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Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955)

Tommy Blackhouse declared: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.’
(Officers and Gentlemen, page 47)

Officers and Gentleman is the second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. As its predecessor, Men at Arms was divided into three parts with a prologue and epilogue, so Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two halves, ‘Happy Warriors’ (London and Scotland) and ‘In The Picture’ (Egypt and Crete), with a small interlude and an epilogue.

Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is entirely about the army and the adventures in it of the trilogy’s dour, self-conscious, 35-year-old, divorced, Catholic ‘hero’, Guy Crouchback – and yet the majority of the book features no fighting. Instead, like its predecessor, it is overwhelmingly about the absurdities of army bureaucracy, politicking and infighting, with a fair admixture describing the absurdities of civilian life during war.

Indeed, the larger presence of scenes of civilian life, in the form of the social circle of Guy’s former wife, Virginia, in London, and of the legendary Mrs Julia Stitch in Alexandria (when the action moves, in the second half, to Egypt)shifts the style and feel of the book noticeably back towards the more obviously silly social satire of Waugh’s 1930s comedies.

Book One – Happy Warriors

The previous novel ended with Guy aboard a flying boat carrying him back from Sierra Leone to England. Officers and Gentlemen opens on the evening of the same day. Guy arrives in the afternoon and makes his way straight to London in time for a big air raid during the Blitz. The novel opens with Guy standing on the steps of his London club, Bellamy’s, admiring the night sky over London lit up by German bombers, explosions, searchlights and anti-aircraft flak, quite a show of fireworks.

Stiff upper lip

Part of the humour derives from the stiff upper lip detachment of most of the characters and the narrator. This sense of ironic detachment is apparent from the opening scene. For many Londoners the Blitz was a time of terror and tragedy. Waugh completely transmutes it into a festival of fun. It’s there in individual sentences:

Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

In sardonic satire:

On the pavement opposite Turtle’s a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning-room.

Or in the extended comic tone of the opening scene when members of Bellamys watch the rival club, Turtles, down the road, burning merrily, and then confront a bedlam of rumours that wine and brandy are flowing in the gutters, the comic spectacle of the night porter, Job, having drink far too much and attempting to keep a straight face and voice, and the farcical spectacle of Ian Kilbannock’s superior officer, an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, hiding from German bombs under the club billiard table.

At the end of the Evelyn Waugh Wikipedia article, his lifelong friend Nancy Mitford is quoted as saying: ‘What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.’

Apthorpe’s last request

A central figure of Men at Arms was the often absurd figure of Apthorpe. In hospital and knowing he was dying, Apthorpe made Guy promise to carry out his dying wish and take his legendary collection of kit and equipment to a chap called ‘Chatty’ Corner (real name, James Pendennis). Apthorpe had brought this chap to a drunken dinner given by the regiment he and Guy are both members of, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Waugh expresses it with characteristic levity:

A spirit was to be placated. Apthorpe’s gear must be retrieved and delivered before Guy was free to follow his fortunes in the King’s service. His road lay backward for the next few days, to Southsand and Cornwall. ‘Chatty’ Corner, man of the trees, must be found, somewhere in the trackless forests of wartime England.

This is the rather slender pretext for the first half of the book which is Guy’s quest to track down this ‘Chatty’ fellow and hand over Apthorpe’s huge pile of clobber.

Recurring characters

In the first novel there was quite an array of characters, who kept changing with the changing configuration of Guy’s regiment. In this novel the focus is a bit more on civilian life and so it feels like there’s a smaller number of characters who keep recurring up. These include:

Ian Kilbannock – early in the war wangled himself a job in the RAF and, during the course of this book, gets himself a cosy niche as information officer
Tommy Blackhouse – the man Guy’s wife, Virginia, left him for, but they’ve both gotten over this, Tommy is a member of Guy’s club, Bellamy’s, so they keep bumping into each other and the central event of part one is when Guy finds himself seconded to the commando group Tommy is commanding in Scotland
Virginia aka Mrs Troy, shallow-minded socialite ex-wife of Guy’s (‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia’, p.78)
Arthur Box-Bender – Conservative MP married to Guy’s sister, Angela, successful if often obtuse older man in his 50s
Miss Vavasour – the concerned old lady who resides in the same hotel as Guy’s father in the seaside resort of Matchet (his daughter, Angela, has dropped hints that she might be in love with him)

Guy spends that night in a hotel then next day Guy takes a train from Charing Cross and reports at the Royal Halberdier barracks. No one is expecting him or knows what to do with him. Guy explains his quest to find Chatty Corner to the Adjutant who promptly gives him some leave, so Guy turns right round, gets a taxi to the station and back to London.

Guy’s father and the Cuthberts

There is a prolonged storyline concerning Guy’s father. Years ago he had been forced to quit the old family home at Broome, let it to a convent, and settled as a long-term resident in a hotel in the coast town of Matchet. The storyline concerns the narrow-minded, uncharitable and profiteering attempts of the owners of the hotel, the Cuthberts, to eject Mr Crouchback from his room and make a lot more money charging it out by the week at the new higher wartime rates.

The general purpose of this recurring storyline is to emphasise what a jolly decent old buffer Guy’s father is (‘He was a man of regular habit and settled opinion. Doubt was a stranger to him.’) and what a thoroughly mean-spirited and greedy lot the horrid working class Cuthberts are.

His daughter, Guy’s sister, Angela, has three daughters by her husband, Box-Bender. All three have been evacuated to the safety of New England. From there they have sent a package containing American products which Mr Crouchback can’t make head or tail of.

He receives a letter from Angela enclosing a message they’ve had from Tony, her only son, who surrendered along with his regiment at Dunkirk and is now in a German prisoner of war camp.

Meanwhile wheels are moving. The Prime Minister, no less, orders that Brigadier Ritchie-Hook be rehabilitated. Along the complex hierarchy of bureaucracy this urge to find something for him to do spins off to affect Guy. Orders are drawn up for him to attend HOO HQ. These are top secret and must be delivered by hand. Who is there to deliver them? Well, old ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, a superannuated retired Colonel who returned to the barracks as soon as war broke out and has been hanging round under-employed ever since. He’s only too happy to be given something to do, namely sit in a car driven by an army driver all the way to the Marine Hotel Matchet where Guy is known to be taking his leave.

And thus Jumbo Trotter enters the lives of not only Guy but his father. For when he arrives in Matchet it rather inevitably turns out that he knows Mrs Tickeridge, wife of the colonel who resides at the hotel along with Guy’s father and was, in fact the man who wangled him a post in the Halberdiers.

The arrival of Jumbo overlaps with the storyline about the Cuthberts wanting to oust Mr Crouchback from the hotel because they have progressed as far as getting a Quartering Commandant, a Major Grigshawe, to force him to leave so his rooms can be taken by more ‘important’ (and higher paying) guests. But Jumbo knows this man Grigshawe, spots him in the bar, calls his name, Grigshawe jumps to attention, and Jumbo has a few words with him which result in Mr Crouchback’s future at the hotel being assured. All without Mr Crouchback knowing it even happened. Why? Because as soon as Mrs Tickeridge introduces Jumbo to Guy’s father, Jumbo recognises him as ‘a good type’; not only the father of a Halberdier but a man fit to be a Halberdier himself. Contacts.

Anyway, you can see why describing this as a ‘war novel’ would be very misleading. For long stretches it’s more of a comic novel about civilian life during wartime.

Guy’s quest

Meanwhile Guy’s quest takes him to some of the barracks the Halberdiers were posted to in the first book. At Brook Park he collects a stash Apthorpe had left, before moving on to Southsand where the Commodore of the Yacht Club is only too glad to be relieved of three taxis’ worth of clutter Apthorpe had left there. And here Guy finds himself becalmed because military orders had it that no soldier should carry more than a haversack. He had assembled all Apthorpe’s gear alright, but isn’t allowed to move it. All Souls Day, 2 November 1940, comes and goes and, ‘ever prone to despond’, Guy broods.

Finally Jumbo Trotter arrives, having tracked him down, and delivers his secret message ‘by hand’. It is instructions to report to HOO HQ at Marchmain House, London. Now this is a tiny but significant detail because readers of Brideshead Revisited will remember that the family title was Marchmain, that their London house was called Marchmain House, and that old Lord Marchmain had been obliged to sell the house to developers who knocked it down and built a block of modern flats. Well, this is the same place, the top floors having been commandeered by Hazardous Offensive Operations (HOO) Headquarters. It’s not only an example of the way all of Waugh’s fictional oeuvre inhabits the same ‘universe’ with multiple cross-references and recurring characters, but also an indication of the way Officers and Gentlemen is a bit more tied into his pre-war comedies than Men at Arms.

Anyway, here occurs one of the many comic misunderstandings which litter Waugh’s stories. Guy tells him that the secret message instructed him to report to London, but he has a devil of a lot of kit. He takes Jumbo to see the kit and Jumbo is suitably impressed:

Together they visited the baggage store and stood in silence before the heap of steel trunks, leather cases, brass-bound chests, shapeless canvas sacks, buffalo-hide bags. Jumbo was visibly awed. He himself believed in ample provision for the emergencies of travel. Here was something quite beyond his ambition. (p.42)

Because Guy doesn’t explain about Apthorpe, Jumbo thinks all this kit is part of a top secret mission Guy is on. Therefore he pulls strings and secures the services of a five ton truck and driver and next morning all this kit is loaded into it and they are driven to London.

When Guy finally reports to a functionary of HOO HQ in Marchmain House, he is told he is being sent on temporary attachment for training purposes to X Commando on the (fictional) Scottish Isle of Mugg, where he will report to Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who, by huge coincidence, the reader will remember, is the man who took Guy’s wife away from him.

When he hears the news Jumbo is thrilled and offers to come with him, extending the use of the three-ton lorry and RASC driver has found him. So they head north.

The Isle of Mugg

After several overnight stops, they arrive at Inverness, where the ferry for Mugg departs. Jumbo volunteers to stay on the mainland with the lorry and Apthorpe’s gear, while Guy takes the ferry to the island.

Once on the little island, Guy makes his way to the only hotel where he’s told the commando is posted. Here he finds Ivor Claire, the famous international horserider (who won medals with his mount, Thimble). After chat with him, Trimmer enters. We know him from the first book, where he was an unpopular officer. Here again he is much disliked, but is masquerading as a Scotsman and (indicative of his slipperiness) is calling himself McTavish. Trimmer is not actually as part of the commando, his regiment were sent to Iceland but he’d sprained a wrist and stayed on here.

Trimmer tells him it’s a small world because a chap’s there who was at the Halberdiers’ guest night the night Guy sprained his knee and, by a massive and implausible coincidence, Chatty Corner is there. Up here his nickname is Kong, short for King Kong. Trimmer offers to take Guy across to his digs, which turn out to be the ‘Old Castle’ a walk away through freezing night along a sheet ice path. And indeed James Pendennis Corner is inside, nursing a heavy cold, wrapped in blankets, with his feet in a mustard bath. He explains he was an old Africa expert, that’s he got to know Apthorpe, and came back as soon as war broke out and began to give Africa training but after Dunkirk somehow the army got it into its head that he knew about mountaineering so they sent him here to teach it. He’s a big hairy man who likes climbing up things, and that’s the reason for the nickname King Kong.

With delight in his heart, Guy gets Corner/Kong to sign a document officially taking ownership of Apthorpe’s stuff. His legal and moral debt is paid. It is, in the chronology of the novels, 7 December 1940.

Back at the hotel Tommy invites Guy to dinner with the old laird, Mugg, who lives in the new castle. It is a spectacular comic passage as they make their way through to the snow and ice to the impressive pile, where the door is opened to the deafening sound of bagpipes. The laird is obsessed with dynamite, he thinks the way to transform the island’s economy is to blast away the tons of rock covering what was once a lovely sandy beach pipes at dinner (later the laird takes Guy on tour of the island and explains it was he who dynamited the old stables and caused the rockfall which has buried the beach). Over the very tough and indigestible venison, he is introduced to the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael who is an ardent Scottish nationalist and so a vehement supporter of Hitler.

Next day Tommy finds the letter sending Guy to Mugg but sadly says he isn’t to become one of them, he is assigned to Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, once he’s better. Meanwhile what Tommy really needs is an old hand who knows his way round the system. Guy describes Jumbo, and Tommy leaps at the opportunity of nabbing him for his commando, and dispatches Guy back to the mainland to fetch him.

Trimmer gets leave and goes to Glasgow. Waugh doesn’t like Trimmer. Here he is among the crowds at the station hotel:

He passed on with all the panache of a mongrel among the dustbins, tail waving, ears cocked, nose a-quiver. (p.73)

In an upmarket place, the Restaurant de Madrid, with another tremendous coincidence, Trimmer bumps into Virginia, Mrs Troy, Guy’s ex-wife. At one point in his career slippery Trimmer was the hairdresser on an ocean liner, the Aquitania, going under the name of Gustave, and used to regularly do her hair and give her a massage. They get talking and Virginia is perfectly prepared to leave behind the crowded, sordid world of the current war in memories of happier times aboard luxury cruise liners. They have dinner then go back to her hotel room.

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

There is a comic running thread, which kicked off in the first book and runs through this one, about a top secret intelligence unit based in London, led by this Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, which gathers intelligence from all over. It gained stray information about Guy and Apthorpe to open a file on him, completely misinterpreting the various events that happen to him, and interpreting them in a sinister light as if Guy is involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy.

In a way it is a distillation or exaggeration of the misinterpreting, distancing effect of gossip which I have identified as a key element in Waugh’s fiction. It is also a satire on the conspiracy theory mindset:

Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war. (p.79)

After four days of sensual bliss, Trimmer runs into the commanding officer he thought was far away in Iceland in the hotel bar. The man is incredulous and inclined to be angry, Trimmer makes up a cock and bull story about having been co-opted into the commando, manages to get away, and tells a not very surprised Virginia that he has to leave straightaway. He hastily writes a letter to Tommy actually requesting to join the commando. Jumbo and Guy see this, and advise against it.

The commando begin training in earnest for a landing on a Mediterranean island. Claire cheats in a night-time exercise to travel to a spot 12 miles distant, by commandeering a civilian bus and getting there before any other squad. This irks all the other officers involved in the exercise and, in his isolation, pushes Claire towards deeper friendship with Guy. They both feel like outsiders.

Trimmer returns and Tommy finds a place for him with a group loosely called ‘Specialists’. The head of this, Major Graves, says Trimmer can have charge of his sappers. A few days later Guy calls in on the laird and realises he’s been chatting to Trimmer. Thinks him an awful fake but he is in charge of the sappers and so has access to the laird’s obsession, explosives, so they are becoming matey. The laird takes him out to the cliffs to show him the spot where he dynamited the old cliffs onto the beach.

Guy has a surreal encounter with a tall, wild hatless man on the beach who turns out to be an expert in dietetics, Dr Glendening-Rees, a forager avant la lettre who’s been sent there by HOO HQ and is going to recommend to the troop that they abandon their usual diet and try to survive on limpets, seaweed and heather roots. It is decided that Trimmer and his little troop of sappers will be the victims of this experiment so they are dispatched into the wilds under the direction of Dr Glendening-Rees.

Improbably, surreally, a luxury yacht appears off the island, the Cleopatra. It used to belong to the famed socialite Mrs Julia Stitch (who played a pivotal role in the earlier novel, Scoop), but she is nowhere in sight. Instead it has been commandeered by a troop of top brass, consisting of Tommy Blackhouse, an admiral, General Whale, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Even Ian Kilbannock is included. He comes ashore, Guy takes him for lunch and he explains he finally escaped his dreaded Air Marshall and has got a new job as press liaison.

Navy ships arrive. For several days there is speculation. Tommy is told they are embarking on a ship-borne exercise and makes detailed plans. But this is a decoy. Once all the men from the various troops of the commando are aboard ship it is announced there will be no exercise. Instead they are sailing for real combat. They are to be collectively titled ‘Hookforce’.

Before embarking Tommy had an uncomfortable interview with Jumbo where he told him he wouldn’t be wanted. Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke had specifically said no, too old. Instead he is to report to HOO HQ in London. Ritchie-Hooke has personal command over Guy who has been given a role as Intelligence Officer.

The ships sail before trimmer and his little squad of sappers stagger back into Mugg town, haggard and unshaven after their seven-day experiment living wild in heather.

Interlude in South Africa

February 1941. Nine weeks after embarking, the three ships carrying the commando battalions have docked at Cape Town which, with its blazing lights at night and shops full of nice products is the opposite of blackout rationed Britain. It’s nine weeks since they left Mugg but four of them were spent ashore on Scapa Flow while Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke put them through training, up ‘biffing’ the surrounding hills day and night. The ships are taking the long way round Africa to the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

Guy has become even more friendly and confidential with Ivor Claire. They have a leisurely conversation in the hotel bar, then wandering round the streets, then back at the hotel, and then in the garden under the southern stars, which is actually a stylish way for Waugh to drop in the backstory of what happened in the intervening weeks.

Colonel Tommy turns up with the bad news that Ritchie-Hooke and the Brigade Major took off by plane from Brazzaville and haven’t been heard of since, presumed crashed, presumed dead.

A couple of fellow officers, Eddie and Bertie, spent the afternoon getting drunk, then trying to sober up again in order to take out a couple of young ladies, then they turn up back on the ship at the end of the evening, walking round the deck trying to sober up while, paradoxically, swigging from a bottle of powerful local liquor they’ve bought because it was named ‘Kommando’.

Book Two: In the Picture

Waugh shows how at a meeting of the top brass in Easter 1941, several further incidents involving the commandos (referred to as Special Service Forces) were reviewed, all of them unfortunate, such as the way that a) they lost their brigadier, Ritchie-Hooke b) when they arrived at the Suez Canal it was closed and c) when the canal was cleared their ships were commandeered to ferry Australian troops to Greece.

Major-General Whale, Director of Land Forces and nicknamed ‘Sprat’, defends his boys and manages to avoid getting them broken up. But he returns to his office aware they need to achieve a success of some kind, preferably one which can be promoted by the Ministry of Information in the press. He calls together his senior planners and asks them to recommend something which can achieve a quick win. Someone digs up ‘Operation Popgun’, a small assault on an unmanned island near Jersey.

Sprat approves it and tells Ian Kilbannock (who is now his chief information officer) it will be led by this MacTavish chap (who we also know as Trimmer) who’s in charge of the sappers unit (we saw how casual his appointment was back on Mugg.

Then the narrative cuts back to our hero, Guy, as he wakes in the commando’s temporary base in Sidi Bishr, then in the desert just outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Guy is still Intelligence Officer, Tommy Blackhouse is Deputy Commander with the acting rank of full colonel, and a new character is introduced, a small, bald, youngish man named Hound who is the Brigade Major. Major Hound does not like the irregular setup and behaviour of the commandos:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Reading this little sequence about official disapproval of the commandos suddenly made me realise why Waugh was drawn to make them central to his big war trilogy – because they are unconventional, because there’s more scope for mischief, anarchy and comedy.

After some business establishing the fractious relations between Guy, Hound (who disapproves of the entire commando), Major Graves (who thinks he ought to be in command of X commando) and a new member of the commando, pale-eyed, journal-keeping Corporal-Major Ludovic, Tommy sends Guy into Alexandria to check up on Ivor Claire who managed to trip over a tent rope and twist his knee and chosen to instal himself in a private nursing home.

En route he drops into a Catholic church to make confession to a French priest who seems to ask rather too many questions about Guy’s brigade. Guy thinks he’s a spy and tries to track him down to the local clergy-house but gets no joy from the Arab doorman.

When he visits Ivor in his private hospital the latter informs him that the egregious Mrs Julia Stitch is in town, a one-woman dynamo of high socialising and bravado behaviour. She once visited the Castello Crouchback on her yacht with some very posh friends. Now, nearly 10 years later, she remembers it perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly. She is a comic prodigy.

Kissing Claire goodbye, she dragoons Guy into her car and for a mad drive across Alexandria, stopping at random moments and blocking all the traffic in order to point out to Guy ancient sites mentioned in the rare copy of E.M. Foster’s guide to Alexandria which she is reading. (Readers of Scoop will remember that, in that book, she drives a kind of baby motor car which she manages to drive into a downstairs men’s public lavatory.) Here she upsets all the local drivers and, in quest of a shoe shop she’s been told about, drives down an alleyway which becomes too narrow her car becomes wedged fast in it.

She obtains the shoes, or rather carpet slippers, she wants then forces Guy to hurry to catch a taxi back to the villa she and her husband have been assigned a little outside of town. It is a typical Stitch luncheon party, featuring a the Commander-in-Chief, a young Maharaja in the uniform of the Red Cross, a roving English cabinet minister, and an urbane pasha, and two little local millionairesses, sisters, who hang on Mrs Julia Stitch’s every word, comically misinterpreting them. They think Guy must be her lover, only reason such a lowly undistinguished officer could be there.

This leads to the comic incident whereby, when lunch is over, the Commander-in-Chief (presumably of the entire army in North Africa) offers Guy a lift back to his base and even directs his driver to go right into the base and drop him at his barracks – to the initial disbelief of captious Major Hound.

It is Holy Saturday, 12 April 1941. We know this because there is a brief description of Guy’s father, venerable old Mr Crouchback, breaking his lenten fast with lunch, a pint of burgundy and a luxurious pipe.

