Samizdata » Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow)

Trafalgar – and after

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 17:31:49 +0000

Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins, 2005

The Campaign of Trafalgar
Julian S. Corbett
Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2005

Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s own hero
Max Adams
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Wellington’s Navy: Sea Power and the Peninsular War, 1807-1814
Christopher D. Hall
Chatham Publishing, 2004

Start with a howler

It must be rare for a reader on opening a book to encounter a howler in line one, page one (to be pedantic, of the first Preface page, p. xiii), of a historical work, but Adam Nicolson has managed it: “More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th century England than in any other country in Europe.” After wondering where on earth such data could have come from, I realised, as every schoolboy used to know, that it was Protestants that got burned at the stake in England, whereas this never happened to Catholics anywhere in Europe at any time. Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, gives 300 Protestants as suffering this fate mostly under Mary Tudor, while J.A. Froude in his classic work The Reign of Mary Tudor , estimates the numbers as between 270 and 290.

Continue with some errors…

But worse is to come. To continue this criticism: Nicolson gives this as an instance of the unusual “scale of aggression” manifested by the English from that time to the Napoleonic Wars, aggression which Nelson could call upon to win at Trafalgar. But here the facts contradict this claim. Mary Tudor was entirely responsible for this persecution, though she found enough fanatics to carry it out. Her advisers – even her husband, who became Philip II of Spain, and the ambassador of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – were against it. In many cases, sympathetic crowds came to witness the steadfastness of the victims. To complete the picture, Mary steadily ran down England’s defences, spending her income on refurbishing churches and restoring monasteries, a policy culminating in the loss of Calais, England’s last foothold on the European continent.

This particular error is all the more deplorable in a historian who has written a very competent account of the genesis of the Authorised Version of the Bible, Power and Glory, Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible which was completed in 1611, hardly far from the period of Mary’s reign, 1553-1558.

The same misinterpretation of events occurs in the author’s throwaway and sourceless line, “A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War than in the French Revolution.” Though the English Civil War can be dated as 1642-1649, no termination date is given for the French Revolution, which after 1792 continued seamlessly for nearly the next quarter century in a series of European wars which cost France itself, according to La Fayette, in his impassioned address to the French Assembly, convened after Waterloo, three million lives and many more in the rest of Europe. Nor does Nicolson take into account the reluctance with which the English Civil War was inaugurated, with the parliamentarians, all from the same class, formerly united in their resistance to the King, now forced to pick sides when he decided to enforce his will to become an absolute monarch, like others across the Channel. Nor was the general population in any way inflamed – far from it.

Even after the war was well under way, a parliamentary general could write to his opposite number:

Certainly my affections are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person… The God of peace in his own good time send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage, and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.

The start and finish of a letter from Sir William Waller (Parliamentarian) to Sir Ralph Hopton (Royalist), quoted by Richard Ollard in This War Without an Enemy, a phrase he takes from the same letter.

Nicolson’s citing of the subjugation of the Highlands after the Fortyfive is also inappropriate. By this time England had not experienced any military activity on its soil for nearly a century, its citizenry were effectively disarmed and its reaction to the incursion of Charles Edward Stuart was essentially passive and very few English Jacobites joined him.

Thus the case for some sort of latent English aggressiveness falls apart on examination. Even the tactic of “breaking the enemy’s line” and provoking a melee with close ship to ship encounters became a Royal Navy tactic only in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was not invented by Nelson, but, as Nicolson states, initiated by Rodney and developed by Howe.

This policy can hardly be attributed to aggressiveness but rather to the fact that Royal Navy ships had become superior to the French in manoeuvrability and gunnery. Once engaged, a higher rate of broadside firing inevitably told and by Trafalgar they could deliver between two to three broadsides for every one of the French or Spanish. Aware of this, the British seamen sailed confidently to the attack. Why was the battle fought?

It was emphatically not fought to save Britain from imminent invasion. Before proceeding any further with a discussion of the battle, it may be helpful to make it clear why it was fought where it was. Napoleon had cancelled the whole project nearly two months before and on the very day of Trafalgar was receiving the surrender of 27,000 Austrians at Ulm, deep in Germany, in Bavaria. Having abandoned the invasion, his instructions to Villaneuve, now in Cadiz, and commander of the Franco-Spanish fleet, were to proceed into the Mediterranean. Villeneuve started to do so, but, becoming aware of a British fleet intent on forcing a battle, reversed course, so that he could return to Cadiz, whether victor or loser. This manoeuvre, which took time and caused some disorder in his line of battle, brought him as far as Cape Trafalgar, some 30 miles south-west of Cadiz.

Collingwood, in Royal Sovereign, was the first to breach the somewhat disorderly enemy line and, though by the end of the action his ship was reduced to a dismasted, unsteerable near wreck by the attentions of five enemy ships before his support could come up and deal with them, suffered only 47 killed. Victory, left in much the same state, had 57, the highest in the whole fleet, including, of course, Nelson himself. Other ships had lower – mostly much lower – numbers killed. The total killed in the British fleet is given as 449; by contrast, those killed in the Franco-Spanish was over 5,000, over ten times as many.

Nicolson gives no figures: for these we must go to Max Adams’ Admiral Collingwood. Likewise, we must go to Navies of the Napoleonic Era by Otto von Pivka (or some other source) to discover as well the manning levels of these ships. The largest, such as Royal Sovereign and Victory, with 100 guns, should have had between 850 and 875 men on board. Thus, in Victory, less than 7 in every hundred were actually killed, a fact not made clear in Nicolson’s sanguinary account.

Readers must be warned that a description of the battle itself does not begin until page 209, with perhaps an overemphasis on the carnage involved. Following it, Nicolson gives a superb account of its aftermath, when Collingwood struggled to bring his own damaged fleet, together with seventeen French and Spanish captures, to safety in Gibraltar against the fearsome gale that blew straight towards the shore. He had to abandon most of the captured French and Spanish ships (valuable as prizes). This meant he had not only to take off the British prize crews, but also chose to evacuate as many of the enemy survivors as he could, including the wounded. The heroic attempts, largely successful, to rescue these last, are graphically described. But Nicolson does not explain how these compassionate activities are compatible with his hypothesis of “English aggressiveness”.

Naval hierarchy, the “Honour” system and ambition;

Nicolson is on firmer ground as he analyses the ethos of the Royal Navy at the time, a mixture of rigid hierarchy, influence (in contemporary parlance “interest”, a sort of super-old-boys’ network), and opportunity: there was a ladder in place from bottom to top, from midshipman to admiral. The most difficult step was the middle one, from lieutenant to captain and here a favoured lieutenant could be greatly helped by his captain, especially on a station with a heavy mortality. Both Nelson and Collingwood gained their promotion this way, at the same time, in the West Indies, a notoriously disease-ridden environment.

All officers were “gentlemen” and bound together by a common code of “Honour”, of which courage was of course an indispensable component, but supplemented by others, such as the etiquette of the hierarchy, deviation from which was fatal. St Vincent compared it “to the chastity of a woman and when once wounded may never be recovered.” In the obverse of patronage, a captain could ruin a lieutenant after very little provocation. The French and Spanish also had their code of Honour, but it was more resigned and fatalistic (as they had cause to be). A heroic defeat was personally as creditable as a victory, not at all the right attitude to take when going into battle.

Coexisting with this system and to a large extent dependant on it was ambition, and its practical manifestation, the attainment of riches. The source for these was captured enemy ships, prizes. Such ships would be bought by the Admiralty, repaired and incorporated into the Royal Navy, often retaining the same name as a taunt to the enemy, who did it as well. Many French ships were, by common consent, better designed and built than Royal Navy ones. For some reason Pivka (op.cit.) gives the captures by the Royal Navy from 1792-99 only: 345, of which 60 were “ships of the line” of 74 guns or over, regarded as capable of participating with their equals in a set-piece battle.

Prize money distribution was greatly skewed towards the officer class and at the top end even more so. A captain could, after a few cruises to pick up merchantmen and privateers, buy a country house and move into the gentry class, if he wasn’t in it already. To get such a plum job needed, apart from enterprise and energy, assignment by the Admiral on station, who would get his share, and influence back home could help a lot. Captain Fremantle is given as an extended example of this process, a rather unpleasant character, whose letter to his wife after Trafalgar expressed his sorrow for the death of Nelson, as a patron rather than as a friend.

All the above, of course, Nicolson applies to officers only: his attitude to the seamen who comprised the majority on board is confused. Rather sweepingly he states they could not be “gentlemen” and “Honour” was a concept unknown to them. The social gap was enormous, and almost unbridgeable, authority above them at best paternalistic. What of the heroism? What of the eagerness of going into battle (prize money would be minuscule)? These are insufficiently explained by the premises above.

Some omissions

What else does Nicolson leave out of this interesting but rambling book? He gives an adequate account on how difficult it was for the French to obtain materials to build their ships and how the revolutionary ethos after 1792 played havoc with their manning, but omits what was probably their greatest disadvantage, their inability to train their officers and seamen in the tasks that must be performed out at sea. The blockade kept up by the Royal Navy made it difficult for a fleet to emerge from their ports, the more so as these were subjected to the prevailing, often stormy southwest wind which incidentally made it easier for British ships to leave the ports on the south coast of England. The French commander, Villeneuve made the point himself: “They [i.e., the Royal Navy] have kept the seas without intermission since 1793, while most of [our] fleet have scarcely weighed anchor for eight years.”

Nicolson’s casual reference to our blockade as being carried out by “scurvy-ridden” ships must also be corrected. The anti-scorbutic properties of citrus fruits in particular were at last becoming well-known (if not understood) and, as Kenneth J. Carpenter states in his History of Scurvy and Vitamin C:

There seems no doubt that the issue of lemon juice, perhaps combined with other improvements in victualling, resulted in the elimination of scurvy from the British navy and, by increasing the time which ships could remain at sea, greatly increased its efficiency during the Napoleonic Wars… so the problem of scurvy in the British navy was solved just in time to maintain the resistance to Napoleon through the continental blockade, whereas the French Services were less fortunate.

Indeed they were “less fortunate”. It was the French fleet that was “scurvy-ridden”. A French Admiral who visited a Royal Navy establishment after the American War of Independence was introduced to the lemon or lime juice cure for scurvy, but did nothing about investigating it for use. By contrast, Carpenter tells us that “Over the period from 1795 to 1814, the Admiralty records show a total issue of 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice.”

Nicolson might also have spared a few pages examining other strands of British society. In his Reminiscences, Captain Gronow gives us a picture of a section of it which, to put it bluntly, most felt no responsibility, or even interest, whatever in the war (though Gronow himself fought at Waterloo). And what of the Army and its ethos? It is easy to see which, soldier or sailor, entailed the greater battle-risk. At the battle of Salamanca in 1812, about one in ten of Wellington’s army (British, Portuguese and Spanish) was killed. Figures of the total manning the British fleet at Trafalgar are hard to come by – Nicolson speaks of 47,000 participating in the battle, and the Franco-Spanish fleet seem to have had slightly superior numbers. Taking all ships of the line (74 guns or more) into account, the chances of British participants being killed were about one in fifty. For something lower: the chance of an American soldier being killed in Iraq has been about one in two hundred and fifty. The chances for a British soldier are much the same.

Nicolson ignores upper-class “Napoleonists”, such as the Hollands, Fox, Whitbread, Byron et al, but makes much of ineffective proletarian unrest, to some extent fuelled by millenarian fantasies. Unmentioned are the Christian Evangelicals, more middle and upper class, a far more sober lot, the founders of what became Victorian morality, concerned rather with individual than mass behaviour, their social goals piecemeal, such as the abolition of the slave trade and boy chimney-sweeps and other ameliorations, rather than utopian. But religion seems to be rather marginalized in historical studies, perhaps as an unacknowledged, or even unconscious legacy of Marxism, whose believers could not credit that people meant what they said, but were “really” motivated by other, economic reasons.

Let a soldier – James Douglas, a corporal – speak:

But show me a man who knows he has an immortal soul, and advancing under the destructive fire of the enemy, but will in his inmost soul offer up the prayer of the publican ["God be merciful unto me a sinner": Luke 18, 13]. To bear me out in this, let 20, 30 nay as many thousands as ever mixed in battle, be advancing to the deadly strife and not one word can be heard in that number, but move on silent as the grave. I now ask the reason for this awful silence. The reason is that each man is employed as he ought to be with his maker. But when the fire is opened all is forgotten save king and country.

Swearing was also strongly disapproved of by the rank and file.

The biographies of Nelson (1758-1805) are legion; this study seems to have been well-reviewed and the back of the jacket is well-covered with laudatory remarks, making my dissent about it badly needed and almost to suggest that this book is an unnecessary one. We all know Nelson was charismatic, fascinated his “band of brothers” and was a hero to the British public ever since the Battle of the Nile. Tears by all ranks of the navy are well-authenticated. Faults recorded by Nicolson are the ones we condemn today, such as his grim enthusiasm for hanging deserters and Neapolitan Jacobins. His infatuation with Emma Hamilton (who seems to have made an unfavourable impression on all the women who met her) might be forgivable if they had conducted their affair with more discretion. A male friend of Nelson observed, “She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking as quietly as a child does pap.”

Perhaps this constant diet was responsible for his mixed behaviour on his only meeting with Wellington just before Trafalgar, when they were both waiting to see the Secretary of State, Lord Castlereigh, as related by the Duke to W.J. Croker, nearly 30 years later:

He entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All I had thought was a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three quarters of an hour I don’t know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now if the Secretary of State had been punctual & admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.

Note that this first impression of Nelson’s behaviour as a “light and trivial character” was something that “other people had had.” Probably this was why Barham, the aged (eighty plus) but exceptionally efficient First Lord of the Admiralty, who had never met Nelson was doubtful about him until after he had sent for and read his Naval Journals of his latest activities.

It is a great pity that Nelson did not survive Trafalgar to have more conferences with Wellington (Arthur Wellesley, as he then was), for if he had, he might have impressed on him the difficulty of combined army-navy operations, which, as we shall see, Wellington took for granted and never really quite understood. Napoleon was much worse in this respect, changing his plans almost daily, baffling the British Admiralty, which had plans to counter them all, almost as much as his subordinates who could not convince him that moving his ships over the sea was a far more complex business that moving his troops over the land.

The result of the battle

In 1919, Julian S. Corbett, doyen of naval historians, published his The Campaign of Trafalgar (in the reprint of 1976, the two volumes are bound as one and are still obtainable at a reasonable price). The bewildering preliminaries to the battle and the battle itself are given in exhaustive detail. In his Conclusion to Volume II he writes:

By universal assent Trafalgar is ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result… It gave England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the Continent. So incomprehensible was its apparent sterility that to fill the void a legend grew up that it saved England from invasion… unsupported as it was by the plain succession of events.

What events? In 1805 William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, had built up what must have seemed a strong Coalition (the Third) with Austria and Russia – Prussia dithered until it was too late. Cancelling his invasion plans (which he may have done anyway, since his naval support failed to materialize), Napoleon headed straight for Austria, captured part of its army at Ulm, occupied Vienna and inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz on December 2nd. Austria sued for peace and the Third Coalition was dead. A British army, which had landed on the coast of West Germany to support the Austrians had to be withdrawn.

The next year, Prussia, after fruitless negotiations with Napoleon, foolishly declared war and was soundly defeated at Jena and Uerstadt in October. Napoleon then pursued the Russians to East Prussia. Eylau (Feb. 8th, 1807) was a bloody, drawn battle, but Friedland (June 14th) was a decisive victory, and at Tilsit (June 25th), the Russian Czar Alexander changed sides and became Napoleon’s not very reliable ally.

Britain could do little but maintain its blockade as it watched the development of these appalling events. Pitt died in 1806 and the King had to call on the Whig opposition to form a government, headed by the pacifist Fox, who opened peace negotiations which came to nothing. Napoleon turned his attention to the only continental country not under his sway – Portugal. An army sent there met with no resistance, and the Royal Navy came just in time to persuade its Regent (its Queen was mad) to be transported to Brazil (Nov. 29th, 1807), a day before the French arrived in Lisbon.

Napoleon now obliged Britain by making an enormous political error. Spain was almost completely useless as an ally, but at least it was quiescent. Its monarchy was in the last stages of decadence, the King a near-idiot, the Queen, ignorant and wilful, who ruled him, with her favourite Godoy, and the Crown Prince uneducated and cowardly, at odds with his parents – but all obsequiously obedient to Napoleon. The whole top tier of society, the Army, the Church and the bureaucracy was irremediably corrupt and when Napoleon poured troops into Spain on the pretext of reinforcing his Army in Portugal, no one protested, even when they occupied key fortresses in the north and Madrid itself.

Then Napoleon went one step too far. He lured the Royal family to Bayonne, forced both King and Crown Prince to abdicate and announced that his brother Joseph was to be King of Spain. Then, at last, when those who should have been their leaders still remained passive, the common people, the mob, rose and rioted in French-occupied Madrid (May 2nd, 1808). Slowly. ill-organized and poorly led, all the provinces followed suit. A deputation from Asturias, on the northern coast came to Britain, now back under a pro-war Tory government, with a request for help (May 30th). This was forthcoming and the long story of the British part in the Peninsular War had begun.

The long aftermath: 1805-1814

Trafalgar may have established the dominance of the Royal Navy at sea, but it still had work to do, though of a more routine, less spectacular kind. The blockade had to be maintained for economic as well as military reasons. It might as well be pointed out here that wreckings were responsible for by far the greatest number of Royal Navy ship losses – not because of bad navigation, but because of the need to keep an eye on the enemy, even in bad weather, off treacherous coasts. Convoys still had to protected from privateers, which could not always be prevented from slipping out of beleaguered ports or small fortified inlets. It was also a necessity to inhibit traffic carrying supplies and reinforcements to isolated coastal garrisons in Spain, where transport by land was next to impossible.

Collingwood

Old Barham had been dismissed without thanks during the government shake-ups following Pitt’s death. The Admiralty, under new management, though doubtless dismayed at the loss of Nelson, could be confident that the Navy was operating as efficiently as it did before. The immediate burden fell on Cuthbert Collingwood (1748-1810) who, no Watson to Nelson’s Holmes, was, according to his biographer “a better seaman than Nelson, a subtler diplomat, and despite his conservative politics, a naval reformer at least fifty years ahead of his time. What Collingwood lacked and admired above all in his friend, was “the irresistible Nelsonian impetuosity that allowed his enemy no time to recover once he had made a mistake.” In a letter praising Nelson, Collingwood wrote: “Everything seemed as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction – but it was the effect of system – and nice combination, not of chance…”

The two had in fact been friends for thirty two years when Nelson fell at Trafalgar, having met in the West Indies during the American War of Independence. Not the slightest trace of jealousy tainted their relationship, though in his last letter to Colllingwood (Oct. 9th) Nelson seems to express a little guilt at possibly having aroused it. Collingwood repudiated any as far as he was concerned: with others it would far more likely, (especially if his behaviour was as Wellington had described it – not mentioned by Collingwood.)

Adams states that, as a prelude to Trafalgar, on 20th August “Collingwood pulled off one of the most extraordinary tactical victories of the war. It is barely mentioned by the majority of historians.” Cruising with a small force off Cadiz he was confronted by Villaneuve’s fleet of 26 returning from the West Indies. They were almost certain to be hoping to pass into the Mediterranean where they could do much damage. First he pretended to chase them, then, using one of the oldest ruses in the book, started signalling to non-existent support over the horizon. Villaneuve fell for this, and made for Cadiz instead – just where Collingwood wanted him to be. “Trafalgar would otherwise not have happened.”

Collingwood had his own grievances: his distinguished service at the Battle of the First of June (1794) was not reported, almost certainly becuse of the ill-will of the drafter of Lord Howe’s dispatch, and the patent for his elevation to a barony did not include descent through the female line – and Collingwood had only two daughters. Unlike Nelson, Collingwood was a devoted family man, but was unable to see any of them – wife or daughters – which he longed to do, during the last five years of his life.

An inclusion in the “family” was the dog Bounce, though his breed, or even size, is unknown to us, apart from the fact that he had grown as high as Collingwood’s desk. For a lonely Admiral he was the perfect confidant and in other ways the ideal Navy dog, though he could never stand the sound of gunfire, immediately going below. He routinely swam behind the Admiral’s barge when he went ashore, until he was too tired to do so, thereby missing an opportunity of having his portrait painted. Back in Britain, he accompanied Collinwood in his long walks when the Admiral, his pockets full of acorns, went in search of suitable sites to plant them.

After his elevation to the peerage, Collingwood humourously depicts Bounce’s behaviour – maybe a gentle hint to his wife and daughters, who were enjoying their new status perhaps too much and too expensively:

I am out of all patience with Bounce. The consequential airs he gives himself since he became the right honourable dog are insufferable. He considers beneath his dignity to play with commoners’ dogs, and truly thinks that he does them grace when he condescends to lift up his leg against them. This, I think, is carrying the insolence of rank to the extreme, but he is a dog does it.

Sad to say, Bounce, now 18 years old and as crippled by arthritis as his master, fell overboard one night in August 1809 and drowned. Collingwood grieved greatly at his death.

Collingwood was the Admiral in change of Mediterranean matters, which did not merely mean keeping an eye on any French fleet manoeuvres from Toulon but the whole diplomacy, from Turkey in the east, to the Barbary corsairs in the west, whom he had to indicate that piracy on British shipping was a no-go pursuit, while depending on them for fresh water, fresh vegetables and beef, which they could count on being paid for. His dealings with the troublesome Bourbons of Naples, now confined to Sicily, showed that he was far from feeling the fascination Nelson had for that unstable monarchy.

Collingwood died on 7th March 1810, a day after his ship set sail for home. Though a post-mortem revealed a growth in his stomach he had, in reality, worn himself out in the service of his country. He was buried beside Nelson in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The Navy and Spain 1807-1814

Christopher Ball’s Wellington’ Navy fills, as they used to say, a long-felt want, though not wanted, apparently, as much as it deserves to be. The author points out that Paul Kennedy in his “seminal work” The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery merely remarks that the Navy provided “logistical support and added mobility”. The fact is that without it the British role in the peninsula would have been a failure. Unfortunately naval and military historians seem never to have communicated. To take just one example: even Oman, in his seven-volume history makes little mention of the Navy’s part in the long defence of Cadiz which was more of a naval than a military one. Added to this neglect must be the lack of any large set-piece battle in the area Hall deals with.

