Sunday round-up 28 June 2026

Mel Brooks marks his centenary, candles for Hans Blix, Kathy Bates and the Crown Prince of Jordan, and the story of the imperial election of 1519, an expensive foregone conclusion

[NB This was supposed to go out during the day on Sunday but got stuck in the equivalent of the outbox. My deepest apologies to the literally some or more readers who may have noted this delay. Thank you for your attention in this matter. EDW]

Birthday boys and girls today include actor, director, producer, screenwriter and centenarian Mel Brooks (100), former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix (98), ex-White House Chief of Staff, Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (88), economist, Nobel Laureate and former Chief Adviser of Bangladesh Mohammad Yunus (86), Procul Harum bass player David Knights (81), Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates (78), author and screenwriter Deborah Moggach (78), actress Alice Krige (72), Inspiral Carpets keyboard player, DJ and presenter Clint Boon (67), journalist and author Kurt Eichenwald (65), screenwriter, comedian and producer Peter Baynham (63), actor, screenwriter and whoops-he’s-off-on-one activist John Cusack (60), actress Mary Stuart Masterson (60), goalkeeper Fabien Barthez (55), world’s richest man, performer of unfortunately fascist-looking hand gestures and to good governance what Martin Bormann was to inter-faith dialogue aspirant space traveller Elon Musk (55, possibly also the name of one of his many children), former Labour MP and minister and founding member of come-on-you-remember-them The Independent Group/Change UK Chris Leslie (54), playwright, novelist, theatre director and film-maker Florian Zeller (47), amusingly named singer-songwriter Kellie Pickler (40) and HRH Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan (32).

Busy being dead but previously celebrating are King Carloman I of the Franks (AD 751), splenetic, punchy, taking-no-shit-from-heretics Hispanophobic Pope Paul IV (1476), Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, Archbishop of Magdeburg, opponent of Martin Luther and indulgence enthusiast Albert Cardinal von Brandenburg (1490), pro-marriage King Henry VIII of England, Ireland and France (1491), painter and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens (1577), cleric, theologian and originator of Methodism John Wesley (1703), political philosopher and theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712), dog show founder Charles Cruft (1852), dramatist, novelist and poet Luigi Pirandello (1867), Nazi-friendly Prime Minister of Vichy France Pierre Laval (1883), precision bombing exponent and first Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force General Carl Spaatz (1891), playwright and composer Richard Rodgers (1902), author and screen writer Eric Ambler (1909), Conservative Cabinet minister, MP, Leader of the House of Lords and buttress of Thatcher governments Viscount Whitelaw (1918), prime ministerial spouse with the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room Clarissa, Countess of Avon (1920), military historian Correlli Barnett (1927), author and The Times and The Sunday Times editor Sir Harold Evans (1928), writer and famous son Patrick Hemingway (1928), outsized Liberal Chief Whip and MP and alleged paedophile Sir Cyril Smith (1928), terrorist and Ulster Volunteer Force Gusty Spence (1933), former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary Lord Carswell (1934), Democratic Senator for Michigan and longtime Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin (1934), not-intimidatingly-butch actor John Inman (1935), actress and comedienne Gilda Radner (1946), and author and critic A.A. Gill (1954).

Going for gold: the imperial election of 1519

Possibly the thing most people know about the Holy Roman Empire is, thanks to Voltaire’s quip of 1756, that it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. I took issue with this characterisation a few months ago, because it requires very narrow and often anachronistic usages of each word. On the other hand, the Empire was an usual. polity: in some ways, it was a confederation of practically countless (no pun intended) kingdoms, electorates, principalities, archduchies, duchies, princely counties, margraviates, landgraviates, raugraviates, wildgraviates, burgraviates, altgraviates, counties, counties palatine, lordships, baronies, chiefdoms, seignories, bailiwicks, commanderies, cantons, provostries, advocacies, territories, imperial cities, imperial free cities, imperial free valleys, imperial farms, imperial knightly estates, imperial villages, archbishoprics, prince-bishoprics, bishoprics and abbeys.

These states varied vastly in size, from significant polities like the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg, to almost inconceivably tiny micro-states like Burgholzhausen vor der Höhe, an Imperial Village a dozen miles north of Frankfurt. There were something like 300 states within the imperial jurisdiction by the beginning of the 16th century, daunting enough to contemplate, but this would grow hugely over the Empire’s lifespan until its dissolution in 1806, when there were more than 1,800 individual states. This proliferation and variation in size means that it is probably impossible ever to draw a complete and accurate map of the Empire.

