Category Archives: England

by | 18 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

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Filed under Bohemia, democracy, Eastern Europe, education, England, France, Germany, Hungary, language, Slovakia

by | 2 September 2023 · 1:20 pm

Forcing English Church Decorum, 1630s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 103-104:

[T]he most significant of [King] Charles [I]’s campaigns to bring order to his English realm was in the field of religion. Charles was personally devout, but religion was also intertwined with his wider project for social order. Charles wanted ‘peace and quiet’ in his Church just as he did in society as a whole. He wanted a ministry that was ‘peaceable, orderly, and conformable’, and subjects who would ‘demean themselves with all Christian reverence and devout obedience’. He didn’t want debate. Predestination, in particular, shouldn’t be ‘meddled withal’, since it was ‘too high for the people’s understanding’. His own preference was for a rich liturgy, with strong emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ so beloved of the ceremonialists. Critically, these were not to be days of latitude. Direction from the top, from the king, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the episcopacy, were to be followed. The Book of Common Prayer and the canons of 1604 were to be enforced in full. Parishioners would stand for the Creed and the Gloria Patri, kneel at the sacrament and bow at the name of Jesus. Those who, like Londoner and aspiring poet John Milton, preferred a ‘homely and yeomanly religion’ without a ‘deluge of ceremonies’, were deeply worried.

Charles promoted ceremonialists and Arminians. By the middle of the 1630s, Charles had created what was effectively an anti-Calvinist church establishment, particularly among his bishops, and not least when Richard Neile became Archbishop of York in 1631 and William Laud, finally, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 on the death of Abbot. The losers were men like John Williams, the Calvinist Bishop of Lincoln and sometime Lord Keeper. He fell out with Laud, was pursued in the courts and found himself fined by Star Chamber and imprisoned in the Tower.

The Church itself was suffering under long-standing economic problems, partly caused by inflation. Most visible were its crumbling buildings: indeed, much of Charles’s campaign for the beauty of holiness was really about stamping out the ugliness of neglect. The great London cathedral of St Paul’s was a case in point. Its spire had fallen down after a fire in 1561, and it was so overgrown with stalls and hawkers that it resembled a marketplace as much as a house of God. So unlike a church was it that one old Warwickshire farmer who was visiting London accidentally (‘in a beastly manner’) defiled St Paul’s ‘with his excrements’. He claimed that he did this ‘merely through ignorance & necessity being not able to go any further through his weakness & age’, and he found his explanation was accepted and was let off with a fine.

Charles and Laud’s aim was to bring back order and dignity to the Church. It was a programme that had real rationale, though some ministers took it to extremes, such as an Essex vicar who refused communion to menstruating women or those who had had sex the previous night, all in the name of decorum.

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by | 28 July 2023 · 6:01 am

Scandinavian Warriors in 9th c.

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 62-64:

Ireland had previously been the target of Norwegian warriors, and in 851 Danes also started raiding the island. In 853 Ivar became king of Dublin and later participated in the conquest of York in 866. In 844 and 846 some of the armies that had fought in France pressed onwards to Galicia in northern Spain, and even to Arabic Lisbon: according to some later Spanish sources, these troops were dispatched by the Danish king Horik. In 854, 70 ships, led by Björn Ironside and Hastings, sailed from England via Spain to Morocco, into the Mediterranean, ultimately reaching Italy. Although it is difficult to measure the scale of these battles compared to earlier periods with fewer sources, it seems clear that the battles from the mid-800s onwards were vaster in scope, earning attention from their contemporaries who became the victims. There are three main reasons for this intensification of warfare.

First, it is clear that the Nordic longship had developed into a maneuverable and efficient war machine: Danish and Scandinavian fleets were famous and desired by other rulers for centuries to come. It probably wasn’t until around 1200 that other countries off the Atlantic coast built equally strong fleets; in the Mediterranean it probably happened in the early 1100s. Until then, the Scandinavians had a significant advantage at sea.

