Category Archives: religion

by | 18 October 2023 · 6:19 am

Parliament’s New Model Army Officers, 1645

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 195-197:

The central political issue at Westminster was now the future of the Parliamentarian armies. The failure, of the old aristocratic generals, particularly Essex and Manchester, were creating serious unease about the leadership of the forces, but the issues ran deeper than this. Aristocrats like Essex were increasingly uncomfortable with the apparently democratic direction of their own side. That December, when the Lords were prevaricating over [Bishop] Laud, the Commons suggested that delay would lead to popular disorder. Essex was appalled, worrying that they were replacing ‘the yoke of the king’ with that of ‘the common people’. ‘I am determined,’ he announced, ‘to devote my life to repressing the audacity of the people.’

Manchester, meanwhile, was in the process of falling out dramatically with his most successful subordinate, Oliver Cromwell. The differences were religious, political and temperamental. The earl was a Presbyterian who valued the existing social order. Cromwell was a fiery radical, an Independent, and had rather less respect for hierarchy. Manchester fought in order to bring the king to a negotiated settlement, Cromwell to bring him to defeat.

More to the point, though, the rich aristocrats weren’t getting results in the field, so they were losing the argument at Westminster. In Parliament, hardliners, linked to the religious Independents and drawn from the war group, were pushing for radical reform of the forces. They were blocked by the more conservative ‘Presbyterians’, who drew on the peace party and were allied to the Scots. Eventually the debate resulted in an ordinance for ‘Self-Denying’, decreeing that no member of either House could hold a commission in the forces. The Lords blocked it, so attention then fell on another bill, this time to create a national army – drawn largely from the old Eastern Association – with central funding. It was to be a ‘New Model’: 22,000 strong: 14,400 infantry all in the same uniform, ‘Redcoats all’, with two musketeers to every pike; 6,600 cavalry, 1,000 dragoons. Its commander was to be the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Fairfax who though somewhat inexperienced and indeed occasionally unsuccessful on the field, was politically tepid and therefore acceptable to both Presbyterians and Independents. The experienced Philip Skippon, a hero of the European wars and of Turnham Green, was to lead the infantry. The command of the cavalry was left open, for the time being, though many MPs had a particular name in mind.

In April 1645, the Lords finally passed the Self-Denying Ordinance: this version forced everyone to resign their commission but left open the possibility of reappointment. Beneath the veneer of compromise, this was a profoundly important step: the old nobility, traditionally the military leaders of the country, were being sidelined in favour of professional soldiers like Fairfax and Skippon. As the William Lilly put it that year, ‘The nobility and gentry who have continued many generations are sinking and an inferior sort of people … are ascending.’ The New Model officer corps was made up of soldiers promoted by reason of their skill and zeal, not their birth. If they were gentry, they were from relatively minor families: men like John Lambert, Henry Ireton or Charles Fleetwood. Not poor men, by any means, and they often shared the experience of Oxbridge and the Inns of Court, but neither were they especially wealthy or well connected. And many of the New Model officers, like the firebrand Thomas Harrison and the yeoman’s son Thomas Pride, were drawn from outside the gentry entirely.

Then there was Oliver Cromwell. He was the man many MPs expected to take command of the cavalry. Although his position in the new army wasn’t yet secure – he was still an MP, of course – for many he was emblematic of that ‘inferior sort of people’. Born in 1599, he was in his mid-forties, with an ungainly face, fierce blue eyes and a hot temper. He was known for promoting comrades for talent rather than social position: ‘I had rather,’ he once wrote, ‘have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else.’ He himself was, as he put it, ‘by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity’, although his wife, Elizabeth Bourchier, came from a wealthy Essex family. After a brief spell at Cambridge, young Cromwell had suffered severe melancholy in his later twenties. Come the 1630s he was a farmer, and his income had fallen to around £100 a year. By that time he’d also experienced a Calvinist ‘conversion’, bringing a belief that he was one of the elect. His views at this point were probably those of a country Puritan: fiercely anti-Laudian and anti-Catholic. But in the course of a war in which he tramped the country as part of a disciplined force of cavalry ‘ironsides’, his views moved strongly towards Independency, and he was developing a deep distrust in the idea that state officers should force religious practices on the people.

