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.

William Kuhn's 'The Politics of Pleasure. A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli 2006

The free Press first edition - 2006

Although one of my heroes is William Gladstone and I regard Benjamin Disraeli as a bounder, I must admit to a sneaking regard for the latter. I have read several biographies on Disraeli, but this was pitched quite differently. As the blurb on the dust jacket says, William Kuhn dusts off Benjamin Disraeli's reputation as an 'eminent Victorian' and reveals him to be Britain's most flamboyant Prime Minister yet. A dandy, an inveterate social climber, bon vivant and incorrigible myth-maker... In fact, the author's work is such a sustained effort to convince the reader that, above all, Disraeli's novels simply proved what the man in actual life was - a homosexual, whether latent or active - that I searched for what I could find about Kuhn on the Internet. The brief, seven line, write-up about him on the back fold of the dust wrapper gave little away. I found out he had also written about Lord Byron, saying that in his work he managed to make a queer love life thrilling... Guess what? In the same piece the author reveals himself to be 'gay'. Absolutely no problem; but it would have helped if he had put that fact on the dust wrapper. At every chance Kuhn has, he either states that Disraeli was gay, or he insinuates it. It becomes the leitmotif of the book. A favourite word of his, used throughout the book, is homoeroticism. To misquote Shakespeare - Methinks he doth protest too much?

Notwithstanding the above, the book was an enjoyable read. I found many of his chapters entertaining: The Boys Will  Laugh At Me, Chateau Desir, Quite a Love of Man, He Interests Me, Enamoured Sexagenarians. I think the best way to encapsulate Kuhn's argument - that Disraeli glorified in his Jewishness (even though baptised as a Christian), felt more at home in the Middle East, dressed like a dandy for the first half of his life; was a great fan of Lord Byron; felt closest to older women; and surrounded himself with attractive young men - is to copy some of his sentences below. 

When he did know [the truth], and altered it to suit his purposes, he became one of the great liars in British history: his art was in his lies...

Disraeli never ceased to think of himself as something like a cross between a rake and a fop of the era of Charles II.

Indebtedness is a major theme in Disraeli's biography until he was well into middle age.

Lord Blake said of these [early] years that Disraeli 'acquired a reputation for cynicism, double dealing, recklessness and insincerity which it took him years to live down'.

Drink could be a remedy for disappointment, but from an early age he also appreciated it for its sensual pleasure and the way it assisted social enjoyment.

His philosophy was based on cheerful hedonism for the few rather than improving government for the many.

There was, however, a good deal of ambiguity surrounding male effeminacy in Disraeli's day and he appears to be exploiting that ambiguity.

...the homosexual element in Disraeli's personality and his desire to know more about his own Jewishness both spurred him to travel to Constantinople, Jerusalem and Cairo...

for Disraeli his Jewishness and his sexuality were mixed together. They had a common eastern geography...

power brought Disraeli newly intensified relations with other men...there was something compulsive in Disraeli's relationships with these men that he was not able to stop.

Disraeli never liked the Irish and never went to Ireland.

Punch took the opportunity to depict him as a cross-dressing angel, a man with his hair in flowers, wearing a lady's gown admiring himself in a mirror as he prepares for a masked ball.

He could not underrate play or pleasure, they were the purpose of life, not secondary to it. This was the transcendent theme of his political just as much as of his literary life...the pleasure of food combined with the pleasure of good company: this was the ultimate enjoyment for Disraeli.

Certainly, it was slightly odd that Disraeli composed several lists in his 'Commonplace Book' for 1842. One of the lists was headed 'men who had romantic feelings for other men'. The list included  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hadrian, Socrates, Byron, Marlowe, Jesus, Napoleon, Leo X, Julius II, Julius III, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and George Canning (Lord Castlereagh). There were many more!

There were several references by Disraeli to Lord Castlereagh, who committed suicide possibly because of a homosexual affair becoming public; romantic fantasies about the author Edward Bulwer Lytton; the young Frenchman, Alfred, Count d'Orsay; George Smythe, a young M.P.; Lord Henry Lennox, third son of the Duke of Richmond; and his last Secretary, Montagu Corry.