Kerstie Kilbannock

The scene suddenly cuts back to London, to describe the life of Kerstie Kilbannock, dutiful wife of Ian Kilbannock who we’ve met as information officer to Special Service Forces. Kerstie has taken two friends named Brenda and Zita into her house in (very smart) Eaton Terrace as paying guests, and to work alongside her, unpaid, in the canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District. When she meets Virginia Troy at the Dorchester Hotel during an air raid, visibly hard up, she invites her to come and join the female menage.

Kerstie tells Virginia about a regular customer, a quite frightfully awful man they’ve nicknamed ‘Scottie’ and the reader is not altogether surprised when, a week or so later, this ‘Scottie’ saunters into the busy canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District and turns out to be none other than Trimmer. He is momentarily taken aback, but nothing daunts Virginia and she says hello. She is obviously going to keep silent about their four days of passion in a Glasgow hotel in November, but that’s no reason not to be civil.

Trimmer is back in the frame because he is called in by General Whale and told he is to carry out a little operation, which will involve a journey by submarine. He is to take his squad and report to Portsmouth. Ian Kilbannock will be, as we’ve seen, accompanying him. Trimmer is taken as the epitome of a bad officer since he has mislaid his ‘section’, never calls them together, never inspects them, is only really semi-attached to the army at all.

In yet another coincidence, Kilbannock says he’ll need to prepare a bit of a profile for the press about Trimmer and asks him to pop into his place for a drink before going onto Portsmouth and, of course, when Trimmer thus pops in, it is to discover Kerstie and Virginia. There is a passage of social comedy, not least the way Ian Kilbannock realises from Trimmer, Kerstie and Virginia’s conversation that something is going on but can’t work out what.

Back in Egypt the small incident of the priest Guy thought was asking too many questions comes back to haunt him. Tommy calls him in to say the priest has definitely been identified as a spy and he has been reported talking to him. Guy says yes, he thought he was a spy, and he reported it to Major Hound. Major Hound who had, until that moment been quietly gloating in a corner of the room is now put on the spot and has to admit to Tommy that, yes, Guy did mention something about it. Tommy tells Hound to write a formal letter to HQ exonerating Guy. Eventually a copy of this letter finds its way to Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole who adds it to his ever-expanding file on Guy Crouchback.

Operation Popgun

Trimmer and his little squad of eight men is kept hanging around at Portsmouth for weeks. Finally they are sent aboard a submarine, along with Ian Kilbannock and a lot of explosives. His description of a journey by submarine is interesting. Basically, boring with no sense of movement. After quite a few hours they surface at night but can’t find the island which is the objective. It is very foggy. An atmosphere of farcical amateurishness. Ian has had quite a few whiskeys to fortify himself i.e. is tipsy during this military operation.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’

They are fired on from her window by an old lady with a shotgun who swears at them in French. Turns out they are not on a little Channel island at all but have landed on mainland France. They run and tumble down a slope into a railway cutting. A slow train passes as they hide. It takes them 25 minutes to make it back to the beach. Trimmer is revealed as a catastrophically bad officer, with no idea what to do, lets the soldiers smoke once they’re ashore, runs away at the first shot etc. What Jumbo Trotter would call a ‘wrong ‘un’.

In his absence his sergeant led the men a little way inland and blew up the railway line then calmly returned to the beach where Trimmer was waiting impatiently, and embarked in the dinghies back to the submarine. The submarine signals ahead that the mission was a great success, and on arriving in Portsmouth McTavish / Trimmer and his men are hailed as heroes by Major Albright, GSO II (Planning), HOO HQ, and the General tells Ian to a) write it up and b) write citations for medals for the sergeant and Trimmer. Farce. Absurdity.

This is then wonderfully embellished by Kilbannock in the press release he gives to the papers (shades of Scoop and its satire on the fabulous lies routinely told by newspapers, shades crystallised when one of the characters mentions the Daily Beast and its proprietor Lord Copper). Then, in a sweet piece of plotting, is read by none other than Mr Crouchback in distant Matchet, who tells his friend Mrs Tickeridge what a fine fellow this Captain McTavish must be. Then it is relayed to the commando in Egypt where the colonel who suggested McTavish be included swanks himself on his ability to spot men and ridicules Guy’s scepticism about Trimmer’s abilities.

In fact the Trimmer affair becomes a stick to beat all Waugh’s enemies with. Head of the commando emphasises that news of the operation must be passed to the Spanish veterans who’ve been assigned to the unit. And the Labour members in the House of Commons get wind of the fact that Trimmer was rejected from the Halberdiers because of his working class background as a hairdresser i.e. snobbery and the old school tie.

He becomes so popular that a very senior meeting is convened to find him an appropriate post and General Whale is appalled to find himself being ordered to give him a senior command, maybe of an entire commando battalion. Ian Kilbannock helps his boss out with a wizard wheeze: Trimmer has a certain confident breezy style: how about sending him to America to promote Anglo-American friendship.

In Waugh’s hands the war is a kind of Engine of Absurdity; it takes ordinary peacetime absurdity and cranks it up to completely new levels.

The fall of Crete

Out in the real world Greece quickly falls to a well planned and executed German invasion 6 to 30 April 1941. 7,000 British and Australian troops are captured. There’s a panic-stricken evacuation of the rest. Guy’s commando is put in charge of defending Alexandria as the war in North Africa turns in the Germans’ favour.

Quite suddenly X commando are told they are to be embarked and sail to the relief of Crete which the Germans, following the total capture of Greece, are now attacking. The complicated business of embarking the entire commando and setting sail, but next morning Guy wakes to find they’re sailing back to Egypt, the ship’s engines have become faulty. Tommy and Guy go for a splendid meal.

Next morning, rather hungover, they embark on a new ship and steam in a heavy swell to the waters round Crete. Here Colonel Tommy slips off a ladder and breaks his leg. Guy finds a haggard senior officer, a Lieutenant-Commander from Crete, in conversation with the captain, saying it’s all a shambles. A motor launch comes alongside their ship, they think it’s for them to embark in but in fact it’s full of walking wounded who painfully come aboard, overfilling the ship. Its skipper says he has another run to make then has orders to scuttle the launch. He tells Guy it’s all over: Crete has fallen.

Nonetheless X commando’s orders are to embark so they climb down and in and are ferried to the wrecked quay which is packed with wounded men clamouring to get on the boat and away. Hound and Guy shout for any representatives of B commando and a battered weary man replies who tells them its commanding officer Prentice is dead, killed during an attack on an airfield. It is 26 May 1941.

The disintegration of Major Hound

In Tommy Blackhouse’s absence Major Hound is in charge of X commando and the core of this long complex account of the collapse and evacuation of Crete is a painful description of the mental and moral collapse of Major Hound. Very early on he tries to cultivate a friendship with Guy by asking if he can address him by his first name (fine) and telling guy his own nickname is Fido. From that first misplaced confidence, it is steadily downhill (p.175).

Under the stress of the chaos and confusion, and huge columns of men marching to the sea, and the constant attacks of Stuka dive bombers, the lack of sleep and, very quickly, the hunger and the thirst, all Major Hound’s book training goes out of the window, he makes foolish decisions, he makes wild decisions, stabbing randomly at a map to indicate where they’ll set up their HQ, then hunger drives him to muck in with the ordinary soldiers and lose all authority.

And then he abandons his post, abandons his men, and begins a wild hallucinatory march to the sea and escape. At one point he slips off a path and falls through the branches of a tree into a deep gully, and I expected him to die. He is thoroughly looted by a huge Cretan peasant and then, to my surprise, is discovered by Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Ludovic has already impressed everyone he meets as an odd fish, a sense confirmed by the philosophical journal he keeps and which Waugh quotes for the reader. When Major Hound insists on driving his men in a lorry up to a location he has almost arbitrarily chosen will be the commando’s HQ, Ludovic begins to display his skills at scrounging and at talking to the common soldiers in their own ‘plebeian’ tongue, or to Australian or New Zealand troops, as easily as talking posh to the officers.

Anyway, Ludovic discovers Major Hound lying bruised in this valley and helps him back to what turns out to be a very cosy cave Ludovic and half the rest of the Major’s troop have assembled up the hill. Seeing which way the land lay, they set about looting and scrounging within a day of arriving and have built up an impressive supply of food. His ulterior motivation emerges when Ludovic frankly tells him that they’ve tried to get aboard one of the launches evacuating men, but there are thousands waiting on the quays and the guards are only letting through troops of men accompanied by an officer. Aha.

Guy among the Halberdiers on Crete

Meanwhile Guy very much does not go to pieces. After Major Hound disappears, Guy makes his own way back towards the sea in the three-ton lorry they’d set out in, having a series of chaotic encounters, for example picking up a venerable old Greek general and giving him and his ADC a lift, running into a German motor cyclist, both sides eyeballing each for a moment before turning round and retreating. He stumbles into an abandoned Greek village and finds two brown-eyed girls guarding the body of a dead soldier. Guy notices he is a Catholic and say a prayer over his body. In some ways he likes travelling alone and travelling light.

But eventually he finds himself at the headquarters of his old regiment, the Halberdiers. Just to be clear, Guy was a proud member of the Halberdiers until he blotted his copybook at the end of Men at Arms, and was then seconded to the commandos, X commando in particular, the one led by Tommy Blackhouse up in the Isle of Mugg. The overall title given the commandos is ‘Hookforce’, even after it becomes known that Ritchie-Hooke has gone missing presumed dead in Africa.

So Guy is delighted to be suddenly among friends again when he discovers the Halberdiers HQ at a place called Babali Hani, men like Colonel Tickeridge and number of the men, including some from his own D company. But when he asks to take part in a forward movement against the enemy he is turned down. He is not part of the regiment any more and the middle of a battle is no place to start swapping units. And he feels the familiar Guy Crouchback of being an outsider, an alien, with no family, that has dogged him all his life:

A few hours earlier he had exulted in his loneliness. Now the case was altered. He was a ‘guest from the higher formation’, a ‘Hookforce body’, without place or function, a spectator. And all the deep sense of desolation which he had sought to cure, which from time to time momentarily seemed to be cured, overwhelmed him as of old. His heart sank. It seemed to him as though literally an organ of his body were displaced, subsiding, falling heavily like a feather in a vacuum jar; Philoctetes set apart from his fellows by an old festering wound; Philoctetes without his bow. (p.210)

At least Tickeridge allows him to accompany him in a visit to the front line, Halberdier units spread across a shallow valley, coming under mortar fire from the Germans opposite. Guy observes the Halberdiers withdraw their line a little. The plan is for the Halberdiers to withdraw through Hookforce who will provide a last line of defence. Guy returns to his own troop to begin to organise them. The absence of Major Hound is not mentioned as he briefs reliable Sergeant Smiley.

Trimmer the PR phenomenon

Cut to London. Ian Kilbannock is touting Trimmer the war hero round the press, and has a date to meet three hard-bitten American journalists at the Savoy. Trimmer has become infatuated with Virginia who says he disgusts her. This is the opportunity for some pretty crude satire of American journalists, who Waugh has named Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan and who Ian is trying to persuade that Trimmer is the heroic face of a new classless Britain. The ramshackle journalists get drunk and sentimental, a crude caricature of belligerent, ignorant Yanks.

But Trimmer is genuinely haunted by his four days of love with Virginia in Glasgow. He can’t concentrate and Ian is worried because Trimmer is about the only good news propaganda coup he and his department have had all year. All this he explains to Virginia when he gets back to his HOO HQ office in Marchmain House for he has got her a job working as his secretary. She did it precisely to get away from the bloody canteen and avoid Trimmer, but now Ian tells her she has to do her patriotic duty and see him, cheer him up, gee him up to perform better in his visits to munitions factories and so on. the war effort depends on it!

Guy at Sphakia

It is 31 May 1941. Guy has kept in touch with moving HQ and followed orders to march his men down to this hill overlooking the sea. Their task is to hold up the enemy while the last stragglers leave the beach and then surrender.

He has a last chat with Ivor Claire, both speculating what it will be like in a prisoner of war camp, then he falls exhausted, like everyone else, shattered.

Dawn finds Guy in the wrecked harbour with thousands of other abandoned and exhausted soldiers, foraging for food and water, smashing their weapons and any other smashable equipment so the Germans don’t get it, the enormous litter of war.

After gazing at the twinkling Med for a while he decides on a whim to go for a swim, luxuriating in the clear water of a cove round the corner from the filthy harbour, floating on his back looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Beautiful evocative description. Eventually he swims over to a spur of rock sheltering the cove and is just pulling himself out onto a rocky shelf when to his amazement a hand is stretched out to help him and it is…Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Up and out he gets and they talk. The subject of Major Hound is raised and discussed in a sentence, the reader getting the strong impression Ludovic used him to get to the beach and then… dumped him…or murdered him? Guy asks him what the devil he’s doing here and Ludovic, in that unnerving way of his, replies that he was contemplating suicide, diving into the sea and swimming south till he drowns. He asks Tony whether that would count as suicide, theologically speaking.

Tony doesn’t know and moves the conversation onto swapping survival stories, then Guy fills him in on the final orders i.e. surrender to the Germans. They both sit surveying the scene of hundreds of men engaged in various pointless activities, including some soldiers fixing a local fishing boat. After a while he notices they’ve manhandled it down the beach and into the sea and are fiddling with the engine. It kicks into life with a puff of black smoke. The little sapper who’s been leading the team and shouts at the beach that they’re taking the boat to freedom, anyone want to come?

Guy consults his men who all prefer to take their chances on dry land then wades out and hauls himself over the side of the boat. Only then does he realise Ludovic has followed him having heard something, but both men are drowned out by the enormous racket of the diesel outboard motor. They start to chug away from the beach and then Guy sees what suddenly motivated Ludovic. Out of the sky appears a wing of Stukas which proceed to systematically dive bomb the beach and harbour, massacring the men waiting there, mangled bits of body thrown into the air. One Stuka makes a strafe over the little boat but then returns to the richer picking onshore. And so, having narrowly escaped annihilation, the little local fishing boat puts out of the picture, one of the last survivors of the ghastly fiasco and failure which was the defence of Crete.

Hospital in Alexandria

Part two chapter seven opens with an absolutely brilliant description of Guy coming round in the hospital in Egypt, of the world of silence and great distance which he inhabits as he recovers from shock and exposure.

Confused memories drift through his mind – he refuses to talk. Then one day Mrs Stitch breezes into his room, repeating the famous quote from the incident on the Italian island and without thinking Guy replies. It is one of the most wonderful moments in a wonderful book – now he can talk again he pops down the hall to see Tommy Blackhouse who’s still laid up with his broken leg. Tony tells him he was carried ashore by Ludovic when their ship finally reached shore in Egypt. Of the four or five other chaps on the boat there was no sign. In the third book in the trilogy it is darkly hinted that Ludovic did away with them, though we never find out for sure.

The Ivor Claire affair

Tommy and Guy discuss the case of Ivor. There is a great scandal because Ivor’s troop were unambiguously ordered to wait till the last minute and then surrender to the Germans. Mrs Stitch tells Guy that Ivor made his way to the beach for last orders and there found a launch leaving whose captain ordered him to get aboard and be saved, claiming another launch was on its way to collect his men. Of course the second launch never arrived and so Ivor stands accused of disobeying a direct order and abandoning his men.

Guy is appalled and disillusioned. He considered Ivor a flower of English gentlemanliness, but turns out to be a sneak and cad. To be honest, I spent the last pages confused because I couldn’t see the difference between Guy who left his men on the beach (to be bombed to death) and made it back to Alex, and Ivor who left his men in the hills and made it back to Alex. What would Ivor letting himself be captured have done for the war effort? This is the common sense view taken by Mrs Stitch who appears to have been involved in spiriting Ivor away to distant India on some secondment, where he can sit out the war among people who know nothing of the story and don’t care.

Staying with Mrs Stitch

Mrs Stitch insists Guy comes and stays with her at the swish villa assigned to her or, more accurately, her very well connected husband Algernon (Algie). It is a comic conceit that Julia has inherited from her strict Victorian grandparents a belief that bachelors should not be pampered and so awards him a squalid concrete bunker of a room, down at basement level, liberally populated by cockroaches.

But he gets to lie on their chaise longue, be waited on hand and foot and to attend some truly swanky parties. One day Julia returns from town with the staggering news that Germany has invaded Russia, 22 June 1941 (p.239).

Mrs Stitch asks Guy if there’s anyone he’s like to see and he says old Major Tickeredge – so he comes to lunch and is awed by the VIPs around him, but after lunch stuns Guy by saying Ben Ritchie-Hook is alive after all!

With the wiping out of X commando Guy is looking forward to being returned to the Halberdiers so is very upset to receive a letter delivered by motorcycle courier ordering him to join a ship the following morning which is to take him back to Blighty. He drives into town to see the officer who signed the order, who tells him it comes from the very top. He begs Mrs Stitch to fix it but she can’t. Very upset. There is a whiff of implication that Mrs Stitch in fact arranged it in order to get Guy completely out of circulation while she spirited her favourite, Ivor Claire, off to safe obscurity out in India.

Epilogue

It takes eight long weeks sailing in a rusty old hulk, Canary Castle, right round Africa with a long stopover in Durban to be refitted. But eventually Guy arrives back in England, back in London and back in his club, Bellamy’s.

This brief epilogue opens with no narratorial introduction, just dialogue. We have got to know the so well we can identify the speakers. It recalls the liberal use of the same technique in Vile Bodies, the early 1930s novel this shares a surprising amount with.

And of course there is a simpler pattern going on here, which is that Bellamy’s is where the novel opens and where it closes. Symmetry.

Thus the epilogue opens with Guy being accosted by the usual suspects, not least the humorous press man Ian Kilbannock and his earnest MP brother-in-law, Box-Bender. The former wants to know more about the Ivor Claire affair, then informs him Virginia is doing her patriotic duty and accompanying Trimmer on a tour of munitions factories in Scunthorpe, Hull, Huddersfield, Halifax…

Box-Bender informs Guy that his nephew Tony has written from his German prisoner of war camp asking for works of religious devotion, which troubles him. Why should it? asks Guy.

All the conversation is about help for Russia, Tanks for Russia Week, his allying with Russia has, at least, motivated the working classes to work harder in those factories. And bloody good thing, too!

Guy never wanted to come back, he wanted to join the Halberdiers in the Middle East but when he reports at Halberdiers barracks the C-in-C tells him it was the doctors at Alexandria’s hospital who reported that Guy needed a complete change of scene. (Or is that all part of Mrs Stitch’s ruse?)

And so the novel ends with Guy back where he began, practising drill on the barracks parade ground, waiting to find his place in the big world around him. Except that things are now no longer so clear and (childishly) simple as they were two years earlier. The performance of British services have been lamentable, the man he considered ‘the flower of English chivalry’ Ivor Claire, turns out to let the side down; but overarching everything, the alliance with barbaric Bolshevik Russia hugely compromises the claim of the war to be any kind of moral crusade. And so the novel ends with Guy back at square one, looking for a role and repossessed by his characteristic gloom and pessimism:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.

Themes and images

Public school

As pointed out so many times, when Waugh (or his characters) reach for a comparison, almost always the first ones that come to mind are taken from their experiences at prep school or private school. Thus, for Guy, in the middle of an air raid:

Guy was momentarily reminded of Holy Saturday at Downside; early gusty March mornings of boyhood; the doors wide open in the unfinished butt of the Abbey; half the school coughing; fluttering linen; the glowing brazier and the priest with his hyssop, paradoxically blessing fire with water.

Snobbery

Waugh’s belief in a class system can be deduced from comments he makes about being an officer in the army:

In all his military service Guy never ceased to marvel at the effortless transitions of intercourse between equality and superiority. It was a figure which no temporary officer ever learned to cut. Some of them were better than the regulars with their men. None ever achieved the art of displaying authority over junior officers without self-consciousness and consequent offence. Regular soldiers were survivals of a happy civilization where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.

‘Where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.’ That is his ideal world, a medieval world of precise rankings, accompanied, ideally, by sumptuary laws.

The working classes rarely appear in his narratives except as servants, waiters, valets, drivers, cooks and so on. They rarely if ever speak, they are nameless serfs at the beck and call of the only people who have agency, Waugh and his class.

If they do speak it is either to reveal they are solid chaps – like some of the brave soldiers Guy meets in Crete whose dialogue is entirely restricted to either ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ – or it is to reveal their coarse, petty money-mindedness, as is the case with the scheming Cuthberts who try and evict nice old Mr Crouchback from their hotel, and are indicted either by their dropped h’s and plebeian idioms or, more subtly, by their complete failure to understand the superior moral standards of their lords and masters:

‘He’s a deep one and no mistake. I never have understood him, not properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine.’

Amateurism

I appreciate from everything I’ve ever read about them that lots of plans and arrangements in times of war are shambolic, but Waugh goes out of his way to emphasise the shambolic nature of pretty much everything his hero encounters, from office politics and rivalries, the loss and misplacement of paperwork, errors over train or shipping times and so on.

These litanies of relatively minor incompetence are then reflected in actual military operations – on a small scale by Operation Popgun, on a massive scale in the fiasco of Crete (which itself followed the fiasco of Norway [described in Put Out More Flags] and the fiasco of Dakar [described in Men at Arms]).

The breezy incompetence displayed by almost every aspect of the military is connected to the cult of upper-class nonchalance, of displaying your upper class credentials by refusing to be seen to be trying too hard, and refusing be fazed or perturbed by anything.