How much trouble Wellington gave the Admiralty can be judged from their (all but) final rebuke by its clearly exasperated First Lord, Lord Melville:

I will take your opinion in preference to any other person’s as to the most effectual mode of beating a French army, but I have no confidence in your seamanship or nautical skill. Neither will I defer to the opinions upon such matters of the gentlemen under your command who are employed in the siege of St. Sebastian, and which happen to be at variance with those of every naval officer in His Majesty’s service.

We can be thankful that Wellington was not in the same position as Napoleon, Britain’s long-evolved Constitution having prevented anything of the sort.

This a book which, without any lengthy analysis, I can recommend to those who wish to know more of this subject: Just read it!

Other activities of the Royal Navy

The Command of the Seas enabled Britain to found its second Empire, picking up the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies (the last of which was returned to Holland), as well as taking as much of the West Indies as it really wanted. During the War of 1812 against the Americans, it, by the end, righted the balance of the early defeats by powerful American frigates.

But these acquisitions did not really hurt Napoleon. Only the Peninsular War, fought on continental soil could really make a difference – which it did, Napoleon contributed with his errors: not going himself there after his initial incursion, which sent Sir John Moore racing for Corunna – a task left to Soult. He left a divided command and attempted to dictate strategy when his information and implementation took months, and was totally impracticable.

Other books consulted

Froude: The Reign of Mary Tudor
Mahan: Life of Nelson – for Croker
Robert Gardiner, Ed.: The Campaign of Trafalgar 1803-1805
Robert Gardiner &al: Winning theNapoleonic War 1806-1814

A radical sect in Islam: 1090-1273

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:41:49 +0000

The Assassins
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967
(reissued 2001, with new preface)

Who they were and who they were not: their long lineage

Perhaps it would be best to start by saying what the Assassins were not. In his preface to the 2001 edition, Lewis states clearly:

According to a view widespread in the western world since mediaval times, the anger and the weapons of the Assassins were directed primarily against the Crusaders. This simply is not true. In the long list of their victims, there were very few Crusaders… The vast majority of their victims were Muslims and their attacks were directed not against the outsider, seen as basically irrelevant, but against the dominant elites and prevailing ideas of the Muslim world of their time.

Their Muslim opponents and potential victims responded in kind:

To kill them [preached one menaced cleric] is more lawful than rainwater. It is the duty of Sultans and kings to conquer and kill them, and cleanse the surface of the earth from their pollution. It is not right to associate or form friendships with them, nor to eat meat butchered by them, nor to enter into marriage with them. To shed the blood of a heretic is more meritorious that to kill seventy Greek infidels, [i.e., the Byzantines, their centuries-old enemies].

Lewis also rejects the tales (though current in the early 13th Century, and included in Marco Polo’s Travels) of “earthly paradises” in which drugged disciples woke to experience the promised pleasures of the world to come, after they had accomplished their suicidal mission. Furthermore, Lewis even rejects the hypothesis of a direct connexion with hashish, the effects of which were known long before the sect began its activities in Syria, where the name became attached to them, he suggests, as a term of abuse.

The religious provenance of the Assassins is a long one, and impatient readers might care to skip to the section below titled 1090: The Story Really starts.

Islam’s leadership (Caliph) problem

Then who were the Assassins? Although their first assassination took place in 1092, the Muslim sect that took this up as a matter of policy had a long lineage going back almost the origins of Islam. Muhammad, Islam’s charismatic founder, had left no intructions as to the succession, which, if he had attended to the matter, might have solved the problem that plagued almost every Muslim dynasty ever after.

Legitimists versus Opportunists: Shi’a versus Sunni

The first three Successors (caliphs), Abu Bakr, Omar and Othman, were associates and early supporters of Muhammad himself. The first had deputised for the prophet during his last illness, so his position seemed a natural continuation of that status; he in turn designated Omar as his successor, while Omar, who was mortally stabbed by a Christian (he was greatly relieved it was not a Muslim) appointed six electors to decide on his. Othman’s caliphate (644-656) ended with his murder by mutineers and this was the opportunity for Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad to assert his claim by heredity. He defeated and killed two claimants but was tricked into negotiating with a third opponent and betrayed by his own advocate. Ali was murdered in 661 for a reason that seems more personal than political, and became the first Muslim martyr, to be followed by his two sons, al-Hasan, who died at the age of 45, possibly of poison (669), and al-Husayn, who was killed, together with all but one of his sons, in what was more a massacre than a battle, at Karbala (680). But the party of Ali, the Shi’atu Ali, survived as the Shi’a, and Ali left plenty of descendants. The Sunni: The Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates

The winning side, the Sunni (the orthodox, as far as such a translation means anything) seem never to have been troubled by how the succession to the caliphate was established, accepting in a pragmatic way whatever came about. Mu’awiyah I (661-680), the first caliph to die a natural death since No 2, was proclaimed caliph on the death of Ali, with no other qualifications than that he was a competent governor and distantly related to the prophet Muhammad. As was now becoming normal, he had to eliminate some rivals.

Nominating his son Yezid as successor, he declared the succession hereditary and founded the Ummayad Caliphate (661-750). A rebellion established the Abbasids, who massacred all the Ummayads, with one exception, who fled to Spain and established a continuation of the dynasty there. The actual power of the Abbasid caliphs was brief, about a hundred years, but they continued, under Turkish control, until the caliphate was extinguished by the Mongols in 1258. It would be tedious to enumerate the caliphs, puppets or otherwise, that got murdered during this period. It is sufficient to say that there seems to have been no inhibition against it.

765: The Shi’a: The emergence of the Ismaili Sect

Meanwhile the Shi’a, also known as Alids and later Fatimids (after Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, wife of Ali), continued to survive, giving rise to some unsuccessful rebellions and splitting into two sects. They were led by Imams, descendants of Ali and Fatima, all “moderate, pliant, yet resolute – who preserved and enriched the Shi ite faith.” There were twelve of these; the last “disappeared”, Lewis says, about 873, and is still “the awaited one”. Mainstream Shi’as, from which other sects defected, are known as “Twelvers”.

The first split among the Shi’a occurred in 765, when Ismail, the eldest son of the previous Imam, was passed over in favour of a younger one, whom most Shi’a accepted. Those who did not formed a sect known as the Ismailis. For some 150 years the Ismaili Imams “remained hidden”. At the end of the ninth century, the Abbaside caliphate was falling apart, and the caliphs themselves were mere puppets, initially of a Persian Shi’ite dynasty. Their sultans decided it was easier to keep the Sunni caliphate, rather than instal a Shi’ite one.

909: The Shi’a: The establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate

This did no good to either the Sunnis or the moderate Shi’ites and left the field open to the Ismailis, who, with the establishment of a power base in the Yemen, sent missionaries all over the Muslim world, from India to North Africa. In the latter “they achieved their most spectacular success”, and there in 909 their “hidden Imam” emerged to proclaim himself caliph, founding a new dynasty, the Fatimids (909-1171). Their greatest achievement was their capture of Egypt, but they failed to conquer the Sunni heartland, and like the Abbasids, became, for their last hundred years, puppets of a military elite originally called in to prop them up.

1094: The Ismailis split: Mustalis and Nizaris

A split among the Ismailis, possibly engineered by the Fatimid military pupper master, came in 1094 on the death of the caliph. The caliph’s elder son, Nizar, was excluded in favour of a much younger one, al-Mustali, “a youth without allies and supporters, who would consequently be entirely dependent on his powerful patron” who also arranged to become his father-in-law. Nizar led a rebellion, and was killed, but his followers remained, refusing any allegiance to the Fatimid caliph. In 1130, after the murder of the caliph al-Amir, the son and successor of al-Mustali by Nizaris or the Syrian Assassins, with whom they had come to terms, the remaining Ismailis also defected from the Fatimid caliphate, claiming that a lost infant son of al-Amir, called Tayyib, was the hidden and awaited Iman. The tottering Fatimids, now nominally even confined to Egypt, were put an end to by their final patron, Saladin, in 1171, and the population restored to the Sunni fold of the Abassid caliphate.

The Seljuk Turks and the Ismaili “New Preaching”

The Ismaili split remained, but while the “Mustalis” stagnated in Islam’s backwaters, the “Nizaris” who had, for reasons not stated, been responsible for the murder of al-Amir, became the mainstream Ismaili movement and flourished. One reason why it did was the unusually chaotic state of the Middle East, into which the Seljuk Turks (luckily for Islam, Sunni converts) had been extending their Central Asian empire since the beginning of the 11th century. As the newcomers displaced the old Arab and Persian aristocracy, discontent was expressed and exploited, inevitably in a religious guise, by the Ismaili “new preaching” and by the charismatic Hassani Sabbah, initiator of assassination as political instrument and policy, whose activities began before the Ismaili split in 1094.

1090: The story really starts: Hassani Sabbah, founder of “The Assassins”

Hassani Sabbah (1050?-1124) was born in Qum, then as now a centre of Shi’a orthodoxy in Iran, experienced a traumatic conversion to the Ismaili sect and then travelled widely to propagate its doctrines, usually getting into trouble wherever he went (Lewis gives much information of these wanderings, both in his text and in his notes). Finally he found the ideal area to set up a power base, in the Elburz mountains in Northern Iran, bordering the Caspian, where the local tribe, the Daylamis, notorious for their independence, had been the last Persians to convert to Islam (peacefully, at that) and were well-infiltrated by Ismaili believers. A fortress in this region would be desirable, and there were plenty of them.

His choice finally fell on the castle of Alamut, built on a narrow ridge on the top of a high rock in the heart of the Elburz mountains and dominating an enclosed and cultivated valley about thirty miles long and three miles wide at the broadest point. More than 6000 feet above sea level, the castle was several hundred feet above the base of the rock and could be reached only by a steep and winding path. The approach to the rock was through the narrow gorge of the Alamut river, between perpendicular and sometimes overhanging cliffs.

So Alamut was impregnable other than to starvation or subversion and Hassani, in 1090, chose the latter course, by converting the inhabitants of the castle (or enough of them) using his missionaries from the surrounding countryside, and then arriving unobtrusively there himself. It was a bloodless takeover and the helpless governor was, according to one account, sent off with a draft of 3000 gold dinars in compensation. Hassani never left the castle and ruled his growing domain in the surrounding mountains and valleys from there, capturing or building castles, while like-minded Ismailis dominated the province of Quhistan, some five hundred miles away and missionaries sowed the seed in distant Syria (see below).

1092: Assassination No. 1; rationale and technique

Three important events took place in 1092. In July the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah sent an army to capture Alamut, which failed to do so On 16th October, the Sultan’s Vizier, Nizam-al-Mulk, was the victim of the first assassination by a volunteer dispatched by Hassani, and in November the Sultan died. The next Sultan was so busy (as normal) securing the succession that he made overtures to Hassani about assassinating his competitor. This just made things worse, Ismailis, sufficiently strong in numbers to make suggestive threats, infiltrated his court and everybody who was anybody went around in body-armour.

For assassinations were, it must be emphasised, carried out on particular individuals for particular reasons and also at close quarters, where the victim must be stabbed to death. The assassins could not hope to survive; indeed, if by some chance they did, this was regarded as some sort of dereliction.

When his hands were free, the Sultan set about campaigning against the Ismailis, but without success, though the next (his erst-while rival) did the Ismailis some damage. There could be little continuity in such efforts, when they ground to a halt on the death of each Sultan. During all this period assassinations went steadily on. One significant one was the murder of the Egyptian Vizier/puppet-master in 1121, which liberated the Fatimid caliph from tutelage and who invited the Nizaris to renounce their claims. However this came to nothing and negotiations with Hassani also ceased when it became apparent that he had plans to assassinate the caliph and his Vizier. The caliph was murdered anyway by the Nizaris in 1130, as recorded above, though the Syrian Assassins were also suspected.

When Hassani died, any hopes by his enemies of a normal succession crisis were dashed; his deputy, Buzurgimid, a castle-taker on his own account and appointed by Hassani to succeed him, took his place at Alamut without any dissension. He ruled from 1124 to 1138 and assassinations dropped of – “The list… is comparatively short, though not undistinguished”, as Lewis puts it. The murder of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid must be regarded as a sort of bonus, caused by perhaps deliberate inattention (vigorously denied, of course) to his safekeeping by his kidnapper, the Seljuk Sultan Mas’ud.

Buzurgumid’s son, Muhammad (1138-1162) succeeded, again without trouble, so again disappointing the many enemies of the Ismailis. Fourteen assassinations, “a meagre haul compared with the great days of Hassani Sabbah” are recorded for his 24 year reign, “the great struggle to overthrow the old order… had dwindled into border squabbles and cattle-raids. The castle strongholds… had become the centres of local sectarian dynasties, of a type not uncommon in Islamic history,” especially during this period. There is some evidence that the Ismailis and the Seljuk Overlord Sultan Sanjay often went into alliance against common enemies. Some Ismailis, however, yearned for the more activist days of Hassani Sabbah, including the heir apparent, Hasan, who immersed himself in the teaching of the Founder, and, despite the suspicions and misgivings of his father, behaved with sufficient discretion to succeed, again without trouble, on his death.

1165-1210: Anti-nomianism in Islam

Hasan (1163-1166) inaugurated a very radical policy for Ismaili Islam, nothing other than the abolition of Shari’a Law. Such antinomianism (“against law”) has manifested itself several times within Christianity, justified in its case that since a sinner is saved by faith, any subsequent behaviour is irrelevant. Islamic antinomianism, which Lewis speaks of as “recurrent”, and gives an example from the early 8th Century, though its manifestations were most likely a relic of pre-Islamic practices, has different causes but much the same result.

Two and a half years after his accession, Hasan staged a dramatic ceremony in the courtyard of Alamut, to which Ismaili representative had been summoned from all over the Muslim world. It was in the middle of Ramadan, the pulpit so arranged that the audience had their backs to Mecca, that he announced the arrival of the Millennium; the “hidden” Nizari Imam had been resurrected, and he was his deputy (da’i); later he changed his mind and claimed to be his grandson. Consequent to this happening, Shari’a Law must be abandoned “because in this period of of the Resurrection [men] must turn in every sense towards God and abandon the rites of religious law and established habits of worship.” This proclamation was followed by a banquet, complete with wine, and delegates sped away with the good news, which was joyfully received in Quhistan and Syria, who put the injunctions into practice. In a total turn-around, those who adhered to the Shari a were punished as severely as those who formerly had broken it.

Although Hasan was murdered by his brother-in-law, strictly on religious grounds, his nineteen year old son Muhammad II (1166-1210) succeeded smoothly and continued with his father’s policies and elaborated his theology. However, Lewis remarks that the whole extraordinary interlude seems to have had little influence of the rest of the Islamic world – at least if contemporary Sunni historians are anything to go by. Their attention was only drawn to it after the destruction of Alamut in 1256 by the Mongols when Ismaili writings on the subject became available. Again, assassinations seem to have dropped off, though in the case of at least one anti-Ismaili cleric, intimidation seems to have been enough. However, the threat of assassination seems to have continued right to the end, with an emissary to the Mongol Khan Hulegu explaining that he had to wear a mail shirt for fear of it. When Muhammad II died his son, Jalal al-Din (1210-1221) reversed his father’s religious policy, an about-turn accepted by the wider Ismaili community, though some suspected his sincerity.

1194: The end of the Seljuk Era

The Seljuk Great Sultanate, which had conquered the Middle East in the early 11th century, was disintegrating. It was never an empire proper and though Seljuk Turks formed the aristocracy of the region, there was no cohesion among them prepared to face the challenge that was coming – the Mongols. One region that was now completely independent was Khorasm, between the Oxus and the Caspian, whose ruler, styling himself Khorasmshah, was now moving south into Persia. In the battle of Rayy, the last Seljuk Sultan was defeated and killed and the Khorasmshah assumed that he would now become the protector of the Abbasid caliph, as Sultan of Baghdad. In this he was mistaken; during the breakup of the Great Sultanate, the caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) had achieved independence himself and was in no mood to surrender it. In fact the Abbaside Caliphate achieved a brief, and final, flowering. The Khorasmians anyway had enough to do, trying to resist the Mongols, who ultimately obliterated them; they also incurred the enmity of the Ismailis, conducting massacres, to which the Ismailis retaliated with assassinations.

The Ismaili lord of Alamut (no longer claiming the Imamate), Jalal-al-Din was succeeded by his only son, aged nine, Ala al-Din (1221-1255), who seems from quite an early age to have shown signs of madness. Business seems to have effectively carried out by his vizier and subordinates, who ensured that Alamut continued to be a center of learning, respected even by Sunni scholars. They also kept up the time-honoured tradition of assassination and intimidation, though the intricacies of feuds and alliances would take us too far from our theme. Finally Ala al-Din was murdered and though his son, Rukn al-Din was not sorry to have it happen, a severe and incapacitating illness at the time exculpated him from any direct involvement. Several probably innocent persons were put to death for the crime: no one knows who was really responsible.

1258: The last of the Alamut Ismailis

Rukn al-Din (1255-1258), the last of the Alamut Ismailis, attempted desperately to appease the Mongols. Early in 1258, they sacked Baghdad and put to death the last caliph, Mutasim (1242-1258) and all of his kin they could find, extinguishing the Abbasid Caliphate. No candidate for caliph, an obviously empty title, emerged, though the Ottoman Sultans, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found it convenient to assume the role when dealing with the Western powers. Rukn al-Din lasted a little longer; the Mongols extracted from him all they could in the way of surrendering Ismaili strongholds, including Alamut, and then murdered him after he had travelled all the way to Karakorum, in vain, to plead to be left with something – Hulegu did not even grant him an interview.

1260: The Mongols repulsed from Syria

Hulegu’s conquests, with their usual massacres, extended into Syria, but having left an army to consolidate these, it was destroyed at the battle of Ain Jalud by the Egyptian Mameluke Kotos in 1260, and the Mongol movement westward was finally halted. However, Hulegu established a kingdom with a Persian core and though himself remaining a pagan, being buried with appropriate heathen rites (virgins strangled to accompany him &c), perforce used the Muslim elite as administrators. Half a century later, his great-grandson, now a devout Muslim, was consecrating much time and energy to the revival of the culture Hulegu had attempted to destroy. Unfortunately for Muslim unity, the population was Shi’a, and Persia/Iran has remained a Shi’a state from that day to this.

The Mongols left of the Ismailis only a remnant in the Middle East and Persia, but a mission to faraway India had been successful and their tradition asserts that a small son of Rukn al-Din survived to sire a line of Imams, whose descendant today is the Aga Khan. In Syria also the sect during all this time had flourished and to its activities there we must now turn, though they did not survive the Alamut Assassins for very long.

1100- 1273: The Assassins in Syria

Missionaries from the Assassin stronghold of Alamut established by Hassani Sabbah found the mountainous terrain of northern Syria at once suitable and familiar as a venue for a power-base, but their inhabitants less amenable for it to be used as such, partly, Lewis suggests, because the emissaries were Persians. As well as indigeous “moderate” Ismailis, there were plenty of other sects to cultivate and convert, including the Druzes, who had broken away from the orthodox Egyptian Fatimids, on the disappearance of the Caliph al-Hakim in 1021, believing, in what seems a standard Muslim convention, that he would reappear in the near or far future. The Alawites, despite their orthodox Shi’a “Twelver” beliefs, combined these with “extremist” tendencies and must have seemed suitable material.

A policy of local alliances: Aleppo 1100-1124

The Assassins (a name of Syrian origin, dating from this time, which we can now use legitimately) managed to sieze, in 1106, the fortress of Afamiya, some 150 miles south-west of Aleppo, where they had many sympathisers, including its ruler Ridwan, who was more than suspected of making use of their services. Or, as Lewis puts it: “the Assassins offered [him] the possibilty of… compensating for his military weakness among his rivals in Syria.”

It was not, however, any of these who eliminated Afamiya, but Tancred, Prince of Antioch, or more precisely, Regent for his uncle Bohemond, who was a captive of the Danishmend Turks and whose ransom, for various reasons, no one, including his nephew, was in a hurry to pay. He is the first crusader Lewis introduces, in many ways typical of the Norman variety, brave, land-hungry (Antioch should have been returned to the Byzantines) and devious, but we have no time to say anything about him here. I have relegated to an Appendix information, which the general public seems to badly need, about the Crusades and Crusaders, who became a factor in the Near East after their capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

Unable to secure an independent base, the Assassins continued to operate courtesy of the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus. They lost no time about it; in 1103 they assassinated the ruler of Homs (possibly to oblige Ridwan) and, to quote Lewis: “The history of the Syrian Ismailis, as recorded by the Syrian historians, is chiefly the history of the assassinations which they perpetrated.” Only a decade after the seizure of Alamut, and the first assassination organized from there, the Syrian Assassins were following the precepts of Hassani Sabbah.

This state of affairs couldn’t last, of course. Ridwan of Aleppo died in 1113 and relations with his son, Alp Arslan, deteriorated. Not long after his accession, the leader of the Assassins was executed and 200 of his followers punished in various ways by the commander of the town militia, who was assassinated when he fell from favour and fled the city in 1119. Finally, in 1124, the Ismailis (or at least those suspected of Assassin tendencies) were expelled from Aleppo.

The policy continued: Damascus 1124-1128

Undaunted, their leader, Bahram (a Persian, as his name suggests) moved to Damascus where he was well received by its ruler, Tughtigin, though more so by his Vizier. Tughtegin not only gave him the castle of Banyas, situated just his side of the Jordan, the boundary of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but also a building, described as palace, for his headquarters. Bahram himself was killed in a raid, where an expedition to gain converts had turned into a typical Arab feud, and was succeeded by another Persian, Ismail, who carried on his policies and activities. But just as in Aleppo, when Tughtegin died in 1128, an even fiercer reaction against the Ismailis, and their protector, the Vizier, followed. The Vizier was murdered and 6 – 20,000 Ismailis (according to which source is believed) were massacred.

1128: The Assassins have to become autonomous

Ismail fled, surrendered Banyas to the Crusaders and took refuge in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where he died in 1130. His asylum-seeking should not arouse surprise; already the Crusaders were just one of the small Levant states making or breaking alliances or at war with each other in kaleidoscopic fashion. When immigrants arrived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem eager to kill Muslims – anyMuslims – their hosts had to explain that things weren’t quite that simple: there was a truce with Them, but it was open season against Them.

