Is the new "theory" that Elizabeth I was secretly a man too stupid to merit a discussion?

Yes.

The face of King Richard III

A fascinating moment in historical discovery has taken place this week. Sadly, it has taken place amid a tidal wave of sugary nonsense - the vast majority of which seems to be tumbling forth from the mouth of members of the Richard III Society, a society which, under normal circumstances, should be the recipients of nothing but praise this week for helping to fund and oversee such a momentous scientific achievement.

The bones found beneath a car park in Leicester have been positively identified by the University of Leicester as being the remains of King Richard III, the last of the three Yorkist kings of England. Richard ruled from 1483, when he seized the throne from his nephew Edward V, until his own death at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, where he fought with great and noted bravery. His wife and only legitimate son predeceased him and he was replaced on the throne by his enemy in battle, Henry VII.

In the Tudor era, Richard III was roundly attacked for allegedly murdering both his nephews and of plotting, back-stabbing and cheating his way onto the throne. It is not true, as some of Richard's hardier enthusiasts have claimed, that this was a deliberately propagated campaign of defamation from the throne itself, but rather something that seems to have grown from the works of men like Thomas More and William Shakespeare. The Tudors themselves spoke very little about Richard III (since they were no doubt keen to avoid reminding everyone that, like him, they too had seized the throne from a lawfully-enthroned monarch). However, even if the Tudors weren't the ringmasters of the "we hate Richard" club of the 1500s, they undoubtedly would have been more inclined to look favourably on Thomas More's portrait of Richard than any attempt to exculpate their one-time foe.

Richard's body was buried hurriedly in Leicester after the battle, but the church he was buried in was subsequently destroyed during the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. Since then, it has been lost and there were even stories that the Tudors had ordered his bones to be vindictively hurled into the river. That, too, is untrue and this week's results have confirmed that the body discovered in September 2012 was that of England's "last medieval" monarch. The bones will be re-interred in Leicester Cathedral, near where they originally rested. That is Church of England protocol and any suggestion of a state funeral or re-internment in Westminster Abbey has been nipped in the bud by Her Majesty The Queen, who has apparently discreetly made it clear that she doesn't want Richard buried there. A move supported or at the very least understood by Phil Stone, the Chairman of the Richard III Society.)

Since the seventeenth century, Richard has found himself the subject of a sustained campaign to rehabilitate him and a slightly less vociferous counter-campaign to have him remembered as a repulsive villain. The pro-rehabilitation "Ricardian" movement has produced many fine pieces of research that have greatly increased our understanding of the late medieval monarchy, although none of them have ever managed to definitively prove that he was not complicit in the disappearance of his nephews, despite valiant efforts. However, as this week has shown, the "Ricardian" movement has also been capable of producing over-zealous "fans". The sight of one person involved in the dig breathlessly proclaiming that the facial reconstruction of Richard III showed "just a hint of a smile, which is just lovely... he had a great sense of humour" forced me to wonder if she realised that the smile had been added in by an artist - since the real Richard died with ten wounds to the back of the skull and was therefore presumably not in much of a mood to crack a grin at the time. Documentaries like Channel 4's "The King in the Car park" only added to the frustration, with layer upon layer of saccharin, almost fan-girl-like, excitement glossing over the still-unanswered mysteries in Richard III's story in a relentless torrent of sentimental rubbish. Proclamations like "This will change everything we know about Richard III," raised an eyebrow. How? Is there a note about Edward V buried with him, clearing everything up? I doubt that. All these bones do are give us details on how he died (gruesomely) and what he looked like (genuinely fascinating.)

I was interview by BBC Radio Wales earlier this week, in which I suggested that, like most late medieval monarchs, Richard was driven by paranoia and ruthlessness. Given the time he grew up in, that seems a likely conclusion and it's an assessment that could be applied to most of his contemporaries. Richard's story is a fascinating one, but the study of it is occasionally being stifled by those who see themselves as Richard's champions. History is rarely comprised of heroes and villains and reducing Richard III and Henry VII to one or the other is frankly nothing short of silly. One member of the Richard III Society (a friend, actually) once pointed out to me, "We're not the Richard III Adoration Society, you know." 

"Well, stop acting like it then," I snapped. (I shouldn't have snapped.) "No-one wants to write anything critical of Richard in case they get hit by a torrent of hate mail from angry Ricardians." 

"I know," he (graciously) admitted. "There are whack-jobs in every movement, though."

