Sunday round-up 12 July 2026

Birthdays for the King of Tonga, the President of Ireland, Josiah Wedgwood and Buckminster Fuller, as well as Henry VIII's (sixth) big day, maybe this one will last

Marking another spin round the Sun today are disgraced former comedian and actor and legally confirmed sexual abuser Bill Cosby (89), journalist, broadcaster, farmer and former Chairman of the Australian Film Institute, the Australian Film Commission and Film Australia Phillip Adams (87), philosopher, meta-ethicist and humanist campaigner Professor Simon Blackburn (82), writer, journalist, producer and famous sibling Delia Ephron (82), rugby union player and sportscaster Sir Gareth Edwards (79), businessman and motorsports entrepreneur Rick Hendricks (77), screenwriter, producer and ImagineEntertainment founder Brian Glazier (75), actress Cheryl Ladd (75), historian and author Professor Timothy Garton Ash (71), President of Ireland knee-jerk NATO opponent and reliable “war-mongering military-industrial complex” bore Catherine Connolly (69), HM King Tupou VI of Tonga (67), Soul Asylum co-founder Dan Murphy (64), former CEO of Bebo, Facebook EMEA Vice-President and Managing Director and Minister for Internet Safety and Security Baroness Shields (64), television host, broadcaster, actress and friend of the three-quarter length jacket Gaby Roslin (62), former tennis player, broadcaster and second-best Treasure Hunt helicopter-borne stooge Annabel Croft (60), comedian and screenwriter Richard Herring (59), actress and legendary Brookside lesbian Anna Friel (50), not-entirely-safe-on-the-roads actress Michelle Rodriguez (48) and Pop Idol runner-up, one-time stutterer and pregnant-Katie-Price enthusiast Gareth Gates (42).

No longer in the party mood are fun-sponges general, dictator of the Roman Republic and celebrity knife block Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BC), potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood (1730), essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817), photography pioneer George Eastman (1854), President of Czechoslovakia and Nazi puppet Emil Hácha (1872), film producer Louis B. Mayer (1884), painter and sculptor Amadeo Modigliani (1884), architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller (1895), director, producer and songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II (1896), poet Pablo Neruda (1904), youngest son of George V and Queen Mary Prince John (1905), comedian and actor Milton Berle (1908), imperturbable broadcaster and journalist Sir Alastair Burnet (1928), racing driver and über-Gallic Formula One team owner Guy Ligier (1930), Tudor historian Professor Eric Ives (1931), former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (1937), former United States National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (1937) and singer-songwriter, keyboardist and Fleetwood Mac songbird Christine McVie (1943).

I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do (but I might not always)

Neither bride nor groom was a novice at this. The bride had first married when she was 17, to Sir Edward Burgh, a Lincolnshire justice of the peace in his early 20s but frail health. He had died four years later, following which the young widow had married Lord Latimer, a twice-widowed landowner nearly twice her age and part of the powerful Neville family of northern England. Latimer died relatively young, in 1543, and Kateryn, 30 or 31, was twice a widow. About a month before Latimer’s death, she had found herself a position in the household of the King’s eldest daughter, the Lady Mary, only four years her junior, whom she knew because her mother Maud had been a lady-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s first Queen, Katharine of Aragon. Indeed, Kateryn was the late Queen’s god-daughter and had been named for her.

The groom was even more experienced in matters nuptual. King Henry VIII was 52 years old and had four dead wives—two of them executed on his orders—and a former wife to whom his marriage had been annulled, the German Anne of Cleves. Having agreed to the annulment without making difficulties, Anne had been given a generous settlement including Richmond Palace and, rather pointedly, Hever Castle, the former home of the Boleyn family. She was frequently invited to court, where she was formally “the King’s Beloved Sister” and granted precedence over all other women except the King’s wife (still something of a moving target) and his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth.

Kateryn was part of Mary’s household by 16 February 1543 at the latest. That was a year and three days since the execution of his fifth wife, Katheryn Howard: she had spent her last night practising how she should lay her head on the executioner’s block, which she asked to be brought to her cell in the Tower of London. She may, with justification, have feared a botched execution; when Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, had been beheaded in May 1541, the inexperienced headsman had gashed the 67-year-old woman’s shoulder with the first blow, and it had taken 11 strokes of the axe to separate her head from her body. Katheryn Howard was lucky, in one sense, because the axe severed her head with the first blow, after which she was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula, where Anne Boleyn had also been interred. Katheryn was 18 or 19.

By the time of her second husband’s death, Kateryn, the Dowager Lady Latimer, formerly Lady de Burgh but born Kateryn Parr, found herself in strange circumstances. She was 30 years old, twice widowed but without children, had a position at court and was experiencing a growing romatic friendship with Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry VIII’s third wife Jane, and uncle of the King’s heir apparent, five-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and had been employed on foreign embassies, 34 years old, and—since Kateryn could not at that point know that he was a vainglorious sexual predator—would have seemed a good potential match.

