D.K. Wilson's Blog

A historian is supposed to be someone with a sense of perspective. He/She should be able to survey current events, nod wisely, and say, 'You may think things are bad now but we've actually been here before and we can learn from our past'. I must admit that I find it difficult to adopt such a superior attitude today. Covid? Yes, we've had plagues before and, thank God, we are better able to cope today than we were in 1346, 1665 or 1918. Political mayhem? There have certainly been times when the leading nations of the day have fallen under the sway of incompetents, crooks and maniacs but I cannot readily draw attention to a time when the civilised (?) world has had to cope simultaneously with the likes of Trump, Johnson and Putin. As for ecological disaster, humanity has frequently suffered floods, droughts and earthquakes but never before have we contemplated the possible destruction of our planet brought about by our own industrial 'success'. There's a savage justice about our current immigration crisis. We have made ourselves so commercially superior that it should not surprise us that less fortunate people want to cram themselves onto our tiny island. Truly we live in 'historic times'.

 

The Unaccountables - Favourites, Advisers and Manipulators

History presents us with a long list of men and women who have become 'powers behind the throne'. They were strong characters who, without the benefit of official position, exercised influence over rulers by engaging their affections or admiration  and were, thus, able to overstep parliaments and councils and gain control of government policy. They make up a motley collection of Machiavellians. There were mistresses whose power emanated from the bedchamber, ambitious courtiers driven by personal ambition, idealists devoted to causes they were intent on promoting, men of energy and talent who took over the control of affairs from kings too indolent to shoulder unaided the heavy burden of office. And there were those whose motivation is difficult to define without recourse to psychological jargon - megalomaniacs who grasped greatness because they believed it was their due.

Throughout the centuries when crowns were passed from father to son or won in battle and kings were responsible only to God (always supposing that they actually believed in the existence of the divine) the only barrier to personal advancement was gaining access to the royal circle. In the early fourteenth century effective power fell into the hands of Piers Gaveston, solely because he was the
bosom boyhood companion of Edward II and had gained emotional control of the young monarch before his accession. The disastrous mishandling of the nation's affairs by Edward and his favourite provoked the leading magnates (whose support was vital to stable government) to, as they saw it,  protect the crown against the king. Edward wriggled and squirmed to protect, not only his friend, but his royal prerogative. As the realm nudged ever closer towards civil war, Gaveston was captured by his enemies and brutally murdered. Fifteen years later Edward shared his fate. Three centuries further on history repeated itself in the saga of George Villiers He caught the eye James I because he was a beautiful young man and a graceful dancer. Whether or not king and favourite were homosexual lovers is little to the point, What is important is that, by the time of James's death in 1525, Villiers, by now Duke of Buckingham, was in charge of England's foreign policy and was making  a pig's ear of it. Worse still, his influence over the new king, Charles I, was as strong as it had been over his father. Parliamentary protests did not deflect the king from support for Buckingham. Once again, the 'solution' was murder. Villiers was assassinated in 1628. Charles's conflict with parliament, which dominated his reign, repeatedly involved his choice of advisers he trusted to give him unquestioning support against his 'disloyal' critics. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was no prancing court fop but a convinced constitutionalist and a political sophisticate. Charles leaned heavily upon him in the escalating conflict with parliament and it was the minister's attempt to shore up his sovereign against a clamorous Commons, if necessary with the aid of the military, that brought him to the block in 1641. Eight years later the king trod the same path. It was not just political incompetence that royal critics found objectionable. They opposed policy and they suspected the motives behind policy. There had been a time when ruthless rulers had been able to make their agents take the fall for unpopular decisions. Almost exactly a century before the execution of Strafford,  Henry VIII's right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, had been sacrificed to deflect attention from his tyrannical boss. Rulers of the ilk of Edward II and Charles I had, at least, remained loyal to their friends - and, ultimately, paid the price. For Henry loyalty was a one-way street. Cromwell, like Wolsey before him, had three advantages. He was hard working and relieved the king of the nitty-gritty of government. Secondly, Henry could take the credit when things went well. Thirdly, if things went badly, the minister could be blamed - and disposed of. 'Those were crude and cruel days and human flesh was cheap'.

In a modern democracy it is still hazardous for a leader to maintain a powerful, unelected adviser - perhaps more so than ever. Why? Because their actions fall under the scrutiny of the entire populace. Because we believe that we pay those in power and their minions to be accountable to us. Because the servant cannot be despatched to the world of shades. He will survive and, therefore, he will become an embarrassment. He knows too much and knowledge is power. That is why Cummings is secure. To put it crudely, he has the prime minister by the short and curlies.