We then debated whether "movement" was an appropriate term. In any case, the point is that historical debate is a good thing and can go on between friends, but when events like this week's moderate criticism gets swept to one side. A text from the same friend last night during the broadcast of "The King in the Car park," read, "Jesus. If she keeps going on like this, they'll be trying to turn his story into the next Disney movie." I laughed. Maybe even Richard, with that enigmatic waxwork smile of his, would have grinned, too.

I love history and I can therefore only be excited by the tremendous work done in Leicester and the reconstruction of this monarch's face. My congratulations to those involved.

Sinned against or sinning? Like most of his generation, I'd have to say: both. Either way, this long-dead king merited a slightly more measured and less breathlessly-excited defence this week. There are plenty of gifted academics who could, and should, have been interviewed to showcase a more serious, and more convincing, defence of Richard III.

My interview with Jason Mohammad at BBC Radio Wales can be listened to here, by going to 1h:22. 

"Trash written by trash": The Belgian royal family responds to its critics

A few weeks ago, I posted an article on how the British royal household seems to be getting sassier with unwarranted attacks on the royal family's private lives, after photographers invaded the privacy of the Duchess of Cambridge while she was on holiday in France. Now, it looks like Belgium's royal family is following suit. Prince Philippe, the Duke of Brabant, is the heir-apparent to the Belgium throne; he is a graduate of Oxford and Stanford, where he took his masters in political science. He has also served in the Belgian armed forces and one of his main priorities as heir to the throne is promoting Belgium's economy, representing the kingdom at over forty economic conferences. 

The Duke is married to Princess Mathilde (nee d'Udekem d'Acoz) and they have four children together - Elisabeth, Gabriel, Emmanuel and Eleanor. Recently, the couple have been the target of books and articles claiming that their marriage is a sham and that their children were conceived through artificial insemination. False interviews with the Duke's father, King Albert II, to substantiate these rather dubious claims, but both the palace and the couple themselves have retaliated by firmly rebutting the allegations. 

The blog Cross of Laeken, which is a fantastic blog that focuses on the Belgian royals, talks about these rumours and about the royal household's reaction to them. 

Missing Royals and Murder Mysteries: Anastasia and the allure of romance

The story of Anastasia Romanov is one of the great melodramas of royal history. In life, the real Grand Duchess Anastasia was the teenage daughter of Russia’s deposed emperor, Nicholas II. Her father had lost his throne during the revolution of 1917 and the entire family had subsequently been deported to Siberia. In July 1918, they were herded into a cellar and shot by local Communists. Their bodies were then stripped, doused in acid, hurled down a mineshaft and buried in a forest. In 1991, geologists announced they had discovered the bodies and surviving releatives of the Romanovs - including Britain's Prince Philip - were asked to provide DNA samples to help with the identification.

But between 1918 and 1991, no one knew, for sure, what had really happened to the Romanovs. The dishonesty and habitual secretiveness of the Soviet Union, the absence of the family’s corpses and rampant media speculation led to rumours that one, or more, of the Imperial Family had survived the massacre. By the 1920s, attention had narrowed to a single candidate – the youngest of the Tsar’s daughters, Anastasia, who had been seventeen at the time of her alleged murder. 

Why Anastasia became the centre of the greatest conspiracy theory of the twentieth century is hard to say. Maybe it was because the name ‘Anastasia’ has links to the theme of resurrection in the Russian language or maybe because it was the unconscious allure of the youngest princess (a favourite phrase in fairy stories.) For whatever reason, it was Anastasia who became fixed in the public’s mind as the 'one who got away,' whilst her three sisters faded into the history books as victims of the October Revolution. 

In time, the most famous of all the pretenders was a woman who travelled under the false name of ‘Anna Anderson,’ and who had first made the claim that she was Anastasia when she was recovering in a German mental asylum after a failed suicide bid in 1920. Anderson’s claim attracted global attention and she prosecuted the longest court case in European history trying to have her claim legally recognised. Some of her supporters included the Duke of Leuchtenberg, the Kaiser’s aging daughter-in-law Crown Princess Cecilia, the children of the doctor who had died alongside the royals in 1918, Anastasia’s childhood playmate who was now a wealthy American socialite called Xenia Leeds, the famous composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, the real Anastasia’s cousin Grand Duke Andrei, and, later, several prominent historians. However, there were notable dissenters – not least amongst them Prince Felix Yusupov, who called Anderson ‘an adventuress’ and ‘a horrible creature,’ the real Anastasia’s godmother the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, the real Anastasia’s cousin Princess Irina, several of the Tsarina’s surviving ladies-in-waiting, the real Anastasia’s French tutor Pierre Gilliard, the real Anastasia’s nursemaid Shura Tegleva, and the real Anastasia’s uncle Ernest, the deposed Grand Duke of Hesse. Ernest in particular became so incensed by Anderson that he spent years obsessively tracking down who she might really be instead. Eventually, he put forward the theory that Anna wasn’t a Russian princess at all, but a missing Polish factory worker called Franziska Schanskowska.

