All posts tagged Roman Catholic

Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett (1946)

‘What are you musing on, Mercier?’
‘On the horror of existence, confusedly,’ said Mercier.
‘What about a drink?’ said Camier.

After writing a series of experimental texts in English during the 1930s, Mercier et Camier was Beckett’s first attempt at an extended prose piece in French. He wrote it in 1946, while he was living in France after the end of the Second World War. It comes between Watt, which Beckett wrote in the last few years of the war, and directly before the three huge experimental ‘novels’ or texts which became known as The Beckett Trilogy – Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953).

Watt was long, experimental and – ultimately, for its author – unsatisfactory; who knows how to describe what it is for its readers.

Mercier and Camier is a lot shorter but Beckett found it even more unsatisfactory, which is why he refused to publish it in its original French until 1970. It only appeared in English in 1974, in Beckett’s own translation, in which he took the opportunity to make substantial alterations to the original text and to ‘reshape’ it from French to English. That’s the translation I read.

Structure

The Calder and Boyar edition I read is just 123 pages long. It is divided into eight chapters and every pair of chapters is followed by a ‘summary of two preceding chapters’ as in a school textbook.

The prose is lucid but highly mannered. A lot of it is similar to Murphy and Watt, not in style but in that it is writing about writing, writing whose main energy comes from taking the mickey out of traditional writing, that plays with the style of official reports, mixes in everyday phrases or clichés, and so on. It is not very interested in describing the world ‘out there’ but has made a nice safe warm space inside the head, playing with phrases. The general idea is that Mercier and Camier are a pair of vagabonds who intend to leave the city on a journey and Beckett introduces it thus:

Physically it was fairly easy going, without seas or frontiers to be crossed, through regions untormented on the whole, if desolate in parts. Mercier and Camier did not remove from home, they had that great good fortune. They did not have to face, with greater or less success, outlandish ways, tongues, laws, skies, foods, in surroundings little resembling those to which first childhood, then boyhood, then manhood had inured them. The weather, though often inclement (but they knew no better), never exceeded the limits of the temperate, that is to say of what could still be borne, without danger if not without discomfort, by the average native fittingly clad and shod. With regard to money, if it did not run to first class transport or the palatial hotel, still there was enough to keep them going, to and fro, without recourse to alms. It may be said therefore that in this respect too they were fortunate, up to a point. They had to struggle, but less than many must, less perhaps than most of those who venture forth, driven by a need now clear and now obscure.

‘Physically it was fairly easy going… The weather never exceeded the limits of the temperate… With regard to money…’ These sound like phrases from an official report, as does ‘It may be aid that…’

The style goes on to change and pull in other registers and mannerisms, playing with various learned tropes and techniques, but it is more often than not more interested in writing, in the possibilities of types and styles of writing, than in depicting any kind of ‘reality’.

Similarly, the dialogue is more often than not about the dialogue – characters speak about the act of speaking ‘did you say that?’ ‘did i say what?’ ‘did you say what you just said?’ ‘i don’t know, did i just say something?’ – played for laughs, played as a solemn game indicating the difficulties of even the most basic communication, rather than the kind of dialogue you find in most ‘normal’ novels.

More than anything else, unlike the monolithic solid blocks of prose found in The Beckett Trilogy, the pages look like a normal novel, divided up into short, sensible paragraphs which flag up new bits of dialogue or action or description in the traditional manner.

The shortness of the text, the use of short chapters, the breathing space provided by the end of chapter summaries, and the layout of the individual pages, all make Mercier and Camier feel like the most readable novel-style book Beckett ever wrote.

Repetition, absurdity and comedy

We are in an unnamed city. Mercier and Camier meet at their rendezvous point, though not before some misunderstanding. Mercier is first to arrive but gets bored waiting so goes for a stroll. Camier arrives ten minutes later so he goes for a stroll a few minutes before Camier gets back. Camier gets bored waiting then goes for a stroll just a few minutes before Mercier returns to the rendezvous point, hangs about a bit then goes for a stroll, and a few minutes later Camier returns to the rendezvous point, and tuts about where his friend can be, before going off for a stroll.. Repetition is at the core of Beckett’s technique, repetitions with slight variations which quickly build up into monstrous tables of permutations, as we have just seen in the numerous examples given in Watt. Beckett invests sufficient energy in this obsessive schedule of mistimed arrivals that he bothers to give us a table describing it.

In the introduction to Watt, Beckett scholar Chris Ackerley says Beckett is satirising the philosopher René Descartes’ notion that a comprehensive enumeration of what philosophers called the ‘accidents’ of a thing will eventually give you ‘understanding’ of the thing, whereas Beckett’s satirical deployment of this technique is designed to prove that the more you enumerate something, the further you in fact become from understanding it, you just become more bewildered.

In this format, this kind of mathematical precision which can be converted into a timetable is obviously a kind of satire on the timetabled way most of us live our lives, with mobile phones and meeting-reminding programs converting the endless flux of reality into bite-sized five-minute chunks.

But there is also something very powerful and uncanny about repetition. Repeat a word numerous times and it quickly starts to lose meaning and become absurd. Repeat a precise action numerous times and the same. It is as if repetition takes us out of the everyday. Transcendental meditators are instructed to repeat their mantra thousands of times to take them into an other-worldly state. Closer to Beckett’s Ireland, Roman Catholics have series of prayers to repeat as penances or on numerous other formalised occasions.

Repetition of drills with weapons make soldiers proficient, repetitive exercise improves athletes’ performance, makes difficult moves automatic, practice makes perfect. All this is true of the physical world. But in the world of language, repetition doesn’t make perfect or battle ready or match fit. Something different happens.

In Beckett’s hands, repetition can become obsessively patterned – as in the timetable of Mercier and Camier missing each other described above – in which case it reduces humans to automata, like buses meeting or missing a schedule, or the figures which come out of cuckoo clocks on the hour.

Or it can be funny, like two gentlemen bowing and taking their hats off to each other in an indefinite cycle of politeness.

Or it can open the door into Absurdity – highlighting the pointlessness of doing the same things or saying the same things over and over and nothing ever changing.

It is in this respect that Mercier and Camier anticipates Waiting For Godot, in that it is a text interested in repetition and a kind of formal patterning of actions and dialogue, but – crucially – enacted by two protagonists.

In the most intense moments (I say moments, in fact reading them takes hours) of The Beckett Trilogy what you have is one voice giving a running, stream-of-consciousness account of its bewilderment and misery and sense of utter crushing futility – which is what makes reading them, especially The Unnameable such a gruelling experience.

But when you have two characters, even if they’re predisposed to be miserable and depressed, for a man of Beckett’s sly humour, the temptation is to poke fun at his own seriousness, the temptation is to have one character deliver a long speech about the meaninglessness of existence… and then have the other character point out he’s sitting on his hat. Or his shoelaces have come undone, he might trip and do himself a mischief etc. Thus:

‘What are you musing on, Mercier?’
‘On the horror of existence, confusedly,’ said Mercier.
‘What about a drink?’ said Camier.

In other words, just the decision to have two characters opens up the possibility of counterpointing the misery of The Unnameable with a world of slapstick, pratfalls and bathos. And it’s in this respect that Mercier and Camier feels like a dry run for Waiting For Godot.

Aspects of style

Having finally met up, Mercier and Camier embrace just as the heavens open and it starts to tip down. They run into a shelter, still embracing.

Obscenity

Still embracing? Two dogs run into the shelter and start copulating furiously, making Mercier and Camier realise they they also are still embracing. Are they gay? Or straight friends caught in an embarrassingly inappropriate moment? Is Beckett pulling the reader’s leg or tweaking the censor’s nose?

The pair continue to regard the copulating dogs, Camier wonders why they’re still plugged together and Mercier gives a wearied / cynical explanation:

What would you? said Mercier. The ecstasy is past, they yearn to part, to go and piss against a post or eat a morsel of shit, but cannot. So they turn their backs on each other. You’d do as much, if you were they.

A moment later Camier asks if they can sit down as he feels ‘all sucked off’. That is not a usual expression for ‘tired’, it is easier to interpret as a sexual expression. Later the ranger tells the dogs to bugger off. Mercier remarks that the ranger was a hero in the mud of flanders during the Great War while he and Camier were ‘high and dry, masturbating full pelt without fear of interruption…’ In chapter two Mercier says ‘fuck thee’. In chapter 4 Camier mildly remarks: ‘Cunts we may be…’ In chapter 6 Mercier remembers his wife, not very fondly, Toffana, making love to whom was ‘like fucking a quag’.

So why is Beckett dwelling on piss, shit and blowjobs, masturbation, buggery fucks and cunts?

Is it another way of ridiculing the high-mindedness of the Rationalist tradition in Western philosophy (as the satires on Descartes’ method are in Watt?) Or a poke in the eye for anyone who thinks human existence is noble and spiritual? Or was it in the spirit of many other mid-century literary rebels who thought writing ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ was a blow against the Establishment / capitalist system / patriarchy?

Beckett prefers ideas and categories to description

The sounds of the city intrude:

On all hands already the workers were at it again, the air waxed loud with cries of pleasure and pain and with the urbaner notes of those for whom life had exhausted its surprises, as well on the minus side as on the plus. Things too were getting ponderously under way. It was in vain the rain poured down, the whole business was starting again with apparently no less ardour than if the sky had been a cloudless blue.

Dickens or Balzac or maybe E.M. Foster or Virginia Woolf would have given us a world of detail, listing occupations and activities of the city coming to life. In his compendious Modernist classic, Berlin Alexanderplatz, the German novelist, Alfred Döblin, used a blitz of collages and quotes from newspapers, adverts and billboards to convey the over-abundant sensual stimulation of the modern city.

But Beckett’s description is a good example of the way he isn’t at all interested in that notion of urban life and colour – his imagination always generalises, moves to the philosophical categories and ideas underlying any situation, and then plays with these and the language they’re cast in. Ignores the sensuous specific for the ideas and possibilities latent in the language of ideas. It’s this which makes so much of his writing seem grey and abstract – because it is.

Dialogue as experiments with the idea of dialogue

Similarly, the dialogue barely refers to events or things, or only the bare minimum required to make sense. Most of the dialogue is about the nature of dialogue, it is playing with the notion of dialogue and what is concealed or implied in it.

No big ideas, no Freudian sub-texts or subtle implications, it isn’t that purposive. Beckett is just tinkering with fragments of dialogue, arranging and re-arranging them at angles to each other, to see what happens, to see what effects are created. It is like cubism. Picasso and Braque in their cubist paintings depicted really banal everyday objects – tables with newspapers, a bottle of wine and some apples on it. The revolution wasn’t in the subject matter which was as banal as can be. It was in the radical experiment of seeing the same thing from different angles.

So just as cubism takes everyday subject matter and subjects it to multiple perspectives and styles, so Beckett’s dialogue takes mundane chatter and subjects it to multiple perspectives and styles. That, I think, is the spirit to approach lots of the dialogue in Beckett. It is, at best, tangential or inconsequential, random, but it also plays with registers or tones. Characters speak to each other in the style of official reports or philosophical textbooks, the exact opposite of the casual slang or jokey tone most people use in conversations:

We shall never know, said Camier, at what hour we arranged to meet today, so let us drop the subject.
In all this confusion one thing alone is sure, said Mercier, and that is that we met at ten to ten, at the same time as the hands, or rather a moment later.
There is that to be thankful for, said Camier.
The rain had not yet begun, said Mercier.
The morning fervour was intact, said Camier.
Don’t lose our agenda, said Mercier.

So it is a kind of verbal satirical cubism. And once you adapt to its arch stylisation, it can become very funny.

Who owns them dogs? said the ranger.
I don’t see how we can stay, said Camier.
Can it I wonder be the fillip we needed, to get us moving? said Mercier.