But the King’s eye had fallen on Kateryn, and he outranked Seymour. Henry VIII was 52 years old, and while the tall, slender, athletic Renaissance prince who had come to the throne nearly 35 years before had not lost any height—at 6’2” he was a strikingly tall man for the period, given that his father Henry VII had only stood 5’9”, and an average male Londoner was around 5’7”—but he weighed well over 20 stones, his weight and a festering ulcer on his left leg which would not heal limited his mobility and he overate and drank too much to distract him from chronic pain. He suffered frequently from infections in an age when such an affliction could be fatal, and, while he had always been high-handed and conscious of his own status and authority, it was no longer tempered by good humour and lightness of touch.

It seems inevitable that being in constant and severe pain must have affected Henry’s mood and personality. It is now very frequently suggested or even taken as read that the King’s increasingly tyrannical, capricious and dangerous moods had partly been caused by a number of traumatic brain injuries sustained in rng or jousting accidents: he had been struck on the head by a splintered lance in 1524 and crushed under his fully armoured horse after falling during a tournament at Greenwich in 1536. It is a neat and attractively modern diagnoses, and it is both possible and unknowable.

But we should remember that Henry VIII had never been in any significant way a “nice” man. He liked and expected to have his own way and reacted angrily when he was defied or frustrated. In particular, he acquired favourites—Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell—but when, in his view, they underperformed or did not achieve what he wanted, he turned on them with a sense of peevish victimhood. As evidence of his ruthlessness, look at the fate of two of his father’s most imporant ministers, Sir Richard Empson, lately Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Edmund Dudley, a lawyer who had been Speaker of the House of Commons and President of the King’s Council.

Empson and Dudley had been careful and despised agents of the King in matters of taxation and income To afford himself an early boost in personal popularity, Henry VIII, shortly after his coronation, had Empson and Dudley arrested and convicted of constructive treason. They were both executed on 17 August 1510, having served Henry VII as well and usefully in life as they now did his son in death. Henry VIII probably did not blink.

The King’s behaviour and ruthlessness during the 1540s, therefore, was nota radical personality change. While some ascribe his monstrousness to brain injury or an emerging personality construct like psychopathy, Dr David Starkey has suggested it could be something much simpler than that. Perhaps the King was simply getting old.

Kateryn seems to have reacted to having two calls on her affections, the King and Seymour, with practical equanimity. It was her duty to accept the invitation of the King, Seymour was to step back and that summer he was appointed to represent the Crown at the Imperial Court in Brussels.

Today in 1543, early in the morning of 12 July 1543, Henry, King of England, Ireland and France, and Supreme Head of the Church of England, married Kateryn, Dowager Lady Latimer, in a small ceremony in the Queen’s Closet at Hampton Court Palace. The service was carried out by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and there were only 18 guests: the King’s daughters, Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth; Lord Russell, Lord Privy Seal; Sir Anthony Browne, Captain of the King’s Pensioners; Sir Thomas Heneage; Sir Edward Seymour; Sir Henry Knyvet; Sir Richard Long; Sir Thomas Darcy; Sir Edward Beynton; Sir Thomas Speke; Anthony Denny, Esq; William Herbert, Esq; Margaret Douglas; Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk; Anne, Countess of Hertford; Joan, Lady Dudley; and Anne Herbert.

It does not smack of a romantic occasion, more a bureaucratic necessity, and so, really, it was. It remained a faint possibility that the King might bolster the line of succession by fathering more children; a queen was a useful protocol prop; and, as would increasingly obvious, Henry would need increasing care as he aged. But it would not be a long posting for Kateryn: the King died less than four years later, on 28 January 1547 at the age of 55. He was succeeded by his son, Edward VI, while Kateryn would a few months later secretly marry Thomas Seymour. But there was a lot of turbulence to come for everyone.

Calendar of saints

Today is the feast of SS Hermagoras of Aquileia and Fortunatus (fl. 3rd century AD), respectively Bishop of Aquileia and his deacon, who were martyred either in Aquileia or Singidurum; of St Viventiolus (AD 460-AD 524), son of a Lyonnais nobleman, who became a monk, priest then prior at Condat Abbey in the Jura Mountains, author of Vita patrum Iurensium, a record of the first monks in Jura, before being appointed Bishop of Lyon; of Saint Giovanni Gualberto (AD 785-1073), born into an aristocratic Tuscan family, who sought revenge on the murderer of his elder brother Ugo, spared him because it was Good Friday and then joined the Order of St Benedict at San Miniato al Monte, becoming admired for his piety, virtue and austerity, and now the patron saint of foresters and park rangers; and of St John Jones (1530-98), born to a recusant family in Caernarfonshire, who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, imprisoned in the Marshalsea under the name Robert Buckley from 1582 to about 1585 for administering the sacraments, left England in 1590 and joined the Conventual Franciscans at Pontoise, returned to London in 1592, arrested, imprisoned and tortured in 1596, convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at St Thomas’s Watering on the boundary of the City of London.

