What has always amazed me about that battle and the characters involved is that in Harold Godwinson we have on the one hand the known villain of subsequent (and of the contemporary) propaganda especially the amazingly effective Bayeux Tapestry (a quite incredible piece of public propaganda which is well worth visiting). Harold has come down by the victor of the Battle of Hastings word as an oath breaker.
Because of that twist of faith, we don’t remember Harold’s own victory at Stamford or the fact that he was seen by many Saxons as England’s bulwark against Norman influence. What’s more because of Hastings, we don’t hear the story of the brother’s Godwinson or indeed of Harald Hardrada who as the link above makes clear had a fascinating life himself.
All told, Stamford Bridge and the ignored heroism or at the very least success if you will of Harold reinforces for me the sense that very often history recalls not the reality of a persons life but only the most resonate aspect of it, that events which have relevance are often overshadowed by subsequent less important but better recorded happenings.
Links & the rest
I decided I would search out George Monck information on the web and the results are pretty great. Google has an interesting timeline feature. You can view it here, but I’ve a screen grab below:
A fascinating Wall Street Journal article that is designed to calm newspaper executives nerves but I think is more interesting for those with an interest in History.
George Monck & The Restoration of Charles II in 1660
Okay, so call this crazy but I have made a decision about my thesis on Monck. I am putting it up on Scribd. I’ve embedded the file above and here is the link to the document. Yesterday I dug out the thesis and re-read it. It has promise but as I note below in a new introduction which I have included in the text, needs a lot of fresh work to be really worthwhile. But equally I think it offers something even as it is. For more on my thoughts, read the note.
2009 Introductory Note
This thesis was written during my Masters year in UCD, Dublin. I enjoyed the process and at the time I was happy with what I had written. However, some six years later I can recognise that there are serious deficiencies in this thesis and that is something I plan at some stage to rectify in another work. Please feel free to send messages or feedback to me at eoin.purcell AT gmail.com.
Original Documents & Eyewitness accounts
In retrospect there are many things I would change, not the least of which would be the sources I used. Four major areas (with many other areas needing minor attention) could be improved. Firstly, more original documentary evidence would have greatly improved the book. Aside from letters and papers of the officers and officials around Monck in Scotland which I now know exist in archives that I did not consult for the original, I believe that there are numerous other sources that might be exploited to huge advantage. They would, I believe, include eyewitness accounts available from:
1) The soldiers in Monck’s units
2) Monck’s officers
3) Londoners during Monck’s time in the city
4) Observers from outside the capital
5) Soldiers and officers still loyal to the last few Grandee’s like Lambert
Character
Secondly, I believe that more work on Monck’s character and his pragmatism and motivations would have been sensible. There is surely more material available to work on that. He is a truly incredible individual. His motivations are a mystery in many ways though I think my analysis of his actions reveals that he was simply taking the easiest course of action to secure his own position, I firmly believe now that had he been presented with the opportunity, he would have crowned himself king or had himself declared Lord Protector. I’d like to spend time proving that.
The Actions of Others
Thirdly, the role of the other actors needs a great examination, I see that now clearly as a major failing in the original work. The Grandee’s in London and the parliamentarians of the Rump are as powerful figures and their motivations and actions were such critical factors in the course of events. Had any of them for instance mounted a sufficient case against Monck while he was in London, or managed to hold together a force in the field, events would have been different. The brief mention of the role of Lord Fairfax is insufficient to explain the reverence he was held in by many of the foot soldiers more work on the importance of his siding with Monck should have been done.
Conclusions
Lastly, the work deserved a better and less lazy conclusion than that which I impulsively gave it in 2003. Events in Iran that year inspired an unfortunate idealism in me that scarred the powerful conclusions of the evidence about Monck. I was more concerned the hammer home the deficiencies of the Grandee’s rule and compare those with the failures of government I saw in Iran than to properly assess Monck’s character and to bring together the argument I had mustered in the preceding pages. That was a mistake and one I think should be rectified in any new work.
The 1st Duke of Albermarle (as Monck became as a reward for his efforts in restoring the monarchy) is one of the most singularly unstudied yet important men in British history. Considering the volumes of material on other actors in the Civil War and Interregnum this is a strange fact. Perhaps, when I have the time I will rectify the problems with this thesis and the lack of a decent examination of the man and publish a book on him.
The Herald today has a smashing review of one of Mercier’s new books: Petticoat Rebellion: The Anna Parnell Story:
During the reign of Queen Victoria, women wore corsets to thrust breasts upwards and nip in waists, and crinoline hoops to make their buttocks and hips wider. They had problems walking freely, and often fainted.
Patricia Groves’ new book, Petticoat Rebellion; The Anna Parnell Story (Mercier Press, E14.99), offers a fascinating insight into the social restrictions and mores that threatened to hamper a radical female activist in the 19th century.
I have to say that I am biased as this was a book I commissioned early enough after arriving at Mercier Press, but the story is a wonderful forgotten episode in Irish history and well worth reading. The author is Patricia Groves and you can read her profile here. The Parnells were a truly international family, Anna’s grandfather was an American Eoin
Tristram Hunt, who is believed to have received an advance of £100,000 for his biography of Friedrich Engels, said that he knew of several colleagues who had taken up fiction because it sold comparitively well. “There is a dangerous tendency among historians to slide into historical fiction, which must be avoided at all costs,” he said.
