Category Archives: History

Cornwall’s Prayerbook Rebellion

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It’s 1549, we’re in Cornwall, and (I’m taking a gamble here) none of us speak the language, because it isn’t English, it’s Cornish. Enough people speak English that we can probably buy a loaf of bread and a pint of beer (we’ll want to stay away from the water), but it’s embarrassing to depend on other people being better at languages than we are.

 

The inevitable background

What else do we need to know? Edward the Kid is on the English throne. That makes him sound more like a wild west gunslinger than a monarch, though, so let’s be conventional enough to call him Edward VI. He won’t last long–he becomes king at 9 and dies of TB at 15–but right now he’s sitting in the fancy chair, and he’s seriously, Protestantly Protestant, and more to the point, so are the people around him who, since he really is a kid, are powerful forces. 

This is when (and why) crucifixes and saints’ images are stripped out of the churches. Stained glass is destroyed. Masses for the dead are banned, and so are rosaries and church processions. The clergy’s gotten permission to marry.

But in Cornwall it’s gone further than that. Churches can’t ring bells for the dead. Church ales–fundraising banquets that are one of the important ways local churches raise money–have been banned. Priests’ vestments have to meet strict guidelines, and parishioners have to pay for that. 

Irrelevant photo: A magnolia blossom. For some reasons, it decided to bloom a second time this summer

These West Country rules come from William Body, who (I’m quoting David Horspool’s The English Rebel here) “got his hands on the archdeaconry of Cornwall against local opposition,” and then managed to line his pockets once he did.

In Penryn two years ago (that was 1547), there was a demonstration against him and the changes he’d introduced. It came off peacefully, and so did the government’s response. 

But the next year, the foundations that sang masses for the dead were suppressed, and in Helston Body was attacked and murdered by a mob led by a priest. 

Do I need to point out that this wasn’t peaceful? The priest and eleven other people were executed. This wasn’t a peaceful response.

Aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you these things?

Still, Edward, his advisors, or a combination thereof, didn’t think the opposition meant much. It happened in Cornwall, for fuck’s sake–the outer edges of beyond. They were convinced that people were thirsty for their reforms, but even if they’d believed the opposite, they might have acted the same way. Because they were right. It said so in their holy book, or it did once someone put the correct interpretation on it. So they moved ahead and introduced a major change in church services: they’d now be in English instead of Latin, and they’d follow the Book of Common Prayer. 

The Latin mass was now an endangered species, and if you insisted on saying it you’d be endangered yourself.

And since we’ve caught up with our timeline, we’ll shift back to the present tense. It almost makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.

Conducting church services in a language people understand is a very Protestant move, and the English church has been edging in this direction for a while, first including snippets of English, then tolerating–maybe even encouraging–English-only masses in a few churches. Now, though, every last church has to use the Book of Common Prayer, and nope, they’re not negotiating this.

This sets off a massive flap. Catholics cling to Latin, and they’re horrified. But people who are further along the Protestant spectrum are equally offended because the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t break as sharply as they’d like with Catholicism. 

And–we’re finally getting to the point here–it offends the Cornish, because say what you like about how a service in the language people actually speak brings religion closer to the people, English isn’t their damn language and their priests can’t say services in Cornish because that’s not how it’s being done this week.

I’m not sure anyone wanted to say the service in Cornish, mind you. I’m just pointing out that the compromise wasn’t on the table. The Act of Uniformity bans every language except English from church services.

 

Cue the rebellion, please 

We’ll start in Bodmin, which is more or less the geographical center of Cornwall. It’s the first day the new services are scheduled to be heard. So people gather. People protest. They convince a local member of the gentry, Humphrey Arundell, to lead them.

Yes, I do notice the strangeness of people having to convince someone to lead them. It speaks, I think, to how deeply ingrained the hierarchy is. Without a gentleman to lead them, how could they possibly know what to do, even if they had to set him up there and tell him to do it?

Instead of going home at the end of the event, the protesters set up camp.

On the same day and for the same reasons, a protest breaks out in Sampford Courtenay, in Devon, the next county up from Cornwall, and nine days later the two groups set up camp a few miles outside Exeter and prepare to lay siege to the city. Figure there are some 2,000 rebels out there. Or some 4,000. Let’s not bog down over the details. A lot of people. More than you’d want at your birthday party.

The rebels put together several versions of their demands, and most of what they want is about religion. The center of religious reformation is in London. In the West Country, they hold to the beliefs and traditions that have been part of daily life for centuries. Still, they don’t call for a full return to the Catholic Church but to a return to the way things were under Henry VIII. And like so many rebels in monarchical countries, they don’t see themselves as challenging the king but the bad counselors around him. 

Yes, everybody’s drunk the monarchical KoolAid. It won’t be until the Civil War that they turn to other drinks.

The siege of Exeter lasts five or six weeks, and Exeter is left to defend itself until John Russell, who just happens to be the Lord Privy Seal (and people take these titles entirely seriously, remember) arrives with soldiers and defeats the rebels.

Estimates of the number of rebel dead are roughly the same as the estimates of the rebels themselves: 3,000 to 4,000. 

Again, don’t try too hard to make the numbers work. The leaders are hauled to London to be ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. 

 

The aftermath

As a BBC historical article puts it, “The insurrection was eventually crushed with hideous slaughter – some three to four thousand West Country men were killed – and in its wake the ruling classes may well have come to associate the Cornish tongue with rebellion and sedition, as well as with poverty and ‘backwardness’. This in turn may help to explain why the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, as it was later to be translated into Welsh. What is certain is that the failure to provide a liturgy in the Cornish tongue did much to hasten the subsequent decline of the language.”

The decline is more or less geographical, with English leaking across the Devon border and pouring south and west. By 1640, Cornish has retreated into the toe of Cornwall’s sock, and as the language dies out, the process of assimilation into England gathers force. By 1700, only 5,000 people speak Cornish.

The last native speaker of Cornish is Dolly Pentreath, who’s born in 1685 and dies in 1777. 

But. The sense of separation stays strong and plays a role in Cornwall taking the royalist side in the Civil Wars–partly (or so the BBC article speculates) because they saw Charles as  British and the Parliamentarians as English. With his defeat, the Cornish identity took another hit.

The An Gof Rebellion, with an extra bit of Cornish history thrown in

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Welcome to Cornwall, 1497. Henry VII is on the English throne and Cornwall is part of England but also not part of England. The way that works is that the Cornish are a separate nation, which is about culture, but not a separate country, which is about law, power, and who’s in charge. So, like the Welsh, they’re a nation inside the country of England.

 

The culture

Most people’s mother tongue is Cornish, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh. And to a few other languages, but never mind that. I know a rabbit hole when I see one. The Cornish language is strongest in the west of the county and among ordinary people. Go east (which is actually northeast, but that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole) or spend time with the gentry and you’ll find English taking a stronger hold–probably alongside Cornish but in spite of what I said in the first paragraph we’re not actually there so we can’t walk down to the market and find out.

 

Irrelevant photo: what could be more Cornish than a Japanese anemone?

English is spoken among the gentry because not long after the Normans conquered England (and with it, Cornwall), the English king started handing Cornish lands to English (or Norman, or–rabbit hole, damn it) lords. That’s given English some upper-class cachet. Either for that reason or of necessity, a fair number of people speak it as a second language. 

But there’s another reason English is gaining a foothold. Cornwall’s surrounded by water, which means ships dock at its ports, bringing people in from other parts of the world, including from that closest of nations, England. People who live in ports tend to pick up at least bits of other languages.

Still, Cornish is the primary language, and the Cornish also have their own way of dressing, their own folklore, their own customs and games and ways of farming. The place is called–at least by the Cornish–Kernow, not Cornwall.

 

What outsiders say about the place

In 1538, the French ambassador to London, Gaspard de Coligny Chatillon, writes that the kingdom of England “contains Wales and Cornwall, natural enemies of the rest of England, and speaking a [different] language.” 

How much should we trust that business about “natural enemies”? Hard to say. An equally authoritative Italian diplomat reports, “The Welshman is sturdy, poor, adapted to war and sociable,” while “the Cornishman is poor, rough and boorish; and the Englishman mercantile, rich, affable and generous.” So yes, a grain or six of salt might not be a bad idea here. These guys aren’t just outsiders, they make themselves into authorities no matter how little they know. 

Still, that idea of enmity might (emphasis on might) be useful background to the rebellion that I still haven’t told you about.

 

But before that, let’s talk about tin mining

Cornwall doesn’t have great agricultural land unless you have your heart set on farming slate, but it does have tin, and it’s been trading it with the world for centuries. Tin’s useful stuff. Mix it with lead and you get pewter. Mix it with copper and you get bronze. Mix it with trade and you get money.  

In 1201, Cornish tinners got their own legal framework, which exempted them from normal laws and taxes but replaced them with a whole different set. This framework divided the county into stannaries, complete with stannary courts. (Stannary? It comes from the word for tin.) The framework changed over the centuries, and starting in the fourteenth century, Cornwall was governed by a combination of the Duchy of Cornwall and a stannary parliament.

But Henry VII is still the king, remember, and his son, Arthur–the one who died and left the next Henry in charge–is the Duke of Cornwall. When he tries to make some changes in the stannary arrangements, the tinners don’t accept them. So what does Daddy do? He suspends the Stannary Parliament and the privileges that go with it. Talk about helicopter parenting.

Henry’s big on centralizing the government anyway, so this works for him.

You can–and at least one writer does–cast this as a conflict between self-rule and centralization, but how relevant the stannary parliament is to the average person I don’t know. It would’ve been run by a thin top layer of Cornish society. Did your average miner or peasant have more in common with them than with an English lord? Possibly, but not necessarily.

