Tag: england

Fit to Rule; Horizon: The Secret Life of the Cat

The second episode of Fit to Rule covered the end of the Stuarts, and the four Georges. Lucy Worsley skipped over Charles II entirely, and only briefly mentioned James II. Unlike his brother, James did actually manage to have a male heir, but unfortunately for him this is what led to his being deposed. James had converted to Catholicism much to the disgust of Parliament so when his second, Catholic wife had a son it Parliament invited William of Orange to invade. William was married to Mary, the eldest daughter of James (by his first wife) and both of them were staunch Protestants. William turned up with an army, but when he got to London James II and family fled. Worsley pointed out that this was a paradigm shift – Parliament were now the deciders of who should succeed to the throne.

William & Mary might’ve been strong in the right religion, but their health was another matter. William was physically weak – he was short & he was also asthmatic. His asthma got worse once he was living in London, so he & Mary moved to Hampton Court. This removed them from the political centre of the kingdom, which didn’t help to ease the friction between the foreign King & his Parliament. Worsley said that Mary was mentally fragile – she suffered greatly from guilt over being involved in deposing her father (which he made sure to fan the flames of, quoting the Commandments in letters to her etc). She also believed that women should not involve themselves in politics, but ended up being regent while her husband was away at war. The couple also failed to have any children – not even a single pregnancy. Worsley said that even at the time there was speculation that this was William’s fault – either through physical problems or possibly that he was gay. Whatever it was, they had no heir. Mary died young, of small pox in her 30s and William died 8 years later.

By this time Parliament had had some time to determine who should be next – Mary’s younger sister Anne who was also a Protestant. Anne’s medical history is rather sad – in 16 years she had 17 pregnancies most of which ended in miscarriage or still birth. Of the 5 who made it out alive, the longest lived child was only 11 when he died (which was before Anne took the throne). Worsley told us that contemporary doctors thought that Anne’s difficulties with pregnancy were due to an imbalance in her humours (that was still the dominant medical theory at the time) – in effect they thought she was slippery (had an excess of cold & wet humours) so the foetuses just slipped out. Obviously implausible to us today, but there’s not enough evidence of what was wrong to diagnose her from this distance of history. One thing that Worsley & the expert she was talking to did draw out was that Anne was obese, which can lead to pregnancy problems (but this wasn’t the whole problem).

Towards the end of her reign there were also rumours about her sexuality. Blenheim Palace was built by Queen Anne (using public money) for the Duke of Marlborough after his victory at the Battle of Blenheim. This caused a certain amount of political problems but it wasn’t Anne’s relationship with the Duke that caused raised eyebrows, instead it was her relationship with his wife. The two women had been very close friends for years, and scandalously treated each other as equals even after Anne became Queen. The Duchess had a lot of power and held the most important offices for a Lady of the Bedchamber and this caused resentment among others of the aristocracy. I’m not sure if there was any truth to the rumours – I don’t remember Worsley saying one way or the other.

After Anne the Stuart dynasty was over – and Parliament cast around for a suitable heir, eventually settling on George, the Elector of Hanover who was a Protestant. Worsley skipped quickly past George I, clearly other than being too German for comfort for his new country there wasn’t much wrong with him. George II didn’t have any medical problems (that Worsley told us, anyway) instead he had family drama. The Hanoverian monarchs were much more fertile than the Tudors & Stuarts had been but this lead to its own issues. Frederick, the eldest son & heir of George II, fell out with his father and this helped to further polarise British politics. The political party system was starting to get going during this era, but wasn’t yet as defined as modern political parties. Now with an adult heir who wasn’t getting on with the King there was an alternative court, so politicians in disagreement with the policies of His Majesty’s Government had a new centre they could revolve around. And the Prince of Wales could attract people to his court with promises of what would happen once he was King.

Sadly for him tho Frederick pre-deceased his father. Instead his son, George II’s grandson, George inherited. George III is famous for his madness, but Worsley was saying that it shouldn’t overshadow what was actually a very long and mostly sane reign. The madness itself is often thought to’ve been porphyria, but Worsley told us that the current theory is actually that this was a manic episode. She spoke to a doctor who has used the same techniques he uses to diagnose modern patients to look at the letters of George III before & during his madness, and he seemed fairly convinced that were George III to see a doctor today he’d be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.

George III might’ve been mad, but he was also fertile and so his eldest son was old enough to be regent during his father’s madness. Worsley told us that this George (later George IV) was probably reacting against his childhood all his life. He’d been sent away from the family as a child to be educated strictly, and to have discipline instilled in him. In adulthood he indulged himself in as much vice as possible. He overate, he drank to excess, he took large quantities of laudanum (which is opium in alcohol), he was a notorious womaniser. Worsley showed us several satirical cartoons of George IV which were drawn by his contemporaries. When he died he was apparently not much mourned.

And that was the end of this episode, saving the rest of the Hanoverians for next time.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

We decided we were just about ahead enough of the PVR filling up to watch one of the non-HD programmes we recorded more recently – because we were both intrigued to watch the most recent Horizon episode: The Secret Life of the Cat. For this programme some researchers had fitted GPS-tagged collars to 50 cats living in the same village. They recorded the tracks of the cats over a week, and also filmed some with cameras set up round the village and attached cameras to others. They picked where & which cats to film based on the early data from the first couple of days of GPS tracking.

There was a bit much “gee wow isn’t this exciting” and fluffy time-filling interviews with the families that owned the cats for my tastes. I’d rather’ve seen more of the data & some more in depth analysis. However there were some interesting results. There was quite a lot of variance between different cats, with some staying close & some ranging much further. They said that the male cats tended to have a longer range than female – I wanted to know if that was entire males or if it was also true for neutered males (and if there’s a difference does it depend on age at neutering?) but they didn’t talk about that. Where the cats are more tightly packed in the centre of the village they saw them time-share territories, which was interesting. And amusing (although not surprising) were the cats that left their own house, sauntered across the village into another house through some other cat’s catflap and finished off that cat’s food. The video they recorded of one of these showed that it wasn’t particularly wary as it did this – clearly it was something usual & the cat felt safe.

Overall it was still fun to watch, just I would’ve preferred something more in depth. It did make me wonder (not for the first time) where Toby goes when he goes out. We’ve thought before about fitting him with a camera or a gps device, but if he goes into our neighbours’ houses I think I’d rather not know 😉

In Our Time: The Putney Debates

The Putney Debates were held (in Putney) in 1647 when the Parliamentary forces first felt they had won the Civil War – Charles I was safely captured – and these meetings were held between differing factions in the New Model Army to discuss the way the country should be governed thereafter. They ended inconclusively, when Charles I escaped and the Civil War re-ignited. However their influence has been felt throughout political thought since then, as the re-discovery in the early 20th Century of the notes from the meetings made clear. The three experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Justin Champion (Royal Holloway, University of London), Ann Hughes (Keele University) and Kate Peters (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge).

To put the debates in context they started the programme by talking about the causes of the Civil War – Charles I believed that as the divinely anointed King he had the right to do what he wanted but Parliament believed that he also had to heed their counsel. As well as the politics of the situation there was a religious aspect, many felt that the King was too close to Catholicism. Despite Parliament not really wanting to go to war against the King in the end it became inevitable, and hostilities broke out in 1642. At first the King had the advantage. Parliament’s troops were very localised, and often refused to fight outside their region, so eventually they decided that in order to win the war they needed to form a New Model Army.

This army was a professional army, which was under a cohesive chain of command rather than being lots of local forces stuck together haphazardly. I think they were saying that there was a rule that Members of Parliament couldn’t be part of the army, so that it was separate from the politics. Many of the soldiers were volunteers, and there was pride in the honour & professionalism of the force. As well as this the army felt they were fighting for a cause – for their country and for the True Religion (and many in the army were more radical varieties of Protestant).

The New Model Army turned the tide of the war and by early 1647 the King’s forces were defeated. The King himself was taken captive from the house he was staying in, by a relatively junior cavalry officer (backed up by the 500 soldiers under his command). And now the problem was to negotiate a settlement with the King. They were saying on the programme that really want people wanted at this point was to return the situation to normal – King back on the throne, peace time law & order restored. Obviously with the proviso that the King would now listen to Parliament and behave himself.

One stumbling block that had to be overcome, from the New Model Army’s point of view, was that the army’s pay was significantly in arrears. They also wanted a proper legal statement of indemnity for the soldiers – i.e. that the blood they’d spilt in the war would not be counted as murder now the war was over. The first proposals put forward by Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and other Grandees of the army for a settlement with the King did not provide for these conditions to be met first – it would happen after the King was restored. This did not go down well with the more radical elements of the army which made their grievances known via petitions and via the Agitators.

The political culture of the time was a very informed one – the experts were telling us how all sides in politics published pamphlets and wrote petitions to be presented to their opponents or political leaders. So the population were generally politically active & well educated about the issues of the day & what the various sides of any debate were. Therefore it wasn’t an unusual step for the New Model Army to present a petition to its leaders putting forward their grievances about the settlement. What was a new step was that they began to organise themselves politically – each regiment elected its own Agitator and these men met to discuss the issues that each of their regiments wanted raised. And it’s the representatives of these Agitators that met with Cromwell, Ireton etc in the Putney Debates. Many of them were part of the movement that would become known as the Levellers.

