Stewart Binns' 'Anarchy' 2013

 

Penguin paperback edition - 2013

To read this novel felt somewhat of a 'light relief' after the heavy biography of Lord Macaulay. I was a little perturbed to read on the back cover, though, that the two readers singled out to be quoted as praising the book were Lord Sebastian Coe and Alastair Campbell, neither particularly noted for their insights in the literary world.

It's now five days since I finished this novel and I am finding it difficult to recall what I wanted to say! It proves to me that I must Blog as soon as possible after I put a book down.

Stewart Binns certainly has a vivid imagination, backed up with some pretty impressive research. His 'Glossary' at the end of the novel runs to 26 pages and includes an eclectic range of headings, e.g. Bucentaur, Carucate, Onager, Corselet, Futuwwa, Kipchak Bow, Leine, Pugio, Turcopole. No, I hadn't heard of most of them, either! Using these words in the text does not diminish the fine flow of sentences and paragraphs. The whole book has a pleasing momentum, ensuring that the reader wants to know what happens next.

The slightly unusual format - whereby the real life Gilbert Foliot, in turn Abbot of Gloucester (1139), Bishop of Hereford (1148) and Bishop Of London (1163), sends a series of letters from Fulham Palace in 1186-87 to his long-time friend Thibaud de Vermandois, Abbot of Cluny (1180) and Cardinal Bishop of Ostia e Velletri (1184). In the letters, he relates a long story, told to me by a man who you will find intriguing. I first came across him in late June 1139...this first meeting seemed likely to be the only encounter between us, for he was badly wounded and near to death...miraculously, proving my surgeons wrong, Harold of Hereford not only survived but went on to play a significant part in England's future affairs. Eventually, he  returned - but not for almost forty years, in 1176 in fact - and when he did, it was to make his peace with God...

For the next 470 pages, Harold's extraordinary life is written down by Gilbert's monks, to the bishop's dictation, and then sent off to Italy. Perhaps, the title of the book - Anarchy - is a slight misnomer, as it is not until page 282 that we meet up with the Empress Matilda, daughter and heiress of Henry II, and one half of the combatants in what we now (anachronistically) refer to as the (English) Anarchy.

Harold's grandfather was Hereward of Bourne (we know him in the history books as Hereward the Wake), his father Sweyn of Bourne and his mother, Estrith of Melfi, (who, notwithstanding becoming an abbess, had a healthy sexual appetite. She helped to design the presbytery of Norwich cathedral and was commemorated as one of the gargoyles on its vaulted ceiling's bosses - as the naked strumpet over there, cavorting with the Devil!). Harold's parents formed a brotherhood - the Brethren of the Blood of the Talisman - with Prince Edgar (the Atheling) and Robert of Normandy. A secret society, no less! This mixing of real with fictitious people does not jar. Harold later takes on another guise as Robyn of Hode - the author really likes to upset traditional history!

Harold leaves England on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but stops off at Venice, where he takes service under the Doge in one of the city's ships, the Domenico Contarini.  He travels throughout the Adriatic and to Tripoli and Alexandria, survives a piratical attack off the Dalmatian coast, when the Venetian ship is sunk and eventually returns to Venice's Arsenale. He meets the Doge, the real life Ordelafo Faliero  (1102-1117), who is so impressed that he is made a Captain in his service  and subsequently excels during fierce fighting against the Dalmatian stronghold of Zadar. A new Doge, Domenico Michele (1117-1130) rewards Harold as a Knight of the Serene Republic of Venice and sends him on commission to take his sister Lady Livia Michele to meet up with her betrothed, Roger of Salerno, Regent of Antioch. Reaching the Anatolian coast, they are shipwrecked, but Harold saves Lady Livia. After landing on a forbidding shore, they eventually make their way to Roger, but only after falling in love with other. Harold chivalrously refuses Lady Livia ardent attempts to seduce him, but Roger turns out to be a very naughty boy. Suffice to say, he is worse than naughty to poor Lady Livia, who, in mental anguish, ends up committing suicide by drowning on the way back to Venice.

Incident follows on incident; the novel is almost too packed with them. Harold meets up with the (to be) famous Hugh de Payens (who proves to be even more of a naughty boy than Roger) and becomes one of the original nine crusaders who formed the Knights Templar. Harold quickly becomes disillusioned with Payens and his authoritarianism and cruelty, and hoofs it back to England. Falling foul of the irascible Henry I (who could not forgive the fact that Harold's grandfather had fought against his father, William I), he flees to Normandy. It is then that he meets up with Matilda/Maud, who is not enamoured with her new toy-boy husband Geoffrey. The biggest flight of fancy in the book now occurs. Not only do Harold and Matilda become lovers, but he is the real father of the future Henry II and his younger brothers, William and Geoffrey. And no one ever guessed!

