BOOK: Poggio Bracciolini, "On Leaders and Tyrants"

Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Pietro del Monte: On Leaders and Tyrants. Edited and translated by Hester Schadee, Keith Sidwell, with David Rundle. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 99. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674297128. xlvii + 566 pp.

This book is about a somewhat unusual subject: a minor controversy that took place amongst several humanist authors, in 1440, about whether Scipio Africanus was more excellent and virtuous than Julius Caesar, or vice versa. Actually we've had one somewhat similar book in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before, Ciceronian Controversies from 2007 (see my post about it); but the pieces that compose the present volume are a bit longer and come from a less numerous cast of authors.

Anyway, while the topic is perhaps a bit obscure, it wasn't too hard to relate to. This whole debate reminded me a little of the sort of arguments that nerds might have nowadays about this or that figure from some science fiction or fantasy franchise; and I guess you could say that the Renaissance-era humanists were fans of ancient Roman civilization in a way not entirely unlike how some people today might be fans of Star Trek or Star Wars or things like that.

On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar

The controversy begins with a short piece by Poggio Bracciolini titled On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar. This is shorter than most of the subsequent works in this volume, and was in many ways my favourite. Poggio gives a brief overview of the careers of both men, and I found the part about Scipio particularly interesting since I knew very little about him. I knew, of course, that he had been one of the leading Roman generals from the Second Punic War, but not much else; I remember reading a book about the Punic Wars many years ago and there must have been something about Scipio there, but I remembered nothing at all.

Poggio clearly considered Scipio to be a vastly more virtuous and excellent figure than Caesar, and from what we see of Scipio's and Caesar's life and actions here in Poggio's account, I was happy to agree with him. Admittedly I had disliked Caesar from before, and Poggio's essay didn't change my opinion about him in any way; as for Scipio, the account of his career that we get here is so glowing and impressive that I couldn't help wondering if there was some bias, either on the part of Poggio or of his sources. For example, there is of course plenty of dirt on Caesar in Suetonius's biography of him, as there is on every of the twelve emperors of whom Suetonius wrote biographies; and we might have had some dirt on Scipio too, if someone like Suetonius had written a biography of him, but no one seems to have done so (“The life of Scipio [. . .] was not written down by any of the ancients”, ¶13). My approval of Scipio might even have grown to admiration, were it not for the fact that I support the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars, so that I can't wholeheartedly approve of a general that fought *against* the Carthaginians. But even if Scipio was an instrument of Roman imperialism, Caesar was even more so; and so Scipio comes out looking better than Caesar anyway.

Speaking of Suetonius, Poggio also uses him as his source for various juicy and unfavourable remarks on Caesar's private life: “Caesar's early years, when he first joined the barracks, were not short of disrepute, for he was sometimes called ‘the bedstead of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia’ and ‘queen’ ” (¶4). “That Caesar was a man of immoderate lust is reported by Suetonius, who makes reference to his very many acts of fornication and adultery. That he was rapacious and covetous of other people's property is generally agreed” etc. (¶10). By contrast, “Scipio's youth is marked both by the most excellent conduct and by honorable deeds, and full of self-restraint, chastity, and modesty; but that of Caesar is reproached by all, and stained by outrages and infamy” (¶20).

But, of course, the main part of the comparison between these two men must concern their public careers. Scipio's conquest of Spain early in his career (¶17) seems to have been a good deal less bloodthirsty than the sort of wholesale genocides that one usually associates with Caesar's conquest of Gaul. And later, after his victory over Hannibal, he refused numerous extraordinary honours which the senate and the people offered him (¶19). Still later, when “his power had grown to the extent that, as Seneca reports, ‘it would become inavoidable that either Scipio must injure liberty, or liberty Scipio,’ [. . .] he left for voluntary exile in Liternum, lest by his presence he violate the liberty of the community” (¶20).* What a tremendous contrast in comparison with Caesar, who amassed power and offices with all the furious greed of a rodent on steroids...

[*Scipio died while in exile in Liternum (p. 476, n. 44), and “declined burial in the family tomb in Rome”; his tombstone bore the inscription “Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones” (ibid., n. 46).]

One curious detail that provides such a neat contrast between them that I couldn't help wondering how much I should trust it: they apparently both had interesting encounters with pirates. That of Caesar, of course, is well known: he got captured by pirates, joked to them that he would have them crucified, and after getting ransomed he gathered a small fleet, caught up with the pirates and kept his promise. By contrast, Scipio's pirate encounter was very different (and quite new to me): “These virtues had earned Scipio so much standing, so much veneration among all that, when he was in exile near Liternum, pirates came to him, revering him as though some divine power: they gave worship at the doorstep of his house as if it were a temple, and once they had placed gifts before the entrance as before some sacred place, they kissed Scipio's hand and left” (¶20). Sure, Caesar comes across as a badass, but also as something of an asshole; meanwhile, Scipio comes across as a paragon, virtuous to a super-humanly (and implausibly) ideal degree.

Anyway, although I enjoyed Poggio's bashing of Caesar (“we find nothing in Caesar's life that deserves worthily to be praised, except for his deeds done in war”, ¶12; “there is nothing on record on which Caesar could leave any trace of his virtue”, ¶21), and read with interest his praises of Scipio, ultimately most of these details are in some sense insignificant compared to the big and obvious difference between them: Scipio had gone out of his way to avoid amassing too much political power in a way that could have harmed the country, while by contrast Caesar went out of his way to gather all the power in his hands, thereby preparing the ground of the reintroduction of monarchy in Rome.

Thus, ultimately, whether you prefer Scipio or Caesar must depend on your attitude towards the monarchy-vs-republic question. I imagine that many people, both in Poggio's time and in other periods, looked with dismay at the turbulent history of republics, both in ancient Greece and Rome, or in renaissance Italy, and decided that monarchy was the preferable option as being more likely to lead to stability; and such people would probably admire Caesar for putting the rotten Roman republic out of its misery and bringing an end to a century of civil wars. I, however, can't regard the introduction of empire in Rome as anything other than a disaster; within a couple of generations they went from people like Caesar or Augustus, who despite their faults were at least capable politicians and administrators, to full-blown lunatics and psychopaths like Nero and Caligula; and they soon had plenty of civil wars again too, as ambitious generals began fighting each other for a chance to become emperor. For all its problems, and they were many, the Roman republic is surely infinitely preferable to the empire that followed it.

Poggio himself is clearly on the side of the republic here, perhaps because he himself was from one (Florence). “Scipio spurned the dictatorship he was offered, Caesar extorted it. One preserved the freedom of his people, the other reduced them to the most pitiful slavery.” (¶24.) In view of all this, the contest between Scipio and Caesar as to who is more excellent and virtuous is not only not close, it's almost completely one-sided; Caesar never stood a chance, and I was happy to see him thoroughly defeated; Scipio comes across as so obviously more virtuous that it's hard to see how Caesar could ever have been seen even as a serious contender.

The debate continues

For me, that first short essay by Poggio was the most interesting part of the book, and the rest of the documents from the controversy don't really add much to it. Another humanist intellectual, Guarino of Verona (also a noted teacher; in one of the early ITRL volumes, Humanist Educational Treatises, there's a treatise by his son, based on Guarino's methods), evidently took exception to Poggio's position and wrote a rebuttal, On the Excellence of Caesar and Scipio, which despite the title is mostly a defense of Caesar (of whom Guarino appears to have been a keen, long-time fan; p. 231). It is much longer than Poggio's essay, and not nearly as interesting; but what I disliked most about it is the rather high-blown rhetorical style in which it is written, constantly addressing Poggio directly and upbraiding him sternly for his supposed errors and shortcomings.

Much of what Guarino does is nitpicking at various little details that Poggio got wrong, or quibbling with small parts of his argument; there's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it has no chance of altering the ultimate conclusion (i.e. that Scipio is better than Caesar). For example, Poggio at some point blames Caesar for the decline of Latin literature in the wake of his reign; Guarino objects and points out the many important authors who flourished after Caesar's time. I'm perfectly willing to agree with Guarino on this particular detail; and moreover, to blame Caesar for any decline in Latin literature is silly because such a decline was inevitable anyway; no golden age lasts for very long, so there was bound to be a decline after Caesar's time regardless of what he did or didn't do. If nothing else, the language was changing, as any living language does; and in most cases, language change is a form of decline; a language usually changes for the worse, not for the better. The Romans, recognizing this, strove to keep on writing in the language of the classical period, and so not unnaturally got the worse at it the more their everyday speech differed from the classical language.

Another example where I agree with Guarino's quibble is where Poggio tried to denigrate Caesar's military successes by suggesting that the Gauls were “a barbarous and wild people, but unused to war” (¶22, p. 29), which is obviously quite absurd, and Guarino cites various authorities to that effect, concluding “that the Gallic people were at no time unused to war” and “were terrifying in arms” (¶57, p. 107).

On the other hand, some of Guarino's quibbles are completely bizarre. When Poggio talks about Caesar's lustful immorality and mentions his affair with Cleopatra as an example, Guarino replies by pointing out that Scipio “was once ensnared by love for a domestic slave and [. . .] surrendered to love”; “which of the two is more deserving of excuse? The man who loved a queen, or the one who loved a servant girl? The man who loved such a beauty that her age produced no finer, or the one who loved an ugly slave?” (¶54). Bold of him to assume that the slave-girl can't have been pretty; and for that matter, who is to say that Cleopatra's beauty can't have been a bit exaggerated by propaganda and then uncritically passed on by ancient historians? (Poggio, in ¶82 of his reply (p. 209), says about Cleopatra being pretty that “Plutarch writes the opposite”, and he mocks Guarino for writing as if he knew that Scipio's slave-girl was ugly.)

Anyway, Guarino, of course, knows that picking on details such as these can't change the argument in favour of Caesar, and so also defends the latter more directly; in his view, Caesar brought much-needed stability to the Roman state; he did not destroy Roman liberty, which “had long since been destroyed, though people still lived in her shadow” (¶60); under him, the fundamental structure of its government didn't change much, and the people were freer than before, being now liberated of the burden of civil strife. I don't doubt that many Romans in Caesar's time saw it that way themselves; his popularity attests to that; but in the long term their acquiescence in the introduction of monarchy was disastrous, and their descendants paid for it by living as subjects to a long series of horrible emperors.

Guarino's treatise provoked an equally long (or even slightly longer) response from Poggio, titled Defense of ‘On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar’, where Poggio goes into more details that he obviously couldn't go into when writing his original short essay, but on the whole this doesn't really have much potential to affect the outcome of the dispute. By the time you get to this point, you have surely already cast your lot either with Scipio or with Caesar, and you aren't likely to change your mind.

Poggio admits that Caesar does deserve some praise, just not as much as Scipio; “in Caesar there were very great outrages, but none in Scipio” (¶81, p. 207).

One thing where I definitely did symphathize with Poggio in his response was the way he objects not to the fact that Guarino disagreed with him, but to the manner of Guarino's disagreement. Poggio emphasizes that he wrote his opinion and that everyone is free to disagree (though he clearly also thinks that Guarino is being a bit silly with his pro-Caesar position); but since Guarino's response attacked him personally and constantly upbraided him in much too strong terms, he felt obliged to defend himself. (I'm guessing that Guarino had momentarily forgotten that he wasn't dealing with one of his students, who were presumably used to being upbraided by him in this manner.)

