Sunday round-up 13 April 2025

Candles for the peerless Edward Fox, the King of Buganda and Garry Kasparov, a decade since Günther Grass died, and the anniversary of Catholic emancipation

All the best/some/no (delete as appropriate) wishes to those celebrating today, who include the reliably brilliant, impeccable and beautifully spoken actor Edward Fox (88), composer and conductor Bill Conti (83), actress, writer and Home & Away stalwart Judy Nunn (80), singer, songwriter, producer and pastor Al Green (79), producer, songwriter and “Chinnichap” glam rock behemoth Mike Chapman (78), actor and famously not-quite-romantic-lead-material Ron Perlman (75), singer, songwriter and Disney-friendly balladeer Peabo Bryson (74), actor, “my” Doctor Who and David Tennant’s father-in-law Peter Davison (74), long-time E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg (74), former Magdalene College, Cambridge, undergraduate King Muwenda Mutebi II of Buganda (70), world chess champion, author and activist Garry Kasparov (62), unlikely Bavarian and Mambo No. 5 aficionado Lou Bega (50) and singer, songwriter, actress and, I regret to inform the court, ukulele-playing vegan Nellie McKay (43).

Last-minute (or, in fact, some-while-back) dropouts from birthday shenanigans include priest, theologian and co-founder of the Society of Jesus St Peter Faber (Pierre Lefevre) (1506), storied Queen of France Catherine de’ Medici (1519), convicted terrorist, traitor and religious extremist Guy Fawkes (1570), former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and loyal servant unto death of Charles I the Earl of Strafford (1593), Prime Minister famously careless with North American colonies Lord North (1732), third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson (1743), iconic English portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769), Cornishman, engineer and explorer Richard Trevithick (1771), Father of Canadian Federation and Irish nationalist-turned-monarchist Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825), feminist and social reformer Josephine Butler (1828), pioneering retailer Frank Woolworth (1852), robber and outlaw Butch Cassidy (1866), 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis (1873), controversial Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Bomber Command Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris (1892), inventor of radar Sir Robert Watson-Watt (1892), Scrabble creator Alfred Mosher Butts (1899), psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901), novelist, poet, playwright and Godot-waiter Samuel Beckett (1906), actor, singer and Dallas legend Howard Keel (1919), financier, “God’s banker” and sticky-end-meeter Roberto Calcvi (1920), former Taoiseach of Ireland Liam Cosgrave (1920), graduate of the University of Edinburgh and first President of Tanzania Julius Nyerere (1922), Conservative MP and minister, supreme diarist and colourful character Alan Clark (1928), freakishly talented racing driver and engineer and subject of a forthcoming essay Dan Gurney (1931), poet and playwright Seamus Heaney (1939), actor and singer Paul Sorvino (1939), racing driver and brother-in-law of Alan Clark (see above) Mike Beuttler (1940), former FIA President and definitely-not-into-Nazi-uniforms fascist offspring Max Mosley (1940) and hugely missed author, journalist and arguer Christopher Hitchens (1949).

All roads lead to Rome

Today in 1829, a deeply reluctant and grudging King George IV gave Royal Assent to the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. Its most important measure was to end the requirement to take a variety of oaths and make certain declarations in order to sit and vote in Parliament and enjoy a range of offices, franchises and civil rights. Particularly discriminatory had been the need to make declarations “against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome”. In effect, it allowed Roman Catholics, without renouncing their faith or swearing false oaths, to be Members of Parliament, to sit and vote in the House of Lords if they held peerage titles, to vote in parliamentary elections and, if qualified, for Scottish and Irish representative peers in the House of Lords (I explained representative peers here in December 2022), to hold most civil and military offices and to be members of lay corporations.

It achieved this by remarkably straightforward and pragmatic means: rather than take the Oath of Supremacy which acknowledged the King as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Roman Catholics were permitted simply to pledge “true allegiance” to the King, recognise the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession, rekect any claim to “temporal or civil jurisdiction” within the United Kingdom by “the Pope of Rome” or “any other foreign prince… or potentate” and “abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment”.

