Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on ‘Glory Smear'd in Dust and Blood’)

“These eyes, that now are dimm'd with death's black veil,
Have been as piercing as the mid-day sun,
To search the secret treasons of the world:
The wrinkles in my brows, now filled with blood,
Were liken'd oft to kingly sepulchres;
For who lived king, but I could dig his grave?
And who durst mine when Warwick bent his brow?
Lo, now my glory smear'd in dust and blood!
My parks, my walks, my manors that I had
Even now forsake me, and of all my lands
Is nothing left me but my body's length.
Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must.”—Richard Neville, 16^th Earl of Warwick, in William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry VI Part 3, Act 5, Scene 2

Yes, I know I had a Shakespeare quote yesterday. But the one above fit perfectly with what happened on this day in 1471: Richard Neville, the 16^th Earl of Warwick, was mortally wounded by the forces of King Edward IV at the Battle of Barnet, with a display of the foolish pride that had already plunged England into decades of civil war.

“Kingmaker,” Warwick’s nickname, rhymes with “Kingslayer,” Jaime Lannister’s moniker in both the George R. R. Martin novel sequence A Song of Ice and Fire as well as its television adaptation, Game of Thrones.

But other Martin characters probably more closely resemble this stealthy and cunning warrior-politician of the tumultuous War of the Roses, including Jaime’s father Tywin Lannister, Mace Tyrell and Littlefinger.

What Warwick has in common with these figures is overweening pride and a willingness to exercise power behind the scenes while avoiding public responsibility. This power behind the throne makes and breaks with allies at will—switching sides, and switching sides again—in this tumultuous era of English history.

The Warwicks of the world are made possible because of weak, incompetent leadership that creates a vacuum of chaos where ambitious men can operate without accountability.

As scholar Stephen Greenblatt points out in his perceptive and timely study of Shakespeare’s treatment of politics, Tyrant, Warwick professes to have no more knowledge of the law than a jackdaw, an aviary byword for stupidity.

But, in the compromise-averse climate that prevails in the conflict between the Dukes of York and Somerset—the “War of the Roses”—he becomes as caught up in the rhetorically violent atmosphere as anyone else. Insurrection and contempt for anyone weaker than one’s self become the order of the day.

Warwick’s career demonstrates that, whether in medieval England or modern America, struggles for power often hinge less on principle or even loyalty than on perceived offenses to one’s pride that produce rancor and opportunism.

But now, the world has taken on another aspect under “death’s black veil,” Warwick admits ruefully. He has no wealth, no land except the plot of ground that will hold his corpse (“my body's length”). The wages of his rancor at blows to his pride and his unabashed opportunism are only “earth and dust.” Or, as Thomas Gray put it more succinctly in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

(The image accompanying this throne is the actor Stanley Townsend, playing the Earl of Warwick in the 2016 PBS series The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, based on Shakespeare’s three-part Henry VI as well as Richard III.)

This Day in English History (Birth of Catherine of Aragon, First—and Best—of Henry’s Six Wives)

Dec. 16, 1485—Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage into the Tudor dynasty was intended to advance power relations between two of Europe’s major royal houses but wound up putting them at odds and widening the continent’s Catholic-Protestant fracture, was born in Alcala de Henares, Spain, the last child of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile.

Catherine’s pivotal role in the fate of Europe came about, of course, because she was the first of the six wives of King Henry VIII of England—the king whose desire to obtain a divorce set off England’s violent and protracted split from Catholicism. For years, schoolchildren desperate to distinguish her fate from that of her successors as Henry’s wives remembered that she was the first in the following helpful mnemonic device:

“Divorced, beheaded, died;
Divorced, beheaded, survived.”

I first became aware of this wronged woman back in the summer of 1971, through the U.S. premiere of the BBC mini-series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. As fine as the series (and especially Keith Michell as Henry) was, it helped further the general visual representation of Catherine as an aging, tired, pious spouse unable to compete with court minx Anne Boleyn.