Northern Ireland is celebrating the Twelfth to commemorate the victory of William III’s army over the forces of the unseated James VII and II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Factoids

1. The death toll of the Great Fire of London of 1666 (about which I wrote an “On This Day” column for City A.M. last year) has traditionally been believed to be extraordinarily, almost unbelievably, low: the popularly cited figure is six; in terms of those which were officially recorded, one historian concludes that there were eight, while another puts it “in single figures”, while conceding that some deaths must have gone unrecorded, especially those among refugees in the impromptu camps which were established for those left homeless by the fire. Others have observed that The London Gazette did not note a single death, and that if there had been a significant number of fatalities which were known about but for some reason not officially recorded, there would still be some trace in the popular literature, news sheets and pamphlets of Restoration England. There are valid counter-arguments that in some places the fire burned hot enough to reduce a human body to nothing but ash or perhaps a few skeletal fragments, and that the undocumented poor did not rank highly in importance to officialdom in 17th century England, and they were not systematically recorded in Bills of Mortality, the weekly statistics of burials and christenings kept by the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. As a result, some historians have posited that the final death toll must surely have reached the hundreds if not well into the thousands. This has a straightforward, mechanistic logic to it, given that the population of London in 1666 was between 300,000 and 400,000—it was the third or fourth largest city in Europe, after Constantinople, Paris and possibly Naples—and the fire destroyed around 13,500 houses (15 per cent of the total), 86 or 87 parish churches, 44 Company halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul’s Cathedral, Bridewell Palace and other prisons, the General Letter Office and the three western gates of the City of London, Ludgate, Newgate and Aldersgate. But even if you take one of the higher figures proposed by historians—for sake of argument, say 4,000, which could be grotesquely inflated—it would still represent only one per cent of the population of the densely packed, highly flammable city.

2. A very different picture emerges from the earthquake which devastated Lisbon less than a century later, on 1 November 1755. The quake struck the Portuguese capital around 9.40 am and was itself brief, somewhere between three-and-a-half and six minutes, its epicentre in the Atlantic Ocean about 180 miles south-west of the city. But it was at least 7.7 on the moment magnitude scale, the equivalent of the simulatneous detonation of 31,000 versions of Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Huge fissures up to 16 feet wide were torn in the earth and the sea receded from the harbour. Around 40 minutes later a tsunami surged back inland and up the Tagus River, and a fire which had started during the initial shock turned into a firestorm. Three-quarters of Lisbon’s buildings were shaken or burned to the ground, including the Ópera do Tejoa and the Royal Ribeira Palace. The total population of Lisbon was around 200,000, comparable with London a century earlier, but the death toll was between 30,000 and 40,000, and another 10,000 may have died in Morocco from its aftermath.

3. We refer to the conflagration in 1666 as “the Great Fire of London”, but the city was prone to extremely destructive blazes. Queen Boudica and her insurgent Iceni burned Londonium virtually to the ground in AD 60, the fires so fierce that a clear layer of ash can still be found in archaeological excavation; and the Roman city was all but razed again at some point in the 120s, the flames destroying 100 acres and leaving only a few substantial buildings like the fort at Cripplegate standing. Another fire in AD 675 destroyed the wooden St Paul’s Cathedral, which was rebuilt over the following decade, more fires were reported in AD 798 and AD 982, then in AD 989 there was a blaze “that, beginning in Aldgate, burned down houses and churches all the way to Ludgate”. Much of Norman London, including St Paul’s Cathedral and all but the foundations of the Palatine Tower on the banks of the River Fleet, were consumed by flames in 1087. There were two subsequent mediaeval fires often referred to as “the Great Fire of London”: at Pentecost (14 May) 1133, a fire began either on London Bridge or at the home of the Sheriff of London, Gilbert Becket, father of St Thomas, and it destroyed most of the city between St Paul’s and St Clement Danes. On 12 July 1212, a fire began in Southwark which burned down the chapel of the Augustinian Priory of St Mary Overie, then strong southerly winds pushed flames towards London Bridge; the bridge had recently been rebuilt in stone and so survived, but King John had authorised the construction of houses on the bridge, the rents from which would pay for its maintenance, and these were lost to the flames. There were also seriois fires noted in 1130, 1132, 1220, 1227 and 1299; a fire in 1633 destroyed 42 premises at the north end of London Bridge and 80 properties on Thames Street, not all of which were rebuilt and turned into a firebreak in 1666; and there was a major fire in 1678.

