History Today 03-2016

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March 2016 Vol 66 Issue 3

OF JAMES I

A CARIBBEAN KING

From Ancient Greece to AIDS. How do

societies deal with the threat of disease?

PLAGUE

PREJUDICE

PLAGUE

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2 HISTORY TODAY MARCH 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

ASA BRIGGS has been a supporter of and adviser and friend to History Today since it was founded in 1951. As he approaches 95, he is understandably less mobile than in his globe-trotting days, when he earned the nickname Lord Briggs of Heathrow, yet he remains sharp. Though pre-eminently a social historian, principally of the Victorian age, Briggs’ long career has been marked by an extraordinary breadth of interests: he played a major role in the establishment of Britain’s new universities, Sussex in particular, and the Open University; he was the official historian of the BBC; he has written incisively on Intelligence, with insights gained when working as a young officer at Bletchley Park during the Second World War; and, long before it became fashionable, he took a keen interest in Chinese history and culture, attested to by his vast collection of political figurines brought back from his many visits there.

Few, however, even his closest colleagues, knew about Briggs the poet, though he had been composing verse since his days at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School in Yorkshire. One hundred of his poems are collected in Far Beyond the Pennine Way, published by EER. I will let others appraise the literary quality of Briggs’ work, but they display a deep and perceptive engagement with the past going back to the author’s youth. One poem from December 1936, ‘The Armies of Islam’, is frighteningly prescient, while the aspiring historian’s meditations on the Italian-imposed exile of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie (‘May they give back to him his rightful home’) and the rise of the European dictatorships reveal a youth engaged with a world in grave crisis. Most striking is his response to the bombing of Guernica (Briggs got to know Basque child refugees in Keighley):

Let us prepare for action; by God’s grace Even for war, so that it may never again be said That England shrinks in cowardice, timid, afraid. No appeaser he.

Over eight decades Briggs sustains an engagement with the world and its past, reflected in verse composed in Shanghai, Beijing, Portugal, California, Montana, the West Indies and, of course, Yorkshire. Few people in their mid 90s have new sides to display, but then Briggs has always surprised us.

Paul Lay

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay

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Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston

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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 Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Tom Holland 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 Ulinka Rublack

St John’s College, Cambridge

Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,

University of London

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Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley

University of Nottingham

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National Portrait Gallery in 1999.

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MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3

History

Matters

Language and Unity

• Watlington Hoard

• Cecil Rhodes

• Annual Awards

FRANCE, 1794. With the Reign of Terror in full swing, France at war with every other major European power and civil war raging in the western provinces, the deputies of the National Convention took time to consider a matter of crucial impor-tance: the language of their fellow citizens. At the time, the majority of the population spoke little or no French, communicating instead through regional languages and dialects. The leaders of the revolution feared that without linguistic unity the fledgling Republic would be swept aside by a wave of counter-revolution and foreign invasion.

The fears of the revolutionaries offer telling parallels with contempo-rary debates in the UK about the links between language and citizenship. Critics of mass immigration warn of dangerous, ghettoised minorities that threaten the cohesion and security of wider society. Migrants, they insist, must integrate themselves, above all by learning English. This is a favoured theme of British Prime Minister David Cameron, as seen in recent comments on the language of immi-grants, especially Muslim women. The government plans to increase funding for schools teaching English to immi-grants, but also requires that those entering the country to live with their spouse learn English under threat of losing the right to remain in the UK. The premier’s desire to build an ‘integrated and cohesive One Nation country’ resonates with the views expressed over 200 years ago in a very different context by Bertrand Barère, a member of the French National Convention and the ruling Commit-tee of Public Safety in 1794, for whom linguistic diversity was a grave threat. By linking an ignorance of English to backwardness, patriarchal oppression

Teaching the natives: The School

Master, a French

illustration, c.1860.

David Cameron’s desire for immigrants

to learn English is part of a debate dating

back to the origins of the modern state.

Stewart McCain

Should One Nation

Mean One Language?

of women and the threat of violent extremism, Cameron echoes Barère, who claimed that ‘to leave citizens in ignorance of the national language is to betray the fatherland, it is to leave the stream of enlightenment poisoned or blocked in its path’.

Concerns about the linguistic unity of nations have a long and often murky past. Just like Cameron, the revolutionaries sought to impose the use of their national language on those who did not speak it. As the abbé Henri Grégoire, Barère’s colleague in the National Convention, remarked, the aim was to ‘annihilate’ other languages and ‘universalise’

French. Schools were the favoured means of achieving this and primary school teachers were obliged to instruct their students in the national language. During the 19th century a variety of unpleasant measures were developed in French classrooms to ensure the language took hold, most notably the use of the infamous ‘symbol’, the French counterpart to the ‘Welsh Not’. This involved the use of a ticket, ribbon or other token, which would be given to the first child to speak in their native tongue. The student would keep this object, some-times grasping it arm extended, until another child used the language and the token could be passed on, with a punishment distributed to whoever was left holding it at the end of the day. This practice was intended not only to make sure children practised

The leaders of the

revolution feared that

without linguistic

unity the fledgling

Republic would be

swept aside

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Alternative Histories by Rob Murray their French, but to impart a sense

of shame in speaking one’s native tongue.

Throughout 19th-century Europe, nationalists pursued linguistic unity with similar vigour and this has often manifested itself in state-sponsored discrimination. Linguistic minorities, especially Polish speakers, in the second German Reich suffered under Bismarck’s Kulturkampf during the final decades of the 19th century, an experience similar to those enduring

Russification under Tsars Alexander II and Alexander III at roughly the same time. As in France, this involved the imposition of the national language in schools and also the restriction of civic rights and freedoms for linguistic minorities.

This is not just about tolerance or intolerance of minorities; it also touches on questions of individual freedom and citizenship raised during the French Revolution. Cameron insists that teaching English to immigrants is also about individual freedom, that without knowledge of the common language, individuals are denied access to the choices enjoyed by the majority. The abbé Grégoire’s opposition to linguistic diversity in France had similar roots. Grégoire feared that the interests and rights of ordinary people would never be recog-nised unless they could read and write enough French to participate in poli-tics. As Grégoire argued in his speech before the Convention in 1794, the collective rights of minorities to have their culture respected con-flicted with the rights of individuals to participate fully in society. These individual rights could be secured only through the intervention of the state.