Poggio even mocks Guarino by saying that “I, for one, would not have believed this to be his work had it not been signed ‘Guarino’ [. . .] would reckon it had been cobbled together by some ranter in the market place and worthless litigator” (¶1, p. 129). Reminds me of that well-known line: “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters” :))

Both Poggio and Guarino tried to interest other intellectuals and even various members of the ruling class in the debate, with some success, and the last piece here is a letter to Poggio from Pietro del Monte, a church official who lived in London at the time. (There he even got the Duke of Gloucester (son of King Henry IV) interested in the dispute; ¶6.) Pietro (who was a friend of Poggio's and a former student of Guarino's; ¶1, 4) fully agrees with Poggio, both as regards the original dispute about Caesar and Scipio, as well as regarding the fact that Guarino's response was too personal and that Poggio was right to respond to it in turn. Pietro also provides some more quotations from ancient sources in support of his (and Poggio's) position. I was glad enough to see that we are all (except Guarino) mostly in agreement, but other than that Pietro's letter doesn't change anything substantial about the debate (and it wouldn't be reasonable to expect it to do so), and isn't likely to change anybody's mind.

I liked the part where Pietro compares Caesar to an earlier Roman tyrant, Tarquin the Proud; the expulsion of the latter was generally held to have been praiseworthy; and Caesar being even worse than Tarquin, “the case for killing Caesar was far more just and persuasive than that for expelling Tarquin” (¶32), and he approves full-throatedly of the assassination: “I could never praise worthily enough that deed of the best citizens” (ibid.).

On the Unhappiness of Leaders

Lastly, this volume also contains another work by Poggio, not related to the Scipio/Caesar controversy (though there is a mention of Caesar in C27 here, as an example of how rulers are generally not good people). It is a longish treatise titled On the Unhappiness of Leaders, and though technically in the form of a dialogue involving Poggio and three other learned men, the character of Poggio says very little in it and most of the talking is done by another speaker, Niccolò Niccoli, who I guess represents Poggio's actual views on the subject. He defends, at considerable length and illustrated by countless examples, mostly from ancient history but also a few more recent ones, the idea that “leaders” * aren't (and mostly can't be) happy (“there is no bond between leaders and happiness”, C18). The other speakers occasionally venture minor objections or try to soften his position somewhat, but Niccolò — who seems to be something of a Cynic and has much of the abrasiveness that traditionally went with that philosophical school — mostly just brushes them aside and keeps going (C40).

[*This is how the word principes is translated here, and I wonder why the translators don't say “rulers” or even “princes” instead; surely this would have suited the dialogue better, since pretty much all the examples in it are of monarchs; no other form of leadership is even hinted at. Poggio explicitly writes that “under this heading I want to include emperors, kings, dukes and the rest who hold sway over others” (C18).]

This is the sort of discussion that, although in a sense interesting, nevertheless gets tiresome fairly quickly, since so much of it hinges on how you define happiness. It soon became clear to me that Poggio's understanding of this word is different from mine. He (or should I say Niccolò as one of the characters in the dialogue) points out, for example, that leaders are prone to all sorts of vices and faults, since there is nothing much that would restrain them; the position of a leader “is bound either to corrupt even the good or to wear them out so thoroughly that they can have no taste of happiness” (C28); “ruling corrupts its possessors with a multitude of mental diseases” (C31). The very few who don't get corrupted will still be unhappy because of all the cares and burdens of their position (C18).

Diogenes himself would be proud of Niccolò when he says that “the things which Carlo cited as conducive to gaining happiness, namely riches, resources, the ability to do things, [. . .], these seem rather to be incitements to and instruments of unhappiness than of happiness.” (C32) He finds fault with everything; leaders “fear poison and ambushes set by their friends. Feasts and drinking sessions engender suspicion” etc. (ibid.; cf. also C56–57). Indeed good rulers “have been rarer than the Stoics' sage” (C37). I particularly liked the following sentiment by Niccolò, though I'm not sure if it's meant to be only anti-monarchism or full-blown anarchism: “with how many disasters the desire for power has afflicted the world [. . .] those men appear worthy of execration who first gave to one man what belonged to everyone and who, subjugating the freedom under which they were born to slavery, preferred one person to have more power than everyone else” (C38); “the position of leader is by nature a bad thing” (C40). To the suggestion that some rulers haven't been that bad, he replies simply that “they have been rarer than monsters and miracles” (ibid.)

This is all well and good, and I'm always glad to see rulers being bashed, but what on earth does it all have to do with happiness? Here we come to the crux of the matter. Niccolò turns to ancient authorities as to what happiness even is: “Aristotle tells us [. . .] that happiness is obtained through the exercise of the virtues. Our own Cicero wishes it to be prosperity in honorable matters or a fortune which aids good counsels, and the person who does not experience these cannot by any means be happy. Hence where virtues or good counsels are lacking, where vices are present, in that place there cannot exist any happiness.” (C46) Later Niccolò tells us his own opinion (and, commendably, says he will not define happiness as narrowly as the Stoics would): “happiness follows a mind which is peaceful, at liberty and free of all disturbance” (C84), which he insists a ruler can't possibly be.

Well, at this point the whole dialogue started to feel a bit superfluous; with such a cunning definition of happiness it is of course blindingly obvious that rulers can't be happy. But the definitions he quoted clearly come from moralists who are trying to manipulate us into behaving virtuously by dangling the prospect of happiness before us like some sort of carrot. Our everyday notion of happiness is surely much wider than that; it's an emotion that people feel, sometimes for shorter and sometimes for longer periods, under various circumstances (and I suppose that modern-day science could tell us precisely which hormones are flooding our brains at that particular moment, and which gland emits them, and I'm frankly surprised why we can't buy them in the form of pills yet).

I could very easily imagine a leader being happy; if he has a reasonably well-organized court, he doesn't have to be as paranoid and suspicious all the time as Niccolò suggests; if he has the slightest sense of delegation (a concept which Niccolò never even hints at), he can hand over much of his work to ministers, advisors, etc., and so avoid being overburdened with the business of running the state (which Niccolò often mentions as one of the things that makes rulers unhappy); and then, if he doesn't have too complicated a personality, he can devote himself to enjoying the pomp and ceremony of his court, the feasting and drinking, the musical and theatrical entertainments, he can chat with his friends, he can dally with his concubines, he can go out hunting — heck, he could even dabble in the arts or whatever other hobbies he might be into; he can, in short, be as happy as a pig in the mud. At least he would call himself happy, and you and I would call him happy; but Aristotle and Cicero and Niccolò wouldn't, I suppose.

Later Niccolò lists many instances of cruelties perpetrated by various rulers (especially the killing of family members as potential rivals) and asks rhetorically: “Do you think that among so many and so foul and monstrous crimes any trace of happiness is left?” (C76) But if he cites authorities concerning the nature of happiness, I can do that as well: “One might kill and rob and yet be happy” — Rostov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, book 4, ch. 15. :]

Niccolò also likes to exaggerate the cares and burdens of a ruler's position; “those who think they are in control, are in fact the slaves of everyone” (C85); “a good leader” is “as it were the public slave of everyone” (C87). But, surely, the solution to this is very simple; don't worry too much about being the perfect leader; don't try to micromanage everything; by igoring some of the work and delegating some of the rest, I'm sure the burdens of leadership can be whittled down to something very tolerable.

Towards the end, the author can't resist tooting his own horn a bit; “it is not among leaders, but among private individuals that happiness is sometimes found” (C97), that is if they are virtuous and pursue “wisdom and learning” (C98); “their mind, removed from ambition, free from desire, is content with what is their own, not seeking what is someone else's, they live freely and make their adherents happy” (ibid.); “if any people seek happiness, they should realize that it has its abode not in the position of leader but in virtue and the blessed life” (C102).

Now, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the life of a (preferably independently wealthy*) scholar-intellectual who doesn't seek public office could indeed be very happy; I just disagree that the concept of happiness should be defined so narrowly. Most people, from most walks of life, can be happy from time to time, and pretty much nobody will be happy all the time, since that just isn't how our brain works. Happiness is not confined to any particular segment of society, and it's nonsense to say that rulers aren't, and can't ever be, happy.

[*He adds later: “I would not call leaders more unhappy than those who hang on the leader's nod in their desire for external things”, C102.]

Miscellaneous

I have to commend the translators for translating a quotation from the Aeneid on pp. 261–3 as real verse, with metre and all, and not as prose as is usually done in the ITRL. I tried to google a few phrases from their translation of this passage but got no hits, so I guess the translation is their own, made especially for this volume.

On the other hand, their use of “taboo” on p. 383 feels anachronistic; you can't help being reminded of the fact that the term and the concept come from Polynesian cultures, with which Europeans would not have had contact for quite some time after Poggio's day.

I also raised an eyebrow at “mining bronze” on p. 365. Surely you can't mine bronze, since it's an alloy of copper and tin? Isn't it more likely that the Latin word aes, which can mean both ‘bronze’ and ‘copper’, is intended in the latter sense here?

And on p. 291, we have “as bluebottles fly toward honey”; since this English word was new to me, I peeked at the Latin on the facing page and found that there they are muscae, i.e. simply “flies” and not specifically bluebottles, which are just a subset of flies.

An interesting anecdote that I didn't previously know about: “Plato, after being summoned by Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily because of the glory of his learning, was sold into slavery upon the tyrant's orders.” (On the Unhappiness of Leaders, C62.) Well, that escalated quickly! I wonder how he got out of this terrible predicament.

I have never given this any thought before, but the words serve and preserve are obviously related, but it isn't so obvious why two such related words should have such unrelated meanings. Apparently the ‘preserve’ sense came first: “slaves [servi] are named from the fact that commanders are wont to sell, and thus save [servare], slaves, and not to kill them” (p. 497, n. 109).

Interesting: Poggio, while attending the Council of Constance, spent some time travelling in Germany looking for manuscripts of otherwise lost ancient literary works, and made several important discoveries (p. 510, n. 20).

BOOK: John Keay, "Last Post"

John Keay: Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East. London: John Murray, 2005. (First ed.: 1997.) 0719555892. xii + 388 pp.

Another book that I bought nearly twenty years ago and only got around to reading now. This is a very pleasant and very readable narrative history of the end of Western colonialism in the Far East, from about 1930 onwards, but there are also several chapters (covering the first 1/3 or so of the book) about how those areas had come under Western control in the first place, which I thought was a great idea as it makes the story quite self-contained.

Placing the beginning of the end of empire in 1930 means that there are basically four imperialist powers that are of interest for the purposes of this book: Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. Portugal still had a few small scraps of territory such as East Timor and Macao, but those are pretty much irrelevant; Spain had lost her territories (such as the Philippines) to the USA at the end of the 19th century. As for Japan, I guess the idea is that Japanese imperial presence in the Far East came to an end with their defeat in the WW2 and there isn't really a separate process of ‘the end of empire’ distinct from their simply losing the war, so there isn't much to say about them in a book like this (although we do of course see a lot about how Japan's conquests of former Western colonies during WW2 contributed to the end of Western imperialism in the East).

*

Although the book is mostly about the end of empire, I found the early chapters, about the growth of Western imperialism in the Far East, very interesting as well. It turns out there were a lot of differences between the four imperial countries. The Dutch had had a fairly long presence in Indonesia (though they didn't finish conquering it until the late 19th century; p. 28), and it was very important to them since they had almost no other colonies elsewhere; they cared about it only from a business point of view, invested heavily and made it very profitable to themselves (p. 15–17), mostly by requiring the natives to dedicate a certain proportion of their land (and time) to growing cash crops for the government (pp. 21–22).