The details of the Anarchy are well covered and pretty accurate, albeit very much from the viewpoint of Matilda's side (her escape in the snow from Oxford castle is particularly atmospheric). Count Geoffrey, Earl Robert of Gloucester, King David of Scotland, Bishop Roger of Salisbury, Brien FitzCount and several other real life figures are well described and given a judicious role in the events. Moreover, the portrayal of King Stephen, his brother Bishop Henry of Winchester, and their supporters are believable. It ends, as we know, with Matilda's failure to become Queen of England, not just Lady of the English, but with the more important successful crowning of her (and Harold's!) son, as King Henry II in 1154.

Final thoughts? It is a thrilling adventure story; almost too jam-packed with incidents. The author, through his mouth piece Foliot, castigates the scandalous early history of the Knights Templar, and the hypocrisy and immorality of the wicked and duplicitous Hugh de Payens. The portrait of the Empress Matilda is compelling.  The minor characters, who I have not mentioned here, also add to the depth of the story-telling.

Robert E. Sullivan's 'Macaulay. The Tragedy of Power ' 2009

 

Harvard University Press first edition - 2009

This biography is certainly not aimed at the 'general reader' and is not for the faint hearted. In 487 densely-packed erudite pages (and a further 90 of Notes), the reader requires stamina, fortitude and, probably, regular incursions to the spirits decanter. I finished the book feeling that the biggest gap between the 19th century elite (and the author - Associate Professor of History and Associate Vice President at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana) and those of the 21st century, is the study and knowledge of the Latin and Greek, the Classical, world - its languages, its thinkers, philosophers, historians, modus vivendi. A classical education once integrated England's leaders intellectually, socially, and ethically. I studied Latin for several years at school - and Greek for a single year! -  but this certainly did not equip me to understand a sizeable chunk of what Professor Sullivan was referring to. Nowadays, in Britain the two languages are rarely taught outside of the public schools, and are as dead as the proverbial Monty Python parrot. This means that a major aspect of Macaulay, his life-blood really, cannot readily be empathised with, or even understood. Sullivan, in his useful Introduction, suggests much of the English-speaking reading world has demoted him from an Eminent Victorian...to a name known only to liberal-arts graduates of a certain age and to students of nineteenth-century culture.

Sullivan provides a valuable sketch of Macaulay's father, Zachary (1768-1838) - a member of the Clapham Sect (a group of mostly rich evangelical Anglicans living in a pious commune), who wanted to impose their morality on the public by abolishing the slave trade and to strangle slavery throughout the empire. They were nurtured and regulated through Bible-reading and prayer. Zachary insisted that his son's pleasing him was the condition for enjoying God's favour: "Unless you are thus docile and obedient, you cannot expect that Jesus Christ shd. love you or give you his blessing." Try that tone in 2025! The younger Macaulay read incessantly as a youngster - before he was seven he produced a compendium of Universal History. His education marked him for the rest of his life - what he studied and how he studied had more in common with the Renaissance, with late antiquity, than with the early 21st century. Studying the classics was inseparable from classical rhetoric. Sullivan charts the increasing distance between father and son, but a distance often skilfully masked by Macaulay. At Cambridge, the latter became a keen competitor, writing Latin epistles and English declamations. For the rest of his life he was more at home as an orator, rarely taking part in, or enjoying, actual debates. He never forgot  the ancients' timeless lesson that "the object of oratory...is not truth but persuasion".

A brief Blog such as this is not the place to chart Thomas Macaulay's life (1800-1859), in all its vicissitudes, but one can pick out some salient pointers: 