Lewis is a little vague as to how the Ismailis managed to survive during the few years before they finally secured defensible territory, especially castles. All the same, they managed to continue with their assassinations, though it was from Alamut that retribution came to Toghtegin’s son, Buri, despite his wearing armour and his armed guard. In 1132, the Assassins bought the fortress of Qadmus, then acquired al-Khaf in 1136, securing Khawabi, Rusafa, Qulaya and Maniqa about the same time, and in 1140, what became their most important stronghold, Masyaf. Almost all of these are on Lewis’s map, clustered in the mountainous region of the Jebal Bahra, and on the border of the County of Tripoli, (feudal dependancy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem), with which they were usually on good terms, though for some reason they assassinated its Count, Raymond II in 1152, incidentally their first Crusader victim.

The Assassins were much less worried about the Crusaders than about their Muslim enemies, by Zangi (1100-1150) in the north and Saladin (1137-1193) in the south. Zangi, the independent governor of Mosul, founded a dynasty (1127-1262) which in absorbing the minor Syrian states, such as Aleppo, Damascus and Homs, inevitably came into collision with the Assassins. Two governors, or emirs, of Mosul had already been assassinated, in 1113 and in 1126, obviously in anticipation of such a western move. The behaviour of the Zangids towards the Ismailis in general and the Assassins in particular fully justified their fear of them.

The threat from Saladin, “protector” of the Fatimid caliphs arose from the alliance of the Ismailis with the Nizaris, their theological differences either ignored or forgotten. The Assassins seem to have neutralised Saladin to some extent by two serious and nearly successful attempts on his life in 1176 and later by demonstrating there were plenty of Assassins among his entourage. Perhaps he was also reminded that, before he was born the man responsible for the disinheriting of Nizar was assassinated (in 1121) and, in 1130, the Fatimid caliph himself, quite probably by the Assassins.

Another account by a later historian gives a sounder reason for the Assassins’ hostility. A raid from anti-Shi’a Iraqis had massacred some 13,000 Ismailis – it must be remembered that most Ismailis lived peaceful lives as far as it was possible; only what might be termed the activists kept to their castles, from where they organized any necessary fighting and assassinations. Saladin had taken advantage of this raid to conduct some massacres of Ismailis himself, winding up besieging Masyaf, the Assassins’ main stronghold. Somehow (the facts are obscure) a non-aggression pact was negotiated and neither side troubled the other for some time after. Otherwise, it is difficult not to assume that the Assassins could have eliminated Saladin had they really decided to do so. For by this time (see below) the Assassins had been organized into an efficient menace to those who aroused their hostility.

1162: Sinan, “The Old Man of the Mountain” takes charge.

Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, also known as Rashid al-Din (1133-1193), the only Assassin that anyone in the West seems ever to have heard of, came from Basra, with, so he claimed, credentials from Alamut, having been brought up with the two sons of Muhammad II, Hasan (who succeeded him) and Husayn. That may have been so, and certainly it is unlikely that he could have attained his position without such credentials, probably from Hasan, but he emancipated himself so successfully from obedience to Alamut, that the “Chief Missionary,” writes an Arab historian, “sent emissaries from Alamut a number of times to kill him, fearing usurpation of the headship, and Sinan used to kill them. Some of them he deceived and dissuaded from carrying out their orders.” It is to him that most myths and legends of Assassin practices have been attached. Indeed, one Christian visitor testified to one of these being demonstrated in his presence, when a number of his disciples, at his command, unhesitating leapt to their deaths from the walls into the depths below.

Sinan turned out to be as charismatic as the Assassins’ founder Hassani Sabbah, and as efficent an organizer. The same historian quoted above summed up his achievements and status:

He built fortresses in Syria for the sect. Some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by stratagems and fortified and made inaccessible. Time spared him and kings took care not to attack his possessions for fear of the murderous attacks of his henchmen. He ruled Syria for thirty-odd years.

Although their main enemies remained Moslems, the Assassins had to turn some of their attention to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem which with the Principality of Antioch controlled the Levantine coastline from Cilicia to Egypt. Their major assassination coup, in 1192, was that of the claimant-King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, who had saved its remnants from disintegration after the capitulation of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Even so, it may actually have been a personal matter. Runciman, who goes into the matter in his The Kingdom of Acre (volume 3 of his History of the Crusades) in more depth that does Lewis, says Conrad refused to give compensation for a ship of Sinan’s he had captured. The survivor of the two assassins (contrary to Lewis, who says both assassins were siezed alive, Runciman states that only one was killed), under torture, failed to implicate anyone else. In realistic terms the Assassins had nothing to gain by the consolidation of Muslim power into a single state, stretching from Egypt to Iraq, as witnessed by their extirpation when this actually happened.

Though the Assassins’ suicide missions invariably targeted (or blackmailed) specific powerful or influential people – caliphs, sultans, viziers, governors, distinguished visitors and the occasional hostile cleric, for whom intimidation was usually enough, one category of leader was left untouched, the Masters of the celibate Military Orders, the Templars, Hospitallers and the Knights of St. John. It was a waste of resources to assassinate these, for they would be replaced by men just as tough and dedicated to their vocation. In fact, like all the other powers, in the area, local, territorial or institutional, the Orders came to terms with the Assassins, either paying or receiving “protection money”, for immunity for pilgrims or caravans as the situation fluctuated. Under these circumstances, assassinations were unnecessary – the threat was enough. If anything, the Assassins leaned towards the Christian powers, who, they knew, would have to be physically ejected before a unified Muslim state could be established in the area.

1193-1273: The last years and end of the Syrian Assassins

Sinan died in 1193 and the succession passed to another eastern Ismaili, Nasr, a Persian. Full relations with Alamut were restored after Sinan’s de facto independance. In fact, despite this, the strange antinomian episode (1165-1210) initiated by Hasan who had succeeded his father in the year of Sinan’s accession (probably no coincidence) and continued by Muhammad II, had caught on, though Sinan moderated its excesses, and its ending was without incident.

There is little more to say about the Assassins before recounting the events leading to their extinction, except that they seem to have maintained the status quo established by Sinan even after the wiping out of the Alamut regime in 1258, following the Mongols’ thorough extermination of the Abbasid Caliphate, with which, during its brief independence, the Assassins had been on good terms. The onslaught of the Mongols on Syria was now impending. Fortunately for the Muslim world, it was ready – just in time.

1250 – 1811: The Mamelukes of Egypt

When Saladin died in 1193, the same year as Sinan, the usual squabbles over the sucession took place, but a satisfactory candidate emerged and the dynasty survived. Its last sultan, a benign one by contemporary accounts, Malik al-Salih, beat off the Last Crusade by St. Louis at Damietta in Egypt (where he was visited by St Francis on a personal peace mission). More importantly for the future, he bought large numbers of male slaves, mainly from the Caucasus, to be trained as soldiers, who became known as Mamelukes, derived from an Arabic word for slave.

1260-1277: Baybars the Mameluke

When Malik al-Shah died, leaving only a baby boy, a Mameluke took over after the usual murder and mayhem. After he was murdered, another, Kotos took over. He was responsible for the great victory of Ain Jalud in 1060 over the Mongols – they never returned – but was in turn murdered by his lieutenent Baybars, who maintained his position for the rest of his life, terminated by his dying in agony in 1277 from poison he had prepared for a victim who craftily switched the drinks.

Baybars received the submission of the Assassins a few years after he came to power and “their skilled services seem to have been, for a short time at his disposal” as Lewis puts it, though the missions had declined from purely the suicidal to high-risk ones, with payment attached: “If the murderer escapes,” the famous traveller Ibn Battuta explained, “the money is his; if he is caught, his children get it. Sometimes their plots fail, and they themselves are killed.” The sometimes is significant. Prince Edward, the future King of England Edward I, a sort of gap-year Crusader in 1272, almost fell a victim; his death might well have changed the history of the British Isles.

1173: The end of the Assassins

But Baybars, whose life-work was the liberation of the Muslim Near East from the double threat of the Christian Franks [a general term in use for all Western Europeans, and not confined to those of French origin] and the heathen Mongols, could not be expected to tolerate the continued independence of a dangerous pocket of heretics and murderers in the very heart of Syria

Nor could they be trusted, there were enough of them devoted to the old ways to arouse suspicion, justified by a certain amount of evidence that a mission was being organized to assassinate Baybars himself. The last leaders of the Assassins, who after the fall of Alamut in 1158, had been appointed by Baybars, were exiled to Egypt and the remaining castles surrendered. The end came not with a bang but a whimper.

Cultural contrasts between Islam and the West, then and now

Although Western Europe, from Scandinavia to the Atlantic could be regarded as Christianized by 1000AD and Christian beliefs and practices regarded as the social pattern to be aspired if not always adhered to, two fundamental customs, which are not given any biblical sanction, became firmly established. The first was a total ban, for any reason, on suicide. The other, of slower growth, was succession by primogeniture. It might be noted that Orthodox, Byzantine Christianity, to which the Russians converted, supported a suicide ban, but in the period we are dealing with, dynastic succession was less firmly rooted than in the West.

Suicide, permissible and impermissible

The taboo against suicide meant, of course, that there could be no Christian equivalent to the Assassins, or the modern suicide bomber. This taboo was rigorously enforced by the Church (a single unit in Western Europe until the Reformation in the sixteenth century – which made no difference) which equated it with murder and consigned the dead criminal to hell-fire, since he or she had obviously died unrepentant, while the corpse was denied burial in consecrated ground. Whether the doctors of the Church, or the university schoolmen debated the prohibition of suicide is strictly irrelevant: it was fact of life. The Jewish position is probably the same, but this I am not certain of. The only suicides I can think of in the Old Testament are of King Saul and his armour-bearer and Achitophel, whose counsel was rejected by King David. These are recounted with neither approval or disapproval.

The Christian prohibition against suicide survives very strongly even in largely secularised Western societies. Abolition of the law against it has only been achieved in the last few decades and “assisted suicide” is still a controversial matter, far more than abortion. In all other major religions – Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Shinto – suicide is a part, a small part admittedly, of the political culture. The Islamic has been demonstrated by the Assassins in the past and the modern suicide bomber in the present, Tamils Tigers are the Hindu element, if we exclude suttee, Buddhists immolate themselves, the Chinese regard (or regarded) suicide as a preferable alternative to public shame and everyone knows about the kamikazis of Japan. Western and Eastern Christian and post-Christians societies denied its legality under any circumstances for almost all of their existence, and they appear to be unique.

Although we can perhaps learn little of use for ourselves from the techniques of the Assassins, perhaps we should remember that they targeted key individuals, and should be aware that the modern Islamic terrorists have not forgotten this and know that it is far from certain that the modern political, democratically elected leader will be replaced, as would have been the Commanders of the military religious orders, with another as tough and dedicated to the work in hand as he was.

Primogeniture: succession made plain

The convention that a man’s estate should pass whole to his eldest son and then to that son’s eldest son, regardless of other male relatives, who might be older, stronger or wiser, was almost certainly the result of the feudal system, a series of hierarchies, based on land holdings, with the knight the bottom unit, sufficiently supported by his land income to afford armour, horse and retinue, owing direct allegiance to a superior, perhaps a baron, who in turn owed his to an earl, who owed his to the King. It was a system that may have sacrificed a certain degree of military efficiency to certainty of status. Any disputes could be settled by litigation, which tended to strengthen the system, the influence of which may even have worked its way upward, so that Kings, instead of dividing up their possessions to parcel them out among their sons (as William the Conqueror and Henry II did with theirs in England and France), saw the merit of a system that sanctioned their being transmitted in a single package.

It hardly needs pointing out that this system was infinitely preferable to the Islamic one, which entailed a free-for-all amongst those who thought they had a chance of replacing the defunct leader, usually but not always, his sons. The three great Islamic dynasties, the Abbasid, the Mughal and the Ottoman all displayed this in their days of greatness, while the eventual Ottoman solution was almost worse than the disease – to keep the Sultan-in-waiting, together with any potential competitors, sequestered until his accession, so that his ignorance of outside affairs made him unfit to rule. Oddly enough the only exception to the “usual methods” employed in the area to decide on the succession were the Assassins, where the transmission of power seems to have been almost invariably smooth.

An appendix on the Crusades and Crusaders

The era of “apologies” is on us and the late Pope was ignorant enough to apologize to the Muslim world for the Crusades. It would have been more relevant for him to have apologized, if at all, for the contemporary Christian reconquest of Spain (a success) than to have done so for the Crusades (a failure). The Crusades, if properly managed, could have kept the boundary of Christendom fixed as far as the Taurus in Asia Minor, or even the Caucasus. Think how convenient that would have been to the bureaucrats in Brussels, with their headache of negotiating an EU extension to the same boundary! Instead, the Crusaders opened up to the Turks a means of destruction of the Byzantine Empire and conquest almost as far as the gates of Vienna. For this the Papacy does bear a heavy responsibility.

To put the matter briefly, the Crusades should, perhaps could, have been a rescue mission, badly needed by the Byzantines, who wanted a large contingent of fighting men to act under their orders. The Empire had suffered a crushing defeat at Manzikert, near their eastern border, in 1071 by a part of the Turkish invaders who were otherwise busy subduing the (Arab) Middle East, aggression beside which any effort by the Crusaders pales into insignificance. But they became Muslims, so that’s all right, isn’t it? Unfortunately, rather like the Muslims, the Byzantines tended to solve their succession problems in the same way, though not so brutally, and it wasn’t until 1081 that the winner, the Emperor Alexius was firmly on the throne. Relations between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Churches were even worse than usual and it was not until 1095 that he was able to call for help to clear Asia Minor and establish the old boundaries.

Instead of what he wanted (after a rabble of pilgrims had been safely deposited on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, to be slaughtered by the Turks) what arrived at Constantinople was, for its time, a well-organized army, intent, for those with a religious agenda, on “liberating” Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulche, and for those with a more secular one, to sieze land to rule completely independently. Both these objectives were achieved, but what should have been their priority was not. Asia Minor was by-passed and lost and, in due course, the Ottoman Turks, with it as their base, ensured that South Eastern Europe was lost as well for many centuries.

An odd (but loving) couple

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 18:17:39 +0000

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens
Jane Ridley
Chatto & Windus, 2002

The great grand-daughter of the architect (“Ned” to all) and his wife (Lady Emily Lutyens, nee Lytton) has set herself the quadrangular task of describing the lives of both of them, together with his architecture and her theosophy. Their interests, to which both were strongly bound, conflicted and in others, and probably at other times, would have ensured their separation. But as his letters (The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily, edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley) can attest, much more strongly than this book does, they retained a deep affection for each other, certainly amounting to love initially and at the end of their lives together. “In the last years of his life,” wrote Lady Emily, in her autobiography Candles in the Sun, “I like to think that we were closer to each other than we had ever been before.” And, penitently, after re-reading their letters two months after his death, she found hers and herself “a revelation of such an odious person, and Father so endlessly sweet and patient.” His letters (a superb collection, and a joy to read) certainly bear this out: as far as I know, hers have not been published – perhaps as she would have wished.

Unfortunately their incompatibilities were enormous. Just for a start, neither seemed to have any idea how to make love. Perhaps if Emily had been seduced by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, “a corridor-creeper” as someone characterised him (and got away with it; and, in the circumstances it did seem an amazingly close-run thing – see A Blessed Girl by Lady Emily herself) he might have taught her how to initiate the obviously clumsy virgin Ned. As it was, after the birth of Mary, the youngest child, she refused (by letter) to have any further sexual relations with him. Fortunately, perhaps, they did not live together very much; at first his work took him to sites and clients, South Africa and India, later her theosophy to camps, congresses, India (he had to warn her that if she came when he was there, he’d have to throw up his work) and Australia. The children suffered terribly – or do I exaggerate? The houses Lutyens bought for the family to live in also sound appalling – one was perennially damp, all were sparsely furnished (bare boards underfoot) and under-heated, if not actually icy. How can I sympathise with an architect who does not care for comfort, for others, let alone for himself and his family? Maybe the Cenotaph and the War Memorials he designed appealed to him as projects because no one had to live in them? In a passage I remember but cannot find, the author states “Lutyens’ houses [for his clients] were notoriously uncomfortable” and there are references to draughts, smoky chimneys and inadequately lighted rooms, to say nothing of increased costs over the estimates.

Even “Viceroy’s House [in New Delhi] was not an easy or a comfortable house to live in”, Ridley admits, p. 402. He paid his office staff the lowest wages in the business and some of them were probably, perhaps because of this, dishonest. His feuding with Herbert Baker, fellow-architect and once his friend, and far more magnanimous in his attitude to Lutyens, was surely excessive. He could never forgive him for “deceiving” him about how the approach road at Delhi would dip so that the view of Viceroy House, with its dome, was sometimes lost. Later, when the project was complete, many judged this did no harm to or even enhanced the effect. Yet, in spite of his defects, Lutyens comes across as an attractive, cheerful (he was always making jokes) and ultimately lovable man. His daughter Mary who wrote her autobiography To Be Young confessed that though she had tried to redress the balance to some extent in favour of her mother, it didn’t work.

Somehow the lives of everyone seem more austere, uncomfortable and chaotic than has been the impression given in other biographies by Mary and her mother. The breakthrough of Lutyens himself into success is not made clear, perhaps because he was always bad at managing money and worried about becoming poorer and poorer, like his father, and dying in poverty. Yet by the time he was 30 “he had so much work in Surrey that he spent most of his time there (p. 73).” He seemed to have wanted to build in the local ‘vernacular’ style, but of course sought clients who desired large houses. Gertrude Jekyll, the legendary garden designer who had, from his first days, been a close friend, collaborated with him and found him many clients (12 out of 20 documented jobs between 1892 and 1896, p. 69) and there were others, Barbara Webb and Betty Balfour, and the Duke of Westminster. At least one house sounds like a disaster, the principal rooms facing the wrong way (p. 70).

It is difficult, of course, to describe architecture, let alone the thought processes that bring it about, without far more illustrations than are possible in a book of this sort and the reader is tacitly referred to other works, particularly Hussey’s Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Perhaps that is why Lutyens’ efforts to get work (one or two bordering on sharp practice) are more obvious because easier to recount. Other features that emerge is his obsession for work, even to the last few days of his life, and linked with it, his painstaking care for detail. His long relationship with Lady Sackville (Macsack) seems to have been a failure architecturally as well as personally.

His achievement in New Delhi was, by contrast, a triumph. It was a paradox that an architect so English should have made something so suitable for India, somehow taking the features of a culture and people he basically thought inferior in order to achieve it. That, at least, is how I see it. Jane Ridley makes the proper anti-racist sounds, but Lutyens was merely a man of his time, nor could the British have ruled India if they had felt anything but superior to the natives and made them feel the same.

By contrast, it is Emily’s (and Mrs Besant’s) position, now perceived as so conventional, that was remarkable. Society, for all its racism, tolerated her behaviour then more than ours would today would her husband’s. Its racist element actually probably made it easier for Emily and Mrs Besant, President of the Theosophical Society (white), to judicially remove Krishna and Nitya from their father (black). Krishna, or Krishnamurti as he became, had been identified as the Theosophical Messiah, a role he repudiated later. As for the sinister ‘Bishop’ Leadbeater, today he would long ago have been locked up as a paedophile. I expect the Rev. Whitworth Elwin, who had named Emily as “a blessed girl” when a teenager and caressed her by his fireside, while his wife grumbled quietly in a corner, would have been on some sort of police list, too. Such are our more enlightened times.

Ridley makes little attempt to explain what Theosophy was (or is), perhaps thinking (and correctly) that Emily would have found some other weird thing to do. (My apologies to modern Theosophists, whose lifestyle is presumably different, and, I trust, much more comfortable now than then). It is very unlikely that it would have been anything that helped her husband, who took the refusal of his marital rights (as they were then regarded) very hard. Although both Edwin and Emily lived through both World Wars (he died on New Year’s Day 1944) neither war is given much prominence – it seems a strange intrusion when one of Edwin’s trips to India is menaced by a U-Boat. There is no mention of any of his relatives being lost in either war. Emily’s sister Barbie lost three sons in WWII; its effect on Emily’s family seems to have been minimal. Only after WWI did it seems to affect Edwin when he served on the War Graves Commission and designed memorials, the Cenotaph being the most famous.

As for his work, strangely his best known did not make money; he waived his fee for the Cenotaph, his beautiful Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House (scale 1:12, see the almost as beautiful book of the same name, by Mary Stewart-Wilson and David Cripps, photographer), with its multiple collaborators (typically, Bernard Shaw was the only one to refuse to contribute a tiny book to the Royal Library) was a personally inspired (and unpaid) jeu d’esprit and the Viceroy’s House didn’t bring him a profit. And his (Roman Catholic) Liverpool Cathedral, the design for which he was working on his death-bed, has become an architect’s fantasy, never (apart from the crypt) to be built, though a full model of it still exists.

Emily survived Edwin for twenty years, dying at 87 from Alzheimer’s. Two years before, her daughter, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, had taken her on a tour in Surrey, visiting there the houses her husband had designed. But “Have I ever been married?” enquired the bewildered old lady. Tragically, after her death, two of her four daughters committed suicide, but all her children left progeny, though of the twenty two now of the fourth generation, only one male bears the name of Lutyens.

Note: Lutyens is a unique family name (as, I believe, is Guinness), all being descended from Bartold Lutkens, a Hamburg merchant who immigrated to London and was naturalised in 1739, anglicizing his name to Bartholomew Lutyens; Edwin was his great-great grandson and had nine brothers and three sisters. At least three of these survived him, but his daughter remembers that from time to time, her father would don a black suit and top hat to attend the funeral of one of his siblings.

One of them, his second elder brother, John went to India after he joined the Royal Engineers and befriended Kipling, then a cub reporter who later in tribute put him in by name as the hero of the polo match in his story The Maltese Cat: “Why Lutyens? What an odd name,” I’d wondered as a boy, long before I’d ever heard of the architect.

Five Lutyens, one of them Edwin’s grandfather, fought in the Peninsula, three at the battle of Corunna. Oman, in his History of the Peninsular War, mentions a Captain Lutyens, presumably one of the other two brothers, who, just out to the Peninsula, may (the facts are obscure) have been killed in a disastrous skirmish there.