By contrast, the British had so many different colonies in the east that “few outside the Colonial Office” (p. 35) could have listed them all; unsurprisingly, many of these were quite new to me. And in a such wild variety of political arrangements, too; there were the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, the Straits Settlements; there was Sarawak, technically an independent monarchy ruled by ‘White Rajahs’ of the Brooke family; and of course there were treaty ports and concessions in China. Of the treaty ports, Shanghai was by far the most important, initially for trade but later also for industry; all the imperialist powers had a presence there, and their concession, the International Settlement, was an example of the “increasingly collaborative approach” (p. 146) to imperialism.

I knew about the 99-year lease on Hong Kong's New Territories which the British obtained from China in 1898; but it turns out that at the same time they got another lease — Weihaiwei, a town much farther north, on the Shantung Peninsula. They were supposed to keep it for as long as the Russians kept Port Arthur; the Russians had to give up the latter after their defeat against Japan in 1905, but the British stayed in Weihaiwei until 1930, when they finally handed it back to China after some prodding (and with remarkably little fuss). The two British officials who had administered this territory were keen Sinophiles: “Run by a Confucianist with a Buddhist as his assistant, Weihaiwei, it was said, was more Chinese than China” (p. 39).

In the case of France, I was particularly suprised by how short-lived their empire in the Far East was: Keay points out that Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of independent Vietnam, was the son of a minor official in the service of the last emperor prior to French colonial rule (pp. 89–90). One gets the impression that for the French, their empire in Indo-China was not primarily a matter of business and profit, but a means of boosting their national pride and spreading christianity and (French) civilization (pp. 92–3); but despite the fine colonial buildings constructed in Saigon, the French impact on the area was actually very shallow (pp. 99–101).

Lastly, there's the USA, whose colonial presence in the Philippines was even more short-lived, starting only in 1898. I knew that they had been a Spanish colony prior to that, but was now interested to learn that Spain had conquered the Philippines from America and subsequently administered them from Mexico (p. 108). The Philippine revolt against Spanish rule in the late 19th century also had more in common with similar revolts in early-19th-century South America than with the later anti-colonial revolts in Southeast Asia in the 20th century (p. 110). The U.S. was at war with Spain around that time, took over several Spanish territories such as Cuba and Porto Rico, and sort of pretended to have taken over the Philippines from Spain as well, although the Spanish had by then almost completely lost control to the Philippine revolutionaries (whose declaration of independence was simply ignored by the U.S.; pp. 112–13). Apparently the Americans believed that if they didn't occupy the Philippines, some other imperial power would (p. 115), which I guess is entirely possible. Although U.S. presence on the Philippines started with a nasty military campaign to suppress the independence movement, relations got better later on, and the Filipinos, especially their elites, became heavily Americanized (p. 119). The U.S. was in principle committed to Philippine independence at some vague indefinite point in the future, and meanwhile gave them favourable access to U.S. markets (pp. 119–20). In 1933 they promised independence in ten years, and the Philippines indeed became independent after the war, in 1946 (p. 187).

William Taft, who would later become famous as the fattest president in U.S. history, spent some time on the Philippines to help organize a civilian government there: “Taft was chiefly remarkable for a stature which rivalled that of most Filipino homes and a 325 lb bulk which exceeded that of entire Filipino families.” :))) (P. 118.)

*

The Great Depression apparently hit southeast Asia pretty badly; the economic slump brought in its wake higher taxation and labour unrest (pp. 128–33); “[t]he myth of colonial prosperity was wrecked by the depression” (p. 4). Nationalist movements emerged and began calling for an end of colonial rule; but probably they would have emerged sooner or later anyway, regardless of the economy.

China, which had of course never really been colonized by the imperialists, was already governed by a nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, who was pushing for a return of the concessions (such as those in Shanghai) under Chinese control, and might have achieved this had the process not been interrupted by the Japanese aggression on China in 1931 (p. 151). The Shanghai concession “rested on bluff” (p. 142) — the imperialist powers had no realistic way of protecting it against the forces which now loomed around it. For a time the bluff worked; in 1931, fighting reached Shanghai but stopped on the borders of the International Settlement, whose inhabitants would gawk at the fighting “[f]rom their roof-tops and verandas” (p. 152). But when the Sino-Japanese conflict escalated into a full-blown war in 1937, “the spell of imperial inviolability” (p. 155) was broken; the settlement got bombed, it had to accept an increasing amount of Japanese control, and its economy declined so much that there was hardly any point in its continued existence (p. 156). Imperial presence in China (except in Hong Kong) was simply swept away in the first couple of years of the war.

Japan's war against China didn't go as well as the Japanese had expected, which led them to increase their war aims so as to justify this unexpectedly large and hard war; they now wanted a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” covering the whole Far East (p. 161). This put them on a course for conflict with the Western powers, who were in any case busy with the war in Europe and weren't really in a position to defend their Far Eastern colonies well. Previously Japan had depended on resources imported from the U.S., but the latter now imposed an embargo and Japan pushed into southeast Asia to secure such things as rubber from Malaya and oil from Indonesia (p. 168). Colonial administrations there were embarrassingly easily swept away; the myth “of imperial invincibility was exploded” (p. 4). In French Indo-China it was even easier; Vichy France maintained neutrality towards Japan and yielded to Japanese demands without a fight, e.g. allowing Japan to station troops in Vietnam (p. 166). On the Philippines, the Americans had ambitious plans to defend the islands, but this went badly and they had to abandon most of the territory quickly (pp. 189–90).

General MacArthur, who led the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines in 1941–2, went to considerable lengths to liberate them speedily in 1944–5. As a result, he was enormously popular there (pp. 194–5), and so was the U.S. as a whole: the Philippines became independent in 1946, but kept very close ties to the U.S., and “nowhere in the East [. . .] did the ex-colonial power enjoy greater popularity” (p. 197).

But in countries where the imperial powers intended to re-establish colonial rule, things would not be so easy. Many of these territories were still occupied by Japanese forces when Japan surrendered, which deprived the Dutch, British and French of restoring their colonial prestige by liberating their ex-colonies in a triumphant campaign (p. 213). Moreover, late in the war, Japan had begun promoting the notion of future independence in such occupied countries as Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines etc., with the idea that they would be Japanese puppet-states, or “at least not anti-Japanese” in case Japan lost the war (p. 208). Nationalist movements in Indonesia and north Vietnam declared independence at the end of the war (pp. 210, 219). The former colonial powers would have to wage wars on them to re-establish control; but they were weakened after the WW2 and could hardly expect the U.S. to help them regain their colonial empires.

In Malaya, the British fared a bit better since the country was too ethnically divided for a nationalist movement to have emerged (p. 229); the native Malays were in danger of becoming a minority amidst all the Indian and Chinese immigrants (known as “Malayans”). Moreover, the British empire in the Far East had been attractive and profitable because of “India's eastern trade” (p. 242), and there was little point in trying to hold on to it once India became independent. “Like one stricken with senile impotence, the British found that losing the means to perform coincided with losing the inclination.” :)))) (P. 243.)

By contrast, the French regarded Indo-China as “part of France; their inhabitants could become French citizens, their deputies sat in the French government” (p. 244), and they also saw their colonies as the key to restoring their great power status (p. 275); and the Netherlands needed its colonies for its post-WW2 recovery “and to avoid, as one Dutch statesman put it, ‘becoming another Denmark’ ” :)) (p. 245). These two countries therefore resisted demands for colonial self-government or independence, or at best tried to deflect them by offering to establish vague unions of the metropole and the colonies, in which the former would always have the upper hand (pp. 261, 275).

The situation in Indonesia struck me as particularly bizarre. The nationalist movement obtained Japanese weapons and was in control of the country; in some places former Dutch prisoners now had to stay in their camps under Japanese guard “for their own safety”, due to all the nationalist militias rampaging outside — how embarrassing :)); and occasionally the Japanese, having surrendered, then fought alongside the British against the nationalists (pp. 250–2). The British troops, which were mostly from India, withdrew in late 1947; the Dutch kept fighting but came under heavy international pressure as aggressors against the “Indonesian Republic” (p. 263). The U.S. had reluctantly tolerated the re-establishment of colonial rule on the theory that it helped prevent the spread of communism, but once it became clear that the Indonesian Republic is heavily anti-communist itself, the U.S. withdrew its support of the Dutch and threatened to cut them out of the Marshall Plan; hence they finally caved in and recognized Indonesian independence (pp. 268–9).

The French fought in Vietnam for a few years, relying to a considerable extent on American equipment (pp. 270–4); for some time they negotiated with Ho Chi Minh about the establishment of a French-Vietnamese union, but refused to offer any real autonomy to Vietnam, so that Ho Chi Minh's policy of moderation and negotiation with France was discredited (pp. 283–5). Hitherto the war hadn't mattered much to anyone outside France and Vietnam, but this began to change after the latter gained the support of China and the USSR (p. 291); now the war became part of “America's global crusade against Communism” (p. 292). After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the French agreed to partition the country and withdraw from (communist-controlled) North Vietnam; and the U.S. was now propping up South Vietnam, so there was no further role for France there (pp. 295–6). Soon South Vietnam received “more than half of its total revenue” in the form of U.S. aid (p. 347); more and more U.S. equipment and soldiers were being shipped in, and in 1965 the U.S. entered the war in earnest (p. 352). Their public opinion soon grew tired of it, the U.S. withdrew in 1972, and South Vietnam collapsed by 1975 (p. 353).

There was also a communist insurgency in Malaya around 1950, but the British managed to suppress it, partly by wisely minimizing civilian casualties (p. 308) and partly by committing to Malay independence and presenting communism as a common enemy to Malay nationalists (p. 302). Malaya became independent in 1957 and merged with a few other states into Malaysia a few years later — a much smoother transition to independence than in Vietnam (pp. 303, 320). There were even some areas that didn't want independence, such as Penang (p. 316), a region in Malaya; nor were the people of Sarawak happy when the last White Rajah ceded the territory to Britain (p. 239).

The last bit of empire to be surrendered was Hong Kong; the lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997, and the rest of the colony (which had in principle been ceded to Britain permanently) would be unviable without them; moreover China demanded the whole of Hong Kong, and Britain wasn't really in a position to prevent them from doing so. As is well known, the only concession that the British were able to obtain from China was a promise to maintain democracy in Hong Kong for fifty years (p. 364). Keay, writing soon after these events, seems to have regarded this arrangement with a certain amount of optimism, but as we now know, the Chinese broke their promise before even half of the fifty-year period was over.

*

An interesting observation from p. 274: after the WW2, “empire as a mechanism of control was ending because ease of communication was making it obsolete”, e.g. due to the spread of air travel. You could still do imperialism, but didn't have to maintain “elaborate administrative structures and far-flung military establishments”. — U.S. interventions in the Philippines in the '50s (to suppress a communist insurgency; pp. 336–41) or Vietnam in the '60s were a typical case of imperialism, even though they didn't involve “the colouring-in of world maps, the monarch's head on colonial currencies and postage stamps” etc. (p. 335). Old-school empire was simply “outdated” (ibid.). Another sense in which empire is now obsolete is that the sort of wars required to maintain it are unacceptable to Western public opinion (p. 355), which makes these wars politically insupportable (as long as the countries are democratic, at least).

