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).

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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’ :))

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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, "Robbery Under Law"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 24: Robbery Under Law. Ed. by Michael G. Brennan. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198836391. civ + 212 pp.

Another interesting book by Waugh on a subject that I knew almost nothing about and which I probably wouldn't have read if not for the fact that it appeared in the series of Waugh's collected works that I'm slowly in the process of reading. As an example of my complete ignorance on the subject: I had no idea that Mexico even had an oil industry! It turns out that “[b]y 1914 Mexico was the world's third producer of oil” and by 1920 the second largest after the U.S. (editor's introduction, p. xxx); it was a particularly important supplier of oil to Britain (p. xxviii; which didn't have any oil on its own territory, unlike e.g. the USA and Russia).* Much of Mexico's oil industry had been developed by British capital, especially by an engineer and industrialist named Weetman Pearson. In fact President Díaz, in the late 19th century, had specifically encouraged British investment as a way to counterbalance U.S. influence in the country.

[*Mexican oil was still important for Britain on the eve of the WW2, due to concerns that developments in the Mediterranean might make it impossible for Britain to get oil from the Middle East; p. lxii.]

The Díaz administration was followed by a long period of instability known as the Mexican Revolution — again something of which I had been only very vaguely aware. Eventually, in 1938, President Cárdenas nationalized the oil industry, including Pearson's “Mexican Eagle Company”. This had been in the the hands of the late founder's son, Clive Pearson; and this is where Waugh comes into the picture: he signed a contract with Pearson to write and publish a book about Mexico. Pearson paid him £1500 plus travel expenses for Waugh and his wife, in return for which Waugh had to let him see the manuscript before publication and to keep the whole arrangement a secret. The whole contract is published in this book in the editor's introduction (pp. xxxii–iii). It is not known whether Pearson actually requested any changes to Waugh's manuscript before publication (p. xlviii).

So, some people have a sugar daddy, but Waugh had an oil uncle :D I don't know whether to laugh or cry; I was mostly just shaking my head in disbelief. It's one thing when Waugh contrived to get himself appointed as a foreign correspondent so he could travel to Abyssinia; it's easy to smile indulgently when he wangles free passage on a cruise ship in exchange for mentioning the company favourably in his book about Africa; but a secret contract with an oil baron? Really?...

At least one has to admit that Waugh regarded his prostitution with good humour. He jokingly refers to Pearson as “Uncle Clive” in his letters to his agent (pp. xxxviii–ix, xli, xliv–v), and describes his book self-deprecatingly as “[l]ike an interminable Times leader of 1880. People will say well Waugh is done for, it is marriage and living in the country has done it” (p. xliv). And he may have been a whore, but at least he wasn't a cheap whore; we see him trying to use Uncle Clive's travel insurance to pay for the cost of his wife's appendicitis operation several months after their return from Mexico :] (p. xxxix; admittedly her problems had already begun while in Mexico).

And one also has to admit that Waugh probably didn't have to betray any of his principles for the sake of this book and of Uncle Clive's oil money. His existing beliefs and commitments — zealously Catholic by religion, politically conservative with a deep dislike of meddling governments and complete distrust in their schemes to improve people's lives — were quite enough to ensure that he disliked the Cárdenas government (and its predecessors) and nearly all of its policies, and that any book that he might have written about contemporary Mexico would have been be no less favourable to British oil interests than Pearson would have wished. Probably the main effect of Pearson's oil money was not on the content of Waugh's book but on the fact that it got written at all — otherwise Waugh wouldn't have travelled to Mexico and wouldn't have written a book about it.

Waugh also tried to get some material from this book published in American magazines, but with very little success (“too much from the British angle”; see p. xliii for a list of magazines that rejected him).