The UK today is not Revolutionary France, nor is it Tsarist Russia or Germany under Bismarck, but these historical experiences can illuminate our current debate about the relation-ship between language and

citizen-ship. Most pertinently, it is worth observing that language policies have often not worked quite as politicians hoped. France only achieved a real degree of linguistic unification after the Second World War, revealing the limited ability of the state to impose its will in matters of language. Efforts under Napoleon to create a mono-lingual legal system were opposed by legal officials who continued to communicate with locals in regional languages in order to be understood. Grégoire, like many contemporaries, hoped that large-scale conscription to the French-speaking army would assimilate the rural population, but when veterans returned home they often returned to the local dialect under pressure from families and friends. Even the French school system, universal and free at primary level after 1881, was less important than urbanisation and the devel-opment of transport links in the countryside. Discriminatory policies in Russia and Germany were often counter-productive, strengthening the appeal of minority identities and stimulating opposition. The history of language and the state in Europe shows how the social and economic context influenced the linguistic choices of individuals far more than narrow government interventions.

Stewart McCain is Lecturer in History at St Mary’s

University, Twickenham.

Without knowledge of the

common language, individuals

are denied access to the choices

enjoyed by the majority

THE Watlington hoard, found in Oxford-shire in 2015, is a gift to the historian. It dates from the 870s: a decade which saw Alfred the Great face and, after some near misses, stave off a Viking invasion of Wessex. These years also witnessed the rule of Ceolwulf II, the last self-styled king of the Mercians, a pow-erful people originally based in the West Midlands, who had been the major force between the Thames and the Humber for two centuries. Most of the narrative built around these two figures comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which focuses on an account of Alfred’s war with the Vikings, as might be expected from a text put together by scholars in Wessex in the decades after the ultimate West-Saxon victory. But the Chronicle’s coherence and focus comes at the expense of breadth and it skates around some of the messier realities. Ceolwulf II, in particular, receives rough treatment. Appointed by the Vikings in 874 and losing half his territory to the invaders in 877, the Chronicle writes him off as a ‘foolish king’s thegn’.

The coins from Watlington provide an important new perspective on the situation as it developed during these crucial years. Ceolwulf II functioned as fully as any king, issuing charters and coins, including many in the new hoard, which is a time capsule from the late 870s, containing silver pennies produced at locations across southern England, in the names of both West-Saxon and Mercian rulers. However, it was probably put together by one of the Viking raiders. Silver ingots and other silver objects, as well as a piece of gold bullion, were found in the hoard and the coins include specimens from con-tinental Europe: features characteristic of precious metal collections gathered

Rory Naismith

A newly found hoard offers

insights into an England

threatened by Vikings.

Evidence of an

Anglo-Saxon

Alliance

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Precious metal: treasures from the Watlington hoard.

Rory Naismith is Lecturer in Medieval History at

King’s College London.

and concealed by Vikings, rather than the English. Watlington is a long way from areas settled by the Vikings, so the hoard may represent the accumulated wealth of a member of the Viking army, buried towards the end of its ultimately unsuccessful campaign in Wessex.

While the hoard’s assembly and concealment are a matter of conjecture, the evidence it presents for the coinage of the 870s offers firmer ground. The hoard contains silver pennies (over 180 in total) of Alfred and Ceolwulf II. All seem to date to about the mid-870s and after. This was a period of rapid evolution for the coinage of Mercia and Wessex. The two kingdoms had shared a currency since Wessex, under Alfred’s brother and predecessor Æthelred I (865-71), adopted the established Mercian ‘Lunettes’ design in the mid-860s. This move is symptomatic of the political status quo at the time: Wessex and Mercia were rivals and allies rather than adversaries. Æthelred I may have wanted to benefit from the tendency for Mercian ‘Lunettes’ pennies to contain less silver, which made it difficult for West-Saxon coins to circulate com-petitively alongside them. By the time Burgred, king of the Mercians (r.854-74), was forced into exile by the Vikings, this process of debasement had reached a low point. But the monetary entente cordiale between Mercia and Wessex still held. Alfred and Ceolwulf II, Bur-gred’s successor, undertook to restore the quality of the coinage.

Several new designs were tried out. Most specimens (including the bulk of the hoard) belong to a group known to scholars as the ‘Cross and Lozenge’ type. This featured an elaborate cross encl- osed within a lozenge on the reverse, paired with a handsome bust of the king, inspired by Roman coins.

Among the most interesting of the other designs was one which again placed a bust on the obverse, but with a different reverse, which showed two emperors enthroned side by side. The ninth-century Anglo-Saxon manufac-turers drew this from Roman coins of the fourth and fifth centuries, issued when emperors shared power. In the context of the rapprochement between Mercia and Wessex, it is unlikely that this image was without resonance; the

two emperors might have evoked the co-operation between Alfred and Ceolwulf II. Until the discovery of the Watlington hoard, just two specimens of this coinage had been found, one each for Alfred and Ceolwulf II. It had seemed possible that this coinage might even have been some sort of limited edition; a rarity for the Anglo-Saxons. But Watlington has added over a dozen more specimens, by a number of new moneyers and diverse in style; an indica-tion that, although this may have been a short-lived coinage, it was produced on

a significant scale. The coinage with the two emperors stands out as a substan-tive as well as symbolic segment of the coinage of the 870s.

One central question historians and numismatists will consider is what kind of infrastructure lies behind the coinage. Most pennies from the ninth century carry the name of the man who made the coin, the moneyer, as well as that of the king under whom he worked. It is rare for coins of this period, however, to carry an explicit reference to where they were made. Canterbury and London were both mint-towns, but which coins

belong to each and which might be the work of moneyers based else-where? Did moneyers move between different places, or did kings share the services of moneyers in major centres such as London? The coins in the Watlington hoard may give fresh answers to these questions and the nuts and bolts of the monetary system which emerge could speak volumes about the organisation and economic geography of ninth-century England.

A larger issue which will have to be revisited is the relationship between money and politics. Who chose to use images such as the two emperors: one or both kings, or local authorities such as the moneyers? Who chose how to title the kings on their coins? Alfred, for instance, was referred to as rex An-glo[rum] ‘king of the Angles/English’ on

some of the ‘Two Emperors’ pennies, and as rex S[axonum et] M[erciorum],

‘king of the Saxons and the Mercians’, on others: both are highly loaded titles, making statements about the status of the two kingdoms.

The Watlington hoard offers an increasingly clear window onto the interaction of Mercia, Wessex and the Vikings, as well as the local articulation of political and economic power. One can only look forward to what else will be seen by gazing through it.

The Watlington hoard offers an

increasingly clear window onto

the interaction of Mercia, Wessex

and the Vikings

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Longman-History Today Awards

David Cesarani was among those honoured at this year’s event.

DAVID CESARANI, the distinguished historian of the Holocaust, the Middle East and Anglo-Jewish politics and culture who died in October, was awarded the Longman-History Today

Trustees Award for 2016. It was received on his behalf by Dawn Waterman, his wife, at a reception held at the Law Society in London on January 12th.

