5 December 2014
Oliver Cromwell remains an intensely controversial figure - the subject of ongoing debate. But what was it like to be a woman at that time, and especially to be the Lady Protectress - wife of the Lord Protector himself, asks Samira Ahmed.
There's a special mystery around the life of Elizabeth Cromwell.
She was a genuine commoner and very few documents survive other than records of her marriage and death. Born in 1598 to an Essex merchant family, Elizabeth might well have been named after Elizabeth I. But she would live to become a consort like no other in British history - a queen who was not a queen.
The England of the mid-17th Century was "a country in which patriarchy was absolute in the original sense", says Laura Gowing, professor of early modern history at King's College, London. "The father is comparable to the king of the country. An orderly household should be a replica of an orderly nation. And a nation is made up of such households."
Historians think it likely that Elizabeth would have modelled her home on that ideal. She and Oliver married in St Giles Cripplegate in London in 1620 and had nine children together. Details of her £1,500 dowry survive, but we don't know if it was a love match or arranged. Still the three letters that survive between them, written 30 years later, speak of their love. "Truly my life is but half a life in your absence," she wrote to him while he was on military campaign.
Love letters
From Oliver Cromwell to Elizabeth, September 1650: "Thou art dearer to me than any creature; let that suffice."
From Elizabeth to Oliver, December 1650: "Truly my life is but half a life in your absence, did not the Lord make up in Himself, which I must acknowledge to the praise of His grace."
From Oliver to Elizabeth, May 1651: "My Dearest, I could not satisfy myself to omit this post, although I have not much to write; yet indeed I love to write to my dear, who is very much in my heart.
Sources: The Cromwell Association, Cromwell Museum Huntingdon
From a young MP's wife in Huntingdon and Ely to the wife of a general in the New Model Army, it wasn't until their 40s that she was to find herself elevated to the wife of the most powerful man in the country and soon housed in apartments at both Whitehall and Hampton Court.
It was a time when "whore" was an easy and dangerous label hurled at women who were deemed to be acting above their place. Avoiding comparison with her predecessor Henrietta Maria, Charles I's queen, might have been an important thing for Cromwell's Lady Protectress.
Elizabeth Cromwell 1598-1665
- Eldest child of Sir James Bourchier and his wife Frances
- Very little is known of Elizabeth's childhood, but her father was a prosperous businessman and landowner
- After her marriage to Oliver Cromwell, the couple lived in Huntingdon, St Ives and Ely, by the early 1650s they had moved to lodgings adjoining Whitehall Palace and in 1654 they moved into apartments in Whitehall Palace
- Hostile accounts published during her lifetime criticised her for her simple ways, and for being and feeling out of place in her elevated role
Sources: The Cromwell Association, Cromwell Museum Huntingdon
Elizabeth seems to have stayed out of state affairs. There's no evidence her relatives benefited in privileges from her connections, though, interestingly, her sole surviving letter to Oliver from December 1650, diplomatically reminds him to write to key political figures, the lord chief justice and Speaker of the House of Commons. "You cannot think the wrong you do yourself in the want of a letter, though it were but seldom."
The Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon holds a court portrait of Elizabeth from about 1653 by Robert Walker. It's not very flattering. She looks uncomfortable in a formal pose and plain dark dress, large pearl earrings and a necklace, and it's hard to read it as an anti-Royalist statement.
As Curator John Goldsmith observes: "Jewellery was terribly fashionable. The bling in the middle of the 17th Century was just incredible. The thing about Puritans having a plain style is hard to sustain. Black was actually a fashionable colour."
An exquisite box of Italian marquetry (inlaid work) is almost the only verifiable court possession of Elizabeth's that survives, passed down unused through her family until today. The collection of rich, perfumed soaps was a gift from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, who wanted to align himself with the Protectorate. It's tempting to imagine Elizabeth being too devout to indulge in such vanity, but unable to resist keeping it.
Our image of the Protectorate - enshrined in popular culture - is of religious fundamentalism and witch-hunting. It was arguably the last period in which religion was manifestly the centre of public life.
Adultery - defined as illicit sex with a married woman - became a capital offence, although there were very few prosecutions. But because there was no censorship during the Civil War and Protectorate, Gowing says, women's voices were more prominent than ever in pamphlets and petitions on Parliament.
"They were involved in starting religious movements such as the Quakers and later the Levellers. They were often quite poor women which actually gives their religious voice more authority." It was only in the Restoration, when rights were being formalised by the centralised state, that women were formally excluded from the public arena.
Elizabeth's status was to change dramatically too, after the death of Oliver in 1658 and the end of the Protectorate under her son, Richard, months later.
In the Restoration, with the aristocracy firmly back in power, Elizabeth was crudely mocked in a satirical pamphlet cookbook The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwell, the Wife of the Late Usurper. She was drawn with a monkey on her shoulder to show her a crude upstart, "a hundred times fitter for a barn than a palace".
"The whole point of the curious pamphlet," says John Goldsmith, "is that she's this ordinary Fen housewife and how ridiculous [it is] that she's elevated to this position."
Elizabeth lost her home and her pension. Her husband's body was dug up and mutilated. Other men who had signed Charles I's death warrant were hanged, drawn and quartered. It must have been a terrifying time. Elizabeth had to petition Charles II to be allowed to leave London, denying rumours that she had stolen any royal jewels. Her low profile in the Protectorate court may have saved her life.
She was to live out her widowhood with her married daughter's family at Northborough Manor in Northamptonshire, dying in painful illness in 1665, seven years after Oliver.
Oliver Cromwell 1599-1658
- Married Elizabeth Bourchier in 1620, with whom he had nine children
- Raised an army in 1642 in support of parliament against Charles I during English Civil War and was instrumental in trial and execution of Charles I
- Became Lord Protector of England in 1653, later refused to be king
- Died at home in Whitehall in 1658 and was exhumed and posthumously "executed" in 1661
Over the centuries books, paintings and later films have either ignored Elizabeth (she barely appears in the 1970 Richard Harris film Cromwell) or imposed their own contemporary fantasies - notably the sentimental 19th Century painting by William Fisk which portrays her kneeling with her children begging Oliver to spare the life of Charles I.
What would Elizabeth tell us? Her kitchen in Ely where she lived her early married life is now a museum.
Her modest grave in Northborough's village church has no inscription, possibly because it was desecrated. The church warden wonders if Oliver's decapitated body might have been quietly brought and buried with her.
We may never know. But it adds to the haunting mystery about a loyal wife and a witness to extraordinary times.
Keith Gessen The Guardian, Wednesday 12 March 2014
Frances Welch's new biography uncovers the humour and strangeness in Rasputin's fatal embrace of the Romanovs
'Incredible charisma, bad teeth, questionable hygiene' … Grigory Rasputin. Photograph: BBC
Grigory Rasputin was a Siberian peasant turned holy man with incredible charisma, bad teeth, questionable hygiene (he claimed that he once went six months without changing his underwear), and a strong animal odour – like a goat's (according to the French ambassador). He used these various attributes to ingratiate himself with the royal family of Russia and become, for about a year toward the end of the Romanov dynasty, the de facto power behind the throne. While doing all this he seduced thousands of women and still managed to get stone drunk several nights a week. It's an inspiring story, though it ends badly, and no wonder that the expatriated French actor Gérard Depardieu has played Rasputin in not one but two biopics in the last two years.
As Robert Massie once wrote, only in Russia could the story of Rasputin have unfolded, but even in Russia it was pretty strange. In her humorous new biography, Frances Welch does not stint on its strangeness, though she does try to explain just how it came to pass.
Rasputin took advantage of the Russian tradition of the wandering peasant holy man, walking from village to village and reputed to have a direct connection with God (even Tolstoy, toward the end of his life, visited one). He also exploited the loneliness and isolation of the last Romanov couple, Nicholas and Alexandra – the tsar a polite, indecisive man and the tsarina a German-born and English-bred granddaughter of Queen Victoria ("The tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics," writes Welch), who never quite adjusted to Russian life or shed her accent (she communicated with Nicholas in English). And, finally, he made use of the vexed condition of the couple's son, Alexis, the heir to the Russian throne, who had inherited (from Queen Victoria) a terrible disease: haemophilia. Nicholas and Alexandra kept vigilant watch over the boy, employed two sharp-eyed sailors to accompany him everywhere and commandeered an army of doctors to try to make him well. None of them could do anything; as Welch points out, they may easily have done more harm than good, prescribing, for example, the new wonder drug aspirin, which we now know is an anti-coagulant, the exact opposite of what a haemophiliac needs. The disease was torture for both the boy and his mother. During bleeding episodes Alexis would suffer excruciating pain, and his mother, an empress but also, she knew, the carrier of the disease, would sit by him, helpless.