The author is very perceptive about Disraeli's relationships with Queen Victoria (he regularly sent her political 'gossip') and his long feud with William Gladstone. I also found his comments on Disraeli's novels, which he had obviously read very carefully  (even if one felt he found what he wanted to find), quite enlightening.

A Collector's Cornucopia Part III

I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time in the Sixth Form, in the Penguin paperback edition. Like many others who join the Richard III Society, it was the book that started my interest in the monarch who only reigned for two years. Tey's real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, but she wrote under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot for her first books and her plays, changing to Tey for her later novels. Perhaps her most famous work was The Franchise Affair (made into a film), but her 1933 Richard of Bordeaux play - starring John Gielgud - was also very successful. I have all her books in first editions, with nearly all in dust wrappers, and three of them signed by 'Gordon Daviot' - her signature, apparently, is rare.

     

Apart from the very early, and very expensive!, works (The Loving Spirit, I'll Never Be Young Again, The Progress of Julius, Jamaica Inn and Rebecca), I have all of Daphne du Maurier's novels, her short stories, her few biographies, some biographies of her - around 50 books, all in first edition with dust wrappers. I read The King's General, then Frenchman's Creek and Jamaica Inn at school and never looked back! 

I read Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. As a result, I have purchased six of his novels in first edition Penguins as well as The Journals and Literary Taste. They remain on my books to read list!

Other Interests and Collections

Prince Rupert

Marquis of Montrose

I have always been drawn to the 17th century Civil Wars, particularly after listening to C.V. Wedgwood describing its main battles on the BBC radio. I was given her The King's War for a Christmas present whilst in the Sixth Form. She wrote the kind of History I prefer - strong narrative, a concentration on characters and scenes; not the boring charts and graphs that bedevil so many earnest History books of the last 40 years. My two heroes are Prince Rupert of the Rhine (7 non fiction first editions and a few novels) and the first Marquis of Montrose (8 non fiction first editions and several novels).

Nunney Castle                                          Cleeve Abbey

 

I have been fascinated with both Castles and Monasteries ever since returning from the West Indies to go to an English school aged ten. Even before that, aged six, I had played around the battered Nunney Castle in Somerset. One never forgets! Holidays were spent meandering around Britain, visiting mainly Ministry of Works (now English Heritage) sites and purchasing the skimpy leaflets on abbeys such as Cleeve, also in Somerset. I have amassed nearly 50 books and scores of leaflets on castles and a similar amount on monasteries (including nunneries). 

I am a sucker for Series! I have several sets of Histories of England: 

Methuen (1904-1913); Oxford (1936-1986); Pelican (1950-1955); Longman's (1953-1980); Nelson's (1960-1969); Paladin (1976-1986); Arnold's (1977-1986); Longman Foundations (1983-1993); and The New Oxford (1995-2010 so far). In addition to the above, I have the six volumes of Peter Ackroyd's History of England and several volumes of the much-maligned Arthur Bryant's Histories, all first editions in pristine condition. in their dust wrappers

The Yale English Monarchs series, supplemented by other publishers (Yale has not featured Elizabeth I,  Charles I, Charles II, William & Mary, and any monarchs after George IV) take up two full bottom row shelves - some 51 substantial books, all first editions and with dust wrappers.  

Since 2015, Penguin have been issuing small hardbacks with semi-dust wrappers on the Monarchs. They are very difficult to track down in secondhand condition (I dislike the newer paperback versions), but I have so far managed to acquire 23 in the series and shall keep looking out for the others.

Two more 'sets':

The Kingfisher Library series published by Arnold. There were only 16, starting with 5 in 1931, continuing with 7 in 1932, a further three in 1933 and, in 1946, John Meade Falkner's Moonfleet. The latter is why I started to collect them. My 13 books are all in their flimsy dust wrappers and are first editions.