That picture needs some adjustment. Particularly at the beginning of their marriage in 1509, Catherine was regarded as having few rivals for beauty in England. At the time, 18-year-old Henry not only had no problems with her, but was even eager to wed this attractive widow of his older, sicklier brother, Prince Arthur. “She was 23, plump and pretty, and had beautiful red-gold hair that hung below her hips,” according to historian Alison Weir. “Henry spoke openly of the joy and felicity he had found with Catherine.”

Many people have written about Catherine over the years, in fiction and nonfiction alike. One of the more fascinating accounts is Garrett Mattingly’s 1941 biography, Catherine of Aragon, which approaches her from his primary interest: diplomatic history. 

Expertly using recently discovered archives in Vienna and Brussels, Mattingly depicted a woman who needed all her strength, intelligence and faith to keep her footing amid neglect by her father, court intrigues waged by royals, envoys and clerics, and settlement in a strange foreign land—all at the hands of males who, more often than not, did not have her best interests in mind.

But one drawback of this biography is its author’s male point of view. Mattingly simply couldn’t understand why Catherine might quarrel with Henry over his infidelity. After all, royal wenching was the norm in that time. Even Catherine’s father, Ferdinand, was unfaithful.

It seems never to have occurred to Mattingly that some women are sincerely bothered by husbands who can’t control their wayward impulses—and don’t even try.

There is a further irony in Catherine’s sad fate: though Henry came to fault her inability to produce a male heir, neither could Anne Boleyn--and the one he was eventually able to have, crowned Edward VI, lasted on the throne only six years before dying himself.

For all his sexism, Mattingly couldn’t help praising Catherine for her “core of iron self-reliance [and] lonely stubbornness.” Like him and the current saucy interpreter of the royals, Lucy Worsley, I, too, am a member of “Team Catherine.”

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Link Between the Past and Posterity)

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”—Anglo-Irish orator and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Flashback, November 1688: William of Orange Invades England

Though invited by Protestant commanders and politicians to assume the British crown, Dutch-born William of Orange was taking no chances. He landed in November 1688 at Torbay, England, with 53 warships,1,700 cannon, 20,000 men, and 7,000 horses—enough to precipitate the most successful invasion of England since William the Conqueror did so in 1066.

Victors not only get to write the histories but even to coin the terms by which these are understood, and the successful conquest (who became William III once he assumed the English throne) only confirms the point. The series of military and political developments that followed, involving the end of the monarch William came to overthrow—his own father-in-law, King James II—came to be called “The Glorious Revolution.”

That “revolution” was meant as a marker in the evolution from “the divine right of kings” proclaimed by James toward a more constrained, constitutional monarchy, setting the seeds for democracy in North America. 

But the ouster of James was far less “glorious” to two groups that had benefited from his policy of toleration: Protestant Dissenters who had taken issue with the Church of England, now experiencing a severe setback, and Roman Catholics, who, especially in Ireland, found themselves at bay in every corner of society for supporting their co-religionist James, who ended up with the dubious distinction of being the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland.

It would also be a mistake to regard William simply as the guarantor of a new tolerance, a royal who ruled through restraint. As a 19^th-century American political boss would put it, he saw his opportunity and took it. The elected ruler of the Dutch Republic, William would much rather govern without someone looking over his shoulder. 

Fortunately for him, the tumultuous political situation in the home country of his wife, Princess Mary of England, presented that opportunity—and James could claim the proper lineage for those concerned about such things. Mary, James’ eldest daughter, was heir to the throne if the king didn’t sire a child, while William’s mother was James's older sister. This made the king his uncle and Mary his cousin as well as his wife.

For all his interest in military affairs, William, at least at this point, did not enjoy a reputation as a commander superior to his father-in-law. James, through his secretary of the navy, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, had served creditably as Lord High Admiral. He had also won a victory over the Dutch in 1665.

But William had it all over James in craft and guile, holding his own counsel until he could reasonably assess those with whom he came in contact. Other men—very much including James’ older brother, King Charles II—would have been inclined to move slowly in a country where Catholics constituted only 6% of the population. Not James. 