The editor's introduction in the present volume has a long section about reviews of Robbery Under Law in the press. It was widely reviewed but for the most part not very favourably; Waugh was said to have “failed to communicate much beyond his own anger [. . .] the book was veiled ‘in sad clouds of disgust’ ” (p. lxxi); Waugh “glories in his misconceptions” (p. lxxxiii); he has a “Waughped view” (p. lxxiv). He “expresses very well the contemporary attitude of the angry minority of Mexican conservatives [. . .] whose land had been taken away and had suffered persecution because of their religious beliefs. [. . .] the only Mexicans he met were disgruntled members of the upper class, who hated Cárdenas not only for economic but also for religious reasons.” (P. lxiv.) One reviewer wondered “why, when the persecution of the church reached its height in the last years of the nineteen-twenties, two devout catholic converts like Messrs. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh should wait until the year after the expropriation of the Mexican oilfields to expose those horrors.” (P. lxxxii.) :))) (Greene's book about Mexico was The Lawless Roads, published in 1939, same as Waugh's Robbery Under Law.)

*

Although Waugh took a trip to Mexico in order to write this book, it isn't really a travel book, and he says as much at the outset (“This is a political book; [. . .] The succeeding pages are notes on anarchy”, p. 2). He likewise openly admits to his conservative biases, which he says were only strengthened by his visit to Mexico (p. 9). Indeed there is a fine concise summary of his political views on p. 10: “I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that thes should be kept at the bare minimum of safety; [. . .] that the anarchic elements in society are so strong that it is a whole-time task to keep the peace. I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination; that men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes; that such a system is necessary for any form of co-operative work, more particularly the work of keeping a nation together.” Yuck :( but at least he is honest.

Nevertheless he does have a chapter about “Tourist Mexico” (pp. 11–28). Overall you get the impression that the country was in a fairly shabby condition, especially once he got out of the areas most commonly frequented by tourists. Waugh comes across as a patient and sympathetic tourist, and I couldn't help wishing that the whole book had been about travel rather than politics.

Waugh continues with a chapter about Mexican history, which I found interesting as it was mostly new to me. He clearly thinks very highly of the Spanish colonial period in Mexico, and says that the country was then more advanced in many ways than the British colonies in North America (pp. 71–2; “the predominance of the U.S. in the New World is quite a recent development”). After independence it began to fall behind, and its history in the 19th and early 20th century was characterized by instability, civil wars, rebellions, revolutions and the like. Apparently much of the 19th-century instability was due to Masonic secret societies :)) (p. 74; though one wonders if Waugh as a Catholic may have been a bit biased about this). Moreover, the United States did their fair share of meddling, the effect of which was mostly to strengthen the “disorderly side” of Mexican politics (p. 96).

Mexican political leaders took turns plundering the country before ending their terms in exile or death (“Now and then a politician gets across the border in time”, p. 40). The only notable exception to this pattern was the administration of Porfirio Díaz (president in 1884–1911), which Waugh describes as a period of stability and prosperity, thanks in no small part to foreign investment (much of it British), which Díaz encouraged. Judging by the wikipedia, Díaz' administration was a near-dictatorship in which economic technocrats ran the country for the benefit of big landowners and rich foreign investors. In fact, Waugh doesn't particularly deny that Díaz was autocratic,* but seems to think it a good tradeoff in exchange for security; he sort of shrugs resignedly, and cynically, as he describes how the Mexicans who “knew the boredom and inevitable abuses that grow in an autocracy, [. . .] wished to see their country conforming still more closely to the contemporary fashion”, and so “party politics were reintroduced [. . .] The result has been twenty-five years of graft, bloodshed and bankruptcy. [. . .] The only difference between the Mexican system and the Fascist is that the nation has sacrificed its political liberties without getting internal security or foreign prestige in exchange.” (P. 40.) “A whole generation [. . .] has known nothing but pillage, graft and degeneration.” (P. 44.) It is unsurprising, of course, that Waugh as a rich and conservative person would prefer the stability of an autocratic system, even a fascist one, over the turbulence of a revolutionary period. But in my opinion the solution to this is not to reintroduce autocracy, but to continue the revolutions until the political system improves :]

[*He remarks elsewhere, in what is simultaneously an admission and a defense of Díaz' autocracy: “It is characteristic of Mexican history that at almost any period one looks at there are abundant reasons for deploring the existing regime; one turns the pages and one realizes that one was wrong; the cure was always worse than the ill.” (P. 80.)]