4. Over the course of April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, began erupting, reaching a climax on 10 April. It released 8.9–10.8 cubic miles of dense-rock equivalent and is believed to have been the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history, continuing to emit periodically for several more months. The amount of debris and ash thrown up into the atmosphere, as well as gases like hydrogen peroxide and sulphur dioxide, had a profound effect on the climate around the world and therefore on human affairs. Summer temperatures in some places were lower and there was more rainfall and a shorter growing season, while winters were stormer and less predictable. Europe was coming to the end of the Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon escaped from captivity in February 1815, eventually facing the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshal von Blücher at Waterloo on 18 June, in an unusually wet summer; the French Army’s march to Waterloo was slow and exhausting because the ground was waterlogged, and the Emperor delayed his first attack of the battle after a fierce storm during the night of 17/18 June. 1816 was known as “the Year without a Summer” and the harvests were poor; in May, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin and their daughter went to Geneva and, with Lord Byron and his physician, John William Polidori, rented the Villa Diodati and Maison Chapouis on the shore of Lake Geneva; Mary Shelley, as she began to style herself, recalled “it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house”. One day Byron proposed that they each wrote a ghost story, and that composed by Mary, who turned 19 on August, was the first draft of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. A series of poor harvests and shortages of staples combined with excessive issuance of paper money set in train the Panic of 1819, the United States’ first serious financial crisis.

5. On 11 November 1918, the day of the armistice which ended the fighting of the First World War on the Western Front, Private Henry Gunther of Company A, 313th Infantry Regiment, United States Army, was in Chaumont-devant-Damvilliers in Lorraine. Earlier in the year, he had been demoted from sergeant after a letter he had written to a friend, detailing the “miserable conditions” on the front line and advising him to avoid being drafted if at all possible, had been intercepted by army censors. Late that morning, his squad encountered a German roadblock consisting of two machine guns. Gunther, against the advice and pleas of his friend Sergeant Ernest Powell, decided to charge the enemy position. He had been brooding on his demotion and was determined to find a way to redeem himself. Armed with a Browning M1918 automatic rifle, he attempted to rush the German machine guns and fired one or two shots, but as he drew close, he was cut down by a short burst of fire and killed instantly. It was 10.59 am. The armistice came into effect at 11.00 am. Henry Gunther was 23 years old.

6. About 130 miles away, in Ville-sur-Haine in Belgium, the 28th Battalion (Northwest), Canadian Expeditionary Force, had pushed forward to a position by the canal by 9.00 am and were informed that hostilities would cease at 11.00 am. Private George Price, a 25-year-old from Falmouth, Nova Scotia, and his comrade Private Art Goodmurphy were worried that the battalion might still be exposed to enemy fire from houses on the other bank of the canal, where they could see some bricks had been knocked out to form loopholes. Price and Goodmurphy, with a patrol of five men, crossed the bridge over the canal to clear the houses and encountered a German machine gun squad mounting their weapons on a brick wall overlooking the canal. The Germans fired at the patrol and, realising they had been discovered, began to fall back; the Canadian soldiers were shielded from the fire by the brick walls of the houses. A Belgian family warned the patrol to be careful as they began to pursue the Germans and secure the position. At 10.57 am, Price stepped into the street and was shot in the chest by a German sniper. He was carried into one of the houses and a young Belgian nurse ran for help but it was useless. The wound was fatal and George Price died seconds later, at 10.58 am, two minutes before the armistice took effect. He was the last British Empire serviceman to be killed in the First World War.

7. There is always a grim fascination with forgotten unsuccessful presidential running mates, those men (and two women) who have failed even to capture an office which Vice President John Nance Garner (1933-41) famously described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”. A handful have found fame through other means: Sarah Palin (Republican, 2008) for setting a very low bar for national politics; Lloyd Bentsen (Democrat, 1988) for his admonishment to a boastful Dan Quayle, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy”; Bob Dole (Republican, 1976) for being Republican leader in the United States Senate from 1985 to 1996 and then the party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1996; Earl Warren (Republican, 1948) for serving as Chief Justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969 and chairing the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (1963-64).