Anderson’s claim, and her court case, helped ensure Anastasia’s place in popular legend. The myth spawned several plays and movies – including the magnificent Oscar-winning Anastasia in 1956 (above), in which Anderson was played by Ingrid Bergman and her Danish grandmother was played by the ‘queen of Broadway,’ Helen Hayes; there was also a 2-part television movie in 1986, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, which had an impressive all-star cast that included first-time-actor Christian Bale (as Anastasia’s younger brother, Alexei), Amy Irving as Anna Anderson, Rex Harrison (in his last movie) as Grand Duke Cyril Romanov, Gone with the Wind’s Olivia de Havilland as Anastasia’s royal grandmother, Brideshead Revisited’s Claire Bloom as the Tsarina Alexandra and Oscar-winner Omar Shariff as Tsar Nicholas II. And, of course, there was the romantic 1997 musical cartoon Anastasia (below), with the voices of Meg Ryan, Kelsey Grammer, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Lloyd, John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Bernadette Peters and Kirsten Dunst. 

However, it is now absolutely impossible for any rational human being to persist in the belief that Anastasia Romanov lived beyond the massacre of 17th July, 1918. If she did survive the initial gunfire, she did so only by a matter of hours. When the bodies of the Romanovs were first unveiled to the world in 1991, it did admittedly seem as if Anna Anderson (below) might have been telling the truth, because two were missing. Scientists eventually confirmed that the absent corpses belonged to one of the Tsar’s daughters and to his only son, Alexei. Even by the time the bodies were ceremonially reburied in the Romanovs’ splendid Saint Petersburg crypt in 1998, the two missing skeletons had still not been found. Admittedly, many scientists insisted that the real Anastasia’s body was actually one of those being buried and that the missing princess was her elder sister, 19 year-old Maria. Supporters of Anderson responded by claiming that Maria and Anastasia had been so close in age and physical appearance that the scientists had mistaken Maria’s body for that of her younger sister – who, they believed, had survived the massacre, lived under the name Anna Anderson and died in Virginia at the age of eighty-three in 1984. 

But ten years later, in 2008, the last two royal bodies were discovered near the original burial pit. One of the Romanovs’ executioners had left records indicating that they had desperately tried to burn two of the bodies and, eventually, scientists were able to confirm his testimony. The bodies of Maria and Alexei Romanov were discovered near the site of the fire and at some point they will presumably rejoin their family in their Saint Petersburg tomb. In a final twist, DNA tests on a surviving scrap of intestine left from an operation undergone by Anna Anderson in the 1970s confirmed that Anastasia’s seemingly-paranoiac uncle Ernest had been right all along. Anderson wasn’t related to the Romanovs, but she was related to the Schanskowska family. Anna Anderson may have ended her life claiming to be the daughter of a tsar, but she had started it as the daughter of a penniless Polish factory worker.

Anderson’s claims have therefore been conclusively debunked and the body of the real Grand Duchess Anastasia rests inside the Peter and Paul Fortress of Saint Petersburg. But, incredibly, there are still those who refuse to accept that Anastasia died alongside the rest of her family in 1918 or that Anderson was nothing more than an extraordinarily gifted fraudster. What they're arguing is logically impossible, so why continue to cling to a belief that science and history have both debunked?

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that Anastasia was the last of a trinity of royal mysteries that have exercised and excited our curiosity for centuries. The other two are the missing Princes in the Tower and the ‘lost king of France,’ little Louis XVII, who disappeared at the height of the French Revolution. They died centuries apart, but there are similarities in their cases and in why they should still be studied today.