One writer also–sorry, by now I’ve lost track of whether it’s the same one or six other people–lists suppression of the Cornish language as a reason for the revolt that–I know, I know–we still haven’t gotten to. No one else mentions that, and he gives no specifics, so I’m inclined to put the language issue on the shelf for a later revolt, which I’ll write about soon.

Really, I will. 

What does matter to everyone is the new tax that goes along with this change in Cornish government. It’s to fund Henry’s war with Scotland. Without question, that affects everyone’s lives. Most people are somewhere between poor and very poor. They don’t have a lot of slack in their budgets.

 

Why a war with Scotland? 

We have to back up another step, avoiding another conveniently placed rabbit hole. It all has to do with Perkin Warbeck, who’s running around up north, claiming to be one of those famous princes in the tower: the ones who are lost to history and presumed to have been killed by Richard the Evil Uncle but miraculously making himself known just now to the world at large. 

But if Warbeck is one of the princes, that means he should be the king, not Henry. Which is awkward for both of them.

The Scots figure Warbeck’s a nice piece of sand to throw into the English governmental machinery and they back his claim. The Cornish, on the other hand, say, “What’s all that to us?” and (as one source puts it) refuse to pay the tax.

All of them say that? Probably not, but enough that a rebellion breaks out, led by the blacksmith Michael Joseph (he’s known as An Gof, which is Cornish for the blacksmith) from St Keverne, and the lawyer Thomas Flamank, from Bodmin, who’s the son of an estate owner. In several places, An Gof is described as powerful and a natural leader. Flamank is described as a plausible lawyer, which doesn’t quite sound like a compliment. 

If you’re not from Cornwall, the place names won’t mean much to you, but so little seems to be known about them that I’m tossing in the few scraps of information I do have. 

 

And at long last, the rebellion

The rebellion starts in the west, in an area called the Lizard (nope, you won’t find more lizards there than anywhere else in Cornwall) and the rebels head up through Bodmin and on toward London. When they leave Cornwall, they’re a force of 3,000 men. (I’m assuming they were all men, but I don’t really know that.) By the time they reach London they’re a guesstimated total of 15,000. 

Those numbers speak to the Cornish rebellion striking a chord among the English, and the Cornish historian Brian Webb says it spoke to both yeomen and peasants. A river of grievance is flowing through the country. So even though I just spent a lot of time talking about Cornwall as a nation, nationalism can’t be the only force driving this. There’s an interesting essay to be written about the ways class and nationalism intertwine and then conflict with each other, but preferably by someone who isn’t me.

At Flamank’s urging, the march is peaceful. The rebels are armed (according to some sources) with bows and arrows and agricultural tools, which have doubled as weapons in many a war, but from what I’ve read they attack no one on the way to London.

What do they plan to do once they get there? I wish I knew. I’m reasonably sure it isn’t get rid of the king. If monarchy strikes you as a natural arrangement, the accepted way to get rid of one king is to pull an alternate out of the oven, then get rid of the one someone else baked. And it helps if yours has a marginally believable hereditary claim. 

These rebels weren’t in the business of baking or un-baking kings. So maybe we should think of the rebellion as a sort of armed demonstration. Cardboard and felt-tip pens haven’t been invented, so you’d pick up a weapon. It said, “Look how serious we are,” not to mention, “We’re not taking any shit, by the way.” But I’m speculating. Let’s not take me too seriously. What I’m reasonably sure of is that the decision to march on London speaks to how much they considered Cornwall a part of England. Contrast that with centuries of Irish rebels, who fight in Ireland to get the English out, and to hell with London.

So the An Gof rebels march to London, and they’re enough of a threat that Henry forgets the Scots and marches an army south to join the forces he’s already assembled, so that 25,000 men meet the rebels outside London, at Blackheath.

 

The defeat

The rebel army is defeated at the battle of (take your pick) Deptford Bridge or Blackheath–same place, two names. In some tellings, in addition to being lightly armed, the rebels aren’t well trained. In another, their weakness is simply that they don’t have horses or artillery, although their archers are good.

Either way, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 rebels die before the group surrenders, and another 1,500 are taken prisoner. An Gof and Flamank are tried and–yeah, they’re going to do that horrible thing to them–they’re sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. An Gof declares that they’ll have “a name perpetual and fame permanent and immortal.” 

In a moment of mercy (Henry’s apparently worried about getting the Cornish any more cranked up than they already are) they’re left to die by hanging before the rest of the theatrical stuff is carried out. A baron who joined them when they marched through Somerset is simply beheaded, because he’s an aristocrat, after all. 

All three heads are displayed on London Bridge. Forgive me, but the Tudors have some really unpleasant habits.

Nobody says what happens to the rank and file rebels who were captured. Nothing good, I’m sure. I also haven’t found anything about the rebels who weren’t captured. I imagine them filtering back home with tales to tell, some true and some good enough for neighbors to buy them a pint or three. And some, inevitably, unwilling to talk about what happened at all.

 

However

In 1508 Henry reinstateds and strengthens the stannary system in return for Cornwall’s payment of a £1,000 fine. The Stannary Parliament now has the power to ignore Westminster’s laws.

That £1,000 would be the equivalent of £666,000 in 2023, but a more useful comparison is to say it’s equal to 709 contemporary horses. Horses, remember, are a luxury, which is why the rebels didn’t have them. In other words, this is a hefty chunk of cash, and I have no idea how it’s raised. Probably from those least able to pay.

According to Historic UK Henry “never imposed such high taxes on the Cornish again.” 

 

Back to 2023

The Stannary Parliament last met in 1753 and the Stannary Court heard its last case in 1896, but the charter that created them has never been revoked, so the Duke of Cornwall still appoints a Lord Warden of the Stannaries. Who, I have to assume, does nothing more than show up here and there in a fancy costume, or at least with a huge metal necklace to show how important he or she is. 

It’s a British thing. If you live here long enough, it almost begins to make sense. 

Who was Trelawny?

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Wander through any Cornish town–or village, for that matter–and you’ll find a house called Trelawny. Or Trelawney. We’re reaching far enough back in history that spelling was still a liquid.

Who was Trelawny? The bishop of Bristol when James II was king, that’s who. It doesn’t sound like he has an obvious connection to Cornwall, but stay with me: it’s a powerful one.

Before we get to that, though, yes, houses here have names. It’s romantic as hell and equally inconvenient. I don’t know how many times my partner and I have been walking the dogs and been stopped by a delivery driver asking where some named house is. We seldom remember, but that’s okay because with our accents (both, after 17 years here, still strongly American) no one believes us anyway. 

Cities and new housing developments have abandoned the for the easier-to-manage system of named streets and house numbers, but nobody’s been brave or crazy enough to reorganize the countryside.

Are we done with that? Good. Onward.

Irrelevant photo: a begonia flower

 

King James and Bishop Trelawny

Jonathan Trelawny was born in Cornwall–in 1650, which I mention so we’ll have some clue as to what century we’re wandering through. He was the younger son of an old Cornish family, although when you think about it, what family isn’t old? We all have ancestors stretching back to the beginning of time, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but old old families are the ones who are impressed with themselves and expect the rest of us to be as well. Ideally, they have substantial amounts of money as well as portraits of their ancestors hanging disapprovingly on the walls.

In this particular old family, Papa Trelawny was a baronet–a commoner, but one with the right to be called “sir.”

Not by me, however. 

A baronet is below a baron but above a knight. Except knights of the Garter and–

Oh, come on, this is just too silly to go into. It’s a title. If they impress you, be impressed, please.

Jonathan became a minister in the Church of England, which is the kind of thing a good younger son would’ve done back then. I haven’t been able to find out what his role was in putting down Monmouth’s Rebellion, but he had one, and in gratitude for it King James (that’s James II, in case you’re counting) made him the bishop of Bristol. 

By this time, Trelawny’s older brother had died and the Trelawny we’re following inherited the title of baronet, and if anyone saw a conflict between being a baronet and a bishop, I haven’t found evidence of it.

We’ll stop here long enough to note that he and his family were royalists, having backed the king not only against Monmouth but (earlier king here but still a king) in the Civil Wars. 

 

And then it all went wrong

A royalist Trelawny may have been, but when, after Monmouth’s Rebellion, James misread the political tea leaves and thought they said “Hey, guess what, the country’s ready for political tolerance,” Trelawney parted ways with him. More specifically, the break came over the Declaration of Indulgence. To modern calorie counters that sounds like an announcement that not only was he going to eat a full English breakfast but that he’d have a slice of triple-layer chocolate cake for afternoon tea. 

Sorry, no such thing. Baking soda–or if you’re in Britain, bicarbonate of soda–and baking powder weren’t invented until the nineteenth century, and chocolate (I think–I haven’t double checked this) was still something to drink. You can, apparently, get a cake to rise using cream of tartar, but that only dates back to the eighteenth century. So no cakes for King Jimmy, and we’re not going to even discuss tea. 

What the Declaration of Indulgence did was suspend laws against religious nonconformists–a category that included those scary Catholics.  

Why were Catholics scary? Because England had spent a good bit of time seesawing back and forth between Protestantism and Catholicism, and every shift in the seesaw involved the two sides performing unspeakable acts on each other. Whichever side you were on, you had good reason to be afraid of the other one. So James granting a measure of religious freedom to Catholics? Especially when he’d appointed some to high offices and sent his Parliament home so they couldn’t stand in his way? If you were living back then, you might at this point let out a heartfelt, Protestant eeek. 

And if you’re living now–as I have to assume you are–you could argue either way about whether James was tippy-toeing (or stumbling) toward a Catholic takeover or toward a more tolerant country. He wasn’t around long enough for anyone to be certain.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. First, James demanded that the Declaration of Indulgence be read out in the churches, and seven bishops, including Trelawney, refused. They were arrested, tried for seditious libel, and (to popular acclaim) acquitted. According to the Cornwall Heritage Trust, the episode didn’t make much of an impact on Cornwall, although the Cornwall SEO Co. site says the acquittal sparked celebrations from Cornwall to London. Take your pick. My money’s on the Heritage Trust, but that’s strictly a hunch. 