And one reason this novel feels so pacey, so unlike the concrete blocks of the Trilogy is because so much of it consists of this slightly surreal, slightly deranged, stylised and often very funny dialogue.

What is more, said Mercier, we have still thought to take, before it is too late.
Thought to take? said Camier.
Those were my words, said Mercier.
I thought all thought was taken, said Camier, and all in order.
All is not, said Mercier.

Tramps discussing Descartes, with half an eye on Laurel and Hardy:

Is thought now taken, said Camier, and all in order?
No, said Mercier.
Will all ever be? said Camier.
I believe so, said Mercier, yes, I believe, not firmly, no, but I believe, yes, the day is coming when all will be in order, at last.
That will be delightful, said Camier.
Let us hope so, said Mercier

The plot

Chapter 1

They are in the Place Satin-Ruth which is dominated by an ancient copper beech, on which a French Field Marshall several centuries earlier had once pinned a label. They are sheltering from the rain in a shelter. A ‘ranger’ sticks his head in and asks if this is their bicycle. They discuss, in their oblique pseudo-philosophical way, the journey ahead. Rather magically night begins to fall. They must have spent the entire day there. They enumerate their belongings (the sack, the umbrella, the raincoat), exit the shelter, pick up the bicycle and push it away, under the watchful eyes of the ranger, who curses them on their way.

Chapter 2

The pair push their bicycle through the busy urban throng.

I’m cold, said Camier.
It was indeed cold.
It is indeed cold, said Mercier

They repair to a pub. Landlord says no bikes so they chain theirs to the railings. Drink for some time and discuss their situation. Decide to press on, go outside, pick up the bike, resume their walk. At a crossroads don’t know which way to go so let the umbrella decide by letting it fall. It points to the left. They see a man in a frock coat walking ahead of them.They both hear the sound of a mixed choir. Then it dawns on them to actually use the umbrella against the pouring rain, but neither of them can get it open, Mercier smashes it to the ground and says ‘fuck thee’ to Camier.

They arrive at Helen’s and notice the grand carpet and the white cockatoo. Helen suddenly appears in the text, with no introduction or explanation, offering them the couch or the bed. Mercier says he will sleep with none. Then:

A nice little suck-off, said Camier, not too prolonged, by all means, but nothing more.
Terminated, said Helen, the nice little suck-offs but nothing more.

Does this mean Helen is a sex worker, and Camier is agreeing to a nice blowjob. By ‘terminated’ does Helen mean she is agreeing to the deal i.e. payment for two blowjobs ‘but nothing more’ i.e. no penetration.

One paragraph later they are ‘back in the street’, the entire night having, apparently, passed. They’re a little way down the road from Helen’s when the pouring rain makes them take shelter in an archway. They realise they’ve mislaid the sack. They enumerate what was in it. Enumerating things is one of Beckett’s most basic techniques.

Camier realises he is hungry and steps out from the archway to go to a shop. Mercier is stricken with anxiety and begs him to come back. Camier relents for a moment but then steps boldly out in the rain to find sustenance.

In his absence Mercier looks up to see a little boy and a little girl standing in the rain, who call him Papa! He shouts ‘fuck off out of here!’ at them and chases them away.

Camier returns and places a cream horn in Mercier’s hand. Mercier squeezes it uncomprehendingly till the cream spills out, and then doubles over in misery, weeping, says he’ll start crawling (as so many Beckett characters end up doing, sooner or later).

Mercier’s mood of misery and futility is interrupted by the sound of a screech of brakes and a crash. They run out into the street and see a fat woman who’s been run over, is lying amid the wreckage of her skirts, with blood flowing. Soon a crowd blocks their view (as crowds are always attracted to car accidents, as described in J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash).

Pepped up by this sight, Mercier feels like a new man, and they resume their journey.

The text is then punctuated by one of the summaries of the content so far. I’ll give the summary of chapter 1.

Summary of two preceding chapters
I
Outset.
Meeting of Mercier and Camier.
Saint Ruth Square.
The beech.
The rain.
The shelter.
The dogs.
Distress of Camier.
The ranger.
The bicycle.
Words with the ranger.
Mercier and Camier confer.
Results of this conference.
Bright too late.
The bell.
Mercier and Camier set out.

Chapter 3

Opens with a macabre first-person account by a narrator who says his parents died in a train crash when he was soon after he was 13 and he was placed with farmers who made him work hard at all sorts of manual tasks, but he turned out – gruesomely – to excel, from the age of 15, at ‘the slaughter of little lambs, calves, kids and porklings and the emasculation of little bullocks, rams, billy goats and piglets’, and smothering geese. At the age of 19 or 20, having got a milkmaid pregnant, he ran away, after setting fire to the barns, granaries and stables. That was 50 years ago (i.e. like so many Beckett narrators, he is now ancient and decrepit).

Only then, at the end of this monologue do we realise that the absence of speech marks Beckett’s deploys throughout the book has, in this instance, fooled us. This isn’t first-person narration, it is the monologue of an old codger in the compartment of the train Mercier and Camier are on. It is a sly, humorous sleight of hand.

The train stops but Mercier and Camier are too slow to get off and relieve themselves of the old man’s company and so, as the train starts up again, so does his monologue, this time a feverish garble which seems to be about whoring and womanising. The train stops at another stop and he gets off, now identified as Mr Madden, ‘He wore gaiters, a yellow block-hat and a rusty frock-coat reaching down to his knees.’ The comic dialogue between our hapless duo resumes. Mercier complains that Camier has booked them onto the stopping train, the slow train south of our Dublin (which was known in those days as the slow and easy):

I knew it, said Mercier. I’ve been shamefully abused. I’d throw myself out of the window if I wasn’t afraid I might sprain my ankle.

Camier says they’ll get down at the next stop and next thing they are in the little settlement surrounding the next station without any description of the train having stopped or them having alighted. The text is full of continual sly jokes like that, or casual underminings of the conventions of fiction. Elsewhere he undermines his own sentences even as he writes them:

It’s … snug, said the man, there is no other word. Patrick! he cried. But there was another word, for he added, in a tone of tentative complicity, whatever that sounds like, It’s … gemütlich.

The narrator uses a description and immediately wonders what the description can mean. The man speaking is an inn-keeper, greeting our travellers, while yelling over his shoulder for Patrick, presumably a servant. Mercier says that he has seen this man in his dreams. A page later we learn he is named Mr Gall, which reminds us of the Mr Gall the piano tuner who prompted a crisis of epistemology in Watt in the eponymous novel.

It is fair day. The farmers have brought their goods and animals to market. The beasts are stuffed in their pens. The narrator describes the farmers as grasping their ‘pricks through the stuff of their pockets’. Mercier summons the manager, they ask for several items off the menu which are all sold out. Camier says his friend Mercier is ‘out on his feet’, is it alright if they take a room for a rest, the manager agrees and our couple go upstairs.

One of the farmers comes over, is greeted by the manager as Mr Graves (which reminds us of Mr Graves the gardener in Watt) and comments the departed pair are ‘a nice pair’ and asks Mr Gall where he got used to such. Is the implication (once again) they Mercier and Camier are gay, and the farmer and manager think they’ve gone upstairs for sex?

Mr Gall appears to change his name and becomes Mr Gast, as the farmers depart and he is suddenly looking out onto a little medieval square, as if in a science fiction or horror story. The barman comes up and describes our pair as: ‘the long hank with the beard [and] the little fat one…’

Mr Gast pops out to find out what’s become of the absent Patrick, and is back a moment later, telling the barman he (Patrick) has died. His penultimate words were for a pint. Mr Gast calls for Teresa who is, fortunately, still alive and she comes out of the loo, a buxom wench carrying a big tray.

A rough tough man enters the bar in his hobnail boots, it is Mr Conaire, explains he’s escaped what he calls ‘the core of the metropolitan gas-chamber’, glimpses buxom Teresa, glances at the barkeeper, who is now named George. Mr Conaire asks the way to the ‘convenience’ and manages to brush against Teresa’s buxomness. Mr Gast has another vision, the present disappears as he sees a distant vista, a desolate moor with a single winding track and a solitary figure…

Mr Conaire reappears from the convenience having had a difficult time of it. Maybe he has constipation. He flirts more with Teresa then says he has an appointment to meet F.X. Camier, private investigator, and gives a description of Camier – ‘Small and fat… red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady pig eyes’ – which George complements with a description of Mercier – ‘A big bony hank with a beard… hardly able to stand, wicked expression’.

George goes up to their room to get them, but discovers Mercier and Camier asleep  and snoring, hand in hand on the floor of the hotel room.

Chapter 4

Our heroes are in the open countryside, not a house in sight, on a bank overlooking a wide field, inhabited only by a goat. But it isn’t a Shakespeare paradise, it is a wintry, cold and gloomy, damp Irish field, the sun is ‘a raw pale blotch’ in the cloudy sky. Camier complains he can feel the cold creeping up his crack. Mercier shares his method of keeping happy, which is to focus on parts of the body which do not hurt.

What shall they do? Camier suggests they need to go back into the town to find the sack, the sack they seem to have misplaced after they left Helen’s place. But maybe the sack itself isn’t the cause or the reason for their sense of want. The sack itself will not supply the truth. Maybe it is some aspect of the sack, as of the bicycle or the umbrella. Camier is disquisiting further on the nature of when Mercier interrupts him to tell him about the dream he had last night, in which his grandmother was carrying her own breasts by their nipples.

Camier loses his temper. Have they not made a solemn vow, ‘No dreams or quotes at any price.’ Camier is dispatched to get provisions from the town, swaggering there on his stumpy legs, while Mercier is left to decide in which direction to collapse.

The text cuts with no explanation to Camier being at the bar in the pub ordering a round of five sandwiches off George and introducing himself to Conaire. Mr Conaire shares a very Beckettian vision of entropy:

Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts and Thursday stones.

We discover he spent the entire previous evening waiting for Camier to appear and fell asleep on a couch. When he woke up in the morning our couple had moved on. Camier is sublimely indifferent and leaves with his sandwiches. Mr Conaire goes for a crap. Mr Gast is absent, picking snowdrops for Patrick’s sheaf. Teresa also is absent.

Back with Mercier, Camier feeds him a sandwich but Mercier throws up. They stagger to their feet and realise they have to press on. Somewhere. For some reason. There’s a page or two of debate about whether to leave the tattered old raincoat where it is, which they do, then lament that they have. They totter back towards the railway station.

Summary of chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 5

They arrive back at the town on Sunday night. Knowing no better, they make their way to Helen’s who lets them stay and presents them with the umbrella, restored to full function. They appear to spend the evening making love, or entwining their naked bodies. So they are gay. Next afternoon they set off for their destination (we are not told what that is), and stop into a pub to wait for dark. And discuss at length and come to Great Conclusions:

1. The lack of money is an evil. But it can turn to a good.
2. What is lost is lost.
3. The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.
4. There is food for thought in being down and out.
5. There are two needs: the need you have and the need to have it.
6. Intuition leads to many a folly.
7. That which the soul spews forth is never lost.
8. Pockets daily emptier of their last resources are enough to break the stoutest resolution.
9. The male trouser has got stuck in a rut, particularly the fly which should be transferred to the crotch and designed to open trapwise, permitting the testes, regardless of the whole sordid business of micturition, to take the air unobserved. The drawers should of course be transfigured in consequence.
10. Contrary to a prevalent opinion, there are places in nature from which God would appear to be absent.
11. What would one do without women? Explore other channels.
12. Soul: another four-letter word.
13. What can be said of life not already said? Many things. That its arse is a rotten shot, for example.

Beckett loves a list. Our heroes decide to postpone decisive action till the following day and return to Helen’s place to kip. Next morning they set out bravely, not forgetting the umbrella. In fact it’s more like a parasol. Mercier tells Camier he bought it at Khan’s, which appears to be a pawnshop. Camier says it appears to have been manufactured in 1900, the year of the siege of Ladysmith during the Boer War. Camier gives such a vivid description of the siege, that they might have been there as young men.