I don't believe that the princes in the Tower (above) survived or that they ever left its walls after 1483. If Richard III had shown unexpected clemency by allowing one, or both, to leave in the months after he became king, then it’s hard to see why he wouldn’t have paraded them through the streets when his regime was slowly being eroded by claims that he had murdered them. Furthermore, why would their mother agree to a scheme that would place Henry Tudor on the throne if she knew that her sons were still alive? There is, above all, absolutely no evidence – none whatsoever – that points to them having lived beyond 1483. There is plenty of passionate speculation, but nothing else. Bodies that are almost certainly theirs were discovered within the Tower’s walls in exactly the place that Saint Thomas More had said they were in, in his excoriating biography of their uncle. It’s too big a coincidence to dismiss. And, finally, if they did leave the Tower then where did they go after 1483? Narnia?

Louis XVII (above) died in horrible conditions, after months of physical and psychological abuse. He was ten years-old at the time and both his parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, had already gone to the guillotine. He was autopsied in the prison but then he was almost certainly hurled into a mass grave. We have no idea where and probably never will. It is only because his heart was removed during the autopsy that tests were able to be performed in the twenty-first century that confirmed that Louis had indeed died in prison in 1795. 

And as for Anastasia: if eyewitness accounts of the Imperial Family’s murder are to be believed, she died towards the end of the massacre, after being repeatedly beaten and stabbed by Bolshevik soldiers. 

These are the awful, hideous, heartbreaking facts behind the three greatest mysteries in royal history and a million miles removed from the fairy tales they have spawned.

All four of these young royals – Edward V, his brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Louis XVII and Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia – disappeared in times of turmoil and secrecy. Richard III could not reveal what he had done with the boys, or allowed to be done to them, without fears of toppling his own regime. The French Republic felt that drawing attention to the appalling treatment the little boy had suffered in jail would only inflame royalist sympathies and the fledgling Bolshevik movement were concerned that Kaiser Wilhelm II would back-out of his recent truce with them if he discovered what had happened to his cousins. The myths about their survival are therefore perfectly explicable by a process of historical logic: initially, no one knew exactly what had happened to them which led to them speculating about possible explanations. I suspect, of course, that it’s more than that and that the reason why so many people believed, or believe, in these fantastic tales of  imperial survival is because the allure of fairy stories never quite leaves us – however hard we try. We want to believe in royal glamour, excitement, danger and happily-ever-afters. We want to believe, I suppose, in some form of magic. 

What do we do with these stories, though, once we know they’ve been disproved? (In Anastasia’s case, and Louis XVII’s, definitively; in the case of Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, by all laws of probability.) Well, as a writer, I see nothing wrong in continuing to dramatize them. As long as you don’t get so caught up in your own fiction that you try to mislead people, I still think there’s a place for stories of lost princes and princesses. And why not? When I think of Edward, Richard, Louis and Anastasia, I often hear the words of poor Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement: ‘What sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I’d like to think this isn’t weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness.’ Robbed of a real life by their families' enemies, I suppose that there is a kind of kindness in giving these children a fictional afterlife. 

But the historian in me wants people to see that the real stories of these children are important in their own right. They are celebrity poster-children against what we are capable of, but shouldn’t be. They’re what happens when politics runs amok. Edward V and his little brother perished at the end of a brutalising century, in which political corruption and ruthless communal ambition had warped the moral fabric of an entire generation. Louis XVII and Anastasia Romanov died because their very existence was inconvenient to a new form totalitarian form of politics. The children did not ‘fit’ into the revolutions’ grand new vision of the world. As a result, in a world without compromise, they were expendable. Leon Trotsky himself dismissed Anastasia’s murder with a shrug, boasting that the horror it had caused would help unite the Red Army in fear behind the Communist cause. What we should be doing now is not focusing too much on what might have happened, but on what did happen. These dead children matter because their fates illuminate the fates of so many others who we now know only by statistics; they give us warnings, not just about politics but about the nature of humanity. Reflecting on the death of Louis XVII, one French royalist lamented that the child had been cut down ‘on the threshold of life.’ These four children died horribly, they died unfairly and they died illegally. Their stories should remind us that we should never go too far in the name of politics, to never cheapen our respect for the sanctity of human life and to remind us that we should never turn our backs on protecting the weak and the vulnerable.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The attack on the "Lusitania" (1915)

