#Whiggish

[coraniaid]

Actually, it's very hard to say whether the past was better or worse than the present, or so claim people who haven't ever troubled themselves to look up historic infant mortality rates.

[ego-sum-arbor]

Did not think that I was going read the phrase “Whiggish historiography” today and yet

[mariacallous]

I just can’t go Jacobite or Montagnard/French, I’m constitutionally incapable

[dnickels]

Such ambiguities raise the more fundamental question of the ideological character of the Labour Party in this era, an issue that is at times obscured by the biographical approach taken by Clark and Torrance. Labour leaders did profess a belief in socialism, and the party’s 1918 constitution featured, in Clause IV, a pledge to secure ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. But this coexisted with an attachment to the Radical Liberal tradition, particularly in economic policy, where Labour was committed to free trade. In practice, the party’s version of socialism denoted a general faith in a fairer, more just society, and a confidence that Britain was moving in this direction. MacDonald did most to define Labour’s ideology, refuting claims that socialism might require a revolution; it would, he wrote in 1911, emerge from capitalism through an ‘organic process’. As Clark writes, MacDonald, who was born in 1866, was intellectually a product of the 19th century, deeply influenced by Darwinism: his socialism was the ‘method of evolution applied to society’. At times, this resulted in a determinism which saw socialism’s eventual arrival as preordained. This optimism was combined with a distrust of the electorate, who, MacDonald believed, were yet to show they were worthy of socialism. Always present, this suspicion of the masses had been deepened by MacDonald’s wartime experiences, when his reputation as a pacifist saw him attacked in the press and his illegitimacy publicised, resulting in his defeat in Leicester West at the 1918 general election. The public were, he concluded, ‘credulous’, too often moved by ‘passion’; socialism would come only when voters showed they were ‘intelligent enough’ to want it. This passive, even fatalistic, view of political change was matched by a Whiggish reverence for Britain’s political institutions. Parliament, in MacDonald’s view, was a neutral site, a tool for governing that Labour could command as soon as the electorate allowed. Rejecting the idea that British socialists could learn anything from the Russian Revolution, MacDonald maintained in 1919 that, by winning ‘a parliamentary election’, Labour could accrue ‘all the power that Lenin had to get by a revolution’.

[mourning-again-in-america]

Indeed, when I was writing the post, I was thinking about then-Colonel future-President Andrew Jackson and the extent to which Americans at the time believed that Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans aided in the peaceable settlement of the War of 1812 (by, among others, his future Presidential rival, John Quincy Adams), despite the battle having taken place chronologically subsequent to the signing of the peace & the general impossibility of such taking into account communications delays.

[transmutationisms]

can you expand on the ted kaczynski stuff 💀

ted k was an ecofascist, historical change is not a linear process of either progress or regression, the nature–technology dichotomy is artificial, the 'industrial revolution' is a highly contested term temporally and philosophically, technology is not determinative of social forms or historical change and its adoption depends on a dizzying array of social and economic factors and motives. every time kaczynski's name comes up i see nominal leftists semi-ironically valorising him because they, like, think that twitter is causing cultural degeneracy. these are fascist ideas and facile historical thinking. once again, primitivism engages in the same narrativising and myth-making as the most chauvinistic, whiggish, positivist anglo histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, only with the valences imputed to 'civilisation' inverted.

[familyabolisher]

At times in the writing of wine history, wine itself has been treated as a historical actor. This is the case in many of the sweeping histories of wine, such as Hugh Johnson’s original Vintage: The Story of Wine, Paul Lukacs’s recent Inventing Wine, John Varriano’s Wine: A Cultural History, or Marc Millon’s Wine: A Global History. These lucid and entertaining histories, written by great narrators with serious wine expertise, follow a similar narrative arc. Wine is the central protagonist, the potable Zelig, popping up in different historical moments in different parts of the world. The story begins in the Fertile Crescent, where Wine is born, or in the ancient Mediterranean, where Wine enters a boisterous adolescence in the symposia and bacchanalia of the ancient Greeks. The reader is invited to pause and appreciate the wine-themed mosaic and shards of amphorae. The story then skips a few centuries and a few hundred miles, to medieval Europe (we are left to wonder what Wine has done in between), where Wine joins forces with powerful and institutionalized Christianity and canny monks create a patchwork of orderly clos on the Côte d’Or: bless them! Wine remains in France, or perhaps summers in Germany, and Bordeaux emerges in the seventeenth century, eventually finding its way to Britain (we are treated to a Samuel Johnson quote, or Pepys). Port and sherry have their seafaring adventures. The nineteenth century opens with Champagne surviving war, producing widows and conquering Russian markets; France produces Pasteur, who produces better wine, a triumph of science and the Enlightenment; wine is enjoying its golden years. Then, three-quarters of the way through this drama, tragedy strikes, in the form of the vine disease phylloxera. Wine is dealt a staggering blow and its very survival is threatened. Fortunately, a new world of scientists, mavericks, and neoliberal entrepreneurs emerge: capital is found, the plucky New World steps in to help, and new vines are grafted. Wine is saved! This cannot be criticized as being a Eurocentric narrative, because the tale concludes in California, or Uruguay, or China. Undeniably, at the conclusion of this story there is incredible momentum and optimism. Global wine production is the highest it has ever been, consumption of wine is high, and wine is (relatively) cheap. Were he a wine historian, Francis Fukuyama would declare it the end of wine history.