The one person who appeared able to help was Rasputin. He was recommended to the family by their confessor, who had been impressed by his mixture of smelliness and religious fervour. Then it turned out that he seemed able to stop Alexis's bleeding. Exactly what Rasputin did has been the subject of medical dispute. During bleeding episodes, Rasputin would talk to the boy, tell him stories, calm him down – this may have lowered the heir's blood pressure, easing the bleeding. Contemporaries claimed that Rasputin could hypnotise people with his eyes, and it's possible he hypnotised Alexis, with the same calming effect. Rasputin was also the purveyor of some undeniably sage advice, as wise then as it is now: "Don't let the doctors bother him too much."
For Alexandra, there was no medical dispute: Rasputin was a Man of God. He became a frequent visitor to the royal household and the tsarina plied him with gifts and favours. Knowing of Rasputin's connection at court, people were always making requests of him, and a word from the empress went a long way in making those requests a reality. Rasputin's St Petersburg apartment became a busy office where he would meet supplicants, taking care of their medical problems with his healing powers and their bureaucratic problems with his influence. Payment could be made in money, pledges of loyalty, or, most controversially, "kisses".
During quieter times perhaps this all would have passed, but Russia was entering a period of intense crisis. In 1905, after a war with Japan ended in defeat and soldiers fired on a large protest in St Petersburg, Nicholas was forced to grant a constitution and convene a parliament, the Duma. But Nicholas granted the constitution against his better judgment, and when the Duma became too bold in its demands, he dispersed it. Another Duma was called, and also dispersed, and then another. Under the leadership of prime minister Pyotr Stolypin the country's economic performance improved rapidly. But Stolypin was assassinated in 1911. Russia soon found itself embroiled in the first world war, and less than four years later the entire royal family, including 13-year-old Alexis, was executed in a basement in Yekaterinburg.
The judgment of most historians is that the autocracy had no chance of surviving a war it could not win. And yet the war was won, eventually. What if Nicholas had held on another year? There's no question that some changes would have been in order. But he and his family may have had a different fate.
That they didn't can at least partly be attributed to Rasputin. His true nature – that of a drunk who made it a principle to start undressing every woman he met, until she made him stop – had become clear to people in St Petersburg relatively quickly, and soon Rasputin's relationship with the royal family became a scandal. The orthodox church, which had supported him, now tried to bring his behaviour to the attention of the tsar. It had no effect. Stolypin considered the question a sufficiently vital matter of state that he, too, presented a report: this also was ignored. And on it went. Rasputin had convinced Alexandra of his holiness, and no amount of evidence could turn her against him. All warnings about Rasputin came to seem like attacks on the family, and further isolated them from the people who wanted to help.
The worse things got, the more Alexandra came to rely on Rasputin's judgment. In the summer of 1915, with the war going poorly for Russia, Nicholas decided to leave the capital and assume command of the Russian army. This was a moderately bad idea militarily, but it was a disastrous idea for the government, which was left in Alexandra's hands. The tsarina was devoted to Russia, but inexperienced, and blinded by her belief in Rasputin. Under their joint direction a series of catastrophic decisions were made, as experienced ministers who disliked Rasputin were dismissed in favour of non-entities and incompetents. For years there had been (crazy) rumours that he and the empress were lovers; now people became convinced that they were also German spies.
Throughout all this, people kept trying to kill Rasputin. Welch lists at least four assassination attempts, including one by the female follower of a rival holy man, Iliodor, who stabbed Rasputin in the stomach. He survived. The final, successful attempt came in December 1916, and was carried out by a monarchist Duma deputy and two young aristocrats – one of them, Felix Yusupov, was the heir to Russia's largest fortune, and the other, Grand Duke Dmitry, was a nephew of the tsar. Yusupov lured Rasputin to his house, where he fed him poisoned cakes and wine, and, when these did not have their intended effect, shot him in the back. Rasputin, however, got up and started running away, at which point he was shot again by the Duma deputy. The conspirators then wrapped him in a curtain, bound his hands and threw him in a hole in the ice in the Neva river; he drowned.
They had hoped to save the autocracy, but if anything things became worse, and in any case it was too late. Just two months later crowds took to the streets of St Petersburg, and Nicholas was forced to give up the throne. In one of its few wise moves the provisional government dug up Rasputin's body and burned it. Not long after, the Bolsheviks seized power.
The story of Rasputin and his fatal embrace of the last Romanovs is a story of autocracy, of the kind of damage that can be wrought when a nation's fate depends too much on the judgment of a single individual. It's not easy to find contemporary analogues – Putin, for example, has no Rasputin – but I do keep thinking of Larry Summers, a man reviled in many circles, who nonetheless managed to ingratiate himself into the inner circle of President Obama's economic advisers early in his first term, when robust and equitable measures might have been taken to save the American republic – all of which Summers discouraged. But in that case, too, there probably wasn't much anyone could have done.
By Charles Emmerson | Posted 4th March 2014
Protesters at Independence Square on the first day of the Orange Revolution, 2004
Not so long ago, looking for a short history of Ukraine in a central London bookstore, I was offered the following memorable advice: “Look under Russia”.
I did. And between shelves groaning with the glories of Russian history, from the love affairs of Catherine the Great to the crimes of Joseph Stalin, I found two thin volumes on Ukraine, a country of some forty six million people. One was decorated with an impressionistic painting of the 2004 Orange Revolution. I bought both. I doubt very much they were immediately replaced.
‘Looking under Russia’ is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Ukrainian history.
Since the Pereiaslav / Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, Ukraine has only enjoyed statehood independent from Russia at moments of extreme geopolitical dislocation, such as in the final days of the First World War, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Russian nationalists today appear to view Ukrainian independence as a similar aberration, the consequence of what President Vladimir Putin labelled the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet Union – a.k.a. the Russian Empire – in 1991.
Old habits die hard. For many Russians, Ukraine is like a phantom limb still felt to be there long after its amputation. The idea that Ukraine is really a nation at all strikes some Russians as odd. To the extent that perceptions of history condition politics, understanding the Russian view of Ukrainian history – and the Ukrainian view of Ukrainian history – is essential.
Though wrong, the idea that Ukrainian history is really just an annex of the sumptuous many-roomed mansion of Russian history is common. To some degree it is understandable. Ukraine and Russia have shared triumph and tragedy from the birth of the Kyivan / Kievan Rus (the first proto-Russian state – though this of course begs the question of whether the Rus was Russian or Ukrainian at all) through the wars against the Poles in the seventeenth century to bloody struggle against fascism in the twentieth.
The historical links between the two countries, ancient and modern, are manifold and profound. The Orthodox churches of Ukraine and Russia share a patron saint – St. Vladmir or St. Volodmyr – whose statue (spelt the Ukrainian way) stands proudly on a street corner in west London. On the edge of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, a huge concrete museum complex inaugurated in the early 1980s commemorates the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Outside, a silvery figure of a woman, two hundred feet tall, holds a sword aloft in one hand, and a shield with the emblem of the Soviet Union in the other. This is a memorial to shared sacrifice – eight million Ukrainians died in the war – and a shared victory. Seventy years after the end of the war, and nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such narratives are still powerful.
For a long time, Russians saw Ukrainians as being little more than country bumpkin relatives. Theories of Slavic ethnogenesis described the two peoples as siblings born of the same Slavic womb: the “Great Russians” (i.e. Russians) on one hand and the “Little Russians” (i.e. Ukrainians) on the other. Ukrainian literature, which began to emerge in the nineteenth century, was patronisingly viewed as the picturesque product of a peasant society, essentially subordinate to Russia’s own literary canon, even when it produced such great poets as Taras Shevchenko. The fact that the flowering of Ukrainian national culture was strongest in western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made some Russians dismiss the whole thing as an anti-Russian ruse sponsored by external forces, a familiar refrain to those heard today.