Just as the states of the Empire varied in size, so they were not all equal in legal and constitutional terms. In theory, none of them was fully sovereign in the modern sense; their rulers possessed Landeshoheit or superioritas territorialis, “territorial superiority”, within their own domains, but the Emperor was their overlord; he was regarded—with varying degrees of consequence and gravity—as at least the first among equals of European monarchs, and the only one to have an imperial title. There was also an argument that the Holy Roman Emperor possessed the authority which had once been that of the Roman Emperors, or at least of the Western Emperors after Diocletian divided the Empire and introduced the Tetrarchy in AD 284, making them nominal temporal overlords of Christendom in an analogous way to the Pope’s ecclesiastical authority. This sense was reinforced in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally conquered the city of Constantinople and extinguished the shrunken, embattled husk of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The imperial title was nominally elective. The Emperor Charles IV (1355-78), King of Bohemia and scion of the houses of Luxembourg and Přemysl, took great interest in the institutional workings of the Empire as it began to recover from the apocalyptic ravages of the Black Death between 1348 and 1351, which killed between a fifth and a third of the population. (Death tolls varied enormously between regions, and Charles IV’s own dominion of Bohemia seems hardly to have been affected all.) In January 1356, he summoned the Reichstag to meet in Nuremberg where delegates drafted a constitutional document which became known as the Golden Bull. One of the main issues the bull addressed was the procedure for imperial elections.

The Golden Bull identified and codified who was to choose the new Emperor when a vacancy occurred. There was an electoral college comprising seven princes, the Kirfürsten or Electors, who were (in the order in which they were to cast their ballots) the Archbishop of Trier, the Archbishop of Cologne, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony-Wittemberg, the Margrave of Brandenburg and the Archbishop of Mainz. The bull stated for the first time that majority voting was acceptable and that four votes of the seven were sufficient for a candidate to win. Significantly, it also declared the electoral territories indivisible; one of the challenges of managing the Empire was that German inheritance conventions did not provide for simple primogeniture, as in England. Rather than a sole heir inheriting the entire territory, possessions were often divided between several heirs, fracturing a family’s lands into more and more smaller and less powerful states over the generations.

Following the death of Charles IV in 1378, there was a power vacuum at the heart of the Empire. Charles was only 62 when he died, and he had apportioned his lands among his three sons and his nephews. His son Wenceslas had been elected King of the Romans, traditionally the title held by the heir to the Emperors, in 1376 and also became King of Bohemia. Another son, Sigismund, Margrave of Brandenburg, had been betrothed to Maria, daughter and heiress of King Louis I of Hungary, while another son, eight-year-old John, was Duke of Görlitz, north of Bohemia.

The inability of any of Charles IV’s heirs to establish authority over the central area of the imperial jurisdiction meant decades of flux and instability. Wenceslas was deposed as King of the Romans by the four Rhenish electors in August 1400, and the following day they chose one of their number, Rupert, Elector Palatine of the Rhineland as Wenceslas’s successor. But he was no more able to impose his will on Germany than his predecessor, and died in May 1410 largely a figurehead. Sigismund was then elected King of the Romans by three electors in September, but 11 days later four different electors chose Jobst, Margrave of Brandenburg, as a rival King. The deadlock was broken by chance event: Jobst died in January—or was he poisoned?—and in July 1411 all seven electors met and and unanimously chose Sigismund as King of the Romans again.

Sigismund inherited Bohemia from his elder brother Wenceslas on the latter’s death in 1419, but it was the 1430s before he was able finally to be recognised as Emperor; he was then crowned in Rome by Pope Eugenius IV on 31 May 1433. But he died in December 1437 at the age of 69, and left behind only one legitimate child, Elizabeth. She was married to Albert II, Duke of Austria, from the House of Habsburg, who was a staunch ally of Emperor Sigismund in central Europe, and on the Emperor’s death, Albert became King of Hungary and Croatia, then King of Bohemia; critically, in March 1438, he was elected King of the Romans. Elizabeth was the last of the House of Luxembourg which had dominated the Empire for more than a century and Albert was busy establishing the House of Habsburg as the next dynasty. While defending Hungary against Ottoman attack, however, he became seriously ill and died on 27 October 1439. Elizabeth was pregnant when her husband died, and on his deathbed he willed Austria, Bohemia and Hungary to his unborn child if it should be a son. In February 1440, Elizabeth gave birth to a boy, Ladislaus, but the estates of Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia refused to accept Albert’s will: under immediate threat from the Ottoman Empire, they would not take the risk of an infant ruler. It seemed as if the rise of the Habsburgs had stalled.

The family was saved by Frederick, Duke of Austria, a cousin of the late Albert, who became regent for Ladislaus. Shortly before Ladislaus’s birth, Frederick was unanimously elected King of the Romans in February 1440. He was a shrewd opportunist with an eye for dynastic expansion, but perhaps his greatest quality was longevity: once elected King of the Romans, he was able to wait until March 1452 when he travelled to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Nicholas V. He was the first Habsburg to ascend to the full imperial rank, and, while contemporaries thought him sluggish and slow to make decisions—his secretary Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, said he wanted to conquer the world while remaining seated—it is more likely he knew the virtue of patience and the ability not to commit to causes in haste.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in May 1453, Frederick was left as the only remaining Emperor; he outlived Ladislaus, for whom he was regent, to gain control of Lower Austria and establish a claim to Hungary and Bohemia, and his brother Albert VI, with whom he was joint Archduke of Austria from 1457 till Albert’s death in 1463. His masterstroke, however, was the marriage of his son, Archduke Maxmilian, to Mary of Burgundy who, after the death of her father Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, inherited the wealthy provinces of the Low Countries which therefore became attached to the Habsburg lands. In 1486, Frederick arranged for Maxmilian to be elected King of the Romans, and when he died in August 1493, at the venerable age of 77, Maximilian effortlessly became Holy Roman Emperor.