Cesarani was an indefatigable champion of public history, who was determined that the Holocaust should be understood in all its complexity by the British public. A widely admired head of the Wiener Library and a noted broadcaster and writer, what is now sadly his valedictory work, The Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-49 was

published by Macmillan in January. The Longman-History Today Book

Prize, awarded for a first or second work of scholarship deserving of a wider au-dience, with a prize of £2,000, went to Sarah Helm for If This is a Woman – Inside Ravensbrück: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (Little, Brown). It was

com-pared by the judges – Professor Jeremy Black of Exeter University, Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London and Taylor Downing, author and film-maker – to ‘a mirror, broken into thousands of pieces and metic-ulously and miracmetic-ulously restored. An outstanding piece of scholarship and historical retrieval’. It is reviewed by Taylor Downing on page 63. Ruth Scurr’s widely acclaimed John Aubrey: My Life

(Chatto & Windus) was highly com-mended among a strong field.

The Longman-History Today

His-torical Picture Researcher of the Year prize is given to a researcher who has done outstanding work to enhance a text with a creative, imaginative and wide-ranging selection of images. The prize for 2016 and £500 was awarded to Maria Ranauro for her work on Alexandra Harris’ book Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies

(Thames & Hudson). An imaginative and beautifully curated selection of images, it was likened by the judges – History Today picture researcher Mel Haselden

and editor Paul Lay – to a walk through

Alex von Tunzelmann

The British Empire is not the

first – nor last – great power

to see its icons crumble.

Rhodes Must

Fall? A Question

of When Not If

a remarkable exhibition.

The History Today Digital Award

and £250 went to the Legacy of British Slave-ownership project based at University College London, which, with both local and global reach, reminds us that slave-ownership played a crucial role in British history.

The Undergraduate Dissertation Award, worth £250 and given in association with the Royal Historical Association, was presented to Cora Salkovskis from the University of Oxford for Psychiatric Photography and Control in the ‘Benevolent Asylum’ of Holloway: the Construction of Image, Identity and Narrative in Photographs of Female in the Late 19th-century Asylum. The judges –

Professor John Henderson of Birkbeck University of London and Dr Lars Fischer of University College London – thought it ‘an outstanding piece of work reflect-ing remarkable sensitivity’.

Distinguished: the Longman- History Today Trustees Award is accepted by Dawn Waterman on behalf of David Cesarani as History Today

editor Paul Lay looks on. Below: the shortlisted books.

OUR WORLD was shaped by empires. Its languages, cultures, infrastructures, maps and monuments mark the movements of power across its surface. It was said that the British Empire turned one quarter of the world pink, the colour that designated its colonial possessions in imperial atlases. Parts of North America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa were named Jamestown, Vic-toria, Wellington and Livingstone. Nor was the British lion the only conquering beast to mark its territory. Alexander the Great named most of the cities he founded Alexandria. Several Roman towns were called Caesarea. Colum-bus named Caribbean islands La Isla Española and Juana. German imperialists created Caprivi and Schuckmannsburg in Namibia. The Belgian Congo had a Léopoldville, an Élisabethville and a Bau-doinville. These places were littered with monuments to the greatness of their conquerors: names, public institutions, parks, places of worship and statues.

As the controversy over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford shows, imperial legacies may be con-tested many generations later. For all the talk now that Rhodes was a ‘man of his time’, he was profoundly contro-versial when he was alive: loathed by the peoples whose lands he colonised and by his rivals the Boers, disdained by many in Britain, who feared his amoral-ity and megalomania. He oversaw war, plunder, civil injustice and the deaths of thousands of Africans. He was also a generous and transformative benefactor to Oxford University. In recognition of this last fact, since 1911 a rather mousy statue of him has stood above Oriel’s main entrance. The students running the Rhodes Must Fall campaign have called for its removal to a museum,

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Alex von Tunzelmann‘s latest book is Reel History:

The World According to the Movies (Atlantic Books, 2015). She is writing a history of the Suez Crisis.

Here today: the statue of Rhodes at Oriel College. where they feel it might appear less

like a relic for uncritical veneration. There are options less polarising than keeping the statue as it is or taking it away; it could be imagina-tively altered or given a new inscrip-tion. Oriel responded to Rhodes Must Fall in December 2015 with an impeccably balanced statement pledg-ing six months of discussion. Then, in January this year, the college suddenly announced that the statue would stay – reportedly in response to wealthy alumni threatening to withdraw be-quests worth up to £100 million. There has been a backlash against Rhodes Must Fall, led by F.W. de Klerk, the last leader of apartheid South Africa; Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Aus-tralia; and Lord Patten, chancellor of

Oxford University. The students have been accused of vandalism, political correctness and trying to obscure his-torical facts that they do not like.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of removing the statue, it is misleading to suggest the campaigners want to obscure the facts about Rhodes. Their objection is born of remember-ing those facts all too vividly. Statues are not history in the sense of having significant pedagogical value. They are political symbols, which drift in or out of favour along with political and aesthetic tastes. The protesters who hauled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003 did not deny or diminish the history of Iraq. They remembered Saddam’s legacy; for that reason, they rejected his glorification. Many in the West cheered when rebels in Hungary tore down Stalin’s statue in 1956 and when those in Ukraine knocked over several of Lenin in 2013-14. The history of the Soviet Union and its satellites may still be told and freely debated regardless of the loss of these monuments.

The continuing memorialisation of the Confederacy is controversial in the US. Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida was originally whites-only: its name honoured a slave-owning Confeder-ate general who was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By 2014 its students were mostly African- American and its board elected to change the name to Westside High. New Orleans recently voted to remove four statues of Confederate generals. It could follow the example of Delhi, Moscow and Budapest, which have created ‘graveyards’ for the mon-uments of past regimes. The stone countenances of party apparatchiks and colonial bureaucrats slowly erode when exposed to the elements, or are swallowed up by tangles of overgrow-ing plants. The grand bronze of Queen Victoria, which once sat under a canopy in Charing Cross, Lahore (now Pakistan) presides over a collection of nicknacks under strip lighting in a back room of the Lahore Museum. School-children sprawl across the Great White Queen’s lap to take selfies.

Some cities still bear the imperial

mark: Abbottabad in Pakistan, Living-stone in Zambia, Brazzaville in Congo. If the residents are content with these names, they need not change. Others have. Alexandria Arachiosa is now Kandahar. Juana is Cuba. Léopold-ville is Kinshasa. Southern Rhodesia, named for Cecil Rhodes, is Zimbabwe. The history of the British Raj did not vanish when Calcutta decided to spell its name Kolkata; neither the Empire’s critics nor its defenders can achieve that. In Russia, St Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad, then St Pe-tersburg again. A campaign now aims to restore Volgograd’s former name, Stalingrad, changed by Khrushchev in 1961 as part of his de-Stalinisation pro-gramme. New statues of Stalin went up last year in several Russian towns. His portraits hang in streets in Donetsk (formerly Stalino). The rehabilitation of Stalin is a disquieting trend, yet, like the others before them, these new monu-ments will probably not last forever.

