J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Historical research

Carmarthenshire Archives: the End of the Beginning?

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Last Thursday, I attended a two-hour consultation meeting in Carmarthen on the proposed new record office for the county, following the closure of the previous one after the discovery of mould in the storerooms. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have just a little bit of history with this particular issue; I’m not going to provide links to all of the previous posts, but anyone so inclined can enter ‘Carmarthenshire Archives’ in the search facility and then trace the story in chronological order. (Note: entering ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ or ‘Dante’s Circles of Hell’ will also produce the same search results.) After the sorry saga of the record office throughout the last twenty years or so, to say that Carmarthenshire County Council has rather a lot of trust to rebuild on this issue is a bit like saying that Donald Trump isn’t quite in the Abraham Lincoln league yet. Therefore, some of you might have expected me to go to this meeting armed with the sword of scepticism and the shield of cynicism. Far from it: remember that I was a teacher for the best part of thirty years, so I always believed that even the most feckless little toerag was capable of redemption – unless, obviously, his/her name was ***** or *******. So I went with an open mind, and, indeed, a positively receptive one, because after all, my principal hope all along has been that Carmarthenshire’s nationally and internationally important archive collections should be preserved, and presented to the public, in a safe and appropriate facility that complies fully with national standards.

That being so, I have to say that I was largely impressed by what I saw and heard. The new building will be a three-storey, then two-storey, extension at the back of the current Carmarthen Library building, of which more anon. The two-storey structure will contain a repository capable of accommodating both the current collection and 25 years’ worth of accruals; the three-storey section will contain staff work rooms and facilities of various sorts, plus, on the third floor, the public search room. The building will have exemplary eco credentials, notably a ‘passive house’ system, and should look impressive, both externally and internally. Above all, being on the same site as the library, and on the same floor as the local history reference collection, should permit considerable flexibility for researchers. Inevitably, some of those present had reservations. Would it permit digital photography, always a bugbear at the old office? Would the outsourcing of conservation work be detrimental to the office’s work? How long might it take to tackle the huge cataloguing backlog (a commonplace, alas, at many repositories the length and breadth of Britain)? For my part, I thought the new search room looked on the small side, but the current and former record office staff who were present assured me that it could easily accommodate the sorts of numbers that the old facility used to see, and that increasing use of digital materials was progressively reducing the pressure on physical seating. The new building is due to open in 2019, until which time the county’s collections will still need to be consulted principally in far-distant Cardiff. But at least there finally appears to be light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

It has the potential to be quite an impressive light, too. Many county record offices these days are housed, to paraphrase an earlier post on this site, in anonymous out-of-town sheds that could easily be on industrial estates, and in some cases, actually are on industrial estates. Not so the new office in Carmarthen. Not only is the main facade and structure of Carmarthen library, through which one will have to pass in order to reach the archives, an eighteenth century listed building in its own right, but it stands directly opposite St Peter’s Church, one of the most historic in Wales – so if you feel like a stroll through history during a lunch break, you’ll be able to go and pay your respects at the spectacular Tudor tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, staunch ally of Henry VII and quite probably the man who killed Richard III, or else the memorial to Sir Richard Steele, the ‘father of journalism’, or perhaps that of General Sir William Nott, or maybe even my particular favourite (for obvious reasons), that of John Williams of Edwinsford, who was serving aboard the frigate Kingfisher during its famous fight with seven Algerine corsairs in 1681. If you fancy a slightly longer stroll, a few hundred yards in one direction will bring you, via the remaining fragment of the ancient tree that was long held to be ‘Merlin’s oak‘, to a Roman amphitheatre, no less (and, to boot, the most westerly surviving example in the entire Roman Empire) – while a few hundred yards in the other direction will bring you to the ruins of the huge castle that was once the seat of royal power in south Wales. (Note: do not confuse with Caernarfon, especially if you’re meant to be getting married in one and not the other.)

Thus from having one of the worst archive facilities in Britain, a national scandal that was condemned time after time by the regulator and finally closed after a perfectly foreseeable near-catastrophe (none of it the fault of its hard-pressed staff), Carmarthenshire potentially stands on the threshold of having one of the best. So I hope there’ll be no spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar: no backsliding on this, no penny-pinching on that, no corner-cutting on the other, and above all, no mindset to the effect that the building has cost so much that economies need to be made in the staffing. The ship may not have looked quite so smart without the proverbial ha’porth of tar, but if it had set sail without sufficient sailors to man it, inadequate tarring would swiftly have been the least of its problems – and after all, Carmarthenshire, of all counties, should know a thing or two about shipwrecks.

