History Today 05-2014

(1)

May 2014 Vol 64 Issue 5

Friendship, betrayal

and Kim Philby

the King of Siam

Louis XIV meets

Industrial Revolution

Roman Britain’s

Nehru

The last days

of India’s first

prime minister

(2)

2 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2014

FROM THE EDITOR

THE SERIES OF cultural events that go under the name 14-18 NOW, promoted by the Department of Media, Culture and Sport and planned for the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, has taken a turn for the bizarre. On March 27th it was announced that people in Britain will be called upon to switch off all but one light at 10pm on August 4th, to mark 100 years since Britain declared war on Germany. The proposal is inspired, if that’s the word, by the comment of the foreign secretary at the time, Sir Edward Grey: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’ and has been met with contempt. ‘A remarkably stupid gimmick’, said the military historian Gary Sheffield, who thought it more in keeping with the spirit of Mr Hodges, the meddlesome ARP warden in the comedy series Dad’s Army, not least because many people and most children will already have their lights out. The culture secretary Maria Miller has yet to tell us if we will be allowed to put them back on in our lifetime.

14-18 NOW has other brilliant ideas up its sleeve, including an arts project based on dazzle paint, the method of camouflage used on the ships of the Royal Navy, whose success was patchy (excuse the pun) at best. An appropriate metaphor, therefore, says the historian Jonathan Boff, for the whole 14-18 NOW programme: ‘little forethought; superficially striking; more liable to confuse than enlighten; and unlikely to have any useful impact’.

The prize for the most perilously anachronistic of the projects goes to Letter to an Unknown Soldier. Beginning in June, members of the public will be invited to write to the soldier epitomised in Charles Sargeant Jaggers’ statue that stands on Platform One of Paddington Station. As always, celebrities have been invited to kick things off. No such gathering is complete without an offering from the actor/comedian Stephen Fry, who takes on the guise of a conscientious objector for his epistle:

For eternity your image will stand for unquestioning courage. I will die proud of you and ashamed of myself. And that is in spite of me being right.

Apart from the issues it raises about the status of conscientious objectors in the Great War, the tone of Fry’s letter is at some remove from the tone of restraint and hesitancy that typifies the correspondence of the men who fought. I live in hope that one day we will start thinking of Them rather than Us.

Paul Lay

Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay

Deputy Editor Charlotte Crow Picture Editor Sheila Corr Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph

Publishing & Editorial Assistant Nick Liptrot Art Director Gary Cook

Website Manager Dean Nicholas

Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell CONTACTS

History Today is published monthly by

History Today Ltd 25 Bedford Avenue London WC1B 3AT Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING

Lisa Martin, Portman Media

Tel: 020 7079 9361

[email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3148 3539 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America).

History Today (ISSN: 0018-2753) is published

monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick NJ. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831. Subscription records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 25 Bedford Avenue, London WC1B 3AT, UK.

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

@All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today

Total Average Net Circulation 19,551 Jan-Dec 2013

(3)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 3 the civic values of ancient Rome, the covenant theology of Old Testament Israel and the ideals of commonwealth and nation forged by the Protestant reformers. For him, a united Britannia, at once stronger and more varied than its component parts, would lead a Europe of small independent states against Iberian imperialism and papal pretension. In order to foster closer community ties and shared identity in the new United Kingdom, he advo-cated intermarriage, planting English colonies in Lochaber and the Western Isles to promote ethnic intermingling and levying steep fines on those who continued to de-scribe themselves as Scottish or English. He also proposed a single parliament for the new United Kingdom, with region-al assemblies in London, York, Lancaster and Edinburgh, drawing at least a fifth of their members from the country on the other side of the old border.

The 18th-century Scottish Enlight-enment further encouraged enthu-siasm for Britishness north of the border, with Alexander Wedderburn and his fellow contributors to the Edin-burgh Review coining the term ‘North Britain’ to describe their country. This espousal of Britishness by enlightened Scots in no sense diminished their sense of Scottishness. Rather their display of what later became known as hybrid or hyphenated identity expressed their conviction that it was as part of Britain that Scotland had its best chance of thriving and improving. In his 1992 book Devolving English Literature Robert Crawford has argued that the whole academic discipline of English literature was essentially an 18th-century Scottish invention as

History

Matters

Great Britain

• Eric Hobsbawm

• Hitler and Churchill

• Clontarf 1014

CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT from the arguments of the ‘No’ campaign in the current pre-Referendum debate over Scottish independence has been any appeal to a shared sense of Britishness. This is perhaps hardly surprising given that recently released data from the 2011 census reveals that two thirds of Scotland’s inhabitants see themselves as Scottish only and fewer than 20 per cent as Scottish and British.

This marked decline in British iden-tity, which is shared to a lesser extent by the population of the rest of the United Kingdom, signals the obsoles-cence of what was a largely Scottish invention, hammered out in the after-math of the 16th-century Reformation and the 1707 Act of Union.

Scottish enthusiasm for the concept of Britishness is evident in the work of one of the first modern histori-ans of Britain, John Major, who taught at the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews and deeply influenced the first generation of Scottish Reformers, not least John Knox. Major styled himself a ‘Scottish Briton’ and his 1521 History of Greater Britain was a pas-sionate call for the union of Britannia. Most Scottish Protestants supported union with England to form a new strongly Protestant nation, which would resist the might and tyranny of the major Catholic powers in Europe, Spain and France. Several, like Andrew Melville, the founder of the Presbyteri-an church settlement, styled

them-Britishness:

a Scottish

Invention

It was Scots who were the

most vocal advocates of a

vibrant, imperial, Protestant

Great Britain.

Ian Bradley

selves ‘Scotto-Britons’ and advocated the full political union of England and Scotland following the Union of the Crowns in 1603 by James VI and I.

A good example of the enthusiasm and expectations that the 1603 Union of the Crowns created among the Scottish reformers can be found in the tract De Unione Insulae Britannicae, written in 1605 by David Hume, a leading Pres-byterian scholar in post-Reformation Scotland. He argued for the full union of England and Scotland, drawing in-spiration in almost equal measure from

The Union of England and Scotland, Peter Paul Rubens, c.1633.

A united Britannia, at once

stronger and more varied than its

component parts, would lead

a Europe of independent states

(4)

HISTORY

MATTERS

Ian Bradley is Reader in Church History at the University of St Andrews and author of Believing in Britain: The Spiritual Identity of Britishness (I.B. Tauris 2008).

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray Scottish writing entered its ‘British’

phase, which was to reach its apogee in the work of Walter Scott.