In much of the criticism of Rhodes Must Fall, the question echoes: where will it stop? Who will be next? Crom-well, Clive, even Churchill? The answer is that it will not stop. Future genera-tions can and will interrogate the past. Whatever happens to Rhodes’ statue, it is a sign of healthy public engagement with history that there is such a vigor-ous debate. Monuments to historical figures and regimes stand not by divine right, but by the grace of those who live alongside them. No vision of the past can be set permanently in stone.

Sixty-three years before Cecil Rhodes went up to Oriel, Percy Shelley matriculated at University College next door. His poem Ozymandias describes

a traveller in an empty desert who comes across two ‘trunkless legs’ and a ‘shattered visage’ of a statue, with the inscription: ‘My name is Ozyman-dias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The British Empire was not the first and will not be the last great power to see its icons crumble. In the historical longview, as Ozymandias fell, so Rhodes will fall. It is only a question of when.

Statues are not history … they are

political symbols, which drift in

or out of favour along with

political and aesthetic tastes

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THE FIRST OF THE Stewart kings of Scotland and later of England owed his throne to the fact that his mother, Marjorie, was the eldest daughter of Robert the Bruce, who was King of Scots as Robert I from 1306. The Stewarts, who were crucial Bruce allies, were the hereditary High Stewards of Scotland and Marjorie was the wife of Walter the Steward. Their son was allegedly born at Paisley Abbey, west of Glasgow, which his family had founded. His 19-year-old mother, heavily pregnant, was out riding near the abbey when she fell off her horse and went into premature labour. She was carried into the abbey where she gave birth to a boy, by an early form of caesarean section, which the child survived, but she did not.

Some historians doubt this story, but there is no doubt at all that Scottish history at this stage was chaotically complicated and it would take the baby Robert more than 50 years to reach the throne. He was heir presumptive to Robert the Bruce, who had no male heirs, but in 1324 Bruce had a son named David, who under a peace treaty with the English in 1328 was married at the age of four to the seven-year-old sister of Edward III of England. A year later, on Bruce’s death, he succeeded as David II King of Scots. Meanwhile, Robert’s father Walter had died in 1326, which made the ten-year old Robert the High Steward of Scotland. The Scottish parliament now declared him heir presumptive to David II.

In the 1330s the English renewed their attempts to take over Scotland, the French interfered as allies against the English and powerful Scots barons vied for control. Edward Balliol seized the Scottish throne with English support and held sway for a time and in 1334

protected his own interests and obstructed attempts to secure David’s release. He was presumably suspicious of David’s English connections and regular amicable visits to the English court. David had been finding it so hard to raise the money to pay his ransom that in 1363 he suggested recognising a son of Edward III as the official heir to the Scottish throne, if the English would cancel the remaining payments. The Scottish parliament flatly refused to accept any such deal and, when David died in 1371, aged 46, the 54-year-old Robert succeeded him as the nearest male heir.

King at last, Robert now began a successful reign. He knew how Scottish politics worked and he used effective methods to win over foes and keep the loyalty of Stewart supporters with grants of land, titles and official posi-tions. He seems to have encouraged the chroniclers to praise Robert the Bruce’s achievements, to reflect well on the Stewarts. His keen appetite for sex had supplied him with a small army of children by two wives and numerous mistresses. There are said to have been more than 21 of them altogether.

The oldest of the children were now grown-up and well able to help. The oldest son, John, now in his thirties High Steward and Earl of Carrick, was the official heir to the throne and supervised much of the running of the regime. The next son, Robert, Earl of Fife, was also active and a third son, Alexander, known as the Wolf of Badenoch, was the government’s principal figure in the Highlands. Daughters came in handy for marrying to leading families to secure their backing. Isabella, for example, was married to one of the Douglases and Margaret to the Lord of the Isles.

Robert was 74 when he died at the castle he had built for himself at Dun-donald, near Kilmarnock, and was buried at Scone. His eldest son John succeeded him as Robert III and the Stewart line was established for centuries to come.

Months

Past

MARCH

By Richard Cavendish

MARCH 2nd 1316

Robert II of

Scots is born

Stewart steward: Robert II in a 16th-century engraving.

young King David’s guardians sent him to France for safety. He returned to Scotland in 1341, but in 1346, leading a punitive raid into England, he was wounded and captured at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, west of Durham. Robert the Steward was there apparently, but ran away.

That could scarcely have pleased David, who was taken to London and kept prisoner in the Tower and later at royal residences in England. Held in comfortable conditions, he came to like and admire his brother-in-law Edward III. In 1357 the English offered to release him in return for a massive ransom of 10,000 marks a year every year for ten years. He accepted the offer and returned to Scotland.

Robert the Steward had meanwhile served as regent in some of the years of David’s absence. Scottish chroniclers disagreed about his competence or lack of it, but he seems mainly to have

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CHINA HAD BEEN ruled for centuries by successive dynasties of emperors, but by the later 19th century their day seemed to be almost done. The country was run on Confucian prin-ciples, which did not value change and progress, but stressed stability and peaceful harmony under rulers who enjoyed the mandate of heaven. As the western powers and Japan increasingly interfered in China, however, the divine mandate seemed to have been forfeited. Even the formidable Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi felt forced to make concessions to the foreigners before her death in 1908 and a rebellion against her successor in 1911 turned China into a republic.

An assembly of delegates declared Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomin-tang Party, provisional president

figure called Yuan Shikai. Yuan had started his career in the army and shown himself exceptionally compet- ent, self-confident and ambitious. He had then risen to high positions under the Empress Dowager. He was now in command of the country’s principal military force and early in 1912 Sun Yat-sen, fearing civil war, made a deal with him. Yuan ordered the six-year-old emperor to abdicate, which he did, Sun resigned as president and Yuan replaced him the following day. Yuan was acceptable to the conservatives in China, and crucially to the army. Now at the age of 53 it was his job to stop the country falling apart.

The government had run out of money, the Chinese provinces were largely under the control of local warlords and the republic’s national assembly spent its time arguing and quarrelling. The Kuomintang, which had a majority in the assembly, kept opposing Yuan’s plans until he allegedly organised the murder of the party’s chairman. Effectively silencing

itary support and in 1913 a rebellion broke out against him in the south-ern provinces, which he put down by force. Sun Yat-sen prudently withdrew to Japan while Yuan’s regime continued in power in Beijing and in 1915 he proclaimed a new Chinese empire with himself as emperor.

