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David Cameron

Disorderly Houses

02/09/2013 by J D Davies

…Or, The Very Long History of British Parliamentarians throwing their toys out of the pram over foreign policy. 

The government’s defeat over its proposed intervention in Syria had political journalists scratching their heads to think of past precedents. Those with GCSE History managed to crawl back as far as Suez, 1956, and Norway, 1940, while those with A-level or even perhaps a History degree raked up Chanak, 1922 (a hypothetical prize to anyone who knows what that was all about without Googling it) or went back to good old Don Pacifico in 1850. In fact, the history of Parliament getting itself into an almighty tangle over war and foreign policy goes back much, much further. Parliament voting for war based on dodgy evidence, regretting it when that war went badly wrong, then launching various soul-searching investigations that satisfied pretty well nobody – all sounds familiar? But I’m not talking about Iraq and Tony Blair, I’m talking about the second Anglo-Dutch war and King Charles II.

For centuries, foreign policy and war were exclusively a part of the royal prerogative, and Parliament played no part at all in their direction. On the other hand, from its earliest days Parliament voted the taxes to pay for war, so it’s hardly surprising that MPs started to take an interest in how well or badly that money was spent. Charles I’s disastrous wars in the 1620s were heavily criticised in Parliament, while between 1649 and 1653 Parliament was the sole legislative and executive branch of government, so it directly controlled foreign policy – a power that it used to embark on the first Anglo-Dutch war. Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, King Charles II probably hoped that he could put the genie back in the bottle, but as it happened, it suited his purposes to let it out even further.

By the autumn of 1664, Charles was set on war with the Dutch. Parliament was carried along on a tide of anti-Dutch sentiment, and voted the then unprecedented sum of £2,500,000 for the war. The actual reasons for war were largely contrived – Dutch aggression against English overseas possessions and trade, ignoring the fact that much of the ‘aggression’ actually originated on the English side. Parliament’s support was sustained during the opening stages of the war, which went very well for England (notably in the stunning victory at the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June 1665, the centrepiece of the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears The Skies). But 1666 witnessed the calamitous defeat of the Four Days’ Battle – which I’m currently writing about in the first draft of ‘Quinton 5’ – followed by the Great Fire of London, and 1667 saw the utter humiliation of the Dutch sailing into the Medway, hoisting their flag over Sheerness and towing away the fleet flagship, the Royal Charles.

After the war ended, not long after the Medway debacle, an angry Parliament began to investigate what had gone wrong. The House of Commons appointed a committee of miscarriages on 17 October 1667. The next few months witnessed the unsavoury spectacle of admirals and administrators attempting to pin the blame on each other, while ministers sought to settle old scores with each other. (I covered these events in detail in my first book, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy.) Meanwhile a separate body, the so-called Brooke House committee, pored over the navy’s accounts and caused many months of anxiety for Samuel Pepys – and as his wife died during the same period, the famous diarist probably never experienced a more traumatic period in his life. But all the various enquiries petered out. For example, the attempt to assign blame for the Chatham disaster culminated in the scapegoating of the naval commissioner at the dockyard, Peter Pett, a verdict so laughable that the poets had a field day: as I wrote in Pepys’s Navy,

‘[Andrew] Marvell captures perfectly the fate of the ‘little men’ who have always taken the blame for the incompetence of others far greater than themselves:

All our miscarriages on Pett must fall,

His name alone seems fit to answer all.

Whose counsel first did this mad war beget?

Who all commands sold through the navy? Pett.

Who would not follow when the Dutch were beat?

Who treated out the time at Bergen? Pett.

Who the Dutch fleet with storms disabled met?

And, rifling prizes, them neglected? Pett.

Who with false news prevented the Gazette?

The fleet divided? writ for Rupert? Pett.

Who all our seamen cheated of their debt,

And all our prizes who did swallow? Pett.

Who did advise no navy out to set?

And who the forts left unprepared? Pett.

Who to supply with powder did forget

Languard, Sheerness, Gravesend, and Upnor? Pett.

Who all our ships exposed in Chatham net?

Who should it be but the fanatic Pett?

Pett, the sea-architect in making ships,

Was the first cause of all these naval slips;

Had he not built, none of these faults had been;

If no creation, there had been no sin.