Emperor Maximilian I, a slightly ramshackle character for whom I have considerable affection, had his father’s dynastic eye with an edge of the wheeler-dealer. His ambitions always outstripped his resources, and in Italy he was contemptuously nicknamed Massimiliano senza denaro, Maximilian the Penniless, but, like his father, he knew how to play the long game. Having assumed the enormously prosperous Burgundian inheritance to bolster the imperial finances, Maximilian was genuinely grief-stricken when his wife Mary of Burgundy died in 1482; in theory this meant her titles passed to their son Philip, only three years old, who became Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Guelders, Limburg, Lothier and Luxembourg, Margrave of Namur, Count Palatine of Burgundy, Count of Artois, Charolais, Flanders, Hainaut, Holland, Zeeland and Zutphen. When Maximilian became Emperor, he ceded effective control of the Low Countries to the 15-year-old Philip, who proved a skilful and adept ruler in reforming the governance of the various provinces and centralising control in his own hands.

In 1496, Philip married the Infanta Juana, second daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón, while her brother, the Spanish heir apparent Juan, Prince of Asturias and Girona, married Philip’s sister Margaret of Austria. Juan died very shortly afterwards, leaving Juana as the heir. (The youngest sister, the Infanta Catalina, would marry first Arthur, Prince of Wales, then, after his death, his brother King Henry VIII and become remembered as Queen Katharine of Aragon.) Isabella of Castile died in1 504, leaving Juana to inherit as queen regnant, and when her father Ferdinand sought to assert his power in his widow’s realms, the aristocracy turned to Juana and her husband, styled Philip the Fair or Philip the Handsome. In July 1506, Philip was recognised as King of Castile and León jure uxoris, but he died barely 10 weeks afterwards, aged 28. There were widespread rumours he had been poisoned, though typhoid fever seems a more plausible cause of death, but Juana believed her husband to have been murdered. His death seems to have caused some kind of psychological or emotional breakdown in the Queen, although the extent of it is questioned given that her father Ferdinand now sought to control Castile directly and her confinement was politically convenient; nonetheless, it is as Juana la Loca, or Joanna the Mad, that she is most commonly remembered by posterity.

All of this was, in a way, serving Emperor Maximilian’s grand dynastic plans. His eldest surviving grandchild was the son of Philip and Juana, born in 1500 and known initially because of his birthplace as Charles of Ghent. The accession and rapid death of Philip made Charles Prince of Asturias and her apparent in Castile and León; he was heir presumptive to Ferdinand’s titles as King of Aragón, Valencia, Sardinia, Majorca, Sicily and Naples and stood to inherit the rapidly expanding Spanish possessions in the Americas; and after his father’s death he was recognised as titular lord of the Netherlands and would assume control of the Burgundian inheritance once he came of age.

This extraordinary concentration of inheritance in one young prince was not wholly by design, but Maximilian knew when to greet good luck as if it were an arranged marriage, even if it had been an unexpected affair. After Ferdinand died in 1516, with his mother still confined in the Palacio Real at Tordesillas in central Spain, Charles travelled to Spain, arriving at Asturias in October 1517 to claim his titles as co-ruler with his mother. There was resistance to the 17-year-old Flemish-speaking prince taking control, but Juana was clearly not a practical alternative as long as she was, or was believed to be, mentally ill; the Cortes of Castile put up a token protest by addressing Charles only as Su Alteza (“Your Highness”), reserving the regal style of Majestad (“Majesty”) for Queen Juana, but by the beginning of 1519, with Charles about to turn 19, he was in effective control of Spain and her overseas possessions, much of southern Italy and the Netherlands, which he had ruled in person since 1515.

On 12 January 1519, the Emperor Maximilian died 10 weeks short of his 60th birthday. He had never been crowned by the Pope, but, unlike his predecessors who had been forced to make do with the title of King of the Romans, he agreed with Pope Julius II in 1508 that he would style himself Erwählter Römischer Kaiser (“Elected Roman Emperor”). It became much easier to blur the line between that and Holy Roman Emperor, and the pressing need for a papal coronation became effectively defunct.

Charles inherited from Maximilian the hereditary Habsburg lands and became Archduke of Austria, Duke of Styria, Duke of Carinthia, Duke of Carniola, Count of Tyrol, ruler of the Austria Littoral and head of the House of Habsburg. He was one of the most powerful rulers in Europe and his possessions in the New World gave him an imperial reach possibly never before seen. It seemed natural, perhaps inevitable, that he would succeed his grandfather in the imperial title as well; but the Holy Roman Empire was still an elective monarchy, and the formalities had to be observed.