This hagiography of Wine is a great read: a mouth-watering tale of high drama, blind monks, and supple tannins. And it is not necessarily inaccurate. But it is, on the other hand, what British historians have called a Whiggish narrative: one that presumes continual progress, culminating in the current era, which is assumed to be the best ever. This Whiggishness may overlook some of the current difficulties in the market, or shrug off past problems in the wine industry, since all ended well. Geographically and chronologically it is uneven, such that the producers studied here generally do not merit inclusion until they have become major global actors. This type of narrative structure is what gives the false impression that South Africa produced a great wine called Constantia in the eighteenth century, and then produced nothing again until 1994. The place of Wine as the embattled protagonist who overcomes many hardships (vine diseases, consumer apathy, high taxation) and emerges triumphant and affordable in the late twentieth century, is also what is known in Marxist terms as “commodity fetishism.” As Bruce Robbins has argued, in the new commodity histories, “each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism.” The commodity itself, rather than the social and economic relationships that led to its production, becomes the driving force of the narrative.

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, Imperial Wine: How the Empire Made Wine's New World

[sabakos]

i am rather whiggish about the availability of art as a pursuit. i don't think there's ever been a time in history where it's been easier to be an artist, develop your skills, have other people appreciate your work, and yes, even get paid something for it, than in the past two decades. there are teenage fanartists for tv shows i don't care about who have more skill and talent than the median full-time professional had a century ago.

But many people who are whiggish about the democratization of art seem to feel differently about this! i suppose this is because the amount of wealth invested in the production of art has not kept pace with the increase in number of people capable of producing it, which means that there's less wealth to go around overall and it's no longer possible for most artists to live upon their art alone. However, if you were concerned with securing your own material position, it literally pays to be more of an elitist about it! the only way it makes sense to not resent the egalitarian position is if the elitist one would have excluded you, specifically. I guess that's the basis of ressentiment though.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

A wonderful person - not very like a woman, you know?

T.E. Lawrence on his friend Gertrude Bell

In many ways the life of T.E.arc Lawrence and Gertrude Bell was similar and overlapped in many ways. Two remarkable persons who represented the height of the British Empire heroism.

Lawrence is undoubtedly the more famous of the pair, branded in Orientalist film history by Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, headdress and all. But historians and contemporaries would arguably say, rightly in my opinion, that Bell’s influence on the Middle east region may have outweighed that of her overly confident friend and colleague, T.E. Lawrence. The First World War made Gertrude Bell into the icon she was to become after her death.

At the same time the First World War and its aftermath are a story of disappointment and depression for Gertrude Bell. Early on, she sees the war as the “end of the order we’re accustomed to” - a Whiggish order in which she had believed that British power could be exercised for good; she witnesses and fears the general abandonment of the belief that “there’s room enough in the sun” for everyone. Scales fell from her eyes earlier for her than for others of her class charged with redrawing the map of the Middle East and especially the fate of the Arabs.

Just before the installation of Prince Feisal, the not-yet-Iraqi tribes rebel. The colonial administration wants to adopt the position vacated by the Ottomans and demands of each tribe a poll tax. These are the the tribes that had been promised sovereignty. That is why they’d fought the Ottomans and sided with the allies: to be rid of their masters, not to swap them for some new ones. When the tax goes unpaid, the aerial bombardment of villages starts.

Gertrude Bell writes home, distraught, already blaming the curse it is that oil has been discovered in this land. Churchill had seen from the start of the war that oil independence for the empire would be the great strategic prize of the war as well as a tactical military requirement. There was never anything innocent in the War Office’s late recruitment of Bell to the Cairo office to work alongside T.E. Lawrence (who, in what is presumably for him the highest of compliments, writes of her that she is “not very like a woman”).

As the war and the aftermath of the Paris Peace 1919 gives way to the realpolitik of the grab for oil-rich Ottoman lands in the 1920s, she tries to warn that “no people likes permanently to be governed by another”.

Dutifully, she draws the boundaries of the new Kingdom of Iraq to balance Sunni and Shia numbers – “to avoid a theocratic state”. The Cairo Conference in 1921 set out to achieve this end and resulted in Feisal being given a Kingdom in Iraq and his brother the throne of neighboring Transjordan.

However in the end, she concludes that “making kings is too great a strain” because, we feel, she knows that Britain’s promises of sovereignty will be empty.

The talent and sympathy of the likes of Gertrude Bell don’t count for much against the onward march of power and the interests of those who wield it.

[st-just]

Probably a sign of deeply ingrained terminal whiggishness on my part, but when people recommend some centuries-old writer as, like, a moral or theoretical authority or as necessary to understand what they're trying to explain my gut reaction is always, like, suspicion?

I mean the options are that either the writer was such a transcendent genius that no one has really built on or superseded their theories since the invention of the steam engine or you're trying to resurrect some mummified tradition from the distant past for your own reasons

Or I mean, neither, neither is definitely option. But when some seemingly entirely conventional vaguely center-left liberal type on a podcast earnestly earnestly cites Plato or Aristotle or whoever as agreeing with them as a point in their favor I'm always left stumped as to the reasoning on why that's a good thing. They were slavers and aristocrats and self-styled enemies of democracy, if your ethical tradition has not found any better exponents in the millennia since that's a pretty strong point against it.

