Sunday round-up 6 July 2025

Birthday wishes to the Dalai Lama, George W. Bush and Eva Green; Jan Hus Day in the Czech Republic; and a tale of Mary Tudor and her Spanish husband Philip II

Streamers, bunting and cake for Buddhist big cheese the 14th Dalai Lama (90), pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy (88), legendary “Duke of Earl” and Groovy Situation enthusiast Gene Chandler (88), Olympic gold medallist and former Lord Lieutenant of Belfast Lady Mary Peters (86), first President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev (85), writer, linguistics guru and Shakespearean expert David Crystal (84), actor, animal welfare campaigner and Boy Wonder Robin sans pareil Burt Ward (80), 43rd President of the United States George W. Bush (79), moral philosopher and surprisingly-relaxed-about-ending-life ethicist Professor Peter Singer (79), actor, director and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone (79), actor and producer Geoffrey Rush (74), actress, comedian and writer Jennifer Saunders (67), Wu-Tang Clansman Inspectah Deck (55), appositely named rapper, actor and Bacardi-sipper 50 Cent (50), comedian and actor Kevin Hart (46), actress and model Eva Green (45) and chirpy, North Harrovian come-on-you-do-remember-her-really singer-songwriter Kate Nash (38).

Choruses of “For s/he’s a jolly good fellow” have faded now for Father of the American Navy and Kirkcudbrightshire native John Paul Jones (1747), Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (1796), curiously Austrian Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico (1832), stalwart sister of King George V and unmarried all-round royal good egg Princess Victoria (1868), pioneering mediaeval historian Marc Bloch (1886), painter and poet Marc Chagall (1887), engineer and inventor of the eponymous strut Earle S. MacPherson (1891), painter and activist Frida Kahlo (1907), World Wrestling Entertainment founder Vince McMahon Sr (1914), former First Lady of the United States Nancy Reagan (1921), military dictator and President of Poland General Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923), Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! creator Merv Griffin (1925), around-the-clock rocker Bill Haley (1925), actress, author and incliner towards baths over showers Janet Leigh (1927), legendary, digitally short-changed sit-down stand-up comedian Dave Allen (1936), ubiquitous actor Ned Beatty (1937), author and critic Dame Hilary Mantel (1952), and supremely talented folk musician Nanci Griffith (1953).

A crown is merely a hat that lets the rain in

Today in 1483, Richard III was crowned King of England and France and Lord of Ireland in Westminster Abbey, in a pageantry-packed ceremony that is regarded as one of the grandest in mediaeval English history. As a simple matter of event planning, of nothing else, he and his allies had moved very quickly.

King Edward IV died on 9 April 1483, at the age of 40. The cause of death is unknown; he had been ailing for a week or two, though his physicians attributed this in part to his habitual use of emetics, allowing him to eat heartily, make himself vomit and then return to eat again. Edward was extremely tall—at 6’4” he would stand out in modern society but in 15th century England he must have been a hugely imposing figure—but had become fat through overindulgence, albeit Dominic Mancini, the Italian chronicler who visited London in 1482-83 noted it was “not to the point of deformity”. It has been suggested he died of a chill caught while fishing, or of syphilis, or, as was a standard suspicion in the absence of a more obvious explanation, that he had been poisoned.

In any event, the King’s death was unexpected, although he had had enough time to add a codicil to his will: this specified that his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, should be Lord Protector until his son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was 12, came of age. At the time of the King’s death, the Prince of Wales was at his household in Ludlow, from where he acted as president of the Council of Wales and the Marches, while Richard was at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire. Edward IV’s funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 17 April and he was interred in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle two days later. Richard did not leave Pontefract for London until 23 April, the new King, Edward V, departing Ludlow the following day.

It had been agreed that the King and the Lord Protector would meet at Northampton and thence finish the journey to the capital together, but when Richard and his entourage, including his cousin and ally the Duke of Buckingham, arrived on 29 April, they found the King’s retinue led by the Queen’s brother, the Earl Rivers, but no King: Edward had been sent on to Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire. Richard must have had some kind of plan prepared: he dined with Rivers, the King’s half-brother Sir Richard Grey and the elderly Welsh courtier Sir Thomas Vaughan, but then had them arrested and sent to Pontefract to be tried for treason (they were all executed on 25 June).

After that events unfolded at a fearsome pace. Richard travelled to Stony Stratford to meet the King, told him that there had been a plot against him, as Lord Protector, to seize Edward but that it had been dealt with and the perpetrators arrested. The royal party then proceeded south, arriving in London on 4 May; initially the King stayed at the residence of the Bishop of London, but on 19 May, he moved to the Tower of London, where monarchs traditionally stayed before their coronations. At a stormy meeting of the King’s Council at the Tower on 13 June, Richard accused Edward IV’s Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hastings, previously his supporter, of conspiring with the Queen’s family and others against him as Protector. Hastings was taken directly from the council chamber into the courtyard and executed, while John Morton, Bishop of Ely, and Lord Stanley were arrested.

On 16 June, Edward was joined by his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, who was nine, in anticipation of the young King’s coronation, planned for 22 June. The “Princes in the Tower” would never leave. When 22 June arrived, there was no coronation: instead, Dr Ralph Shaa, a theologian and the half-brother of the Lord Mayor of London, preached a sermon at the open-air pulpit at St Paul’s Cross in which he claimed that Edward IV had already entered into a precontractual marriage with Lady Eleanor Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, before he later married Elizabeth Woodville, now queen dowager, in 1464. As a result, the marriage to Elizabeth was bigamous and invalid under canon law, their 10 children, including Edward V and the Duke of York, were illegitimate and could not succeed to the throne. All of that left the Lord Protector as the legitimate heir and now rightfully king.

Writs of summons for Parliament had been sent out in Edward V’s name on 13 May, with the intention that it should meet on 25 June, three days after the coronation. By the time the lords, clergy and commons assembled, however, Shaa had made his accusation and the coronation had been at the very least postponed. It seems that the King’s Council thought the charge of bigamy at least sufficiently plausible not to ignore it. The “Three Estates” met at the Guildhall in the City of London, but could not legally be regarded as a parliament, at least not with any legal certainty, as there was in effect no king, but they were presented with a petition by the Duke of Buckingham calling for Richard to accept the crown on the grounds of the late King’s invalid marriage and Edward V’s consequent bastardy.

