted to the president.
What the devil will they do here? No! No! Baltimore is the
place, Sir. That is of so much more consequence. He further
anticipated (also wrongly) that, if the British dared to move
against Washington, their attack would end as a mere
Cossack hurrah, a rapid march and hasty retreat. Militarily,
Armstrongs view was not unreasonable. Washington at the
time was little more than a dusty village of 13,000 citizens
and slaves, built on swamps with few houses. Pennsylvania
Avenue, which would later become Americas Main Street,
running between the Capitol Building and the Presidents
House, was then unpaved and always in an awful condition from either mud or dust. But Armstrong seriously
misjudged the massive symbolic significance of the capture
and burning of the young nations capital and the effect this
would have on American morale.
Before marching on Washington, Ross and Cockburn
led their troops against a hastily organised American force
assembled near the quiet little village of Bladensburg,
Maryland, a few miles from downtown Washington.
WASHINGTON 1814
Right: George
Mungers watercolour of the
burned-out shell
of the Presidents
House standing
alone in the
landscape, 1814.
Below: The Fall
of Washington or Maddy
in full flight,
British cartoon
of 1814, shows
the president
and probably his
secretary of war,
John Armstrong,
escaping from
Washington with
bundles of state
papers, watched by
bemused
Americans on the
left and British
sailors on the right.
During the fighting, Cockburn charged recklessly across

the battlefield on his white horse, his large, gold-laced hat
conspicuous in the August sun. When a bullet struck his
saddle and another killed a nearby marine, an aide pleaded
with him to take cover. Poh! Poh! Nonsense!, the admiral
blustered. The US defenders were routed by the British on
August 24th at the Battle of Bladensburg, thereby removing
the last significant obstacle to the capital.
ROSS AND COCKBURN led a small advance guard to
Capitol Hill in Washington under a flag of truce to agree
terms. Both commanders were in complete agreement that
looting and the wanton destruction of private property
would under no circumstances be tolerated by their troops
and this was made clear to the dejected Americans. In the
end seven soldiers would be flogged for disobeying this
order. But they saw the destruction of public buildings as
fair game. Indeed, it was at the heart of the expedition.
As Ross and Cockburn rode up to the Capitol Building
a group of diehards fired a volley at them from a nearby
house, killing a British soldier. The generals horse fell dead
beneath him. The house was promptly burned down and
the Union Jack raised over the American Capitol.
The invaders were impressed by the grandeur of the
Senate and House of Representatives with their elegant
interiors, which at the time were temporarily separated
by a makeshift wooden structure joining the two wings of
the still-unfinished Capitol Building, where the distinctive
central rotunda would later be constructed. The whole
building was set alight with rockets and flares, gutting

both wings, which burned fiercely. The Library of Congress
(then housed in the offices of the Senate majority leader)
was consumed by the fires, taking its 3,000 volumes with
it. But the thick stone walls of the Capitol survived, leaving
an empty, burned-out shell. Cockburn on horseback then
led the British troops down Pennsylvania Avenue to the
Presidents House. The great little Madison (who stood just
It must have been a strange moment

as the descendants of Madisons slave
beheld the famous portrait of the
slave-owning first president
5 4 tall) and his wife Dolley

had fled, separately, just hours
before. Ross and Cockburn
found an elegant, deserted,
23-room building that had
been tastefully furnished by
Thomas Jefferson during his
presidency. A large dining
table was carefully laid for 40
guests; Dolley Madison had
been expecting the cabinet
for lunch at 3pm that very
afternoon. Cockburn, Ross
and their troops feasted on
the food and toasted the
health of the Prince Regent in
London before they set about
gathering furniture together
in the oval drawing room to
start a fire. The Presidents
House burned furiously until
the following day. Like the
Capitol Building, the heavy
outer walls, survived while
the interior and its furnishings were completely gutted.
PARED FROM THIS

conflagration was a
copy of the large Lansdowne portrait of George
Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart and named
after the Marquess of Lansdowne, the British prime minister who had negotiated peace with the American colonists
in 1783. It depicts the retiring Washington nobly renouncing a third term as president. The US government bought
a Stuart-painted replica of the painting for the Presidents
House in 1800. On August 24th, 1814 it hung in the large
dining room. Credit for saving the painting was claimed by
and has usually been ascribed to, Dolley Madison, who remained behind in the house after her husband and officials
had departed, supervising the loading of personal affects
into a wagon before she escaped shortly before the arrival of
the British. Pointing to the Washington painting, she is supposed to have ordered Save that picture! Save that picture if
possible. If not possible, destroy it. Under no circumstances
is it to fall into the hands of the British! The canvas was cut
from its frame and removed for safe-keeping. This account
was later challenged by Madisons 15-year-old slave and
manservant, Paul Jennings, who wrote a short memoir, A
Colored Mans Reminiscences of James Madison, many years
later, which flatly contradicts the First Lady:
An American
propaganda
painting by
John Archibald
Woodside, c.1814.
It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs Madison

escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the
large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there),
and carried it off. She had no time for doing it. It would have
required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the
silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few
squares off, and were expected any moment.
Jennings identified the French doorkeeper John Sus
(Jean-Pierre Soiussat) and the presidents gardener Magraw
(McGraw) as the people who
actually rescued the Washington portrait, which today
hangs in the East Room of the
White House the only object
to remain on display since the
building was completed in the
1820s. In 2009, descendants
of Jennings were invited to
the White House by President
Obama to look at the painting their relative helped save.
It must have been a strange
moment as the descendants
of Madisons slave beheld
the famous portrait of the
slave-owning first president of
the United States during the
first term of Americas first
black president.
Most of the other prominent
public buildings in Washington
were systematically fired by the
British, with few exceptions,
such as the Patent Office, where
the members of Congress later
convened when they returned to
the devastated city. A great fire
in the direction of Washington
was observed from Cockburns
flagship on the River Patuxent. Rosss deputy recorded that
the events of the last ten days, culminating in the burning of
the US capital, were as fine a thing as any done during this
war, and a rub to the Americans that can never be forgotten.
Cochrane agreed, boasting that the war-making President
Madison had been hurled from his throne.
Cockburn was initially determined to burn down the
offices of the Washington newspaper the National Intelligencer, which was an enthusiastic supporter of Madison
and had roundly denounced and abused the admiral as a
Ruffian for his campaign of destruction in Chesapeake Bay.
He was persuaded not to by neighbours, who feared that
the fire would engulf their homes as well. Instead he compromised and ordered the building to be torn down brick
by brick, decreeing that all the letters C of its metal type
be destroyed on the presses so that the rascals can have no
further means of abusing my name.
Most of the fires that engulfed the city were doused by
a huge thunderstorm and hurricane, which swept through
Washington while the British were still present. Great
God, Madam!, Cockburn exclaimed to a resident. Is this
the kind of storm to which you are accustomed in this
Above: Fort
McHenry near
Baltimore
under attack
by the British in
September 1814,
contemporary
aquatint by John
Bower.
Right: RearAdmiral Sir
George Cockburn,
credited by Ross
with the idea
of attacking
Washington,
stands before the
burning Capitol
buildings, in a
contemporary
painting.
Secretary of State Monroe cursed

the British troops as all damnd
rascals from highest to lowest for
torching the capital
infernal country? The admiral then headed out of the city,
very pleased with the devastation he left in his wake after
an occupation that had lasted barely 24 hours.
The Americans were as dejected and enraged as the
British were elated by the effects of the occupation. The reserved and stoical Madison returned to Washington as soon
as the British had departed. Unable to live in the Presidents
House, he took up residence at the home of his brother-inlaw. His wife soon joined him, exclaiming when she saw
the ruined capital: Such destruction, such devastation!
The secretary of state James Monroe, Madisons successor
as president, cursed the British troops as all damnd rascals
from highest to lowest for torching the capital. He seems
to have forgotten that American troops had done much the
same in 1813 when they occupied the undefended city of
York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada (now the
province of Ontario). Then they had burned the colonys
legislative and judicial buildings, plundered its public library
and destroyed private property. Indeed, the Governor
WASHINGTON 1814
General and military Commander-in-Chief of British North
America during the war, Lieutenant-General Sir George
Prvost, wrote that, as a just retribution, the proud capital
at Washington has experienced a similar fate. When the
news reached London a month later of the British retaliation, guns outside Parliament and the Tower of London
boomed a joyous salute, a reaction echoed throughout the
colonies of British North America, particularly in York.
In the wake of the British attack, many Americans
favoured moving the capital north to Philadelphia, which
had been a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the
United States and where the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution were both drafted. It had also been the
capital during the Revolutionary War. Afraid that this suggestion might be taken up, Washington property owners
paid for the construction of a temporary brick building
where Congress met from December 1815 until 1819, while
the gutted Capitol Building was rebuilt. Ultimately, a bill to
relocate the capital was defeated and Washington remained
the seat of government. The White House was restored in
time for James Monroes inauguration as president in 1817.
OR THE AMERICANS the summer of 1814 presented

few silver linings in the dark cloud of their national
humiliation. General Ross reluctantly agreed to lead
a joint attack on Baltimore with Admiral Cockburn.
He landed his troops just over 10 miles from the city at
North Point on September 12th. During the ensuing battle,
Ross was shot dead by an American sniper. When told of his
death, Cockburn exclaimed: It is impossible! I parted with
him this moment. Cockburn mourned his friends death:
Our country, sir, has lost in him one of its best and bravest
soldiers, and those who knew him, as I did, a friend honoured and beloved. Admiral Cochrane lamented the loss of
one of the brightest ornaments in the British Army. Rosss
body was preserved in a hogshead of Jamaican rum and
shipped to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was interred in
the citys Old Burying Ground of St Pauls Church. A monument to Ross was erected in St Pauls Cathedral in London
and at his Irish birthplace, Rostrevor, County Down, on the
spot where he had planned to build a home for his retirement after the war. Surprisingly, a painting of Ross by an
unknown artist now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery
of the Smithsonian Institution in the city.
The Americans repelled the attacking British forces at
the Battle of Baltimore immediately after Rosss death.
Famously, the siege of the citys Fort McHenry inspired
the lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key to compose the
poem Defence of Fort McHenry, which later provided the
lyrics for The Star-Spangled Banner. Set to the tune of the
18th-century drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven, the
reference to the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in
air in the future national anthem were references to the
attack on Fort McHenry witnessed by Key.
On Christmas Eve, 1814 delegations from Britain and
the United States (including the future sixth president John
Quincy Adams) met in a former monastery in the Belgian
city of Ghent to sign a Treaty of Peace and Amity between
the two states. This news did not reach America in time
to stop Major-General Andrew Jackson inflicting a heavy
defeat on British troops at the Battle of New Orleans in
January 1815. The Prince Regent later confirmed the treaty
The flag flying

over Fort
McHenry,
which inspired
the writing of
the poem that
became the US
national anthem.
for Britain with his signature, as did Madison for the US on

February 17th, 1815. Neither side had gained any territory
and both claimed victory after over two years of war that
left deep national scars for many decades to come.
For Britain the war was a minor sideshow of its imperial
saga that is now almost wholly forgotten, completely
eclipsed by the victories of Wolfe at Quebec, Wellington at
Waterloo and Nelson at Trafalgar. For the US it proved to be
a sobering lesson in the weaknesses of its military preparation and leadership and it exposed some ominous internal
political divisions in the young state. For Canada, by contrast, the War of 1812 was a turning point in the formation
of English-Canadian identity. It was a decisive crucible out
of which the remaining English-speaking British colonies
in North America forged a new sense of self-confidence
and solidarity with themselves and with Britain. This may
explain why there have been major celebrations and commemorations of the war in Canada, particularly Ontario,
many more than in the US, and none at all in Britain.
Graeme Garrard is a reader in history at the School of European Studies,
Cardiff University.
FURTHER READING
Pierre Burton, Flames Across the Border: 18131814
(McClelland and Stewart, 1981).
Christopher George. Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of
1812 on the Bay (White Mane Books, 2000).
John Grant and Ray Jones, A Guide to Battlefields and
Historic Sites: The War of 1812 (Western New York Public
Broadcasting Association, 2011).
MacKay J. Hitsman, The Incredible War of 1812: A Military
History (University of Toronto Press, 1965).
James A. Pack, The Man Who Burned The White House
(Naval Institute Press, 1987).
Anthony S. Pitch, The Burning of Washington: The British
Invasion of 1814 (Naval Institute PressBest, 2008).
InFocus
The Fire Fly on Union