When the Putney Debates started in October 1647 the subject had moved on from simply being about pay and indemnities. The Levellers had published a couple of pamphlets setting forward their opinions on how the country should be run now that the war was over, and so the constitution of the country was under debate. The Levellers’ ideas were pretty radical for their time – they thought that every man over the age of 21 should have the vote. Both of these were regarded as appalling by the more conservative participants in the debates. Ireton said that universal suffrage would be anarchy, that you should only get the vote if you had a fixed & permanent interest in the country (i.e. were a land owner). The Levellers felt that by their fighting for their country they should get a say in the running of it – the cause they had fought for was important otherwise the army lost its legitimacy.

On the subject of religion the Levellers were also pretty radical, they felt that people should be allowed to worship as they pleased (I suspect there was an unsaid “so long as they’re Christian & not Catholic” here…). This was also too radical for the other side of the debates – Cromwell & Ireton were in favour of increased tolerance of different forms of Protestantism but they felt there should be a universal Church to which everyone belonged and any tolerance was to be within this Church.

The debates ended inconclusively after a few weeks – the King escaped from custody, and the second phase of the Civil Wars started. The notes taken during the debates weren’t publicly available at the time, and were lost to historians until the early 20th Century. Despite their lack of conclusion at the time they can be seen as the first steps towards our modern Parliamentary Democracy.

This was a programme that seemed like it had bitten off more than it could chew! It felt like they needed to give so much context that the meat of the programme got a bit short-changed. And it reminded me how little I actually know about the Civil Wars.

Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell is primarily remembered for the dissolution of the monasteries and for his (probable) hand in Anne Boleyn’s fall. This programme presented by Diarmaid MacCulloch was a biography of the man which discussed how there was more to him than a cynical destroyer. It also featured footage from 3 of the 4 towns I’ve lived in – Cambridge & Oxford weren’t exactly surprises, and Ipswich shouldn’t’ve been but somehow was and it was a bit of Ipswich that’s only a 10 to 15 minute walk from our house too.

I know the overall shape of the Cromwell story but there are a lot of details I didn’t already know (I’d’ve enjoyed watching it anyway, but it’s nice to also learn stuff). It was good to see MacCulloch showing us so much of the primary sources for things, the actual documents that the information for these events comes from, right from the very start of the story. Cromwell was born in poverty, in Putney in London. His father was a brewer, and pub landlord, and MacCulloch described him as running the sort of pub you wouldn’t go to twice. He then showed us the court records for the region, which include 48 occasions where Walter Cromwell was fined for watering his beer. Thomas Cromwell left home and the country around the age of 17 (his date of birth isn’t known for sure, but a good guess is 1485). The next 14 years are unclear, later sources suggest he spent some time as a mercenary fighting for the French and subsequently working for a banker in Florence. Whether this is right or not when he returned to England he’d acquired an education (in languages & law) which allowed him to mix with a much higher social class and to marry up (to the widowed daughter of a financier, pretty good for a brewer’s son).

After Cromwell’s return he acquired a reputation as a man who could fix things. An important step in this was work he did for a Guild in Boston, Lincolnshire. The main income of this Guild (I forget which one MacCulloch said it was :/) in Boston was from the sale of Indulgences – they had a licence form the Pope to do so which was due to expire soon. So the Guild employed Cromwell to head a delegation to Rome to negotiate with the Pope for a renewal of the licence. MacCulloch showed us the documentation of the expenses that the Guild paid to Cromwell for this undertaking – he said it was the equivalent of £600,000 in today’s money, which both shows the trust they were putting in Cromwell and also how important this income was to them. Cromwell did his job well – and in a style that would characterise his future dealings. Instead of following the rules & protocol & joining the queue for an audience with the Pope he engineered a “chance meeting” – as the Pope was returning from a hunting trip he came across Cromwell & his entourage who were singing. Once he’d met once with the Pope Cromwell then at future meetings catered to what he knew as the Pope’s weaknesses – he was known to have a sweet tooth, so English delicacies were offered to him. Cromwell’s methods worked, he returned to Boston with a new (and extended) licence for the sale of Indulgences – the Guild’s income was assured. MacCulloch didn’t spell it out, but I was amused to note how ironic this was given Cromwell’s later evangelical zeal.

Cromwell now got himself into the employ of Wolsey & this is where Ipswich came into the programme. Wolsey was also of low birth (in Ipswich) and had risen to the rank of Cardinal in the Church – and had also become Henry VIII’s “man who got things done”. MacCulloch said that when Henry took the throne he wanted the glory & prestige of being King, but was less keen on the work that was needed to actually run the kingdom and Wolsey became the man who did the work. So Cromwell became the fixer for Henry VIII’s fixer. One of the jobs that Cromwell did for Wolsey was to do with the establishment of Wolsey’s two colleges. Wolsey had benefited from an Oxford education and wanted to make sure more of his home town’s people would have this opportunity, so he established a college in Ipswich (which no longer exists, only the chapel remains – the church of St Peter’s at the Waterfront which J & I actually visited the other day) and a college in Oxford (now Christchurch College). Cromwell was involved in the actual set up of these, and presided over the dissolution of several monasteries which paid for these colleges – an act that resonates with his later career.

Wolsey fell from power with his failure to negotiate the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Eventually he was charged with promoting the rule of a foreign power and removed from power – effectively he was charged with doing his job as a Cardinal aka the representative of the Pope in England. Which as MacCulloch pointed out wasn’t exactly fair. Cromwell feared that his time in the sun was over because his career was tied to Wolsey’s, but still he continued to do his duty to Wolsey and also ameliorated some of the effects of Wolsey’s fall (in particular ensuring that Ipswich still had a school even if not the grand college Wolsey had envisioned).

The King’s Great Matter (his divorce from Catherine) was still not solved, and here is where Cromwell managed to put his talents for organising things to use and get himself into Wolsey’s old position as Henry’s fixer. Cromwell went through old histories of England to find some precedent that Henry could use to ignore the Pope (effectively), MacCulloch was saying that the King had to have come up with this idea but Cromwell was the man who implemented it. The legal fiction they used was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of Britain, where King Arthur is said to have authority over the Roman Empire. Complete myth, but a useful one – if Arthur was an Emperor then so is his successor Henry and Emperors do not answer to anyone, not even the Pope. Cromwell now set about making this have some legal standing – he was by now a Member of Parliament (and had been for a while) so he was able to engineer the passing of an Act of Parliament that stated that Henry was (and always had been) an Emperor. MacCulloch said this had greater significance even than in the King’s Great Matter. Previously Parliament had only had two functions – passing on petitions from the people to the King and raising taxes. But with this Act for the first time Parliament had created a part of the constitution of the country, so MacCulloch was saying that this was the first step towards our current political system. And also that other European countries were gradually losing their councils and concentrating power with the monarch, but by solving the King’s Great Matter in this way Cromwell had ensured that the English Parliament continued to be relevant & powerful. I had the feeling that MacCulloch was overstating things here to make his point, but then again he’s the historian here not me 🙂

This then is the decisive split of the English Church from Rome, and Henry appoints Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Who annuls Henry’s marriage to Catherine (on the basis of being illegal due to her prior marriage to Henry’s brother) and marries Henry to Anne Boleyn. We now come to the period of Cromwell’s life that he’s most remembered and vilified for. As Henry’s righthand man he presided over the dissolution of monasteries all across England. This wasn’t just done for the money, it was also done through a desire to reform the Church. The Reformation is sweeping across Europe at this time, and the wealth and corruption of the Church is one of the driving factors. Cromwell has, at some point previous to this, become a part of the Reform movement (I’m struggling with phrasing here – “movement” sounds a bit too organised, I mean this is where his religious sympathies lay and he was in contact with others in the court who also felt this way, like Anne Boleyn). So this is partly about cleaning up what Cromwell sees as the corruption of the English Church – some of the monasteries are dissolved after their “relics” are demonstrated to be false (and so the income they got from pilgrims is ill-gotten gains which they aren’t entitled to).

Henry, despite the break with Rome, isn’t really an Evangelical but he welcomes the extra money so is perfectly happy with dissolving the monasteries. However Anne & Cromwell fall out over where the money should go – Anne believes it should be used for good causes, Cromwell is the King’s man and believes it should go to the King to do with as he sees fit. Anne & Henry are also not on as good terms as they were, so Cromwell engineers the downfall and execution of the Queen. (Obviously MacCulloch is in the “Cromwell did it” camp (c.f. the Anne Boleyn programme that aired the day before this one for the other theories (post)). And MacCulloch admits that this is a pretty dark point in Cromwell’s career, hard to spin as anything palatable.