Now both try and fail to open the wretched thing. Camier disappears back up the stairs (presumably of Helen’s place). Mercier takes advantage of his absence to walk on and enters a Joycean stream of consciousness phantasmagoria of thoughts and impressions about time and passersby. His path crosses an old man, he sees a man guiding a donkey, and urchins playing at marbles in the street, he rattles chains with his big stick, as he staggers senilely on.

Chapter 6

Evening of the same day. Camier is in a pub. Another pub. It is packed with dockers and sailors, a fug or smoke and beer fumes. He closes his eyes and spends two pages imagining Mercier arriving. When he opens them, Mercier has arrived, causing a momentary lull in the male fug of conversation.

They enter an obscure and highly stylised conversation. Where is the umbrella? When Camier was helping Helen, his hand slipped – he explains, as if that explains anything. Is it a sexual reference. Meanwhile the bicycle they left chained to the railings has, with Beckettian entropy, disintegrated, having lost wheels, saddle, bell and carrier, though not, intriguingly, its pump.

They set off into the dark night, supporting each other, though neither knows whither or why. They struggle to speak, Camier wants to ask questions but Mercier explains he has used up all his answers. What happened to the sack? They go into a narrow alleyway. Neither of them can remember how to describe walking. It becomes more than ever like Godot.

Where are we going? said Camier.
Shall I never shake you off? said Mercier.
Do you not know where we are going? said Camier.
What does it matter, said Mercier, where we are going? We are going, that’s enough.
No need to shout, said Camier.

Even the fresh line for each bit of dialogue looks like a play. They end up walking back and forth along this dark alleyway wondering where they’re going, and why, and why in each other’s company. They smell kips which appears to mean the perfume from a brothel. They ask a policeman if there’s a brothel and when he says they should be ashamed at their age, says it’s all they’ve got left. That and masturbation. So are they solidly heterosexual?

The officer arrests them and turns up Camier’s arm and smacks him. He’s about to blow his whistle when Mercier kicks him in the balls and the officer releases Camier, falling to the ground. This gets extremely unpleasant, for Camier seizes the officer’s truncheon and starts beating him round the head, they pull his cape over his head and beat some more, the impression of the head being of a boiled egg without it shell. Seems they’ve murdered him. They run along the alley into a square, across it and into a narrow street, and decide it is best to go back to Helen’s place.

Summary of chapters 5 and 6

Chapter 7

Descriptive passage of open moorland, heather, mountains looming, lights of city in distance, lights of harbour reflected in the sea. Presumably the countryside surrounding Beckett’s family home in Foxrock. Lucky bugger.

Mercier and Camier are making their way across this wild landscape. They have cut themselves cudgels to clear the undergrowth. They spy a wooden cross of a nationalist’s grave and head towards it but lose their thread. Start wondering if there are worms in turf. Feel something spectral is surrounding them.

Night is coming. It gets dark. They do not think they can walk any further (‘if you can call it walking’). They cannot see each other. They totter. They fall in the dark, in the bog, and help each other get up. Eventually. They finally make it to some ruins they’d spied, and collapse. And ‘their hands were freed to go about their old business’. Is that masturbation? And the text mentions their ‘customary cleavings’. Gay sex?

The narrator says the text could end here, frankly. But there is no end. There are never endings.

Here would be the place to make an end. After all it is the end. But there is still day, day after day, afterlife all life long, the dust of all that is dead and buried rising, eddying, settling, burying again. So let him wake, Mercier, Camier…

This is the utterly exhausted, bleak voice of the Beckett Trilogy. They waken separately, stumble out the ruins, each thinking the other has abandoned him, barely able to see in the dark, indistinguishable footfalls, they are heading back to town, of course, because that is what they do as soon as they have left town, their endless itinerary. They come to a fork in the road, Camier takes one road but when Mercier comes up to the fork, he cannot see his compadre and so takes the other. The text has ceased to be light and funny. It is weighed down with the full concrete futility of the books to come.

Such roughly must have been the course of events. The earth dragged on into the light, the brief interminable light.

Chapter 8

‘That’s it’, the text sinks into Beckett despair at the exhausting business of getting up, washing, dressing and all the rest of it, God, the endless waiting for death, dragging on, the dead and unburied with the dying, and the pathetic illusion of life (and so on and so on).

Camier leaves a house. He is an old frail man now, unable to walk without a stick, head on his chest. He is in some street when a heavy hand falls on his shoulder. A big man says he knows him, watched his mother change his diapers, introduces himself as Watt, and says he wishes to introduce him to a Mr Mercier, standing just along the pavement. Watt, says Camier. I knew a fellow named Murphy, died in mysterious circumstances.

Watt takes the two men imperiously by the arms and half drags them along the pavement, they are walking into the sunset (!) – until a police officer blocks their way. Watt defies the police officer, grabs the pair round the waist and hauls them further along the pavement. They collapse into a bar (as men so often do in these stories).

Watt orders whiskey all round. In an obscure roundabout way Mercier and Camier warm up and begin to regard each other in the old friendly way. Suddenly Watt bangs the table loudly and shouts, ‘Bugger life!’ The landlord comes over and angrily tells them to leave. Mercier and Camier go into a perfectly co-ordinated and comic turn, claiming that poor Watt has just lost his darling baby, his wife is at home in paroxysms of grief, they have brought Watt out to console him, could they just have another round and everything will be alright, honest your honour!

They call Watt daddy (despite being decrepitly old themselves). This last section contains a number of mocking anti-religious references, for example, the narrator tells us most of the pub’s clientele are butchers who have been made mild by the blood of the lambs. Ha ha. This undergraduate wit is common in Joyce and, alas, lives on in Beckett, lowering the tone or, more precisely, thinning the texture. Like the fondness for including swearwords in the story. Alright, but… it lets the reader off the hook. It stops being demanding. Swearwords are as easy-to-read, as assimilable as the sentimental clichés he so mocks. They’re just another type of cliché.

The landlord backs down and serves them their second round of drinks. Mercier goes to the window and looks out. The colours of heaven were not quite spent. He resumes his seat and Camier has begun to reminisce about what he remembers of their travels (the goat in the field, Mr Madden who gave the intense soliloquy about being a beast-slaughterer at the start of chapter 3) when Watt starts from his apparent sleep, seizes Camier’s stick and brings it crashing down on the table next to them, at which sits a man with side whiskers quietly reading his paper and sipping his pint. The stick breaks, the table top shatters, the man falls backwards in his chair (still holding his newspaper). Watt flings the shattered stick behind the bar where it brings down a number of glasses and bottles, then bawls:

‘Fuck life!’

Mercier and Camier bolt for the door. From just outside they listen to the uproar within. They both hear someone in the pub shout ‘Up Quin!’ Only those of us who have read the notes for Beckett’s novel, Watt, know that in its early drafts the protagonist was called Quin. Sol that’s quite an obscure reference there, Sam.

Mercier invites Camier for a last pint at another pub. Camier says no but ends up walking with him part of the way home. They reminisce in a fragmentary way about their adventures. Mercier starts crying. The houses grow more sparse. Suddenly space gapes and the earth vanishes but… all it means is they’ve climbed a small, picturesque bridge over the canal. It is gently raining.

High above the horizon the clouds were fraying out in long black strands, fine as weepers’ tresses. Nature at her most thoughtful.

It’s one of those rare moments when Beckett displays an old-fashioned notion of poetic sensibility. They sit on a bench, two old men. Mercier tells Camier to look north, beyond the stars. He seems to be pointing out… stars… flowers…? Camier refers to them as the Blessed Isles? This is obscure. Then, with characteristic bathos, he points out the grim pile of the hospital for skin diseases.

Camier goes to the edge of the canal. I think it is implied he is having a pee. Then returns to the bench. Mercier reminds Camier of the parrot at Helen’s. He has a feeling the parrot is dead. Camier says it’s time to go. Says, Goodbye Mercier. Alone, Mercier watches ‘the sky go out’ and hears all the little sounds which have been hidden from him by the long day.

… human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water.

So this final passage is unexpectedly poignant. 1. This thread of (possibly sentimental) feeling, along with 2. the shortness of the book 3. its conventional division into chapters and into paragraphs of clearly signposted action and snappy dialogue, and 4. the humour of much of the exchanges – yes, Mercier and Camier is definitely Beckett’s most accessible novel.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on November 4, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 4, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/04/mercier-and-camier-samuel-beckett/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 7 – the reign of James II

Because King Charles II died in February 1685 without a son and heir – without, in fact, any legitimate children from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza – the throne passed automatically to his brother, James Duke of York, who ascended the throne as King James II.

Catholic

James was a professed Roman Catholic and a zealous reformer. He wished to lift the multiple legal restrictions which had been placed on his fellow Catholics and, as a balancing gesture, to lift legal constraints on the Puritans and non-conforming Protestant sects. However, within three short years he managed to alienate almost every party and profession in the country, and especially the powerful Whig politicians.

The seven bishops

The crisis came to a head over two big issues. First James made the error of trying seven Anglican bishops for seditious libel. To be precise, in April 1688, encouraged by the Quaker leader William Penn with whom he had struck up an unlikely friendship, James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence first promulgated by his brother, and ordered Anglican clergy to read it in their churches.

When seven Bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted a petition asking the king to reconsider this request, they were arrested and tried for seditious libel, the trial taking place in June 1688. This looked like a full-frontal attack on the Church of England which was, by now, central to almost everybody’s concept of the English political system.

A Catholic son

Secondly, his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, who he had married in 1673, bore him a Catholic son and heir, James Francis Edward, on 10 June 1688. Now, when James’s only possible successors had been his own two Protestant daughters – Mary and Anne – from his first marriage to Anne Hyde (who had died in in 1671) most Anglicans could put up with James’s pro-Catholic policies in the belief that they were a temporary aberration from what was essentially a Protestant succession. But the young prince’s birth at a stroke made it seem likely that Britain would become a Catholic dynasty and that the unpopular religious policies James was ramming through would become permanent. All kinds of former loyalists began to think again.

The supposititious child

And so did the people. Rumours quickly spread about the baby, irrational sometimes hysterical rumours, the most lurid of which was that the baby proclaimed as the Prince of Wales hadn’t been born to Mary of Modena. The rumour went that the royal couple’s actual baby had been stillborn and so a new baby was smuggled into the Palace in a warming pan, purely to satisfy Jame’s dynastic ambitions. It doesn’t make sense, but it can be seen as a fairly simple piece of wish fulfilment: people just didn’t want it to be true that James had sired a Catholic heir.

Prince William

Channels of communication between English Parliamentarians and nobles who opposed James and the solidly Protestant William, Prince of Orange (a state of the Netherlands) had been open since the 1670s. William was in fact the grandson of Charles I, being the son of Charles’s daughter, Mary and so, before the birth of the baby, had been third in line to the throne. And he had himself married his cousin, James II’s daughter by from his first marriage, another Mary who – until the baby was born – had herself been first in line to the throne. In other words William had close blood ties twice over to the English ruling family. James II was his father-in-law.

For these reasons Protestant William’s position as a possible successor to Charles II, instead of Catholic James, had been widely canvased among Whig politicians during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81. In the event the crown passed peacefully in 1685 to James but, as he alienated more and more sectors of British society, William’s name began to reappear in political conversations – not as a direct replacement, but maybe as some kind of regent or protector, nobody was quite sure what.

William the defender

What Kishlansky’s account brings out that William was totally aware of all these developments in England and their implications for him. And not just for himself, but for his country. Since he turned of age William had played a key role in the Netherlands’ ongoing resistance to King Louis XIV of France’s ambitions to seize its territory. From the Exclusion Crisis onwards he was alert to the possibility that England, with its great wealth, its army and its powerful navy, might, in some form, come under his control. But how? What form would it take?