The Mayflower Pilgrims

Important anniversaries are important because they are important. They remind us of major events in our history. But they are also important because they provide an opportunity for re-evaluation, perhaps because fresh evidence has come to light or scholarly debate has thrown up new questions or suggested different perspectives. My take on the epic voyage of 1620 offers a new viewpoint by deliberately avoiding the `birth of a nation` approach. Instead of considering `how we (specifically the USA) got from there to here`, I have asked the question, `how they got to there from where they were before`. Let me explain. The traditional approach to the Mayflower story sets it in the context of the founding of Plymouth Colony and the subsequent growth of a great modern nation. This can lead to a romanticised telling of the story in which the `pilgrims` appear as heroes and heroines, representatives of national identity. While not for a moment doubting the courage and religious fervour of the Christian nucleus of the Mayflower's complement, I suggest that they did not caste themselves in a heroic mould. They were, and knew themselves to be, fallible, largely disoriented people with mixed motives. Their minds were focussed more on what they were leaving behind, what they were trying to escape from, than on the new society they planned to establish. The Mayflower Pilgrims is an exploration of their history, rather than an account of their position in our history. That is why my narrative ends with their departure from England.

My thesis is that when we see this mini-migration as one of very many in an age of religious and political ferment we shall better understand both the pilgrims and their world. That world was changing very literally as 'new' lands were being discovered and exploited by Europeans and, therefore, new questions were being asked about Christians' responsibility  for the planet and its peoples. Amidst this heart-searching of thinking men and women of the late Renaissance old certainties were re-examined, old beliefs questioned. Western Christianity was the main victim of this process. It fragmented. Protestants divided themselves from Rome - and then went on to divide themselves from each other. Armed with vernacular Bibles and freed from the dictates of an authoritarian priesthood, believers were able to adopt their own versions of the faith - and they did. This posed a political threat in countries (like England) where Church and State had always been bound together with hoops of steel. As a result Europe fell into the oxymoronic 'wars of religion' during which followers of the God of love maligned each other, excommunicated each other and slaughtered each other. At the outer edge of English Christianity were to be found a rainbow-hued assortment of radical fellowships, each with their own take on 'the faith once given to the saints' and their own authoritarian expositors of 'truth' (As Milton later pointed out 'new presbyter is but old priest writ large')

It was among these self-identifying 'separatists' that the 'pilgrims. were to be found - restless souls trying, by defining ever more narrowly the lexis and praxis of Christianity, to discover a purer, more perfect church life. Their quest for a haven led them to establish holy nuclei, first in their own country, then in Amsterdam, then in Leyden, then, for a few, even in Newfoundland, or in any place where their chosen devout regimen would not be corrupted by 'false' Christians who did not agree with them to the letter. These restless little communities were easy prey for the colonizing companies seeking, for commercial purposes, settlers prepared to go to the New World to exploit its (undoubted) mineral and vegetable resources.

When the story of these religious pioneers is placed under the spotlight of research what becomes visible is a complex picture with brilliant and inspiring pinpoints of courage and conviction set amidst (and in some places concealed by) many shades of grey. Any honest investigation reveals a narrative of soaring aspiration, self-sacrificial commitment, unavoidable compromise and sordid self-seeking. In other words a very human story.

What will historians be writing about our current political chaos in a hundred years’ time? Where might Brexit feature in a list of the worst years in British history? These are questions historians should be very wary about trying to answer. Our job concerns the past. We are not social commentators or soothsayers. Or are we? Surely, if the past has nothing to say to the present, there is no point in recording it. Historians become redundant. With all this in mind it is with a fitting humility that I make the following comments.

 Back in 2008 I suggested that the worst anni horribili were those in which ‘dislocated societies’ were ‘cut off from their past and fearful of their future’. That certainly applied to three out of my top five – 1536 (when the nation was riven by religious and political conflict), 1812 (when, according to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, ‘insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English history‘), and 1937, a year of hunger marches, Fascist and Communist agitators using popular prejudice for their own ends and millions demonstrating their lack of trust in politicians by refusing to vote in the general election. I see no reason to renege on that analysis.