In the Soviet period the idea of Ukrainian nationhood was viewed with similar suspicion, now additionally freighted with suggestions it was intrinsically counter-revolutionary. In April 1918, as Russia imploded in revolution, a conservative German-backed regime was set up in Kyiv. Its leader Pavlo Skoropadsky revived the title of Hetman, an ancient Cossack military title, last held by a man who had died aged 112 in 1803, in a remote Russian monastery which the Soviets would subsequently turn into a gulag. Later, in the Great Patriotic War, some Ukrainians signed up with the Germans to fight the Soviets – some even joined the SS. Nationalist anti-Soviet actions continued into the 1950s – providing the basis in historical memory for the contemporary lumping together of even moderate Ukrainian nationalists with right-wing extremists as “fascists” and “bandits”.
In the Soviet era Ukrainian national identity was never completely subsumed into Russian or Soviet identity. Sometimes, indeed, it could be useful to the Soviet state. In 1939, when Galicia, Volhynia, and Bukovyna were annexed to Soviet Ukraine as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Stalin’s co-invasion of Poland, the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet sent this message to Stalin: “Having been divided, having been separated for centuries by artificial borders, the great Ukrainian people are reunited forever in a single Ukrainian republic”. In 1945, professions that Ukraine was not a Soviet vassal but in fact an independent Communist state allowed Ukraine to join the United Nations as a founder member alongside the USSR, thus giving Moscow an extra vote in UN proceedings.
The process through which the borders of modern Ukraine were defined, both in the west and on the Black Sea, was part and parcel of Russia’s own headlong expansion through three centuries of Eurasian history. In the 1700s and 1800s, as the Russian geopolitical imagination became obsessed with the idea of turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake – perhaps even going so far as to seize control of Constantinople/Istanbul – the Ottoman Empire was bloodily and repeatedly pushed back from its redoubts on the northern side of the Black Sea. The Ukrainian provinces were the territorial beneficiaries. The country became ever more tightly integrated into the economics and politics of the growing Russian empire, serving as its breadbasket, and as its route to the sea.
At the end of the eighteenth century, German-born Catherine the Great founded the port of Odessa – and its hinterland of New Russia – with the help of a Spanish-Irish Neapolitan and, later, a French aristocrat. The city filled with Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews. Pushkin was sent there as punishment, and promptly started an affair with the wife of the city’s Russian governor. Amongst countless others, Odessa would ultimately produce Trotsky and Akhmatova, two titans of Russian politics and culture, before becoming the site of some of the cruellest massacres of the Holocaust.
Further east, through war, colonisation and the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population, Crimea, the last remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde, was turned into the finest jewel in the Russian Empire. As proverbial pleasure garden for late imperial flings (as recounted by Anton Chekhov), then fantasy holiday camp for Soviet factory managers and key to Russia’s southern flank (as base of the Black Sea fleet) Crimea became firmly embedded in Russians’ psychological geography as their own private playground. Less than a century after the Tsars had conquered it, Stalin chose Crimea as the place to redraw the map of Europe once more in 1945.
Nine years later, when former Ukrainian party boss Khrushchev transferred Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of the Pereiaslav / Pereyslav treaty, there was no thought that the internal borders of the Soviet Union would ever become international borders. It was only in 1991, as a result of an attempted coup (which took place, ironically enough, while Mikhail Gorbachev was on holiday in Crimea) that the peninsula spun out of the ultimate control of Moscow, with the Soviet superstructure itself being legislated out of existence.
The idea that Crimea became part of an independent Ukraine essentially by accident is gospel truth amongst Russian politicians. It is but a short step to view Ukrainian possession of Crimea as historically illegitimate. And therein lies the beginnings of a dangerous game. What happens next? Perhaps Ukrainian independence itself, or that of the Baltic states, is equally seen as the consequence of a set of historical circumstances which some might now like to reverse.
Where does a concern for history shade into revanchism? And how far does one’s historical perspective extend back into the past? Visions of the Crimea as eternally Russian wilfully forget the Muslim population which Russian and then Soviet power displaced and deported – sometimes violently, always tragically, and with little historical recognition. As late as the turn of the last century, before the cataclysms of the twentieth, the Crimean Tatars represented nearly half the people of Crimea. Khrushchev recognised the deportation of the Tatars as one of Stalin’s crimes in his famous 1956 speech to the Twentieth Party Congress. It was not until the 1990s that many were able to come back.
Russia’s version of Ukrainian history, wrapped up in its own narrative of imperial rise and fall, from the Romanovs to the Soviets, helps explain Moscow’s attitude towards its southern neighbour – not in terms of objective interests, though these are real enough, but in terms of emotion, in terms of who is right and who is wrong. What makes things truly bad, from the Russian perspective, is that Ukrainians by and large no longer share the Russian interpretation of their history. The past looks different these days from Kyiv (still more, from Lviv). Instead of Ukrainians cherishing their supporting role in Russia’s geopolitical greatness – which essentially means the power and prestige of the state – Ukrainians have come to cherish alternative narratives of their history, based around freedom and resistance. Rediscovering their past has been a critical part of asserting Ukrainian independence. Accepting the possibility of multiple histories, not just one, is a hallmark of democracy, now vital.
Episodes once viewed as the historical glue of the Russo-Ukrainian relationship have become contested. While Russians tend to see the Pereislav / Pereyaslav treaty of 1654 as a moment of reunification for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, many Ukrainians see the same treaty as a temporary alliance between military leaders which the Russians subsequently interpreted to their advantage. In 2009, on the three hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Poltava – perhaps the most important battle in Russian eighteenth century history – then-President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko was blasted by Russia for suggesting that the Ukrainians who fought with the Swedes against the victorious forces of Russian Tsar Peter the Great were true patriots.
Similarly, while the famines of the early twentieth century used to be viewed as a common experience of Soviet suffering, even as part of the forging of the Soviet industrial miracle, some now argue that the famines were, in effect, a Moscow-led assault on Ukrainians in particular. Some go so far as to suggest genocidal intent. The incorporation of western Ukraine into the Soviet Union in 1939 can still be seen in its traditional light: as the re-unification of the Ukraine under Soviet leadership. But for the old aged pensioners of Lviv – and increasingly for their grandchildren – it may be remembered as the beginning of a fifty-year Russian occupation. And while Ukrainian nationalists in the Great Patriotic War used to be roundly condemned as nothing more than opportunistic, anti-Semitic and fascist lowlifes – which some of them no doubt were – more savoury elements may now be rehabilitated, as in the modern Baltic states, as patriots caught in a vice between the equivalent totalitarianisms of Nazism and Communism. Some Ukrainians make what is, for many Russians, a sacrilegious parallel: Putin as Hitler.
For both Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of Ukrainian history is personal. As in all borderlands, the contradictions and complexities of the tangled past are reproduced over and over in the stories of families and in the identities of individuals. For the governments in Moscow and in Kyiv, history is political too. Narratives of the past can be spun to justify, oppose or defend different courses of action in the present. History can be a tool of influence – a tool of long-term psychological warfare even – used to manipulate the here-and-now, to give added emotional resonance to geopolitical imperatives or to claims of political legitimacy.
Bluntly put, history can be a kind of territory. In Ukraine, it is not just the country’s land which is being tussled over. It is the country’s past as well. If Russia and Ukraine are to live as respectful neighbours side by side, they will have to find a way to live with each other’s history too.
Charles Emmerson is the author of 1913: The World before the Great War. Visit his website here
Jamie Doward The Observer, Sunday 3 November 2013
Former classified documents show how close the Soviet Union came to launching an attack in 1983
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher was alarmed by intelligence reports about the Soviet Union's reaction. Photograph: Jockel Fink/AP
Chilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the cold war.
Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility.
When intelligence filtered back to the Tory government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the UK and the US thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between east and west.
The papers were obtained by Peter Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an organisation that campaigns against nuclear proliferation, who said that the documents showed just how risky the cold war became for both sides.
"These papers document a pivotal moment in modern history – the point at which an alarmed Thatcher government realised that the cold war had to be brought to an end and began the process of persuading its American allies likewise," he said.
"The Cold War is sometimes described as a stable 'balance of power' between east and west, but the Able Archer story shows that it was in fact a shockingly dangerous period when the world came to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe on more than one occasion."
Able Archer, which involved 40,000 US and Nato troops moving across western Europe, co-ordinated by encrypted communications systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (Nato) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons.
Numerous UK air bases, including Greenham Common, Brize Norton and Mildenhall, were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy. However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organisation, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962," he said .