Although this vastly opened up the offices and functions of government to participation by Roman Catholics, it did not remove all legal disabilities placed on them. No Roman Catholic clergy were permitted to sit in the House of Commons, and Roman Catholics could not hold the Office of Guardians and Justices of the United Kingdom or Regent of the United Kingdom (this last was important, as the King had been Prince Regent for his father, George III, from 1811 to 1820); they could not serve as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, Lord Keeper or Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, Chief Governor or Governor of Ireland.

Roman Catholics could also not be appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. (The ineligibility for this last post was only lifted earlier this year to facilitate the appointment of Lady Elish Angiolini. I explored the issue here in March, and am still not wholly convinced that the Cabinet Office, the Royal Household and the Church of Scotland had simply forgotten that it remained on the statute book.) Nor could they hold offices in then Church of England, the Church of Scotland or the Church of Ireland, and they were ineligible for academic posts at universities and the headships of Eton, Westminster and Winchester. They were also forbidden from advising the Crown on appointments in the Church of England, the Church of Ireland or the Church of Scotland.

The act was absolutely not a measure which granted equal civic rights to Roman Catholics. Nor, in England or Wales or in Scotland did it really seem so very significant, except in intellectual and moral terms: by the end of the 1820s, there were perhaps 245,000 Roman Catholics in England and Wales, in total population of 13.8 million, and in Scotland there were as few as 30,000 Catholics in a nation of 2.4 million. Substantial Catholic immigration was not far off, especially to Scotland, but in 1829 the act was extending civic rights to a very small community.

Ireland was a completely different matter. The population of the island was around 7.7 million, of whom 6.2 million, 80 per cent, were Roman Catholics. It was in Ireland that matters would become urgent and reluctant hands would be forced. In its last decade before abolition at the Act of Union, the Parliament of Ireland had passed the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793. It eased some of the strictures which had accumulated under the Penal Laws, and allowed Roman Catholics to take degrees at Trinity College Dublin, but it maintained in place an oath which prevented Catholics from taking seats in Parliament in Dublin. Section IX of the act listed a large number of offices in the Irish government from which Roman Catholics remained excluded: Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy, Lord Chancellor, Lord High Treasurer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer, Master of the Rolls, Secretary of State, Attorney General… it did nothing to alter the entrenchment in power of the Protestant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

The 1793 act did, however, enfranchise Roman Catholics in Ireland on broadly similar terms to the Protestant electorate. Daniel O’Connell, an affluent Catholic barrister from County Kerry whose first language was Irish, had in 1823 established the Catholic Association, a mass-membership political movement which campaigned for further emancipation for the Roman Catholic population, and from 1826 it began using its funds to support parliamentary candidates. The sudden resignation after a stroke of the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, saw Foreign Secretary George Canning become head of government; he was a moderate and favoured Catholic emancipation, as a result of which several more conservative Tories refused to serve under him while he gained the support of leading Whigs like the Marquess of Lansdowne, Henry Brougham and Lord John Russell.

Canning was already in poor and declining health, and died after 119 days as Prime Minister, the shortest ever tenure of the office until Liz Truss’s 49 days in 2022. He was succeeded by the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Viscount Goderich, but “Goody” Goderich was no more able to hold together the fragile Canningite/Whig coalition than Canning himself had been. He resigned after 144 days, without ever meeting Parliament, and by January 1828 the King was faced with having to choose yet another Prime Minister. George IV, vaguely in favour of Catholic emancipation in his youth, was by this stage strongly opposed to such measures, citing his coronation oath to uphold the Protestant religion. But he was 65 years old, going blind because of cataracts, so badly affected by gout in his right hand and arm that he could not sign documents, grotesquely overweight and plagued by arteriosclerosis and peripheral oedema.