Now Cromwell is riding high. He’s made a Knight of the Garter & Earl of Essex (after the previous Earl died without an heir). He continues with his Reform efforts – he even gets the King to authorise an English Bible. This is a key part of the Protestant Reformation, it is a movement that wants to get back to the word of God as set down in the Gospels and to make that happen the Bible needs to be available to all worshippers, not just those that have learnt Latin. Henry has been against this in the past, and yet Cromwell still takes the risk & gives the King a copy of an English Bible. He’s counting on his popularity with the King and on the fact that with his third wife pregnant (hopefully with an heir) the King is in a generous mood. The risk pays off and the Bible is authorised, MacCulloch showed us the frontispiece of a copy of this Bible. King Henry VIII presides at the top of the page (below God but bigger than God) handing Bibles down to Cranmer & Cromwell who pass them along to the clergy (Cranmer) and the laity (Cromwell).

Cromwell is also the most probable hand behind another Reformist undertaking at this time. Zwingli in Switzerland is even more radical in his rejection of Catholic “superstition” than Martin Luther had been – he goes so far as to say that in the Mass (which he re-moulds as Holy Communion) the bread and the wine do not become the body & blood of Christ, instead they are a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice of himself for the sins of mankind. Henry regarded Zwingli as a heretic, as did Archbishop Cranmer. Yet still an official looking delegation of Oxford graduates went to visit Zwingli & learn from him. MacCulloch points out that Cromwell is the only man with both the power & the inclination to send this delegation, and that this did in the end become the dogma of the Anglican Church.

It’s not just in matters of religion that Cromwell had a lasting effect on the country. As a result of the closure of the monasteries there was much higher unemployment in the country, and Cromwell took measures to counteract this. To our ears his laws about parishes being able to force able-bodied men to work doesn’t seem a good thing, but MacCulloch was presenting this as a necessary first step on the way to our modern welfare state – the previous “solution” would’ve been to just drive them out of the parish, which only gives the people involved more problems. Cromwell was also responsible for the law against homosexuality – MacCulloch showed us the document of the law against “the sin of buggery”. This had been one of the charges laid against the monasteries, part of how they were seen to be corrupt, and Cromwell was keen to make this forbidden even after the monasteries were shut.

So Cromwell is well established, and getting his own way even in matters of religion. But he fatally missteps when Henry is looking for his next wife, after Jane Seymour’s death. MacCulloch showed us a 17th Century summary of a now lost contemporary record of a conversation between Cromwell & Cranmer on the subject – Cranmer is urging Cromwell to consider the King’s comfort (that the woman should be someone he likes the look of & can talk to) but Cromwell wants the woman to be a proper Protestant Princess to further lock England away from the Roman Church. He sends Holbein off to paint Anne of Cleves, his preferred candidate for the next Queen – and looking at the portrait she seems a pretty woman, and Henry agreed so the marriage was arranged. Unfortunately the reality did not please the King as much as the portrait, and so he had this marriage annulled. This was easier than the annulment of his first marriage, but more humiliating because he had to publicly admit to impotence & an inability to consummate the marriage. Henry blamed Cromwell both for the failed marriage and for the humiliation and Cromwell had not enough friends in court to stick up for him. He was arrested, and executed. Henry is said to have regretted this later – to have said that he had put to death the most loyal servant he had. But a bit too late for Cromwell.

I was struck throughout this programme how much I recognised of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell (post about “Bring Up the Bodies”) – a sign, I think, that she did her research. I’m not sure I entirely agree that we should look at Cromwell as a principled statesman instead of a cynical thug. I think rather that he was both.

The Last Days of Anne Boleyn

The start of the Tudor Court Season at the BBC! 🙂 This is the first of a handful of one off programmes about the Tudors – not concentrating on the stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth that are so much a part of national mythology, but instead looking at the other central characters of the times. This programme was about the sudden fall of Anne Boleyn from Queen of England to executed adulterous & treasonous “whore”.

First, I’ll get the big nitpick out of the way: throughout the programme Robert Glenister (narrating) repeatedly refers to the events as happening 600 years ago, or six centuries ago, when in actual fact 1536 is a bit short of 500 years ago. A shame, as from reading the comments on the BBC blog post about the programme it seems some people have got fixated on the arithmetic error and haven’t bothered to pay attention to the rest of it. They should’ve got that right tho :/

The programme is billed on the website as “a radical new approach to televised history”, which is a little overblown, but there is a kernel of truth to it. Instead of a cohesive story that is presented as fact we have seven talking heads, plus a narrator, and they do not agree about the interpretation of the facts available. Suzannah Lipscomb in the BBC blog post breaks the theories down like this:

Broadly, the theories about Anne’s death boil down to four possible scenarios:

  1. that Anne was guilty,
  2. that Thomas Cromwell and, possibly, the Seymours conspired against her,
  3. that Henry VIII wanted to get rid of Anne,
  4. that dangerous talk cost lives and it was what Anne said – rather than what she did – that made her appear, in Henry’s eyes, guilty.

And the talking heads divide up as follows: George Bernard (a historian) was in favour of Anne being guilty. Suzannah Lipscomb (a historian) & Greg Walker (a historian) were in favour of the last of the theories (an appearance of guilt rather than actual guilt). The other four were split between the two conspiracy theories, with Philippa Gregory (novelist, including “The Other Boleyn Girl”) on the Henry-did-it side and Hilary Mantel (author of “Bring up the Bodies” (post)) on the Cromwell-did-it side. I think David Starkey (historian) was also a Cromwell person, and Alison Weir (author of many popular history books, plus some historical fiction) was more on the Henry end of the spectrum. But as I didn’t take notes I may’ve muddled that up a little – there’s a degree of overlap between the two theories anyway, as Cromwell could’ve provided Henry with the means to bring down Anne.

The format of the programme was for the narrator to talk us through the events, and the talking heads gave their opinions on the motivations or causes of things. In between the talking heads there were bits of re-enactment to give us something to look at. I think between them Mantel, Starkey & Lipscomb contributed more than half the discussion but the other four also had space to put their positions.

The programme started by working briskly backwards from Anne Boleyn’s execution on 19th May 1536 via her arrest two weeks earlier, her auspicious start to the year and then started moving forward again from her arrival at court several years earlier. As it wasn’t the focus of the programme we passed fairly swiftly over the intervening years till the start of 1536, just hitting the high points. Anne arrives at court age 21 having spent time in the French court beforehand. She’s intelligent, witty, charismatic, sophisticated … and the King becomes infatuated. He wants her to be his mistress, she holds out for marriage and in the end the King succeeds in divorcing Catherine of Aragon by splitting the English Church from Rome.

So as 1536 starts Anne is married to the King and secure in her position at court. Catherine of Aragon finally dies on 7th January and Henry and Anne celebrate. Anne is pregnant for the second time, and everyone is convinced this time it will be a boy and the heir that Henry needs. All is well. But on the day that Catherine is buried (29th January) Anne suffers a miscarriage, and the dead child was a boy. Henry is devastated, and the pro-“Henry did it” viewpoint identifies this as the beginning of the end for Anne – she’d had miscarriages before and this was a sign to Henry that the pattern was re-asserting itself. Gregory went further and told us about a midwife who examined the baby and discovered it was malformed, and if this was the case then that (in the eyes of 16th Century people) would mean that Anne had committed a dreadful sin or was even a witch. Both Mantel & Lipscomb pointed out that there’s no actual contemporary evidence of this, it’s a story that starts to circulate later long after 1536. Around this time Henry also began to pay court to Jane Seymour, who would be his next wife – again this could be seen as evidence that “Henry did it” but others of the historians pointed out that Henry had several mistresses over his lifetime and there’s no evidence that he was looking for a replacement wife in Jane.

The next major event they covered was a sermon given by Anne Boleyn’s chaplain on Passion Sunday. This had as its theme a warning against treacherous advisers using the story of Haman from the Book of Esther. This is identified by the Cromwell-did-it viewpoint as being squarely aimed at Cromwell, and as a sign of a rift between Cromwell & Anne Boleyn. Cromwell by this stage is the Minister of Everything – all the business of the court passes across Cromwell’s desk. He was also the man who’d managed to find the solution to how the King was to be able to marry Anne, so their rises to power were intertwined. The Cromwell-did-it viewpoint is that they were no longer closely linked, and there was a power struggle going on between them. Countering this Lipscomb pointed out that just because the priest was Anne’s chaplain doesn’t mean that he was speaking on behalf of Anne, we don’t know the motivation behind the choice of text. And it doesn’t seem to make sense for them to be working against each other.

Another thing that happened at this particular service makes it clear that Anne was still in favour with the King – Henry engineered it so that Anne & Chapuys (the Holy Roman Emperor’s Ambassador) came face to face, and Chapuys had to bow to Anne. As he was in the service of Catherine of Aragon’s nephew he had been refusing to meet Anne, and this incident meant that he was forced to choose between being rude and acknowledging Anne as Queen of England. He chose the latter path, quite the diplomatic coup for Henry. And as more than one of the talking heads pointed out, why would he do this if he was already thinking about setting Anne aside?