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by | 16 October 2023 · 4:15 am

Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia, 1940

From Bessarabia: German Colonists on the Black Sea, by Ute Schmidt, trans. by James T. Gessele (Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, 2011), pp. 305-308:

The people of Bessarabia heard the news of a Soviet ultimatum on radio the evening before the invasion. It created profound shock in the German villages that soon paralyzed the entire country. It appeared that the Germans in Bessarabia would now meet the very same fate that they had escaped in 1918 by a stroke of luck. For years their friends and relatives on the other side of the Dniester kept them meticulously informed of the catastrophic effects of Soviet agrarian policies, collectivization and kulak persecutions, about famine and massive dying, political repression and deportation. The uncertainty over their future was enormous.

Gradually it leaked out that the German government was negotiating an evacuation, intending to transfer Germans in Bessarabia and North Bukovina to the German Reich. A precedent had been set in the fall of 1939 with the evacuation of about 67,000 Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia. In the winter of 1939–40, German resettlement commandos had removed an additional 130,000 Germans from Volhynia, Galicia and the Narev region towards the West across the new demarcation line.

In fact, a German delegation, residing in Moscow since July 22, 1940, was negotiating over the transfer of the population. On September 5, 1940, the “German-Soviet Russian Agreement Regarding the Resettlement of Germans from Bessarabia and North Bukovina” was signed. As news of this reached the German communities, it was greeted with an overwhelming sigh of relief. Meanwhile, during a better than two-month interval of excruciating uncertainty, it became clear to most of the Bessarabian Germans that the Soviet invasion meant the end of independent farming and a colonist culture founded on it for over five generations. as they had come to know it.

Agreeing to resettlement from their trusted home to a highly uncertain future required of the Bessarabian Germans a difficult decision. Especially for the older ones, evacuation meant a fundamental interruption to their way of life as they knew it that would demand of them and their families even more difficult adjustments ahead. On the other hand, they had no alternative if they wanted to avoid living in a Soviet sphere of power and partaking in the fate of other German colonists in the remaining Black Sea region—collectivization, deprivation of rights and deportation.

All the same, officers of the invading troops had generally treated the German population correctly. The promise of security that Molotov had made to the German government was largely adhered to. That was not true for the other nationalities. While the Germans were hardly bothered by the Soviet secret police (GPU)—except for isolated harassment or arrest—they were forced to observe how their affluent Russian, Jewish or Bulgarian neighbors were hauled off to interrogations—mostly at night—and often never heard of again. The German pastor, Erwin Meyer of the Leipzig, Bessarabia parish, wrote in his April 1941 personal essay:

“Almost none of the Germans were deported—many of the Russians, Bulgarians and well-to-do Jews were, however, taken away. Nothing was done to us, the pastors, but the Orthodox clergy had to immediately remove their vestments, cut their hair and shave off their beards—as was the case in Ismail. None of us Germans were evicted from our homes, but other nationalities were. German property was either not seized or returned immediately, but not in the case of others. Factories, mills and churches were not nationalized until shortly before our departure. We have German protection to thank for this.” (Jachomowski 1984, 61–62)

Not just fear of harassment from the Soviet secret police, but also the grave changes in everyday life in the wake of the Soviet occupation spurred on in the German villages a willingness to resettle. Shortages, mismanagement, deprivation of personal liberties and reprisals were on the horizon. Within a short time, consumer goods such as fabrics, notions, leather goods, sugar, salt, kerosene and tobacco were in short supply or available only at ever-increasing prices. The German community officials were dismissed and new village soviets formed. Local committees were placed under the jurisdiction of regional committees in which Russian communists set the agenda. The business world was also restructured. All private business was dissolved. Larger industrial firms and commercial enterprises remained largely intact but were placed under new managers. Even the German Commercial Association in Artsiz was reorganized after a Soviet model.