The best known product of this ‘British’ phase of Scottish literature was the song ‘Rule Britannia’, written in 1740 for a masque about Alfred the Great by James Thomson, a son of the Manse who hailed from Ednam in the Borders and studied arts and divinity at Edinburgh University. Thomson, who initially thought of following his father as a Church of Scotland minister but chose rather to pursue a literary career in London, wrote numerous poems promoting Britain as a cultural

and ethnic amalgam embodying the principles of diversity in unity. Like many 18th-century Scots who took up the idea of Britishness, he did so partly to make clear that Britain included more than England. Sending an early draft of his poem, ‘Summer: A Pane-gyric on Britain’ to a fellow Scottish poet, he observed: ‘The English are a little vain in themselves, and their country. Britannia too includes our native country, Scotland.’ The opening line of what is often taken to be the first British novel, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) – ‘I was born in the northern part of this United Kingdom’ – provides a further example of dual Scottish-British identity.

Two towering Scots of the 20th century, both sons of the Manse deeply imbued with the muscular Christian values of Presbyterianism, made a significant and enduring contribution to the notion of Britishness. John Buchan, whose hyphenated identity was expressed in the fact that his favourite landscapes were the Scottish Borders and the Cotswolds, created in his famous ‘shockers’ a quintessential-ly British genre of adventure stories. John Reith almost single-handedly constructed one of the great modern

institutional embodiments of Brit-ishness, the BBC. His determination to invest royal and national occasions with quasi-religious significance earned him the sobriquet ‘Gold Mi-crophone Pursuivant’. He also made sure that the BBC expressed Britain to itself and to the world in all its variety by establishing separate services for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions, which both opted out of the national UK output and also contributed to it their own distinctive accents and cultures.

The reasons for the decline of a sense of British identity among Scots over the last 50 years or so include the ending of the British Empire, out of which they had done so well, the economic woes consequent on the collapse of traditional industries like coal mining and ship building and the erosion of Protestant identity. Ironi-cally, that part of the United Kingdom which was once the most consciously British is now the least so. Yet occa-sionally this old attachment re-surfac-es, as when the most recent Scottish prime minister, Gordon Brown, cham-pioned Britishness and sought to stem what seems an unstoppable tide in terms of narrower and more exclusive identities across the United Kingdom.

Churchill and Hitler painted

scenes of the Western Front

while in remarkably close

proximity to one another.

CHURCHILL AND HITLER did not have much in common, but they shared one interest: both were amateur painters, who took their brushes, sketchpads, pencils and paintboxes into the trenches of the Western Front.

Churchill’s paintings had colours liberally applied, while Hitler’s style was classical and his aversion to ‘modern’ art would come to fruition when his Nazi regime confiscated, sold or destroyed works of ‘degenerate’ art and either banned the artists who created them from practising their craft – even when, like Emil Nolde, they were Nazis – or drove them into exile. Churchill also shared Hitler’s aversIon to modernism, telling his painter friend Alfred Munnings that if he ever saw Picasso in Piccadilly he would ‘kick him up the arse’.

Hitler’s early ambition was to become an artist, but having twice been turned down by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, in 1907 and 1908, he eked out an existence painting postcards of city scenes, which he either hawked around cafes or sold through middle men. By 1914 Hitler had drifted to Munich, where he joined a Bavarian reserve infantry regiment on the outbreak of war.

Churchill’s introduction to art came much later in life. As Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty he was a key minister in the prewar Asquith ad-ministration. However in May 1915, aged 40, he fell like Lucifer after the Gallipoli campaign, which he had extravagantly backed, and was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

A month later, a frustrated Churchill was prowling the garden of his Surrey country home, Hoe Farm, when he came upon his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline ‘Goonie’ Churchill, painting a watercolour. Although according to his youngest daughter, Mary Soames,

Nigel Jones

At Arms,

At Easel

The best known

product of this

‘British’ phase of

Scottish literature

was the song ‘Rule

Britannia’

(5)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORY

MATTERS

Nigel Jones is author of Peace and War: Britain in 1914 (Head of Zeus, 2014).

Churchill had never set foot inside a gallery, he was intrigued. He joined Goonie at the easel, soon tired of pallid watercolours and graduated to oils.

Churchill opened an account with the art shop Robinsons in London’s Long Acre. American-born Hazel Lavery, wife of the Irish portraitist John Lavery, was summoned to give Churchill his first formal art lesson, advising him to attack the canvas with the same vigour he brought to politics: ‘Splash into the turpentines, wallop into the blue and white ...’

Always subject to depression, Churchill told the poet and diplomat Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: ‘There is more blood than paint upon these hands’. Indeed Blunt believed that had it not been for painting, Churchill might have gone mad.

In November 1915 Churchill resigned from government, feeling he could best assuage his guilt over Gallipoli by serving as a soldier. He was promised command of a brigade by his friend Field Marshal Sir John French, but agreed to learn the ropes of trench warfare first, attaching

himself to the Grenadier Guards. When Churchill arrived at the front, Hitler was billeted in the French village of Fournes-en-Weppes near Fromelles. He had already had a vicious ‘blooding’ in the First Battle of Ypres, after which he was promoted to corporal, decorated with the Iron Cross and served as a regimental runner.

The first six months of 1916 was a period of relative quiet and Hitler took advantage of the lull to paint and draw (he was nicknamed ‘the artist’ by his comrades), though his earliest surviving war picture is from December 1914, of the ruined church of St Nicholas in Messines (now Mesen), where he was quartered in the crypt.

Just ten miles away was Ploegsteert (known as ‘Plug Street’ to the British), which had seen bitter fighting. On January 5th, 1916 (Temporary) Lieuten-ant-Colonel Winston Churchill arrived as commander of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. He and Hitler would never be in such close proximity again.

In December Churchill’s ally Sir John French had been removed as com-mander of the BEF to make way for Sir Douglas Haig. Asquith reneged on French’s promise to give Churchill a brigade. Churchill had irritated Asquith in Cabinet by his ceaseless bombardment of ideas for running the war more ener-getically and the prime minister vetoed his former colleague’s promotion.

Churchill was dismayed – antici-pating his promotion he had already ordered a brigadier-general’s uniform – but he played the good soldier. He took up his command with good grace and quickly won round the initially sceptical officers from a battalion that had seen major losses during the battle of Loos.

Meanwhile Corporal Hitler contin-ued reading and sketching, aloof from his comrades. He refused to join in his mess mates’ drinking, still less their visits to the bars and brothels of nearby Lille. Though Hitler took the tram from Fournes to Lille with the rest, unless there was a theatre show or concert to see, he mooched alone around the city’s streets, or sat on benches with his

sketchbook, drawing buildings. Churchill’s battalion held a 1,000-yard wide section of the front before Ploegsteert. Its HQ was located in Laurence farm, an already partially ruined domain 500 yards behind the front line; it is depicted in one of Churchill’s paintings. Another, ‘Plug Street’, shows the village itself under shellfire, with cotton-wool puffs of explosions in the sky. Unlike Hit-ler’s strictly representational work, Churchill’s style bears the influence of Impressionism.