The party that seized power during the Mexican Revolution was called, reasonably enough, the Revolutionary Party of Mexico; in Waugh's time, it was led by General Cárdenas (president in 1934–40). The party had Marxist leanings and did not shy from policies of nationalization and confiscation. Waugh, as befitting a man of his politics, spends much time ranting about the supposedly immoderate demands of Mexican workers, the frequency of strikes, and you can practically see him holding his breath as he tells you — hoping you will be as shocked as he is — that the right to strike extends even to schoolchildren, who are able to get unpopular teachers replaced that way (pp. 35, 117)! The poor, poor employers are afraid to hire people, knowing they won't be able to fire them (p. 35)! The nasty, nasty unions have such immoderate power that janitors end up working as museum curators (p. 36)! Won't you shed a tear for the unfortunate, beleaguered upper classes of Mexico?

He has an interesting theory — and is honest enough to admit that it is no more than a conjecture — that relations between labour and employers follow a cyclical pattern: labourers get exploited for some time; start standing up for themselves; but gradually their demands grow excessive, class war ruins the country and paves the way for the rise of fascism or something like it; war and ruin follow, and the cycle is ready to start anew (pp. 43–4). The ‘rise of fascism’ part, he suggests, is where Mexico might go next. In fact he seems to have, much like many right-wingers today, a stubborn but nonsensical idea that far left and far right systems have much more in common than they really do (since WW1 “two forms of proletarian rule have appeared, Nazism and Communism”, p. 162), and that the sort-of-Marxist sort-of-dictatorship of Cárdenas could easily turn, at any moment (perhaps through a coup), into something like fascism or nazism.* In fact, Waugh says, Cárdenas is already cooperating just fine with the Axis powers: after he nationalized foreign oil companies, Britain and America refused to buy Mexican oil, so he started selling it to the Axis powers through barter agreements (p. 69). Evidently Waugh thought that these commercial links could easily develop into closer political alignment as well, and in fact late in the book he has some impressive fearmongering about the supposed spread of German influence all over Latin America (p. 162). This was, of course, a common enough concern at that time, one that many authors liked to write worried articles and book chapters about, but as far as I can tell this supposed influence in Latin America did not do Nazi Germany even an iota of good. I suspect most of this influence existed only in the minds of the fearmongers.

[*In an outline of his book for an American publisher, Waugh wrote similarly that the present Mexican “regime is an odd mixture of Nazism & Communism representing most of the worst features of both systems. In the next few years, perhaps months, it is likely to throw in its lot definitely with one or another of the two extremes.” (P. xlvi. Another of his many failed prognostications.)]

*

Considering that this book owes its very existence to Uncle Clive's oil money, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it actually dedicates no more than one chapter (pp. 45–69) to the Mexican oil industry and its nationalization. I liked his summary of the different political attitudes to the issue: on the one hand you have English extremists “who believe that the world was created to supply the English with physical comforts”; on the other hand you have Mexican extremists “who believe that the soil of the country and anything on or below it, was ordained for the exclusive use of the heterogeneous peoples who have been born there; that this possession is inalienable and that any use made of it by a foreigner is an act of theft.” (P. 50.) I for one am happy to side with the Mexicans here, but Waugh argues for a middle course where the case should be judged on its merits, and spends most of this chapter defending the foreign oil companies from various accusations.

He points out that oil companies had been established in Mexico with the full encouragement of President Díaz; that large investments are needed before you find sufficient oil deposits and develop them into a profitable venture; hence having big oil companies do this is the best option. He denies that they meddled in Mexican politics, except for yielding to various demands for bribes without which they wouldn't have been able to operate at all during the turbulent times of the Mexican Revolution. If oil has an outsized role in the Mexican economy, it is (Waugh says) because the unwise policies of Cárdenas and his predecessors have already ruined all the other branches of the economy (p. 57). Waugh insists that the oil companies “paid high wages and high taxes; the workmen misspent the wages and the politicians misspent the taxes, with the result that the country did not benefit as richly as it might have done had it been differently inhabited” (p. 59). In fact wages and working conditions in the oil industry were better than in other branches of the economy (pp. lviii–ix, 63).