8. Even more grim is the fate of those who fail to become failed candidates: Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and came extraordinarily close to snatching it. Because he took the fight all the way to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri in August—the last time a party began its convention without a nominee effectively chosen—he had to select a potential running mate in case he was victorious. On 26 July 1976, three weeks before the convention, Reagan announced that he had chosen Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. He had just turned 50 and had been in the Senate since 1969, having previously represented Pennsylvania’s 13th district from 1961 to 1969. Schweiker had served as an electronics technician aboard the aircraft carrier USS Tarawa at the end of the Second World War, then studied at Slippery Rock State College and Pennsylvania State University to graduate in psychology in 1950. He then joined his family business, American Olean Tile Company, becoming president, before entering electoral politics. He was on the progressive wing of the Republican Party, supporting the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the creation of Medicare, but opposing the war in Vietnam and two of President Richard Nixon’s nominations to the Supreme Court, Clement Haynsworth (1969) and G. Harrold Carswell (1970). Reagan picked Schweiker because his reputation as a liberal balanced his own conservatism, though it came as a surprise to Schweiker as he and Reagan did not know each other. He retired from the Senate in 1980 and served in the first Reagan administration as Secretary of Health and Human Services (1981-83), then was President of the American Council of Life Insurance, the industry’s trade body, until 1994. He died in Pomona, New Jersey, in 2015, aged 89, from complications from an infection in hospital.

9. The climax of Hamilton: An American Musical is the 1804 duel in Weeahawken, New Jersey, between Vice President Aaron Burr and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, in which the latter was fatally wounded. However, less well known is that two serving British Prime Ministers fought duels. In May 1798, during a debate in the House of Commons on the Manning of the Navy Bill, George Tierney, an Irish Whig and MP for Southwark, was standing in for the ageing and ailing Charles James Fox as leader of the radical section of the Whigs. Tierney objected to the speed at which the bill was being hurried through the House and proposed that more time be allowed, but William Pitt, Price Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in ill temper and suspected the Whigs of simply wanting to delay the measure. At the despatch box he said that Tierney’s proposal came from a “desire to obstruct the defence of the country”. This was unfair, though by the robust standards of the time it was perhaps not the worst slur that could be made, and Tierney was furious. He appealed to the Speaker, Henry Addington, a decent man with a good procedural grasp who went on to be Prime Minister, who in turn offered Pitt the chance to explain his remarks. Pitt was approaching his 39th birthday and had been Prime Minister for more than 14 years continuously, and his health was frail due to gout, stress and heavy drinking. He was uncompromising: “I will neither retract from, nor farther explain, my former expressions.” The following day, Colonel George Walpole, late of the 13th Light Dragoons and Member for Derby, delivered a challenge to Pitt from Tierney, as whose second he would act. Pitt—the Prime Minister, remember—accepted immediately and asked Speaker Addington to be his second. When the Speaker of the House wisely declined, Pitt sought out his close friend Thomas Steele, MP for Chichester and Joint Paymaster of the Forces but couldn’t contact him, so turned instead to one of the other Paymasters, Dudley Ryder, MP for Tiverton. The quartet, Tierney and Walpole, Pitt and Ryder, met on Putney Heath on 27 May, the day before Pitt’s 39th birthday, to fight with duelling pistols. A small crowd had gathered, as the location had somehow become known. An added frisson was that duelling was effectively illegal, as the outcome was prosecutable as murder or the common law offence of grievous bodily harm; but it was widely tolerated and rarely regarded by the courts as a grave offence. At 12 paces, Pitt and Tierney took aim and fired. Both missed. When the time came for a second exchange, Pitt fired into the air; Walpole and Ryder co-operated to intervene and insist that, in the words of The Times, “the business was ended with perfect honour to both parties”.

10. The second duel took place just over 30 years later, in 1829. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, the greatest soldier Britain ever produced, had only just turned 46 when he defeated the Emperor Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, and subsequently his last active military posting was as Commander-in-Chief of the Allies’ Army of Occupation which controlled France from 1815 to 1818 under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris. When he returned home, the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, sought to secure both his services and his reputation and Wellington became Master-General of the Ordnance. It was a senior military appointment responsible for all artillery and engineer units, fortifications, military supplies, transport and field hospitals, and was not subordinate to the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, at that point George III’s second son, Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany; it was also frequently a Cabinet-level position, but Wellington had political experience as a Member of Parliament (1806-09), an MP in the Irish House of Commons (1790-97) and as Chief Secretary for Ireland (1897-09). Wellington had been the only credible candidate to replace the Duke of York as Commander-in-Chief on the latter’s death in 1827; and when Viscount Goderich’s hapless five months as Prime Minister came to an end in January, George IV had sent for Wellington to head a new government. Sir Robert Peel, the pre-eminent Tory in the House of Commons, became Home Secretary for a second time and Leader of the House. Although both Wellington and Peel had previously been opposed to any kind of emancipation for Roman Catholics, who by law were prevented from sitting in Parliament, holding naval or military commissions and occupying many senior public offices, both came to realise that if no measure of accommodation was made towards the Catholic population, mounting pressure was likely to spill over into violence, especially in Ireland. They faced down the King’s splenetic opposition to introduce what would become the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, but a group of hard-line Tories who became known as “Ultras” were implacable in their opposition. As the bill was nearing the end of its progress through Parliament, on 14 March 1829 a 37-year-old peer, the 10th Earl of Winchelsea, a virulent anti-Catholic, wrote to The Standard accusing the Prime Minister of having “an insidious design for the infringement of our liberties and the introduction of Popery into every department of the State”. Wellington, rightly furious, demanded an apology and a retraction, while Winchelsea, though admitting privately he had gone too far, saw no way to back dow while keeping his honour intact. Wellington, therefore, although he had opposed duelling in the Army, called Winchelsea out. They met at Battersea Fields early on 21 March: Wellington’s second was Colonel Sir Henry Hardinge, MP for Durham and Clerk of the Ordnance, who had served under Wellington in the Peninsular Wars; supporting Winchelsea was the Earl of Falmouth, another Tory Ultra. When the duellists were 12 paces apart, Wellington fired but missed his opponent. Winchelsea then fired into the air. With Winchelsea having faced Wellington’s shot, he could not be accused of cowardice. Falmouth, who had been frantically anxious that he might end up with a dead Prime Minister, eagerly accepted that Winchelsea had been in the wrong and, his honour maintained, could now apologise. Wellington, if anything, found his reputation with the public enhanced, remarking that “the atmosphere of calumny in which I had been for some time living cleared away”. The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 was granted Royal Assent on 13 April and came into force on 24 April.