They seem to have been satisfied by Buckingham’s case. The next day, 26 June, a delegation of the Three Estates visited Richard at Baynard’s Castle, the residence of his mother, Cecily, Duchess of York, near St Paul’s Cathedral. Overseen by Buckingham, they petitioned him to take the throne, to which he agreed; he then proceeded to Westminster Hall and symbolically took his seat in the Court of the King’s Bench, one of the three royal courts, along with the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of Exchequer, which sat at Westminster. John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, was confirmed as Lord Chancellor, John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells, was reappointed as Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Richard’s friend John Kendal became King’s Secretary.

Everything was now set and the coronation, this time for King Richard rather than King Edward, was scheduled for 6 July. The previous day, Richard and his wife Anne left the Tower of London in a procession, Richard on horseback and Anne in a litter, and travelled to Westminster. At Westminster Hall they took part in the Ceremony of the Void, in which the peers presented wine and spices to the King and Queen, after which the peers were in turn served by their own household staff. Richard then bathed ceremonially in preparation for the following day, while the ampulla containing the oil of St Thomas Becket was taken in a candelight procession from the Jewel Tower of the Palace of Westminster a few hundred yards to Westminster Abbey.

The coronation itself was on Sunday 6 July. Richard needed it to be an impressive and reassuring spectacle, to emphasise his rightful inheritance of the throne and give the appearance of tradition and orderly succession. It was rare event in being a double coronation, with the Queen crowned alongside her husband. There were only three precedents the most recent of which was still 175 years in the past: Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1154, Edward I and Eleanor of Castile in 1274 and Edward II and Isabella of France in 1308 (it was no doubt coincidence that the first and third of those queens had eventually been involved in rebellions against their husbands).

Richard and Anne walked barefoot from Westminster Hall to the abbey behind a large cross and a group of clergy. The Duke of Buckingham, appointed Lord Great Chamberlain, held the King’s train immediately behind. The Earl of Northumberland carried the Sword of Mercy and Lord Stanley, quickly forgiven after his arrest in the Council three weeks previously, had been appointed Lord High Constable and carried the mace of his office. The Earl of Kent and Viscount Lovell followed with swords of justice, then the King’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, bore the King’s sceptre and Lord Scrope of Bolton the Queen’s, while the orb was carried by the King’s nephew, the Earl of Lincoln. The Earl of Surrey, newly ennobled, bore the Sword of State while his father, recently made Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal, acted as Lord High Steward and carried the crown. Behind them walked the Queen, her train was held by the Countess of Richmond, Lady Margaret Beaufort (whom we encountered last week), then the King’s sister, the Duchess of Suffolk.

The coronation ceremony itself was conducted by the elderly Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cardinal Bourchier, nearly 80 years old. Almost the entire peerage was in attendance, since they had come to London for the sitting of Parliament and there must have been a brief sense of unity and order: some leading Lancastrians had been included in the pageantry, the King and Queen were healthy, vigorous adults (30 and 27 respectively), and they had an heir, Edward of Middleham, Earl of Salisbury, somewhere between six and nine years old. Although he was sickly child, there was no reason the royal couple should not be blessed with more children. It was regarded as the most impressive coronation in living memory, surely a sign of good things to come.

Or, as we know, not.

I am just going outside, and may be some time

On this day in 1557, the King of England left Dover to sail across the Channel, where he intended, as so many Kings of England had, to make war on France and try to expand England’s territorial possessions on the Continent. This King of England, however, was a Spaniard, and 31 years later he would send forth the Armada to try to conquer the country he had once (sort of) ruled.

It seems to be a fact irredeemably lost to the popular imagination that Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary Tudor, having become Queen of England in 1553, a year later by the act of marrying Philip of Spain caused him to be King of England. We are so used to unkingly consorts like the Duke of Edinburgh, or Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, or Queen Anne’s easily forgotten husband Prince George of Denmark and Norway, Duke of Cumberland. But there is no doubt nor margin for interpretation: from the day of Philip and Mary’s wedding on 25 July 1554, until Mary’s untimely death on 17 November 1558, the couple shared their titles, were depicted together on English coins, called Parliament under joint authority and Acts of Parliament were passed in both their names. After 1556, when Philip’s father Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, abdicated the throne of Spain, the two sovereigns were formally styled thus:

Philip and Mary, by the Grace of God, King and Queen of England, Spain, France, Jerusalem, both the Sicilies and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tirol.

The relationship between Mary and Philip, and the interlocking nature of their authority, had been set out before their marriage in Queen Mary’s Marriage Act 1554. Philip was not quite King of England like any other: he fully held the style and title, but the statute made clear that he would cease to hold his titles in regard to the English throne if Mary predeceased him (as she did by some 40 years); he could not appoint foreigners to offices at the English court; and he was not to take the Queen, and any child they might have together, out of the realm of England. The Treason Act 1554, passed the following year, made it an offence to deny Philip his titles, with a first offence leading to forfeiture of goods and perpetual imprisonment, while a second offence would count as high treason.

“The Spanish Match”, as it has often been rather slightingly described, was controversial at the time and has remained so. Mary was 37 when she came to the throne of England, the first woman ever to occupy it without serious question, and like every monarch her overriding duty was to provide an heir. At her age, in the 16th century, that would not be easy and there was certainly no time to be lost. One school of thought in political circles at the time was that she must under no circumstances marry a foreigner, because that risked subordinating England to whichever jurisdiction a husband would come from, and in November 1553 a parliamentary delegation met the Queen and asked that she marry an Englishman.

The candidate widely thought obvious was Edward Courtenay, recently created Earl of Devon. His paternal grandmother, Catherine, had been a daughter of Edward IV and therefore the sister of Mary’s paternal grandmother, Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII. Perhaps 10 or 11 years younger than the Queen, he had initially grown up in the household of Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, the Queen’s aunt. In the late 1530s, Edward’s father, Henry, Marquess of Exeter, had fallen out of favour with Henry VIII, partly because he had supported the cause of Queen Katharine, Mary’s mother, but partly, and as it proved somewhat ironically, because the Marquess was suspected of trying to arrange a match between Edward and Mary. Edward and his parents were imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1538, he and his mother were attainted and Edward would spend 15 years in prison, only being released when Mary came to the throne. He was largely rehabilitated: the earldom of Devon was created anew for him (though not his father’s forfeited marquessate of Exeter), he carried the Sword of State at Mary’s coronation on 1 October 1553 and was encouraged by some, not least the Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, to see himself as a likely suitor for the Queen.