That was too much even for his conser- vative and military supporters and opinion turned against him. Armed rebellions broke out in the provinces and in March 1916 he abolished his new empire. He remained president of the republic, or so he maintained, until he died three months later in Beijing, at the age of 56. There would be more civil war until Sun Yat-sen formed an alliance with the Communist Party and made himself effectively the ruler of China until his death in 1925.

MARCH 29th 1866

The end of

imperial

China

John Keble dies in

Bournemouth

English translations of early Christian theologians and Keble issued a trans-lation of the Psalms in 1839. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and would become cardinal, but Keble and others remained in the Church of England. As Anglo-Catholics they would have a lasting influence on the Anglican church at home and abroad.

After 1841 Keble retired to his country vicarage in the village of Hursley, near Winchester. He wrote tracts and hymns, but took his clerical duties seriously and once said that, if the Church of England collapsed, it would be found in his parish. He was a complicated character, shy and reserved, but also forcefully strong-minded. A friend described his sermons as having an ‘affectionate almost plaintive earnestness’. He was buried at Hursley after his death on a trip to Bournemouth and his wife Charlotte died a few weeks later and was buried with him. They had no children. Keble College at Oxford was named in his honour, when it was founded in 1869.

High churchman: John Keble in 1863. Anti-imperialist: Yuan Shikai photographed in 1915.

CLERGYMAN, theologian and poet, Keble was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, which developed at the uni-versity in the 1830s in response to fears that the Whig government intended to disestablish the Church of England and gravely weaken it. The movement’s leader, John Henry Newman of Oriel College, traced it back to Keble’s sermon on ‘national apostasy’ in the university church in 1833. Keble, too, was a fellow of Oriel. In 1827 he had published The Christian Year, a popular volume of poems

for Sundays and festivals and he was Oxford’s professor of poetry in 1831-41.

Newman and his followers pub-lished Ninety Tracts for the Times, which

earned them the name Tractarians. They were high churchmen who believed the Roman Catholic traditions of the Church of England were being wrongly overlooked. It was in their view a truly ‘catholic’ body, stemming directly from Jesus’ original disciples. They disapproved of moves afoot to allow Nonconform-ists to study at Oxford. They published

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The accusation that James I was

murdered by his favourite, the Duke

of Buckingham, may have been a

false one but it was widely believed

and helped to justify the execution

of Charles I. Alastair Bellany and

Thomas Cogswell explain.

T

HE VETERAN DIPLOMAT Sir Balthazar Gerbier addressed a short treatise to Prince Charles in June 1648, explaining why things had gone so badly wrong for the Stuarts. The dynasty, he noted, had been beset by dangerously scandalous tracts penned by ‘spirits of Delusion’. He thought that among those ‘Libels’ was ‘one more Eminent than the rest’, a short tract from 1626, in which an ‘inraged Scotsman, Eglesham, a professor of Phisick’ had made ‘a report of the practice of Poisoning in the Court of England’. At first glance, it seems puzzling that, at the height of the crisis of the English Revolution, Gerbier’s attentions should be focused on a pamphlet that was now more than two decades old. Modern scholars have scarcely noticed George Eglisham’s The Forerunner of Revenge. Its most sensational allegation – that the king’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham had poisoned James I – seems preposterous. Yet Gerbier believed that Eglisham, that ‘inraged Scotsman’, had inflicted serious damage on royal authority and that he was continuing to do so years later. Most contemporaries knew of the charge and a significant number of them believed it. There was no denying its potency. It had played a central role in the impeachment of Buck-ingham in 1626 and helped inspire and justify his as-sassination in 1628. Most remarkable – and clearly to the fore in Gerbier’s meditations – was the charge’s resurrection in early 1648, when Parliament had re-worked Eglisham’s accusations to implicate Charles I in his father’s murder. This allegation about the death of James I haunted the prolonged political turmoil in 1648 that culminated in Charles I’s trial and execution in January 1649. The alleged murder of one king helped contemporar-ies imagine and justify the beheading of another. FRUSTRATED AT THEIR inability to persuade Charles I to agree to a negotiated settlement after the second Civil War, the House of Commons voted in early January 1648 to end talks with the king. The House appointed a committee to

Murderer

most

eminent

draft a declaration justifying this dramatic decision that Royalists feared would make a ‘Bonfire of Monarchy’. When it appeared in February 1648, the Declaration ex-plained why Parliament felt compelled to end negotiations with the king, rehearsing the various proposed settlements that Charles had rejected and assembling a laundry list of his numerous crimes, most of them committed during

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, by Michiel Jansz van Miereveld, 1625-26.

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the Civil Wars. But the Declaration led the attack on Charles with a new twist on an old accusation. Even before the final draft had been approved, the Venetian ambassador had heard the reports: the Declaration would charge either that Charles I had ‘hastened the death of his father by poison or that Buckingham attempted it with his consent’. James I had died at his palace at Theobalds in late March 1625. At the time he had first fallen ill, earlier that month, the court was tense, shaken by ongoing arguments between the king, the prince and Buckingham over foreign policy and unnerved by a steady succession of fatal illnesses among the English and Scottish elite. As James sickened, the level of anxiety rose yet further with the death of his cousin, the Marquis of Hamilton, whose corpse began to swell and discolour shortly after his death. A medical report ruled out foul play, but the dramatic post-mortem symptoms encouraged anxious whispers that the marquis had been poisoned.

A

T FIRST, few were seriously worried about the king. His physicians diag-nosed tertian fever, which (if properly handled) would pose little danger. After several bed-ridden weeks, James finally seemed on the mend. Then the Earl of Kellie reported from court that something odd had happened that was ‘here much disliked’. On the night of March 21st and 22nd, Buckingham placed a plaster on the king’s chest, ‘after which his Majesty was extremely sick’, and gave him something to drink, all ‘without the consent or knowledge of any of the doctours’. James’ condition immediately deteriorated and the frightened doctors and cour-tiers in the sickroom exchanged angry recrimina-tions. Five days later, James was dead. Reports of Buckingham’s medical dabbling and the ensuing recriminations circulated both inside and outside the court, but soon began to subside. A year later, however, they would make a startling and more public return. In late April 1626, as the Parlia-ment-men were preparing for Buckingham’s im-peachment, a sensational new account of James’ last days, published in a pamphlet ostensibly from Frankfurt, was scattered around London’s streets.