After this service the King is in conversation with Chapuys, and then the King and Cromwell have a falling out. No-one who heard what was said reported it, but apparently the body language was clear that they were having a row. Cromwell leaves court and stays in his house for a day or two saying he is unwell – he is said to have looked in poor health as he walked away from this charged conversation. They were saying that it’s thought that Cromwell was overstepping his bounds in organising foreign policy. And of course there’d just been that sermon, whether at Anne’s instigation or not it would still seem aimed at Cromwell. It’s after he comes back to court that the whole thing starts to come unravelled for Anne – so this can be seen as more evidence for a rift between Anne & Cromwell. There’s a later letter from Cromwell to Chapuys where Cromwell says that he “made the whole thing up”, but Lipscomb was saying that in the full context of the letter it’s not clear if he made it up from nothing of his own volition, or if he did so at Henry’s prodding or what. I don’t remember if it was spelt out, but I was also thinking that a letter from Cromwell after Anne’s disgrace to a man who had no cause to like Anne might not be the most unbiased source – one can easily imagine reasons why Cromwell might want to claim credit.

The first stage in Anne’s downfall was that rumours about her behaviour started to spread – the incident that sparked it was the Countess of Worcester, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, on being told off by her brother for her loose living says something to the effect of “if you think I’m bad, you should see how the Queen behaves”. Next Cromwell takes a young man called Mark Smeaton away for a chat about this – he was a musician who often played for the Queen & her ladies. The presenters talked a bit about whether or not he was tortured – there’s no direct evidence either way. Apparently torture wasn’t often used at Henry’s court, but set against that is the fact that Smeaton confessed which seems foolish. I remember from Mantel’s novel that she has Smeaton tricked into being boastful. But whatever happened (which we’ll never know) the fact is that Smeaton confessed to having slept with the Queen and named others who also had.

So Cromwell takes this to the King and moves on to a full scale investigation of what’s going on. I think it’s at this point in the programme that they spent a bit of time discussing Henry’s character in relation to why he would believe this. I think Gregory harked back to the theory that Henry as a devout man would see that Anne’s miscarriage was some sort of sign of God’s disapproval. Starkey on the other hand was telling us that Henry was the sort of person who could convince himself of the truth of whatever was convenient. And Anne’s failure to give birth to a male heir and her general demeanour as a woman who didn’t know her place might mean it was convenient to take this opportunity to replace her with someone less arrogant and full of herself, like Jane Seymour. I think it was Lipscomb that brought up the idea that even rumours of adultery were a public relations disaster for Henry – it would be a sign he couldn’t control his own household, and if he couldn’t do that how could he control a realm?

Seven young men are arrested, including Mark Smeaton, Henry Norris (one of the King’s closest courtiers) and Anne’s own brother George Boleyn. They are charged with committing adultery with the Queen, two are later released but five of them go on to be tried and executed for it. All of them except Smeaton deny the charges, interestingly Smeaton never recants his confession. Anne is arrested shortly after them on 2nd May 1536 and taken to the Tower. She denies all the charges, right up to the very end. She defends herself at her trial, but the outcome is a forgone conclusion – she is convicted of adultery, incest and wishing the death of the King and sentenced to be executed. The men are executed on 17th May 1536 and Anne follows two days later. She receives the final sacrament in the Tower before her execution and when she makes her final confession she swore on the threat of eternal damnation that she was innocent of the charges against her. Which Lipscomb pointed out as quite compelling evidence of her innocence – Anne’s about to die and is devoutly religious, risking eternal torment by lying at this point when it can change nothing isn’t in character.

Bernard was the lone voice on the programme suggesting that Anne might’ve been guilty. He drew attention to the fact that when the rumours started to spread and the investigation began no-one stuck up for her or defended her. He also noted that there is a suggestion that Henry was having problems with impotence, and so getting herself pregnant by someone else might’ve seemed the obvious solution to the “how to have a male heir” problem that Anne had. And even the incest with her brother might be explained by this, after all the resulting child wouldn’t look like anyone unfortunate. Bernard also pointed out that Anne & George weren’t brought up together, they met as almost-strangers as adults, so it’s not as disturbing as the modern mind thinks it is.

However Lipscomb pointed out that a lot of the charges were fabricated. The records of the trials are lost, but the list of charges still exists. These are very specific, they list several occasions on which intercourse took place and list Anne plus a named person on a given date in a named place. And even though not all evidence from the time survives modern historians have enough documentation of the places where Anne and the men were during this period to disprove three quarters of the charges because either Anne or the man or both weren’t in the right place at the right time.

Lipscomb & Walker were also keen to point out that the paranoid atmosphere of the court would prevent people from sticking up for Anne – if she’s on the way down you don’t want to get caught in her wake even if you do think she’s innocent. They also pointed out that life for a lady in the court was a tightrope act – you had to appear to be totally chaste, yet also take part in the games of courtly love. Flirt, but not flirt too much. Lipscomb told us that the most damning piece of evidence against Anne was a conversation with Norris where they imply that Norris wants to marry her once Henry is dead. This is taken as evidence by Cromwell that Norris & Anne were plotting the death of the King, but Lipscomb was saying that maybe it was a conversation that just crossed the line a bit too far and happened to be overheard at the wrong time.

I enjoyed this programme (you can probably tell by how much I’ve written about it 🙂 ). I particularly liked hearing the different viewpoints and appreciated that it drew a distinction between “this is a fact” and “this is an opinion”, it was always clear what was known and where people were speculating. Apparently the seven experts were interviewed separately, but they managed to cut the bits of footage together in a way that made it feel like a conversation.

Wild Arabia; Chivalry & Betrayal: The Hundred Years War; Panorama: North Korea Undercover

Over the last week we finished off watching the Wild Arabia series. The second episode looked at the wildlife along the south eastern coast of the peninsula (what I think of as the bottom of it, for no apparent reason!). Part of the programme focussed on the sea life in the region (including turtles coming up to lay their eggs on the beach. Another strand followed two biologists (from Oman) who set up cameras through the region to record the animals that moved past & got some great footage of species that are generally hard to find. Most of the year the landscape is the sort of desert you’d expect, but during monsoon season the winds blow across the Indian Ocean full of moisture and when they get to the cliffs in this region the water comes out first as mist then as rain. And the land is transformed into a lush green landscape.

The third episode looked at the impact of the oil industry and the cultural changes that’s brought on the land and the animals. It was pretty evenly balanced, showing us both the bad and the good effects. The bit that sticks most in my mind was the high-tech camel racing – instead of a jockey each camel has a small robot on its back and the trainers drive alongside the track shouting encouragement to the camel that is played out through a speaker on the robot. And the robot carries a small whip for when the trainer thinks that is required. It was a very odd sight.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

The third & last episode of Janina Ramirez’s series about the Hundred Years War covered the time from the English victory at Agincourt (in 1415) to the end of the war in 1453. After the victory at Agincourt Henry V set about conquering France properly – he didn’t just take an army over the Channel to raid, they captured and held cities and towns. And Henry handed out lands & titles to his nobility, this was a Norman Conquest in reverse. The English were helped in this endeavour by the divisions among the French. Charles VI (the Mad) was still on the throne and spent not inconsiderable amounts of time thinking he was made of glass and worrying about breaking – but Ramirez was saying that unlike in England the French saw their King as so sacrosanct that no-one was about to depose him even if he was mad. So real power didn’t rest with the King, instead there were the supporters of the Dauphin (the heir to the throne) called Orleanists who were in charge through most of the south of the country. And in the north of the country (including Paris) were the supporters of the Duke of Burgundy. These two factions were more concerned with their power struggles against each other than they were with what the English were doing in Normandy. So Henry V managed to conquer most of Normandy before there was any thought of stopping him.

Finally the two French factions met to negotiate with thoughts of stopping Henry V – but instead of actually negotiating the Dauphin’s men killed the Duke of Burgundy. Which didn’t go down well with the Duke’s son & heir, so the new Duke of Burgundy formed an alliance with the English. Henry V now had control of the north of France, including the treasure house in Paris. And access to Charles VI. A treaty was agreed between Charles & Henry saying that Henry was now heir to the throne of France. Henry also married Charles’ daughter. And doubts were cast on the Dauphin’s legitimacy, to make him seem a less viable alternative.

Sadly for Henry he was never to be crowned King of France, as he pre-deceased Charles VI by a couple of months in 1422. Henry’s son Henry VI was only 9 months old at the time, and before Henry V died he appointed his brothers as regents and gave them strict instructions about how to proceed – in particular they were to persist with the conquest of France. Ramirez told us how the brothers did their best to follow Henry’s wishes, in particular the Duke of Bedford who was left in charge of the French conquest. Over the next few years he pushed forward with the conquest of France, and eventually England controlled all of France down to as far south as the Loire. Well, almost all – the island Mont Saint Michel off the coast of Normandy wasn’t under English control, which Ramirez told us was a psychological boost to the Dauphin and his supporters because Saint Michel was the Dauphin’s patron saint.

And now the tide was about to turn. Ramirez told us that the Dauphin was a bit of a non-entity, but now he had help from an unexpected source – the peasant girl Joan of Arc who heard messages from God. She won the trust of the Dauphin, and led the French to several victories over the English which was taken as a sign that God was now on the side of the French. During this period of pushing back the English the Dauphin was crowned King of France in Reims as was traditional. The Duke of Bedford tried to counter this by having a coronation ceremony for Henry VI in Notre Dame in Paris – but Ramirez spoke to a French historian who told us that this wouldn’t’ve been seen as a “proper” coronation by the French. All French Kings were crowned in Reims, and anointed with the Oil of Chrism kept there – so a coronation somewhere else wasn’t regarded as real.