 

And then?

And then James was overthrown by the Glorious Revolution, which brought in a pair of Protestants as joint monarchs, which is why we don’t get to know which way James was trying to nudge the country. Trelawny became the bishop of Exeter, which brought him closer to Cornwall but he was still on the wrong side of the Tamar River, and later of Winchester, moving him further away. He died in 1721.

Why, then, is his name on so many houses in Cornwall? As far as I can tell, it’s because in the nineteenth century Reverend Robert Steven Hawker wrote a song about him, “The Song of the Western Men,” better known as “Trelawny.”

 

Rev. Hawker, the mermaid, and the elusive truth

Hawker was nothing if not an eccentric. He built himself a hut on the cliffs, where he smoked opium and wrote poetry. He publicly excommunicated one of his cats (he had ten) for killing a mouse on a Sunday. You can pretty well count on the cat not being impressed.

He also put seaweed on his head, sat on a rock, and impersonated a mermaid. The shorter version runs like this:

“For several moonlit nights, he sat at the end of the long Bude breakwater draped in seaweed, combing his locks and singing mournful dirges, to the consternation of the local inhabitants. Finally a farmer loudly announced his intention of peppering the apparition with buckshot, whereupon it dived into the ocean and was never seen again.”

If you want the longer version, you’ll find it here.

Hawker’s song tells the story of 20,000 Cornishmen marching to London to demand Trelawny’s release. The problem is that they didn’t. One estimate puts the Cornish population in 1760 at around 124,000. Let’s say half of those were women, although I seem to remember that, left to herself, nature produces a slim majority of girl babies. I found some slim and pointless comfort in that back in the Dark Ages, when everything in (and out of) sight was engineered to promote more males than females. Never mind. We’re down to 62,000 people. Let’s say randomly that a third of those were either too young or too old to fight. After rounding out the numbers to make my life easier (have you ever wondered why I’m not a statistician?), we’re in the neighborhood of 40,000 men of fighting age. So that would be half the men of fighting age downing tools and taking off for London to wave their weapons and issue threats. 

No, I don’t think so either. And if you’re inclined to argue with my figures, you’ve got more than enough grounds. Even the original population number is an estimate. Britain’s first census (unless you count the Domesday Book) wasn’t taken until 1801 and it’s not considered a professional-quality census anyway.

But to return to our alleged point: there was no Cornish army marching on London. Cornwall Heritage speculates that Hawker mixed in an earlier rebellion, the An Gof rebellion of 1497. Call it poetic license if you like, or blame the opium. Or the seaweed.

In spite of that minor historical problem, Hawker’s song is still sung and it has great power. It taps into the well of anger you’re likely to find in any formerly independent nation that’s lost its language and been overwhelmed by incomers. A fair number of people count “Trelawny” as the Cornish national anthem. You’d be wise–and so (as an incomer) would I–not to run around debunking the man or the song. 

 

So how does the song go?

With a good sword and a trusty shield
A faithful heart and true
King James’s men shall understand
What Cornish men can do
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

Chorus
And shall Trelawny live?
Or shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

Out spake the captain brave and bold
A merry wight was he
Though London Tower were Michael’s hold
We’ll set Trelawny free
We’ll cross the Tamar, land to land
The Severn is no stay
Then one and all and hand in hand
And who shall bid us nay.

And when we came to London wall
A pleasant sight to view
Come forth, come forth, ye cowards all
Here are better men than you
Trelawny, he’s in keep in hold
Trelawny he may die
But twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why.

 

Want to hear it instead of reading it? Catch the Fisherman’s Friends–a Cornish group if there ever was one–singing it. 

I was going to tuck the An Gof rebellion in at the end of this but I’ve got on long enough. Next week if all goes well. Stick around. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a question for people whose British geography is better than mine: what route would take you from Cornwall to London that crosses the Severn?

The Monmouth Rebellion and the king who wasn’t

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If you tied a knot in the thread of English history every time somebody led a rebellion, you’d make a mess of your sewing. So let’s skip the knots–they weren’t my best idea–and talk about the Monmouth Rebellion, which was led by (no points for guessing this one) Monmouth, the Duke of.

Okay, half a point if you got the Duke part right.

Like everything else of its time (1685) and place (England), the rebellion only makes sense when you paint in the background: the wrestling match between Catholics, Protestants, and super-Protestants for the soul–and more importantly, the throne–of England. 

Can a wrestling match have three contestants or does that make it a free-for-all? Does a contest involving three people take place between them or among them? Does anyone care about the answers to these questions?

Probably not. 

Irrelevant photo: mountain ash berries. Fall is coming. Or autumn , if we’re speaking British.

We’ll start our tale in (for no good reason) the present tense at a time when King Nobody (the first and last of that name) wears England’s crown. Cromwell and some of the super-Protestants are in power. The last king’s dead. The country’s kingless. The super-Protestants lack superpowers, though. They get their name (from me; no one else calls them that) because they’re further along the Protestant spectrum than the more moderate Church of England Protestants. 

That lack of superpowers explains why–

But I’m getting ahead of our story. Cromwell’s in power and Charles II, son of the now-beheaded Charles I, is in exile. 

 

What does Charles get up to while he’s in exile?

Some regal hanky-panky, and the fairly predictable result of that is a son, James.

Time rolls on, as time will. Everybody involved gets older. Cromwell dies. The super-Protestants don’t find a way to continue a kingless government. (See above: lack of superpowers.) Charles comes back to England as king, becoming Charles II. If you’ve seen portraits of the Charleses, he’s the one who looks like an aging and particularly dissolute Bob Dylan. The thought of anyone being or ever having been in bed with him–

No, let’s put that out of our minds.

Charles may be the king, but he doesn’t have superpowers either. All around him are forces pushing to lock the Church of England into place and edge both Catholics and nonconforming Protestants to the furthest corners of the national picture.

It’s in this context that he flirts dangerously with both Catholicism and Europe’s Catholic powers, and it’s also in this context that he and his wife fail to produce–forget a son, they don’t have any kids at all. So his brother is next in line for the throne and he’s–gasp, wheeze–a Catholic convert.

It’s easy to think this is all intolerant and silly, but the country has just emerged from a time when people killed each other in the name of religion, and even now, when things have settled down a bit, which religion you’d committed to decides what earthly doors are open or closed to you. So everyone has solid material reasons not to want Those People from the Other Religion(s) in power. 

That’s in addition to whatever religious reasons they have.

 

Yeah, but what about little James?

Well, James gets knocked around a bit. Before he’s ten, he’s kidnapped, jailed, exiled, and kidnapped again, this time by his father’s agents, who dump him into the household of his father’s gentleman of the bedchamber, where he’s barely educated. 

Gentleman of the bedchamber? It’s not a lascivious as it sounds. He dresses the king, waits on him when he eats alone, and generally hangs out with him. 

At some point, Charles wakes up, says, “Didn’t I have a kid around here somewhere?” and brings him to court, where he becomes a favorite and is turned into a Duke and given a bunch of other titles that if you’re not used to British traditions sound like something JK Rowling made up. He also has a variety of income streams arranged for him. When he’s older, he fights for the king here and there and gains quite the reputation as a soldier. He joins the privy council.

So far, he barely justifies a footnote to history, but the thing is, James is a Protestant and a king’s son, even if he wasn’t born with the right paperwork.

But hold on a minute. His mother (who’s now conveniently dead) always claimed that she’d been married to Charles, and since marriage records haven’t been computerized yet, no one can prove she wasn’t, even if, equally, no one can prove she was. That makes it possible to build a case that he should be the next–safely Protestant–king. So schemes to set James on the throne buzz around him like flies around roadkill.

Eventually he gets involved in a conspiracy, the Rye House Plot (it would’ve involved killing the king and his brother). After a bit of back and forth James goes to live in the Netherlands.

 

And doesn’t live happily ever after

Instead, when Charles dies, James–

But let’s call him Monmouth from here on. It’ll help us remember who’s the king (James, Charles’s brother) and who’s the wannabe (also James, Charles’s son a.k.a. Monmouth). 

So Charles dies and Monmoth launches a full-scale rebellion–or invasion if you prefer–that’s coordinated with an anti-Catholic Scottish rebellion in the highlands.

Why the Scots? Well, England and Scotland are two separate countries, but they have a single king, and if you think that’s confusing try to explain the pronunciation of Worcestershire to someone who learned to read English using phonics. 

The Scottish rising fails while Monmouth’s still crossing the Channel, though, leaving him and 82 men to land in Lyme Regis (that’s in Dorset, in the southwest) without anything to distract the government’s attention. 

Why such a small force? Monmouth’s counting on the country to rise in his support, and initially that seems to work. He’s popular in the southwest, and he gathers an army of 3,000, which is a nice number, trailing an appealing collection of zeroes. The problem with them is that none of them come from the gentry–the people with some soldierly training. He has an army of enthusiastic amateurs without much in the way of weaponry. 

By another count, his army is uphill of 1,000.  How far uphill? Will you stop splitting hairs? We’ll never get out of here. 

Monmouth’s not exactly claiming the throne at this point, just saying he has a right to it but will only take it with Parliament’s agreement. Let’s not split hairs, though. A lot of his followers call him King Monmouth, and they have time to defeat a few county militias before the king’s army arrives. Commoners and the poor flock to his banner, and in Taunton he’s proclaimed king. By now, he has some 6,000 soldiers. 