What those lobbying for Mary to take an English husband failed to see, and what Mary’s half-sister would perceive with absolute clarity, was that for the Queen to elevate one of her subjects above all the others, indeed, in some ways to submit to him as a wife would be expected to submit to a husband, was at least as problematic as choosing a foreign prince. Although Mary’s grandfather Henry VII had effectively ended the Wars of the Roses, stabilised the Crown and gradually whittled away the power of England’s great noble families, the Tudor court was no less subject to faction and intrigue than any other.

That tendency had become more pronounced as Henry VIII had moved gradually towards dissolving his marriage to Queen Katharine and then assuming supremacy over the Church. Over his 38-year reign, Henry would execute at least one duke, one marquess, four earls, one countess, one viscount, one viscountess, six barons, two bishops, four abbots, three priors, three Speakers of the House of Commons and two of his wives. Elizabeth I gave serious consideration to marrying her childhood friend Robert Dudley, whom she made Earl of Leicester, but the idea met fierce opposition at court; equally the favour she showed later in life to Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, caused antagonism and factions within the Privy Council.

In truth, early modern gender roles and expectations made choosing a husband a near-impossible task for a female ruler. Mary Queen of Scots found it no easier to manage and Isabella I of Castile and Léon (Mary Tudor’s grandmother) united her realms with those of her husband, Ferdinand II of Aragón, so that they were co-rulers.

The Emperor Charles V (who had been engaged to Mary when she was a child and he was in his 20s) promoted the candidacy of his eldest son and heir, Philip. His Portuguese wife, Maria Manuela, had died in 1545 and he was 11 years Mary’s junior, but Mary was attracted to the security of an alliance with Spain and the Habsburg lands. She was, after all, half-Spanish herself, her mother, Katharine of Aragón, having been the Emperor’s aunt. Charles V also ruled the Netherlands, one of England’s key trading partners, and both Charles and Philip were reliably Catholic. It was not, in many ways, nearly so ill-starred a match as many contemporaries feared or as some subsequent historians have suggested.

Philip and Mary met for the first time two days before their wedding. For the Spaniard, the union was purely business: one of his advisers wrote to a correspondent that “the marriage was concluded for no fleshly consideration, but in order to remedy the disorders of this kingdom and to preserve the Low Countries”. Philip spoke no English—why would he?—so the couple communicated in a mixture of Spanish, Latin and French (although Philip would never properly master a modern foreign language all his life). For better or worse, Mary, in some ways a more romantic soul that she is given credit for, seems genuinely to have fallen in love with Philip, who was reputed to be one of the most handsome princes in Europe (though bear in mind almost all of that reputation would have been drawn from portraiture rather than life).

The King only spent two periods in England. After his marriage in July 1554 he hoped soon to leave for the Netherlands but was told by his father he was not required. He was not idle in England, regularly attending meetings of the Privy Council and holding public audiences, but as he spoke no English everything had to be done through translators, which proved cumbersome. By November the Queen believed she was pregnant and he agreed to stay until the birth; it proved a false pregnancy, and he left for the Low Countries in August 1555.

At the beginning of 1556, following Charles V’s abdication, Philip became King of Spain and Sardinia and ruler of the Netherlands. From his father he also inherited an ongoing war with France, and he was keen to bring his other kingdom of England into the fray. He therefore returned to London in March 1557 and set about making the case for war with France to Mary and her Council. England was still—just—a continental power at this point, still holding the port of Calais and the surrounding area known as the Pale of Calais (the city was represented by two Members in the English Parliament), and the notion of turning the tide of decline from the halcyon of the Hundred Years’ War still occasionally flickered.

In the second half of April, a deeply unlikely episode tipped England into war. On 25 April, Thomas Stafford, whose great-grandmother, Lady Katherine Woodville, had been sister of Edward IV’s queen and who could trace his lineage back seven generations to John of Gaunt, landed at Scarborough with two ships and more than 30 men supplied by the King of France. He took possession of the unprotected Scarborough Castle, declared himself “Protector of the Realm” (a title you may recall from the story of Lady Margaret Beaufort last week), denounced Mary’s marriage to Philip and, a Farage avant la lettre, promised to restore the Crown “to the trewe Inglyshe bloude of our owne naterall countrye”.

It was self-evidently absurd and hopeless mission, and three days later the Earl of Westmorland, by coincidence Stafford’s cousin, the 3rd Duke of Buckingham being their common grandfather, arrived with local levies and retook the castle. Several of Stafford’s men were summarily hanged, while Stafford was taken to London, tried for and found guilty of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill on 28 May. It had been a ludicrous folie de grandeur, but a French-supported uprising, however doomed, within England meant that Mary declared war on France on 7 June.

And so it came to 6 July 1557. An English army of nearly 7,000 (4,000 infantry, 1,000 cavalry and more than 1,500 engineers and sappers) had been assembled under the Earl of Pembroke, a skilled and experienced if impetuous military leader. Among the captains were Robert Dudley (see above) and Nicholas Throckmorton, later Elizabeth I’s ambassador to France. They were to join a Spanish and Imperial force of 70,000 already on campaign under the 29-year-old Duke of Savoy, the Governor of the Netherlands.

When Philip left Dover that day, he would never see Mary again. In December 1557, she told him she was pregnant; she had suffered a false pregnancy previously, in 1554-55, during which she had stopped menstruating, gained weight and been afflicted by morning sickness, but eventually her abdomen had ceased to swollen and it became clear there was no child. This time Philip was sceptical. Not only had Mary gone through one false pregnancy, but she was now 41, and the likelihood of her having a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy was all the smaller.

Yet perhaps it was would be the end to a good year. In August, shortly after Philip had arrived in France with the English reinforcements for the Spanish and Imperial army, the Duke of Savoy had laid siege to the town of St Quentin in Picardy. A French force of 26,000 soldiers led by the Constable of France, the Duke of Montmorency, and Louis de Gonzague, son of the Duke of Mantua, made to relieve the siege but became stuck in marshland and was heavily defeated on 10 August. Both Montmorency and Gonzague were taken prisoner and more than a third of their force was captured or killed.

The year that followed, 1558, would be a dreadful one. On 7 January, Lord Wentworth, the Lord Deputy of Calais and the Crown’s representative there, surrendered to besieging French forces. It had been an English possession for 211 years, and its return to French sovereignty meant the last English gain of the Hundred Years’ War was finally lost. England no longer had any continental possessions, nor any military reserves to try to recapture Calais. As the year wore on, it seemed more and more likely that Mary was suffering another phantom pregnancy, and by May she was anyway ailing and weak. She had difficulty sleeping, was deeply depressed and enduring acute pain, possibly from ovarian cysts or uterine cancer; she also had oedema, swelling caused by fluid building up in body tissue and known to 16th century medicine as dropsy. By September she was also experiencing high fevers, headaches and periods of confusion and loss of vision (perhaps a tumour on her pituitary endocrine gland pressing against the optic nerve?); by late October it was clear to everyone that the Queen was dying.