This is exemplified by the elephantine imperturbability of old Jumbo Trotter or, in a different way, by the administrative officer of HOO HQ who gets used to hearing the most preposterous stories. ‘My entire platoon has just been ambushed and massacred.’ ‘Oh, I say, bad show, old boy.’

Drunkenness

At luncheon Mr Crouchback drank a pint of burgundy.

Everyone gets drunk. ‘Have a drink?’ remains the watchword among these people, as it had been in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. ‘Tight’ is the word they use for ‘drunk’. The narrative describes what this or that individual is like ‘when they’re tight’ because it is just taken for granted that everyone will gets tight at some point or another, sometimes every night.

These posh characters’ haunt is their London club, where they drink prodigious amounts of booze, indeed the novel opens with the image of fine wine and brandy flowing in the gutters of Blitzed London. Evening drinks and evening dinner are always accompanied by plentiful booze. On Mugg they get drunk and in Cape Town they get drunk and in Alexandria they get drunk.

They ate lobster pilaff and a great dish of quail cooked with Muscat grapes…They ate six birds each and drank a bottle of champagne. Then they had green artichokes and another bottle. (p.163)

The character who dominates the first book, Apthorpe, literally drinks himself to death (and is thus a spiritual cousin of pretty boy Sebastian Flyte who drinks himself into impoverished middle age in Brideshead Revited).

And Waugh venerates this drunkenness, finds it admirable, stylish, amusing. I was really struck by the ending of the short South Africa interlude, where we have witnessed Eddie and Bertie getting drunk all day long before going off to a club to drink some more, while Guy admires Ivor Claire do a kind of sub-Noel Coward impersonation of nonchalance and airy superiority. Guy delivers quite a pompous reflection on these three fellow officers:

Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to write. Hitler had accurately counted on the decadence of the class which ran the British Empire, which had appeased him throughout the mid-1930s and which, for a year or so after the declaration of war, continued to seek some kind of accommodation with him, led in the cabinet by Lord Halifax. Hitler, of course, had many sympathisers among the British upper classes, even among Waugh’s own friends, even the abdicated king.

The thought that two drunks and a camp horserider represented the spirit which defeated Hitler is absurd. The brute fact of the English Channel and the heroic efforts of the RAF during the Battle of Britain stymied Hitler’s ambitions but didn’t defeat him, just led to a stalemate. Where Hitler did badly miscalculate was in thinking Soviet Russia would collapse like a pack of cards in the autumn of 1941 and then thinking he could take on Russia and America after Pearl Harbour (December 1941). Set against the enormity of these vast mistakes, the antics of Guy and his drunken shambolic friends seem risible, almost shameful.

‘What say we all have a drink?’ said Bum. (p.215)

(Then again, I suppose you could argue this pompous passage reflects badly on Guy not his author; that it has an artistic purpose which is to set Guy’s childish patriotism up for the fall it receives when Ivor Claire betrays his high calling and lets the side down. Maybe it’s there to set up this further step in Guy’s slow disillusionment with the war and the values it’s supposedly being fought for.)

Childishness

Arguably the amateurishness and the drunkenness are related to the prep school obsession in that they are all childish. These people live in a state of permanently retarded development. The most praised characters, Mr Crouchback and Jumbo Trotter are, in effect, schoolboys protected by their prep schoolboy innocence. The comedy of a character like Mrs Stitch is that she’s a childish cartoon. Ditto the comic figure who dominates the first book, Apthorpe. Occasionally he writes phrases which bring the implicit childishness of the entire worldview into the open:

Guy set his intelligence section to make a map of the camp, for Major Hound had returned from one of his trips to Cairo with a case labelled ‘intelligence stores’ which proved to contain a kindergarten outfit of coloured inks and drawing materials.

Mental illness

The exception which proves the rule to the dominating sense of childishness is Waugh’s odd fictional relationship with mental illness and states of extremity. They tend to come at the end of the books as a climax to the narrative, hence the description of Tony Last’s delirium then despair at the end of A Handful of Dust.

And so the final passages of this brilliant novel include a) a prolonged passage describing the moral and mental collapse of Major Hound and b) the wonderful, luminous description of Guy’s detached mental state and mutism in the hospital in Alexandria, as he recovers from the terrible effects of prolonged exposure at sea, but for a long time is incapable of responding to anyone, even friends, doctors, nurses.

But there is a wide array of odd mental states throughout the book: for example, the laird of Mugg with his potty obsession with explosives; the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael with her outrageous support of the Nazis; remember that Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, went mad and starved himself to death. Guy himself suffers from recurrent feelings of emptiness and depression. Waugh’s books are weirder and deeper than you first realise.

Credit

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1955. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Bartholomew Fair is a very long comic play set in London’s huge and sprawling Bartholomew Fair. The fair had been held every year on 24 August since the 12th century in the precincts of the Priory at West Smithfield, outside the Aldersgate, and by Jonson’s day had grown into a massive, teeming festival of entertainment, sideshows and crime.

Reflecting the size and complexity of its subject matter, Bartholomew Fair is a very decentralised play. There is no hero or central authority figure, although a couple of the more monstrous caricatures come to dominate the narrative. Instead there are some 33 speaking parts which sprawl across an unusually long text.

The characters can be divided into two categories: the regular fair stallholders who remain their colourful selves throughout the play, such as fat Ursla, keeper of the roast pig stall, and Edgworth the cutpurse; and the visitors to the fair, a more disparate crew who can be sub-divided into three groups:

A citizen family made up of John Littlewit – immensely proud of his own cleverness and of his beautiful wife Win-the-fight, her mother Dame Purecraft, and Purecraft’s spiritual father, the vehement Puritan, Zeal-of-the-land Busy. Win is pregnant, so one motive for the family going to the fair is to buy some of the roast pig it was famous for and she is yearning for; but another is so Littlewit can see the puppet show he has written.
Another family party led by Bartholomew Cokes, a legendarily simple-minded idiot, his tiny angry tutor Humphrey Wasp (who Cokes winds up by referring to throughout as ‘Numps’), his fiancee Grace Wellborn (who is reluctant to marry Cokes) and Cokes’s married sister, Mistress Overdo.
A pair of witty gallants – Winwife who is a suitor for the hand of Dame Purecraft, and Quarlous (who at one point accuses his friend of ‘widow-hunting’). These two only go to the fair once they’ve learned the Cokes family are going, because they reckon the latter will behave so stupidly as to be good entertainment.

Omitted from this list is Justice Overdo. One of the main themes of this complex play is the legal situation of wards of court. Through the Court of Wards, Justice Overdo has ‘bought’ Grace Wellborn, i.e. become her guardian, expressly in order to marry her – and her fortune – off to his idiot brother-in-law Cokes. One of the complex ironies of the play is that Justice Overdo ploughs through the fair seeking out relatively minor misdemeanours while all the time blind to the gross moral (albeit legal) crime which he was committing (the issues is explained in detail on page 98 of the New Mermaid edition).

Similarly short-sighted and troublesome is the butt of the other Big Theme of the play, which is Puritanism. For over forty years, ever since the earliest plays began to appear on Elizabethan stages in the 1570s, Puritan preachers and writers had been violently denouncing plays and, by implication, most forms of imaginative writing. They accused them of dramatising and thus glamorising all manner of crimes, including murder and adultery, stirring up bawdry at every point, and also as providing a cockpit for gallants and fine ladies and city merchants and prostitutes and petty criminals to meet and indulge their basest passions.

When the play was presented to James I in 1614 Jonson wrote a short verse prologue specifically addressing the king and the trouble he had with non-conformists and Puritans – ‘the zealous noise of your land’s faction’ and their ‘petulant ways’ – is mentioned as early as line 3 and makes up most of the content:

Your Majesty is welcome to a Fair;
Such place, such men, such language, and such ware
You must expect: with these, the zealous noise
Of your land’s faction, scandalised at toys,
As babies, hobby-horses, puppet-plays,
And such-like rage, whereof the petulant ways
Yourself have known, and have been vext with long.

So an overbearing city official (Overdo) and an overbearing humbug (Busy) are the two main, serious, satirical butts of the play – but there are plenty of other victims, large and small.

Cast

Visitors to the fair

John Littlewit, a Proctor
Solomon, Littlewit’s man
Zeal-of-the-land Busy, suitor to Dame Purecraft, a Banbury Man
Winwife, his rival for Dame Purecraft, a Gentleman
Tom Quarlous, companion to Winwife, a gamester
Bartholomew Cokes, an Esquire of Harrow
Humphrey Wasp, his tutor
Adam Overdo, a Justice of Peace

Win-the-fight Littlewit
Dame Purecraft, her mother, and a widow
Mistress Overdo
Grace Wellborn, Ward to Justice Overdo

Fair people

Ezechiel Edgworth, a cutpurse
Nightingale, a Ballad-singer, who Edgworth slips the purses after he’s cut them
Mooncalf, dim and slow tapster to Ursula
Dan Jordan Knockem, a horse-courser, and a ranger of Turnbull – who talks continually about ‘vapours’
Lanthorn Leatherhead, a hobby-horse seller (toyman)
Valentine Cutting, a roarer or bully
Captain Whit, a bawd with a thick Irish accent
Trouble-all, a madman
Bristle, Haggis } Watchmen
Pocher, a Beadle
Filcher, Sharkwell } door-keepers to the puppet-show
Northern, a Clothier (a Northern Man)
Puppy, a wrestler (a Western Man)

Joan Trash, a gingerbread-woman, always bickering with Leatherhead the toy-man
Ursula, an immensely fat pig-woman
Ramping Alice, a prostitute

Costard-monger, Mousetrap-man, Corn-cutter, Watch, Porters, Puppets, Passengers, Mob, Boys, Etc.

The plot

Before it even starts, there is an unusual prologue in that the first person on-stage is a young stage-sweeper who gives a lengthy moan about how the play they’re about to see is nothing like Bartholomew Fair, he (the sweeper) knows it much better and gave the playwright many useful suggestions which he mocked and ignored.

The stage sweeper is then shooed offstage by two new arrivals, a book holder and scrivener, the former announcing he has come to make a deal with the audience. He gets the scrivener to read out a mock legal contract between author of the new play and the audience, which goes into some detail about how they are only allowed to criticise the play according to the entrance fee they’ve paid, and if one man has treated others audience members he can criticise to the extent of his payment but the others must be silent, and other humorous joshing about audiences and their criticisms. He says the play isn’t going to hearken back to former glories, nor is it going to feature servant-monsters from a Tale or Tempest (usually taken as a reference to Shakespeare’s recent plays The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest). He also goes out of his way to tell the audience to beware of spies and ‘politic pick-locks’ who would interpret this or that character as a libel on the famous and powerful. Such people must be exposed and mocked. All is for entertainment.

Act 1

The entire first act is set in Littlewit’s house, as we meet the man himself, in a good mood and fussing over his wife Win, lovely Win, la Win what a lovely day etc. Then one by one other characters are introduced: Winwife who, it is explained, is a suitor for Win’s mother, Dame Purecraft. Quarlous, who also fancies the Dame. To both Littlewit explains 2 things, 1. that Dame Purecraft has taken to visiting Bedlam to see the mad people, so anyone wooing her would do well to act a bit crazy and 2. just a few days ago her superior in the Puritan religion, Zeal-of-the-land Busy has come from Banbury to stay with them.

The act ends with Littlewit persuading his wife, Win, that she wants to go to the fair to eat pork at the famous pig shop – Littlewit also telling his wife that he has written a play for the puppets that he is itching to see performed.

Key characters

It is a vast play, 180 pages of solid prose whereas others in the New Mermaid hover around 100 to 120 pages, half of that in verse. In other words, it’s just packed with words and verbiage. Some of the characters are given whole pages of dense prose without paragraph breaks to explain their character and purposes.

Quarlous and Winwife play the role of The Observers, a pair of smart alec gentry who are cleverer than all around them. Having observed Littlewit and his compliant wife in the latter’s house – and then the arrival of Coke, the gangling, 19-year-old idiot heir – they declare to each other that following these dimwits to the fair will amount to excellent sport. And so they saunter through the rest of the play, sardonically observing the follies of the rest of the cast, pretending to sympathise while egging them on.

Thus they spend several pages outdoing each other with insults and abuse of Ursla, the pig woman, telling her how fat she is, while she replies with rich Bartholomew insults, until she is so infuriated she goes into her stall and emerges with a red hot scalding-pan, and gets into a fight with the two cocky young men, which she loses and in falling over manages to badly burn her leg so that half a dozen of the fair people have to carry her into her stall (II, v).

Master Overdo dresses up as a madman in order to infiltrate the world of the lowlife stallholders and is amusingly over-shocked by even the slightest scams and adulterations of food or drink or tobacco which he overhears, and has the stage to himself at quite a few early points to make mock heroic speeches about his bravery in going undercover and what he has to put up with in the performance of his duty – pomposity which is clearly intended to be mocked. Specially after he gets into dispute with Edgworth the cutpurse and ends up getting beaten up.

‘It is a comfort to a good conscience to be followed with a good fame in his sufferings. The world will have a pretty taste by this, how I can bear adversity; and it will beget a kind of reverence towards me hereafter, even from mine enemies, when they shall see, I carry my calamity nobly, and that it doth neither break me, nor bend me.’

Zeal of the Land Busy is a conspicuous hypocrite, depicted as endlessly stuffing his face (‘he eats with his eyes as well as his teeth’) while making long speeches about the sins of the flesh. He rails so loudly against Leatherhead’s toy stall and upsets Joan Trash’s basket of gingerbread men all over the floor, so that Leatherhead calls officers who, seeing all this, arrest Busy and take him off to the stocks.

Act 4

In a separate storyline Overdo (in his disguise) is placed in the stocks and learns that a man who he convicted the year before lost his place at the fair and his mind, and Overdo is chastened, and listening to other stories it dawns on him that compassion is suitable for a judge (IV, i).

After this chastening experience they take him out the stocks just as new officers rock up with Zeal-of-the-land who they had intended to put in the stocks but now the ravings of the madman Trouble-All has persuaded to take Busy in front of Justice Overdo instead.

Coke wanders round the fair being an imbecile. He has two purses. When the one containing only a little silver is pick-pocketed he makes a great show of waving around the other one and telling everyone it is full of gold, interspersed with joining in a long ballad about cutpurses sung by Nightingale, in the middle of which Edgworth does indeed pick Coke’s pocket, cutting the strings which attach his purse to his hose, and slipping it to Nightingale when no-one is looking (III, 5).

Except that Quarlous and Winwife are watching and see everything. They approach Nightingale and Edgworth, tell them they saw everything but won’t tell the officers, so long as the two crooks carry out some scams on simple-minded Cokes. Thus in a later scene they arrange for a pear-seller to stumble and drop his pears at Cokes’s feet. So naive is Cokes that he hands his hat, cloak and sword to a kind bystander as he stoops down to collect all the pears – and the bystander – Edgworth – promptly runs off with Cokes’s stuff – who stands up again, looks around, then starts shouting ‘Thief thief!’

Quarlous and Winwife – Quarlous is really the ringleader – commission Edgworth and Nightingale to steal from Wasp the black box containing the warrant for Coke’s marriage to the (very reluctant) Grace Wellborn III, v).

Meanwhile, in their flaneuring round the fair stirring up trouble, Quarlous and Winwife have been accompanied a lot of the time by Grace Wellborn, the poor young woman engaged to Cokes. In Act 4 she explains the situation. Her parents died leaving her a ward of court. Justice Overdo ‘bought’ her from the court and has now engaged her to his idiot brother-in-law, Cokes. Grace has now choice. If she refuses the marriage she will have to herself pay Overdo the value of the estate which he bought to buy her.

This outrageous story lights a spark of love in both men’s hearts and before we know what’s happening, Act 4 scene iii opens with the two men in a swordfight over Grace’s favours She begs them to desist. They say she must choose one of them. She says that’s ridiculous, she only met them a few hours ago. Instead she suggests they write in some writing tablets a name apiece, and then ask the first person to come past to choose one. They agree, write their names and the next person to appear is the madman, Trouble-All, whose every sentence is asking whether people have Justice Overdo’s warrant for their behaviour. He has difficulty understanding the task then ticks one of the two names more or less at random.

Now, Grace made the two suitors promise she wouldn’t show them which name was chosen till she was safely home, but in any case at this moment Edgworth rolls up to tell the pair of gallants that Wasp has fallen in with a droll set of company and that, if they come to watch, they enjoy his discomfiture and watch the box being foisted off him.

Quarlous watches half a dozen of the fair lowlifes playing a stupid game of ‘vapours’ where each person just has to contradict the speaker before him. Edgworth makes sure a fight breaks out between testy little Wasp and the Irishman, Captain Whit, and in the confusion steals the marriage licence (intended for Cokes and Grace) out of Wasp’s black box. Officers arrive to arrest Wasp (their role seems to be to punish everyone who is uppity and overbearing) and meanwhile, Mistress Overdo has been left without her man in the company of these rowdy gamesters and has been trying to calm them and stop them fighting.

Now she asks Whit if he can arrange for her to go for a pee somewhere. Just then fat Ursla enters and Whit asks her if Mistress O can use the ‘jordan’ in her booth to which she points out it is already being used by Win, Littlewit’s wife who we saw, in an earlier scene, saying she needed a leak. Knockem comes upon Whit in a corner with Mistress Overdo trying to help her and the conversation takes a bawdy turn as the rough fairmen make rude innuendos to Mistress Overdo which – I think – she quite enjoys.

Anyway, as Mistress Overdo goes into Ursla’s booth or tent, Littlewit and Win emerge – her presumably relieved to have had a pee – and Littlewit announces he is off to see the puppet show that he wrote and off he goes.

The point is – this leaves Win by herself just by Ursla’s booth and Mistress Overdo within it and sets Ursla thinking – the various rascals and cutpurses she knows will be tired and randy by the end of the fair and she has no ‘plover or quail’ (meaning wenches, meaning whores) ready for their entertainment. And here are two posh and rather silly women abandoned, Win and Mistress O. Ursla suggests to Kockem that they ‘work on’ the two women, with a view to making them compliant with the wishes of the whore customers they know will be arriving soon.

Kockem and Whit immediately set about persuading dim Win that a married woman’s lot is a terrible thing and she would be much better if she became a ‘lady’, wore fine clothes bought for her by her countless male lovers. Win is immediately dazzled, but the plan is knocked awry because, inside Ursla’s tent, Mistress Overdo encountered a real whore / punk, Alice of Turnbull, Ramping Alice, who has started beating and belabouring her. The men – Whit and Knockem – quickly dispatch Alice – after some choice insults have flown about – and resume seducing Win with visions of fine clothes and a coach of her own.

Enter Edgworth who has given the marriage licence he stole out of Wasp’s black box to Quarlous. Edgworth offers Quarlous the women in Ursla’s booth, fine green women he promises, but Quarlous scorns such an offer and warns Edgworth he saw him cut a purse so holds the threat of the hangman over him.

Edgworth exits and enter the watchman, Haggis, bearing Wasp to the stocks which they lock him in. (If you remember Wasp got into a fight with a bunch of roughs and Mistress Overdo shouted for the watch to come and restore peace, and because testy old Wasp wouldn’t stop shouting ‘A turd i’ your teeth’ at everybody, they arrested him.) Quarlous saunters by and enjoys teasing Wasp in the stocks.

As he does so the other officers bring back Zeal-of-the-land Busy and Justice Overdo still in disguise. They lament that they can’t find Justice Overdo anywhere and his assistants don’t know where he is so, in the absence of his authority, they’ll clap these two troublemakers min the stocks and proceed to do so – so for a while Wasp, Overdo and Busy exchange moans.

Trouble-All enters. Now Quarlous has been looking for him ever since he indicated in Grace Wellborn’s writing tablets which man should marry her to ask him which he chose – but the officers now tease Trouble-All and call him a madman so Quarlous is taken aback to learn that the man who has made the decision of whether he will marry Grace or not is insane. By a ruse Wasp escapes from the stocks and the officers, when they return, argue about whether they were locked properly, undo them with a view to redoing them tighter but at that moment Trouble-All enters and the mocking escalates into a fight, during which Overdo and Busy take advantage to escape. When they stop fighting the officers look round and are horrified that their prisoners have escaped.

During this confusion, improbably enough, Dame Purecraft, the widowed Puritan falls in love with Trouble-All because, like many stage madmen, he speaks clearly and nobly (if obsessively and repetitively). While Dame Purecraft declares her love for Quarlous-as-Trouble-All, Quarlous has dressed like this in order to ask Grace to see the chapbook and see which name ‘he’ ticked. Turns out it wasn’t him, it was Winwife. The secret is out.

So: Grace admits it to Winwife who is over the moon and they exit. Quarlous is sunk in dejection as Dame Purecraft tells him she loves him – at which he rounds on her with a snarling abuse of all Puritans. To which she reveals that she is indeed a hypocrite and gives a long list of the deceptions and cons she has been carrying out under cover of being a deacon for the past seven years, not least mulcting gifts from all the suitors she’s led on – and goes on to indict Zeal-of-the-land as ‘the capital knave of the land’ and listing his crimes and deceits – presumably to the enthusiastic applause of the audience.

Quarlous turns to the audience and ponders. Well, he’s definitely lost Grace and has no other prospects in sight. Dame P has just said she’s worth some £6,000. Well… why not marry her, he has Cokes’s marriage licence in his pocket, all he has to do is scratch out the name, marry the widow and come into a fortune and a juicy wife. Yes. He’ll do it.