It is a quirk of history that policies are sometimes brought to pass by those who fundamentally oppose them. The King, against Catholic emancipation and by instinct inclined towards the Tories, had initially approached the Earl of Harrowby about forming a ministry as Goderich’s premiership teetered on the edge of collapse, but Harrowby, a former Foreign Secretary and friend of William Pitt the Younger, refused. George IV now turned to the Duke of Wellington: the hero of Waterloo had resigned from the government as Master-General of the Ordnance when Canning had become Prime Minister, partly because of his opposition to Catholic emancipation. But by the beginning of 1828, the Duke had reluctantly and grudgingly come to accept that some degree of relief for Roman Catholics was essential to avoid serious unrest in Ireland. His conversion was shared by Sir Robert Peel, who had resigned as Home Secretary in 1827 and now resumed the office; so fiercely sectarian and Protestant had Peel’s reputation been when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland 1812-18 that he had (inevitably) been nicknamed “Orange” Peel.

So the King, against relief for Catholics, appointed as Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington, long opposed to the idea, and the chief place in the House of Commons, as Home Secretary and Leader of the House, went to another veteran opponent, Sir Robert Peel. But tectonic plates were shifting. Lord John Russell introduced a bill into the House of Commons to do away with the requirements in the Corporation Act 1661 and the Test Act 1673 to be a communicant member of the Church of England to hold a huge range of government and military offices. Peel gave it his support and the Sacramental Test Act 1828 was given Royal Assent in May 1828. But the act principally lifted disabilities on Protestant non-conformists and dissenters, making the limitations on Roman Catholics seem all the more stark.

In June 1828, as part of a series of ministerial changes, Wellington promoted the Paymaster-General of HM Forces, Anglo-Irish aristocrat William Vesey Fitzgerald, to President of the Board of Trade. As was then the convention, on being appointed to an office of profit under the Crown Fitzgerald had to submit himself to re-election in his parliamentary constituency of Clare in the west of Ireland. In the by-election in July, O’Connell stood against Fitzgerald on a manifesto supporting emancipation and won comfortably; there was no legal prohibition on Roman Catholics offering themselves as parliamentary candidates, but O’Connell was unable to take his seat in the House of Commons without swearing the Oath of Supremacy.

Wellington was now buttressed in his view that, however much he disliked it, emancipation was preferable to serious disorder, perhaps even civil war. He was well informed on the matter; his elder brother Richard, 1st Marquess Wellesley, a former Governor-General of India and Foreign Secretary, who had previously sat in the Irish House of Commons, was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1821 to 1828 (and would resume the office in 1833-34). Wellesley had tried to placate Catholic opinion in Ireland, and in 1822 had dismissed the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, an effective politician and administrator but noted even by contemporaries for his extreme anti-Catholic sentiments. Yet the rising tide of disquiet had not been stemmed. Peel concluded that “though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger”.

In February 1829, a new Session of Parliament began, and, the King being absent, the Gracious Speech was read by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst. Part of the speech dealt with the situation in Ireland, regretting the existence of O’Connell’s Catholic Association as “dangerous to the public peace, and inconsistent with the spirit of the Constitution”. However, the King asked Parliament:

that you should review the Laws which impose civil disabilities on his Majesty’s Roman Catholic subjects. You will consider whether the removal of those disabilities can be effected consistently with the full and permanent security of our establishments in church and state, with the maintenance of the reformed religion established by law, and of the rights and privileges of the bishops, and of the clergy of this realm, and of the churches committed to their charge. These are Institutions which must ever be held sacred in this Protestant Kingdom, and which it is the duty and the determination of his Majesty to preserve inviolate.

He further asked that Parliament consider the issue with the necessary “temperance” and “moderation”.

Peel introduced the Roman Catholic Relief Bill into the Commons on 5 March and piloted it through bitter debates skilfully and rapidly. The House of Commons passed the bill by a large margin on 30 March and it was sent to the House of Lords, where opposition to its provisions was much stronger. Because of the stiff opposition from the Lords, and the ongoing disapproval of the King, Wellington at one point threatened to resign, which might have paved the way for a Whig Prime Minister in favour of not just Catholic emancipation but electoral reform of the franchise throughout the United Kingdom. Piqued, George IV for a very short while accepted Wellington’s resignation and favoured the madcap notion of his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, forming an administration. Cumberland was an active and highly conservative member of the House of Lords, vehemently opposed to emancipation and recently appointed Grand Master of the Orange Institution of Ireland. He had believed that Wellington would deal firmly with dissent in Ireland and had become bitterly disillusioned, but the idea that a highly reactionary royal duke who had been mainly resident in Germany since 1818 would have the slightest chance of winning the support of the House of Commons was fantastical.

