Some things I'm thinking about: past, present and future

These are ideas which have not yet matured into coherent essays but are turning over in my mind for long enough that they will probably receive a full treatment eventually

The Ideas Lab is not a democracy. Where would be the fun in that? (Peter Ustinov created an imaginary country in his head, Concordia, which was a democracy, but one in which unaccountably he as its ruler was always returned to office at the ballot box—but he was Peter Ustinov.) So you should not imagine this is some fevered and uncharacteristic appeal to public opinion on my part. However, to give readers a potentially terrifying insight into the iterative process which is my mind, even if only as a cautionary tale, I thought I’d take this opportunity to mention a few ideas which are currently being steeped in further thought to see whether they have merit, and—as a democrat I go this far—I am more than happy to hear readers’ thoughts on them.

These will probably appear in the fulness of time as free-standing essays, as they have stayed with me long enough to prove themselves more hardy than mere ephemera, but life, as we know, is uncertain and one can count on nothing. If you listen very carefully, you may hear the strain of my instincts against tight knots to prevent them running wild and writing several thousand words about each of the subjects just as an introduction. The struggle, my friends, is very real.

From the shadows to the premiership

Sir Tony Blair is one of only two shadow home secretaries ever to become Prime Minister; the other was Jim Callaghan, who held the job from June 1970 to October 1971, and had a not-very-glorious three-year premiership (1976-79) which ended in election defeat by Margaret Thatcher. I’ve written in the past about the Home Office’s reputation as the “graveyard of careers”, and that uneven opportunity-cost balance holds true for the role of shadowing it, to some extent; Roy Hattersley (twice)? Brian Mawhinney? Ann Widdecombe? Diane Abbott?

The question is therefore whether Blair’s success in becoming Labour Party leader then Prime Minister for a full decade was a statistical outlier in relation to the portfolio he held immediately beforehand (he was Shadow Energy Secretary 1988-89 and Shadow Employment Secretary 1989-92); or whether his performance as Shadow Home Secretary for two years, opposite the hardline Thatcherite favourite Michael “Prison Works” Howard, contributed to his dominant victory over John Prescott and Margaret Beckett in the 1994 leadership election. What were the hallmarks of Blair’s tenure of the post?

The Commonwealth nears 100

Next year the Commonwealth celebrates its centenary. Well, it depends what you want to mark: the idea of an association of increasingly autonomous dominions was agreed by the Balfour Declaration (not that one), the official communiqué of the Imperial Conference which met in London in October and November 1926 and rejected the proposal of a formal Constitution for the British Empire; but it was the Statute of Westminster 1931 which enshrined the idea of the “British Commonwealth of Nations” in law; and Elizabeth II, addressing her Canadian subjects on Dominion Day in 1959, argued that the Commonwealth had been born at the Confederation of Canada on 1 July 1867, creating the first independent country within the Empire. At any rate, there is one centenary to mark next year.

The question is what we’re celebrating. There was a time when the Commonwealth as an institution and a repository of respect and loyalty, mattered to some people, and right up until the United Kingdom’s accession to the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973, it was common for those who opposed membership to cite potentially adverse effects on our relationship with other Commonwealth countries. Undoubtedly for many of a romantic and nostalgic turn of mind, the Commonwealth, conceptualised as a family with the monarch as its benignly permissive patriarch (or matriarch), was a kind of substitute for the Empire which disappeared with such astonishing rapidity after the Second World War. Whether that is preposterous or pragmatic, it was deeply felt and therefore relevant.

But what was and is the Commonwealth for? Australian, British, Indian and New Zealand forces had taken part in the post-war occupation of Japan under the banner of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, which numbered 40,000 at its peak and was commanded by a succession of Australian three-star general officers. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, British Commonwealth Forces Korea was established as the command to oversee the Australian, British, New Zealand, Indian and Canadian troops who were deployed as part of the United Nations defence of Korea; land units came under the 1st Commonwealth Division, which was reduced to a brigade in 1954 after the fighting ended. After Korea, however, the Commonwealth was never a tool of British strategic influence, let alone hard power, of any significant kind.