In contrast to this creeping dispossession, the property of German farmers, including large estate farmers, was not touched for the moment. They continued going about their work but were under the supervision of the village soviets. Soviet officials insisted that the harvest still be brought in before resettlement and, using absurd measures and harassment, often pressed hard against the work tempo and farming methods. The imposed and arbitrarily fixated taxes frequently exceeded the farmer’s proceeds but still had to be paid. Quickly, the accusation of sabotage came into play. Relatives and neighbors banded together to help out those farmers who had gotten into difficulties.

Church life and Stundist Brethren gatherings went mostly unhindered. Of course, holidays falling on work days were banned and, during the harvest, work had to be done on Sundays, too. In light of the profound disruptions in the lives of the German communities, Pastor Erwin Meyer came to the conclusion in his previously mentioned essay that “all rules and concepts, order and traditions and self-evident assumptions in living together with people” had been “turned upside down in the Soviet state.”

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by | 6 October 2023 · 4:15 pm

Two Social Exiles Emigrate

From My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (Houghton Mifflin, 1924), Book I, Chapter VIII:

When Pavel and Peter were young men, living at home in Russia, they were asked to be groomsmen for a friend who was to marry the belle of another village. It was in the dead of winter and the groom’s party went over to the wedding in sledges. Peter and Pavel drove in the groom’s sledge, and six sledges followed with all his relatives and friends.

After the ceremony at the church, the party went to a dinner given by the parents of the bride. The dinner lasted all afternoon; then it became a supper and continued far into the night. There was much dancing and drinking. At midnight the parents of the bride said good-bye to her and blessed her. The groom took her up in his arms and carried her out to his sledge and tucked her under the blankets. He sprang in beside her, and Pavel and Peter (our Pavel and Peter!) took the front seat. Pavel drove. The party set out with singing and the jingle of sleigh-bells, the groom’s sledge going first. All the drivers were more or less the worse for merry-making, and the groom was absorbed in his bride.

The wolves were bad that winter, and every one knew it, yet when they heard the first wolf-cry, the drivers were not much alarmed. They had too much good food and drink inside them. The first howls were taken up and echoed and with quickening repetitions. The wolves were coming together. There was no moon, but the starlight was clear on the snow. A black drove came up over the hill behind the wedding party. The wolves ran like streaks of shadow; they looked no bigger than dogs, but there were hundreds of them.

Something happened to the hindmost sledge: the driver lost control,—he was probably very drunk,—the horses left the road, the sledge was caught in a clump of trees, and overturned. The occupants rolled out over the snow, and the fleetest of the wolves sprang upon them. The shrieks that followed made everybody sober. The drivers stood up and lashed their horses. The groom had the best team and his sledge was lightest—all the others carried from six to a dozen people.

Another driver lost control. The screams of the horses were more terrible to hear than the cries of the men and women. Nothing seemed to check the wolves. It was hard to tell what was happening in the rear; the people who were falling behind shrieked as piteously as those who were already lost. The little bride hid her face on the groom’s shoulder and sobbed. Pavel sat still and watched his horses. The road was clear and white, and the groom’s three blacks went like the wind. It was only necessary to be calm and to guide them carefully.

At length, as they breasted a long hill, Peter rose cautiously and looked back. “There are only three sledges left,” he whispered.

“And the wolves?” Pavel asked.

“Enough! Enough for all of us.”

Pavel reached the brow of the hill, but only two sledges followed him down the other side. In that moment on the hilltop, they saw behind them a whirling black group on the snow. Presently the groom screamed. He saw his father’s sledge overturned, with his mother and sisters. He sprang up as if he meant to jump, but the girl shrieked and held him back. It was even then too late. The black ground-shadows were already crowding over the heap in the road, and one horse ran out across the fields, his harness hanging to him, wolves at his heels. But the groom’s movement had given Pavel an idea.

They were within a few miles of their village now. The only sledge left out of six was not very far behind them, and Pavel’s middle horse was failing. Beside a frozen pond something happened to the other sledge; Peter saw it plainly. Three big wolves got abreast of the horses, and the horses went crazy. They tried to jump over each other, got tangled up in the harness, and overturned the sledge.

When the shrieking behind them died away, Pavel realized that he was alone upon the familiar road. “They still come?” he asked Peter.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Twenty, thirty—enough.”