At this point Justice Overdo-in-disguise approaches Quarlous, thinking he is Trouble-All who he has so much offended, and reveals his true identity and offers to do anything to make reparations, offers him a blank warrant signed and sealed by him. Quarlous jumps at the opportunity, Overdo gives him such a warrant, and Quarlous is left reflecting how powerful this disguise of insanity can be.

Act 5

Act five centres around the puppet theatre and the play Littlewit has written for it. But of course various other plotlines come to a climax.

Enter Leatherhead (who for the rest of the play takes the alias Lantern) and Filcher and Sharkwell, who are going to stage the puppet theatre. Leatherhead reflects that although Biblical subjects are topical (like the fall or Nineveh or Sodom and Gomorrah) domestic subjects like the Gunpowder Plot are best.

Enter a) Overdo in a new disguise, that of a porter, still bent on his misguided mission to seek out ‘enormity’ before, as he plans, bursting forth in all his magnificence to rain down justice on his people. At least that’s how he sees himself; b) Quarlous, who has disguised himself as Trouble-All the madman.

The playmen and their booth: enter Cokes followed, as he now is everywhere, by a flock of children who’ve realised he’s an idiot, he reads out loud the playbill for the benefit of the audience i.e. it is going to be a parody of Marlowe’s heroic poem, Hero and Leander. Enter Lovewit who one of the boothmen owners won’t let enter though he protests he is the author of the damn play!

Littlewit greets Cokes and is surprised to see him without a cloak or hat – Cokes laments how he has lost everything at the fair – both his purses, his clothes and all his friends. Like an idiot, Cokes is excited about the play and asks if he can meet the actors or visit the changing room. Amused, Lantern explains that both are a little small.

This conversation takes in references to contemporary actors, including Richard Burbage and Nathan Fields, before Lantern explains that they commissioned Littlewit to adapt Hero and Leander for modern times and modern audiences. Indeed, we learn that the Hellespont has been translated into the River Thames, Leander is a dyer’s son from Puddle Wharf, and Hero a wench of Bankside, who is rowed one morning over to Old Fish Street and Leander, spying her alighting at Trig Stairs (these are all real locations in Jacobean London) falls in love with her. Or with her white legs. It is a crude, funny burlesque of the Marlowe poem.

Other character arrive for the play: Overdo still in disguise as a porter; Winwife now attached to Grace (they both hear Cokes being very dismissive of Grace who he’s never liked); and the two posh women who have been talked into becoming whores, silly Win and pompous Mistress Overdo, both wearing masks, swanking in fine clothes and enjoying having chairs pulled out for them, men dancing attendance; and Wasp – when Cokes tells Wasp he knows he’s been in the stocks, Wasp laments that his authority over his pupils is now at an end. (To be honest this doesn’t make much impact, because Wasp never seems to have had any influence at all over the idiot Cokes.)

They settle down to watch the play in bad rhymed verse as the puppets play the parts of Hero the fishmonger’s daughter, and Leander the dyer’s son. Cokes keeps interrupting when he doesn’t understand bits, or to praise bits he does understand.

This is by far the funniest part of the play, not least because it is the most self-contained and comprehensible. The reader easily understands that the puppet play is an outrageous burlesque of two classical stories, the tragic love affair and Hero and Leander and the legendary friendship of Pythias and Damon. In Littlewit/Jonson’s hands these become raucous fishwives and drunks. The famous friends fall out as they compete to hurl insults at the lovers which descends into a fight. And a little later puppet Damon and Pythias comes across puppet Hero and Leander snogging, start insulting her as a whore, she turns, bends, flips up her skirts and says they can kiss her whore arse, at which they kick her arse, and all the puppets descend into fighting again. All this while Cokes, like an idiot, repeats various parts of the bad verse, telling everyone else how much he admires it, and then cheering when the puppets start fighting. It’s also funny the way the puppetmaster, Leatherhead/Lantern, whispers asides to Cokes, about the onstage action, as if the puppets are real people.

So as a scene it is by far the most coherent and comprehensible and the comedy is as funny now as it was 400 years ago.

All this argy-bargy wakes up the puppet ghost of Dionysius but he’s barely delivered a speech before into the whole scene bursts Zeal-of-the-land Busy, fired up with rage and fury against the play and against the fair in general. But his wrath against the puppetmaster, Leatherhead, is neatly diverted against the puppets themselves, and Busy finds himself engaged in a Public Debate About Morality with a puppet – much to the derision of the onlookers.

The debate reaches a climax when Busy accuses the puppets of what Puritans had been accusing the theatre and actors for 40 years or more, namely that theatre was an unnatural abomination for encouraging men to dress up as women and women to dress up as men. The puppet Dionysius gleefully refutes Busy by lifting up his skirts and revealing that – he has no sex at all!

Deflated, Busy acknowledges defeat and sits down.

But this is the moment Justice Overdo chooses to throw off his disguise and carry out his Grand Promise to discover the ‘enormities’ of the fair and punish them all.

OVERDO: Now, to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! the example of justice, and Mirrour of Magistrates; the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours, and but observe my discoveries; and compare Hercules with me, if thou dar’st, of old; or Columbus, Magellan, or our countryman Drake, of later times. Stand forth, you weeds of enormity, and spread.

Immediately all the shady characters – Knockem, Whit – start sneaking away. But the real point is that, instead of dispensing justice and creating order, Overdo’s presence raises confusion to new heights. Ursla comes running in chasing the real Trouble-All, who has stolen her pan because, as Ursla explains, some nasty man stripped Trouble-All and borrowed all his clothes. Overdo turns to the man he thought was Trouble-All, who is in fact Quarlous and now admits it. Overdo orders the two masked women in the audience to unmask and they are revealed as Win – so Littlewit is appalled to see his wife dressed up as a whore – and Mistress Overdo – and the Justice is dumbstruck to see his wife dolled up like a trollop. Worse, she is immediately sick into a basin having drunk to excess (explains how the rogues got her to dress that way in the first place).

While Overdo is struck dumb, Quarlous – the witty cynical gallant who has in many ways been a chorus and instigator of scams – now steps forward and takes the Justice’s function, pointing out the true state of affairs.

The man Overdo took a liking to early on in the fair and has been protecting throughout is none other than Edgworth the cutpurse, who stole both Cokes’s purses and helped stir up the fighting which got Overdo and Wasp landed in the stocks.
Grace Wellborn, who Overdo intended to marry off to Cokes, has now become ward to Quarlous, who filled in the blank seal and signature he gave him to this effect.
Quarlous hands Grace over to Winwife, who won her in the little game where she wrote their names down and got the first passerby (who happened to be Trouble-All) to choose one. But since Quarlous is now Grace’s guardian, Winwife must pay him the value of her estate in order to free her for marriage. (This is a little difficult to follow, but it was the law of the land at the time.)
Quarlous hands Trouble-All back his cloak and gown and thanks him for the loan.
Then turns to his wife, Dame Purecraft, whom he has married in the guide of the madman Trouble-All, and who he now promises he can be mad whenever he pleases.
And then points to Wasp and facetiously thanks him for the marriage licence (which Quarlous got to steal out of Wasp’s black box) which he has used to marry the widow.

So Zeal-of-the-land Busy has been publicly humiliated and revealed as a hypocrite; Justice Overdo revealed as a man puffed up with own self-importance who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, and his wife was on the verge of becoming a drunken whore; Wasp has lost all authority over his pupil; Littlewit has realised his wife was also easily led to become a fairground bawd; Winwife did win a wife, but only by default, not out of his own abilities.

And Quarlous is the clear winner and impresario of the entire play. As such he reprimands the justice:

QUARLOUS: Remember you are but Adam, flesh and blood! you have your frailty

And then goes on to perform the traditional role of inviting everyone to an end-of-comedy celebration feast at Overdo’s house:

QUARLOUS: Forget your other name of Overdo, and invite us all to supper. There you and I will compare our discoveries; and drown the memory of all enormity in your biggest bowl at home.

And then the Epilogue steps forward to address the king and asked if he was pleased. Presumably he was, as Jonson wasn’t thrown into prison! In fact by this stage, Jonson was well into his second career as a writer of masques for the royal court, and was in the highest favour.

Thoughts

Long Bartholomew Fair is so epically long – twice as long as a play like The Shoemaker’s Holiday – and consists of walls of solid prose unrelieved by passages of verse like all the other Jacobean comedies I’ve read – that I was just relieved to get to the end of it.

Numerous characters Both Volpone and The Alchemist have a much smaller cast of characters, much more focused plots and move much faster. There are so many characters in Bartholomew Fair that I found it difficult to distinguish many of the minor ones, especially the rogues who only appear in a few scenes, like Puppy and Cutting and Northern and Haggis and Filcher and Sharkwell.

Difficult prose This is compounded by the fact that 17th century prose is difficult to read. It’s unusual to get even a single sentence that doesn’t contain at least one obscure word or expression, or isn’t part of an elaborate metaphor which is incomprehensible without a good footnote. So you are continually stopping to read the notes and understand what they’re saying.

Different motivations And at a level just above the verbal, it’s often difficult to understand what the characters are trying to say or do. Even when you’ve understood every word in a speech it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve understood why the character said it or what they were driving at. You are constantly rubbed up against the fact that, on a verbal and minor psychological level, the people of 400 years ago had different moment by moment concerns, and expressed them in language, metaphors and elaborate conceits, which are hard to grasp.

Disease Despite these obstacles, several things do come over loud and clear. The first is how utterly unlike our times the Jacobean era was in two obvious respects: the brutality of its punishments and the virulence of disease. There was no medicine worth the name and not only the recurring pandemics of plague, but smallpox, typhoid, syphilis and a host of other diseases killed or maimed a large percentage of the population and there was nothing the so-called doctors or anyone else could do about it.

Brutality As to the punishments, it is hair-raising the way even minor offences led to hanging, and the play refers throughout to the ritual whereby the condemned were taken in carts from the various London prisons to Tyburn to be hanged amid much popular celebration. But even worse in its way was the commonness with which whipping and scourging was applied. Ramping Alice the prostitute was whipped and scourged simply for being a prostitute.

Therefore the people in this time, as for centuries before and for some time to come, lived between two dire threats, the threat of catching, suffering horribly and dying from appalling diseases – and the threat of infringing one of any number of man-made laws and being subjected to capital punishment or extremely violent punishments.

Sex The next most obvious aspect is the absolute drenching of the play in sex and sexual innuendo. As with most comedies there’s a marriage plot (who will marry Grace Wellborn?) surrounded by seemingly endless jokes about marriage and adultery, endless references to the cuckold’s horns which arise when a man’s wife is unfaithful to him. But it’s far deeper than that, not a page of the text, not a minute of the play goes by without someone making a comment which has a sexual implication or double meaning. In these plays sex is everywhere, all the time.

Theatrical convention Now you could take this at face value and say something like, the Elizabethans and Jacobeans lived in a society which was massively less sexually repressed than our own, in which everyone all the time is making sexual comments and innuendo. Except that, as the editor of the Mermaid edition of The Shoemaker’s Holiday, D.J. Palmer, emphasises, plays like this should not be taken as documentary evidence of 1600s London life – far from it. They are entertainments and follow the conventions of entertainment, many of which have stayed the same from Chaucer to TV sitcoms like ‘Allo ‘Allo, Open All Hours or Last of the Summer Wine.

For centuries – in fact for millennia, because the Greeks and Romans did it, too – playwrights have used bawdiness and double entendre to make people laugh and have flooded the stage with sexual innuendo and byplay precisely because it was and is so lacking in everyday life. Characters on stage are licensed to be outrageously forward and suggestive (just as they are licensed to fall into despair and kill themselves or rage and storm and murder people) precisely as an outlet for feelings and impulses which most people, most of the time, in most societies we have records of, have been forced to repress and contain.

Overdo As to the obvious themes of the play, these are embodied in arguably the two key figures are Justice Overdo and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. The justice is probably the more important one and his storyline concerns the way he adopts a disguise to seek out ‘enormity’, but this is problematic. Arguably going in disguise means abdicating the responsibility he has to be there in person – we see the watchmen at a loss what to do without his authority – and has a secondary indictment in that the ‘enormities’ he thinks he discovers are trivial. The main point of his storyline though, is seeing close up the impact a casual judgement of his against Trouble-All had on the poor man, namely to drive him mad.

Busy Zeal-of-the-Land Busy has less stage time than Overdo but is a more vivid character, not least because the Puritan rhetoric he uses is so very distinctive and, in its way, attractive. Here he is warning his little flock about the perils of the fair:

BUSY: The place is Smithfield, or the field of smiths, the grove of hobby-horses and trinkets, the wares are the wares of devils, and the whole Fair is the shop of Satan: they are hooks and baits, very baits, that are hung out on every side, to catch you, and to hold you, as it were, by the gills, and by the nostrils, as the fisher doth; therefore you must not look nor turn toward them.—The heathen man could stop his ears with wax against the harlot of the sea; do you the like with your fingers against the bells of the beast.

He is taken down twice, once when the widow, Dame Purecraft, reveals to Quarlous and the audience all the scams she and he have been foisting on their ‘brethren’ for seven years, and then when he loses his Public Debate to a puppet.

Conclusion

Complicated and obscure as some of it is, the broad plotlines are still totally accessible and Bartholomew Fair is not only sometimes very funny but turns into a thought-provoking meditation on social and cultural power which is still relevant to our times.

Social history

The Hope theatre where the play was performed, was also used for bear-baiting. On bear days the stage was taken down to allow packs of dogs to try and maul bears to death while the bears defended themselves and spectators gambled on the outcome.
King James opened a public lottery in 1612 to raise funds for the colonisation of Virginia (a colony often mentioned in these plays). James Fort, Virginia, had been founded in 1607, and would be renamed Jamestown.
It was a popular stereotype that Dutchmen consumed excessive amounts of butter.
Bridewell prison specialised in sexual offenders. The sex worker Ramping Alice was recently an inmate where she was flogged and scourged i.e. cut with the scourge.
A waistcoat, when worn without a gown over it, was the sign of prostitutes, who were sometimes known as ‘waistcoateers’.
Words for sex worker: prostitute, whore, bawd, jade, punk, waistcoateer, green woman,
Tailors were supposed to be a) bawdy, presumably because they saw their clients in states of undress b) greedy, having enormous appetites.
Colliers, black from their trade, were thought to be a) notorious cheats b) associated with hell.
The trade of working with feathers to make and sell fans and puffs and perukes was associated with Puritans, especially in the Blackfriars area (location of the Blackfriars theatre and also where Jonson lived). The contradiction between their vehement raging against worldly vanity, and the fact they made a handsome profit out of catering to that vanity, did not escape the Puritans’ critics.

Jacobean comedies

Cavalier poetry

The Cavalier Poets: An Anthology edited by Thomas Crofts

17th century history

Restoration comedies

Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston (1605)

Six salient facts:

1. Eastward Ho and Westward Ho were the cries of the watermen who plied on the Thames, telling customers which way they were headed.

2. Eastward Ho! was a collaboration between three leading playwrights of the era, George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston. Scholars have been arguing for centuries about who wrote which bit.

3. Eastward Ho! was staged at the Blackfriars Theatre by a company of boy actors known as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, granted a patent by King James I in 1604. Boy actors! So imagine everything that follows being played by boys! All the double entendres and jokes about pricks and purses, Gertrude making eyes at Quicksilver, Sindefy the whore, all the vamping… boys.

4. Eastward Ho! was performed at the Blackfriars Theatre. This was an enclosed theatre which catered to a financial elite, charging sixpence admission, compared to 1 pence at the more popular and open-to-the-elements Globe Theatre.

5. Eastward Ho! includes references to and parodies of popular contemporary plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine and Hamlet. Even the play’s title is a reference, a riposte to the recently performed Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, who then went on to write Northward Ho! as a response to Eastward. Jacobean theatre was a tightly packed, highly competitive, self-referential little world.

6. The play contained scathing satire on all manner of subjects to do with contemporary London life, but one of these was the widespread animosity against the many Scots who had accompanied the new king, James VI of Scotland who became James I of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1605, down to London. Chronically poor from the start of his reign, James quickly became notorious for selling knighthoods for £40. 900 were sold in the first year of his reign. This created a mercenary atmosphere of corruption, that all that mattered was money, a sense that you could get rich and climb the social ladder overnight by clever scams. This is the corrupt vision which lures Quicksilver, Petronel and Security, the play’s three baddies, who all hope to get rich quick by various scams – and who are balanced by Touchstone, standing for the bourgeois virtues of hard work, and Golding, who stands for loyalty and honesty.

Having read the play I’m surprised that the handful of satirical references to the Scots and the selling of knighthoods are relatively trivial, you could blink and miss them.

1. When Sir Petronel Flash is washed up on the Isle of Dogs two passing gentlemen mock him, and then one – out of tune with his preceding remarks – says something in a Scots accent:

FIRST GENTLEMAN: On the coast of Dogs, sir; y’are i’th’ Isle o’ Dogs, I tell you, I see y’ave been washed in the Thames here, and I believe ye were drowned in a tavern before, or else you would never have took boat in such a dawning as this was. Farewell, farewell; we will not know you for shaming of you. I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.
SECOND GENTLEMAN: No, no, this is he that stole his knighthood o’ the grand day for four pound given to a page; all the money in’s purse, I wot well.

It’s peculiar the way this one-off remark and its odd Scottish impersonation sticks out from the text around it, as if it’s been cut and pasted onto the rest of his speech in English. It’s an oddly random moment in the text

2. In the pub, the gentlemen who are joining the expedition to Virginia ask Captain Seagull what it’s like and he sets off on a long deceitful description of how it’s overflowing with gold,m in the middle of which he suddenly segues into a passage about Scots, and the jokey idea that it would be lovely if all the Scots in London could be magically transported to America.

SCAPETHRIFT: And is it a pleasant country withal?
SEAGULL: As ever the sun shined on; temperate and full of all sorts of excellent viands: wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here; venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers, only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who indeed are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England, when they are out on’t, in the world, than they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ’hem were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here.

Someone reported the playwrights to the authorities as disrespecting the new king. Marston got wind of it and went into hiding, but Jonson and Chapman were briefly imprisoned for lèse majesty.

Ten years later, Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden (a Scots writer who he stayed with on a visit to Scotland) that they thought they might have their ears and noses slit.

It’s very difficult for us to really assimilate the casual violence and casual death of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period. Tens of thousands died of the periodic outbreaks of plague. There were plenty of other ailments to die of in between. You were liable to be conscripted for one of the endless wars. Jonson is known to have killed a fellow actor in a duel. The plays refer to the common punishment of being whipped. And here are a couple of poets in gaol for a few weeks wondering if they’ll publicly have their ears cut off or noses slit! As I say, difficult for us to really imagine what life was like.

What happened to Jonson and Chapman? The pair wrote letters to every influential patron and person they knew asking for their intercession. These letters are included as an appendix in the New Mermaid edition of the play and very interesting reading they make, too. Eventually, they were released, whereupon they threw a big banquet for their friends and supporters.

Cast

There’s quite a large cast (all played by boys!):

Touchstone, a goldsmith.
Quicksilver, and Golding, apprentices to Touchstone.
Sir Petronel Flash, a shifty knight.
Security, an old usurer.
Bramble, a lawyer.
Seagull, a sea-captain.
Scapethrift, and Spendall, adventurers bound for Virginia.
Slitgut, a butcher’s apprentice.
Poldavy, a tailor.
Holdfast, and Wolf, officers of the Counter.
Hamlet, a footman.
Potkin, a tankard-bearer.

Mistress Touchstone.
Gertrude, and Mildred, her daughters.
Winifred, wife to Security.
Sindefy, mistress to Quicksilver.
Bettrice, a waiting-woman.
Mrs. Ford, Mrs. Gazer, Coachman, Page, Constables, Prisoners, &c.

Eastward Ho! plot summary

Master Touchstone is an honest but tetchy goldsmith. He has two daughters and two apprentices. The elder daughter, Gertrude, is ‘of a proud ambition and nice wantonness’, the younger, Mildred, ‘of a modest humility and comely soberness’. So with the apprentices who are nicely paired & contrasted, Quicksilver is a graceless unthrift ‘of a boundless prodigality’, but Golding is ‘of a most hopeful industry’, a model of industry and sobriety.

Act 1 scene 1 The play opens with Touchstone and Frank Quicksilver arguing, the latter insisting he is the son of a gentleman and is off to the pub to hang out with gallants and gull them out of money. Crossly, Touchstone says that he rose by hard work and repeats his catchphrase, ‘Work upon it now!’ Touchstone exits and Golding is left alone with Quicksilver, who insults Touchstone for being a flat-capped bourgeois, swears a lot and it is in this speech that Quicksilver says Golding shouldn’t face West to the setting sun, but look out for himself and fare Eastward Ho!

As the play develops East is associated with:

the rising sun
the mythical castle in the country which Sir Petronal Flash claims to own
the direction down the Thames the ship to America will take

Act 1 scene 2 Proud Gertrude is impatiently awaiting the arrival of her suitor, Sir Petronel Flash, while meek and mild sister Mildred watches her dress up in pretentious finery, mock the lowly origins of her own parents, and look forward to becoming a fine lady. Her tailor, Poldavy, encourages her to prance and bob like a ‘fine lady’. She is a type of the pretentious bourgeois.