Though described as being as visible and voluble ‘as a baby elephant’, Churchill somehow survived un-scathed, but during the three months he held command his battalion saw 15 men killed and 123 wounded, a casualty rate of 20 per cent.

Churchill’s military career ended in May 1916. Satisfied that he had done his duty and atoned for Gallipoli, Churchill was granted permission to return to England. He resumed his political career and by the end of the war was a minister once more. Hitler was not so fortunate. Wounded in the thigh by shrapnel on the Somme, after recovering he returned to his regiment to take part in the battles of Arras and Passchendaele in 1917. Gassed at the end of the war, he heard of the Armistice while still in hospital and resolved then and there – or so he later claimed – to enter politics.

That decision also ended Hitler’s artistic career. Churchill continued to paint with characteristic energy, producing an output of over 500 pictures, chiefly landscapes, right up to and through the Second World War. Many can be viewed by the public at his Kent country home, Chartwell. Hitler’s work occasionally surfaces at auction houses but, because of the artist’s notoriety, are often withdrawn from sale. When sales do go ahead, they fetch high prices, far in excess of their artistic merit.

The two war leaders’ opinions of each other’s artistic endeavours was never recorded. Above: Adolf Hitler’s Shelter in Fournes, 1915. Left: Winston Churchill’s Plug Street, 1916.

(6)

HISTORY

MATTERS

Jan RÜger is Reader in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. HISTORY AFTER HOBSBAWM, a major

international conference taking place in Senate House, London, from April 29th to May 1st, 2014, will bring together some of the most influential historians from across the world to discuss the current state of their discipline. The event draws inspiration from the capa-cious legacy of the late Eric Hobsbawm, who taught at Birkbeck, University of London for most of his life. Many of the topics that he wrote about are still of crucial relevance today, includ-ing the rise of capitalism, nationalism and imperialism. But how should we go forward in our understanding of the past? The conference will seek to address this question.

One of the many issues that will be discussed by speakers including Mark Mazower (Columbia), Catherine Hall (UCL), Rana Mitter (Oxford), Antoinette Burton (Illinois) and Maya Jasanoff (Harvard) is the relationship between British, European and world history. For Hobsbawm there was never a question that British history had to be under-stood in a European as much as a global context. He explained this succinctly in an essay entitled ‘The Curious History of Europe’, which was first published in 1996. ‘Europe’, he wrote, was a ‘shifting, divisible and flexible concept’, not a clearly defined territory or homogenous political entity. The historian’s task was to explore Europe’s diversity – and Britain as part of that patchwork of dif-ferent European pasts. In Hobsbawm’s writing this task went hand in hand with an understanding of imperialism and globalisation, both of which defined the 19th century. It was ‘impossible to sever European history from world history’. Britain’s past had to be under-stood in both contexts.

This insistence on the link between European and world history came long

before the ‘global turn’ in historiogra-phy. In his trilogy on the 19th century (The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848; The Age of Capital, 1848-1875; The Age of Empire, 1875-1914), published between 1962 and 1987, Hobsbawm offered a narrative that continuously interweaved British, Euro-pean and global pasts. Apart from the sheer craftsmanship of his writing, what made the trilogy work so well was that it was based on the belief in an underlying structure that explained the 19th century. As he put it in the preface to The Age of Revolution, his approach was to trace ‘the transformation of the world between 1789 and 1848 insofar as it was due to what is here called the “dual revolutions” – the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution’. Any part of the world that was touched in a lasting fashion by these two developments was to be covered; any part not affected by the ‘dual

revolutions’ was not to be included. If the book’s focus was primarily Euro-pean it was so ‘because in this period the world – or at least a large part of it – was transformed from a Europe-an, or rather a Franco-British, base’.

It was this focus on socio- economic change which gave coher-ence to Hobsbawm’s trilogy, rather than an overarching geographical or political definition. At the same time it allowed him to integrate Britain into his survey. The United Kingdom was a key factor in the socio-economic transformation called the Industrial Revolution and a pioneer of Europe-an imperialism. How could it not be at the heart of a narrative aimed at explaining how Europe had changed, allowing it to turn outwards in the 19th century and take on a temporarily global role?

Two central aspects of this inter-pretation have since been profoundly challenged. First, the underlying Marxist model which functioned as the trilogy’s interpretative backbone: the belief in the ‘process of revolu-tionary transformations’ as the key to an understanding of the 19th century. Second, the Eurocentric perspec-tive that dominated in Hobsbawm’s explanation of the period. How to write a history of the modern world in which ‘Europe’ is neither at the centre nor just a province, how to construct a narrative which takes account of the many varied intersections between Britain, Europe and the world, as well as the undetermined character of the 19th century, remain key questions for modern historians. They are ques-tions that will be hotly debated at the History After Hobsbawm conference.

Since the completion of the

Marxist historian’s trilogy in

1987, history has changed,

but in what ways?

Jan RÜger

History After

Hobsbawm

Central aspects of Hobsbawm’s

interpretation have since been

profoundly challenged, not least

the underlying Marxist model

To find out more about the History After Hobsbawm conference go to: www.bbk.ac.uk/historyafterhobsbawm. To encourage the next generation of historians, Birkbeck has set up a fund for student scholarships. If you would like to know more, or would like to make a contribution, visit: www.bbk. ac.uk/alumni/supporting-birkbeck/ eric-hobsbawm-scholarships

Eric Hobsbawm by Mark Boxer.

(7)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 7 CLONTARF IS NOW an affluent

suburb north of Dublin, but a thou-sand years ago it was the setting for an unprecedented event in Ireland’s history. Good Friday 1014 saw the Battle of Clontarf, an all-day affair of infernal carnage, where longstanding animosities climaxed in a spectacular deluge of bloodshed.

To commemorate the anniversary, the Clontarf community is hosting a slew of diverse events that range from historical society lectures to a rugby match between Clontarf and the Barbarians FC. According to the website, www.clontarf.ie, there will also be an interactive history display where visitors can see if they are mighty enough to wear the armour and carry the weapons of the 1014 combatants. There are walking tours that explore the old Viking Dublin as well as Brian Boru Millennium Cele-bration tours that take visitors to the very site where, by most accounts, the old leader was slain.