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” (Thomas Jefferson)

1. “The Civil Service has slipped out a dangerous plan to make Britain ungovernable”: my favourite Remainer-turned-rabid-Brexiteer and self-appointed keeper of the sacred flame of “real” Conservative values, Lord Frost, can sniff a blob-like conspiracy eight times out of every five, and in The Daily Telegraph he tells the horrifying tale of… the Cabinet Secretary’s forthcoming Review into the Organisation, Performance and Transformation of the Permanent Civil Service. Having been appointed in February, Dame Antonia Romeo has been asked to look at ways of improving “the delivery, accountability, innovation and productivity of the civil service”. Frost, who was once (mirabile dictu) a member of the Diplomatic Service and served as Ambassador to Denmark, assumes that the civil service is now institutionally malign and is outraged that the Cabinet Secretary is conducting it (what most of us would call an ‘internal review’). Astonishingly, for a man who has treated words like the juggled hand grenades of a traumatised Vietnam veteran, he observes of the review’s terms of reference that, “as always with any document produced by the bureaucracy, the precise wording is crucial’. His habitual bombast is almost a pity because it drowns out one or two valid points. He highlights two high-level issues which needs be thrashed out: “accountability of civil servants and the legal status of the service”. As it happens, I tend towards Frost’s view on the undesirability of making the Civil Service a statutory body with clearly delineated responsibilities and privileges: setting out anything beyond the existence of the Civil Service risks elevating it to a co-equal position, saying that ministers and officials are distinct classes within the constitution, rather than one serving the other within the context of the executive. Frost has reached a stage where he requires the Civil Service to be not inefficient, outdated or slow to change, but to be the enemy. With a certainty that should alarm, he has pronounced on the future of the British state: “the only serious solution is to politicise the upper reaches of the Civil Service, to bring in capable people who share the minister’s world-view and political aims. Then when the government changes, so do the people.” The “only serious solution”. Beware the man of a single book, as St Thomas Aquinas reminds us.

2. “Gary Stevenson is wrong about wealth taxes”: the redoubtable Chris Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs enters the lists in the pages of The Critic to take on the fashionable nostrums of former City trader Gary Stevenson, who has caught a certain section of the public imagination with his soak-the-rich, all-shall-be-well platform. Stevenson is, as Snowdon puts it cuttingly,”best known for his advocacy of a wealth tax and for dressing like a 16 year old scally despite being a 39 year man”, and his Channel 4 thinkpiece, How To Get Filthy Rich, presents a simple problem with our economy—inequality—and a simple remedy, wealth taxes. Unfortunately, as Snowdon meticulously and methodically demonstrates, Stevenson’s diagnosis and treatment are both highly debatable at best (he shows “a staggering ignorance of the tax system” and “a lot of what he says is simply gibberish”). In 1990, 12 OECD countries had some form of wealth tax. Now it is three, because they are cumbersome, ineffcient, larded with perverse incentives and simply bad fiscal policy. But they are simple to explain on a superficial level and pander to a reflexive, atavistic combination of (allegedly) solving economic problems and punishing an unpopular and allegedly undeserving rentier class with no wider fallout. Any solution so simple should arouse suspicion but Stevenson has peddled it well. Which is why it needs to be debunked as often as possible.