Enter Sir Petronel Flash who quickly comes over as a superficial fool. Mistress Touchstone is as keen to be rich as Gertrude and the two of them, plus Flash, make a bevy of pretentious fools. Mistress T explains that Sir Petronel is one of the new knights, a reference to James I’s innovation of selling knighthoods. Gertrude wishes him to take her away from all this to his big house in the country. She uses the affected pronunciation of city-dames, namely saying ‘chity’ and ‘chitizen’.

The pretentious threesome exit leaving the stage to Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Rather surprisingly Touchstone marries Golding to Mildred. She is all filial loyalty and so meekly agrees, Golding swears his devotion to his master and they go in to have a little wedding meal. Touchstone, alone on stage, explains that he is running a little experiment:

This match shall on, for I intend to prove
Which thrives the best, the mean or lofty love.
Whether fit wedlock vow’d ’twixt like and like,
Or prouder hopes, which daringly o’erstrike…

There is no mention of any love or affection whatsoever between the young couple. It is a striking example of Jonson’s didactic theatre, utterly lacking either the magical romance of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the innocent mirth of Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday.

Act 2 scene 1 Next morning outside Master Touchstone’s shop. He calls Quicksilver to him, who is hungover and explains he got smashed at the party to celebrate Gertrude and Sir Petronel’s wedding. He staggers off to drink some more. Touchstone retires and listens to the conversation of Golding and Mildred which is exemplary for love and devotion. At this point Quicksilver staggers back on stage, positively drunk and asks first Golding, then Touchstone if he can borrow money.

Touchstone has had enough and throws him out, giving him his indenture and all other belongings. Very drunk, Quicksilver quotes the opening speech from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, then swears at Touchstone:

Quicksilver: Sweet Touchstone, will you lend me two shillings?
Touchstone: Not a penny.
Quicksilver: Not a penny? I have friends, and I have acquaintance; I will piss at thy shop-posts, and throw rotten eggs at thy sign.

As Quicksilver staggers offstage, Touchstone abruptly frees Golding from his apprenticeship, offers him a handsome dowry and promises to host a marriage feast even more spectacular than Petronel’s. Golding, modest and sober, demurs, saying it would be profligate and wasteful and he and Mildred will be happy to have a small ceremony with just Touchstone present, and then consume the cold leftovers from Petronel’s feast. Touchstone remarks that his daughter is now impatient to seat off Eastward to her knightly husband’s country pile.

Act 2 scene 2 At Security’s house. Security has a little soliloquy in which he introduces himself as Security, the famous usurer, who keeps people’s belongings, in this case the fine clothes of Quicksilver, who in the past has nipped in here to swap his prentice clothes for fancy togs to go meeting his gallant mates.

Enter hungover Quicksilver climbing into his swagger clothes. The notes explain the business relationship between the two: Quicksilver pretends friendship to city rakes and gallants, lends them money, then pretends to be in debt, persuades them to sign a bond for a commodity or an exorbitantly high-interest loan payable to Security, for which they are responsible. In other words, Quicksilver dupes his ‘friends’ into getting into deep debt with Security: which is why Security keeps his clothes and minds his affairs for him.

Security is married to a young woman, Winifred but has a sexy servant, Sindefy, ‘Sin’ for short, who comes bearing the rest of Quicksilver’s posh clothes. Quicksilver calls Security ‘Dad’. After lengthy speeches about how they rely on no trade, preferring to make money out of money, (which are designed, I think, to make the audience despise them) Security lays out their latest plan: Quicksilver will get Sir Petronel Flash into his debt. They’ve learned that Flash married Gertrude to get his hands on her inheritance, to convert it to cash and take ship for Virginia as a ‘knight adventurer’.

They devise a Plan: Gertrude has not yet gone down to the country to visit her husband’s (fictional) castle, but is still in London. Quicksilver will visit her and will help the introduction of Sindefy who will take on the character of a gullible young woman just up from the country – you can just imagine this will lead to an orgy of ridiculous social pretentiousness.

Just before they pack up, Security is called offstage by his wife (?) Winnie, leaving Quicksilver alone. Out of Quicksilver’s mouth oozes pure, malicious evil, as he insults Security behind his back and says he hopes to live to see dog’s meat made of his flesh. This sounds like Ben Jonson. It is exactly the tone of vicious hatred which animates Mosca in Volpone. Coming from the bonhomie of The Shoemakers’ Holiday, this kind of thing is like treading in dog poo.

Act 2 scene 3 Quicksilver is at Petronel’s London lodging as the latter prepares to set off. He wants to flee London to escape his wife, who he can’t stand. He readily admits he has no castle in the country, something Gertrude will shortly find out. With what I think of as typical Jonsonian heartlessness, Petronel hopes Gertrude will hang herself in despair.

Quicksilver persuades Petronel to stay and get Gertrude to sign over her inheritance, give it in bond to Security who will increase its value. Enter Gertrude now dressed grandly and swanking with grand manners, telling the men when to doff their hats and when to put them back on.

Security presents to her Sindefy, demurely dressed, and preposterously describes her as a simple country girl who intended to become a nun but has come up to the big city seeking advice. In her pretentiously lofty manner, Gertrude agrees to employ her as her personal maid.

Security invites Petronal to come and dine with him but Gertrude is hen-pecking him, and refuses to let him go, insisting they dine at home so she can quickly take him to bed. Quicksilver and Security make cheeky asides about her being bossy. Finally it is agreed that Petronel will visit Security the following morning.

Act 3 scene 1 The next morning at Security’s house, he has just given Petronel a fine breakfast feast. They exchange extravagant compliments, Security promising to make Petronel godfather to his first child, while Petronel gives him a diamond to give his first-born, and Security makes his young wife, Winifred, kiss him. Security’s lawyer, Bramble, has drawn up documents.

Enter the captain of the ship taking Petronel, Captain Seagull and Spendall who say they must haste and leave under cover since the ship is taken out in a false name.

Act 3 scene 2 An inn-yard where the harassed coachman and servant makes haste to prepare Gertrude’s coach. She is obsessed with being the wife of a knight and having a coach. Two city women, Mistresses Gaze and Fond, line up to watch the show and shout encouragement to Mistress Gertrude, who is accompanied by her mother, Mistress Touchstone, equally impatient to be a Great Lady.

Petronel himself arrives and asks her to wait, but she says she is impatient to decorate his castle for his arrival. Quicksilver also enters and tells Gertrude her father has just officiated at the wedding of Golding and Mildred. Gertrude is disgusted at her father for marrying her sister to a common apprentice: henceforth he (her father) will have to call her ‘Madam’.

Enter Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Gertrude is appalled her sister got married in such a common hat. Touchstone disowns her for snobbery. Gertrude insults Golding for marrying her sister. Golding is tactful and considerate of his master.

Enter Security and his lawyers and they cozen Gertrude into signing away her inheritance, she thinking it’s a minor property in town and the money will be used to beautify the castle. She and Mistress Touchstone and Sindefy, her maid, depart in the coach. Petronel and Quicksilver discuss the very great disappointment Gertrude is going to have when she discovers he has no castle – but by then Petronel will have fled the country.

Petronel expects Security to bring him the money they’ve discussed at Billingsgate. There then follows a complicated sequence during which Petronel reveals to Security that he is in love with the wife of Security’s lawyer, Bramble. He would like, as a favour, Security to take Bramble out for a drink, while he steals Bramble’s wife away. Security enters into the spirit of the plot and exits. Only then do Petronel and Quicksilver reveal that, while Security is out with Bramble, Petronel will steal away Security’s wife, Winifred. Quicksilver and Petronel are fretting about how to disguise her, when Security unexpectedly re-enters and says the best disguise will be his wife’s cloak and hands it over.

Act 3 scene 3 Captain Seagull and his men (Spendall and Scapethrift) are at the Blue Anchor tavern, Billingsgate, awaiting Petronel. His dim men ask about Virginia and Seagull confidently tells them the streets are paved with gold, says the expedition there of 1579 was a great success and the Englishmen intermarried with the natives.

Petronel arrives and they toast the success of the voyage. Security and Bramble arrive, impressed with the toasting and confidence of the crew. Quicksilver arrives with Security’s wife in disguise and wearing a mask. Petronel explains, ostensibly for the benefit of Bramble, that it is a cousin come to see him off who doesn’t want to be recognised in a low tavern.

She is crying and so Petronel asks Security, as a favour, to comfort her. This is designed to elicit howls of laughter from the audience, as Security is all unknowingly comforting his own wife, telling her she is well shot of ‘an old jealous dotard’ and will soon be in the arms of a young lover! About six times various characters make the joke that the ship is bound that night for Cuckold’s Haven, a real place, on the Thames below Rotherhithe.

Increasingly drunk, Petronel suggests to the company that they hold their farewell feast aboard Sir Francis Drake’s old ship, and they dance round the silent, disguised woman to celebrate the idea. Bramble tells Security the mystery woman is wearing Security’s wife’s clothes, but Security just laughs at him, confident that she is Bramble‘s wife – everyone in the audience, of course, laughing at him.

Security and Bramble go their ways but the rest of the company calls for a boat to take them to Sir Francis Drake’s ship, where they’ll get even more drunk, before setting off to be put aboard their final ship. The pub’s drawer watches them go, remarking that the tide is against them and a storm is brewing and it is a fool’s errand.

Act 3 scene 4 A very brief scene, just long enough for Security to return home, find his wife not there, discover that she is at Billingsgate, make the deduction that she is the mystery woman and is sailing with Petronel, and run off yelling for a boat.

THE STORM

Act 4 scene 1 Cuckold’s Haven There’s a storm blowing and the Thames is turbulent, A fellow named Slitgut is climbing up a tree at Cuckold’s Haven to attach cuckold’s horns to it, after an ancient tradition when he spies a ship going down in the river. He gives a running commentary of a man struggling through the waves who comes ashore and proves to be Security, who moans his wretched luck and crawls away. He has been crushed down to the earth.

The Slitgut sees another person wallowing in the weltering wave, a woman, and describes how she is rescued by a man who brings her to shore. It is the drawer from the Blue Anchor tavern who came down to visit a friend at St Katherine’s and he has rescued Winifred. She asks him to go fetch her bundle of clothes which she left at the pub, but begs him to keep quiet about her or it will ruin her reputation. A would-be whore, she has washed ashore by St Katherine’s monastery.

Next out of the water is Quicksilver, washed ashore capless by the gallows reserved for pirates. He bewails the fact the storm has sunk the ship and ruined all his plans.

Next to stagger ashore are Petronel and Seagull who are drunkenly, confusedly convinced they have washed ashore in France until two men passing by assure them they are on the Isle of Dogs and briskly make off, but not before making the joke that one of them (i.e. Petronel) looks like a thirty-pound knight.

I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.

This is obviously written to be said in a Scots accent and was the most obvious bit of anti-Scots satire, which caused its authors to be thrown into gaol. Petronel and Seagull are now united with Quicksilver and all bewail their fate. They had not, in fact, made it as far as the main ship which was to take them to America, but worry that that ship will now have been seized (there was something illicit about it which I didn’t quite understand).

Petronel is all for giving in, but Quicksilver suddenly changes the subject by declaring he has the specialist knowledge to make copper look like silver: he’ll restore their fortunes yet. The other two adore him and they depart.

Enter the Drawer and Winifred now dressed in dry clothes. He has brought her near to the pub where he works, and very nobly leaves her to continue alone i.e. uncompromised by being seen with a strange man. Which is when she bumps into her husband, Security! Quickly Winifred ad libs and lies that she has come out expressly to look for him, that she was fast asleep when he returned to see her (at the end of act 3) and his shouting stirred her and she was about to call back but he ran off in such a hurry. Thus, lying her head off, she is restored to her husband and he ends up apologising, promising that every morning he will go down on his knees and beseech her forgiveness. They exit.

At which point Slitgut, who has been up his tree watching each of these encounters, climbs down saying he won’t continue the ridiculous pagan custom, and bids the cuckold tree farewell.

Act 4 scene 2 A room in Touchstone’s House Touchstone has heard that Petronel and Quicksilver’s ship was sunk. He tells us he has also heard that his ungrateful daughter, Gertrude, and his wife and the maid, discovered there was no castle anywhere and so ended up sleeping in the famous coach until they crept back to London, repentant.

Golding appears and in his guileless way reports that he has been voted Master Deputy Alderman. He had already been taken into the livery of his trade, so Touchstone is thrilled that he is progressing in his career and doubts not that he will soon be more famous than Dick Whittington.

Then Golding tells Touchstone that the rascally crew were shipwrecked as they took a ferry boat down towards Blackwall, were washed ashore and are returning in dribs and drabs to London and Golding has organised a reception committee of constables. Touchstone’s reaction is what I think of characteristically Jonson, and the reason I didn’t like this play:

TOUCHSTONE: Disgrace ’em all that ever thou canst; their ship I have already arrested. How to my wish it falls out, that thou hast the place of a justicer upon ’hem! I am partly glad of the injury done to me, that thou may’st punish it. Be severe i’ thy place, like a new officer o’ the first quarter, unreflected.

Revenge, the fiercer and severer the better, is the Jonson theme. A mood continued when Gertrude and her mother and Sindefy enter. Mistress Touchstone is thoroughly mortified by the discovery that Petronel was a liar, but Gertrude remains comically obstinate, persisting in the belief she is a lady and owes nothing to her father who ought to bow to her. She flounces out.

A constable enters to announce the arrival of Petronel and Quicksilver. Touchstone is gleeful. He insists that Golding (in his new rank of deputy alderman) judges the rascals. The Shoemakers’ Holiday was about forgiveness and festivity. Eastward Ho! is about judgement and punishment. Golding lays out the accusations against both Petronel and Quicksilver in detail, and is seconded by a vengeful Touchstone. Then they instruct the constable to take them away pending further judgement.

Act 5 scene 1 At Gertrude’s lodgings Gertrude and Sindefy bewail the hard times they’ve fallen on. Gertrude has pawned her jewels, her gowns, her red velvet petticoat, and her wedding silk stockings and all Sin’s best apparel. She wishes she could sell her ladyship. She fantasises about finding a jewel or gold in the street, anything which could save her from poverty.

Her mother enters and laments all her ambitions and decisions to become a lady, but Gertrude blames her and asks how much she’s stolen from her cursed father. But she weeps bitterly. It’s not a funny scene. Eventually Mistress Touchstone advises that she goes and throws herself on the mercy of her good sister Mildred.

Act 5 scene 2 Goldsmith’s Row Wolf comes who is a gaoler of ‘the Counter’ where Petronel, Quicksilver and Security are imprisoned. He has brought letters from them begging for help and then describes their reformations. Touchstone is tempted to forgive but exists rather than give way to pity. Golding, true to his immaculate character as Good Man gives Wolf some money and messages of hope to take back to the prisoners.

Act 5 scene 3 The Counter i.e. prison. Lawyer Bramble visits Security who has gone half mad in captivity and can’t stand the light. Two anonymous gentlemen comment on the extent of Quicksilver’s reformation, who gave away all his fancy clothes, has penned a wonderful apology for his life and helps the other prisoners write petitions.

Wolf arrives back from Golding with the message of hope and a little money. Quicksilver has completely changed. He genuinely thanks Golding, then asks Wolf to distribute the money to other prisoners. The two gentlemen who have observed this noble gesture, remark on Quicksilver’s reformation.

Next, Golding himself arrives in disguise. He has a Plan. He asks Wolf to let him into the prison, then take his ring to Touchstone and say that he, Golding, has been imprisoned for a debt to some third party, can he (Touchstone) come quickly. Then they will work some kind of resolution. Wolf agrees, lets Golding into the prison, sets off with the message to Touchstone.

Act 5 scene 4 Touchstone’s house Mildred and Mistress Touchstone try to intercede on behalf of Gertrude but Touchstone insists his ears are stoppered like Ulysses’ against the sirens. Until Wolf arrives with the token, with Golding’s ring, which Touchstone recognises and instantly promises to come to his aid.

Act 5 scene 5 The Counter Touchstone enters with Wolf. Petronel and Quicksilver enter, and a prisoner and two gentlemen are present to listen to Quicksilver’s sincere and moving song of repentance. It’s a long doggerel poem and various bystanders applaud, ask for more and, at every interval. In an aside, Touchstone tells us that his hard heart is melting. By the end he is quite convinced of Quicksilver’s reformation and forgives him. He goes bail for Quicksilver, Petronel and half-mad Security and they are all released.

Gertrude, Mildred, Mistress touchstone, Sindefy and Winifred all arrive i.e. all the main characters are on stage. Gertrude finally repents and asks Touchstone’s forgiveness, and also her husband’s forgiveness and he begs her forgiveness for deceiving her. Is anything missing? Only that Quicksilver should marry his punk, Sindefy, and make a decent woman of her. Which he instantly volunteers to do.

Bad tastes

I didn’t like this play for at least three reasons:

The contrasts set up right at the start between Dutiful Daughter and Haughty Daughter, and Conscientious Apprentice and Spendthrift Apprentice, feel too mechanical, to put it mildly. Like many other aspects of the play the characters of Golding, who is Peter Perfect, and Mildred, who barely exists as an individual, feel schematic and lifeless.
The rascal characters are all too inevitably riding for a fall and, when they hit it, are judged very inflexibly and harshly. They don’t just fall, they are crushed into the dirt and ground underfoot, reduced to miserable penury in prison. Security goes mad. The harshness of their fate feels cruel.
And at countless incidental moments along the way, the characters are vile. Gertrude’s haughtiness to her father is meant to be funny, but can easily be read as just horrible. Much worse is the way Quicksilver and Security conspire against Petronel, but then Quicksilver and Petronel conspire against Security. They’re all scum. The basic attitude was epitomised for me by the way Petronel said that, once his deceived wife discovers there is no castle, she will be so angry, that she’d be doing Petronel a favour if she hanged herself. A kind of Tarantino level of heartlessness and hate underlies the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The quality of justice

Feels contrived. The rascals’ repentances have no real psychological validity. Gertrude in particular is a bitch up to the last moment – and believable and funny as such, probably the funniest character in the play – till she suddenly turns up in prison right at the last minute, a changed woman. It is literally unbelievable.

In my opinion there is something necessarily shallow about Jonson’s entire view of human nature, shallow and extreme. He sees people as viciously cynical and wicked right up to the last few pages… when they suddenly undergo miracle conversions. The cynicism is unpleasant and the conversions are insultingly shallow and contrived.

But the cardboard stereotypes are an inevitable result of the strictness of his theory of comedy. He thinks comedy should hold up folly and vice to ridicule. But this is a very ideological and schematic ambition, and explains the metallic inflexibility of the play. The precise details may be unpredictable but the ultimate outcome – the crushing humiliation of the rascals and fools – is never in doubt and feels profoundly unconvincing.

As C.G. Petter points out in his introduction to the New Mermaid edition of the play, there is a marriage at the play’s end, the rather tediously inevitable requirement of any comedy – but it is the marriage of an upstart social pretender (Quicksilver) to a whore (Sindefy) whose dowry is paid by a usurer (Security). Gertrude and Petronel’s marriage is a sham from the start, he only marries her for her money. And the marriage of Golding and Mildred in the first act has absolutely no romance or emotion about it whatsoever because it is the union of two wooden puppets.

The intellectual and psychological crudity of so much of this is typified by the thumpingly crude final moral, delivered by Touchstone. Having forgiven Quicksilver after the latter has read out his very poor, doggerel poem of repentance, Touchstone offers Quicksilver decent clothes to change into from his prison rags. But the newly penitent Quicksilver nobly turns down the offer, preferring to walk through the streets of London in his prison clothes to set an example to the children of Cheapside. At which Touchstone intones the final lines of the play:

TOUCHSTONE: Thou hast thy wish. Now, London, look about,
And in this moral see thy glass run out:
Behold the careful father, thrifty son,
The solemn deeds which each of us have done;
The usurer punish’d, and from fall so steep
The prodigal child reclaim’d, and the lost sheep.

Could anyone seriously expect that plays as wooden and contrived and stereotypical and obvious as this could be expected to ‘reform’ vice and folly? What a ludicrous idea. They’re a night out at the theatre, full of jokes, lots and lots of sexual innuendo, absurd farce, ironic reversals, sentimental speeches and a big round of applause at the end.

Elizabethan comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

Restoration comedies

17th century history

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 – 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 5

The Commonwealth 1649-1660

In my life I’ve met plenty of earnest republicans, who think we in the UK should abolish the monarchy because it stands at the apex of the system of power and privilege which entrenches privilege and inequality in British society, that we should disestablish the Church of England – whose only role is to prop up ‘the Establishment’ – and we should abolish the House of Lords, a ramshackle combination of Anglican bishops, hereditary peers and dodgy political nominees given places for ‘services rendered’ to the ruling party.

Anyway, all these steps were carried out 370 years ago, during the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and all modern republicans would do well to study in detail what happened.

Basically, the big constitutional experiment of the English Republic (from the execution of Charles I in 1642 to the restoration of Charles II in 1660) was a failure, because nobody knew what to replace the existing system with and all attempts at a replacement were a) unworkable b) unpopular. And because the Republic came to rely on the abilities and achievements of one man, Oliver Cromwell, and when he died the delicate balance of forces he’d held in place collapsed.

The history of the Commonwealth is a political laboratory in which the people who had overthrown the monarchy, the established church and the House of Lords tried to find an equitable and effective replacement – and failed.

In the end it became clear that the country could only be ruled by a strong leader – Oliver Cromwell – and in the end – and I think this is a crucial point – they offered him the kingship. Even his own supporters, republicans and Puritans, eventually tired of the ceaseless constitutional experiments and said, ‘Listen, just be king’.