Officially, nationalization was the government's response to the failure of the oil industry to negotiate with the trade unions; but Waugh says that this was only a pretext, the unions' demands (pp. 64–66) were deliberately impossible, and at any rate the lot of the oil workers did not in any way improve with nationalization. The deeper reason, according to Waugh, is simply that to the Mexican politician “wealth is, in fact and in theory, the product of theft” (p. 60).* In the nineteenth century they had looted the Church; then more recently the big landowners, with an agrarian reform dedicated to expropriating their estates rather than at opening up more land (of which Mexico had plenty) to farming; and now the oil industry was the last thing left to loot.

[*He wrote similarly in a synopsis of proposed newspaper articles about Mexico: “For century [sic] Mexican economy based on theft.”]

Even if all this is true (and it may well be; I simply have no idea), I still think it's better if each people develops its own resources, at its own pace, with its own abilities and capital, even if foreign companies would do it better and sooner. Every form of trade is unequal; one party or the other always gets screwed over. Here the foreigners got their oil, “paid high wages and high taxes”, the Mexicans pissed away the money, and in the end had nothing to show for it; so it would have been better if the oil had stayed in the ground instead. The Mexicans would still have had nothing, but at least the foreigners wouldn't have profited from their oil. I do agree, however, that it would have been more decent if the Mexican government had been forthright about its goals, rather than pretending that this is all because of some sort of labour dispute.

*

Cárdenas's government also announced a “Six Year Plan”, with much fanfare and clumsy, heavy-handed propaganda; but it was hardly a plan at all, certainly nothing like the detailed four- or five-year plans of the Nazis or Soviets (p. 98), and not much of it was likely to get implemented (p. 119).

Apart from the nationalization of oil, Cárdenas's most notable efforts seem to have been in land reform. Most of the land, according to Waugh, had always been in the hands of big landowners — under the Aztecs, under the Spaniards, and after independence. Now the government was dispossessing them, on the basis of (often fake) petitions by local peasants (p. 106). The better your estate, the sooner it would be expropriated, which discouraged owners from trying to improve anything. With the land now split into small holdings, farming was mostly less efficient and production fell (p. 109). Waugh presents some pretty reasonable ideas of his own as to what a more moderate land reform might look like (p. 111).

This seems to be another good example that land reforms should be done carefully and gradually; before you kick the old owners out, you should make sure that you have other people ready with the necessary skills to run their farms. Zimbabwe is a more recent example of the same problem (and I guess revolution-era Haiti was another).

*

Unsurprisingly, there is also a long chapter about the plight of the Catholic Church in Mexico — a subject that Waugh didn't need any oil money to be interested in. Apparently many accusations were being circulated about the Church being rich and greedy, the priests being immoral, etc., but Waugh insists this was mostly exaggerations of isolated cases — slander spread by the Mexican government who just wanted an excuse to rob the Church (p. 125). The persecution of the Church had already started under the Reptilians “Liberal-Mason-Agnostics” (p. 139) of the 19th century, and had lately been intensified by the communist-leaning governments in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.* The 1917 Constitution of Queretaro contained very harsh anti-Church provisions (p. 140); at the time of Waugh's writing, he says that the Church was in practice tolerated to a somewhat greater extent than before, though this varied from region to region (p. 141). Cárdenas himself was not particularly fanatical (“He is more interested in pleasing the people than in following any logical policy”, p. 144), but some of his supporters were.

[*Waugh puts the roots of this conflict still farther back: it is a “conflict with merciless, fanatical atheism—an atheism that at the moment adopts Marxist language, just as in earlier generations it used Liberal language, but which antedates either; the atheism of the impenitent thief at the crucifixion.” (P. 122.)]

Meanwhile, the bulk of the Mexican people were deeply attached to the Church. Waugh even says he met an organization of laypeople working in secret to “train and maintain teachers [. . .] counteract the official atheism [. . .] facilitate the movement and concealment of the priesthood; [. . .] organize study groups” etc. (p. 149), but he is vague about the details (understandably so, I guess).

