Where's Eleanor? Hollywood's English History

I was doing a little research on Eleanor of Aquitaine's annulment of her marriage King Louis VII of France, which was granted in 1152. Soon after being freed from that marriage and getting her lands back, Eleanor married Henry, the Duke of Normandy, soon to be crowned the King of England in 1154. Although she had borne only daughters for Louis, Eleanor gave Henry several sons: William, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. One note about Eleanor and Louis VII's daughters: they were not declared illegitimate, since their parents had married in good faith in spite of their degree of consanguinity. Also note that Henry and Eleanor were even more closely related than Louis and Eleanor!

As viewers of The Lion in Winter know, Eleanor and Henry endured some marital problems--she helped her sons in rebellions against Henry and he had her imprisoned. He let her out for Christmas and other holidays, but as Robert Bolt's play imagines, those were not happy reunions!

Reading further about her life after Henry died and Richard freed her, I noticed that Eleanor had governed England during Richard's absences and survived in fact into King John's reign. She had helped raise the ransom demanded by Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor (who had been excommunicated by Pope Celestine III for imprisoning a Crusader). She was the regent in England while Richard was imprisoned.

That brought to mind those two great Hollywood movies about England while Richard is held by the Emperor, Ivanhoe and The Adventures of Robin Hood. Where's Eleanor in those movies? In both of them, John is trying to usurp Richard's throne. The historical John did try to offer Henry IV some money, along with King Philip II of France, to keep Richard prisoner until Michaelmas (September 29) in 1194, but Henry refused that offer. Richard I was finally released on February 4, 1194. 

So once again, for the sake of a good story, Hollywood misleads us. Eleanor was in charge, not Prince John or Sir Guy of Gisbourne, in England. I'll let you know soon why I was researching Eleanor of Aquitaine and her annulment from King Louis VII.

Hollywood History: Richard the Lionheart

On Wednesday last week, Turner Classic Movies showed a series of Medieval swashbucklers (plus of a couple of outliers (set during the reigns of Charles II of England and of Philip II of Spain)--among them three featuring Richard the Lionheart: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, and King Richard and the Crusaders.

The first two pose a Hollywood historical problem: did Richard the Lionheart come home and confront his usurping brother John with the help of Robin Hood and his merry men or did he arrive during a tournament duel between Ivanhoe and De Bois-Guilbert? What both movie's Richard the Lionheart have in common is that he wants to create unity in England between Norman and Anglo-Saxon, restoring order and justice after removing his brother John and his followers.

As the BBC notes, however, Richard I had little interest in ruling over England and certainly forgave John for any attempts to usurp power while he was held for ransom:

As king, Richard's chief ambition was to join the Third Crusade, prompted by Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in 1187. To finance this, he sold sheriffdoms and other offices and in 1190 he departed for the Holy Land. In May, he reached Cyprus where he married Berengaria, daughter of the king of Navarre. Richard arrived in the Holy Land in June 1191 and Acre fell the following month. In September, his victory at Arsuf gave the crusaders possession of Joppa. Although he came close, Jerusalem, the crusade's main objective, eluded him. Moreover, fierce quarrels among the French, German and English contingents provided further troubles. After a year's stalemate, Richard made a truce with Saladin and started his journey home.

Bad weather drove him ashore near Venice and he was imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria before being handed over to the German emperor Henry VI, who ransomed him for the huge sum of 150,000 marks. The raising of the ransom was a remarkable achievement. In February 1194, Richard was released. He returned at once to England and was crowned for a second time, fearing that the ransom payment had compromised his independence. Yet a month later he went to Normandy, never to return. His last five years were spent in intermittent warfare against Philip II. While besieging the castle of Châlus in central France he was fatally wounded and died on 6 April 1199. He was succeeded by his younger brother John, who had spent the years of Richard's absence scheming against him.

The BBC also posts a discussion of whether Robin Hood and Richard I ever met.

Blog Tour Interview: "The Middle Ages Unlocked"

I interviewed the authors of The Middle Ages Unlocked: A Guide to Life in Medieval England, 1050–1300 (Amberley Publishing, 2015), Gillian Polack and Katrin Kania, as part of their U.S. blog tour. One of the things about the book that intrigued me was the two disciplines of history and archaeology (thus question #4) working together:

1. For many years, under the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers and historians, people thought of the Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages”. Does your history offer a key to unlock this view of the Medieval era?

Since the Renaissance, the Middle Ages has been considered the time in between Classical history and the Renaissance. The Renaissance self-defined as rebirth, and tried to distance itself from the time before, calling them the Dark Ages. These days, the time between the fall of Rome and early modern times tends to be described differently. Our book shows one section of the Middle Ages, the time from 1050 to around 1300, in their variety, and it quickly becomes clear that the Middle Ages were not Dark Ages at all. They were neither all dirty, nor all poor, nor all cold and dark and dreary.

2. With the celebration of the Magna Carta this year, did you highlight the issues of freedom and rights in your history?

Our book was a long-term project. We were delighted that it was released in the year of the Magna Carta anniversary (the UK release was actually on the very day!) but we had not planned for it. Freedom and rights are explained in our history as part of legal systems and religion. The Magna Carta is, of course, mentioned, but we did not focus on the Magna Carta specifically: it was far more of a political event than a fundamental shift in rights. We explain structures and society – our book does not replace political histories, but helps to understand them and to put political events into a wider context.

3. Do you consider this book a resource for research or a book to be read straight through—or both?

Both! We worked hard to make it pleasant to read through, and to find a good, logical structure for the individual chapters that lets them flow into each other. The individual chapters are stand-alone enough to provide information on a specific topic, and the corresponding recommendations for further reading are helpful in getting started on further, deeper research.

4. Please discuss how the disciplines of history and archaeology work together (or against each other) in helping us understand the past.

This is a very good question! History and archaeology tend to focus on different aspects and look at things differently even if the research topic is the same. Historians and archaeologists thus have to figure out what the other discipline is looking at, how they pose their questions and what they focus on, which means good communication is absolutely essential for working together successfully. If this does work, blending historical and archaeological work is helpful for getting a bigger, wider picture, and for avoiding misinterpretations due to gaps in our respective sources. For instance, an archaeologist will know more about the materials and techniques used in a workshop, and that knowledge can help the historian to better understand why a workshop was worth a certain amount of money, or why getting a specific resource from abroad could have been important for the craftsperson. Our respective disciplines can work dynamically together, giving important insights and helping us, as modern people, to better understand the Middle Ages.

5. In both your introduction and the foreword by Elizabeth Chadwick, the importance of religion in the Middle Ages is stressed. How can secular readers appreciate the role of religion in Medieval England when they don’t share the worldview that “God is Everywhere”?

Most modern people have a different take on religion to that of a medieval person. Medieval piety was very much a part of daily life. However, that does not mean that somebody needs to be pious, or religious at all, to read and learn about the Middle Ages. Appreciation of how important something is, and how that something works, is fortunately not closely tied to actually believing, using, or having that something. People can learn how a car works, and appreciate how important a car is to our modern society, without having or using one themselves – there is no reason why an atheist should not be able to understand and appreciate how religion permeated medieval society, and how important it was for both government and private life.