Mills Bridge, 1863
HE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR is entering its third

year and so far the South has had the best of it.
There have been two battles close to this spot,
called First and Second Bull Run, or Manassas, as
both sides fought to control the strategically vital junction
of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, running north to
south in Virginia, with the Manassas Gap Railroad running
east to west through the Shenandoah Range. First Bull
Run, the opening battle of the war in July 1861, saw the
Union forces routed; in the second encounter, in August
1862, they were again beaten but were able to retreat, in
better order, back to the defensive lines round Washington DC. It must have been shortly after that this bridge at
Union Mills, a little to the north of the junction, across a
creek flowing into the Bull Run, was destroyed by the Confederate forces, maybe as General Robert E. Lee led them
northwards three weeks later to fight the bloodiest one-day
battle in US history, at Antietam. Now, in 1863, it has been
temporarily repaired with wooden trestles and the Norths
Fire Fly locomotive poses for a photograph by one of the pioneering US photographer Mathew Bradys team. It makes
a handsome sight, with its distinctive chimney to catch the
sparks from its wood-burning boiler, its huge lantern and
the gothic windows of the drivers cab.
Early in 1862 Abraham Lincolns administration had
made a key appointment when Herman Haupt, previously
chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was put in
charge of the Norths railroads within the theatre of war.
Mathew Brady employed 23

photographers to record the
American Civil War
He brought efficiency, time savings and swift repairs. In
May 1862, after he had rebuilt the bridge across Potomac
Creek, Lincoln said: That man Haupt has built a bridge 400
feet long and 80 high, on which loaded trains are passing
every hour, and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing
in it but corn stalks and bean poles. Haupt was probably
responsible for the repair of the Union Mills bridge, the US
Military Construction Corps able to do a job like that in a
day or two, using timber cut down in the locality.
Mathew Brady employed 23 photographers to record
the Civil War, each equipped with his own travelling dark
room, something that Roger Fenton had pioneered a few
years earlier when photographing the Crimean War. In
October 1862 Brady had mounted an exhibition in New
York baldly entitled The Dead of Antietam, which included pictures of corpses scattered on the battlefield taken two
or three days after the battle the month before. Fenton had
not taken such shots, but Felice Beato had, during the Third
Opium War in China in 1860, when an Anglo-French force
had stormed the Taku Forts on the way to Beijing. Bradys
team took over 10,000 plates during the war and, although
the US government refused to buy the collection from him
afterwards, a great many of them have survived.
ROGER HUDSON
| HANOVER
A British on
Hanging
Genocide
in
to
Hanover
Three hundred years ago, in August 1714, the Protestant

Elector of Hanover ascended to the thrones of Great Britain
and Ireland, becoming George I. Graham Darby describes the
latter phase of the personal union, which lasted until 1837.
THE PERSONAL UNION between the monarchs of

England and the state of Hanover, the outcome of the
Protestant Settlement signed in 1701, came to an end
with the death of William IV in 1837. The foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, was delighted:
Hussars of the
Kings German
Legion in the
Peninsula, watercolour possibly by
Henry Alken, 1808.
The Hanoverian Dynasty, and German prejudices which belonged to it, and which for a century have embarrassed and
impeded our march both at home and abroad will cease.
The Sovereign of England will no longer be hampered by
considerations belonging to the petty state of Hanover; and
I believe that since the accession of George I, these German
politics have more or less continually had their influence on
the Councils of England.
Historians have long recognised that the Electorate

of Hanover (so-called as one of eight states whose heads
elected the Holy Roman Emperor) played an important
role in British foreign policy under the first two Georges,
the German kings. It has been acknowleged more recently
that Hanover was important to George III (r. 1760-1820),
too, though he was careful to separate Hanoverian from
British interests. During the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815),
however, this became impossible.
After French troops occupied Hanover in 1803 the
remnants of the Hanoverian army came to England and
formed the Kings German Legion (KGL), around 14,000
strong, based in Bexhill and Weymouth. The Legion served
with distinction in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.
However, in 1806 the French were ousted and Hanover

was occupied by Prussia. This prompted the foreign
secretary, Charles James Fox, to engineer a declaration of war against Prussia, but it was unusual for the
Hanoverian tail to wag the British dog in George IIIs
reign. There was criticism from republican and other
quarters, particularly from the radical journalist William
Cobbett (whose anti-Hanoverian stance culminated in
a two-year jail sentence in 1810 for his condemnation
of the KGLs action in flogging militiamen in Ely). The
situation was shortlived, as France reoccupied Hanover
in 1807. Napoleon now abolished the Electorate (having
already abolished the Holy Roman Empire) and incorporated it into the newly created kingdom of Westphalia,
ruled by his brother Jrme. Prussia now became an
ally and the restoration of Hanover an aim of British
foreign policy, as much as a personal wish of George III.
The objective was not practical until after 1812, when
Napoleons defeat became a real possibility, by which
time the Regency was fully established.
Following his appointment as foreign secretary in
1812, Viscount Castlereagh worked closely with Count
Mnster, the head of the Hanoverian chancellory.
Castlereagh was impressed by Hanovers diplomatic
network and this cooperation aided
the foreign secretarys strategy
of establishing a firm Continental alliance to defeat Napoleon
once and for all, a plan that was
successful at Waterloo. French
control of Hanover continued until
October 1813. Napoleons defeat at
Leipzig later that month spelt the
end of the Confederation of the
Rhine. Hanovers territories were
formally restored to George III
and his youngest son, the Duke of
Cambridge, was appointed military
governor in December 1813. He
would become governor general
in 1816 and subsequently, under
William IV, viceroy.
Despite Castlereaghs good relationship with
Mnster he was not prepared to sacrifice British for
Hanoverian interests. His main aim was to ensure
that France would not revive and to do this he wanted
Prussia to act as a bulwark on the Rhine. Mnsters
extensive territorial ambitions for Hanover were consequently subordinated to those of Prussia. Nevertheless,
it did gain substantial territory, increasing in size by 20
per cent, and at the Congress of Vienna it was elevated
to the status of kingdom in October 1814, though this
was not so much a reward as a necessity, given that the
Holy Roman Empire was not restored. With no emperor
to elect, the electorate was redundant. After 1815,
however, Hanover and Britains interests diverged.
When the Prince Regent finally became George IV
in 1820 he was quick to arrange a formal state visit to
Hanover, the first since 1755. His visit the following
year was met with much ceremony and jubilation in
the new kingdom and, surprisingly, with little criticism

in Britain (despite the traditional dislike of German
militarism in general and especially Hanoverian standing armies paid for by the British taxpayer). Like his
father, George IV also sought to keep Hanoverian policy
separate from British, as did George Canning, who was
foreign secretary from 1822. This was one reason why
Canning opened up foreign policy to public scrutiny
through speeches and the publication of despatches
in order to counter association with the kings other
foreign policy. Despite this separation, there was some
suggestion that Hanoverian troops might be used to
aid British interests in Portugal in 1824, as no British
troops were available. However, there were objections
from both kingdoms. After Cannings relationship with
the king, hitherto frosty, improved, he was able to be
less circumspect and could take advantage of Hanovers
diplomatic network to further British foreign policy
interests.
Public ignorance
Hanoverian news was generally of little interest in
Britain and newspapers and periodicals often commented about the publics ignorance of it. There were times,
though, when Hanover did attract
attention. Its new constitution
passed almost unnoticed on its
announcement in 1819, but from
1825 it became a matter of public
interest in Britain over the issue
of Catholic Emancipation. The
addition of Catholic territories to
Hanover in 1814-15 had led to the
granting of toleration to Catholics
there and the contradictory policy
of the monarchy on this issue at
home prompted even the Duke of
Clarence, the future William IV, to
observe an inconsistency of the
king refusing in Ireland what he
had granted in Hanover. Of course,
the counter argument was that,
whereas Hanover was ruled by hereditary right, Britain
was ruled by Protestant Settlement. Despite George
IVs objections, Catholic Emancipation was eventually
granted in Britain in 1829.
Hanover was prominent again in British politics at
the beginning of William IVs reign. The Great Reform
Act extending the franchise had just received royal
assent in early June 1832, when William IV accepted (for
Hanover) Metternichs oppressive Six Articles, which
after that same month sought to limit the rights of
representative assemblies later that same month. This
seemingly contradictory policy prompted Palmerston to
condemn the Six Articles in the Commons and make his
famous declaration that constitutional states were the
natural allies of England. The Times was apoplectic, declaring Thank God, Hanover is no kingdom of ours and
eagerly anticipated the end of the personal union at the
death of the king. In fact, the end of the personal union
The contradictory
policy of the
monarchy on the issue
of Catholic toleration
prompted the Duke of
Clarence to observe
an inconsistency of
the king refusing in
Ireland what he had
granted in Hanover
| HANOVER
seemed a possibility throughout the reigns of both
George IV and William IV. Whereas George III fathered
15 children, his offspring were less productive. The Salic
law operated in Hanover and consequently male heirs
had precedence over female. From 1830 Princess Victoria of Kent was heir apparent to the British throne. This
meant that her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, would
inherit the kingdom of Hanover. And so it came to pass
on the death of William IV in 1837, much to Palmerstons relief.
Unpopular figure
The general public was largely indifferent to this shift,
though there was some satisfaction that the Duke of
Cumberland, now King Ernst Augustus of Hanover,
would be leaving Britain. The duke, an ultra-Tory,
was unpopular in some quarters. To be fair
to him, malicious accusations levelled
by the Whig propaganda machine had
been quite outrageous. Among other
offences, he was held responsible
for the suicide of Lord Graves by
dint of having had an affair with
his wife. It was also alleged that
he had killed his valet and sired
a son by his sister. The charges
seem to be without foundation,
but mud sticks. Moreover, Ernst
Augustus remained the heir apparent to the throne of England,
so the possibility of his return was
a factor until Queen Victoria gave
birth to a daughter late in 1840.
Ernst Augustus reign in Hanover was
reasonably successful (his equestrian statue
still stands outside Hanover station). He made a
formal state visit to Britain in 1843 and, despite previous
slanders, was generally well received, though relations
with Queen Victoria were cool, mainly due to arguments
over precedence and heirlooms. He was succeeded in
1851 by his son, George V.
Brass medal
showing the Duke
of Cumberlands
galloping horse
trampling a
dragon en route
to Hanover.
Born Hanover, British subject

The centenary of the personal union in August 1814
had been the subject of considerable celebration, with
the Prince Regent organising ftes in three London
parks. Of course, the link was still live at that time
and Hanover had just been recovered after several years
of French occupation. In many ways this was a double
celebration. The bicentenary in August 1914 was totally
overshadowed by the outbreak of hostilities with the
(relatively new) German empire, which had absorbed
Hanover in 1866.
Historians have long appreciated the political significance of the personal union, but less attention has
been paid to the economic and social dimension that
also went with it. Some study has been made of the
economic relationship: it appears that it was a rather
one-sided arrangement, whereby Britain used
Hanover to access the markets of Germany
for its manufactures, while not granting Hanover any significant trading
concessions in return. Little research
has been conducted into the social
relationship though there has been
some investigation into the links
between Britain and the University
of Gttingen, which were broken by
the French occupation.
However, those of us with
ancestors whose records state: born
Hanover, British Subject
my mothers family included have
a story to investigate. Between 1714
and 1837 many Hanoverians settled in
Britain and a great number did so after 1837,
until immigration became an issue later in the
century. In 1886 it was ruled that Hanoverians born
after the death of William IV were not entitled to be
British, though this ruling was designed to stem future
immigration and did not affect those already residing
in the United Kingdom. Understandably, the two world
wars with Germany in the first half of the 20th century
It appears that the economic relationship was rather one-sided, whereby Britain
used Hanover to access the markets of Germany for its manufactures, while not
granting Hanover any significant trading concessions in return.
In 1863-64 Britain nearly went to war with Prussia
in support of Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein
question (see page 16), but the ageing Palmerston had
met his match in Bismarck, the Prussian Chancellor,
who joked that he would have his police force arrest the
British army, if it invaded. When in 1866 Prussia went to
war with Austria, the Hanoverian parliament recommended neutrality but George stubbornly insisted on
taking Austrias side. Hanover was soon overrun. The last
ruler of Hanover, George, died in exile in Paris in 1878
but was buried at St Georges Chapel at Windsor Castle:
the royal family bond remained, even if the demise of
the kingdom was of little significance to the British
public.
led many families to gloss over memories of their

German ancestry; possibly the most famous incidence in
this respect is the current royal family, which felt compelled to change its German name from Saxe-Coburg to
the House of Windsor in 1917. Still, on this, the 300th
anniversary of the personal union between Britain and
Hanover, it is probably about time that the relationship
can once more be explored without prejudice.
Graham Darby is the author of The Thirty Years War available via Kindle
Publishing Direct.
A number of events are taking place to celebrate the
tercentenary in both Britain and Germany. For details see
www.london.diplo.de/300yearsBritishGermanRoyalTies
MakingHistory
Understanding the emotional lives of people in the past is one of the most difficult challenges
facing the historian, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.
How Does it Feel?