Dublin City Council will hold a Battle of Clontarf Festival on Easter Weekend (April 19th and 20th) at St Anne’s Park in Clontarf. This free festival will include many exhibitions as well as sword and archery sessions

for participants of all ages. Each day will culminate in a 45-minute re-enact-ment of the battle, featuring hundreds of would-be warriors – including ones on horseback – appearing in an event billed as ‘the biggest living history battle re-enactment ever held in Ireland’.

It will be interesting to see the degree to which the Vikings are portrayed as the main enemy, as they often were in contemporary annals. On the other hand, modern historians tend to stress the Celt-on-Celt violence between high-king Brian Boru, ruler of Munster, and the rebel king of Leinster, Máelmórda mac Murchada.

One possible reason for the annals’ emphasis on the Viking enemy was religious. Though some Vikings had converted to Christianity, many re-mained heathen, which meant that the chroniclers tended to view the Battle of Clontarf as a triumph for Christianity in Ireland. Another reason for stressing Viking hostility was that the annals were composed by monks, whose monasteries were the primary targets of Viking pillage. Clontarf 1014 was painted as such a nationalistic struggle for Ireland that it became the medieval equivalent of the Easter Rising of 1916, according to Seán Duffy, author of the recently published Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Gill and Macmillan),

Commemorating Clontarf

Ray Cavanaugh

One of the bloodiest and most decisive battles in Irish

history took place a thousand years ago this month.

not least because of the fact that it took place on Good Friday, with all its associations of Christian martyrdom.

Adding to the drama of Clontarf was the fact that Brian Boru died during the battle (though he was almost certainly not an active com-batant). Even Norse writers waxed lyrical over him: ‘Brjánn fell ok helt velli’ (Brian fell and was victorious). His victory and martyr-like death made him a national hero, celebrated for having trumped the Vikings in this struggle for Ireland’s destiny. The narrative of Brian Boru’s life and death sounded compelling, so the poets and chroniclers went with it and it is the harp of Brian Boru that became and remains Ireland’s national symbol.

There has long been disagreement over how Brian Boru died. Some said that he was killed in hand-to-hand combat. This is unlikely, though, as he was at least in his mid-60s by the time of Clontarf. The more probable account (and the one to which Brian Boru’s biographer Duffy subscribes) is that the old king was killed in his tent, where he sat waiting for the battle’s end, when he was discovered by a fleeing Viking mercenary.

This assailant has been identified as Brodir, a commander of the Vikings on the Isle of Man. He was unable to savour the assassination for long, as he was reportedly tracked down and slaughtered by the day’s end. Inter-estingly, Brodir had a brother named Ospak, who actually fought on Brian Boru’s side. It is uncertain if Ospak was, like his brother, a mercenary; he sacrificed much in the battle, as he was not only injured but he also suf-fered the loss of two sons. In this last respect he shared something with the fallen Brian Boru, one of whose sons also died at Clontarf.

A thousand years later, this one-time venue of wrath and fury is now a site of commemoration and – for some – prayer. The anniversary day of April 23rd will feature an ecumenical service to commemorate the lives cut short on both sides.

Ray Cavanaugh is a historian of medieval Ireland.

Battle of Clontarf

by Hugh Frazer, 1826. This painting has returned to Ireland in time for

(8)

One of the most significant figures in Christian history was born in 1509 in France, at Noyon in the Picardy area, as Jehan or Jean Cauvin. His later oppo-nents would contemptuously label his followers Picard or later still Calvinist, which was originally a term of abuse. His father, a lawyer, intended him for the priesthood and sent him to the University of Paris when he was 14, but he decided not to be a priest. In his student days he was drawn to the rising tide of ideas that would soon be labelled Protestantism, which believed that the Roman Catholic Church had fallen prey to materialism and superstition and called for a return to the original Christianity of the earliest centuries. He would later write that God ‘subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life’.

Calvin became so identified with ‘reformism’ that he could not safely stay in France. In 1535 he arrived in Basel in the Swiss Confederation, where in 1536 he published the first edition, in Latin, of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, later known simply as the Institutes. Purport-ing to teach ‘almost the whole sum of godliness’, it attracted the attention of other Protestant enthusiasts. He pub-lished revised editions of it for the rest of his life and it would make him famous.

Leaving Basel in 1536 for Strasbourg in Germany, Calvin went by way of Geneva, an independent city just outside Switzerland, which had attracted reformist refugees from France and Italy. One of them, a Frenchman called Guillaume Farel, persuaded Calvin to stay and help to establish Protestantism there. Farel and Calvin were too inflexi-ble for the Geneva city council, which in 1538 ordered them to leave. They went to Strasbourg, where in 1540 Calvin married a widow called Idelette de Bure.

Her death only nine years later would be a dreadful blow to him.

By 1541 Calvin’s reputation had grown to the point where the Geneva council asked him back to put the chaotic religious situation there in order, which he did. He believed that the Protestant Church should be run by pastors and teachers to care for and guide the laity, elders to help the pastors maintain discipline and deacons to run charitable work. Citizens who refused to accept Calvinism were expelled from the city or, in extreme cases, executed as heretics.

On the surface at least, Calvin was a forbidding and joyless figure. Although he believed that the very few human beings who would attain salvation would gain it, and were predestined to gain it, through the grace of God, not through leading a good moral life, he took an uncompromisingly austere moral line and sternly disapproved of sexual misbehaviour, drunkenness, ribald songs, swearing, gambling and dancing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch put it in his

study of the Reformation, although Calvin enjoyed playing the equivalent of shove ha’penny and an occasional game of quoits, ‘he was not inclined to convivi-ality … He did, however, relish getting his own way, which he identified with doing the will of God’.

Doing the will of God kept Calvin working desperately hard. He preached hundreds of sermons and conducted innumerable baptisms and weddings. He maintained a vigorous correspond-ence with religious and political leaders all over Europe, as well as writing widely circulated commentaries on the scriptures, including much of the Old Testament and every book in the New Testament except Revelation. In 1559 he founded the Geneva Academy, where students were trained for the minis-try, which the Scottish reformer John Knox called ‘the most perfect school of Christ seen on earth since the days of the Apostles’. Protestant immigrants, meanwhile, nourished new industries and businesses and Geneva prospered. Its printing industry was a success for the city’s economy, as well as an efficient Calvinist propaganda machine.

The burden of so much work put a growing strain on Calvin’s health. In 1558 he came down with quartan fever, or malaria, but laboured on to complete a hugely enlarged and, as he intend-ed, definitive edition of his Institutes to leave to posterity. Michael Mullett in his biography of Calvin quotes an admiring contemporary, Theodore Beza, who described him in 1563 as ‘exhausted by labour’ and ‘broken down by suffering’. He had lung trouble, gout and excruci-ating pain in his kidneys and bladder.