Mary continued to attend to her duties and administration in her lucid spells when she could see. On 6 November, reluctant but with no alternative, she recognised her half-sister Elizabeth as her heir; while Mary lay dying at St James’s Palace in London, Elizabeth was at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, and officers of the household and courtiers slowly drained away from to the other. By the early hours of 17 November, the Queen was peaceful and heard Mass, and between 4.00 am and 5.00 am she died. She was 42.

In that moment Philip ceased to be King of England, and would never return. It was not for want of trying: shortly after Mary’s death, Philip proposed marriage to Elizabeth I in an attempt to retain England within the Habsburg sphere of influence, but the new Queen never formally responded (389 years would pass before another Elizabeth would marry a foreign prince named Philip). The Spanish king had had no way of knowing that when he left Dover on this date in 1557, he was leaving England forever and would never see his wife again. It is unlikely it would have troubled him, as he had always regarded his marriage to Mary as transactional, pragmatic and dynastic.

Philip was in Brussels when he learned he was a widow for the second time. Reflecting on the late Queen, he wrote to his sister Joanna, “I felt a reasonable regret for her death”.

Eat, drink and be merry

Today is the feast of St Romulus of Fiesole (d AD 90), a disciple of St Peter who was martyred with four companions during the reign of Domitian; and of St Maria Goretti (1890-1902), a poor girl from a farming family in Ancona who was stabbed to death at the age of 11 by the 20-year-old son of the family with whom she shared a house when she refused his sexual advances and who forgave her killer as she died.

The Republic of Malawi celebrates Independence Day today, the former Nyasaland Protectorate becoming a dominion in 1964 under the Malawi Independence Act 1964 and a republic in 1966 (the first Prime Minister (1964-66) and President (1966-94) of Malawi was Dr Hastings Banda, who held a BPhil from the University of Chicago and a Triple Qualification in medicine from the University of Edinburgh, and was an elder of the Church of Scotland). The Union of the Comoros also marks its independence: in 1975 the Territorial Assembly unilaterally declared the islands independent from France as the State of the Comoros, despite being part-way through an agreed process of decolonisation.

It is Statehood Day in Lithuania, to mark the coronation of Grand Duke Mindaugas as the first and only King of Lithuania in 1253 (the exact date of the coronation is not certain, nor is its location, but it is believed to have taken place in Navahrudak, now Novogrudok in modern-day Belarus). It is also the Day of the Capital City of Kazakhstan, marking the decision in 1994 of the Supreme Council of Kazakhstan to move the nation’s capital from Almaty to Akmola, rename Astana in 1998 and known as Nur-Sultan 2019-22.

The Czech Republic is marking Jan Hus Day, to commemorate the religious reformer who was burned at the stake for heresy at the Council of Constance on this day in 1415, despite having been promised safe conduct to the gathering.

Today is International Kissing Day. I’m just saying.

Factoids

1. At the beginning of the 16th century, Spain had no fixed capital. Indeed, there was no single Kingdom of Spain; the Iberian peninsula, setting aside Portugal, comprised the Kingdoms of Castile, León, Toledo, Galicia, Seville, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Granada, Aragón, Valencia, Mallorca, the Principality of Catalonia, and the Counties of Barcelona, Roussillon, Cerdagne. These were held in personal union after 1479 by Isabella I, Queen of Castile &c., and Ferdinand II, King of Aragón &c., second cousins from the House of Trastámara, who effectively united Spain. Although Philip II (see above) styled himself “King of Spain”, the independent kingdoms would remain formally separate until the Nueva Planta decrees introduced between 1707 and 1716 by Philip V, the first Bourbon monarch. Like many late mediaeval and early modern courts, that of Isabella and Ferdinand was peripatetic, although the Emperor Charles V, King of Castile &c. as Charles I from 1516 to 1556, tended to use Valladolid, one of the traditional seats of the Castilian monarchy.

2. Philip II changed all of this. He had a powerful minatory lesson in the shape of his father, who, abdicating in his mid-50s, was worn out and prematurely aged by his endless travelling around his sprawling European possessions. In his farewell speech in Brussels on 25 October 1555, the Emperor had spoken of travelling “nine times to Germany, six times to Spain, seven times to Italy, four times to France, twice to England, and twice to Africa in a total of four great journeys… [I] crossed the Mediterranean Sea eight times and sailed the Atlantic Ocean twice, not to speak of the journey I made from Spain to the Netherlands”. Philip resolved to pursue exactly the opposite course of action. Initially, like his father, he governed from Valladolid, but on 21 September 1561 and subsequent days the city was devastated by an enormous fire which burned for 50 hours and destroyed most of the urban centre including the cathedral. Philip used the opportunity to establish a permanent capital in Madrid, almost in the centre of the Iberian peninsula. More specifically, he constructed a vast palace and monastery 30 miles north-west of Madrid, El Escorial, built between 1563 and 1584.

3. The pious King dedicated the site to San Lorenzo, St Laurence, a third century Spanish Christian martyr who was roasted to death on a gridiron in Rome in AD 258. Why San Lorenzo, you might ask, apart from the fact that he was a Spanish saint? The Battle of St Quentin in 1557 (see above), at which the Duke of Savoy had defeated the French army in Picardy, had taken place on 10 August, the feast of St Laurence.

4. Madrid was not a major city before Philip II made it his capital. The population in 1561 was around 18,000; population estimates are very rough, but the biggest cities was Seville (70,000-100,000), followed by Toledo (60,000), Valencia and Granada (50,000), Valladolid (45,000) and Barcelona (30,000). Lisbon, the capital of neighbouring Portugal, was a major port of around 100,000. Seville, with its access to the sea, was the seat of the Casa de la Contratación de las Indias, the crown agency for trade with the New World, and this had allowed it to grow to a size at which it was Spain’s only significant city in terms of population on a European scale. Why did Philip II choose the modest settlement of Madrid? In many ways because of what it was not: Valladolid, which was anyway half-destroyed, was the old Castilian administrative centre, Toledo was the seat of the Archbishop who was also Primate of Spain, Granada was the old capital of the Moorish kingdom, only conquered in 1492, Valencia, on the south coast, was periodically troubled by raiding Barbary pirates and Seville was already prosperous through trade. Madrid, in the vicinity of which the crown owned substantial estates, offered something close to a blank slate, lying in the centre of the country and not dominated by vested interests.