Secondly, the expansion in the 800s shows that Scandinavia was an extremely rich area. There is a very specific reason for that. With the rise of Islam in the 600s and the conquest of large parts of the Mediterranean world until the beginning of the 700s, Europe’s economic center of gravity shifted to the east. The link between East and West in the Mediterranean was left un-interrupted, but the Arab gold mines and new efficient exploitation of the Silk Road and its access to the East’s lucrative trade system provided an economic boost to the Byzantine Empire, particularly to the capital of Constantinople. The Scandinavians had access to this via the Gulf of Finland, Lake Ladoga in northwest Russia, and along the great Russian rivers to the Black Sea (Bjerg et al. 2013). Islam actually brought Scandinavia closer to being Europe’s economic center, becoming bridge and a transit area between the East and West. The vast quantities of gold coins found in Scandinavia clearly illustrate this. So far at least 200,000 Arabic gold coins have been excavated by archeologists, and with the spread of metal detectors more and more are discovered each year. Yet it is still only a small percentage of the many coins that were buried, and they represent only those treasures that were not dug up again by their owner or his heirs. Most of these immense riches were later invested towards war technology and political capital, in ships and men.

Third, most of these raiding expeditions were not random looting. Nor did they reflect a large-scale war between Denmark and other countries or between two cultures, one European and one Scandinavian, or between two religions, one Christian and one pagan. Rather, they were a natural element of an intricate political game between a variety of different rulers, with opponents and allied partners coming together across the political and religious spectrum.

The Danish wars in England were a continuation of old alliances across the North Sea. In northern England, Danish armies were apparently well received by the local population, whose elite probably had ancient Scandinavian roots. Several groups of warriors joined together to form the “great army” in 865, and in the coming years they conquered relatively easily East Anglia and Northumbria, which starting in around 870 came under Danish control. The Great Army threatened the kingdom of Mercia and Wessex in southern England, where it was stopped by King Alfred the Great. The warriors were soon followed by peasants who settled and cultivated the land. Danish had a lasting influence on the English language, and northern England became known as the Danelaw, the area under Danish law and control. We do know the names of several Danish commanders and kings located in England from the 800 and 900s. However, we don’t know if these kings also simultaneously ruled over anything back in Denmark. English sources say that they occasionally returned home to Denmark. This indicates that the relationship would have been close at the time, and the involvement in England clearly had a profound effect on the political hierarchy and power dynamics in Denmark.

The same certainly applies to the Frankish empire. One of the most important defensive strategies of the French king against the attack of the Scandinavian armies was to quickly ally himself with other Scandinavian rulers who were given land to which to defend [like Rollo in Normandy].

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Filed under economics, England, France, Ireland, Mediterranean, migration, military, piracy, Scandinavia, Spain, war

by | 11 March 2022 · 7:05 am

Origins of Portugal’s Empire

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 70-72:

Portugal’s experience of the Reconquest and her Iberian cultural heritage made her share many characteristics with her neighbour Castile, their cognate histories frequently crossing and overlapping with each other. As in the case of Castile, the centuries of fighting against the Muslims produced a society in which religion had a crusading quality and was closely associated with the national identity. The system of land tenure was similar to Castile’s: in the fertile, well-populated north, there were a large number of smallholders and tenant farmers; in the south the latifundium and a seigneurial regime predominated.

The Portuguese were not particularly given to seafaring. Though fishing was significant, most of the population were actually peasants who worked the land. Still, Portuguese society was motivated by aristocratic and military values, and, with its reconquest concluded some two centuries before Castile’s, Portugal’s quest for glory and riches was carried abroad to North Africa and into the Atlantic, where the spirit of adventure of a small minority was to lead to remarkable feats of maritime exploration and empire-building. Exploits overseas, however, went hand in hand with commerce, stimulated by the presence of considerable numbers of Genoese merchants and mariners who had settled along the coast, and especially in Lisbon, which was by far the most populous city.

The Portuguese monarchy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was constantly under threat from ambitious nobles, from a powerful Church, and, not least, from dynastic quarrels in which the hand of Castile was invariably suspected, and with good reason. Relations with Spain would remain ambivalent: the larger neighbour exerted a very powerful influence on culture as well as politics, but there would always exist forces of repulsion, and Portuguese foreign policy was chiefly concerned with maintaining national independence from Castile. Portugal’s long association with England – starting as a trading relationship in the twelfth century and periodically formalized by a series of treaties – stemmed from the need for a strong ally to counterbalance the perennial threat of incorporation by Spain.