The King rapidly withdrew his acceptance of Wellington’s resignation and the House of Lords agreed to the bill on 11 April. Two days later George IV gave it Royal Assent. The effect of the act was enormous, both practically and symbolically. Although a very small number of voters in Britain were newly enfranchised, it widened the electorate in Ireland hugely and lifted the restriction on most Irishmen and women from voting on the basis of their religion (women were unable to vote because of sex, of course). But there had been political concessions to the Protestant ascendancy: the same day as the King indicated Royal Assent to the Roman Catholic Relief Act, he did the same for the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act, which actually restricted the franchise in the county constituencies in Ireland by raising the property threshold of qualification from ownership or rent of a 40-shilling freehold to the threshold applied in Britain, which was £10. Given the relative poverty of Ireland compared to England, Scotland and Wales, this was a vast increase, and it is estimated that the electorate in Ireland was reduced from around 215,000 to 40,000 (remember, the total population was nearly eight million).

A dark day for the Raj

Today in 1919, a large crowd of between 10,000 and 20,000 gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh, a garden by the Golden Temple in Amritsar. It was Vaisakhi, the first day of the month of Vaisakh, celebrated as a spring harvest festival throughout Punjab and marked by Sikhs as the anniversary of the foundation of the Khalsa in 1699. But there was a strong wave of political unrest too: some who gathered were also protesting at the recent introduction of the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919 (the so-called Rowlatt Act), which allowed stricter control of the press, arrest without warrant, indefinite detention and for certain specified “political” offences trials in camera without a jury. It extended many of the provisions of the Defence of India Act 1915, and reflected a desperate attempt by the British authorities to stamp out any nationalist or revolutionary dissent and deter further expressions of resistance.

Nationalist feeling had been given a boost in 1915 by the return to India from South Africa of the charismatic and shrews barrister Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, increasingly dubbed “Mahātmā”, meaning “venerable” or “great-souled”. As a civil rights campaigner in South Africa he had developed a formidable reputation as an organiser and strategist, passionate Indian nationalist and articulate theorist, as well as a champion of non-violent resistance. He had supported the recruitment of Indian soldiers to fight in the First World War but was becoming a more and more powerful advocate of the peasantry of India and their exploitation by landlords and the colonial administration. Disappointed by the modest reforms the British authorities were offering in the wake of the conflict, he promised to lead a campaign of civil disobedience.

In February 1919, Gandhi had sent a telegram to the Viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, warning him that if the Rowlatt Act was passed, he would step up his campaign of resistance. Chelmsford was an intelligent, dutiful man, a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had served as Governor of Queensland (1905-09) and New South Wales (1909-13). A volunteer in the Dorsetshire Regiment, he had sought active service at the outbreak of the First World War and as a captain was posted to India with his battalion; after a series of rapid promotions, he was, to widespread surprise, appointed Viceroy and Governor-General in March 1916 when Lord Hardinge of Penshurst was recalled to London for a second term as Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office.

Chelmsford was no oppressive die-hard. He favoured greater Indian involvement in the administration of the territory and, working with the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, he had produced a report on constitutional reforms in 1918 which served as the basis of the Government of India Act 1919. The Viceroy was diligent, consensual and cautious, sympathetic to the well-educated and largely Westernised Indians with whom he mostly dealt, and he saw the cause of reform as his viceroyalty’s mission. At the same time, he was not an instinctive politician, lacking the nous of a schemer or deal-maker, and it was that element of inflexibility which meant that his reaction to Gandhi’s warning was to become determined not to be influenced by threats but to forge ahead as planned.