5. The first member of the British royal family to travel by train was Her Majesty Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV. On 22 July 1840, the 47-year-old German queen dowager, popular with the public for her modest, pious and charitable nature, travelled on the Midland Counties Railway from Nottingham Carrington Street to Derby, then changed to a service of the North Midland Railway from Derby to Leeds. She was on her way with her sister, Princess Ida of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, from Belton House near Grantham, the home of the Earl Brownlow, Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, to Harewood House, the seat of the Earl of Harewood, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

6. When Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle William IV on 20 June 1837, the Accession Council which met later that day at Kensington Palace proclaimed her queen “saving the rights of any issue of His late Majesty King William the Fourth which may be borne of his late Majesty’s Consort”. Queen Adelaide had given birth to a premature daughter who lived only a few hours in 1819, and miscarried later that year; another daughter, born in 1820, had died aged three months; she had given birth to stillborn twins in 1822 and may have had another brief pregnancy some months later. By 1837, however, she was nearly 45 and the late King had been 71, so a pregnancy was unlikely in the extreme. But a child would have trumped Victoria in the line of succession, so the long reign of the Queen-Empress, as she became, was, for its first few months, legally conditional.

7. Queen dowagers are a rarity in British royal circles. Since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, Adelaide was one of only seven: Queen Henrietta Maria (1649-69), widow of Charles I; Queen Catherine (1685-1705), widow of Charles II; Queen Mary (1701-18), widow of James VII and II; Adelaide herself, Queen Alexandra (1910-25), widow of Edward VII; Queen Mary (1936-53), widow of George V; and Queen Elizabeth (1952-2002), widow of George VI. Of those seven, four—Henrietta Maria, Alexandra, Mary and Elizabeth—were also queen mothers.

8. Arthur Guinness, the founder of the great Irish brewing dynasty, must have felt a degree of confidence in his product and its likely success. When he took over a disused brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin in 1759, having begun making beer in Leixlip, County Kildare, he signed a 9,000-year lease on the four-acre property at £45 per annum. (The lease was superseded as Guinness expanded and bought the original brewery and the surrounding areas outright, and it now covers more than 50 acres.)

9. I had long thought this to be an apocryphal tale but my friend Mark Heywood, wise in the ways of Iberia, tells me it is quite true: Spanish has a verb, anaranjear, which means “to kill a cockerel by throwing oranges at it”. Now, this prompts many questions, let’s be honest, not least which came first, the word or the deed? But it also makes me wonder how many blows from an orange a cockerel can endure, whether one can be fatal, what kind of orange is required, whether other citrus fruits were tried and rejected, and whether the cockerel is tethered before the act begins, or if one must strike it as it runs free. But it does remind you of a fundamental truth of language: if there is a word for it, it’s because someone has done it.

10. “Orange”, of course, is a rarity in English in having no true rhymes. It appeared as the name of the fruit in the 13th century, but would not be adapted as a colour descriptor, so far as we can tell, until the early 16th century: in 1502, there is a reference to clothing of that colour owned by Margaret Tudor, elder sister of Henry VIII, who was Queen of Scotland from 1503 to 1513 and then regent for her infant son James V after her husband, James IV, was killed at the Battle of Flodden. She was ousted as regent in 1515 in favour of John Stewart, Duke of Albany, uncle of James IV, but returned when he was ousted in 1524 and was recognised by the Parliament of Scotland as the King’s chief councillor. It was declared that James V’s minority was over (he was 12) but Queen Margaret remained a powerful influence over her son; but within months her estranged second husband, the Earl of Angus, reluctantly admitted to the Council of Regency by Margaret, had seized the King and effectively held him prisoner for the next three years. Margaret was the fons et origo of the claim to the English throne of the Scottish royal house which was realised with the Union of the Crowns in 1603: by her first husband James IV, she was grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots and great-grandmother of James VI and I, but by her second husband the Earl of Angus she was grandmother of Henry, Lord Darnley, who became Mary Queen of Scots’ second husband, and therefore she was… great-grandmother of James VI and I. Again.

“The devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs.” (Mark Twain)

1. “Exploding U.S. indebtedness makes a fiscal crisis almost inevitable”: the indomitable George F. Will warns in The Washington Post that the soaring national debt of the United States is unsustainable and may have catastrophically transformative effects. He points to an new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem—An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead, by the economist and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff, who argues that politicians and voters now expect the almost-limitless financial safety net of debt capacity, and that inflation is the almost-certain result. Sir Niall Ferguson (from whom more below) has been tirelessly expounding “Ferguson’s Law”, his assertion that “any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power”, and the United States broke Ferguson’s Law in 2024, for the first time in more than a century. Will concludes that, while it is difficult to predict what form a looming debt or inflation crisis will take, its arrival is near-inevitable.

2. “What Zohran Mamdani doesn’t understand about wealth”: economic journalist Mani Basharzad in CapX examines the extraordinary rise of the Democratic Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York in November’s election. Given that there have only been three non-Democrat Mayors in 80 years (of whom one, John Lindsay (1966-73), switched from the Republican Party to the Democrats halfway through his second term), Zohran Mamdani must be the favourite to win, as indeed polling suggests. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist, he favours rent control, thinks billionaires should not exist, doesn’t believe policing has much effect in reducing crime, wants to provide free bus travel and thinks the city authorities can run grocery stores more efficiently and effectively than the private sector. Basharzad identifies a fundamental fallacy which underpins Mamdani’s economic policies: he sees the economy as a zero-sum game, and thinks that if some are prospering then they must be doing so at the expense of others. But writers like von Mises and Hayek have long pointed out that this isn’t how capitalism works as all; as Basharzad observes, “in capitalism, you can grow rich by making the pie bigger: creating products, companies, jobs and innovations that benefit not only yourself, but millions of others”. Attacking billionaires as the root of the problem may be a shortcut to populist support but it is illiterate, as the very wealthy include those who generate economic growth which improves conditions for everyone. “You don’t fight poverty by punishing wealth, but by creating more of it.” Hear hear.