[bimboficationblues]

I think it's necessary to engage in a re-materializing of the history of political and economic thought, which still generally hew to very Whiggish or Great Man contours - contextualizing theorists within their appropriate place in history (Hobbes and the English Civil War, Ricardo/Malthus and parliamentary debates) is necessary but insufficient, it isolates thought to the domain of professionals and philosophers

prompted by reading Rebecca Spang's book Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution:

While many historians have recently developed the history of economic thought as a version of intellectual history, this book follows a different path. Since money features in any market transaction and in many family arguments, it seems wrong to limit “economic thought” to the work of a comparatively small set of canonical authors. Surely if David Hume, Adam Smith, and the marquis de Condorcet had ideas about money, so too did any woman who bought bread, sold fish, or pawned her wool blanket every summer. That the thoughts of these latter individuals have largely gone unrecorded makes them more difficult to trace but no less real or meaningful to consider. Wherever possible, therefore, I shift attention from the enunciated theories of philosophes to the enacted practices and everyday conduct of ordinary people. In doing so, some of the questions asked in this book are deceptively simple looking: What did people do, physically, with money? How did they handle it? When did they need money and when could they do without it? ... The misperception of value as a quality inherent in things (rather than as a product of relations between people) is central to this book’s analysis. Take, for instance, most revolutionaries’ commitment to the ideas of money as merchandise and of money as a good which should, like any other, have its price determined by supply and demand. Such an assertion only became plausible when the social trust and shared cultural norms of monetized exchanges were routinely mistaken for (and asserted to be) qualities of physical currency objects themselves. This confusion of the social for the material (this fetishism, in the Marxist sense) arose first as a form of political criticism: when they insisted value inhered in metals, seventeenth- and eighteenth- century writers from Locke to the encyclopédistes tried to limit the otherwise absolute power of a monarch who ruled by divine right. Transposed to a political context in which sovereignty resided “essentially in the people,” however, the idea of intrinsic value had far different and largely disastrous effects... For it meant the means of exchange most commonly used by the great majority of the actual people (small change, personal paper, book debt) could easily be treated as worthless. Revolutionary lawmakers, nearly all of whom believed political liberty and economic deregulation to be inseparable, long refused to take any action that might have ameliorated the situation. A fundamental tension hence existed between the liberty of the metaphorical “people” and the increasingly precarious, lived existence of ordinary men and women. Neither the symbolic nor the material but the contrast between the two drove further radicalization...national money was meant to create shared emotions but it had the effect of highlighting socioeconomic difference. Intentions and outcomes did not coincide.

this is part of what I find compelling about Capital but also what makes it something of a sprawling mess - not that Marx was insufficiently charitable to his theoretical sources, but that he was simultaneously examining and critiquing political economy as a mode of thought - a "mode of thought" being not just a set of canonical theorists (Ricardo et al) but also emergent from people's real practices

[tanadrin]

Not sure who the dysgenics post is vaguing, and I don't want to get into this off anon, but sterilization (ostensibly voluntary) of genetically inferior potential parents is an idea that I've seen advocated by someone concerned about dysgenics

It's a side post to big discussion involving some people I follow about Scott Alexander's pessimistic predictions for the future. All very silly Decline and Fall stuff, as @discoursedrome put it.

(And even then I think he was being too charitable--"the whole world looks like it's decaying if you live in the political and economic center of it and even small things are shifting around you" is true, but I actually don't think very big shifts are occurring--I could go on at length here, but suffice it to say I think US hegemony is assured for the time being, we're making progress even on the biggest issues facing our society, like climate change, and I simply do not think a 50/50 chance of humans destroying themselves within 100 years--or even experiencing a major global collapse--is realistic. I think Acott Alexander lives inside a bubble of people with a lot of really silly ideas about the world and how it works, where being clever is seen as a sufficient substitute for expertise, and he is there because he is fundamentally gullible to any idea packaged in the right aesthetic.)

But historically, the idea of dysgenics/eugenics arose in the context of Social Darwinism. I think Social Darwinism is a funny animal; it is a surface-level retread of some ideas that were in circulation in Britain for a long time before Darwin. Specifically, the idea of a hierarchy of virtue that exists alongside and underpins a hierarchy of class is nothing new--that in itself may be as ancient as human civilization, since every society needs an ideology to legitimate its power structures. But in the context of early 1800s Britain, you had the Whigs, the new middle class of the burgeonining Industrial Revolution, looking to join the ranks of power--either to position themselves against the lazy shiftless aristocracy who did not work for a living, or to join them, to be like "yes, we don't have titles [but please give us some!], but we're also not like those awful lazy/drunk/Irish poors." I think alongside the Whiggish enthusiasm for science and progress, Social Darwinism nicely blends both that older idea of a hierarchy of virtue with newer ideas about dispassionate natural processes to produce an idea with a lot more mimetic heft for the new age (if you don't know much about either Darwinism or economics) than the unfiltered Anglicanism of the pre-1860s generations, one which takes the exact same policy prescriptions and like 90% of the same underlying rationale ("we cannot improve the social condition of the poor; they will waste their money on drink and gambling, breed like rabbits if their children are no longer often starving to death or dying of cholera, and they will corrupt the virtue of our society") and adds just a light dusting of pseudoscience ("we cannot improve the social condition of the poor; they will waste their money on drink and gambling, breed like rabbits if their children are no longer often starving to death or dying of cholera, and they will have a dysgenic effect on the white race").