6. And to follow up on that question, do you think it is necessary for us to appreciate the role of religion in that era to understand the Middle Ages? If we don't what are the consequences?

Yes, it is absolutely key to take the importance of religion in the Middle Ages into account when we try to understand the era. When its role is underestimated, or when religion is ignored, many things are hard to understand or make no sense to us. On the other hand, it is also very important not to overestimate religion, or to believe that every priest taught their congregation the same things. There was a great deal of variation in religious belief and practice, and churches were not only places for worship, but also social spaces used in many different ways.

7. Aside from primary or contemporary sources, what historians most influenced your overall view of the Middle Ages?

The wonderful thing about working on an overview is that it allowed us to form our own views of the Middle Ages. Of course there are prominent names for research in specific topics, but we have never relied on just one single view or just one single book. Writing an overview also means that many topics are touched from different directions, and it automatically results in a re-evaluation of the current view. Our coming from different academic disciplines added another level to this. So there is no single historian (or archaeologist) that we can name here, and we are happy that this is the case.

8. Are the details about daily life applicable only to England in this era, or would we expect to find similarities with life on the Continent at that time?

Some details are, and some are very different from life on the continent. There is a signifiacnt amount of overlap between English life and life in western France, including the Old French spoken in these areas. It is hard to extrapolate beyond that – not only because we have not researched in detail how similar or how different daily life may have been, but also because this can vary from place to place and from example to example. A spindle stick would look about the same in England, Finland and Germany, but shoes might have looked very different. To really say something about this, however, we need to have enough sources giving us information in sufficient detail, which is not always available. There are several more books’ worth that could be written about similarities and differences between England and France alone!

9. Elizabeth Chadwick highlighted a detail that would add verisimilitude to her next novel set in medieval England. Do you think of this book as a resource for writers? Who else should read this book?

The book was originally intended to help writers understand and use medieval England, so we are happy that writers like Elizabeth find it useful. People who need world-building skills for fantasy or science-fiction novels or other applications such as role-playing might also profit from reading the book, as it shows how many different aspects interconnect and influence each other. The book will also help the general public to get a basic understanding of the era, which will make it easier to find out more on individual aspects, and to put those into context – so basically everyone interested in the Middle Ages might want to read our book!

10. With the cutoff date of 1300 in the subtitle, are you suggesting that life in England was different in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Did things start to change?

The fourteenth century was an appalling time. War, plague, famine: it had the lot. Cultural change didn't happen overnight, but it did happen. The period before the fourteenth century set up social structures, legal and political systems that shaped even today’s England, however the amount and nature of the changes that happened in the fourteenth century would have required The Middle Ages Unlocked to be a much longer book if we had included it. Material culture also changed a great deal after the thirteenth century. All these reasons together made it easy for us to decide when to stop with our history.

According to the publisher:

To our modern minds, the Middle Ages seem to mix the well-known and familiar with wildly alien concepts and circumstances. The Middle Ages Unlocked provides an invaluable introduction to this complex and dynamic period in England. Exploring a wide range of topics from law, religion and education to landscape, art and magic, between the eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, the structures, institutions and circumstances that formed the basis for daily life and society are revealed. Drawing on their expertise in history and archaeology, Dr Gillian Polack and Dr Katrin Kania look at the tangible aspects of daily life – ranging from the raw materials used for crafts, clothing and jewellery to housing and food – in order to bring the Middle Ages to life. The Middle Ages Unlocked dispels modern assumptions about this period to uncover the complex tapestry of medieval England and the people who lived there.

Blog Tour: A History of the English Monarchy

From the poster above, you can see that I'm stop number two on this blog tour for Gareth Russell's A History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I. Please note that if you want to participate in the book giveaway, leave a comment below: I'll select the lucky winner and arrange to have the book sent to him or her. (UPDATE: the winner has received her copy). I interviewed Gareth who is: "an historian and writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied Modern History at the University of Oxford and completed a postgraduate in medieval history at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of two novels and three non-fiction books, including his most recent book, A History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I. He is currently writing a biography of Queen Catherine Howard."

Q. What was/is the role of organized religion (Christianity) in the development of the English Monarchy?

A. It’s hard to understate its role, I think. You can of course make the perfectly valid point that monarchy pre-dated Christianity and I start the book by looking at pagan monarchies and their impact on Britain, but I think the medieval English monarchy’s character was fundamentally shaped by its Christian ethos. Its role in inspiring Alfred the Great in his wars against the Vikings was enormous. In the Middle Ages, religion influenced some of the monarchy’s worst actions – particularly Edward I’s treatment of the Jewish community – but it also ameliorated many potential atrocities and created a king’s mentality and the mentality of those who advised or followed him. It encouraged chivalry, how the monarchy patronized the arts and how it dispensed charity, often on a grand scale. Today, I think the Christian influence on Britain is in many ways underestimated and the secularization theory might have been over-stated to a degree, perhaps because the religious debate here is not often expressed in the same open and vocal way as it can be in US politics. The current Queen is devoutly religious and I think the Christian ethos in the monarchy continues to encourage and shape ideas of duty and service, as well as destiny.

Q. Who has a baby (male) and who does not is so essential to the history of the monarchy, as Henry VIII’s reign shows. Which other births—or non-births—are most important in this history?

A. I suppose the obvious example is of course to wonder what would have happened if Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn or Mary I had given birth to sons or, in Mary’s case even a daughter, who outlived them. Another non-birth that really mattered was the lack of child from Henry I’s marriage to Adeliza of Louvain, which I deal with in a chapter called “Beauclerc”, and its consequences – a civil war after 1135 – in the chapter “When Christ and His saint slept”. One birth that happened and stands out in my mind in terms of his ancestry and his future career was James VI’s birth in 1566 to Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. He had the ancestry of the Scottish and English royal houses, which enabled him to unite the thrones in 1603 and lay the foundations of Great Britain.

Q. Who is your favorite queen consort, and why?

A. It’s a tough question and the reason why is because there are consorts I love researching and writing about – writing this book I came away with a real sense of admiration for queens I had never given a huge amount of thought to before, like Adeliza of Louvain in the twelfth century and Margaret of Anjou in the fifteenth. Though in both cases, and particularly in Margaret’s, they made some horrendous errors of judgement.In terms of personality, I have a creeping fondness for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who falls well outside the parameters of this book. I don’t think she was as “fluffy” as the royal PR machine suggested and I think Hitler’s backhanded compliment that she was “the most dangerous woman in Europe” captures something of her grit, patriotism and charisma, all wrapped up in inimitable and obfuscating Edwardian charm. So in a tough horse race, I’d say the late Queen Mother is someone I admire, am intrigued by and would love to one day write more about.

Q. Other than the development of the Magna Carta, what other significant events effected changes in the balance of power between the monarch and aristocracy?

A. I think in the long-term the Reformation really shifted things and not in the monarchy’s favour. I hope you can see a little in the book’s final chapter why Elizabeth I was so hostile towards fundamentalist Protestantism and her distress when some of those close to her, even the Earl of Leicester, began to sympathise with the Puritan movement. Elizabeth was clever enough to realise that more radical Protestantism was shifting concepts of sovereignty and she had only to look at the damage Presbyterianism had inflicted on Mary, Queen of Scots to appreciate the threat in England.