3. “Thom Tillis’s unforgivable sin”: in The Washington Post, Kathleen Parker notes the impending retirement of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who clashed with President Donald Trump over the childishly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Tillis couldn’t vote for deep cuts to Medicaid and was thereafter the target of playground abuse from the President on social media; he has announced he will not seek re-election next year, though he claims he was contemplating retirement anyway (he will be 66 by the time of the election, barely middle-aged in United States Senate terms). He is hardly a child of privilege, his family having moved 20 times by the time he was 17, but seeking to protect the most vulnerable in his state was irrelevant. What the episode shows is what has been true for some time, that Trump demands absolutely loyalty (though it is a one-way transaction) and will use any weapon to punish those who don’t fall into line. In truth, though, as I explained in The Spectator in April, my sympathy has its limits. This did not happen suddenly or by storm: the Republican Party made Faustian pact after Faustian pact with Trump’s unmoored and dishonest populism, and are now hollowed-out and completely in his thrall. There were alternatives, but they chose to take what advantage they could from an unreliable carney barker who only intermittently shared their instinct. It is not wholly clear to me that the GOP has a way back from here.

4. “The Ivanka Harvest”: the glorious Kara Kennedy Clairmont turns her attention to Ivanka Trump for The Spectator World and finds the presidential daughter in the food business. Her Planet Harvest enterprise is designed to “bridge the persistent gaps between produce supply and demand, where surplus, off-grade, and overlooked product often goes to waste while buyers struggle with access, pricing, and seasonal volatility”, which certainly sounds more wholesome and well-meaning that some Trump family ventures. I’ve always found Ivanka interesting: I can say nothing of her character, but she is clearly much cleverer and more deep-thinking than her brothers, and if I had to bet which Trump offspring will have the most robust public profile and career in 15 or 20 years’ time, well, I wouldn’t be picking Don Jr, let’s put it that way. I’m sure I’m not alone in scrutinising this current venture for deeper meaning or indications of future intent, and I may be looking for something that isn’t there, but this is a stylish, perceptive profile, definitely worth reading.

5. “How can Labour turn this mess around? With honesty—and taxes”: you will know or be able to intuit that The Guardian isn’t my newspaper of choice and this is the first time Polly Toynbee has featured in these recommendations, but I read this column on the grounds that you should know what the other side is thinking. It reads like a bad test-version of an AI programme but, to give Toynbee her due, it is absolutely on brand. The message is that the government should raise tax and that raising tax is a good thing: “It’s time to remind citizens that their taxes go to things everyone values most… the things that really matter can only be bought through taxation”. Of course there is no acknowledgement that higher taxation might come at a cost in economic performance, because for Toynbee it is a bottomless well from which we could all drink if we were only brave enough. And of course, “the things that really matter” must, without exception, be channelled through the state to make them more virtuous. You will not make your own arrangements with your own money for healthcare or your children’s education; first it must be state-washed to make it pure of heart. She refers to President George H.W. Bush’s infamous phrase “the vision thing” as something he “dismissed sneerily”, when he did nothing of the sort. He recognised it wasn’t his strong suit by a long way and so conveniently (if infelicitously) parcelled it up as one item on a longer agenda for a meeting. And she avers that Rachel Reeves will not be sacked, because “history shows that prime ministers rarely last after sacking their chancellors”. Well, I’d say the jury is out on that: Lord Salsisbury didn’t look back after Lord Randolph Churchill’s departure in 1886, A.J. Balfour’s dismissal of Charles Ritchie in 1903 made no contribution to his government’s fall a few years later, Harold Macmillan gained his reputation for being “unflappable” when he parted company with Peter Thorneycroft in 1958 and John Major made a very sensible decision in removing Norman Lamont in favour of Kenneth Clarke in 1993. But that doesn’t fit the thesis. Astonishing lack of insight or reflection.

6. “How to read Morgan McSweeney”: Nicholas Harris in The New Statesman attempts to shed light on the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Corkman Morgan McSweeney, who has become a totemic figure in Labour politics over the past year. McSweeney is seen as the driving force behind Sir Keir Starmer’s attempts to retain or win back voters tempted by Reform UK, and Harris explores the fact he is currently reading The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West by Palantir CEO Alexander C. Karp. Calling Karp a “nostalgic futurist”, Harris suggests that the book’s thesis, that business and government need to co-operate to leverage technology as an engine of economic, national and social reinvigoration, appeals to McSweeney as “another instance of a political apparatchik who, desperate for a stubborn government to simply move faster, has turned for inspiration to the engineers and developers who have changed the world quicker than anyone else this century”. It is an interesting possibility: I think McSweeney’s abilities and reputation are overrated and that he rather revels in a slightly shadowy image, but this does at least suggest that he is thinking constructively about the future of the state.

7. “The precarious future of NATO’s open door policy”: Thomas Graham is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations and served on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, so I feel a degree of trepidation here. This is an interesting article, as always from Engelsberg Ideas, but I don’t agree with it at all. His thesis, and I hope I’m not simplifying unfairly, is that NATO will have to abandon its effective open-door policy as expressed in Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which allows members states to “invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty”. Graham quite rightly notes that it is not quite an open door, as the impetus is clearly member states to extend invitations, they must have unanimous agreement, and it is restricted to “European states”. Expansion was not actively pursued across the board during the Cold War, though Greece and Turkey were admitted in 1952, West Germany in 1955 and Spain in 1982. It was only in the 1990s that the Clinton administration saw the expansion of NATO eastwards as a way of reinforcing democracy and demonstrating America’s commitment to European security. Now, however, Graham argues that “the open-door policy makes Europe a more dangerous place. It prevents fashioning a policy toward Russia that will provide stability.” There may be an intellectual case behind this, but in realpolitik terms I cannot see that it would do anything except retrospectively justify Vladimir Putin’s claim that his years of violence have been in response to threats from NATO and also reward his invasion of Ukraine by agreeing to one of his key demands, that Ukraine should not be allowed to join the alliance. How else could the Kremlin see such a policy?

8. “Towards a Liberal Patriotism”: Dr Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research writes in Law & Liberty on the divide between liberalism and nationalism in contemporary America which, in his words, “helps clarify some of the stark disparities between the principles, priorities, and policies that distinguish, say, the J. D. Vance-brand of conservatism from that of those American conservatives who remain committed to classical liberal ideas about free markets and limited government”. He argues that in mid-19th century Europe liberalism and nationalism made easy bedfellows, “shifting the locus of statehood away from allegiance to a royal dynasty and towards peoples with a shared ethno-linguistic identity”. Those, for example, within the Habsburg empire who sought greater autonomy for the Kingdom of Hungary imagined that autonomy within a framework of constitutional order, democratic representation and the rule of law. How could it be otherwise? If you seek freedom for your own “tribe”, whatever that may be, you are unlikely then to want to subject it and its new freedom to authoritarianism. The other side of that coin is the way that Bismarck was able to harness a spirit of pan-German unity to extend the power of the Kingdom of Prussia, enfeeble the other German states and inflict military defeats on Denmark, Austria-Hungary and France. He ends with what I find a very attractive and encouraging call for patriotism to be defined not by nationalists and populists but by “those who favor markets, limited government, and the rule of law”. As Gregg concludes, “today’s classical liberals and limited government conservatives… more than ever… should stress that it is precisely because they love their country that they oppose contemporary nationalism’s friends-versus-enemies logic, belligerent rhetoric, and terrible economic ideas”.