A turning-point came in 1385 at the battle of Aljubarrota, when a new king, John of Aviz, nominated by the Portuguese Cortes and aided by English allies, won a victory against Castile and the Portuguese nobles. The long reign of John I (1385–1433) saw the development of a powerful monarchy capable of creating a stable nation state largely free from baronial challenges and galvanized by a renewal of the crusading spirit, though this was now directed towards Africa: the imperial phase of Portuguese history began with the taking of Ceuta in 1415. A few years later, John’s son, Prince Henry the Navigator, established a school of navigation at Sagres on the Algarve and became the patron of the voyages of exploration that would continue long after his death in 1460 and would eventually open Africa, India and the East to the Europeans.

The death of John I was followed by an interlude of aristocratic revolt and dynastic civil wars, the latter overlapping with the wars of succession which put Isabella on the Castilian throne. In Portugal, John II (1481–95) finally imposed order and proceeded, by a combination of murders and executions, to break the power of the nobility and confiscate much of its wealth. It was John II who finally created in Portugal an absolutist nation state resembling the Catholic monarchy of Spain, with the Church playing a crucial role in giving a monopoly of legitimacy to the unifying authority of the Crown.

For eighty years after John’s death, Portugal’s Catholic monarchy supervised the building of one of the most far-flung empires ever to have been created by Europeans: in 1487 the Cape of Good Hope was rounded by Bartholomew Dias; by 1498 Vasco da Gama had reached India; the year 1500 saw another Portuguese expedition discover a land that would eventually become Brazil; in the course of the sixteenth century the Portuguese established bases and factories in Ceylon, Malacca and the Spice Islands of the Indonesian archipelago; by the 1570s they had won a monopoly of the lucrative trade between China and Japan from a base established at Macao on the Chinese mainland in 1557.

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Filed under Africa, Asia, economics, England, migration, military, nationalism, Portugal, religion, Spain, war

by | 16 October 2020 · 8:10 am

Travails of a Royal Horse Guards Cornet, 1930s

From Irregular Regular: Recollections of Conflict Across the Globe (The Extraordinary Life of Colonel David Smiley Book 3, Sapere Books, 2020), Kindle pp. 5-8:

In September 1936 I had arrived at Hyde Park Barracks, Knightsbridge, commissioned a 2nd lieutenant (cornet) in the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues). At Sandhurst I had lost six months’ seniority by ‘dropping a term’ after a crashing fall in a point-to-point which put me in hospital for six months. My only academic achievements at Sandhurst were passing out top in map reading and bottom in economics.

Rules in the Household Brigade were strict, even off parade. I was soon to find this out when I was awarded fourteen extra orderlies — an officer’s equivalent to CB (confined to barracks) — for dancing downstairs in the Café de Paris in a dinner jacket. If you chose to dance downstairs in the Café de Paris you had to wear a white tie and tails; in a dinner jacket you had to confine yourself to dancing on the less conspicuous balcony upstairs. White tie and tails were also de rigueur at the theatre and I was once reprimanded for being seen in a party at the theatre wearing a dinner jacket — at my hostess’s request.

I accepted these rather strange rules and customs, chiefly because life as a cornet in the Blues was, in most ways, idyllic. Like our sister regiment The Life Guards, we were a very small unit, almost a kind of club. The peacetime strength in 1936 was 14 officers, 419 men and 250 horses. Our only motorised transport was about a dozen Austin Sevens and a few motor cycles used by the signals troop.

…

Everything in a young officer’s life depended on his NCO. We had no experience; many of the NCOs had served ten to twenty years. They knew all the tricks of the trade and the characters of our senior officers. A good NCO was one part nanny, one part coach, and one part poacher turned gamekeeper. I was lucky to have an excellent corporal of horse (sergeant).

Soldiering, however, played only a small part in our lives. Officers were encouraged to seek adventure on leave. Bob Laycock sailed home from Australia in a windjammer. Others went on big game safaris to Kenya. Some did a stint as ADCs, usually to the Viceroy of India or Governor-General of Canada. Hunting, shooting, polo and steeplechasing were regarded as duty; in other words they didn’t count against one’s leave. Before the war leave was the same as it is today — six weeks in the year; but adding to it the days spent away hunting, and weekends, it must have amounted to three or four months. In those days we were informed that leave was a privilege and never a right. All my army life I failed to understand the logic of this, but I did find that the higher you climbed the ladder of promotion, the less leave you seemed to get.