*

Looking back, I can't help but be surprised at how quick and easy the end of Western imperialism in the Far East was. Who would have thought, in 1930, that in little more than twenty years it would all be over? When you look at maps of the world in the Age of Imperialism, with huge swathes of the planet painted pink, blue, etc. to signify the British, French etc. empires, it's hard to resist the temptation to think that such huge empires must have been enormously powerful; and yet they all turned out to have been mere houses of cards, completely unable to preserve themselves, collapsing ignominiously at the slightest push as soon as they were dealing with anything other than literal spear-chucking natives. I think this fact, just how weak these empires really were, is not emphasized enough in education today, and this gives us an unrealistic idea as to just what is possible for a country to accomplish if it sets its mind to it.

Another proof of just how weak the imperialists really were is the fact that they never managed to colonize any substantial parts of China, and never even seriously tried to. Even in the 19th century when they actually won a few wars against China, none of those were proper wars of conquest; and when they won, all they got was just leases here and concessions there, nothing that China couldn't easily claim back once she ceased to be weak. It is telling that the only imperialist country that managed to conquer any substantial amount of Chinese territory was Japan with her conquest of Manchuria, probably due to the advantage of geographical proximity. That famous old cartoon of imperialist powers carving up China turned out to be a mere illusion. I wonder how different the world would be today if China *had* been properly colonized. In that hypothetical scenario, would the China of today be less dangerous and harmful than she is here in the real timeline, with its size, power and malignant authoritarianism? If the imperalist powers had really carved China up, there might be several independent countries there now, smaller and hence less dangerous and less harmful.

Another interesting hypothetical scenario: obviously the WW2 had a big effect towards speeding up the end of imperialism in the Far East, but it's tempting to speculate how things would have developed if the WW2 hadn't taken place, or if the imperialist powers had been able to reassert control after the war — perhaps with American help, if the U.S. hadn't been so heavily opposed to traditional colonial empires at the time. But I suspect that even then, the end of empire could only have been delayed by a few decades, rather than really prevented. Once the whole population of a colony becomes politically conscious and is completely opposed to your colonial rule, what are you going to do? You'd have to have a spy in every street, a squad of soldiers on every corner, send millions of people to prison camps, pile up mountains of skulls, raze villages and cities to the ground. It is certainly possible to control a hostile subject population that way. Many conquerors have done it over the course of history; China's treatment of the Uyghurs is a recent case in point, as is Russia's treatment of the parts of the Ukraine that they are presently occupying. But by the mid-20th century the western powers, and especially their public opinion, didn't have the stomach for that sort of thing any more; and without that you can't do old-style imperialism with any success, and there's no point in even trying. It may even be objectively true that you'd be bringing a better administration to the primitive inhabitants of your colony, but they won't appreciate it, and your efforts will be wasted.

ToRead:

Keay mentions a great many very interesting-sounding books, especially memoirs of people who were involved in the events discussed in this book.

• Hickmann Powell: The Last Paradise (1930). A book about Bali: “A world rent by repressions and revolutions badly needed a new paradise myth, and in this island in the back of beyond it found it” (p. 14).
• Ladislao (László) Székely: Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (1937). The memoirs of a Hungarian who participated in the ‘gold rush’ focused on tobacco cultivation in late-19th-century Dutch East Indies: “He found unimaginable brutality, described it in appalling detail, yet stayed on long enough to acquire the expected reward” (p. 26).
• R. O. Winstedt: Start from Alif: Countfrom One (1969). An official in British Malaya, he is mentioned here on p. 30 for his remarks on the Dutch exploitation of Java.
• Gregor Krause: Bali (2 vols., 1920; archive.org has the 1922 one-volume reprint); “written in German but lavishly illustrated with photographs of Balinese physiques” (p. 31), this book drew the attention of Western travellers and helped make Bali a tourist destination.
• Reginald Johnston: Lion and Dragon in Northern China (1910). A memoir by a British official in China; later he also became the tutor of the last Chinese emperor and eventually served as the last British governor of Weihaiwei (p. 77). I now see on Johnston's Wikipedia page that he wrote two other interesting-sounding memoirs: From Peking to Mandalay (1908) and Buddhist China (1913).
• Stella Benson: this “sylph-like novelist” (p. 82) of the 1920s and '30s lived in China for a number of years, where her husband was a British customs official; Keay mentions her a few times and occasionally quotes from her letters (Some Letters of Stella Benson, ed. by C. Clarabut, 1978), but doesn't mention any of her novels or travel books specifically. I was greatly intrigued to read, in her wikipedia page, that she received the Benson Medal :)
• Osbert Sitwell: Escape With Me! (1939). A travel book, mentioned here on p. 100 for Sitwell's impression of the shallowness of French presence in Indo-China.
• Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown: Crowded Hour (1975). Memoirs of an “old Malay hand” (p. 233; also quoted on pp. 126, 177).
• Maggie Keswick: The Thistle and the Jade (1980). She was the daughter of John Keswick, a prominent Scottish businessman in China (hence the title). Mentioned here on p.  127; when the Sino-Japanese war started in 1937 and the Chinese authorities “banned the use of the radio telegraph, desperate dealers in Jardine Matheson's office suddenly became avid pigeon fanciers” :)
• R. H. Bruce Lockhart: Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). About his time as a spy in Russia in 1918–19; mentioned here on p. 133.
• Mona Gardner: Menacing Sun (1940). An American writer who visited Singapore shortly before the Japanese invasion; quoted here on p. 172.
• Ronald C. H. Mackie [but everyone else on the internet spells it ‘McKie’]: This Was Singapore (1941). “A laconic Australian journalist with a Philip Marlowe prose style” (p. 173), he spent three years in Singapore just before the war.
• Somerset Maugham: The Circle (1921), The Painted Veil (1925), The Casuarina Tree (1926), The Summing Up (1938). According to the wikipedia, these are a play, a novel, a book of short stories, and a memoir, respectively. Keay refers to them here and there in the book, so presumably they are at least partly set in the Far East (pp. 62, 85, 172).
• Agnes Keith: Land Below the Wind (1939), Three Came Home (1948). A “restrained but heart-rending account, later filmed, of survival in Japanese detention” (p. 180), by the American wife of an English official on Borneo.
• K'tut Tantri: Revolt in Paradise (1960). K'tut Tantri was “the Balinese title used by a Scots-born American called Vaneen Walker” (p. 182; but her wikipedia page currently says Muriel Stuart Walker); she ran a hotel on Bali in the 1930s. Her “account of her wartime exploits as a gun-runner for the Indonesian resistance and then as a prisoner of the Japanese has strained the credulity of critical readers” (p. 257). At the end of the war she gained some notoriety for her radio broadcasts in support of the nationalists trying to prevent the re-establishment of colonial rule in Indonesia (ibid.).
• Albert Klestadt: The Sea Was Kind (1959). “A pipe-smoking back-packer with a taste for intelligence”, Klestadt lived in Manila when the Japanese invaded. He was initially interned but “[s]ome fluency in Japanese [. . .], plus his German birth, secured his release” (p. 190), and after many adventures he eventually made his way to Australia.
• F. Spencer Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (1953). About his involvement in resistance to Japanese occupation in Malaya (p. 213).
• Compton Mackenzie: All Over the Place (1947). A book about “the wartime exploits of the Indian army” (p. 242): “Nowhere east of Gibraltar had Indian troops not been involved” (p. 243).
• James A. Mitchener: The Voice of Asia (1952). Quoted here on p. 236 for his observations on Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak.
• Dirk Bogarde: Backcloth (1986). A memoir of his time as an intelligence officer in Indonesia just after the war (pp. 249, 252); later he became a famous actor.
• Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent (1951). He travelled in Indo-China while the French were trying to re-establish control (p. 274). For a moment I thought he was the same travel writer who had written Old Calabria some time before WW1, but then it turned out that I mixed him up with Norman Douglas.
• S. J. Perelman: Westward Ha! or, Around the World in 80 Clichés (1948). The author was an American humourist; mentioned here on p. 289 for his encounter with the Vietnamese ex-emperor who, by 1947, was living it up in the night clubs of Hong Kong.
• Lucien Bodard: The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (1967). The author was a journalist and “friend and mentor to the novelist Graham Greene” (p. 292).
• Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955). A novel set early in the Vietnam War; some of the characters are based on real people (pp. 343–4).

BOOK: Patrick French, "Liberty or Death"

Patrick French: Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division. London: Flamingo, 1998. (First ed.: HarperCollins, 1997.) 0006550452. xxv + 467 pp.

Yet another book about India that I bought a long time ago (some 15 years ago, in this particular case) and only got around to reading it now. I probably wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't found it at a deep discount in a bookshop at the time, as I'm not *that* interested in the subject of Indian independence; but now that I've read it, I have to say that it was actually quite interesting, and certainly well written.

I was also intrigued by the title, though one associates its more with the Greeks than with the Indians; and I remembered it vaguely as the title of a novel that I read long ago in the early years of this blog. I see now in the wikipedia that many other revolutionary groups also used this slogan, but I can't see any specific connection to India, nor do I remember noticing any references to this slogan in French's book, despite its use as the title, except briefly in the introduction (p. xxv) and one instance of Bose's supporters using it in 1943 (p. 205).

The book does have one or two features that I found a bit odd. As French explains in his introduction, the British government used to have its spies keep an eye out on various Indian independence activists, both in India and in Britain, and the files of these intelligence agencies remained classified until French, in the process of working on this book, got the government to release them (p. xxi). I imagine it is every historian's dream to be able to tap into a fresh and previously unaccessible store of primary source material, so we can't blame him for making use of it in this book; but I couldn't help feeling that the way he made use of it was somewhat incongruous. Most of the time his book tells a perfectly ordinary story with characters whose activities were a well-documented matter of public record — your viceroys, your Congress politicians and the like — but then every now and then, our attention is suddenly and briefly diverted to some obscure official from the Indian Political Intelligence or some other such spying organization, without it ever being particularly obvious why we should suddenly be interested in them or whether their activities really had any material impact on the larger story. You can't help feeling that he included them simply because that's what his fresh new source material was about, so he was damn well going to include these things in his book.

The other odd thing is his concern that “by approaching the past through documents and dignitaries, I risked writing bureaucrat's history rather than living, human history” (p. xxiii), and to ameliorate that he occasionally interrupts his historical narrative with a page or two about his conversations with random people in India whom he encountered while doing research for the book. It's not that these passages aren't also interesting to read (I particularly liked the section where he follows the route of Gandhi's salt march; p. 74), but they don't really improve your understanding of the historical period that the book is supposed to be about; they would fit better into a travel book instead of a history book; and besides, I think a bureaucrat's history focused on documents and dignitaries is precisely how history should be written — those are the things that matter, and not the everyday lives of random unimportant people. If what you really want to be is a collector of anecdotes and teller of tales, that's fair enough, but you shouldn't mix that up with the practice of writing history. It's sad to think that the field of history has sunk so low that a historian now feels compelled to apologize for not focusing enough on random nobodies.

One thing I liked about the book is that it's fairly broad in its coverage. It starts around 1900 (early enough that when we first meet Nehru, it isn't Jawaharlal but his less well known father Motilal) and doesn't end with independence, but also contains a few chapters about its aftermath: the partition of India and Pakistan, with the enormous amount of violence that accompanied it; subsequent political developments in both countries (it was depressing to see how quickly Pakistan descended into its now seemingly permanent condition of military dictatorship, p. 365); the civil war in Pakistan that led to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh; and in an excellent couple of chapters at the end of the book, French spoke to a wide selection of people who still remembered the partition and whose lives had been impacted by it. At the time of the writing of his book — and I suspect it is not much different now, some 25 years later — there still existed whole communities of people who were basically stuck on the wrong side of a border. (An interesting observation from p. 381: noting the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, French says that “most political commentators” think that “Hindu extremism has reached its peak, and will now decline into oblivion”. Alas, that was more than 20 years ago, and we can now see that just the opposite happened, and the BJP has been ruling India for a decade now.)