The exercise took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an American spy plane.
Earlier in the same year the US president, Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" and announced plans to build the "Star Wars" strategic defence initiative. With distrust between the US and USSR at unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger.
As Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection.
Nato and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR's own form of war-gaming. However, the classified documents obtained by the NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as the prelude for a nuclear strike against them.
A classified British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report written shortly afterwards recorded the observation from one official that "we cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs [command post exercises] as posing a real threat." The cabinet secretary at the time, Sir Robert Armstrong, briefed Thatcher that the Soviets' response did not appear to be an exercise because it "took place over a major Soviet holiday, it had the form of actual military activity and alerts, not just war-gaming, and it was limited geographically to the area, central Europe, covered by the Nato exercise which the Soviet Union was monitoring".
Armstrong told Thatcher that Moscow's response "shows the concern of the Soviet Union over a possible Nato surprise attack mounted under cover of exercises". Much of the intelligence for the briefings to Thatcher, suggesting some in the Kremlin believed that the Able Archer exercise posed a "real threat", came from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky.
Formerly classified files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered her officials to "consider what could be done to remove the danger that, by miscalculating western intentions, the Soviet Union would over-react". She ordered her officials to "urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise Nato attack".
Formerly secret documents reveal that, in response, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence drafted a joint paper for discussion with the US that proposed "Nato should inform the Soviet Union on a routine basis of proposed Nato exercise activity involving nuclear play".
Information from the JIC report and Gordievsky was shared with Reagan, who met the spy and was apparently so swayed by the arguments that he pushed for a new spirit of detente between the US and USSR.
However, Burt stressed that the end of the cold war did not mean that the risks had gone away. "Even though the cold war ended more than 20 years ago, thousands of warheads are still actively deployed by the nuclear-armed states," Burt said. "We continue to face unacceptably high risks and will continue to do so until we have taken steps to abolish these exceptionally dangerous weapons."
How a war game brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster | UK news | The Observer
By Daily Mail Reporter 3 September 2013
- Captain Robert Campbell was injured and captured in France in July, 1914
- After two years in German camp his mother in Gravesend, Kent, fell ill
- Briton wrote to the Kaiser asking to return home and enemy leader agreed
- Story revealed in documents unearthed by historian Richard van Emden
Remarkable: Captain Robert Campbell returned to a German PoW camp after being given permission to leave to visit his dying mother in Britain by the Kaiser
A British soldier was freed from a German POW camp during World War One to see his dying mother - and kept his promise to the Kaiser by returning, historians have discovered.
Captain Robert Campbell, aged 29, was captured just weeks after Britain declared war on Germany in July, 1914.
But after two years in Magdeburg Prisoner of War Camp the British officer received word from home his mother Louise Campbell was close to death.
He speculatively wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II begging to be allowed home to visit his mother one final time.
Incredibly the German leader granted the request allowing the professional office two weeks leave - as long as he returned.
The only bond he placed on the leave was Capt Campbell's ‘word' as an army officer.
He returned to his family home in Gravesend Kent in December 1916 and spent a week with his cancer-stricken mother.
He then kept his promise by returning to his German prison - where he stayed until the war ended in 1918.
The remarkable example of wartime honesty was uncovered by historian Richard Van Emden, 48, as he researched his new book.
But the author admitted the act of chivalry was rare even for the bygone age of the Great War.
He said: 'Capt Campbell was an officer and he made a promise on his honour to go back. Had he not turned up there would not have been any retribution on any other prisoners.
Evidence: A note found in the National Archives reveals when Capt Campbell was due to return home for a 'fortnight's leave of absence'
Historic: This document shows how he was allowed to return to his family home in Gravesend Kent in November 1916 and spent a week with his cancer-stricken mother - then went back to prison for the final two years of war
Progress: This memo from 1916 shows how Captain Campbell came via Holland on his journey home to see his mum on 'parole'
'What I think is more amazing is that the British Army let him go back to Germany. The British could have said to him ‘you're not going back, you're going to stay here'.
KAISER BILL SET ASIDE 'HATRED' TO SEND SOLDIER HOME TO BRITAIN
The last emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had a schizophrenic relationship with the British until he was forced to abdicate in 1918.
He was the nephew of Queen Victoria and had an English mother, developing a passion for the country, but was furious that he was never accepted by high society.
The expansion of the German navy before the war was directly because of his love, and his mother's, of the Royal Navy.
He once told his uncle Edward VII that his dream was to have a 'fleet of my own some day'.
Historian David Fromkin described his love-hate relationship with Britain as: 'The half-German side of him was at war with the half-English side.
'He was wildly jealous of the British, wanting to be British, wanting to be better at being British than the British were, while at the same time hating them and resenting them because he never could be fully accepted by them'.
As World War One dragged on Wilhelm's influence over the military disintegrated and he was left to hand out awards and attend ceremonies.
But the case of Captain Campbell reveals a more understanding side, which allowed him to use influence to help a British man get home.
'This was totally unique. I think it is such a unique example that I don't think you can draw any parallels. In my experience this is a one off and is one of those things that just tickles your fancy.'
Capt Campbell had been leading the 1st Bn East Surrey Regiment when his battalion took up a position on the Monds-Conde canal in north-western France.
But a week later his troops were attacked by the German forces and Capt Campbell was gravely injured and captured by enemy soldiers.
The wounded Brit was treated in a military hospital in Cologne, Germany, before being transported to the Magdeburg Prisoner of War Camp.
In 1916 he was allowed two weeks compassionate leave by the German Kaiser, to include two days travelling in each direction by boat and train.
Capt Campbell reached his mother's bedside on December 7 and spent a week with her before returning to Germany. She finally passed away in February.
The British officer, who had served in the army for 11 years before the outbreak of war, remained in Magdeburg until the armistice in 1918.
Mr Van Emden discovered the incredible story in correspondence between the British Foreign Office and their German counterparts.
The records also show the Germans contacted the British requesting German national Peter Gastreich be allowed to leave the Isle of Wight to visit his dying father - but the British authorities refused the request.
Discovery: Historian Richard van Emden (pictured left) made the discovery of the documents about Capt Campbell who lead the 1st Bn East Surrey Regiment whose badge is pictured, right
More detail: This official memo from the U.S. Embassy in London showed that the agreement between Campbell and the Germans went via the Americans
Didn't work both ways: German Peter Gastreich asked to be allowed to leave the Isle of Wight to visit his dying father, but the British refused to accept Captain Campbell's case set a precedent
At the end of the war Capt Campbell was freed from the camp and allowed to make the journey back to the British coast - retiring from the military in 1925.
And despite his traumatising ordeal Capt Campbell was again thrust into military action in 1939 when he rejoined the 1st Bn East Surrey Regiment for World War Two.
His role as the Chief Observer of the Royal Observer Corps in the Isle of Wight was less precarious than that thirty years earlier.
Troop: Capt Campbell was among troops like these ones when he was captured at the very start of the war
Recovery: Captain Campbell was was treated at this military hospital in Cologne before he was taken to the POW camp
Prisoner of war: Capt Campbell had been leading the 1st Bn East Surrey Regiment when his battalion fought at the Monds-Conde canal in north-western France (pictured), where he was injured and captured
He managed to survive the war unscathed and died back in his home country in July 1966 aged 81.
Capt Campbell's story has been told in Mr Van Emden's new book, ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War'
‘Let Scotland’s war craft be this: foot soldiers, mountains and marshy ground; and let her woods, her bow and spear serve for barricades. Let menace lurk in all her narrow places among her warrior bands, and let her plains so burn with fire that her enemies flee away.
Crying out in the night, let her men be on their guard,
and her enemies in confusion will flee from hunger’s sword. Surely it will be so, as we’re guided by Robert, our lord.’
Scotland’s Strategy of Guerrilla Warfare ( c.1308)Who was Robert Bruce?
Bruce was descended from ancestors in Brix, in Flanders. In 1124, King David I granted the massive estates of Annandale to his follower, Robert de Brus, in order to secure the border. The name, Robert, was very common in the family.Born in 1274, Bruce was the grandson of another Robert Bruce, the failed claimant of the Scottish crown in 1290/2, and the son of yet another Robert Bruce. His mother, Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, brought him an ancient Gaelic lineage. Descended from the Gaelic Earls of Carrick, she was a formidable operator who apparently held Bruce’s father captive after he returned from crusade, refusing to release him until he agreed to marry her.