In fact, the outraged backbench MPs never cast a glance in the direction of a much more plausible batch of culprits, namely themselves. £2,500,000 proved to be a completely inadequate sum to finance three (or potentially more) years of naval war, and the essentially medieval revenue-raising methods of the state ensured that much of it never actually reached the Treasury. Even so, the MPs had dabbled in foreign policy and the conduct of war. They proved determined to do so again, even before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 established annual meetings of Parliament and gave the legislature much greater control over both spending and strategy – witness the so-called ‘Convoys and Cruisers’ Act of 1694, by which Parliament for the first time assumed the power to insist that a certain number of warships were deployed on particular kinds of mission. During the autumn and winter of 1673-4, for example, Parliamentary opposition to war proved crucial in forcing Charles II to abandon his unpopular alliance with the French and seek a unilateral peace with the Dutch.

So the Parliamentary rebellion over Syria is merely the latest manifestation of a tradition that stretches back to the seventeenth century. I doubt if that’ll be much consolation to David Cameron, but at least he now knows how King Charles II felt in 1667 and 1673: and as his children are direct descendants of the King, thanks to their mum, perhaps he’ll see the irony.

***

I’ve got an interesting week ahead. First up, I’m off to Portsmouth to speak at a conference on naval recruiting at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, although I also hope to find the time to pay my first visit to the new Mary Rose Museum. I then head directly for East Anglia to meet up with a Naval Dockyards Society tour that I helped to organise before standing down as chairman; I’ll be acting as their ‘tour guide’ around Dunwich, Southwold and Nelson’s birthplace, Burnham Thorpe. The dates mean that I won’t be blogging next Monday, but I’ll aim to put up at least one post about the museum, the conference and the trip by Tuesday or Wednesday.

Filed Under: Naval history Tagged With: Anglo-Dutch War, David Cameron, King Charles II, Parliament, Samuel Pepys, Syria

The Rise of Historyism

15/10/2012 by J D Davies

It was a very bad week for politicians and History. Or, to be exact, it was a bad week for History because of politicians’ inability to stop distorting it to serve their own ends. Take David Cameron’s big speech to the Conservative conference, for example. ‘This is the country that … defeated the Nazis…and fought off every invader for a thousand years.’ Great for getting delegates to their feet, but risible as historical analysis. Fought off every invader for a thousand years? As I tweeted shortly afterwards, tell that to Richard III and James II. ‘Defeated the Nazis’? Umm…I think the Russians might have something to say about that, Dave. But when it comes to rewriting History, the PM isn’t in the same league as his great rival, Boris Johnson. ‘Not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France!’ thundered the mop-topped Mayor of London about the policies of President Hollande, thus simultaneously ignoring the fact that there wasn’t really a ‘tyranny’ in France in 1789 (The Terror, which is presumably what you had in mind, Boris, started in 1793) and the entirety of the German occupation during World War Two, which was debatably just a tad more tyrannical than the raising of a few tax rates by a bespectacled technocrat with a slightly tangled love life. Now, it’s possible to forgive Boris on the grounds that it’s his usual jokey hyperbolic style and, after all, it’s not his period, inter alia, but unsurprisingly his rant didn’t exactly go down too well across the Channel, and it’s symptomatic of the way in which politicians think they can get away with serving up sloppy History to serve their own dubious ends. (Before anyone accuses me of party political bias, I should add that Labour and Lib Dem politicians are just as guilty. Don’t get me started on Ed Miliband and ‘One Nation’, for example…) Of course, we Brits have no monopoly on this – all American presidential candidates, including the current crop, are quick to press their own versions of their national past into the service of getting them elected, no matter how much they have to distort it to do so, and much American political discourse is fundamentally moulded by differing interpretations of a document written in 1787.