So if all goes to plan, gentle readers, this will be my penultimate post on the subject of Carmarthenshire Archives. The last one of all, I fervently hope, will be posted some time in 2019, and will report on my first day in the new facility, praising it to the heights, and saying how inspired I now feel to finally complete my book on the Stepney family. But before then, there are some quite important things to do – starting next week, when all the shenanigans surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway kick off. More detail next Monday!

Sea, the Conference

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This blog has often touched on the subject of ‘sea blindness’ in modern Britain, notably here, and I also took that as the theme of the keynote lecture I delivered to last year’s conference for new researchers in maritime history. One important element of this discussion is the state of maritime history research in the broadest sense of the term: after all, expecting greater public awareness of, and engagement with, ‘the sea’ in all its aspects, is likely to be pie in the sky if those engaged in that research are working on obscure or done-to-death themes, if they are overworked by the demands of the sectors they work in, or simply if their numbers are declining as successive governments put more and more emphasis on training up only scientists, engineers, IT specialists, and other supposedly ‘useful’ disciplines. A recent piece in Topmasts, the excellent online newsletter of the Society for Nautical Research (available to non-members, too), put forward a tongue-in-cheek proposal that the problem of relentless focus on one well-worked theme in particular could be addressed by instituting a seven-year ban on ‘the N word’ (as in ‘N’s Column in T Square’), in order to focus on lesser known and neglected themes. This author concluded with a provocative statement: ‘maritime history is too important to let it die or sink to the tokenism of one essay in an undergraduate course’.

It’s in this context that I’m delighted to join with the organising parties to make a really important announcement. For some time, the Research and Programmes committee of the Society for Nautical Research, which I chair, has been developing the first conference that the society has ever run under its own name, rather than sponsoring other people’s. There are many reasons for doing this: it’s one way of improving the ‘package’ we offer our members, as well as raising the society’s profile, but the society also wanted to offer something rather broader than the many conferences which focus on specific themes, say, or the anniversaries of particular events. Consequently, we’ve partnered with the wonderful Greenwich Maritime Centre, who will be providing the facilities and much of the organisation for the conference to be held on 9 September of this year, under the title ‘The State of Maritime History Research’.

The text of the call for papers (also available on the GMC website) follows, but the key point that I’d like to make here is that we want this to be broad an event as possible, touching on a wide range of themes and disciplines. It’s certainly not all ‘doom and gloom’ in the world of maritime history research, but where are the strong and weak areas? What are the challenges? Above all, what, if anything, can be done to address ‘sea blindness’ – and is that a valid concept in any case? We’re hoping to attract prominent speakers and delegates for what should be a really important event, which we hope will garner considerable publicity. Moreover, if this conference succeeds, we’re looking to make it a regular event, held every few years, because this is an ever-changing scene – for example, university courses disappear, or new ones come into being, with bewildering frequency, while in an age of austerity, it’s a sad truth that the survival of many maritime museums and even historic ships is in doubt. (Witness the current crisis over the survival of HMS President 1918, for example.)

I’m certainly minded to offer a paper myself, but if we get a scrum of outstanding speakers, I’ll happily step aside!

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Over the past few decades there has been significant debate as to the place and shape of maritime history. In January 2008, the Council of the American Historical Association approved unanimously to add ‘Maritime, including Naval’ to its taxonomy of academic specialties. But since then, it has been suggested that the field has been marginalised.  Or does the growth of new areas of interest – such as the study of port towns, the ‘Atlantic World,’ Coastal History, and the role of gender in maritime history – suggest a flourishing, if more diverse, environment? What is the state of health in other research-orientated maritime activities such as public history and heritage?

The Greenwich Maritime Centre and the Society for Nautical Research are excited to announce a major conference to be held at the University of Greenwich to consider these questions. The conference will bring together key contributors from within the broad field of maritime history, as well as those who write on maritime and coastal topics, but do not consider themselves maritime historians. Papers and key discussion points will be published in hard copy and/or online by the Society of Nautical Research.

Proposals are invited for papers on any of the following aspects, or on other related and relevant themes. The principal criterion for acceptance will be the extent to which a paper provides a broad overview of the current situation in a specific field, and of the prospects for the future, rather than narrow, descriptive accounts of a particular period of history or historic ship (to give two examples).

  • The study of maritime history in the university and school sectors
  • The state of maritime research in particular geographical regions and countries
  • The state of particular sub-disciplines within maritime history and research, e.g. naval history, nautical archaeology, port towns, coastal studies
  • The health of the maritime museums sector, and current and future challenges for it
  • The state of the historic ships and craft sector
  • ‘Sea blindness’: fact or fiction?

Proposals of 500 words, together with a short biography of no more than 150 words, should be submitted by 1 June 2017  to  https://tinyurl.com/SNRConference2017

NB: There will be a nominal fee of £25 for the conference. Please book  at  https://maritimeresearch.eventbrite.co.uk, registration will open on 1 June 2017.

The Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland, 1627

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This week, I’m delighted to welcome Professor Adam Nichols as my guest blogger. Adam is the co-author of a new book which provides a first-hand account of one of a remarkable but very little known event, the Barbary Corsair raid on Iceland in 1627. Having done quite a lot of work over the years on aspects of Britain’s interactions with the corsairs, I’m very pleased to be able to help Adam publicise the book! So without further ado, I’ll hand over to him.

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The early decades of the seventeenth century were the great heyday of the Barbary corsairs. Not only did they swarm the Mediterranean, but with the help of European renegados they also attacked both ships and coastal settlements all along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, from Spain to the British Isles and beyond.

In the summer of 1627, Barbary corsairs descended upon Iceland, killing dozens of people and abducting more than 400 to sell as slaves in Salé and Algiers. The sheer audacity of this raid—it was a 3,000 mile sail from North Africa to Iceland, a 6,000 mile roundtrip—makes it exceptional. But there’s something else that makes it stand out as well. The Icelanders, who were collectively traumatized by the attack, attempted to process that trauma by writing about what had happened. (Icelanders have always been an astonishingly literate bunch, so writing about the events came naturally to them.) As a result, there is an extensive collection of contemporary descriptions, chronicles, memoires, and letters about the raid—a unique, detailed account quite different from other records of Barbary corsair assaults.

The details of the 1627 corsair raid are not well known outside Iceland, and many references to it are inaccurate. Mainly, this is because few of the Icelandic documents about the raid have been translated. Without access to the primary source documents, amateurs and professional historians alike have had to rely on second-hand précises and summaries of précises.

The documents themselves recount a story somewhat different from the one usually told.

First, the Tyrkjaránið, as the Icelanders refer to the 1627 raid, actually consisted of two raids: one by a group of corsairs from Salé (on the Atlantic coast of Morocco), the other from Algiers. Both groups were led by European renegados who had ‘turned Turk,’ converted to Islam, and made lives for themselves as Muslim corsair ru’asa (plural of Arabic ra’is, meaning ‘captain’).

Routes of the corsairs
Routes of the corsairs

According to the Icelandic sources on the Tyrkjaránið, the Saletian raiders arrived on June 20 and attacked the southwest corner of the island. This group was led by a Dutch renegado ra’is whom the Icelandic sources call Amórað Reis—the (in)famous Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, aka Murat Reis (i.e., Murad the Captain), a Dutch renegado ra’is who operated first out of Algiers and then Salé, where he became the Admiral of the Salé corsair fleet. Murad Reis is typically credited with masterminding the entire raid on Iceland, but Icelandic documents made it clear that his group was separate from, and caused less damage than, the Algerians. The Saletian corsairs were in Icelandic waters a little over a week, and made off with a few dozen captives and a Danish merchant ship—arriving back at Salé on July 30.

The Algerian corsairs appeared in Icelandic waters on July 5 (a fortnight after the Saletian raiders had sailed away) and remained for two weeks, departing on July 19 and arriving back at Algiers on August 16 or 17. This group was led by another Dutch renegado whom the Icelandic sources refer to as “that soul ripper named Mórað Flaming” (an Icelandic rendering of Murad Fleming, i.e., Murad the Flemish, “Flemish” being a common way of referring to the Dutch at the time). The Algerian corsairs first attacked the East Fjords, on Iceland’s southeast corner, and then raided Heimaey, one of the Westman Islands just off the south coast. After that, they set sail for Algiers. The Heimaey raid was the largest and most brutal attack.

The harbour on Heimaey

In typical Icelandic fashion, a month after the raid on Heimaey, a Lögsagnari (the equivalent of a deputy sheriff) named Klaus Eyjólfsson was dispatched to the island to interview eyewitnesses and write out an accurate account of what had happened. His report is filled with the sorts of excruciating, detailed anecdotes that come from eyewitness testimony of such violent events:

“Among those who crossed the path of the pirates was a man named Bjarni Valdason, who tried to run away. They struck him across the head above the eyes and killed him. When his wife, who had been fleeing with him, saw this, she at once fell across his body, screaming. The Turkish took her by her feet and dragged her away, so that the cloth of her dress came up over the head. Her dead husband they cut into small pieces, as if he were a sheep. They took the woman to the Danish houses and threw her in with the other prisoners….

“Then they began to set fire to the houses. There was a woman there who could not walk, whom they had captured easily. Her they threw on the fire, along with her two-year- old baby. When she and the poor child screamed and called to God for help, the wicked Turks bellowed with laughter. They stuck both child and mother with the sharp points of their spears, forcing them into the fire, and even stabbed fiercely at the poor, burning bodies.”

Not all the accounts are so harrowing, though.