It would be equally hard to argue that the Commonwealth has been a significant influence on Britain’s economy. There is no formal Commonwealth-wide free trade arrangement, and the UK’s accession to the EEC meant we could not negotiate separate agreements anyway. The sterling area formed after the UK left the gold standard in 1931, by which many countries which had previously pegged their currencies to the gold standard now pegged them to sterling, was placed on a statutory footing by the Exchange Control Act 1947 and, with the exception of Canada, was a kind of Commonwealth instrument.

In the immediate post-war period it was the largest and most coherent currency bloc in the world, but the UK’s relatively poor economic performance diminished its weight, and when the government devalued sterling in November 1967, many in the sterling area did not follow suit. The introduction of exchange controls between the UK and most other members of the sterling area in 1972 severely weakened the bloc, and it effectively ended when the new Conservative government abolished exchange controls altogether in 1979.

If we conclude that the Commonwealth is not a significant forum for leveraging diplomatic, military, economic or commercial power, it is fair to ask why it exists and why the United Kingdom is a member. The Commonwealth Secretariat, its central administrative body based at Marlborough House on Pall Mall, only costs around £25 million a year to run, and the Secretary-General is believed to be paid something north of £160,000 a year with the use of Garden House on Hill Street in Mayfair. (Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey of Ghana will take over as Secretary-General from Baroness Scotland of Asthal next week.) I am, readers will know, a natural conservative who believes in the immanent authority and wisdom of institutions, and that change has to prove its case, but that case must be allowed to be tested and cannot be lost by default.

The peasants are revolting

This year is the 500th anniversary of the denouement of the Peasants’ War (or Bauernkrieg) which wracked the south-western parts of Germany as well as Switzerland and modern-day Austria for just over a year in 1524-25. Lyndal Roper, the Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, has written a new account of the uprising, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War, which I have not yet read but which has in general been favourably reviewed.

My sense is that the Peasants’ War receives little attention in this country outside academia, any taste for popular uprisings being largely catered to by our own Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (about which I wrote a year ago). In its own geographical context it is much more widely known and studied: Friedrich Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany in 1850, in which he tried to apply the analysis of his friend and collaborator Karl Marx to the events of 1524-25; and the 450th anniversary of the conflict in 1975 created a great deal of interest with a range of ideological filters in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. (The excellent Katja Hoyer wrote a short piece about the Peasants’ War for her Substack recently, which I heartily recommend.)

I was recently reading a review of Roper’s book in The Literary Review by Professor Peter Marshall, a leading historian of early modern religious belief and practice at the University of Warwick. I was especially struck by his reference to the way the peasants directed anger and violence towards religious houses as part of their campaign.

Monasteries and nunneries became a particular focus of resentment: well over five hundred were attacked in the course of the war. Plundered supplies from religious houses did much to keep rebel forces in the field. According to Roper, the peripatetic peasant armies constituted ‘a kind of vast antipilgrimage, opposed to shrines, relics, monasteries, and saints’.

As those of you who read the section of last week’s round-up which described the closure of England’s last monastery, Waltham Abbey, in March 1540 may recall, I mentioned the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rebellion in 1536/37 which began in Yorkshire but spread across northern England until it was bloodily put down. In my view, and I am not alone, the Pilgrimage of Grace was the worst scare the Tudor monarchy experienced in its 118 years, the closest England came to overthrowing any of its rulers in that period.

It took place barely 10 years after the Peasants’ War, yet there is a striking difference: so far from being hostile to monastic foundations, the rebels in the north of England had at least partly been inspired to unrest by the beginning of the dissolution of the monasteries. Although the legislation to suppress the smaller religious houses had only been passed six months before the Pilgrimage of Grace began and the larger abbeys, priories and convents still had a few years of existence, that in itself was enough to create considerable discontent because of the disruption to local economies, the confiscation of former monastic land by the Crown and genuine popular affection and respect for the monasteries and the regular clergy within them.

(There were, of course, other contributing factors, and modern historiography has diluted the traditional view that the uprising was purely or even largely religious in its inspiration. But the part played not only by the dissolution but by the passage of the Act of Supremacy 1534, the death in January 1536 of Queen Katharine after the annulment of her marriage to King Henry VIII three years before, the issue of the Ten Articles and the simultaneous promulgation of a series of royal injunctions on religious matters by Thomas Cromwell as Vicegerent in Spirituals should not be underestimated.)

