A Radical History Of Britain
Page 68
Wroe, James 339, 340, 342
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 110
Wycliffe, John 58, 81
Wyvill, Charles 219, 252, 299
Yates, Edmund 479
York, Frederick, Duke of 291, 295, 296
York, Richard, Duke of 80, 87, 89, 97
Yorke, Charles 292
Yorke, Henry ‘Redhead’ 264
THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
Edward Vallance
‘A brisk, taut and lucid account … with the pace of a thriller’
Independent
In the summer of 1688, seven English peers wrote to William of Orange requesting his assistance in overturning their monarch, James II. On 5 November William had landed with a massive invasion force and within six weeks James had fled the country, fearing for his safety. Three months later William and his English wife Mary, James’s Protestant daughter, were crowned joint monarchs, accepting the Declaration of Rights that affirmed Parliament’s ancient rights and liberties.
In this highly readable narrative of the period, acclaimed historian Edward Vallance counters the claim made by generations of Whig historians that this was a bloodless revolution – a victory for progress. Civil war was avoided by the narrowest of margins and the conflict was characterised instead by warfare and bloody massacre.
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RUBICON
Tom Holland
‘Narrative history at its best … it really held me, in fact, obsessed me’ Ian McEwan, Book of the Year, Guardian
‘I owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Holland not just for reminding me of the great figures who bestrode the Roman world – Pompey and Crassus, Cato, Cicero and Caesar – but for explaining what it was that made Rome the greatest superpower the world has known, why it lasted so long and what caused its eventual fall’ Christopher Matthew, Daily Mail
‘The bloodstained drama of the last decades of the Roman republic is told afresh with tremendous wit, narrative verve and insight’ Independent on Sunday
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PERSIAN FIRE
Tom Holland
‘Thrilling … masterly … gripping’
Independent on Sunday
It was 2,500 years ago that East and West first went to war. In the early 5th Century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, whose kings had founded the first world empire, incomparably rich in ambitions, gold and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the most powerful man on the planet, and defeated him is as heart-stopping as any episode in history.
‘Holland has a rare eye for detail, drama and the telling of anecdote. His account of the Battle of Thermopylae is surely the most exciting in print. A book as spirited and engaging as Persian Fire deserves to last … It has turned the stuff of public-school translation exercises into vibrant, bloodthirsty popular history, told with a rich sense of irony and irresistible narrative timing’ Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph
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MILLENNIUM
Tom Holland
‘A blaze of colour lights up the Dark Ages’
Independent
In 900 AD, few would have guessed that the splintering kingdoms of Europe were candidates for future greatness. Hemmed in by implacable enemies and an ocean, there were many who feared that they were nearing the time when the Antichrist would appear, heralding the world’s end.
Instead there emerged a new civilisation. It was the age of Otto the Great and William the Conqueror, of Viking sea-kings, of hermits, monks and serfs. It witnessed the spread of castles, the invention of knighthood, and the founding of a papal monarchy. It was a momentous achievement: for this was nothing less than the founding of the modern West.
‘An exhilarating sweep across European history either side of the year 1000; riveting’ Allan Massie, Books of the Year, Spectator
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ENDGAME 1945
David Stafford
‘A harrowing masterpiece of modern history’ Sunday Express
In this remarkable account of the end of the Second World War, David Stafford looks behind the headlines of history and uncovers the stories of those, soldier and civilian alike, who had lived through the war and now must endure the daily horrors and hardships of its aftermath. Endgame 1945 is an unforgettable panorama of the defeat of Fascism, of ordinary men and women and extraordinary valour, and of Europe in every way tested to its limits. It is the final chapter of war.
‘Stafford has assembled a remarkable gallery of human stories – heroic, tragic, squalid, moving’ Max Hastings, Daily Mail
‘Intimate and compelling … What a rollercoaster of dramatic highs and lows’ James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday
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BLOODY FOREIGNERS
Robert Winder
‘Supremely readable’
The Times
‘Our aristocracy was created by a Frenchman, William the Conqueror, who also created our medieval architecture, our greatest artistic glory. Our royal family is German, our language a bizarre confection of Latin, Saxon and, latterly, Indian and American. Our shops and banks were created by Jews. We did not stand alone against Hitler, the empire stood beside us. And our food is, of course, anything but British … Winder has a thousand stories to tell and he tells them well. Topical, formidable and engaging … A tremendous read’ Sunday Times
‘Enlightened and illuminating. Winder goes a long way towards defining what we are as a nation’ Independent
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* David Stevenson suggests that ‘Jenny Geddes’ was a generic name, rather like ‘Jock Sporran’, designed to signify, in one person, the prominent role of women in the Covenanter movement; see Stevenson, ‘Jenny Geddes’, ODNB.
* Australian suffragists played a prominent part in the women’s struggle for the vote in Britain too. In 1908, Adelaide-born Muriel Matters became the first woman to speak in Parliament, albeit while chained to the grille of the Ladies’ Gallery in the House of Commons.