Another brother, Englebert, had the duty of keeping an eye on Napoleon on St. Helena, which he did with such consideration (against orders) that Napoleon gave him a pair of pistols. Edwin also thrilled his children with the ghoulish story that “Englebert was on duty the night after the post-mortem on Napoleon, guarding his remains, when waking from a doze he was just in time to stop a rat from making off with Napoleon’s heart.”

“Fought” is perhaps not the quite the correct word to describe the role of another brother, Edwin’s grandfather Charles, who was a general in Wellington’s commissariat, and left the army a wealthy man. As Ridley puts it, “The administrative offices of the army were notoriously venal and, though in his war diaries he grumbled about dishonesty and graft, it seems unlikely that the shrewd and worldly Charles, as commissary general, neglected altogether the chance of enriching himself.”

The Light of Asia into western eyes

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:47:19 +0000

The Buddha and the Sahibs
Charles Allen
John Murray Publishing, 2003

It came as something of a surprise to me that so much that is now known about the Buddha (the “Wise One”, not an exclusive title in his time) seems to have been discovered by Europeans, who, later joined by the Americans, played a large part in the revival of Buddhism in the East, as well as its spreading into the West. It may be a fault in this book that the reader is really left in the dark as to the actual tenets of Buddhism. There have been plenty of investigators eager to claim significance for their discoveries, but their painstaking translations are rarely quoted and Asoka’s famous much-carved edict, triumphantly deciphered after 2000 years of incomprehensibility, and generally deploring violence, is more noted for the rarity of such an expression of its sentiments than for anything profound or even unusual about them.

Undoubtedly a historical person, the Buddha was born Siddhartha, prince in a small Sakya kingdom on what is now the Indian-Nepali border, into the Gautama tribe or clan: Sakyamuni and Gautama are thus other designations, as well as Burkhan (holy). The trouble with written records in the subcontinent at this time and for many centuries to come is that they were extremely perishable, ranging from bark in the north to palm leaves in the south. There were inscriptions on rocks and pillars, but ability to read them had long been lost. Oral traditions, however venerated, could not be regarded as reliable.

Most histories and reference books I have looked up give 568-463BC for the Buddha, or a few years earlier, linked to the known reign of the Mauryan king Asoka, 273-232BC. Allen favours the Sri Lankan source for 624-542BC, as Buddha’s lifespan, while Keay in his India, a History puts his death between 400 and 350BC, two or three generations before Alexander the Great’s incursion.

Enter the sahibs, from the late 1700s on, mainly younger sons or others from impoverished families or both, joining the East India Company, where it was possible to make a fortune, if one survived, for in that climate mortality was heavy. Enough of them manifested curiosity about the country to which they’d come to learn its languages and look at its monuments. Sanskrit (spelt Sanscrit by those who wrote about it at the time), the ancient language, from which the various languages and dialects of North India were derived, was kept by the Brahmins as far as possible a secret from others trying to find out anything about it. After this barrier was breached, it became apparent, somewhat to the amazement of European scholars, that Sanskrit had strong affinities to their own languages, and even more to Greek and Latin, their ancestral classical languages; its grammatical structure being much more elaborate and systematic. In the often quoted words of William Jones (1746-94), though he was not the first to study it, it was found to be “of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.” In fact (though this is not mentioned here) the discovery of the affinities of the Indo-European languages should be credited to James Parsons, FRS, whose book, published in 1767, The Remains of Japhet, Being Historical Enquiries into the Affinity and Origins of the European Languages, has, according to J.P. Mallory in his In Search of the Indo-Europeans, languished in obscurity because of its length and tediousness.

William Jones went badly off the rails in his speculations about a common culture embracing Egypt, Ethiopia and India – before any documents from Egypt or Mesopotamia, let alone Ethiopia had even been discovered, let alone deciphered. He did, however, manage to find the date of the Indian king Chandragupta, by identifying him with Sandrokottos, cross-referenced by Greek historians for his contact with the post-Alexander Seleucids in 303BC. From a reasonably reliable list of Indian kings with their lengths of reign, other dates could be established, the most important, from the connexion with the Buddha, being the reign of Asoka (268-233BC), third in line after Chandragupta. This king, after a successful campaign to add territory to his dominions, was so sickened by the death and devastation involved, that he decided to put into practice the precepts of the Buddha, to which he had so far merely nominally subscribed. He had numerous (forty two discovered to date) pillars and rock faces inscribed to this effect, made peace with his neighbours and forbad animal sacrifices.

If this seems an unduly prolix and discursive introduction to Buddhist origins it merely matches the author’s, who sets the scene of general ignorance, as of a jungle through which numerous characters metaphorically, and often literally, had to hack their way to add some fragment of information to be assembled, jigsaw like, into a final solution. I should be sorry to have missed information on any of these who all had to pursue their investigations in their spare time. But to pick just one: easily the most attractive is James Prinsep (1799-1840), of whom there is a charming picture, confidently lecturing, aged 20. As employee, later Master of the Calcutta Mint, he found that by early rising he could complete his duties by 10 o’clock, and turn his attention to other matters, including making a detailed map of Benares, which led to his scheme of draining its pestilential swamp.

This, and other benevolent projects, won him the gratitude of the Indians, who built a ghat on the Hooghly in his honour, its name, unfortunately, worn down into “Prince’s”. Any normal person, but not James Prinsep, would have had no time or energy left to work on the deciphering of the Asoka inscriptions, to which his expertise in numismatics contributed; any knowledge of the scripts had long been lost. It is sad to record that his passion for work contributed to his early death; he suffered a complete mental collapse and, carried back to England in this condition, died of “an affection of the brain, which proved to be a softening of the substances”.

To be fair, the sahibs in India were looking at the most difficult place, though, to excuse them, they hardly knew what they were looking for. Buddhism had long disappeared from India as a living faith, and the last two witnesses to its presence there are the Chinese pilgrims Fa Hian (400AD) and Huang Tsang (537AD). There is some evidence that in Kashmir Buddhism had been forcibly replaced by Hinduism around the earlier date, and it is uncertain to what extent persecution or simply assimilation of multiple incarnations of the Buddha to Hindu Gods was responsible for its disappearance in India. There was a Buddhist kingdom in Bihar as late as the 12th century, but it and its Buddhist institutions were destroyed by the Muslims at its end.

Looking for Buddhist origins in India therefore was a matter of archaeology and it was a triumph in this field that, working with the itineraries of the two Chinese pilgrims, the site of the capital of the state where the Buddha was born was discovered. There was a rogue archaeologist who was exposed as such and had to resign, but the other two, Waddell and Smith, must get the credit. Rather typically, Waddell never got back to the site, his military duties taking him to India’s North West Frontier and to China to participate in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 (Allen has these in the wrong order).

Somewhat earlier than the sahibs who began their investigations in India, others were doing the same in Ceylon, the coastal region of which had been taken over by the British from the Dutch, together with all their other overseas possessions, when Holland was conquered and then “allied” with the French Republic. Here they found a population that was largely Buddhist, together with a literature which, when translated, gave an account of its origins and how the religion had been brought to the island by one of Asoka’s sons (not his successor) and a daughter, around 270BC, and therefore during Asoka’s lifetime. It is from this source that Allen takes the anomalous dates for the Buddha’s lifespan.

From Ceylon Buddhism had spread to Burma and Siam. This branch of Buddhism, originating in Ceylon, is known as Theraveda Buddhism (the Doctrine of the Elders) or Hinayana Buddhism, the “Lesser Vehicle”, as distinct from Mahayana Buddhism, the “Great Vehicle”, which from its original source in North India spread to Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan. Allen pays little attention to this form, presumably because sahibs had little or nothing to do with it, repelled by the extreme filth of its Tibetan practitioners. The ultimately sanguinary “Mission” to Tibet in 1903-4, led by Francis Younghusband, a military sahib not actually that different from the sahibs of this book, tended to confirm the opinion that Buddhism there was a very degenerate form of that religion.

It is rather difficult to evaluate the effect of this unearthing of a religion by Western investigators, intellectually curious rather than expecting or seeking to find a system of beliefs that might satisfactorily replace their own. There was approval of its basically pacific tenets, contrasted with the warlike substratum of both Hinduism and Islam. In the later part of the nineteenth century Buddhism became, as it were, a sort of supplementary religion for some of these investigators.

Two people were important in this regard. One was Thomas Williams Rhys Davids (1843-1922), who encountered Buddhism as a civil servant in Sri Lanka. Even so, its Scriptures were in a dead Indo-European language, Pali, descended from Sanskrit and unrelated to the languages of South India and Sri Lanka. Rhys Davids undertook to organize the translation and printing of Pali texts: “the sacred books of the early Buddhists have preserved to us the sole record of the only religious movement in the world’s history which bears any close resemblance to Christianity,” he enthused. Steering Western interest towards Hinayana Buddhism, Rhys Davids had no hesitation in characterising it as a pure, “Protestant” form of the religion, compared with the corrupt, priest-ridden, “Catholic”, northern Mahayana Buddhism, overlaid with demonism, various hells and (one should not forget) physical dirt. It is debatable, says Allen, whether Rhys Davids considered himself a practicing Buddhist, but his own words come close to saying as much:

Buddhist or not Buddhist, I have examined every one of the great religious systems of the world and in none of them have I found anything to surpass, in beauty and comprehensiveness, the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha. I am content to shape my life according to that path

The other, probably the greatest populariser of Buddhism in the English speaking world was – perhaps still is – Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) whose 50,000 word blank verse Tennysonian-type poem The Light of Asia (1879 and still in print) gave an account of the Buddha’s life and teaching in an accessible form, sympathetic to the Protestant Victorian mindset on both sides of the Atlantic. Arnold had gone to India when he was 25, with a wife and child, to take up the post of Principal of Deccan College in Poona. He did not stay there long (though long enough to master Marathi, the local language, and to learn Persian and Sanskrit), returning to England to become a journalist and ultimately, for sixteen years, editor of the Daily Telegraph. His poem, he said, “was composed in spare moments, being jotted down on anything that was available and transcribed later.” It received tremendous acclaim, and was even turned into an opera. I cannot give a personal opinion of the work, for I have mislaid my copy, but remember it as a “good read”, though from many years back.

Inevitably perhaps, more dubious disciples from the West took to this newly discovered religion, whose vague theology left it open to individual manipulation. Easily the most notorious of these was Helen Petrova Blavatsky (1831-91), estranged wife of the Governor of Erevan in Russian Armenia. When exposed as a fraudulent medium by the Society for Psychical Research, she was forced to leave India and the Theosophical Society she had founded with an American colleague, Colonel Olcott. He had his problems with her equally strong-minded successor, Annie Besant (1847-1933), whose interest, however, was deflected from the Theosophical Society (of which she remained President until her death) by her taking up the cause of Indian Independence. Another questionable character that caused the Society trouble was ex-Anglican priest Charles Leadbeater, whose paedophilia in these times would certainly earn him a gaol term and probably bankrupt the Society. The bizarre and austere life of its followers, is well-recorded, for those interested in it, in the autobiography To Be Young, of Mary, the youngest daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens, long-suffering husband of Lady Emily Lutyens (nee Lytton), devotee of the Society and of its reluctant Messiah, Krishnamurti, a title later repudiated by him.

Buddhism has settled down in the West as one of the many movements that are untainted by accusations of brainwashing and kidnapping. The general public here seem to be reluctant to accept one possible implication of its dogma of reincarnation, that disabled people are expiating sins and crimes committed in a previous life. When a football coach, whose name I have forgotten (perhaps everyone else has) made such a suggestion a few years ago, the outcry against him was universal, including a condemnation by the Prime Minister, who thought, as everyone did, that he should lose his job, as, of course he did. No Buddhist organization or individual came to his rescue, nor, being what he was, could he defend himself, his pronouncements being usually of the level “the boy done good.”

As for the East, it would be strange if the spread of authentic texts and moreover ones printed and cheap did not have considerable impact. One cause of a Buddhist revival in Ceylon, for instance, was Olcott’s Buddhist Catechism, approved by the highest Buddhist authority, to be learnt by heart by believers, despite its “rationalist views that in many instances ran contrary to the Buddhist practices then prevailing on the island.” The practice of meditation by lay persons resulted from the translation of a Pali text (of course incomprehensible to all but scholars) by Rhys Davids, entitled The Manual of a Mystic. Other results were not so happy: there were squabbles about sacred sites, all of which, if recognized as such and supposed to retain any holiness, were occupied by Hindus.

This book is harder to read (and review) than the author’s previous one, Soldier Sahibs, the Men Who Made the North-West Frontier, whose activities were of a more simple and straightforward nature: “There was nothing but God above and duty below,” as one of them put it, and if their peace-keeping duties sometimes involved considerable bloodshed, it was not because they stood idle while massacres took place nearby. Nor is likely that the sahibs who searched for the Buddha in their spare time would shirk their duty when called upon to do their real job.

The publishers, as so often is their habit, provide an irritation by putting on the cover of its paperback edition a picture of a tall, gaunt military figure, leaning against the leg of a giant statue, reaching about to its mid-calf. There is nowhere in the book or on its cover any indication of who it is.

Bragging about English

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:20:50 +0000

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre 2004

A History of the English Language
Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable
Routledge & Kegan Paul 1951, revised 1978.

It is probable that those who have watched Melvyn Bragg on television and have heard him on radio on the subject reviewed here, will find the printed word, in short, his book, by far the superior medium to communicate it. It would be tedious to enumerate the advantages of the printed word, but the lack of sound is its great drawback, for of course language is oral, not visual – yet the only evidence of its past and development is visual, not oral. In his fluent, informative and thoughtful account of our language, Bragg tends get excitable: English faces “challenges” and, at a critical stage even “kept its nerve”, though whether its speakers were aware of these anthropomorphic postures is doubtful. Readers might do well to keep by them the more sober narrative of Baugh and Cable.

Although he gives a mention to the Indo-European stock from which almost all European languages differentiated, Bragg very sensibly begins in the fifth century when a variety of invaders from the mainland of Europe started to land in what is now England, speaking a distinctly different language from those who were already there. This language was a Germanic one, existing in a number of dialects. Some dialects were brought across, others left behind. The resulting mixture evolved into Anglo-Saxon, though it seems its closest living relative is present-day precarious Frisian.

The Anglo-Saxon speakers moved west, gradually conquering the resistance of the Celtic-speaking inhabitants and replacing their language with their own. One must be careful to distinguish this process from one of replacement of the inhabitants themselves, for studies of the DNA of today’s population indicate that this was far from being the case. However, the Celtic language itself survived only in Wales and Cornwall, though refugees transferred it to Brittany in France, while a related Celtic language continued unaffected in Ireland, and what was probably another one, spoken by the Picts in Scotland. Bragg shows that Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, continued to develop more or less in isolation for nearly four hundred years. It took on very few Celtic words and Christianity, from the sixth century, brought in its Latin and Greek terms, such as church, bishop, monk and angel, most, as the examples suggest, originally Greek. Though Latin was learned by monks, little if any other than religious words percolated into the vernacular.

The next event, as far as the language goes, was the series of invasions by the Danes during the ninth century, starting as raids and continuing as colonisation. Bragg sees King Alfred’s victory over them at the battle of Ethandune (Edington) in 878 as bringing this process to a halt, though consultation of any history book shows that Alfred continued to fight the Danes till the end of his life in 899 and the ultimate settlement left most of England in Danish hands. They had, however, agreed to become Christians, a big step to assimilation. Their presence in the north and east of England can be charted by the endings to place names, some 1,200 and counting: “-by”, “-toft” and “-thwaite”: “mickle” (cognate with Greek “megalos” = great) was common to both languages, which were not that distantly related.

It is almost certainly going too far to claim, as Bragg does, that the victory saved English as a language. The Danes failed to impose theirs on the north and east of England which they controlled. When another lot of Danes took over Normandy at about the same time and under the same conditions, they soon became French speakers. Danish donated some one hundred and fifty words to English, according to Bragg and, unlike many later imports, they are recognizable only by experts. What could be more English than they, their, them, birth, take, call, dregs and egg? Very often both English and Danish words continued side by side, diverging into different meanings: we still have English doom, and Danish law. Other features are evidence of speakers of two different languages trying to get along with each other by adapting their speech. As a result even core words – pronouns, prepositions and parts of the verb “to be” passed into English: “They are at…” is an example. Because case-endings were often different in the two languages, they tended to be dropped in favour of prepositions, a process that was going on anyway.

The next foreign language to make its impact was French, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 – and it may be of interest that at the time the invaders were always referred to by the English as “the French”. Once again, Bragg sees two languages in an epic battle with each other; in fact, other sources deny that there was any hostility by the rulers, who spoke French, towards the language of the ruled. French was the language of the government, but there was much less of that then than now. Although Bragg does not make this clear, for the first 150 years or so after the Conquest, English absorbed far fewer words than in the next 150, when French was plainly in decline.

During the first period, kings of England ruled large areas of France as well, and the aristocracy were as much at home there as in England. These lands were lost in 1204, and after that their feudal owners had to make the choice of being either French or English. Gradually, with this link cut, Norman-French became more and more isolated from mainstream, metropolitan French, and by 1250 there is evidence that some, perhaps most of the nobility, probably, Bragg suggests, because they had been brought up by English mothers or nurses, were actually having to learn French as children. Upwardly mobile English were doing the same – and, of course, still speaking English as well. The kings also started to speak English, at least as a second language. Edward I (1272-1307) knew it well enough to make jokes in it, and used the threat to it as a rallying call against a French invasion. By the end of the century proclamations and directives to local officials were made bilingually.

As the French-speaking, and generally better-educated people turned to English, they inevitably brought into it large numbers of French words. This influx peaked during the lifetime of Chaucer (1340?-1400), a courtier who wrote in English, while Wycliffe (1329?-1384), or rather, it seems, his followers, translated the Bible (from Latin) into English, obviously now the dominant language of those who could read. But, paradoxically, it was just as French was going out of use that it enriched English the most. Indeed some French words replaced the English ones – uncle, envy and noble, for example. During the whole period slightly more than 10,000 French words came into the English language, 75% of which are still in use today – 40% of all of French origin.

It was during this time that pronouns and auxiliary verbs progressively replaced case endings for verbs. As for nouns, all endings were lost except two. One is those for the plural, “-s” and the rare “-en”, found now only in brethren, oxen, men, women and children – and if the last is replaced by kids, only men and women will soon be left. The other is the possessive case-ending, where “-’s” (once “-es”) is still an alternative after the noun to “of” in front of it. Together with these grammatical changes went the loss of gender for inanimate objects, which effectively became neuter, together with any need for adjectives and adjectival pronouns to take the gender of the nouns they were attached to. There was also a shake-up in possessive pronouns, which are now “my”, “thy/thine” (obsolete or obsolescent), “his”, “her/hers”, “ours”, “yours”, and “their/theirs”. The neuter possessive pronoun, once “hir”, got lost for an obvious phonetic reason. For some time, it was replaced by – well, “it”, and “thereof” placed after the noun (which is always the case in the King James Bible), until “its” was invented around 1500. Its came slowly into use and, purists will be disconcerted to learn, was optionally written “it’s” until about 1800.

If all these changes were a blessing, English spelling has been regarded as its perennial curse, partly due to changes in pronunciation and partly due to the importation of foreign words, also altered, together with attempts to retain for both the original spelling. A free for all in spelling continued through the sixteenth century, writers sometimes varying the spelling of a word throughout a single letter or document. By the end of the century there were calls for order: Richard Mulcaster, for example, issued a list of 7,000 words in 1582.

Well before 1500 English was recognizably the language we have today. If we stumble over Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (pre-1400), we have less trouble with Wycliffe’s Bible (revisions up to 1407) and hardly any at all with Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1470). The printing press now enters the scene: the Englishman William Caxton returned from the continent, where he had learnt the craft and set up as a printer-publisher in 1476. Over time, the printed word has done much to stabilize a language as literacy spreads from such modest beginnings. Caxton printed both Chaucer and Malory – not Wycliffe, of course: translations of the Bible were burnt whenever they fell into the hands of the authorities.

It took more than fifty years before the Bible appeared in English in print, and this was largely due to the work of one man, William Tyndale (1494?-1536), to whom Bragg pays generous tribute. For most of the first half of the sixteenth century promoting a vernacular translation of Holy Writ was a dangerous thing to do, not merely in England, but in large parts of the continent, unfortunately those with the best printing-presses. Tyndale was caught in the Netherlands and, his work unfinished, strangled and burnt. What he had done, however, became the foundations of the English Bible for the next four centuries. Bragg hits the mark when he says:

“It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale’s writing. Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale’s words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circled the globe.”

In some ways Tyndale was a conservative strand in the development of English. During the century following his death some 12,000 new words were incorporated into English, many via French, others from Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch – the last, apparently, adding obscenities to the curses until then only blasphemies. The renewed interest in the classical languages brought words in via the academy. All these would be absent from the Bible translations that followed Tyndale’s. Even Tyndale may have been deliberately archaic: “thou” and “thee” are retained, though found only once in the contemporary translation of Froissart from French (1525), “ye” and “you” remain nominative and accusative throughout, “yes” occurs only four times instead of “yea” and “its”, as noted, is absent. The translators who followed Tyndale, who regarded themselves as revisers rather than innovators, kept these archaisms.

The influence of Shakespeare, who revelled in using new, even experimental words, is more difficult to evaluate; most people would never see or read his plays, certainly not in the way they would hear and read their Bible. But he could, with his English thus enriched, give us, as Bragg says “a new world in words and insights which would colour, help, lighten and depict our lives in thought and feeling. He had to the known limit exercised that most important and mysterious faculty, the imagination.” And Hesketh Pearson, a now forgotten popular biographer, enraged his father by pointing out (nearly a century ago) that there were more quotations current from Shakespeare than from the Bible.

Bragg does not quite say that we would all be speaking Spanish if the Armada had managed to do its job and put several thousand troops ashore in 1588. After all, its purpose was regime change rather than conquest and England’s population was still about two-thirds Catholic, with much of the nobility liable to swing either way. However such a outcome might well have obstructed the overseas expansion of England – and English. Spanish, and the closely related Portuguese had, or were about to spread, granted rather thinly, right over South and Central America and much of North America and then across the Pacific to the Philippines. England had barely a foothold at the eastern edge of North America by 1600.