(Along with the corollary, obviously, that we should get rich people to breed more, because clearly wealth and intelligence and virtue are heritable.*)

I do not think Scott Alexander is a Social Darwinist. Almost nobody is these days, and while I think he sometimes takes some very bad ideas seriously, I do not think he is at "19th century British racist" levels of taking bad ideas seriously. AFAICT the kind of eugenics Scott Alexander would support is what's sometimes called "positive eugenics," i.e., not sterilizating people against their will, but making sure that (for instance) middle-class people aren't actively discouraged from having kids by the tax structure, and using genetic engineering if/when it becomes available to gradually improve longevity, health, and IQ. But where concerns about dysgenics do pop up in modern authors, they tend to echo or simply restate older Social Darwinist concerns--as a general argument against welfare, for instance. But Scott has also talked about how UBI is a good idea, and that's pretty much the welfariest welfare you could possibly welfare. So I assume he's not worried that if we give the poor food, we will be up to our eyeballs in shiftless drunk Irishmen within a few generations.

(*"Heritable" is a great word! Wealth, for instance, is indeed heritable! How much money you will have is strongly predicted by how much money your parents had. But "heritable" is obviously not the same as "genetic," and this kind of equivocation--like that between intelligence and education, or between virtue and conformity to arbitrary social norms, was the bread and butter of 19th and 20th century Social Darwinists.)

[period-dramallama]

The King's Mind by Christopher Rae: review.

"How curious men are, how much is hidden, how much left unsaid."

A very late post for @fideidefenswhore sorry for the wait xx

TLDR: Solid, but I have some Notes. Rae is knowledgeable but he falls into some common pitfalls. Not as good as Rae's The Concubine. The pacing is weaker, and unlike The Concubine there is a Whiggish streak that gives the book a preachy taint.

Long post below.

Henry: I'm not easily persuaded

*a few moments later*

Henry: you know what? I've been deceived.

The book starts in media res and even I am a little lost and confused. The book hops between first and third person without warning which gets easier but at first takes some getting used to. Was it always necessary? We go from third person "a sky streaked with red and gold" to Henry saying the sky is streaked with red and gold.

The presence of Weston and Norris in this book is good. It was a good choice to emphasise the presence of Weston and Norris at the coronation. I think a lot of writers tend to forget they existed before 1536. They're Henry's Great and Loyal Friends yet they pop into existence ex nihilo solely so they can be beheaded. Obviously their presence also makes good foreshadowing. They're natural portents of doom.

Sometimes, as is often the way with first person POVs, Henry gets too self aware: “He knows how easily I can be mollified by a good cash offer”. But Rae's is probably the most interesting and nuanced of the Henries. Rae captures his ego: "Mark, who plays the lute so prettily, almost as well as myself." Cromwell “is now better informed than any man alive, with the exception of myself." After a whole book of his ego, Duchess Mary roasting Henry at the end was remarkably cathartic. Girl's got a point.

Henry has a serious case of doublethink. "My sweet Anne, so mild and sensible. I know that they are all constantly working upon her to have their way in this, but she is the true friend of my heart and her counsel will always be in my best interest. Of course, she is right."

On the very next page: "Anne’s eyes gleam with triumph, she believes she has influenced me to align myself with her purposes, and has won the field."

"Anne is naive sometimes and behaves as if matters of grotesque complexity can be reduced to simple solutions, simply because she wills it so."

Pot calling the kettle black, Your Majesty.

"More does not learn from the world, he merely seeks to impress himself upon it."

POT CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK, YOUR MAJESTY.

"I am glad of it, your majesty, for I am certain of what is true. This strikes me as an odd thing to say at first, but upon reflection I decide that I rather like it, and might profitably adopt it for my own use."

I don't have much to say about this moment, it's just funny and feels very Henrician.

“The king is like a man who sets fire to his own house, and then goes crying in the street for help.” Wolsey decides to ignore this while privately acknowledging the truth of it."

Wolsey:

“The honour of my betrothed must be preserved, and passion must bow before patience.” There's some nice moments of Tudor-style courtship, and Rae does a better job than most of giving Henry a distinct voice: “Diana, flushed with the exertion of emptying her quiver. By the mass, she is pretty when she is roused.” "Ah, my sweet, but I will never allow it. For that would kill me, and I cannot let you become a regicide." “return to the palace where there is precious little pleasaunce now.” PUN! Henry described himself as the king of disappointment, I liked that moment.

Many Henries are pretty gullible, but this Henry has a certain low cunning and I like the interpretation that while he's swayed by Anne he is quite manipulative himself: “I play the innocent most cruelly deceived, and I know that she finds me plausible.”

In terms of pacing, there is a tendency towards repetitiveness. PARTLY but not wholly because, let’s be real, the KGM has a repetitive nature. Like we get it already, Wolsey's fat, he's gotten fat, he's big, he's bulky, he's plus-size, he's chubby, he's out of breath WE KNOW. Anne is impatient and worrying about her age, WE KNOW. Henry is impatient and wants to marry Anne. Wolsey thinks it can’t be done. Wolsey thinks Henry is like a kid who has to be told he can't just have whatever he wants because he wants it, WE KNOW. Henry is fickle and people hope he will tire of Anne. WE KNOOOOOOOOOOW. The book also goes back in time to 1528 less smoothly than in the concubine. (Also, this book again calls Katherine 'Aragon' instead of Princess Dowager, sometimes the Spaniard, which works better.) You could probably cut out Latimer’s recantation to Warham as it repeats what we got from other scenes.