Its author was George Eglisham, a Scottish Catholic physician and poet and a skilled polem- icist. Eglisham had lost his post as one of James I’s extraordinary [i.e. unpaid] doctors early in March 1625, after he had tried to orchestrate Hamilton’s deathbed con-version to Rome. Eglisham then fled to Brussels, where his old connections in the Spanish administration encouraged him to publish, in Latin, German and English editions, his lurid accusations about ‘the practice of poisoning in the Court of England’. Printed in Brussels but carrying a fake Frankfurt imprint, the English edition was called The

Fore-runner of Revenge Against the Duke of Buckingham. The Forerunner vividly portrayed Buckingham’s syste-

matic murder of a host of rival courtiers, using a cunning poison designed by a sinister ‘poisonmonger-mountebank’. This poison, Eglisham avowed, had caused the startling

James I, by Daniel

Mytens, 1621. distortion of Hamilton’s corpse, which ‘began to swell _{in such sort that his thighs were as big as six times their}

natural proportion, [and] his belly … as big as the belly of an ox’, while blisters, ‘some white, some black, some red, some yellow, some green, some blue’, covered his skin and ‘blood mixed with froth of divers colors a yard high’ poured from his mouth and nose.

Eglisham reworked the murky rumours about James’ final days into a murder allegation: Buckingham had quar-relled with James over foreign policy and needed the king out of the way. As James lay in his sickbed, Buckingham had waited until the doctors were at dinner and then given the king a glass of wine with a white powder in it. Overcome

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MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 13 had never taken it, it will cost my life.’ Buckingham then applied a plaster to James’ chest and ‘his Maiesty grew faint, short breathed and in great agony’. The king died shortly afterwards and, when Buckingham asked the attending physicians to certify that he had given the King ‘a good and safe medicine’, they declined. Meanwhile, ‘the kings body and head swelled above measure’.

This cunning work of Habsburg-sponsored disinformation was designed to embroil English domestic politics in conflict and it succeeded all too well. For three days in late April 1626 Parliament interrogated the royal physicians about the events in James’ sickroom. Although one doctor reported that James had reacted to Buckingham’s remedies

by asking ‘will you murder me and slay me?’, the testimo-ny only made things murkier, for it revealed that matestimo-ny had sampled Buckingham’s potion and that the duke’s servant, Mr Baker, had eaten some of the plaster. Never-theless Buckingham had clearly acted without the doctors’ approval and with no consideration for the suitability and timing of his remedies, which had been prepared at his request by an obscure physician from Essex. The hearings also unearthed hints of Buckingham’s relationship with Piers Butler, an eccentric Irishman who reportedly distilled poison from toads. Some in the Commons thought the evidence would support a murder conviction, but the House charged Buckingham only with a ‘transcendent presumption of dangerous consequence’ in offering medicine to the king against the physicians’ orders.

F

ORCED TO DEFEND himself, Buckingham explained that James had ‘commanded me to send for that physic’, that he had refused to apply it until two sick children and Sir James Palmer had first tested it and that, when some began accusing him, the dying king had announced ‘none but devils would speak of any such thing’. The effectiveness of Buckingham’s testimony, however, was undercut a week later when Charles dissolved the Parliament before the Lords had fully considered the impeachment charges. Eglisham’s allegations of poisoning were to tarnish Buckingham’s reputation for the rest of his life. Indeed, after John Felton assassinated Buckingham in 1628, one well-placed observer reported that the assassin had claimed Eglisham’s tract as one of his motivations.

When Parliament revived Eglisham’s 1626 accusations in 1648, however, their target was not the long-dead Buckingham, but Charles I. The Forerunner had not directly implicated Charles in Buckingham’s crimes, but Eglisham had appealed to the young king for justice against his fa-ther’s murderer and Charles’ steadfast defence of Bucking-ham in 1626 inevitably raised awkward questions. In May 1626 Charles had briefly imprisoned two Parliament-men because he thought they had hinted at his involvement in

Eglisham’s allegations of

poisoning were to tarnish

Buckingham’s reputation

for the rest of his life

Balthasar Gerbier by Paulus Pontius, after Antony van Dyck, 1634.

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The implication of these

publications was clear. Charles I

was likely involved in his father’s

death and parricide was an

unforgiveable crime

Anthony Weldon's pamphlet of 1650.

James’ murder and ‘if he were not tender of this point of the death of his father’, a councillor explained, ‘he was not worthy to wear the crown’. Charles soon released both men, but contemporaries continued to ponder, albeit quietly, his possible involvement. One man, writing shortly after the dissolution of Parliament, brooded over the 1626 proceed-ings and The Forerunner before concluding that Charles, if nothing else, was an accomplice after the fact because he had clearly dissolved the session to protect Buckingham from justice.

Eglisham’s charges long survived in the ‘underground’ manuscript news culture, but late in 1642, shortly after the first Civil War began, possibly as many as six editions of The

Forerunner were published in London. This revival included

a clever reworking, called Strange Apparitions, which imagined a dramatic confrontation between the ghosts of James, Buckingham and Eglisham. The old king at first refused to believe that his favourite had murdered him, but Buckingham eventually confessed, provocatively adding that soon ‘Time shall produce’ the names of the others in-volved in James’ murder. These works and later allusions to them helped stiffen the resolve of Parliament’s supporters and their continued use horrified royalist commentators. The revival of Eglisham’s charges early in 1648, however, took them in a far more radical direction.

Chief among the crimes enumerated by Parliament’s Declaration of February 1648 was Charles I’s response to Parliament’s inquest held in 1626 into ‘the Death of His Royal Father’. The Declaration claimed that when Parlia-ment was about to deliver its verdict against Buckingham, Charles had dissolved the session before ‘Justice could be done’. Since the king had never launched his own inquiry into James’ death, the Declaration now concluded that ‘we leave the world … to judge where the guilt of this remains’. Parliament ordered that 5,600 copies of the Declaration be distributed across the realm and onto the Continent. Preachers reportedly read from the text in their pulpits. To second the Declaration, a radical London printer issued an abridged version of Eglisham’s Forerunner, now highlight-ing James I’s alleged protestation that ‘if His owne sonne should commit Murther ... he would not spare him, but would have him dye for it’. To help contemporaries imagine the inevitable next step, printers issued the first English translations of Vindicae Contra Tyrannos, the controversial 1579 Huguenot justification for the deposition of wicked rulers. The implication of these publications was clear. Charles I was probably involved in his father’s death and parricide was an unforgivable crime.

R

OYALISTS FULLY appreciated the danger posed by the Declaration’s claims about James I’s murder. One writer rebuked the parliamentarians that ‘if any thing must doe your feat of dis-uniting the hearts of this Kingdom from his Majesty’ it ‘is that which concerned the death of the late king’. The impact on foreign opinion was potentially even more disastrous; Secretary of State Sir Edward Nicholas fretted that ‘nothing in that libel did leave a worse impression among strangers than the particular malicious and false aspersion concerning the death of King James’. While the Royalist newsbook

Mercu-rius Aulicus urged its readers to ‘shut your eyes’ and ‘stop

your eares’ against the Declaration, a much better response was to attack it and, with Nicholas and Sir Edward Hyde

coordinating their efforts from exile, the Royalists mounted an impressive campaign of refutation.