The Munich crisis caused a flap. I was orderly officer and had to telephone every officer who was on leave recalling him to barracks. This did not make me very popular. We dug slit trenches and weapon pits in the sports fields in Hyde Park just opposite the barracks. To the delight of the more insubordinate, so many sandbags were piled on the roof of the Orderly Room block, which included the colonel’s and the adjutant’s offices, that the roof collapsed.

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by | 22 October 2019 · 9:45 am

Battling Barbary Pirates in the 1600s

From Dawn Like Thunder (Annotated): The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy, by Glenn Tucker (Corsair Books, 2019), Kindle Loc. ~980-1000:

England had her first naval brush with the Barbary Powers in 1655. When Oliver Cromwell became Protector, the Dutch ruled the waves and their Admiral Van Tromp moved with his fleet up and down the Channel with a broom fastened atop his mainmast, giving notice that he would sweep England from the seas. After he had been defeated by the English Admirals Blake, Dean, and Monk, and the Dutch Admiral De Ruyter likewise had learned that Blake’s broadsides swept cleaner than a broom, England became the leading sea power.

Admiral Robert Blake, sickly with dropsy [edema], scurvy, and other ailments on his voyages but awesome in battle, was in 1654 given secret orders by Cromwell to sail to Tuscany and collect reparations for injuries inflicted on British shipping. Cromwell would not mind if Blake picked up some of the Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World while he was cruising around Gibraltar. But one of his leading tasks was to chastise the Barbary powers and put an end to their raids on British and Irish seacoast towns.

Blake has generally been held to be the first admiral who dared to take wooden ships against stone fortresses. What he accomplished in this respect must have been in the mind of Captain Edward Preble of the U.S. Navy 150 years later. The question was whether mobility was superior to great stationary strength and he gave the odds to mobility.

Blake claimed forts were effective only for making noises and arousing fears. He sailed into the harbor of Tunis, gave the two fortresses such a pounding that he battered them down, and here and at Algiers and Tripoli he destroyed the pirate fleets and put a stop for a season to all Barbary depredations.

Clearly, Christendom could have used more Admiral Blakes along the Barbary Coast. He managed to pick up part of the Spanish plate fleet as he returned to England. But was that not technically war and in no manner piracy? England and Spain were ever at odds on the sea.

De Ruyter, whose sea greatness was by no means ended by Blake, took a Dutch fleet into the Mediterranean in 1661, dictated treaties with Tunis and Algiers, liberated Christian prisoners, and gave piracy another setback. These nations learned what the United States discerned later, that treaties with petty despots were not worth the paper they were written on.

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Filed under England, Mediterranean, military, Netherlands, piracy, religion, slavery, Spain

by | 15 September 2019 · 2:37 pm

When Knights Avoided Battle

From A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, by Marc Morris (Pegasus, 2015), Kindle p. 60:

Siege and counter-siege, raid and counter-raid: such was the normal method of medieval warfare. Skilled commanders moved their troops like pieces on a chessboard, taking individual castles and knights as part of a developing strategy. Attrition and retaliation were the name of the game; direct confrontation was to be avoided at all costs. No matter how daring a general might be, he would almost never commit to battle because of the enormous risk involved. In the noise and confusion of a battle everything could be lost in a few short hours. As a consequence, they were rare events: in the spring of 1264, there had been no battle in England for almost half a century.

Montfort, a renowned warrior well into his mid-fifties, had never fought in one. And yet it was battle that Montfort now sought. In recent weeks his range of options had diminished rapidly. After his retreat to London they had never seemed so limited or so bleak. Dover Castle, his only other significant asset, was now threatened by the arrival in the south of the royal army; once it fell, Montfort would be trapped. In strategic terms it was almost checkmate, but the earl was not a man readily to concede defeat. On 6 May, like a cornered animal, he came out fighting, marching his forces out of London in search of his enemies.

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by | 7 September 2019 · 4:37 pm

Welsh Differences in 13th Century

From A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, by Marc Morris (Pegasus, 2015), Kindle pp. 26-28:

Geographically, of course, there were similarities between Wales and Scotland that a first-time visitor would have readily appreciated, and this meant that economically, too, they had certain similarities – Wales, like Scotland, was poor in comparison with England. Culturally, however, Wales was very different from both its near neighbours. Perhaps most obviously, the Welsh spoke Welsh, even at the highest social levels. This was a source of pride to the Welsh themselves, but to the French-speaking kings and nobles of England and Scotland it sounded like so much incomprehensible babble.