Why? Because everyone understood kingship. The entire social and legal system was built around it. Everyone understood where they stood in terms of kingship and its powers, in fact it defined where many, perhaps most, people stood. The existence of the monarchy underpinned their sense of identity and meaning.

To effect a revolution you don’t just overthrow the existing order, you have to train everyone in the new order. You have to indoctrinate them in the new set of values. You have to create new identities for an entire nation.

The French Revolution had a good stab at this by declaring 1790 Year Zero, inventing a new calendar and a new religion of the Rights of Man – although all this was to be swept into the dustbin of history only a few years later upon the rise of Napoleon who, as soon as he could, restored all the trappings and regalia of monarchy, much to most peoples relief.

Only the Russians were brutal enough to realise that a revolution requires not just the overthrow but the extermination of the old system (killing not only the Czar but his entire family, and then imprisoning/executing as many of the old aristocracy as they could get their hands on), and the wholesale indoctrination of the entire population in new ways of thinking, something which, under Stalin, they made a sustained attempt to do.

But the English of Cromwell’s day had nothing like the propaganda tools of those later societies (Stalin’s attempts are indoctrinating an entire society happening almost exactly 300 years after Cromwell) – although they used what they had – Sunday sermons, early newspapers and pamphlets – to maximum effect.

After the execution of King Charles I

While he was still alive, King Charles acted as one clearly identified enemy who served to unify the very disparate factions in the Parliament and New Model Army. After the king was executed in January 1649 these differences began to come out into the open. Cromwell, who had been a leading force in the execution, was away on campaign from the middle of 1649 until 1651, and this allowed factionalism to grow in the Rump Parliament.

Once he had defeated the Royalists at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 – the last battle of the English civil wars – Cromwell returned to London and tried to force the Rump to set dates for new elections, to unite the three kingdoms under one ruling body, and to create a large, tolerant national church.

During the crisis leading up to the execution of the king many moderates had expressed all kinds of reservations, reluctant to kill the king, recoiling from the social and religious radicalism which had bubbled up in the New Model Army. Now the Rump dithered about setting an election. It passed a law allowing liberty of conscience but failed to devise any alternative for the tithes or to dismantle other aspects of the existing religious structure which supported the Anglican church.

In frustration, Cromwell demanded that the Rump establish a caretaker government in April 1653 of 40 members drawn jointly from the Rump and the army and then dissolve itself. But for the umpteenth time, the Rump ignored him, preferring to debate its own bill for setting up a new government.

This endless delay was what prompted Cromwell’s famous step of dissolving the Rump Parliament by force. On 20 April 1653 he entered the chamber accompanied by troopers, sat and listened to the debate for a while, and then stepped to the Mace, and declared:

You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament; I will put an end to your sitting.

He seized the ceremonial mace, symbol of Parliament’s power, called it a ‘bauble’ and demanded it be removed. The troops, commanded by Charles Worsley, later one of his Major Generals and one of his most trusted advisers, cleared the chamber. England now had no Parliament and no government.

Barebone’s Parliament, 1653

Nine days after the forced dissolution of the Rump, on 29 April Cromwell set up a small Council of State of thirteen members, responsible for foreign policy and administration of the country. The council debated what form a new English constitution should take. Major-General Thomas Harrison called for a sanhedrin of ‘saints’, a sanhedrin being an assembly of either twenty-three or seventy-one elders, appointed to sit as a tribunal in every city in the ancient Land of Israel, as recorded in the Bible.

Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist, who believed that the overthrow of the king signalled the imminent Second Coming of Jesus. Cromwell didn’t share these beliefs but liked the idea of an assembly of men chosen for their upright, religious credentials.

The Council raised the suggested number to 140 – 129 from England, five from Scotland and six from Ireland. The Council nominated all the new MPs themselves, with some informal consultation with independent congregations around the country.

At the opening of the assembly on 4 July 1653, Cromwell gave a speech lasting two hours reviewing the events which had led up to it, highlighting God’s Providence in the course of events, and emphasising that the nominated representatives now had divine sanction to govern the nation.

The Nominated Assembly, sometimes known as the Parliament of Saints, was quickly nicknamed Barebone’s Parliament after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone, a leather seller, Fifth Monarchist and lay preacher from Fleet Street in London.

Cromwell tasked them with finding a permanent constitutional and religious settlement (Cromwell was invited to be a member but declined). But almost immediately the assembly, despite being hand-picked by the narrow group of the Council of State, began to fall out over big issues, namely:

reforming tithes, objected to by many sects on the grounds that they were a remnant of Catholicism, that they supported a professional rather than voluntary clergy, and that their economic burden fell unequally: everyone agreed they were bad, but no-one could devise a workable replacement
the trial of professional trouble-maker John Lilburne, which split opinion
reform of the legal system, with Fifth Monarchists arguing that only laws contained in scripture should be reflected in the temporal legal system while moderates pushed for practical reform

Fierce argument over bills to abolish the Court of Chancery, regulate legal fees, and speed up settlement of cases in the Court of Admiralty added to the splitting of the assembly into factions. Attendance dropped from 140 to 100 to as few as 70 towards the end of its brief existence.

On 6 December the defeat of new proposals to reform tithes led a majority of moderates to give up. They wrote a letter and physically carried it down the road to Cromwell in Whitehall, asking for the Assembly to be dissolved. Faced with its simple refusal to carry on, Cromwell was forced to agree.

The Protectorate: 1653–1658

After the dissolution of the Barebones Parliament, John Lambert put forward a new constitution known as the Instrument of Government, closely modelled on a document called the Heads of Proposals which had first been drawn up by the Army in 1647.

The Instrument made Cromwell Lord Protector for life to undertake ‘the chief magistracy and the administration of government’. Cromwell was sworn in as Lord Protector on 16 December 1653, with a ceremony in which he was careful to wear plain black clothing, rather than any monarchical regalia.

But Cromwell did start signing his name ‘Oliver P’, P being an abbreviation for Protector, in the style of monarchs who use an R after their name to mean Rex or Regina – and it soon became the norm for others to address him as ‘Your Highness’. When you reflect on this, you realise that apparent backsliding like this from ‘republican principles’ take place because people need to know what they’re doing. They had all been raised in a very hierarchical model of society (and religion). Everybody, including Oliver, needed to know where they stood.

As Lord Protector, Cromwell had the power to call and dissolve parliaments but was obliged under the Instrument to seek the majority vote of a Council of State to do so. Nevertheless, Cromwell’s power was buttressed by his continuing popularity among the army. As the Lord Protector he was paid £100,000 a year, a vast sum.

Cromwell had two key objectives as Lord Protector. The first was ‘healing and settling’ the nation after the chaos of the civil wars and the regicide, which meant establishing a stable form for the new government to take.

Although Cromwell declared to the first Protectorate Parliament that ‘Government by one man and a parliament is fundamental’, in practice social priorities took precedence over precise forms of government. Cromwell was never interested in forms and details. The precise constitutional arrangements, were, Cromwell declared, ‘but … dross and dung in comparison of Christ.’

But Cromwell was no social revolutionary. Despite the revolutionary nature of the government, his thinking was socially conservative. Cromwell declared, ‘A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman; the distinction of these: that is a good interest of the nation, and a great one!’

His first Protectorate parliament proceeded to make small-scale reforms in the legal system, but these were outweighed by the broader attempts to restore order to English politics and affairs. Direct taxation was reduced slightly and peace was made with the Dutch, ending the First Anglo-Dutch War.

Cromwell secured the submission to his rule of England’s colonies in America. One of his notable acts was intervening to curb Puritans who were usurping control over the Maryland Colony by confirming the former Roman Catholic proprietorship and enforcing an edict of tolerance there. It’s interesting to learn that of all the English dominions, Virginia was the most resentful of Cromwell’s rule, and Cavalier emigration there increased during the Protectorate, laying the foundation for the elaborately courtly style of behaviour you find in novels about the Old South generations later.

Cromwell convened the first Protectorate parliament on 3 September 1654. He declared that ‘healing and settling’ were the ‘great end of your meeting’. However, the Parliament was quickly dominated by those pushing for more radical, republican reforms. After some initial gestures approving appointments previously made by Cromwell, the Parliament began to work on a radical programme of constitutional reform. Cronwell, a conservative by nature, balked at many of these changes but, rather than enter into endless meetings with constitutional lawyers, simply dissolved it on 22 January 1655.

Cromwell’s second objective for his Protectorate was spiritual and moral reform. He aimed to restore liberty of conscience and promote both outward and inward godliness throughout England. During the early months of the Protectorate, a set of ‘triers’ was established to assess the suitability of future parish ministers, and a related set of ‘ejectors’ was set up to dismiss ministers and schoolmasters who were judged unsuitable for office. The triers and the ejectors were intended to be at the vanguard of Cromwell’s reform of parish worship.

The Major Generals

After the dissolution of the first Protectorate Parliament, Cromwell tried another constitutional experiment. A Royalist uprising was planned for locations around the country early in 1655. In most places it was a damp squib with few if any civilians rallying to the handful of rebels, but the rising led by Sir John Penruddock in the West succeeded in seizing Salisbury for a few days, before being crushed by a troop of the New Model Army.

Since the uprising had been planned for centres all round the country it made sense to reinforce New Model garrisons everywhere. This led Cromwell’s adviser, General John Lambert to suggest going one step further and dividing England into military districts each ruled by army major-generals who answered only to him.

Map of the major generals and the regions they administered (source: BBC Bitesize)

Thus Cromwell appointed 15 major-generals and deputy major-generals each to rule a region of England and Wales. They were called ‘godly governors’ and charged not only – were central not only with maintaining national security, but forwarding Cromwell’s crusade to reform the nation’s morals.

The generals not only supervised militia forces and security commissions, but collected taxes and ensured support for the government in the English and Welsh provinces. Commissioners for securing the peace of the Commonwealth were appointed to work with them in every county.

While a few of these commissioners were career politicians, most were zealous puritans who welcomed the major-generals with open arms and embraced their work with enthusiasm. However, the major-generals lasted less than a year. Many commissioners feared they threatened their reform efforts and authority. Their position was further harmed by a tax proposal by Major General John Desborough to provide financial backing for their work, which the second Protectorate parliament – convened in September 1656 – voted down for fear of creating a permanent military state.

Ultimately, however, the fall of the major-generals was due to Cromwell’s failure to support his men in their conflicts with the commissioners. Their activities between November 1655 and September 1656 had, however, reopened the wounds of the 1640s and deepened antipathies to the regime.

Historians agree that the Major-Generals were tremendously unpopular and left a legacy of hostility towards standing armies which has, arguably, saved Britain from ever coming near the possibility of a military dictatorship.

Cromwell and the Jews Cromwell was aware of the Jewish community’s involvement in the economic success of the Netherlands, by the 1650s England’s leading commercial rival. This, and Cromwell’s principled tolerance of the right to private worship for those outside Puritanism, led to his personal encouragement of Jews to return to England in 1657, over 350 years after their banishment by Edward I, in the hope that they would help speed up the recovery of the country after the disruption of the Civil Wars.

Cromwell offered the crown

In 1657 a cohort of Cromwell’s closest advisers, frustrated by the repeated failures of their constitutional experiments, offered Cromwell the crown as part of a revised constitutional settlement. He agonised for six weeks over the offer. He was attracted by the prospect of stability it offered but finally, in a speech on 13 April 1657, he made clear that God’s providence had spoken against the office of King.

Instead, Cromwell was ceremonially re-installed as Lord Protector on 26 June 1657 at Westminster Hall, sitting upon King Edward’s Chair, which was moved specially from Westminster Abbey for the occasion. The event in part echoed a coronation, using many of its symbols and regalia, such as a purple ermine-lined robe, a sword of justice and a sceptre (but not a crown or an orb). But the office of Lord Protector was still not to become hereditary, though Cromwell was now able to nominate his own successor.

Cromwell’s new rights and powers were laid out in the Humble Petition and Advice, a legislative instrument which replaced the Instrument of Government. This new constitution echoed many aspects of the old constitution, including a house of life peers (in place of the House of Lords). In the Humble Petition it was called ‘the Other House’ as the Commons could not agree on a suitable name.

But the Humble Petition and Advice did not provide for the vetting of members of the House of Commons and when it assembled in 1658 many of those who had been excluded in the first session, retook their seats and immediately began attacking the new settlement – rather as, every time Charles I reconvened Parliament, it picked up its fierce criticism of him exactly where it had left off.

So on 4 February 1658, Cromwell again dissolved Parliament. During 1658 Cromwell increasingly took on the trappings of traditional monarchy, notably creating three peerages: Charles Howard was made Viscount Morpeth and Baron Gisland in July 1657 and Edmund Dunch was created Baron Burnell of East Wittenham in April 1658.

Death and legacy

On 3 September 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, aged 59, exhausted by his efforts to create an honest, godly, English society. The Lord protectorship passed to his son, Richard, who had none of his father’s qualities and struggled to hold together the rival political, religious and military factions of the regime. Nine months later he was gone.

So Cromwell:

overthrew monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England
tried to hold free and fair elections
nominated a parliament of the righteous
divided the country into administrative units run by army generals in co-operation with civilian commissioners
tried to institute freedom of religious belief
tried to resist the forceful offer of the monarchy from his closest supporters
supervised but then was forced to dissolve two elected parliaments

It’s easy to interpret Cromwell as a religious fanatic, a hypocrite and, from an Irish point of view, as a genocidal bigot. But he can also be seen as a man into whose lap fell a unique, once-in-history opportunity to utterly redraw the constitution of England, something he tried to do again and again – and failed.

In May 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne and with him came the House of Lords, the Church of England and its bishops. The ten-year experiment to devise some other way of ruling this country had failed. Many of the best minds of the time joined in the attempt, but none of could concoct a system which a) could win the support of even a minority of the nation b) could come up with solutions to the numerous issues which confronted them (funding of the church, ownership of church land, reform of the law, management of international affairs, and so on).

Abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords and disestablishing the Church of England would, even today, in a sense, be relatively easy, a few acts of Parliament would achieve it. But:

What, exactly, would you replace them with? that’s the catch
And would whatever you replace them with be in any better position to tackle and solve the intractable social problems which confront us, than Barebones Parliament or the Major-Generals were to tackle the pressing problems of Cromwell’s day?

The restoration of Charles II was greeted with wild enthusiasm, and he has gone down in history as one of the most popular English monarchs and what did he represent, on a popular level? Booze and boobs. Drinking, gambling and mistresses.

What the Restoration proved once and for all is that England is not a nation of high-minded, earnest intellectuals just gagging to be reformed by high-minded Puritans. It is a nation of Sun-readers, who follow the football, like a flutter on the horses, a pie and a pint on a Friday night, and the chance to dress up and go on the pull at the local nightclub every Saturday night. It is a nation of overweight shopaholics with an average reading age of 11.

So when I argue with high-minded and (generally) very well-educated republicans, I ask them, ‘Who do you think you would be abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords for? Apart from your high-minded Guardian-reading friends? Do you think this nation of party animals, obese alcoholics and lager louts will thank you for your efforts? You’re offering a society with no more coronations, no more royal weddings, no more tittle tattle about Megan and Catherine. Do you expect the people of this great nation to thank you for that?’

Old Olly wasn’t jolly, whereas Charles II had at least thirteen mistresses and 21 illegitimate children. Which one did ‘the people’ prefer, then as now? It is a lowering and dispiriting fact, but it is a fact which all leftists and liberals should acknowledge and start from.

Karl Marx on the American Civil War (1861-65)

Marx the journalist

Karl Marx fled the revolutions which rocked Europe in 1848 to the relative calm and safety of London. Although he never intended to, Marx then ended up spending the rest of his life, in fact three quarters of his entire adult life, in capitalist England.

Ironically for Marx the revolutionary, he lived here during pretty much the quietest period of 19th century English history. The uproar surrounding the Great Reform Act of 1832 was long over, and the Chartist Movement failed and fizzled out after 1848. There followed 25 years or so of growing wealth, accompanied by (admittedly piecemeal) Parliamentary legislation to try and improve the lot of the working classes toiling in the new industrial cities in their grim seven-days-a-week factories. It was the era of the triumphant bourgeoisie and the unstoppable rise of British Imperialism, in India, China and around the world.

Although Karl wanted to write great masterworks of historical and economic theory, these wouldn’t pay the rent for himself, his wife and growing family. Although he wanted to be at the head of great revolutionary organisations, the Communist League with which he’d been associated during the 1848 revolutions, splintered and fizzled into insignificance.

So Karl turned to journalism, which he had actively pursued in Germany since his student days (it was his editorship of the seditious Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne which was the reason he was kicked out of Germany in 1849).

Incongruously, Marx ended up getting a job not even with a British publication, but with the New York Daily Tribune, working as its European correspondent, from 1852 to 1862. The Tribune had wide working-class appeal in America and, at two cents, was inexpensive. It had a circulation of 50,000 copies per issue and its editorial line was progressive and anti-slavery.

So it was a this progressive New York newspaper which ended up paying the rent of the Marx household living in Soho, London for a decade. However, when civil war broke out in America in the spring of 1861, it was for the Liberal Vienna paper Die Presse that Karl wrote 37 articles about it, starting six months into the conflict, on 20 October 1861.

Karl Marx

Marx’s articles about the American Civil War

The American Civil War began with the secession of the southern slave states, starting with South Carolina, which declared independence in January 1861.

The eight seceded states went on to declare themselves a new nation, the Confederacy, with its capital at Montgomery, Alabama. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces shelled Fort Sumter, a fort off the coast of South Carolina which was still held by units of the U.S. or Union army. It was this action which signalled the start of the American Civil War.

Of Karl’s 37 articles just two are translated and published in the Penguin selection of Karl’s Writings From Exile 1848-1863, which is a shame. I wonder if you can read the lot online.

Karl begins by lining up the London papers of the day, The Times, The Economist, The Saturday Review and summarising their positions.

Most of the British press sympathised with the southern states. They thought the war was mostly about the issue of trade tariffs. The North imposed various tariffs on imports and exports, whereas the South didn’t. Moreover, an enormous amount of southern cotton was bought by British factory owners, turned into clothes, and traded back to the South (or sold on to India).

This explains why Britain, being a free trade nation, and economically linked to the region, had strong sympathies with the South.

It was because of this economic self-interest – Karl argued – that Britain’s papers and politicians argued, ‘Why shouldn’t the South declare itself a separate nation?’ And ‘Why should the North bother, or dare, to try and invade and suppress this new nation?’

Buried, pushed aside, undiscussed in all the mainstream media articles which Marx quotes, is the issue of slavery. In the two articles published in the Penguin selection, Marx sets out to contradict and refute the British bourgeois position, and to put the issue of slavery smack bang in the middle of the argument.

Marx’s knowledge

Marx is incredibly knowledgeable. I found reading the nineteen pages which these articles make up in the Penguin edition nearly as illuminating as reading James McPherson’s 860-page history of the war. Karl demonstrates a surprisingly detailed grasp of the geography, the economic facts, the demographic changes and the political manoeuvring that led up to the war.

Karl gives his unstinting support to the North and says it must conquer the South and overthrow its iniquitous slavery system. Otherwise the South will triumph in its pre-war attempts to impose and spread slavery to all parts of America and with it, to enslave the working classes, too.

Karl says the war is about slavery pure and simple. The Founding Fathers may have been slave-owners (most famously Washington and Jefferson), but they thought slavery was an evil imported from England which they hoped would eventually die out. By contrast, apologists for the South treated slavery as a good in itself which deserved to be spread as widely as possible. According to them, slaves loved their slavery. Not only that, they wished to spread and cement slavery as a core element in American society. The South is fighting, as one apologist put it, for ‘the foundation of a great slave republic,’ (page 336).

Karl details the political build-up to the war, including:

the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which established 36º 30′ as the northernmost extent of slavery)
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 (which retracted that ruling)
the attempt to spread slavery into New Mexico
the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which forced northern officials to acquiesce in the hunting, kidnapping and return of slaves who had fled North into slavery-free states
the 1857 Dred Scott case which established that slave owners had a right to take their slaves anywhere in the country

Marx describes the revival of the slave trade in the years running up to the war which, he claims, had resulted in 15,000 new Africans being kidnapped and brought to America (making a bigger deal of it than McPherson does in his history).

And Marx repeats the outrageous but widely publicised aims of the southern states to conquer Cuba for America, and to extend their rule throughout Central America (specifically in Nicaragua where, for a year, a southern American mercenary did, indeed, manage to become president!).

All of these political events show, to Karl, the wish of the South not just to defend slavery, but to actively extend it throughout the wider region.

Why?

Marx’s economic explanation for the motives of the Confederate states

Karl gives a characteristically economic explanation for political events.

The old slave states are exhausting their soil. Maryland, Virginia, even South Carolina, have become net exporters of slaves. ‘Breed ’em and sell ’em,’ is the slavers’ policy. Therefore, the slave states need a steady supply of new markets, they need to make new territorial conquest, in order to maintain their economies.

Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil… South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances in so far as it already sells slaves to the states of the Deep South and South-West to the tune of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slave-holders can introduce slave labour into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave-raising and the sale of slaves. (page 341)

There is also politics. Each American state sends two senators to the Senate, regardless of population. Therefore, there is a naked power struggle whenever a new state is admitted to the Union as to whether its two senators will be pro or anti slavery, each new state’s nature threatening to upset the very finely tuned balance of power between slave and anti-slave states in Congress.