Although she is less famous than her equally-unlucky rival the Titanic, it's arguable that the Lusitania's actual impact on history was far greater. When she first entered service for the Cunard Line in 1907, the 32,000-ton flagship was instantly hailed in the British press as recapturing that all-important national maritime pride in the commercial race for transatlantic dominance with Imperial Germany. Since 1897, German companies like Northern German Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika had garnered most of the international prestige with their series of patriotically-named superships. With the Lusitania and her slightly larger, slightly faster and slightly younger sister-ship, Mauretania, Britannia was fighting back. The Cunard sisters were nearly twice again as large as any of their rivals and both easily out-paced their German competitors when it came to speed. At the end of 1907, the Mauretania won the Blue Riband, the coveted prize for the fastest crossing of the North Atlantic, which she quite incredibly managed to keep until 1929. With room for 2,200 passengers in three classes, the Lusitania was praised for the opulence and comfort of her interiors (below), as well as for her speed, safety and commercial success.

But the Lusitania's ultimate historical importance arrived eight years later when she once again became a symbol for the rivalry between the British Empire and Germany. This time, the rivalry had turned into a bloody conflict and as the First World War raged, more and more of Britain's commercial fleet was requisitioned by the Royal Navy. A drop in passenger numbers meant that Lusitania's two running mates, Mauretania and Cunard's new flagship, Aquitania, were voluntarily removed from service and laid-up in Liverpool. (Both were called up for service as troop carriers and hospital ships once the Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire began.) By the spring of 1915, the Lusitania was the only major luxury liner still operating the route from New York to England. 

The Imperial German embassy in America suspected that she was being used to transport munitions from British sympathisers in the United States. Furthermore, the government in Berlin had recently declared that any ships, commercial or military, attempting to bypass the German blockade of Britain would be legitimate targets for German submariners. Heedless of these warnings, or perhaps ignorant of them, the Lusitania set sail from New York from Pier 54 on May 1st, 1915. Six days later, off the Old Head of Kinsale in Ireland, she was struck by a German torpedo at 2.10 p.m. Passengers, finishing dessert in the first-class dining saloon, felt an enormous jolt rock the ship and from the periscope of the U-20, the German captain, Captain Schweiger, heard a second explosion, which he initially assumed to be an exploding boiler or coal powder.

The sinking of the Lusitania was quick, chaotic and hideous. The 32,000-ton steamer sank in only eighteen minutes, tipping hundreds into the beautiful but freezing Irish waters. The ship pitched so violently to one side that half the lifeboats could not be launched; power-cuts and the speed of the sinking meant that dozens of passengers were trapped inside the ship's elevators and drowned like caged animals; lifeboats fell and crushed survivors fleeing in ones below; children were separated from their parents in the chaos and dozens were killed by miniature explosions, scalding water and deck equipment. Residents in the nearby Irish port of Queenstown later said that the dozens of children's bodies in their little coffins in the town's streets was a sight they would never forget.

Since the day of the Lusitania's sinking, controversy has raged about what caused the second explosion and the actions of the respective British and German governments. In the United States at the time, there was no doubt that Germany was to blame. American public opinion was inflamed by the deaths of so many American civilians and Captain Schweiger was painted as a war criminal for refusing to give the Lusitania time to disembark her civilian passengers before firing. Britain, unsurprisingly, concluded that the sinking had been "the illegal act of the Imperial German government" and insisted the second explosion had been caused by Schweiger vindictively firing a second torpedo into the ship's side. Germany, and later conspiracy theorists, insisted the second explosion was Britain and America's fault, because they had been trading munitions and it was those munitions which exploded on impact, causing the Lusitania to sink in such record time.

It seems that the Lusitania was carrying arms - shells and cartridges - but she had been carrying those in trade even before the war began. It is doubtful that American port authorities would ever have allowed a commercial vessel to load significant amounts of military hardware, particularly at such a delicate time. In hindsight, the second explosion, which helped pitch the Lusitania onto her side as she sank, was almost certainly caused by the first torpedo igniting either a boiler fire or a coal dust explosion. The British version of events, which claimed there had been a second German torpedo, and the German version of events, which claimed the Lusitania had been little more than a military cargo ship with a civilian shield, were both almost certainly incorrect and self-serving. At the time, Germany's reputation in the United States was irreparably damaged and Germany's two principal allies, Imperial Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, both distanced themselves from the sinking and refused to condone it.

The United States entered the war on the Allied side in 1917.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The Loss of the "Republic" (1909)

This month, there was the tragic news of the sinking of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia, after it ran aground off the Isola del Giglio. Costa Concordia was, to date, the largest ship built on Italian soil and, at the time of writing, the sinking has claimed sixteen confirmed lives, so far.