Gandhi began his campaign on 30 March by calling for a general strike or hartal. Although he then tried to change the date to 6 April, the original schedule was observed widely throughout India, with Hindus and Muslims both closing their shops and other businesses. At a protest in Chandni Chowk, one of the oldest market squares in Delhi, a brutally heavy-handed police response saw soldiers open fire on protestors and 60 were killed. The shootings provoked riots across the country, and Gandhi again appealed for peaceful resistance, instead urging Indians to boycott British goods and burn any British-made clothes they owned. The British warned him to stay away from Delhi but he defied the instruction and arrived on 9 April, only to be arrested immediately. The following day, two more leaders of the Indian National Congress, Dr Satya Pal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew (both Cambridge graduates, as it happened), were arrested and secretly taken to Dharamshala in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The three arrests provoked more public demonstrations. Gandhi’s insistence on non-violence was obeyed by many, but the atmosphere was extremely tense: Punjab in particular had seen many instances of sabotage and disruption to railways and telegraph lines, and the Lieutenant Governor of the province, an experienced Indian Civil Service officer from a minor Anglo-Irish landowning family in Tipperary, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, suspected these were the first signs of a coordinated revolt against the British authorities. By 13 April, he had decided to impose martial law on Punjab. The evening before, however, Congress leaders in Amritsar met and decided to hold a public protest at 4.30 pm the following day in the Jallianwala Bagh.

The commandant of the 45th (Jullundur) Brigade 50 miles away in Jalandhar, and therefore the man with the greatest degree of force at his immediate disposal, was a 54-year-old British Indian Army officer, temporary Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer CB. He had been born in Murree in northern Punjab and educated there and in Simla before being sent to Midleton College in County Cork, and after being commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey), he had transferred two years later to the Bengal Army as a staff officer. Over the following 30 years he had served all over India and in Hong Kong and Afghanistan, rising to colonel by 1915 then temporary brigadier-general the next year.

A elderly British missionary, Marcella Sherwood, had been attacked in Amritsar by a group on Indians on 11 April, and the news both shocked and outraged Dyer. He shared O’Dwyer’s anxieties about a serious insurrection, and decided to take swift and determined action to restore order and discourage any would-be rebels. On the morning of Sunday 13 April, he banned all public meetings, and at 9.00 am went through the centre of Amritsar with a number of local officials, announcing the implementation of a pass system to enter or leave the city, a curfew beginning at 8.00 pm that night and a ban on all processions and public meetings of four or more people. The instructions were read out and explained in English, Hindi, Urdi and Punjabi, but many did not hear them or simply ignored them.

Dyer was informed of the planned assembly at the Jallianwala Bagh at 12.40 pm. By mid-afternoon, there were already thousands of people in the garden, some of them on their way home after worshipping at the Golden Temple, others aimless after the police had closed the local horse and cattle fair early at 2.00 pm. The Bagh is an open area roughly 200 yards by 200 yards, surrounded by tall walls and with only five narrow entrances. In the centre there was a ritual cremation site and a well 20 feet across. The protest meeting began at 4.30 pm.

At 5.30 pm, Dyer arrived at the Jallianwala Bagh with 50 soldiers from the 9th Gurkha Rifles and the 4th Sikhs (Frontier Force) armed with rifles, and two armoured cars; the narrow entrances to the garden meant that the armoured cars had to stop outside the main gate. Dyer ordered the exits to be blocked, then, without issuing any warning, ordered his men to open fire on the crowd, directing their fire towards the largest groups, trying to escape through the exits. The panic among unarmed civilians was indescribable. The soldiers maintained their fire for 10 minutes, by which time, according to Dyer’s own subsequent claim, they had fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition. As well as those killed by rifle fire, hundreds or more were trampled to death or died in the well in the centre of the Bagh trying to escape the shooting. Eventually 120 bodies would be recovered from the well. Some had died hours later or overnight.

It is not known how many Indians were killed. The British authorities, referring to a “violent attack” by a “mob”, initially suggested 200 had died. An independent investigation reported 379 had been killed and 192 seriously wounded. A committee of inquiry led by the Scottish judge Lord Hunter in 1919-20 endorsed the figure of 379 deaths, among them 41 boys and six-month-old baby, but estimated well over 1,000 wounded. Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War, told the House of Commons in July 1920 of “the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three or four times as many”. The Indian National Congress put the number of dead at 1,000.