 Wars, plagues, famine, and other ‘external’ calamities do have some redeeming qualities. They produce remarkable acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. They reinforce national solidarity. They inspire people to roll up their sleeves and tackle with shared hope the work of recovery. But when a population is riven by division; when anger and hatred stalk the land; when civilised discourse becomes impossible; when confidence in the nation’s leaders has broken down; where can people look for hope of a better future? The legacy of 1536 was a century or more of politico-religious upheaval and the execution of a king. The fallout from 1812 included the Peterloo Massacre (1819) and the socio-economic deprivation about which Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew were still writing a generation later. And 1937? Well, it took a World War and a near-invasion to shake Britain out of its internal woes and direct its energies towards building a united future.

 How far should we go in regarding such warnings as portents to be applied to our current situation? We are too close to it to know. Crystal balls are not part of the historian’s standard equipment and, therefore, I refrain from making predictions. This alone can I say, based on my study of past crises: specific issues (eg. Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Luddite Riots, the Jarrow Crusade) were only catalysts. They ignited already existing flammable social materials. Whether, when, if and how Britain leaves the EU has become an irrelevance. The damage is done. The argument has sparked a conflagration that will be with us for years. That is what historians will be writing about a century hence.

DEREK WILSON's The Queen and the Heretic: How two women changed the religion of England (published Lion 978-0-7459-6882-7) describes itself as a dual biography of Anne Askew, a noblewoman who was burnt at the stake for heresy during Henry VIII's reign, and Catherine Parr, the King's final wife and the first woman ever to publish a theological text under her own name.

In reality, the first part of the book is more of a history of the Reformation and religious changes in Britain during Henry's reign, although Wilson does try to relate the changes back to the lives of both women as much as possible, besides attempting to establish where the foundations for their religious convictions stemmed from.

The book is easy to read and accessible. Wilson does not assume any prior knowledge from his readers, and is careful to give wider contextual information where relevant. Both women are brought to life with vibrancy, and as fully formed individuals. It is engaging, and the book deserves credit for highlighting the part played by Catherine's works in influencing British religious policies and beliefs during this period of history.  (Although I would suggest that arguing that Anne "changed the religion of England" is going too far.)

As a non-fiction work of history, however, the book has some problems. As Wilson himself admits, there is a lack of evidence for Catherine and Anne's early lives. Wilson undermines his own scholarship and evident research, however, by bridging the gap with suppositions about how the women "must have felt" and padding his narrative with events that "doubtlessly happened" but for which he has no evidence.

Some of the quotations and sources that he quotes are footnoted, but others are not. This makes the unreferenced evidence harder to believe, and so weakens his arguments.

In other places, presumably to cover the lack of information about either of his subjects, Wilson refers to a dearth of courtiers, noblemen, and theorists of the day, in what can sometimes be a dizzying spin of names and titles, leaving the reader confused about their significance or relevance to the narrative in hand. Some of this long list are referred back to later in the book, but trying to remember one individual's arguments from the myriad of voices that Wilson presents is frequently impossible.

To the book's credit, as it progresses, and the narrative reaches the point at which the evidence for both Anne and Catherine increases, the book becomes more focussed, and more academic in its reasoning.

Overall, it is an interesting book, which is informative and easy to engage with, and does a great job of contextualising the political upheaval of the 1540s within the religious debates and pressures of the day. It is a must-read for anyone who thinks of Catherine Parr as nothing more than the wife who "survived".

Review by Danielle Cavender on filling in the gaps in Tudor historiography. Danielle is completing an MA in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She also works as a living-history interpreter at Hampton Court Palace and the Tower of London.