The Costa Concordia's sinking is one of the first maritime losses of a luxury liner in the twenty-first century. Over the next few days, I'll take a brief look at some of the previous century's most famous disasters at sea.

The sinking of the RMS Republic (1909)

Ironically, given its name, the White Star liner Republic was actually built in Ulster, the most vociferously monarchist of the four provinces of Ireland. At the time, Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyards were the largest and the best in the world; the east Belfast workforce produced ships for companies all over the globe, but their closest working relationship was with the British firm, White Star Line, one of the main British commercial bodies operating the lucrative transatlantic trade. Built in Belfast in 1903, she was originally christened Columbus and sailed under the livery of the Dominion Line, a sister-company of White Star's, before being transferred to the White Star and re-named, after only two voyages. Although Republic was praised in shipbuilding industry journals at the time for the comfort offered onboard, she was originally built with an eye to incorporating all of the latest safety techniques. In 1909, six years into her commercial life, these features were put to the test when Republic departed New York for the British colony at Gibraltar, and other Mediterannean ports. In thick fog, she was hit by the Italian liner Florida. Two of the Republic's passengers were killed on impact, as they slept in their cabins, and three of the Florida's crew men also died. Part of the rescue was carried out by the Florida and the U.S. coastguard's Gresham; the passengers were then transferred back to New York by another White Star steamer, the Baltic. In many ways, the tragedy of the Republic ironically gave the shipping industry, and White Star in particular, a false sense of security. The Republic took a full thirty-nine hours to sink. At nearly 16,000 tons, Republic was the largest ship to be lost to the sea, at that point in history. The slow speed at which she sank, the effectiveness of Marconi in securing multiple rescue ships and the low loss of life all helped persuade many industry insiders, like Captain E.J. Smith, that terrible, swift maritime disasters were a thing of the past - a view which the tragedy of the Titanic would brutally dispel three years later. Today, the Republic is most well-known for the rumour that at the time of her sinking, she was carrying $3 million in coins for the Imperial government of Russia. If that were true, the coins, if still onboard, could be worth nearly $5 billion in 2012. However, if these stories are true, to my mind, it's improbable that they would not have been evacuated along with all of Republic's passengers and crews during the lengthy rescue operation.

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 9): The Blame Game

Historians still continue to debate about how far Henry VIII was involved in his second wife's murder. It may surprise many who are not well-acquainted with the academic debates surrounding Henry's personality to learn that in many modern histories he is presented as an essentially weak sovereign, who was easily manipulated by those around him. In this scenario, the chief culprit for orchestrating Anne's downfall becomes Thomas Cromwell, the King's chief adviser and her one-time ally turned mortal enemy. I do not agree with this interpretation of events and it seems to me that the arguments put forward by J.J. Scarisbrick and Derek Wilson, that Henry was the main architect of what happened.

"For me personally, however, the missing third of this tragedy is not Thomas Cromwell, but Henry VIII. It was, after all, Henry who signed the death warrants and whilst it may have been Cromwell who organised the interrogations, arrests and trials, it frankly beggars belief that Henry could have been so easily duped into believing in his wife’s guilty. As far as I’m concerned, Henry was neither a participant nor a victim in what happened in 1536 – rather, he was the chief architect and the author of the tragedy. Cromwell certainly organised the details and oversaw the execution of the plot, but under no circumstances could he have dared act so audaciously – and so manically (the entire thing was a swift, brutal mess, without any of Cromwell’s usual slow, brilliant, relentless tactics) – without having been told to do so, in so many words, by Henry and to do so quickly."

Click HERE for the post on Henry's role from last year.

Above: Australian actor Keith Michell as Henry VIII in the television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1971.)

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 5): The Arrest of the Gentleman Poet

Above: An incomplete sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger (d. 1543) believed to show Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503 - 1542), a Tudor courtier, diplomat, politician and adventurer, who is perhaps best known nowadays for being one of sixteenth century England's most influential poets. He was arrested on May 5th, 1536 under apparent suspicion of being Queen Anne Boleyn's sixth lover. He was a close friend of her brother, Lord Rochford, "a tall, muscular, multi-lingual Oxford graduate with a passion for poetry, power and Protestantism," who was also currently a prisoner in the Tower.