Thus William had well-placed spies and ambassadors in London who not only kept him informed of events but acted as propagandists for his cause, promoting him as a defender of Protestantism and traditional English liberties against the Francophile, Catholic James.

The Immortal Seven

All these tendencies crystallised in the sending of a letter to William, on 30 June 1688, jointly signed by a group of seven Protestant nobles and clerics which invited the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army. In fact William and the dissidents had been discussing what constitutional or legal forms could be used to justify his invasion since April the previous year. The letter of invitation wasn’t a spontaneous gesture but a carefully calculated contrivance agreed by both sides.

The letter

The letter asked William, who was a nephew and son-in-law of James II, to use military intervention to force the king to make his eldest daughter, Mary, William’s Protestant wife, his heir. The letter alleged that the newborn prince was an impostor. The letter told William that if he landed in England with a small army, the signatories and their allies would rise up and support him. The Invitation reprised the grievances against King James and repeated the widely held claim that the king’s son was ‘supposititious’ (the technical term for fraudulently substituted). The letter then went on to give advice about the logistics of the proposed landing of troops.

The courier

It was symbolic of the widespread disaffection throughout the English military and navy that the message was carried to William in The Hague not by a spy or diplomat but by Rear-Admiral Arthur Herbert (the later Lord Torrington) disguised as a common sailor, and identified by a secret code. It was also importantly symbolic that the seven signatories (who became known as ‘the Immortal Seven’) were not all dyed-in-the-wool opponents: five were Whigs, but two were Tories, traditionally the party of the Court.

Louis offers help

By September it had become clear that William planned to accept the invitation and to ‘invade’ England. Louis XIV could see this, too, and he offered James French support, but James a) thought his own army would suffice b) didn’t want to become even more unpopular by inviting French Catholic troops onto English soil. He also c) couldn’t believe that his own daughter, Mary, would conspire against him.

Defections

What he hadn’t anticipated was that when William did finally arrive with his Dutch army, landing at Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1688, many Protestant officers would defect from his army and join William, as did James’s younger, unmarried daughter, Anne.

James runs away

James had joined his army in Salisbury preparatory to marching south-west to engage William who had made his base at Exeter but, as key commanders and their troops defected, he lost his nerve and took horse back to London. On 11 December James tried to flee to France, first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials, but released and placed under Dutch protective guard. But William didn’t want to try or officially dethrone James, that would cause all kinds of complications and remind everyone of the execution of Charles I – it was much more convenient to occupy a throne which had been vacated – in other words to create the convenient fiction that James had abdicated of his own free will.

And so William let James escape on 23 December and take ship to France, where he was received by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who offered him a palace and a pension.

James’s Catholic crusade

What Kishlansky’s relatively brief chapter on James’s reign brings out, that I’d forgotten, is the astonishing speed and thoroughness with which James tried to recatholicise England.

The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion

In 1685, soon after Charles’s death, James’s opponents in exile conceived a large-scale invasion of Britain, with a landing in Scotland to raise Protestants who had suffered under the Stuarts, and one in the West Country. The Scottish rising under the Earl of Argyll failed to materialise but Charles II’s oldest and most charismatic son, James Duke of Monmouth, landed in the West Country and raised a large army which gathered support as it marched towards Bristol. James dispatched an army to the West of England which massacred the rebel army at the Battle of Sedgmoor on 6 July 1685. But what Kishlansky emphasises is that James ensured that as many officers as possible in the winning army were Catholics.

It’s a stock A-level history question to ask why the English establishment and army gave James their full support when he crushed the Monmouth rebellion in the summer of 1685 and yet just three years later, abandoned him in droves and let him be overthrown?

Recatholicising policies

The answer is simple. In the summer of 1685 the nation as a whole didn’t yet know what to expect from James, but three short years later, they had learned the scale and thoroughness of his Catholicising ambitions. Just some among James’s many recatholicising policies include that he:

  • allowed the creation of Catholic seminaries in London, sent a message to the pope and supported newly-established Catholic presses in London and Oxford
  • set priests to convert his leading ministers and daughter Anne and sent one to convert Mary in the Netherlands
  • replaced half the royal judges with Catholics
  • appointed four Catholics to the Privy Council and composed an inner council including his Jesuit confessor
  • this council set about trying to retire JPs across the land and replace them with Catholics
  • Catholic officers were drafted into the militia and into the standing army
  • the two universities had Catholic officials imposed on them and when the fellows of Magdelen College Oxford refused to accept a Catholic warden, he had them all sacked and replaced with Catholics
  • he sent the Catholic Tyrconnell to be lieutenant-general of the Irish army and he immediately set about purging the army of Protestants; hundreds of Protestant gentry fled
  • insisted the bishops restrain anti-Catholic preaching by vicars under their charge, and set up a commission to charge Anglican officials who didn’t carry this out

All this by the end of 1686. In 1687:

  • London was stripped of Anglican aldermen, militia captains and members of livery companies
  • all Lords Lieutenant were issued three questions to ask potential JPs which required the latter to support repeal of the Test Acts

The Dissenters do not rally

Throughout his aggressive recatholicisation, James had hoped that the many Dissenters and Non-conformists who had been persecuted under Charles’s long reign would welcome change and religious toleration. But they didn’t. The Dissenters James was counting on to help him remained largely silent. He underestimated the strength of their enmity to Catholicism, with its devotion to a foreign pope and its overtones of political absolutism.

The Anglicans weary

James also took it for granted that his Anglican subjects would passively obey him, and so they did, to begin with… but ultimately he miscalculated the extent of their tolerance, building up reservoirs of opposition at every level of the political system.

James tries to engineer a supportive Parliament

Then, in November 1687, the public learned that Mary of Modena was pregnant. James redoubled efforts to set up a compliant parliament by sending commissioners to check the loyalist character of its electors around the country. More Tories were put out of their seats and replaced with Catholics or dissenters. He used whatever expedients he and his ministers could devise to ensure the selection of a parliament compliant to the recatholicising project.

The Declaration of Indulgence

So it was against this background that James reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered it to be read in every Anglican pulpit, that the seven bishops petitioned for this order to reconsidered and James, a man in a tearing hurry, had them tried for seditious libel, an extraordinary proceeding. They were acquitted by a London jury.

Considered in this much detail, it’s hard to see James’s policy as anything other than a thorough and concerted attack on the Church of England and Anglican belief at every single level of society.

William of Orange’s plans–

William the defender

Meanwhile, Kishlansky goes into just as much detail about William of Orange’s position and aims. William, born in 1650, was a Protestant prodigy whose sole aim in life was to protect the Netherlands from the France of Louis XIV. Ever since he had married James II’s daughter, Mary, in 1677, England had played a part in his diplomatic calculations, and Dutch ambassadors and propagandists had been at work for some time presenting himself as a friend, and possibly saviour, of Protestant England.

William’s awareness

He had watched the political crises at the end of Charles II’s reign, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, with a canny eye, looking for his best advantage. Thus, as he saw James’s government set about alienating everyone in England and important factions in Ireland and Scotland, William was constantly aware of its impact on him and his wife, and on her and his succession to the throne.

The geopolitical threat

The birth of the Prince of Wales not only pushed him and his wife further down the order of succession, it helped to crystallise the real geopolitical threat the Low Countries faced. Louis XIV was again making belligerent noises and informed sources expected him to make a renewed attack on the Netherlands in 1689. Like his brother before him, James was a confirmed Francophile and was actually on the payroll of Louis XIV, who was subsidising his government.

Thus the situation for William was one of cold political realities: he needed to neutralise England by any means necessary in order to avoid an attack not just by France, but France in alliance with England.

William had been in touch for some time with opponents of James’s regime in England who had developed a network of dissidents and gauged the extent of opposition, not just in political circles but, crucially, in the army and navy – and the birth of the Prince of Wales triggered action on both sides.

William suggests the letter

It was William who actively asked the seven leading British political figures to write him a letter and suggesting the subject, making it an invitation to him to come and investigate a) the circumstances of the birth of James’s son and heir and b) to protect English liberties.

Even so it took four long months for William to mount an amphibious landing on England’s shores, and this period was long enough for James to discover what was being planned.

James suddenly reverses direction

In Kishlansky’s account it is almost comic the way that James, suddenly realising how many people he had alienated, set out on a charm offensive to rebuild his reputation. He suddenly announced that no Catholics would be allowed to sit in the upcoming parliament. He restored the bishop he had suspended and abolished the hated Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes. He restored all the Anglican fellows he’s sacked from Magdelen College. He abrogated all the charters on cities and boroughs since 1679, which had the effect of reinstating Tory Anglican mayors, aldermen and councillors. In the counties Tory lords lieutenant and JPs were reinstated.

William of Orange’s declaration

It was too late. In October William published a declaration in which he announced he planned to come to England in order to preserve and maintain the established laws, liberties and customs’ of the nation. Another plank of William’s strategy was to be claiming to defend the hereditary rights of his wife, Mary, as one in line to the throne, by investigating the alleged ‘supposititious’ birth of the Prince of Wales. In other words, his declaration carefully laid out a suite of arguments designed to appeal to Tories and traditionalists.

William’s invasion fleet

William assembled a huge invasion fleet, 500 ships carrying 20,000 of his best soldiers and 5,000 horses. He warned supporters to expect him on the North or West but let himself be guided by the wind which carried him down the Channel (and kept the English fleet in harbour) making landfall at Brixham in Devon on 5 November, an auspicious day for Protestants. It took two weeks to disembark his army which he marched to Exeter.

James’s army

On 17 November James left London for Salisbury where his own army was encamped. On paper he commanded 25,000 men and could expect local militias to supply at least as many again. On paper, it looked like things were heading towards an epic battle to decide the future of England. But there was no battle.

James panics

As soon as he arrived at Salisbury, James’s nerve broke. He suffered from insomnia and nosebleeds. He decided his army wasn’t large enough. Two of his most senior commanders defected. On 23 November he returned to London to discover his other daughter, Anne, had deserted him and gone to the Midlands, where insurgents for William had already taken major towns. His advisers told him to call a parliament and send envoys for peace and to ‘pardon’ William.

Negotiations

On the short wet December days the envoys struggled to make William an offer. William’s Whig advisers weren’t, in fact, that keen for a parliament to be called since they needed to time to assure their support around the country. While these negotiations were stuttering forward, all sides were astonished by the news that James had fled London. His last acts were to officially disband his army, destroy the writs required to summon a Parliament, then he threw the Great Seal into the Thames i.e. James did everything he could to sabotage the machinery of government.

Anti-Catholic riots

When Londoners learned James had fled there was an outbreak of anti-Catholic violence with rioters attacking and burning Catholic chapels. And it was now that James, in disguise, was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials. After he was recognised, James returned to London where at least some of the crowd cheered his arrival.

William orders James to leave

William had begun his march on London and he and his supporters were stymied by this sudden reversal in the situation. After pondering all the alternatives, William sent an order to James to vacate the capital within ten hours, and an escort of Dutch guards to assist him to do so and to accompany him to Rochester.

Second time lucky

The great mystery in all of this is why James didn’t stand his ground and rally whatever patriots he could find against what was clearly a foreign invasion. But he didn’t. He meekly went along with the Dutch guard who were given instructions to let him slip away at the first opportunity and now, for the second time, James made an escape to the Kent coast, and this time successfully took ship to France.

What do we do now?