* Seats in the ‘gift’ of a handful of electors. The most notorious of these, Old Sarum, had a mere eleven electors in 1831, all of whom were major landowners who lived outside the borough.
* Ramsey’s biographer reveals that he was a prelate ideally suited to his task: as an introverted boy given to a vivid fantasy life, the future archbishop wrote letters to King John in hell, telling him he was ‘a very bad man’.
* Clause 37 is a general saving clause; clause 1 a general confirmation of the privileges of the English Church, which has proved largely useless in the face of parliamentary encroachment; and clause 9 relates solely to the privileges of the City of London – as ever, the City has done very well in avoiding being reformed.
* The concealment was largely achieved by failing to register unmarried women and widows within households.
* The Archbishop had directed the construction of this church and founded a college of canons there in 1365.
* ‘Summonses of the Green Wax’ were mandates authorising county officers to take fines. Purveyance was the requisitioning of goods for royal supply. The burden of purveyance fell particularly heavily on Kent.
* The only evidence of these summary executions comes from the dry records of the city’s accounts, which itemised the nine pence spent on the removal of bodies and the thruppence it cost to repair the ladder from which the condemned were thrown.
* Another corporal implicated in the rising, William Eyre, was a volunteer member of the irregular militia that the republican MP Henry Marten had raised in Berkshire and was not deemed to be under military discipline. He was imprisoned in Oxford and then Warwick Gaol until 1650; see W. Eyre, The Serious Representation of Col. William Eyre (16
49).
† As commander of the Parliamentarian New Model Army, Fairfax was personally involved in suppressing the Leveller mutinies of 1649. He showed leniency at Burford, but a month earlier, over Cromwell’s pleas for clemency, he had had Robert Lockyer executed for leading a mutiny in Colonel Whalley’s regiment.
* Forest fines and ‘distraint of knighthood’ were ancient fines revived by Charles to prop up his prerogative rule. The former were fines for encroachment on the boundaries of royal forests – as defined by their area in the reign of Edward I (1272–1307). ‘Distraint of knighthood’ was a fine imposed on all men with landed income worth £40 or more per annum who had failed to present themselves for knighthood at the King’s coronation.
* A common seventeenth-century term for a political clique or faction, derived from a misspelled Anglicisation of the Spanish junta.
* The famous self-denying ordinance that prohibited members of the Lords and Commons from also being army officers did not prevent reappointment after resignation.
* Overton, though, was not an advocate of ‘soul sleeping’ but of the mortality of the soul. The distinction was lost on most of his opponents.
* It is worth noting that no participant at Putney argued for the rights of women, despite the prominence of figures such as Katherine Chidley within the Leveller movement.
* Charles’s break for freedom was reputedly inspired by reports of the hostile references made at Putney to the King as a ‘man of blood’. Despite the effective ban on reporting, information about the debates reached the King via Royalist prisoners in the Tower of London, who in turn received their news from a fellow prisoner, John Lilburne.
* Lucas and Lisle were executed on the grounds of breach of parole – they had both earlier sworn never to take up arms for the King again.
* Charles II was proclaimed by the Scots as King of Great Britain, not merely of Scotland, on 5 February 1649, just six days after the execution of his father, effectively signalling that the Scottish Convenanters were intent, once again, on intervening militarily in English political affairs.
* The Diggers defined themselves as ‘true Levellers’ to distinguish themselves from ‘sword Levellers’ like Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Wildman, who were now, in the wake of the Burford incident, too heavily linked to the use of force.
* The refusal of ‘hat honour’, the removing of headgear in the presence of a social superior, was usually viewed as a profound affront to noble dignity.
* Behmenists were followers of Jakob Boehme, a German Lutheran mystic and shoemaker.
* Muggletonian beliefs were unusual, to say the least. Unitarians, they believed that God was a man between five and six feet tall who lived in a real, physical heaven about six miles above the Earth. The death of Jesus – God – had caused a power vacuum in heaven, with Elijah and Moses having to deputise for the Almighty until the resurrection. Muggletonians, like their bitter rivals the Quakers, rejected traditional forms of worship and Muggletonian religious meetings were often little more than informal gatherings in pubs. In addition, they initially held that the solar system was geocentric – revolving around the Earth. On a more enlightened note, because Muggletonians rejected the separation of matter and spirit they believed that there could be no such things as witches, ghosts or other spectral phenomena. This remarkable little sect survived until at least 1979, when the last known Muggletonian believer, a Kent apple farmer called Philip Noakes, died. Given Muggletonians’ ambivalence about evangelising, and its rather secretive nature, it may be that some living followers remain, either in the UK or the USA.
* The revolution of 1688–9 was known as ‘Glorious’ not because it was achieved without violence, but because it was comparatively bloodless when viewed in the context of the events of the 1640s.