Now his middle horse was being almost dragged by the other two. Pavel gave Peter the reins and stepped carefully into the back of the sledge. He called to the groom that they must lighten—and pointed to the bride. The young man cursed him and held her tighter. Pavel tried to drag her away. In the struggle, the groom rose. Pavel knocked him over the side of the sledge and threw the girl after him. He said he never remembered exactly how he did it, or what happened afterward. Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.

Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever since. They were run out of their village. Pavel’s own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves. Wherever they went, the story followed them. It took them five years to save money enough to come to America. They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.

Pavel died a few days after he unburdened his mind to Mr. Shimerda, and was buried in the Norwegian graveyard. Peter sold off everything, and left the country—went to be cook in a railway construction camp where gangs of Russians were employed.

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by | 3 October 2023 · 6:52 am

English Civil War Not a Class Struggle

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 180-182:

England was divided. Political crisis had escalated and the country’s differences would have to be settled on the battlefield. Now that the king’s initial plan to take London had floundered in the face of mass opposition at Turnham Green, both sides were digging in for a longer conflict than anyone wanted.

Broadly, the king was strong in the north, the west and in Wales; Parliament in the south and east. But this isn’t the whole story: Puritan towns in Royalist regions, like Bolton, Manchester or Dorchester supported Parliament. Even individual families could be torn asunder. When the son of Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh, declared for Parliament, she wrote to him trying to persuade him to change his mind. His refusal to support the king, she told him, was more painful to her than childbirth: ‘I do more travail with sorrow for the grief I suffer for the ways that you take,’ she wrote, ‘than I ever did to bring you into this world.’ London was split, though control for now lay with Parliament. Hold of the capital was both a blessing and a curse. A grumbling hive of disorder and opinions, it was hard to control, yet it boasted a huge wealth of manpower and money, not to mention the lion’s share of the English print trade. It was, though, also a great target: if the Royalists could take London, they might break the Parliamentarian war effort at one blow.

The aristocracy were mostly Royalist, though with some major exceptions like Warwick, Mandeville (now the Earl of Manchester) and Northumberland. In fact, fully a quarter of Charles’s old Privy Council ended up as Parliamentarians. Beneath them, the gentry were more evenly divided. In many areas they were instinctively Royalist: it was said because they hated the common people more than they hated tyranny. ‘How many of the nobility and gentry were contented to serve arbitrary designs,’ asked the radical Parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow, ‘if they might have leave to insult over such as were of a lower order?’ That said, in parts of the country, notably the south-east, the gentry were largely Parliamentarian.

Beneath the gentry we have less idea, though there were evidently real divides and genuinely heartfelt opinions. Some thought the middling sort were more likely to support Parliament. The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson remembered how most of the Nottinghamshire gentry were Royalist, but ‘most of the middle sort, the able substantial freeholders, and the other commons, who had not their dependence upon the malignant nobility and gentry’, were Parliamentarian. In Gloucestershire, meanwhile, the king’s support was alleged to come from the rich and the ‘needy multitude’ who depended on them, while ‘the yeomen, farmers, clothiers, and the whole middle rank of people’ supported Parliament.

There were plenty of members of the middling sort who supported the king, though, and statements such as those just quoted should certainly not be understood as implying the war was neatly divided on a class basis. Rather, they showed that people were taking notice of the apparently newfound political consciousness of the middle sort of people. They were evidently acting independently of their superiors, and this was worthy of comment.

More to the point, the suggestion by some on the Parliamentarian side that those below the middle ranks who followed the king did so simply out of dependence on the rich should be treated very carefully. The reality was that each side’s war effort relied on support from across the social spectrum. This wasn’t just a mobilisation of the rich followed blindly by the poor. When London, for example, built up its defences against a potential Royalist attack, the work was done by thousands of ordinary women and men from the capital: a vast, collective project. Women, sniffed a Royalist some years later, ‘From ladies down to oyster wenches / Laboured like pioneers in trenches.’ In the end, perhaps around a quarter of adult males would fight – and they were supported by everyone else, men and women. Women, indeed, would look after soldiers, and would work on civil defences, among so much else. Sometimes they would even fight in battles. Some donned men’s clothes and joined the armies, or fought to defend towns, such as the woman at the siege of Gloucester who took potshots at the enemy from the city’s defences. The war affected everyone, and everyone took part in one way or another.