“Up in the cliffs above Ofanleiti, the pirates found five stout men, whom they fell upon and captured, binding their hands and feet. They then caught sight of two girls. When they chased after these girls, they passed over a hill so that one of the girls managed to evade them and return to the bound men. As she approached them, one of the men implored her to untie him, which she did in a hurry. After that, one man untied another. When the pirates returned to fetch them, the men ran off as fast as they could, not daring to look back, scattering in all directions, until they could not see each other. The distance was long, so the Icelanders could climb down the cliff and seek hiding places there.”

One of the people taken captive on Heimaey was Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, a Lutheran minister in his early sixties. Of him, Klaus Eyjólfsson writes:

“Since the Reverend Ólafur Egilsson was growing old, and the pirates saw that he was not physically strong, their main captain wanted to leave him behind. But when his wife heard this, she asked him, for God’s sake, not to leave her. He said it should be that way, and that he would suffer along with her.”

Algiers seen from the sea

And so he did. Reverend Ólafur, his pregnant young wife (who gave birth during the voyage) and their two small children, along with nearly 250 Westman Islanders, were loaded onto the corsair ships and, with over a hundred others who had been captured in the east Fjords, transported to Algiers—where they were sold en mass into slavery.

Reverend Ólafur wrote a memoir, chronicling his experience. Here is his recounting of the moment when his young son was taken from him in Algiers:

“The people from the Westman Islands were brought to the slave market, which was a square built up of stones with seats encompassing it all around. The ground was paved with stones which appeared glossy—which I understand is because they were washed every day, as were the main houses, sometimes as much as three times a day. This market was next to where their local King [i.e., the Ottoman Governor of Algiers] had his seat, so that he would have the shortest way there, because, as I was told by those who had been there a long time, their King took from the captured people every eighth man, every eighth woman, and every eighth child…

Algiers slave market
Algiers slave market

“When we came to the slave market, we were placed in a circle, and everyone’s hands and face were inspected. Then the King chose from this group those whom he wanted. His first choice amongst the boys was my own poor son, eleven years old, whom I will never forget as long as I live because of the depth of his understanding. When he was taken from me, I asked him in God’s name not to forsake his faith nor forget his catechism. He said with great grief, “I will not, my father! They can treat my body as they will, but my soul I shall keep for my good God.

“I have to say with Job: What is my strength, that I should hope? Were one to try to weigh my misery and suffering altogether on a scale, they would be heavier than all the sand in the sea.”

Reverend Ólafur was not sold into slavery himself. Instead, he was designated by his captors to act as an intermediary to negotiate ransoms from the King of Denmark (Iceland was a Danish possession in those days). He travelled, penniless, from Algiers to Livorno, in Italy, from there to Genoa, and from Genoa to Marseilles. In Marseilles, he met a Dutch sea captain, with the improbable name of Caritas Hardspenner, who offered him free passage to Holland. From Enkhuizen, in Holland, he managed to get to Copenhagen, where he finally arrived after nearly six months of arduous travel.

Routes of Olafur Egilsson's travels
Routes of Olafur Egilsson’s travels

It was the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, however, and Denmark was faring badly. The royal coffers were empty. Reverend Ólafur was forced to return to Iceland alone, sans ransom, sans family.

Ten years later, thirty-four Icelanders were finally ransomed (twenty-six women and eight men), twenty-seven of whom made it back to Iceland. Among them was Reverend Ólafur’s wife, Ásta. The two had the better part of three years together before Reverend Ólafur died in 1639, at the age of seventy‑five.

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You can read more about Reverend Ólafur’s experiences and about the Tyrkjaránið in The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: the Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627.

Reverend Ólafur (who was born in the same year as William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei) wrote The Travels to chronicle his experiences both as a captive and as a traveller across Europe. He was a keen observer, and the narrative is filled with a wealth of detail—social, political, economic, religious—about both the Maghreb and Europe. It is also a moving story on the human level: we witness a man enduring great personal tragedy and struggling to reconcile such calamity with his understanding of God.

To give a clearer sense of the extraordinary events connected with Tyrkjaránið, The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson includes not only Reverend Ólafur’s first-person narrative but also Klaus Eyjólfsson’s report on the attack on Heimaey and a number of contemporary letters written by captives describing the conditions under which the enslaved Icelanders lived.

This is the first time any of these Icelandic texts have ever been translated into English.

The Travels also has Appendices containing background information on the cities of Algiers and Salé, on Iceland in the seventeenth century, on the manuscripts accessed for the translation, and on the book’s early modern European context.

The combination of Reverend Ólafur’s narrative, the report and the letters, and the material in the Appendices provides a fascinating first-hand, in-depth view of the early modern world, both Christian and Islamic.