WHEN I WORKED at Hampton Court
Palace one of the questions that visitors often asked was: How did Henry
VIII feel when ? For the historian,
it is a difficult question to answer; it is
fantastically hard to chart a history of
feelings and to access the emotions of
people in the past.
Yet it is not impossible. As with all
history, the tightrope to be walked
is between the mystery and the
familiarity of the past. Back in the
1960s the French historian Philippe
Aris claimed that modern concepts
of childhood and family sentiment
did not exist in the medieval period.
Through examining changing
vocabulary, family portraiture, toys,
dress and education patterns, Aris
concluded, in the face of devastatingly
high infant mortality rates, that late
medieval parents didnt feel as we
would do and instead experienced
inured indifference in the face of the
deaths of their children because too
many of them died. This indifference,
he argued, was a direct and inevitable
consequence of the demography of the
period; nothing about this callousness should surprise us: it was only
natural in the community conditions
of the time.
Historians have since used letters,
diaries and other personal documents
to demonstrate that parents did, in
fact, feel great sadness in the face of
their childrens deaths, but Aris work
carries an important and salutary reminder that we should not just assume
that people in the past felt as we do.
Yet sometimes I find myself in a battle
between myself as a scholar knowing
that thoughts, beliefs and feelings in
the past must have been culturally
conditioned and historically variable
and myself as a friend, lover, daughter,
recognising what looks like a similar
emotion in the affective life of people
of the past.
Following BBC Radio 4s broadcast
in April (still available online) of Five
Hundred Years of Friendship, presented

by Thomas Dixon, I have been thinking in particular about the historical
nature of friendship.
Friendship was a preoccupation of
the period I study, the Renaissance.
The intelligentsia of the period looked
back to ancient models of companionship, as charted by Aristotle and Cicero,
and wrote their own odes to true
friendship. As Susan Brigden noted in
her award-winning book on Sir Thomas
Wyatt, The Heart's Forest (2012), poets
Friendship could encompass

a love that we moderns find
hard to credit outside the
bonds of an erotic attachment
of the Henrician court often wrote of
friendship. At court it meant, above
all, honesty; the false friend was a
flatterer. It also meant constancy and
fidelity in the face of temptations to
betrayal. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
praised his childhood friend, Henry
VIIIs illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy,
Duke of Richmond, when he wrote of:
The secret thoughts, imparted with
such trust The friendship sworn,
each promise kept so just. This was a
rare prize. Sir Thomas More called a
The Three Species

of Friendship, an
illustration from
a 15th-century
French edition of
Aristotle's Ethics.
faithful and constant friendship in

the storms of fortune a high and
noble gift.
The rarity of true friendship was
emphasised in the writings of the
inventor of the essay form, Michel de
Montaigne. For six years in the 1550s,
until his friends death, Montaigne
was a bosom companion to Etienne de
la Botie. Theirs was such a devoted
friendship that Montaigne described
them as having souls mingled and
confounded in so universal a blending
that they efface the seam which joins
them together so that it cannot be
found. Looking to history, Montaigne
and La Botie modelled themselves on
the friendship of Socrates and Alcibiades even to the point of Montaigne
casting the (slightly) older La Botie in
the role of ugly sage.
This unflattering attribution
aside, the language of their friendship
seems, to a modern reader, distinctly
romantic. Montaigne writes: If you
press me to say why I loved him, I feel
that it cannot be expressed except by
replying: Because it was him: because
it was me. Yet, like Socrates and
Alcibiades, few scholars conclude that
they had a sexual relationship. Friendship could encompass a love that we
moderns find hard to credit outside
the bonds of an erotic attachment.
So is it possible to have a friend
like this in the modern age? For
Renaissance writers, I wouldnt stand
a chance. For I am a woman and such
heights of friendship were never
thought attainable by mere females. It
is again a reminder that feelings were
culturally conditioned and historically
variable. Yet isnt this one instance in
which the past seems to give us a rare
and beautiful emotional ideal to which
to aspire, male and female alike?
Suzannah Lipscomb is Convenor for History and
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the New
College of the Humanities, London.
PANAMA CANAL
The Keys
to the
Universe
Matthew Parker, on the centenary
of the completion of the Panama
Canal, describes the gruelling
challenges faced by those competing
to succeed in the project to join the
Pacific and Atlantic oceans, from the
16th century to the present day.
T WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE a glorious histori- A postcard

cal symmetry. This month, exactly a hundred celebrating the
opening of the
years after the triumphant completion of the
Panama Canal
Panama Canal in August 1914, should have seen as the kiss of the
the opening of the new $5.5bn expansion, one of oceans, 1914.
the biggest engineering projects currently underway anywhere in the world. But the Panama Canal has broken men
and reputations before. Amid strikes, huge cost overruns and rumours
that the main construction consortium was in financial difficulty, the
completion date slipped first to October, then to March 2015; now it is
early 2016. Each day of delay reportedly costs the canal company nearly
a million dollars in lost revenue.
Construction of the massive new locks began in 2009. There was
enormous optimism. Vessels carrying up to 12,000 containers more
than twice the current Panamax limit would be able to cross the
isthmus, hugely benefiting world trade and bringing vast revenue for the
Panamanian government. But critics smelled corruption and doubted
the financial viability of the Spanish-led consortium,

which won the main lock-construction contract by
underbidding its nearest rival by $1bn. Bechtel, the US
engineering giant, which had expected to get the work,
sneered that the price bid would not even cover the cost
of the concrete required.
The canal project has always attracted insane optimism, corruption and disaster. Part of the danger of
what became known as the lure of Panama was that,
from the very earliest days, it always looked so obvious
and easy. Having established a colony on the isthmus
Atlantic coast in September 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nez de Balboa led a party of men into the
interior to search for the rumoured Great Ocean across
the mountains. Only a third survived the heat, insects,
snakes and hostile Cuna Indians in the jungle, but on September 25th
Balboa climbed a hill and silent on a peak in Darien he turned one
way and then the other; he could see both oceans quite clearly. He fell
to his knees in prayer and then called up his men, shewing them the
great maine sea heretofore unknowne to the inhabitants of Europe,
Aphrike, and Asia.
The discovery of the Pacific Ocean came with another realisation:
that only a tantalisingly narrow strip of land blocked the way to the
riches of the East, the motivation, of course, for the voyages of
Part of the danger of what became

known as the lure of Panama
was that, from the earliest days, it
always looked so obvious and easy
PANAMA CANAL
Above: the frontispiece to the first

volume of the Company of Scotlands
directors meeting minutes, 1696.
Left: Balboa extracting gold from the
natives and being told of the South Sea
in Theodor de Brys engraving for La
Historia dei Mondo Nuovo by Girolamo
Benzoni, late 16th century.
discovery in the first place. In Balboas party was an engineer, Alvaro

de Saavedra, who suggested in a report to the Spanish King Charles V
that although the search for a strait between the two oceans should
continue, if it was not found, yet it might not be impossible to make
one. By 1530 it was clear that no such waterway existed in the tropics
and in 1534 Charles ordered that a survey be carried out with a view
to excavation. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream
attracted throughout its history, a priest wrote to Charles from Panama:
If there are mountains there are also hands To a King of Spain with the
wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the
spice trade, what is possible is easy.
Fortunately for those who would have been ordered to dig, the Spanish
authorities soon decided that it was safer to have a wall of land between
the riches of Peru and rival European powers, so no work was undertaken. But at the end of the 17th century a Scottish adventurer produced
a bold plan.
William Paterson was born in 1658 and as a young man had travelled, as part missionary, part buccaneer, to the West Indies. Returning
to England, he made a fortune in business and became a projector, a
promoter of speculative moneymaking schemes. Ever since his sojourn
in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a Great Idea, the
venture to cap everything. If ports could be established on both coasts
of the Panama isthmus, cargoes could be transferred over the narrow
strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape
Horn. He had identified a spot where there was no mountain range at
all and where broad, low valleys extended from coast to coast. It was
perfect enough to envisage not just a road but, in time, a waterway.
Paterson intended a truly global entrept, to rival any in the world, and
whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess the Gates to
the Pacific and the keys to the Universe.
HEN THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT, jealous of the

riches flowing into England from trade, passed an Act
to encourage new settlements and commerce, Paterson
rushed to Edinburgh to sell his scheme. Do but open
these doors, he wrote in his proposal to parliament, and trade will
increase trade, and money will beget money. There were warnings that
the area was jealously guarded by Spain and that Paterson talks too
much and raises peoples expectations, but the government were sold.
In June 1695 an Act of the Scottish Parliament established the Company
of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies. But then the English Parliament turned against the project. Royal assent to the Act was withdrawn,
along with substantial English subscriptions of 300,000. However a
wave of patriotic indignation in Scotland saw money pouring in from all
levels of society. 400,000 was quickly raised, about half the countrys
available capital. It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver.
In July 1698 five large vessels carrying 1,200 people left Edinburgh
for Panama. Although more than 40 of the colonists died on the threeand-a-half month voyage, at first all went well. Friendly relations were
established with the local tribes, land was cleared and the soil found to
be highly fertile. But as soon as the Scots had landed in the New World,
there were fierce protests in London from the Spanish ambassador, as
well as from English merchants. In response, William III issued orders
to the Governors of Virginia, New York, New England, Jamaica and Barbados, forbidding them to trade with or supply provisions to the Darin
colonists. For a settlement established as a trading station, this was a
fatal blow.
Seeing the futility of trying to

compete with England and stripped
of capital from the disaster,
Scotland was merged
into Great Britain in 1707
Scots abandoned the isthmus. Only half of the weakened settlers would
survive the journey home. Two further fleets sailed from Scotland and
twice the colony was briefly re-established. But in March 1700 the last
settlers, weakened by hunger and disease, were driven out by Spanish
troops. In all, Patersons Great Idea had cost over 2,000 lives and the
precious savings of an entire nation. The Darien Disaster hastened
the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish parliament.
Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of
capital from the disaster, Scotland was merged into Great Britain in 1707,
an early but spectacular casualty of the lure of Panama.
The disaster did nothing, however, to dampen interest in the dream
of a transisthmian canal. Among those gripped by the idea were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The former envisaged a
canal as a means to ensuring world peace through enhanced
commerce and communication; the latter saw the canal as
an essential step towards the southwards expansion of US
power. During the 18th century France sent a number of
explorers to the isthmus. But it was the lifting of the dead
hand of Spanish rule in the 1820s, together with the advent
of the Canal Age in Europe and the United States and the
arrival of steam power, that gave the idea fresh momentum.
Thereafter the isthmus saw a stream of optimistic
surveyors and explorers from the United States, Britain,
France, Italy, Denmark and Holland. Their backers were
sometimes private companies, sometimes kings or emperors. The King of the Netherlands and Louis-Philippe of
France were at various times interested. It was an idea that,
once taken on, seemed again and again to become an obsession. Most of the explorers got lost, perished from hunger
or disease, or were wiped out by the hostile Cuna Indians.
But they still sent back optimistic reports of remarkable
depressions and lost Indian canals.
To build a bridge of water over the isthmus required what was then
the biggest dam in the world at Gatn. This, in turn, created the largest
man-made lake of its day.(Three huge locks at either end of the canal
lifted vessels to 85 feet above sea-level.)
EVERYTHING STARTED TO UNRAVEL. The death rate from fever was