Q. How important was Marian devotion in the history of the English monarchy until Elizabeth I? Why was England known as Our Lady’s Dowry?

A. It was a huge part of English culture. There’s a lovely little anecdote that I enjoy that marigold flowers got their name from being nicknamed “Mary’s Gold”. Henry V, one of England’s most successful warrior-kings, consecrated the kingdom to Mary’s patronage, which helped foster a patriotic notion that England was a gift to the Virgin. Devotion to her proved far more difficult to eradicate during the Reformation – obedience to the papacy was perhaps one of the things that collapsed quickest in England, at least by 1540 though it later revived in the recusant community, but Mary and prayers for the dead proved a lot harder to dislodge. Well into the seventeenth century, there were Protestant writers who wanted to encourage devotion to Mary in the “new religion” and of course that did happen in the Victorian era, with the emergence of the Oxford or High Anglican Movement. I visited Lincoln Cathedral recently, which is a Protestant church, but in the gift shop the ladies behind the till and the parishioners referred to the Virgin Mary as “Our Lady”.

Q. The Empress (putative Queen) Maud may have been one of the most intriguing figures of the early history of the monarchy. What would have changed if she had successfully reigned as Queen?

A. I don’t know if much would have changed in the long-term, given that her successor would have been the same as King Stephen’s – her son, Henry II. English intervention in Ireland took place after Maud’s death, so again it’s hard to know if that would have changed or maybe delayed even longer if she had continued to reign until 1167, pushing Henry II’s reign back by thirteen years. It may have soothed the fears about a female sovereign, which could then have had a knock-on effect on Henry VIII’s frantic quest for a son after 1509.

Q. You’ve written about the Tudors separately. What difference, if any, did it make to your perspective when you wrote about the Tudor dynasty in the context of a book about the history of English monarchy?

A. What a great question. It didn’t make a difference to my own perspective on them, but it certainly did change how I wrote about them in this particular book. In the sense that I was approaching them as the end of the story, I could discuss their links to their predecessors, which was great – after all, the Tudors did not know they would be seen as the “birth of modernity”. Like all of us, they could only ever look back. So I was able to talk about how Henry VIII used the examples of Emperor Constantine and kings like Henry II and John to justify the Break with Rome and I could rebut the idea that Anne Boleyn was a failed queen because she had too much personality. A brief glance at England’s medieval queens consort shows that fire and character were not things they generally lacked. I was able to set the Tudors more in the context of their inspirations and ancestors.

Q. Do you plan to write the sequel, from James I to Elizabeth II?

A. At the moment, there are no immediate plans to. I’m currently working on a biography of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife. I tried to make sure that“A History of the English Monarchy” can stand alone as a narrative of the English monarchy and its medieval experience. I think the Stuarts are a topic I’d love to tackle. When you grow up in Northern Ireland, where the legacy of the Glorious Revolution is still so contested, it’s hard not to wonder what the truth behind it was.

More about the book from the publisher, Made Global:

In A History of the English Monarchy, historian Gareth Russell traces the story of the English monarchy and the interactions between popular belief, religious faith and brutal political reality that helped shape the extraordinary journey of one of history’s most important institutions.

From the birth of the nation to the dazzling court of Elizabeth I, A History of the English Monarchy charts the fascinating path of the English monarchy from the uprising of ‘Warrior Queen’ Boadicea in AD60 through each king and queen up to the ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth I. Russell offers a fresh take on a fascinating subject as old as the nation itself. Legends, tales and, above all, hard facts tell an incredible story… a history of the English Monarchy.

If you are not the lucky winner and want to read the book, it's available in paperback and digitally here. Remember to make a comment if you want a chance to win--please include your email address in your comment for me to contact you (if you win). Thank you. UPDATE: The winner has received her copy. Thanks for your comments!

An Elizabethan Heroine: Lady Cecily Stonor

Author Gareth Russell asked me to contribute an article on one of my heroes or heroines. On his blog, he offers an introduction to my selection:

A few months ago, I fell into a conversation about heroism and whether it still serves a purpose. In his biography of Anne Boleyn, published in 2010, Professor George Bernard dismissed the idea, quoting the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht's response to "Unhappy the land that has no heroes" - "Unhappy the land that needs heroes". Bernard, paralleling the old idea of heroism with the contemporary fascination with celebrity, continued, "Models are not necessary ... Men and women should not need to study the life of Anne Boleyn, or modern 'celebrities', to learn that if you do not like your lot in life, you should do what you can to improve it."

This certainly raises a valid point about projecting our own needs and neuroses onto the men and women of the past and, in doing so, misrepresenting them. However, I also think that people can be heroic and inspirational without being whitewashed. Theology teaches us that even the holiest saints had their flaws. To be inspired does not necessarily equate with creeping on metaphorically knee to the shrine of the revered. In this vein, I am delighted to share an article by American author Stephanie A. Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics endured the English Reformation, who has written a reflection on Lady Cecily Stonor, a English Catholic who defended her faith in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

An excerpt from my essay (please read the rest there):

Although I write often about the Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation era and certainly highlighted them in my book about the English Reformation—and there are three women honored by the Catholic Church among the canonized and beatified martyrs of that era, I have not chosen a martyr as my heroine.

The heroine I’ve chosen does have much in common with those three martyred Catholic women (St. Margaret Clitherow, St. Margaret Ward, and St. Anne Line). She could have suffered the same punishment they did: she was a recusant Catholic and she protected Catholic priests in her home. Because she came to trial in 1581 before it was a felony for hiding Catholic priests, she avoided execution. But she suffered much because she remained true to her Catholic faith and her conscience.

Lady Cecily Stonor (nee Chamberlain) and her late husband Sir Francis Stonor (+1564) had two sons, Francis and John, and three daughters. They were recusants and because they would not attend Sunday services in the Church of England, they had to pay huge fines, selling land and estates as necessary. In 1577, according to the Stonor Park website, the family paid the modern equivalent of £50,000 in fines. . . .

I am going to participate in the blog tour for Gareth Russell's new book on the English monarchy, so watch this space.

The Last Whig Historian Born: G.M. Trevelyan

George Macauley Trevelyan was born on February 16, 1876 in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was the great nephew of Thomas Babington Macauley and he maintained his relative's Whig view of English History.

This review essay from The London Review of Books of two biographies of G.M. Trevelyan sums up his beliefs:

G.M. Trevelyan was the strongly agnostic son of a mildly ‘nothingarian’ father. The grandparents were Evangelical Anglican on one side, Unitarian on the other. All three Trevelyan brothers were unbelievers, but with George it was much more than mere absence of belief, it was a creed in its own right. ‘Two terrible things have happened this week,’ he was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned down on religious grounds by the first great love of his life, the daughter of a great Anglican family. In the aftermath of this rejection, he thought ‘a definitely agnostic atmosphere is essential for my free development of work and of life’. His daughter, the wife of a historian bishop with whom Trevelyan got on rather well, not surprisingly softens the outlines, notes his regular attendance at Chapel when Master of Trinity (1940-51), and records his saying: ‘If there had been more sensible clergymen in Cambridge in my time I could have been a churchman.’