The worldliness, wit, and winking attitude toward matters of the flesh so characteristic of Restoration comedy took their cue from the libertine nicknamed “the Merry Monarch.” As if that weren’t enough, Charles also proved powerfully adept at warding off potentially lethal political blows. 

But James’ obstinacy and arrogance reminded older government officials all too much of his father, and why he ended up executed. What could have been a political masterstroke--a Declaration of Indulgence that exempted Catholics and Dissenters from penal laws, moving the nation toward genuine tolerance--turned into a blunder when he dissolved Parliament, forced clergy and bishops to read the Declaration from their pulpits, and prosecuted the seven bishops who refused to comply.

Nevertheless, even a ruler without James’ undeniable faults might not have avoided sharing his fate, for as a Catholic convert—one who took his faith very seriously—he represented a direct threat to the power and influence wielded by Protestants in both government and the military. His more reluctant supporters were willing to bide their time in the hope that upon the death of 55-year-old James, the throne would pass to his Protestant daughter Mary.

But the announcement of an heir to the aging monarch and his wife, the Catholic Maria of Modena, who successfully gave birth in her late 40s after several miscarriages, still births and deaths in infancy energized the opposition and catalyzed the Resistance of the time. The news came on the heels of more pronouncements indicating that James, unlike Charles, was serious about his faith.

In contrast, out of necessity growing up, William learned how to maintain a veil of discretion, according to Thomas Babington Macaulay in his influential but problematic The History of England, from the Accession of James II: “Long before he reached manhood, he knew how to keep secrets, how to baffle curiosity by dry and guarded answers; how to conceal all passions under the same show of grave tranquility.”

All through 1688, William set the stage for his armada, working swiftly but surreptitiously, without letting key factions supporting him know what was happening on other fronts:

*He hired the most combat-ready soldiers from armies across Europe;

*He worked non-stop on the logistics of the expected campaign, with the help of the breadmakers of Rotterdam and the gunsmiths of Utrecht;

*He secured financial backing from banks, from Huguenots who had carried precious metals with them when they fled religious persecution, and gold equaling a hundred thousand guineas, from secret British supporters—all to go along with what the parsimonious William had put aside for an emergency;

*He exploited the religious resentments of Protestants even as he assured Catholics they had nothing to fear from him—winning the support of key members of the military and Church of England, while telling prominent English Catholics that James’ favoritism would only excite mobs who would perpetrate untold mayhem upon them; and,

*He allowed King Louis XIV to play into his hands, as Protestants all over Northern Europe came to fear that the Catholic “Sun King” would ally himself with an increasingly assertive co-religionist on the English throne.

The conspiracy against James might have unraveled but for perhaps England’s ablest soldier of the time secretly joining their ranks. Two and a half centuries, his illustrious descendant, Sir Winston Churchill, strenuously attempted to explain the conduct of John Churchill during this crisis, but it just won’t wash. It’s hard to do so given Churchill’s desire for preferment and riches; his profession of loyalty to the point of death to James, even as he was plotting to desert the king; and his advice to his monarch to visit Warminster, where he could be kidnapped.

As I explained in a prior post, this lieutenant general can easily be charged with ingratitude, since Charles and James had raised him from humble circumstances to preeminence in the English military. But, for all his justifications to the contrary, opportunism played the decisive role in his switch to William of Orange, who ended up naming him Duke of Marlborough. That opportunism can be seen in John Churchill’s secret letter several years later to James, in an attempt to get back into his good graces.

That letter illustrated nothing so much as Churchill’s lack of insight into political reality. In the interim, James had dismayed his followers by fleeing to France instead of confronting William; by leaving Ireland after losing the Battle of the Boyne; and by being unable to get over the destruction of another fleet, staffed by Louis XIV, before his very eyes.

England avoided a civil war, but because James lost his bid to remain in power, Catholics would continue to be second-class citizens until passage of Daniel O’ Connell’s Emancipation bill of 1829.

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on How Men Are Ruined)

“All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.” —Anglo-Irish orator, statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)