• crucially, his family taught him to be Janus-faced...he succeeded in crafting an intricate and winning public face that often belied him. He believed that "morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God..."
• His Whiggism was accommodating rather than dogmatic, an attitude that eventually made him a bellwether.
• elected as an M.P., Macaulay soon made his name as a compelling orator. Interestingly, he supported religious toleration, not so much for protecting religious minorities, but as a way of subordinating their diversity to the authority and control of the state.
• Tom was permanently celibate. An area which Professor Sullivan tries to unpick is Macaulay's 'incestuous' feelings for his two youngest sisters, Hanna (10 years younger) and Margaret (12 years his junior). Psychologists would have (and have had) a field day. Even accounting for 19th century sentimentality, his amorous language and clear dependence for emotional satisfaction upon the two girls is disturbing. Margaret's early death left him distraught and his subsequent attachment to Hannah and her daughter was intense. 
• His time in India as a legislator (he sailed with Hannah. who met and married Charles Trevelyan there, caused further emotional distress to her brother) was admired but, from a 21st century  viewpoint, deeply disturbing. Natives were "a nest of blackguards", "beggarly Musselmans", "scare-crows". On the other hand, the "brave, proud, and high-spirited race, unaccustomed to defeat, to shame, or to servitude", the English, were "the greatest and most highly civilised people that the world ever saw". And moreover, "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia". Macaulay argued that it was clear India could not have a free Government, but could have the next best thing - "a firm and impartial despotism".  Whilst in India he created a regimen of reading Greek and Latin "for three or four hours" every morning before breakfast. Macaulay believed that England's imperial mission was civilizing, not Christian.
• Ireland? to many Englishmen, including Macaulay, the indigenous Irish appeared barbarous, perhaps savage, and hence even lower on the scale of civilization than the Indians. There were shades of an ethic of civilizing and imperial extirpation in his views; his attitude to the awful years of the Irish famine make for very uncomfortable reading. Civilizing and progressive slaughter in history amounted to the secular expropriation of Providence. From projecting the eradication of aborigines' languages and literatures, it was a manageable stretch to recommending the eradication of aborigines who resisted the civilization that would uplift future generations. You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs.
• England's responsibility to extend its superior civilization made conquest a moral imperative to be rewarded with growing prosperity and power. "all nations, civilised and uncivilised,", should know that "wherever an Englishman may wander, he is followed by the eye and guarded by the power of England" (a view soundly endorsed by Palmerston in his foreign policy).
• Of course, the publication of the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) brought the imperial idea, dressed in toga and sandals and armed with a sword and shield, alive to Macaulay's countrymen. They taught that Rome's invented traditions inspired its citizens to devotion, slaughter and sacrifice - defining modern "ardent patriotism".
• The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848, 1855) was not to be an objective history. His book was the product of a classically trained orator inspired by the art of Thucydides and the other great ancients. Re-reading the ancients during the late 1840s in dread of democratic revolution convinced him to see the past from their vantage and to look down on ordinary people as "politically too insignificant for history". High politics was his story, and political actors were his characters, More than Walter Scott or even the hero-worshiping Thomas Carlyle, Macaulay depicted the powerful movers of great events as the agents of historical change. For Macaulay, England superseded Christianity as the font of national unity. He also wanted to make history lively. English history was the triumph of reason and the state over barbarism and the church, and the unparalleled greatness of England depended on the Revolution of 1688. William III was "the greatest prince that has ever ruled England". Macaulay's disdain for "the multitude" was huge - "Rabble", "Common People", "the vulgar", "Clowns", "Rustics" and "ignorant populace". There was a permanent underclass threatening respectability, property and order and waiting to assault - "the human vermin".
• other aspects worth noticing -  Macaulay hated the Quakers - the dullest, vilest, most absurd of Christian  sects. The History  was unreliable in its transcription of documents (reminds me of Abbot Gasquet!) For Macaulay, the civilizing imperative was integral to modern England's identity and power. It required establishing "the ascendancy which naturally and properly belongs to intellectual superiority", first over the domestic "mob" or "multitude", then over the Celtic fringes, and finally over a global empire, above all over India.

The History was an immediate triumph. The first print run of 3,000 copies was quickly sold out; volumes one and two went through thirteen printings. To most contemporary readers it told a generally accepted story. It is interesting to read that Macaulay was allergic to criticism. When confronted with indisputable factual errors, he corrected them, but grudgingly and surreptitiously and never for the Quakers! More than ever, he respected domination as the precondition of civilization. England's history was a winner's tale. Democracy would enable the poor to plunder the rich and civilization would perish. The Irish were ill-suited to benefit from England's civilizing and imperial mission. The Scots were fit to be anglicized!

During the 1850s Macaulay pioneered in making belief in "perpetual progress" English public doctrine. The 'Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations' vindicated his vision of progress. The Crystal Palace housed "more than 100,000 exhibits...from Britain, its colonies and dependencies, and numerous other countries". Macaulay saw English nationalism as the exhibition's principal column, the outward and visible sign of England's inner strength and progress. He "could hardly help shedding tears" on his last visit.

Near the end of the biography, Sullivan had this perceptive comment to make about his subject: His indifference to his family's ambitions, desires, and well-being captures his emotional consciousness. Neither a psychiatrist nor psychologist, I am unwilling to inflict incompetent theories on someone long dead. Thomas Babington Macaulay understood my subject: his sensibility. Lifelong patterns in his interactions and words - mostly to himself - reveal him as a powerful and ultimately tragic man. His stunted emotional consciousness caused him to live barely attentive to and mostly unconcerned about the people and places in front of him, while his masterful intelligence empowered him to interpret and help shape the English public mind during his nation's century. Macaulay's sensibility also made his life a tragedy. Blind to the humanity he shared even with the unseen thousands whom he recommended killing, he lived as if riveted to a mirror, contemplating himself hopelessly, and finally alone.

Having read this biography, I got the feeling that Professor Sullivan didn't actually like his subject. Admired, was in awe of - yes. But Macaulay's denigration of nearly every other race apart from the English is so antithetical to the present mindset (at least to the majority of thinkers) that it is hard to 'like' the man. However, always study the 'context' of a person's life and times. Macaulay expressed the predominant view of mid-century Victorian England - a firm belief in History as progressive and in England as a civilising power, even greater than that of the ancient world. After this intellectual blockbuster, I am in need of a brain-rest, so I shall turn to a simpler book next!