The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: the Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, translated and edited by Karl Smári Hreinsson and Adam Nichols, is published by the Catholic University of America Press and is available on Amazon.uk

Here is a link to the book’s website: http://www.reisubok.net/

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The Icelandic Embassy in London is hosting a European launch for The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson on Thursday, March 2. If you are interested in attending this launch and meeting the authors, contact Adam Nichols, adam.nichols@faculty.umuc.edu.

He can arrange for the Icelandic Embassy to issue you a formal invitation.

 

Adam Nichols is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland.

Karl Smári Hreinsson is an independent Icelandic scholar, free-lance writer, and documentary film maker.

 

 

 

 

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time (Redux)

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The current media storm about ‘alternative facts’ put me in mind of a post I first published on 1 November 2011, when this blog was read by two men, a dog, and a vole called Kevin. So I thought I’d re-post it now for a rather wider audience, especially as it chimes neatly with some of the themes I’m exploring in my new book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy. In that, I deal with some of the instances where Samuel Pepys peddled his own ‘alternative facts’, many of which have been accepted uncritically by pretty much all writers. But as I’ll be demonstrating in Kings of the Sea, several important measures for which Pepys claimed the credit, and which historians and biographers have invariably been prepared to accept as being his responsibility, were not actually his doing at all, or not entirely so – and one entire source which he produced, and which has always been treated by historians as ‘gospel’ evidence for what happened in the navy, is, in fact, seriously flawed and misleading. So the book is likely to get quite a few people’s backs up…

However, back in 2011, I raised some questions about the veracity of the other great diarist of the Restoration period, John Evelyn, after first talking about a book I was then reading as part of my research for Britannia’s Dragon. Time to fire up the DeLorean, Marty!

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Just finished two books on my Kindle – Roy Hattersley’s biography of Lloyd George (which showed the old goat to be even more randy and devious than I’d ever realised) and Anthony Dalton’s Wayward Sailor, an exposé of another brazen old rogue, the bestselling sailing guru Tristan Jones. Despite a schmaltzy and overblown prose style, Dalton does a meticulous job of dissecting Jones’s wildly exaggerated claims, proving that many of the experiences he recorded in his wildly successful ‘non-fiction’ books were either partly or wholly invented. I’m particularly interested in Jones because he claimed to be Welsh (although the ‘Llangareth’ where he claimed he grew up doesn’t exist) and to have served in the Royal Navy throughout World War II, being torpedoed three times and being present at the sinking of the Bismarck, among many other adventures recounted in his wartime ‘memoir’ Heart of Oak. Unfortunately, as Dalton shows Jones was actually born in 1929, not 1924 as he claimed, and thus could not possibly have served in the war; in fact, he did not join the navy until 1946. Heart of Oak is thus a complete invention, unlike some of the books about his sailing exploits which are at least vaguely grounded on truth. Yet remarkably, it continues to fool some. By coincidence, I was recently sent a review copy of a new book on the Royal Navy in World War II by an eminent authority in the field, and was amazed to discover that the author was citing Heart of Oak as a valid historical source. (I’ll save the author’s blushes, at least until my review appears in print!) We all make mistakes in our research, and I’ve sometimes been as guilty as anyone of not checking sufficiently on the provenance of a source, but even a simple check of Wikipedia would have revealed the extent of Jones’s invention.

This put me in mind of an unsettling discovery I made a few years ago. As far as I know no-one has ever queried the authenticity of John Evelyn’s diary,  but among the seventy-odd entries I wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography were those on two men whom Evelyn knew well, Edward, Earl of Sandwich (the patron of Evelyn’s friend Pepys) and Thomas, Earl of Ossory, one of the most charismatic figures at the Restoration court (and one of the nicest, although he’s sadly little known these days). In both cases, Evelyn recounted stories about the end of the men’s lives that were simply not true. The diarist describes a meeting with Sandwich shortly before the latter joined his flagship, the Royal James, which was destroyed by a fireship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672). He told Evelyn that he ‘was utterly against this war from the beginning’, and  regarded his own prospects fatalistically: when he parted from Evelyn, ‘shaking me by the hand he bid me good-bye, and said he thought he should see me no more … “No”, says he, “they will not have me live … I must do something, I know not what, to save my reputation”’. It’s perfectly possible that Sandwich spoke to Evelyn in those terms, but if he made the statement that he was against the war from the beginning, he was either lying outright or cleverly concealing one very important fact. Unknown to Evelyn or the earl’s subsequent biographers, Sandwich was the principal English signatory of the secret Anglo-French naval treaty of January 1672, which set out the arrangements for the conduct of the joint naval campaign against the Dutch. He was a principal architect of the war that killed him, not an opponent of it.