But the Trevelyan who attended Chapel as an official duty – Trinity was worth a mass – had essentially the same outlook as the Harrow schoolboy who had refused to be confirmed. He preached a sermon in Trinity in 1945, but it was not a Christian sermon. To say he was merely anti-clerical is only partly true, though he retained the old Evangelical family feeling against high churchmen, for his definition of anti-clericalism was pretty capacious. Talking in old age of Lucretius, he burst out: ‘And doesn’t it strike you as extraordinary that Lucretius should have lived and written only a few years before the greatest outburst of clericalism that the world has ever seen?’ Trevelyan’s judgment of Christianity was probably formed essentially by his experience of it as a university party at Cambridge: his knowledge of it in other contexts was slight, though he did once stoop to arrange an honorary degree for Dorothy Sayers. But his main reason for opposing Christianity was that he believed in something else, and did so to the end.

He really believed in Carlyle, Shelley, Meredith, civic altruism, the countryside, Garibaldi, and the lives of heroes teaching by example. If he had not been more gentleman than intellectual, he might have become a Comtean; as it was, he remained a Carlylean. His last two publications were attempts to put Carlyle and Meredith before the public of the 1950s; he had been trying to do the same thing in his The Meredith Pocket Book of 1906. His Clark Lectures of 1953, his last sustained composition, showed how little two wars had affected his creed. He defended Scott as the great social historian who had made Carlyle and Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like love or it is nothing.’ He fused England, poetry, joy, youth and landscape in a single sacramental experience. If this is rather like Arnold, dynastic connections are not far to seek: his wife was the great-niece of the poet, and her mother, Mrs Humphry Ward of Robert Elsmere fame, had even composed a special free-thinkers’ marriage service for G.M. Trevelyan’s wedding. The late Victorian child was truly father to the Master of Trinity. Trevelyan was as strongly opposed to modernity, urban modernity, as any Christian. If he could move people ‘to seriously question the value of modern life, I shall be quite satisfied’. He was as explicitly sacramental as any Christian. He saw the modern passion for mountains, rocks and moors as ‘one of the sacraments prepared for man or discovered by man’. In this he had all the seriousness and severity of his Evangelical ancestors. He was a pious pagan who took his paganism with a deep reverence, without any touch of hedonism. He felt kinship with Meredith, Shelley and Carlyle because they – Meredith particularly – seemed to him to be pious pagans who had faced the problems of life without religion with a religious outlook. He even believed in a pagan version of life after death. The statue of Garibaldi in every Italian town was ‘the symbol of the hope of resurrection after centuries of death’. At times of difficulty, his thoughts turned to Garibaldi, as the orthodox might look to Christ.

Not "What Would Jesus Do?" I guess, but "What Would Garibaldi Do?" According to the review, his last thoughts and words were historical:

The day before he died, Trevelyan had Macaulay’s Third Chapter read to him. His last words were ‘Peterloo’. The nurse asked: ‘What about Peterloo, Master?’ He replied, ‘1819,’ and did not speak again.

The chapter referred to is a great work of historical writing volume one of Trevelyan's great uncle's The History of England, from the Accession of James II, : "The State Of England In 1685". You can hear it read here.

"How English history used to be told": Marshall's OUR ISLAND STORY

Andrew M. Brown discusses bias in English History for The Catholic Herald:

What are you supposed to do when you’re reading the gripping history book Our Island Story, by H E Marshall, to your children and you stumble into a bit that is fervently anti-Catholic? These passages crop up with monotonous regularity. For example, in the section dealing with Edward the Confessor, Marshall sneers at King Edward’s medieval piety, observing that “he thought more about building churches and buying relics or bones of holy men, long since dead, than of strengthening his castles and trying to make the lives of his people peaceful and happy”. All the priests are “rich” and all the monks “wicked”. Generally the picture is of the Middle Ages as backward and unenlightened. (But how backward can a culture have been that produced buildings of the lightness and beauty of our great cathedrals?)

That is how English history used to be told. They were the received assumptions – at least, until the current generation of historians known as the revisionists came along, most prominently Eamon Duffy, but also Jack Scarisbrick, Richard Rex and Peter Marshall.

Anti-Catholicism persists in historians’ circles, as the reaction to the revisionists demonstrates. As Duffy has written, the work of these mostly Catholic scholars is wrongly characterised in some quarters as the “grinding of papistical axes”.

Yet no one batted an eyelid when, previously, nearly all histories of the Reformation were written by Protestants. There is a list as long as your arm of them, including John Foxe in the 16th century, Gilbert Burnet in the 17th, James Froude in the 19th and, in the 20th, Sir Keith Thomas, A G Dickens, G G Coulton, A F Pollard and the Methodist Luther scholar Gordon Rupp.

Our Island Story is a very popular children's book by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall. Civitas, "a community of researchers and supporters committed to discovering how best to strengthen democracy, uphold limited government, maintain personal freedom, achieve opportunity for all, and encourage free enterprise" has reissued the book with a foreword by Lady Antonia Fraser. Civitas provides some information about the author and her work:

Very little is known for certain about Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall. She was born in Scotland in 1867, the third daughter in a family of six children, and was warden of Queen Margaret Hall in Glasgow from 1901 to 1904. She was in Melbourne when Our Island Story was published in 1905, in Oxford from 1905 until 1908, and in Redlands, California, USA from 1913 until 1917.

All else about the author of Our Island Story remains shrouded in mystery, save for her abiding legacy to the world. This consists of a remarkable series of children’s books that she wrote, dealing for the most part with the history and literature of the British people at home and elsewhere in the world where they have settled in number.

Marshall never married and had no children. However, the subject matter of her books and the gentleness of their style suggest she may well have been a governess or private tutor to young children.

She died in London in 1941, having spent the last part of her life in straitened circumstances, but her genius as a storyteller and educator will live on for as long as boys and girls continue to be able to open the pages of her enchanting and informative books.

Her principal books, together with the dates each was first published, are: Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls (1905); Stories of Robin Hood Told to Children (1905); Stories of Guy of Warwick Told to Children (1906); Stories of William Tell Told to Children (1906); Scotland’s Story: A History of Scotland for Boys and Girls (1906); Stories of Roland Told to the Children (1907); Our Empire Story: Stories of India and the Greater Colonies told to Boys and Girls (1908); Stories of Beowulf Told to the Children (1908); English Literature for Boys and Girls (1909); A History of France (1912); Through Great Britain and Ireland with Cromwell (1912); This Country of Ours (1917); and Kings and Things (1937).

Through Great Britain and Ireland with Cromwell? I wonder how she deals with Drogheda and Cromwell's stated anti-Catholicism AND anti-Anglicanism. 

Should a book like this, published with the express purpose of making history entertaining and easy to read, be accompanied by notes that provide greater context? If the books are not as informative as they are enchanting--or may even be deceiving when used in classrooms and schools, should they be corrected?

Brown suggests one method for a parent to use:

Without doubt, today’s revisionist historiography has acted as a necessary corrective to the dominant Protestant mode. And when reading Our Island Story, all I need to do is bowdlerise as I go along – skip or rewrite on the hoof when I come across an anti-papist belch about building churches and relics and all that murky medieval stuff. You can see how easily, if you were to give children a steady diet of this material unadulterated, an attitude of mind towards Catholicism would become ingrained. But it is very much a Victorian or Edwardian view that was carried over to the 20th century. Most importantly, it is wrong.