I must give this book some leeway and acknowledge that I'm just not as interested in the political dimensions of the KGM as I am the intellectual and theological dimension: partly because I find it boring and frustrating the way it constantly goes around in circles and there's this document and this document. But personal preferences aside, I still think the book could have been less repetitive.

“she contains within her a deep strand of idealism…But if Anne lacks anything, it is an understanding of the pragmatism that accompanies power.” Anne overall is better characterised in The Concubine. Here it is Anne's insistence that keeps Mary from her mother while Henry is willing to let them meet. Hmm. Disagree, but it's not too bad.

“Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and of course the great red whale- Wolsey.”

I choose to interpret 'great red whale' as a reference to the 'white whale' in Moby Dick. Wolsey is Anne's equivalent of the white whale.

Ambiguity just how corrupt Wolsey is. "The fate of his grace the Duke of Buckingham, brought down by Wolsey and sent to the block, is not forgotten"- Buckingham's fall was Henry's doing. Wolsey actually warned Buckingham to be more careful.

"And Norfolk? His grace has all the diplomatic ability of a culverin." "Norfolk has nothing to do with things that are broken." Norfolk is slightly softer in here than he was in The Concubine, and not angry all the time.

Unlike The Concubine in this novel Cromwell seems to have a hint of being an evangelical, being motivated by religion.

"Today he will truly make or mar."

"As ever, in the shape he shows to the world, Cromwell is quiet, unassuming, and affable. Not blessed with a great deal of the outward glamour which tracks the interest of women, he relies instead on comporting himself in a manner which causes men to desire his presence."

Men desire his presence, you say? *Eyes emoji*

Also speak for yourself Cromwell is dummy thicc

Rae gives us a witty and remarkably sympathetic Gardiner. He's not usually given this much attention, or depth to his motives and thought process. We have him admiring Cranmer's intelligence.

More has more energy than usual which I like. He's usually depicted as soft-spoken for some reason when there's no indication in the primary sources that he had a quiet voice. We'll get to the problems with him later in the review.

"Fisher... the sympathy he drips with is not of a personal nature. For him Catherine is nothing more than a simple minded, weak, creature, as all women are, and he thinks that she has failed England and the one office which should have justified her feeble existence- to provide the king with the heirs he needed."

I'm not a fan of Fisher but DAMN that's an unusually unsympathetic portrayal. What a meanie. But it's refreshing to see Katherine of Aragon's supporters as less than noble or admiring for a change, at least in their heart of hearts.

Like The Concubine, there are some great turns of phrase.

"For some time he sits there, like some Saint of the early church undergoing a particularly unpleasant and imaginative martyrdom at the command of a Pagan emperor."

"And for the first time he begins to despair, because for the first time he sees clearly that he does not have the power to truly open their eyes. The terrible, inescapable conclusion begins to oppress him; There is actually nothing he can do to prevent disaster."

^^I like this moment because it encapsulates the feelings of many people in the Reformation, on both sides.

“I was nothing more than an empty vessel, like unto A goblet made in the most glorious and rich fashion, but empty nonetheless, a vain, dry thing. Here is the wine which was lacking, it comes now brimming, overflowing, and sweetest tasting anything upon the earth.”

^^ A particularly evocative and authentic conversion narrative.

This book also had some good analogies, like this one: "Master Christopher, think of the king as like a man who has inherited a battery of cannons."

Rae did a good job in this book with foreshadowing and instilling a sense of doom:

“There is a heaven for Anne Boleyn, in which she ascends uncontested to the throne as Queen of England, and a hell also, in which she is confined to being seen as nothing more than the king’s mistress, until he tires of her and moves onto the next one.”

^^It really drives home that Anne's fate is beyond her wildest nightmares. HILLARYYYYYYYYYYYY

"The shadows that have claimed the last of the sunlight are gone from the garden, and the Cardinal's face is now in shade, the whole of his vast bulk entirely consumed by the dusk."

^^A nice bit of pathetic fallacy and foreshadowing of Wolsey's downfall.

"Norfolk, so fond of sending people to the tower. Perhaps he will get the chance to see what is like one day himself?" “As she listens Anne’s eye is drawn upwards; she senses black shapes moving in the air, and she sees two ravens alighting upon the crenelated rampart high above. A sudden chill descends upon her, and she shivers.”

There are some good details in this book. Wolsey in the garden in the evening- Cavendish mentions that he takes evening walks. "He smells of cabbage, cabbage and wet horse dung!" A reference to Gardiner's skill at salads? “but the heat will recede, as it does when the sun progresses around the world and the hours of darkness begin.”

"But as I recall, when Hercules cleaned the stables he also slew the man who owned them. Because Augeas would not pay him for his work, Thomas. I think the king preferred to leave them as they were."

^^ a nice classical analogy. I wish Rae paid more attention to humanism and the classical learning of the characters. He tends to forget about the existence of humanism and the fact that the Reformation isn't binary, especially at this moment in time.

Not all the details are correct: The great seal of England sits inside a white linen bag when it was actually a white leather bag.

Rae continues to have good moments of levity:

“His single word expires, friendless and alone. He looks down at the floor as if he has lost its companions and thinks they might be down there somewhere.” “Ah yes, but there are only so many wives a man may take, before things start to become complicated. I think Henry has discovered this already, no?"