Joan of Arc was eventually captured by the Burgundians and then tried for heresy by the English. Ramirez explained it was politically motivated – if Joan of Arc was a heretic then clearly God isn’t on France’s side and the Dauphin would be tainted with heresy as well. Joan was condemned & burnt at the stake – first they burnt her & put out the fire so that people would see that she was dead. Then they lit the fires again to reduce her body to ash so that there would be no relics.

But the death of Joan of Arc didn’t improve anything for the English. After the Duke of Bedford died, trying to fulfil his brother’s wishes to the last, the alliance between England and the Burgundians broke down. The Duke of Burgundy allied with the Dauphin and France was now united against the English.

The programme took a small detour here to consider what sort of man Henry VI was. He’d been brought up sheltered from any dangers and it seemed he was also protected from ever making his mind up. He’d inherited his father’s piety, but not his warrior nature – in fact he’s apparently the one medieval king never to lead his army into battle. Ramirez paid a visit to King’s College Chapel in Cambridge which was started by Henry VI – this building, inspired by Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, is where the money went rather than towards the conquest of France.

In the end the French managed to drive the English completely out of France – England even lost control of the territory in France that it had had at the start of the Hundred Years War. The last battles were decisive victories for the French – they used new war technology and tactics to defeat the now out-of-date English army. I know, but I always forget, that the Hundred Years War ends as cannon and guns become the new weapons of war.

And now the series is over – I enjoyed watching it 🙂 This time period is just before my favourite era of history, so I know a bit about it but this gave a different perspective because it concentrates on the war and not so much on what’s going on in England. If anything I’d’ve liked more details on the French side of it, because what I know of French history is pretty much just the bits where it interacts with England. Once I whittle down my stack of books to read I should add an overview of French history to the list.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

We were running late on Wednesday, so looked for a half hour programme to finish the evening with. We ended up continuing the current affairs theme we’ve had recently by watching the Panorama programme about North Korea. The journalist John Sweeney (and presumably an uncredited camera person) joined a tour group doing an official 8 day tour of North Korea, and secretly filmed their visit. It was notable that even most of the sanitised-for-the-foreigners stuff that they were shown on the tour (and actually permitted to photograph) was looked dirty and poor and backward. Whenever the electricity went out, or they couldn’t visit somewhere on the itinerary, it was always the fault of the war. The wording used about the possibility of thermonuclear war was interesting too – always “if war is provoked”, not “declared”, not “breaks out” but “provoked”.

It must’ve taken a lot of courage to make the programme – the consequences of being caught would not be good. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way Sweeney kept poking at the edges of what the people he spoke to were allowed to say. Like the segment in the hospital where he keeps asking why there aren’t any patients there. Other parts of the programme had interviews with defectors from North Korea and they were all clear that to say the wrong thing in North Korea meant death and it didn’t matter how high ranked you were. So to try & expose the foolishness of the script these people were following felt wrong – they would believe it would cost them their lives to deviate from it.

As well as the footage within North Korea, and interviews with defectors, there were also interviews with analysts and diplomats. They all seemed to agree that the posturing about nuclear war with the US is really part of the propaganda & brainwashing for the North Korean public – the image of a strong leader is one who is ready to go to war and to destroy enemies so Kim Jong-un needs to use that rhetoric. Tho one expert did say that thermonuclear war might still happen, albeit not because North Korea wants it … just they might miscalculate. Not particularly reassuring.

Wild Arabia; Israel: Facing the Future; Chivalry & Betrayal: The Hundred Years War

We’re still trying to whittle down the amount of stuff we have recorded on our PVR so on Tuesday evening we started to watch a series about Arabian wildlife & people narrated by Alexander Siddig. This first episode was called “Sand, Wind and Stars” and was all about the desert in the centre of the Arabian peninsula. As with most nature programmes it’s hard to say much about it, because the point is primarily the visuals. This was a very beautiful programme, lots of shots of endless desert sands and oryx moving across the scene. And close-ups of a variety of animals that can survive in the desert heat. There was also another strand of the programme that followed a man and his son on their way to a camel racing gathering – a Bedouin tradition.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

On our normal Wednesday night tv night we started off with a programme about Israel – John Ware visited Israel and spoke to a combination of ordinary people & political or religious leaders (mostly Israelis, but also Palestinian Arabs) about Israel & the future. The thesis of his programme was that Israel stands at a crossroads between a secular future and a religious future.

The programme started with some scenes of Tel Aviv and Ware pointing out that at first glance this could be any cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. But you don’t really have to travel that far to get to the Egyptian border, where the army patrols after attacks on Israel from the Egyptian side of the border. And back in Tel Aviv he spoke to the members of a rock group who are all pilots in the airforce as their “day job”. Israel has been in a state of conflict, if not outright war, with the surrounding Arab nations since the country was founded and this is an always present fact of life for Israelis. And if anything this tension is on the increase in the aftermath of the Arab Spring – for instance Egypt has elected the Muslim Brotherhood to power who are anti-Israel. But Ware said that these are not the issues that are concerning Israelis the most, in the most recent election the candidates campaigned on internal matters. He went to a football match in Tel Aviv and spoke to random spectators about their views on the election and got a wide spectrum of answers from conservative to liberal. Much like you would if you went to a football match in the UK and asked similar political questions.

Ware spent the rest of the programme talking to representatives of various different ideologies & political positions within Israel. One group he talked to were the Ultra-Orthodox Jews who, as the name suggests, are a particularly conservative subset of the Jewish faith. Some of them (all of them?) were living in the region before it was Israel (or are descended from people who were) – and they are predominantly anti-Zionist, believing that the Jewish state shouldn’t’ve been founded by secular authorities and that it should’ve waited for the Messiah. Ware filmed a demonstration by Ultra-Orthodox Jews who wanted to boycott the last election, and pointed out how odd it seems to us to see Jews who don’t want an Israeli state. Or rather, who don’t want this Israeli state. There are also tensions between this community & more liberal Israelis partly because there are a high proportion of the Ultra-Orthodox receiving welfare benefits (because they are devoting their lives to their religion and spirituality rather than supporting themselves). And partly because the more extreme Ultra-Orthodox have tried to impose their behavioural rules forcibly on other citizens who don’t share their beliefs.

Ware also looked at the position of Arabs within Israel – the descendants of those who stayed when the country was founded. He primarily interviewed an Arab man who writes a comedy tv show about the mis-adventures of an Arab in Israel. We were shown clips from it, it made me think of Mr Bean a bit but much sharper edged. The writer talked about how Arabs are often treated with prejudice by ordinary Israelis, and although they are full citizens with the same rights as anyone else in practice they are poorer than other Israelis and often feel like second class citizens.

And of course a lot of space was devoted to the situation in the West Bank (and Gaza to some extent). Ware talked to an Israeli woman who lives in one of the settlements in the West Bank – in an area that’s practically a suburb of Jerusalem. I felt she was very media-savvy, when asked why she lived where she did she said it was “of course” partly for ideological reasons, but then dwelt at length on the beauty of the place, how good it will be for her children to grow up there, how the schools are very good. As a counterpoint Ware also talked to a group of young Arab activists who in the wake of the Arab Spring have been doing very media friendly protests. For instance they boarded a bus travelling from the West Bank into Israel proper carrying signs and having alerted media so they could be filmed being removed from the bus at the border.

There have been long running attempts to get some sort of peace settlement between Israel & the Palestinians who lived in the West Bank & Gaza before Israel attempted to expand into that territory. Mostly this has focussed on trying to set up a Two State solution where the Israelis withdraw from the West Bank & Gaza and the Palestinians will form their own state in those regions. Ware spoke to some people in favour of this sort of solution. One of these was an Arab businessman who is funding and leading a building project to create a Palestinian community in the West Bank with similarities to the sorts of housing the Israeli settlers have – beautiful, modern, a good place to live. He was upfront that part of his reason for talking to Ware was because he wants the world to see that the Palestinians can be builders too, not just the stereotype of destructive terrorists. Another of the people Ware spoke to was an Israeli politician who thought that Israel did not have a God given right to claim any territory that had been in biblical Israel, so they should withdraw & leave the Palestinians in peace.

But there are people at both ends of the political spectrum who believe that the idea of a Two State solution is dead, that the only way forward would be a single state. They believe this for very different reasons, and would like to see very different sorts of single states. The Arab protesters I mentioned a couple of paragraphs above and other more liberal people would like a single state where all the citizens of the state whether Israeli or Arab have the same rights. And that this might mean that Arabs get elected to positions of power in the government and get to influence the direction of the state, and that’s OK.

At the other end of the spectrum the religious conservatives want a single state, where everyone has rights but where only Jews get to have any influence on the direction of the state. Ware spoke at length to a woman who is a politician with this sort of ideology and she was quite clear that she thought that the most important thing about the Israeli state was that it was Jewish and keeping it that way should be paramount. She also felt that Israel has a right to the territory in the West Bank based on the biblical borders of Israel. And in addition she didn’t believe that a Two State solution would be in the interests of Israel’s security – stating that since the Israelis withdrew from Gaza violence from Hamas against Israel in that region has increased.