The Civil War wasn’t a class struggle. It was a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class. The Royalists were anti-Puritan, they stood by the old hierarchies in the Church, notably bishops. They were nostalgic for ‘Merry England’ before it was ruined by Puritans moping at their books. Parliamentarians claimed they were fighting for God and the constitution; Royalists did, too.

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by | 1 October 2023 · 3:40 pm

English Factions Choose Sides, 1642

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 169-171:

By summer 1642, not only were there two distinctive political ideologies at play, but the Parliamentarian side were starting to argue – grounded in a theory of popular sovereignty – for wresting control of the executive away from the king.

The warm months were spent jockeying for support in the country. Great ‘musters’ for Parliament took place in a number of counties under the Militia Ordinance, with thousands of men turning out with arms and horses; Charles responded by activating the old medieval device of ‘Commissions of Array’, which called people out to join him to defend the realm. It was a long-lapsed mechanism, and many considered it of dubious legality. The commissions were also in Latin, which hardly helped. But some musters under the Array did take place. And where both opposing sides were hoping to take control of the same strategic town or arsenal, there were moments of confrontation, even if both sides were reluctant to fire the first shot. In July, in Manchester, a skirmish broke out that resulted in at least one death. The Midlands was said to be ‘like a cockpit one spurring against another’. Another scrap took place near Street in Somerset, followed by a confrontation on the Mendips in which the Marquess of Hertford, attempting to recruit for the king, was opposed by a large gathering of 12,000 Somerset men and was forced to retreat.

The navy backed Parliament: both king and Junto tried to get its support, but it was the latter’s man, the Earl of Warwick, who got to the Downs first, and it was Warwick the sailors wanted anyway. Most towns, too, were Parliamentarian, although many were split. Oxford and Cambridge universities were Royalist, while the towns themselves supported Parliament. Similarly, in many cathedral cities, the townsmen were Parliamentarian, while the clergy in the close were Royalist. In Canterbury, one Royalist minister worried ‘that we can hardly look upon one another in charity’.

Some places tried to avoid taking sides: the Isle of Wight, in August, simply declared itself neutral, while Lincolnshire and Staffordshire went so far as to raise men to defend the county borders from all comers. Bulstrode Whitelocke, a lawyer who had been involved in the Strafford trial, was horrified by it all. ‘It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea.’ We ‘scarce know how,’ he lamented, ‘but from paper combats…we are now come to the question of raising forces, and naming a General and officers of our army.’

The drift to war was shocking and unfathomable. If only Charles had defeated the Scots; if only the Irish rebellion hadn’t broken out; if only the king hadn’t launched his ham-fisted coup against the Five Members. Charles’s own unwillingness to part with his prerogatives without a fight or a plot didn’t help, but then isn’t it also unfair to expect someone brought up to expect divinely ordained rights to power to give that up freely? More to the point, the coming war had deeper causes. It was born out of fundamental disagreements over faith and government: about religious conformity and about the proper role of Parliament in the constitution, and, of course, also about the monarch: whether they could override human laws and if they did, could the people legitimately resist.

Those disagreements had been played out in a world of rising literacy, particularly among the middle sort of people and the gentry, and particularly in London. The people had been crucial. At key moments, the opposition of a significant segment of the English population – whether their reluctance to mobilise against the Scots, their willingness to elect opposition MPs twice in 1640, the petitions that reached Westminster, the demonstrations against Strafford, the iconoclasm of 1641 and, most of all, the great popular uprising in London in the winter of 1641–2 – had prevented Charles from keeping control. The breakdown wasn’t just about mistakes by politicians and the king. It was about the politicisation of the English population.