"By the mass I would have her now, hereupon the sweet earthen floor of the forest, with the sound of the rain hissing down upon the leaves around us."

Someone's watched The Tudors.

"His face, when he sees who has come uninvited and unannounced, is a picture, and his people begin at once to scurry to and fro like frightened chickens."

Someone's watched A Man For All Seasons.

"Thomas Howard. And Charles.... Charles..." he pretends to struggle to remember Suffolk's name. "Brandon? My Lords, you are welcome, though your message is not. Let me explain something to you."

Norfolk’s face contorts into an ecstasy of fury and hatred, and his hand reaches for his belt before he remembers he is unarmed. ‘You are ended, Wolsey. By the mass I will kill you myself, with my bare hands. "

Wolsey stares at him,  unmoved . "my Lord is intemperate."

He (Suffolk) gropes for a suitably devastating parting shot, but his invention fails him, as it often does."

Hilarious, I love it, 5 stars, 10/10. Wolsey is delightfully bitchy and it's infinitely better than the meh equivalent scene in Wolf Hall.

Now for my Notes.

"The story is that he fell ill on the journey from the north, and died of it, conveniently. I do not believe it. Either he ended his own life, or someone helped him to do it".

While I love the intrigue, this novel has gone to SUCH lengths to stress that Wolsey is stressed, out of shape and in poor health. If there's one thing we know about Wolsey from this novel it is that he is F-A-T. He's also 57. He's no spring chicken. It makes total sense that he'd fall ill and die, especially after a long journey, drinking and eating from a variety of different sources, some of which may well be contaminated. But the characters speak as though Wolsey was a svelte Olympic gymnast who was spinning around on the crossbars until he suddenly died from eating some dodgy kale.

"Then he tosses what remains over his shoulder, and wipes his hands upon the silken cloth." I get that Francis I is the worst but people took etiquette seriously in this time period.

"Mary discovered a taste for them [kings] in Paris, and says that it was the recommendation of king Francis that brought her to the King's attention."

I'm pretty sure historians are questioning the old story that Mary slept with Francis?

Elizabeth Boleyn suggested Anne play hard to get (which I like) but later in the book Rae has Norfolk suggest it to TB years before. Yet Thomas B reacts to Elizabeth as if it was the first time he heard it. So what gives?

And like in the Concubine, Rae puts in things he's read uncritically from historians, and the result is something that makes no sense.

"His [Norfolk] affection for More is undiminished" yet the scene clearly shows that they have nothing in common, they see the world in starkly different ways, Norfolk sees More as vain and stubborn and More sees Norfolk as a crude toady. Norfolk even has a "menacing look" when he looks at More. So what is this nonsense about them having any affection? Well, like Jane Boleyn's nonsensical motives in the Concubine, Rae has read a historian, unquestioningly, and feels the urge to insert it into the story like a square peg in a round hole even though as a writer he can probably tell it doesn't fit.

There are some anachronisms- the phrase 'like a good Catholic'. 'Catholic' means united- Anglicans believe in "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". Protestant and Catholic are divisions that show up in the 1550s. "More is a fanatic"- fanatic is a very modern criticism. People at the time wouldn't object to religious obsession- the problem was if your doctrine was incorrect.

(Also Henry should be happier at the birth of Elizabeth.)

Now for the misconceptions.

While Wolsey did get his BA at 15, university students then were younger than they are now.

“Henry has been taught to stick to what the bishops tell him in matters of religion, and he derives his idea of faith his elders, who have made him think that orthodox observance matters more than a deep personal sense of a world imbued with the Holy Spirit. He is often reluctant to talk about such things, but she has formed the opinion that he is genuinely in motion, attracted by the scent of reform and willing to alter his thinking to accommodate change.”

Henry was given a (renaissance) humanist education. And the humanists like Erasmus were influenced by the late medieval devotio moderna that placed great emphasis on interior faith. Erasmus absolutely believed that inner faith was more important than outward show: that rituals like the Mass mattered, but that empty ritual was bad. But Rae falls into the false binary of Catholic: Rituals Good and Protestants: Rituals Bad.

Gardiner says: “Your majesty must know that the Pope holds the keys to heaven, there is no higher authority. If clarification or exegesis is required concerning the interpretation of scripture, then the final word must always rest with His Holiness.”

There IS a higher authority! Gardiner and More would tell you that the highest authority in the Church is a Church Council. Basically all the bishops across Christendom come together in a General Council and the Holy Spirit descends upon them invisibly, blessing the proceedings and giving authority to the decisions. If the Pope, say, tried to get rid of the Nicene Creed, Gardiner and More would say the Pope is wrong. Because the Creed comes from the Council of Nicaea, and a General Council >>>>the Pope. Papal infallibility doesn't show up until the nineteenth century.

"How can I help you, when I do not believe it is the right course for a Christian king to abandon his lawful wife? I make no secret of it, as you know. I am not one of those who will say anything in the hope of pleasing you."

More's stance was actually closer to: "I'm not qualified to speak on this issue so I stay well out of it". Fiction tends to portray him as more outspoken in Katherine's support (though he did like her as a person) than he actually was. Fisher was the one loudly objecting to the divorce. It was the Supremacy that More took issue with: he was willing to accept the new succession.

"Attend to your Scripture, and tell me where it says that our Redeemer left any vicar to succeed him upon this earth."