rapidly rising. The valleys extending coast to coast turned out to be
a fiction and no realistic attempt was made as planned to open up an
overland route to the Pacific. Relations with the Indians cooled when it
became apparent that the new arrivals were preparing no blow against
the common Spanish enemy.
Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease and demoralisation; among the first to die was Patersons wife. Within six months,
nearly 400 settlers had perished from fever or starvation. The onset of
the rainy season in May, and the concurrent further worsening of living
conditions, was the final straw.
Utterly discouraged, on June 20th, 1699, after just seven months, the
HE CIVIL ENGINEER, THOMAS TELFORD, proposed a grand scheme for a transisthmian canal.
The Great Idea of such a structure now attracted not only proven engineers, but millionaires,
dreamers, amateur engineers and crackpots. With the canal
the great unfulfilled engineering challenge of the world, the
isthmus remained the focus of international great power
rivalry. In the 1840s it almost brought war between Britain
and the US, only averted when the two powers agreed in
a treaty in 1850 that neither would build a canal on their
own. Particularly for the Americans, no canal was better
than one under the control of a foreign power.
At the end of the American Civil War, Washington launched an aggressive policy to reverse creeping European involvement in Central
America. For the Secretary of State William Seward, a transisthmian
canal was a cornerstone of his countrys Manifest Destiny, spreading
US commerce and civilisation. Under President Ulysses Grant a series
of meticulous surveys was carried out to decide the preferred route.
The best option, it was decided, was for a canal in Nicaragua, using the
high great lake. But the US was held in check by its treaty with Britain
and by concerns that it did not have a strong enough navy to defend the
waterway should it be completed.
Into this impasse snuck a French company, launching in the 1880s
what would result in one of historys greatest ever engineering disasters.
Led by the celebrated builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps,
it was an effort characterised by corruption, fantasy and heroism. The
initiative was doomed from the start: at an international conference
in Paris a sea-level canal at Panama was decided on, thanks to the mesmeric influence of de Lesseps, who had decided, before he had even
PANAMA CANAL
John Bull looks

on approvingly as
France defies the
Monroe Doctrine and
highlights US military
weakness by planning
a canal at Panama,
from the American
Harpers Weekly, 1880.
seen Central America, that only an ocean

Bosporus would do. American delegates at
the conference, committed to a lock canal
at Nicaragua, condemned the whole show
as, a comedy of the most deplorable kind.
But de Lesseps shared the huge confidence of his age in the benign effects of
new technology. The French public were
told that it was their patriotic duty to back
the canal project and duly did so in their
hundreds of thousands. De Lesseps also
tried to raise money in Britain and the
United States. The Americans were infuriated that the French should be meddling
in what they saw as their backyard. So no
money was forthcoming from them. In
Britain, de Lesseps was applauded for his
achievement at Suez, but his Panama plans
were cold-shouldered. It is magnificent,
wrote The Times newspaper, but it is not
business.
N 1880, AMID GREAT FANFARE, the construction effort was personally launched
by de Lesseps, greeted in Panama by
banners declaring him The Presiding
Genius of the Nineteenth Century. But
by 1884 it was clear that the estimates of
cost had been wildly optimistic and there
was a pretty much permanent epidemic of disease on the isthmus. The worst
killers were malaria and yellow fever.
The former was thought to be caused by
miasma toxic emanations from the rich
corruption of tropical soil disturbed by the
digging. Yellow fever was supposedly the result of filth or dead animals,
or even, experts suggested, from a particular wind off the sea or from
eating apples. Treatment consisted of mustard, brandy and cigars. The
realisation that both diseases were transmitted by mosquitoes was still
a decade or so away.
Jules Dingler, a proven great engineer, arrived in Panama as chief
engineer in early 1883. His theory, shared by many, was that yellow
fever was caused by immoral personal behaviour or moral weakness.
He declared that only the drunk and dissipated die of yellow fever.
To prove that the disease held no fear for him and to stiffen morale, he
brought out to Panama his wife, his son and daughter and his daughters
fianc. Within a few months, his daughter, 19-year-old Louise, contracted yellow fever and died a miserable, agonising death. Eighteen months
later, her fianc, brother and then mother had also all succumbed to the
disease. Dingler returned to France a broken man.
As many as 20,000 died during the French canal period, the majority
of them Jamaicans, who provided the muscle for the effort. Three out
of four of the French engineers who set out to be part of de Lesseps
scheme were dead within three months. The sense of death all around,
a sword of Damocles hanging over them, stoked a feeling of idealistic
unreality: The constant dangers of yellow fever, wrote one young engineer, exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love
for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined
the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France. Amazingly,
some Frenchmen were prepared to die for the canal.
American observers on the isthmus took a more cynical line. To them
such reflections were so much Gallic hot air. Nothing is ever done
by the canal company without a great amount of pomp, circumstance
and red tape, one American journalist wrote in late 1887. Of what one
hears in Panama disregard one third, doubt one third, and disbelieve the
other third The air is as rife with deception as with miasma. In order
to raise money at home, the company was forced to cover up the death
rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets while distributing,
it later turned out, over 12 million francs to the French press to keep it
on side. Nonetheless, the money borrowed became ever more expensive.
S THE DE LESSEPS adventure slid towards catastrophe, bedeviled by disease and engineering problems (many due to
Panamas extraordinarily heavy rainfall) and also fire, war
and earthquakes, American technicians on the isthmus were
convinced that their country would assume control of the enterprise.
The British in Panama thought the same the Panama Canal would be
taken over by Great Britain, just as de Lesseps Suez Canal had been.
Yet, when it came to the crunch at the beginning of the 20th century,
the American diplomats found their British counterparts at last willing
to remove the restrictions of the 1850 treaty. Embroiled in a costly and
unpopular war in South Africa, a naval arms race with Germany and
fearful of Russian ambitions towards India, Great Britain was forced to
remove the shackles of the treaty and thereby concede to the United
States hegemony over the western hemisphere.
The American leadership under Theodore Roosevelt now moved
with utter ruthlessness to make the canal a reality. They bought out
the French company for $40m, a figure
that dwarfs the purchases of Louisiana,
Canal workers
Alaska and the Philippines. When the
gather to receive
their wages,
Colombian government seemed unwillc.1885, by which
ing to give in to the American demands
time there were
that they concede total control over a
around 20,000
canal zone, Roosevelt made plans to
employed by
the French
invade Panama, but instead fomented,
company.
supported and protected a separatist
revolution on the isthmus. He then
bullied the new Panama republic into
signing a treaty that reduced it to vassalage and established
total military control of the new canal zone. There was a
sharp backlash in the US, where the president was accused
of dragging the country down to the sordid level of the European land-grabbing powers, but it was a fait accompli and a
watershed for US presidential power and American imperial
ambition.
The Americans learned virtually nothing from the failures of the French over the canals history. For the first two
years they even hoped to build a sea-level canal which
had been proven to be impossible. Because of the fallout
In order to raise
money at home,
the company was
forced to cover
up the death
rate and set ever
more unrealistic
excavation targets.
Over 12 million
francs were
distributed to the
French press to keep
it on side
Surveying the jungle and swamp of
Panama for the canal, engraving,
c.1840.
PANAMA CANAL
Because of the fallout from Roosevelts action, there was pressure to make
the dirt fly and excavation work started without proper preparation
Above: Roosevelts
rough diggers,
from Puck, 1906.
The presidents
aggression in
Panama divided
US opinion. John
Stevens is depicted
in the foreground.
Right: construction
workers from
Barbados arrive
by boat at Coln,
1909.
from Roosevelts action, there was pressure to make the dirt fly and
excavation work started without proper preparation. Determined to
avoid the corruption of the French era, the project was tied up in horrendous bureaucracy.
ORST OF ALL, although the mosquito theory of the

transmission of malaria and yellow fever had by now
been established, conservative members of the US canal
leadership dismissed this as balderdash and refused to
support the work of William Gorgas, the Commissions head doctor, an
experienced yellow fever specialist. The disease inevitably struck and,
lacking the motivation of the French, three quarters of the American
workers fled the isthmus as panic broke out. A year after the start, the
project was on its knees.
After two years of chaotic bungling, a plan was decided on for a lock
and lake canal, a bridge of water rather than a sea-level through-cut.
New leadership emerged in the figure of John Stevens, a successful
railway engineer who was hired by Roosevelt to be chief engineer for
the canal. He fully supported Gorgas work and, in 1906, a visit by the
president himself boosted morale.
To attract and retain skilled labour from the US, the canal authorities
offered generous holidays, high pay and free accommodation. Nevertheless, such was the turnover of white staff 100 per cent a year that in
1907, following a crisis after the resignation of the exhausted Stevens,
coupled with criticism at home that the project was riddled with graft
The final joining of the

oceans, October 1913.
It required the humble
pick-and-shovel men to
complete the job.
and waste, Roosevelt found it necessary to hand

the project over to the army, or as he said, put it
in the charge of men who will stay on the job until
I get tired of having them there, or till I say they
may abandon it.
HE NEW ARMY regime was utterly ruthless, arresting and deporting critics and
keeping the Panama republic on a tight
rein. This achieved, its greatest challenge
was the Culebra Cut, the highest point of the canal
line. This nine-mile stretch required three quarters
of the total excavation. At the peak of the work,
it contained 76 miles of track carrying 160 trains,
300 rock drills and 6,000 men. With temperatures
reaching 120 degrees, it became known as Hells
Gorge. And as the mountain was removed, the
ground fought back. Because of the extreme geological complexity of the isthmus, slides were numberless, eventually adding 25 million cubic yards
to the total excavation, which in the end would
be three times that required for the Suez Canal.
An American called it the land of fantastical and
unexpected. No one could say when the sun went
down at night what the condition of the Cut would
be the next morning. Or, as one West Indian put
it: Today you dig, tomorrow it slides.
MOST OF THE labour force was from the small
island of Barbados. Of a population of 200,000, some 45,000 went to
Panama during the American period. The West Indians were treated as
cheap and expendable by both the French and Americans. The working
conditions were described by one as some sort of semi-slavery and,
under the Americans, there was a rigid apartheid system in place
throughout the canal zone. The West Indian workers were given all
the most dangerous jobs and were three times as likely as any others
to die from disease or accidents on the works. In all nearly 6,000 died
during the American construction period, as well as 300 US citizens.
Nonetheless, in spite of obvious resentments, the West Indian accounts
are full of pride in knowing they were part of a great, heroic and civilising
achievement. Many times I met death at the door, wrote one worker
50 years after the completion of the canal, but thank God I am alive
to see the great improvement the canal had made and the wonderful
fame it has around the world.
Thus the canal carries a legacy of poor labour relations. During one
of the first strikes soon after the recent expansion plan got underway,
a union leader declared that his members would not be treated as our
Jamaican forebears were. Moreover, the estimated costs have been
shown to be hopelessly optimistic, and the projected annual revenue of
the completed canal money will beget money has now been revised
down from $5 billion a year to just over $3 billion. In a further echo of
the initial construction, cost overruns have been blamed on Panamas
fiendish geology and extraordinary rainfall. Given the history, what is
startling is that any of these setbacks should come as a surprise.