Merryn Williams' 'A Preface to Hardy' 1993

 

Pearson Education paperback edition - 1993

Some while back - I haven't checked my Blogs, but it was around the time of the infamous 'lockdown' - I re-read a Thomas Hardy novel. At 'A' level, one of our set books for our English Literature paper entitled 'The Novel' was Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Encouraged to read other works by the chosen authors, I found The Woodlanders in the school library, and remember thinking 'I wish this had been the set book'! Hardy is much more to me than his books; I have had several holidays or short breaks in what is now termed 'Hardy Country' - Dorchester is one of my favourite small country towns; the trail from Stinsford, where his heart lies, to  Higher Bockhampton, where he was born, is still by-and-large timeless, with a reading of the author's Under the Greenwood Tree whisking you back nearly two hundred years. Fortuitously, several cinematic versions - of Tess, The Woodlanders, Far from the Madding Crowd and Under the Greenwood Tree - have been pretty faithful to their literary origins.

 

 

 

After purchasing Merryn Williams' little paperback last year in Derby's Oxfam bookshop, I finally got down to reading it. First published in 1976, she brought out this second edition seventeen years' later, as she felt she had originally given too much attention to Hardy's novels at the expense of the rest of his work. This time, Williams has written a new chapter on the short stories and The Dynasts and greatly expanded the one on the poetry. Notwithstanding this, I found the first Part - The Writer and His Setting - the most interesting; but I have always found biography and the 'context' of someone's life more nutritious. There are three chapters in this first Part. Hardy's Life inevitably trod familiar ground for me, but I did find the comments on his time in London (visiting, for instance, the Great Exhibition of 1862 and the Science Museum); his relationship with his cousin Tryphena Sparks; and the influence of Horace Moule, whom Hardy went to see in Cambridge in June 1873; all well worth recalling. I had forgotten that Hardy was struck off the list of the Architectural Association in 1872 for not having paid his subscription! Merryn Williams deals astutely with Hardy's 'middle years', quoting from The Life of Thomas Hardy (although published under his second wife's imprint, actually mainly written by Hardy himself) which got to the nub of a problem which would remain with him until he gave up novel writing - he perceived that he was 'up against' the position of having to carry on his life not as an emotion, but as a scientific game...that hence he would have to look for material [for his fiction] in manners - in ordinary social and fashionable life as other novelists did. Yet he took no interest in manners, but in the substance of life only.

 When The Mayor of Casterbridge came out, reviewers complained that it was gloomy. There were hostile reviews when Tess was published, but most critics were enthusiastic. However, Jude the Obscure was banned from public libraries, and a bishop said he had burned it. Review headlines included 'Jude the Obscene' and 'Hardy the Degenerate'. Although attitudes mellowed during the 20th century, Hardy retained a reputation for pessimism. Ironically, having endured the 2020s with its mindless and pernicious 'cancellation' of any literature that does not fit the ghastly mindset of a too-important and noisy section of the 'intelligentsia' (more often than not the so-called Zoomer generation), one can have a certain empathy with Hardy's increasing disillusionment. 

I found the next two chapters on Hardy the Countryman and Hardy the Victorian particularly interesting. His deep respect for Dorset's traditions and culture (and language) infuses nearly all his work, particularly encapsulated in the delightful Under the Greenwood Tree. I think Williams is right to suggest that Hardy's use of dialect was considerably more subtle and varied than William Barnes', whom the much younger man often turned to for advice. Many of Hardy's greatest novels also reflect the social realities of Dorset in the 19th century - hiring fairs, child labour, the extension of the railway system and the abolition of the Corn Laws. He bitterly regretted the destruction of the class to which he and his parents had belonged. The skilled craftsmen, the shopkeepers and others were being gradually squeezed out by the landowners and larger farmers, who hated their independence. Hardy was not the typical Victorian (if there ever was such a person). He was an agnostic; in many ways a man of the left; and someone who hated war. Throughout his life he was haunted by the suffering of the innocent, particularly of animals. He was influenced by the ideas of Keats and Shelley, of John Stuart Mill and Swinburne. Hardy was in the central agnostic tradition when he denied that there was any such thing as Providence - a force which made everything in the world work towards good.

Part Two: Critical Survey, focused on the Hardy hero and his predicament, on The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the Short Stories and The Dynasts. From reading the extracts from the latter (I have never read the full poem), I tend to concur with Williams that it is generally agreed that its language, with a few exceptions, is commonplace and uninspiring and that it also looks as if he had no gift for blank verse. Williams calls it 'the great white elephant of Hardy studies', remarking that the author seemed to have thought it was his finest achievement, yet few people have read it, those who have agree that much of it is poor and it is unlikely ever to become popular. Another reason for Hardy's pessimism! I much prefer Prose to Poetry and often find it difficult to understand what the latter is going on about. The present Spectator's contributions usually leave me cold! I know it's my failing, not the poets'.

Halik Kochanski's 'Sir Garnet Wolseley. Victorian Hero' 1999

The Hambleton Press first edition - 1999

The long gap between this Blog and the last one can be explained under two headings:

• I was asked to read and produce a Review for the Richard III Society's Journal, The Ricardian Bulletin, on the latest Scott Mariani novel. Since the Review will not be published until June, I daren't use it as a Blog until then.
• I must admit I struggled with this Biography of Sir Garnet Wolseley. The first nine chapters, detailing his early life onwards, until the fiasco relating to the failure to rescue Gordon from Khartoum, were interesting and plain sailing. This took me up to page 176 out of 275; however, the last hundred or so pages were very heavy-going and I kept putting the book down. Well, I have finished just before the end of March. But to Blog on just two books must be one of my lowest monthly totals ever.