The sudden brutal killing of so many unarmed civilians stunned public opinion in India and elsewhere. Even Indians who had regarded British rule with equanimity or acceptance were horrified and outraged. Dyer reported to his superior officer, Major-General William Beynon commanding the 16th Division in Lahore, that he had been “confronted by a revolutionary army”, and received in response a telegram which read “Your action correct and Lieutenant Governor approves”. Dyer later told the committee of inquiry that he had known about the planned gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh at 12.40 pm but had done nothing to prevent it, and had then travelled there with his soldiers with the intention not of dispersing the crowd but attacking one of he found it. His purpose, he said, “was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience”. He then added:

I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself.

When he was asked if he would have used the armoured cars to fire on the crowd if it had been possible to get them inside the Bagh, he responded “I think probably, yes”. He also told the committee that he had not ordered his soldiers to stop firing when the crowd began to flee because he believed it was his duty to keep firing until they had dispersed. There had been no effort to assist the wounded because “It was not my job. Hospitals were open and they could have gone there.”

Hunter’s committee of inquiry unanimously condemned Dyer and his conduct. Churchill, hardly a bleeding-heart liberal on the issue of India, described the massacre to the House of Commons as:

an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.

He went on:

The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed upon the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This was continued for 8 or 10 minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion.

This was not a universal reaction. There were many Members of Parliament who dwelled on the difficulties and pressures facing Dyer, the conduct of Indians in disturbances elsewhere and the notion that, even if mistaken, Dyer had simply done his best as he saw it to maintain order and security. Many of his fellow officers agreed.

Dyer was relieved of his command on 23 March 1920 and prohibited from employment in India, but there was no kind of prosecution or sanction. He died on 23 July 1927 in Somerset, aged 62. Coincidentally, in Richard Attenborough’s epic Gandhi (1982), Dyer is played by Edward Fox, whose birthday it is today.

Livin’ on a prayer

It is a low-key day in hagiographical terms. Today is the feast of St Proculus of Terni (d AD 310), a bishop who was martyred by decapitation in Bologna towards the end of the Diocletianic persecution; of St Martin I (AD 590-AD 655), an Umbrian monk who served as nuncio in Constantinople, overseeing diplomatic relations between the Pope and the Emperor, was elected to the papacy while still in deacon’s orders, found himself arrested and imprisoned after condemning the Monothelite tendencies shared by Emperor Constans II and died in exile in Cherson in Crimea, the last pope commemorated as a martyr; of St Guinoch (d AD 838), of whom little is known except that he was a counsellor to Kenneth MacAlpin, King of Dál Riada (AD 541-AD 850) and King of the Picts (AD 848-AD 858); and of St Margaret of Città di Castello (1287-1320), an Italian noblewoman born blind and growth-restricted, with a severe curvature of the spine, who was walled into a room in their residence by her parents for more than 10 years so that no-one would see her disabilities but became a Dominican tertiary and is invoked by blind and disabled people.

For readers in Thailand, or those with a particular interest in matters Siamese, it is Songkran, the New Year festival, while, in Punjab and other parts of northern India, it is Vaisakhi (see above).

Factoids

1. Colonel Douglas Clifton Brown, Member of Parliament for Hexham (1918-23, 1924-51), was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1943 to 1951. He and his wife, Violet (née Wollaston), had one child, a daughter Audrey (1908-2002), who in 1931 married Old Etonian and graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, barrister Harry Hylton-Foster. He stood as Conservative candidate in Shipley in the 1945 general election, then was MP for York (1950-59) and Cities of London and Westminster (1959-65). Sir Winston Churchill appointed him Solicitor General for England and Wales in 1954, when, as used to be the custom for law officers, he was knighted. In 1959, amid some controversy as the Opposition felt that had not been consulated, he succeeded W.S. Morrison as Speaker of the House of Commons, Lady Hylton-Foster, as she now was, becoming the only person to be the child and the spouse of Speakers; she also lived in Speaker’s House twice, staying with her father while recovering from the measles then becoming châtelaine during her husband’s tenure. Speaker Hylton-Foster died suddenly of a heart attack while walking along Duke Street in St James’s, aged 60. At the end of the year, to mark his service, Audrey was given a life peerage and became Baroness Hylton-Foster, and was given an annuity of £1,667 under the terms of the Honourable Lady Hylton-Foster’s Annuity Act 1965. She served as Convenor of the Crossbench Peers from 1974 to 1995, and died in 2002, aged 94. The provision of her annuity was abolished when the parent act was repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 2004.