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by | 20 September 2023 · 6:58 am

Romania’s Minority Gymnasts

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 66-67, 69-70:

There was no law forbidding persons from Romania’s ethnic minorities from holding positions of responsibility, but it wasn’t encouraged. From 1952 onwards, Gheorghiu-Dej set about Romanianising the central apparatus of the Party, inspired by the anti-Semitic purges that had taken place in the Soviet Union, but it was Nicolae Ceauşescu who imposed an emphasis on nation and state in the political discourse. By 1975, the nationalist discourse was flourishing, promoted in various forms. The media and cultural outlets saturated the public with works that claimed that Romania was a cradle of civilisation, that the Romanian people had a heroic past stretching from Burebista to the emergence of the Communist Party, a discourse that went hand in hand with a reserved attitude towards minorities, which by now were referred to as ‘foreign elements’ and who were denied any significant part in the country’s history.

Therefore, in 1975, the Securitate was trying to gain a clear picture of the Oneşti staff and to recruit as many of them as possible, and each new informer that joined the network was pressured to write reports on his or her colleagues and the working atmosphere. The following year, by which time the number of agents had increased, and the volume of information had likewise burgeoned in consequence, it was as if the objectives on which the secret police thought they should concentrate also came into clearer focus, and the most important of these proved to be Béla Károlyi.

Although in the meantime he had achieved significant successes and had himself been recruited as an informer, Béla Károlyi became a target of systematic surveillance, for a number of reasons. His collaboration with the Securitate left a lot to be desired and it became increasingly obvious that he was going to be dropped as an agent. The Securitate officers in Oneşti and Bucharest, respectively Vasile Miriţă and Nicolae Ilie, didn’t like him, due to his arrogance and even defiance. Agent ‘Nelu’, who wrote a number of reports about Károlyi during this period, signalled that he was saving up money and intended ultimately not to return to the country from abroad. He informed the Securitate that Károlyi sometimes alluded to the fact that Hungarians were discriminated against in Romania and was in the habit of making tendentious remarks about national leaders. But above all else, he reported that Károlyi was abusive towards the gymnasts he trained.

…

At the beginning of 1976, the relationship between Károlyi and the Securitate deteriorated further, and he was accused of a number of faults, including ‘a nationalist-chauvinist position.’ …

During the Montréal Olympics, one of the Securitate officers in the Romanian delegation claimed that Károlyi ‘pressured Romanian judge Liţă Emilia, demanding that she ask the other judges in the uneven parallel bars brigade to award higher marks to a Hungarian gymnast so that she could win the silver medal instead of Teodora Ungureanu. I mention that Károlyi Béla exerted this pressure because he is friendly with the trainer of the Hungarian team, the gymnast in question being his wife. The Romanian judge categorically refused to do so, replying that Teodora Ungureanu was clearly superior to the Hungarian gymnast.’

The Securitate continued to make a great deal of the fact that the Károlyi’s were more Hungarian than Romanian and might even be secretly involved in what it termed ‘hostile actions’. In December 1977, by which time a surveillance file on ‘Katona’ [= Béla] had been opened, a study draw up by Department One stated that during his frequent trips abroad ‘he might be contacted and lured into disloyal actions by reactionary elements hostile to our country. To this can be added the fact that being a citizen of Hungarian nationality the target might be in the sights of hostile elements inside the country, as well as among reactionary Hungarian emigrants.’

Did Béla Károlyi harbour nationalist prejudices? Even if only privately, did he proclaim Hungarian superiority over Romanians? Károlyi was too pragmatic to be a ‘nationalist-chauvinist’, and we believe the Securitate’s accusation to have been ungrounded. Károlyi was enough of an opportunist to favour gymnastic talent regardless of ethnic background, and his preference for working with Hungarian gymnasts and trainers was only natural; any ethnic Romanian in Hungary would have done the same.

However, when the Károlyis later had serious conflicts with the Romanian Gymnastics Federation and frequently claimed they were marginalised because of their Hungarian ethnicity, such a position was also at odds with the truth. Ethnic insults were flung from both sides. During telephone calls recorded by the Securitate, Romanians whose relationship with the Károlyis was tense used to claim that Béla ignored all contrary opinions because he was a bozgor [an ethnic slur for a Hungarian], while in 1976 Béla was recorded stating his agreement with the opinion that ‘it’s still the Hungarians who have to do the Romanians’ jobs for them.’