At this point the situation became humorous with the kind of comedy we find in the history of human affairs again and again, because – Nobody knew what to do. The Tories would certainly not have welcomed William’s invasion if they had thought of it as such, as a conquest by a foreign prince. The Whigs were William’s natural supporters but were themselves divided, some saying William should place Mary on the throne, convene a Parliament to ratify her succession, and then retire to become merely a king-consort. The more full-blooded Whigs wanted William as king. The leading figure of the day, Lord Halifax, pithily summed up the confusion:

As nobody knew what to do with him, so nobody knew what to do without him. (quoted on page 283)

The Convention Parliament

When he arrived in London, William summoned the Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual to assemble, and they were joined by the privy councillors on 12 December 1688. On 26 December they were joined by the surviving MPs from Charles’s last Parliament, the one he held in Oxford (none from James’s tainted Catholic Parliaments). This assembly in turn summoned the Convention Parliament, consisting of Lords and Commoners, which recommended setting up of a ‘Convention’ to decide a way forward, which was formally opened on 22 January 1689.

The key fact was that nobody wanted civil war or the outbreak of rebellion in either Scotland or Ireland. The solution had to be fast. And so it was that the knottiest problem in English history was solved by the Convention Parliament in just two weeks!

Lords and Tories

In the House of Lords some, especially the bishops, wanted a simple restoration of James, the rightful king. Other Tories suggested that William and Mary might rule as ‘regents’ until the death of James II, and then Mary would reign as rightful queen thereafter. William, Mary and Anne all let it be known that they opposed this option, the two women deferring to the male monarch.

Whigs

In the House of Commons, Whigs put forward a formula that James had abrogated the contract between a sovereign and his people by abdicating. But 1. the notion that monarchy rested on some kind of voluntary contract between sovereign and people was unprecedented and revolutionary in implication, and 2. it was far from clear that James had, in fact, abdicated. He had been ordered to leave.

Plus 3. the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that the throne is never vacant: the moment one monarch dies, his or her heir succeeds. Even if James had abdicated, then his son the Prince of Wales automatically became the rightful heir – but nobody at all wanted rule by a baby (referred to by many of the debaters as ‘the brat’, according to Kishlansky). And 4. the notion that abdication created a sort of vacuum which had to be sorted out by the people implied another revolutionary idea – that the people in some sense elected their monarch. An elective monarchy.

Reluctant acceptance

Nobody wanted to explicitly say this, as it made a mockery of the fixed hierarchical principles on which the whole of English society rested. But nonetheless, this notion of an agreement by the people to choose a sovereign was the formula which was eventually accepted for the simple reason that the alternative – that the king had been overthrown by an armed invasion – was worse. That idea would legitimise the violent overthrow of the rightful monarch and take everyone back to the constitutional chaos of the 1640s.

Arguments

The differing arguments were played out in disagreement between the Commons, which accepted the new reality, and the Lords who held out for significant rewording the Act agreed by the Commons. The deadlock dragged on for days until William, always a busy man, threatened to go back to Holland and leave the English with a broken country.

The Lords capitulated and both Houses passed an Act declaring William and Mary joint King and Queen of Britain.

The Declaration of Rights

While the politicians had been arguing, the nation’s top lawyers had been drafting a Declaration of Rights. Like the Act, the Declaration had to be very careful in its language, ambiguous at a number of key moments in order not to alienate the different groupings of Whigs and Tories.

A compromise

Like many other constitutional documents (the Magna Carta or the American Constitution) The Declaration of Rights was less a bold statement of timeless principles than a fix-up designed to be acceptable to the largest number of the political nation. As it progressed through drafts, it evolved into a ringing restatement of old and existing laws and liberties, sweeping away James’s innovations, but not proposing anything new.

Even then, the situation called for equivocation. If William had been forced to agree to the Declaration, he would have become in effect an elected monarch and the monarchy and elective monarchy – something which was anathema to most of the bishops and lords and Tories throughout the land.

A tricky coronation

William’s coronation had to be accompanied by the Declaration but not dependent on it. Hence the peculiar fact that at William’s more-elaborate-than-usual coronation on 11 April 1689, the Declaration was read out before William was crowned, and he referred to it in the speech after his coronation as embodying the principles for which he had entered the country – but it was carefully made clear that his crowning was in no way dependent on accepting the Declaration. And no-one mentioned abdication or contracts or elective monarchies or anything like that. Shhh.

Muddling through

Once again the English had managed their way through a massive constitutional crisis on the basis not of logical principles, but of fudging and mudging, of masking ambiguity and unclarity in robes and orbs and high ceremonial. Was it a triumph of enlightened constitutional principles, or of English pragmatism, or of barely concealed hypocrisy?

However you interpret it, what came to be called ‘the Glorious Revolution’ certainly solved one immediate and pressing problem, but laid up a whole series of longer-term challenges for the future.

Related links

Restoration art

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 4, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 4, 2020

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The restoration of Charles II

Introduction to the restoration of Charles II

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.

Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the army generals. From this secure base he made attempts throughout the Protectorate, 1653-58, to reach out to:

  • in religion, episcopalians, moderate Anglicans, Presbyterians and independents
  • in politics, to moderate Royalists, to republicans and to the revolutionaries who had denounced his regime after the regicide
  • in Scotland and Ireland to moderate leaders prepared to accept his authority and work with him

These two central elements a) military authority and b) the intricate skein of negotiated settlements with all these constituencies, often based on personal acquaintance – vanished with his death.

The actual sequence of constitutional, parliamentary and political events following Cromwell’s death are extremely complex, but a high-level summary is that the general in Cromwell’s army tasked with running Scotland, General Monck, got in touch with representatives of the king and offered his services to broker a restoration.

Monck’s main concern was the material demands of the army:

  • there was to be a general pardon for actions carried out under orders
  • arrears of pay were to be fully met
  • titles to former Crown and Church lands bought during the Interregnum were to be confirmed
  • religious toleration for moderate sectarians was to be guaranteed

Charles and his advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that offered a free pardon and amnesty to everyone who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return. However, Charles was canny enough to avoid the main points of contention, saying he’d put them off to be agreed by the first Parliament elected.

The result of these negotiations was the Declaration of Breda, signed by Charles on 4 April 1660, Breda being a town in the southern part of the Netherlands, where Charles had relocated for the negotiations.

Copies of the Declaration were sent to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. A new Parliament had been elected in April 1660, and when Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to it on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.

Timeline of the Restoration

The timeline below gives some sense of the confusion and potential anarchy which spread after Richard Cromwell was forced to abdicate and then nobody knew what was happening or what to expect.

1659

May 7 – Richard Cromwell forced by the Council of Officers to reinstate the Rump Parliament.
May 24 – Resignation of Richard Cromwell after Parliament refuses to recognise the Protectorate.
June 7 – Parliament commissions Charles Fleetwood commander-in-chief of the armies in England and Scotland but retains the power to appoint or promote officers.
July 3 – Viscount Mordaunt arrives in England to co-ordinate a general Royalist insurrection.
August 5-19 – Booth’s Uprising: Royalist revolt in Cheshire, suppressed by Colonel John Lambert.
September – Officers of Lambert’s army meet at Derby and draw up a petition setting out their demands for the government of the nation.
September 22-3 – Parliament forbids any further petitioning by soldiers. Sir Arthur Hesilrige calls for Lambert’s arrest.
October 12 – Parliament revokes the commissions of Lambert and eight other senior officers.
October 13 – Lambert’s troops occupy Westminster and prevent Parliament from sitting.
October 15 – The Council of Officers appoints a ten-member Committee of Safety to consider how to carry on the government.
October 20 – General Monck sends a declaration from Scotland demanding the return of Parliament.
October 25 – The Council of State dissolved; the Committee of Safety re-appointed by Army leaders.
November 3 – Lambert marches north from London with 12,000 troops to block Monck’s route into England.
November 12 – Monck’s representatives arrive in London for talks with the Council of Officers.
November 24 – Former members of the Council of State appoint Monck commander of all military units in England and Scotland and empower him to take military action against the enemies of Parliament if necessary.
December 3 – Sir Arthur Hesilrige secures Portsmouth for Parliament.
December 5 – Riots in London for the return of Parliament.
December 8 – Monck crosses the border and establishes his headquarters at Coldstream.
December 14 – Vice-Admiral John Lawson sails for the Thames, threatening to blockade London in support of Parliament.
December 26 – Fleetwood forced to recall the Rump Parliament.

1660

January 1 – General Monck marches from Coldstream for London.
January 9 – Sir Henry Vane expelled from Parliament for having sided with the military junta.
January 11 – Lord Fairfax meets Monck at York and urges him to restore the Monarchy.
February 3 – Monck’s army arrives in London.
February 9 – Parliament orders Monck to remove the City gates and portcullises after citizens of London demand the reinstatement of Presbyterian MPs purged in 1648.
February 11 – Monck demands the re-admission of the purged MPs and apologises for his actions in removing the City gates.
February 21 – The Long Parliament restored: surviving MPs purged in 1648 re-admitted to Parliament under Monck’s protection.
March 5 – John Lambert imprisoned in the Tower of London.
March 16 – The Long Parliament calls free elections and votes for its own dissolution.
April 10 – Lambert escapes from the Tower and tries to rally resistance to the Restoration.
April 22 – Lambert and his followers defeated at Daventry; Lambert returned to London as a prisoner.
April 25 – The Convention Parliament assembles.
May 1 – Charles II’s manifesto the Declaration of Breda read in Parliament.
May 8 – The Convention Parliament declares Charles II to have been King since 30th January 1649.
May 14 – Parliament orders the arrest of all surviving regicides.
May 25 – Charles II lands at Dover.
May 29 – Charles II makes a triumphal entry into London.

The reign of Charles II, the 1660s

Charles’s reign breaks up into a number of periods and is dominated by a few key themes.

First, was how to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. Charles was in favour of forgiveness and tried to steer the first Parliament of his reign, the Convention Parliament, in that direction. However, the second Parliament, which came to be known as the Cavalier Parliament, not to mention the newly restored House of Lords, contained many who had suffered severely, lost land and family to the Roundheads. They were determined to push the clock back, to recover their lost land and money, to savagely punish all those responsible for the wars and the regicide, and to re-establish a rigid conformity in religion.

Convention Parliament

The Convention Parliament sat until the end of 1660. It was responsible for implementing the terms for the initial Restoration settlement under which Charles II established his administration.

The Convention passed the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which was intended to reunite the nation under the restored monarchy by pardoning the majority of those who had opposed the Crown during the civil wars and Interregnum. It also undertook the task of disbanding the army which had underpinned the Commonwealth and Protectorate régimes. First steps were taken towards settling disputes over lands which had been sold off during the Interregnum, and initial legislation to provide revenue for the restored monarchy was set out. Charles dissolved the Convention Parliament on 29 December 1660.

The Clarendon Code

The Restoration religious settlement comprised four acts of Parliament known collectively as the Clarendon Code. The name derived from Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who served as Charles II’s lord chancellor – though Clarendon was not the chief instigator of the acts and even argued against some of the more severe aspects.

The Corporation Act (1661)

This required all office holders in towns and cities to take oaths of allegiance to the Crown, to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to take the sacrament in accordance with the doctrines of the Church of England.

The Act of Uniformity (1662)

This brought all ordained clergymen under the doctrines and liturgy of the established Church. Candidates for the ministry had to be ordained by a bishop according to the rites of the Church of England. They were required to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to declare their acceptance of the revised Book of Common Prayer and all doctrinal articles sanctioned by the Church. Hundreds of Presbyterian and non-conformist clergymen were expelled from their livings on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1662 for refusing to comply with the Act of Uniformity.

The Conventicle Act (1664)

This was intended to prevent clergymen ejected by the Act of Uniformity from forming their own congregations. Fines or imprisonment were imposed on anyone attending an independent prayer meeting or act of worship (a so-called ‘conventicle) that was not in accordance with the Anglican liturgy.

The Five-Mile Act (1665)

This was intended to curb the influence of dissenting clergymen by prohibiting them from residing within five miles of any living they had held before the Act was passed. Furthermore, they were required to take an oath of non-resistance to royal authority before accepting any appointment as tutor or schoolmaster.