I thought Ware tried to make a balanced programme, letting the various people say what they had to say without overly editorialising. Obviously he chose who to speak to and how to edit them, but I felt the storyline he was fitting the programme to was that there’s a range of opinion & ideology in the country and it’s not a simple situation. Of course it’s hard for me to tell how balanced he actually was, because I know nothing about Israeli politics!

The second episode of Chivalry and Betrayal covered the period from 1360 to 1415, and was actually mostly about England and the English monarchs rather than the Hundred Years War per se. But Ramirez started off by telling us what the situation was like in France after the peace treaty between Edward III and John II. Whilst there was peace on a national level, and no actual armies going around fighting, bands of English soldiers were going about the French countryside looting and pillaging. These freebooters were sometimes led by knights, but there was no real organisation – every man in it for the profit he could get out of it. I don’t imagine the English authorities tried terribly hard to stop it, and the French were handicapped because their King was still held captive by the English.

Once John II of France died his son, Charles V, could finally take over properly. He declared war on England once more and started to turn the tide against England. His new general, Bertrand du Guescilin, was less interested in the army being perfectly chivalrous and more interested in winning – Ramirez pointed out the similarities here to how Edward III had got the upper hand in the initial stages of the Hundred Years War. Having driven the English mostly out of France, the French also put together a fleet that was much bigger & more capable than the English fleet. This they used to harass the towns along the Southern coast of England. Ramirez talked to an expert on this who told us that the MO of the French was to sail in with the rising tide, then loot, pillage and burn the town. Following this they’d drag the town’s ships out to sea as they departed on the receding tide. 6 hour lightning raids, that would not only destroy a particular town but also strike fear along the coast about where they’d strike next. The townsfolk would obviously appeal to the crown to do something about this, but no help was forthcoming and that’s the next thing Ramirez went on to talk about.

Edward III is still on the throne at this point, but gone are the days of the warrior King he was in his youth. Old sources suggest that he went senile towards the end of his reign, in the 1370s. Ramirez went to look at Edward III’s funeral effigy which has a model head made from a plaster cast of the King’s face after he died – so it’s a true likeness of the man. The expert she spoke to pointed out that there are indications that Edward III had had a stroke or a series of strokes. So she was saying that it wasn’t dementia that affected the King, instead it had a physical cause (I’m not quite sure why that matters – I think it’s more that these days “senile” is a technical term, but back then it would probably have been more broadly applied and cover loss of mental capacity due to a stroke as well).

Edward III was succeeded by his 9 year old grandson, Richard II – because the Black Prince had pre-deceased Edward III. So now England has been pushed out of France and has a child on the throne (after a few years of an ineffective King in Edward III). So there’s a bit of a hiatus in the Hundred Years War & in fact Richard II and Charles VI (the Mad) do agree some sort of peace.

Just as well, because there are other things for the English to worry about – first the Peasant’s Revolt, where the day is only saved by Richard II himself (still young) promising the rebels their demands will be heard then reneging on the promise. But it’s a close call, and the Chancellor (Simon Sudbury) is dragged out of the Tower of London and killed during this conflict. Ramirez visited the church in Sudbury (the village in Suffolk) and saw the head of Sudbury (the man) which is kept there. It’s a skull (obviously) but still has some skin on it. She spoke to an expert anatomist who showed us the marks on the vertebrae which show he was decapitated but not with a single blow, the first cut didn’t quite go all the way through.

Ramirez then visited the National Portrait Gallery and showed us the diptych portable altarpiece that shows Richard II kneeling before Christ, Mary & the heavenly host – as she said, it shows us what sort of King Richard was. Vain and concerned with other things than war. She also showed us an inventory of all the precious things Richard had bought, and pointed out that the country might’ve put up with taxes for war but there was discontent about being taxed so much for the King’s luxury. This contributed to Richard II’s downfall. He’d exiled the future Henry IV, and then when Henry’s father John of Gaunt died Richard extended Henry’s exile and took his inheritance for the crown. Henry came back, raising an army of discontented English, and defeated Richard II to take the throne. He had a claim, as John of Gaunt was a son of Edward III, but was still a usurper.

When Henry V took the throne after his father, Henry IV, died one of his driving motivations was to prove he was a legitimate King. And Ramirez told us that the way he did this was to go back to war with France to show he was a warrior King and that God was on his side. Charles VI (the Mad) is still on the throne in France – Ramirez didn’t tell us much about him, but what she did say was that like Richard II he was more interested in peace. This new campaign by the English reaches its climax with the Battle of Agincourt, which is still remembered today (thanks to Shakespeare) as a great victory for the English. Henry had proven his point, God was on his side.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

The Other Pompeii: Life & Death in Herculaneum; Chivalry & Betrayal: The Hundred Years War

Pompeii is the city most often mentioned when talking about the places destroyed by Vesuvius erupting in 79AD, but Andrew Wallace-Hadrill explained that Herculaneum actually tells us even more about how the Romans lived than Pompeii does. He started this programme by explaining that the way that Herculaneum was covered up by the ash from Vesuvius means that there is a lot of stuff preserved in Herculaneum that isn’t preserved in Pompeii.

So as well as buildings and the wall paintings & mosaics, there is also a lot of wooden furniture that has survived. This includes things like decorated wooden screens between rooms, or beds and so on. Some of these pieces of wood still have traces of paint & he showed us some wooden ceiling panels where that’s the case. He was telling us that they’ve done analysis of the paint traces and then showed a reconstruction of the vivid colours that it would’ve had originally. Also along that sort of line he showed us the head of a marble statue that had been discovered still with a large amount of the original paint – the hair was a ginger colour and you could see the painted eyelashes & irises of the eyes.

The preservation of wooden objects in Herculaneum also means that a lot of the town’s legal documents were preserved – originally these would’ve been written on wax tablets and the wax is long gone but the traces of the writing are still visible on the carbonised wooden frames. These documents are invaluable for telling us about the inhabitants of the various houses and their lives. He told us about one set of tablets that were a slave girl challenging her status – we don’t know if she won or not, but she was able to go to court and have witnesses called to determine if her mother was a slave when she was born or not (which would determine her own status). He also showed us the citizenship documents of an ex-slave who had managed to make use of the legal system once he was freed in order to become a citizen. Upward mobility appeared to be very common among the inhabitants of Herculaneum, and there were many freed slaves. Interestingly Margaret Mountford said in her programme about Pompeii that Herculaneum was a resort town, but Wallace-Hadrill didn’t mention that idea at all.

When we got to the segment of the programme about the sewers I remembered what we’d seen Wallace-Hadrill in before – Mary Beard’s programme about Pompeii had a section on the Herculaneum sewers where she talked to Wallace-Hadrill (he is the main man in the Herculaneum conservation project after all). Here he spoke to the people doing the investigation of the organic material from the sewers. They told us about the diet of the inhabitants of Herculaneum – a lot of fish, unsurprisingly for a town on the coast of the Bay of Naples. It seems Romans liked their fish whole & crunchy, the fish bones found in the sewers showed signs of digestion even the ear bones from the fish. Wallace-Hadrill then went to a market in the modern town & showed us that much of the fish & of the fruit & veg are still available today.

To corroborate the evidence from the sewers there is also data from the bones of the people found in the boat sheds. Wallace-Hadrill talked to the anatomists who are investigating these bones. They have done some analysis to see what sort of diets people ate (as this shows up in the bone composition) and this backed up the idea of a fish-rich diet. It also showed a lot of variety, they said it was hard to tell what factors affected who ate meat or fish and who was mostly vegetarian because of the social mobility meaning it was hard to identify who was or was not a slave or higher status. One thing they emphasised a lot while talking about the skeletons was that this is a unique resource – it’s a sample of about 10% of the population of the town from a variety of backgrounds & lifestyles. Because they all died simultaneously in this disaster it’s a snapshot of what the town was actually like.

An interesting programme, particularly when put together with the “how did they die” one we watched last week 🙂

The other programme of the evening was the first episode of a series about the Hundred Years War presented by Janina Ramirez. We’ve seen some of her programmes before – she did one about what medieval illuminated manuscripts tell us about the Kings of England, and one about Anglo Saxon treasures.

The Hundred Years War is a conflict between England and France in which started in the 14th Century. In this first programme Ramirez started off by setting the scene – when Edward III came to the throne of England in 1327 he was not just the King of England but also held two duchies within the kingdom of France for which he had to pay homage to the King of France. Edward also believed that via his mother he was entitled to the French crown once the King of France died. However the French disagreed & his cousin Philip took the throne. At this time the French and English courts were tied together not just by blood, they also spoke the same language (French) and had a common culture of chivalry.