For many British history lovers and not a few in America, the sixteenth century is a source of endless fascination, rivalled by no other era. Why should this be? Does the period 1485-1603 merit iconic status? Or do we simply project onto it our contemporary obsessions? Or do we romanticize it, seeking historical figures whom we can refashion into larger-than-life characters for our entertainment? It was in the hope of encouraging an intelligent debate on these and related questions that I invited people to tweet me with just one subject that they found exciting about the ‘Tudor century’. The response was both gratifying and daunting – gratifying because it resulted in a large volume of replies (which, if nothing else, justified my asking the question). Daunting because the wide variety of those replies makes any attempt at analysis subjective (and, perhaps, pointless). However, I have made my bed, so I must lie on it. In what follows I try to filter out some general principles, rather than attempt any kind of statistical analysis.
The great Geoffrey Elton, under whom I had the privilege of studying at Cambridge, described professional historians as ‘those who crawl along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass’. They study what is there, they sift the detritus left by our ancestors, to find those fragments which make the account more complete. While many fans continue to be fascinated by the monarchs, ministers of state and military leaders they first encountered at school, several respondents told me of their detailed studies of lesser known personalities and events. It was encouraging to note the number of respondents looking beyond the headline grabbers of the Tudor ‘society pages’; and exploring the lives of ‘minor celebs’ such as Margaret Beaufort, Charles Brandon (though, sadly, not his wife, the redoubtable Duchess of Suffolk), William Tyndale, Jane Grey, Philip Sydney. I particularly appreciated one tweeter’s confession to an admiration of the clowns of the Shakesperian stage. There are readers fascinated by particular topics. One reminded me of the important changes in the codification and application of criminal law. And another pointed out that this was a high-water mark of Gaelic culture. Others shared with me their passion for Tudor art, music, architecture and dress.
So much for enthusiasts who start from there and explore the past with all the objectivity they can muster. There are other students and fans who can never quite let go of here. Susan Brigden, in her fascinating interpretation of the age, New Worlds Lost Worlds, observes, ‘We cannot understand the past without imposing patterns.’ We all come to the ancient texts with our own convictions and passions. That’s why interpretations change from age to age. For example, J.A. Froude, writing in the heyday of Victorian industrial and imperial might, could laud Henry VIII as the founder of the English navy and, by extension, of the nation’s worldwide domination. Today our contemporary concerns and preoccupations still influence our preferences when it comes to our appetite for history. This seems to work on two levels.
First, I believe I detect readers who seek out stories that endorse, or can be thought to endorse, certain contemporary attitudes. The most obvious one that happens to be engaging several who responded to my tweet is women’s rights. Some tweeters take inspiration from talented, courageous, and influential ladies of whom there were many in the Tudor age (I’ve recently explored some of them in Mrs Luther and Her Sisters, and The Queen and the Heretic). Their stories are certainly worth the telling but only within the setting of 16thcentury beliefs and attitudes. Such women were not, could not be, feminist champions, because feminism is a daughter of democracy, and democracy did not exist in Tudor England. Not only was society hierarchic but its rigid structure was accepted by everyone as part of the divine ordering of things. Erasmus might urge that daughters should be educated alongside their brothers. Henry VIII might replace Holbein with Levina Teerlink as count painter. The Tudor dynasty might be kept going by Mary and Elizabeth when the male line petered out. But for anyone to have claimed equal rights for women and men would have been as absurd (and possibly as dangerous) as claiming that the poor ploughman had as great a stake in the ordering of society as the lord of the manor.