Calvin was 54 when the end came the following year and the council recorded that he had ‘gone to God’. He was buried with little ceremony in, it is thought, the Cimetière des Rois. The grave was left unmarked, though in the 19th century a stone was placed on the one traditionally identified as the last resting place of the man Beza called ‘the greatest light there was in this world for the direction of the church of God’.

Gone to God: John Calvin in a 16th-century French portrait.

Months

Past

MAY

By Richard Cavendish

MAY 27th, 1564

John Calvin

dies in Geneva

(9)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 9 The Caped Crusader made his entrance

on the US comic book scene in the monthly Detective Comics. His creator was Bob Kane, an artist and writer aiming to find a new hero to rival Superman, who had appeared the pre-vious year. Kane did sketches of a char-acter with wings like those of a bat and showed them to a comic book writer called Bill Finger. The two men, both in their mid-twenties, collaborated on the Batman stories, though it was Kane who got all the credit and most of the money, to Finger’s eventual resentment.

In his ordinary human persona the character they invented was a rich, idle playboy called Bruce Wayne. Finger coined the name from Robert the Bruce and ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, an 18th- century American general in the revolu-Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera went through a troubled evolution, which he once said would earn him a martyr’s crown. In 1803 the composer, then in his thirties, was commissioned by Emanuel Schikaneder, who ran the recently opened Theater an der Wien in Vienna, to write an opera set in ancient Rome and called Vestas Feuer (‘The Vestal Flame’). Beethoven made little progress with Schikaneder’s

libretto, which he found uninspiring. He said it could have been created by the Viennese apple-women.

Financial problems forced Schikaneder to sell the theatre in 1804, which cancelled Beethoven’s contract. The composer now fell in love with Countess Josephine Deym, a widow to whom he wrote passionate letters and told her ‘you have con-quered me’. Their relationship ended in 1807, but meanwhile the new Theater an der Wien management had renewed his opera commission and he had written a different work with a libretto adapted from one by the French playwright, Jean- Nicolas Bouilly, which had been used for French operas earlier.

Set in Spain in the late 18th century and called Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal, it was about the heroism and devoted love of Leonore, who disguises herself as a young man called Fidelio to rescue her husband Florestan. He is being slowly starved to death in solitary confinement in a dungeon by an evil official called Pizarro. Beethoven’s version was called Leonora at first, hence the Leonora overtures, and later Fidelio. The composer’s passion for Josephine,

explanation supplied by Finger, he was driven by seeing his parents murdered by a street thug when he was a child.

Batman was instantly popular and sales zoomed still higher when his young sidekick Robin was introduced by Finger in 1940. There were female Robins later on. Many other writers and artists were employed on Batman tales over the years and he starred in films, on television and in video games. Recent suggestions that the early Batman was gay have been fiercely disputed. From the 1950s Superman and Batman worked together in some stories. The rogues’ gallery of villains Batman worsted included the Joker, the Riddler and Catwoman, by whom in one tale he had a son. In the hugely profitable 1989 Batman film, the Joker was so brilliantly played by Jack Nicholson that he stole the limelight from Batman himself.

Finger died in 1974, Kane in 1998. Together they created a US cultural phenomenon, who long outlived them.

O what a joy: the poster for the premiere of Fidelio at Vienna’s Kärt-nertortheater. MAY 23rd, 1814

First performance of

Beethoven’s Fidelio

his longing for conjugal love and the ‘solitary dungeon’ of his worsening deafness may have helped to inspire him, but when the work was per-formed in 1805 it was a flop and was dropped after just three performanc-es. Beethoven revised it and short-ened it from three acts to two, but it achieved only two performances in 1806 and the composer fell out with the theatre director. It would not be seen in public for another eight years.

In 1814 the Viennese court theatre suggested reviving the opera and Beethoven agreed, provided it was revised. A drastically altered libret-to was written by Georg Joseph Treitschke, who Beethoven thanked for salvaging ‘a stranded ship’. He wrote some magnificent new music for what was now definitely Fidelio, including a new overture. The final version was successfully presented at the Kärtnertortheater and a gala evening in September was organised for the crowned heads and leading political figures attending the Con-gress of Vienna to reorganise Europe after Napoleon’s abdication. With its appropriate central theme of liber-ation from tyranny, Fidelio has been part of the repertoire ever since.

tionary war against the British. He lived quietly in Gotham City (which was New York City), while as Batman he used his genius-level intelligence, supreme physi-cal abilities and indomitable will to wage a ruthless war against criminals. In an

Birth of a super-hero: the Detective

Comics edition featuring Batman’s first appearance.

Batman makes

his debut

MAY 1st, 1939

(10)

I

N 1740 Horace Mann was appointed as Britain’s repre-sentative at the court of Tuscany and took up residence at Casa Manetti in Florence. Lacking two of the principal requisites for employment as a diplomat in the 18th century – wealth and nobility – his post was almost certain-ly due to his famicertain-ly’s connection with Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. Armed instead with charm, innate courtesy and a meticulous attention to detail, Mann (c.1706-86) proved himself to be a natural diplomat.

One of his first visitors was Sir Robert’s son Horace Walpole (1717-97), who was making his Grand Tour accom-panied by the poet Thomas Gray. During the 12 months that Walpole stayed at Casa Manetti, he and Mann found they shared a remarkable similarity in their views and outlook. They were both refined and effeminate, delighted in scandal and gossip and laughed at the same jokes, although Wal-pole’s sense of the ridiculous was in a class of its own.

Though the two Horaces were never to meet again, since Mann would spend the rest of his life in Italy, the friendship formed during those months not only survived separation but initiated a correspondence that was to last until Mann’s death 46 years later. This sequence of letters – nearly 1,800

Caroline Chapman delves into a wide-ranging and prolific correspondence, spanning half of

the 18th century, between two men who spent just a year in the same country: the British court

diplomat to Florence, Horace Mann, and the historian and patron of the arts, Horace Walpole.

Horace

to

Horace

of them – fill seven of the 42 volumes in the Yale edition of Walpole’s correspondence, edited by Wilmarth Lewis. ‘We now come to the great Andean range of the Walpolian continent’, writes Lewis in his introduction. ‘For sweep and variety and the procession of great events it is unrivalled among Walpole’s correspondences.’

Walpole had been a great success with Mann’s Italian friends. They had been charmed by his wit and conversa-tional brilliance and eager to rub shoulders with the son of the most powerful man in Britain. He was feted by even the grandest of the Florentine nobility, who were renowned for their exclusivity and reluctance to entertain foreigners. Their liaisons and intrigues became one of the main topics of Mann’s letters.