There may be one further replaying of history. As the European-led
expansion effort stumbles from crisis to crisis, so the American embassy
in Panama reported to Washington, the US company Bechtel, with
their reputation for coming in to clean up messes, are keeping a close
eye on the project.
Matthew Parker is a historian of the West Indies and the author of Hells Gorge: The Battle
to Build the Panama Canal (Arrow, 2008).
FURTHER READING
Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and Panama Canal,
1903-1979 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to
Panama, 1850-1914 (University of the West Indies Press, 1984).
Bonham C. Richardson, Panama Money in Barbados, 1900-1920
(University of Tennessee Press, 1985).
James M. Skinner, France and Panama: The Unknown Years, 1894-1908
(Peter Lang, 1989).
REVIEWS
Joan E. Taylor seeks the real Herod Daniel Swift revisits Fussells Great War
Roger Moorhouse praises an account of the Warsaw Uprising
5th Battalion Royal Irish

Fusiliers in the trenches at
Gallipoli, 1915.
SIGNPOSTS
Britain, Ireland and

the First World War
British historiography has been offered a oncein-a-generation opportunity to integrate
Irelands contribution into analyses of the
Great War, argues Catriona Pennell.
IN OCTOBER 2012 David
Cameron promised a truly
national commemoration to
mark the centenary of the First
World War. Concerns quickly
emerged that national, in
reality, meant England. Not only
would this be unrepresentative
of the United Kingdom as it
exists today but it also disregards
the geopolitical configuration
of the state that declared war
on August 4th, 1914: the United
Kingdom of Britain and Ireland.
Understanding the interconnected relationship that existed

during the war between the now
independent states of Britain
and the Republic of Ireland is significant to our understanding of
the First World War on a number
of levels. How did nationalist
Ireland the most significant
threat to the British authorities
in the summer of 1914 come
to support the war effort? What
contribution did Ireland make to
the British war effort and how
can it be framed more broadly

within a colonial response? How
did Anglo-Irish relations evolve
over the course of and as a result
of the war? Where and when did
divergences emerge? What was
the postwar legacy of Irelands
contribution, for both Britain
and the Irish Free State? How has
that contribution been remembered, if at all?
Existing historiography on
Britain and the First World War
tends to exacerbate this sense of
separateness. There is no shortage of work that looks at British
experience of the war and its
consequences either holistically
or from specific angles. However,
scholars of the British perspective have struggled to integrate
Ireland into their explorations.
Alan G.V. Simmonds devotes less
than five per cent of his highly
accessible Britain and World
War One (2012) to the topic.
Adrian Gregorys The Last
Great War (2008) is one of the
most imaginative and important
books on British society and
the conflict and should be the
starting point for anyone wishing
to understand how British
people made sense of the war
as it unfolded. However, while
he acknowledges that the break
up of the United Kingdom of
Britain and Ireland is crucial to
any overall history of the war, he
admits defeat, owing to restrictions of space. My own attempt
to integrate Ireland into an exam-
ination of public responses to the

outbreak of war in 1914
A Kingdom United (2012)
tackles the conundrum directly
but is not without issue. The confinement of Irish material largely
to a single chapter continues to
encourage a sense of separation.
Why has it been so difficult to
write a fully integrated history of
the United Kingdom of Britain
and Ireland in the First World
War? It is a combination of difference and denial. First, the situation in Ireland was completely
different from that in Britain,
due to the Home Rule crisis and
threat of civil war (in 1914) that
evolved into wartime political
flashpoints, most notably Irish
resistance to the introduction
of conscription. Ireland as an
anomaly relative to Britain, at
least created its own logic of
historiographical separatism.
Second, the historiography
of early 20th-century Ireland
was restricted until recently by
Irelands fraught relationship
with the First World War. Many
scholars were in denial about
nationalist Irelands involvement
with the war. Instead, the Easter
Rising of 1916 was the central
military struggle toward national
liberation.
The historic breakthrough
in the Northern Ireland peace
process of the 1990s created a
new space to consider how the
First World War was, in fact, a
part of nationalist Irish history.
Significant research has been
done on a plethora of aspects of
Irelands involvement in the war
and new work is appearing all
the time. A quick glance at the

reading list provided via www.
Irelandww1.org reveals research
into Irish involvement in the
war, ranging from military to
home front experiences and
from macro-level political
organisation to micro-historical
local studies, with many more in
between. Important syntheses
exist, such as Keith Jefferys
Ireland and the Great War (2000),
in which he argues that the First
World War was the single most
central experience in 20th-century Ireland. Our War, edited
by John Horne (2008), together
with Gregory and Senia Paetas
edited volume, Ireland and the
Great War, explores the lasting
impact the war had on personal,
social, economic and political
aspects of Irish life. The recent
volume, Towards Commemoration, edited by Horne and
Madigan (reviewed right),
Many historians
are already
expressing
concerns that
the forthcoming
centenary
commemorations
may be little more
than an exercise
in national
navel-gazing
makes a unique contribution to
debates surrounding Irelands
centenary decade (1912-23),
of which the war is central.
Nuala C. Johnson and Catherine Swizter have both made
pioneering contributions to the
historiography of Irish commemoration of the war. There is
still more research to be done,
particularly in relation to the
role and experience of women
in the story of the foundation
of modern Ireland. Perhaps the
most important contribution
to recent scholarship on Ireland
and the war is the expansion of
the traditional chronological
parameters of 1914-18 to acknowledge the uncomfortable

reality that the end of the Great
War did not immediately bring
peace. The outbreak of revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars
of independence and fratricidal
conflict were not unique to
Ireland but are an important part
of the legacy of the First World
War. Robert Gerwarth and John
Hornes edited volume War in
Peace (2012) is the starting point
for anyone interested in this
aspect of the historiography.
Anne Dolans Commemorating the Irish Civil War (2003)
explores the tensions between
memory and national amnesia
in Ireland between 1923 and
2000 in order to highlight that
forgetting is a key feature of Irish
remembrance.
Many historians are already
expressing concerns that the
forthcoming centenary commemorations may be little more
than an exercise in national
navel-gazing. The centenary
provides a once-in-a-generation
opportunity to situate national
experiences of the war within
broader European and global
contexts. For British historiography an important first step
would be genuinely to integrate
Ireland into analyses of the war.
Certainly the recent visit of the
Queen to Ireland in May 2011
(the first royal visit to Ireland in a
hundred years) and the reciprocal visit of the Irish President
Michael D. Higgins to Britain in
April 2014 suggest that the time
is ripe for the two nations to look
collectively at the experience
and implications of the history
of the First World War. However,
in line with the latest academic
research, such scholarship would
be deficient if it did not situate
the analysis within a wider
transnational framework. Jay
Winter and Jean-Louis Roberts
two-volume Capital Cities at War
(1997 and 2007) still remains on
the somewhat unobtainable pedestal of comparative, historical
analysis; but one that First World
War historians including those
of Britain and Ireland should
continue to strive towards.
Towards
Commemoration
Ireland in War and

Revolution, 1912-1923
John Horne and
Edward Madigan (eds.)
Royal Irish Academy 182pp 14.75
Political Imprisonment
& the Irish, 1912-1921
William Murphy
Oxford University Press 301pp 65
THE YEARS between 1912 and 1923

were arguably the most transformative in modern Irish history.
The mass signing of the
Ulster Covenant, which
highlighted Unionist
opposition to Home Rule
for Ireland, marked the beginning of a period of war,
revolution and change in
Ireland, north and south. By
1923 Ireland had witnessed
the birth of two states, the
Irish Free State and that
of Northern Ireland, experienced political upheaval,
endured a violent war of independence and a bloody
and divisive civil war. It is these
various events that are now being
marked in Irelands decade of
commemoration. Towards Commemoration is a collection of 18
essays, written mostly by historians, but also including the views
of media commentators, civic activists and politicians, all reflecting
on the meaning and significance
of events during the period. The
majority of the essays focus on
COMING SOON
A special issue of History Today about the Great War
Available on iPad, Kindle Fire and Android tablets
www.historytoday.com/fww-issue
Catriona Pennell
REVIEWS
Ireland and the First World War.
Questions are asked about how
we should commemorate the past,
the potential benefits and dangers
of such memorialisation and the
relationship between commemoration and history. The essays,
written in an accessible style, are
thoughtful and challenging and
the volume makes a considerable
contribution to debates on the
subject of commemoration.
Political Imprisonment in Ireland
marks the appearance of a
significant publication relating to
Irelands revolutionary decade.
This is the first comprehensive
study of political imprisonment in
the years between 1912 and 1921,
when 6,129 men and women
were either interned or imprisoned as a result of the unrest in
the country in the aftermath of
the 1916 rebellion and subsequent
A number of
prisoners who died
on hunger strike
or were executed
... became central
to republican
martyrology
and to supporters
of the
revolutionary
movement
War of Independence. The focus is
on the treatment of Irish political
prisoners by the British government, including how it operated in
Ireland. Murphys study begins in
1912, the year in which suffragette
prison protest began in Ireland.
This marked the beginning of
a new approach to political
imprisonment when the women
involved employed levels of prison
militancy, including hunger strikes,
unprecedented in an Irish context.
Murphy argues that the suffragettes provided an influential,
though rarely acknowledged,
model of political imprisonment,
for those prisoners who followed
them in subsequent years.
A number of prisoners who
died while on hunger strike or
who were executed, including

Terence MacSwiney, the Lord
Mayor of Cork, Thomas Ashe and
Kevin Barry, became central to
republican martyrology and to the
supporters of the revolutionary
movement. The propaganda value
of such deaths was immense.
Murphy uses the letters and
diaries of prisoners to explore
the experience of imprisonment,
whether in camps or prisons.
Some felt the lack of privacy in the
internment camps, complained
about the constant noise or the
boredom. There were rows among
the internees and tempers were
frayed. Many worried about their
families or the burden of work
placed on wives and children, left
to manage farms and businesses.
For some, though, the camps were
a haven because, once they survived arrest and arrived at a camp,
they were safe from possible execution (between February 1st and
June 7th, 1921 23 convicted rebels
were executed in Ireland), or of
being killed by the crown forces in
Ireland. Prison authorities, such as
governors, warders and medical
officers, faced danger for their
perceived roles in the treatment of
prisoners.
Imprisonment was central
to the personal experience of
thousands of men and women
who shaped the Irish revolution.
Time served as a political prisoner
became an important qualification for public life in Ireland and in
other European countries. Political
prisoners came to be seen as
models of self-sacrifice. While the
aim of the government was to
suppress dissent, their actions by
interning men and women saw
the prisons and camps become a
focus of radical challenge to the
legitimacy of the state and many
individuals were radicalised by
their incarceration. Public support
for those imprisoned was strong
and added to the governments
headache in trying to contain
dissent. The prisons and camps
were spaces where revolutionary
identities were shaped and sites
where revolutionaries directly and
often successfully challenged the
British state, affecting the shape of
the Irish revolution.
Maria Luddy
The Aesthetics of Loss
German Womens Art of the

First World War
Claudia Siebrecht
Oxford University Press 188pp 65
IN AUGUST 1932 the German

artist Kthe Kollwitz was
present at the unveiling of the
war memorial she had designed
at the German war cemetery in
Eesen Roggeveld in Belgium. In
itself this was not remarkable, as
in the years following the First
World War thousands of memorials to the dead and missing
were erected in the cemeteries,
battlefields, villages, towns and
cities of Europe, as societies profoundly affected by the mass loss
of life during the war attempted to mark it. However, what
was unusual was the intimate
nature of Kollwitzs sculpture.
Die Traurnden Eltern (The Grieving
Parents) marked a private grief
as well as a public remembrance:
Kollwitzs youngest son, Peter,
had been killed on the Western
Front in October 1914 and the
sculpture was placed in the
cemetery where he was buried.
Thus, Kollwitzs sculpture is a
memorial to the German war
dead, a representation of bereaved parents and a means of
commemorating her son, and her
personal loss.
Claudia Siebrechts fascinating and timely book, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Womens Art of
the First World War, begins with
Kollwitzs story to draw
the reader into the world of
wartime and postwar Germany
through a study of the visual
responses to war and loss of a
range of female German artists.
Across Europe, artists respond-
ed to this new kind of war with

new forms of representation:
modernist visions by Nash and
Lewis in Britain, Dadaism in
Switzerland and a reworking
of traditionalist iconography
among German women artists,
who drew widely on images of
the Pieta to represent maternal
sacrifice. Siebrecht examines the
work of 38 women to explore the
ways that they were affected
by, and responded to, war. Of
course these responses were
varied, shaped by the impact
of war on the individual, by
the progress of the war and by
the artists political beliefs and
moving, as the war dragged on,
from patriotic representations of
citizenship and nationhood to a
more personal focus on grief and
loss. However, Siebrecht finds
common themes and modes of
expression in the images and
sculptures she analyses, which
combined modern forms with
traditional iconographical tropes,
increasingly focusing on maternal grief, redemptive sacrifice
and the hope for a peaceful
future. Well illustrated, the stark
nature of many of the sculptures,
paintings, woodcuts, linographs
and linocuts discussed here act as
a visual narrative of the multiple
demands that the war made on
civilians as well as combatants.
This cultural history draws
on these public works of art, so
redolent of private emotion, both
to explore civilian responses to
mass death and bereavement
in wartime and to expand our
understanding of aesthetic
responses to this modern, total,
war. By focusing her research on
female artists, Siebrecht helps
to move the historical studies of
the First World War away from
the male world of the battlefield
towards a wider understanding
of the impact of, and responses
to, this most transformative of
conflicts. Sensitively written and
carefully researched, Siebrechts
book opens up a whole range of
German sources to an Englishspeaking audience, reminding
us of the universality of grief
amongst the bereaved of the
First World War.
Lucy Noakes
THE CLASSIC BOOK
The True Herod