Their newsbooks reacted immediately. One denounced the Declaration and ‘its poison-pointed arrows, to murder Majesty withall’. Another announced that Parliament’s sole goal was to ‘render his Majesty odious’ by charging him with being ‘accessary to [James’] Death’. A third rudely re-sponded by urging the authors of the tract to ‘kiss my bum’. One of the most effective short responses, one that claimed to ‘stop the mouths of all Divelish Detractors’, appeared in

Mercurius Elencticus. It demanded that Parliament print all

the testimony from the 1626 investigations, which would prove that James had insisted on the irregular treatments, that John Baker had eaten part of the plaster and that James Palmer (among others) had drunk the potion. Moreover the newsbook urged readers to interrogate Palmer and Baker themselves and provided their addresses. To counteract Eglisham’s melodrama, the newsbook employed its own

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Charles I, by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1628.

high pathos. James had died in Buckingham’s arms, it reported, and afterwards the duke was so overcome with tears that Palmer had to take ‘the Dukes hand in his, and with his Fingers closed up the Kings eyes’. Nicholas thought this account so powerful that he arranged for it to be re-printed in Dutch and French.

More detailed responses soon appeared in longer books. Dr George Bate, who had attended Charles, directly attacked Eglisham as ‘a man of a cracked Brain’ and ‘bad … Reputation’ and he stressed that, since Eglisham was ‘a Papist’, his malicious motives were abundantly clear. Bate pronounced Buckingham’s treatments ‘innocent’ and delivered ‘out of a good affection’ and he ascribed James’ death to the fever which had ravaged ‘an aged man’ who ‘kept an Ill Diet’ and had ‘an evill constitution’. For his part, Secretary Nicholas emphasised the evidence from 1626, es-pecially Buckingham’s answer to his impeachment, which he challenged Parliament to reprint, and reiterated that the

and a transcedent Presumption, and not of Treason’. Hyde stressed similar points. Buckingham’s ague remedies were the kind that ordinary people believed ‘to do much good’ and that doctors knew ‘can do no hurt’. Hyde insisted, too, that ‘there was nothing administered to the King, without the privity of the Physicians and His own Importunate desire and Command’. As for Eglisham, he was an ‘infamous ... Papist’ with ‘an ambition to be taken notice of as an Enemy to the Duke’. Hyde added that Eglisham had eventu-ally confessed his ‘Villainy’ and died with ‘great penitence’. Finally, all of these Royalist responses stressed that, when the doctors had opened James’ corpse for embalming, they found no evidence of poison: Eglisham’s claim of tell-tale swellings was false.

The Royalist campaign against the Declaration was highly sophisticated and it revealed how seriously they took the reinvention of these old allegations about James’ death. But in the radicalised landscape of 1648, the allegations were beyond effective rebuttal. A petition from Leicester-shire later that year simply assumed that the Declaration had declared Charles ‘to be guilty of the death of King James’, while another from Rutland flatly charged the king with ‘the death of his father’. As radicals in the army brooded over the blood guilt of Charles Stuart, the Declara-tion powerfully suggested that the king had more than just his subjects’ blood on his hands.

T

ALK OF THE MURDER of James I continued in the run-up to Pride’s Purge and Charles I’s trial. A radical newsbook noted in September 1648 that Parliament had charged Charles ‘with all the blood that had been shed by this War’ and then added ‘the death of his father King James’, too. When the army justified its intervention to prevent Parliament from reopening deal-ings with the king, it took the claims of the Declaration as part of its warrant and, in December, the Parliament-men that were left after the purge led by Colonel Pride all swore to their faith in the document. Another late 1648 tract charged Charles of dissolving the 1626 session, ‘lest his fathers death should be inquired into (fearing that himself might be found too much concerned in it)’. Not surprisingly, many observers assumed that a charge of ‘Murder and Parricide’ would appear in the indictment being drawn up against the king. Fragmentary evidence suggests that some involved in framing the indictment were eager ‘to blacken him, what we can’ and thus to include a review of his entire reign. Eventually, the High Court of Justice opted for a much briefer document, focusing on Charles’ actions in the 1640s. But the murder of James I had not been forgotten.

At his trial, Charles refused to recognise the court’s authority or to offer a plea, thus negating the prosecution’s requirement to fully present its case. Shortly after Charles’ execution, John Cook, the High Court’s prosecutor, pub-lished King Charls His Case, which contained the speech he had intended to make if the king had entered a plea. His book revealed that Cook had planned to discuss ‘the Death of King James’ to aggravate the charge of tyranny against Charles. Following the script set out by the 1648 Declaration, Cook noted that Charles had ‘no justice to do justice’ even ‘to his own Father’. He had dissolved the 1626 Parliament in order to protect Buckingham ‘and would

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S

TORIES OF James I’s murder were to long outlive his son. The partisans of the new English republic appropriated Eglisham’s charges in their propaganda campaign to tarnish monarchy. Eikon Alethine, a response to Charles’ bestselling Eikon

Basilike, dismissed the dead king’s

alleged commitment to justice by reminding readers of ‘the dissolving the Parliament, for questioning the Duke of Buckingham for poisoning his Father, when he was bound by all ties of justice and Nature, to have heard them’. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton cited Charles’ actions in 1626 to protect Buckingham when he was charged with ‘no less than poisoning the deceased King his Father’. In Pro Populo

Anglica-no Defensio, Milton likened Charles to

Nero: thus, just as the emperor had killed his mother with a sword, ‘Charles did the same with poison to his father’. Sir Anthony Weldon, John Hall, Sir Edward Peyton, William Lilly, Sir Arthur Wilson and the newsbook editor extraordinaire, Marchamont Nedham all took James’ murder and Charles’ involvement in it as a given and they played endless variations on Eglisham’s themes, which soon became the leitmotif of their collective project to vilify the entire Stuart dynasty. In this black legend of the Stuart family, Mary Stuart

had murdered her husband; James I had killed his eldest son, Henry; and Charles I had poisoned his father. This trail of murder had provoked God’s righteous anger against the English and Scottish monarchy. As the preface to Weldon’s book warned, those who still supported the Stuarts should ‘take heed how they side with this bloody House, lest they be found opposers of Gods purpose, which doubtless is, to lay aside that Family’.