Rather more than 200 years later, to skip the important events that brought it about, most of North America was English-speaking. The United States dominated the continent, its population increasing phenomenally both by the high birth-rate of its predominantly English white settlers and by a completely open policy (or a neglect of any policy at all) of immigration, almost entirely from the Protestant countries of Northern Europe and still mostly from the British Isles. Bragg pays much attention to the development of American English; rather staid, disciplined though still innovative in the East, with Webster’s Dictionary replacing Dr Johnson’s, while in the West, as Bragg puts it in his hyperbolic fashion, “English went wild”.

The spread of American English reinforced, perhaps guaranteed English as a world’s common language, a near necessity for international communication. Indeed, especially in India it has achieved that status for internal communication as well. During the nineteeth century some fears (or perhaps hopes) were expressed that the speech on either side of the Atlantic would become mutually incomprehensible. Insufficient attention was paid to the rapid progress of all forms of intercommunication; instead each has absorbed words and locutions from the other, with most of the traffic flowing this way. Hollywood films, later supplemented by American soap operas on television helped this traffic, while pop songs, if they are to be taken seriously, must have an American accent.

Originally a Cumbrian dialect speaker himself, Bragg perhaps makes too much of dialects and patois as survivals, and pidgins and creoles as possible developing languages. All of these have to be discarded by the individual, as Bragg admits was his own case, who wants to get into the mainstream and make his way, though the pressure is not what it was. Though dialect words are inadmissible, especially in writing, differing accents, if mild, are generally tolerated and even imitated by the elite when afraid of sounding too posh (a word with a well-known false etymology).

The homogenization of writing and speech was well under way by the eighteenth century and the Scots philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-1776) submitted drafts to his English friends for correction. Samuel Johnson, with his Dictionary, did much to stabilize the language, particularly its spelling, though he claimed to describe, rather than prescribe. He would be surprised that, as Bragg points out, for the next century and more, “correct” speech and writing would be propagated by the pastime of reading novels. Jane Austen led the way and Scott and Dickens firmly relegated vernacular speech to the lower classes.

When it comes to the incursion of English into India, Bragg is in a dilemma but does succeed by grasping both horns. His book, after all, verges on the triumphalist, but then, on the other (left) hand, wasn’t the Empire a matter of exploitation and a source of misery? Somehow “English was often eagerly sought by Indians and yet it was also forced on them.” As for the reasons for learning English, these were not only for mere self-betterment. Bragg quotes the disappointment Rammohan Roy felt in 1825 when he found that, instead of spending funds for education on “employing European Gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the Nations of India in Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful sciences,” the East India Company “are establishing a Sanscrit school under Hindoo Pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India.”

Macaulay clarifies this situation in his much misunderstood (and surprisingly inaccessible) Minute “On Education in India” of 1835, issued when he was a member of the Council of India. He was seeking to change the type of support, confined to “learning in the native languages”, given by the Company since 1813. One result had been the setting up of schools to teach Indians Sanskrit (for Hindus) and Arabic (for Muslims). Unfortunately the graduates, after being supported through ten or twelve years of instruction, could find no means of employment. Macaulay puts it succinctly: “We are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanskrit students, while those who learn English are willing to pay us.” He also points out that 23,000 volumes of Sanskrit and Arabic works had been printed, at a cost of about œ6,500 (multiply by 40 to get present day value), which next to no one would buy.

As for the matter of what should be taught, Macaulay is dismissive of what Indian literature had to offer. Bragg quotes: “I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the value of the Orientals themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” In fact Macaulay wrote “at the value of the Orientalists”, i.e., students from Europe of Oriental languages and literature, not “Orientals”, and Bragg’s mistake distorts the meaning of the whole quotation. Certainly it was not within “Oriental learning” that Rammohan Roy (who died two years before Macaulay wrote his Minute) would obtain what he wanted.

Macaulay was successful and forty to fifty million Indians speak and write English as well as we do, and often better, while “three hundred million have some sort of familiarity with it” out of population of nearly a billion. Bragg does not document his assertion that at any time it was really “hated and resented”, or there was “often savage opposition” to it. Perhaps Ghandi, whom he cites, stands in for the usual clutch of intellectuals who seek victim-status from benefits conferred, like the woman writer of Indian origin I heard recently liken herself to an offspring of rape, after confessing her love of Shakespeare.

The British rulers could not have been so stupid as to be unaware that the literature Indians were thus given access to was replete with enough subversive words and deeds to stimulate imitation. From the very nature of our culture, and the vehicle which carried it, this was simply inevitable. Was it our fault that Indian politicians chose Marx and Fabian socialism instead of Adam Smith and capitalism? I fear the answer is probably Yes, for our own politicians were doing much the same thing when we gave India its independence.

In conclusion: what else do I wish Bragg had included in this excellent book? A comparison with other languages to further justify this English Success Story would not have come amiss, especially the degree to which they have incorporated foreign words, something research (which Bragg must have on tap) could easily quantify. It has been estimated that only 5,000 of our words come from Old English, though ninety three of the hundred most-used words do (two come from French, five from Danish-Old Norse). A serious omission is an account of how English spread to other parts of the British Isles, particularly within Scotland, where England had (apart from a few years) no political control.

How Johnson did it in 42,773 words

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Thu, 12 May 2005 19:22:53 +0000

Dr Johnson’s Dictionary
Henry Hitchings
John Murray 2005

The fifteenth of April marked the 250th anniversary of the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary, the making of which Hitchings has subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World. Johnson lives on as a personality, immortalised by Boswell, but more for his idiosyncrasies and oracular bon mots than for his literary eminence. Should interest flag, the appearance of another biography or an interesting book, such as this one, revives him as an icon.

This is not to minimize his status as a writer (after all, how many eighteenth-century writers are nowadays – a word barely admitted by Johnson – read for pleasure?) However, the considerable bibliography listed by Boswell does consist mostly of what Johnson would certainly have regarded as ephemera, though the 208 bi-weekly numbers of The Rambler (March 20th, 1750 – March 14th, 1752), essays of 1200 – 1500 words, were collected, revised and published, going through ten editions during the lifetime of the author. His novel Rasselas can be compared to its advantage with Voltaire’s Candide, as treating the same subject matter in greater moral depth than Voltaire’s cynicism could plumb. Both were published in 1759 and so closely together that Johnson remarked that “there was not time for imitation”. Written hurriedly in a week to pay for his mother’s funeral and sent to the printer in instalments, it was never, Johnson claimed, actually read by himself – until 22 years later, when he came across a copy in Boswell’s coach, which he devoured with great interest.

Between the ephemeral and the immortal lies a dictionary, or, I should say lay. Until forty or fifty years ago the same dictionary could stay on the shelf for reference for the same period of time. Now the paperback dictionary attests its impermanence, as technological and social neologisms crowd in for recognition and definition. Whereas we accept the fluidity of our vocabulary and by extension of our language, from the late seventeenth century on there was a general suspicion, voiced by Dryden, Defoe and Swift, that both would lead to incomprehensibility. An authoritative” dictionary would prevent such a trend getting out of hand by “fixing” the meaning of words and even, by excluding some as unsuitable, “refining” the language “for ever”. Johnson moved away from this purist to the pragmatic approach of recording words which were used rather than prescribing those which should be. But he confined himself to the written word, preferably from the works of authors who were dead. There was a more practical reason for publishing a dictionary: the booksellers saw the need to replace the inadequate ones available – and Hitchings supplies some definitions from the “best work of the period” to make this apparent. The bookseller Robert Dodsley takes the credit for perceiving that compiling a dictionary was a one-man job, a far from obvious fact, and that Johnson was the one man. Johnson was at first hesitant, then confident: “I have no doubt that I can do it in three years.” In fact it took seven, and nearly eight from when the contract to undertake it was signed. As a single bookseller could not underwrite this project, Dodsley formed a consortium with three others. Johnson was to be paid 1,500 guineas (£1,575) which Hitchings reckons to be worth £150,000 in our money. Johnson took on all the expenses of producing the actual work, though the booksellers paid the printer some £1,200 and spent £1,500 on paper. Thus the total outlay was more than £4,000.

The wealthy printer William Straham was someone who took care to obtain excellent fonts and high quality paper (“thick, almost luxurious to the touch”) and became Johnson’s good friend and, to a certain extent, his banker and manager. There is no mention of any solicitation for subscribers and the only patronage mentioned as having ever been sought (famously in vain) was that of the Earl of Chesterfield, to whom Johnson addressed his prospectus, A Plan for an English Dictionary, receiving only a paltry £10 in acknowledgement. There seems to be no explanation – certainly not from the Earl himself – for this indifference in someone who had been flatteringly addressed by Johnson as one “whose authority in our language is so generally acknowledged”. In the end, as Johnson wrote in the Preface (composed, as most prefaces are, at the completion of the work), “The English dictionary was written . . . without any patronage of the great”. And his magisterial response to Chesterfield’s attempt to ingratiate himself ex post facto is too well known to recount here.

Johnson moved into a large house, 17 Gough Square, which still stands, the only one of Johnson residences to do so, paying £30 a year rent. It had, and still has, a large garret well-lit by daylight and this was where the work was done. Like all other dictionary-makers, Johnson plundered the word-lists of others, but the definitions were all his own and he dealt faithfully with the many shades of meaning of such common words as “put”, “take”, “in” and “up”. He was not the first to use illustrative quotations from “authoritative sources”, many taken from his capacious memory, often inaccurate and sometimes improved to fit, others picked out from (not, Hitchings makes clear, searched for in) the concurrent reading he carried out for the purpose: he mentions that he had never read Bacon until then. Careful of their moral effect, Johnson excluded a number of authors (Thomas Hobbes, for a start) and, of the 42,000 plus words defined; some 10&percent; were garnished with quotations from the Authorised Version of the Bible. The words from the quotations, garnered in this almost random and haphazard manner, but also with regard to their use, not only supplemented those already available, but in due course became his preferred method of generating them.

Boswell did not meet Johnson until eight years after the Dictionary was published and Hitchings maintains that he did not understand the method of its compilation. Nor how laborious it was as a task, something that Johnson himself, safe now in his celebrity, tended to make light of, even suggesting that it was one he had contemplated before being asked to do it. One of the obstacles to its progress was that Johnson was a convivial man, the last to lock himself away and get on with the job. Helpers were needed, amanuenses who copied out on paper slips the marked quotations – in soft pencil, easily erased with breadcrumbs, Johnson claimed – from the books he quarried them from, and filed them until they were needed for the words embedded in them. Such helpers were not acknowledged, as they would be in a modern preface. Some of them Hitchings identifies; there seem to have been six in all, though never more than four at work at a time. They seem to have been hacks down on their luck, badly in need of a job and personally known to Johnson.

It would not, I think, be unfair to say that Hitchings wanders up many byways in describing Johnson’s methods and way of life, but these, after all, parallel Johnson’s own habits. For example, a businesslike visit to Oxford to browse in the Bodleian and consult persons likely to be helpful in the compilation of introductory essays was extended for social reasons. However, most readers will hardly feel helped by the author’s chapter headings, which proceed alphabetically, from Adventurous to Zootomy, with words and definitions from the Dictionary. This might have seemed a good idea at the time, but the link with the chapter contents is tenuous. The chapter in which Johnson deals with scientific terms is “Microscope”, which should remind the reader and reviewer of its subject and “Publication” is about just that for the ultimate appearance of the finished work. “Philology” is not where the naive might have expected to find Johnson’s inadequate treatment of etymology – that is under “Lexicographer”. But it does tell us that “not more than 5,000 Old English words have survived into modern usage,” though it is under “Pastern” that we discover that perhaps “a well-educated adult . . . has an active vocabulary of around 50,000 words”.

This quirk is the more unfortunate because Hitchins has amassed an enormous amount of material about words, though in the way of such things, in small packets, which the reader, on encountering, thinks: “How interesting,” and then forgets about or cannot remember their context. Though the chapter headings will not help him, the General Index, which is a good one, may, and so may the Index of Words, 476 in all, which Hitchings has picked out for comment, or at least a mention – more than 10% of those in the Dictionary. All the old chestnuts are there, of course – oats, network, pastern, patron, pension, Whig, Tory, excise and lexicographer – and many others intriguing enough to look up. Sixty, by my count, are no longer in use (though I had hopes of “boghouse”). A surprise to me, as a zoologist, is that “zootomy” is still extant, though perhaps as a courtesy to Johnson’s last word. Doubtless some, such as “barbecue” (a hog dressed whole, in the West Indian manner), have changed their meaning, if intelligibly. Some were plainly redundant: Johnson has “gazingstock”, “laughingstock” and “pointingstock”, but one would have to delve into the Dictionary itself to find from its quotations if they were concurrent. He said – perhaps jokingly – that he had coined only five words himself. Contemporaries found some of his inclusions far-fetched, including, I can’t help thinking, “subderisorious” (scoffing or ridiculing with tenderness and delicacy), a practice I wish could be substituted for what goes on now. Do political cartoons, for example, have to be quite so disgusting?

Publication day came at last. 2,000 copies had been printed, at a price of £4 10s; if all were sold, they would generate £9,000, more than twice the booksellers’ investment. What did – what does – it look like? It is massive: 20 pounds weight, 10 inches wide and one foot six inches deep, consisting of 2,300 pages, containing 42,773 words with their definitions and illustrative quotations. Though designed to be bound in two volumes, it was often put into four – the British Library’s copy, stacked up, is nearly ten inches high. Aesthetically, with its fine typeface and spacing, it makes a good impression. The public reception was favourable and Johnson rose from obscurity to recognition – it is possible that but for this achievement and rise in status, Boswell would never have met (or wanted to meet) him and written his masterpiece, leaving him a next to unknown eighteenth century literary figure. But fame, such as it was, did not bring financial security. He had been paid for his work as he went along and there was nothing left; in fact, he had been paid £100 too much, a debt which the booksellers forgave him. Boswell’s bibliography shows that he continued what looks like literary hack work – reviews and essays in the Literary Review and prefaces to other men’s works. He also, from 1758 to 1760, issued a weekly essay, The Idler, in the style of The Rambler; it also was collected and issued in bound form at the completion of the series.

In 1762, seven years after the publication of the Dictionary, Johnson was rescued from this hand to mouth existence by being awarded a state pension of £300. His sentiments on pensions of this kind (the word did not have its modern meaning) were well known from his Dictionary definition “. . . generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country” and he consulted a number of friends as to whether he should accept one. The suspicion of bribery to keep the government immune from attack by a writer of Johnson’s quality was not unreasonable, but we need not disbelieve his account that the Earl of Bute, who was responsible for such handouts, when thanked, said to him (twice, to ensure his hearing it), “It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done.” Thomas Sheridan, among others, had set the ball rolling: in case anyone should chalk this up to the credit of the dramatist (who was eleven at the time), I should make clear this was his father (who obtained a pension for himself as well). Johnson, on being told by him that the pension was to be granted, was fervent in his gratitude to the King, finding he could express himself fully only by employing the French word penetre.

And there, I think, we can leave him, with a comfortable standard of living, soon to be boosted further a year or two later by the hospitality of the Thrales, who set aside a room for his use in both their town and country houses. He was delighted to receive a pension and bore the sneers of Wilkes and others philosophically. If his writings became less polemical, the accession of George III in 1760, who “gloried in the name of Briton”, was an excuse for Johnson to tone down his hostility to the House of Hanover. He even wrote a pamphlet against the rebellious American colonists. But he never altered the definition of “pension” in later editions of the Dictionary.

But greater ease could not guarantee greater happiness and Johnson remained all his life subject to bouts of melancholy, or clinical depression as they would doubtless now be diagnosed, a condition not alleviated by the sombre tenets of his religious beliefs. Even the generosity which others noted he was now more able to afford can only have brought him a sense of stern rectitude to counter the irritation he must have felt at the quarrels of the indigent characters he gave shelter to. He did not stop work by any means. His edition of Shakespeare, with prefaces and notes, and his Lives of the Poets still lay in the future, though delayed now not only by his indolence but also a lack of urgency. And we can be quite sure that without his pension (and without Boswell) he would never have made the expedition that produced his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.

Spying in Greece during World War One

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:58:38 +0000

Gallipoli Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Cassell, London, 1929

First Athenian Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Cassell, London, 1931

Greek Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Chatto & Windus, 1932

Aegean Memories
Compton Mackenzie
Chatto & Windus, 1940

(All out of print)

Compton Mackenzie, A Life
Andro Linklater
Chatto & Windus, London, 1987

Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) has left little in the way of reputation behind him. Both his early “serious” and his later “lighter” novels are now unread. Like all “personalities” dependent on attention from and appearances in the media, memory of them and him soon faded and disappeared when these ceased. In Scotland, to which he retired, physically and metaphorically from a wider scene, he is little more remembered, even as a founder member of the Scottish National Party, with which he became disillusioned. Yet when young, before the First World War, he was widely regarded as a near-genius of great literary promise and when it was learned that he was bound for Gallipoli there were plaints in cultured circles that the country, after the death of Rupert Brooke in the same theatre of war, could not afford to lose another of the same calibre. Yet it was as a result of his decision to participate (for this was still a voluntary act) that he produced his masterpiece, in four volumes of “Memories”, which I hope will at some time be republished to ensure him a deserved immortality. His ninety-three other books do not include a credible competitor and it would be a pity if the film Whisky Galore, from the book of the same name, was his only and inadequate memorial.

Gallipoli Memories, published in 1929, was the first in what Mackenzie seems to have projected as a four-volume account of his First World War experiences. He was as eager as anyone of his age to do his bit (we must put aside any sort of back-projection of a pacifist atmosphere generated amongst intellectuals by four years of trench-warfare) and could pull strings to do so. A military doctor told him he would only be fit for service in a warm climate such as Egypt. It was Orlo Williams, to whom the book is appropriately dedicated, who, having noticed that Sir Ian Hamilton, the Commander-in-Chief of the Gallipoli Campaign, was reading Mackenzie’s novel Sinister Street, found him the job on Hamilton’s staff, ensuring Mackenzie his share in the campaign. Though he wholeheartedly approved of it, after a while he had the gut feeling that it would not succeed, justified later by his realisation that it was insufficiently supported by the military back home.

He was not trying to make an historical contribution in this book. He did not keep a diary and such letters as survived were mainly useful for fixing dates. Perhaps the most prominent feature of all the books are his studies of his associates, largely favourable and observed without malice, those otherwise regarded being left anonymous. It is a loss that he never met Churchill (anyway not at this time), but Maurice (later Lord) Hankey who came out instead, “did make a most definite impression” on Mackenzie. He was only 38, not that much older than Mackenzie, but was “always . . . alluded to as if he were trembling on the verge of eighty” and was “the only man throughout the war for whom I never heard anybody suggest a better substitute”. Another phenomenon was Aubrey Herbert, the eccentric, near-blind Turcophil (for more about whom, see Margaret Fitzherbert’s The Man Who Was Greenmantle.) For other friends &al, see Index: Aspinal-Oglander (surely Keyes’ biographer?), Wyndham Deedes (1883-1956: father of Bill?), Hadkinson, the gone-native fisherman, Heathcote-Smith, Lt.-Gen. Hunter-Weston, whose invaliding-out may have lost the whole venture, Eddie Keeling, Kenny, George (later Lord) Lloyd and Harold Thompson.

The early pages are full of comical attempts to get the right – or any kind of – uniform, and then how to get from Alexandria to the Aegean and when there to find where GHQ actually was, and then how to get there. The fact that the Allies occupied neutral Greek territory at will passes without an allusion, let alone an explanation. The constantly mentioned ubiquitousness of flies is a reminder how much is owed to DDT by later combatants.

Mackenzie richly illustrates the maze of espionage, to which he was assigned, with the tragi-comic circumstances of the Vassilaki family (two brothers, three sisters), under suspicion after having back-migrated from the US in an attempt to do well out of the war. His amusing (and successful) machinations convinced everyone, including the Germanophil Nomarch of Lesbos, and the hapless British Consul there, that he was looking for suitable sites for a camp for three divisions on the island as a jumping off place for an invasion of the Anatolian mainland. Even though this may have diverted Turkish troops from the Gallipoli peninsula at a time of a vital attack, this was the tragically mismanaged one on Suvla Bay when the troops loitered on undefended beaches, even going swimming, instead of pressing on inland, while an absurd concatenation of accidents kept the Commander in Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, uninformed. The volume ends when, too ill to be of further use, Mackenzie leaves for Athens to be cured and to find another job.

In First Athenian Memories the story continues: Mackenzie has been invalided to Athens and, though it is not made quite clear why, he must also, and apparently first, find a job there in Security, though he is obviously pretty ill with a combination of dysentery and cystitis. After a sort of farewell debauch (which includes a road accident most perilous in its bureaucratic aftermath) he is booked into an extremely boring clinic, with a dragon-nurse who does not speak the Italian he was promised and forbids him to whistle. On the other hand, the doctor, an authority on Asclepius, is charm itself. The cry in the street outside, “Seeka freska” ( Fresh figs!”) – it is August; they must be in season then – is the chapter heading of this episode.

Between seeing the doctor and entering his clinic, Mackenzie encounters a variety of personalities at the British Legation, including the Minister, Sir Francis Elliot, “spare and taut as a wire rope”, and his own superior for this book, the “mysterious V”, never otherwise designated by Mackenzie (but revealed as a Major Samson in Andro Linklater’s biography, where his letter is R) “whose courtly grace and charm of manner” he writes, “sometimes reminded me of a French marquis and sometimes of a high grade mandarin.” V’s actions seem to border on the futile and absurd, like so many persons in the book, including, by his own admission, Mackenzie himself, without any of them being in any way to blame. An example of the ridiculous behaviour to which V could sink was his idea of meeting a colleague/subordinate in a cemetery instead of his office. Mackenzie himself claims the letter Z, and there is an absent C, whose identity is never divulged (though we find out more about him in Greek Memories). It must be said at once that the circumstances in which espionage was conducted did not seem to be regarded as likely to be lethal, either by Mackenzie and his associates and agents, or by the persons whose designs he was attempting to frustrate. Future events suggests that this attitude was over-complacent.