But again I wonder, especially when reading Civitas' explanation of why they wanted to republish the book:

But there was also a serious underlying purpose behind the decision to republish the book. Marshall knew all about the importance of the institutions of a free society, and explains thoroughly why we need to make sure the state cannot imprison people without trial, or force them to worship God in a particular way, or extract taxes without allowing people a say in the running of the country. Now that the teaching of institutional and political history is so weak in many schools, her message is of vital importance – and not only for the 7 to 11-year-olds the book is aimed at.

Does Marshall really make sure her readers know why "the state cannot imprison people without a trial" when the rights of Catholics were violated (Henry VIII having the Carthusians chained in prison, Edmund Campion and companions tortured in violation of English law during Elizabeth I's reign, etc) or why the state cannot "force them to worship God in a particular way" when it was the Catholic Mass that was outlawed (Edward VI and The Book of Common Prayer; Elizabeth I and the Act of Uniformity, recusancy laws, penal laws, etc)? I wonder.

England=ISIS; Irish Catholics=Middle Eastern Christians?

In The Week Michael Brendan Dougherty writes about the choices Catholics faced in Ireland after "The Glorious Revolution":

 

When William of Orange defeated his father-in-law, the deposed King James II, along with his Irish Catholic allies at the Boyne in 1690, Parliament was determined that an Irish Catholic uprising never threaten their rule again, and so they passed penal laws, or "papist codes." As author Thomas Keneally put it, these codes were "aimed at keeping the native Irish powerless, poor, and stupid."

 

The details of these laws should still shock us. All Catholic bishops, and religious clergy (friars, etc), had to leave the country or face death. Any bishops coming from foreign countries were to be killed. All remaining Catholic priests were to sign an oath that was abominable to their conscience, or be killed. Catholic priests caught "perverting" a Protestant (i.e., receiving them into the church, or marrying them to a Catholic) were to be killed. Ordinary Catholics could not have schools, could not teach in schools, and could not be the guardian of a child. They could not travel abroad to attend schools. They could not own a horse worth more than five pounds. They could not accept substantial gifts from Protestants. Catholics could not live within five miles of incorporated towns. (This law applied to 80 percent of the island's population.)

 

Any decent Catholic church building was confiscated and given to the official "Church of Ireland." Catholics were to be whipped if they refused to work on Catholic holidays or visited holy sites. They could not own weapons. Upon death, Catholics were to split their lands among all their children, unless a child or a child's spouse was a Protestant, in which case the Protestant child was given the entire estate. Catholics were excluded from all professions and from voting. No tradesman was allowed to have more than two Catholic apprentices. There were standing bounties made available to "priest-hunters." The old Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes the papist codes this way: "The law presumed every Catholic to be faithless, disloyal, and untruthful, assumed him to exist only to be punished, and the ingenuity of the Legislature was exhausted in discovering new methods of repression."

 

Edmund Burke called the Penal Laws "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."

 

Dougherty notes the Penal Laws' results:

 

Now, these laws were not always or effectively enforced. Irish Catholics found ways to educate their children at illegal "hedge schools." The Catholic Church continued to send bishops to the isle, and some people found ways of sending their children to Spain, France, or Rome for an education. The penal laws failed to achieve their aim of de-Catholicizing Ireland. The faith survived because it thrives in persecution and because of the support of institutions beyond England's reach. But an older map of the gaeltacht, where the Irish language is still a mother tongue, doubles as a map of places where the difficulty of the terrain and the wildness of native resistance finally restrained the English cupidity for Irish land and estates.

 

The full results of these English policies would unfold over centuries. A century and a half after the codes were installed, Irish Catholics were concentrated on poorer lands, relied far too heavily on calorie-rich potatoes, and had no margin for failure when it came to the rent system of agriculture. When the famine came in the 19th century, over 1 million Irish died of starvation or disease. Nearly 2 million more emigrated. In some waves, about one in five emigrants died on the journey. Ireland lost one quarter of its population in just over a decade. The prefamine population of Ireland was higher in 1840 than it is even today. As Ireland's men and children were dying, Parliamentarians speculated that the crop failure was "a Visitation of Providence, an expression of divine displeasure," and entertained themselves with cartoons depicting the Irish as simians, while they dined on still-cheap Irish beef and butter.

 

Statements like that certainly support Tim Pat Coogan's view of England's Role in The Great Hunger:

 

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson."

Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diaspora of nearly 80 million people today.

St. Joan of Arc and the English Reformation

Just a quick note about St. Joan of Arc and the English Reformation--listening to the EWTN radio broadcast of Mass yesterday I heard the celebrant mention that if she had not led France in defeating the English during the Hundred Years War, at least of part of France (more than Calais!) might have been under English control. And that would have had consequences.

St. Joan was burned alive at the stake on May 30 in 1431. In 1531, one hundred years later, Henry VIII started his break away from the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church by forcing the Convocation of Bishops to acknowledge his authority over the Church in England "as far as God allows", and proclaiming himself the Supreme Head and Governor of the Ecclesiae Anglicanae in the Act of Supremacy three years later. Thus if she had not helped rally France to defeat the English, "France" would have participated in the English Reformation, her great monasteries suppressed (250 years before the French Revolution's suppression), statues and paintings of Notre Dame crushed and burned along with other great Christian art, and many glorious Gothic cathedrals despoiled and destroyed, their shrines and relics, treasures and art plundered--Chartres without the Sancta Camisa, Sainte Chapelle without the relic of the Crown of Thorns--again anticipating much of the iconoclasm that did occur after the French Revolution. But without St. Joan of Arc, hearing the voices of the saints, going to her country's weak king, and leading France to victory, France would have been Anglican (Protestant) in the 16th century, and western culture, Catholic culture, would have lost the same things in France as were lost in England: art, music, visual beauty, books, monasticism, and worship.

This website suggests other aspects of an alternative history without St. Joan of Arc:

What events might not have happened without Joan of Arc saving France? Without Joan of Arc it is very doubtful that France would have become the strong unified nation that it became. Without a strong France many of the later events that occurred in Europe and around the world would have been much different. It is even conceivable that American independence from Britain would never have happened because it was the French military assistance that made the difference and directly caused the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Do you think France would've existed to this day without Joan of Arc's actions? Joan helped to give the people of France a national identity. Before Joan people would identify themselves as being from parts of France such as people from the region of Burgundy calling themselves Burgundians. After Joan of Arc the people were much more likely to identify themselves as being French. It was having a national identity that helped forge the great nation that France became and still is today.

In one of those strange ironies, the Church of England honors Joan of Arc on their liturgical calendar--as a visionary (not necessarily because her visions were true, but because she listened to them)! The Catholic Church honors St. Joan of Arc as a martyr and virgin, unjustly condemned to death; a holy Maiden who loved Jesus and Notre Dame.

Wishful Thinking? Two Ways England Could be Catholic Today!

Although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were safely delivered of a healthy baby boy, a couple of British publications are looking back in history at a couple of "might have been" "what if's"--what if Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon's first baby boy have survived? and what if the eldest child, not the eldest son, had been the heir?