A SYSTEMATIC ROYALIST counterattack was hampered by the Cromwellian regime’s tightened control over the presses, but Sir William Sanderson’s massive Compleat

History of Mary and her son James, published in 1656,

vigorously refuted Eglisham and his later admirers. The Marquis of Hamilton, Sanderson insisted, had died not from poison but from excessive drinking and a late night meal of ‘Mushroom Salads’. Sanderson took great pains to dissect what had really happened in James’ sickroom, emphasis-ing the harmless nature of Buckemphasis-ingham’s remedies and James’ determination to try them. He referred readers with any lingering doubts to Baker and Palmer, who could still be ‘examined, with very great satisfaction, to clear that calmny’. The Forerunner itself, he observed, ‘at the first

sight is frivolous’, but thorough investigation revealed it to be ‘malacious’ and unworthy of even fleeting attention. By noting Eglisham’s Catholicism, Sanderson, like Bate and Hyde in 1648, stressed that a revolution driven mostly by Scripture-quoting Protestant radicals was in fact based on a work of ‘popish’ disinformation.

The Restoration of Charles II drove stories of James I’s murder underground, though it continued to fascinate historians into the 19th century. The eminent Victorian scholar S.R. Gardiner had little patience for the tale, however, dismissing Eglisham’s accusations as ‘worthless’. His brusque dismissal of the story’s significance has cast

a long shadow over subsequent schol-arship, but Gardiner’s verdict rested in part on a small tract published by Dr

Norman Chevers, a physician based in Calcutta, who had become interested in James’ death. Gardiner approvingly

cited Chevers’ scientific conclusion that Eglisham’s accusation ‘amounts

to absolute falsehood’, but he ignored Chevers’ other major argument: although James I had not been

mur-dered, there was an important history to be written about the belief that

he had. Chevers had thus called for ‘a close scrutiny into all that relates to the Eglisham pamphlets’, for this little tract was nothing less than ‘the spark igniting that train which

ex-ploded in the Great Rebellion and in the death of King Charles the First upon a scaffold at Whitehall’.

Chevers overstated his case, but he had an important point to

make. Talk and writing about the murder of James I exacerbated the

political tensions of the 1620s and the revolutionary dynamics of the 1640s and early 1650s. Contemporaries took it seriously and so it is long past time that historians did so, too. The

Forerunner did not cause the English Revolution, but its

history does help us better understand the forces that did. Balthazar Gerbier was a notoriously slippery character, trusted by virtually none of his contemporaries, but, like Norman Chevers, he knew that The Forerunner of Revenge was a libel ‘more eminent than the rest’.

George Eglisham's pamphlet, Strange

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W

E LIVE IN A WORLD overflowing with things. British

wardrobes are bursting with over six billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per person. It has become usual to replace dresses and jackets every two to three years and there is nothing peculiarly Anglo-American or neoliberal about this growing mountain of stuff. Swedes, often held up as paragons of thrift and simple living, bought five times as many appliances and three times as many clothes in 2007 as they did in 1995. Even these figures reveal only so much. Imagine walking out of a shop not just with a new tablet device or a pair of trainers but with all the oil, aluminium and other materials needed to make them and you would be carrying an additional 300 shopping bags every week.

The notion that

‘Greed is Good’ was not born in

the 1980s, nor even in the 20th century.

Frank Trentmann traces the roots of today’s

rampant consumer culture to the imperial

ambitions of the great European powers.

Five

centuries

Stuff

centuries

Stuff

of

CONSUMERISM

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MARCH 2016 HISTORY TODAY 19 Junk shop in Upper Lascar Row antique market, Hong Kong.

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Trend spotters and futurologists claim to see signs of a shift from stuff to fluff, with possessions giving way to experiences. But this is fantasy, not history. The historical evidence points to a relentless human appetite for more and more. How did this desire to accumulate become so powerful, not just in the affluent North but increasingly in developing countries, too? Is it a desire for ostentation, a need to emulate the rich? Did an obsession with stuff begin in the 1950s? No. Consumption had begun its ascent well before governments started to count GDP. And to reduce it all to a frivolous desire for ‘unnecessary’ stuff is equally unhelpful, because it makes the whole phenomenon look ephemeral, something that would stop naturally, if only people came to their senses. For the rise of consumption is anything but frivolous and, to come to grips with it, we need to understand its history. Consumerism created a new material world which transformed power, nature and society, redefining who we are and how we live.

Thirty years ago historians such as Neil McKendrick looked for the ‘birth’ of consumer society in 18th-century Britain. It set off a race among specialists to claim the first date for their own period, finding stirrings in Renaissance Italy and even late medieval England. But con-sumption was not simply ‘born’. It had enormous momentum. This dy-namism changed dramatically between the 15th and the 20th century. A first major change occurred between the 15th and 18th centuries, when a new culture took shape which prized private comfort and the pursuit of the new. Possessions, refinement and comfort were already on the rise in Renaissance Italy and late Ming China. In 1475, for example, the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi ordered 400 glass beakers from the Venetian island of Murano, while 16th-century China was awash with books, porcelain cups and embroideries. Yet dominant values also

restrained consumption in these prosperous societies. Big spending was fine in Renaissance Italy, if it paid for public banquets and family chapels that demonstrated one’s civic virtue, less so for private pleasure. In late Ming China, the elite prized antiques, not novelties. Courtesans were known for their plain robes and many merchants oriented themselves towards the official scholar elite, the art of the zither and calligraphy.

I

T WAS IN north-west Europe, in the Netherlands and Britain, that a more dynamic and innovative culture of consumption broke through in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trade and the unparalleled spread of towns and cities helped: in England and Wales in 1800, one in five people lived in towns with populations of more than 10,000; in 1500, it had been fewer than one in 30. Cities favoured consumption not only because they stimulated spending, having a greater number of shops, but also because clothes and accessories were visible ways to signal one’s status and respectability. Still, urbanisation was at best an enabling factor, for Northern Italy had cities and even the lower Yangzi had some towns. What proved decisive was a cultural and institutional environment that was more open and inviting to the world of things.

The Netherlands and Britain developed an unprecedented craving for exotic products from distant places. Tobacco, tea, cotton and porcelain changed how Dutch and Britons ate and drank, smelled and felt. By the late 18th century, cotton gowns and tea kettles had found their way even into the homes of the urban poor. This wave of new goods spread more easily through these two countries, unimpeded by the restrictions and customs that stood in the way elsewhere. In Germany, by contrast, goods faced a maze of customs barriers, guilds and suspicion by the male elite: women sporting fashionable neckerchiefs were fined or ostracised. A Cloudburst of

Material Possessions,

Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1510.

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Clockwise from above: couple in a US appliance store buying a new wall oven, 1956; blue and white Chinese mustard pot with Dutch silver mounts, Chongzheng, 1635-40; US advertisement for food items, 1951; Ming Dynasty vase, c.17th century.