It began to seem as if it might not be a formality. The end of the 1510s saw Europe wracked by fierce struggles for land and titles, and 24-year-old Francis I, King of France since 1515, had ambitions to expand his power in northern Italy, while Charles uncle by marriage, Henry VIII, was 26 and about to mark a decade on the English throne. Charles had disadvantages which were attendant on his huge inheritance: born in Flanders, he spoke French and Flemish, and was learning Spanish, but had not mastered German; and he was physically absent in Spain at the beginning of 1519 and had never actually visited Germany.

Francis I made a serious play for the imperial title. He was acutely aware that if Charles was elected then France would be encircled by Habsburg possessions, and was willing to commit to the election by spending substantial amounts of money in bribes to the Electors. He also found the backing of Pope Leo X, the 43-year-old sybaritic Medici pontiff, who had no reason to support strengthening Charles’s hand in Italy; the Pope’s temporal interests as ruler of the Papal States were much better served by a balance of power between France and the Habsburgs.

It is hard to say how serious Henry VIII’s bid for the title of Emperor was. He was vastly ambitious and would have seen nothing lacking in himself to put him on a lower level than the Kings of France or Spain. Perhaps, though, like the supposed close calls to come of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey nearly being elected Pope in 1521-22 and 1523, the idea of imperial election satisfied something in Henry’s mind, to imagine that he was competing at that highest level; isn’t it pretty to think so, he might have asked himself. But he made no serious diplomatic efforts to win support for his candidacy and had the air of a paper candidate.

The Electors gathered in Frankfurt-am-Main today, 28 June, 1519. At this point, the College of Electors consisted of:

Albert Cardinal von Brandenburg, Archbishop Elector of Mainz
Richard von Greiffenklau zu Vollrads, Archbishop Elector of Trier
Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne
Louis I, King of Bohemia*
Ludwig V, Elector Palatine of the Rhineland
Frederick III, Elector of Saxony
Joachim I Nestor, Elector of Brandenburg

*King Louis of Bohemia was only 12 and his vote was being exercised by Sigismund I, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

There were many complicated strands at work. The Elector of Brandenburg and the Archbishop of Mainz were brothers, and both had racked up enormous debts to the Fuggers of Augsburg, the wealthy banking family. Albert was recouping some of this money by collecting money from the sale of indulgences, the practice which had already sparked Martin Luther’s trenchant attacks on the church; the brothers were also aware that any bribes being offered in the course of the imperial election would be another useful source of income.

The King of Bohemia, although being represented by Sigismund of Poland-Lithuania, was Charles’s brother-in-law, having married his sister Mary in 1515. Emperor Maximilian had been his legal guardian until his death, when the role had passed to Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, who had familial links not only to the two Hohenzollern Electors, Joachim Nestor of Brandenburg and Albert of Mainz, but also to Sigismund.

Charles waged a strenuous if improbable propaganda campaign for his candidacy on the basis of German nationalism: he was the head of the House of Habsburg and grandson of Maximilian of Austria, “German by blood and stock”, while Francis I was a “foreign adventurer” (glossing over Charles’s Ghentish birth and childhood, kingship of Spain and inability to speak German). He and only he could be trusted to preserve the liberties of the German princes rather than represent foreign interference; while this argument might have rung false with the Electors, they may have been persuaded of its coincidental truth due to Charles’s extensive interests outwith the Empire, which might serve to keep him busy.

That substantial bribes were paid by both Charles and Francis does not seem to be disputed; some historians have argued that the influence of bribery was not nearly as powerful as might be supposed. Nevertheless, Charles is reputed to have spent 835,000 florins on the election, of which 332,000 was directly in bribes; well over half of this sum was a loan from Jakob Fugger, his family perhaps the only unqualified beneficiaries of the electoral process.

(Giving a modern equivalent value of 835,000 florins is difficult and varies hugely according to how you choose to put a value on money. In terms of purchasing power, however, it could be around £1 billion.)

The King of France was not averse to bribery, and is supposed to have paid a great deal to Archbishop von Greiffenklau zu Vollrads of Trier, though, as we shall see, it does not seem to have proved especially effective.

There is much we do not know about the election, or of which we cannot be certain. Some accounts suggest that Joachim Nestor of Brandenburg refused any bribes on the grounds that he was already committed to the candidacy of Francis I; this seems unlikely given what we know of his conduct and of the outcome.

Another story may have more truth to it. It is suggested that the Electors were not especially enthusiastic about Charles or Francis, and as a compromise turned to one of their own, Elector Frederick III of Saxony, and attempted to persuade him to accept the crown. (I wrote about Frederick for Engelsberg Ideas last year.) Frederick the Wise, as he was known, is a contradictory character: a devout worshipper and almost fanatical collector of holy relics—his collection in the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg numbered almost 20,000—he nevertheless expended effort and political capital to protect Martin Luther, whose 95 Theses had at first been posted on the very door of the Schlosskirche in 1517. It was not that the Elector was a crypto-Lutheran, though Lutherans claim he received the Eucharist under the reformed rite on his deathbed; rather, Luther was the star attraction at the University of Wittenberg, which was a source of pride and prestige for Frederick.