First, from the New Statesman, by Amy Licence:

History also provides examples of royal births which illuminate the pressures experienced by queens, whose role required them to deliver the future, in a literal and metaphorical sense. Henry VIII’s marital exploits are well known, but the birth of his first son, early in his reign, is less well remembered. Following his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, in 1509, Henry began the quest to father a son which would last for the next 28 years. It was to be far more difficult to achieve than he could ever have imagined. Early in 1511, Catherine delivered a boy whom they named Henry. When the news was proclaimed, London went into celebration. Days of public rejoicing and partying followed, with bells ringing, wine flowing, cannons at the Tower booming and bonfires burning in the streets. The boy was given a magnificent christening, with jousts, pageants, feasts and tournaments: it was the second most expensive occasion of Henry’s reign, outshone only by the legendary Field of Cloth of Gold. A special gallery was built for Catherine and her ladies to watch the proceedings and it seemed as if the future of the Tudor dynasty was secure.

However, tragedy struck. Before the child was two months old, he succumbed to one of the infant illnesses of the day. Had he lived, the little prince would have become Henry IX of England. Although it is not possible to rewrite history, the implications of his imagined survival help us understand the impact of his premature death. Had this child lived, the well-known story of Henry’s six wives almost certainly would not have happened. Perhaps the course of the English Reformation would also have played out differently. There would have been no Edward VI, no Mary I or even Queen Elizabeth. The imagined reign of Henry IX is another historical “whatif” which provides a fascinating alternative path for English history; save for one small twist of fate, perhaps even an infection that may easily be cleared up by antibiotics today, it may have become established historical fact. The life and death of this tragic prince truly did shape the future of his country.

And this from the Mirror:

What if the monarch's oldest child - even if it was a girl - had always inherited the throne? Well, we could all be Catholic... and speaking German.

VICTORIA II NOT EDWARD VII

By marrying Frederick II of Prussia in 1858, Queen Victoria's oldest child, daughter Victoria, 17, became Empress of Germany and Queen of Prussia.
She would have become Britain's queen on January 21, 1901, when her mother died. But she died of breast cancer on August 5 that year.
The throne would then have gone to her son - Kaiser Wilhelm II who led Germany during the First World War.

ELIZABETH II NOT CHARLES I

If we'd let the oldest child inherit the throne 400 years ago, it could have prevented the English Civil War. On the death of James I in 1625, his daughter Elizabeth would have become queen, instead of Charles I. Her descendants were the rulers of Hanover, who later become Britain's kings - her ninth great granddaughter is the real Elizabeth II.

MARGARET I NOT HENRY VIII

After the death of Henry VII in 1509, eldest daughter Margaret Tudor could have become monarch instead of the most famous king of all, Henry VIII.
Without Henry's plea in vain for the Pope to annul his heirless marriage to Catherine of Aragon would there have been an English Reformation at all?
Margaret had married James IV of Scotland and their Stuart line ended up inheriting England's throne anyway.

ELIZABETH I NOT EDWARD V

Maybe she had a lucky escape, otherwise Elizabeth - eldest child of Edward IV, could have been murdered by her uncle (later Richard III) just like her brothers, the Princes in the Tower.
She became Queen Consort when she married Henry VII. So she was the daughter, sister, niece, wife and mother of monarchs Edward IV and V, Richard III, Henry VII and VIII.

But, as Captain James T. Kirk certainly knows, you just can't mess with the space-time continuum!

The Carmelites in Britain Before and After the English Reformation

On this feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, it's only appropriate for me to highlight the presence and absence and restoration of the Carmelite order in England. According to the website of the British Province of Carmelite Friars:

The hermit brothers from Mount Carmel were first brought to Britain in 1242 by returning crusaders; arriving first at Hulne near Alnwick in the north east of England, and then later in the same year at Aylesford in the southern county of Kent.

At that time we were still a group of hermits but, following a historic General Chapter (meeting of the Order) held at Aylesford in 1247, we became part of the newly formed movement of mendicant friars (begging brothers). Because of our white cloaks, we became known as the Whitefriars. . . .

At its height there were more than 1,000 friars in the English Province in some 40 communities (known as priories, friaries or convents), divided into four 'distinctions' with regional headquarters at London, Oxford, Norwich and York. . . .

Carmelite friars were pastors and theologians, confessors to kings and servants of the poor. To read an article about Carmelite spirituality in the fourteenth century, please click here.

Although there was no 'Third Order' of Lay Carmelites and no Carmelite nuns in Britain before the Reformation, we do know of many lay people - including women - who had varying degrees of affiliation to the Order.

The Carmelite presence disappeared from Britain in 1538 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII. At the Reformation the friars were dispersed and the houses were either desecrated and destroyed or handed out to private individuals as rewards by the Crown.

The last active friar we know of, George Rayner, died for the Faith in chains (in odium fidei) in York prison during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

The site also has information about the restoration of the Carmelite order and the interim when English Carmelites lived in exile on the Continent here. There are even more great resources on the order between the dissolution and the restoration linked here.

St. Simon Stock of England is one of the better known of the Carmelite saints, who received the Brown Scapular in a vision of Our Lady and wrote this prayer:

Flower of Carmel, tall vine, blossom-laden;
splendour of heaven, child-bearing, yet maiden;
none equals thee.

Mother so tender, whom no man didst know,
on Carmel's children thy favours bestow;
Star of the Sea!

Strong stem of Jesse, who bore one bright flower,
be ever near us, and guard us each hour,
who serve thee here.

Purest of lilies, that flowers among thorns,
bring help to true hearts that in weakness turn
and trust in thee.

Strongest of armour, we trust in thy might,
under thy mantle, hard pressed in the fight,
we call to thee.

Our way, uncertain, surrounded by foes,
unfailing counsel you offer to those
who turn to thee.

O gentle Mother, who in Carmel reigns,
share with your servants that gladness you gained,
and now enjoy.

Hail, gate of heaven, with glory now crowned,
bring us to safety, where thy Son is found,
true joy to see. Amen.

Four Important Events on May 2

1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason and witchcraft. She was taken to the Tower of London and to the very apartments she had used before her coronation:

As you know, Anne Boleyn was arrested on 2nd May 1536 at Greenwich Palace. Alison Weir writes of how Anne was accused of “evil behaviour” by Sir William Paulet, Sir William Fitzwilliam and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, charged with adultery and informed that both Mark Smeaton and Sir Henry Norris had confessed their guilt. Anne denied these charges but it was no good, she was allowed to return to her apartments for her dinner, under guard, and then she was escorted by barge along the Thames to the Tower of London.

Although Traitor’s Gate is often pointed out as the place where Anne would have disembarked, Alison Weir points out that Anne, as Queen, was taken to the Court Gate in the Byward Tower, a private entrance. Here she was met by the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, who was Sir William Kingston’s deputy and then Anne would then have been escorted along Water Lane (in the Outer Ward), past the back of the Lieutenant’s House to the entrance of the royal palace where she was to be imprisoned.

It was ironic that Anne Boleyn was imprisoned in the same lodgings that she stayed in before her coronation in 1533 – the Queen’s apartments in the Tower’s royal palace.

But where are these lodgings?