There is no doubt that Mann’s letters are not a patch on Walpole’s. They were dismissed by one critic as being ‘absolutely unreadable’. But it is hardly fair to compare the letters of a busy diplomat, obliged to compose lengthy dispatches and maintain a large official correspondence, with a man who Lewis believed had ‘brought the art of letter-writing to the highest point it has reached in our language’. Horace Mann wrote from an urgent need Above left: British

gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s home in Florence by Thomas Patch c.1763-65, with Mann in blue. The paintings on the wall are of fire-works on the Arno and a portrait of Mann. Above right: Horace Walpole painted c.1741 by Rosalba Giovanna Carriera.

A TALE OF TWO HORACES

(11)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 11 Mann’s letter to Walpole of March 11th, 1742: ‘How extremely kind and obliging you are to write to me at a time that I know you must be so hurried as not to have one moment’s peace. If I could avoid being miserable without your letters I would insist on your not writing at all. Write me but three lines to say you are well, and that all goes well and I shall be happy.’

(12)

A TALE OF TWO HORACES

The night before Walpole left Florence,

Mann wrote: ‘One thing alone makes

me really happy, which is that I am

sure you love me and are convinced of

my most sincere and tender affection

for you’

Right: Sir Horace Mann, painted by John Astley in Florence, c.1751, and given by Mann to Horace Walpole for Strawberry Hill a year later. Below: Bernardo Bellotto’s painting of the Arno in Florence with the Ponte Vecchio, c.1745.

to communicate with a dear friend. Walpole wrote partly for the same reason, but also as a means of recording the history of his own times for the benefit of posterity. To this end, Mann was required periodically to return Walpole’s letters to England. They were then transcribed into six folio books, the originals presumably later destroyed, as they have never been found.

W

ITH HIS EYE SO FIRMLY fixed on posterity, did Walpole continue the correspondence with Mann purely as a means of obtaining an accurate picture of events in southern Europe? Lewis certainly thought so. Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, one of Walpole’s 20th-century biogra-phers, believed that Walpole chose his correspondents with care, so that ‘each particular branch of his activities and interests ... should be regularly depicted’, and that should a correspondent fail for some reason another was found to take his place to ensure there was no break in the record.

Even if Mann was selected as one piece of Walpole’s great historical jigsaw, there is sufficient evidence through-out the letters to show that Walpole was deeply attached to him. In 1758 he ends a letter: ‘Adieu! my dear child – shall we never meet? Are we always to love one another at the discretion of a sheet of paper?’

Of the depth of Horace Mann’s feelings for Walpole there is no question: on the night before Walpole finally

left Florence in spring 1741, Mann wrote: ‘I am more miserable than I wish you to conceive ... One thing alone makes me really happy, which is that I am sure you love me and are convinced of my most sincere and tender affection for you.’ Their friendship was the single most im-portant element in his life. He had friends in Florence, both English and Italian, and was a gracious host to the endless stream of Grand Tourists who passed through the city, but few of these friendships survived the tests of time and distance.

If there was any calculation in Mann’s attachment to Walpole it was limited to his need to be on good terms with the son of his patron (this motive naturally ceased with Sir Robert’s death in March 1745) and, in the 1760s, to his reliance on Walpole to use his influence to speed up both his long-awaited promotion and his investment with the Order of the Bath, an honour that had been promised to him on several occasions but had never materialised. Walpole’s pleading on Mann’s behalf displayed the devotion of a true friend.

Walpole also proved his friendship whenever Mann had difficulties with members of his family who consistently failed either to communicate with him or to carry out his simplest requests. Walpole often had to step into the breach, either to chivvy or to conciliate. But with Galfri-dus, Mann’s much loved twin brother, there was no need for such intervention, as he and Walpole had developed a friendship independent of Horace. During Gal’s protracted last illness, it was Walpole who kept Mann informed of

(13)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 13 expressed by Mann in his reply appear to be built on his as-sumption that, should the government fall, Walpole would return to Italy:

My chief reason I solemnly declare to wish it [Sir Robert’s defeat], is that we may be quiet and happy here together far from the insults of saucy ungrateful people. In such melancholy circumstances what a satisfaction would it be to a heart that overflows with love and gratitude (as I assure you my eyes at present do with tears) to have it in his power to enjoy the only satisfaction it would have left – I say no more. You must certainly understand me; you have an heart too tender yourself not to excuse the want of utterance on such an occasion. This is startling stuff but, significantly, Mann’s heartfelt wish elicited no response from Walpole. Nor did he ever mention it again.

T

HE THREE WEEKS that letters took to make the journey between Florence and London occasion-ally led to repercussions. In spring 1745 Mann was still expressing his hopes that Walpole’s father would recover from his illness, when Sir Robert was already in his grave. ‘I wish I had received your letters on his death’, Walpole replied, ‘for it is most shocking to have all the thoughts opened again upon such a subject. It is the great disadvantage of a distant correspondence.’ And, when Mann once apologised for some of his letters arriving in batches, Walpole replied: ‘I am angry at your thinking that I can dislike to receive two or three of your letters at once. Do you take me for a child, and imagine, that though I like one plum tart, two may make me sick?’

There were also occasional signs of the correspondence flagging. These came not from Mann, for whom contact with his friend – and with all he represented – was essential A satire on the duel in 1743 between Horace Walpole’s uncle, also Horace, younger brother and political collaborator of Robert Walpole, on the right, and William Chet-wynd. Walpole described the scene in a letter to Mann of March 14th, 1743: ‘Don’t you delight in this duel? I expect to see it daubed up by some circuit painter on the ceiling of the salon at Woolterton.’ every stage in his decline and who shared his profound grief

when Gal died in 1756.

In 1773 it was Walpole who needed help when the eccentricities of his nephew George, 3rd Earl of Orford, turned to madness. Walpole tried to persuade George’s widowed mother, Lady Orford – then living in Florence – to return to England to deal with matters. But she refused and it was left to Walpole to attempt to salvage something out of the ruin of George’s affairs. But he was unable to save Houghton, the great house in Norfolk so lovingly created by his father, or to prevent the magnificent art collection from being sold to Catherine the Great. (Several of the paintings had come from Italy, their acquisition facilitated by Mann.) Walpole was badly shaken by the whole business, seeing it as further evidence of the ‘shipwreck’ of his family. In letter after letter he poured out his feelings to Mann.

In the early months of their correspondence the two Horaces addressed each other either as ‘My dear child’ or ‘My dearest child’. It was almost certainly Mann who initi-ated this form of address. He was 34 when they met and he must have regarded the 23-year-old who arrived at his door as little more than a precocious youth. The freedom with which they expressed their emotions and their frequent avowals of friendship may give the impression that they had been lovers during the months they had spent together at Florence. But in the 18th century it was not only women who gave free reign to their emotions; men, too, were allowed to ‘feel’ and to commit those feelings to paper.