I am a great believer in heroes and heroines. From my teenage years, when I had photos of (usually nubile!) film actresses and tennis players (who now remembers the South Africans Sandra Reynolds, now 91!; Annette Van Zyl, just 81? - well, I do) pinned on my locker walls; and, later, the wonderful Argentinian Gabriela Sabatini - now a mere 54. My early interest in History at school was stimulated by my awe when reading about heroes such as Henry V, Prince Rupert and the Marquis of Montrose. Later, it became more nuanced, as I studied the careers of William Gladstone, Cavour and Garibaldi. History, to me, has always been about individuals. In Literature, it was Trollope, Scott, Stevenson, Susan Ferrier, Thomas Hardy; in Art, the Pre Raphaelites and most of the Impressionists. If I had grown up in the late 19th century, undoubtedly, Sir Garnet would have been a hero of mine.

The secrets to Wolseley's long career were threefold. He was undoubtedly talented; he was driven by ambition to reach the top; and he was lucky. He saw action in the Crimean War, then was plucked out of a group of officers during the Indian Mutiny and given a staff job; whilst in the relative backwater of Canada, he gained further advancement when the Red River expedition was decided upon. After a period in South Africa in 1879-80, the patronage of well-placed politicians made up for his lack of social connections. It meant administrative posts at the War Office - Quartermaster General, Adjutant General and, finally, Commander-in-Chief.

However, it was his innate ability which brought him this career success. He was a master of small wars - in Canada, West Africa, South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan He excelled in administration and logistics; planning each campaign before arriving at the war front and always advancing with great care. He was certainly respected by his troops and most of his peers, but he seemingly was too cold and distant to win their affection. A vital ingredient in Wolseley's success was his ability to select able subordinates. His 'Ring' of officers may have been criticised for being too 'narrow', but they were usually effective. He also recognised the value of the improved education provided by the Staff College. In his later years, driven by a desire to improve the efficiency of the army, he proved to be an extremely talented and energetic administrator at the War Office. He was a major exponent and defender of the newly introduced short service system and the Army Reserve. Leo Amery praised him for having helped to awaken the national consciousness out of the self-satisfied full-bellied drowsiness in which it had so long rested. One of Wolseley's greatest achievements was the organisation of the British army into army corps ready for mobilisation for service at home or abroad. The 1914 British Expeditionary Force was organised on the system he had drawn up in the 1880s. As the author says at the very end of the biography, in such a way Wolseley was the father of the modern British army and fully merits the statue of him looking out over Horse Guards Parade.

Finally, I found his comments to the then Commander in Chief of the British Army, the Duke of Cambridge, when out in the Sudan (and having failed to rescue Gordon), very enlightening.

We cannot flatter ourselves that we are here to fight for an oppressed people, to help a population struggling to be free or to put down slavery. None of the spurious and clap trap pretexts under which we so often invade uncivilised countries will serve us here...

Glenda Youde's 'Beyond Ophelia. The True Legend of Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti' 2025

Unicorn first edition - 2025

Glenda Youde certainly has a mission and it is praiseworthy - to pluck poor Lizzie from the muddy depths of Millais's painting and explore her true artistic legacy...her design ideas were inspirational and were 'borrowed' by her male counterparts. Without her ideas, Pre-Raphaelitism may have taken a very different course. If Youde is correct in her analysis, then she really has resurrected Lizzie from her cold bath, which the thoughtless Millais had submerged her in and then let the warming lamps go out. For if Lizzie is known at all to the general public, it is for three things: she posed for Millais as the dying/dead Ophelia in that bath; she died from an overdose of laudanum; and her grave was dug up some years later so that her grieving widower, Dante Rossetti, could retrieve the only copy of poems he had placed by her head in the coffin.

Over her eleven chapters, Youde skilfully builds her case. Her first chapter considers The Bathtub Incident, the result of which had a permanent injurious effect on Lizzie's health; her 'discovery' in The Bonnet Shop by Walter Deverell; her Death by Laudanum - suicide or not?; and Firelight Exhumation, when, seven and half years after Lizzie's burial, her coffin was raised, opened and the only copy of Rossetti's poetry with his wife was recovered. Youde then looks at Alternative Narratives for each incident, in particular that there is little evidence to substantiate any suicide claim. Chapter 2 assesses how Lizzie was portrayed after her death: in Fiction - by William Gaunt's The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (1942); Paula Batchelor's Angel with Bright Hair (1957);Elizabeth Savage's Willowood (1979); Fiona Mountain's Pale as the Dead (2002); and Rita Cameron's Ophelia's Muse (2015). Youde argues that in Elizabeth's case, biography and fiction have become almost indistinguishable. The author also describes how Lizzie has been portrayed in poetry, drama (particularly on television) and in exhibitions.