The second level of response to Tudor history which seems to start from hererather than there was highlighted by the intriguing response from someone who confessed to being turned on by the ‘romance’ of the period, while, at the same time, acknowledging that ‘it was by no means romantic’. I suppose this suggests escapism – using a certain kind of historical writing as a magic carpet to times and places peopled by heroes and heroines, saints and villains. This is, or should be, confined to the realm of historical fiction (though good novels, including, I hope, my own, are all the better for being grounded in well-researched fact). But books and, especially, films can be powerful persuaders. I confess to being worried about the impact of the big and small screen historical ‘soap operas in doublet and hose’, which aim for audience appeal by lavish use of sex, sinister intrigue, gratuitous violence and anything else that will keep viewers’ eyes rivetted to the screen. Of course, lechery, chicanery and bloody murder existed but they no more define the Tudor era than they do our own age, and they blur the complexities of 16thcentury life. When it comes to non-fiction treatments of the more ‘glamorous’ or ‘sensational’ episodes that, clearly, fascinate several people certain topics tend to be visited and revisited ad nauseam – the princes in the Tower, the king’s ‘great matter’, the fall of Anne Boleyn, the fate of the Spanish Armada, the exploits of the ‘sea dogs’. Well and good, as long as the writers are coming up with revelatory, new evidence and fresh insights, rather than regurgitating old theories because they are popular.
But this is concentrating on minutiae. What excites many Tudormaniacs, including me, is the big themes. ‘Change is the only constant.’ Heraclitus’s dictum, however, does not suggest that the pace of change is constant. Some eras vacillate more rapidly and more self-consciously – than others. It’s the headlong rush into novelty that enables us to apply the word ‘revolutionary’ to the Tudor age. This exciting reality was put into words by several respondents: ‘The Renaissance hustled Europe into the modern age’; ‘the destiny and psyche of England changed’; ‘there were large personalities playing for high stakes’; ‘the impact of religious change was immense’. I was particularly moved by the person who said that studying the Reformation brought about a change of her own religious allegiance.
If pressed to answer my own question and name the one thing that most intrigues me, I would have to say ‘the impact of the English Bible’. It stimulated education and liberated, for good or ill, an individualism that wrought not only religious change, but also sent reverberating through the nation seismic tremors that affected political and social relations at every level.
England in 1603 was a very different place from England in 1485. Geographically it had become part of a bigger and confusingly varied world. Topographically the nation had changed as monasteries tumbled to be replaced by stately mansions. Socially England faced the challenge of unemployment, vagrancy and population drift from village to town. Psychologically individuals had been obliged to embrace new modes of thought and belief – or risk the gallows, the block or the pyre. Perhaps all this was best summed up by the person who enthused, ‘The Tudor age has got everything.’
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          'Neither life, honour, riches, neither whatsoever I possess here, which 
          appertaineth unto mine own private commodity, be it never so dearly               beloved of me, but most willingly and gladly I would leave it, to win               any man to Christ'
     This is the sort of earnest declaration we might associate with the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century or with the high rhetoric of a modern American evangelistic preacher. In fact, these words appear in a remarkable little book published exactly five hundred years ago. It was entitled The Lamentation of a Sinner and it is remarkable for several reasons: 
1.  It was published by a woman under her own name - a thing unheard of before that time. English women simply did not write books. Such a thing would have been considered a rejection of the divine ordering of society. Certainly, there were some earlier significant contributions to religious literature by the likes of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich but they existed only in manuscript until later ages made them available to a wide public.
2.  It was an intense personal testimony of the writer's journey from formal religion - what she called 'dead, human, historical faith' - to the assurance of 'knowing Christ for my Saviour and Redeemer'.
3.   It was written (though not yet published) at a time when justification by faith was regarded as Lutheran heresy, punishable by death.
4.    It was written by the Queen of England.
For these reasons alone The Lamentation of a Sinner deserves its place in the library of Christian classics and should be better known.
The popular image of the author, Catherine Parr, is probably confined to the fact that she was the last of Henry VIII's six wives - the one who 'survived'. She does not register prominently in over-romanticised annals of Tudor court intrigue as one of the queens who flirted with danger by getting involved in politics. The traditional portrait of her is that of the dutiful wife who meekly nursed her irascible, overweight, semi-invalid husband during the last few years of his life. The reality is very different. Catherine was a feisty, attractive woman who, in the terms of the religious history of the age, was the most committed Protestant of all Henry's wives and did her cautious best to steer Henry further along the path of reform.