I don't normally collect paperbacks, apart from the thrillers of Scott Mariani and the Historical sleuths of Edward Marston, Sarah Hawkswood and Susanna Gregory. However, I was much attracted to the inter-war Jarrolds Jackdaws - 22 books in the general series (1936-1938) and 16 in the Crime series (1939-1940). I have 18 and 12 of them respectively. Fish hook like, this has made me turn this year to the similar Hutchinson Crime-Book Society paperbacks. I have only purchased the first ten, but anything could happen!

Finally, and most recently, I have begun collecting and reading novels on foxes. They are nearly all novels, dating from 1893 to 1984 - all, inevitably!, in first edition and with dust wrappers if they had them. Although there is only so much you can describe of a fox's life, I still find each tale very interesting - often due to the obvious love for and knowledge of the animal by the author. Moreover, there are usually superb illustrations to complement the text.

I have covered nearly all my Collections; I have left out a few areas - my books on the West Indies; Ludlow, Shropshire; Local History books; more esoteric subjects such as the Knights Templar, the Green Man etc. What is apparent - there are no Science books (a very few Naturalist books) and no 21st century novelists (bar a few thriller/Historical writers such as Ken Follett, Robyn Young. Nicola Upson) I have a few G.A. Henty and Charlotte Yonge novels in first edition, as well as a larger collection of Emily Holt and Evelyn Everett-Green's  - all 19th century history novels.

A Collector's Corncopia Part II

 

Buchanalia

The photograph above shows my main John Buchan Collection; there are further shelves which contain books about him and his family's (sister, wife, children, grandchildren) works - mainly fiction. I first read a Buchan novel aged ten - I think it was The Island of Sheep - and have been an avid reader and then collector ever since. From around 1978, I collected with vigour! The result is contained in the 82-page booklet below; there are no illustrations, unlike all my other booklets, but simply the date, title and format. The books/pamphlets are all in first edition, many of them signed and nearly all of them with their original dust wrappers, if they ever had them.

With his family - O. Douglas, his sister; Susan his wife; his brother Walter; his children, Johnnie, Alice,  William and Alastair; and his grandchildren, Perdita, Ursula and James; I have amassed one of the largest collections of Buchanalia in the world. My favourite novel? The Blanket of the Dark. My favourite non-fiction work? Montrose.

 

Close behind in interest (but not in profusion of works) is John Meade Falkner. Again, it was one of his (three) novels which caught me when young - Moonfleet, read by our Headmaster, with just a table light to pierce the winter darkness in the school hall. I founded the John Meade Falkner Society in 1999 and it still exists, small in numbers but great in quality! My Collection has first editions of all his works and many subsequent printings. Several of the books are signed by the author.

What young boy could fail to find the swashbuckling adventures of Stanley Weyman exciting? He was one of the most successful authors in his day and I have all of his novels in first edition, some 26 of them, a few of them signed. I first read him from the same school library that furnished me John Buchan, Rider Haggard and Tolkien. Happy days! Once enamoured with the French tales, more recently I have favoured those set in England - Chippinge, Starvecrow Farm, The Castle Inn and The Great House.

An author probably few would have heard of these days, apart from one or two passionate about the North East of England, Northumbria in particular, is Robert Henry Forster. He wrote 11 Historical novels, 7 books of poetry and books and articles on Archaeology. I have them all in first edition but, I must admit, I still have a few to read. He was a respected man in the rowing fraternity as well as being a dedicated amateur archaeologist.

Often linked with John Buchan and seen as Ireland's answer to the Scot, was Maurice Walsh. When we were in Ireland some years back, we stopped by the wayside to take photographs of the small homestead where he was born. He was an Irish nationalist and, much to his credit, loved red-haired women. My wife would agree! I have all 20 of his novels, in first edition and in dust wrappers. His early works - The Key Above the Door, While Rivers Run, The Small Dark Man and The Road to Nowhere, are perhaps his best. 