Writing in 1931, Mackenzie did not have to explain the state of the war in 1915, or the complexities of Balkan politics; King Constantine’s German connexions he could take as known, together with who Venizelos was and why Greek politics were polarised between him and the King. The British Foreign Office, under the gentle dilettanti Sir Edward Grey, had no discernible Balkan policy: “Had the British Government been illuminated by even the glimmering notion of what it wanted in the Balkans, that notion could have been carried out,” claims Mackenzie in exasperation, “as it was, the British Foreign Office led the hand to mouth existence of a street conjurer, producing Thrace, Cyprus, Macedonia and badly cut chunks of Asia Minor [to gain allies]“. Fortunately, Mackenzie’s relations with his French opposite number were excellent. For those who can appreciate it there is a fine parody of the Athanasian Creed with reference to the various jurisdictions in the Levant on the pages following 346.

With this complete chaos as a background, the reason why Mackenzie had to leave Athens in a hurry in November after of the dissolution of the Greek Chamber of Deputies is obscure to us now, and was so even to him at the time. He went no further than Naples and Capri (where he had been staying at the outbreak of war). And why can he then return within a month? But that is to reach the end of the book omitting all the intervening action.

As before, a prime feature of interest is the cast of characters, most of whom he found congenial even though some of them were distinctly bizarre, and even more so some of their agents or informers, or those who aspired to be. Many of the names of these, and of some colleagues, are made up, either by themselves or by the author, though it seems odd to give to a Maltese as a pseudonym the distinctly German name Liebig (Linklater reveals his name as Monreal) who had been in British (secret) service for nineteen years and who V became convinced was a fantasist and, to Mackenzie’s relief, managed to get rid of.

Not the least fantastic of the clandestine episodes is the account of how a (male) stenographer had to be hidden in a cupboard to record the interview with a suspicious (in both senses) agent, in the chapter fittingly entitled “Absurdities of Secret Service”. He produced an excellent transcript, but alarmed V by his threat to leave Athens if employed in such a way again – to absolve the cupboard from suspicion, Mackenzie had been tossing empty bottles into it during the interview. In a world which takes cars for granted, it is almost comic to read how difficult it was for Mackenzie’s unit to secure one; but it was a good one – a Sunbeam – with an excellent chauffeur.

It is nearly impossible to wend one’s way through this complex maze and it does seem strange that the Greek king should have been able to muster a pro-German party which would entail Greece being drawn onto the side of both Turkey and Bulgaria, traditionally long-standing enemies. Most touching story: the obviously emotional encounter after forty years between Mackenzie’s cook/housekeeper Lisa and the magnificent Archbishop of Syra, a very tall man with flashing eyes and flowing hair, a superb profile, and a beard of Zeus-like majesty”.

The publication in 1932 of Greek Memories, Mackenzie’s continuation from First Athenian Memories, got the author into trouble under the the Official Secrets Act, purportedly for quoting from a document or documents that came to his knowledge during the war. Considering that the book was republished effectively uncensored in 1939 and is full of quotations from official documents it was for long a mystery why he was prosecuted at all, fined £100 with £100 costs, incurring more than £2,500 expenses plus, he claims, a like sum in wasted time – all this in pre-war money, some twenty to thirty times its value today. The responsibility for this persecution, as revealed by Ando Linklater, goes as high up as King George V; Mackenzie, after all, spent a lot of his time as described in this book, in conflict with the Germanophil King Constantine, a relative of King George, as well as, of course, the Kaiser.

Linklater’s also reveals that Mackenzie’s mysterious boss C was the legendary Mansfield Cumming, subject of a recent biography by Alan Judd, The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service. Relations at a distance between them had not been too good, but when Mackenzie finally went to London in October 1916, they became, as two fellow-romantics, blood-brothers. Mackenzie reports C as telling him: “I intended to make myself extremely unpleasant to you; but I said that when I saw you I should probably find you a man after my own heart, and fall on your neck,” which of course is exactly what happened; he then introduced Mackenzie to his wife as the man who had given him more trouble than anybody else in the service.”

To the story itself: as mentioned, the most important component is the vendetta between King Constantine and Venizelos which in the end brought about the departure of both Mackenzie and his unit for the island of Syra, selected since it was the telegraph cable centre, in the middle of the Cyclades, and ideal for organising the consolidation of Venizelist power in the Aegean islands. Unfortunately the Greek Army (in the upper ranks at least) was Royalist and dominated Athens sufficiently to make this move necessary, aided by the incompetence of the French Admiral whose ships were anchored in the Piraeus, doing little to counter German submarines, and who trusted King Constantine’s assurances longer than sanity should have permitted. This ensured that rioters sacked Venizelist houses in Athens (and would have killed Mackenzie when they sacked his, if he had not hoodwinked them) and killed some eighty British and French marines. Despite this, Mackenzie retained good relations with most of the French diplomatic corps.

Mackenzie goes through the year 1916 in 12 chapters, month by month and most of the narration is light relief compared with the nearly lethal ending. There are, for example, the three attempts to intercept the German mail, the last of which succeeds, and the surrender to Mackenzie personally of the most able German agent who prudently refused to break his parole, given to Mackenzie, when Royalist militiamen offered to liberate him; he survived to enjoy a comfortable internment on Malta. There are motor car journeys, sometimes through idyllic countryside to inspect coastal caves suspected of containing stores of petrol (always called benzine) for German submarines, never found, other journeys leave everyone caked in dust. Once only the alert ear of the chauffeur detects the noise that indicates that a wheel has been malevolently loosened, and is about to come off; another time, a large boulder bounds down from Lykabettos a few yards in front of the car, “normally an unusual event.”

Mackenzie was frequently incapacitated by severe attacks of sciatica, probably the reason why photographs in which he appears show his face tense and strained. Again, his colleagues and agents are part-grotesques; he never seems quite to take the competent but rotund Tucker (for whom he successfully struggled to gain the rank of lieutenant) seriously, the women clerks he finally secured are paragons of efficiency, the Minister, Sir Francis Elliot, is ever the imperturbable Minister, even when waving with his umbrella for the shooting (by the other side) to stop. Some, of course, are carry-overs from First Athenian Memories. The most blatant imposter in the book is a Mr. Watney Hyde who, when unmasked and sent back to England by Mackenzie, managed, on the strength of a piece of office stationery with the Royal Arms stamped on it, and the scribble MI6, to return all the way back to the Aegean, expenses paid, where he had the misfortune to encounter Mackenzie again on Syra. Mackenzie’s cruellest tease is to terrify a young Lothario who has been impressing and seducing governesses and nurses by indicating that he knows military secrets. Instead of being shot, or, as a commutation, merely beheaded, he is sentenced to scrub the floors of the Annexe three days in the week and to leave his hair uncut.

Mackenzie as man of action is actually quite impressive, witness such acts as his kidnapping the Royalist Colonel/Commandant of Naxos, with the Mayor added in as a bonus and his bluffing the Royalist police force of Syra itself into capture before the arrival of a sea-sick Venizelist contingent from Crete. The oration by the unlikely-named Poseidon (in translation by the speaker, which Mackenzie assures us does not do justice to the original version in Greek made for him) closes the book, with the crowd applauding “Hail, thou golden-mouthed one!”.

Aegean Memories, the fourth and last of Mackenzie’s War Memoirs (never so called by the author), written in 1939/40, 22 years after the events they describe, takes up the tale when he had to leave an Athens dominated by Royalists since December 1st, 1916 and to set up his establishment on the island of Syra. As already stated, this was chosen because it was the junction of the East Mediterranean cable/telegraph network. With this advantage he was instrumental (as recounted in Greek Memories) within the month of garnering in for the Venizelist cause almost all of the Cyclades. These were acquisitions from “Old (i.e, pre-1913) Greece”, which were supposed to be Royalist in tendency, as opposed to Venizelist “New Greece” – Crete, Macedonia, Thrace and the East Aegean islands.

The vendetta between the King and Venizelos was irreconcilable and the French, who seemed for some time to favour the King, resolved it clumsily, coming down off the fence, forcing him to abdicate on Greece’s most unlucky day, Tuesday, May 29th, anniversary of the Fall of Constantinople. Venizelos returned to Athens as their protege, rather than with either obvious popular or Allied backing. This led to the Minister Sir Francis Elliot asking to be recalled, an unfortunate event for Mackenzie whose position, with an unsympathetic replacement, was undermined, as more and more British personnel of varying incompetence and obstructiveness arrived in Athens, from which he was excluded. He was reprimanded for making a quick visit to see Venizelos – because he saw no one else.

In fact, Mackenzie had made too many enemies within his own ranks, to say nothing of his allies. However cordial personal relations were with their representatives, both France and Italy were well aware that he was willing and able to thwart their interests. “Every suggestion I have made since I started here has been finally adopted and has worked well. Not a single suggestion made by anybody else but has failed to work well”, he protested at the time. Unfortunately, the Foreign Office right at the top, and all his superiors seemed to have no clear idea what British policy ought to be. “It is absurd to talk about winning the war without saying what winning the war means,” he comments on an appreciation of the Balkan-East Mediterranean situation by Lord Loch. It is illuminating to realise that even Lloyd George had a short attention span – “He can’t listen too long at a time to anything nowadays,” confided Lord Milner to Sir Francis.

Much of the book is given over to intrigue, which may have seemed tedious reading in 1940, and I fear does so now, but has a kind of documentary interest in describing how it actually is carried out. Again, the author’s interest in people and personal relations, so important in his role as spy-diplomat, comes out in the narrative and his affection for his colleagues. The invaluable Tucker, he records with grief in 1940, had died two or three years before, back in Istanbul from where he had come to fight the war. Francis Storrs (brother of Sir Ronald) died on Armistice Day from the virulent Spanish flu, again to Mackenzie’s great grief. A flamboyant character, later to have a distinguished academic career is (Professor) J.L. Myers, whose great black beard, reminiscent of an Assyrian king and the pirate Teach, whom he resembled in other ways, is always mentioned, though it was occasionally nibbled by cockroaches. There is the taciturn Larkins, who warned him that heat was not good for sciatica and was killed when transferred to Tanks, the cheerful Molesworth, mad teenager Macartney (unfortunately with a criminal destiny), loyal and generous Knoblock and boon companion Hope Johnstone. It was in his incarnation as a French naval officer that he met an unobtrusive Pierre Loti.

There were heart-rending partings when he finally left Syra, in his little ship Avlis, especially from his tiny, sweet housekeeper Lisa, expressing herself in broken French to the last: “Jamais plus. Vous jamais plus. Lisa jamais plus vous voir.” A friend told him that in August 1939 he was sure he had seen her, boarding a tram in Athens.

An Australian naval surgeon, who visited him in Capri, invalided him out: “You won’t do any more active service in this war” after wondering how he was ever passed fit: he never had been, having gone from Capri, via Alexandria, to Gallipoli. A constant of Mackenzie’s life is how often he was laid up by illness, not only the frequent, if irregular attacks of sciatica, but also by bouts of dysentery, while any travel by ship meant sea-sickness.

Back in London, C, who had had his own difficulties, revealed to him that a War Office list had noted against Mackenzie’s name “This officer has too much initiative, but should make an ideal Number Two.” He suggested a fortnight later that Mackenzie might become his Number Two, but later still had to say that all his staff had unanimously protested – not that Mackenzie himself seems to have been much tempted. C died in 1922, long before any of the Memories were written, and Sir Francis Elliot in 1940, just before he could read the proofs of this book. And Compton Mackenzie himself as man of action: wasn’t the rest of his long life – he died at 89 – something of an anticlimax?

The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 – a romantic non-event?

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 11:02:16 +0000

The ’45
Christopher Duffy
Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2003

Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart
Frank McLynn
Routlledge 1988

Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign to regain the British throne for his father is the most romantic episode in British history, retold many times. Landing in Moidart on the Scottish mainland with seven companions, and then persuading a number of clan chiefs to support him, he conducted a brilliant campaign that took him to 120 miles of London. Because of the passivity of the English Jacobites and the failure of any French help to arrive, the clan chiefs refused to proceed further and the army retreated back to Scotland and ultimate defeat. The five-month hunt for Charles through the Scottish Highlands and Islands until he escaped at last to France provides a coda just as romantic and more material to make him into a legend, which even turned the head of Frederick the Great.

Duffy’s massive 639 page account is primarily a military history, giving much information on the forces of the two sides, Stuart and Hanoverian, their movements, tactics and morale, but strangely lacking serious discussion of strategy. The political background, national and international is likewise missing; in 1743 Britain had got involved in the war of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and was at war with France. It may be that the author is overconscious of going over well-trodden ground, but it seems perverse to opt out of giving an account, or even a summary of an account, of the council of war at Derby that decided that the Jacobite army should retreat, and though he dissents from that decision himself: “It is not the purpose of the present work to recapitulate the details of the sessions, which are recounted at length in every serious biography of the Prince and study of the ’45 (p. 301)”.

McLynn’s biography makes it clear that the Highland chiefs, whose clans had been the spearhead of the invasion simply refused to continue. They had been disappointed by the lack of French intervention, promised by Charles, together with the passivity of the English Jacobites. Duffy makes much of the fact that the scale may have been turned by the false information that the Duke of Cumberland’s army was about to block any possible retreat provided by the Hanoverian agent, Dudley Bradstreet, masquerading as Oliver Williams, an English, or more likely, a Welsh Jacobite volunteer. Bradstreet must have had nerves of steel, for he stayed with the Prince on the retreat, and was not slow to take the credit for it. Duffy does not say when he deserted – for that one would presumably have to read Bradstreet’s own account (1750; edited and republished, 1929). Needless to say, it is far from being accepted by everybody as gospel.

There is no doubt that until Derby, the rebels had won every move, mainly because of their greater mobility and their seizing of the initiative. Even the weather, usually bad, favoured them, despite or even because by the time the crisis came they were conducting a winter campaign, for which they were better suited than their opponents, not only because of the greater hardiness of the Highlanders, who made up their shock troops, but because of their logistics. They advanced from town to town in an orderly manner, usually collecting money already accumulated there for tax payments and sometimes clothing and equipment. What they did not get, especially after they had crossed the border, were many recruits. The impression given is that most of the population, both in England and Scotland, had decided to sit things out and see what happened. Although remote, the Highlands may well have been the most sensible place for Charles to start the campaign, since it was only there in the British Isles that the male population still consisted of and regarded itself as, should the occasion arise, natural fighting men, with arms for the purpose. To go with this, as Duffy makes very clear, was an extremely squalid lifestyle; the men did little other than indulge in cattle-raiding while, as in most primitive societies, the women did most of the work. The only alternative to, or reinforcement for the Highlanders would be a force of French regulars of about the same numbers – upwards of 5,000 – landed, with the help of smugglers disaffected to the government, in South East England, where, Duffy argues, the geography would help the formation of a bridgehead and an advance on London. Britain was at war with France (and had an army on the continent, from which the Duke of Cumberland was recalled) and the Duc de Richelieu, on Louis XV’s orders, organized an invasion attempt, but was (according to N.A.M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean) unready at the critical time, becoming aware of the retreat from Derby when he arrived to do the job. Rather pointlessly he planned an operation, then abandoned it: the important thing is that the French were not there when wanted, expected and needed.

Even a token attempt by them might have been sufficient to have swayed Prince Charles’s advisers to fall in with his wish to march on London – which was clearly also that of his army, as distinct from its leaders. Both the opposing forces, Wade’s and Cumberland’s, were poorly positioned to resist it, able to march at only about half its speed and, after much fruitless activity, in a poor state physically and psychologically. Foreign observers in London, in particular the Swedish Ambassador, noted how disorganized the government response was. Derby was only 120 miles from London and Highlanders could march 25 miles a day for five or six consecutive days.

By any judgement, surely, the whole project was a gamble and Duffy does not give the arguments, if any, as to how retreating at this stage would favourably increase the odds, while it decisively boosted the morale of the Hanoverian government. The reverse would be the case for the Stuart army and the effect was disastrous on the Prince, who fell seriously ill when back in Scotland. Certainly from then on, matters for the Jacobites seemed only to deteriorate. There was no attempt to turn and fight in England, a garrison was left in an inadequately defended Carlisle and then abandoned and captured, then the Scottish lowlands were evacuated. One reason for a retreat to Scotland was that much of the North East coast was held by the Jacobites with adequate forces, gathered since the Prince left for England, making communication with France feasible and reinforcements of men, munitions and money from there possible, though much was intercepted by the Royal Navy. Yet the ports there were also abandoned and resources frittered away in localised fighting. After a botched attempt at a night attack, the result next day of the battle of Culloden, with weary, half-starved rebels, pitted against rested, well-fed troops, now properly trained to resist a Highland onslaught, was inevitable.

Duffy emphasises more than once that Prince Charles saw no point in continuing the conflict as a sporadic guerilla war and after Culloden that there was nothing for him to do but to escape. He had determined to carry out his campaign in proper form, with a orderly, disciplined army, which is what he did, at all times leading it from the front, usually on foot, until the retreat, when he brought up the rear. There was little or no looting or misbehaviour by his soldiers, Highlanders or others. For a full character assessment of Charles, Duffy refers readers to Frank McLynn’s biography, which unsparingly depicts its terrible deterioration in his later life. Duffy’s own opinion of the Prince is: “I have to say I found him to be an extraordinarily impressive character,” and the narrative bears this out. His opponent Cumberland also comes out better than one might have expected, considerate of his troops’ welfare, and a competent commander in contrast to his subordinate Hawley. His harsh behaviour towards the rebels does not seem out of line with the times; the contrast of Charles in the treatment of prisoners might be put down to differences in policy from necessity of conciliation as opposed to repression.

Cumberland’s – and the government’s – measures following the rebellion can be seen to be justified since the comparative leniency shown after previous uprisings and disturbances had obviously not worked. The Highlanders were disarmed and their style of dress (rather different from the present one) banned; clans as potential armed units withered away. As superb fighters with other no source of employment, however, Highlanders as individuals were soon surprisingly willing to serve King George.

Duffy does not deal with the political fallout from the rebellion, or speculate on what might have happened had things turned out differently. It may be worth while to note, however, that the House of Hanover had now reigned for 30 years, that Whigs had been in government for the same length of time, for much of it under the control of Walpole, and that neither were popular, let alone charismatic. The mechanism of “regime change” through a parliamentary two-party system had not yet been properly established, though after 30 years the country was probably needing something of the sort. The ’45 therefore coincided with a situation which might have allowed “regime change” to take place.

McLynn plainly leans towards the possibility that Prince Charles might have succeeded, without quite saying so:

“With the recent revival in Jacobite studies, we are at last able to appreciate the deadly threat to the regime posed by the 1745 rising. Some of the finest young historians at work today now rate the mixed phenomenon of domestic rebellion and foreign invasion threat, as in 1779, 1798 and, most clearly, 1745 as more important threats to the social and economic order than the much trumpeted revolutions of the 1640s and 1688.”

This is a very odd statement because, if it means anything, it is that threats which didn’t come off should be “rated more important” than revolutions which did. Nor are the two examples given in any way convincing or impressive. In 1779 Spain joined the vultures gathering to take advantage of the American Revolution (not exactly a “domestic” rebellion), so that the combined French and Spanish fleets greatly outnumbered ours in the Channel. However, the French had badly bungled their preparations, rendering their fleet almost useless, had no charts or pilots or any idea, for lack of scouting, where the defending fleet was, which was under the command of a cool and competent admiral. The expedition withdrew to Brest and the crisis passed. In 1798 there was even more of a fiasco. Located in the west of Ireland, there was a “domestic” rebellion, but it was crushed before French assistance had even set out. The 1,000 French troops, uselessly landed, were rounded up and seven of the ten ships that arrived a month later were captured or sunk.

We must not be distracted by speculation of what might have been, though it is hard to believe that Charles could really have taken control of London with just over 5,000 men, not all Highlanders. The rebellion failed and its repercussions were suprisingly slight. The war with France continued and George II went on quarrelling with his ministers about the priority he wished to give to defending his vulnerable electorate of Hanover. Only in the Highlands was its aftermath important, where a long-overdue pacification started to bring the region under the rule of law.

The Stuarts in exile had been a marginal element internationally for decades; now they became a nuisance and, finally, an embarrassment. By the terms of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, Louis XV undertook to expel Charles from France which he did, though not without an enormous fuss and resistance by the Prince who finally had to be arrested, bound hand and foot and driven away from Paris. After a very expensive visit to Avignon, which was Papal territory, and which paid the bills, he settled in Venice.

There would be no replay; he would never return. His character, if nothing else, ensured that. The legend and the myth live on, deservedly so, but as myths and legends are, things of the past, not inspiration for the future. Even contemporaries must have noticed, as we can see now, that Parliament, representing the governing class, was becoming more important than the monarch. The rebellion had given it a fright, but it slipped easily into its old ways, as if nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing really had, and the ’45, noisy and frightening as a thunderstorm, was ultimately a Non-Event.

Finest Hour, Last Gasp – or both?

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:06:00 +0000

The Duel
John Lukacs
Ticknor & Fields, New York 1994

Five Days in London: May 1940
John Lukacs
Yale Univ. Press 1999

We buried Winston Churchill forty years ago. Sixty five years ago, come May, he faced, for us, the greatest crisis of our history. BBC’s Radio 4 commemorated his death with a fine, hour-long recall of his funeral and the crisis of 1940 with a gripping drama, Playing for Time – Three Days in May 1940. I do not know whether the author of the play, Robin Glendinning, owed anything to the books noticed here, but to me they seem to autheticate it. Another Radio 4 programme, Churchill’s Roar, very perceptively analysed the voice that spoke the words that still move us.

The World’s Debt to Britain

To put it no higher, the world is fortunate that, for a whole year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain had a government that did not capitulate to or compromise with Hitler. The situation during that year looked barely a stalemate. The Axis Powers now completely dominated Europe. Italy was an ally, Spain was friendly and the USSR no threat (the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler). Germany had absorbed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, then in less than a year’s war had overrun and partitioned Poland, occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and completed her conquest of Western Europe by knocking out France. The Balkans represented no problem.