Edward refused to pay homage to the new King of France, which lead Philip to try to confiscate his duchy of Aquitaine. Then Edward declared himself the rightful King of France and this started the war. The first major battle was at Caen, where Ramirez pointed out the unpleasant side of chivalry as a concept – it didn’t apply to everyone equally, fellow knights would be taken prisoner & properly treated if they made themselves known. But the townsfolk at Caen were slaughtered wholesale by the English army. After this victory Edward III marched his army nearly to Paris, and then lured the French army to Crécy where he and his army waited at the top of a hill. This battle was a disaster for the French, in large part because Edward III completely ignored the chivalric rules of war. Instead of allowing the numerically greater number of French Knights to close with the English Knights and fight it out he had stationed two divisions of longbowmen (who weren’t nobly born) to target the French as they advanced. The resulting slaughter of both men & horses was responsible for Edward winning the battle. The army then went on to Calais, where they also won.

I think we skipped forward about 10 years here – Ramirez told us some stuff about what was going on in England during this time but I think there weren’t any major battles in France. One of the significant events was the formation of the Order of the Garter – meant to call to mind the Knights of the Round Table this was an elite order of 26 Knights. But as usual Edward’s version of chivalry was heavily leavened with practicality – these Knights were chosen based on their demonstrated ability on the field of battle. The French King created his own order of Knights in response – the Order of the Star. Instead of 26 handpicked proven warriors this order consisted of about 500 Knights, who all swore an oath not to leave the battlefield while they could still fight.

The next campaigns were led by Edward’s eldest son, Edward the Black Prince. He started with his army from Aquitaine & marched towards Carcassone in the east. As the army passed through France they destroyed any villages, farms or mills they came across. They took the food they needed on the march and then burnt the rest. Once they reached Carcassone the knights at the town retreated into their fortifications, and the English could lay waste to the town (and kill the townsfolk). Again chivalry didn’t count for the ordinary people. Once the English had headed back to Aquitaine again, having made their point, the French King wrote a letter to the townspeople saying how he was sorry they’d suffered (but not actually doing anything about it). Ramirez emphasised how this campaign was a statement of power – look how the English could destroy the land and livelihoods of the French people and their King couldn’t do anything about it.

The Black Prince’s next campaign the following year went northeast from Aquitaine in much the same way. It ended up at Poitiers, where this time the French army was waiting for them. This time the English didn’t have the advantage of high ground, nor the surprise of their archers, but nonetheless they still won – and took the King of France (by this stage Philip had died and Jean II was King) into custody. He and other noble prisoners were taken back across the channel to England and held hostage. A truce was declared at this point (mostly due to the Black Death, Ramirez was saying) and then after a while a peace treaty was signed that gave Edward more lands in France (around Aquitaine mostly). He also held all his French lands in his own right, not as a vassal of the King of France. In return Edward was to renounce his claim to the throne of France … only somehow he never got round to that bit!

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

Richard III: The King in the Car Park

For TV night this week we watched the documentary about the finding of Richard III’s remains that was aired on Monday evening on Channel 4. It was presented by someone I didn’t really recognise – Simon Farnaby – who turns out to be a comedian who does the Horrible Histories programmes (which I haven’t watched, but know about). The format of the programme was that Farnaby & a camera crew showed up at key moments of the excavation and subsequent analysis of the skeleton & so we got to see what happened & what they discovered as it happened. There were also segments of the programme where Farnaby told us about the relevant history.

The project to excavate the car park in Leicester where the remains were found started with Phillipa Langley & the Richard III Society who did the preliminary work of figuring out where to dig, and funded the dig. So Langley was also present at all the key moments, and a fair amount of attention was paid to her (and her fellow society members’) reactions to what was discovered. Which I felt was overdone – she was quite clearly a nut, and was over-emotional at all possible moments. I would’ve preferred a bit more about the science behind the identification & a bit less of looking at some woman break down in tears seeing the skeleton of a man who’d been dead 500 years.

So, Richard III is the last king before the Tudors at the end period of the Wars of the Roses. He took the throne after his brother Edward IV died – usurping it from Edward IV’s son. Edward IV’s sons were locked up in the Tower of London and subsequently were not seen again, the Tudors claim Richard III killed them and various partisans of Richard’s right down to the modern day say that this is a lie put about for propaganda purposes. Richard only reigned for about 2 years, before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victor at this battle was Henry Tudor, who then took the throne as Henry VII. Obviously his and his descendants’ regime had good reason to cast Richard III as a terrible despot who deserved to be overthrown (but contemporary accounts suggest he was better liked than that), and also had good reason to insist that the Princes in the Tower were dead (as their claim to the throne would be better than Henry’s). The image of Richard III that’s come down to us via Shakespeare of a hunchbacked, murdering tyrant therefore needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. And the Richard III Society is devoted to the idea that he had no physical deformities, was a wise etc etc ruler & didn’t murder anyone. There was a segment of the programme that showed Farnaby talking to various of the society members on skype or something like that, and they were all very passionately saying things like “he would have nothing to gain from murdering the princes” and so on. Which made me roll my eyes somewhat, it has to be said. Of course there was probably some carefully chosen editing going on here – the programme did seem keen to play up the “aren’t these people weird?” theme. Perhaps to an unkind degree.

Langley & her fellow society members might’ve been nuts, but they were nuts that had done their homework. One of the legends surrounding the death of Richard III was that his body had been chucked in the river, but this was a later invention by a writer who’d visited the wrong church & found no signs of the grave so made something up to explain it. Langley had tracked down (with help from historians) more contemporary sources which said he had been buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester, and she also tracked down where (geographically) that church had once been. And then we had another of the more “nutty woo-woo” bits, as she told us how she’d gone there and stood in the car park that was now there and stood at the parking bay labelled with an R and “felt something”.

So the Richard III Society raised the money (over £10,000) to fund an excavation by Leicester University to see if they could find the bones of Richard III. They double checked the info, and started by digging three trenches in the car park. The first thing they found, in the first trench, right under the letter R were human bones. The rest of the archaeological evidence (which mapped out where the church was) subsequently showed that these were a likely candidate for the bones of the very man they were looking for! I was a little annoyed that the woo-woo had lucked out 😉 But it was good for the excavation because the slim chance had actually paid off – it’s the sort of thing you couldn’t put in a story because no-one would believe the coincidence.

These bones were then properly excavated (with a slip-up of damaging the skull :/ but only that one slip-up) and taken off to Leicester University for analysis. Another more nutty bit was Langley’s insistence that the box containing the bones be transported drapped in the standard of Richard III. But anyway, once at the university they were subjected to all sorts of analysis. The first thing we were told about was the analysis of a piece of metal found near the spine – unfortunately this turned out to be a Roman nail that just happened to be in the soil there.

They also CT scanned the bones & could do quite a bit of analysis from that. The first, most striking, thing was that he did have a curvature of the spine – which was very upsetting for Langley. But this scoliosis seems to’ve been in the same plane as the torso and was probably not particularly visible when he was clothed. Maybe one of his shoulders would’ve been a bit raised, but not by much. And definitely no withered arm. So this shows us that the later Tudor propaganda about the deformities – hunchback, withered arm – was based on a kernel of truth and then exaggerated to fit the purposes of the Tudors. (Bear in mind that at this time any deformity would be seen as a punishment from God, and to indicate something about your moral character.) One other notable thing about the skeleton is that he seemed to have quite feminine features to his bone structure – more gracile than the average male and some particular features of the pelvis were towards the feminine end of the spectrum.

They could also see the causes of death from the bones. The notable wounds included a hole in the top of the skull made by a dagger pounded down through it and a blow that had sliced off a piece of the skull to an extent that would’ve exposed the brain. Clearly these were not survivable wounds (even with modern medicine) – tho it can’t be determined which one was the one that killed him as both happened at or very soon after death. They also said that there was a wound on his pelvis that had occurred after death – a knife thrust through the buttocks. These wounds fit the contemporary stories about how Richard had died – surrounded in the melee fighting and killed then, and subsequently his body was found and carried to Henry VII tied over a horse (for display to prove he was truly dead before he was buried). The buttock wound might well have occurred while he was tied over this horse.

They also carbon dated the bones. The first estimate came out a bit early (by about 50 years) but they then said that given he was a part of the elite he’d’ve had a diet rich in marine food. This would change the estimate, and the range of the new one covered the right date.

And they did the DNA testing, to see if it was an acceptable match of a known descendant of one of Richard III’s sisters. I was disappointed with this bit of the programme because it didn’t actually give us any details, just said that the “the DNA was a match”. Er, right, not much info there. Couldn’t we’ve cut some of the weepy woman stuff & talked a bit about what testing they did? I found more from the Leicester University website for the project – it seems they looked at the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones and compared it to two descendants in an unbroken maternal line from Anne Neville (Richard’s sister). A somewhat simplified explanation of this – mitochondria are the bits in a cell that provide the cell with energy, and once upon a time they were free living bacteria that now live in symbiosis inside other cells. This means that they still have some vestigial remains of their own DNA, which is distinct from the DNA of the main cell. Mitochondria are always inherited from one’s mother – they are present in the egg cell pre-fertilisation. So if you look at markers in the mitochondrial DNA then people who share a common maternal ancestor will share those markers (barring mutation, which is a relatively rare occurrence). So when they looked at the markers of the two maternal line descendants of Richard’s mother (via his sister) and compared it to the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones they found that the markers were the same. Interestingly the website also mentions that the three samples share a particularly rare form of one of markers, making it even more convincing that these are relatives in the maternal line (i.e. this gets even less likely to be a case of coincidence).