If Frederick was invited to be a compromise, and German, candidate for Emperor, it may have been wisdom living up to his nickname. Becoming Emperor might be expensive but staying so was likely to cost even more, and while Saxony was a regional power in south-eastern Germany, it could not stand up to Spain and Austria, France or England. A powerless or penniless Emperor who was reduced to a puppet could find himself with even less freedom than a supposed vassal.

In the end, whatever the understandings between Francis I, the Archbishop of Trier and the Elector of Brandenburg, Charles was unanimously elected Emperor, taking the style Charles V. It was the outcome for which Maximilian had been planning, and perhaps it was inevitable: no “foreign” king had been elected since Frederick II, King of Sicily, in 1220, while France and the Empire had not been under the same ruler since the Carolingians had petered out in the 9th century AD. Henry VIII no doubt wanted to be Emperor, but never had a realistic chance, while Frederick of Saxony could well have snatched the title, but chose not to.

Charles V was crowned King of the Romans in Aachen Cathedral, originally the chapel of Charlemagne’s palace, on 26 October 1520; it was where more than 30 German kings had been crowned over the centuries, and after his coronation by the Archbishop Electors of Mainz, Trier and Cologne in front of the high altar, he was seated on Charlemagne’s marble throne. Eventually, on 24 February 1530, he would be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in the Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna. He would be the last Emperor ever to receive a papal coronation, even though the Empire would last another 276 years.

Charles would be Emperor for nearly 39 years, though his departure was a protracted one. Beginning in 1554, he divided up the Habsburg patrimony between his eldest son Philip, who became King of Spain, Naples and Sicily as well as ruler of the Low Countries and Milan, and his brother Ferdinand, who had been elected King of the Romans as far back as 1531, was King of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia and would become Emperor as well as inheriting the Habsburg lands in Austria. His reign was proof that the Habsburgs had amassed too much land and too many territories for one man effectively to govern with the communications and mobility of early modern Europe.

He was also terribly unwell. Only in his 50s, Charles was exhausted, shattered by the rigours of governing. On 25 October 1555, he addressed the States-General of the Netherlands in the Great Hall of the Palace of Coudenberg in Brussels, where 40 years before he had taken personal control over the Netherlands. Now, leaning heavily on the shoulder of William the Silent, his young counsellor, and weeping, he told the assembled gathering:

When I was nineteen [...] I undertook to be a candidate for the Imperial crown, not to increase my possessions but rather to engage myself more vigorously in working for the welfare of Germany and my other realms [...] and in the hopes of thereby bringing peace among the Christian peoples and uniting their fighting forces for the defence of the Catholic faith against the Ottomans. [...] I had almost reached my goal when the attack by the French king and some German princes called me once more to arms. Against my enemies, I accomplished what I could, but success in war lies in the hands of God, who gives victory or takes it away, as He pleases. [...] I must, for my part, confess that I have often misled myself, either from youthful inexperience, from the pride of mature years, or from some other weakness of human nature. I nonetheless declare to you that I never knowingly or willingly acted unjustly. [...] If actions of this kind are nevertheless justly laid to my account, I formally assure you now that I did them unknowingly and against my own intention. I therefore beg those present today, whom I have offended in this respect, together with those who are absent, to forgive me.

By 1557, he had finalised all the abdications and retired to seclusion in the Hieronymite monastery of Yuste in Extremadura. In the early hours of 21 September 1558, having been taken ill a month earlier, he died aged 58, clutching the cross his wife Isabella of Portugal had been holding when she had died in 1539.

The elective element of the Holy Roman Empire would continue right until the end; the last election was on 5 July 1792 in Frankfurt. The seven Electors, holding the same positions as in 1519 except that the Elector Palatine had been replaced by the Elector of Bavaria, unanimously chose Francis II. But after 1519 it was a formality: there would only be two subsequent Emperors who were not Habsburgs, and only once more, on 24 January 1742, would there be a contested election, when Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria and head of the House of Wittelsbach, defeated Francis, Archduke of Austria and Grand Duke of Tuscany, by five votes to three to become Emperor Charles VII. Francis was not a Habsburg but was married to Maria Theresa, daughter of the Emperor Charles VI and ruler of the Habsburg lands but not able, as a woman, to be Emperor in her own right. He therefore succeeded Charles VII when he died in 1745 and as Francis I was the only other non-Habsburg Emperor between 1452 and 1806.

Day of days

Today is the feast of St Irenaeus of Lyon (d AD 191), a theologian and evangelist from Smyrna who saw the preaching of St Polycarp who in turn was supposed to have heard St John the Evangelist, was named Bishop of Lyon and wrote Against Heresies as a refutation of gnosticism; of SS Basilides and Potamiaena (d AD 205), the former an officer of the court in Alexandria by which the latter was sentenced to death by fire when she refused to renounce Christianity, after which the former converted to the Christian faith and was beheaded; of Pope St Paul I (AD 700-67), born in Rome into the aristocratic Orsini family which had provided his immediate predecessor, his brother Pope Stephen II, and would supply three more pontiffs, who spent a lot of his papacy securing the territories of the Papal States in central Italy; of St Heimerad (c AD 970-1019), born to unfree parents in Meßkirch near Lake Constance, who joined and was expelled from several abbeys across Germany, became a travelling preacher, established a hermitage on the Hasunger Berg near Kassel and is celebrated as a Fool for Christ; and St Vincenza Gerosa (1784-1847), who in 1832 with schoolmistress Bartolomea Capitanio founded the Institute of the Sisters of Charity of Saints Bartolomea Capitanio and Vincenza Gerosa to provide respite, medical care and education.