Geza Vermes
Bloomsbury/T&T Clark 192pp 19.99
HEROD THE GREAT is remembered as one of historys bogeymen: the paranoid king of Matthews Gospel, scared of anyone
usurping his rule. On hearing from
Magi and priests about the future
Messiahs birth in Bethlehem, he
has every child aged two years old
and under slaughtered. Herod
casts an ominous shadow over
the nativity stories seen in primary
schools, a pantomime villain.
According to Geza Vermes, who
died in May 2013, the so-called
Massacre of the Innocents never
happened. It is a literary construction: Herod is configured as the
pharaoh of the Exodus, the cruel
ruler who killed Hebrew infant
boys at the time of Moses, with
Moses alone saved thanks to a
reed basket floated on the Nile. By
the time of the Gospel account,
this story had evolved into an attested folkloric form, with Pharaoh
warned of a future king by a
prophetic sacred scribe. Matthews
story was told for meaning, not for
actuality: Jesus is like Moses.
The True Herod re-examines the
evidence and offers a fresh telling
of the story of Herod. Vermes also
notes how Herod is presented over
the centuries, including in film. We
are confronted with a young man,
born around the year 73 bc of an
Idumaean Jewish convert father
and a Nabataean (Arab) mother,
who was thrust into responsibility
as governor of Galilee at the age
of 25 and embroiled in a fierce
struggle within the ruling priestly
dynasty of the Hasmoneans.
Backed by successive powerful
Romans, eventually Augustus, he
FIRST PUBLISHED in 1975, Fussells study of the Graves subsequent memoir, Goodbye to All That,
will perhaps never be bettered. But the book is
literature of the First World War, and the ways
also a weak, often simplistic, account of almost
in which that conflict has been remembered, is
everything before and after the war. It is great
a canonical work. His argument has two strands.
literary criticism and lousy history. Fussell wants
First, that the First World War as fought in the
the war to be two things: a total break with the
trenches of France and Belgium had a curious
past and the exemplary modern war.
literariness. He finds specific rhetorical patterns
In 2001 the International Committee of the
in the memoirs, novels and poems written by
Red Cross released a study of relative casualty
soldiers: the imagery of sport and chivalry, for
rates for all wars of the 20th century. During
example, or the imaginative habit of what he
the First World War nine soldiers were killed
calls gross dichotomising, which is the division
of a situation into extremes of black and white.
Chief among these motifs is irony, by which he
means a gap between expectation and experience and the dark laughter which arises.
Second, the war sets the terms for all that
follows, both in warfare and in literature. I am
saying, he writes, that there seems to be one
dominating form of modern understanding;
that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates
largely in the application of mind and memory to
the events of the Great War.
for every civilian. During the
Fussell describes the passing
Second World War and all
of the Military Service Act in
wars fought in the second half
early 1916 as an event which
of the century, however, 10
could be said to mark the becivilians were killed for every
ginning of the modern world.
soldier. In this light, the First
Previous wars were conceived
World War begins to look like
as taking place within a seama strange throwback.
less, purposeful history
We might end with one
involving a coherent stream
example: of a poet who
of time running from past
saw precisely this strange
through present to future,
conventionality of the war
but the First World War ended
and whose articulation of this
that and we are Far now from
antique quality is inevitably
such innocence, instructed in
condemned by Fussell. David
cynicism and draft-dodging.
Jones served with the Royal
As should be clear from even
Welch Fusiliers from 1915
this brief sketch, behind Fusto
1918 and with his long
sells account is the Christian
The Great War and
poem, In Parenthesis (1937),
story of the Fall ( The innoModern Memory
attempted to tell his wartime
cent army fully attained the
Paul Fussell
experiences in a heavily
knowledge of good and evil at
OUP/The Folio Society 464pp 44.95
allusive, high Modernist mix
the Somme on July 1st, 1916.)
of prose and verse, lyric and
This seems to overstate the
list. He worries throughout at the possibility for
importance of the conflict. Surely the US wars
poetry to tell history; he uses imagery drawn
post-9/11 have been fought with an evangelical
from Shakespeares Henry V and from the biblical
sense of history; and there have been disenaccount of Christs crucifixion. Fussell, of course,
chanted treatments of warfare for centuries.
will not accept this. He describes Jones as a
Shakespeares Henry V, for example, establishes
turgid allusionist and the poem as an honouraan ironic distance between the chorus claims
ble miscarriage.
for Henrys glamour and the grubby, indignant
For Fussell The war will not be understood
group of soldiers we actually see doing the fightin traditional terms; it must be special and
ing on his behalf.
unexampled. Jones crime is to hint that the
Here is the odd paradox of this book: it is a
First World War belonged to the past as much as
superb study of the literature and language of
to the future. A century on, we might wonder
the Great War and specifically the metaphors
who is right.
and myths by which it was waged. Fussells readDaniel Swift
ings of Rosenberg and Owens poetry or Robert
A superb study of the

literature and language
of the Great War and
specifically the metaphors
and myths by which it
was waged
REVIEWS
was the Romans golden boy who
would help them defeat the rival
Parthians in 40 bc and become
their loyal King of the Jews.
Clearly, Herod was ruthless
and his family intrigues are worthy
of a movie. The list of family and
friends whom Herod executed
included his beloved Hasmonean
wife Mariamme and three of his
sons. Vermes relishes telling these
tales, but ultimately he is interested
in what motivated Herod. Using
Josephus, he identifies what drove
him as a quest for honour. Lack of
approval made Herod crave it and,
as he gave honour to his mentors
and benefactors, he wanted it
back. His great buildings were
sometimes erected for reasons of
security, or architectural brilliance,
but often also for honour, as in the
case of the cities of Caesarea or
Sebaste (for Augustus), with the
greatest honour of all given to the
God of the Jews: the rebuilt Temple
of Jerusalem. In the end Herod
This is a rich read,

demonstrating the
knowledge and
understanding of
an author at the
peak of his powers,
even so close to his
death
would honour himself by building
his glorious tomb and theatre at
the fortress Herodium.
This beautiful book has been
produced with the dedicated skill
of Geza Vermes widow Margaret
and a fine team at Bloomsbury/
T&T Clark. Assembling an array of
gorgeous illustrations to match
the lively text, they have created
a lush product befitting Herods
aesthetic. This is a rich read,
despite its brevity, demonstrating
the knowledge and understanding of an author at the peak of
his powers, even so close to his
death. In this book that honours
the complex character of Herod,
we have also an honourable tribute
to the exceptional historian who
wrote it.
Joan E. Taylor
Between Court and

Confessional
The Politics of Spanish
Inquisitors
Kimberly Lynn
Cambridge University Press 391pp 60
FROM 1478 a new Inquisition

against Christian heresy
spread throughout Spain and its
overseas possessions in Europe
(Sicily) and America. It would
last until the 19th century and
acquire a reputation for almost
totalitarian cruelty, but was
attacked at the time by Spains
enemies and by lovers of religious liberty. In recent decades
it has been the object of a vast
amount of historical work by
scholars from various countries.
In this carefully researched
monograph Kimberly Lynn
focuses sharply on individual inquisitors who made the
system function in the 16th and
17th centuries. Her chosen five
careers cover a wide range of the
Inquisitions activities, in Spain
itself, Sicily and Latin America.
Using many manuscript and
printed sources, she traces the
lives of these officials, most of
them priests and all trained in
the canon law of the Roman
Catholic Church. We follow them
in their usually considerable ambitions, as they struggled in local
tribunals, or tried to make their
way at the centre of Spanish
power, either on the governing council of the Inquisition
(Suprema), or in the royal court.
The chapters on the five selected
inquisitors are introduced by a
discussion of the history of the
institution and to the ways in
which historians have tackled it.
In the last chapter and epilogue
more general issues are raised

about the values of the Inquisition and their implications for its
target groups converts from
Judaism and Islam, Protestants
and those whose religion was
not in accordance with that laid
down by the Catholic hierarchy.
This is a demanding read, but we
emerge much the wiser about
what made these men tick as
they wrote up the trials that
they conducted and composed
histories and treatises about
the institution to which they
devoted their lives, often in
difficult and even dangerous
circumstances. Yet the books
strength is also its weakness.
We find ourselves sucked
into the inquisitorial mind.
This is a good thing insofar as
a writer should identify closely
with her subject, but the reader
gains, rightly or wrongly, the
alarming impression that Lynn
appears to swallow the official
line. The word heretic never
receives such qualifying inverted
commas, Luther, Calvin and the
other Protestant reformers are
(a) wrong and (b) a menace.
Judaism is a threat to society,
Native American religions are
not religions at all and the worst
enemies are reformers within
the Catholic Church. Thus the
unwary reader would never
know from this account that
the mid-16th century witnessed
a major debate between the
legalistic gospel of the inquisitors in Spain and Italy and those,
including the Spanish Dominican
Bartolom Carranza and the
English Cardinal Reginald Pole,
who preached a gospel of mercy
and reconciliation. Carranza and
Pole were not lawyers like the
inquisitors presented here but
theologians and Lynn appears
to accept without question the
inquisitorial doctrine that jurists,
some of them not even priests,
were better equipped to define
the niceties of Christian doctrine
than those who were trained
in it and lived it. Carranza is
presented partially, in both
senses of the word. In the latter
pages of the book it is suggested
that criticism of the Inquisition
is largely justified by ideas that
originate in the 18th-century

Enlightenment, as though the
moral values of earlier centuries were somehow different
and the Inquisitions violence
and oppression were therefore
acceptable. Yet there was public,
and even official, opposition to
religious intolerance from the
very beginning of the Spanish
Inquisition and it is a shame that
this scholarly and otherwise
enlightening account takes so
little notice of it.
John Edwards
Gods Traitors
Terror and Faith in Elizabethan

England
Jessie Childs
Bodley Head 443p 25
ELIZABETH I embraced an important truth that had evaded her

father and her siblings: no ruler
can dictate his/her subjects beliefs.
What she could, and did, demand
was their loyalty. However, as
Richard Hooker pointed out, since
the Kingdom of England and the
Church of England were the same
thing viewed from different angles,
politics and religion could not be
conveniently compartmentalised.
Thus, convinced Catholics and
Puritans found themselves at odds
with the Elizabethan Settlement.
Quite what this might mean for
successive generations of a single
family is the subject of Jessie Childs
latest book.
Her chosen clan is the extended
East Midlands family of Vaux, the
descendants of Nicholas, first
Baron Vaux of Harrowden (d.1528).
Like some of Elizabeths subjects,
they maintained their allegiance to
the old faith. However, unlike most,
they could afford to be discreetly

disloyal. The government, ever
averse to making martyrs (and
concerned not to be likened to the
persecuting regimens of Spain and
France), demanded attendance
at Anglican worship and imposed
fines on defiant recusants. Such financial constraints had their effect
and papal fifth-columnists, sent to
restore heretic Elizabeth and her
people to their Roman allegiance,
found few English households that
could afford the risk of giving them
succour. This was why affluent
families were so important
indeed vital to the survival of a
vestigious English Catholicism.
Those familiar with Childs
earlier biography of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey, Henry VIIIs Last
Victim (2006), will find the same
thorough research coupled to a
vigorous, readable style. However,
Gods Traitors is a more complex
This colourful saga

of a downwardlymobile family on
the losing side of
national events
reminds us that
history is not all
about winners
book with a large dramatis personae
and deals with the intricacies
of familial relationships among
the Catholic minor nobility. The
dramatic tale of itinerant Jesuit
missionaries dodging government
posses, devout country squires
holding clandestine masses and
priests concealed in ingenious
hiding places has been oft told (e.g.,
John Robinson, Recusant Yeomen in
the Counties of York and Lancaster,
2003; Ethan Shagan, Catholics and
the Protestant Nation, 2005) but
this concentration on one family
sharply focuses the narrative and
the principal contenders emerge as
well-rounded characters.
Strangely, the word Elizabethan in the subtitle is not altogether appropriate. While the first two
thirds of the book covers the Vaux
fortunes during the reign of the
last Tudor, the storys climax, which
occupies the last 100 or so pages

is the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath. Arch-conspirator Robert
Catesby was a Vaux kinsman who
sought to involve some of his relatives in his schemes. In this section,
Jessie Childs forensic investigation
of every aspect of the plot and her
careful analysis attempts to discover who knew what and when;
who met whom and where; who
was implicated in the crime; and
who tried to dissuade the plotters.
Having sifted through the conflicting evidence, Childs confesses,
any narrative of the Gunpowder
Plot is necessarily based more on
credibility than certainty.
The temptation with this kind
of story is to make all the principal
characters, principled characters.
Jessie Childs avoids this trap in
her even-handed narrative. This
colourful saga of a downwardly
mobile family on the losing side of
national events reminds us that
history is not all about winners.
Derek Wilson
Warsaw 1944
The Fateful Uprising