Who is pushing the drive to extend slavery? Karl estimates that there are only some 300,000 significant slave owners in the whole of the country. So an oligarchy of 300,000 has been trying to impose the political, legal and economic system which underpins its wealth onto the other 20 million Americans.

This ‘plantocracy’ was well aware what it was fighting for and understood that to restrict slavery to its current territories would:

reduce slaver representation in the senate i.e. undermine their political power
lead, over the long term, to the inevitable extinction of slavery
and the consequent general impoverishment of the South would lead to class warfare between the slave-owners and the poor whites who would, finally, realise how they are being exploited by the wealthy 300,000

Thus the war is nothing to do with free trade and tariffs, as the respectable London papers were trying to claim. It was about whether:

the 20 million free Americans should submit to a political and economic system imposed by an oligarchy of 300,000
the vast new territories of the Republic should be slave or free
whether the foreign policy of America should be peaceful – or get dragged into further wars with Cuba and Central America

Punchy and pithy

Karl is at his journalistic, punchy and pithy best. In the second article he makes the rhetorical point that the South – which had declared itself a new nation – isn’t a proper nation at all.

It is not a country at all, it is a battle-cry. (p.344)

In the second article he gives a detailed description of the geography and slave populations of all the ‘border’ states between south and north and describes how the slave states had made political, legal and, finally, armed attempts to infiltrate and capture these states for slavery.

Conventional opinion had it that it was the northern armies who had invaded the south, and indeed most of the fighting was done on the soil of southern or the so-called ‘border’ states. But Karl’s list of, first, the political attempts to suborn the border states, and then his detailed accounts of border incursions and raids by southern forces, makes a powerful case that the war is in fact:

a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery. (page 350)

A glance at the map of America in 1854 shows what was being fought over. The southern slave states (dark green) already controlled significantly more land than the northern free states (pink). The issue was: should slavery be extended into the huge expanse of land to the west (light green) – nearly half of the American land mass, which was still only roughly parcelled out into territories provisionally named Kansas, New Mexico, Oregon etc, but which would, in the near future, attain the status of ‘states’ and be admitted to the union. Should they be slave – or free?

American states in 1854

Marx was wrong about lots of things but the materialist worldview which predisposed him to see all major events in terms of their economic basis and in terms of the class conflicts which capitalism inevitably give rise to, often gave him a thrillingly incisive vision which cut through the painful bombast and wordy rhetoric of the stuffy, obtuse Victorians he lived among.

Thus in Marx’s view the American Civil War was emphatically not about tariffs or free trade or the right to have a separate culture or any of the other mystifications and obfuscations which filled so many speeches and newspaper columns, no:

The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully co-exist on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

He thought the North would win and that the full emancipation of the slaves was inevitable.

Given that he was writing in November 1861, with the war only six months old and most Republicans (including President Lincoln) still reluctant to countenance slave emancipation under any circumstances, Karl in these articles was not only typically incisive and insightful, but remarkably prophetic.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (3) by James M. McPherson (1987)

This is a long book. It takes McPherson about 280 pages before he gets to the outbreak of hostilities, just to paint in the complicated political, economic, legal and social background to the American Civil War. This build-up section is absolutely fascinating, giving insights into a number of deep and enduring aspects of American history and culture.

Cuba

I had no idea that freelance forces raised in the southern states repeatedly tried to invade and capture Cuba (this was after President Polk offered Spain $100 million for it and Spain haughtily refused). The so-called ‘Ostend Manifesto’ of 1854 declared that Cuba was as vital for American interests as any of the other American states. Invasion attempts were led by Narciso Lopez among others. Cuba was attractive because it had a slave population of some 500,000 i.e. annexing it to America would create a) another slave state, thus giving the existing slave states more political clout, b) add a big new territory in which slaves could be bought and sold i.e. where slave traders could make a profit.

And Nicaragua. In 1855 adventurer and mercenary leader William Walker managed to get himself appointed head of the Nicaraguan army, from where he usurped the presidency, ruling as President of Nicaragua for a year, 1856-57, before being defeated in battle by an alliance of other Central American states. (Walker had previously ‘conquered’ La Paz, the capital of sparsely populated Baja California, with a force of 43 men, and concocted various plans to seize territory from Mexico. McPherson’s book conveys a wonderful sense of this era of bandits, adventurers, filibusters and mercenaries.)

Plenty of southern ideologists thought that, blocked by the free states in the north, their destiny was to seize and conquer all the nations surrounding the Gulf of Mexico (Mexico, all of Central America, all the Caribbean islands), institute slavery in all of them, and corner the market in all the world’s coffee, sugar, cotton and other tropical goods, establish a new slave empire.

What an epic vision!

The various invasion attempts reinforced Latin American countries’ suspicion of America’s boundless arrogance and her thinly veiled ambitions to control the entire hemisphere, which lasts to this day.

Reviving the slave trade

Many southerners wanted to renew the slave trade, and some went as far as commissioning private ships to go buy Africans and ferry them back to America e.g. Charles Lamar, although Lamar was arrested (and released) and no sizeable trade was, in the end, established.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

In McPherson’s opinion the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was ‘the most important single event pushing the nation towards civil war (p.121).

The territories of Kansas and Nebraska needed to be defined and organised. The process was led by Senator Stephen Douglas. He needed senate support. A key block of southerners made it clear they wouldn’t support the bill unless Douglas allowed slavery in the new states. To be precise, unless he repealed the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’ which had a been a central part of successive compromises with the slave states since 1820.

Douglas inserted such a repeal into the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the bill’s supporters then forced a meeting with President Pierce (1853-57) during which they threatened him: ‘Endorse repeal or lose the south’.

Pierce caved in, the act passed and caused a storm of protest. McPherson details the process by which the Kansas-Nebraska Act precipitated the collapse of the Whig party, whose northern and southern wings increasingly struggled to find common ground. From the ashes arose a variety of anti-slavery parties, which eventually crystallised into a new, entirely northern, Republican party.

Nativism

Immigration quadrupled after the great potato blight in Ireland of the mid-1840s. Immigration in the first five years of the 1850s was five times higher than a decade earlier. Most of the immigrants were Catholic Irish fleeing the famine or Germans fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848. They tended to be poor peasant labourers who crammed into urban tenements, driving up crime, squalor, disease and drunkenness.

Pope Pius IX (1846-78) helped stoke anti-Catholic feeling among liberals and the American Protestant establishment by making the Catholic Church a beacon for reactionary beliefs – declaring the doctrine of papal infallibility and publishing a Syllabus of Errors which forbade Catholics from praising or practicing liberalism, socialism, public education, women’s rights and so on. American Catholic archbishop Hughes published an inflammatory book declaring that Protestantism was declining and would soon be replaced by Catholicism in America.

Unsurprisingly, in reaction, spokesman arose for a movement called ‘nativism’, which promoted the Protestant virtues of sobriety and hard work. There were riots and fights in cities between nativist mobs and Catholic groups.

Nativism overlapped with a growing temperance movement, which sought to close down bars and ban hard liquor – an anticipation of the Prohibition of the 1920s.

Secret societies grew up dedicated to keeping America Protestant by organising their members to only vote for Protestant candidates. There may have been up to a million members of these societies who were told that, if anyone asked about the name or membership of their local branch, they were to say ‘I know nothing’. As a result they became known as the ‘Know-nothings’, and in the few years up to the Civil War knownothingness became a sort of political craze.

The Catholic Irish also tended to be strongly against blacks, with whom they competed for the roughest labouring jobs at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It was the Irish vote which played a key part in preventing blacks from being given equal voting rights in New York, in 1846. One journalist summarised the conflict as:

freedom, temperance and Protestantism against slavery, rum and Catholicism (p.137)

Abraham Lincoln

The trigger for civil war was the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on 6 November 1860. The less well-known of the two candidates for the Republican party, it wasn’t so much him personally, as the sweeping triumph of the essentially northern antislavery Republican party running on a platform of opposing the spread of slavery to any more U.S. states, which prompted southern slave states to finally carry out the acts of secession they’d been threatening every time there was a political clash or controversy for the previous decade or more. (For example, South Carolina had threatened to secede in 1850 over the issue of California’s statehood).

Indeed, it was South Carolina which first seceded from the United States as a result of a political convention called within days of Lincoln’s election, the official secession declared on December 20, 1860. South Carolina was quickly followed by Mississippi (January 9, 1861), Florida (January 10, 1861), Alabama (January 11, 1861), Georgia (January 19, 1861), Louisiana (January 26, 1861), Texas (February 1, 1861), Virginia (April 17, 1861), Arkansas (May 6, 1861), North Carolina (May 20, 1861), and Tennessee (seceded June 8, 1861).

The seceding states joined together to form the Confederate States of America (CSA). In April 1861 President Lincoln made a speech saying the seceded states did not form a separate country, and that he would take steps to protect Union property and assets in the so-called Confederate states.

Almost immediately a flashpoint arose at Fort Sumter built on a sandbar at the entrance to the harbour of Charleston, capital of South Carolina. Reports that the Union navy was planning to resupply the small Union garrison in the (unfinished) fort prompted the South Carolina militia to make a pre-emptive strike and bombard the Fort into surrender on April 12, 1861. These were the first shots fired in the Civil War and Lincoln had been astute in managing to ensure it was a rebel state who fired them.

A political war

It was a political war. From start to finish the aims of both sides were political – broadly speaking the survival of their respective political, economic and social systems (one based on slave labour, one not) i.e. it was not a war fought about land or conquest.

Although it quickly escalated (or degenerated) into a total war, mobilising the resources of both sides, and leading to terrible casualties, the political aspect of the struggle was always pre-eminent.

Neither side was monolithic. There were moderates in the south, there were even unionists in the upper southern states, to whom Lincoln held out the possibility of negotiation and reconciliation. Similarly, not all northerners were in favour of total war, and one plank of southern rhetoric was to reach out to northern ‘constitutionalists’ by emphasising that the southern states’ cause was a logical consequence of the American Constitution’s concern for each state’s individual autonomy. They were merely fighting for their rights under the Constitution to govern by their own laws.

Whose rights came first – the states or the Union as a whole? Who ruled – the central or the states governments? This had proved a thorny problem for the drafters of the Constitution back in the 1780s and was, at least to begin with, the core issue of the war. It’s certainly the one Abraham Lincoln focused on in his early speeches, which assert that you simply can’t have a government if large parts of the country threaten to secede every time laws are passed which they disagree with.

We must settle this question now: whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.

But the south didn’t think it was a matter of this or that law – they thought the Republicans’ stated aim of stopping slavery from spreading and, in time, forcing it to wither and die, represented an existential threat their entire economic and cultural existence. As the South’s reluctant president, Jefferson Davis, said, the Confederate states had been forced:

to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and state sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires.

Length and complexity

This is why the first 300 pages of McPherson’s book are so important. They need to paint a really thorough picture of the confused and contradictory political scene right across American society in the decades preceding the conflict:

explaining the arguments over slavery which tore both the pre-war Whig Party and that Democrat Party apart
explaining the rise of the new antislavery Republican party; describing the importance of nativist and racist movements in the north (not only anti-Catholic and anti-Irish but also anti-negro)
describing in detail the sequence of political crises which flared up over the admission of each new state to the union, the blizzard of arguments on both sides about whether each the new state should be slave or free
and detailing the complicated compromises which just about papered over the cracks for decades until the election of Lincoln.

And you need a good grasp of the kaleidoscopic and shifting complexity of American political scene in these years to understand why Lincoln took the decisions he did; for example why he appointed to his first cabinet several of his major political rivals – even from other parties – in order to build the widest coalition.

Why he appointed a soldier from the rival Democrat party George B. McClellan as head of the army on the Potomac, and stuck with him even though he failed to press the North’s military and logistical advantage.

Similarly, why Lincoln delayed so long before declaring the Emancipation of the Slaves – namely that he had to keep onside as many as possible of the Democrat (i.e. slave-friendly) politicians in the north who had continued attending the Union Congress and Senate, and avoid offending opinion in the border states of Missouri and Kansas.

The American Civil War really is a classic example of the old saying that war is politics by other means as, throughout the conflict, both leaders, Lincoln and Davis, had to manage and negotiate unending squabbles on their own sides about the war’s goals and strategies. McPherson notes how both leaders at various points felt like quitting in exasperation – and how both sides found their war aims changing and evolving as political feeling changed, and as the value of various alliances also changed in importance.

Killers

Meanwhile, as in any war, some men discovered that they liked killing.

You need the background and build-up in order to understand why the border states between north and south (for example, Missouri and Virginia) found themselves torn apart by opposing political movements and descending into their own mini civil wars, which generated gangs of raiders and freelancers beholden to neither side, degenerating into tit-for-tat bloodbaths.

One of Quantrill’s Raiders, the best-known of the pro-Confederate partisan guerrillas (or bushwhackers) who fought in the American Civil War. Their leader was William Quantrill and they included Jesse and Frank James (pp.292 and 303)

It takes some time to explain why such a large, rich, bustling, vibrant nation managed to tear itself to pieces and descend, in many places, into violent anarchy. Battle Cry of Freedom is a very long book because it needs to be – but it never ceases to be completely absorbing and continually illuminating.

Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)

Without the slaves there would have been no sugar and without sugar there would have been no national addiction to coffee and, later, to tea. (p.4)

I bought Walvin’s book 20 years ago, read it and found it as unsatisfactory then as I do now. He uses a thematic approach to grouping the material in order to loosely follow the slave experience. Thus the opening chapters describe the ways slaves were seized in Africa – in war or expressly for slavery – marched to the coast, he describes the coastal slaving forts, the Atlantic crossing, the slave auctions in America or the Caribbean, and then life and death on the different types of plantation.

It’s a valid enough approach, but the downside is it is very bitty. It creates a kind of magpie effect, picking out dazzling facts and incidents from Barbados in 1723 or Georgia in 1805 or Jamaica in 1671, fragmenting your understanding.

Not only is there little sense of chronological development and change, but some of the incidents he chooses are in reverse chronological order, so that the chapter about slave rebellions opens with the massive slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s, treating it at some length. But a) to do so he has to bend his own rules since Haiti – then called Saint Domingue – was a French colony and everywhere else Walvin restricts himself strictly to British colonies.

And b) he then works backwards from the Haiti revolt, to describe far earlier uprisings from the 1600s onwards, for example the Stono uprising in South Carolina in 1739, or jumps forward to uprisings near the end of the period – Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, 1831, or the 1822 Charleston uprising, and then back to Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, then forward to the Baptist Uprising on Jamaica in 1831.

It all ends up being quite confusing. Much more sensible would have been to try and show what the slaves cumulatively learned about organising uprisings, and what the authorities learned about suppressing them.

Walvin repeatedly refers to the differences between plantation culture in the West Indies and on the American mainland, but never makes them as clear as Alan Taylor does in his outstanding book American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (sugar grew best in the West Indies, tobacco in the Chespeake Bay area (Virginia, Georgia) and Europe-style agriculture from New York north into New England).

It was entirely these agricultural and climatic facts which gave rise to the intensive slave labour of huge sugar plantations in the Indies, to large but not-quite-so-vast tobacco slave plantations in the South, and to the relatively slave-free, family-run farms of the middle and northern states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England).

Most irritating of all, Walvin has a fondness for rhetorical questions, which often just seem lame. It’s as if a historian of the Holocaust kept stopping every few pages to sigh, ‘But where are the memorials to all the Jews that died at Belsen?’ or ‘How can we imagine the feelings of the Jews of Jewish mothers as they carried their babies into the gas chambers?’

The facts are quite horrifying enough. They don’t need lachrymose embellishments, such as:

When Lord Mansfield died, in March 1793, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey… But where are the memorials to those thousands whose lives were touched by the career of England’s Chief Justice? (p.22)

But how many watery miles would always remain between the slaves he had sold in Antigua and their loved ones in Africa? (p.43)

Nuggets

Nonetheless, the book does have loads of nuggets of information tucked away in it, and I thought I’d extract and list ones which stood out for me, as an aide-memoire:

Drinks The new fashionable drinks of the late 1600s and early 1700s – coffee, tea and chocolate – are all naturally bitter. They need sweetener. Sugar. Grown by slaves. What a stunning fact that a product from China (later imported into India and Ceylon), sweetened by tea from the West Indies, grown by slaves imported from Africa, became an addiction in cold northern Europe.

Puddings During the 18th century the British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar: hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, creams, charlottes and bettys, trifles and fools, syllabubs and tansys, junkets and ices, milk pudding, suet pudding, custards and cakes, and rice pudding (rice grown by slaves in Georgia and Carolina, sugar grown by slaves in the Indies).

Somerset v Stewart (1772) Slavery had never been authorized by statute in England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield decided that it was also unsupported in common law. Lord Mansfield tried to narrowly limit his judgment to the issue of whether a person, regardless of being a slave, could be removed from England against their will, and said they could not. Nonetheless the case ‘aroused enormous interest and political controversy’ (p.305) and became one of the most significant milestones in the abolitionist campaign.

Mansfield had in his own household a black slave, Elizabeth Dido, born to a slave woman captured aboard a Spanish ship by a British pirate, who got her pregnant and passed the baby on to his relative Mansfield, who brought her up.

In his will Mansfield specified that Dido be freed and given an annuity for life.

The Zong case (1781) The Zong was a Liverpool-based slave ship. In September 1780 it departed the coast of Africa for Jamaica with 470 slaves on board. 60 Africans and seven crew had died from disease on the crossing when, on November 29, Captain Luke Collingwood called a meeting of his officers to decide whether to throw the sick Africans overboard in order to preserve the others and save drinking water. 131 slaves were thrown overboard. The owners of the Zong, Gregson, claimed the loss of their slaves (£30 each) from their insurers, Gilbert. The insurers refused to pay. The case was taken to court and provoked a storm of outrage. Another milestone towards abolition.

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

John Newton John Newton, later in life an ardent abolitionist and author of the hymn Amazing Grace was, early in life, captain of a slave ship and responsible for punishing and reprimanding uppity slaves. He used thumbscrews.

The Middle Passage It surprised me that, as a proportion, more of the white crews died in the Atlantic crossing, than the slaves. I have seen the diagrams of the slaves packed tight below decks hundreds of times, and they have been recycled in numerous works of art as symbols of unprecedented suffering. Who knew, that as a proportion, more whites died than blacks!

All Souls Barbados was the most densely planted and cultivated sugar island in the West Indies. The largest slave owner was Christopher Codrington. It was his land which funded the establishment of the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford. It comes as no surprise to learn that in our politically sensitive times, the College is setting up a scholarship to help West Indian students.

Oxford college to launch scholarship in attempt to address slavery legacy

West Indian output Between the 1660s and the abolition of slavery, the African population of the West Indian sugar islands rose to 1 million. During that period over 10 million tonnes of sugar were produced.

Task work Slaves were set tasks and, once these were complete, were free to tend their own gardens, practice artisan skills and so on. In fact, one of the biggest learnings from Walvin is that many slaves had a surprising amount of freedom and agency.

Many were trained in a very wide range of skills, from artisan work such as coopers, carpenters and smiths, to work gang overseers, to book keepers and accountants, while off to one side of field work was an entire hierarchy of domestic servants from lowliest char to senior butler and household supervisor.

I thought the chapter about ‘runaways’ would be about desperate conspiracies to break shackles, get through the barbed wire fence and escape – but this is completely wrong. It turns out many, many slaves had jobs which naturally took them far afield, taking all kinds of goods to local markets, fetching and carrying from towns or neighbouring plantations, and even operating boats and ships to carry plantation produce down river to collection centres and big towns.

Slaves were much more mobile than we might imagine. (p.165)

Some slaves’ jobs required them to be absent from the plantation for weeks on end, and so it turns out that the definition of ‘runaway’ is ragged round the edges. Many slaves didn’t ‘run away’ so much as stay away longer than a job warranted – for all kinds of human reasons, because they had a sweetheart to visit, or distant spouses and children they’d been separated from, to gamble and get drunk.

Free blacks Similarly, it is startling to have it brought home how many free Africans lived in the slave areas, specially of the Deep South. They also sailed the seas as free sailors, alongside white sailors, ending up in ports wherever European ships anchored – which is to say, right round the world.

Striking that Olaudah Equiano, who left a detailed account of his life, worked aboard a British ship which made an expedition to the Arctic in 1773!

If there is one really pervasive message to Walvin’s book, it is the counter-intuitive one that slaves – captured, enslaved Africans and their descendants – were emphatically not passive helpless victims, but adapted to their appalling new circumstances, spread into all walks of life available, acquired skills, saved up and earned their freedom, set up businesses and schools, and sailed the seven seas alongside their European one-time captors.

As Walvin puts it, everywhere historians look, they see:

the growth of an independent slave culture, linked to the world of plantation slavery but operating and thriving at an economically autonomous level. (p.115)

The black African element not only underpinned the wealth of the British Empire in the 1700s, but was everywhere visible in that empire.

It was news to me that there was a black drummer in the Scottish court in 1507, that Henry VII and Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter, that Elizabeth I had black musicians and dancers. At a celebration ball in London in 1764 all the musicians were black.

Black servants were highly fashionable among the 18th century aristocracy. And not just aristocrats. Samuel Johnson’s much-loved manservant Francis Barber was black, and Johnson not only made him his heir but left him most of his important papers.