More perplexing still for English and Scottish onlookers, and far more problematic, were Welsh social attitudes, which stood in sharp opposition to their own. Take, for instance, the rules governing inheritance. In England and Scotland, and indeed almost everywhere else in western Europe, the rule was primogeniture: firstborn sons inherited estates in their entirety. This was hard on any younger brothers or sisters, but had the great advantage of keeping a family’s lands intact from one generation to the next. In Wales, by contrast, the rule was ‘partibility’: every male member of the family – not just sons and brothers, but uncles and nephews too – expected his portion of the spoils, and rules of precedence were only loosely defined. This meant that the death of a Welsh landowner was almost always followed by a violent, sometimes fratricidal struggle, as each male kinsman strove to claim the lion’s share.

The result of this idiosyncratic approach to inheritance was that Welsh politics were wont to be tumultuous. The fact that partibility applied at the highest levels was one of the main reasons why there was no single political authority in Wales as there was in England and Scotland. Welsh poets spoke of their country as if it were neatly divided into three kingdoms, but this was a broad simplification; the reality was a complex patchwork of petty lordships. Occasionally one ruler might, through force of arms, diplomacy or sheer good luck, contrive to establish something greater. But such constructs were always temporary. When a successful Welsh ruler died, his work was swiftly undone by the general carve-up that inevitably followed.

Such cultural and political differences meant that the English found it difficult to do business with the Welsh as they did with the Scots. Inherent instability meant that amicable relations were hard to sustain. The king of England could marry his daughter to the king of Scots, safe in the knowledge that her rights would be guaranteed; but he would not give her away to a Welsh ruler, no matter how great, for who knew how long his greatness might last?

And yet, if the English found the practice of partibility baffling, they were far more troubled when the Welsh showed any signs of abandoning it. From the start of the thirteenth century, up until the time of Edward’s birth, there had been a worrying (from the English point of view) movement in the direction of pan-Welsh political unity. Gwynedd, the most remote and traditional of Wales’s three ancient ‘kingdoms’, had extended its power from the mountains of Snowdonia to cover much of the rest of the country. When, therefore, the architect of this expansion, Llywelyn the Great, had died in 1240, Henry III had been quick to intervene and undo his work. In the years that followed, Gwynedd was torn down to size, and its pretensions to leadership were crushed. Llywelyn’s descendants were forcibly persuaded to follow traditional Welsh practice and share power among themselves. Lesser Welsh rulers who had formerly acknowledged Llywelyn’s mastery were disabused, and obliged to recognise that their proper overlord was, in actual fact, the king of England. Most contentiously, Henry confiscated and kept for himself a large and comparatively prosperous area of north Wales. Known as Perfeddwlad (middle country) to the Welsh, and as the Four Cantrefs to the English, this region between the rivers Dee and Conwy had been contested by both sides for hundreds of years, but Henry was determined that from that point on the English would retain it for good. The Four Cantrefs, he declared, were an inseparable part of the Crown of England, and to give force to this assertion he built two new royal castles there, one at Dyserth, the other at Deganwy. At the same time, lordship in the region was made more exacting. From their base at Chester, royal officials introduced English customs and practices, including more punitive financial demands. By 1254, when the Four Cantrefs (or ‘the king’s new conquest in Wales’, as they were now also being termed) were handed over to Edward as part of his endowment, the castles were complete, and the process of anglicisation well advanced. At the time of Edward’s visit two years later, his officials there were in a supremely confident mood. According to chronicle reports, his chief steward boasted openly before the king and queen that he had the Welsh in the palm of his hand.

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by | 6 September 2019 · 2:50 pm

Norman King Picks Saxon Name, 1239

From A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain, by Marc Morris (Pegasus, 2015), Kindle pp. 3-4:

Henry, although king of England, was ancestrally and culturally French. He and his family were direct descendants of William the Conqueror, the Norman duke who had snatched England’s throne some 170 years earlier. Similarly, his leading subjects were all directly descended from the Conqueror’s Norman companions. When they talked to each other they spoke French (or at least a slightly anglicised, Norman version of it), and, when they came to christen their children, they gave them French names. William (Guillaume), for example, was still a popular name, for obvious reasons. So too was Richard (Ricard), because it evoked the memory of Henry’s famous uncle, Richard the Lionheart. And Henry (Henri) itself was perfectly respectable and commonplace. Henry III might have been rather limited in his abilities, but his two namesake predecessors had both been fearsome and successful warrior kings, worthy of commemoration and emulation.