There's also an interesting section about the Virgin of Guadalupe, of which I was only vaguely aware until now. Mary appeared to a recently converted Indian in 1531, and an image of her, with Indian features, miraculously appeared on his cloak. Waugh, of course, defends the authenticity of the miracle, and emphasizes its social consequences: the Spanish colonialists at the time had been having some doubts about the policy of baptising the Indians; but now here was “a Virgin with an Indian face; a thing no painter would have dared to do without incurring the charge of blasphemy. And the Spaniards accepted the miracle. The important feature is not the repugnance it aroused but the fact that the repugnance was overcome. The nobility of the country, from the Viceroy down, solemnly prostrated themselves in the new shrine”. It proved to everyone “that the religion of the Spaniard was equally the religion of the Indian” (p. 133). (Incidentally, there has been a new development since the time Waugh wrote about this: Juan Diego, the man to whom the Virgin had appeared, was canonized in 2002.)

Another interesting passage in this chapter was about a small community of nuns that managed to exist in hiding for some seventy years, from the time religious orders were banned in the mid-19th century until 1935 when they were discovered (pp. 145–7). I never quite understood why so many regimes were opposed to monasteries (e.g. Henry VIII shut them down as soon as he turned protetant). If you tolerate regular priests, why not monks and nuns as well? If anything, they have less of an impact on the outside world since they are mostly shut in their monasteries, so there's no harm in allowing them to continue.

*

Waugh concludes the book with some speculation about Mexico's future. He suggests that if the Mexicans grow disappointed with Cárdenas's socialism, they may well end up trying something along the lines of Nazism or even National Bolshevism (pp. 153, 163). Moreover, Mexico might get destabilized by all the anarchists, communists etc. who sought asylum there from their defeat in the Spanish Civil War (p. 156). There could be a civil war; an anti-Cárdenas coup; Mexico might join the Anti-Comintern Pact (p. 162). He warns against growing German influence in Latin America, and suggests that the nationalized Mexican oil fields may soon be in Nazi hands (p. 157). He even suggests that, since the example of the U.S. fighting in Europe in WW1 proves that waging a campaign across the Atlantic is now possible, Germany may soon do the same: “South America has become accessible as a battle-ground while at every point the German-Japanese alliance threatens vital American interests.” (P. 162.) Or perhaps now that Franco has won, Spain might rise again as an imperial power (p. 157–9). Or perhaps a pagan cult might re-emerge amongst the Indians (p. 159). Or perhaps pigs will soon fly over Mexico City... no, wait, he doesn't mention that one, but it's scarcely less probable than some of his other ideas.

As you can see, no scenario is too ridiculous or too far-fetched for Waugh to entertain, and I think we can pretty safely conclude that he has proven to be a complete and utter failure as a prognosticator of the future. As far as I can tell, what actually happened in Mexico was: absolutely nothing dramatic; or at least nothing dramatic enough that someone like me, living some 80 years later and one ocean away, would have much reason to care about it.

Another prediction: “I believe, in fact, that within a hundred years Mexico will form part of the U.S.A.” (P. 38.) There's some 15 years left before we can judge that one, but I don't think it's likely to happen :) But I guess he was just extrapolating from past experience; he says later that in the time of Díaz, some “statesmen were openly claiming that the natural boundary of the United States was the isthmus of Panama” (p. 40).

More interesting than his wild speculations is the last paragraph of the book (p. 164), where he suggests that the ongoing collapse of Mexico can be a warning to all: “Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. [. . .] Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. [. . .] we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. [. . .] The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. [. . .] There is nothing, except ourselves, to stop our own countries becoming like Mexico.” (P. 164.)

I found that paragraph very interesting as another fine summary of Waugh's conservative views, where civilization is just barely hanging on and we're always just one step away from barbarism and anarchy. But it seems to me that civilization is a good deal more robust than these people give it credit for. World wars, great depressions, momentous social transformations and the like have been tearing at the fabric of society for more than a century, and the damn thing just won't collapse! Any kind of chart you care to look at just goes up, up, up all the time. Any collapse you might get is very localized, such as when a country gets a particularly bad government, and is sooner or later followed by the inevitable recovery when its regime changes. Even outbursts of barbarism are short-lived and surprisingly half-hearted: people are at each other's throats for a war or two, do a bit of genociding, but then ten years later they are friends and neighbours and trading partners again, and listen to each other's popular music and visit each other for vacations. The conservatives always feel as if we were in 5th-century Rome, facing a flood of barbarians about to plunge our world into the dark ages for the next thousand years — heck, often enough I feel that way myself — and yet it's hard to see just how you can justify such views with objective facts. Actually these feelings are probably mostly borne of internal factors; it would be more honest to say: eh, you're just mildly dyspeptic, the world is mostly OKish and will keep hobbling along much the same as hitherto; very far from perfect to be sure, but hardly in any real danger of imminent collapse either.