9. “AI’s great brain robbery—and how universities can fight back”: I have no idea which of the many paths suggested artificial intelligence is going to lead us, and, to be honest, neither has anyone else, but Sir Niall Ferguson in The Times is realistic without being resigned and suggests that the whole way in which we learn will have to be adapted to new circumstances (something, after all, humans are supposed to be quite good at doing). He warns of the enormous scale and speed of AI’s growth but instead of despairing, sets out five essential steps which he has proposed at the University of Austin, where he is a founding trustee. I will let you read them, but, as always with Niall, it is a thought-provoking suggestion.

10. “The Mirthful Assyriologist, the Real Noah’s Ark, and the Oldest Writing in the World”: a lovely article by Brian Klaas of University College London on wonderful Dr Irving Finkel, Senior Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. Finkel’s particular field of study is cuneiform inscriptions from Mesopotamia, a logo-syllabic writing system that began around 5,000 years ago. As Finkel describes it, “the world’s oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!” His ability to decipher cuneiform and to translate writing left behind by some of our earliest “civilised” ancestors allows him to give us an amazing insight into and connection with a world that seems otherwise impossibly, unrecognisably distant. Finkel is 74 but his passion for his work seems undimmed. When Nicholas Cullinan became Director of the British Museum last year, he asked Finkel what his plans were, to which Finkel replied that he wanted to re-read all 130,000 cuneiform tablets in the museum’s collection. Cullinan asked how long that would take, and, when told it would be about 100 years, replied, “Well, we must get you a new contract, then”.

Intermezzo: Nanci Griffith

A new and almost certainly irregular feature in these weekly collections, but, as I’ve said before, my blog, my rules. Looking at today’s birthdays, I noticed that 6 July was the date on which Nanci Griffith was born, but at the same time I was reminded, with an unexpected degree of shock, that she died nearly four years ago, at the age of (only?) 68. I must have known she’d died, it’s inconceivable I wouldn’t have done, yet somehow in my mind, if I’d ascribed any status to her, it would almost certainly have been among the living.

Nanci was part of the explosion of folk and country music which burst into my life and musical heartland in my late teens and early 20s. (I say “Nanci”; of course I didn’t know her, had never met her, yet her music, her recordings and her stage presence suggested such a sweet, good-natured and warm-hearted nature that it would seem absurdly formal to refer to her as “Griffith”. From what I can gather, it was wholly authentic and representative.) I can tell you exactly how and roughly when it began. I was an undergraduate at St Andrews and I switched the television on to watch something on BBC2, but caught the last ten minutes of BBC Scotland content, scattered as it was throughout the week. It was an episode of the second series of Transatlantic Sessions, an ensemble music show originally conceived by Aly Bain and Jerry Douglas, in which a range of folk, country and roots musicians would come to a country location, play together, record each others’ songs, and, so far as one could see, have a high old time of it.

Series 2 had been recorded at Raemoir House in Banchory in Aberdeenshire in August 1998 and was screened that autumn, so I was beginning my third year, my first year of honours classes after two years in sub-honours. There were seven episodes, so it could have been 16, 23 or 30 October or 6, 13, 20 or 27 November, but I don’t remember which I saw: episode six seems the most likely, as it features Paul Brady’s mesmerising rendition of Arthur McBride and the Sergeant which instantly became and remains one of my favourite songs. In any event, I found the whole experience captivating and threw myself headlong into the artists I saw: Paul Brady, Jerry Douglas, Ricky Skaggs, John Martyn, Karen Matheson, Sharon Shannon and, not least, Nanci. Her performance of Trouble In The Fields, written with Rick West for her fifth album Lone Star State of Mind, in this case accompanied by Maura O’Connell, is breathtaking.

Nanci was from Texas, born in Seguin and raised in Austin, and it rang through every timbre of her voice. What a voice, too: soft, childlike, hesitant when speaking, but unleashed it song it could be glorious, joyful and soaring. She had started singing in local coffee houses before she was even a teenager, and although she took a degree in education from the University of Texas at Austin and taught in kindergarten and first-grade for a couple of years, she more or less spent her life as a professional musician. Her first album, There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, came out when she was 25, and she never looked back.

How to explain Nanci Griffith? She was a folk singer, in a sense, though being a folk singer from Austin necessarily brought with it a huge influence of country music; she called her style “folkabilly”, which is as good a description as any. More than anything else, she was a storyteller, a fine and affecting one, and she had a profound interest in and reverence for musical forebears and contemporaries. She released two albums of covers, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1993) and Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful) (1998) which not only reworked the music of people like Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton, Townes van Zandt, Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny but called on performances from Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Iris DeMent and John Prine. I get the impression that if Nanci asked you to perform, you didn’t say no.

Nanci was only 68 when she died. The usual battery of tributes fro colleagues seemed somehow sharply heartfelt and earnest—there was no hint of anyone going through the motions. Since I started compiling this week’s round-up I’ve gone back and listened again to some of her many albums (there were 18 studio recordings and two live albums), and it’s been a poignant joy. She was an exceptional talent, both as a performer and as a songwriter, and while her fans are devoted I suspect they are a more exclusive club than they should be. Her work is a reminder that the best singer-songwriters are, or should be regarded as, cut from exactly the same cloth as poets: after all, much of the earliest poetry, like the Hebrew Psalms, Homer’s epic tales of the Trojan Wars and their aftermath in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Shijing of Zhou China, would have been sung rather than recited. In any event, it has rekindled my boundless affection for her music, and that is no small thing.