I spent the past week in Scotland, working on the plot outline for ‘Quinton 5’ and various other ideas for new books. There, the independence debate is cranking up nicely, despite the referendum date being two years away. Whatever the eventual outcome, this is clearly developing into a classic case study of the manipulation of History by two ferociously antagonistic sides – just read the comments on any political or historical story on any Scottish newspaper’s or TV channel’s website for depths of vitriolic unpleasantness unknown even on the comments pages of the online version of the Daily Mail. The nationalists’ appeal to what might be called the Braveheart version of Scottish history is being countered by the unionists’ appeal to ‘Britishness’, mustering to their cause such events as the Olympics and the forthcoming centenary of World War I. But a potential weakness of the unionist strategy is revealed in the latest blog from the always interesting Eagle Clawed Wolfe. It seems that at Carlisle Castle, the English Heritage guides have been told not to talk about the Border Reivers for fear of offending Scottish visitors. This is a case of ‘don’t mention the war’ writ large, and ludicrously so: the existence of the Reivers has much to do with why Carlisle Castle is there at all, so omitting it from the castle’s story is very much a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. (And history, or elements within it, should offend – just as other elements should move, entertain and inspire.) As the Wolfe rightly points out, there are no such qualms on the other side of Tweed and Solway, where the Reiver history is celebrated – and, it might be added, where the history of conflict with England is part of the national psyche to an extent that is simply inconceivable south of the border, except perhaps in certain quarters of the BNP and English Defence League. One trivial but telling example: many Scots football fans fly flags adorned with the slogan ‘Bannockburn 1314’. When was the last time you saw the flag of St George adorned with ‘Culloden 1746’, or, at England-France fixtures, ‘Agincourt 1415’, ‘Trafalgar 1805’ or ‘Waterloo 1815’?

Of course, one could turn this argument on its head and say that it proves the Scots generally have a stronger sense of their own history than the English, even if it is a distinctly slanted one – and arguably, the Irish have an even stronger sense than either, or rather ‘senses’, given the two rival traditions which both depend for their mythologies upon distinctly myopic views of Irish history. (And yes, I’ve deliberately omitted my own countrymen, the Welsh, from this analysis; a subject for a future blog when Britannia’s Dragon is about to see the light of day. But I might go to the next Wales-England match with a Red Dragon flag adorned with ‘Bryn Glas 1402’ and see if anybody knows what it’s all about…) No doubt historically literate English football fans – and surely there must be some, somewhere? a few?? one??? – could argue with some justification that a flag bearing the names of all their country’s great victories would probably be too big to get into the ground. But surely a sensible, non-triumphalist acknowledgement of past conflict is better than Carlisle Castle’s precious and utterly wrong-headed policy of ignoring it. Ultimately, ignoring leads directly to ignorance, and ignorance breeds the sort of dangerous manipulation of history practised by cynical politicians and those with more dubious agendas. Indeed, with racism and sexism now regarded as increasingly unacceptable, maybe this ‘historyism’ is rising to replace them – that is, the use of shakily-founded throwaway historical references deliberately to offend or to employ a distorted view of the past to promote a prejudiced view of the present.

***

Many Scots claim to have learned their history from the novels of Nigel Tranter, and I spent last week staying very close to Aberlady, where Tranter lived in his latter years and where he wrote his books as he walked along the coastal footpath that began at what he called ‘the footbridge to enchantment’. Every time I visit the bridge and the adjacent memorial cairn to him, my mind boggles both at his working method (if I tried it, I’d keep bumping into people or stumbling in rabbit holes) and his sheer productivity – he wrote well over fifty historical novels, all of which I’ve read and still have on my shelves, covering the whole span of Scottish history, as well as twelve children’s books, ten westerns, and about twenty non-fiction books. True, his novels are uneven – the later ones tend to be quite weak and repetitive, his sex scenes are always hilariously bad, and his one attempt at ‘naval’ fiction, The Admiral (about James IV’s naval commander Andrew Wood), had late 15th century cogs and caravels possessing roughly the handling characteristics of modern warships. True, his historical interpretation is invariably old fashioned, distinctly nationalist and often hopelessly romanticised. But Tranter described his vision of Scotland, particularly medieval Scotland, quite brilliantly, and many Scots claim to have learned their history from the man often regarded as ‘Scotland’s storyteller’. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with English history. Historical novelists now tend to stay within their ‘comfort zones’, which they’ve researched to the nth degree (‘I’m Roman’ was heard more than once at the Historical Novel Society conference the other day). Bernard Cornwell is a rare exception, but even he has concentrated on three or four fairly narrow chronological periods, and only on military history. Where is ‘England’s storyteller’, the equivalent of Nigel Tranter, who can produce an attractive, popular narrative across pretty much the whole span of the country’s history, embracing the political and social ‘big pictures’ as well as the battles? Or is that simply too big an ask for any author?

Filed Under: Fiction, Scottish history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Bernard Cornwell, Boris Johnson, Carlisle Castle, David Cameron, Historical fiction, J D Davies, Nigel Tranter, Scotland

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