I also liked French's many concise and interesting judgments on the various politicians involved in the story. For example, as someone who mostly knew about Gandhi from watching the famous biographical film in which he had been played by Ben Kingsley, I was interested to see here that the real Gandhi “was an emotionally troubled social activist and a ruthlessly sharp political negotiator” and “a crafty Gujarati lawyer” (p. 17). Jinnah was a “cadaverous chain-smoker” (p. 230) and, somewhat surprisingly for the leader of the Muslim League and hence practically the founder of Pakistan, a ham sandwich enjoyer :)) (p. 63).

*

Despite starting earlier and ending later, the bulk of the book deals with the period from approx. 1920 to independence. The Indians had expected that their loyalty during WW1 would be rewarded with greater autonomy after it, but the reforms introduced by the British after the war were minimal and kept the vast majority of power in British hands. This disappointment “marked the start of serious agitation” (p. 37) and transformed the Indian National Congress into a truly mass movement. British rule was based on “legal authoritarianism rather than arbitrary totalitarianism” (p. 37), and so they couldn't really do much to seriously suppress the movement once it grew large enough (p. 52).

Indeed I couldn't help feeling, as the story progressed, a sense of inevitability about it — British rule in India had always relied on the fact that, at some level, Indians basically accepted it, and once this ceased to be the case there was no way the British could have kept India short of going full Nazi on it; and they weren't willing to go as far as that. You can't help feeling that this must surely have been obvious to them in 1920 if not earlier, so that instead of dragging their feet for another few decades and then leaving in a positively unseemly haste once things really got out of control, they could have preserved some dignity by exiting earlier, before it became obvious how powerless they were to direct the course of events.

Instead, they just made matters worse by trying to delay the inevitable. As time went on, Indian demands grew and British concessions were invariably too little and too late. “The reforms of 1919 might well have appeased political India in 1909; the reforms of 1935 would have evoked enthusiasm in 1919” (p. 96). Of course, at the same time I don't doubt that even if the British had given them greater concessions earlier, the Indians would still have kept on raising their demands all the way to full independence; so in that sense it doesn't really matter what the British did or didn't give and when.

An example of such a concession was the introduction of provincial autonomy in the 1935 Government of India Act (p. 150). As a result, from about 1937 onwards the regional governments of India were in the hands of the Congress (p. 108), and the British were less and less able to exert any control over what was going on.

The British set up a secret agency called Indian Political Intelligence to spy on Indian activists (p. 98). This occasionally provided them with useful information, but of course couldn't really change the flow of events in any major way.

I was interested to see that it was only in the late 1930s that the Muslim League became a true mass movement (p. 113). Initially it was small and was dismissed by Congress as irrelevant, which was probably harmful in the long run (p. 111). Its first demands for something resembling an autonomous Pakistan only appeared with the Lahore Resolution of 1940 (p. 124), though they were a bit vague on the details.

An interesting detail: at the start of WW2, the then Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on behalf of India, without consulting the Indian politicians (p. 120); this naturally caused much resentment, even though otherwise they'd likely have been in favour of such a declaration. But I was surprised to see that a separate declaration of war by India was even necessary; I didn't think it had enough autonomy for that (unlike, say, Canada or Australia) — after all, it wasn't even a dominion yet. Linlithgow accompanied his declaration with the bizarre statement that India could not “accept the dictation of a foreign power in relation to her own subjects”; French remarks that the irony “was probably lost on him” (ibid.). The Congress responded by withdrawing from participation in provincial governments (p. 121). The British lost the “moral argument” by claiming they were fighting WW2 to liberate occupied countries and yet continuing to occupy India themselves (p. 141).

Churchill, who was the prime minister during most of the WW2, was heavily against any sort of autonomy for India, and probably did more harm than good with his stubbornness on the subject (p. 130); but even he could not prevent the inevitable. The British lost a lot of prestige after their defeats in Southeast Asia in 1942; there was a “popular feeling in India that their British rulers were no longer invincible” (p. 135). Moreover, some pressure to make concessions to India also came from the Americans, who were not fond of the British Empire and whom Churchill couldn't afford to ignore since Britain increasingly depended on U.S. support in the war (p. 137).

[Incidentally, there is a pleasantly wacky paragraph about plans that Roosevelt discussed with a “Professor Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution” on how to “cross-breed and develop ‘an Indo-Asian or Eurasian or (better) Euroindasian rase’ as a counterbalance to the ‘nefarious’ Japanese. [. . .] The idea was that certain ‘racial crossings’ were good, while others were dangerous.” Roosevelt insisted “that Japanese-European and Chinese-Malayan crossings were ‘bad’, while Chinese-European were ‘not all that bad’ and Dutch-Javanese were positively ‘good’. Roosevelt was especially concerned with an indigenous ethnic group in Japan who went by the intriguing name of the ‘Hairy Ainus’, and wondered in what way they differed from the other Japanese, apart from their hirsute appearance.” (Pp. 138–9.) Not that I really have anything against this sort of good old-fashioned racism — at least it has the virtue of being honest, unlike the present-day quasi-religious insistence that all groups of people are somehow equal — but the part that amazes me is how they came up with this insane shit in the first place. How did Roosevelt even come to form an opinion as to whether Chinese-Malayan hybrids are better than Dutch-Javanese ones or vice versa? When did he even meet any Malayans or Javanese? If you asked me which of those two groups is better than the other, I could only say that I haven't got the foggiest idea, but here's Roosevelt having very definite and firm preferences regarding them...]

The British were not keen to make big concessions, and the Congress was not willing to accept small ones, figuring they could get better terms later since British power was obviously on the wane. The gap between the two sides is illustrated by the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942: Cripps tried to come up with a compromise, but it was rejected by both sides, being far more than Churchill was willing to give and far less than the Congress was willing to accept (p. 147).

The Indian nationalists decided to embark on a wide-ranging campaign of civil disobedience, the Quit India Movement (p. 151). The British, for their part, were willing to suppress this sort of thing pretty heavy-handedly since India was of great strategic importance during the war, both as a source of soldiers and on account of its production (p. 133). As soon as the Quit India campaign began, the British arrested the Congress leadership and kept them in (admittedly fairly comfortable) imprisonment for most of the rest of the war (p. 156). Initially the British even planned to deport them out of India, to Aden, though this last part of the plan foundered on bizarre legal complications: they couldn't legally be detained while in transit at sea, and moreover the Governor of Aden indicated that there was no room for any additional nonwhite people in his colony :))) (p. 153).

Protests, strikes, riots, sabotage etc. spread over large parts of India, and the “authorities responded with public floggings, the burning of villages and collective fines” (p. 159); they shot at protestors and raped the women (ibid.). “India was spiralling out of control” (p. 161). “By the end of 1942, sixty thousand people had been arrested” (p. 161) and the Quit India movement was mostly suppressed (p. 169). British rule over India lost all legitimacy and could thenceforth only be sustained by the means of repression (p. 160). Anglo-American relations also deteriorated as the Americans now saw that the British were more interested in preserving their control of India than in fighting against Japan (p. 162).

I liked this wild idea by Field Marshal Wavell, who was appointed as the new Viceroy of India in mid-1943: he proposed that the leading Indian politicians should be told that Britain was committed to giving India self-government as soon as possible, and they “would then be put into a room, with access to a secretariat of experts on matters such as constitutions, international law and so forth, and be left there until they reached a solution” (p. 177). Of course, nothing came of this; Churchill and his ministers “were not amused; the last thing they wanted was a Viceroy who showed initiative” (ibid.). The idea reminds me of how the Bosnian war of 1992–95 was ended when Bill Clinton shut the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia into a U.S. Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, and told them they aren't getting out until they sign a peace treaty :))

Unlike Churchill, who had something of a visceral hatred of Indians and couldn't stomach the idea that the British Empire might be coming to an end (pp. 188–9), Wavell was a realist and surprisingly open-minded for a former military officer. He understood that what Britain would sooner or later have to do in India was something rather akin to a military retreat (pp. 260–1), and that such things are best done in an orderly manner and in accordance with a plan prepared in advance. He constantly urged the Cabinet to give him some sort of definite instructions as to what kind of policy to pursue towards India, but they just ignored him and dragged their feet (p. 194). Meanwhile, law and order were deteriorating in India; by 1944 Wavell observed that “HMG has no longer the power to take effective action” (p. 191). It became clear that after the war British rule could only be maintained if a large number of troops were deployed in India to suppress popular unrest — something that was both politically and financially impossible (pp. 189, 289).

A funny anecdote about Major Peter Coats, whom Wavell brought on as a sort of “major domo at Viceroy's House”: “When an eminent Indian visitor complained that there was a rat in his room, Coats replied: ‘Ah, a rat, sir. Those are for our most distinguished guests, the others only get mice.’ ” (P. 180.) :)) I wish the visitor had then asked how distinguished one would have to be to get a cat :)

Another thing that caused great damage to British reputation in India was their unwillingness to do anything about the great famine in Bengal in 1943/44 (p. 183); Wavell, who was viceroy at the time, urged the British government to do something, but they ignored him. (He noted later that they were much more interested in preventing famines in Europe than in India; p. 194.) This lack of British response to the famine even induced some Indian soldiers to defect to Bose's “Indian National Army”, which fought alongside the Japanese (p. 206).

An interesting observation from p. 197: the British Empire, at that time, “was no longer turning a profit [. . .] with the exception of Malaya, all the imperial colonies were losing money from the 1920s onwards”. It would have made financial sense for the British to cut their loses and let their colonies go, but “[t]he belief in Empire remained long after its practical uses had evaporated”. This sounds very interesting and I should like to read more about it at some point. How could the Empire be losing money like that? Was Britain spending too much money on paying its bureaucrats and soldiers there, and on building infrastructure and the like? I suppose they should have reduced these expenditures to a level which the local economy of a colony could support, even if that meant that some colonies made progress more slowly. As it was, the British seem to have been getting the worst of both worlds: they were getting hated by the natives and also losing money in the process.

I was surprised to read how popular Bose is in modern India (or was, at any rate, when French was writing this book in the late 1990s): “Some more extreme Indian politicians are currently calling for the erection of a statue of Adolf Hitler, using the inverse logic that since Hitler was a supporter of Bose, he must have been a great man.” :)) (P. 202.) French interviewed a manufacturer of statues, who told him that statues of Bose were now much more popular than those of Gandhi or Nehru (p. 203). In actual fact, Bose's INA had been strategically irrelevant, and its main contribution to Indian independence may have been the fact that, when the British put some of its senior officers to trial after the war, this added to the anti-British feelings in India, since most Indians saw the INA people as “simply patriots who had been caught on the losing side” (p. 210).

The British, contrary to what was later sometimes believed in India, were not actually keen to divide their old colony into two countries, i.e. India and Pakistan (p. 222); but after the WW2 they reluctantly had to admit that such a division might be necessary, since on the one hand the Congress and the Muslim League were unable or unwilling to work together, and Congress was getting so strong that if they started a large-scale uprising Britain would have been unable to suppress it (p. 217). Accordingly, Wavell drew up a secret plan of how the country might be divided; the biggest problem were the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, where the population was about 50% Muslim and 50% non-Muslim (pp. 219–20). New elections were held in 1945/46, with Congress getting the vast majority of non-Muslim votes and the Muslim League the vast majority of Muslim ones (the Muslim voters weren't necessarily quite sure what sort of country Pakistan might be or what its boundaries might be, but saw it as their best hope for protection from being oppressed by the Hindus); pp. 223–4. This success of the Muslim League meant that the Congress could no longer afford to ignore it as they had hitherto done (p. 226).