However there is one letter from Mann that could indicate that he had wished for a more intimate relation-ship. It was written in response to a distressed letter from Walpole, who had arrived in England to find the govern-ment in crisis and his father’s long reign as prime minister about to end in humiliation and acrimony. The sentiments

(14)

to his wellbeing, but from Walpole. Lack of news was the usual cause. One letter ends: ‘Adieu! I have scribbled, and blotted and made nothing out, and in short, have nothing to say, so goodnight!’

Sometimes Walpole was in a cross mood when he sat down to write and he made no attempt to hide it. If my share in our correspondence was all considered, I could willingly break it off; it is wearisome to pursue the thread of folly for so many years, and with the same personages on the scene. Patriotism, prostitution, power, patriotism again – one ought to be new to it all, to see it in an amusing light – but I recollect that you wish to hear it, and I submit to run through a recapitulation of what moves little more than my contempt!

B

UT GIVEN A GOOD SCANDAL or a

political crisis and he instantly revived and wrote reams, several letters running to a dozen pages of his gilt-edged writing paper. The War of the Austrian Succession, the Jacobite Rising in Scotland and the other conflicts that erupted during the course of their correspondence generated long screeds, Mann fulfilling his role as Walpole’s informant on affairs in southern Europe in wearisome detail.

Walpole’s close acquaintance with Floren-tine society proved a rich seam of gossip for many of Mann’s letters: ‘I know you love to hear the most minute circumstances about your Florentine friends’, he wrote in 1741. One such ‘circumstance’ concerned a lady whose new lover, General Braitwitz, was an old friend of Mann. The general, Horace recounted, had insisted on her not following ‘the odious practice of the Italian ladies to wear breeches, such impediments to joy. This she objected to on account of the cold her lower parts might be exposed to’, but he soon removed this objection by presenting her with an under-pet-ticoat ‘made of fine beaver, lined with a scarlet shag, and richly laced with gold, which, and

the motion her blood is put into, she finds equivalent to the best velvet breeches’.

Walpole countered with details of matches, dispatches and scandals among the English aristocracy, although his tales lack the elements of farce so present in Mann’s anec-dotes about his Florentine friends. One of Mann’s letters contains an account of a ‘frightful’ new fashion brought to Florence by a famous opera singer; a broken engagement; two duels; the cost of keeping a mistress; and the deathbed scene of a certain general. Of the latter, Mann wrote: ‘The priests soon got about him and banished the two pictures [of his mistresses] from his bedside to make room for those of saints of both sexes.’

AS THE TWO MEN GREW OLDER, and their memories of the people concerned grew dim, such stories diminished. Walpole once admitted that he had no news because ‘living as I do among people, who, from your long absence, you cannot know, I should talk Hebrew to mention them to you’. But, as the number of Grand Tourists increased during the century, a pattern developed whereby Walpole wrote to

Walpole’s letter to Mann of

June 12th, 1753, beginning

‘Now you shall walk into the

house ...’ has become one of the

most quoted of all his letters

describing Strawberry Hill.

‘I like to be there better than I

have liked anywhere ...’

warn Mann of the arrival of lord this or earl that and, some months later, Mann would reply with news of their arrival and what he had thought of them.

Their health was another recurrent theme. We learn far more than we might wish to know about Horace Mann’s haemorrhoids and wince at the detailed descriptions of the operations he underwent to relieve them. His blinding headaches, from which he suffered all his life, haunt the correspondence, as do his periodic fevers and weak nerves.

With age, gout – a malady suffered by many men in the 18th century – increasingly featured in their letters, each of them insisting they had found the ultimate cure. One of Walpole’s remedies was to eat three pears every night for supper. Mann thought pears ‘at that hour must surely be improper’ and instead sat with his feet in cold water. But Walpole’s discovery of ‘bootikins’ – soft boots of flannel covered with oiled silk – transcended all other cures. He tried, unsuccessfully, to convert Mann to their use, even sending him a pair with instructions on how they should be applied. Walpole was to remain a convinced ‘bootikinist’,

(15)

MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 15

A TALE OF TWO HORACES

Left: A transcip-tion in Walpole’s own hand of a letter he sent to Mann on June 12th, 1753. The letter decribes the location of Straw-berry Hill exactly as it is depicted in a painting by Johann Heinrich Muntz’ (opposite left) of 1755-79. Right: Mann bought this small bust of Caligula and sent it to Walpole, who displayed it in a glass case at Strawberry Hill.

although once, when gout had confined him to bed for 22 weeks, he was driven to taking Sir Walter Raleigh’s cordial, a devastating mixture of hartshorn combined with ‘vipers flesh with their hearts and livers’. His subsequent letters make no mention of the result.

O

CCASIONALLY the correspondence throws up some fact that startles the modern reader, such as Mann’s observation that although ‘the better sort of people’ had embraced the newly discov-ered inoculation against smallpox, the poor saw the disease as a way of easing ‘them of the burden of their children, whom they cannot maintain ... and they make no mystery of owning it’. While this comment whisks the reader straight back to the 18th century, some of Horaces’ views could have been expressed today. Walpole’s account of his house being wilfully damaged during a break-in and of riots in London in 1771 in support of John Wilkes horrified Mann, who was convinced that England was descending into chaos. He blamed the ‘ill-regulated police’ for their

inability to control the mob and reflected sadly ‘what a piteous light all this puts our nation in abroad’.

Such weighty concerns are off-set by frivolous anec-dotes, for example, Walpole’s about a man who dropped dead outside White’s club. He was carried inside, where-upon everyone ‘immediately made bets whether he was dead or not and, when they were going to bleed him, the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet’.

At times, the letters convey an extraordinary sense of immediacy. ‘Nothing was ever so vexatious!’, Walpole once exclaimed. ‘I have just written you a long letter of three sides, and laid it upon the hearth to dry, while I stepped into [the] next room to fetch some sealing wax; a coal has fallen on it, and I find it all in flames’. And in the middle of one letter Mann suddenly cried: ‘Jesus! A large green-house that was near finished in the garden is this instant fallen down.’ Walpole’s intimate knowledge of Casa Manetti enabled him to visualise such incidents, but Mann was handicapped by having no mental picture of either Walpole’s house in London or of Strawberry Hill, the Twickenham villa Walpole purchased in 1747. Walpole had once confessed that he did not favour the country just ‘because it bears turnips well, or because you may gallop over it without meeting a tree’. He now revelled in beautifying his acres and cultivating his garden. From this point on his letters to Mann are suffused with his love for the place and

(16)

A TALE OF TWO HORACES

his endless pleasure in transforming it into a little Gothic ‘castle’. His letter to Mann of June 12th, 1753, which begins ‘Now you shall walk into the house...’, has become one of the most quoted of all his letters describing Strawberry Hill. ‘I like to be there’, he told Mann, ‘better than I have liked being anywhere since I came to England. I sigh after Florence ... I can truly say that I never was happy but at Florence’, a sentiment which must have been profound-ly gratifying to Mann. But he was not

altogether excluded from what had become the passion of Walpole’s life. He was able to contribute to the villa by seeking out objects with which to adorn it. And he had the satisfaction of knowing that several of the presents he had given Walpole found a home there.