Of course, Sandwich might have dissembled deliberately by telling Evelyn he was against the war; the conflict was unpopular, and Sandwich might have been covering himself in the event of a future parliamentary enquiry, such as that which had followed the previous war. But my inner alarm bell really started to ring when I moved on to research Ossory. In 1680 he was appointed Governor of Tangier, a posting widely regarded as a death sentence. According to Evelyn, Ossory spoke to him privately of his doubts on 26 July, bemoaning the fact that he believed he was being sent out solely so that Charles II could prove to the next Parliament that he, the king, had done all he could to save Tangier by sending out his best and most popular general; in other words, Ossory’s reputation would be destroyed in a mission that could not succeed simply to serve the king’s own cynical political agenda. Still according to Evelyn, it was at a dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall on the same evening that Ossory fell ill with the severe fever, probably typhus, that was to kill him. Although Ossory and Evelyn might well have had the sort of conversation described by the diarist, Evelyn’s recollection of the sequence of events is seriously faulty. The earl had been stricken by the fever on about 18 July, and on the 26th he was in the second day of a delirium that lasted until his death.

So what explains Evelyn’s apparent inventions? Of course, he might simply have got the dates wrong, especially if he was writing up several days of his diary at once; but this seems unlikely in Ossory’s case at least, given the nature of Evelyn’s entries on the days before and after the 26th. But it seems curious that Evelyn should have claimed sole privy knowledge of the last thoughts of two of the most eminent warriors of the age. Throughout history, there are those who have claimed to be the last witnesses to the final hours and thoughts of a great figure, often as a way of emphasising their own importance in the history of their age. (Witness the weight given to the reminiscences of Hitler’s last secretary/bodyguard/etc, and more recently to those of Colonel Gaddafi’s driver.) If Evelyn did invent or exaggerate Sandwich’s and Ossory’s statements, he must surely have done so in the belief that his diary would eventually be published, and that such publication would present him as an important figure who was privy to the innermost thoughts of the great. Which begs an unsettling question – what else in Evelyn, or in many other sources that historians have always accepted as gospel, might be at least ‘economical with the truth’? At least we now know where we stand with Tristan Jones, who brazenly invented vast tracts of his life; or at least, we should do!

The Kings of Post-Truth

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OK, right, all this ‘post-truth’ malarkey, then.

Now, you know you’re never going to get out-and-out politics in this blog, for reasons I might fully elucidate one day. But for various reasons, I’ve been getting a little peeved with all this media hype about ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, and so on and so forth. To me, much of it seems to be, to a certain degree, yet another case of historically illiterate journalists (and even more historically illiterate users of social meejah) suddenly waking up to a phenomenon that they assume to be new, but which has actually been around forever and a day. The always fascinating Many Headed Monster blog recently demonstrated how fake news was endemic during the British civil wars, for example, while the dear old Daily Mail has been shamelessly peddling colossal whoppers (and influencing the outcomes of elections with them) since at least the Zinoviev Letter in 1924. Back in my previous life, I used to show my GCSE students the famous ‘before and after’ pictures of Trotsky alongside, and thus clearly both physically and politically close to, Lenin – a fact so inconvenient to Stalin that he got his proto-photoshoppers to simply remove Trotsky from the picture, long before an icepick removed him from the bigger picture too. So the principle has been around since the serpent spun a bit of fake news to Eve; the only thing that’s ‘new’ is the method of delivery (after all, as vehicles for news delivery and political debate, Facebook and Twitter are little more than shiny versions of 1640s newsbook-fuelled pub arguments), its potential reach, and arguably, the greater gullibility of its audience. All of this was grist to the mill of a man who would undoubtedly nod sagely and mutter plus ça change about all this ‘post-truth/fake news’ debate, namely the genius who literally wrote the book on the subject, Mr George Orwell.

Now you see him, now you don't
Now you see him, now you don’t

But there needs to be one big caveat to all this: what we assume to be absolutely cast-iron ‘facts’ often turn out to be anything but. To demonstrate my point, I want to look at one seemingly unassailable set of ‘facts’, namely the names and dates of the Kings and Queens of England.* How on earth can these be ‘dodgy’ in any shape or form, you might reasonably demand?

The catalogue of English monarchs is probably the best known chronological sequence of heads of state in the world – so much so, indeed, that there are sad people out there who have, as one of their claims to alleged fame, the ability to reel off the names and dates of all the monarchs since 1066. (Raises hand tentatively, then swiftly puts it back down again.) But once you start to unpick it, these supposedly certain ‘facts’ look rather more shaky than they might first appear to be. Take, for example, the civil war during the 1130s to 1150s, known to history as ‘The Anarchy’ (and just how subjectively loaded a description of an epoch is that?). Just who, exactly, decided that only King Stephen would be regarded as the true monarch for the entire period between 1135 and 1154, despite the arguably superior claim to the throne of the Empress Matilda – who, indeed, effectively controlled most of the country for some of that time? How is it that Matilda’s place in the list, and thus her claim to be England’s first female monarch, has always been denied, while the ‘readeption’ of Henry VI in 1470-1 – which is probably just as debatable as her ‘reign’ – has usually been included? Might we be dealing with a teeny weeny bit of Victorian misogyny here, heavily influenced by a large dash of Shakespeare?