All these options, however, Henry rejected. He had no desire to father conquerors, or for that matter crusaders. Thanks to his own father, the notorious King John, he had grown up surrounded by uncertainty and conflict. John had died in the midst of a self-inflicted civil war, bequeathing to his son a kingdom scarred and divided. What Henry craved above all for himself and his subjects was peace, harmony and stability. And it was a reflection of this ambition that he decided to call his son Edward.

Edward was a deeply unfashionable name in 1239 – no king or nobleman had been lumbered with it since the Norman Conquest, because it belonged to the side that had lost. Edward was an Old English name, and it sounded as odd and outlandish to Norman ears after 1066 as other Old English names – Egbert, Æthelred, Egfrith – still sound to us today. To call a boy such a name after the Conquest was to invite ridicule; he was bound to be mocked by the Williams, Richards and Henrys who were his peers.

But Henry III had good reason for foisting this unfashionable name on his firstborn son. After his father’s death, his mother had abandoned him – Isabella of Angouleme left England for her homeland in France, remarried and never returned. Effectively orphaned from the age of nine, the young king had found substitute father figures among the elderly men who had helped him govern his kingdom. But these men too, Henry ultimately decided, had failed him, and by 1234 he found himself alone once more. It was at this point, though, that the king discovered a new mentor, a man who would never, ever let him down – largely because he had already been dead for the best part of two centuries.

Henry’s new patron was Edward the Confessor, the penultimate king of Anglo-Saxon England. Like Henry himself, Edward had not been a very successful ruler: his death in January 1066 had sparked the succession crisis that led to the Norman Conquest nine months later. Posthumously, however, Edward had acquired a reputation as a man of great goodness – so much so that, a century after his death, he had been officially recognised as a saint. Thereafter his reign had acquired the retrospective glow of a golden age: men spoke with great reverence about his good and just laws (even though, in reality, he never made any). Of course, the fact that Edward was not a great warrior had made him an unlikely exemplar for the conquering dynasty of kings who came after him. But to a man like Henry III, who was entirely lacking in military skill, the Confessor seemed the perfect role model.

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by | 10 April 2016 · 4:02 pm

European Peace Dividends, 1713

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down, by Colin Woodard (Mariner Books, 2008), Kindle Loc. 1212-1228:

WITH THE END of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, tens of thousands of sailors suddenly found themselves out of a job. The Royal Navy, bankrupted by the twelve-year-long world war, rapidly demobilized, mothballing ships and dumping nearly three-quarters of its manpower, over 36,000 men, in the first twenty-four months following the signing of the Peace of Utrecht. Privateering commissions ceased to have any value, their owners compelled to tie their warships up and turn the crews out onto the wharves of England and the Americas. With thousands of sailors begging for work in every port, merchant captains slashed wages by 50 percent; those lucky enough to find work had to survive on twenty-two to twenty-eight shillings (£1.1 to £1.4) a month.

Peace did not bring safety to those English sailors who found work in the West Indies. Spanish coast guard vessels, the guardas costas, continued to seize English vessels passing to and from Jamaica, declaring them smugglers if so much as a single Spanish coin were found aboard. They always found the “illicit” coins because they were the de facto currency of all of England’s Caribbean colonies. Thirty-eight Jamaican vessels were so seized in the first two years of peace, costing the vessel owners nearly £76,000. When the crews resisted, the guardas costas often killed a few in retribution; the rest spent months or years in Cuban prisons. “The seas,” the governor of Jamaica would later recall, had become “more dangerous than in time of war.”

As the months passed, the streets, taverns and boarding houses of Port Royal grew crowded with angry, destitute mariners. Merchants, stung by their losses, sent out fewer vessels, further reducing the number of jobs for sailors. Those sailors who had been captured—some more than once—were physically abused by the Spanish and financially pinched by their employers, who reduced their losses by not paying them for the time they were serving in prison. “Resentment and the want of employ,” one resident later recalled, “were certainly the motives to a course of life which I am of [the] opinion that most or many of them would not have taken up had they been redressed or could by any lawful mean have supported themselves.”

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