Money

Once again a Stuart king let himself become poor, spending a fortune on the two stupid Dutch wars and frittering it away on mistresses and favourites at home.

A timeline of the 1660s

1661 Corporation Act – aimed at Presbyterians, the Act provided that no person could be legally elected to any office relating to the government of a city or corporation, unless he had within the previous twelve months received the sacrament of ‘the Lord’s Supper’ according to the rites of the Church of England. He was also commanded to take the Oaths of Allegiance and the Oath of Supremacy, to swear belief in the Doctrine of Passive Obedience, and to renounce the Covenant.
1662 Act of Uniformity compels Puritans to accept the doctrines of the Church of England or leave the church.
1662 Royal Society for the improvement of science founded

Catherine of Braganza

Charles married Catherine of the Portuguese royal house of Braganza. He married her for money but her dowry was quickly spent and then Britain found itself drawn into Portugal’s war against Spain. And, crucially, Catherine turned out to be ‘barren’ or incapable of conceiving children. Charles wasn’t. He was to acknowledge fatherhood of eighteen bastards (the most famous being the Duke of Monmouth, born as early as 1649, when Charles himself was only 19).

The lack of a male heir from the Braganza marriage meant the throne would pass to his brother James who was an overt Catholic i.e. more or less condemned the Stuart line to come to an end. As with Henry VIII, the infertility of a royal marriage was to have seismic consequences for the British.

1664 England seizes the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, changing its name to New York.
1665 Outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War
1665 The Great Plague strikes London and over 60,000 die.
1666 The Great Fire of London rages for four days and three nights. Two thirds of central London is destroyed and 65,000 are left homeless

1667 As part of The Second Dutch War A Dutch fleet sails up the River Medway captures the English flagship The Royal Charles and sinks three other great ships. This humiliation provided Charles with a pretext to blame and thus get rid of the Earl of Clarendon, the statesman who had guided and mentored him in exile and dominated the first seven years of his rule.

Fall of Clarendon

Clarendon was replaced by a set of five statesmen or advisers who come to be known as The Cabal and held power from 1668 to 1674.

The Cabal

The linchpin of the Cabal was probably George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Although he only held the household office of Master of the Horse, with responsibility for overseeing the King’s travel arrangements, Buckingham was a long and close associate of King Charles II. They had practically been raised together since they were children, during the close association of their fathers, Charles I and the first Duke of Buckingham, a relationship they consciously compared themselves to in adulthood, and might have replicated, had the younger Buckingham possessed the skills of his father. Nonetheless, Buckingham was in constant contact and a clear favourite of the king, and the centre of the Cabal’s grip on power. Gilbert Burnet, who knew some of its members personally, said that Buckingham stood apart from the rest of the Cabal, hating them and being hated in return.

The Lord High Treasurer Wriothesley having died just before Clarendon’s departure, the Treasury came under the nominal chairmanship of George Monck (Duke of Albermarle). But as Monck was practically retired from public life, control of the Treasury commission was taken up by Sir Thomas Clifford (Comptroller and soon Treasurer of the Household) and Anthony Ashley Cooper (Chancellor of the Exchequer). With the assistance of their close associates John Duncombe (Ashley’s deputy at the Exchequer), Stephen Fox (the Paymaster of the Forces) and Sir George Downing, the secretary to the Treasury commission, Clifford and Ashley overhauled the monarchical finances, placing them in a much more solvent state than before.

Foreign affairs was directed by Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington (Secretary of the South), with occasional assistance from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. (Although foreign affairs were notionally in the purview of the Secretary of the North, the Cabal bullied Sir William Morice into selling the seat to Sir John Trevor, and then sidelined the latter.)

John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale (Secretary of State for Scotland) had already consolidated his position in 1663 by securing the dismissal of his principal rival, John Middleton (Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland) and his replacement by the more pliable John Leslie, Earl of Rothes. In 1669, Lauderdale went one step further, and got Leslie dismissed and the Lord High Commissioner position for himself, consolidating his hold and ruling Scotland as a virtual autocrat for the remainder of his career.

Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Royalist lawyer who had prosecuted the Regicides, and who took over Clarendon’s duties as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1667, was outside of this inner circle, although cooperated with their goals.

Despite their comparative energy and efficiency, the Cabal was a fractious and unpopular group. Although perceived as a secretive and unsavoury junta, they rarely formed a united front, and their internal quarrels often spilled over into the public arena.

J. P. Kenyon suggests that the King actually encouraged the Cabal members to quarrel, in the belief that this made them easier to control. They in turn, never trusted him not to bring them down as he had brought down Clarendon, and as Kenyon remarks, they hardly dared turn their backs on him for fear of sudden dismissal.

It was said that the King treated his ministers very much as he did his mistresses: ‘He used them, but he was not in love with them, and was tied to them no more than they to him, which implies sufficient liberty on either side’.

Sir William Coventry, the Secretary to the Admiralty, resigned from office following a duel challenge from the Duke of Buckingham, and re-emerged in the House of Commons at the head of a group of MPs known as the ‘Country Party’, which loudly opposed the Cabal and its policies.

Charles II acceded to the Cabal’s recommendation to prorogue parliament repeatedly, keeping it out of session for as long as he could, and leaving the Cabal to run the country on their own. When he found himself in financial difficulties following the Great Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 and the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles was obliged to re-convene parliament in 1673 and the parliamentarians were bent on revenge.

Fall of the Cabal

The Cabal began to split in 1672, particularly over the autocratic nature of the King’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence, the financing of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and Britain’s relationship with France.

Personal rivalries and a conflict over foreign policy between Buckingham and Arlington escalated. The Ministry became very unpopular. The public saw them as ‘untrustworthy, venal and self-seeking, their eyes always on the main chance”.

Towards the end of the year, Ashley, now the Earl of Shaftesbury, became Lord Chancellor, leaving Treasury matters to Clifford and the Exchequer to Duncombe. He pressed publicly for greater reform of government, taking the side of the Opposition against his colleagues and the King.

Clifford resigned over the in-fighting and retired from public life: as an open Roman Catholic he would in any case have been debarred by the Test Act of 1673 from holding office in the future. Shaftesbury was replaced by Viscount Osborne, soon to become Earl of Danby, in the summer of 1673, on the recommendation of Buckingham and Clifford.

Danby immediately established his authority over the remaining members of the Cabal. Buckingham’s feud with Arlington saw him leak the details of the Treaty of Dover and fall from favour in 1674. Arlington survived as Southern Secretary until September of that year. Lauderdale retained his position and his relatively autonomous power in Scotland, becoming an enemy of Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury began to agitate against Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II. He briefly returned to government in the Privy Council Ministry and took a lead in forming the partisan group that would eventually become known as the Whigs.

Reign of Charles II, the 1670s

1670 – Charles signs the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles agrees to declare himself a Catholic, suspend penal laws against Catholics in England in return for secret subsidies from Louis XIV of France.
1670 – Second Conventicle Act
1670 – Hudson Bay Company founded in North America

1672 – Charles issues the Declaration of Indulgence, allowing dissenters and Catholics to practice their religion in private
1672 – Outbreak of the Third Dutch War as part of the secret treaty with France, the French invading the Spanish Netherlands while the British fleet engaged the Dutch fleet. The Dutch defeated the British fleet at Sole Bay and repelled a land invasion by France by flooding their dykes.
1672 James Duke of York’s wife, Anne Hyde (daughter of the disgraced Earl of Clarendon) died in childbirth, having delivered him two daughters, Mary (b.1662) and Anne, both of whom were brought up as Protestants. Who suspected, then, that they would both reign as queens of England?

1673 – James, Duke of York remarried, taking as his second wife Mary of Modena, a Catholic who was only four years older than his daughter, Mary. James came out publicly as a Catholic which caused a scandal.

1673 – When Charles allowed the Cavalier Parliament to sit again in 1673, it was inflamed by rumours of Charles’s deals with the King of France and Catholic influence in British statecraft, and so the vengeful Anglicans passed a Test Act which required everybody holding public office to take Anglican communion and swear an oath against a belief in transubstantiation – that the wafer of bread and the wine administered during communion actually and literally become the blood of Christ, a central premise of Roman Catholicism. In other words, the Act was expressly designed to keep Roman Catholics out of political office. The Catholic Treasurer Lord Clifford resigned his office then took his life. Charles’s brother, James Duke of York, resigned as High Admiral of the Navy.

In 1677 the Earl of Danby, who had emerged as Charles’s most capable minister, persuaded both Charles and James to let him make a strategic alliance by marrying James’s daughter Mary to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. William was the son of the King’s late sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession after James, Mary, and Ann. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day’. She was 15.

Reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after

1678 – The fantasist Titus Oates concocted the Popish Plot, the notion of a complex, far-reaching plot to murder Charles and convert Britain to a Catholic dictatorship. His initial claims were passed up the chain of command to Charles himself who handed them to Danby to investigate, and with each telling they became more fantastic and baroque. They played into the sense that Britain was being sold into Catholic influence which had haunted the 1670s, what with James’s overt Catholicism, his marriage to a Catholic princess, with Charles repeatedly allying with Catholic France against the Protestant Dutch. Oates’s fabrications helped create a McCarthy witch-hunt atmosphere. Even when he accused the Queen of being a member of the plot to assassinate her own husband, he was widely believed.

A second Test Act (1678) was passed which excluded all known Catholics from both Houses of Parliament. Known Catholics were ordered to leave London and many Protestants in the city openly carried weapons to defend themselves against the impending Catholic ‘onslaught’. Shops in London were boarded up, chains were stretched across major roadways, ferry passengers were detained for questioning, a fleet of lesser crooks and narks emerged to inform on their neighbours and rivals. Some twenty-four utterly innocent people were tried and executed, while Oates was awarded rooms in Whitehall and a pension.

The hysteria lasted from 1678 to 1681. A new Parliament was elected in March 1679 which presented a bill seeking to prevent the succession of the Catholic James. Charles worked on numerous fronts to address concerns, taking opponents into his Privy Council, sending James out of the kingdom, being prepared to sign a bill limiting the power of a Catholic monarch. But he would not concede the right to determine the royal succession to Parliament and so he dissolved this Parliament and called a second one. The second Parliament of 1679 was called amid mounting hysteria and opposition was orchestrated by the Earl of Shaftesbury amid press campaigns and petitions.

The coalition of allies which Shaftesbury put together around this central anti-Catholic approach was arguably the first political party in Britain and became known as the Whigs. The king’s supporters quickly copied the new organisational tactics of the Whigs and began to be known as the Tories. Charles refused to let the second Parliament sit, proroguing it seven times over the course of a year. Whig propagandists played on fears of Catholic tyranny; Tories revived memories of 1641 and the way a Parliament trying to seize the king’s prerogatives had led to 20 years of chaos.

Whigs and Tories

The term Whig was originally short for whiggamor, a term meaning ‘cattle driver’ used to describe western Scots who came to Leith for corn. In the reign of Charles I the term was used during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was then applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the King’s Episcopalian order in Scotland.

The term Whig entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681 when there was controversy about whether or not King Charles II’s brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles’s death. Whig was a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. The fervent Tory Samuel Johnson often joked that ‘the first Whig was the Devil’.

In his six-volume history of England, David Hume wrote:

The court party reproached their antagonists with their affinity to the fanatical conventiclers in Scotland, who were known by the name of Whigs: The country party found a resemblance between the courtiers and the popish banditti in Ireland, to whom the appellation of Tory was affixed. And after this manner, these foolish terms of reproach came into public and general use; and even at present seem not nearer their end than when they were first invented

In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs’ strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months but when it did in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but Charles was in attendance when it was rejected in the Lords and Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681.

As Mark Kishlansky summarises, ‘the governing class was now irredeemably divided.’