More and Fisher don't give a rebuttal to this in the book- because Rae can't think of one. But they actually could: a Catholic would say that Jesus said exactly that in Scripture. Jesus says to Saint Peter in the gospels "you are the rock on which I build my church." Then in the book of Acts, (the sequel) Peter is the leader of the early Christians in the years after Jesus zooms up to heaven. For Catholics, St Peter is the first pope. All the later popes follow him because of something called the Apostolic Succession.

(Also Catholics believe that 2 Maccabees supports Purgatory. Problem is, both 1 and 2 Maccabees are deuterocanonical and therefore less authoritative than the gospels.)

“Going to Wittenberg, I believe, where he intends to continue his work. A new testament in English, what do you think of that, Thomas?” He looks at me and I see the sorrow in his eyes. He thinks very little of it indeed.

“And how will things be then? When the plough boy reads Scripture in his own rude tongue? Without guidance, or education, without knowledge? Without the interpretation of the church placed upon it? He will say, ah, now I understand it, here is the meaning of this, or that. But when he meets his fellow they will not agree upon it, for this man will say, no- you have it wrong, it means this. They will not be of a like mind, and will fall into endless disputation strife. and the heretics will go about amongst them, stirring up whatever abominations they wish. There will be no order in what men think, no agreement. There will be no unity. That is what the church gives to men, unity, and it is our only hope of it.” “And if men throw off the authority of the church, whose authority will they look to throw off next?”

“If the church is corrupted, then it must be reformed, from within, by honest men of faith. Who has appointed master Tynedale to translate scripture into English? Who is there to supervise and approve the work? No one, because it is forbidden, and with good reason.”

This is a mixture of accurate and inaccurate. Yes, More did see the authority of church and state as connected. He argued that the church had every reason to support the king- because when anarchy breaks out, vulnerable priests and monks and their churches are attacked and looted. So it was in the best interests of priests to support, not subvert, secular authority and the rule of law. Yes, More wanted reform from within the church. He wanted political reform of the church not theological reform. He didn't want fewer priests, he wanted well-educated and well-behaving priests.

But More was a humanist. The ploughboy singing psalms as he worked? Exactly what Erasmus wanted. Even when the Reformation was underway, More still wanted an authorised English Bible, as he thought it would do some harm, but on balance, more good than harm.

So why did he have such beef with Tyndale? Because of how Tyndale translated the Bible. Tyndale's word choice in More's eyes undermined Catholic doctrine and made it look like Catholic doctrine didn't have Scriptural support- especially dangerous given that Tyndale was also saying Sola Scriptura. Tyndale pointed out that some of his word choices were the same as Erasmus' word choices. But More argued that Erasmus was translating honestly while Tyndale was being subversive.

And while More's Confutation Against Tyndale's Answer is a fierce criticism, More does quote Tyndale saying something he agreed with: More replies to this quote "this is well and holily spoken". So I wouldn't say More is blind with hatred for Tyndale, any more than Tyndale is blind with hatred for More. If More was blind with hatred, he wouldn't say anything positive about a single word of Tyndale.

“Like many wise men, Thomas More understands astrology and can read what is written in the heavens.” More knew astronomy. Astrology More thought was BS. But that doesn't fit the binary of Rational Protestants versus Superstitious Catholics, even though Rational Tolerant Elizabeth I believed in astrology while UberCatholic Pope Fan More was sceptical.

Rae’s analysis is Whiggish, and like most Whigs, it gets really preachy really quickly.

“His mind is the prototype of the totalitarian. One who has invested in a static system of thought, which cannot easily accommodate change or development. More thinks only in terms of certainty, and cannot bear the presence of doubt, which may undermine the fortress.”

Anachronism aside, historians actually debate whether More's opinions changed over time: if he became more religiously conservative as the Reformation progressed, having started as a humanist Catholic reformer. Personally, I'm on the side of consistency. More was never opposed to burnings and his last letter to Erasmus explicitly supports Erasmus and his work and calls Erasmus' critics jealous people. His debate with Tyndale is a Catholic Humanist versus a Protestant Humanist. And in classic humanist fashion they're arguing about language.

As for doubt: his patron saint was Doubting Thomas. So I wouldn't say doubt is the enemy to him, but that you must overcome your doubts by choosing to believe.

Also More did not see the Church as static. Catholics believed in progressive revelation: ie. you can add to the faith (things like purgatory) if the Church has a revelation that is authorised by a General Council. You just can't contradict the Bible. The Protestants want to go back to the OG Christianity: the faith of late antiquity, and cut out things like Purgatory that are seen as medieval accretions. They want the Church to go back to the old and keep it that way. They are not changing- they are undoing change, in their eyes.

“He [More] thinks himself to be a compassionate man, but is untroubled by the grotesque cruelty he has inflicted on those who have dared to oppose the orthodoxy which he deems essential to peace and salvation. They are given every opportunity to see their errors and recant, and if they will not then they must burn, so that the infection of heresy may be cauterised, and other vulnerable souls may be saved from it. This is a man of the highest intellectual capacity, who has earned his place among the most exalted thinkers of the new century.”

You could say this about literally anyone in the Tudor period. Cranmer is also considered to be compassionate, and his writing shaped the English language, but that didn't help Joan Bocher, did it?

"Now there is nowhere for men like More to turn, except back to persecution and mediaeval barbarity."