In any case, I don't want to sound too critical of the book. It was an enoyable enough book to read, written in the same pleasant style as all of Waugh's works, with plenty of sarcastic and humorous passages, and as long as you take his opinions with a grain of salt, keep his political biases in mind, and pay no attention to his efforts to speculate about the future, you can still learn something little about 1930s Mexico and have a good time while doing so.

Miscellaneous

Waugh in a letter about his voyage from the U.S. to Mexico: “New York was 93° and felt like 193°. The Siboney packed with jewesses.” :)))

Waugh in a letter some ten years after his visit to Mexico: “The food is very nasty—an awful kind of tough pancake with a sauce that takes the skin off the tongue is the main dish—called I think ‘tamales’.” (P. lxx.)

Before settling on Robbery Under Law, Waugh intended the book to be titled Pickpocket Government (p. xlv). Even with the new title, his American publisher was “somewhat afraid of this title” and changed it to Mexico: An Object Lesson for the American edition (p. xlix).* Waugh didn't seem to mind: “They can call the book the Giant Panda for all I care.” (P. l.) :)) Another change was that some passages critical of Henry Lane Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico in 1909–13, were toned down in the U.S. edition (p. liv). There were also many minor changes in spelling and capitalization (p. 181; notably, the U.S. ed. prints acute accents on Spanish names while the U.K. ed. doesn't).

[*Editor's note 133 on p. xcii suggests that this was because Britain had by then broken off diplomatic relations with Mexico (due to the nationalization of the British oil companies) but the U.S. hadn't.]

Robbery Under Law was reprinted in 1940 by the Catholic Book Club, despite the fact that Waugh pokes fun at book clubs in his preface: readers, he says, have lately “banded themselves into book clubs so that they may be perfectly confident that whatever they read will be written with the intention of confirming their existing opinions” (p. lxxxv). :)

Waugh has some doubts whether tourism promotes international friendship: “There are very few English villagers who have seen an Egyptian; very few Egyptian villagers who have not seen an Englishman; the result is that the English generally are well disposed towards Egypt, while the Egyptians detest us.” :)) (Pp. 3–4.)

About the loss of old architecture: the Mexicans “have been rather frivolous in their vandalism; they have stolen and neglected and put things to unsuitable uses, but there has been none of the systematic extermination of good architecture the Londoners have enjoyed” (p. 16).

He mentions some people who “drink cokokola” (p. 23) — a sign, I guess, that this brand was not yet known in Britain at that time. In the U.S. edition it is spelt correctly, “Coca Cola” (p. 184).

Waugh is skeptical about the Aztecs: “When I read accounts of the splendour of lost civilizations, I always remember the descriptions with which the world's press was lately full of the Imperial court at Addis Ababa.” :] (P. 29.)

He has several sour comments to the effect that Mexican nationalization of British oil provoked comparatively little protest amongst the British public because it was done by a left-wing and not a right-wing regime. “If the Japanese, or Nationalist-Spaniards, or Germans or Italians had taken our oil, then there would have been a series of meetings in the Albert Hall; but the Mexicans had a Left Book Club vocabulary.” Cárdenas's regime may have been autocratic, but “when the Mexicans saluted their bosses they raised the arm with clenched first, not with extended fingers. So they were all right; they were democrats, like ourselves and the French.” :))) (P. 46.) Waugh, like I suppose most right-wingers, refuses to recognize that left-wing totalitarianism is fundamentally good, even if horrible in practice, while right-wing totalitaranism is fundamentally evil, and that this difference is important.