The next attempt at a Parliament met in March at Oxford, but when it also determined on the Exclusion Bill, Charles dissolved it after only a few days. He then he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and ruled for the rest of his reign without Parliament.

In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, which directly implicated many of them.

1683 The Rye House Plot a conspiracy to kill Charles and his brother James and return to parliamentary rule is uncovered. The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. The royal party went from Westminster to Newmarket to see horse races and were expected to make the return journey on 1 April 1683, but because there was a major fire in Newmarket on 22 March (which destroyed half the town), the races were cancelled, and the King and the Duke returned to London early. As a result, the planned attack never took place.

There seems to have been disagreement among the plotters on almost every aspect, including whether there even would be an assassination or whether it should be a kidnapping, and exactly how the subsequent uprising would be started and managed.

Once information about it was leaked, the plotters incriminated each other and letters and diaries were discovered which spread the net wider and wider.

Unlike the Popish Plot, Rye House was a genuine conspiracy involving an extended network of Whigs, politicians and non-conformists. Twelve were executed including William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, two condemned to death but pardoned, 10 imprisoned including the ageing Leveller John Wildman, 10 fled into exile including the noted philosopher John Locke and, most importantly, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been the effective leader of the Whig party. These formed a core of Whig opposition in exile, in the Netherlands.

As Anglican pledges of support flooded in from round the country, the authorities took the opportunity to crack down in dissenters and over 1,300 Quakers were imprisoned over the next 12 months.

Charles undertook a policy of reincorporation, systematically placing loyalist country officers around the country.

Death of Charles II

Charles died on 5 February 1685, aged just 54, only barely outmatching his father, who died aged 48. On his deathbed he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In the absence of any legitimate male heirs, the crown passed to his younger brother, who became King James II.

Related links

Restoration art

Restoration comedies

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Posted by Simon on August 31, 2020

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The Crimean War by Orlando Figes (2010)

This was the first war in history in which public opinion played so crucial a role. (p.304)

This a brilliant book, a really masterful account of the Crimean War, a book I reread whole sections of and didn’t want to end. It covers the military campaigns (along the Danube, in Crimea) and battles (at the Alma river, Balaklava, Inkerman) competently enough, maybe with not quite the same dash as the Crimea section of Saul David’s Victoria’s Wars – but where it really scores is in the depth and thoroughness and sophistication of Figes’ analysis of the political and cultural forces which led to the war in the first place and then shaped its course – his examination of the conflict’s deep historical roots and in its long lasting influence.

Thus the first 130 pages (of this 490-page text) deal with the background and build-up to conflict, and drill down into the issues, concerns, plans and fantasies of all the main players. Not just the British (though it is a British book by a British historian) but a similar amount of space is devoted to the Russian side (Figes is a world-leading expert on Russian history), as well as the situation and motives of the French and the Ottoman Turks, with insights into the position of the Austrian and Prussian empires.

The Holy Places

The trigger for the war has always struck anyone who studied it as ridiculously silly: it concerned the conflict about who should have control of the ‘Holy Places’ in Jerusalem, the Catholic church (championed by France) or the Orthodox church (championed by Russia). (Who could have guessed that the acrimonious theological dispute about the meaning of the word filioque which split the two churches in the 11th century would lead to half a million men dying in miserable squalor 800 years later.)

To recap: the life and preaching and death of Jesus took place in Palestine; by the time of the Emperor Constantine (c.320), Roman Christians had supposedly tracked down the very barn Jesus was born in, at Bethlehem, and the precise site of the crucifixion in Jerusalem – and begun to build chapels over them.  By the 1800s there were well-established Churches of the Nativity (at Bethlehem) and of the Holy Sepulchre (in Jerusalem) with attendant monasteries, chapels and so on stuffed with Christian priests and monks of all denominations.

The situation was complicated by two factors. 1. In the 700s the Muslim Arabs stormed out of Arabia and by the 900s had conquered the Middle East and the North African coast. The Muslim world underwent a number of changes of leadership in the ensuing centuries, but from the 1300s onwards was ruled by the Ottoman dynasty of Turkish origin. The Ottoman Empire is alleged to have reached its military and cultural peak in the late 1500s/early 1600s. By the 1800s it was in obvious decline, culturally, economically and militarily. Many of the ‘countries’ or ‘nationalities’ it ruled over were restive for independence, from the Egyptians in the south, to the Christian ‘nations’ of Greece and Serbia in the Balkans.

What Figes’ account brings out in fascinating detail is the extent to which the Russian Empire, the Russian state, Russian culture, Russian writers and poets and aristocrats, academics and military leaders, were all drenched in the idea that their entire Christian culture owed its existence to Constantinople. The founding moment in Russia’s history is when missionaries from Greek Orthodox Byzantium converted the pagan ‘Rus’ who inhabited Kiev to Christianity in the 9th century. This newly-Christian people went on to form the core of the ‘Russians’, a people which slowly extended their empire to the Baltic in the North, the Black Sea in the south, and right across the vast territory of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean.

In a really profound way, which Figes’ book brings out by quoting the writings of its poets and philosophers and academics and Christian leaders, Russia saw itself as the Third Rome – third in order after the original Christian Rome and the ‘Second Rome’ of Constantinople – and felt it had a burning religious duty to liberate Constantinople from the infidel Turks (Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, being of course the capital of the Ottoman Empire). It is fascinating to read about, and read quotes from, this broad spectrum of Russian nationalist writers, who all agreed that once they’d kicked the Turks out of Europe they would rename Istanbul ‘Tsargrad’.

Alongside the deep and varied rhetoric calling for a ‘Holy War’ against the infidel Turks was the linked idea of the union of all the Slavic peoples. Russians are Slavs and felt a deep brotherly feeling for the Slavic peoples living under Ottoman rule – in present-day Serbia and Bulgaria in particular. The same kind of Russian intelligentsia which wrote poems and songs and pamphlets and sermons about liberating Constantinople, and – in extreme versions – going on to liberate the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, also fantasised about a great pan-Slavic uprising to overthrow the shackles of the infidel Turk, and uniting the great Slavic peoples in an Empire which would stretch from the Adriatic to the Pacific.

Intoxicating stuff, and this is where Figes is at his tip-top best, taking you deep deep inside the mind-set of the Russian educated classes and leadership, helping you to see it and understand it and sympathise with it.

The only snag with this grand Russian vision was the unfortunate fact that there is such a thing as Catholic Christianity, and that a number of the ‘nations’ of the Balkans were not in fact either Slavs or Orthodox Christians – e.g. the Catholic Romanians. In fact, there was a lot of animosity between the two distinct versions of Christianity, with the Catholics, in particular, looking down on the Orthodox for what they regarded as their more primitive and pagan practices.

The simmering conflict between the two came to a head at the two churches mentioned above, especially the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The churches had become rabbit warrens themselves, with holy grottoes underneath and vestries and side chapels sprouting onto them, with both Orthodox and Catholics clerics building monasteries and so on in the immediate vicinity and claiming complete access and ownership to the sites.

The Ottoman Turks had done their best to resolve disputes between the squabbling Christians and there had even been a succession of treaties in the 1700s which laid down the precise access rights of each Christian sect. But when the silver star embedded in the floor of the Church of the Nativity by the Catholics was dug up and stolen in 1847 the ‘dishonour’ was so great that the new ruler of Catholic France became involved, demanding that the Ottomans cede the French complete control of the Holy Sites to ensure there wasn’t a repetition of the sacrilege.

In that same year, the religiously significant silver star was stolen that had been displayed above the Grotto of the Nativity. In 1851, the Church of the Nativity was under the control of the Ottoman Empire. But near Christmas of 1852, Napoleon III sent his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and forced the Ottomans to recognise France as the “sovereign authority” in the Holy Land, which the Latins had lost in the eighteenth century. The Sultan of Turkey replaced the silver star over the Grotto with a Latin inscription, but the Russian Empire disputed the change in “authority,” citing two treaties—one from 1757 and the other from 1774 (the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca)—and deployed armies to the Danube area. (Wikipedia)

Egged on by the pan-Slav and religious zealots in his court, Tsar Nicholas I saw the opportunity to teach the Ottomans a lesson, to reassert Orthodox authority over the Holy Places, to spark the long-awaited Slavic uprising in the Balkans and to extend Russian power to the Mediterranean. Hooray! In May 1853 Russian forces moved into the two principalities which formed the border between Russia and the Ottoman Empire – the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, ‘Danubian’ because the river Danube ran through them. The Ottomans moved armies up to face them, and the war was on!

Politics in depth

What sets Figes’ account apart is the thoroughness with which he explains the conflicting political and cultural pressures within each of the countries which then got drawn into this conflict.

France, for example, had recently been through a revolution, in 1848, which had eventually been crushed but did manage to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and usher in the Second Republic. To people’s surprise the man who managed to get elected President of the Republic was Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew and heir of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoléon’s presidential term expired in 1851, he first organised a coup d’état in that year, and then the following year, reclaimed the imperial throne, as Napoleon III, on 2 December 1852. At which point the Second Republic changed its name to the Second Empire. (19th century French history is a hilarious farce of revolutions, coups, republics and empires, each one more incompetent than the last. Mind you, 20th century French history isn’t much better – between 1946 and 1958 the French Fourth Republic had 22 Prime Ministers!)

But that’s not the interesting stuff, that’s just the basic factual information: the interest Figes brings to his account is his analysis of the various political pressures which the new president found himself under from within France. Obviously the Catholic Right and many actual churchmen were calling for action to defend the rights of Catholics in the Holy Places; but there was a large left-wing grouping in France whose hopes had been crushed by in the 1848 revolution. Napoleon realised that he could reconcile these opposing factions by depicting war against Russia as a pro-Catholic crusade to the Church and as a setback to the autocratic Tsarist regime – which was widely seen on the Left as the most repressive and reactionary regime in Europe. On top of which a glorious French victory would of course cover secure his place as successor to his famous uncle.

Polish liberation was a big cause in France. It wasn’t so long since 1830 when Polish nationalists had risen up to try and throw off Russian control of their country. The rebellion was brutally put down and Tsar Nicholas I (the same Tsar who launched the Crimean offensive 20 years later) had decreed that Poland would henceforward be an integral part of Russia, with Warsaw reduced to a military garrison, its university and other cultural activities shut down.

A stream of Polish intellectuals and aristocrats had fled west, many of them settling in France where they set up presses, publishing newspapers, pamphlets, books and poems and establishing networks of lobbyists and contacts. Figes investigates the writers and activists who made up this Polish lobby, specifically Prince Adam Czartoryski, and explains how they went about demonising Russia (and you can understand why), losing no opportunity to exaggerate Russia’s threatening intentions and, of course, lobbying for the liberation of Poland. Figes is excellent at showing how the Polish activists’ influence extended into both British and French ministries and military hierarchies.

But this was just one of the many forces at work across Europe. All the way through his account of the war, which lasted two and a half years, the constellation of forces at work in France shifted and changed as public opinion evolved from feverish support of a war against the Russian aggressor to increasing war-weariness. It is absolutely fascinating to read how Napoleon III tried to manage and ride the changing positions of all these factions, the vociferous press, and fickle public opinion.

And the same goes for Britain. In the 1830s and 40s conflicts in the Middle East – not least the rebellion of Mehmet Ali, pasha of Egypt, who rebelled against his Ottoman masters and demanded independence under his personal rule for Egypt and Syria – had forced the British to realise that, corrupt and collapsing though it may be, it was better to have a weak Ottoman Empire imposing some order, rather than no Ottoman Empire and complete chaos over such a huge and crucial region.

Thus the French and British governments, though perennially suspicious of each other, agreed that they had to prop up what became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.