Although it may have been the result of miscalculation and misfortune that for a year Britain “stood alone”, it turned out to be the right thing to do. And more than calculation stood behind the decision: it felt the right thing to do. But what could Britain hope for? The Dominions (except for Southern Ireland, still officially one of them, whose government played its ignoble role, excused by its history, until the very end) were loyal and contributed men and arms. The United States was sympathetic but strongly isolationist: to win the Presidential Election in 1940, Roosevelt felt he had to promise to keep out of the war. There was little Britain could do but protect herself and trounce Hitler’s jackal-ally Italy in Ethiopia, Somaliland and North Africa – and hope that Hitler would make some mistake.

The Inevitable Parallel: Napoleon and Hitler

The parallel between Britain’s struggle against Napoleon and that against Hitler hardly needs to be drawn, but if there is any lesson in history, surely it is here. Napoleon retains his high reputation, gained from victory in a dozen battles; Hitler never commanded in the field, yet subjugated Europe more thoroughly. Both underestimated Britain in both her power and persistence, Hitler the more excusably. Napoleon abandoned the attempt to invade, and did not in person try to eject Britain from Spain and Portugal; in combination, a fatal error. Hitler postponed his invasion attempt, half-hoping the fruit would drop into his hand, also a fatal error. Hitler’s Priority – and his Four Mistakes

We can see now that the priority for Hitler was the elimination of Britain. Any move that Hitler made that did not have this purpose was bound to be a mistake. From June 1940 until April 1941 he had no other enemy; a better opportunity to attack her was never to recur. That he failed to concentrate on this was his first mistake. Then he made his next; he attacked Jugoslavia and Greece, wasting energy merely to enter the irrelevant theatre of the Mediterranean by a more difficult route than one he already had, through Italy – Rommel was already causing us trouble in North Africa. The third error, the colossal blunder of invading the USSR, followed in June; from then on Germans were to be killed on a large scale, though at terrible cost to the Russians because of the stupidity of Stalin and the wastefulness of his generals. Even so, the first German offensive would almost certainly have captured Moscow, Leningrad and European Russia, including the Ukraine, had Hitler’s resources not been depleted by his Balkan adventure and the need to keep watch on Britain. We on our part, began to send arms to Russia. Hitler’s fourth mistake was the inexplicable stupidity of declaring war on the USA. This sealed his fate by rendering Britain impregnable and providing inexhaustible armaments to anyone willing to fight him.

That the US military alliance was vital, no one can deny. Churchill, in May 1940, our darkest hour, confessed to his son that his only hope was somehow to get the United States into the war. The rapport that Churchill and Roosevelt developed was an extraordinary bonus, not something that could have been taken for granted. Although it can be confidently asserted that Churchill took the initiative and that necessity drove him, yet the bond formed was firm and lasting. When Roosevelt died in January 1945 Churchill wept copiously at his Memorial Service; reciprocally, Roosevelt had confided to a colleague that Churchill was “the greatest man alive”.

Why Britain’s Survival in 1940 was Essential to Win the War

The survival of Britain as a fighting power after June 1940 was thus essential to victory. Without it, the US would would almost certainly never have come to Europe, where the political scene, whether dominated by a Nazi Germany or, much less likely, a Communist USSR would be at best depressing, at worst horrific. While both ideologies might mellow or collapse over time, that time would undoubtedly have had its fill of horrors and humiliation. It would certainly have been most of the last 65 years and of the lifetimes of those born since 1940, the year we are now so reluctant to see as our Annus Mirabilis.

…and Why We Should Have Fought On

There have been suggestions that Britain, in 1940-41, might have reached a modus vivendi with Hitler, similar to the Peace of Amiens in 1802 with Napoleon. Logically, Hitler should have offered to withdraw to 1939 boundaries (which still included Austria and Czechoslovakia), but this would have been for Hitler, a political and psychological impossibility. He made no offer anything like it. For Britain to have accepted anything less, on the other hand, would have been unwise, leaving her vulnerable, both materially and psychologically, to a second round. And Britain in 1940 was not Britain in 1802. In 1802 her foreign policy was run by a handful of aristocrats with a managed Parliament, who took their country in and out of wars and alliances with little need to consult public, or even informed opinion. In 1940, by contrast, a government that stopped the country fighting would have had difficulty in starting it again.

Churchill as Inspirer (or Mouthpiece?)

The resolution of the government, in 1940 as in 1802, remained all-important, and accounts of Cabinet meetings and less formal discussions leave one in no doubt that this resolution would have wavered, had it not been for Churchill. Well might he have said, in the words uttered (without bombast, one feels sure) by Wellington after Waterloo: “By God! I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there!” In fact, Churchill’s assessment of his own part was humble: “Had I faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office.” Yet when Churchill inspired, first his cabinet, then the nation, while France crumbled and the BEF was being evacuated from Dunkirk, he had been Prime Minister for less than a month.

Since any terms offered by Hitler would have been equivalent to surrender, Churchill refused to condone any negotiating, which would merely admit weakness. Both RAF and Royal Navy chiefs thought they could prevent an invasion, but emphasised the importance of national morale. Churchill probably overestimated the nation’s courage and determination, but in thinking he was only its mouthpiece, he inspired it into believing itself what he thought it was. “It fell to me,” he wrote later, “to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do because they were mine also. There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end.” With the Battle of Britain won and the Blitz endured, Britain was saved. and, ultimately, the war was won. If any one man was responsible for this achievement, it was Churchill.

If Britain Had Been Beaten…

Allow me to reiterate the logic of this claim. If Hitler could have subjugated Britain, he could then, by concentrating all his resources, and in his own time, have occupied or neutralized all of Europe west of the Black Sea, dominated the Mediterranean, and still have surprised the USSR and annihilated her armies. The USA could only have acquiesced in this state of affairs. It might ultimately have collided with Japan, but yet have taken no action while that power absorbed the Far Eastern possessions of the Dutch, French and British and turned China into a helpless puppet. India could have experienced a spurious liberation, either by the Germans or the Japanese – how can anyone know what might have happened to her?

The laws of Physics determine that however long and strong a lever may be, without a fulcrum it cannot be used. It is almost impossible to believe that Germany could have been beaten without either Soviet or US participation, but in the event, neither could it have happened without Britain’s survival through the year 1940-1 when she stood alone. We do not know whether or for how long we could have survived a determined German attack, but we do know that Churchill’s role in Britain’s defiance was paramount. The VE Day crowds in 1945 did not doubt it. When he told them “This is your victory” they roared back “No – it is yours”.

…or negotiated

By the end of October 1940 the British Government knew that German invasion plans had been cancelled. It is presumably during the next five months, until the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, which was started at the beginning and completed by the end of April, that some modern historians see a “window of opportunity” for a negotiated peace. Whether or not this seems reasonable in retrospect, it is difficult to see how it could possibly ever have happened. Churchill was now at the zenith of his power and prestige and had no intention of discussing peace. There was no politician of any standing whom a peace party could form around; Chamberlain was dead, Halifax (as a lord, anyway more or less disqualified) had been sent as Ambassador to Washington and Cripps to Moscow; Butler had been sidetracked into the unwarlike Ministry of Education.

Which Would Hitler Invade First – Britain or the USSR?

Be that as it may and granted that Churchill had the bit between his teeth (we can surely dismiss personal ambition) we still have to decide whether peace was a reasonable option and on what terms. The question boils down to this: if Hitler had spent the better part of a year preparing to invade Britain, would he have succeeded? For this his best strategy would be a massive aircraft and U-Boat building programme. The Army was certainly adequate as it was. But here a large factor looms – the USSR. With hindsight, we know that Hitler always intended to subjugate it. From captured documents the British government knew that in July 1940 Hitler had initiated the planning to do so. So for Britain, the question must have been not “If?” but “When?” As we have seen, Hitler’s best strategy would have been to neutralize Britain first; as soon as Britain knew the attack on Russia was fixed for June 1941, there would be no reason to seek peace. The British Government would not be justified in making, or in considering, peace overtures if the evidence showed that Germany was either not making a serious attempt to dominate the Channel, or that such an attempt would fail. After the Battle of Britain, which we won, evidence for both became overwhelming.

So confident was Churchill and the government of this that the the British felt able to send troops to Egypt and campaign, in a morale-raising way, to throw the Italians out of North Africa. Hitler refused Rommel reinforcements which may, at the time, have revealed that he needed the men elsewhere – Russia.

The Academic Debate: The Price We Paid – Unnecessary or Inevitable?

Despite the facts in the analysis above, it has been claimed that this interlude, irrespective of Hitler’s choice between the two alternatives, would have been a good time to negotiate. Large numbers of Britons (200,000+?) would have stayed alive, large numbers of houses and factories would not have been destroyed, our empire, including its oil-rich territories, would have remained intact, and its resources diverted to counter any threat from the Japanese. The morality of such a policy could be brushed aside and with some reason; Nazi atrocities were largely in the future, were dwarfed to date by Communist ones and, it has to be said, did not affect military strategy when they were known.

Lives Lost…

None of these reasons is really valid. What of the 200,000+ putative lives to be saved? Spread over the whole country, this would be a one chance in 275 of being killed, about twice the likelihood of anyone today being killed in a road accident during their entire lives. In human history, warfare has ranged from being regarded as a somewhat dangerous sport, through all the various stages of high-risk activity to kamikaze and suicide bomber. In short, it is difficult not to believe that most people in this country would have accepted a 100 to 200 to 1 chance of being killed in preference to the risk of trusting Hitler. Admittedly, in the armed forces, the risk would be higher!

Material Resources…

The other reasons can be dealt with more straightforwardly. The actual aftermath of the war has shown how rapidly material resources can be regenerated. The undeniable fact that the two defeated nations subsequently outstripped the victors economically even suggests that a thorough demolition of obsolescent structures, physical and psychological, can be even beneficial.

…and The Empire

As for the survival of Britain’s empire; this had been held together by moral force; selfconfidence in the rulers, acquiescence by the ruled. It would have been amazing if it could have survived a perceived British defeat any better than it did the ultimate British victory, especially in the case of India. The Japanese, had they taken care not to become embroiled with the US, could have over-run Malaya and Burma just as effectively as they did in 1942. To them, the difference between a compromise peace and an outright British defeat might not have seemed sufficient for them not to take the risk.

The Surprising “Moral Dimension”

Coming, lastly, to the moral dimension, it may surprise cynics, blase to British claims to hold the higher moral ground, to find how crucial this was. If the Germans had treated the inhabitants of White Russia (Belorus) and the Ukraine humanely or as allies against Bolshevism, as most of them wished to be, the Soviet Union might well have fallen to pieces nearly 50 years before it did. Hitler was even advised to do so but opted for their enslavement, largely because he regarded them as inferior human beings. With a parallel idiocy, both sides ill-treated their prisoners, instead of wooing them.

But Back to 1940 – 41: The Actual Situation…

During the months October 1940 to March 1941 Churchill waited to see whether Germany was going to move against Britain or the Soviet Union first. Given his complete dominance over the Cabinet, Parliament and the nation, there was, because of his refusal to consider them, no chance of peace negotiations coming about and the discussion of their desirability is literally an academic exercise. The academic exercise conducted in the paragraphs above suggests that he was right. At Nuremburg, the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (if one can believe him) claimed that Hitler himself, baffled as to what to do about Britain, even turned in desperation to Japan – to initiate an alliance that was to make his ruin ultimately complete.

Britain’s “Compromise Option” – To Be Eaten Last

There was, of course, an enormous risk that Hitler would succeed in completely defeating the Soviet Union, disintegrating its armies, killing or capturing Stalin or after occupying Moscow and Leningrad, turning him into a completely discredited, hunted man. But this risk would be much increased if Britain was neutral and our position would become desperate when the last power independent of Germany in the whole of Eurasia disappeared. Consequently it was not in our interest to agree with Hitler to give him a free hand to deal with the Soviet Union; that would be merely to accept the privilege accorded by the Cyclops to Odysseus – to be eaten last.

Because the United States, due to Hitler’s folly, became involved in the European war, Britain never had to confront either single power, Germany or the Soviet Union, dominant on the continent. However, whichever it had turned out to be, we should have been best to do so fully armed, with our resources mobilised in a fashion that only actual belligerance can ensure.

In The Duel, practically a day by day account of 80 days, May 10th to 31st July 1940 Lukacs explains how Churchill put the backbone into the British policy of defiance, a policy justifiable at the time only because the alternatives would be worse, but ultimately vindicated. Its most obvious feature is Churchill’s determination and will power, compared with the pessimism, if not actual defeatism, of, in particular, Halifax and Butler. Against their wish to explore Hitler’s terms was Churchill’s awareness of the “slippery slope” down which any interest in them might lead. It was another matter to carefully place “false feelers” to confuse and delay German reactions.

But there are other points well worth taking into account. The magnanimity of both Chamberlain and Churchill emerge; Churchill in his loyalty until his time comes and his kindness thereafter; Chamberlain’s acceptance of his replacement (he surely realised how much more adequate Churchill was to the task) and his pressure on his own supporters to rally behind Churchill. The number of Conservative MPs who began the period hostile to Churchill was large (large enough in the Commons Chamber to cheer Chamberlain rather than Churchill after the changeover). I rather wish that Lloyd George (Petain in waiting?) had been followed up.

The famous “calling off” by Hitler of Rundstedt’s advance on Dunkirk remains (to me) unexplained. The book finishes just as the Battle of Britain begins. Not perhaps argued strongly enough by the author is his suggestion that airborne or paratroop landings by the Germans might have led to the defeat of Britain immediately after, perhaps during, the Dunkirk evacuation. But were such airborne facilities yet developed sufficiently?

As an American, Lukacs is aware of the dependence of Churchill upon hopes of US help and knows the personalities in US politics; the various ways and means may have been simplified here. The weakness of a democratic system, especially of the US constitutional type, shows up in the difficulties Roosevelt had in aiding Britain, e.g., for his political support he had to keep the defeatist Joseph Kennedy as Ambassador to Britain. He also characterises John Foster Dulles as an isolationist in 1940 – and John F. Kennedy following his father in his defeatist attitude. It seems amazingly fortunate that the Republican candidate in 1940 was Wendell Wilkie, who also favoured intervention short of war.

In his Five Days in London: May 1940, Lukacs, in 1999, followed The Duel with a more detailed examination of the most critical period of 1940. I am not sure if I can say that he has added much to the subject, though doubtless the detail is greater. Perhaps there is more about the precariousness of Churchill’s position, but even so, this seems to have ended before the Dunkirk evacuation when far more men had been rescued that had been thought possible by anyone at its start. He may have thought the book was necessary after the publications of such revisionist historians as Charmley or Lawler, while he cites fairly often Roberts’ biography of Halifax, The Holy Fox (1991) and Eminent Churchillians (1994), often to correct and contradict. The book has the merit of greater brevity, concentration and force than The Duel.

The aftermath

Britain emerged from the War exhausted and bankrupt, unable and unwilling to be any longer a Great Power. The Americans had come to liberate us all from the Germans; they remained to protect us from the Russians. Increasingly content, like the rest of Western Europe, to shelter under the American umbrella, and increasingly powerless, we could all cavort beneath it in a parody of independence, indulged by our benign protector, whom we treat in the normal, expected way – with ingratitude.

East is East and West is West

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 23:55:34 +0000

From Babel to Dragomans
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004

Two passages from this collection of essays catch the eye for quotation. The first is from the author himself, written in 1999, in an essay entitled The Taxonomy of Group Hatred:

Let me begin with a proposition that may seem outrageous: to hate the other, the outsider, the one who is different, who looks different, sounds different, smells different; to hate, fear and mistrust the other is natural and normal – natural and normal, that is to say, among baboons and other gregarious animals, or in the more primitive forms of human existence, such as forest tribes, cave-dwellers and the like. Unfortunately it survives into later forms of human development. It survives in even the most advanced and sophisticated civilised societies. It is, and we should not disguise this from ourselves, a very basic human instinct, not just human, but going back beyond our most primitive ancestors to their animal predecessors. The instinct is there, and it comes out in all sorts of unexpected situations. To pretend it does not exist and that it is some sort of ideological aberration cannot lead anywhere useful.

The second is itself a quotation, from the Baghdad-born conservative British historian Elie Kedourie (1926-92), and is the epigraph of Lewis’s essay Islam and the West:

There was nothing unreasonable in believing that the Muslim world would attain the power and prosperity of Europe by the same methods Europe had used, and that this could be done without endangering any of the essential values of Islam.

Sad to say, I have encountered the work of Bernard Lewis late in the lives of both of us, but this collection of essays written during the last fifty years, between 1953 and 2003, provides some samples to encourage investigation of his more extended productions and here I can only discuss a sample of his samples. His territory is what used to be called the Near and Middle East, that area of Asia (like Europe, a strictly non-Islamic term) extending from Turkey to Pakistan. It is probably best to say at once, for those who do not know it, or others who might think that I was trying to conceal a relevant fact, that Bernard Lewis is Jewish, though how “observant” I do not know and cannot infer from these essays. The xenophobia, elucidated in his first quotation and amply displayed in his subject matter, past and present, does not lead him to lose hope in the fulfilment of the belief stated in the second. Yet his explanation of how Islam and the “West” (another non-Islamic term) fundamentally differ in their political philosophies makes it clear how difficult such a fulfilment will be. When, in the 7th Century the Arabs conquered all the land mass stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic, bringing Islam, their new religion with them, they were also bringing a social system with no distinction between the sacred and the secular and certainly not between church and state. There was (and is) no “church” or indeed any religious hierarchy, as Lewis keeps pointing out. Christianity had penetrated the Roman Empire in quite a different way, over a period of some three hundred difficult years, resulting in two organizations, church and state, ideally harmonious but often antagonistic. For Muslims, by contrast, religion seamlessly laid down both the rules by which they lived and the authority by which they were ruled.

Until comparatively recently Muslims were rarely subjected to infidel rule and the Islamic core lands when conquered were conquered by Muslims. Lewis points out more than once how this promoted isolation from and ignorance of their Christian neighbours until it was too late: a medieval Muslim description of European political geography is quite ludicrous, but, its author apologetically explained, only put in for completeness. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when the Thirty Years War (1618 – 48) was devastating central Germany, the Ottomans seemed unaware of the opportunity this gave them to smash through the Habsburg bulwark.

Lewis makes clear that almost all of the traffic and travelling, such as it was, between the two rival civilizations took place, until almost the end of the nineteenth century from Christian to Muslim lands. Muslims were used to Christians, as such, for there were tolerated communities of these living among them. The converse was certainly not the case; Muslims were unwelcome in Christendom, had no incentive to go there and for centuries could assume, as members of a superior culture, that nothing was to be gained from visiting such a benighted place, one of whose main exports was slaves.

Compared with what educated Muslims knew about Europe, educated Christians during all this time knew far more about the Near and Middle East; it was, after all, where their beliefs, and much of their intellectual heritage had come from. They would know more, indeed, of the pre-Islamic Persian, Mesopotamian or Egyptian Empires than any of the Muslim historians who knew next to nothing about them.

The title essay, From Babel to Dragomans extends this theme of physical isolation to that of mutual linguistic incomprehension. A dragoman (a word Lewis derives ultimately from ancient Assyrian) was an interpreter, used, by the sixteenth century by Europeans to make themselves understood to Turkish officials, merchants and others. He was usually Greek and something of a professional, having been sent to Italy by his well-to-do family for his education, returning fluent in that language which perforce became the medium of communication.

The reliability of such translators was suspect, and rightly so when it is taken into account that they were Ottoman subjects who had to be careful what they said to whom and how they said it. Thus a firm ambassadorial message tended to get turned into a humble supplication. (The Russians apparently got round the problem by ending any such communication with “Do so, or I will declare war,” which was normally effective.) The plea of the British Ambassador’s dragoman to a top Aga who had locked him up for some reason is the most obsequious piece of writing I have ever read (p. 26) – and that was just its page one.

By the eighteenth century clever young men were being sent out to their embassies to pick up the language and matters were not lagging behind back at home: by 1800 there were 70 Arabic, 10 Persian and 15 Turkish grammars in print, with 10, 4 and 7 corresponding dictionaries, as well as a lot of matter to use these aids on. The preponderance of Arabic was due to its acceptance as a “classical” language, fit to be studied at universities: the others were not – any more than were English, French, German or Spanish. The old system of making oneself understood at official (as distinct from tourist) level might be said to have packed up for good when the Grand Dragoman was publicly hanged, together with the Oecumenical Patriarch, in 1821 on suspicion of complicity in the Greek Revolt of that year.

As distinct from travelling outside it, within the Muslim world from its beginnings there was wide scope for such activity and “Mediaeval Islamic society enjoyed a far greater degree of voluntary, personal mobility than did any other known premodern society (p. 399)”. The obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, instituted by Muhammad, who died before the Arabs broke out of Arabia, gave the impetus to those with more secular matters on their minds. Merchants did not suffer from the low status they had in most other contemporary societies, for was not Muhammad himself a merchant? Scholars, attaching themselves to the merchants’ caravans wandered as far as China in search of knowledge. Borders were permeable and, during the first few centuries, non-existent. Quite a large travel literature (rihla) emerged as a genre, the best-known example of which is probably that of Ibn Battuta in the first half of the 14th century who started from (and returned to) Tangier and got as far as Canton in China, with considerable journeys to places in between, including a visit to Constantinople and an eight-year stint as a judge in India.

Lewis is also much impressed by Islamic history-writing: “The first thing that strikes us is its immense richness and variety, as contrasted with other history-writing civilizations. It has been calculated that the historical literature of medieval Islam is far greater in bulk, just in Arabic, that the literature of medieval eastern and western Christendom in Latin, Greek and all the vernaculars combined.” It would be interesting to know whether the availability of paper, common in the Islamic world long before it reached Europe, had anything to do with this. “Islam, from the very beginning, has attached enormous importance to history. Indeed, in many parts of the world, reliable history begins with the advent of Islam (p. 406).” This last applies particularly to India. Lewis also stresses that Muslim historians were scrupulous with their facts – and as frank about their defeats as about their victories. It seems strange that with all this material to transmit, printing did not “take off” until the 19th Century.

One can almost see Lewis licking his lips as he describes in an early essay (1960) the opening of access to The Ottoman Archives, which date back to 1453, when they began to be kept in Istanbul; but their perils started when the Empire came to an end in 1923. However, when nearly 200 “bales” faced what is now called recycling, the scandal involved ensured their proper treatment. Official obstruction over the centuries to their inspection has ceased and now researchers have merely to face “a difficult language and an obscure script . . . an involved chancery style and a highly technical official vocabulary (p. 419).” Lewis makes clear just how hard a job this will be.