In “The Lady in the Tower”, Weir describes Anne’s lodgings as lying “on the east side of the inner ward between the Lanthorn Tower and the Wardrobe Tower” and writes of how these apartments were renovated for Anne’s coronation, with Cromwell spending the equivalent of over £1 million pounds to make them fit for the new queen. These Renaissance style apartments were therefore a luxurious prison for Anne Boleyn but a prison is a prison. If you go to the Tower of London today, it is not possible to see Anne’s prison because these lodgings were uninhabitable by the end of the 16th century and demolished by the end of the 18th century. The present half-timbered Queen’s House which overlooks the green is not where Anne was imprisoned as these apartments were not built until around 1540, at least 4 years after Anne Boleyn’s execution.

1559 – John Knox returns from exile to Scotland to become the leader of the beginning Scottish Reformation. He was thus able to contribute to the revolution that overturned the regency of Queen Mary of Guise for her daughter Mary, the Dauphine of France and Queen of Scotland, draft the Scots Confession for the Parliament, and argue with Mary, Queen of Scots.

1568 – Mary, Queen of Scots, escapes from Loch Leven Castle. She had been imprisoned there after the death of her husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and her abduction by and marriage to Lord Bothwell. Having lost the battle of Carberry Hill on June 15, 1567 before it even began, Mary was taken in custody to Edinburgh and then imprisoned in Loch Leven, where she miscarried and forced to abdicate. Then she escaped on May 2 and lost the battle of Landside eleven days later. By the middle of May in 1568 she was in England and in Elizabeth's custody.

1611 – King James Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker. According to the wikipedia article, things did not go smoothly:

The original printing of the Authorized Version was published by Robert Barker, the King's Printer, in 1611 as a complete folio Bible.It was sold looseleaf for ten shillings, or bound for twelve. Robert Barker's father, Christopher, had, in 1589, been granted by Elizabeth I the title of royal Printer, with the perpetual Royal Privilege to print Bibles in England. Robert Barker invested very large sums in printing the new edition, and consequently ran into serious debt, such that he was compelled to sub-lease the privilege to two rival London printers, Bonham Norton and John Bill. It appears that it was initially intended that each printer would print a portion of the text, share printed sheets with the others, and split the proceeds. Bitter financial disputes broke out, as Barker accused Norton and Bill of concealing their profits, while Norton and Bill accused Barker of selling sheets properly due to them as partial Bibles for ready money. There followed decades of continual litigation, and consequent imprisonment for debt for members of the Barker and Norton printing dynasties, while each issued rival editions of the whole Bible. In 1629 the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge successfully managed to assert separate and prior royal licences for Bible printing, for their own university presses – and Cambridge University took the opportunity to print revised editions of the Authorized Version in 1629 and 1638. The editors of these editions included John Bois and John Ward from the original translators. This did not, however, impede the commercial rivalries of the London printers, especially as the Barker family refused to allow any other printers access to the authoritative manuscript of the Authorized Version.

A Telling Detail: St. Thomas More's Chain of Office

From Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal analysis of Margaret Thatcher's funeral comes this telling detail:

Thatcher's funeral was striking in that it was not, actually, about her. It was about what she thought it important for the mourners to know. The readings were about the fact of God, the gift of Christ, and the necessity of loving your country and working for its betterment. There were no long eulogies. In a friendly and relatively brief address, the bishop of London lauded her kindness and character. No funeral of an American leader would ever be like that: The dead American would be the star, with God in the position of yet another mourner who'd miss his leadership.

The pageantry, for an American, was most moving. The English as always do this brilliantly but I wonder if they understand—they must, but it's not something they acknowledge—that when they bring out and put forward their splendor they are telling the world and themselves who they are and have been. Leading the procession into St. Paul's was the lord mayor of London, in velvet coat, breeches and buckled shoes. On his coat he wore Sir Thomas More's gold chain of office, taken from him before he was killed in the Tower (sic). Imagine a nation that puts such a man to death, contemplates it, concludes in the end it was wrong, and now proudly displays the saint's chain at its greatest events. When I saw it I thought of a recent trip to the Vatican. Touring its archives, we were shown one of its proudest possessions: a letter from Galileo.

Things change. Time changes them. Great nations, and institutions, rethink. But only if they're great.

The chain of office Noonan refers to is the Collar of Esses, which in the detail of the Holbein portrait from this site, you can see is a chain of "S" linked with a Tudor Rose hanging from it. This article has some more detail about the Lord Mayor's Chain of Esses, noting that it is not completely original, and that Henry VIII gave these collars out as rewards for faithful service:

The merciless punishments Henry VIII meted out to his enemies have been well documented. Less is known about how, on the rarer occasions when the king was happy with the service of his courtiers or the country's most eminent noblemen, he liked to give them a golden livery collar or heavy chain as a token of his gratitude.

Henry VIII only awarded around 20 of the chains. They were all engraved with the characters SS, referring to the Latin religious creed, Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spirit), though none were believed to have survived in their entirety. [I'm not sure what the author is refering to here--the Holy Spirit is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity; Spiritus Sanctus is just the Latin for Holy Spirit.]

Now, however, the first complete "collar of the Esses", as they were known, has been discovered in the family home of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The collar was presented to Edward Montagu, the then Lord Chief Justice, by King Henry in the 1540s.

It is understood that the extraordinary find is to be sold in December at Christie's auction house in London, where it is expected to fetch up to £1m.

The only other Esses collar known to be in existence, which is owned by the Lord Mayor of London, is believed to contain just 20 per cent of the original craftmanship, while the new discovery has much more of its original design intact.

A number of silver collars of the Esses, which were handed out to queens and courtiers, survive today, including one on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But a gold version of the livery chain was far rarer to behold in Henry VIII's day.

The gold collar famously features in the portrait of Sir Thomas More painted by Hans Holbein, which was used as a background for credits in the television series, The Tudors.

Although the English nation may regret the execution of Sir Thomas More, we know that it has had greater difficulty with acknowledging the truth about the English Reformation--that's been a regular theme of this blog and my book, Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation. As recently as last year, Eamon Duffy stated:

For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.

To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope. . . .

It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity.

How a nation deals with its past, especially the dark periods of its past, is, as Noonan indicates, an important test of its honesty and humility. The United States certainly has periods it has to deal with honestly and forthrightly, and England, like any other nation, has others to deal with other than the English Reformation. Perhaps this detail of Sir Thomas More's Chain of Esses--which was not really taken from him, but which he surrendered upon his resignation as Lord Chancellor, when he saw the dark era England was about to enter--could be a sign that England has faced the injustice of his execution and acknowledged it. Let's hope so!

Regine Pernoud Would Agree!

Regine Pernoud wrote the book shown above, published by Ignatius Press and translated by Anne Englund Nash, and she would agree with Stephen Cooper, who "argues that we should resist using ‘medieval’ as another word for backward." He goes on to outline what we should know about the medieval period, especially the 15th century, in his article titled "Positively Medieval" in History Today:

The work of the late Dom David Knowles showed that monasticism was far from corrupt and decadent, although the heroism and austerity of the High Middle Ages may have been lost. Eamon Duffy has demonstrated that religion was thriving at parish level. In The Practice of Kingship Jeremy Catto argues that most 15th-century bishops were graduates, learned men who were both efficient administrators and conscientious diocesans. As for the origins of Protestantism, McFarlane was sceptical that these were to be found in the Lollard heresy. He showed that this had been rooted out of Oxford and respectable society by the time of the Lollard rebellion known as Oldcastle’s Revolt (1414). It survived, though tenaciously, among country ‘bumpkins’ only. By implication the origins of the Reformation lay not in the decline of the medieval Church but in the difficult family life of Henry VIII.