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by | 9 September 2023 · 2:57 pm

Roles of English Print Media in 1640s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The Protestation Oath [of allegiance to the King and Church of England] had now been printed and was being circulated around the country, and people in their thousands were swearing to it. Tonnage and Poundage [import/export duties] was soon abolished. So, too, was Star Chamber, the Councils of Wales and North, and the hated [ecclesiastical] court of High Commission. In the summer, Ship Money would be annulled, and knighthood fines declared illegal. Step by step, the apparatus of Charles’s Personal Rule was being picked apart.

Pamphlets were streaming off the presses, as an excited and literate capital tried to make sense of what had been happening down the road at Westminster. There are just over 600 surviving titles per year for the 1630s, and this figure had risen slightly, to 848 for 1640. In 1641, there are 2,042. It was an astonishing explosion of print. Henry Burton, who had experienced brutal censorship first-hand, recalled how ‘many mouths were stopped, many shut up’, but ‘Parliament hath opened their mouths…it has opened the prisons.’ Or, in the lavishly biblical allusion of another Puritan author, ‘the stone that made the stoppage of the well of Haran is now removed and the flocks of Laban may drink freely’. The works of Prynne, Burton, Leighton were now freely available.

Print helped bring a great flowering of new religious groups especially in and around London. In July, the Venetian ambassador reported drily that there seemed ‘as many religions as there were persons’. Even in the Parliamentary pulpit at St Margaret’s, in the small church under Westminster Abbey, radicals told of tearing down Babylon, building up Zion and the planting of a new heaven and a new earth. That summer, Burton declared that the Church of England had become anti-Christian, and advocated the creation of independent congregations, in which people gathered with no direction from above, to worship together as they pleased. Sometimes, so the reports went, groups met on the dark peripheries of the capital: Hackney Marsh and the hills around Hampstead and Highgate. Other congregations gathered in suburban houses, and by the end of the year there was even one led by the radical leather-seller Praisegod Barebone that met in his house on the Strand.

Religious enthusiasts from humble backgrounds, so-called ‘mechanic’ preachers, were giving sermons in public. One of Henry Burton’s followers, Katherine Chidley, scandalised readers by arguing that true ministers could be ‘tailors, felt-makers, button-makers, tent-makers, shepherds or ploughmen’. The press made the most of it all, and in the journalists’ insatiable desire for sensation, they contributed to a wider sense that old certainties were collapsing. While many stories about weird and worrisome radicals were undoubtedly written for laughs, more nervous readers still trembled at the lurid horror. There were reports of naked Adamites, of Anabaptists and Brownists, even Muslims and ‘Bacchanalian’ pagans, not to mention those worshipping the planetary deities of Saturn and Jupiter. One tract laughed at a mechanic preacher who spoke ‘like a Lancashire bagpipe’ so (fortunately) ‘the people could scarce understand any word’. Another delighted and horrified its readers in equal measure with its cast of concocted female radicals: ‘Agnes Anabaptist, Kate Catabaptist, Frank [< Frances] Footbaptist, Penelope Punk, Merald Makebate, Ruth Rakehell, Tabitha Tattle, Pru Prattle, and that poor silly, simple, senseless, sinless, shameless, naked wretch, Alice the Adamite’.

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by | 7 September 2023 · 10:38 am

Parliament Challenges Charles I

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-132:

Charles’s military preparations stopped. If he had been planning a coup against Parliament, then it had been outflanked. With his chief adviser under guard, the king was drastically weakened.

Now that [Thomas Wentworth, Earl of] Strafford was out of the way, and on the 25th had been moved to the Tower through a jeering crowd, Parliament could turn to business. Top of the agenda was the staging of huge public rehabilitations for those who had suffered during the king’s Personal Rule.

On the 16th, Bishop John Williams was released from the Tower by the Lords. Even before that, after an emotional speech by a rather scruffy East Anglian MP called Oliver Cromwell, orders had been made for the release of Alexander Leighton and a spirited young polemicist named John Lilburne – imprisoned in 1638 for importing ‘scandalous’ books from the Netherlands. The biggest celebration, though, came on the 28th, when – on a crisp sunny Saturday – Henry Burton and William Prynne returned from imprisonment to the capital. Church bells chimed amid a chorus of cheers as the men processed slowly through town. There were so many followers, throwing flowers and herbs from their gardens, that it took the procession a reported three hours to pass Charing Cross.