The last essay, undated and “previously unpublished” and which I suspect may have been written especially for this collection is On Occidentalism and Orientalism and is more or less a justification of the author’s specialty. It may even be a riposte to Orientalism, by the late Edward Said (1935-2003), though neither the book (which I have not read) nor the author is mentioned by Lewis. Googling a long way down an article entitled Debunking Edward Said, however, I came across “If Said can be said to have a bete noir it must surely be Bernard Lewis,” with quotations to prove it. It might be mentioned, for those who do not know it, that Edward Said, a Christian Arab born in Cairo, for many years until his death held a secure academic position in the US. Lewis quite mildly points out the natural, if irrational, resentment those from one culture feel when practically all the study of it has been carried out by members of another. Somehow we are back at the first quotation from Lewis’s essay The Taxonomy of Group Hatred: “to hate the other, the outsider… is natural and normal.” Amongst academics? God forbid!

Can this reader suggest to the editor of such a collection as this that the source of each essay be placed near the essay itself, either at its beginning or end? The information itself is there, but printed at the beginning of the volume. Some of the essays in the text, justifiably arranged thematically rather than chronologically, are headed by the date, but many are not. The absence of an Index is regrettable, but forgivable.

Who pays the cost?

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 23:52:04 +0000

The Cost of “Choice”
Edited by Erika Bachiochi
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2004

This is a frankly partisan book, and though subtitled Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion, it would be fair to say that positive claims for any impact are given short shrift, and the editor is someone who has changed her mind. Changed her mind in what sense? Perhaps the greatest difference between British and American attitudes – and I must make clear that this is not the same as British and American practices – is that while here we regard abortion as a range of moral options, Americans have been polarised by their legal system into only two: for or against. This is an American book (the experience of other countries is hardly mentioned), the editor is American; she was once for abortion and is now against it. Under all circumstances? It is fair to say that this not much discussed.

The landmark decision on abortion in the US was the Supreme Court ruling (which has been strengthened by several subsequent ones) in Roe v. Wade in 1973, five years after the Abortion Act was passed in this country. Both effectively legalised abortion on demand, at any stage in the pregnancy, so that it was it was perfectly permissible to kill someone who, if born, could survive if supported by present-day technology, or even without it (p. 6). Personally I would like to think that such cases are uncommon. However, the on-going US debate on “partial birth” abortion, where parturition is induced so that the emerging baby can more conveniently be killed (p. 19), suggests otherwise. Congress passed a law against it, which was vetoed by President Clinton, but signed by President Bush in 2003; it may yet fail at the Supreme Court, which in 2000 declared partial-birth abortion legal.

Although in this country the matter was debated in Parliament (though without its later ramifications being even suspected) and laid to rest when the Act that legalized abortion passed into law, in the US “the decision of Roe v. Wade launched a civic debacle… [when] the Court abruptly brought this process to a halt (p. xii)”. There is no doubt that this decision, tortuously argued from a “right to privacy” not mentioned, let alone enshrined, anywhere in the US Constitution, was correctly called by one of the dissenting judges “a power grab” and by another “an exercise in raw judicial power”. And if legislatures could be circumvented in this way, where would it all end? In fact, it looks as if this short-circuit “legislation by judiciary” is a one-off. Some constitutional lawyers had their misgivings but at least the men seem, as one of them put it in a burst of frankness, to have “been made to understand that the abortion issue was so important to the women in our lives, and it did not seem that important to most of us (p. 12).” And what, to be cynical about it, could be more convenient for the errant male than to be absolved from the responsibility of paternity by paying for an abortion? So much for the “oppressive patriarchy”. As for the upholders of the, up till then, conventional morality, perhaps their surrender is best typified by the reply of the Jesuit dean of Boston College: “Well you see, Mary Ann [Glendon], it’s very simple. According to Vatican II, abortion is an ‘unspeakable moral crime’. But in a pluralistic democracy, we can’t impose our moral views on other people (p. 11).” Such passivity, of course, is not the stance of a true activist, but perhaps for Catholics, already overcome by the consensus on fornication, adultery and contraception, a defeat on abortion was simply the inevitable continuation of an unstoppable trend, one they were, if politicians, “personally opposed to” but also could do nothing about and even vote for if electorally advantageous.

So much for scene-setting. Twelve women have contributed essays to this book, but it must be said that anyone hoping to see facts laid out in tables, graphs or histograms will be disappointed; there is one table in the text and one in a footnote – and nothing else. But never mind about that; the aims of the group are unclear. It is obvious from the tenor of the articles that all the writers regard abortion as undesirable – that is their reason for their contributions. “Is the unborn child inside or outside the circle of moral concern? That is the heart of the matter.” Such is the rather roundabout statement made in the Preface by a thirteenth woman, University of Chicago Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain. I should prefer the simpler question: “Is the unborn child a human being?” Whether the foetus, at any stage of its existence, has any human rights is uncertain, for these, such as they are, depend entirely on the will of its mother, who can kill it at any time, though it remains criminal to kill it without her consent. Human rights groups, so far as I am aware, have no interest in the subject. Incidentally, it might be noted that the adjective “moral”, both here and in the Jesuit’s statement above, is merely used for emphasis and quite unnecessary.

According to surveys given here, most Americans do regard the unborn child as human and are far from agreeing that it is a mere lump of parasitic tissue, as the more militant feminists tell them it is. Most of them are also unaware that “the right to choose” has been expanded to include abortion on demand. Even many law professors seem surprised when told this is the case (p. 6). Howover this ignornace is less likely in those in a position to know and two-thirds of all obstetricians and gynaecologists refuse to do abortions under any circumstances, especially those young (under 40) and female, the very category that should be most sympathetic to the pro-abortion message. Most abortions are carried out in clinics set up for that purpose which are, from what is said here, far from being supervised, inspected or regulated satisfactorily.

It also seems to be a fact that the number of abortions in the US is falling, though only slightly – from 1.36 million in 1996 to 1.31 million in 2000. Proportionately, this decrease is not great, but it might be noted that it is twice the number (200,000) of illegal abortions estimated to have been carried out annually before Roe v. Wade. For some readers, it may be a defect in the book that these abortions, which represent 25% of all annual US pregnancies, are not classified in any way, by age, race (it is well known that abortions are disproportionately high for black women), or economic status or at what stage or trimester in the pregnancy they are carried out. Perhaps these data are more difficult to find than I think they ought to be: a quick (amateur) google did not give quick results, and those only from 1974 until 1994, at www.abortiontv.com/Misc/AbortionStatistics.htm. These did, however, show a definite shift from younger to older women during that time, and (confirming the statement given above) an even more definite one from white to black, presumably correlated with the progressive disintegration of black families during this period.

There are two consequences of abortion examined here, additional that is to the elimination of the foetus: psychological trauma and subsequent ill-health. It is probably not too harsh to say that the evidence for the first more than verges on the anecdotal. No one can deny that many women bitterly regret their abortions, whether undergone willingly or under coercion, and suffer greatly. But the evidence here was not gathered by sampling, but by solicitation (e.g. p. 87), and there is no mention of those others who may have had no regrets, didn’t suffer and felt only relief. However it is only fair to mention that, in a study based on Finnish statistics, post-abortion suicide was three times the national average for women in the same age-group, which itself was twice the rate for those who had given birth, taking the following year as the time interval (p. 96). It may well be objected that causal does not follow from correlation, and that a woman who has an abortion may have other problems, leading to both abortion and suicide. Yet only the heartless can dismiss the possibility that the prevention of the first might prevent the second.

In the matter of subsequent health problems we are undoubtedly on firmer ground. The evidence for a link between abortion and breast cancer seems well-documented and two authors who believe in it (Shandigian and Lanfranchi) discuss it at length, including the endocrinal mechanism by which the one may cause the other. However, the extent to which the link is still controversial is indicated by their admission that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not support their position. On the other hand there is evidence, again anecdotal, that academics are reluctant to discuss the link in the milieu they expect to attain professional advancement, while learned bodies ban discussion of it at their conferences as “too political” (p.85). According to one study (numbers not given), there is an increased hazard for women who have a family history of breast cancer. All pregnant teenagers from such families who aborted their first pregnancy developed breast cancer by the age of 45 (p. 67 and 75). Would this information give such a pregnant teenager pause? The chances are that she would never hear about it.

In the end we confront the question this book does not really face, but which the reader inevitably asks: what is to be done about the 1.31 million abortions per annum? If the nation is comfortable with this, is there nothing more to be said? If it uneasy about it, as surveys seem to show, though in a non-urgent sort of way, then pro-lifers can hope to get their way, to the extent they limit their demands to what is politically possible. For it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that a country as rich as the USA, and from where women travel as far as China to find a baby to adopt, can afford to absorb this hypothetical surplus, or at least some of it. Can this potential supply be manipulated to meet this demand? Can a social climate be generated where abortion is not a first option? The mere suggestion arouses hostility; even organized attempts to persuade pregnant women not to abort seem to face an uphill task. For example, the California affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) got First Resort, a “pregnancy care service” with this purpose closed down (p. 37), and, of course, such services are entirely privately financed. So, to be sure, are the pro-abortionists, but they do not have to provide any “care services” beyond pointing applicants in the direction of abortionists, who will do what is wanted for the money. It would probably also not be wrong to say that they are by far the better organized, and have the backing, explicit or implicit, of mainstream women’s and feminist organizations.

If it would take too long to develop a general social climate in which the unwillingly pregnant were persuaded to give birth, and their unwanted children could be reared, perhaps the answer would be legal coercion to restore the status quo ante 1973. Once the clinics where most abortions are carried out came under State supervision and law enforcement, something could probably be done by legislation to introduce limits which the public would not only expect, but welcome. The situation would inevitably be messy, with “shopping around” between States with lax and severe laws, but would be the only method by which a realist could expect to bring about a reduction in the number of abortions. Quite simply, if it is made more difficult to get an abortion, there will be fewer of them. The first step towards this end, if desired, is of course to reverse the Supreme Court’s decisions and return the problem to the State Legislatures from whence it came. This will only come about if more judges who are “strict constructionists” of the Constitution are appointed to replace those who retire or die and if somehow a relevant legal case is brought to reverse Roe v Wade and the other decisions that extended it. I do not need to go into the enormous difficulties facing those who would have to try to bring this about.

The rise in abortion is in fact only one more feature of what has happened to what might be roughly called Western Civilization during the last forty years, put in lapidary form by Louis Roussel, head of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and quoted here:

It is exceedingly rare in the history of populations that sudden changes appear across the entire set of demographic indicators. Yet in barely 15 years, starting in 1965, the birth rate and the marriage rate in all the industrialised countried tumbled, while divorces and births outside marriage increased rapidly. All those changes were substantial, with increases or decreases of more than 50 percent.

The First Islamic Empire – Its Decline and Fall

Findlay Dunachie (Glasgow) — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 22:54:48 +0000

The Court of the Caliphs
Hugh Kennedy
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004

There were 37 Abbasid Caliphs, in a succession that lasted from 749 to 1258, when the last of them was rolled up in a carpet and suffocated by the Mongols after the surrender of Baghdad. Why Hugh Kennedy should sub-title his fine, interesting and rather horrifying book The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty is a bit of a mystery. The last effective Caliph was assassinated by his Turkish guards in 861 and although the Family Tree dribbles down to the bottom of its page until 1031, perhaps just to fill it up, Kennedy continues his history only as far as 935, by which time the Caliphate had fragmented into independent entities in Spain, Africa, Egypt, Persia and Khurasan. According to Hitti’s History of the Arabs, from 945 the Caliphs were puppets of the Persian Shia Buwahids (“who made and unmade Caliphs at will”), ruling Iraq (and Baghdad) from distant Shiraz until in 1055 they were replaced by the Seljuk Turks (“a new and more benevolent tutelage”). As the Seljuk supremacy petered out around 1200, the Caliphate regained some power and prestige, only to be extinguished by the Mongol Hulagu in 1258.

Thus the effective rule of the Abbasid Caliphs was quite short and any ‘golden age’ during it even shorter. It began when discontented elements in the north-eastern borderland province of Khurasan rebelled against the Umayyad Caliph in Damascus. Despite their considerable resources, the Umayyads were unable to resist the forces organised against them by the able, ruthless, fanatical (and pseudonymous) Abu Muslim. Too obscure in origin to be a claimant himself, he perforce backed a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas (who had never actually become a Muslim himself and was assumed to have gone to hell). This first Caliph was sickly and died after a five year reign, being succeeded by his brother, called, after his accession, Mansur (Victorious), “the most remarkable individual in the whole story of the Abbasids” whose twenty year reign set the dynasty on its feet, and probably ensured it survived at all.

Although Mansur had been appointed heir by his brother, whose sons were too young to be contenders, he had to dispose of a threat by an uncle, who claimed to have done as much as anyone to defeat the Umayyads. With the aid of Abu Muslim, Mansur brought about the break-up of the uncle’s army, and then lured Abu Muslim to his tent and had him murdered, behaviour often repeated in the history of the dynasty. As far as the legitimacy behind the claim for the Succession (the Caliphate) to the Prophet was concerned, suffice it to say that, in terms of relationship, that of the Abbasids was not indisputable. Descendants of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her husband Ali were plentiful but poorly organized. Ali himself had been assassinated in 661 and both his sons had died, one in battle, the other possibly poisoned, which made all three martyrs to give rise to the Shia branch of Islam. Mansur had to destroy one outright claimant who made the mistake of starting his rebellion in Medina, which, howerever sacred, was “a place where there is no money, no men, no weapons and no fodder” and, in the end, no support. Other “Alids” were watched and confined to Baghdad, the new capital, founded in 762. There is a sinister tale that on Mansur’s death, his heir found a whole room with their neatly laid out and ticketed corpses, of all ages. The Alids were invariable losers, and misfortune seems to have dogged their followers, the Shia, who have done either the right or the wrong thing at the wrong or the right time, down to the present day. Harun al-Rashid (786-809), the fifth Abbasid Caliph, is the best known of all of them and the one whose reign became legendary for its power and prosperity, probably because of the chaos that followed it. He figures, for instance, as the benign Caliph in the Arabian Nights, and though versions were first current in the fourteenth century, long after the demise of the dynasty, their roots can be discerned within two generations of his death. On the whole his reign was successful politically and militarily, insofar as the Caliphate remained intact and raids against the Byzantines, who were going through a difficult period, kept them submissive. Unfortunately two key administrative problems remained unsolved: how to dismiss civil servants without a blood bath, and how to arrange a peaceful succession. Both resulted in spectacular failures. Harun had been supported at the critical time of his accession by members of the Barmakids, Muslim converts in the far north of what is now Afghanistan. These became his intimates at court and ran the Caliphate bureaucracy. For no clear reason, though the events of the coup are well-recorded, all disappeared into prison, never to be seen again, or were executed. As for the succession, Harun had laid elaborate plans for his two sons to follow each other as Caliphs, complete with oaths which both solemnly swore at a pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, two years after Harun’s death, civil war broke out between the brothers and Baghdad endured a siege followed by prolonged street fighting which left it in ruins. The elder brother was killed there in 813, but the younger, Ma’mun, who had ruled Khurasan from its capital Merv, did not come to Baghdad until 819.

Ma’mun did his best to reconcile the opposing factions brought about by the civil war and there were no severe reprisals. He died unexpectedly in 833 while about to start a campaign in southern Asia Minor against the Byzantines and was succeeded by his brother Mu’tasim who, probably because he was with him when he fell ill, was in a stronger position to do so than his son, who later lost his life in a bungled conspiracy. Mu’tasim did two things that sowed the seeds for the crisis and collapse of the Caliphate by the end of the century. He bought Turkish slaves from Central Asia to turn into a private army or bodyguard and he built a new capital, Samarra, 100 miles north of Baghdad. The Turks were unpopular in Baghdad and it may have seemed a good idea to segregate them, though it resulted in their acquiring so much power that after the short reigns of Mu’tasim and his son Wathiq they were able to pick from obscurity Wathiq’s brother Mutawwakil in 847 to be the next Caliph.

Despite his Turkish installation, Mutawwakil was far from a nonentity or puppet and managed to put to death a number of the Turkish cabal. He was also “a prodigious builder of palaces” and “the last caliph to be free of major financial constraints”. This independence, together with an attempt to regularise the succession among his three sons which only caused trouble, led in 861 to his murder by Turkish conspirators, who replaced him with his eldest son, who soon died. Chaos followed, including another siege of Baghdad. Caliph after Caliph was murdered, including Mutawwakil’s other two sons. After this Kennedy tells us little of any of the Caliphs that exercised any power at all and: “In 935 a military adventurer by the name of Ibn Ra’iq took power as Amir al-Umara, Prince of princes, depriving the Abbasids of the last remnants of their secular power.”

Sandwiched between the narratives are several chapters dealing with Abbasid culture in general, though the reader might be forgiven for wondering just when, in the hurly burly of the times, things became sufficiently settled for anyone to indulge in it. However, just as war has been described by its participants as long periods of boredom punctuated by short ones of excitement, Abbasid court life could perhaps equally be described as long periods of elegant liesure broken by short bursts of mayhem. It is a little dispriting to find that “early Abbasid court culture was dominated by poetry and song” especially when the “public poetry of the Abbasid court was largely praise poetry” and formed “the bread and butter of literary life”. Epic poetry might have been suitable for public recitations instead, but there is no mention of it at all and drama did not exist. Nor, of course, did representational art, which came under the Islamic ban on the depiction of human and animal life; to some extent calligraphy flourished in its stead. Literacy was promoted by a need for an imperial bureaucracy and facilitated by the manufacture of paper, a technological import from China through Central Asia. Caliph and courtiers were alike literate, a contrast to the aristocracy of Western Europe, though not that of Byzantium.

It was at this period that elements of Greek science, medicine and philosophy were assimilated, but once absorbed, no longer studied. As Bernard Lewis puts it, in his The Political Language of Islam: “This literature… is neverthless of marginal importance in the political and intellectual history of Islam. The Muslim philosophers of the Hellenistic school were a comparatively small, relatively minor group. Their kind of philosophy flourished for a time in the Islamic academies during the Middle Ages, but it died out and had only a limited impact on later generations. It did, however, contribute substantially to the vocabulary of political writing of far greater significance…” Although there were large Christian communities and smaller Jewish ones living under the Caliphate, Kennedy makes no mention of any interaction between them and if Christians read the Koran or Muslims the Bible and Jews read both there is no suggestion that this led to any published result, of the type of controversial literature against heresies written by orthodox Christians during the pagan period of Imperial Rome.

Kennedy devotes a whole chapter to the Harem. Everyone knowns that, guarded by eunuchs, the Caliph was the only intact adult male ever to set eyes on its inmates. Other males were not the only moral hazards however: a grim anecdote recounts how one Caliph personally beheaded two slave girls found making love to each other. Broadly speaking, the Harem consisted of all the women of the Court, from the swarms of slave-girls and concubines to extremely influential and rich women at the top, sometimes a favourite wife (though Caliphs after Harun-al-Rashid seem to have given up formal marriage arrangements) or a Caliph’s mother. Harun’s mother Khayzuran, who ensured he became Caliph, and his wife Zubayda were both extremely rich. Another rich Queen Mother was apparently too stingy to give her Caliph son a comparatively small sum to pay his Turks, with the result that he was assassinated. On the whole the women connected with men who were assassinated or executed, or, before such events occurred, merely political enemies, were not themselves killed, harshly treated or even molested. An exasperated Turk is recorded as hanging one of them upside down and beating her to get her to tell him where her money was hidden (she refused), but such treatment was regarded as irregular.

There is little here about the Caliphate’s military organization or the strategy and tactics of its armies, though something from the author’s The Armies of the Caliphs (which I have not read), tucked away in the Bibliography, without even a reference to it in the text, would have been appropriate. Islamic expansion seems to have ceased and the border with the Byzantine Empire remained little altered during the whole period, having in fact moved somewhat to the east when the Islamic capital moved from Damascus to the more distant Baghdad. Campaigns against it were essentially larger or smaller raids and if fortified towns, such as Heraclea and Armorium were captured, they were later abandoned, though their inhabitants might be deported as slaves, resettled or simply massacred. The last siege of Constantinople, a crushing failure, had been in 716 by the Umayyads; there were none by the Abbasids. Why the enormous resources of the intact Caliphate were not brought to bear to eliminate the relatively small area of the last Christian power in the East is not examined, let alone explained.

In fact, most Abbasid warfare was internecine and possibly the most severe was the suppression of a revolt by black African slaves, the Zanj, who worked the saltpetre mines in the south of Iraq, lasting from 869 until 883. This uprising (in the name of Ali – who else?) is not mentioned by Kennedy, except in his Chronology, though it may have caused as many as half a million deaths. Ronald Segal, in his Islams Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora, credits the abandonment of any attempt by Islamic societies to use Africans as forced labour on the land, as was done centuries later in the Americas, to the trouble this revolt had caused.

It is not clear to me why the Abbasid Caliphate deserves the admiration that Kennedy obviously thinks I should feel for it. After less than two centuries of its existence the Caliphate it had usurped had fallen to pieces and the fertile, irrigated heartland it had inherited had been ruined. Whoever exercised power, whether Caliph or his puppet-master, had as councillors only sycophants or who were, if otherwise, suspect as subversive. In either case his caprice could kill. The succession, like that of other Islamic empires, the Ottomans and the Mughals, was always a problem, usually solved with violence. As with many historians and intellectuals, Kennedy gives too much credit to the trappings of civilization, rather than marking its more solid achievements. Poetry meant little to the peasants whose crops were trampled, irrigation ditches blocked and water polluted and whose taxes paid for the splendid palaces they never saw (is there something familiar about this last?).

There may be lessons which contemporary Arabs can learn from the events chronicled in this book, but they are not ones that should give rise to imitation. In his final paragraph beginning “The memory of the caliphate survived to inspire later generations…” Kennedy continues with words and phrases such as: power, prestige and unity, ancient greatness, potent inspiration for Osama bin Laden, cultural legacy, defined the style and performance of Muslim monarchy, showed how a caliph and vizier should behave (eh?), flowing elegant script, astonishing achievement. This is mythology, not history, and should be debunked rather than supported.