In Ukraine, today is Constitution Day, marking the date in 1996 when the Constitution was agreed by the Verkhovna Rada and was deemed by the Constitutional Court therefore to have come into force.

Factoids

1. By the second half of 1940, it was clear that, as in the First World War, Germany was going to make extensive use of submarines to destroy merchant shipping and try to make supplying the United Kingdom, as well as exporting goods, intolerably and unsustainably dangerous. At that stage of the Second World War, the Merchant Navy was losing more ships that it could build or acquire. Domestic shipbuilding was at full capacity and all existing United States shipyards were engaged either in building warships for the US Navy or fulfilling the requirements of the US Maritime Commission’s Long Range Shipbuilding Program as set out in the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. The UK sent the British Merchant Shipping Mission under Professor Sir Arthur Salter, Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Shipping, a former civil servant and expert on transport policy and economics, to the United States to meet American and Canadian shipbuilders. The mission negotiated a deal with ship repairers Todd Shipyards of New York City and shipbuilders Bath Iron Works of Bath, Maine, to form a consortium, the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation, which would build a brand new facility at South Portland in Maine to build 30 new ships. Similar arrangements were agreed with a number of other companies to produce a total of 60 Ocean-class cargo ships for the Ministry of War Transport. They were simple, sturdy vessels, based on a design conceived for tramp steamers in Sunderland in 1879. Impressed by the straightforward efficiency of the programme, President Franklin Roosevelt drew on the idea and in January 1941 announced the Emergency Shipbuilding Program to produce 200 ships very similar to the Ocean-class for American use. Everything possible was done to make these vessels, known as Liberty ships, as simple and quick to construct as possible, using prefabricated sections which were welded together rather than riveted, which took far longer. The shipbuilders also learned from experience. Early Liberty ships in 1941 took more than six months to construct—still an impressive feat for an ocean-going cargo vessel—but by 1943, improved assembly line techniques had slashed this to an average of 42 days. Some were completed in less than two weeks, but the zenith of efficiency came in the shape of the SS Robert E. Peary. Its keel was laid at Kaiser Permanente Metals Corporation’s Richmond Shipyards in California at 12.01 am on 8 November 1942 and it was launched at 3.30 pm on 12 November. Construction had taken four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. This was a war the United States could not lose.

2. If there is a three-line whip and everyone is in attendance, November’s ceremony of remembrance at the Cenotaph on Whitehall will attended by a record nine former Prime Ministers: Sir John Major KG CH; Sir Tony Blair KG; Gordon Brown CH; Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton; Baroness May of Maidenhead; Boris Johnson; Liz Truss; Rishi Sunak MP; and Sir Keir Starmer KCB KC MP. Together with the then-incumbent, presumably Andy Burnham MP, they number 10 of the 59 Prime Ministers there have ever been since Sir Robert Walpole is regarded as having created the position in April 1721, or around 16 per cent of the total.

3. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (see above) was of necessity a polyglot. He was raised speaking French, which remained his most natural language, began learning Dutch at 13 and acquired a good command of Castilian after becoming King of Spain in 1516. He also picked up some degree of Basque thanks to the presence of Basque-speaking secretaries at the court. After his election as Holy Roman Emperor, he mastered German well, though never spoke it with the fluency of his French, picked up Italian during his campaigns there in the 1520s, and by 1532, having married a Portuguese princess, he could speak some Portuguese. He also had a decent grasp of Latin. It is a possibly apocryphal remark, but Charles is supposed to have said of his linguistic preferences and usage, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse”. Lucky horse.

4. Charles V’s great-grandfather, Emperor Frederick III (see above), who was the first Habsburg Emperor, was fascinated by hidden symbols and double meanings. As a motto, he used AEIOU, ostensibly just the five vowels of the alphabet, but it could be read as an acronym for Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan (“All the World is under Austria”) or Austriae est imperare orbi universo (“It is for Austria to rule the whole world”). It could also be taken to stand for Austria erit in orbe ultima (“Austria will be the last in the world”). First appearing in Frederick’s notebooks, it was taken up by Maximilian I, but not, it seems, by Charles, who may have been otherwise engaged actually ruling the whole world.

5. We will never know whether or not Charles V’s mother Juana la Loca was indeed “mad” or whether mental instability was a convenient excuse for her opponents to keep her inconfinement. She was known to have been an extremely intelligent child and young girl; by the time she was 27, she had given birth to six children, and been left widowed by the death of a husband she seems to adored, Philip the Fair, who himself had several extra-marital sexual relationships. There were strong rumours that her father, Ferdinand of Aragón, who wanted to retain control of her mother’s kingdoms of Castlile and León, may have had Philip poisoned. After he died, Juana insisted on keeping his body near her. If she was unwell, possible diagnoses have included melancholia, a depressive disorder, a psychosis or a rare inherited form of schizophrenia.