We’ll skip the back and forth. Monmouth’s and the king’s armies meet at Sedgemoor and Monmouth loses badly. After the battle, his soldiers are hunted down and killed on the spot. (They were commoners anyway, and you can do that to commoners and still sleep at night.) Some 200 who are caught later are tried before being killed. Another 2,000 are transported to the West Indies to work–in a weird and little-known footnote to history–to work alongside slaves from Africa.

Or by that other count, 320 executed and 800 transported. By a third, it’s 333 and 860. Let’s treat the numbers as rough guesses. 

Men, women, and children with remote connections to the rebellion are flogged. Monmouth is captured and executed. 

David Horspool, whose book The English Rebel I rely on whenever I write about rebellions (and I’m a sucker for a good rebellion), thinks Monmouth’s failure was a result of rushing into his rebellion instead of waiting for James to discredit himself. 

 

What happens then?

James discredits himself. He interprets Monmouth’s defeat to mean that the country values stability above everything else and overestimates their tolerance for religious tolerance. He appoints Catholics to important positions, most controversially to positions in the military. He grants for all religions more leeway than they’ve had. And when I say “all religions” here, we do seem to be talking about all religions, including Jews, Muslims, and dissenting Christians. As far as I know, that’s the limit of England’s religious population at this point.  He When judges, justices of the peace, and lords lieutenant resist his moves, he fires them and he comes into conflict with Parliament–nothing new for kings, but the whiff of Catholic incense hanging over the conflict supercharges the reaction he gets.  

Is he genuinely trying to build a state that tolerates multiple religions or is he making sneaky moves toward a Catholic state? I don’t know, but a lot of powerful Church of England Protestants think they do. They believe he’s favoring Catholics and setting the building blocks of a Catholic state in place. 

There’s something very contemporary about that fear, don’t you think? Just slot a more modern into place and the rhetoric’s the same. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, whoever. There’s a lot of it going around. I know you’ve heard it.

 

Why does any of this matter?

Because it sets up the Glorious Revolution, which hits the Eject button that’s been quietly installed on James’s throne, replacing him with a Protestant monarchy. 

But that’s a story for another time. 

The control freaks of Tudor England

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Set aside your stereotypes of Tudor England. It wasn’t all heretics going up in flames and virgin queens wearing so much clothing that how could they help being virginal?. Tudor England also developed a level of control freakery that reached deep into society.

 

Clothes

The Tudors inherited sumptuary laws–laws dictating who had the right to wear what–from Edwards III and IV, but the Tudors went wild with them. Only the royal family could wear purple or cloth-of-gold. Except for dukes and marquesses, who could wear a bit as long as it didn’t cost more than £5 a square yard. Earls and upward could wear sable. Barons and upward could wear cloth-of-silver or satin. 

Other levels of society could wear silk shirts, gold or silver bordure (don’t ask; I’d guess trim but we don’t really need to know), crimson, blue velvet, scarlet, violet, and garments made “outside this realm.” The act listed the realm’s parts in case anyone wasn’t sure. Knights could wear this, lords’ sons could wear that. 

Irrelevant photo: Meadowsweet, which was once used to flavor mead.

Moving down the social scale, hose that cost more than ten pence a yard could only be worn by a husbandman, shepherd, or laborer if he owned goods worth more than £10. 

What’s £10 in modern money? Something along the lines of £5,000 in 1988 currency. Today it would be–um, more. 

What happened to people who broke the rules? The important people would be fined. The husbandman, the shepherd, and the laborer would be put in the stocks for three days, and they’d lose the offending piece of clothing. Half the value would go to the king (this particular stature was Henry VIII’s) and the other half to the informant.

Actors, foreign ambassadors, and a few others got a free pass. 

Servants, they weren’t supposed to wear blue, but blue became so common in servants’ livery that no gentleman would be seen in it. Which is enough to make a person wonder how much the laws were enforced.

All of that, though, was about men’s clothes. According to Jasper Ridley, whose book, The Tudor Age, I’m pulling this from, a woman who dressed “above her station” might be ridiculed, but she didn’t threaten the social order the way a man would and wasn’t legislated against. 

Being part of a despised group has its occasional small benefits. 

 

Hats, caps, and consumer protection

Along with the restrictions went some bits of consumer protection, dealing with cloth that shrank, overpriced cloth and caps, and a few other specifics. This led Parliament into some fairly intricate legislation limiting who could buy wool (middlemen pushed the price up), who could work as a weaver, and where weavers could set up their looms.

To protect the people who made hats and caps, though, Parliament limited imports: they had to be sold at the port where they landed and no one could buy more than twelve at a time. In 1571, a new act required anyone over the age of six to wear a woolen cap (made in England, thanks, with English wool) on Sundays and holy days unless they were traveling outside the town or village where they lived. 

Nobles and men who owned land worth 20 marks a year could ignore that business with the woolen caps, and so could “maidens, ladies and gentlewomen.” 

 

Wages & work

All this control stuff got serious when it came to work and pay. Two things led the government to at least try to keep a lid on wages: the plague (it hit England in the 14th century) and the gradual end of serfdom (also the 14th century). A series of pre-Tudor laws already capped wages and made it a criminal offense to pay more, although it was okay to pay less. When their turn came, the Tudors passed updated versions. The employer who paid over the maximum could be fined, and so could the person who accepted higher pay. Any unemployed artisan or workman who was offered work at those wages and refused it could be jailed until they agreed to take the job. 

And the workman who quit before his contract was out could be both jailed and fined–unless, of course, his master gave his permission to quit or if a man joined the king’s service. 

It wasn’t exactly serfdom, but it wasn’t what we’d call freedom either. 

I assume this applied to women as well, but once writers decide that the word man includes women, as writers did so casually a thousand years ago when I was young, it’s hard to tell who anybody’s talking about at crucial moments.

Hours were also fixed, because “artificers and labourers retained to work and serve waste much part of the day and deserve not their wages.” 

Whoever wrote that sentence wasted much part of a number of words (cut “retained to work and serve” and you haven’t changed the meaning) but probably didn’t dock his own pay. 

Summer and winter hours were fixed, along with meal breaks. 

Working people responded by refusing to enter into the usual work contracts, which ran for three months or a year. They became casual laborers, working from day to day, and could leave when they damn well pleased. That was outlawed in 1550, because that sort of people “live idly and at their pleasure, and flee and resort from place to place, whereof ensueth more inconveniences than can be at this present expressed and declared.”

More wasted words also ensued.  

Under this new law, craftsmen–shoemakers, weavers, etc.–who hired unmarried workers without a contract were risking a fine and jail time. And journeymen had to accept a contract if it was offered, and if they couldn’t agree on a wage, a justice of the peace would set it. 

All this seems to have been widely ignored, and under Elizabeth they tried again, but with wage rates that recognized inflation. Some other details changed, but they were reaching for the same thing: drive those lazy working people into the jobs that were going begging. I’ve heard contemporary politicians making pretty much the same noises, although the punishments have changed.

A few decades later, another act covered the same territory and complained that the earlier one wasn’t being enforced.

 

Pronunciation

If all that strikes you as too practical to count as control freakery, try this: Scholars disagreed about how a word should be pronounced in Greek. That was ancient Greek, mind you, so they couldn’t just hop on a cheap flight to Greece and ask around. The lack of any possible certainty left them free to argue, and the argument came with religious overtones (don’t ask). And since all religion was political, this mattered enough that it made perfect sense for the chancellor of Cambridge University to threaten any undergraduate using the pronunciation he disapproved of with a whipping.

I’m willing to bet the wrong pronunciation was whispered over many a pint of ale.

 

Warfare and sports

By the Tudor era, Europe had learned about explosives and figured out how to pour them into a tube so they could shoot projectiles–not just tubes the size of cannons but smaller weapons called arquebuses, which the English called hagbuts, and eventually pistols. But the longbow still had its uses. It was faster and it worked in the rain. 

Even then, the English knew a lot about rain.

What’s that got to do with control freakery? England needed to keep its archers in practice, so a 1487 act, after deploring the decay of the country’s archery skill, set a maximum price for longbows. By 1504, though, they’d decided that the problem wasn’t the price of bows, it was the popularity of the crossbow. So a new law made it illegal for the average person to shoot a crossbow. 

That must not’ve worked, because four more laws made it a crime for the average person to keep a crossbow at home or to carry one on the king’s highway. An exception was made for people living near the Scottish border, the sea, or several other areas that were considered lawless or vulnerable to attack. The small print said that if someone who owned land worth more than £100 a year saw the wrong person–basically, a poorer person–with a crossbow, they could confiscate it and have themselves a nice crossbow. Or the profit from its sale.

It was that kind of small print that made the Tudor control machine work. 

Every man between 16 and 60 had to keep a longbow and arrows at home. From 7 on up, boys had to have a bow and arrows so they could learn to shoot.

In 1512, the government decided that the problem wasn’t just the crossbow, it was sports in general, so it limited tennis, bowls, and skittles to the upper classes. It also banned football, a game that could’ve passed for unarmed warfare, with no limit on the number of players and damned few rules. If someone had the ball, they (it could be a man or a woman) could be stopped by hitting, punching, tripping–pretty much anything short of murder. 

Then in 1542 a new act noted that people were evading the older law by inventing games that hadn’t been banned yet (which is how shuffleboard got started) and it banned them, except at Christmas–and of course only for the lower classes. It added dice, cards, and quoits to the existing list. 

 

Vagrants

Vagrants were an ongoing obsession of Tudor government, so let’s ask who became vagrants. Some were sailors or soldiers who’d been discharged. Some had been retainers of noblemen but had been let go when Henry VII limited the number of retainers a nobleman could keep. Some were cut loose when Henry VIII closed the monasteries. Some were laborers of one sort or another who refused to work for the pay and conditions that were offered. Some were university students. Some were children. Many were people who’d been pushed off their land by the enclosure movement, and I won’t go into that here. If you’re interested–and it’s worth knowing about–here’s a link. The enclosure movement comes in about a quarter of the way through the post.  