Jukebox jury

1. “Nothing But The Same Old Story”, Paul Brady

2. “I Wish It Would Rain”, Nanci Griffith

3. “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her”, Mary Chapin Carpenter

4. “Oh What A Circus”, David Essex

5. “Please Read The Letter”, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

From the archives: We hold these truths to be self-evident

Friday was the Fourth of July, Independence Day in the United States. I explained in City A.M. earlier in the week that the legal declaration of independence by the Second Continental Congress took place on 2 July 1776, and that was the date which many contemporaries, including John Adams, the second President of the United States, assumed would be the commemoration thereafter, but it didn’t quite turn out like that.

The Declaration of Independence is only 1,331 words long: not quite two standard op-ed pieces in a newspaper, or a short-ish undergraduate essay (assuming undergraduates still write essays or have Chat GPT write them, rather than submitting memes or emojis these days). I’ll be generous and assume that most halfway-conscious Americans have read it but on this side of the Atlantic I suspect it’s a document more known about than read, analysed and remembered; in Britain, particularly, and not without reason, we have a snarky tendency to say “Yeah, but what about slavery, then?” when greeted by the phrase “all men are created equal”. But it is an extraordinary document and thought experiment: flawed, of course, because it was written by human hand and we are all flawed, but still astonishing in its intellectual context.

By the summer of 1776, the Second Continental Congress had been sitting in Philadelphia for a year. There were around 60 delegates from the Thirteen Colonies who were in rebellion against the British Crown, and on 6 July 1775 the assembly had sent King George III A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, which set out the reasons for their unwillingness to endure the various acts of Parliament imposed on them and known as “the Intolerable Acts”. It was still framed in the spirit of seeking a compromise and restoration of the status quo ante, but had been overtaken by events: after receiving news of his army’s victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June, the King had issued a Proclamation of Rebellion on 23 August which declared the colonies in revolt against lawful authority, and he refused to receive the Declaration of Causes.

There was a general acceptance by May 1776 that declaring their independence was the only way forward for the Thirteen Colonies, assuming they could achieve military success over British forces. Accordingly, on 7 June, a Virginia delegate, Richard Lee, tabled a motion which declared:

That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

There was little question that the Continental Congress was approve it, but such a momentous step required explanation, and four days later a Committee of Five was appointed to draft an explanatory declaration setting out the cause and justification of the action. Its members were John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York. All but Franklin, who was at that point easily the most famous and eminent, were lawyers, though with varying kinds of educational background: Livingston was a graduate of King’s College in Manhattan (now Columbia University), while Sherman had attended a local grammar school for a few years but relied mainly on insatiable intellectual curiosity and his father’s library.

The Committee of Five left no minutes or records (as a former clerk I find that one of the most shocking facts of the entirely Revolutionary War), but the declaration seems to have been based on an initial draft by Jefferson which the others then amended and commented on, with Jefferson then producing a revised and consolidated version. On 28 June, the final draft was submitted to a Committee of the whole Congress, an emulation of the Committee of the whole House stage of consideration in the House of Commons, whereby the whole membership formally becomes a committee but all can participate. At around 6.26 pm on 1 July, the Committee agreed to the draft, then reported it formally to the Congress as a whole. The following day, 2 July, Congress approved the declaration as reported and agreed to Richard Lee’s resolution, thereby formally declaring the independence of the United States.

The Declaration of Independence was not quite ready. Some changes were made and sections deleted on 3 July but by the time the Congress adjourned that day, the text seems to have been finalised. The following morning, probably between 10.30 am and 11.00 am, it was formally approved and a proof was sent to the printers. Yet it is that day, 4 July, relatively inconsequential, which is marked rather than the passage of the Lee Resolution on 2 July.

It is a careful and methodical document. It begins with the general principle that people may seek their political independence as a matter of natural law (“the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them”) but acknowledges that such a serious breach with a previously recognised lawful authority requires explanation. In continues by asserting that people have innate rights (“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”) and that if these are infringed then it is legitimate for people to engage in revolution in defence and reassertion of those rights (“it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”).

The Declaration then moves from the general to the specific, laying out an indictment of George III and his government and detailing the ways in which they have violated the rights of the residents of the Thirteen Colonies and by which, therefore, the colonists are entitled to reject the government’s authority. It also stresses that the colonists warned Britain again and again that these violations were intolerable and implored the Crown to reverse them.

Finally, having rehearsed the case, it draws the inevitable conclusion:

That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.

This was the last quarter of the 18th century (just). This balance of rights and responsibilities, and a compact between rulers and subjects, was not an intellectual framework universally acknowledged or even accepted. Certainly it has some antecedents extending centuries back in English legal and constitutional history: the idea of some kind of legitimacy deriving from justice and consent can be found in Magna Carta in 1215, in the emergence of Parliament later that century and then coming sharply into focus during the Civil Wars of the 17th century and the settlement of the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights 1689. But the Declaration of Independence is much clearer, crisper and more concise.

Other European polities were even further distant. In France, where the Revolution was still more than a decade in the future, the King had huge powers to govern by lettres de cachet, letters of instruction which would be countersigned by one of his ministers and the royal seal affixed. There was no right of appeal against the instructions or judgements contained in these lettres, and the Estates General, the closest equivalent to a legislature in ancien régime France, had not met since 1614.

In Spain, the Nueva Planta degrees (1707-16) had reorganised the fractured kingdoms of the peninsula (see above) and left the Cortes of Castile, now the Cortes Generales del Reino, as the only representative body, but this had last met in 1713 in Madrid only to recognise the Salic Law as governing the succession. It did not meet again until 1789. Prussia, which had been recognised as a kingdom in 1701 after the elevation of the Elector of Prussia to royal status, was an absolute monarchy and the Landtag had very little influence over events, while in Russia there was no assembly at all, the Tsar was an autocrat and huge swathes of the population lived in legal serfdom.

Of course the Declaration was built on emerging intellectual trends of the Enlightenment. Jefferson would say nearly 50 years later:

Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

The English Bill of Rights was cited as an influence, and Jefferson was hugely indebted to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government of 1689, the second of which created much of the case for natural rights and contract theory. Emerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations: Or, Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, published in Switzerland in 1758, is another likely influence, and certainly a work of which Benjamin Franklin was fully aware; some historians detect signs of the Magdeburg Confession of 1550, a statement by nine Lutheran pastors in response to the Augsburg Interim (1548), which explained why the city would not submit to imperial law and were justified in using force to oppose it.

Perhaps the genius of the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson suggested, was to be an “expression of the American mind”, a clear and elegant summation not just of the cause of the Thirteen Colonies but of a wider principle of freedom based on justice, rights, consent and mutuality. In any event, it is worth five minutes to read and think about.

The Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

The story of the gradual renewal of a man…

… to quote Dostoyevsky, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.