The first of these was a portrait of Bianca Cappello, mistress and later wife of Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, which Walpole had admired when he had seen it in Florence. Walpole expressed his astonishment that ‘there is a man in this world’ who, despite the pressure of business and being ‘overrun by cubs and cubbacionis’ (as he called Grand Tourists), should not only remember that he had coveted the picture after 12 years had elapsed, but ‘whips it on board a ship, and sends it to his friend’. Twenty years later it remained a source of pleasure: ‘I am writing to you in the bow-window, of my delicious round tower with your Bianca Cappello over against me, and the setting sun behind me, throwing its golden rays all around ...’

I

N 1767 MANN SENT WALPOLE a small bronze head of the Roman emperor Caligula, one of the earliest finds during the excavation at Herculaneum. Mann had bought it from a ‘great antiquarian’ who ‘always carried it about in his pocket’. Walpole was enchanted by it, declaring that it was ‘the finest little bust that ever my eyes beheld. I gaze on it from morning to night’. When Walpole received yet another gift from Mann he expressed his gratitude in mock-angry terms: ‘Upon my honour I will pack my house at Strawberry Hill and send it to you, if you send me any more presents. Why, it is full of them, and belongs more to you than to me. Have you no mercy?’ Some five months later he was in nostalgic mood: ‘It is cruel to me never to see you here – what an addition would it be to the tranquility I have had the sense to give myself.’

In December 1775 Mann’s last surviving brother died. Initially there were doubts as to whether the family estate in Kent had been left to him. Walpole at once offered to contest the will on his friend’s behalf, should it prove neces-sary. Then, displaying a surprising obtuseness by presuming that Mann would move to England, he continues:

I flatter myself this thought delights you as much as it does me. I own it was the moment I always looked to. It was my comfort against the melancholy idea of our never meeting again. You must come to your country – and, I trust, to your estate.

Mann’s reply listed his reasons why leaving Florence was out of the question: his advanced age (he was nearly 70), the long journey, the climate and the high cost of living. ‘What should I ever do in the great town of London, without employment or pursuit of any kind, and without health and strength to partake of the fatiguing amuse-ments of it?’ Clearly, the prospect of trying to start his life afresh in his native country appalled him. ‘It would be

imprudent’, he wrote, ‘to quit such an employment as this which I now enjoy with tranquility suitable to my age.’

Walpole was deeply hurt by Mann’s letter: ‘You have chilled me so thoroughly by the coldness of your answer, and by the dislike you express to England, that I shall certainly press you no more to come. I thought at least it would have cost you a struggle.’ Mann’s reply demonstrated that it had indeed been a struggle: his brother’s death had not been unexpected and he ‘had had full time to make all my reflections upon it, and it was then that the conflict in my mind was great indeed’. A month later Walpole was resigned: ‘Your return might have opened a warm channel of affection, which above 30 years could not freeze; but I am sure you know my steadiness too well, to suspect me of cooling to you, because we are both grown too old to meet again.’

This episode had upset them both, but their correspondence soon resumed its usual steady course, though ruffled now by the drip of bad news from America, as Britain fought to retain its colonies. Occasionally an anni-versary is marked: ‘I shall ever remember’, Horace mused in January 1780, ‘the year 1739 as the happiest of my life, as it procured me the greatest consolation I have ever since had, in your most inestimable friendship’. And from Walpole: ‘A correspondence of near half a century is, I suppose, not to be paralleled in the annals of the Post Office!’

Horace Mann’s last letter to Horace Walpole, written in a trembling hand on September 5th, 1786, ends: ‘Adieu my dear Sir, I am quite exhausted.’ He died nine weeks later. Caroline Chapman is the author of Elizabeth and Georgiana: The Duke of Devonshire and his Two Duchesses (John Murray, 2002).

Galfridus Mann by John Astley, in a companion portrait to the one of his brother that hung with it in the refectory at Strawberry Hill.

|

SPY DIARIES

BETWEEN 1939 AND 1953 Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counter-espionage, kept a diary. Almost every working day he would dictate an entry, often several pages long, to his secretary Margot Huggins, who would then type it up and lock it in the personal safe of MI5’s director general. The diary was so secret it had its own code name: ‘Wallflowers’.

This diary is probably the single most important British intelligence document of the 20th century. It describes in metic-ulous detail the daily workings of MI5 (the Security Service), MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) and other parts of the Whitehall intelligence machine: the turf battles, the personalities, anecdotes, suc-cesses and failures. It also tells an extraor-dinary story of treachery and betrayal.

Liddell, a First World War veteran and holder of the Military Cross, was intelli-gent, sensitive, witty and quite lonely. His marriage to an eccentric aristocrat, Calypso Baring, fell dramatically apart when she ran off with her half-brother to California, taking their four children with her. From then on Liddell lived alone in a flat off Sloane Street and seems to have found it therapeutic to unload his thoughts into his journal. Like all the best diarists, he confides in himself.

Liddell was part of the wartime circle of hard-drinking, highly educated, faintly bo-hemian intelligence officers that gathered frequently at the home of Tommy Harris, a wealthy half-Spanish art dealer who would gain fame as the MI5 case officer for Juan Pujol, the double agent codenamed ‘Garbo’. Harris and his wife Hilda were generous hosts and their Chelsea home, with its large wine cellar, became an open house for spies during the war.

Kim Philby of MI6 was a regular at the Harris salon: ‘You’d drop in to see who was around’, Philby remembered, to enjoy the company of fellow intelligence officers in an ‘atmosphere of haute cuisine and grand vin’. Another regular guest was Guy Burgess, a friend of Philby from Cambridge, who had been recruited into MI6 before the war, flamboyant in his homosexuality, faintly malodorous and wildly unpredictable. Here, too, came their friend Anthony Blunt, a Cambridge art scholar and another homosexual.

Harris’s evening soirées offered a retreat where in-telligence officers could relax, drink and gossip togeth-er. Members of the secret services, forbidden to speak of their work to their wives and families, bonded in this strange, elite world. ‘It was an organisation in which a large proportion of one’s colleagues, male and female, were personal friends’, wrote Nicholas Elliott, Kim