So far, the majority of my collection has revolved around men. There are two Regional Novelists, whom

I admire greatly for the quality of their writing. If I was 30 years' younger, I would probably set up a Constance Holme Society (like my John Meade Falkner Society). However, I doubt whether I would reach half-a-dozen members.  Although she was the only living author at one time to have all her books published in the delightful Oxford World's Classics series, she is all but forgotten these days. I read her The Old Road from Spain in the Sixth Form and recall my pleasure to this day. I started to collect her works towards the end of the last century and now have all her eight novels in first edition, many of them signed and in their dust wrappers. I have her booklet of Plays and several pieces of ephemera. Above all, I have her last, unpublished, novel, The Jasper Sea, in ALS and a score of short stories and articles mainly in written form but some typed; and a large selection of her letters. I have the full set of the nine works in the Oxford World's Classics series - all signed first editions in dust wrappers. A Treasure Trove!

Secondly, there is Mary Webb, who did for Shropshire what Holme did for Westmorland. I read, possibly her most famous work, Gone to Earth whilst still a teenager, but it is only this century that I started to collect her books. I now have all her six novels, and The Chinese Lion, in both UK and USA first editions. I also have a dozen books about the author. Nearly all of my collection are in dust wrappers if so issued. I have yet to compile a Bibliographical booklet on her. 

Finally, in this Blog, Alfred Duggan - another novelist who was much admired by authors such as Evelyn Waugh, but who seems to have fallen out of favour these days. I recall reading his first novel, Knight with Armour, at school and much enjoying it. I had a burst of collecting him some 20 years' ago and now have all his works in first edition and in dust wrappers. I haven't read them all and hope to one day! There are 25 books, 17 of them are novels.

The Collector's Cornucopia III will deal with two or three more Novelists and the 'sets'/series which I collect.

A Collector's Cornucopia Part I

 

I thought I would remind myself of why the rest of the family feel that they are living in a Library. The above photos are of some of my bookshelves - not all! This also made me think I should address what constituted the bulk of my Collection and why the books were collected in the first place. The vast bulk are History - including Local History - or Literature, with smaller sections devoted to Natural History and Travel.  

My History and Literature interests are, not surprisingly, often linked.

I find 19th century British History fascinating and have 9 biographies of Gladstone and 7 of Disraeli. Books on other titans of that era include the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel, Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Rosebery, Lord Salisbury and (tipping into the first half of the 20th century) three biographies of Lloyd George and two of Asquith. I also have 16 books on the British Empire in both the above centuries. Moreover, I have collected biographies of Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie (17 books), which led me on to purchase 9 (so far!) novels set during the Second Empire; Cavour, Garibaldi and Popes Pius IX, XI and XII (which tend to confirm my anti-papal views!) all figure on my shelves. 

Reading a few of Sir Walter Scott's novels as a young teenager (yes, we did in those far off days) started me on collecting his first editions when you could purchase them for a mere £10-£15 - for triple deckers! Fishhook like, it led me on about a decade ago to search for and buy other Scottish novelists of the early 19th century.

I have just updated the above booklet, which list 81 books, all, bar five, in first editions - many of them in three volumes. It includes 22 by Walter Scott; 13 by John Galt; 4 by J.G. Lockhart; 3 each by Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, John Wilson, Grace Kennedy and Allan Cunningham; 2 each by Jane Porter, Amelia Gillespie Smyth, Michael Scott, Eliza Logan, 'Mrs Blackford' and Catherine Sinclair; and single works by another thirteen authors. I have read - and Blogged on - 70 of the 81. I look forward to reading the last eleven later this year.  

Ever since I read Kidnapped at school, I have been a fan of R.L. Stevenson. I now have over 40 of his works, all in first edition, including Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Black Arrow and Kidnapped. Due to my interest in Scottish literature, I have also collected 25 novels from what is known as the Kailyard School, much scoffed at by the elite literati. This has been rounded off by The House of the Green Shutters which laid into them! All are first edition copies. 

I read G.P.R. James novels from an early age, and now have collected 11 three volume and 2 single volume first editions, as well as several more later editions. More recently, I have begun to read and collect R.D. Blackmore's works - just four so far, two of them in three volume first edition. Although I read and collect Anthony Trollope's Barchester series and Thomas Hardy's novels (my favourite? - The Woodlanders), they are all in reprints, as first editions are too expensive.