The website also mentions looking at the paternal line (i.e. looking at Y-chromosome markers that are only passed down from father to son) but then it just says that this is harder because it’s more clear-cut who someone’s mother is (as birth generally takes place in front of witnesses particularly at that level of society), but it’s harder to be sure who the father is (as conception happens in private and may not be accurately reported). So I guess that didn’t pan out with any of the putative direct male line descendants (of Richard’s father).

So each piece of evidence they showed isn’t completely convincing in itself. But taken all together it seems that this is extremely likely to be Richard III’s skeleton. He died at the right time, in the right way, he had the right sort of physical deformities, he was buried in the right place and he is of the right maternal line. Which is pretty awesome 🙂

They also did a reconstruction of his face from the skull, but I kept wondering about confirmation bias – it turned out to look quite like the portraits, and how much of that is because consciously or unconsciously any time there was a choice the one that made it look more like the portraits was chosen? This bit also drew the somewhat daft observation from Langley that “this wasn’t the face of a tyrant” – I’m not sure you can really say anything about his personality from a model of a computer reconstruction of a long dead man.

Overall I enjoyed this programme, even if I felt they could’ve cut quite a bit of Langley’s emotions and replaced it with the science. Farnaby was a good presenter – he narrated it with a sense of humour (unsurprisingly for a comedian) but this wasn’t at the expense of presenting the actual information.

In Our Time: The Anarchy

The Anarchy is a 19th Century term for a period of civil war in England in the 12th Century. The three experts who discussed it on In Our Time were John Gillingham (London School of Economics and Political Science), Louise Wilkinson (Canterbury Christ Church University) and David Carpenter (Kings College London). It turned out to be quite a lively discussion – Gillingham and Carpenter in particular seemed to disagree quite vigorously over how poor (or otherwise) a king Stephen was.

The period of time in question is about 80 years after the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror was succeeded by his son William Rufus. Who in turn was succeeded by his brother Henry I. Henry had only two legitimate children (and about 20 illegitimate ones) – William and Matilda. William died young, drowned when the White Ship sank in the English Channel in 1120, and so Henry had no male heir. He promptly re-married but that marriage had no children. So he reluctantly designated Matilda as his heir, and made his nobles swear an oath to support her as heir.

Matilda had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor, she was sent to Germany at the age of 8 and educated there. When she married at the age of 12 she started to take on the role of Empress – in Germany the wife of the ruler was to some degree a co-ruler, so she granted charters etc. Wilkinson was saying that when Matilda was 12 her exercise of power was probably under the guidance of the Emperor’s advisers as part of her education, part of her training to rule. Once the Emperor died in 1125 she was summoned to return to England by her father to be designated as his heir, and re-married to Geoffrey d’Anjou in the hopes that this second marriage would produce offspring (it did).

Despite saying that she was his heir it seems that Henry didn’t really do much to make sure she had a chance of holding the throne. All three experts were in agreement that he didn’t let her establish a power base of any sort in England – he assigned her no lands, no castles. So really he was responsible for what happened after he died in 1135 – instead of Matilda inheriting, the throne was seized by her cousin Stephen de Blois. And the nobles in England were all perfectly happy to let this happen. The nobles in Normandy would’ve preferred his older brother to take the throne, but no-one was really on Matilda’s side (or at least not publicly). This was partly because she was a woman, and partly because she was foreign-educated. She was also widely regarded as proud and arrogant – Wilkinson was clear that she thought this was primarily because Matilda was a woman. That the same characteristics and actions as a man would’ve brought Matilda praise. The other two seemed to think that there was more truth to this than that – that Matilda might’ve been able to make life easier for herself if she’d been a little less concerned with her status as Empress.

Stephen was the sort of man who got along with everyone – he’d not been intended to be King & in many ways stayed more first-among-equals with the Barons, rather than their ruler. Carpenter was fairly anti-Stephen, he thought that he showed poor judgement in choosing who to please, whose side to take in disputes. Gillingham felt rather that Stephen had inherited a bad situation, and did as well as he could. But whichever is true, after a while Robert Earl of Gloucester (one of Henry’s illegitimate children) went over to Matilda’s side. He escorted her to England and his holdings gave her the power base she’d not had before. Stephen had the chance to capture Matilda at one point during this journey, but didn’t do so – which Gillingham thought was the right course of action due to the potential effects on Stephen’s reputation, but Carpenter thought was a ludicrous mistake.

The conflict dragged out for nearly 20 years, although there weren’t many actual battles. Stephen’s wife, another Matilda, was instrumental in both the negotiations and in raising armies particularly during a period where Stephen had been captured by the Empress. She wasn’t regarded with as much distaste by the nobles, because she managed to do this while still behaving femininely enough for the standards of the time. Despite the lack of battles the war had a lot of effect on the country – hence the later name of the Anarchy. One of the standard strategies in warfare at the time was to ravage the lands around your opponents castles – so burn the crops, burn the villages, ruin the economy of the area as well as deny the fortresses food. Gillingham and Carpenter disagreed on how much and how widespread this was. Carpenter was presenting a picture of the whole country in flames and turmoil, but Gillingham felt that outside a few areas it was pretty much business as usual for the peasantry.

The war was finally over when Stephen and Matilda’s son Henry came to an agreement that once Stephen died then Henry would be heir.

In Our Time: Caxton and the Printing Press

The printing press was invented in Germany around 1440, and by 1476 had even been brought to the relative backwater of England, by a man named William Caxton. The guests on the episode of In Our Time that talked about this were Richard Gameson (University of Durham), Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, University of London) and David Rundle (University of Oxford). I’d heard of Caxton before, because he’s the subject of one of the mini biographies in a book I read earlier this year (“Renaissance People” ed. Robert C. Davis & Beth Lindsmith), but didn’t know much about him.

He was in his 40s by the time he became a printer – prior to that he was a mercer, that is a merchant involved in the cloth trade. He was clearly of some importance, he spent time in Bruges (in Burgundy) as the Governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London in Bruges (I think I have the title right) – basically the representative of all the London merchants to the officials in the city & to the other trading nations there. They got side-tracked when talking about it, so I’m not quite sure why Caxton left Bruges and why he changed career, but in his 40s that is what he did. Moving first to Cologne where he got involved in the new trade of printing, then he went back to Bruges (probably) and proceeded to set up shop printing not just Latin & French books (which would have an international readership) but also books in English for import into England (and pretty much nowhere else, because English wasn’t an international language).

He then moved to Westminster, where he set up shop as the first printer in England (and he remained the only English printer for some time, other printers were of continental origin). They spent a while discussing why Westminster and not London (and as always I was momentarily taken aback that they aren’t the same place – I know this, but I have to remind myself every time). Partly it seems because there was already a book trade in the city of Westminster, so selling print books as well as manuscripts was in some ways more of the same and your customers would already be there. Partly because Westminster had the Abbey and all the religious related printing needs (like indulgences). Partly because the niche that Caxton was trying to fit into was more Westminster oriented than City of London oriented – he wasn’t doing legal documents and such, or pamphlets, he was primarily printing books. And partly because there were taxes and restrictions on who could produce books in the City of London, so setting up shop outside gave him more freedom (and lower bills).

So Caxton’s clientèle were primarily the religious institutions and the nobility – and a large part of what he printed was books in English, which was unusual. He is most remembered for his editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and they spent a while talking about that on the programme. Caxton is credited with helping to cement Chaucer’s status as the première English writer, but they were pointing out that this wasn’t a new thing that Caxton did, he was very much building up an existing reputation (partly as a way of marketing his editions of the books).

Caxton is also credited with starting the standardisation of written English. But the guests on this programme were pretty clear that this wasn’t really the case – yes, printed books did do this (because you didn’t have local scribes copying texts with their local spelling, everyone bought the same edition) but Caxton himself didn’t really have much to do with it. They seemed clear that he did edit things, but was inconsistent within his own works. Also early printed books actually used the vagaries of spelling to their advantage, which I didn’t know before! So if it was more convenient to have a few letters more on a line to make the edges line up nicely then the typesetter would sprinkle a few “e”s on the ends of words, or double a letter or two. Or if you need some less, perhaps you’d take out a “u” or two.

A lot of what is known about Caxton comes from his editorial work, in particular the prologues & epilogues that he added to his books. They did stress, however, that these are often full of clichés so need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. He was clearly good at being a publisher/editor/printer though, because he didn’t go bankrupt which a lot of early printers did. This was due to the high start up costs (you need all the equipment) and because you needed to figure out how many copies of something you wanted in advance, guessing demand right could make the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. Caxton clearly did, as his business was inherited after his death by his foreman, who gradually moved towards printing things for the legal trade and printing pamphlets. And after a while he moved the business to the City of London – to Fleet Street.

The three guests all seemed very enthusiastic about the subject, and all keen to have their say on every bit, but I did end up feeling a little sorry for Julia Boffey who got talked over more than once. She’d start making a point and one of the others would jump in and she’d be reduced to saying “yes, yes” while they talked.