(Similarly, Lady Jane Grey was once left out of the list entirely, but now seems to be a permanent fixture. But just about the one thing that distinguishes her from other so-called ‘pretenders’ who were proclaimed monarch in opposition to the supposedly rightful heir – say, Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck, or the Duke of Monmouth – is that, unlike the others, she and her supporters controlled London, if only for nine days. So is the inclusion of Jane in regnal lists merely yet another blatant example of metrocentric bias?)

If you haven't read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again
If you haven’t read it, leave this website immediately and never darken my door again

The regnal list fascists have also struggled with the notion that it might be possible to have two monarchs simultaneously. True, they make grudging allowance for William and Mary, although I seem to recall that in my childhood, the latter was often airbrushed out of the record as comprehensively as Trotsky, despite the hugely important work she did in her own right (as I discovered when I touched on aspects of her role in directing naval affairs after 1689). Sellars and Yeatman memorably satirised the intellectual hurdles inherent in the concept of joint monarchs by combining the two into a single androgynous creature called Williamanmary, alongside a picture of a crowned fruit (‘England ruled by an Orange’). But if William and Mary are allowed, why not Philip and Mary a century and a half earlier? Philip of Spain was given full monarchical status by his wife – coins, acts of Parliament, etc, were all made in the names of Philip and Mary jointly. So surely writing Philip out of the record is nothing more or less than a manifestation of Protestant xenophobic bias against the man who would later despatch the Spanish Armada against these shores? Similarly, Henry II had his eldest son, another Henry, crowned in his lifetime, to prevent future succession disputes, but ‘the Young King’, as he was known, never features in the lists, perhaps because ‘Henry II(A)’ is just too difficult for some to get their heads around.

Let’s take another example. When he was restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II and his ministers categorically proclaimed it to be the twelfth year of his reign, thus effectively declaring that the Interregnum had never legally happened at all, and that thus, more importantly, all of the legislation passed during that time was invalid. But at some subsequent point, somebody, identity unknown, sensibly decided to ignore the Royalist interpretation of what had happened between 1649 and 1660 – thus making a political judgement on which set of ‘facts’ should be accepted, and which should not. One need not add, of course, that for Jacobites – and there are still a few out there – every ‘regnal date’ since 1688 has been a fiction, and we are currently living in the eleventh year of the reign of His Majesty King Francis II, who fills in the time before his inevitable and glorious restoration by fulfilling the onerous duties of the patron of the Bavarian Dachsund Club.

'Don't call me Mrs Tudor'
‘Don’t call me Mrs Tudor’

The familiar sequence of names of the royal houses is equally contentious. The late, great Tudor historian Cliff Davies caused a minor furore in academic circles a few years back – not to mention much wailing and gnashing of teeth among historical novelists and the makers of countless BBC dramas and documentaries – by pointing out that England’s most famous dynasty never actually called themselves by the surname at all, partly because of a degree of shame about the name’s humble Welsh origins, partly because they actually saw themselves as reuniting the disparate strands of the old Plantaganet royal line. (The abstract is here, although the full article is behind an armed Mafiosi checkpoint – sorry, academic publisher paywall.) Indeed, he argued, hardly anybody else in the ‘Tudor age’ ever used the word ‘Tudor’, either. Even in our times, there’s been a nagging uncertainty about what the surname of the current royal family actually is: the brilliant Netflix series The Crown convincingly portrayed Prince Philip’s fury at not being able to bestow his own name on his children, although that name (Mountbatten) is itself an invention, only four years older than the prince himself, as is his wife’s maiden name of Windsor. Still, Mountbatten-Windsor is probably preferable to trying to conjure a suitable moniker out of the coupling of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.  

One final point. Who, exactly, decided that the list of ‘English’ monarchs should only commence in 1066, when the English royal line was comprehensively overthrown by a Norman invader? What about all the Saxon and Danish Kings of England before that date? True, it suited all the Norman Edwards to number themselves as though the likes of Edward the Elder never existed – but why on earth have all subsequent historians, makers of lists, and setters of pub quizzes, bought into that hugely political reinvention of history by a bunch of Anglo-French toffs?

There we have the nub of the problem: the list of Kings and Queens of England is not the string of unassailable set-in-stone facts that it appears to be, but an arbitrary set of choices based on political prejudices and unchallenged orthodoxies. And if that is the case, and the facts themselves are potentially so badly flawed, then ‘post-truth’ thinking in such cases can actually be a positive, forcing us to reassess the very building blocks of history from first principles.