In the spring of 1946, the British government sent a delegation to negotiate with Indian nationalist politicians, both Hindu and Muslim, but without much success because both groups were too stubborn. The British proposed an independent India as “a loose federation of Hindu-majority, Muslim-majority and Princely States”, with provinces being able to form “groupings [. . .] with a large degree of autonomy” (p. 237). This could help avoid the issues of splitting Bengal and the Punjab, and Jinnah even accepted the idea in principle (p. 240), but then the whole thing failed because he and the Congress could not agree on the details of how the groupings should work (p. 243).

Wavell decided to form an “interim government” of Indian nationalist politicians, hoping this would help keep the peace; however, the Muslim League refused to participate (p. 249) and a series of riots erupted anyway, with thousands of people killed in Calcutta (p. 252). The riots continued and increased, so that by late 1946 “much of northern India was [. . .] heading towards anarchy” (p. 268).

An interesting side effect of the establishment of the new interim government was that the Indian Political Intelligence, an organization which the British had built up to spy on the Indian nationalist politicians, now came under the control of one of the most powerful of these politicians, Vallabhbhai Patel. He decided to keep the IPI's surveillance activities going, but direct them against extremist groups only, rather than against mainstream Congress politicians like himself; and he made sure that the intelligence thus collected was available only to him and his colleagues from the Congress, but not to the Viceroy (pp. 258–9, 267).

In early 1947, the British government decided to definitely withdraw from India by June 1948, and announced that “power would be handed over come what may, even if necessary ‘to the existing provincial governments’ ” (p. 277), i.e. if the Indian politicians at the national level couldn't by then agree on questions of federation or partition etc. This spurred them to action, and in March 1947 the Congress accepted the partition into India and Pakistan, provided that Bengal and the Punjab get split between the two countries; Jinnah had to agree with this, knowing that the British would be leaving soon and he couldn't get a better deal from the Congress later (pp. 277–8).

An interesting observation from p. 291: what took place at Indian independence was not a case of “grassroots liberation” or “revolutionary transformation”, but simply “a transfer of power”.

Mountbatten, the new Viceroy since February 1947, began negotiating with the Indian politicians on the details of the transition, but his options were limited by the fact that “[t]he British were no longer in a strong enough position to impose a settlement on India” (p. 296). He proposed a “Balkan plan” according to which each province and princely state could decide for itself whether to split up, become independent or join some larger grouping (p. 297); but this was unacceptable to the Indian politicians, and would probably have led to chaos. What was eventually adopted was the alternative plan written hurriedly by V. P. Menon, a high-ranking Indian civil servant; this provided for two separate independent countries, India and Pakistan, with provinces such as Bengal and the Punjab deciding for themselves whether to be divided (p. 301). Menon accomplished in some three hours what others had been unable to do in years.

With the British gone, the princely states could theoretically be independent again but in practice all were pressured into joining one or the other country (mostly India; pp. 312–13). The princes were supposed to keep a share of the taxes from their former territories, but I was saddened to read, on the wikipedia, that both India and Pakistan unilaterally deprived them of these revenues in the early 1970s (pp. 367–8).

State assets had to be divided in great haste, which was no simple thing, but it also had its ludicrous aspects: in Delhi, “senior civil servants who had opted for Pakistan were turfed out of their buildings, and ‘in some cases they have had to move tables and chairs out and are working under the shade of trees’ ” (p. 315). The army was likewise split into two, with soldiers “given a matter of days to decide” which country to join (p. 343). A British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was brought in at the last moment to define the details of the border between the two countries, in a little more than one month (p. 324; he seems to have made an honest effort, but it was “an impossible job”, pp. 330–1).*

[*Later, a Bangladeshi general, complaining about Radcliffe's complicated boundary line which “curved backwards and forwards over either side of riverbanks”, joked that “the British could never draw a straight line!” (P. 410.) I guess the joke is that in other parts of the world, the British had drawn plenty of straight lines, and those usually weren't liked any better by the locals either...]

Interestingly, many at the time of independence thought the partition into India and Pakistan was something unnatural, and expected the two countries to merge again soon (p. 306). Others thought, until the massacres began in the lead-up to independence, that the two countries would remain on friendly terms and people could easily move from one to the other and back (pp. 323, 401), that “the relationship between India and Pakistan would be similar to that between Canada and the United States” (p. 351). “There was a stunning incapacity among politicians of all kinds” as to how much violence would accompany the partition (p. 344); about a million people ended up getting killed (p. 349). Houses of people who fled across the new border for safety were seized by corrupt officials instead of being used to house refugees who had moved across the border in the opposite direction (pp. 394, 401).

A funny joke from p. 332, told to the author by an old Sikh: “If a Sikh has one bullet left in his gun, and he sees a Muslim, a Hindu and a Britisher coming towards him, which should he shoot? The Muslim — you only shoot Hindus and Britishers for pleasure.” :)))

Another Sikh joke from p. 398: around the time of the partition, some Muslims caught a Sikh and threatened to kill him unless he converted to Islam. He converted, but then told them to kill him anyway. They asked why, and he replied: “Because when you kill me one more Muslim will be gone from this earth.” (P. 398; told to the author by a Muslim in Lahore.) I remember hearing a similar joke except it was a Jew who, on his deathbed, asked for a priest, saying he intended to convert to Christianity ‘because it's better if one of them dies than one of us’ :))

*

So, I enjoyed reading this book, and the only thing I disliked is something that the author can in no way be blamed for, namely that the subject-matter is a bit sad and depressing. Imagine if this were a fictional story, a movie set in a galaxy far away or something of that sort, in which a great people, after a patient struggle of many decades, led by a group of surprisingly clever and upright politicians, finally won its freedom from the evil empire that had been oppressing them — there would have been a happy end to the movie at that point, and that would have been it. Here in the real world, we get a million people massacred, tens of millions displaced, and the nation gets split into three squabbling corrupt authoritarian shitholes, each worse than the other. You can't help wondering if it hadn't been possible to manage things differently somehow, to get a better outcome.

The best thing of all, in my opinion, would have been for the British to never have colonized India in the first place; then it would have developed in an organic fashion; perhaps it would have unified like Germany or Italy did in the 19th century, or perhaps it would have remained split into a plethora of states, but either way there would be something ‘natural’ about this state of affairs, which is not the case about the present-day division into three countries.

Or alternatively, given that the British *had* colonized India, they should have given it independence earlier, before the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims got too bad, and before independence they should have reorganized it into a loose confederation where each province or princely state was nearly autonomous; that, again, would have reduced the need for massacres and mass expulsions.

Or the British should have kept ruling India for much longer than they had, using as much oppression as necessary to maintain control, waiting for as long as it took the local population to grow less religiously zealous, less excitable and less prone to political corruption; at that point it might have been possible to give them independence without the whole thing turning sour immediately afterwards. In practice, of course, this solution never happens in cases of decolonization; the point at which a colonized nation becomes too strong for its colonizers to keep controlling it invariably comes much sooner than the point where it would be capable of governing itself well; the result, inevitably, is that it gets independence too early and then governs itself badly.

So perhaps, in the end, horrible though the aftermath of Indian independence was, it was simply the least bad of the realistically available possibilities, perhaps the only possibility. The British did not wish to leave earlier than they did, and weren't able to stay longer than they did, so the current outcome was the only one possible. And that's what makes the whole thing rather depressing. Another proof, if any further proof were necessary, that it would have been better not to colonize India in the first place.

ToRead:

• Katherine Mayo: Mother India. A “hugely popular 1920s compendium of bigotry and prejudice about the failings of Indians” (p. 93). :))
• David Cannadine: The Pleasures of the Past (1989). A collection of essays, quoted here on p. 289 for his remarks on Mountbatten as “the pioneering and pre-eminent de-imperialist” for his role in the British withdrawal from India and its transition to independence.

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Edmund Campion"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 17: Edmund Campion. Ed. by Gerard Kiloy with the assistance of Thomas M. McCoog. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198817529. cxiii + 407 pp.

One nice thing about deciding to read some author's complete works — as in the case of me reading Waugh here — is that it causes you to encounter books that you would never seek out otherwise, and so to find new and interesting things that you'd otherwise miss. I had never even heard of Edmund Campion before reading Waugh's book, and it would never have occurred to me to deliberately go and look for a biography of him; having how read Waugh's Campion I feel that I have learnt a few new things and got a glimpse at a period of history about which I otherwise know very little.

Most of Waugh's books that I've read so far seem to have been inspired in some way or another by something he had experienced in his life, and this one is no exception. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 under the guidance of one Father D'Arcy, who subsequently became the master of Campion Hall (a sort of college for Catholic students) at Oxford University (pp. xxix–xxx, xxiv). In 1934, they were trying to construct a new building for the hall, and to help pay for the costs, Waugh offered to write a biography of Campion, the 16th-century martyr after whom the hall was named (p. xxx, xli). Moreover, D'Arcy introduced Waugh to a new circle of more or less intellectual Catholic friends,* and Waugh hoped that the new book would establish him as a Catholic intellectual and impress the woman he was then courting, Laura Herbert, and her family (she and Waugh got married in 1937 — incidentally, she was a cousin of his first wife; p. xxxviii).

[*The editors suggest that D'Arcy's “intervention quite possibly saved Waugh from a life of despondent decadence: affairs with married women [. . .] and distasteful encounters with ‘little Arab girls’.” (P. xxxix.) Incidentally, earlier on the same page we read about a “fifteen-year-old Moroccan girl he had wished to take ‘for his exclusive use’ from a brothel in Fez” :))) Perhaps I am naive, but I would imagine that a recently converted Catholic would be a little more keen on avoiding such obviously sinful activities as sleeping with underaged prostitutes...]

Of course, Waugh was no academic historian, and as he himself says in a note at the start of the book (p. cxiii), he “merely attempted to put into a single, readable narrative the most significant of the facts that are scattered in a dozen or so standard books” and in various other sources. (His main source was Edmund Campion: A Biography by Richard Simpson, first published in 1867. See p. 387.) He originally included a few endnotes and a bibliography, but later thought them so poor that he dropped them in subsequent editions (“I have long been greatly ashamed of the Notes to Campion”, p. lx. The editors of the present edition agree with his decision in the most uncharitable manner: “There is no doubt that the book is greatly improved by the omission of these two disappointing features”, p. liv. Ouch!) The book was “reviewed principally in religious and literary magazines, but largely ignored by historical journals” (p. xc).

Thus this book is a work of popular history, and succeeds quite well at its goals; I found it readable and informative, and the style is not without literary qualities. I also liked the fact that Waugh often puts the story on hold for a moment to give you some useful bit of background information, e.g. about everyday life at Oxford in Campion's time (p. 12), or the history and nature of the Jesuit order (pp. 41–2), or the antagonism between English and Welsh seminarians in Rome (pp. 47–8). (Interestingly, one reviewer said that “Waugh wrote well on Campion himself; he was less successful when he ventured into the history of the period” (p. lxxxii); another similarly complained that “the lack of a real historical knowledge of the period means an absence of background” (p. lxxxi). But those were opinions of professional historians; to a reader as ignorant as me, Waugh's ventures into background material are informative enough.)