Youde now gets to the kernel of her argument. From Chapter 3 onwards she focuses on Elizabeth the Artist, pointing out that both Ruskin and Rossetti himself appreciated and extolled her skills. Youde builds a powerful case that, far from Lizzie simply being the passive sitter (and lier * in a bath!), she is an active member of the pre-Raphaelite circle - learning from, but also contributing and influencing, other members of the group. Her work was on display in Rossetti's home and other artists would have seen and seemingly copied her ideas. Her drawing and watercolours were subsequently put on show in mainstream galleries, such as the Tate (1923); Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (1947); Maas Gallery (1960s); the Tate again (1984, 2012 and 2023 - the latter I attended); the Ruskin Gallery, Sheffield (1991); Wightwick Manor (2018); and the National Portrait Gallery (2019), which I also visited.

During her lifetime Lizzie made over 100 drawings and watercolours, but only a few are widely known and accessible in public galleries. Many are in private collections, whilst the location of over 30  are currently unknown. Luckily Rossetti not only retrieved as many of his late wife's work as he could, but had the pictures photographed and bound in an album and distributed to friends and associates. Several copies of these photographic portfolios survive in whole or part  - in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Princeton Library, New Jersey and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The portfolios contain 67 authenticated drawings by Lizzie's hand. It is strange that Rossetti is said to have destroyed every letter, photograph or memory of Lizzie he could find, yet he painstakingly preserved her drawings. The photographic portfolios that Gabriel created present Elizabeth as an artist who produced a body of work that is worthy of being recorded.    

Youde's further chapters not only document much of Lizzie's work, but also argues that she had a profound, yet by-and-large unacknowledged, influence on several male Pre-Raphaelite artists. She emphasises the close working relationship with Ford Madox Brown, particularly in Lizzie's art education and the possibility that she was aiming to produce work to be used as illustrations in books. Her chapters 7 to 10 aim to show, with several accompanying illustrations, the direct influence Lizzie's work  had on, for example, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, Arthur Hughes, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Frederick James Shields and Rossetti himself.  I must admit I found these chapters rather hard going and couldn't always see the relationship between the 'compared' pictures! I tend to agree with Lucasta Miller, who reviewed Youde's book  in The Spectator (22 February 2025), when she writes, Youde's commitment to chasing up every minute lead in terms of possible artistic influence makes this book feel a little pedestrian and heavy on detail. But the build up of evidence she cites compels. The book's origin, as a PhD thesis, probably explains its 'heaviness'.  However, it is a welcome addition to our knowledge of Lizzie Siddal[l] and certainly make us view her in a much more positive and admiring light.                                                                                                        

* - yes, I checked there is such a word as 'lier' !

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I have a small Collection of books on the Pre-Raphaelites, including the ones listed below which are specifically on Lizzie Siddal[l] and Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists. I found it pertinent that a booklet published in 1965 (reprinted in 1970 and 1975), describing some of the most important works of the Pre-Raphaelites in the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, lists Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, as well as Ford Madox Brown and Arthur Hughes, but has no mention of Siddal[l] or any other Woman Artist. It is clear, as Youde and other writers have stated, that the Feminist Movement of the late 1970s onwards led to the rightful reappraisal of the latter and the publication of several important works, such as those by Jan Marsh, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Lucinda Hawkesley and Serena Trowbridge. Youde has has built on, and developed, their trail blazing.

1906  Elbert Hubbard: Little Journeys to Homes of Great Lovers (Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal)

1981  Paddy Kitchen: The Golden Veil. A Novel based on the Life of Elizabeth Siddall

1985  Gillian Allnutt: Lizzie Siddall: Her Journal [1862]

1989  Jan Marsh: The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal

1991 Jan Marsh: Elizabeth Siddal 1829-1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist

2004  Lucinda Hawksley: Lizzie Siddal. The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel

2018  ed. Serena Trowbridge: My Ladys Soul. The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall

2025 Glenda Youde: Beyond Ophelia. The True Legacy of Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti

1987  Jan Marsh: Pre-Raphaelite Women. Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art

1989  Jan Marsh & Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement

1997  Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn: Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists

David Kertzer's 'The Pope at War' 2022

 

Random House first edition - 2022

This is the third massive tome on the Papacy by David I. Kertzer that I have read. His The Pope and Mussolini (2014), about Pius XI, which won the Pulitzer Prize, my Blog discussed on 27 July 2022.  I had written another Blog on 21 September 2021 on The Pope Who Would Be King (2018), on Pius IX.  In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally opened and the author has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church's power. In 2005, Kertzer was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the combination of intense (and immense) archival work as well as an erudite approach and easy style suggests it was merited. 