Tudor laws also paint a picture of unauthorized physicians, solicitors (that’s one flavor of lawyer), palm readers, pardoners, actors, and players in unlawful games roaming the country and making trouble for the authorities. It’s enough to keep a sensible monarch awake at night.

Vagrants could be punished by whipping, by having their ears cut off, and by being returned to their home parishes. People who gave a vagrant food or shelter could be punished. Constables who refused to whip beggar children or cut off the ears of vagabonds could be punished, which hints that getting the laws enforced wasn’t a simple process, or necessarily a successful one. 

After a certain number of non-lethal punishments, according to one law, a vagabond could be hanged. A different law would force a vagrant to work for any master who’d have them–for pay if possible, for food and drink if not. If the vagrant refused, the justice of peace could brand them and keep them as a slave and mistreat them in an assortment of specified ways.

Do you get a sense of the lawmakers settling on wilder and wilder solutions to a problem that wouldn’t go away? 

In a fit of mercy and realism, the act proposing slavery was repealed in a few years and the country relaxed into mere ear-cutting and whipping–and taking away any children over the age of five and putting them to work without pay. Until a few decades later, when capital punishment was reintroduced on the third offense. 

Starting in 1550, some provision began to be made for people who couldn’t work–the aged and impotent poor, they called them. They would be sent to abiding places and put to working doing whatever they could. 

Welcome to the greatness of Tudor England. Your best bet is to hope you were born lucky.

 

Enforcement

Ridley calls the Tudor era despotism on the cheap. The government didn’t have hordes of civil servants–or what we’d call civil servants. What it had was a lot of enthusiastic but unpaid amateurs, and with the exception of Wales and parts of Northumberland, and of the occasional rebellion (Ridley counts eight) or riot, the country was pretty orderly. And the trains ran on time. None were scheduled for several centuries, so that was easy enough.

Local government was in the hands of sheriffs (and above them, lord lieutenants), mayors, justices of the peace, and on the lowest level, by constables, bailiffs, and officers of the watch. That’s not a  lot if you think about keeping a country within the bounds of all those rules.

But the general public had to turn out and help catch any fugitive and had good reason to actually do it: If a felony was committed in the parish and the baddie (or some plausible substitute) wasn’t caught, every last householder was fined. 

To keep criminals from escaping into Wales, ferries were banned from carrying anyone across the Severn at night. And the ferryman wasn’t to carry anyone unless he knew who he was and could report his name and address if he was asked. Which would’ve taxed the memory of anyone who couldn’t write.

In Northumberland, landlords could only rent land to people who found two men of property to vouch for them.   

How well did any of this work? It’s hard to say. When you see various versions of the same law passed time after time, it’s a hint that the first ones didn’t work. So they probably didn’t stamp out sports, working people did continue to push for better pay, and vagrants, beggars, and vagabonds continued to roam the land, since the conditions that had produced the first batch continued to produce even more of them. And although servants weren’t supposed to wear the color blue, it was such a common part of their livery that no gentleman would be seen in it.

The House of Lords: how it formed and what it does

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Britain’s House of Lords traces its history back to the 11th century, which means it predates the country itself, because although Britain did eventually show up at the party, it was unforgivably late.

The part of the 11th century that we happen to be talking about is the Anglo-Saxon part of the century, before the Norman invasion, when the king had a witan–a group of advisors to consult if and when he wanted to. It would’ve been made up of the king’s ministers plus the most powerful of the lords and religious leaders–you know, the country’s big bruisers–and a wise king sometimes made sure they’d support whatever he had in mind before going too far out on a limb.

Although having said that, there’s some debate about who got invitations to the witan and who got to stay home and sulk. A lot of Anglo-Saxon history is subject to debate, but we’re going to rampage through this quickly because we were looking for Britain, remember? And Britain isn’t here yet.

Irrelevant photo: morning glories, a.k.a. bindweed

Before we leave, though–have a drink while I’m messing around, why don’t you?–I should mention that whatever the Witan did (and that sounds a little hazy too), it did get to select the king. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t automatically go with the oldest son. 

 

Then the Normans invaded and everything changed…

…except for what didn’t. Kings still summoned the country’s big bruisers once or twice a year. Because in theory the kings might’ve been all-powerful, but they couldn’t govern without the backing from their lords–at least not well and not for long. It’s not hard to find examples of English kings offending the nobility more than they were willing to be offended and ending up in history’s large and unsentimental trash can. 

After one of those not-quite-all-powerful kings was forced into signing Magna Carta (1215, and yes I did have to look it up), he and all the kings who came after him were committed to asking the barons’ consent before they imposed taxes. This gave his proto-parliament–that yearly or twice-yearly gathering of lords–a well-defined power. 

As the thirteenth century wore on, locally elected representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs also began to be summoned when taxes needed to be approved. Among other things, this made the taxes easier to collect. 

Representatives of the towns and cities were called burgesses and tended to be rich lawyers and merchants. Representatives of the counties were called knights of the shire and were mostly from the landed gentry. I haven’t a clue what representatives of the boroughs were called. They may also have been called burgesses, since the root word looks the same and a borough was nothing but a town with a fancy hat. 

The burgesses outnumbered the knights and were paid two shillings a day when parliament met, but the knights (probably) dominated the proceedings because they were better connected and, as everyone at the time would’ve agreed, more important and better looking, and in recognition of all that were paid four shillings a day. 

After 1325, no parliament met without the commoners.

Now let’s get to the small print: When I said these assemblies could approve taxes, that doesn’t mean it was easy for them not to approve them. They had to go pretty far out on a limb to say no. In 1376, when they did refuse one, they had to claim that funds had been misappropriated by some of the king’s courtiers. 

Short of saying no, though, they could negotiate. They could drag their feet and sulk. They could, in general, be a pain in the neck. 

Never underestimate the power of being a pain in the neck.

Much to the monarch-of-the-moment’s annoyance, he (or the occasional she) needed Parliament. The monarchy’s income from its own lands had decreased over the years–hey, it’s tough up there at the top of the heap. And they kept taking the country to war, which is an expensive little habit. So however annoying parliament became, the monarch was constantly driven to call it back and ask for some new tax. 

Parliament was also the place where communities and individuals, high and low, could go to petition the king, and it was petitions involving the affairs of the country gradually drew parliament into a law-making role. At first, it was the king’s prerogative to initiate a law, but in the 14th century parliament began petitioning the king about this or that and making gradual moves into what the king’s territory.

 

The houses separate

But we’ve spent entirely too much time brushing our refined elbows against the commoners elbows. We should be talking about lords.

If we can duck back for a minute to the 13th century, we’ll see a forerunner of the House of Lords in a small group of councilors clustered around the king. And by councilors, of course, I mean important people, and by important people I mean nobles. By the 14th century, they’d become a larger group that began meeting separately. These were dukes, earls, barons, marquesses, viscounts, and the top layer of the clergy. They were called, collectively, the peerage. 

And I’m sure the peers were much happier meeting that way. The commoners had been getting too big for their little bootsies. An anonymous publication from the 1320s argued that parliament’s barons could only speak for themselves, unlike (as the BBC puts it) “the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented ‘the whole community of England’ . . . who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.”

Yeah. A pesky lot, those commoners. 

As the two groups separated, the king’s key officers–the chancellor of the exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household–met with the lords, not the commoners, and the real business was done there, at the top. As someone put it in 1399, the commons were merely “petitioners and suitors,” and all judgments of parliament “belong solely to the king and lords.”

 

The mysterious shrinking peerage

This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s interesting: during the Tudor period (start counting in 1485 and stop when Elizabeth I dies), the number of peers shrank. Part of that was the War of the Roses–the count dropped from 64 to 38–but nobles had always died in wars; under normal circumstances dead ones would’ve been replaced with live ones who were either their heirs or, if no heir was to be had, someone the king owed a favor to. Or liked or wanted to placate or hoped to control. Or whatever motivated that particular king at that particular moment. 

Henry VII, though–the first of the Tudors–didn’t replenish the stock, probably because he didn’t want a group of powerful nobles who might challenge him, starting another war. He’d seen enough of that, and the country was out of roses anyway. 

So start there, then run through the rest of the Tudor kings and queens and count the number of nobles executed for treason whose titles were taken from them, which meant their heirs didn’t inherit them. I doubt being a Tudor-era peasant was a barrel of laughs, but belonging to the nobility had its own dangers. Romanticize it all you want, the Tudor era was a dangerous time to be part of the nobility.

For the last 30 years of the Tudordrama, the country had zero dukes, in spite of the after-VII Tudors (not to be confused with After Eight Mints) having created some new peers as they went along, and most of the 16th-century nobility were of recent coinage. 

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the number of abbots in the House of Lords (no surprise here) shrank, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there wasn’t an abbot to be found in the Lords, and only 26 bishops. For the first time, the secular lords formed a majority. Semi-relevantly, the secular lords were and still are called the Lords Temporal, because everything needs a fancy name.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled drama.

 

From the Civil War to the 19th century

From the Tudor period, it’s a short march to the Civil War, when Parliament seized power. In 1642, it excluded bishops from the House of Lords. Then in 1649, it abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. I’m sure that made the bishops feel better about having been tossed out. Guys, the party ended just a few years after you left, so don’t feel bad.

When the monarchy was restored, everybody pushed the Reset button and Parliament was reconstituted in its old form–Commons, Lords, Church worthies–and when (you thought we’d never get there, didn’t you?) Scotland and then Ireland were folded into the batter that became first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, the Scottish and Irish peers elected representatives to the Lords. 