Brought up at Turnberry Castle, Bruce was a product of his lineage, speaking Gaelic, Scots and Norman French. In 1295 he became Earl of Carrick and was no doubt convinced of his families entitlement to Scotland’s crown.
Claimant of the Crown
Robert Bruce’s struggle for the Scottish crown wasn’t entirely an enterprise born of patriotism, and, although no doubt his attitude changed over the years, Bruce’s motives do appear to be slightly more self-serving than that. The ascension of his family to royalty seemed more central to his long-term plans than Scottish liberation from English rule. The facts speak for themselves. Both Bruce and his father supported Edward I’s invasion of Scotland in 1296, hoping to gain the crown after Balliol’s fall. They were understandably disappointed when Edward proceeded to install himself as king.In 1297, Bruce, encouraged by Bishop Wishart, raised the standard of revolt at Irvine (the reason why he was absent at the Battle of Stirling Bridge). However, the rising failed and Bruce, rather than join Wallace after the Scots victory at Stirling Bridge, kept a low profile until he could determine what the English reaction would be.
Bruce was also absent at the Battle of Falkirk, in which Wallace’s army was devastated, but seems to have made an effort to help by burning the town of Ayr in order to deny it to the English as they returned south.
In 1298, after the Scots defeat at Falkirk, Bruce and John Comyn replaced Wallace as Guardians of Scotland. They soon quarrelled however, Comyn being a supporter of Balliol’s claim to the throne, and Bruce was ‘replaced’ a year later. He continued to fight on until it seemed Balliol was about to return, then, once again, he submitted to the English king, hoping for recognition of his claim to the throne.So Bruce wasn’t adverse to switching sides in pursuit of his goal, and this wasn’t irregular practice amongst noblemen in pursuit of power at the time. The rhetoric of the Declaration of Arbroath, 22 years later - “For as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English” - was never Bruce’s rhetoric, for he had appealed to English lordship on more than one occasion.
1304 was a crucial year for Bruce. His father’s death made him the Bruce claimant to the throne, and the capitulation of the Scots in the face of English attacks ended hopes of a Balliol restoration. Edward I had conquered Scotland, but he wasn’t expected to live much longer. Bruce started to seek allies.
On 11th February 1306 Robert Bruce met John ‘The Red’ Comyn at Greyfriars Kirk in Dumfries. We don’t know what they discussed, but an argument flared, swords were drawn, and Bruce stabbed Comyn before the high altar. Comyn’s murder is not believed to have been premeditated, however Bruce was excommunicated and outlawed, whilst Scotland was plunged into civil war.
There was no way back, Bruce realised he would have to start his rising, that force would now take precedence over diplomacy. Within six weeks Bishop Wishart gave him absolution and he was hurriedly crowned king at Scone on March 25th 1306.
The Fugitive, Outlawed, Ex-communicated King
It was disastrous start to his reign. Bruce had provoked civil war as well as war with England. One of his brothers was killed, whilst his sisters, wife and daughter were captured and imprisoned. In June 1306, Bruce’s disorganised forces were defeated at Methven and he fled to the Gaelic west, hiding on Rathlin Island, off Ireland, and in the Hebrides Islands. It is here that he passes into legend as the dispossessed king, hiding in the mountains and in caves, suffering hardship for the good of the nation. However, at this point Bruce was by no means the people’s hero in Scotland. Very few bishops or nobles had been at his inauguration, and there is evidence to suggest that he threatened many his countrymen into supporting him.Guerrilla Warfare
It was then that Bruce changed tactics, and success followed. He turned out to be a natural guerrilla commander, winning small victories at Glen Trool and Loudon Hill. In 1308 he defeated the Comyn faction at Inverurie and took Aberdeen, establishing control over the Kingdom north of Perth and Dundee.He ruthlessly crushed those who opposed him, forcing them into exile, but he also knew how to reward those who came over to his side. The tide seemed have turned in Robert's favour and many of the common people of Scotland now turned to him as their only hope of salvation from English tyranny.
Luck was also on his side. Edward I, furious at Bruce, died within sight of Scotland on a march north to crush the rebels. His successor, Edward II, never a match for his father, sought a two year truce with Bruce. By 1313 Robert was powerful enough to issue an ultimatum to the remaining Balliol supporters - to join him or forfeit their estates.
Bruce’s commanders now embarked on daring raids on the remaining English garrisons. Sir James Douglas surprised Roxburgh castle, inspiring Thomas, Earl of Moray, to take Edinburgh castle by stealth. In England, Edward II had to react. In 1314 he led a massive invasion force into Scotland, where they met the Scots army at the now famous Bannockburn, near Stirling.
Bruce had chosen his ground carefully at Bannockburn, in the battle that ensued, on the 23rd and 24th of June, Bruce won a tremendous victory over a vast English army. Edward II, was nearly caught up in the catastrophe, and only just escaped. Here was perhaps his greatest hour and the most enduring memory of Robert the Bruce - fighting for his nation's independence against a hugely superior English force and winning, just as Wallace had done at Stirling Bridge 17 years earlier.
Bruce was now in total control of Scotland, however, he still hadn't achieved his aim. Scotland's independence and Bruce's monarchy still hadn't been recognised by the English or the Pope, and this was essential if his rule was to have any credence in Christendom as a whole.
Edward Bruce’s invasion of Ireland 1315-18
The Scots opened a second front when Robert's brother, Edward, invaded Ireland. Robert appealed to the native Irish to rise against Edward II’s rule, and some have seen this as a cynical manipulation of Gaelic sentimentalism. The Dark Age Kings of Alba had been intensely proud of their Gaelic-Irish origin and Bruce wrote as king asking them to free ‘our nation’ (meaning both Scots and Irish) from English rule. Edward Bruce may also have had a reasonable claim to the Irish high kingship. He was supported by Ireland’s most powerful king, Domnall Ua Neill, a kinsman of Robert and Edward through their maternal grandfather.
The invasion, however, was a disaster, as famine blighted Ireland, and Edward’s bid for the high kingship ended when he was slain in 1318. The whole expedition does show, however, just how ambitious the Bruce family were. The attack on English-ruled Ireland could be perceived as ploy to split English forces and, hence, better defend Scotland, but Edward Bruce did have a serious ambition to rule Ireland as the King. Would the Bruces have stopped at Ireland and Scotland? Or would Wales have been their next target, in a sort of United Celtic Kingdom?
Diplomacy & Real Politick.
On the diplomatic front, the Scots appealed to the papacy through the famous 'Declaration of Arbroath', but to no avail. The papacy ignored the Declaration and English recognition wasn’t forthcoming. Bruce, by now quite ill with a form of leprosy, accepted a 13 year truce with Edward II in the knowledge he would surely die before its end.
However, another stroke of luck helped Robert to fulfil his ambitions. In 1328 England fell into crisis after the deposition and murder of Edward II. Seizing the moment, Bruce launched an invasion of northern England, threatening to annex it to
Scotland. His challenge couldn’t be ignored and the Edward III’s government was forced to recognise Bruce’s kingship and Scotland’s independence. A year later, Bruce died.
Bruces body is buried in Dunfermline Abbey, whilst his heart is at Melrose Abbey in the borders. It is buried with the inscription -
‘A noble hart may haiff nane es...Gyff fredome failyhe’.
The Religious Policy of King Henry VIII
by Jeff Hobbs
Henry VIII is often remembered as the English monarch who broke with the Roman Church. However, Henry was only attracted to Protestant doctrine in a limited way, as the years 1530-1547 demonstrate.
Between the years 1530-1534, Henry tried to secure the Pope's permission to divorce Catherine of Aragon, by threatening first the English clergy and then the Pope's powers in England. When the Pope still did not grant the divorce, Henry undertook the most extreme of measures, claiming jurisdiction over the English Church for himself. The Act of Royal Supremacy of 1534 stated that the Crown was reclaiming powers that it had always possessed; powers that Rome had usurped during the previous four hundred years - a fact which Henry and his advisors firmly believed.
Yet, by the end of 1534, the English Church was still a Catholic one. Although it was now free of Rome, its religious doctrine hadn't changed at all. There was plenty of debate over the form of doctrine the Church should take, and Henry incorporated some evangelical ideas into his Church. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, for instance, may have been primarily concerned with matters of money and land, but it also swept away a huge and privileged clerical society. This was a very visible attack on the pre-Reformation Church, and the whole task was completed within the four years between 1536-40.