To conclude, then, to say that history is written by the winners is only partly correct: history is, and always has been, written by those who decide who the winners actually are.

 

 

(* Very similar issues apply to the regnal lists of Scotland and Wales. Quite apart from the ‘grey areas’ in the former – e.g. Edward Balliol – the whole Scottish royal sequence has been politically charged since 1603, and not just because of the Jacobite dimension referred to earlier. My Scottish friends rightly get very upset when their King James VII is referred to indiscriminately as ‘James II’, while postboxes newly adorned with the royal cipher of ‘Elizabeth II’ were firebombed in the early 1950s by those who knew rather better than Anglocentric Post Office apparatchiks that Scotland never had a previous Queen Elizabeth… As for Wales, the traditional description of Llywellyn ap Gruffydd, killed in 1282, as the last native Prince of Wales, is very much a construct of English conquest. His brother Dafydd was proclaimed Prince after Llywellyn’s death, and could be legitimately regarded as such until his own death in the following year, while the proclamation of Owain Glyndŵr in 1400 muddied the waters even more. Indeed, the pendulum has now swung the other way, and it’s become ‘politically correct’ in Wales to refer categorically to the latter as the last prince – a line taken even in such a seemingly innocuous context as the Christmas quiz on S4C, the Welsh TV channel.)

Noah’s Archive

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So there are conferences which you go to and think ‘meh’, conferences which take place on a Saturday and you’ve completely forgotten what they were all about by Monday, and the conferences that fire you up and leave the building thinking you’re Thor or Wonder Woman (delete as applicable) and that the bad guys had better take cover. The event held at the National Maritime Museum last week, under the innocuous title of a ‘Maritime Archives Initiative’, fell into the last of these categories.

Now, ‘maritime archives’ might not sound like a superhero-generating subject. In fact, they’re absolutely at the heart of what people like myself do, and one of the great strengths of the conference was that it brought out the diversity and importance of collections the length and breadth of Britain. John McAleer of Southampton University gave the keynote, talking about some of the archives he’d used for his research, primarily on eighteenth century slaving. His point that superb material could be found in such unlikely locations as Winchester and Carlisle really rang a bell with me; I’ve worked in Cumbria Record Office in Carlisle too, which contains a terrific amount of seventeenth century naval material, and also in equally unlikely places. Lincolnshire Record Office, for example, contains some of the best material on the actual conduct of naval warfare during the Anglo-Dutch wars to be found anywhere, together with some completely unique material on the operations of Charles II’s royal yachts, which I’ve mined extensively for my new book, Kings of the Sea (more of which next week). Over the years, I’ve found terrific material about Welsh history in Scottish archives, and vice-versa. The lesson is simple – don’t assume that everything of importance is in the obvious places, and be prepared literally to go the extra mile to explore your subject fully.

We then had six presentations about different archives that hold maritime material – the Trinity House archives at London Metropolitan Archives (an old haunt), Cornwall Record Office (ditto), Tyne and Wear Archives, the SS Great Britain, the Ballast Trust (which saves the archives of Scottish maritime companies, e.g. shipbuilders) and Staffordshire Record Office. The last of these might sound to be an unlikely contributor, but I can personally testify to the importance of the archives there, and it was nice to see on the screen a few familiar old friends from the papers of Lord Dartmouth, who commanded both the expedition to demolish Tangier in 1683-4 and the fleet assembled to defend against William of Orange’s invasion in 1688.

The afternoon was taken up with group brainstorming sessions. These were all essentially concerned with getting archivists and researchers collaborating more closely – and, indeed, encouraging collaboration with other institutions as well (the speaker from Tyne and Wear had regaled us with a wonderful story of how the previous director banned archives staff and museum service staff from even walking down the same corridor in their shared building, let alone collaborating with each other). Some old bugbears inevitably came up – “why can’t there be a single national reader’s ticket?” – and ways of raising public awareness were aired, one message being that in this day and age, Twitter and Facebook are absolutely essential for any institution. Perhaps the principal theme of all, though, was the need to try and improve the standardisation of online cataloguing, to make it easier to track down relevant material. Plenty of problems with this one, but rather fewer potential solutions, although enhancing the National Archives’ ‘Discovery’ catalogue and/or Exeter University’s ELMAP project were suggested as as ways ahead. Above all, though, there was great enthusiasm to make the conference the start of a regular process of engagement, not just a one-off. Let’s hope this proves to the case – or, to put it another way, Archivists, Assemble!

(Sorry.)

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By the time I post next week’s blog, I should have sent off to the publisher my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, so the post will provide the first detailed preview of it – plus a first look at the cover!