Now we do a couple of fancy steps until we get to the 19th century, when the number of bishops in the House or Lords was limited to 26 and the monarch got to create life peers. That’s as opposed to hereditary peers. Once they’re appointed, they can put down roots and make themselves at home, but they can’t shoehorn their kids in after them.

 

20th century

In the 20th century, the story gets interesting enough that I’ll slow it down again. By the beginning of the century, it was standard for the prime minister to govern from the House of Commons, so basically the power had shifted. The last PM to govern from the Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

Then we get to 1906, when the Liberals won a big honkin’ majority in the Commons–132 seats–and figured they’d use it to introduce radical things like sick pay and old age pensions.

Horrors, the Lords said in one aristocratic voice. And double horrors because the programs would be paid for by a tax on the rich–especially on the landed rich: in other words, on the people sitting in the House of Lords.

You might have already figured out that the House of Lords had a built-in Conservative–and lower-case conservative–bias. So predictably enough, the Lords refused to pass the budget. After a bit of back and forth, including a general election, the Lords did pass the budget, though, along with the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited  the Lords’ power. 

Why’d they do that? Because the government threatened to flood the house with 400 new Lords, all of them Liberals. 

The bill left the Lords with the power to, at best, delay money bills by a month, and it completely lost the ability to veto bills. It could delay non-budget bills for two years, but that was the limit.

The two years have since been reduced to one.

That takes us to 1958 and the Life Peerages Act, which poured in a group of life peers, including experts in various fields and for the first time–gasp; horrors–women. It was a gesture in the direction of counteracting the house’s built-in rightward tilt. 

Then we skip forward again. Tony Blair had a three-stage plan that would fold the House of Lords into a paper airplane, sail it out to sea, and replace it with a fully elected house. 

How did that fare? Well, the House of Lords started 1999 with 758 hereditary lords and ended the year with 92, but then it all bogged down. The plan’s probably still stashed on some governmental shelf, gathering dust, and we still have 92 hereditary peers. They’re chosen by all the country’s hereditary peers, making the aristocrats, in a nice little piece of irony, the only elected members of the Lords.

People who think seriously about these things, along with people who don’t but who shoot their mouths off anyway, have suggested all sorts of ways to reform what’s clearly an antiquated system, including setting a limit on the number of lords, but tradition allows outgoing prime ministers to shovel in new members, and we’ve been through a lot of prime ministers lately. Each one got a shovel of their very own. A committee’s supposed to weed out anyone who’s inappropriate, but the committee doesn’t get the final say. 

At the moment, 779 people sit in the House of Lords. Or don’t sit there. Nothing says they have to show up. 

Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain

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Let’s wriggle into a small, dusty corner of British history and see what someone left behind. In other words, let’s talk about Britain’s (as far as I can establish) first conscientious objectors: the men who refused to serve in the military during World War I. 

But–as usual–we have to take a step back before we go forward. To have conscientious objectors, a country needs a draft–a system of conscription that forces all physically fit men between certain ages into the armed forces. Without that, there’s nothing to object to, conscientiously or otherwise. 

From the information I’ve found, World War I marked the first time Britain introduced universal conscription. The fighting was on an unprecedented scale and it called for an unprecedented number of fighters.  

The war started out with brass bands and a tide of patriotism, working the country into the kind of fever you need to recruit soldiers. Men and boys signed up, and at some point some number of women–it was probably a small number but they’ve been written into history in bold-face type–began handing white feathers to men who looked able-bodied enough to be soldiers but who visibly weren’t to publicly shame them.

Irrelevant photo: campion and stitchwort growing by the roadside

But the number of volunteers wasn’t high enough. The war was turning soldiers into dead bodies on a massive scale: 6% of the adult male population died in the war–12% of serving soldiers. They had to be replaced, so the country introduced a draft.

 

The conscientious objector category

It’s against that background that we take our snapshot of Britain’s conscientious objectors–or COs, since (a) they were often called that and (b) my fingers are convinced conscientious is spelled some other way.  

From the time conscription was introduced (1916, two years after the war started, first for those who care, first for single men between 18 and 40, then for all men, married or otherwise) until the end of the war, 20,000 men applied for CO status, and that tells us two things. The most obvious is that it wasn’t a massive number of people but it wasn’t an insignificant one either, but the more interesting and less obvious thing is that a category had been created. If you either naturally or with some contortion could fit yourself into it, a recognized way had been made for you to refuse military service.

The Military Service Act–the same one that introduced conscription–set up tribunals where men could argue that they shouldn’t be drafted on the grounds of hardship, illness, education, essential work, or–pay attention here, because this is the point–a conscientious objection to military service, which could be religious or more generally moral.

The tribunals included someone from the military along with local men–and we can count on the local members being drawn from the area’s, ahem, important people, because class comes into everything in Britain. And elsewhere, but oh-so-visibly here. So if you showed up to argue that you shouldn’t be drafted, they were the ones who’d decide whether you had a legitimate reason or were just a coward–you know, the kind of lowlife who objected couldn’t see the patriotic joy in climbing out of a trench and running through a hailstorm of bullets. 

Some people’s objection to the war was political, and the act allowed no space for that. You could have a moral or religious objection or you could pick up your damn rifle and go fight.

The panels’ questioning was (no surprise here) often hostile. One CO described his hearing this way:

“They put me through the usual sorts of questions that these tribunals did. They had certain routine questions. A favourite one was, what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? And I can’t quite remember what I answered but it was to the effect that that had nothing to do with being a CO against the war. I think that I said that I didn’t know what I would do and that it didn’t matter in the present context in the least what I would do. The thing was this was a protest against the war, that the war was wrong.”

If your argument was accepted, you were shunted off into the Non-Combatant Corps, and my fingers don’t object to the spelling there but it was called the NCC anyway. Let’s save a few of the keystrokes I’ve wasted explaining that and use the acronym. It was created by the same act that established the draft.

If it wasn’t accepted–and most weren’t–you were drafted and had to decide whether to serve or to refuse, leading to tales such as that of a rifleman who refused to load his rifle for target practice and another one who refused to put on his uniform.

 

The NCC

If your argument was accepted and you were shunted into the NCC, you  were expected to accept military discipline. You were also expected to accept acronyms. I can’t tell you any tales about what that was like in Britain, but I met an American World War I CO (he was the brother of an uncle-by-marriage–that’s how old I am) and he was sent to an army camp in the Midwest somewhere. Let’s randomly say Kansas. When he got there, conscientious objectors were rare enough they weren’t sure whether to lock him up (he might be a conscientious objector) or salute him (he might be a commissioned officer). His paperwork didn’t make it clear.

After a few days, unfortunately, they figured it out and the quality of his food went down sharply.

I had to slip that in. I never have found a spot for it before.

In the NCC, you might end up building, cleaning, loading or unloading anything that wasn’t munitions, and you might do it in Britain or where the fighting was. You might carry stretchers–a job that was as dangerous as being in the infantry–or work in the medical tents. You were subject to military discipline.

 

The refuseniks

On the other hand, you might join the hard-core COs and refuse to follow the NCC’s military discipline, in which case you’d be court martialed and end up in prison. 

As an alternative to prison, you could join the Home Office Scheme, which offered imprisoned COs the choice of doing “work of national importance under civil control”–building roads and reservoirs, say. You’d live in a camp, and if you weren’t in the military your life still wasn’t your own. In some camps, you’d be treated decently and in others badly. In one camp, the COs went on strike.

Or you could join the handful of COs who took an absolutist stance. For them, working on a road or a reservoir benefitted the government in wartime and was an acknowledgement that the government had a right to dictate to them. They were court martialed, sometimes repeatedly. Some went on hunger strikes and were force fed. Many were underfed. Seventy-three died of poor treatment either in prison or shortly after their release. And the abuse that COs faced often fell on their families as well.

Just short of 6,000 men were sentenced for resisting military authority. 

 

Legacy of the COs

After the war, some former COs went into politics and a few ended up in Parliament. Others struggled to find work and rebuild their lives. All continued to have acronym-haunted dreams.

Why British history isn’t the story of a white country

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A new BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has set off (heavy sigh) yet another conversation about whether British history is the story of a white country. 

Why? Because either the show’s casting was color blind, where actors are chosen without regard to their skin color, or because (and my bet’s on this) the directors deliberately placed Black actors in major roles. 

Cue the predictable emails/phone calls/howls of outrage. Cue mentions of wokeness and political correctness. Sadly, I doubt we can cue any repetitions of that glorious confection of manufactured outrage, “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” The workerati had too much fun with it and the sleeperati had to retire it. But if you want to do your bit to keep the phrase alive, for £12.99 plus shipping and handling, you can buy a tee shirt announcing your reading and eating preferences.

It comes in a variety of designs, which says (a) it’s popular, (b) someone had too much fun to stop at one, or (c) it wasn’t all that popular and they’ve still got stock left. 

But forget the shirts. The assumption behind the complaints is that having a Black lawyer in a Dickens story is historically inaccurate and can only be explained by someone’s desire to rewrite history into something tofu flavored. 

 

Brief interruption for the sake of complete accuracy

I don’t like tofu. I can eat it–it’s not liver, after all–but I haven’t found a way to enjoy it and I’ve stopped searching for one. I do like the shirts, although I won’t be eating any. I probably won’t be wearing one either. I’ve stopped thinking people want to hear from my clothing.