6. Despite Henry VIII’s fancies, no English ruler or prince ever became Holy Roman Emperor. However, King John’s second son, Richard of Cornwall (1207-72), was elected King of the Romans in 1257. He had been created Earl of Cornwall by his brother Henry III in 1225 and had become Count of Poitou that same year, went on crusade in 1240 and while in Provence met Sanchia, third daughter of Raymond Berengar IV, Count of Provence. Her elder sisters Margaret and Eleanor were the wives of Louis IX of France and Richard’s brother King Henry. Richard and Sanchia were married at Westminster in November 1243. Richard was offered the crown of Sicily by Pope Innocent IV in exchange for money, but responded, “You might as well say, ‘I will sell or give you the moon, rise up and take it’”. In 1257, four of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the Archbishops of Mainz and Cologne, the King of Bohemia and the Elector Palatine, voted for Richard as King of the Romans, while the Archbishop of Trier and the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg backed Alfonso X, King of Castile. On 17 May 1257, the Archbishop of Cologne, Konrad von Hochstaden, crowned Richard in Aachen Cathedral, as Charles V would be crowned in 1520, but the Holy Roman Empire was in a period of such disarray that the title was never much more than nominal. Although he was formally King of the Romans for 15 years, until his death in 1272, he only visited Germany briefly on four occasions.

7. If you have ever wondered in what sense Hitlerian Germany was the “Third” Reich (das Dritte Reich), here lies the answer. The German Empire established under King Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1871 which collapsed with the abdication in 1918 of his grandson Wilhelm II was the Second Reich (das Deutsche Reich or Kaiserreich), while the First Reich (das erste Reich) was the Holy Roman Empire frp, AD 800 to 1806. “Reich” is translated as “empire” but it can have a wider meaning than simply the territory under the rule of an emperor. There was no imperial crown in Germany after 1918, yet both the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany used the term “Reich”to describe themselves.

8. The three diocesan territories the bishops of which were also Electors of the Holy Roman Empire—Mainz, Trier and Cologne—are all very venerable sees which are still in being today. The first Bishop of Mainz is claimed to have been Crescens, appointed around AD 80, it became an archbishopric in AD 745 and reverted to a standard episcopal diocese; the first Bishops of Trier emerge in the mid-third century AD, it gained archiepiscopal status in 1189 and reverted to a bishopric in 1802; the first Bishop of Colonia Agrippina is recorded around AD 85, it became the Archbishopric of Cologne in AD 784 and has remained so to this very day, the current Archbishop being Rainer Maria Cardinal Woelki.

“If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it” (Rudyard Kipling)

1. “Andy Burnham Is Going To Be Yet Another Useless Prime Minister”: on his Substack The Ruffian, Ian Leslie rejects the popular argument that Britain has become “ungovernable” in recent years (leaving the European Union is a commonly attributed cause) and suggests that we are reluctant to accept a more plausible explanation for our political turmoil. The problem, he argues, is that the Conservatives and Labour have chosen a succession of leaders who are simply bad at the job of being Prime Minister. Leslie makes clear that he doesn’t mean Prime Ministers who took decisions which were controversial or which turned out to be mistaken; “I’m talking about something narrower and less value-laden; the day-to-day, month-to-month ability to do the job”. He adds that David Cameron’s government did many things with which he disagreed, “but I never once thought, ‘This person is wildly unsuited to the job, by ability and temperament.’ I have thought that about every one of his successors.” I have a great deal of sympathy with this notion. The idea that Brexit was such an unforgivable and mortal sin that it has broken an entire political community is laughable: we withdrew from a trading bloc with centralising instincts, neither more nor less. Whereas if you look at the six Prime Ministers to hold office in he 10 years since Cameron resigned, there’s a very plausible case for each of them being bad candidates to lead the government—some, of course, more than others. They have lacked either vision and direction or competence or both, and I find it hard to argue against the idea that Andy Burnham, an unimpressive Cabinet minister under Gordon Brown who has revived his reputation by organising public transport and investment in Manchester, will be dramatically different.

2. “Stop looking for Burnhamism—in six years I’ve never found it”: Joshi Herrmann, writing for The Mill, draws on his experience of reporting on Manchester while Andy Burnham has been Mayor. He says that Burnham can be “instinctive and brilliant” in catching the public mood in a crisis and, unusually for a politician, is a good listener. But this empathy means that, while he is interested in politics as a human story, he has little feel or care for the hard yards of policy work: investment, infrastructure, the nuts and bolts of the regional economy. His instinct for headlines can galvanise bureaucracy into action but can also lead to unfulfillable promises, and Burnham’s tendency to surround himself with advisers in his own image means there is often a serious lack of internal challenge. The putative Prime Minister is depicted as humane, caring, warm, capable of articulating the emotions of the public; but also impulsive, lacking in self-criticism, wanting to be liked, easily distracted and often a poor judge of character. Perhaps he won’t be so very different from Sir Keir Starmer after all.