Waugh does not try to hide the fact that he is siding with the Catholics, but to my pleasant surprise, that never bothered me even though I am a rabid atheist myself; in fact this may be the first time ever that I felt sorry for some Catholics. Moreover, I never got the impression that the book would be really biased in a problematic way; after all, in England of Campion's time, it really was the Protestants that were oppressing the Catholics and not the other way around, so if Waugh wanted to make the Catholics look good and the Protestants look bad, he didn't have to do anything more than tell the truth. (Of course, my sympathies for the Catholics while reading this book were moderated by the fact that they had happily persecuted the Protestants in the same way when they had had the upper hand a few decades earlier. Almost any religious group is tolerably nice while it is small and oppressed, and almost each of them turns ugly if it gains control of the state and its power. I wonder why I never felt sympathetic to the early Christians when reading about their being persecuted by the Romans in the first few centuries AD; perhaps because I knew that in the end the Christians would win and become oppressors in turn.)

*

One curious omission in the book is the lack of anything regarding Campion's youth and antecedents. Perhaps Waugh didn't think these things important, or perhaps he found nothing about them in the sources available to him. At the start of the book, Campion is already in his mid-twenties, a promising scholar at the University of Oxford, and his oratory impressed Queen Elizabeth and her court when they came to visit the University in 1566 (p. 6). The state needed new clergymen for its emerging Protestant Church, and it could be the start of a successful career for someone like Campion (pp. 10–11),* but his Catholic sympathies were too strong, and getting stronger: he couldn't believe “that the truth, hidden from the world for fifteen centuries, had suddenly been revealed in the last few years to a group of important Englishmen” (p. 15).**

[*Waugh remarked elsewhere that in Campion's time “the English church, at the top, was run almost exclusively by arrivistes” (p. lxx). He gives an example of a colleague of Campion's who made a great career as a Protestant prelate, and concludes with this glorious remark: “Tobie Matthew died full of honours in 1628. There, but for the Grace of God, went Edmund Campion.” (P. 12.)]

[**On a related note, there's a fine passage from the speech Campion made at the end of his trial, pointing out how preposterous the Protestants' effort to make a break with the past was: “In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors—all the ancient priests, bishops and kings—all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter./ For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach?” (P. 122. But see also the editors' note on p. 233, according to which there is some doubt as to the authenticity of this passage.)]

Throughout this book we see how the suppression of Catholicism was gradually growing stricter and stricter; new laws were being passed, and existing laws enforced more firmly. For the English Government it was not only a matter of religion but of politics as well: they increasingly thought it somewhat treasonous for an Englishman to be a Catholic. When the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth (pp. 24, 52), would a Catholic be loyal to the Pope or to the Queen? If a Spanish army were to invade England (something which they seemed to be constantly paranoid about), would the Catholics help defend the country or would they side with their fellow Catholics invading it?

By 1569, Campion came under pressure to openly profess Protestantism, and resigned from the University rather than do that (p. 19). He moved to Dublin at the invitation of the father of a former student, and spent some time working on plans for the establishment of a new university there and writing a History of Ireland. In 1571, he had to flee to the Continent to avoid getting arrested in the wake of yet another Spanish invasion scare (p. 26).

Campion studied theology for some time in Douay, France, where English Catholics had established a college (p. 36); he committed fully to Catholicism, moved to Rome and became a Jesuit (p. 41). Apparently that order had a habit of sending its members to wherever it thought they were needed, and Campion spent the next six years as a professor in a Jesuit college in Prague. (Waugh covers this period of Campion's life relatively briefly; according to the editors' introduction, more is known about Campion's life in Bohemia from sources probably not available to Waugh, and several manuscript works by Campion were recently discovered in Prague; pp. xlix–l.)

In Rome there was a seminary to train English Catholic priests, but it was troubled by poor leadership (the rector was a Welshman who blatantly favourized Welsh students, thereby antagonizing the English ones*). Eventually it was entrusted to Jesuits, but with the understanding that English Jesuits should thenceforth work in England (p. 49). Campion, too, was summoned to Rome to take part in this mission, along with another English Jesuit named Robert Persons** and about a dozen other people, mostly priests but also a few laymen (p. 52). Their task was not to proselytize or to dispute against the Protestants, but simply to support the Catholics who still lived in England, by secretly holding masses, hearing confession, giving sacraments etc. (p. 51).

[*But we know that Waugh was a bit anti-Welsh himself, so perhaps we should take these things with a grain of salt :) The editors say that Waugh “could not resist the chance to make fun of the Welsh” (p. 174), and I remember instances of that from several of his other books.]

[**Interestingly, the editors say that “[u]nlike Persons, Campion displayed little enthusiasm for a mission to England” (p. 176). Somewhat ironically, it was Persons, rather than Campion, that managed to evade arrest, return safe to the Continent and die of old age.]

This was in 1580; the missionaries spent some two months walking across Italy, Switzerland and France, where they split into smaller groups and crossed to England in disguise, from various ports, to avoid detection (the English government had spies in Rome and elsewhere, and was well informed that the missionaries were coming; p. 57).

Waugh has an interesting couple of pages describing how far the oppression of Catholics in England had progressed by then. An interminable series of laws had been passed, imposing heavy fines and prison sentences for performing or attending Catholic masses* and the like (p. 66). And even if you kept these things secret, there was also a fine of £20 per month for not attending Protestant church services;** soon, “none but the wealthiest had any choice between submission and destitution” (p. 67; the editors add: “By the end of Elizabeth's reign, only sixteen Catholic families could still afford to pay the fines”, p. 189). English Catholics lived in constant fear of spies and informers, facing the prospect of arbitrary imprisonment at any time. Englishmen were also prohibited from studying at Catholic seminaries abroad, with fines threatened against their families in case of non-compliance (p. 84). The government hoped that Catholicism would gradually expire in England under all this pressure; the existing “Marian priests” (from the days of Queen Mary, Elizabeth's predecessor) were getting older and would soon die off, and no new ones would be allowed to appear (pp. 33, 36).

[*An interesting minor detail that was new to me: apparently Protestants don't have masses. They have something which to my naive eyes looks much like mass, but they call it a “service” and are very proud of this apparently important distinction. Here in this book we see them referring to Catholic priests as “massing priests” (e.g. p. 84) to distinguish them from Protestant ones.]

[**You might imagine that it would be easy to avoid this fine by simply attending the Protestant services despite being a Catholic, but the Catholic Church was very strongly against that. Persons, Campion's fellow missionary, called it “the highest iniquity that can be committed” (p. 71).]

After spending some time in London, Campion and the other missionaries spent several months travelling across the English countryside in disguise, staying as guests in large households and holding secret Catholic services. Their efforts were still remembered by the locals nearly a century later (p. 204). “Sometimes they stayed in houses where only a few were Catholic. There was constant coming and going in the vast, ramshackle households of the day [. . .] It was natural enough that any respectable wayfarer should put up there for the night, whether or no he had any acquaintance with his host.” (Pp. 79–80.) Campion also wrote a book, Rationes Decem (Ten Reasons), arguing in favour of Catholicism; his associates managed, with great difficulty, to print it secretly in London (pp. 86–8). Later it was widely reprinted across Europe and “was still being used by a Dominican provincial prior in Krakow [. . .] to teach theology and rhetoric in the Jagiellonian University in the early nineteenth century” (p. 209).

There was always a risk that one of the supposed Catholics attending your secret Catholic mass would prove to be a government informer. Several of Campion's associates were arrested in this way, and eventually Campion's luck ran out as well. When the authorities came to arrest him, Campion and two other priests almost managed to escape detection in a secret room of the house where they were staying. The local authorities didn't actually seem terribly keen to find them, but thanks to the fanatical zealousness of the government's spy who had betrayed them, one George Eliot, they were eventually found and arrested (pp. 94–5).

Campion was taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower. Early on he was taken to see Queen Elizabeth and several of her chief advisors; “satisfied that he had no treasonable designs”, they offered him preferment if he converted to Protestantism, but he refused (p. 104). During the following four months or so, he was tortured on the rack several times (three times according to Waugh, five according to the editors, p. 220), but they got no admissions of treason out of him, and very little in the way of names of people he had been associating with (p. 105). The rack left him permanently crippled, unable to lift his arm (p. 115).

What is even more bizarre is that the government organized four “Conferences”, public disputations between Campion and various Protestant clergymen, on terms ludicrously biased in favour of the Protestants (pp. 109–13). Given the unfavourable conditions, Campion acquitted himself pretty well and the government found the propaganda value of the conferences so doubtful that they discontinued them.

The Privy Council was determined to have Campion executed, for political reasons that had little to do with him* (they wanted to bolster Elizabeth's popularity with the Protestant part of the population, who had been getting upset over the plans for Elizabeth to marry a Catholic, the Duke of Anjou). In principle Campion's being a Catholic priest was enough to find him guilty of treason, though they hoped he would confess to being part of some conspiracy more concrete than that (p. 114). In the end they proceeded to trial despite the absence of such a confession, or of any other solid evidence. Campion did a good job of defending himself, but it was plainly a cangaroo court and his position was hopeless.** He and most of the other 15 or so defendants were sentenced to death, except for one who had an alibi (he “could prove that he was [. . .] in London when he was supposed to be at Rheims” conspiring against the Queen, p. 123).

[*And in fact in general, the impression I got from this book was that Elizabeth and her advisors weren't really particularly fanatical about Protestantism as a religious thing; their decision to support Protestantism and suppress Catholicism seems to have been mostly about politics, questions of loyalty and concerns over treason and so on. Waugh contrasts this with people like Campion, who genuinely believed that his side was right. Elizabeth et al. “had been used to the spectacle of men who would risk their lives for power, but to die deliberately, without hope of release, for an idea, was something beyond their comprehension.” (P. 104.) During the preceding reign, of the (Catholic) Mary I, “Elizabeth and Cecil and Dudley had quietly conformed to the prevailing fashion; they had told their beads and eaten fish on Fridays, confessed and taken communion. Faith [. . .] was unknown to them [. . ]. What correspondence, even in their charity, could they have with Campion?” (Ib.)]

[**Another historian, A. .F. Pollard, “agreed that Campion's trial was grossly unfair but no more than every state trial in England at this time.” (P. lxxxii.) Cold comfort :S]

Campion rejected another offer of pardon if he converted (p. 123); his friends made an appeal to the Duke of Anjou to intercede for him, but the Duke ignored them (p. 124). Campion, with two others, was hanged on December 1, 1581; he was supposed to be cut down while still alive and then disembowelled, but fortunately they did in fact wait until he was dead and then butchered his corpse instead (p. 235; this seems to have been thanks to the efforts of a courtier named Charles Howard, p. 369).

Miscellaneous

Waugh joking, in a letter, about his progress on the book: “I'm pegging away at Campion. Hope to arrest him this afternoon and rack him before I leave. Then I will hang, draw & quarter him at Mells.” :)) (P. xli.)

In 1949, Waugh edited a book of sermons by Ronald Knox, a priest he was acquainted with. The editors of the present volume note that “the type rises to 5 mm” (p. lxi, n. 92). How very odd to measure type in millimetres! Why not in points like any normal person? 5 mm = approx. 14.2 pt, which is indeed rather large.

Regarding his conversion, Waugh wrote that “the first ten years of his adult life as an atheist had proved to him that life was unintelligible and unendurable without God” (p. lxx). That may well be true, but it doesn't therefore follow that God really exists and that you should become religious... He's practically admitting that the whole thing is based on nothing more than wishful thinking :(

Edmund Campion won the 1936 Hawthornden Prize for a “work of imaginative literature” (p. lxxxiv) — perhaps not quite what you want to hear about a work of history :)) But it's not an unheard-of thing, of course; I remember occasionally seeing popular history books (mis)placed in the historical fiction or romance sections of bookshops.