3. “Who really runs Manchester?”: since it became clear that Andy Burnham was inexorably headed for Downing Street, there has been a great deal of interest in how the city, and the wider combined authority, actually work, what they’ve achieved and who deserves credit. I’m sure there are Burnham supporters who regard this as opportunistic, dirt-digging and perhaps even a witch-hunt, and I’m sure there are a lot of sudden armchair experts on local government. But I think Burnham has to take that on the chin: in the same way as Sir Keir Starmer (mis)sold Labour as mature and serious, the “grown-ups in the room”, Burnham has made his tenure as Mayor of Greater Manchester since 2017 so fundamental to his pitch for the premiership that he has declared open season on the city’s goveranance. In The Spectator, Gus Carter looks at some of the less well known names who have played central roles in Manchester’s development but for much of whose work Burnham has been happy to take the credit. Elsewhere people have pointed to Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council from 1996 to 2021, but Carter suggests that the real capo of Manchester politics was Sir Howard Bernstein, Chief Executive of the City Council from 1998 to 2017. Bernstein was said to insist that developers engage Deloitte as planning advisers (then took up a non-executive role with Deloitte within days of retiring from the council); also part of the circle of civic leadership were David and Julie Roscoe, a husband-and-wife who are moving towards retirement now but retain huge influence over the planning department which they have run under various job titles for 50 years. There is a tight-knit group of politicians, city officials and business leaders who are said to manage the planning and development system for mutual benefit and to the exclusion of outsiders. This is not necessarily an indication of ineffectivness, but it is difficult to trumpet as a replicable model.

4. “Before Manchesterism, there was Docklandsism”: “Manchesterism” is the mot juste as Andy Burnham glides towards Downing Street, thought it’s really not clear what, if anything, it actually means and whether it’s a coherent approach of urban development. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the excellent, elegant and sharp-tongued writer, critic and design guru Stephen Bayley looks further back, to the early 1980s and the dereliction of London’s Docklands. Pummelled and shattered by German bombing during the Second World War, the docks, from Wapping and Limehouse in the west to the Royal Docks in the east, experienced a rapid, surprising but brief recovery in the 1950s then went into steep decline as containerisation made cargo ships bigger than the Thames could accommodate. By the end of the 1970s, eight square miles of east London were effectively industrial wasteland (a fascinating visual record can be seen in John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday, filmed between August and October 1979 in places like St Katharine Docks, Millwall Docks, the Isle of Dogs, Canary Wharf and Wapping). In 1981, Margaret Thatcher’s Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine, who knew a grand projet when he saw one, created a statutory body, the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), which was to be financed by a grant from central government and the proceeds from the disposal of land for development. It would act as a catalyst for development and an ambassador for the area, and its first Chief Executive, Reg Ward (1981-88), proved both imaginative and flexible in attracting development. He persuaded Michael von Clemm, Chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, that Canary Wharf was an ideal location for the bank’s back office services, away from the Square Mile, but the firm ended up bringing a front office too, establishing a second London headquarters and sparking the evolution of Docklands as a financial centre. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when so many employees left their offices, it looked as if Canary Wharf might be doomed, but the tide has been turned: HSBC is bringing back some of the staff it relocated to the City of London and Barclays has renewed the lease on its building for 999 years. As Bayley notes, the Barclays building, One Churchill Place, “is nothing very special, just good-ordinary by HOK, a leading US commercial architect… it will be replaced by something better in a process of steady evolution that all great cities share. And that’s progress. Mrs Thatcher was right to be optimistic.”

5. “Britain should embrace the Twelfth of July celebrations”: in The Spectator, writer Owen Polley makes the quixotic proposal that Great Britain should adopt the bank holiday and attendant celebrations currently only marked in Northern Ireland to recall William III’s victory over his deposed father-in-law, James VII and II, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. I think there are two things going on here, and I suspect Polley would admit them: the first, which is an argument he is entitled to make, is that the Twelfth has an undeserved reputation for Protestant and Loyalist triumphalism and anti-Catholicism, but in fact the day often passed off peacefully and was later weaponised by Republicans to discredit Unionism and especially the Orange Order. I think the concise response to that is “Up to a point, Lord Copper”. The second argument, with principle of which I have considerable sympathy but I don’t think Polley’s solution is the correct one, is that the Glorious Revolution, in the wake of which came the Williamite War, the Siege of Londonderry and the Battles of Enniskillen, the Boyne and Aughrim, is hardly remembered outside academia and Parliament in Britain but should be marked more emphatically and more positively. After all, the Bill of Rights 1688 gave us substantial limitations on the independent power of the Crown, for example to maintain a standing army without annual authority from Parliament; free elections, frequent parliaments and the absolute freedom of speech in parliamentary proceedings; and protection from “cruel and unusual punishments” and excessive bail. In many cases these were the rights which the American colonists of the 1770s and 1780s were looking back to and regarded as having been lost. The Glorious Revolution, neither perfect nor complete, was a central part of the creation of our parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy. But it would seem perverse and suggestive of another agenda for Britain to celebrate the events of 1688 and 1690 on the anniversary of and through the lens of a battle fought in Ireland in 1690, after the replacement of James VII and II by William III and Mary II had taken place and was largely secure, and could be argued to be no more important than the Battles of Beachy Head or Aughrim.