Alexandra Richie
William Collins 738pp 25
AS WELL AS other rather more

loudly trumpeted commemorations, August 2014 will also
see the 70th anniversary of
the Warsaw Rising; the fateful
summer when the Polish
underground army rose in the
name of liberty against its Nazi
oppressors.
Alexandra Richies new book,
Warsaw 1944, first published in
2013, is an engaging retelling of
that harrowing story; one that
is still largely unknown outside

Poland and is confused persistently in the public mind with
the Ghetto Uprising of 1943.
The Rising marked the moment
when the Polish underground
having gallantly resisted the
worst effects of the German occupation attempted to exploit
the decline in Hitlers fortunes
to wrest control of the Polish
capital before the expected
arrival of Stalins troops.
It was a brave but ultimately
futile effort. Lacking arms and
facing the murderous fury of
the SS alone, the Polish fighters
provoked the destruction
of their city and large-scale
massacres of its civilian population. In the aftermath of 63
days of bitter fighting, as many
as 150,000 civilians lay dead
alongside 18,000 members of
the Polish Underground Army
the Armia Krajowa or AK. A
further 150,000 Varsovians were
deported to the Reich as forced
labour, countless more became
refugees. Their city, meanwhile,
would be systematically razed.
Not for nothing does Richie
invoke the name of Carthage
throughout her book.
Richies is certainly a harrowing account, giving particular
focus to the bestial atrocities
committed by the troops of
the infamous Dirlewanger and
Kaminski brigades of the SS,
who ran amok through the
suburbs of Wola and Ochota,
raping, looting and slaughtering seemingly at will. The
book, consequently, is not for
the faint-hearted. Even the
most hardened reader of the
20th centurys horrors will be
appalled.
Richie has benefited greatly
from her access to the archive
and library of Wadysaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish foreign
minister, a veteran of the fighting and, incidentally, her
father-in-law. Consequently
there is a good deal of new material included, much of it relating to the horrendous sufferings
of the citys civilians.
However, this asset is also
a weakness. In presenting so
many vivid eyewitness accounts,
Richies narrative drifts

somewhat into an extended
nightmare of murders, rapes
and mounds of decomposing
corpses, which not only induces
a degree of fatigue in the reader,
but also causes the book to lose
some of its drive and focus. In
this respect, one feels, less really
might have been more.
The same applies to the
books length. At more than
700 pages Warsaw 1944 is rather
long and one has to question
the structure and pacing of any
volume that takes almost 200
pages to reach its main subject
matter. Given the occasional
repetitions, the reader can only
conclude that the book might
have benefited from a more
interventionist editor.
Beyond the horrors and
aside from the quibbles the
wider context of western impotence, German desperation,
Soviet intransigence and, of
course, the tragic determination of the Poles is competently
presented. Richie does well, for
instance, to locate the Rising
within the nexus of events of
that summer the July 20th
Plot against Hitler and Models
attack on the Red Army east of
Warsaw. The broader political
and strategic struggles prove
a little more problematic. One
gleans only a patchy impression,
for instance, of the complex
progress of the fighting in the
city itself and the inter-Allied
wrestling match over supplying
the Polish insurgents is given
only cursory coverage. Richie is
quite right, nonetheless, to note
that Warsaw was, in essence,
the first engagement of the
coming Cold War.
Warsaw 1944 is a sympathetic, detailed and well-written account of one of the most
seminal yet under-known events
of the Second World War. It is
not without flaws, but for its
general accessibility and its
wealth of new eyewitness
material it deserves genuine
praise and a prominent place
in the still-slim canon of
English-language books relating
to the subject.
Roger Moorhouse
REVIEWS
The Hero of Budapest

The Triumph and Tragedy
ofRaoul Wallenberg
Bengt Jangfeldt
I.B.Tauris 352pp 25
AMONG the heroes who, at great

risk to their own lives, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust
under the noses of the Nazis, few
deserve a moreprominent place in
the pantheon thanSwedens Raoul
Wallenberg.
This Scandinavian Schindler
personally rescued between 8,000
and 10,000 Jews by his own courageous and resourceful initiatives.

Moreover, by bribing, persuading
and browbeating the retreating
Nazis not to activate their plans
to blow up the Budapest Ghetto,
where some 70,000 Jewish survivors wereleft at the wars end,
Wallenberg probably saved more
wartime lives than any other individual. Not for nothing is he honoured with memorials worldwide.
But,if that role was the triumph
of the subtitle of Bengt Jangfeldts
meticulously researched and
surely definitive biography, then
Wallenbergs tragedy was his
hideous fate at the very moment
of Hitlers defeat.
In January 1945, probably on
the direct orders of the Stalinist
apparatchik Nikolai Bulganin
(a decade later feted on a state
visit to Britain with Khruschev),
Wallenberg was summoned to
the Budapest HQ of the Red
Army commanded by General
Malinovsky, where he disappeared
from history.
The mystery of Wallenbergs
abduction remained unsolved for

decades, despite strenuous efforts
to discover what had happened to
him. For years rumours persisted
that he was still alive in some
forgottenfrozen hellhole, fuelled
by reports from those who had
escapedthe Gulag. The British spy
Greville Wynne, for example, also
arrested in Budapest and released
from Russian captivity in 1964, reported hearing a Swede speaking
in the next-door cell.
In fact, as Jangfeldt finally
establishes, Wallenberg had died
Wallenbergs
tragedy was his
hideous fate at the
very moment of
Hitlers defeat
as early as 1947, almost certainly
murdered, in the dreaded cells of
the notorious Lubyanka, the KGBs
combined HQ, prison, interrogation centre, torture chamber and
execution site in central Moscow.
The man who had saved so many
was finally unable to save himself.
Wallenberg was born to a
wealthy family and travelled
widely in his youth.Later, working
with a Jewish owned importexport company, he frequently
visited Hungary. Here he learned
the language and observed the
increasing persecution of Jews
under the antisemitic regime of
Admiral Horthy. He also gathered
how to outwit the Nazi officials
who had occupied Hungary in
March 1944, intent on exterminating its Jewish population.
Under the supervision of
Adolf Eichmanns SS, aided by the
Nazis Hungarian auxiliaries, the
fascist Arrow Cross party, half a
million Hungarians were shipped
toAuschwitz and their deaths.
When, in July 1944, Wallenberg returned as a diplomat to
Budapest,he was on a mission
of mercy and began a deadly
race with Eichmann. Wallenberg
issued thousands of his own
private passports to Jews. These
had no legal validity, but looked
sufficiently official to impress
bureaucraticGermans. Hundreds
CONTRIBUTORS
John Edwards has recently
completed a biography of
Archbishop Pole (Ashgate).
Nigel Jones Peace and War:
Britain in 1914 is published by
Head of Zeus.
Maria Luddy is Head of the
History Department at the
University of Warwick.
Roger Moorhouse is the
author of The Devils Alliance:
Hitlers Pact with Stalin, 1939-41
(Basic Books, 2014).
Lucy Noakes has co-edited
(with Juliette Pattinson) British
Cultural Memory and the Second
World War (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Catriona Pennell is author
of A Kingdom United: Popular
Responses to the Outbreak of the
First World War in Britain and
Ireland (OUP, 2012).
Daniel Swift is the author of
Shakespeares Common Prayers
(Oxford University Press, 2012),
Joan E. Taylor is Professor of
Christian Origins and Second
Temple Judaism at Kings
College, London.
Derek Wilson is the author
of several books on the
Reformation.
of other Jewsweresheltered in
buildings that Wallenberg bought
and declared Swedish territory.
On at least one occasion, ignoring
warning shots, he boarded a death
train and scattered passports like
confetti, snatching scores of Jews
from the jaws of death.
But when the Red Army liberated Budapest it was Wallenberg
himself who was doomed as one
of the first victims of the burgeoning Cold War. Jangfeldts research
in Russian and Swedish archives
proves that the reason behind
his abduction and murder was
paranoid Soviet suspicion that he
was spying for America, because
the agency that funded his Scarlet
Pimpernel activities was based in
the US. Likehis fellowSwedish
wartime humanitarian,Count
Folke Bernadotte, Wallenbergs
life-saving work cost him his own.
Nigel Jones
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Compare and Contrast
Paul Leggs article (Its Over!
Over! Over!, July 2014) brought
home anew to me the rocky road
Germany has travelled to rebuild
international trust and put itself at
the centre of the European Union.
As a long-time resident of
Japan I cannot help but contrast
the experiences of the two countries. Anti-Japanese sentiment
remains strong throughout Asia,
yet is greeted with official denial
and public bewilderment. I teach a
course in modern Japanese history
and am astounded by how little
awareness compulsory education
gives Japanese people of their
modern history.
One common refrain is we
started at the beginning and ran
out of time, leaving a gaping
hole between samurai and
smartphones. Coupled with rote
memorisation and a lack of analysis, little is retained beyond the
exams, creating Japanese citizens
who are ill-equipped to understand
tensions with other Asian nations.
I will be lecturing on Japanese
imperialism and its aftermath with
this article as a thought-provoking
and topical point of comparison.
Caroline Hutchinson
Sunfield NASU,
Chiba-ken, Japan
Now and Then

The article Just How Nasty Were
the 1590s? (July) and David
Camerons recent statement
about the threat posed by native
Islamists returning from Syria
should prompt us to recognise
the similarities between the two
situations. Like contemporary
Britain, late Elizabethan England
was subject to an existential
threat: a foreign, non-territorial
power embodying a militant ideology challenged the legitimacy
of the state and its allies overseas.
In order to overturn this state,
devotees of the ideology within
the country travelled overseas
to receive training and then re66 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2014
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 25 Bedford Avenue,
London, WC1B 3AT
turned to carry out subversion.

Whether the danger posed
by recusant priests was as great
as that posed by todays terrorist
network is debatable, but the
Catholic conspirators of 1605
had intentions similar to Islamic
bomb-makers inspired by local
preachers of hate and foreign
demagogues. Of course, the
majority of Catholics at the time
of the Gunpowder Plot, as with
most Muslims in Britain today,
did not embrace extremism and
sought to balance their loyalties
in a peaceful way, even when
they suffered marginalisation.
The government, in turn, devoted
its intelligence resources to
exposing and thwarting such
plans. It was Walsinghams secret
service that implicated Mary
Stuart in the intrigues of Catholic
plotters, a revelation that ultimately led to her execution.
The government when faced
with such threats chose to take
the fight to the enemy, as the
article makes clear. Elizabeths
decision to send troops to aid
Protestant forces in the Netherlands and France, as with
the policy of sending troops to
Afghanistan and Iraq, was in part
prompted by the wish to avoid
confrontation nearer home.
Arguably European religious
conflict came to an end with
the Thirty Years War, although
the Catholic challenge to the
British state continued with the
Jacobites, supported by France
for most of the 18th century. This
religious rivalry ceased with the
1789 revolution, which upset
and brought about significant
changes to the Catholic powers
of Europe. An upheaval of similar
dimensions in the Muslim world
of the future might also reduce
the dangerous global polarity that
exists at present.
Whether todays policy of conciliation and inclusion towards
Muslims will prove as effective
in eliminating the domestic
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threat as was the process of harsh