Irrelevant photo: Cuckoo flowers–also called lady’s smocks, milkmaids, and mayflower. It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family, and yes, it will be on the test.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Complaints Department…

…the question we’re considering is, How likely would it have been in the Victorian (and slightly pre-Victorian) era, which is when Great Expectations takes place, to find a Black lawyer and an Indian law clerk? And would Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, be–um, it’s not immediately apparent from watching the series what her ethnicity is. I was going for someplace in Asia (it’s a big continent; surely it has a likely spot somewhere), but it turns out the actor playing her is of Mauritian and Thai heritage. She’s also described as an English-born Australian actor. That last bit isn’t relevant to the flap at hand but does remind us how complicated a person’s background can be. She has brown skin, though, and I’m assuming that does its bit to stir up the complainers.

To answer the question I’ve wandered away from, though: It’s quite accurate. English history is not all white, even if it’s often presented as if it were.

 

Georgian Britain

Let’s start with Georgian Britain, since that’s when Great Expectations begins (it then crosses into the Victorian era without needing to present a passport). The Georgian era ran from 1714 to 1830. Yes, I had to look it up, and I learned that it took four back-to-back Georges to cover that many years. 

At least 5,000 Black people lived in Georgian London, although that’s a minimum estimate, not a complete count. Data is (sorry: are) sparse–not just about Black people in London but about lots of people and things of the era. We have to work with what we’ve got. Many of them arrived as slaves and lived on in Britain as enslaved servants–it was quite the fashion among the upper class to have a Black servant in the household. Many of them escaped, though, disappearing into the general population. We know about them from newspaper ads calling for their capture and return. They’re often identified by the metal collars fastened onto their necks and by their scars.

Slavery within Britain itself was abolished in 1807, although the country continued to accumulate wealth from slavery in its colonies and trading relationships. Anyone who presents history as a simple picture is lying to you or themselves or both. So however ironically, British soil itself was free, and so were the people who stood on it.

Who, then, were these Black Britons? Most were poor and not lawyers in Dickens novels, but then so were most white Britons and you won’t find anyone offering that as an argument against casting a white actor as the lawyer. 

A few did become part of the middle and upper classes. 

How upper is upper?As far as I know, none of them inherited titles, but Queen Victoria  (you don’t get much higher in the class structure than that) had a ward and goddaughter, Sara Forbes Bonetta, who was Yoruba. 

So a Black lawyer? Entirely possible. 

As for the Indian law clerk and Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, when a country conquers an empire,it will be changed by the countries it conquers. The British Empire didn’t  just bring back money, textiles, tea, spices, opium, and new recipes to break up the same-old same-old of British cooking. People came as well, some by choice and some not. They came to work, to study, to live, to do all the assorted things humans do. Some stayed a while and went home. Others put down roots and became British. Communities formed.

That’s not to say there was no racism. 

 

Racism

British racism was (and, I think, still is) different from the American brand. For one thing, intermarriage wasn’t uncommon in Britain, whereas during large parts of US history it wasn’t just uncommon, it was illegal in many states. I mention that in part because a lot of readers here at Notes are American and also because culturally speaking I’m more American than British. I do know the US isn’t the world’s focal point, but I can’t help using it as mine a lot of the time. 

In the Victorian era, science was dragged in, kicking and screaming, to explain why racism and empire were natural and whites–and especially whites of the British persuasion–were superior to whoever else you had in mind. They measured heads and found that–surprise, surprise–the heads that happened to be shaped like their own had more brain power than anyone else’s, proving that their little twig of the human tree was by far superior to the other little twigs. They catalogued humanity into races, and no matter how many times later scientists have demonstrated that science provides no basis for the divisions, we’re still fighting our way out of that paper bag.

So again, we’re looking at a complicated picture. Racism, yes, but also Black people distributed–however unequally–throughout society.

And for the benefit of American readers, who see the word Black and understand it to mean someone of African heritage, in Britain it often includes Asians, although I think that’s shifting.

The Victorians didn’t invent racism, though. As soon as the country dove into slave-holding and the slave trade, it began to tell itself that the people it was enslaving were a lower grade of human. All the Victorians did was sprinkle a bit of pseudo-scientific glitter over it.

 

Moving backwards

Historians have relatively recently begun tracing Black British history in the Tudor era, picking individuals out of the sparse records that are available, and again the picture isn’t simple. Miranda Kaufman writes about a weaver, a sailor, a porter, travelers, a salvage diver, and an assortment of others. Onyeka Nubia combed through marriage and baptism records and found Black people who often married whites and over several generations disappeared into the gene pool. As he put it when I heard him speak to an almost all-white crowd, “This is not my history [he’s of African extraction]. This is  your history.”

Peter Fryer covers some of the same territory, but he starts with Roman legionnaires. 

Most of the stories they give us are, of necessity, limited. The written records mark  brief moments in people’s lives, then they disappear. But they were here. They lived, they worked, they died. They’ve been written out of British history. If someone writes them back in, it’s an act of restitution, not tofu addiction.

Does racism go back as far as the Tudor era? I’m not sure, but if it does it was probably different from the racism we know today. 

As early as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603, and yes, I had to look it up) we can find Liz issuing two separate orders to expell Black people from Britain because they were eating food that should have gone to her people, and besides, most of them were heathens. Or some of them were heathens. Or, well, never mind, they ate, and getting rid of them was easier than wrestling with inequality and famine.

Except that she didn’t get rid of them. She issued a couple of proclamations and there (give or take a bit of historical running back and forth, which we’ll skip) it ended. You can find the full tale here. 

Does it matter whether Black people were targets because they were Black, because some of them weren’t Christian, or because they were an immigrant community (with some  descendants of immigrants added in)? I’m not sure. None of those positions are comfortable. 

Onyeka Nubia argues that the Tudor era was more open and it wasn’t until later that the contributions of Black Britons were written out of the official history. I’d give you details but I haven’t gotten my hands on his books yet. Expect me to come back to the subject.

Archeology in Britain

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Have you ever read about an archeological dig and wondered how history’s layers get buried? Is the planet stealing soil from someplace and using it to hide the past? Do we keep the same amount of soil but does the wind blow all those layers of dirt over the past’s leavings? And if it does, why doesn’t it unbury an equal amount of history someplace else?

A book I stumbled across recently–Digging Up Britain: a new history in ten extraordinary discoveries, by Mike Pitts–finally answered the question for me, at least in part. A city, Pitts tells us, accumulates people–people who weren’t born there; people who don’t live there. While they’re there, they work, they trade, they eat, they drink, they sleep, and they do much of that within walls if they can. 

Most of those activities involve physical objects, so the city brings in wood and stone for its buildings, and tiles, slates, or reeds for its roofs. It brings in food for its, um, food. Okay, the rhetorical pattern’s breaking down here. We’ll sneak away without anyone noticing. It brings in leather and metal and fabric (or the raw materials to weave fabric) and everything else that you can think of and I haven’t.  

Irrelevant photo: The north Cornish coast

“Goods are also exported and people leave, but with time and decay, the city gains more than it loses. One generation’s walls become the rubble foundations for another’s. Every leather offcut, rusted nail, broken cup and lost penny finds its way into the teeming earth. Slowly, imperceptibly, the ground rises, covering the traces of the past.”

Well, yes, now that he’s planted the picture in my head, it’s a screamingly obvious one. The cause isn’t space dust. It’s people moving stuff from one place to another and wandering off without it. 

 

London

Pitts goes on to talk about some of London’s biggest ground-lifting events. Roman London had two fires that can still be spotted in layers of red earth. One of those would’ve been set during Boudica’s rebellion, when she burned London and two other cities to the ground. Then, when 1666’s Great Fire of London finally burned itself out and it was time to rebuild, stone was hauled in and a new city rose on the leveled remains of the destruction.

The biggest leveling of walls, though, was the blitz–the bombing of London during World War II–and when Pitts reaches this point, he focuses on a small area where two excavations found particularly rich Roman artifacts: On the night of May 10, 1941, bombing “disrupted” 8,000 streets, killing more than 4,000 people and seriously injuring 1,800. It wiped out most of the block he’s interested in, where there’d been 350 businesses “crammed into a warren of high Victorian terraces and narrow alleys.” They included cafes, a bookseller, a tailor, a dentist, accountants, and a postage stamp perforator.

Who knew there even were postage stamp perforators? I assumed that got done by some sort of machinery working where and when the stamps were printed. Or that someone with pointy little teeth came along and–

Never mind. Not much was left of the street, and in 1952, when it was redeveloped, the area was opened to archeologists just before an office building went up on the site. The digging had uncovered an underground temple to Mithras, and it was taken apart, and reconstructed (badly) above ground and facing the wrong way. And then in 2012, when the 1952 building was torn down and something newer and shinier was about to be built, archeologists got in there again, only with more time to do their job. What they found was “like a library of random news from across Roman London.” The area had been used as a dump, and archeologists love dumps. It turned out to be “the most productive single excavation of a British Roman site in modern times,” and included a horde of wood-and-wax tablets recording, for the most part, business transactions. It gave them a glimpse into the city before it had the grand public buildings we associate with Roman towns. This was a town in its early stages. 

The success of that second dig was made possible by a change in the relationship of archeologists and developers.

 

Archeologists and the construction industry

One of the major ways the past gets uncovered in Britain is that someone comes along with heavy-duty construction equipment and starts digging. They’re not hoping to find, say, a Roman villa or a Bronze Age settlement. In fact, they’re hoping not to. They want to build a parking ramp or a shopping mall. 

Until 1990, archeologists were dependent on the goodwill of the developers for access to their sites. Before that, if a developer stumbled into something of archeological importance, and if they didn’t sweep it under the metaphorical rug fast enough, archeologists had to rely on a mix of diplomacy, goodwill, and the public pressure set off by media coverage to get access. Because archeologists mean delays, and delays cost money.

In a showdown between history and national heritage on one side and money on the other, it’s not often that history and heritage win, but they did win when the foundations of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre were discovered by accident. A media storm set off a celebrity storm, which in turn set off a wider public storm, and under that pressure a delay was organized and the new building eventually went up over the theater’s foundations, which are now covered in water to keep the ground from cracking.