History and Literature have also been matched with the following four topics.

I got interested in 'The Anarchy' at University, studying the wicked Geoffrey de Mandeville! The result? Shelves packed with 28 novels and 56 non-fiction books and journals on the period 1135 to 1154.

Lollardy has always fascinated me - as a Non-conformist, the Lollards' story appeals to my anti-establishment frame of mind! I have 16 non-fiction and (as listed in the booklet above) 25 novels on John Wycliffe and his followers.

Closely linked to the early development of Lollardy was Henry V, a monarch determined to stamp out the movement. However, ever since I read Monmouth Harry by A.M. Maughan in my early teens, I have regarded the king as one of my medieval heroes. I now have 25 novels, mainly 19th century, relating to his reign  and over 50 non-fiction works. In addition, I have a further 25 non-fiction books on the Hundred Years' War as a whole. I also have a partiality, and some dozen books, on William Langland and his Piers Plowman.

My major, late Medieval, collecting focus has been on Richard III and the Wars of the Roses. Ever since I read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, I have been hooked on the man and his times. Having been a member of the Richard III Society since 1973, I have amassed six large shelves of non-fiction, some 220 books, and a large collection of novels, as detailed in the above booklet, 32 from the 19th century and at least as many from the 20th.

A Collector's Cornucopia Part II will look at my other Fiction writers.

Glyn Frewer's 'Fox' 1984

 

Patrick Hardy Books first edition - 1984

It is rare that I comment on the actual appearance of the book itself. This time, however, it was a pleasure to both look at and handle Glyn Frewer's Fox and sincere compliments must be paid to Patrick Hardy Books of 1 Newburgh Street London. I couldn't find anything about the publisher on the Internet, but it is forty years' later and much dirty water has gone under the amalgamate-at-any-cost book world. The photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting of Bury St Edmunds and the printing by Ebenezer Baylis & Son of Worcester matched the standards set by both author and publisher. The cover (both on the book itself and replicated on the dust wrapper) is striking, the print font and size is pleasant and the paper of a commendable quality. I found the two, clearly drawn, maps at the front helped in the understanding of Flik's wanderings and the narrative benefitted greatly from the superb line drawings - two of which are reproduced below - of the Illustrator William Finch. A 5* award to all!

 

It was W.E. Gladstone who wrote: Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from the shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you. Kindles? Bah!

The book starts with a very apt quotation about the fox from Buffon (not the Italian football goalkeeper, but an author writing in 1767): All his resources are within himself. Acute as well as circumspect, ingenious and patently prudent, he diversifies his conduct and always reserves some art for unforeseen accidents. Of his own preservation he is extremely vigilant.

Flik is born, with three siblings, in a badger's sett in a spinney above White Lodge Farm, (somewhere in the South Midlands). Ruf, the dog-fox, and Vara, the mother had been joined by a young vixen, Deva, still in her first year, who had been accepted as a running mate. Forced to leave their earth, due to men blocking up all the badger setts, and find a new home more than a hundred metres away, Vara is unable to save the last cub, who is clubbed to death by one of the men. The author skilfully describes the learning processes for the cubs under the two vixens' tutelage - stalking and trapping voles, mice and rabbits. The family move to an old ruined chicken coop in a kale field near the Long Wendon rectory. Flik's life nearly ended when he was hit by a car. A brother and sister find him unconscious and take him to the vet. His broken left hind leg is fixed but he moves with a limp for the rest of his days. With a splint and a lead, the youngsters hope to tame him. No chance! He escapes at the earliest opportunity and the rest of the tale is about his adventures in what the map calls Fox Country - an area studded with small villages/hamlets - Great and Lower Wadcombe, Lower Barton, Middleton and Long Wendon. There are woods, spinneys and copses; downs and valleys; a reservoir and warren; a cricket pitch which figures in an amusing episode; a quarry, an electricity sub station and a caravan park - all of which Flix explores and uses to his advantage. 