3. “Parliament has become dangerously mawkish”: Madeline Grant, parliamentary sketch writer for The Spectator and one of the two or three best sketch writers currently working, picks up a theme from this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions at which there were sharp exchanges over the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, whom Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch called a “spiteful class warrior”. You might think this is relatively weak stuff for a robust political culture: it is hardly Aneurin Bevan describing Conservatives as “lower than vermin” at a Labour rally in Manchester in 1948, or John Bright’s dismissal of Benjamon Disraeli as “a self-made man who worships his creator”, or David Lloyd George’s venomous remark about Sir John Simon that “the right honourable and learned gentleman has twice crossed the floor of the house, each time leaving behind a trail of slime”. Yet Badenoch’s undeniably harsh words brought forth denuncations and the invocation—in the poorest of taste—of murdered MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. Madeline mentions that “scarcely a week goes by without a minister hailing a victim or relative in the viewing gallery”, which always gives me an involuntary twitch: before the intervention of Speaker Bercow in 2017, it was disorderly for any Member to draw attention to the presence of individuals in any of the galleries of the House of Commons, and such people could only be prayed in aid in general terms in order to move that the galleries were cleared or a motion proposed “that this House do sit in private”, which must be put to a division immediately and without debate. Expressing emotion in the House of Commons is a challenging rhetorical task, and two of the hardest to convey effectively are anger and profound sadness, which is why the mood among Members can so easily descend into the mawkishness Madeline talks about. Moreover, that kind of cloying grief, especially when used to assume victimhood, essentially tries to be a trump card for reasonable and rational debate, something seen repeatedly in the debates in both Houses on Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill which fell because of lack of time at the end of the last Session. We need to do better than this.

4. “‘We Don’t Do God’: Reappraising Religious Understanding in Foreign Policy”: a thought-provoking article by Andrzej Marszewski for RUSI which argues that an increasingly secular West often regards religion and religious practice and an eccentricity, or, worse, a malign bigotry. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s Downing Street Director of Communication, famously warned journalists, “We don’t do God”, though Blair very much did and does. That aversion to discussing faith and belief, Marszewksi suggests, minimises the analysis we devote to the religious motivation of some of our enemies. We have poorly understood the nature of Iran’s brand of militant Islam because we have written it off as fanaticism, but it is the wellspring of Tehran’s behaviour and foreign policy. To fail to devote attention to religion when it is relevant to an enemy’s decision-making, methods of waging war and—perhaps more critically than anything else—its resilience, risk appetite and capacity to endure suffering and hardship is as foolish as ignoring any other types of intelligence about them as a matter of principle or habit. A perspective I hadn’t entertained enough but which is potentially very revealing.

5. “Stop Blaming Churchill”: on his eponymous Substack, military historian and broadcaster James Holland (brother of The Rest Is History’s Tom Holland) displays a flash of understandable exasperation in dealing with the hardy perennial of leftist pseudo-history: that Winston Churchill was A Bad Man all of whose achievements should be erased because he was a racist and an imperialist who was responsible for the Bengal Famine of 1943. A 40-minute film—I’m sorry, “video installation”—called Persistence by artist Helen Cammock in the National Portrait Gallery, in discussing Oliver Cromwell’s military campaigns in Ireland in the 1650s, mentioned that “he starved people, en masse, a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill”. After initially defending the work, the National Portrait Gallery then reported that Cammock had asked for it to be removed: this came after a letter of protest signed by 50 members of the House of Lords was sent to the gallery’s board by historian and Churchill biographer Lord Roberts of Belgravia. A pious statement from the artist said: “There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst. I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society and art is intrinsic to this.” She is of course right that we must “question, challenge and explore ideas and histories”, but Holland’s objection to her assertion that Churchill was responsible for “the wilful starvation of the Indian population” is that it does not “question” or “challenge” anything because it is mendacious and inaccurate. He laments that “the lack of intellectual curiosity on this subject is staggering” and methodically ticks off important elements in the sham argument Cammock breezily and uncritically swallows, including the role of climate, the floods and plant fungus which had hit Bengal the previous year, concerted relief efforts by the Indian administration, the global shortage of shipping being experienced by the Allies, and, not unreasonably, the culpability of Japan—which had begun the war in the Pacific—in invading and occupying Burma, which had been the chief source of food for Bengal for a decade or more. At the height of the most destructive war the world has ever seen, hard choices had to be made and priorities chosen, and it is inevitable that some of those will have been wrong. But to characterise the whole episode of the famine as one man’s “wilful starvation” of people—presumably on grounds of simple, racist, diabolical pleasure-seeking—is not merely inaccurate and distorted. It is breathtakingly simplistic and child-like.

Jukebox jury: music to rule empires by

1. “Zadok the Priest”, George Frideric Handel

2. “Te Deum”, Marc-Antoine Charpentier

3. “Benedictus”, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

4. “Rex tremendae”, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

5. “I Was Glad”, Sir Hubert Parry

Gone—flitted away…

… as Lord Tennyson wrote, Taken the stars from the night and the sun from the day! Gone, and a cloud in my heart.