In 1536, the Ten Articles were produced as a formulary of the new Church's faith. These articles referred to just three sacraments - baptism, penance and the Eucharist - rather than the usual seven. This was radical at the time, but also confusing, and there was much debate over the 'missing' four sacraments of confirmation, ordination, marriage and last rites. A month later, Thomas Cromwell's Injunctions took a moderate stand against images in churches and against pilgrimages, and it also banned some holy days and saints' days. The issue of transubstantiation was not specifically mentioned, and the Lutheran concept of justification by faith alone was watered down. Therefore, the official religion of England did not condemn the Mass and it did not condemn the Catholic call for good works; but emphasis was laid upon the words of the Scriptures and upon the merits of the simple Christian life. It was a tentative move in an evangelical direction.
In 1537, the 'Institution of a Christian Man' was a further attempt at a formulary of faith. It tried to deal with the questions of purgatory, and the status of the four missing sacraments in the Ten Articles - which were now found to be lesser sacraments! It emphasised the fact that justification through the merits of Christ didn't dispense with the need for good works. On the issue of transubstantiation the Bishop's Book was adamant that "under the form and figure of bread and wine, which we there presently do see and perceive by outward senses, is verily, substantially, and really contained the very selfsame body and blood of our Saviour Jesu Christ".
However a great breakthrough for evangelicals did come in 1537 when royal permission was given for a vernacular version of the Bible. In 1538 Cromwell issued further Injunctions that required that all churches acquire a copy of the English Bible. The central position of scripture in Protestant belief made it vital to make the text available, and an official version gave the English Bible the stamp of approval. Cromwell's Injunctions also took a strong line against images, and centres of pilgrimage.
These three years 1536-38 marked the high watermark of officially sanctioned evangelical doctrine under Henry VIII. The King was a keen theologian, and was prepared to incorporate evangelical ideas into his new Church where he saw fit. But he wasn't comfortable with the alterations, and from 1539 onwards he reversed most of his previous policies. In 1539 the Act of Six Articles returned the Church to unambiguous Catholic orthodoxy apart from papal supremacy. Amongst other things, transubstantiation and auricular confession were reaffirmed. Clerical marriage, which had crept in, was condemned, and vows of chastity were now held to be unbreakable. This was an embarrassment to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, whose marriage was an open secret at the time.
More significantly, under this act heresy again became a felony. This was a clear signal that Henry VIII wouldn't tolerate those with radical religious views. Henry tried to establish a consensus between Protestants and conservatives. Protestants were punished for violating the Six Articles, while papists were punished for denying the royal supremacy.
Until Henry's death in 1547, the Act of Six Articles remained the basis of the Church's faith. In 1543, 'A Necessary Doctrine & Erudition for any Christian Man' came down entirely on the side of traditional orthodoxy, and merely replaced the papal supremacy with the king's authority. Any traces of Lutheranism that were present in the Book of 1537 'Institution of a Christian Man' had now disappeared. Although the English Bible was retained, access to it was severely restricted by the Act for the Advancement of True Religion in 1543. This allowed only upper class men & women to read the Bible, with such women only allowed to read it in private.
Henry VIII had dallied with Protestant ideas, but ultimately he proved to be conservative on matters of religious doctrine. It would take his son, Edward VI, and his advisors, to turn England into something more like a genuine Protestant country.
The cross existed at one time and may still exist in some dark cellar or dusty attic. If found, it would be the only tangible relic in existence associated with King Arthur and could provide important clues as to whether or not it was his grave that was opened on that day in 1190.
Discovery of the Cross
he medieval historian, Gerald of Wales, tells us that sometime before he died in 1189, Henry II gave a message to the monks of Glastonbury Abbey regarding the location of the grave of King Arthur. He also tells us that Henry had gotten the information from an unnamed Welsh bard.
Gerald's account goes on to say that the Glastonbury monks, presumably acting on this information, had uncovered a hollowed-out log containing two bodies, while digging between two stone pyramids standing together in the abbey cemetery. The log coffin had been buried quite deep, at around 16 feet down. A stone slab cover had been found at the seven foot level, and attached to its underside was an oddly shaped cross with a Latin inscription on it, naming the occupants of the coffin as the renowned King Arthur and his queen, Guinevere.
Beside Gerald's report written in "Liber de Principis instructione" c.1193, there were several other versions of the discovery of the grave and cross which appeared in various chronicles over the years. Each account was a bit different from the others and either included or omitted details which the others did not. At least five different versions of the inscription on the cross have been reported, and this inconsistency in the details of the story has led many scholars to think that a great hoax was being perpetrated by the Glastonbury monks for the purpose of generating pilgrim traffic to their abbey.
Adding to the suspicions aroused by the above inconsistencies, the case for a "monastic hoax" gains more strength when we consider that there were several obvious motives for it:the monks' beloved abbey church, the most glorious in all England and possibly in all of Christendom, had been destroyed by fire in 1184, just a few short years before. the abbey's greatest pilgrim attraction, the "Old Church," England's oldest Christian structure which dated back many hundreds of years, had been burned up with it. the abbey's chief benefactor, the recently deceased Henry II, was no longer in a position to finance their efforts to rebuild and the new king, Richard, was more interested in using his money to go "Crusading." A popular legend, current among the British people, claimed that King Arthur had never actually died and that he would one day return to his people when their need was great. While it is easy for modern people to discount a story like that, the twelfth century was an age of great credulity, and since no one could point to the location of Arthur's actual burial place, the legend couldn't be so easily discounted. Amazingly enough, no one had ever even claimed to know where the grave was, let alone try to identify it. A verse from the Welsh "Stanzas of the Graves" (aka The Graves of the Warriors of Britain), states:
a grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;
the world's wonder, a grave for Arthur. . .tomb of Arthur is nowhere beheld, whence the ancient ditties fable that he is yet to come.Given the immediate need for cash to rebuild their abbey, the death of their chief benefactor and a willingness to engage in questionable practices to serve what they believed was a noble end, it would take no great leap of the imagination to expect that the Glastonbury monks would come up with some other scheme to raise funds. In King Arthur, it would seem that they had a ready-made solution to their problems: a major legendary figure whose grave could attract all the pilgrims that the Old Church did, and, at the same time, enhance the abbey's reputation for sanctity and prestige as the final resting place of saints and kings.
Having said all that, it must be noted that there are a few difficulties with the "monastic hoax" theory. First of all, if we are going to credit the monks with the imagination and effrontery necessary to perpetrate a hoax of this magnitude, then we should also expect them to be able to manage the public relations campaign that would be needed after the "discovery" of Arthur's body.
Instead, we see several different accounts of the exhumation of the grave and, over the years, we get several versions of what was inscribed on the cross. The varied accounts of the inscriptions are as follows:
"Here lies the famous King Arthur, buried in the isle of Avalon"
Margam Abbey (Wales), "Chronicle," some date it early 1190's, others, 14th century
"Here lies the famous King Arthur, buried in the isle of Avalon"
John Leland, 1542
"Here lies the famous King Arthur, buried in the isle of Avalon"
William Camden, "Britannia," 1607
"Here lies the famous King Arthur, buried in the isle of Avalon"
Monks of St. Albans, "Chronica Majora," mid- to late-13th Century
"Here lies the renowned King Arthur, buried in the isle of Avalon"
Adam of Domerham, "Historia de rebus Glastoniensibus," 1291
"Here lies interred in the isle of Avalon, the renowned King Arthur"
Gerald of Wales, "Liber de Principis instructione," c.1193
"Here lies buried the famous King Arthur with Guinevere his second wife in the isle of Avalon"
Gerald of Wales, "Speculum Ecclesiae," c.1216
"Here lies buried the famous King Arthur in the isle of Avalon with his second wife Guinevere"
Shouldn't we expect that if the monks had been willing to risk this deception in the first place, that they would have made sure that everyone was telling the same story? Another troublesome thing is that while the fortuitous timing of the "discovery" of Arthur's grave might seem highly suspicious to us, the monks didn't follow up by doing what we might expect them to have done if they were really trying to pull off a hoax. We would expect them to have launched a major publicity campaign, announcing the discovery to the world. We would expect to find evidence that a major influx of pilgrims had been planned for. We would expect to find documentary and literary evidence that Glastonbury had, in fact, become a more important place of pilgrimage than it had already been.