A Jesuit named Clement Tigar wrote to Waugh in 1949: “I know at least four persons who became Catholics as a result of reading your book.” (P. xci; a few more such converts are mentioned later on the same page.)

After the WW2, Waugh was much moved by the persecution of Catholics in countries that recently became communist, and alluded to it in a new preface to the American edition of Campion (in 1946; p. 399). “His long and passionate denunciation of Communism, ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’, presented to Anthony Eden in March 1945, was quietly filed away by the Foreign Office” (p. xciv; according to n. 259 on the same page, this essay was reprinted in 1992, but the note does not mention if we'll get it in the present edition of Waugh's collected works eventually).

Tragic scenes when the Protestants descended on the libraries of Oxford earlier in the 16th century: “the illuminated office books in Magdalen choir were hacked up with choppers, and from every College cartloads of books were removed to be burned or sold as waste paper; a coloured initial was enough to convict the contents of Popery; a mathematical diagram of magic.” (Pp. 9–10.)

Pope Gregory XIII “did not continue the more severe, puritanical measures of his predecessor [i.e. Pius V] under whom a wealthy layman had been publicly flogged for adultery and a drove of harlots turned loose on the campagna to be massacred by bandits.” (P. 39.) :)))

Interestingly, Waugh writes “Middle-Europe” on p. 42 where one might expect “Central Europe”. One is tempted to wonder if this is a result of German influence (Mitteleuropa), but I didn't get the impression from this book that Waugh had studied anything much in German while working on Campion.

Interesting: “Ireland, however, was, in feudal law, unquestionably a Papal fief, and had always been recognized as such by the English monarchy; moreover, it had never been effectively conquered or administered; outside the Pale English control had been negligible.” (P. 57. See also the note on p. 183: “The English Pope Adrian IV (c. 1100–1159) granted Ireland as a papal fief to King Henry II (1133–1189) in 1155”.)

A dubious claim from p. 64: “In accordance with his stern moral code Philip forbade his American colonists from enslaving the native Indians and from importing negroes.” The editors note that “It is not clear what evidence EW had for this claim. [. . .] the Asiento de negros legitimizing slavery remained in place until 1750” (p. 186).

“There were numerous disturbing portents recorded on the eve of the Jesuits' arrival. [. . ] A woman named Alice Perin, at the age of eighty years, gave birth to a prodigy with a head like a helmet, a face like a man, a mouth like a mouse, a human body, eight legs, all different, and a tail half a yard long” etc. (pp. 64–65). :S

Richard Topcliffe, one of the informers employed by the Government to hunt out Catholics, “was accorded the privilege unique in the law of England, or, perhaps, of any country, of maintaining a private rack in his own house for the more convenient examination of prisoners.” (P. 67.)

On pp. 72–3 Waugh describes the curious case of one Father Bosgrave, an English Jesuit who spent 16 years in Poland, “far out of touch with the course of events in England”, until he was sent back to England by his superiors “by a singular irony, for the good of his health” (p. 72). The Protestants arrested him and got him to attend their church; he apparently had no idea that, in England at least, a Catholic was not supposed to attend a Protestant church. “The Catholics all shunned him, and Father Bosgrave, who retained only an imperfect knowledge of English, wandered about lonely and bewildered.” (Ib.) Eventually the matter was explained to him; he denounced Protestantism, was duly arrested and found guilty of treason, but was fortunately only banished rather than executed. “He then returned to Poland and resumed his duties there, having benefited less by his prolonged stay in England than his superiors had hoped.” (P. 73.) :))) All's well that ends well, I guess!

Nowadays in English, when you want to combine the passive voice with the progressive aspect, you use constructions of the form: ‘The house is being built.’ I was interested to learn some time ago that this construction only became widespread in the late 18th century, and was frequently objected to by usage guides throughout the 19th. The older way of expressing the same thing was to use the verb to be and the present participle: ‘The house is building.’ This older construction actually has a nice advantage over the newer one: if you want to add the perfect aspect, you can say elegantly enough that ‘the house has been building’; but in the newer construction you'd have to say ‘the house has been being built’, and nobody in their right mind would say that because the combination ‘been being’ sounds too ridiculous. Anyway, I got the impression that the older construction was still in use relatively often in the mid-19th century (I remember seeing it often enough in Dickens), but became rare by the late 19th century. Since then I have always been on the lookout for late occurrences of this older construction, and so it was interesting to find one here in Waugh, in a book written in 1935: “the great houses of the new ruling class were building” (p. 79).

There are some interesting remarks in the editors' introduction about Catholicism in Britain in Waugh's time; “there was a split [. . .] between ‘a small rather consciously English upper-class elite and the urban working class [. . .] with its strong Irish connections [. . .]’ ” (Adrian Hastings, quoted on p. lxvii). Waugh obviously was part of the former group, many of whom, like him, were recent converts. This trend of conversions later declined: “An oddity of the polemic of some Catholics against pre-Vatican II Catholicism is their failure to address the issue of why it was so attractive to converts of the highest culture; and why after the 1960s it ceased to be so” (Sheridan Gilley, quoted on p. lxviii, n. 122).

Glorious beginnings of English protestantism: “Henry [VIII] remained committed to all other features of the Catholic faith, and on one day he hanged three priests for denying the royal supremacy, and burnt three others for heretical views on the Eucharist” (editors' note on p. 147). :))

One of the houses where Campion stayed while in Ireland “survived until 1987, when it was pulled down to give way to a lurid golf club, now itself derelict” (editors' note on p. 159). I'm extremely curious what a lurid golf club looks like :]

Interesting: “James VI of Scotland wrote an epic poem celebrating the victory, His Maiesties Lepanto, in 1591, a poem widely read and translated on the Continent” (editors' note on p. 168).

Decent people hate this one weird trick: “Torture was illegal under common law. [. . .] The government circumvented the prohibition by issuing warrants that exempted the practitioners from common law charges of assault.” (Editors' note on p. 203.)

One Dr. Nicholas Sander organized, “with papal funds”, “an ill-fated invasion force” which landed some 500 men in Ireland about a year before Campion's mission. It was brutally surpressed by the English, but made them extra paranoid: “Sander's intervention put every county in England on invasion alert, and completely undermined Campion's spiritual claims for the mission.” (P. 384.)

*

The book includes a nearly-60-page appendix of “Biographical Notes” covering seemingly absolutely every person mentioned anywhere in the book, whether by Waugh or by the editors. This, together with the strict alphabetical order, results in a curious assembly where seventeenth-century clergymen, Elizabethan courtiers and Spanish ambassadors mingle easily with Waugh's friends, literary agents, critics, fellow Catholic writers and so on. This was interesting enough to read in moderate doses, but tended to get boring after a while.

A “radical Calvinist” named William Charke got “in trouble with more moderate Protestants for claiming [. . .] that Satan had invented bishops” :)) (p. 350).

On the execution of another Catholic martyr, John Felton, in 1570: “He was cut down very early, and he is said to have uttered the name of Jesus as the executioner held his heart in his hand.” :))) (P. 359.)

Anthony Munday, included here as the author of one of the early pamphlets about Campion's capture, also wrote “The English Romayne Life (1582), a lurid proto-Gothic tale of Catholic conspiracy and self-flagellation” (p. 376), inspired by his time working as an English government spy in Rome. Another thing for the ToRead list :]

Rage, glorious rage

So overall this was a very fine and interesting book and the editors have clearly done a tremendous amount of background research for it; but there's one thing where I disagree with them vehemently: normally Waugh's works in the present series are reprinted without changes from their first British edition; but the present volume makes emendations “where EW's spelling of names departs from received norms, or belongs to vanished empires, to aid the reader's recognition” (p. 240). A long list of these emendations then follows: the Duke of Alva becomes Alba (p. 153), Claudio Aquaviva becomes Acquaviva (p. 163), Tredake in Ireland becomes Drogheda (p. 269), Brunn becomes Brno (p. 170), Leipsic becomes Leipzig (p. 170), and so on.

I don't know how to say how enraged these emendations make me. This is a book written, in 1935, by a man who was born in 1903 and hated everything new that had occurred during his lifetime. Of course his names belong to vanished empires — so, after all, does much of his mentality. (And that's just why we like him!) Of course someone like Waugh couldn't give a damn about some silly Czechs suddenly pretending to have a country of their own and calling their dinky little town by some ghastly name like Brno or whatever — of course it would remain Brunn to him for the rest of his days. Of course he wouldn't care about the Irish spelling of Drogheda; it sounded like Tredake to English ears, so Tredake was how he was going to spell it. And of course seeing as Leipsic had been good enough for English writers in 1850, it was damn well going to be good enough for Waugh in 1930 and he would see no reason whatsoever to adopt a different spelling merely because the silly Germans spell it differently.

In short, the spellings he adopts are obviously an integral part of who Waugh was and of his style. How dare you modern editors of his work interfere with that, for an edition like the present one? If you have the temerity to modernize his place-names, what's preventing you from modernizing the countless other little details where his language differs from how someone would have expressed the same thing in 2020? What's preventing you from updating his facts with things discovered about Campion's life since 1935?

Obviously the correct thing to do would have been to mention the modern equivalents of his spellings in the editorial notes, not to meddle with the text itself...

P.S. And as always, the punishment for trying to correct someone else's text is that you make errors of your own in doing so. They may have updated Brunn to Brno, but nearby Olmütz (p. 44) has not become Olomouc :] (though they do mention the Czech name in parentheses in an editorial note on p. 171).

Errors

Considering how well researched and annotated this volume is, and what a large amount of work must have no doubt gone into it, it's a pity that the publisher didn't bother to have it proofread thoroughly. I noticed a bunch of little errors:

• P. xxv lists the History of the University of Oxford as having been published in 1584–2000, but that might be a bit extreme even by their standards :) Actually the first volume appeared in 1984.

• A similar error on p. 146: the year of publication of a Robert McNulty's edition of John Harington's 16th-century translation of Orlando Furioso is given as 1572, but it should be 1972.

• On p. lxx we find: “Waugh ‘later explained [. . .] was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’.” That first opening quotation mark has no marching closing mark.

• “Sibonik” (p. xciv) should be “Sibenik” or, better yet, “Šibenik”.

• “Four year later” (p. xcv) should be “years”.

• P. 149, near the bottom, says “see Appendix A”, but this is already in Appendix A; no doubt they mean “see Appendix B” (namely p. 255).

• “forty-fout” (p. 174).

• “Directory ]” (p. 178) has a redundant space.

• “Givevra Crosignani” (p. 179) is of course Ginevra.

• “Montsarrat” (p. 191) should surely be “Montserrat”.

• On p. 192 we find ‘Mr Edmunds’ in single quotes followed immediately by “Mr Edmunds” in double quotes; only the second one should be kept.

• The comma in “Hanmer, was reluctant” (p. 202) should be removed.

• On p. 294, “bibliopola” is glossed as “stationer/publisher”, but surely it is a bookseller. The second part of the word is the same as in ‘monopolist’ = the sole seller.

• On p. 365 we learn that “Harrington, William (1566–1593)” was “executed on 18 February 1594 with spectacular brutality”, which evidently went so far as to interfere even with the calendar :]

• “He became a trusted adviser [. . .] of Elizabeth, with whom she often stayed” (p. 396) should clearly end with “he often stayed”.