The book is based largely on documents found in archives scattered across five countries as well as the Vatican City - in each case (German, Italian, British, American, French, Vatican) the author pays a heartfelt tribute to other archivists and historians. No one person could possibly assemble such a formidable and wide-ranging body of material. The Notes for each chapter run to 92 pages, whilst the References (or Bibliography) show just how much others' work have helped to build up a pretty damning case on Pius XII. As I slowly read the 484 pages (and it took several nights of intense concentration), time and time again any defence on behalf of the pope shook and, usually, crumbled. The man of rare courage, of great virtue, heroically standing up to the Nazis and their Italian Fascist allies, which Pius's defenders portray, simply will not stand up to scrutiny. There were always sceptics, throughout the actual war and up to modern times. The key date, though, was March 2020, when the present Pope Francis, decided to order the archives for Pius XII's papacy to be available to researchers. Kertzer's book is the first full account to take advantage of them. Here one reads of how Pius balanced his public stance of neutrality while presiding over an Italian church hierarchy that offered enthusiastic support for the Axis war. 

The author's father was a thirty-three years old Jewish chaplain with the Allied troops at Anzio beachhead in early 1944. He presided over funerals of Jewish soldiers. A few days after Rome was liberated, together with the chief rabbi of Rome, he conducted the first service held at Rome's Tempio Maggiore since German troops had occupied the city the previous September and began rounding up the city's Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. So, a personal vendetta? No, but an account with clearly personal feeling behind it. The fully documented story, backed up by specific and authenticated end notes, stands on its own feet. 

Pius XII

Pius was first and foremost an Italian and, more specifically, a Roman. Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, was born in Rome into an upper-class family of intense piety, a member of the 'Black Nobility', or aristocracy, who had sided with Pius IX in the latter's opposition to the newly-formed Italian state. Secondly, he was leader and myopic defender of the smallest independent State - Vatican City; thirdly, he ruthlessly supported a Roman Catholic Italy, particularly in a hatred of Communism. Only once these priorities were addressed, did he look beyond to support Catholics in other countries. Tribal best sums him up. Protestants, other religions and, at the bottom, Jews and Communists, simply were not God's chosen ones, Was I surprised as I read Kertzer's damning account? - no. I had always suspected a cover-up. Was I shocked? - of course.  Equally shocking, was the push for canonization of Pius XII after his death in 1958.  He was made a servant of God by John Paul II (another fierce anti-Communist) in 1990 and Benedict XVI declared him Venerable in 2009.   Let Kertzer, in his pages, build up an alternative appraisal.   

If Pius XII is to be judged for his action in protecting the institutional interests of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of war, there is a good case to be made that his papacy was a success. Vatican City was never violated, and amid the ashes of Italy's Fascist regime the church came out of the war with all the privileges it had won under Fascism intact. However, as a moral leader, Pius XII must be judged a failure.

(p.34)  From the first days of his papacy, Pius XII decided it was best to tread a careful path. He was committed to maintaining the church's mutually beneficial collaboration with Italy's Fascist government and was eager to reach an understanding with Nazi Germany.

(p.88)  The Polish ambassador to the Holy See had repeatedly urged the pope to speak out, but to no avail. Britain's envoy to the Vatican complained that the pope "has carried caution and impartiality to a point approaching pusillanimity and condonation."

(p.139)  It is impossible to understand the pope's actions without recognizing he had good reason to think the church's future would likely lie in a Europe under the thumb of Hitler and his Italian partner.

(p.157)  From the moment Italy entered the war, Osborne [Britain's envoy] observed, "the moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline...Axis methods of blackmail were used to good effect."

(p.178)  "reality," wrote the French ambassador d'Ormesson, "Pius XI and Pius XII were very different men. In the place of a robust mountaineer from Milan came a more passive Roman bourgeois."

(p.201) While Pius XII carefully avoided any condemnation of Hitler or the Nazis, there was one evil he had no trouble in denouncing...Comparing the battle to be fought today with the "glorious" Crusades of old, the pope told member of the Girls' Catholic Action organization it was crucial for them to help government authorities "combat the dangers of immorality in the areas of women's fashion, sport, hygiene, social relations, and entertainment."

(p.231) On the text of Osborne's report [12 July 1942], a London Foreign Office official added a handwritten note: "timidity becomes ever more blatantly despicable."

(p.238) After dismissing the pope's generic words denouncing the crimes of war as of little use, Osborne warned, "A policy of silence in regard to such offences against the conscience of the world must necessarily involve a renunciation of moral leadership and a consequent atrophy of the influence and authority of the Vatican."

(p.258)  "Having been reliably assured that the Pope was going to speak out this Christmas, I am now equally reliably assured that he is not. The Vatican will be the only State which has not condemned the persecution of the Jews. (Osborne's Diary) 

(p.322) Now that Mussolini had fallen, the church faced the urgent task of denying it shared any responsibility for having promoted popular support for his regime.                                                  (p.333) "...the Holy Father speaks to tell us that...Christianity is threatened. Is that His true feeling about a German defeat, or is it that His horizon is bounded by the Alps and the Sicilian straits. The robbed and starving in Greece, in France, in Belgium, Holland, Austria, in concentration camps - religious, priests, seminarians, the enslaved workers - does their liberation mean nothing to the Vatican? Sad, sad." (Father Vincent McCormick, 7 August 1943)

(p.367) Lutz Klinkhammer, the foremost historian of Germany's military occupation of Italy, summed up the pope's reaction to the roundup of Rome's Jews: "It is more than clear that all their efforts were aimed above all at saving the baptized or the 'half-Jews' born from mixed marriages."