According to the story recorded by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, this was almost her undoing. Henry did not take kindly to being lectured by his wife on matters of religion, and the reactionary members of his Council saw this as an opportunity to accuse her of heresy and urge the king to authorise a thorough investigation and a search of her apartments for banned books. Catherine managed to escape the noose dangling before her (the full story is included in the, just published, The Queen and the Heretic) but it was a close run thing and one that C. J. Sansom's excellent fictionalisation, Lamentation, may well not have too much exaggerated.  Had Catherine gone the way of two of her queenly predecessors the course of the English Reformation could have been very different. It's one of the intriguing 'what-ifs' of British history.

What there is no doubt about - no doubt whatever - is Catherine Parr's commitment to the evangelical cause and her desire to do all in her power to further it.
_____  

            We are sickeningly accustomed to seeing bestial images of Syrian civilians being indiscriminately burned, gassed and shattered by ‘brave warriors’ pouring obliteration into homes, schools and hospitals from the security of aeroplanes and artillery vehicles. We hear the partisan rhetoric used to defend such acts by men who have no right to call themselves human. But, hideous though such long-range obscenities are, they come nowhere near the hand-to-hand vicious slaughter that raged throughout Central Europe during the conflict which began exactly four hundred years ago. The Thirty Years War was, without a shadow of doubt, the worst conflict in European history. Worse than the Second World War? Yes. Worse than the First World War? Yes. Worse than the Revolutionary and Napoleonic War? Yes. Just look at the stats. Between 1939 and 1945, sixty million people perished. Between 1618 and 1648 a mere seven and a half million died. But the fatalities of World War II represented 3.5% of the population of the nations involved. The combatant states of the Thirty Years War lost 35% of their populations, and in the German lands most affected the proportion was higher.            But let’s leave the cold balance sheet of death from military action, disease and famine and talk about actual events such as the siege of Magdeburg. At dawn on 17 May, 1631, that fine city held some 30,000 inhabitants. By noon on the 20th that number had been reduced to 5,000, most of them women and children. The downfall of Magdeburg was the end result of strategic miscalculation and rivalries between commanders supposedly on the same side. The siege, by Catholic forces fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor, began on 20 March. The city held out doggedly. The imperial commander, Johann Count Tilly, called for reinforcements from his ‘colleague’, Albrecht von Wallenstein. But Wallenstein was fighting a personal war and was happy to see his rival getting into difficulties. The citizens, too, were looking for a saviour in the form of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, leader of the Protestant forces. But he was also baulked by German princes who should have been his allies but who dallied over their response and prevented him coming to Magdeburg’s relief. The result was strategic stalemate, one of the worst things that could happen in seventeenth-century warfare. Idle armies rapidly became demoralised. More than that, they became resentful. And hungry. The majority of soldiers were conscripts, men plucked from the plough or prison or the ranks of unemployed vagabonds. The age of conscription was lowered as their conflict dragged on. Those African child soldiers drafted into modern wars had their counterparts in Europe 400 years ago. Tilly’s rag-tag army had little concern for ‘rules of engagement’. Their first and most desperate need was to survive. And that need became more urgent as the siege dragged on.            When a false rumour that Gustavus Adolphus was advancing rapidly reached the besiegers, it panicked them into redoubling their efforts. They knew they had to take the city and commandeer all the food they could lay their hands on as soon as possible if they were to be in any shape to face the advancing Swedes. They had become little more than crazed animals who would do whatever was necessary to ensure their survival. On 17 May Tilly’s men began a fierce artillery bombardment. It went on, unsuccessfully, for more than two days. It was dawn on the 20thbefore a breach was, at last, made large enough for the desperate invaders to pour through.            What followed was an orgy of killing, brutality, plunder and destruction on a scale that shocked the whole of Europe. Tilly’s troops swept through the city, completely out of control, mindlessly punishing a defenceless civilian population for their own sufferings. They broke into wine cellars and rapidly got drunk. Now they were not only savage beasts; they were insensible savage beasts, slaughtering every cowering man, woman or child they came across.             Then came the fire. At the beginning of the onslaught, the imperialists had set fire to one of the city gates to stop it being closed again. Sparks were carried to the thatched roofs and timber-framed houses of the crammed streets. Within hours beautiful Magdeburg was in flames from one end to the other. The pile of smouldering ash took days to cool down and, when it did, the gaunt, blackened walls of the cathedral and a handful of other churches and public buildings stood like tombstones in a bleak, grey landscape. The city had to be rebuild almost from scratch. And the citizens? Their bodies lay piled in the streets. Survivors huddled together in groups for shelter, unwittingly spreading disease. There was no question of burying the dead. Eventually Tilly ordered all the remaining corpses to be thrown into the Elbe. For months afterwards the river was choked with putrid bodies.            The siege of Magdeburg was one battle among many in this devastating war in which the Swedish army alone destroyed 1,500 German towns, 18,000 villages and 2,000 castles.            2018 marks another anniversary. It is 80 years since one of the great historians of the twentieth century published the definitive and immensely readable history of the Thirty Years War. Dame Veronica Wedgewood’s verdict was unequivocal:Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.            Only months after that was written, German troops marched into Poland. As we watch from the comfort of our armchairs the hideous events in Syria, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we civilised Europeans would never do that sort of thing, can’t we?                                                                                  _____

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, SURVIVED, BUT ONLY JUST !

     When the chronicle of Henry VIII's ill-used wives is related, the one who gets little mention is Catherine Parr. In the popular imagination she often features as an unglamorous coda, a dowdy middle-aged nursemaid who - patiently and uncomplaining - tended the sick and corpulent tyrant through his last few years. In fact she was only 30 or 31 when she married the king. She was a passionate woman who understood - and used - the arts of sexual allure. She was feisty, knew her own mind and wrote about the things that were important to her (the first Englishwoman to do so under her own name). Through her writing and through the considerable influence she had on Henry VIII's children her beliefs and ideals long outlived her. As late as the eighteenth century the narrative of her own conversion was being quoted in evangelical circles. Catherine was prominent among a coterie of female intellectuals and religious devotees that included Marguerite of Navarre, Margaret More, Catherine Brandon, and Anne Bacon, among others. As such she had a greater impact (and thus is more important to history) than the more 'romantic' of the second Tudor's unfortunate bedfellows. Not that her position was any less fraught with potential danger than theirs. In 1546 she survived execution - BUT ONLY JUST.