6. “The Troubles made us forget Belfast’s architectural magnificence”: for a number of psychological, emotional, political and experiential reasons, I have a profound love for Belfast, perhaps—if this makes sense—the biggest city in the UK that most people haven’t been to. There are good and bad parts, as there are in any city of 350,000, it’s had the problems attendant on any major former industrial centre—in Belfast’s case, shipbuilding and linen-making—and over it all hangs not just the shadow of the Troubles but the weight of sectarianism since the creation of a separate Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. In The Daily Telegraph, historian and journalist Simon Heffer (now Lord Blackwater) looks at the city’s Georgian and Victorian heyday, the wealth and quiet Presbyterian self-assurance which produced a slew of handsome civil buildings: the Exchange and Assembly Rooms, St George’s Church, the Lanyon Building, the Custom House, the Ulster Hall and the modestly magnificent City Hall. Of course these buildings are not free of context. Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant which was signed by 237,000 men and the equivalent Women’s Declaration which attracted 234,000 names were available at City Hall in 1912; it was outside the City Hall in November 1985 that another crowd of 500,000 gathered in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement and hear the Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley deliver his electrifying verdict on the matter: “Never, never, never, never!"; and the Ulster Hall saw an enormous rally against Home Rule in 1886 led by Lord Randolph Churchill, and was where Sir Edward Carson publicly signed the Covenant on Ulster Day, 27 September 1912, after a huge rally the previous evening. In some ways the architectural glories of Belfast illustrate the point I try to make about history not being inevitable: when the City Hall opened on 1 August 1906, Ireland was hardly quiescent and there were two failed Home Rule Bills in the rear-view mirror, but then, from one point of view, Ireland had been a battelground for centuries. Those at the opening of the City Hall could hardly have guessed that most of Ireland would have left the Union within 15 years, that Northern Ireland would become a province with its own parliament and government, or that 120 years later—that is, now—it was at least possible that Northern Ireland would be heading for the exit in the near future.

7. “Democrats’ extremism and stupidity are catching up with the GOP’s”: I am not a natural Democrat (though many British Conservatives feel more at home with the monied, centrist tendency in the Democratic Party than they do with Republicans), but I say without glee or schadenfreude that, unspeakable, immoral, ignorant and base as I might find President Trump, Democrats have done exceptional work in putting up opponents almost tailor-made for the kind of impatient, instinctive, feelings-above-all populism which is Trump’s stock in trade. Semi-communists, full-fat Marxists, radical identitarians, monomaniacal “decolonisers” and peddlars of collective guilt and inherited trauma, economic fantasists: every time Republicans accuse Democrats of something genuinely so stupid it cannot possibly be true, there is a good chance that a story will emerge which Democrats have to admit is true and is not purely propaganda. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) really did publicly identify herself as part-Cherokee, despite being at most between 0.09 per cent and 1.5 per cent of Native American ancestry; Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN) really has perpetuated and given House room to a range of antisemitic tropes and smears. In The Washington Post, George Will starts with the suspension of Democrat Graham Platner’s bid to represent Maine in the US Senate. Controversy after controversy had piled up around Platner—a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest, accusations of rape, violence and threatening and abusive behaviour towards former partners, previous support for political violence and armed resistance—but he retained the confidence of his party’s leadership for too long. Will, dismissing Platner as a “lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents”, explained how this had appeared: “individual Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’.” Will is a bone-deep conservative but has no room for Donald Trump in his cosmology, “the louche star of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, and the payer of hush money to his porn star paramour”. He condemns Vice President Vance as “broad-minded about the narrow-minded”, “a Republican populist who, as a matter of principle, defends the equity of including in his party’s diversity the dregs of America’s political swamp”, with his “solicitude, though inconstant, for the white supremacist, Holocaust-denying antisemite Nick Fuentes”. Fundamentally, Will stands with the Founding Fathers in their disdain for populism, and his horror at the way Trump-era populism has thrown away any sense of character and moral fibre in politicians. Both parties have distorted their judgement and reason, and the Democrats should take only the coldest of comfort from having done so less than Trump’s acolytes.

All my possessions…

… Elizabeth I said just before she slipped away at about 3.00 am on 24 March 1603, aged 69, for a moment of time.

But it doesn’t work like that, not even for princes.