Surprisingly, we see none of that. Other than a few mentions in monastic chronicles through the years, there is no record of any "advertising blitz." There were no new structures built to enshrine the bodies or to house or otherwise accommodate the pilgrims. And there was nothing written to suggest that the "discovery" at Glastonbury attracted any unusual attention, at all.
From their grave, the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere may have been translated to a tomb inside the newly rebuilt Lady Chapel, which had been completed in 1186. After the discovery in 1190, nothing is heard of the tomb or the bodies until many years later when they are reported by the "Annals of Waverley" to be in the treasury in the east range of the abbey church, awaiting a move to a more fitting location. The bodies remained there until the year 1278, when Edward I came to Glastonbury to preside over their re-interment in a new marble coffin, underneath the high altar, in the recently rebuilt great abbey church (a marker indicates the spot where the tomb stood; see photo above). Arthur's cross was laid on top of the tomb for all to see, and there it remained for about 250 years.The final disposition of the bodies is unknown, but they probably didn't survive the Dissolution of the abbey by Henry VIII and his zealots during the English Reformation in 1539. The burial cross did, though. It was seen and handled by John Leland around 1540 and illustrated for the 1607 edition of "Britannia" by William Camden. It was last reported in the possession of one William Hughes, an official of Wells Cathedral, sometime in the early eighteenth century.
The story of the cross doesn't end there, but continues on to the present day. There have been several reports in the 20th century that the cross has been found, but in each case, the reports have proven to be false. Those erroneous reports don't mean that the cross does not exist, only that it hasn't been found, yet. It may, even now, be gathering dust in an attic or a cellar, or perhaps lying unseen underneath a pile of logs in an outdoor shed. But, if it were to be found, it would be our only tangible link to the strange events at Glastonbury over 800 years ago.
What We Know About the Cross:
- A cross was found during the excavation of a grave site next to the Lady Chapel at Glastonbury Abbey.
- The date of the discovery was reported as taking place in 1190 (Adam of Domerham) and 1191 (Ralph of Coggeshall). This discrepancy can be accounted for by allowing for inaccuracies in the calendar that was in use in the late 12th century.
- Adam of Domerham said that Arthur's grave was discovered 648 years after his death. If we take Geoffrey of Monmouth's word for it, the date of the Battle of Camlann and, presumably, his death was 542. The simple addition of 542 + 648 = 1190.
- The cross was said to be "leaden".
- The cross was fastened to the underside of a stone slab located seven feet down (the actual bones were found at the 16 foot level), and the inscription was turned in toward the stone slab.
- There are five different reported versions of how the cross was inscribed (see above).
- Gerald of Wales' account states that the inscription was on one side of the cross. He also says that the inscription included a reference to Guinevere. Camden's illustration of the cross shows the inscribed side, but there is no mention of Guinevere, there.
- The letterforms used in the inscription are not consistent with any known fifth or sixth century script, but are more likely to be of the tenth century.
- The earliest and most contemporary account of the dig is by Gerald of Wales (aka Giraldus Cambrensis, aka Gerald de Barri).
- Ralph of Coggeshall's account states that Arthur's grave was located, accidentally, while digging a grave for a monk whose fervent desire was to be buried between the pyramids.
- Gerald of Wales' account, said that the grave site location was given to the monks by Henry II, after it had been specifically revealed to him by a Welsh bard. It stated also that there was only one coffin (actually a hollowed-out log, split into two sections, one each for Arthur and his queen) and that the cross specifically mentioned her by name.
- Adam of Domerham, writing in 1290, and John of Glastonbury, around 1350, tell us that there were two tombs and add the interesting detail that while the digging was being done, the grave site was surrounded by white draperies or curtains.
- The Margam account stated that there were three separate coffins (one each for Arthur, Guinevere and Mordred) and that the wording on the cross did not mention Guinevere.
- Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to use the term Isle of Avalon, but he didn't equate it with any geographic place. The first equation of Glastonbury and Avalon came in Gerald of Wales' account.
- There are three common elements in the five inscriptions: King Arthur, burial or interment and Avalon. The following syllogism can be constructed using those common elements: Arthur's last resting place is the Isle of Avalon, Arthur lies in Glastonbury, therefore Glastonbury is the Isle of Avalon.
- The only drawings of the cross (that we know of) were done by William Camden for the 1607 and 1608 editions of his historical work, "Britannia." There was some variation in the shapes of the letters between the two editions.
- The usually reliable John Leland, writing in "Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii," having held the cross in his hands during a visit to the abbey around 1542, said that it measured nearly a foot in length.
- The cross was attached to the top of the marble coffin in which Arthur and Guinevere's bones were reinterred in 1278 by Edward I.
- The cross remained there until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, after which it spent the next hundred years or so in the Reverstry of the parish church of St. John Baptist, Glastonbury (Bodleian Rawlinson B.416A, folio 10v, see Carley, p. 178 )
- The Cross disappeared from view and wound up, in the early 18th century, in the possession of a certain Mr. William Hughes, Chancellor of Wells.
The Arthur Cross Rediscovered? A 1981 hoax involving a fake cross.
Bibliography:
......................................Ashe, Geoffrey, King Arthur's Avalon: the Story of Glastonbury, Barnes & Noble, 1992 Barber, Richard, King Arthur: Hero and Legend, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1961 Carley, James P., Glastonbury Abbey, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1988, Chambers, E.K., Arthur of Britain, Cambridge: Speculum Historiale, 1927, 1964 Newell, W. W., William of Malmesbury on the Antiquity of Glastonbury, PMLA, XVIII (1903) Thorpe, Lewis, trans., Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain, Penguin Books, 1966 Thorpe, Lewis, trans., Gerald of Wales: The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales, Penguin Books, 1978
By Philip Lawson | Published in History Today Volume: 38 Issue: 3 1988
Peaceful protest or planned provocation? Philip Lawson re-examines 19th-century England's most famous law-and-order massacre with the aid of a key eyewitness account.
A painting of the Peterloo Massacre published by Richard Carlile
The events at St Peter’s Field in Manchester August 16th, 1819, are so thoroughly documented it would seem that little more could be said on the matter. Indeed, in the highly charged historical debate covering Peterloo, as it is now known, the events of August 16th themselves occasionally appear irrelevant to broader ideological analyses being undertaken. There is a mythology surrounding the name Peterloo which has attracted and repelled students of the period in equal number over the last 150 years or so. The simple fact of interchangeable terms, like incident, massacre, demonstration or riot, frequently used as a suffix to Peterloo merely underlines the contention surrounding the issue.
Contention, however, lies at the heart of the appeal of Peterloo to any one who first comes across this episode in English history. It offers a case study in the polarity of contemporary documentation, which subsequent historical writing has dutifully mirrored. At first sight, the issue appears cut and dried which in its crudest form presents two competing sides of interpretation: the government or official view versus the reform or radical position. From the 1820s on, contemporary pamphlets and prints presented both sides of this case, encouraging the idea of rivalry which scholarship of the 1980s still perpetuates. It is a pattern of historical analysis in which two very differing, and adversarial views of Peterloo, can be discerned. In brief, one side argues that the reformers went too far in their protest or demonstration at St Peter's Fields and that in the aftermath of Peterloo, support for the established order was reaffirmed by the mass of the population. On the other side there exists the view that a legitimate movement of popular constitutionalism ended in a massacre, betrayed on all sides by middle-class equivocation and a corrupt and repressive political system.
This gulf of historical interpretation has not really narrowed one inch since 1819, and may never do so in light of the deep cleavages in the way scholars perceive the evolution of England's socio-political structures in the modern period. Yet it is not the purpose of what follows to recite or summarise all the accounts and arguments that have emanated from the historical debate on Peterloo, but to consider some fresh evidence from an account of the action on August 16th by a special constable, one Robert Mutrie, on duty for the day in St Peter's Field, that reveals some interesting correctives to present knowledge of Peterloo. Mutrie prepared the account for his brother-in-law, Archibald Moore, who worked as the factor to the first and second Marquess of Bute in Scotland.