 

Irrelevant but interesting bit of information 

Exploration of the theater’s foundations brought us the news that hazelnuts were the popcorn of Shakespeare’s day. The shells were everywhere. 

 

The relationship changes

After the battle to save the Rose, things changed, and it kills me to say anything good about Margaret Thatcher’s government but I’m going to have to: they’re the ones who introduced Planning Policy Guidance 16–Archaeology in Planning, called PPG16 by its friends and admirers. 

PPG16 is a guidance paper that requires anyone building anything that needs planning permission–and in Britain, that’s just about any building at all–to consider its  impact on archaeology. According to Heritage Daily, PPG16’s impact was unintentional, but lovely, so I don’t have to be particularly nice about Thatcher’s government: they didn’t mean to do something good; they were just trying to shut everybody up.

Heritage Daily  describes the events at the Rose as an omnishambles, with “leading actors, including Sir Ian Mckellen and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, facing down the developers’ bulldozers, standing alongside archaeologists, the general public and local children waving placards declaiming, ‘Don’t Doze the Rose.’

“Faced with this highly public demand that the historic site be protected, the Environment Department, under Secretary of State Nicholas Ridley, proved utterly incapable of formulating a coherent policy to dig the developer Imry Merchant and the Government out of the mire. “

In the end, they cobbled together a system that had local and national governments, developers, heritage professionals, and the public working together to preserve whatever could be preserved in place, and to record, and sometimes move, whatever couldn’t be. It didn’t make developers or free-market purists happy, but it did keep politically damaging incidents like the Rose from happening again. 

 

The impact on archeology

All this meant archeology had to change. The profession came into this period as a mix of local heritage organizations, professors, and museums. None of them were equipped to meet the schedules or use “the same language as the architects and developers whose plans the system was designed to facilitate,” Heritage Daily says. 

After PPG16, “Archaeology as a discipline found itself putting on a suit, becoming a profession and sitting down in planning meetings with architects and developers to discuss fitting in an excavation alongside the other building site preparation and ground works.”

“It’s not perfect, but . . . once PPG16 and the concept . . . was in place, pipeline surveys and large scale infrastructure projects like Heathrow Terminal 5 and HS1, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, did offer the chance to develop practice and sample large transects of landscape to sometimes startling effect.”

Some years ago, not far from where I live, a new sewage line uncovered enough Cornish history that the archeologists involved organized a presentation in the village hall, and it was packed. That was my first hint of the working relationship between archeologists and the construction industry, and I was impressed.

One of the finds they talked about was a series of Christian and pre-Christian burials. You could tell them apart because the Christians were buried so that they’d be facing east when they rose on–what is it? Judgment day? Whichever. If it happens, I’m sure someone will have set an alarm clock, so I don’t need to worry. Anyway, they were supposed to rise from their graves and be facing east. The non-Christians, on the other hand, were buried with grave goods–things they’d used in life and would, presumably, want in the next one. Or maybe the goods were a way for the living to grieve and pay tribute. Who can know at this distance in time? Whatever the reason, that’s how they buried their dead. 

But the archeologists had found a few people who were hedging their bets–or at least whose descendants were. They were buried facing east but also with grave goods. Whichever way the afterlife played out, they’d be ready.

In Pitts’ last chapter, he mentions an enlargement of the A14 (that’s a road) near Cambridge that’s been a particular gift to archeology. They’ve uncovered ancient villages, industrial zones, religious monuments, 15 tones of bones and artifacts, pottery kilns, field layouts and more, all of which could so easily have been dug up, scattered, and lost to history.

The last invasion of Britain

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When was Britain last invaded? 

Sorry, no, it wasn’t in 1066. It was in 1797, France landed troops in Wales, and it played out more as farce than as pivotal historical moment. 

This was toward the end of the French Revolutionary wars, when Britain and France were at war, so invading Britain wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The French were backing a hoped-for Irish rising against the English, and invading Britain would make a nice diversion. 

Irrelevant photo: Primroses on a frosty morning.

 

What didn’t happen and what did

The original plan was to land troops in Cornwall, Bristol, Newcastle and–most importantly–Ireland, the last landing planned with the help of the Irish revolutionary leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who’d convinced revolutionary France that with its help Ireland could free itself of British domination. Before it got far, though, the project was already looking shaky. The raid on Cornwall was canceled, the raid on Newcastle was foiled by the weather, and the ships carrying 15,000 troops to Ireland were also dispersed by the weather and limped back to Brest. 

That left the expedition to Bristol–four ships carrying 1,400 soldiers under the command of William Tate. Why it wasn’t called off is anyone’s guess. 

Tate’s orders were “to bring as much chaos and confusion to the heart of Britain as was possible; to recommend and facilitate a rising of the British poor against the government; but whenever and wherever possible, to wage war against the castle, not the cottage.” 

Disciplined troops might have managed that distinction between castle and cottage, but Tate didn’t have disciplined troops. Over half were newly released prisoners and the rest (including Tate) didn’t have a whole lot of military experience. 

That made no difference to Bristol, because they never got there. The weather was against them and the ships landed instead near the mighty metropolis of Fishguard, Wales. I can’t find population figures for 1797, but the 2021 census reports a population of 3,421, up 2 from the 2011 census. It’s a fair guess that the place had 6 or 8 fewer people in 1797.

The ships actually landed outside Fishguard, not in the metropolis itself, dropping off Tate and his soldiers and sailing back to France and out of our story. 

Tate got down to business and sent out patrols and they set to work looting people’s houses. It’s a well known way of getting cottage-dwellers to support your cause. And since a Portuguese ship had run aground not long before, both houses and cottages were well stocked with brandy. Or in a different telling, wine. 

Okay, brandy turns out to be distilled wine. Lord Google just whispered that in my ear. The things I learn writing this blog.

Before long the soldiers were well stocked with brandy themselves and (I’m guessing here) roaring drunk. One is said to have shot a clock.

Take that, you sumbitch. You won’t try that again, will you?

I’ll guess again and say that had something to do with the brandy.

According to legend, they also cooked some geese in butter and got food poisoning. Now, goose cooked in butter may not be kosher but there’s no reason the soldiers would have known about that or cared if they had, and also no reason that eating goose cooked that way would give you food poisoning. We’re probably missing a piece of the puzzle but I’ve checked under the couch and it’s not there, so let’s go with what we’ve got and not complain. For either one reason or both, a good number of them incapacitated themselves.

One source questions whether the troops were even armed, raising the possibility that they counted on capturing weapons.

 

Meanwhile in the other corner…

…was mighty Fishguard. What did it have by way of defense? The Fencibles, for one thing. They sound like something that could be sold illegally in a back alley but weren’t. They were a militia that could be called up for local service. Their members didn’t have much in the way of training and lived at home, so mobilizing them was slow and probably chaotic, but eventually they gathered at the local fort. Then they abandoned the local fort, marching off in the direction of greater safety, away from the French. On the way, they met the better trained Pembrokeshire Yeomanry Cavalry–professional soldiers–who gathered them up, turned them around, and organized everyone into a night raid on the French position.

At this point, I’m thinking, Hey, night attack. Guerrilla warfare. That’s novel stuff for the era. Shows you what I know. They stumbled along a country lane in the dark with the volume on their fifes and drums turned up to max, alerting (no surprise here) the French, who (as far as I can figure out) took up ambush positions, at which point the British thought better of that night attack idea and marched back the way they came.

 

Does anyone come out of the tale looking competent?

Yes: the local people, who gathered with scythes and pitchforks and rounded up French scouts and stragglers, killing at least one. The local cobbler, Jemima Nicholas, captured a dozen or so while armed with nothing more than a pitchfork.

Did she really capture a dozen soldiers, however drunk, food-poisoned, and badly trained, using only a pitchfork? Who knows. We’re dealing with legend here. She captured some. Presumably she had a pitchfork. She wasn’t a woman to mess with and became a local hero.

Because so much of what happened comes to us by way of legend, though, I’m having trouble putting together a coherent account, so I’ll step back a bit and tell the story from a distance: Local people and British soldiers (back, presumably, from their earlier retreat) lined the crest of the hill, looking to the French like a couple of thousand soldiers–an impression helped along by the local women’s custom of wearing red dresses and tall black hats, which were a fair match for British army uniforms, at least if you didn’t get too close. In fact, the French outnumbered the British but didn’t know it. 

Among the French, discipline was evaporating. Or had evaporated earlier, when all that the brandy signed up. Or it had never been present to evaporate. Tate sent a messenger to Fishguard with a note:

“The circumstances under which the body of French troops under my command were landed at this place renders it unnecessary to attempt any military operations, as they would only lead to bloodshed and pillage. The officers of the whole corps therefore intimated their desire of entering into a negotiation upon principles of humanity for a surrender. If you are influenced by similar considerations, you may signify the same to the bearer. In the meantime, hostilities shall cease.

“Health and respect,

“Tate, Chef de Brigade”

The British bluffed, demanding an unconditional surrender, and got it. The French surrendered and were imprisoned, which seems like an unkind response to someone who signs their note “health and respect.”

 

And then?

Then some of the French soldiers broke out, stole a yacht belonging to Lord Cawdor–the officer they’d surrendered to–and like the ships that had carried them to Wales, sail out of our story, no doubt savoring the occasional sweetness of life’s little ironies.

The building where the surrender was signed became a pub–but not immediately.

After that the story gets serious. Even here at Notes, that sometimes happens.

In 1798, a rebellion did indeed break out in Ireland, but by then the French would only commit enough forces to make minor raids along the Irish coast. Tone landed in Donegal with 3,000 troops and was captured. He was sentenced to be hanged but killed himself before the British got a chance.