2. The maverick Conservative MP Alan Clark (see above) lived at Saltwood Castle in Kent, which had been bought in 1953 by his father, the art historian, broadcaster and gallery director Lord Clark. Before that it had belonged to Lord Conway of Allington, another art historian (Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge 1901-04 while Clark had been Slade Professor at Oxford 1946-48 and 1961) and previously a Conservative MP (Combined English Universities 1918-31). Prior to that Saltwood had been the childhood home of Conservative cabinet minister, editor of The Daily Telegraph and Fleet Street legend Bill Deedes, but from 1580 until restoration in the late 19th century it had been uninhabitable as a result of the Dover Straits Earthquake of 6 April 1580.

3. Saltwood had an early starring role in English history in December 1170: at that point, the castle was in the hands of Ranulf de Broc, a loyal supporter of King Henry II who had appointed him to manage the estates of the archdiocese of Canterbury in 1164. The King had appointed his adviser and close friend Thomas Becket to the role of Archbishop in 1162 but they had become estranged as Becket discovered a previously absent passionate advocacy for the rights and privileges of the Church. Becket had gone into exile on the Continent in 1164, but by 1170 a compromise was in sight which would allow him to return. His feud with the King was rekindled, however, when Becket excommunicated three fellow bishops in November 1170 for participating in the crowning as heir Henry’s son. That had led to the King’s angry (rhetorical?) outburst over Christmas, traditionally rendered as “Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, though a more plausible version comes from Becket’s biographer Edmund Grim: “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” In any event, four rowdy knights heard the King’s words as a challenge and returned to England. While at Saltwood on 28 December 1170, Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracey and Richard le Breton agreed the Archbishop must be punished and brought to heel. The next day, they travelled the 15 miles from Saltwood to Canterbury, burst into the cathedral and hacked Archbishop Becket to death by a door to the cloisters.

4. Saltwood has also been much in demand as a filming location. Apart from obvious programmes like Dear Bill: A Tribute to Lord Deedes (1994), The Real Alan Clark (2000) and The Alan Clark Diaries (2004), it was also used for The Tripods (1984-85) as the Chateau Ricordeau, The Castle of Adventure (1990) and My Week with Marilyn (2011).

5. Maybe this is personal rather than universal, but we tend to think of King John (1199-1216) as the worst ever King of England, an abject failure and cautionary tale in every respect and the end of one chapter in history, the drawing of a line. He was, at least, succeeded by his eldest son, Henry III (1216-72), only nine years old at his accession, but John had four more legitimate offspring with his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême, and they were hardly underachievers. Richard (1209-72) was made Earl of Cornwall as a 16th birthday present by his brother King Henry, thereby becoming one of the richest men in Europe, served as Regent three times, was offered the crown of Sicily by Pope Innocent IV and in 1257 was elected King of Germany and heir to the Holy Roman Empire by a margin of four to three in the Electoral College; he was never able to establish himself as Emperor and had no territorial base in the Empire. Joan (1210-38) became Queen of Scotland when she married Alexander II (he was 25, she was… 10: nice). Isabella (1214-41), having been written into her sister Joan’s marriage contract as a potential understudy, married the twice-widowed Emperor Frederick II, becoming Holy Roman Empress and Queen of Sicily, Italy and Jerusalem. Eleanor (1215-75), who never met her father, married William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, when he was 34 and she was nine (seeing a pattern?), was widowed and then married Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, who became virtual ruler of England in the 1250s and 1260s, summoned the first parliament which included representatives of the cities and towns in 1265 but did also indulge in some reasonable heavy-duty antisemitic pogroms.