The writing is clear and straightforward but also expressive, concentrating at all times on Flix - almost like an autobiography. He forages in the villagers' and campsite's dustbins and black plastic bags; he meets up with Drax, a three year old dog fox who suffers Flix to wander over his territory; he kills a pheasant which leads the keeper to set three spring-loaded gin-traps - to no avail, as it is the keeper's dog Gyp, a rangy young labrador-alsation, who is caught. By now Flix is seven months' old and fully grown: His fur was at its thickest and glossiest, ready for the winter and his head and body, some seventy centimetres long, was large even for a dog fox. He was at his most handsome, too, with his back a dark rusty red turning to pale grey below before becoming white on his underbelly. The backs of his ears were black, his feet and lower legs dark brown. His white chest blaze was vivid against the red and his brush bushed thickly to a white tip. His face and muzzle had distinctive dark markings, which gave him an unusually ferocious appearance.

He moves his killing ground to the reservoir-lake, where he catches moorhens and even devours a dead bream, discarded by fishermen. In the chapter entitled Predator, Flix develops from a mere scamp into a more ruthless hunter. He breaks into a shed and takes a white doe rabbit, a little girl's pet and then kills six Rhode Island Red hens, plump and fluffed out, seemingly safely  asleep in another coop. He also meets up with two young vixens, Vulpa and Arka (Drax's offspring) - when the inspections were finally completed to the satisfaction of all three, Flik put his mark on a nearby mound and the others followed suit. He mates with Arka and, due to snares being placed around all burrows which showed signs of fresh digging, sets up a den under a large hut, built on raised brick piles. In fact, it is Lower Barton's cricket pavilion. Here Arka gives birth to five cubs. Tragically, she dies from strychnine applied to a freshly killed young rabbit. Luckily, Vulpa takes over - like most barren vixens, she had helped the breeding vixen rear the cubs, bringing her food and grooming and playing with them.

The first cricket match of the season progresses peacefully enough, until two border collie puppies decide to explore the gap under the pavilion.

This leads to a most amusing scene (based on a real life event?) well described by the author. The cubs, terrified by the collies, race across the cricket field, closely followed by Flik and Vulpa; Tom Bowers, with a straight bat, faced the last ball of the over. The Marshford fast bowler was always tricky but if he could survive this one, then John Hollis at the other end could knock up a few more sixes. Over went the bowler's arm and Tom's eye was on the ball when a procession of fast moving animals raced across the pitch. His concentration vanished and his bat was nowhere near the ball which lifted his middle stump out of the ground. Completely foxed!

Other near escapes followed for Flik - lying in a field of long grass, he is caught up in haymaking where the combine  remorselessly reduces his cover, but he gets away. For a while he forages through the pickings of the plastic sacks on a caravan site; he is pursued by a large powerful Alsatian, but slithers and slides down the edge of a quarry to take refuge in a fissure in the rock. Eventually the villagers and farmers had had enough of the scavenging  dog fox with the limp. The last two chapters - The Meet and The Hunt - see Flix being pursued by the local Hunt, led by the redoubtable Major Garfield-Whitton, an experienced Master of Foxhounds, resplendent in red coat, white breeches and shining black boots. Notwithstanding the experienced leading hound, Pedlar, Flik - after a chase  excitingly described by the author - lives to fight another day. A stone's throw away, in the deep autumn litter of leaves below the bushes, Flik lay, too tired to lick the foul-smelling mud from his coat. He let his head fall on to his outstretched forepaws and closed his eyes; only the twitching of his ears showed that he was awake. Well done, Flik; bad luck the Major.

The author regularly conveys an excellent feel for the changing seasons. ...gradually days grew warmer and in the shelter of the gulley, new life emerged. Celandines and coltsfoot opened along both sides of the track and bumble bees, small tortoiseshells and brimstone butterflies winged their way between the flower heads. The hazel catkins at the far end by the gate swung yellow-heavy in the sun and the wind took the golden powder-pollen across the fields. Lapwings engrossed in soaring acrobatics called incessantly from the far side of the gully while...blue and great tits chased among the elders. From the blackthorn top, the missel thrush sang full throated, even during the rainstorms. The sun retreated once again as March began with a squall of rain and sleet that lasted three days.