To present a brief historical analysis of the events of August 16th, 1819 is no simple matter, for there is not really a clear cut consensus about the motives and aspirations of the crowd and its policing forces in the literature on Peterloo. There is, however, general agreement about the narrative. No one argues with the fact that certain radical leaders, led by Henry Hunt, called a reform meeting on that day, and approximately 60,000 people attended the gathering at St Peter's Field. It is also accepted that the throng found itself policed by mounted yeomanry, special constables supported, in turn, by regulars of the 15th Company of Dragoons. Some short time after Orator Hunt began speaking, the yeomanry, supported by mounted regulars, charged into the crowd, ostensibly to arrest the principal speaker. In the ensuing melee, eleven people were killed and some 400 or so injured. So far so good; but after this point, and years of debate, agreement ceases to exist.
All other questions relating to Peterloo still exercise historians today. The incompetency and the fear of the officials involved, for example, is a favourite launching pad for discussion and judgement. On the other side, the nature and collective consciousness of the crowd has offered a focus for investigation. Were the reformers placid or belligerent on August 16th? Were they armed? Or were they in fact helpless? Though the sheer violence of the dynamic between the crowd and the authorities is well enough documented, how much of what really motivated the authorities to intervene in such a volatile situation is based on conjecture?
Every one of these queries has been given a good airing. In fact such has been the torrent of information on Peterloo, that the question now begged is how can such historiographical discrepancies exist when so much appears to be known of the actual events? The answer certainly lies, in part, with contemporary reporting of Peterloo which in its vague and erratic form more often muddies rather than clarifies the waters of understanding. Contemporary reporting, as Mutrie put it, covered 'all sides of the question', and revealed the whole spectrum of prejudice and tension between the crowd and its police. In a caption to a popular engraving, for example, the action of authorities was condemned as 'a wanton and furious attack by that brutal armed force The Manchester and Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry'. In its report of August 19th, 1819, The Times was more circumspect, admitting that trouble occurred but only 'after Hunt had spoken for about ten minutes' and the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry rode up to the hustings, and surrounded it ... At the other extreme, there resides what might be termed the ultra- establishment view. In the Manchester Mercury of August 19th there is a story of one reporter witnessing a 'band' of men marching into town, whose leader 'bore a large club'. The Courier reinforced this vision of an animated crowd, threatening and unified, with a similar report on the 19th:
What scholars have made of such evidence is one of the most sumptuous meals on the menu of British history in the modern period. The argument today swings back and forth across the ideological spectrum much as it did then, and it is worth highlighting two points in particular, that scholars of Peterloo always raise to reinforce their case. First, were participants in the reform meeting ready and armed for confrontation with the policing forces, and, second, did the authorities, from Home Office down, concoct a plan to deliver a smashing blow to the reform impetus in North West England?
On the first issue, armed radicals, Mutrie's account is most informative. Indeed, perhaps historians should now turn the usual question of who was armed on its head, and ask, in its stead, who did not bear arms? For it seems apparent that everyone and his dog carried some sort of weapon at Peterloo. The yeomanry had sabres, the regulars swords and firearms, the special constables batons and staves, and those in the crowd nearest to the speakers shouldered sticks or even 'pistols'. In reserve, there was obviously an infinite supply of stones to supplement this primitive arsenal. The motive for the policing authorities to carry weapons of one sort or another is straightforward. The reason why the crowd might do so seems more tangential. From Mutrie's description, however, some important revisions to the oft repeated story of August 16th, 1819, emerge. In the first place this was not a pacific gathering of casual observers interested in reform, even if such was the intent of the organisers. A verifiable portion of the crowd in attendance at St Peter's Field were prepared for violence and had armed themselves accordingly.
The nature of the conflict envisaged can only be postulated from Mutrie's description, but there is a very modern ring to parts of his account. The action of the yeomanry looks very much like that of snatch squads so familiar to scenes of urban arrest in Britain today. The clear inference to be drawn from Mutrie's description, and other contemporary evidence in the press, is that nineteenth-century radicals may also have been familiar with this policing tactic and took suitable precautions. Armed radicals in the crowd stood around the hustings and, as soon as the yeomanry charged and attempted to snatch Hunt, they were met with swinging clubs and a barrage of stones. In the ensuing scuffles, Mutrie attempted to retrieve a 'souvenir' (a common practice), and managed to lay his hands on a. cap of liberty which, much to his surprise, was lined with tin and could not be stuffed in his pocket. It was not the floppy bonnet atop a popular standard that he expected, and that appears in many contemporary depictions of the scene. Nevertheless this was all the 'plunder' Mutrie acquired, for he had more pressing concerns to attend to.
Mutrie's concern for his livelihood sheds light on the second area of revision offered by his account – the question of concerted action by the authorities. Mutrie's experience as a special constable in the crowd hardly conformed to what might have been expected. In fact, in the light of his experiences, there can only be one negative answer to the query over coordinated policing of Peterloo. The Magistrates, yeomanry and special constables may have known what they were doing and where to stand; in Mutrie's case this amounted to 'keeping an open passage betwixt the House where the magistrate was stationed and the Hustings'. The dragoons, on the other hand, followed their own strategy, 'without previous knowledge of what was done'. If they had liaised with anyone, the constables patrolling the crowd were oblivious to the outcome. For after the Manchester Yeomanry charged into the crowd and laid about radicals and onlookers 'with the backs of their sabres', the 15th Dragoons followed suit to remarkable effect. A hundred or so constables, including Mutrie, with shouldered staves were mistaken for radicals and 'laid on our backs', presumably by the horses. A chaotic scene then developed in which Mutrie suffered the additional ignominy of being bladed twice more on the head, courtesy of both the yeomanry and the regulars.
This state of affairs did not represent the ideal concerted plan of action by the authorities often depicted in accounts of Peterloo. Panic, confusion and ineptitude might be a better precis. Two sides here in an ideological confrontation had had a go at each other with unedifying results. It had happened before Peterloo in popular protests and would do so again in the 1820s and beyond. Mutrie himself did not hang around long after being struck by a blade, preferring the safety of horseback in the mopping up operation in the streets surrounding St Peter's Field. As can be seen from his description, the aftermath proved more arduous than breaking up the original gathering. The common eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century problem of regular military personnel, in this Case the Hussars, acting as policemen all came to the fore in the hours after the dispersal of Hunt's assembly. Not the least of these difficulties was the reluctance of the magistrate to read the Riot Act before the miLitary could use their firearms with intent to kill if required. The reasons for the reluctance was certainly appreciated by contemporary opinion of which Mutrie formed a part. He knew what the consequences of reading the Riot Act in the heated surroundings of St Peter's Field would be, and his description conveys the grim reality of the rule of thumb in these circumstances:
The moment it was read Capt B ordered the infantry officer to form a hollow square in the centre of the Cross, we all took shelter in the square when the word was given to fire in all directions – the square then opened and the horses charged every way upon the crowd – my mare grew quite mad and carried me over the back of many a poor Devel – two people were shot in the first charge just opposite my room window.
Thus, the carnage occurred, and the tragedy completed.
In his conclusion on the outcome of Peterlon Mutrie made the unintentionally prophetic comment that 'this does not look like peace'. How true: there would be several more lost battles before the radicals won the war for reform: though few other confrontations have quite lived up to the mythology surrounding Peterloo. Any assessment of what new light Mutrie sheds on the events of that day has, of course, to be tempered with his reliability as a witness. Mutrie can be doubted simply because of his obvious bias in his role as a const- able, and his reluctance to display hostility even towards the yeomanry responsible for 'the rough usage'. But such outright condemnation would be unfair to the main body of his testimony. Mutrie had no axe to grind against one side or the other in his account. It is characterised by cold realism and, more pertinent still, was not written for public consumption with one ideological intent in mind. Mutrie corroborates evidence recited across the historiographical spectrum on Peterloo. The mood of mutuaI antagonism, increased, in turn, by the number on both sides carrying weapons, is a good example of this. The attack of the yeomanry on the constables is another. Mutrie also gives the cold-blooded facts about how the troops opened fire on the riotous crowd after it had been dispersed, leaving it quite open for the reader to decide whether or not it represented a massacre. The fear of the magistrate Norris, who 'was very averse that we should commence hostilities' is presented in the most dispassionate light, as is the scene of mayhem after the Riot Act was read. In almost every aspect of the depiction of Peterloo, in fact, this document offers a unique contribution to present knowledge of the events on that day. It enriches a debate that will long continue to focus scholarly attention on the 'most dreadful day' – Monday August 16th, 1819.