“The best writing is certainly when you are in love.” (Ernest Hemingway)

1. “Saviour complex: Jonathan Powell is still trying to change the world”: veteran former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood has penned an intriguing portrait of Jonathan Powell, Sir Keir Starmer’s National Security Adviser, for The Spectator. Powell was, of course, central to Sir Tony Blair’s decade in power—at its senior level, only he, Blair and Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer held the same positions for the full 10 years—and is now said to be the biggest foreign policy influence of all on the current Prime Minister. While the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, continues to bang the drum for his muddled and now rather shop-soiled “progressive realism”, Powell maintains his own moral world view, more quietly but perhaps with greater determination. Wood argues that, while he is more “grizzled”, in one colleague’s description, he is still trying to make the world a better place and fundamentally cleaves to the high water-mark of Blairite international relations, liberal interventionism. I wrote a critique of Powell’s outlook about 18 months ago and see the world very differently from him, but there remains a widespread consensus that he was and is a massively impressive operator, with a formidable brain and the necessary sense of the absurd to survive the long years in power. He has not been National Security Adviser for six months yet, so it’s too early to assess his role and performance definitely, but Wood has set out a useful framework to do that.

2. “The untold story of British military chiefs’ crucial role in Ukraine”: Larisa Brown, defence editor of The Times, has carefully assembled a detailed picture of the roles played by the British Defence Secretary, Sir Ben Wallace, and senior UK military officers in working closely with Ukraine to help the country sustain its spirited defence against Russian invaders. It’s by no means a soft-focus, wrinkles-smoothed-out account but it shows how much initiative and latitude was used by Wallace, Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin and General Sir Jim Hockenhull, Commander UK Strategic Command, among others, not only to give Ukraine its best chance of advantage but also, critically, of taking time to absorb lessons from close observation of a kind of war we haven’t seen before. I have a great deal of time for Wallace, whom I first met more than 25 years ago, I suppose, and while in some ways he’s not a standard politician he was a great fit at the Ministry of Defence. There are lessons for the future in here too, but I haven’t quite distilled and articulated them yet.

3. “Parasitic control is no basis for industrial security”: a punchy argument from the Substack of former Home Office security minister and Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Tom Tugendhat on the ownership of British Steel. He savages the measures rushed through Parliament yesterday in the Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025, maintaining that the government is “legislating for control without ownership, coercion without investment” and that the correct response to the situation would either have been straightforward nationalisation or the creation of a private-sector funding vehicle to assume control. Meanwhile the underlying reasons for the weakness and vulnerability of the British steel sector are unaddressed. I don’t yet know if I agree with him, but it’s good to have someone kicking over the traces and taking a different path.

4. “The last grand strategists: what Brzezinski and Kissinger could teach Trump”: in The Financial Times, journalist and author Edward Luce examines two European-born, highly intellectual former United States National Security Advisors, Dr Henry Kissinger (1969-75) and Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski (1977-81), both Harvard PhDs, and tries to imagine how each would have dealt with the war in Ukraine. No spoilers, but worth a read, especially if you set them against—if you can bear it—the calibre of advisers currently surrounding President Trump.

5. “‘She’ is a weird word”: a deliciously arcane and surprisingly rich item from Colin Gorrie’s joyous Substack on the linguistic history of English, Dead Language Society. Even the most restlessly curious of us, I suspect, spend little time thinking about pronouns except in the modern, performative and politically charged context of sex and gender debates, which makes it all the more wondrous to realise that “she” is not only a relative latecomer to standard English, only settling down with any dominance in the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century; but its origins are obscure and contested, and it seems to be a complete outlier compared to all the other pronouns we regularly use. This is one of those articles that you will never need to know, but if you believe, as I do very strongly, that learning in an abstract sense is good, civilising and healthy, then it will make you feel a little bit better about yourself by the end.

Moving pictures?

I have watched almost no television this week, which I hold up neither as admission or virtue, so you will have to find your own way on that score.

Just before our love got lost…

… as Joni Mitchell put it, you said “I am as constant as a northern star”, and I said, constantly in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.