And again: the night coming alive all around him. Pale moths cavorted above his head; a single bright star winked low on the horizon like a living eye and from high above him came the high-pitched squeaking of the pipistrelles as they flicker-hunted over hedgetops. From the heart of the whitebeam bubbled the stream of the nightingale's song and from the valley shadow came the wailing call of the lapwings.

G.P.R. James's 'Arabella Stuart. A Romance from English History' 1844

 

Richard Bentley first edition - 1844

Although James' subtitle is A Romance from English History, I must admit I thought it was the least romantic tale of his that I have read so far! Perhaps it is because he stuck more closely than usual to the actual historical 'facts'; that he allowed his emotions to get the better of his telling (nearly all the main characters were either irredeemably black or white), which led this reader to feel it was a straightforward tragedy, rather than a romance. The final scenes set in the Tower of London, where first Sir Thomas Overbury is poisoned then suffocated, whilst Arabella herself slowly and remorselessly declines, conjures in this reader praise for the quality of the writing but also a profound feeling of sadness and bitterness. 

To deal with the malign characters first. The author has no time at all for James I, who he says, in his Dedication, has been pourtrayed [sic] by Sir Walter Scott with skill, to which I can in no degree pretend, but with a very lenient hand. He here appears under a more repulsive aspect, as a cold, brutal, vain, frivolous tyrant...my conviction, however, is unalterable, that James I was at once one of the most cruel tyrants, and one of the most disgusting men, that ever sat upon a throne. The king is first encountered on his way South from Scotland: a somewhat corpulent and heavy-looking man, on horseback, riding with a slouching and uneasy air, coarse in feature, clumsy in person, with his broad lips partly open, and the tip of his tongue visible between his teeth...

James VI and I

G.P.R. returns to the attack in a long paragraph at the start of Volume II. What satisfaction could you derive from pictures of a court full of venality and corruption? - What satisfaction would it be either to the writer or the reader to look into the pruriences of the most disgusting monarch that ever sat upon the English throne? We will not therefore attempt to paint him to you, either in his villainous efforts to crush the liberties of his people, and to establish the tyranny of prerogative upon the ruins of the English constitution; or, in his pitiful pedantry, erecting himself into an Ecclesiastical judge, and setting himself up as the Pope of Great Britain. We will not represent him in his unjust and illiberal prodigality, stripping the crown of its wealth, robbing his subjects of their property, and despoiling the best servants of the State of their just reward, to bestow with a lavish and a thoughtless hand the plunder of the people upon the unworthy heads of base and ill-deserving favourites. Although the author never writes the word, the monarch's homosexuality is clearly as abhorrent to him as his tyranny.

Queen Anne of Denmark

Queen Anne of Denmark, James' wife, fares better in the author's estimation, having not only a strong but a somewhat passionate spirit.

Robert Carr

For the majority of the period in question, the ill-deserving favourite par excellence, is Robert Carr. The author does not introduce the reader to him until Chapter II of Volume II. ...one of the first minions whom the king thought fit to honour in England, afterwards Earl of Rochester, one of the most despicable of those who were proud to fill the infamous place of king's favourite...the dignity of knighthood was almost immediately profaned to do honour to this deedless and unworthy person. At least (as far as we know) there was no private passage linking the bedchambers of the king and Carr - unlike that found during the restoration of Apethorpe Palace between 2004 and 2008, which revealed such a route for James and his subsequent favourite George Villiers (created the Duke of Buckingham).

