You can always tell by the magisterial prose when a book was written by Churchill, and The Birth of Britain is no exception. The first volume of Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples is one of his later works (completed 1956, after Churchill had suffered multiple strokes and handed the keys to Number 10 over to Eden). It covers the period from prehistory up until the battle of Bosworth (I don't know why we always date the end of the middle ages to the battle of Bosworth, but we do). Of course, for most of that period the British Isles weren't occupied by anyone speaking anything close to English, but Churchill doesn't let that stop him. Although inaccurate, I did find it quite refreshing; it's nice to see the Anglo-Saxons get some love. We tend to start English history in 1066, which means we miss some of the coolest names (Edmund Ironside, Ulfkill Snilling*) and most interesting events (St Brice's Day massacre) in history. The book is primarily designed to offer a popular introduction to British (well, mainly English) history; it leans heavily on kings and bishops - there's not much social history to be had. And it also tends to repeat romantic stories which are of slightly dubious provenance (Eleanor of Aquitaine offering fair Rosamund a dagger or a cup of poison, for instance). That, combined with the sometimes overbearing prose and a slightly cavalier approach to historical fact (Churchill was never one to let facts seriously get in the way of a good story - a perspective I can appreciate, but not condone in a history book) mean that I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who didn't already know a lot about English history. If you do like English history, and you appreciate the prose style, it's not a bad way to pass an evening or two.
I was struck by a couple of things whilst I read through the book. One was the comparison between William the Conqueror and his sons and the Godfather; William I had three sons -
It is also interesting that, although history is usually written by the victors, Harold Godwinsson gets a surprisingly good write up. Courageous, cunning, funny, there always seems to be a feeling that although William I won, Harold really should have. Partly, I think it's the typical English sympathy for the underdog (witness the passages in 1066 and All That about how the British army can only win when heavily outnumbered), and partly that he was the last actually English king England ever had. There is something sympathetic about him, violent warlord though he was. Of course, given that the alternative was William I, one of our more effective, but least sympathetic rulers, that's not hard. One cannot imagine William replying to a demand for his kingdom by saying "they say he is taller than other men, so I will give him seven foot of English earth, from his head to his feet." Nor, had William fallen at Hastings, would we have an image as enduring as Edith Swan Neck wandering the field, searching for her fallen lover.
There are some kings though, about which nobody has a good word to say. Churchill does point out that we owe the development of parliamentary democracy, and all our modern freedoms to our least competent monarchs. If every ruler we had was of the calibre of Henry II, we'd be living in an absolute monarchy now. Still, it's hard to warm to figures like Ethelred the Unready, Edward II or Richard II. It is unfortunate that modern English renders Ethelred Unraed as "Ethelred the Unready". In the original Old English, the pun is rather more subtle; Ethelred means "Noble Counsel" - Unraed translates as variously "No Counsel", "Evil Counsel" and "Traitorous Weasel" - all of which are quite appropriate. Trying to commit genocide is evil. Trying to commite genocide against the vikings? Stupid and evil. Trying to commit genocide against the vikings and murdering the sister of the king of all the vikings? Very, very stupid. And also evil.
Churchill's verdict on Edward II is that he was a "perverted weakling". The book is showing the prejudices of it's age there really; we've had other gay kings (off hand, William Rufus and Richard I for definite, and possibly James I). But it doesn't tend to get mentioned, because they were (for the most part) competent. Edward II was certainly weak though. One does tend to feel slightly sorry for Isabella ("The She Wolf of France") during the early stages of her marriage. On the other hand, murdering one's spouse isn't really behaviour I can condone. And any method of death which has a description including the words "hot" and "poker" isn't a nice way to go.
Churchill seems to be quite keen on Richard II however. I don't know why. The man was less trustworthy than Nick Clegg; once he says "villeins ye are and villeins ye shall remain" to the peasants who put their trust in him, all my sympathy for him dies. That said, Richard II does showcase one crucial feature of the English people. They will not pay a Poll tax. Not in 1385, and not in 1985.
There is something archaic about a lot of the language in A E Housman's Collected Poems. It's not a large book, but about half of it is filler. Basically, A Shropshire Lad is excellent - there both considering the individual poems and as a collection - and everything else is a bit crap. A Shropshire Lad felt similar in some ways to the Wasteland (by T.S. Eliot) to me; both are books of poems conceived as a single work, rather than just a collection; the Wasteland is technically a single poem, whilst A Shropshire Lad is clearly a collection, but in both the style and rhyme scheme of the poems changes rapidly and titles are sparse in A Shropshire Lad, giving the poems more of the feel of stanzas within a larger whole. The development of themes across the poems, and consistently through the book, also helps with that impression. Both Eliot and Housman make deliberate use of archaic (but very beautiful) grammatical constructions.
Housman's poems are very melancholy, but it is a Victorian melancholy (not surprising - A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896). Reading the poems, one can almost smell the fresh cut grass after rain, and see the old horse-drawn plough in the field. Many of the protagonists go to join the army, but it is the British army of 1815, rather than that of 1914 - or rather, I guess, the army of 1914 but not that of 1916; an army where you stand in line in a field in a red coat, and take a musket ball to the chest, fighting people you don't know for reasons you don't understand. If you die (and melancholy as Housman is, you almost certainly will), you die quickly, and are buried in a green field. No drowning in mud; no gas. It is a genteel death; in that Housman is far more romantic even than Kipling. For all his jingoism, Kipling knew well enough that battles are nasty, messy, scary places. I think the best comparison is actually with Tennyson's Maud (appropriately enough, a very maudlin poem), although Housman's characters are much further from top of the social pyramid; Tom, Dick and Harry drinking in the village pub, rather than Sebastian wandering his ancestral halls. And for that reason, they are far more sympathetic (to me, at least). Great Britain's attempt to steal the planet in the 19th Century was a bad thing; it had a lot of evil effects that we still feel today. That said, I've always felt sorry for the poor bastards in red coats who were sent somewhere east of Suez to do the stealing; they didn't plan it, they didn't get anything out of it (apart from possibly an interesting tropical disease) and, in an era before universal suffrage, it wasn't their fault their country was being run by thieving socipaths.
*If I ever have a child, I will be tempted to name them Ulfkill.
No comments:
Post a Comment