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with a black servant by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Death in the Indies The majority of slaves were imported into the West Indies where they dropped like flies, because of poor food, appalling conditions, and being worked to death by the brutal requirements of sugar production. Fewer slaves were imported onto the American continent, but more of them survived because working tobacco was relatively less onerous, food and conditions were better, and, above all, disease was less lethal.

Music Apparently, it’s racist to say that Africans have a special feel for music and rhythm – but the testimony of slave owners and visitors to plantations is full of evidence for the slaves’ fondness for music of all sorts, from chanted and sung words alone, to the accompaniment of instruments made from whatever came to hand, through to full proficiency on European instruments like the violin.

Christianity I’ve met no end of progressives, especially feminists, who think that Christianity’s influence was and is and can only ever be a terrible, calamitous thing. In some respects this may be true, but Walvin has a chapter ramming home the fact that it was the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, and the spread of Protestant missionaries throughout the slave colonies, the conversion of many slaves to Christianity, and then the widespread dissemination of Christian anti-slavery pamphlets, sermons and so on, from the 1770s onwards – which played a huge role in creating widespread public and political support for abolition.

The role of Christianity in freeing the slaves was ‘seismic’ (p.194).

Phases of abolition Anyone familiar with the subject knows this, but it’s worth emphasising that abolition came in waves.

In the 1780s there were attempts to rein in what were becoming the well-publicised excesses of plantation owners in the colonies. Parliament passed laws restricting the types of punishment (for example, the number of lashes) they could dole out.

Phase one was the campaign from the end of the American War of Independence (1783) to abolition in 1807. This first abolition was the abolition of the slave trading by ship. From 1807 no British ship was allowed to carry slaves. Parliament and the campaigners expected that this would result in an improvement in the conditions of slaves in the West Indies, and they set up a demographic register to monitor change.

In the event, the evidence came in that it improved nothing. The condition of slaves in the Indies remained as miserable as ever. Abolitionism was put on hold during the Wars with France. When these ended in 1815, there was a period of intense political repression in Britain. But this slackened in the 1820s and a new generation called for further reform, and not just of slavery.

The new post-war generation chafed against the domination of the landed gentry under the old voting franchise. The industrialists of the north chafed against having no political power to match their new wealth. Apologists for capitalism insisted that Free Trade was the great panacea which would drive the British economy and so campaigned against trade tariffs. Christian missionaries provided a ceaseless supply of literature describing the appalling conditions and sufferings of the ongoing slave colonies.

This was the second wave of abolitionism, led by a new generation, which called for the abolition of slavery on moral, Christian, but also economic and political grounds. Free market economists insisted that slavery distorted markets, businesses and wages, thus hampering the growth of British trade and prosperity.

It was only after the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, and a new ‘reformed’ Parliament assembled, that a laws was finally passed to abolish the condition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

On 1 August 1834 all slaves under 6 were freed. Adults became ‘apprentices’ and were still forced to work for their owners for 40 hours a week, for nothing, for a period of 6 years. Some islands decided tojust get on and free all their slaves.

Many of the colonies had reacted to the unrelenting pressure from the church and the mother country against slavery, by steadily releasing slaves already, especially if they were old, ill or unable to work. Slavery was always first and foremost an economic consideration.

Full abolition only came at midnight on 31 July 1838. Freed slaves across the West Indies held marches and parades, made speeches, attended church, decked their houses and towns with flags and bunting.

The British enforced the slave trade Having seen the light, the British became enthusiastic opponents of the slave trade wherever it remained. It became a standing order of the Royal Navy to confiscate slave ships. Between 1820 and 1870 the Royal Navy seized 1,600 slave ships on the Atlantic and freed 150,000 slaves, especially heading to Cuba and Brazil.

American slavery But we no longer had jurisdiction over the United States. By 1860 there were some 4 million slaves in the USA, far more than had been liberated from the British colonies in the 1830s.

Their struggle for liberation, and the epic civil war it prompted, is another story.

American Colonies by Alan Taylor (2001)

Alan Taylor’s American Colonies is the first volume in the multi-volume Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. It is a big-format book, with 470 densely packed pages covering the colonisation of America from the arrival of the first humans 15,000 years ago up to AD 1800. It is an extraordinarily thorough, wide-ranging, thought-provoking and exhilirating read, but which deals with some extremely grim and depressing subject matter.

Broad canvas

Most of the histories of America I’ve read start with Sir Walter Raleigh and the early English settlements of the 1580s and 90s, and then briskly run through the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the Atlantic coast in the 1600s, in a hurry to get to the War of Independence (in the 1770s) when the ‘true’ story of America begins.

Taylor’s approach couldn’t be more different. His canvas is longer and broader and much, much bigger. Longer, in that he starts with the arrival of the first humans in America some 13,000 BC. Echoing the picture painted by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, he describes how a probably small group of hunter-gatherers in Siberia moved across what we now think of as the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and then, as the climate improved, a) the land bridge flooded, separating America and Asia and b) the early settlers were able to move south into the huge empty continent.

Domesticable mammals

As we know from Guns, Germs and Steel, their arrival coincided with the mass extinction of all the large mammals in America – presumably through human overhunting – leaving no mammals on the continent capable of being domesticated. According to Jared Diamond this is perhaps the decisive difference between the inhabitants of Eurasia – which domesticated pigs, goats, cows and sheep and, crucially, the horse – and the inhabitants of all the other continents, which had hardly any or simply no domesticable mammals.

Animal diseases

The domesticated animals of Eurasia were important not only for their use as food, in providing skins and hides, manure to fertilise crops and the pulling power of horses and oxen – large numbers of farm animals allowed the fomenting of terrible epidemic diseases, which jumped the species barrier into humans and then spread through our densely populated towns and cities. We are the descendants of the survivors of repeated epidemics of plague, smallpox, tuberculosis and so on which devastated Asia and Europe.

Thus when the first Europeans arrived in the New World (on Columbus’s First Voyage of 1492), it wasn’t the gunpowder or steel swords or even the warriors on horseback which did for the natives – it was the diseases we brought. Again and again and again, Taylor tells harrowing stories of how our diseases – especially smallpox- devastated the populations of the West Indies, of the Aztec and Inca empires, then of the Mississippian civilisation, and then all up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

It’s only recently that historians have taken the measure of this devastating biological warfare: for a long time it was thought that the Native American population was about 1 million when the English started colonising the Atlantic coast; but now it is thought the original population, before the Spanish arrived in 1492, may have been as high as 20 million. I.e. in about a century (1490-1590) 95% of the Indian population was wiped out by European diseases.

Thus, Taylor emphasises, until recently historians thought that the Indian tribes which the European settlers encountered had inhabited their territories from time immemorial. The new ‘disease-aware’ theories suggest the exact opposite: that Europeans encountered survivors who were still reeling from the devastation of their populations by disease, which in turn had led to internecine warfare and the seizing of territory, to regrouping and realliancing (p.74). Often this occurred before the main body of European explorers arrived – after all it only took a few sailors going ashore from a Spanish ship to fill water barrels on the south coast to infect an Indian, who then took the disease back to his tribe, which passed it up along the Mississippi and to decimate the entire population.

Thus Taylor shows again and again that the social and ecological and political arrangements of the Indians which Europeans encountered, and took to be timeless, had in fact only come about because of the disruptive activities of the Europeans themselves.

The Spanish

So – number one – Taylor’s vastly broader canvas starts thousands of years before the conventional histories, in order to place the Native Americans within the fullest possible context.

It then – number two – very sensibly takes the time to give a thorough account of the Spanish conquests starting with Columbus’s first voyage of 1492. In fact, Taylor goes back before Columbus to give us enough European history to place the entire ‘Navigation Revolution’ in its full global context. The biggest single element of this was the continuing success of imperial Islam. The Turkish or Ottoman Empire finally captured Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, in 1453, and spread up into the Balkans (thus creating the hodge-podge of ethnicities and religions which has caused instability and conflict right up to the present day).

These Ottoman conquests closed off overland trade routes from Europe to India and the Spice Islands far to the East. And it was this closure of the Eastern route which gave a big financial incentive to adventurers and explorers to try and find a route west, across the seas, to the Spice Islands. As countless commentators have pointed out, it is one of the greatest ironies in history that the discovery of America was a terrible disappointment to the explorers and their royal patrons back in the capitals of Spain and Portugal and France and England. (And Taylor’s book is brutal about the terrible consequences for the native peoples everywhere the Europeans went.)

Taylor explains the economic and technological background to the Spanish conquests of Central and South America not just for their own sake, but because the Spanish also expanded up into what was later to become the USA. The Spanish colonised Florida and sent expeditions deep into what would later become California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. In doing so they established a particular pattern of landholding – vast haciendas farmed by natives turned into serfs – which would remain influential in the south-west USA for centuries, as well as bringing disease and disruption to the native peoples.

The West Indies

Taylor devotes a lot of space to the settlement of the numerous islands of the West Indies, firstly by Spain in the early 1500s. He describes how French and English pirates took to preying on the regular Spanish shipments of silver and gold from central America back to Europe via the Indies. Then how France and England set about establishing colonies of their own in this scattered archipelago of islands.

Taylor describes tells in great detail the settlement of Barbados and then of Jamaica. Several points emerge.

The original settlers dropped like flies. The climate was inimical to white men, who also didn’t know – for a long time – what to farm in these places. It took some time before the invaders worked out that sugar cane was the perfect crop for the climate. Unfortunately, working cane is – as Taylor explains in detail – extremely labour-intensive.
So the Europeans then proceeded to enslave and work to death as many of the native population as they could capture, waging genocidal wars with the rest, all the while spreading their fatal germs.
It was when they’d worked the natives to annihilation, that the settlers began buying African slaves. The trade had existed for over a hundred years, but the Spanish and Portuguese had mainly made do with enslaving the local Indians. It was the sugar economy of the West Indies which converted the Slave Trade into an industrial concern.

The British colonies

There then follow a sequence of chapters which describe the English settlement of the Chesapeake Bay area. I learned that originally, the entire coast from the Spanish colony of Florida up to the French territories in Canada, was all known as ‘Virginia’, after the supposedly virgin queen, Elizabeth I. A familiar pattern is established. The original settlers drop like flies (mostly from water-borne diseases caused by the low tidal movement of the bay – for decades they were drinking water polluted by their own faeces). So it takes a long time for settler deaths to be outweighed by new arrivals and the colony to really take hold. The ‘indenture system’ is widespread i.e. poor whites from England sell themselves into 4 or 5 years servitude, to pay for the transatlantic crossing. After 4 or 5 years they are released, having paid their debt, and given a basic amount of land and tools to make it themselves. Initially weak in numbers and understanding of the environment, the colonists rely on trade with the Indians to get by. But as soon as they are strong and numerous enough, they start expanding their settlements, inevitably coming into conflict with the Indians who, in any case, are regularly devastated by the diseases the colonists have brought, especially smallpox.

Eventually, in Virginia the settlers discovered that tobacco is the crop of choice, hugely profitable when shipped back to Europe. But Indians refused to work in the kind of prison-camp labour the crop requires, and the flow of indentured servants dried up in the 1650s as economic conditions in England – the bad economy, overcrowding and unsettled social conditions of the British Civil Wars (1637-60) – improved. Solution: African slaves.

Slaves to the sugar plantations of the West Indies, slaves to the tobacco plantations of Virginia. Taylor describes how large planters flourished, picking off smaller planters who tended to go under in bad periods of trade fluctuation. This set the pattern for what would later be seen as the ‘Old South’ of vast plantations worked by slaves and overseen by fine white lords and ladies living in grand style, in big mansions, with countless servants to organise their lavish feasts etc. The lifestyle of Gone With The Wind. Very hard for a modern white liberal not to despise.

Taylor then goes on to describe the settlement of New England, the northern colonies settled by English Puritans – religious exiles from the old country – arriving in the 1620s. A key distinction which sticks in my mind is that, whereas the Virginia settlers were mostly single men, the Puritans came in well-organised groups of families. Those Virginian men were aggressive competitors who broadcast their success once they’d ‘made it’. The Puritans, by contrast, set up tightly organised and disciplined townships, each with local administrators based on their numerous churches and congregations, and closely monitored each others every word and action to make sure they conformed with ‘godly’ practice. In time the New England Puritans were to get a reputation for republicanism and democracy, both dirty words in the 17th century.

I knew some of this already, but it is all given in more detail, more intelligently and with more insight than I’ve ever read before. Also I hadn’t appreciated just how thoroughly New England fed into the Atlantic Economy. Put simply, New England farmers produced the staple food crops which were traded down to the West Indies sugar plantations. Ships from the West Indies and Virginia brought sugar and tobacco to Boston, where it was transferred into ships to carry it across to Bristol and Liverpool. The empty ships carried back food to the sugar and tobacco colonies. The ships which sailed east across the Atlantic emptied their goods in England, then sailed down the coast of Africa to buy slaves, before catching the Trade Winds which carried them west across the Atlantic to the West Indies and up to Virginia where they sold the slaves, and loaded up with sugar and tobacco.

I knew about the Atlantic Economy and the Slave Trade but Taylor’s book is the first I’ve ever read which explains lucidly and thoroughly the background, the climatological, environmental, social and economic forces behind the growth of this immense money-making machine.

New York and Pennsylvania

Different again was the settlement of New York, which was originally carried out by the Dutch. I knew that the Dutch had created a surprisingly far-flung empire, given the smallness of their country and population (1.5 million to England’s 5 million). And I knew that the British fought three wars (1652-4, 1665-7 and 1672-4) with the Dutch, because they loom large in the history and literature of the British Civil Wars (1637-60).

Taylor explains the fundamental reason the British were able to seize the few Dutch territories on the Atlantic coast (famously New Amsterdam, which we renamed New York after the Duke of York, Charles II’s brother and future King James II). Because a) the Dutch lacked the manpower to defend it b) it wasn’t making much money, unlike their colonies in South America, at the Cape in South Africa, and especially in the Far East.

Taylor gives a characteristically thorough account of the creation of Pennsylvania, a huge tract of land simply given to the aristocrat William Penn by Charles II in 1681 to pay off a gambling debt, and which Penn then settled in a systematic and well-organised way with members of his own non-conformist sect, the Quakers, naming its first main town Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love.

New France

Meanwhile, up in what would become Canada, the French had been exploring and settling the St Lawrence Waterway, the long river which penetrates at an angle deep into North America, ultimately linking up with the Great Lakes. They founded settlements at its mouth, Louisbourg, and along its length at Quebec and Montreal. In the cold north, the French could barely grow wheat let alone the hot-climate crops of tobacco or sugar. Therefore they pioneered trading with the Native Americans for furs and pelts: because of the climate and this economic model ‘New France’ was always thinly populated, mainly by hunters who worked closely with their Indian allies and often went native, marrying Indian women and adopting their ways. All the chapters about the French echo with the lamentations of the French governor or military commander, that they barely have the men or resources to hold the territory.

This is all the more puzzling since France was the largest, most powerful nation in Europe, population 20 million, compared to England’s 5 million, and the Dutch 1 million. In chapter 16 Taylor gives some reasons:

In France the peasantry was more rooted to the land. In England the 17th century saw a movement of ‘enclosure’ acts in which the gentry seized common land and drove the rural poor off it, creating a pool of unemployed keen to travel to find work.
If French peasants did want work all they had to do was walk south into Spain where there were labour shortages.
The English encouraged their religious dissidents (the Puritans) to emigrate to the colonies, where they turned out to be hard working and disciplined pioneers. The French banned it. French protestants – known as Huguenots – were forbidden by law from going to new France. Instead some 130,000 artisans, craftsmen and merchants fled to Switzerland, Germany, Holland and England, especially after the fool King Louis XIV in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had previously granted them religious freedom.
Word came back that New France was freezing cold, with poor agricultural prospects – all true enough.
Finally, the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV was determined to make France the greatest power on the Continent and so built up a massive war machine, inheriting an army of 20,000 in 1661 and growing it to 300,000 by 1710. England’s surplus population created America; France’s created an army.

The furs and pelts never covered the cost of the colony. This is the single most important fact about New France: it always needed to be subsidised by the Crown, and was a constant drain on French finances. This was even more true of ‘Louisiana’, the vast area either side of the Mississippi which the French optimistically claimed for themselves in the 17th century. In reality this boiled down to a poverty-stricken settlement at New Orleans, which suffered from disease, lack of crops, periodic flooding, hurricanes and constant harassment by local Indians (pp. 384-385).

The sole reason the French crown continued to subsidise both wretched settlements was geopolitical – to hem in and contain England’s settlements along the Atlantic coastline. As I know from reading about The Seven Years War (1756-63) the simple geography of the situation made conflict between the two empires inevitable, indeed French and Indian raids were a menace to settlers in New York state and Pennsylvania from as early as the 1690s. The surprising thing is that it took until the 1760s for the British to defeat the French, but this is the benefit of hindsight. During the later 1600s and early 1700s both sides were too weak and geographically separated to engage in proper conflict.

Indian torture and European brutality

At several places Taylor goes into detail about Indian beliefs and religion (granting, of course, that different nations and tribes often had different practices). Broadly speaking:

men were warriors, seeking opportunities to display their prowess, which they proved through the number of scalps i.e. the skin and hair from the top of an enemy’s head
in wars among themselves, the Indians sought plunder and increased hunting territory
the loss of warriors prompted grief but also fear of the dead which was assuaged by loud mourning and ritual feasts
deaths in battle prompted further ‘mourning wars’, in which they raided enemy tribes and seized prisoners
these prisoners were then incorporated into the tribe, replenishing its numerical and spiritual power
most tribes were matrilinear i.e. power descended through the female line and so the older women of the tribe decided the fate of captives: women and children were invariably adopted into the tribe and given new names; young male captives were generally tortured to death
death was inflicted as slowly and painfully as possible: the Iroquois tied the captive to a stake and villagers of both sexes took turns to wield knives, torches and red hot pokers to torment and burn the captive to death
‘the ceremony was a contest between the skills of the torturers and the stoic endurance of the victim, who manifested his own power, and that of his people, by insulting his captors and boasting of his accomplishments in war’ (p.103)
once dead, the victim was dismembered, his parts put in a cooking kettle and the resulting stew served to the entire tribe to bind them together in absorbing the captive’s power
torture and cannibalism bound the tribe together, gave them spiritual power, hardened adolescent boys for the cruelties of war and dramatised the tribe’s contempt for outsiders

It goes without saying that the Europeans had their own grisly punishments. Accounts of the conquistadores’ behaviour to captured Aztecs and Incas are stomach-turning, and the slave-owning British invented all kinds of brutal punishments for rebellious or insubordinate slaves. What surprised me was the brutality of the French in Louisiana to their own men. I’m disgusted but not really surprised to learn that the French turned over rebel or runaway slaves to their Indian allies to be tortured or burned to death as only the Indians knew how – to deliberately inspire terror of rebellion or flight in their slaves. But the French paid their own soldiers so badly that they lived in conditions little better than the slaves – a visitor reported them lacking shirts or boots and on starvation rations – leading to repeated desertion and runaways. And if these runaway soldiers were caught, ‘the lucky died on the gallows; others died as their backs were broken on the wheel or severed by saws’ (p.387). Severed by saws!

This is why I described the book as depressing at the top. Maybe grim and hateful would be better words. The breadth of Taylor’s view, the grasp of detail, the clarity of the narrative and the incisiveness of his insights all make this a brilliant read. But the subject matter is appalling: the catalogue of suffering and violence and epidemic disease and starvation and torture and more violence call for a very strong stomach.

Summary

All of this is covered in just the first half of this long and fascinating account.

You can see how Taylor’s account restores to ‘the colonisation of America’ its full historical scope (stretching back to the very first human arrivals) and fullest geographical scope (making it abundantly clear that any telling of the story must include the economic and social colonisation by the Spanish and explain the colonisation of the West Indies a) because the Caribbean economy established the pattern of slave-worked ‘plantations’ which was to be copied on the mainland, and b) because the West Indies sugar colonies formed the lynchpin of the entire Atlantic Economy which allowed the North American colonies to flourish).

His account explains the surprising variety of types of European settlement made in American – in terms of their economies and cultures, their crops and religions – and how this variety left a legacy of diverse and conflicting social ideals to later Americans.

It explains in great detail the tragic encounter between Europeans and native peoples, with scores of examples of how initial co-operation turned sour as both sides failed to understand each other’s notions of law and rights and property, leading to violence and counter-violence, to wars large and small – and how the Indians always ended up on the losing side, partly because the whites controlled their access to guns and ammunition, but mostly because the Indians everywhere fell victim to the terrible diseases the whites didn’t even realise they’d brought with them from the Old World.

And it explains in thorough and appalling detail the scale and brutality of the transatlantic Slave Trade, explaining why it became ‘necessary’ to the one-crop economies of sugar in the West Indies and tobacco in Virginia, why the nature of these crops demanded exhausting and back-breaking labour which couldn’t be supplied by either local Indians or indentured labourers from England, but why – as a result – the white owners lived in constant fear of rebellion by blacks who came to outnumber them by as much as 9 to one and so were forced, by a bitter logic of fear, into more and more brutal discipline and punishments of slaves who ran away or organised any kind of rebellion.

His book paints an enormous canvas, full of startling and terrible revelations, which for the first time fits together every element in the story into what must become a definitive account for our times of the very troubled origins of the ‘United States’ of America.

The landing of William Penn in 1682 by J.L.G. Ferris (1932)

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