“The General [Cárdenas], too, is, like all revolutionary leaders, in a somewhat ambiguous position with regard to revolutions. The crown of Spain might logically claim that all rebellion was of its nature, wrong; no subsequent government of Mexico has that right.” :)) (P. 57.)

A pleasantly cynical view of elections: “There are, in various parts of the world, various means of securing election; the candidate may buy votes in the old English way of ready money down, in the new English way of promises to pay from the public funds when elected; [. . .] the Mexicans, for the most part, prefer to leave the voting papers uncounted and draw from the lists made up at the party headquarters.” (P. 79.)

“Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.” :)) (P. 80.)

When visiting the Exhibition of the Six-Year Plan [Plan Sexenal]: “Some no doubt were misled by the name Sexenal and having heard lurid stories of sexual education in the schools, were there in the hope of being shocked.” :)) (P. 98.)

Waugh remarks that “[t]his is true nearly everywhere; a great proportion of militant communists are or have been teachers [. . .] partly because there is something about the work itself which sensibly inclines the mind to bigotry” (pp. 113–14). He had worked as a teacher early in his career (1925–27); I wonder if he speaks from experience?

“There are only a few thousand native whites in Mexico” (p. 159). I guess that his ideas of what counts as white were narrower than today, but that still strikes me as an unusually small number.

The editor of the present volume provided a “Glossary of Names” with short biographies of nearly everyone mentioned in the book. I was interested to see that Cárdenas (p. 190), in spite of Waugh's gloomy, near-apocalyptic predictions, retired from office without any fuss when his term as President of Mexico expired, and had a fairly un-dramatic life for another thirty years before dying in 1970.

Two tidbits from p. 198, illustrating the instability of 19th-century Mexican politics. The biography of José de Salas (President of Mexico in 1846 and 1859) consists of a single sentence: “He did not die violently.” :)) On the same page we learn that Santa Anna was “President of Mexico on twenty-two non-consecutive occasions from 1833”.

Errors

Here are a few I've noticed:

“10s 6^d” (p. xxxiv) — it makes no sense to typeset “d” as a superscript here.

“upt us” (p. xxxvii) should be “put us”.

The “Vichy malice agent” (p. li) was probably just a police agent. Perhaps a Freudian slip? :)

“that of outstanding interest” (p. lxvii) is missing an “are”.

“lamps, contain” (p. lxviii) shouldn't have the comma.

“ ‘padded ’ ” (p. 32) shouldn't have the space before the closing quotation mark.

“Chihuaha” (p. 82).

“Spanish legionnaires who had crossed into France during this period were interred.” (P. 178.) Let us hope for their sake that this is a misprint for “interned” :))

“Mactezuma” (p. 196) should probably be “Moctezuma”.

“The Russian imperial family from 1613 until 1917” (p. 198) shouldn't be in bold italics, as it isn't really a part of the name.

Not exactly an error but a deplorable editorial decision: the first edition of this novel “italicizes Spanish words and following punctuation (e.g. ‘hacienda;’); in these cases the punctuation has been silently revised to roman” (p. 182). Why??? Setting a punctuation mark in italic type after an italic word is exactly the way it should be done in good-quality typesetting; unsurprisingly this practice is less common nowadays since typesetting, like most other things, has gone down in quality. But here they had a good example from a better age that they could have followed, and instead they've gone out of their way to make things worse :(

ToRead:

• The editor's introduction lists a number of books about the Mexican oil industry and its nationalization (pp. lvii, lxiii), but it is not known whether Waugh consulted them in writing his own book. At any rate most of them seem to have been published after 1938, so they would have appeared too late for him to use.

• One book he did use was Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (1928), but it seems to have been a lot more favourable to Mexican revolutionary governments than Waugh was (p. lvi).

• He also used F. C. Kelley's Blood-Drenched Altars (1935), about the persecution of the catholic church in Mexico (pp. lxv–vii).

• D. H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent (1926). A novel depicting “the revival of a pre-Christian religion with Aztec overtones” by Mexican revolutionaries (p. 166). Mentioned by Waugh on p. 6. I had some bad experiences with Lawrence's travel writing many years ago (see my post from back then), but perhaps I should give his fiction another chance.

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”.