(p.382) "for a protest by the pope for the arrest of the Jews, it is not even being considered." (Ernst von Wizsacker, German ambassador to the Vatican to Berlin, mid-December 1943.)

(p.398) "Cardinal Secretary of State send for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be amongst the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation." (British envoy to London)

(p.415) "The pope is working six days a week for Germany, on the seventh he prays for the Allies." (Weizsacker 29 March 1944)

(p.426) "People credit Pope for saving Rome, though he had nothing to do with it." (Osborne)

(p.460) Pius XII's speech for 2 June 1945 highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and represented Catholics in Germany as the Nazis' victims. He made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis' extermination of Europe's Jews. If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope's speech. Nor did he make any mention of Italy's part in the Axis cause, much less suggest any Italian responsibility for the disasters that had befallen Europe.

I wonder if Pius XII has done his time in Purgatory yet?

Frances Pitt's 'Tommy White-Tag' 1912

 

Blackie and Son first edition - 1912

After I had read Frances Pitt's Scotty (see my Blog of 23 December 2024), I looked the author up online for further information about her. I read that she had published another book on a fox, exactly twenty years' earlier. She was then only 24 and it was her first book - Tommy White-Tag, clearly based around her own experiences of taking care of, and raising, wild animals..

The story starts with two rabbit catchers digging out an earth where they thought a dog fox was hiding. In fact, it contains five small cubs, three of which are mangled and torn almost out of recognition by one of the men's terrier. Two survive - two little things, like rather large, dark-brown kittens - blind too, like kittens before they reach the "nine-days-old" stage - lay there, kicking feebly and giving curious squeaky grunts. One of the men, Jim Rogers, wraps them  in a red-and-yellow handkerchief and puts them in one of the capacious pockets in his corduroy jacket. He takes the cubs to the local big farm house (the family have at least two servants) - on the way one of the cubs dies - and hands the surviving cub over to Master Tom Brown, whose parents allow him to keep the fox. The next chapters feel very much based on the author's own experiences. A mother cat, whose kittens have just been 'dealt with' , takes over the nurturing of the cub. Tom's father suggests a name for the fox cub - Tommy White-Tag...

The book is clearly written for youngsters, but it is no worse for that. We follow the simple story of the young cub growing up within a family setting, which includes not only the devoted cat but the house dog, Jim and, later, Jewel - a large fat puppy, marked on its round white back with patches of black, and on its head with black and tan. In fact, it is a foxhound puppy! Then the 'mother' cat goes missing - she had been shot at by the rabbit catcher - and goes to live with another family. Tommy White-Tag is bereft, but not downcast enough to stop him escaping one night from the outside farmyard area. There is an atmospheric description of his first moments in the great world:

White-Tag hurried forward: he knew not why nor whither he was going; but freedom, precious freedom, was his, and so onward, onward, away from prison, away from the house, from his friends and companions, from an easy life and abundance of food - forward along a fence side, through briers and mud, dirt that splashed on his white chest, under great trees, through more bushes, more briers, more mud, and onwards still to a life of hardships, of hunting and being hunted, of many dangers from many things, but also of liberty.

If I was a pre-teenager with even a modicum of imagination, I would have lapped that up! The last 50 pages of this short book describes how the young fox copes with his new environment; learning by his mistakes and well as his successes. He is warned off one earth by a much larger pale, sandy-coloured fox; he learns how to trap voles and rabbits; he raids hen houses; and, twice, he has to flee from the local Hunt. Chapter XI Great Hunt, is particularly well written - giving the mind-set and experience of both the hunters and the hunted. White-Tag, fortuitously, saves a small, dark vixen, when the Hunt alters its course to pursue him instead. Frances Pitt describes the change from the early galloping fox to the exhausted animal: He is a very different object now from the fox who started forth from the holly fence an hour and a half ago. His tongue hangs out, his brush drags on the ground, he is clogged and laden with mud, he quivers in every limb; but he is yet confident of defeating his pursuers...Which he does, of course. He successfully makes for the farmhouse where he was reared and hides in the very kennel he had escaped from. The boy Tom, just home from school, realising what was happening, closes the doors and Tommy White-Tag lives to fight another day.

Not only that, but in the last Chapter, headed Family Affairs, Tommy has linked up with the small vixen, Mrs Darkie, again and they are parents to two offspring: Never were two cubs so tenderly brought up in the way they should go...their mother was an exceptionally clever fox, while White-Tag, in addition to his natural talent, had valuable experience of human beings, acquired by living among them... So White-Tag and Darkie "lived happily ever after", and reared many litters of cubs, raiding the hen pens for many a mile round the old home. Hounds searched for them several times, but they were never found. They had learnt some way of making themselves scarce.

A youngster's tale? Yes, but enjoyable for all that.