We can see for ourselves, in the glories of Perpendicular architecture in the parish churches, cathedrals, the abbeys, chantry chapels and collegiate churches and in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, that the Church was by no means in decline in the 15th century. On the contrary, there was a flowering of piety, especially lay piety. Men were building and re-building to the glory of God and for the benefit of their souls, right down to the Reformation. What changed, when that came, was doctrine and fashion. The abbeys and the chantries were torn down because men had ceased to believe in the notion of Purgatory, at least officially, though their late medieval ancestors (apart from the Lollards) had taken this so seriously.

In secular architecture it was traditionally the Tudor period that saw the transition from castle to manor house; W.G. Hoskins popularised the idea of a ‘Great Rebuilding’ of more humble dwellings between 1550 and 1640. Yet this does not mean that there was no rebuilding in the 15th century. A later building may obscure an earlier one. Take Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382-1439), father-in-law of that quintessential ‘medieval’ figure, Warwick the Kingmaker. He built or rebuilt castles and manor houses at Warwick, Hanley, Drayton Basset, Elmsley, Caversham and Hanslope and, when he died in 1439, he was buried in a magnificent tomb in St Mary’s Church in Warwick. This has a bronze effigy and weepers, the work of a Flemish master, just as beautiful and impressive as the much better known ‘Renaissance’ effigy of Henry VII by Torrigiano in Westminster Abbey. Yet, according to traditional chronology, Warwick is a ‘medieval’ figure, while Henry VII is ‘early modern’. In fact, there are wonderful 15th-century timber and plaster buildings everywhere one looks in England, but we have become accustomed to describe these as ‘Tudor’.

In literature, we have been taught that Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) was a genius, but John Lydgate (c.1370-c.1451) was a dunce; and that the whole of the 15th century, at least before the advent of the printing press, was a fallow period. Yet in his own day men enjoyed Lydgate and rated him. Henry V and his brothers, Bedford and Gloucester, were all bibliophiles; and there is a good case for saying that English Humanism began in the 15th, rather than in the 16th, century (see Daniel Wakelin’s Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1450-1530). In law, we have been taught to think that ‘medieval’ means backward and ‘modern’ means advanced; but it is in the works of Sir John Fortescue (c.1394-1476) that we find the classic statement that torture is contrary to the common law of England, while in the 17th century the state used it routinely, at least so far as Catholic conspirators were concerned.

"We were taught," "we have been taught"--when Cooper uses such phrases in the article, the traditional Whig is being knocked askew yet again. That old Whig view, espoused by historians like David Hume and James Froude in Scotland and England, and adopted by the Enlightenment philosophes of France, that the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, worthy of nothing but ridicule, avoided by historians because of their superstition, papistry, and obscurity--it's still with us today. Think of William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire, which even Thomas Cahill notes is filled with Anti-Catholic prejudice and "one howler after another" (see Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which demonstrates some of his own unexamined prejudies with a ridiculous emphasis on attacking George W. Bush and promoting "Voice of the Faithful" and "Call to Action").

Pernoud's slender volume is filled with almost Chestertonian paradoxes: one of the most memorable to me now is that she contrasts medieval Gothic and renaissance Classicism in architecture by noting that the architects, even though anonymous in the Middle Ages, innovated in developing the soaring perpendicular Gothic cathedrals: renaissance architects copied the architecture of Greece and Rome. I enjoyed Pernoud's debunking of the myths (the same myths Manchester repeated and Cahill regretted); I enjoyed her book on Women in the Age of the Cathedrals even more.

I was reading it on an airplane years ago, and another (female) passenger expressed some deprecatory interest--"I expect there's not much to say about women in those days, since we were so oppressed". You might anticipate my reply (but I'll tell you anyway)--"Au contraire; you should read Pernoud's book: you would discover how much economic and intellectual freedom women had in the Middle Ages!" I doubt she read the book, don't you?. Someday, I hope these old Whig ideas will be completely debunked and exposed, but it will take a long time for the easy prejudgements Pernod describes in Those Terrible Middle Ages and I experienced in the late twentieth century to be replaced by more thoughtful appreciation of an essential period of European history.

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain by Alec Ryrie

That's an intriguing title because one's first thought might be: what else were people (if they weren't Catholic) in England during the Reformation? I think we might (or at least I might) be too quick to assume that there was one way of being part of the Church of England.

According to the book description from OUP:

~Offers the first comprehensive survey of the early Protestant religious experience
~Provides a distinctive perspective on the dynamism, intensity, and breadth of early British Protestant culture
~Focuses on the material reality of religious experience
~Integrates religious history with currently lively fields such as history of emotion, of childhood, and of Puritan reading and writing
~[Is] Clearly and accessibly written

The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism.

Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears.

This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal.

The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women, and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. Alec Ryrie shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part I: The Protestant Emotions
1: Cultivating the Affections
2: Despair and Salvation
3: The Meaning of Mourning
4: Desire
5: Joy

Part II: The Protestant at Prayer
6: The Meaning of Prayer
7: Answering Prayer
8: The Practice of Prayer
9: Speaking to God
10: Prayer as Struggle

Part III: The Protestant and the Word
11: Reading
12: Writing

Part IV: The Protestant in Company
13: The Experience of Worship
14: Prayer in the Household

Part V: The Protestant Life
15: The Meaning of Life
16: The Stages of Life

Conclusion
Select Bibliography

The author is Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity, Durham University:

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer's Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

Book Review: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England

I received this book as a Christmas gift from a kind friend--and I'd to read Ian Mortimer's "sequel": The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England. Mortimer writes this book as guidebook to England in the fourteenth century:

 

The past is a foreign country - this is your guidebook. Imagine you could travel in time, back to the fourteenth century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? Should you go to a castle or a monastic guest house? And what are you going to eat? What sort of food are you going to be offered by a peasant or a monk or a lord?

This radical new approach turns our entire understanding of history upside down. It shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. It sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you, the reader, to the middle ages, and showing you everything from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture.

Being a guidebook, many questions are answered which do not normally occur in traditional history books. How do you greet people in the street? What should you use for toilet paper? How fast - and how safely - can you travel? Why might a physician want to taste your blood? And how do you test to see if you are going down with the plague?

The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: revolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail, and startling for its portrayal of humanity in an age of violence, exuberance and fear.

The Contents:

Introduction: Welcome to Medieval England
1. The Landscape
2. The People
3. The Medieval Character
4. Basic Essentials
5. What to Wear
6. Travelling
7. Where to Stay
8. What to Eat and Drink
9. Health and Hygiene
10. The Law
11. What to Do
Envoi
Notes

I agree with the publisher's blurb: this is a very entertaining book, filled with detail about daily life, customs, clothing, music, religion, food and drink--so many insights into daily life. It is written as non-fiction but as if the reader is there, experiencing and learning about life in the fourteenth century for peasants, clergy, knights, lords, nobility, and monarchs.

Ian Mortimer's website is also filled with detail and information about this book and The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.