     And this is where the other remarkable woman enters the story. Like Catherine, Anne Askew belonged to that 'middle class' of English society, the rural squirearchy. Her family was just one of the many that central government relied on to maintain law and order in the shires. Anne had relatives and friends in the royal court but, unlike Catherine, she was not destined for the glamorous life of a lady-in-waiting to one of Henry's queens. But she refused to be debarred from the exciting world of new ideas swirling around among the fashionable set in Renaissance and Reformation England. She could - and did - read avidly, opening her mind to unorthodox concepts. Somehow, this Lincolnshire maiden who should have had nothing more adventurous to contemplate than marriage to some neighbouring gentleman's son and a life of conventional domesticity carved a place for herself in the nation's history.  Married Anne was - but not for long. Her husband, Thomas Kyme, was not, as far as we know, a cruel man but he tried to inhibit the free spirit he had married. It was not her place, he insisted, to go around PREACHING, particularly when what she was broadcasting to any who would listen was heresy. When the tension reached breaking point Anne chose obedience to God - as she saw it - to obedience to her husband. She continued, and extended her scandalous 'gospelling', eventually ending up in London. There she associated with like-minded people of the capital and the court. There she was investigated for heresy. There she stood up for her beliefs when challenged even by the Bishop of London and members of the royal Council. There she was interrogated, tortured and condemned to death by burning. There she, like the queen, ventured into print, smuggling out accounts of her faith and her personal story which would eventually find their way into John Foxe's Book of Martyrs and become an inspiration to countless readers down the centuries.

     And this was where the stories of these two quite extraordinary women converged in a dramatic and historic crisis. The enemies of reform were determined to remove wife number six from the royal bedchamber, and the Stalinesque tyrant who, by this stage, trusted no-one, was not averse to having Catherine's 'heresies' pointed out to him. Anne Askew was the chief weapon in the plotters' arsenal. If they could prove the link between a convicted heretic and the Queen of England they could halt Reformation in its tracks. It was a technique that had worked before when they wanted rid of influential enemies. But they reckoned without the determination of Anne and the ingenuity of Catherine. What happened was ...

The Queen and the Heretic will be published on 23 March and advance orders may be placed now.

May, Merkel, Mugabe - three very different leaders in three different circumstances, yet sharing something more than an initial letter - determination to cling to power. The African dictator will only be dragged from office kicking and screaming. The German chancellor favours a fresh appeal to the electorate in the hope of retaining her position. The British prime minister, having tried that tactic once, with disastrous results, will certainly not do so again, and so staggers on.

Can anything be done to ensure the institution and maintenance of responsible and effective government, working exclusively pro bono publice, or, in this world of frail human beings, is that too much to ask? Tyrants can only be removed by force - sometimes by popular uprising but more often by the military. In democracies the situation is more complex. Governments are sustained or changed by a system of checks and balances which, theoretically, ensure that the will of the majority population is upheld. But no system is perfect and those elected into power can and do manipulate it to their advantage.
There could scarcely be a better example of that truth than the current British situation. A ruling party, riven by divisions, headed by a cabinet of politicians, noted more for ambition than integrity, is only sustained in office by a league with a minority N. Ireland party that cannot even govern its own province. This would be an unhealthy state of affairs in normal times but when our leaders are charged  with international negotiations that will affect for years to come our economic wellbeing and our standing in the world, where Middle East tensions are sending shock waves of migrants to the West, when computer technology provides new resources for terrorists, when the USA, by electing an intellectually-challenged incompetent, has abdicated any claim to free-world leadership - well, then, it is nothing short of disastrous.
What can we do about it? Bugger all! We have given our power to our current leaders and we cannot take it back until they say so. Let us pray it will not be too late. In 1653, the then British parliament was obsessed with its own importance and interminable debates. It agreed in principle to its dissolution but, when push came to shove, it could not bring itself to abandon power. Then it was that a certain Oliver Cromwell stood up and challenged the members: 'You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!'
Ah well ...
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