* Since the mid-seventeenth century these ‘secrecy norms’ had been regularly breached, but it remained officially a criminal offence to report votes or debates. It was not until the nineteenth century, when the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt, that galleries and seats for journalists were installed in Parliament.
* In Lewes, all male householders who rented property worth £10 or more a year were permitted to vote.
* The transformation was encapsulated in the – quite possibly apocryphal – story of the elderly woman who called out to him in the street, ‘Wilkes and liberty!’ only to receive the response, ‘Be quiet you old fool! That’s all over long ago!’ Wilkes’s reputation as an advocate of reform nonetheless stayed with him. In 1794 a loyalist mob smashed the windows of his house. His reponse was characteristically phlegmatic: ‘They are only some of my pupils, now set up for themselves.’
* The extent of Paine’s bravery should not be exaggerated. One fellow soldier reportedly remarked, ‘Paine may be a good philosopher but he is not a soldier – he always kept out of danger.’36
* Of course, the idea that the revolution was ‘bloodless’ was nonsense, especially when events in Ireland and Scotland were included in the discussion. See Vallance, Glorious Revolution, especially chapter 7.
* Tooke’s appetite for women almost put Wilkes to shame. On being told by Wilkes’s attorney that it was high time he settled down and took a wife, Tooke replied, ‘Whose wife?’ His capacity for alcohol was similarly impressive. He once settled an argument with a guest at one of his celebrated Sunday dinners by challenging his antagonist to a brandy-drinking contest. By the second quart bottle, Tooke’s opponent had literally been drunk under the table.50
† Wollstonecraft’s work was written in some haste. Her future husband, William Godwin, later recalled that she had sent the pages to the printer as she wrote them. Halfway through the work she was seized by ‘a temporary fit of torpor and indolence, and began to repent her undertaking’. She called in on her printer Joseph Johnson and told him about the impasse: ‘Mr Johnson immediately, in a kind and friendly way, entreated her not to put any constraint upon her inclination, and to give herself no uneasiness upon the sheets already printed, which he would cheerfully throw aside, if it would contribute to her happiness.’ This was not what Wollstonecraft had expected to hear. If Johnson’s comments had been intended to encourage his writer to abandon her project, they had quite the reverse effect. ‘Her friend’s so readily falling in with her ill-humour, and seeming to expect that she would lay aside her undertaking, piqued her pride. She immediately went home; and proceeded to the end of her work, with no other interruptions but what were absolutely necessary.’51
* Here Paine was alluding to the contemporary meaning of ‘toleration’ as a statutory indulgence of certain groups outside the state Church, as prescribed licence rather than a general liberty.15
* Wollstonecraft revealed her contempt for the conventional accoutrements of feminine beauty – elaborate clothes, make-up and extravagant headgear – by wearing her hair unadorned, using no cosmetics and clothing herself in cheap, rough dresses and the sort of black worsted stockings worn by milkmaids – giving her the appearance, according to one hostile commentator, of a ‘philosophical sloven’.
* In Dorchester Gaol, Yorke met the governor’s daughter, whom he later married. By the time of his release, he had fully repudiated his radical principles and turned his propagandist efforts to supporting the unreformed constitution.
* The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1802 prohibited trade unions and all levels of col-lective bargaining by workers.
* Paull had fought a duel with Burdett a mere two days before his deselection. Paull’s vengeful behaviour at the duel – he had demanded that the pistols be reloaded and fired again after the first shots missed – alienated many metropolitan reformists. The dishonoured reformist committed suicide a year later. Paull’s request that his body be returned to the East Indies – he had made his fortune as a trader in Lucknow, India – and then blown up was not honoured.
* The anti-corruption strain to reformist rhetoric was nonetheless a persistent one, even within popular radicalism. A great deal of Hunt’s rhetoric
in favour of reform was based on the notion that it would overturn the corrupt ‘court party’ and thereby reduce waste, leading in turn to a reduction in taxation.
* Petitioning continues to this day to be regulated by an act of 1661 against ‘tumultuous’ petitioning, and by eighteenth-century notions of ‘decent and respectable language’.23
* Cheap stockings that could be mass produced with less skilled labour.
* Before his murder, Perceval had himself received anonymous letters threatening his death if he continued to pursue a bill to make frame-breaking a capital offence.4
* The Times, 10 February 1818, in a speech by a Mr Phillips, condemning the violence used by the Manchester magistrates – a reminder that sympathy for the casualties of major demonstrations did not equate to support for the cause of those demonstrations.
* He had withdrawn the offending parodies from sale and had only been prosecuted because Richard Carlile, the Painite writer and publisher, had reissued them without his permission.
* Brandreth would not be tried for this murder. Instead William, Joseph and Robert Turner, and William Ludlam and William Barker, were convicted of it.
* The ‘Six Acts’ prohibited drilling and military training (a law that has only recently been removed from the statute books) and meetings of over fifty people; authorised justices to enter and search houses without warrants to look for arms; raised the stamp duty on periodicals; and extended the powers of magistrates to deal with seditious action and libel.48