Again where Figes excels is by going much much deeper than standard accounts, to show the extent of the ‘Russophobia’ in British politics and culture, identifying the writers and diplomats who showed a fondness for Turkish and Muslim culture, explaining how British diplomats, the Foreign Office, and the cabinet staked their hopes on British-led reforms of Turkey’s laws and institutions.

Figes presents not a monolithic slab called ‘Britain’, but a complex country made up of all kinds of conflicting interests and voices. For example, it’s fascinating to learn that the British had the most varied, free and well-distributed press in the world. A side-effect of the railway mania of the 1840s had been that newspapers could now be distributed nationally on a daily basis. The prosperous middle classes in Bradford or Bristol could wake up to the same edition of The Times as opinion leaders in London.

This led to the first real creation of an informed ‘public opinion’, and to a huge increase in the power of the press. And Figes is fascinating in his depiction of the robust pro-war politician Lord Palmerston as the first ‘modern’ politician in that he grasped how he could use the press and public opinion to outflank his opponents within the British cabinet. Thus the British Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was against war and supported the moderate Four Points which a peace conference held in Vienna suggested be put to the Russians. But Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, had a much grander, much more aggressive vision of attacking Russia on all fronts – in the Baltic, Poland, the Balkans, the Crimea and in the Caucasus.

Figes’ account goes into great detail about these other little-known fronts in the war – for example the repeated efforts by the British to storm the Russian naval port of Kronstadt on the Baltic, with a view to ultimately marching on St Petersburg! (The successive British admirals sent out to size up the plan consistently declared it impossible pp.337-339.) Or the plan to foment a Muslim Holy War amongst the tribes of the Caucasus, who would be levied under the leadership of the charismatic leader Imam Shamil and directed to attack the Russians. In the event there were several battles between Turks and Russians in the Caucasus, but Palmerston’s Holy War plan was never implemented (pp.336-337)

The summary above is designed to give just a taste of the complexity and sophistication of Figes’ analysis, not so much of the actual events which took place – plenty of other histories do that – but of the amazingly complex kaleidoscope of political forces swirling in each of the combatant countries, of the various leaders’ attempts to control and channel them, and of the scores of alternative plans, alternative visions, alternative histories, which the leaders were considering and which could so nearly have taken place.

Being taken into the subject in such detail prompts all kinds of thoughts, big and small.

One is that history is a kind of wreck or skeleton of what is left when leaders’ grand plans are put into effect and come up against harsh reality. History is the sad carcass of actual human actions left over when the glorious dreams of night time meet the harsh reality of day.

The Tsar dreamed of liberating the Balkans, creating a great pan-Slavic confederacy and throwing the Turks completely out of Europe, liberating Istanbul to become the centre of a reinvigorated empire of Orthodox Christianity.

The Polish agitators dreamed of throwing off the Russian yoke and creating a free united independent Poland.

Napoleon III dreamed of establishing French supremacy over a weakened Ottoman Empire, thus consolidating his reputation at home.

Palmerston dreamed of a grand alliance of all the nations of Europe – Sweden in the Baltic, France and Prussia in the centre, Austria in the Balkans, allied with the Turks and Muslim tribesmen in the Caucasus to push back the borders of the Russian Empire a hundred years.

Figes is just as thorough in his analysis of the forces at work in the Ottoman Empire, which I haven’t mentioned so far. The Ottoman Emperor also struggled to contain domestic opinion, in his case continual pressure from Muslim clerics, imams and muftis, and from a large section of educated opinion, who all dreamed of an end to the ‘humiliation’ of the Muslim world by the West, who dreamed of a ‘Holy War’ to repel the Russians and restore Muslim power and dignity.

All these shiny dreams of glory, honour, liberation and holy war ended up as battlefields strewn with the corpses of hundreds of thousands of men blown up, eviscerated, decapitated, butchered, bayoneted, as well as plenty of civilian women and children raped and murdered – all rotting in the blood-soaked soil of the Crimea, the Danube, the Caucasus.

No matter what glorious rhetoric wars start off with, this is how they always end up. In rotting human bodies.

Figes brilliantly shows how, as reality began to bite, the various leaders struggled to control the rising tides of disillusionment and anger: Napoleon III deeply anxious that failure in the war would lead to another French revolution and his overthrow; the Tsar struggling to contain the wilder pan-Slavic fantasies of many of his churchmen and court officials on the one hand and a steady stream of serf and peasant rebellions against conscription, on the other; and, strikingly, the Ottoman Emperor (and his British advisors) really worried that unless he acted aggressively against the Russians, he would be overthrown by an Islamic fundamentalist revolution.

In standard histories, the various nations are often treated as solid blocks – Britain did this, France wanted that. By spending over a quarter of his book on an in-depth analysis of the long cultural, historical, religious, technological and social roots of the conflict, Figes gives us a vastly more deep and sophisticated understanding of this war, and of the deeper social and historical trends of the time.

Relevance

Many of which, of course, endure into our time.

Why read history, particularly a history of a forgotten old war like this? Because it really does shed light on the present. In a number of ways:

1. The area once ruled by the Ottoman Empire is still desperately unstable and racked by conflict – civil war in Libya, military repression in Egypt, chaos in northern Iraq, civil war in Syria. Almost all Muslim opinion in all of these regions wants to restore Muslim pride and dignity, and, whatever their factional interests, are united in opposing meddling by the West. And it doesn’t seem that long ago that we were living through the civil wars in former Yugoslavia, in lands where Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians were raping and murdering each other.

2. In other words, the religious and cultural forces which lay behind the Crimean War still dominate the region and still underpin modern conflicts. Again and again, one of Figes’ quotes from the pan-Slavic visions of the Russians or the Muslim doctrine of Holy War read exactly like what we read in the newspapers and hear on the radio today, in 2017. After all it was only as recently as March 2014 that Russia annexed the Crimea, an act most UN member states still consider an act of illegal aggression, and the Foreign Office consequently advises against any foreign travel to the Crimea.

165 years after the events analysed so brilliantly in this book, Crimea once again has the potential to become a flashpoint in a wider war between East and West.

What could be more relevant and necessary to understand?

3. And the book continually stimulates reflection not just about the possible causes of war, but about how national and religious cultures have eerily endured down to the present day. Figes paints a fascinating portrait of the fundamentally different social and political cultures of each of the belligerent countries – I was particularly struck by the contrast between the essentially open society informed by an entirely free press of Britain, as against the totalitarian closed society of Russia, which had only a handful of state-controlled newspapers which never criticised the government, and where a secret police could cart people off to prison and torture if they were overheard, even in private conversations, to utter any criticism of the tsar or the army. 160 years later Britain is still a raucously open society whereas journalism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a risky occupation and open opposition to the President has landed many of his opponents in gaol, or worse. Plus ca change… Also, it becomes quite depressing reading the scores and scores of references to Muslim leaders, mullahs, muftis and so on, insistently calling on the Sultan to put an end to Western interference, to declare a Holy War on the Western infidels, to attack and punish the Christians. Again, almost every day brings fresh calls from Al Qaeda or the Taliban or ISIS to defeat the infidel West. How long, how very, very long, these bitter hatreds have endured.

4. And the book offers another, more general level of insight – which is into the types of political pressure which all leaders find themselves under. The leaders of all the belligerent nations, as described above, found themselves trying to manage and control the often extreme opinion of their publics or churches or courts or advisors. How they did so, where they gave in, where they stood firm, and with what results, are object lessons modern politicians could still profitably study, and which give fascinating insight to us non-politicians into the sheer difficulty and complexity of trying to manage a big modern industrialised country, let alone a modern war.

The Crimean War was a shameful shambles for nearly all the participants. This book not only describes the squalor and suffering, the disease and dirt, the agonising deaths of hundreds of thousands of men in a pointless and stupid conflict – it sheds fascinating light on how such conflicts come about, why they are sometimes so difficult to avoid and almost impossible to control, and why sequences of decisions which each individually may seem rational and reasonable, can eventually lead to disaster.

This is a really outstanding work of history.

Memorable insights

The trenches The Siege of Sevastopol lasted from September 1854 until September 1855. Criminally, the British were completely unprepared for winter conditions in Russia (like Napoleon, like Hitler) resulting in tens of thousands of British soldiers living in pitifully inadequate tents, with no warm clothing, amid seas of mud and slush, so that thousands died of frostbite, gangrene and disease. In an eerie anticipation of the Great War both sides created elaborate trench systems and settled into a routine of shelling and counter-shelling. In between times there were pre-arranged truces to bury the dead, during which the opposing armies fraternised, swapped fags and booze and even toasted each other. In this element of prolonged and frustrating trench warfare,

this was the first modern war, a dress rehearsal for the trench fighting of the First World War. (p.373)

Alcohol 5,500 British soldiers, about an eighth of the entire army in the field, were court-martialled for drunkenness. It was rampant. Some soldiers were continually drunk for the entire 11-month siege.

Disease As usual for all pre-modern wars, disease killed far more than weapons. For example, in January 1855 alone, 10% of the British army in the East died of disease. Died. Cholera, typhoid and other waterborne diseases, combined with gangrene and infection from wounds, and frostbite during the bitter winter of 1854-55. Figes has a splendid few pages on Florence Nightingale, the tough martinet who tried to reorganise the wretched hospital facilities at Scutari, on the south side of the Black Sea. I was staggered to read that the Royal Inquiry, sent out in 1855 to enquire why so many soldiers were dying like flies, despite Nightingale’s intentions, discovered that the hospital barracks was built over a cesspit which regularly overflowed into the drinking water. As Figes damningly concludes, the British wounded would have stood a better chance of survival in any peasant’s hut in any Turkish village than in the official British ‘hospital’.

Nikolai Pirogov Figes goes into some detail about Florence Nightingale (fascinating character) and also Mary Seacole, who is now a heroine of the annual Black History Month. But Figes brings to light some other heroes of the 11-month long siege of Sevastapol, not least the Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov. Pirogov arrived in Sevastapol to find chaos and squalor in the main hospital, himself and the other doctors operating on whoever was put in front of them by harassed orderlies and nurses, as the allies’ continual bombardment produced wave after wave of mangled bodies. Finally it dawned on Pirogov that he had to impose some kind of order and developed the  system of placing the injured in three categories: the seriously injured who needed help and could be saved were operated on as soon as possible; the lightly wounded were given a number and told to wait in the nearby barracks (thus not cluttering the hospital); those who could not be saved were taken to a rest home to be cared for by nurses and priests till they died (pp.295-298). He had invented the triage system of field surgery which is used in all armies to this day.

Irish A third of the British army consisted of Catholic Irish. This surprising fact is explained when you learn that the army was recruited from the poorest of the urban and rural poor, and the poorest rural poor in the British Isles were the Irish.

The camera always lies The Crimean War is famous as seeing the ground breaking war reporting of Russell of The Times and some of the earliest photographs of war, by the pioneer Roger Fenton. However, Figes points out that the wet process of photography Fenton employed required his subjects to pose stationary for 20 seconds or more. Which explains why there are no photographs of any kind of fighting. He goes on to explain how Fenton posed many of his shots, including one claiming to be of soldiers wearing thick winter wear – which was in fact taken in sweltering spring weather – and his most famous photo, of the so-called Valley of Death after the Light Brigade charged down it into the Russian guns – in which Fenton carefully rearranged the cannonballs to create a more artistic effect.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) by Roger Fenton

The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) by Roger Fenton

This reminded me of the account of Felice Beato I read in Robert Bickers’ The Scramble for China. Beato was an Italian–British photographer, one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. Beato was allowed into the Chinese forts at Taku after the British had captured them in 1860 towards the climax of the Second Opium War and – he also arranged the bodies to create a more pleasing aesthetic and emotional effect.

Interior of the North Fort at Taku (1860) by Felice Beato

Interior of the North Fort at Taku (1860) by Felice Beato

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by Simon on July 10, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 10, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/the-crimean-war-orlando-figes/

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