I haaaaaaaaaate this line. It’s so Whig history. As someone interested in ancient history and also the Tudor and early modern period in particular, I can confidently say that barbarity is absolutely not the preserve of the mediaeval period. On the contrary, the early modern period gives us more holy wars and witch hunts. Back to persecution? Persecution was ongoing. Protestants in heartlands like Zurich were drowning Anabaptists in the Rhine at the same time as Catholics were burning them!

(Also Protestants believed in the Trinity and infant baptism even though there's actually no explicit mention of those things in the Bible...)

[tricornonthecob]

Now my Hips hurt

LK 110: Warshington Takes A Knee

(pt1)(pt2)(pt3)(pt4)

He's gonna steal the Declaration of Independence

oh man what is Spy!Henri doing.

Ominous Disguise feat, +2 stealth

The resident Bard is casting some mad buffs with that fiddle.

What a fanboi!

This is turning into an episode of Turn, all we need is the handwriting sound-effects from the subtitles when we get to a new scene.

Fucken. Street Urchin Cloak of Endearment +2 luck and NPCs have to make a wisdom saving throw or else they are charmed by you.

Who wants to bet John Andre is in Boston rn

Local Community Theater director is appalled.

awwww they're so disappointed.

Howe fucking would.

Henri really put all of his stats in Dex and Charisma, didn't he. This is why he's the best field agent in this outfit.

But like also they just didn't even try.

The fucking cardio of this frenchman

That seems... precarious.

"Oh gdi"

jesus fucking christ that's a fucking difficult move.

Honestly? If I survived that shit the adrenaline would leave me cackling like a madman.

Agent Henri reporting for debriefing, and toasting his bunsies.

Just gonna raid the Boston Community Theater server.

"But Desantis saw drag in an patriotic but educational children's cartoon and the cognitive dissonance gave him a brain anyeurism."

You may need to dial down your Whiggish tendency to be super thrilled at American victories, Sarah. Also lowkey love that you're taking care of some of James' pigeons.

Oh my god she loves them. She is all in on James' hobby.

OH MY GOD ITS BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU AND THUS THE PIGEONS KNOW YOU'RE A CORE PART OF THEIR FLOCK.

Like at first she's a little troubled by this and by them hanging around her but she kind of just "This is my life now." Like the dads who did not want pets but end up spoiling them.

I am SO invested in this.

And the sheer width of his shoulder measurement.

[di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es]

@sabakos:

I'd posit that most other "Whiggish" people are similar to me: the rejection of tradition is not about the traditions themselves, it's about the rejection of the people who would preserve them over all else. It's useless to negotiate with people who are willing to make sacrifices in the rate of industrialization and internationalization and modernization in the name of tradition. If being more sensitive to the preservation of cultural traditions means that the infant mortality rate takes ten more years to reach acceptable levels, then the people who advocate for cultural traditions must be sidelined and ridiculed, because they want to have infant blood on their hands. No amount of lost linguistic data or culturally significant oral tradition is worth a million dead babies. Industrialization is positive, tradition is at best neutral, but anyone who confuses those priorities and demands they are negotiable is a negative.

Not happy about swallowing the pill necessarily for a variety of reasons, but I cant argue with the logic

[helloquotemyfoot]

Book Backlog Busting Reading Challenge!

Okay, so it's been another hot minute. In my defence... um... Stardew Valley is a really fun game?

Okay, I haven't been spending all of my time gaming, I have been reading too! So here's my (condensed and no pretty pictures) list:

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. For some reason I just didn't find this gripping, which is strange because I loved another of Pratchett's books for younger readers (Amazing Maurice). I gotta admit that the ending got the tears going though.

Reformation Divided by Eamon Duffy. I love Duffy's work as a historian and this was no exception, providing an important counterbalance to the popular Protestant/Whiggish historical narrative. Quite dense, though, not recommended to a general audience.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Not flawless worldbuilding (the main issue being the tension between the author trying to write a feminist critique of the St George and the Dragon story, as well as building a fully realised fantasy world, which leads to things like a black man being told his religion is wrong by someone of a superior religion and culture, he's not allowed to politely ask that people don't disrespect his religion directly in front of him, and the narrative supporting this) but extremely compelling characters and I still enjoyed it immensely. Other fantasy authors should study how to tell a broad, epic narrative without eighty billion povs from Shannon too.

All Things Made New by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Really interesting studies, especially the meta historiographical essays, but I was lacking content for some of it. I need to look for more of his books.

Voices from Morebath by Eamon Duffy. Super interesting local study, Duffy strikes a good balance between the particulars of Morebath and using it as a (possible) generalising example. Very short book that I think would be interesting to general readers too!

Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan (Powder Mage Trilogy #1). Really fun, fast paced book with varied and interesting characters, gritty without becoming grim or too dark. The first time I've ever said this, but possibly a bit *over* worldbuilt, having no less than five different kinds of magic users in one story without any apparent unifying system, making it feel a bit like everything had just been shoved in there. Still, the story was never bogged down by exposition and I remain cautiously optimistic there is some kind of explanation forthcoming in the sequel books.

This leads me onto the topic of also books, but ones I haven't yet read. With my Wheel of Time boxset 4 finally arriving, I can pick up that series again and have added books 10-14 to my reading list. On top of that, per our house rule about sequels, I'm adding the other Powder Mage books to the list, so even though I have finished (brief count) 6 books since we last spoke, these additions lead me to say...

84 books remaining!

(Yes that means it did go up. I will still drag myself out of this bottomless pit of books somehow dammit.)