repression of Catholics practised
by Elizabeth and her successors
remains to be seen. In part it is a
matter of confidence: the Tudors
managed to create a strong sense
of national identity in the wake
of a period of protracted civil war
following the dissolution of the
Angevin empire; todays Britain
is struggling to achieve a similar
coherence.
Colin Sowden
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire
Dont Ignore Me
I enjoyed Onyekas article
(Black Equestrians, July) but I
am surprised he did not mention
my book Untold Histories:
Black People in England and
Wales During the Period of the
British Slave Trade, c. 1660-1807
(Manchester University Press,
2011). It uses a database of 3,000
references drawn from a range
of primary sources to produce
a comprehensive examination
of the black presence at all
levels of society over the long
18th century. It includes some
lesser-known gentlemen whom
Onyeka might have mentioned,
such as Nathaniel Wells, Under
Sheriff of Monmouthshire, JP
and Master of Foxhounds; Cesar
Picton, merchant in Surrey; and
John Cranbrook, greengrocer in
Clapham at the time of the Sect.
New discoveries are being made
all the time which show how
black people were not stigmatised outsiders but were woven
into the fabric of all classes in
British society.
Kathleen Chater
via email
Not a Tool
Joanne Baileys Signpost on
gender history (June) is interesting, but I believe she is wrong to
call gender historical studies a
tool. For me it is a line of inquiry.
A tool implies the employment
of a certain statistical technique
or some such. To investigate the

role of gender in a certain period
is equivalent to studying how
societies cope with recovering
from major natural disasters or
how the Greek hoplites differed
from their Roman counterparts.
One uses methodological tools
in history to answer questions.
As such, gender history is a subdiscipline within history, in the
same vein as military history or
political history.
Mario de Vivo
So Paulo, Brazil
Attention Grabbing
I began reading William H. Funks
article Brutal Saviours of the
Black Patch (June): Deepest
night in southern Kentucky
Hmm, very atmospheric, I
thought. I continued reading:
... the humid air thick with the
sprightly scent of tobacco plants.
Perhaps this is from someones
memoirs or diary? I was intrigued
so I continued again. Some men
attack the farmhouse: A gutter
is severed and slides like the arm
of a dying man down the front of
the faade. Surely this is from an
original letter or diary, but where
is the reference? Is this historical
fiction? Has this episode been
dramatised for effect, or simply
made up to grab my attention?
Richard Stride
via email
Correction
An error introduced to my
appreciation of the life and career
of the great French medievalist
Jacques Le Goff (History Matters,
June) may have led readers to
understand that the historian
Marc Bloch was Le Goffs uncle.
This was not the case. Le Goff was
inspired in different ways both by
Marc Bloch and by his own uncle
and both men were involved in
the Resistance during the Second
World War.
Miri Rubin
Queen Mary, University of London
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Coming Next Month
The Dancing Congress
The Congress of Vienna, convened in September 1814 after the defeat

of Napoleon, marked the first attempt in history to build a peaceful
European order based on the active cooperation of the major states.
Stella Ghervas surveys the aims of this transformational project, while
Glenda Sluga offers a fresh perspective on the ways in which women
influenced the diplomatic manoeuvrings that shaped the innovations
of the Congress.
No Plain Sailing
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Junes Prize Crossword
Roger Moorhouse tells the bizarre story of the Ltzow, a vast 20,000ton warship sold in an unfinished state, by Germany to the USSR for
100 million reichsmarks. The fate of the vessel presents an unlikely
metaphor for the wider strategic relationship between Germany
and the USSR, from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to its
dramatic scuppering in 1941.
An Article of Faith
On the 200th anniversary of his birth, Patricia Rothman commemorates the British-born mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, whose
progress on the long road to his appointment as Savilian Professor of
Geometry at Oxford was thwarted on several occasions by the
antisemitic restrictions of the age and his refusal to compromise.
Suffragette Cities
Jad Adams reflects on the international impact of the Womens Social

and Political Union from Munich to Mexico City. He explores the
actions during the movements most militant years, which led Gandhi
to conclude: We have a great deal to learn from these ladies.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The September issue of History Today will be on sale throughout

the UK on August 21st. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
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The winner for June is James Watson, Wirral.
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Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
3 Where did the British

Expeditionary Force (BEF) fight its
first battle of the war on August
23rd, 1914?
4 Which two men were awarded
the first Victoria Crosses of the
Great War?
5 Which major Belgian port city
capitulated to German forces on
October 9th, 1914?
6 Which German naval base in
China was attacked by Japan on
August 23rd, 1914?
7 Papa was the nickname given

to which French general?
8 Around how many Britons
volunteered for military service in
the first eight weeks of the war?
9 Which German general,

commander of the Eighth Army,
was sacked for failing to halt the
Russian advance of 1914?
10 What was a Rosalie?
11 Which German commerceraider caused havoc among Allied
shipping in the Indian Ocean

before it was attacked by
HMAS Sydney in November 1914?
12 Where in eastern Prussia did
German forces rout the Russian
First and Second Armies between
August 26th and 30th, 1914 before
advancing into Poland?
ANSWERS
2 What is the name of the

German ship that laid mines in the
Thames estuary in August 1914 only
to be sunk on its way home?
1. Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener

of Khartoum (1850-1916).
2. Knigin Luise.
3. Mons, Belgium.
4. Lt. Maurice Dease and Pte. Sidney
Godley of the Royal Fusiliers.
5. Antwerp.
6. Tsingtao.
7. Joseph Joffre (1852-1931).
8. 761,000.
9. Maximilian von Prittwitz.
10. A cruciform bayonet used by the
French army.
11. Emden.
12. Tannenberg.
1 Who was appointed British war

minister on the outbreak of the
First World War in August 1914?
Prize Crossword
ACROSS
6 Zulu king of Natal, d.1840 (7)
7 Japanese Buddhist thinker (11731263), born Matsuwaka-Maru (7)
9 Jack ___ (d.1686), London
executioner (5)
10 Donald ___ (1919-95), English
actor whose film roles included
Dr Crippen, Himmler, Lenin and
Pontius Pilate (9)
11 Fermats Last ___, 2002 book by
Simon Singh (7)
13 City of Kyushu, Japan, known
historically for its patterned cotton
textiles (6)
15 Building of the Vatican Palace
erected in 1473-81 by the architect
Giovanni dei Dolci (7,6)
19 Ancient Libyan city, formerly a
Greek agricultural colony known as
Antipyrgos (6)
20 Devon resort with docks designed in 1868 by Eugenius Birch (7)
23 One of a Gothic people ruled in
the fifth century by Theodoric the
Great (9)
24 Influential Greek physician of the
second century bc (5)
26 Richard ___ (1804-54),
Warwickshire-born inventor and
patent campaigner (7)
27 Phase of cultural and technological development beginning in
Europe in around 1200 bc (4,3)
Gregor Mendel
(1822-84)
DOWN
1 Anglo-Scandinavian king, father of
Harold Harefoot (4)
2 And When Did You Last See Your
___?, 1878 painting by W.F. Yeames (6)
3 In Greek myth, the muse of tragedy (9)
4 Montana city, formerly known as
Hellgate Village (8)
5 Ornamental style, popular in Europe
and the US between 1890 and 1910
(3,7)
6 RAF name for the Douglas DC-3
airliner (6)
7 Maximilian, Count von ___ (18611914), German admiral killed at the
Battle of the Falkland Islands (4)
8 US river, disputed former boundary
with Mexico (6)
12/21 All good to me is lost; ___
Satan in Miltons Paradise Lost (1667)
(4,2,4,2,4)
14 William Sharp ___ (1863-1930),
historian and author of Magna Carta
(1905) (9)
16 Medieval county of southern
France (8)
17 Jrgen ___ (1895-1952), SS officer
notorious for his role in the 1943
destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto (6)
18 Thomas ___ (1648-82), Tom of Ten
Thousand, murdered by Charles George
Borosky, the Polonian (6)
21 See 12
22 Neils ___ (1885-1962), Danish
physicist (4)
25 Legendary king of the Britons (4)
The winner of this

months prize
crossword will receive
a selection of recent
history books
Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 25 Bedford Avenue, London
WC1B 3AT by August 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

gregor mendel
The German-speaking Silesian

scientist was an Augustinian Friar
at St Thomas Abbey, Brno, where
one of the choirboys was ...
movie director, one of

whose screenwriters was
Harriet Quimby
(1875-1912)
Leo Janek
(1854-1928)
early US aviatrix, who became

the first woman to fly across the
English Channel in 1912, the same
year that
Czech composer, who

went on to marry one of
his pupils, as did
Sir Lawrence
Alma-Tadema
(1836-1912)
whose paintings provided source

material for the 1916 silent film
masterpiece Intolerance by
D.W. Griffiths
(1875-1948)
Robert Falcon Scott

(1868-1912)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
Royal Navy officer and explorer lost

his life in Antarctica, where he now
has an Antarctic research station
named after him, as does
HENRY V
FromtheArchive
Dan Jones argues that Nigel Sauls article on Henry V and the union of the crowns of England and
France does not take into account the long-term consequences of the kings achievements.
From Agincourt to Bosworth

WHEN HENRY V died in August 1422
he had ruled for fewer than ten years,
the shortest reign of any English king
since Harold Godwinson in 1066.
Nevertheless, Henry had achieved
something unique: he unified the
crowns of England and France.
The Treaty of Troyes, sealed on
May 21st, 1420 following the battle
of Agincourt (1415) and a ferocious
military assault on northern France,
recognised Henry as legal successor
to the mad king Charles VI of
France. It disinherited Charles
son, the dauphin, and was sealed
with the marriage of Henry to
Charles daughter Catherine de
Valois. When, 19 months later,
Catherine gave birth to a son,
the union between Christendoms two greatest royal families
appeared complete. Two realms,
two crowns, one king. Astonishing. But what next?
Nigel Sauls 1986 article, Henry V
and the Dual Monarchy, is an astute
analysis of the immediate consequences of Troyes. As Saul points out,
the English had claimed the French
crown since the 1330s, but the claim
was largely opportunistic: it was
trumpeted or forgotten depending on
Englands see-sawing fortunes in the
Hundred Years War. The problem of
what to do if the dual monarchy was
actually achieved had never been seriously considered. After 1420, though,
it became real and troublesome.
Henrys victories in France had
been paid for handsomely by the
English and were celebrated in London
with wild street parties. Now the
mood changed. Troyes, writes Saul,
meant that in legal terms, the war for
the crown of France was over the
war between two nations had given
way to one between the king of France
(Henry) and his rebellious subjects
(the dauphinist resistance), in which
the people of England had no part
to play. From this point on it would

be increasingly difficult to convince
English parliaments to pay for further
campaigning.
The French situation was also complicated. The realm was fractious and
obstinately regionalist. Under Charles
VI it had been torn in half between the
factions of Burgundy and Armagnac.
Henry had exploited this division,
siding with the Burgundians to seize
the crown. Now the division that had
The pressures of
defending Henry Vs
conquests slowly
destroyed his sons
mind and rule
helped him win it became his biggest
headache. A diehard opposition party
would entrench itself around the
dauphin to leave the English ruling not
as rightful kings, but as an occupying
army. The war of subjection would
be even more difficult and expensive
than the war of conquest.
Henry V neatly avoided most of
the consequences of his triumph by
dying. He was followed two months
later by Charles VI. Englands struggle
to maintain the dual monarchy passed
to Henrys relatives, governing in the
name of the infant Henry VI (theoretically Henri II of France). At first
things went well: Henry Vs brother
John, Duke of Bedford won battles
(e.g. Verneuil in 1424), bombarded the
country with dynastic propaganda and
passed onerous penal laws against his
opponents. In 1429, however, Joan of
Arc turned up and the Hundred Years
War turned fatally against England.
In 1986 Saul did not consider the
longer-term repercussions of Henry
Vs achievement at Troyes. But the
kings over-reach in 1420 sowed the

seeds of the Wars of the Roses 35 years
later. The financial and psychological
pressures of defending Henry Vs
conquests slowly destroyed his sons
mind and rule. Bitter rivalries began
between men like Edmund Beaufort,
Duke of Somerset and Richard, Duke
of York, who fell out during their
military service in France. Defeat at
the battle of Castillon in 1453 pushed
Henry VI into madness and eventually
sparked a terrible war between the
houses of Lancaster and York; quite
an irony, given that Henrys father
had won so much by exploiting a
near-identical schism between the
houses of Burgundy and Armagnac,
caused by the madness of Charles VI.
There was one last important
consequence of the dual monarchy.
Catherine de Valois, whom Henry V
married at Troyes, took as her second
husband a Welsh squire called Owen
Tudor and her grandson, Henry, would
kill the last Plantagenet king, Richard
III, at Bosworth in 1485. Out of the
Plantagenets greatest triumph came
the seeds of their final defeat.
Dan Jones The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the
Roses and the Rise of the Tudors is published by
Faber in September.
VOLUME 36 ISSUE 5 May 1986

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