Frances Howard

Linked closely to Carr, both in the novel and in real life, was Frances Howard, the Countess of Essex, She hates her husband and spurns the approaches of the king's eldest son, Prince Henry (who was to die tragically young), not, indeed, that her bosom was the abode of any pure feelings of high principles, but because she had already conceived a passion for another, to which she was ready not only to sacrifice every moral obligation, but to violate common decency... With the king, Carr and Frances are the two evil characters in the tale, particularly the latter. The author wrote:  I shall probably be accused of having drawn an incarnate field; but I reply that I have not done it. Frances is the prime mover in ensuring the death by poison of Sir Thomas Overbury, a humourless, self-seeker who attaches himself to the coat-tails of Carr in the hopes of preferment at Court. He makes the mistake of warning his master against entanglement with the Countess. Carr's hold over the king and Frances' hold over Carr, ensure Overbury is sent to the Tower and certain death. The latter bitterly says of Carr, "On my life, this feeble-minded favourite is as base as shrewder men! 'Tis safer by far to serve a sensible villain than a weak fool." The author turns to the more criminal personages of our tale, and trace them in that rapid down-hill road, where vice treads upon the the steps of vice, and iniquity upon iniquity, till they are hurried on into the yawning gulf of destruction and despair.

 Frances had been determined that Overbury should return no more to this stage. She had Sir William Wade, the honest Lord Lieutenant of the Tower, removed to make way for Sir Gervase Helwys; and a gaolor, Richard Weston, of whom it was ominously said that he was a man well acquainted with the power of drugs, was set to attend Overbury. Weston, afterwards aided by Mrs. Anne Turner, the widow of a physician, and by an apothecary called Franklin, plied Overbury with sulphuric acid in the form of copper vitriol. All these pond life are described in a masterly fashion in G.P.R. James' account and meet deserved ends. Carr and Frances, by this time married, fall out of favour with the king and in late May 1616, the couple were found guilty of Overbury's murder and sentenced to death. They remained prisoners in the Tower until eventually released in 1622. By this time, George Villiers was firmly in the seat of power.

What of Lady Arabella herself, who the author talks of bringing out the brightness of that sweet lady's mind, and the gentleness of her heart?  Considered a possible successor to Elizabeth I, her 'danger' to James I was heightened by her secret marriage to William Seymour in June 1610 at Greenwich Palace. Arabella was 4th in line to the throne and William was 6th, so one can understand the king's paranoia. James chronicles their relationship and the couple's attempts to escape abroad - Seymour's being successful (he was a Royalist commander in the Civil War, was created Marquis of Hertford by Charles I in 1641, and had his great-grandfather's Dukedom of Somerset, forfeited in 1552, restored to him by Charles II in 1660. He died in November that year.) Over 100 letters written by Arabella have survived and, in 1993, a collection of them was published. The author's Arabella hovers dangerously close to being a milksop (although I can entirely sympathise considering the woman's dreadful life). She suffers: "This long absence from my husband, the difficulties and dangers of this enterprise, the long, wide-spread, misty blank of the future, all rise up before my mind, and agitate and terrify me." And, again: Her spirit was one that had never through life indulged in sanguine expectations; and with her brightest and most cheerful feelings there had always mingled a shade of melancholy, as if she were forewarned by some internal voice of the sad fate before her. The heart-rending scenes, where the author charts her physical and mental decline and has Seymour smuggled into the Tower (probably fictitious) to be with her at her death, are sympathetically well written.

Two important (but fictitious?) characters are Sir Harry West - veritable roast beef of olde England! - and Ida Mara  : she was lightly but beautifully made; and, though her complexion was somewhat dark, her skin seemed smooth and soft, her features fine, her hair rich and luxuriant, and her hands and feet small and delicate. Milanese by birth, purchased from her parents by an English perfumer and charlatan, she had been brought to England for him to make use of her talents as a singer and lute player. Sir Harry rescues her and gains her undying devotion. By the end of the story, after her long and loyal service to Arabella, on the latter's death, although Sir Harry is in his mid 60s and she just over 20, they marry! Both had been undying in their support for Arabella.

James stuck closely to the actual events and the majority of the characters are historical. He clearly despised James I, as he did Charles II in his novel Russell - had he an inbuilt animus against the Stuarts? I must admit, I will not look on James again in the same light. It is of some comfort to know that William Seymour married again - Lady Frances Devereux in March 1617 - and had at least eight children. One of his descendants was Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the 'Queen Mother' and, thus King Charles III.