Lisa Jardine, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, said that she was avoiding a new contract because of the uncertain state of the market. “I would not be surprised if I were now offered half of my last advance,” she said. “A few years ago we got really handsome advances to write books that did indeed become quite good bestsellers, but never earned out their advances. Then the publishers started asking jobbing authors to write books that did annoyingly well, but they’ve dried up, too. Now, as far as I know, what has replaced us are books about the history of science.”
Somewhat late in the day to be posting this article in The Guardian about the new history kids on the block but it is well worth the read:
They have been an actor, an artist and a TV presenter, are aged between 25 and 35 and they all have book contracts. One wrote his account of the year 1381 in a corner of the trendy London members’ club, Soho House, during leave from his day job at a men’s magazine. And rather than being looked down upon by the old guard, they are highly regarded by the academic establishment: David Starkey is considered a mentor by two of them; Simon Sebag Montefiore by others.
Lots more out there in the world of history. If there is anything anyone wants me to mention or link to, please feel free to e-mail me at eoinpurcellsblog AT gmail.com.
Robert Kaplan Strikes Again
Kaplan writes an elegant and persuasive article about how Geography affects the world! In many ways it is a plea for a realist view of the world:
Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action—culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.
What I like about the piece is threefold
Firstly I enjoy his references to philosophers and historians. The philosophers are Isaiah Berlin and Thomas Hobbes, both with interesting and illuminating things to offer reader. And Google Books has plenty items in Full View for both though frustratingly in the case of Hobbes, not a Leviathan available for extract so instead you get a rather nice but non-downloadable Forgotten books edition! Which seems crazy when the base text is well out of copyright!
His historical references are numerous but Mahan and Braudel stand out! One eye opener was Nicholas Spykman (for more on his truly intriguing views here is a very nice overview) of whom I had never heard but of whom Kaplan say:
Similarly, the Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman saw the seaboards of the Indian and Pacific oceans as the keys to dominance in Eurasia and the natural means to check the land power of Russia. Before he died in 1943, while the United States was fighting Japan, Spykman predicted the rise of China and the consequent need for the United States to defend Japan. And even as the United States was fighting to liberate Europe, Spykman warned that the postwar emergence of an integrated European power would eventually become inconvenient for the United States. Such is the foresight of geographical determinism.
For another thing
Secondly I like his concept of:
geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.
And maybe I feel that way because I wish to justify my recent (and fabulously cheap) purchase of Keith Johnston’sA Sketch of Historical Geography which is a truly excellent text worth owning and you can read in the lovely Open Library edition here, but I think there is something to what Kaplan says. Something that informs the rest of the piece.
And finally
I like his closing exhorting for us all to:
learn to think like Victorians. That is what must guide and inform our newly rediscovered realism. Geographical determinists must be seated at the same honored table as liberal humanists, thereby merging the analogies of Vietnam and Munich. Embracing the dictates and limitations of geography will be especially hard for Americans, who like to think that no constraint, natural or otherwise, applies to them. But denying the facts of geography only invites disasters that, in turn, make us victims of geography.
I very much enjoy Kaplan but sometimes I’m left with as many questions as answers with him, not that that is a bad thing! Eoin
Battles & Such
Some years ago I read a fascinating biography of John Hawkwood an English condottiero (mercenary) in 14th century Italy. His story was a fascinating one. It was called John Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman and it was written by Frances Stonor Saunders. I’d encourage anyone interested in the period of Italian history to read the book. It will help you get under the skin of a very, very complicated society.
The reason I raise this today is that I stumbled across an interesting note about today’s date on Wikipedia:
A little digging around the world of online material yields some interesting results. There is the preview version of John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-century Italy by William Caferro. The book page on Google Books is full of information and really a very rich resource worth visiting. It certainly beats the pants off the book page for Frances Stonor Saunders’ book.
Worth reading more on Hawkwood I suggest, if only as a way to understand what was a very confusing period. Eoin
A daring feat & cruel
339 years ago today Henry Morgan captured and sacked Panama City which he had discovered was but lightly defended and whose defenders he succeeded in defeating by using their lack of experience against them and sending half his force around their flank.
However his actions in sacking the city and in torturing the inhabitants sullied his reputation and because of the timing (a treaty had just been negotiated between Spain & England) he was arrested and sent back to England under a dark cloud.
All told it was at once a daring and impressive act of piracy marred by the indiscriminate violence and the unfortunate timing. It effectively quashed his rise if only for a time and he was later knighted and made Lieutenant Govenror of Jamaica.
You will find quite a but of material on Morgan and the early history of the English Caribbean and Central American enterprises on Google Book Search and they are worth delving into.
I’ve also been given the hardback version of Simon Schama’s The American Future: A History. It’s reviews (1, 2, 3, 4) are more widespread which is unsurprising given it had a tv show to go with it.
Last but not least (for history anyways) I got the paperback version of Piers Brendon’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire which is now a full year old and has a fewreviews to its name as well and features an interesting excerpt on The Daily Beast.
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