The question, then, is what accounts for these diametrically opposed popular reactions to monasticism, only 10 or so years apart, in southern Germany and northern England? I am in the front rank when it comes to arguing for the exceptionalism and peculiarity of the English Reformation, but, with my monastery-researching hat (tonsure?) on, this seems to me an issue worth probing in a little depth.

Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties

In the course of writing an essay about Lord Curzon (still to come, yes, it’s overdue and, what do you know, longer than I initially planned), I have been reading quite a lot about the University of Oxford in the second half of the 19th century. It spurred a memory of something David Starkey said to me in passing though with a characteristic degree of testiness a few years ago, essentially noting the relative anonymity of the regius professors of history at Oxford and Cambridge, their absence from mainstream debate and the implication that this was a development which was both new and unwelcome.

Forgive me if this is unnecessary and/or patronising, but just so that we’re all on the same page: regius professors are appointed to their chairs by the monarch and the chairs are usually royal endowments. The oldest regius chairs are probably those in divinity at Oxford and Cambridge, founded by Henry VIII and in position by 1540; but the University of Aberdeen claims precedence—fairly spuriously, as far as I can see—by dating its position of Regius Professor of Medicine not from 1858, when it was established by Queen Victoria as the Regius Chair in Materia Medica, but 1497, when King James IV of Scotland created a teaching post known as the Mediciner at King’s College, Aberdeen. This role lapsed between 1571 and 1619, there were no lectures between 1793 and 1838 and no record exists of it being referred to as Regius Professor of Medicine until after 1858, although Marischal College, Aberdeen, had a plain Professor of Medicine from 1700.

Until 2012, they existed only at Oxford and Cambridge, the four ancient Scottish universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin. In October 2012, however, the government announced that Elizabeth II would create up to six new regius professorships to mark her Diamond Jubilee, though in the end 12 were established. Another dozen were founded to mark the Queen’s 90th birthday, and as a result 21 universities in the UK now have at least one regius professor; typically quirkily, Trinity College Dublin in the Republic of Ireland retained the “regius” title after Ireland became independent and still has four regius chairs, in Physic, Laws, Greek and Surgery, though the last has been vacant since 1998. The University of Glasgow, if I may take some slight vicarious pride in my late father’s alma mater, has the highest number of extant regius chairs, at 14.

Back to historians. Only Oxford and Cambridge have Regius Professors of History (there is also a Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford). Until 2005, the post at Oxford was Regius Professor of Modern History, and is ex officio a Fellow of Oriel College. The chair at Cambridge was similarly renamed in 2010.

As mentioned above, Lyndal Roper is Regius Professor of History at Oxford, and on appointment in 2011 was the first woman to take on the role. The Regius Professor of History at Cambridge is Sir Christopher Clark, appointed in 2014, meaning that both regius professors are Australian; both spent two years studying in Germany, Roper at Tübingen and Clark at the Freie Universität Berlin. Roper’s specialism is German history from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, with particular interests in gender and the Reformation, witchcraft and visual culture; Clark began as an historian of Prussia, focusing on church-state relations and the Kulturkampf.

Both Roper and Clark are extremely eminent historians. Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is an outstanding and exhaustive treatment of the events leading up to the First World War, while Roper’s 2017 biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, produced for the 500th anniversary of the German friar’s 95 Theses, was widely acclaimed. Yet I can’t help but feel that, for whatever reason, Starkey had a point. Neither Roper nor Clark, who should in some ways be the doyen(ne)s of the profession of academic history, is a household name. Perhaps much lies in the fact that neither has made the breakthrough to television.

If we look back over a century or so, we will find names at Oxford like V.H. Galbraith (1947-57), Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton (1957-80) and Sir Michael Howard (1980-89), and at Cambridge Lord Acton (1895-1902), G.M. Trevelyan (1927-43), Sir Herbert Butterfield (1963-68), Sir Geoffrey Elton (1983-88) and Sir Richard Evans (2008-14). No doubt there are many factors at work here, including the changing nature and size of higher education and the media profile of historians, but there is, I think, just enough in Starkey’s complaint for it to be worth thinking about.

So, there we are. Some ideas forming which I will return to in due course. You have, as they say, been warned.