Now, as winter approached, the work of unpicking Charles’s government could begin. ‘[T]here was never, I dare say, so busy a time in England,’ wrote one correspondent. Soon, though, Londoners staged a stunning intervention which threatened to disturb the whole project. On 11 December, braving the icy cold, a delegation of some 1,500 citizens crowded into Westminster Hall bringing with them a printed petition, signed by 10,000. It blamed the bishops for everything from problems in the cloth industry, to ‘whoredoms and adulteries’, to the ‘swarming of lascivious, idle and unprofitable books’. It asked not just for reform of religious abuses, but that the episcopacy itself be abolished, ‘with all its dependencies, roots and branches’. Here was the potential for a complete radicalisation of the reform agenda. More to the point, the sight of so many ordinary Londoners, petitioning publicly for the uprooting of the ecclesiastical order was staggering.

For now, Parliament carried on, confining itself to attacking the worst excesses of Archbishop Laud. Just five days after the London petition, the Canons of 1640 were declared illegal; Laud himself was impeached two days after that, and detained. The most far-reaching proposal in Parliament, though, was not a religious one. It came in the last week of December when, on Christmas Eve, the Devonian MP William Strode introduced a bill mandating annual Parliaments: if passed, it would ensure Parliament’s permanent sitting. The gauntlet had been thrown.

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by | 4 September 2023 · 1:52 pm

How Charles I Alienated Scotland

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-110:

By 1637 the outcry over the Book of Sports had calmed. In fact, that year had started with a victory for Charles. In February he had written to his 12 judges of the Common Law to shore up the legal case behind Ship Money. He asked two questions, clearly expecting a positive answer. The first question was whether, when the ‘good and safety of the kingdom’ required it, could he demand ships from his people. The second was whether it was he, as king, who was to decide what constituted a threat to that ‘good and safety’. Two of the judges were uncertain, but eventually all 12 fell behind the king and gave him the answer he wanted.

But then, in spring, the government committed a needless and damaging blunder. It was decided to make an example of three of the most clamorous Puritan writers. One was William Prynne, whose confinement in the Tower had done nothing to stall his literary career. The other two were the physician John Bastwick and Henry Burton, former clerk of the closet to Princes Henry and Charles, now a radical and thoroughly disgruntled Puritan. In early 1637, they were tried before Star Chamber for seditious libel and sentenced to pillorying, whipping and having their ears – in Prynne’s case the remaining parts of his ears – cut off. The three were then to be detained in far-flung corners of the realm: Jersey (Prynne), the Isles of Scilly (Bastwick) and Lancaster (Burton). The punishments were harsh, and their infliction on members of the social elite particularly offensive. More to the point, the men behaved like martyrs. Three times, shocked crowds watched as the blood poured down from the pillory, and the victims were cheered and garlanded as they progressed to their places of imprisonment. Far from instilling fear and respect, the government had managed to make themselves look like vicious tyrants.

What brought the king’s peace to a juddering halt, though, was not the prosecution of Prynne, Burton and Bastwick, but events in Scotland. Charles was born a Scot, but he’d left as a toddler and was seen there as thoroughly Anglicised. He didn’t help his reputation much in 1625 when he pushed a radical plan, known as the ‘Revocation’, to reclaim all lands granted by the Scottish crown since 1540, plus any properties owned by the pre-Reformation Kirk. It was a serious threat to the Scottish nobility, who had been the main beneficiaries of the land transfers, although the following year it was announced that they’d at least be adequately compensated. Charles had then waited nearly eight years before coming to Scotland to be crowned as their king, and when he did so – in 1633 – it had been a disaster. The Scottish Kirk maintained a much stronger Presbyterian tradition than the Church of England. In 1618, James had pushed back against this, bolstering the power of the Scottish bishops and trying to enforce such traditional practices as kneeling at communion and the celebration of Christmas and Easter. Charles wanted to go further. He wanted to draw Scotland closer to conformity with England and its now increasingly ceremonialist Church. It was a project that quickly provoked serious disquiet.

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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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