"... Sir Thomas Wyatt, was a 32 year-old poet, who had known the Queen since her arrival in England as a debutante fourteen years earlier. His sister, Lady Lee, was one of the Queen’s chief ladies-in-waiting and in the days before she had come to Henry VIII’s attention, Wyatt had apparently been in love with Anne Boleyn, “this new beauty.” By the accounts of all those who actually knew them, this love was unrequited and we have some haunting poetry from that time expressing Wyatt’s pain at the situation. Upon hearing of Anne’s betrothal to the King, he had returned to his rooms, packed his bags and gone to Italy for several years on a diplomatic mission to the Vatican. The kind of overblown and melodramatic gesture one might expect from a poet and an indication of why he made so many women go weak at the knees - all except Anne, of course, and his own wife, who openly despised him."

For this blog's full account of the day on which Wyatt was arrested and escorted to the Tower, click HERE. 

April 9th, 1649: The Birth of a Royal Bastard?

1649 was the year that Charles II lost a father and gained a son. It had been less than three months since his father had been executed on the orders of a rebel parliament, dominated by Oliver Cromwell, and in the  moment that Charles I ceased to exist, in the eyes of millions the dead king's eighteen year-old son became Charles II, By the Grace of God, King of England, King of Scotland and King of Ireland. To them, the republic recently declared in the British Isles was both illegal and blood-stained.

The abolition of the British monarchy at the end of one of the most destructive and brutal civil wars in European history had scattered the surviving Royal Family to the winds. Charles himself was living in the Netherlands, where his eldest sister, Mary, had married the Prince of Orange and provided asylum for Charles when he was forced to flee England and lead the royalist resistance abroad. They had been joined by their second brother, fifteen year-old James, a strikingly handsome blond who was already being eaten up with cancerous hatred for parliament's murder of his father. Two of their siblings, thirteen year-old Elizabeth and eight year-old Henry, both of whom had been with their father on the day of his execution, were still being held in a republican jail in England and the youngest, four year-old Minette, had been smuggled out of England by a loyal palace servant and brought safely to Paris, where she was reunited with her grieving mother, Queen Henrietta-Maria.

To say that Henrietta-Maria was devastated by her husband's murder is something of an understatement. The bright and vivacious French princess who had been Charles I's wife for twenty-four years was now, at the age  of thirty-nine, a widow. In her heyday, Henrietta-Maria had been the first lady of a court celebrated for its elegance and its patronage of the arts. She had also been demonised in parliamentarian circles for her Catholicism, her foreign birth and her antipathy towards democracy. She had been unfairly blamed by parliamentarians for leading her husband into a rift with Parliament and thereby causing the civil war. Charles I needed no encouragement to believe in the cause of absolute monarchy and, in any case, Henrietta-Maria had taken absolutely no interest in politics for most of her married life. She had all-but worshipped the ground her husband walked on and Catholic and French envoys had often been frustrated by the Queen's refusal to recommend a policy which she thought her husband might not like to hear.

The news that her beloved husband had been beheaded outside the banqueting hall of the royal family's favourite London home was broken to Henrietta-Maria on a January evening by her Master of the Horse, Henry Jermyn. Whilst her servants collapsed weeping hysterically around her, Henrietta-Maria did not speak or move. It was only when her childhood friend, the Duchesse de Vendôme, came to visit her, hours later, that Henrietta-Maria, now the Queen Mother, collapsed shrieking and moaning with 'her extreme grief.' She sent news to her sister-in-law, the Queen Mother of France, that her husband's death 'had made her the most afflicted woman on the wide earth.' For days and even weeks after Charles's execution, Henrietta-Maria had sat hugging the hands of her ladies-in-waiting, piteously declaring: 'I have lost a king, a husband and a friend, whose loss I can never sufficiently mourn, and this separation must render the rest of my life an endless suffering.'

Under the circumstances, it was understandable that Henrietta-Maria, who was usually so omnipresent (even occasionally overbearing) in her children's lives was apparently unaware that her eldest had just impregnated his most recent mistress. The Queen Mother was in any case uninterested in her son's bed hopping and was instead focussing all her attention on trying to get her children, Elizabeth and Henry, released from Cromwell's prisons. She was also distracted when Paris itself erupted in riots aimed at overthrowing the government, which brought back terrible memories of the days when London too had first been convulsed by protests. It would be months before the indomitable Henrietta-Maria had recovered her fighting spirit and galvanised herself to endure any sacrifice and any pain to ensure that the cause of the monarchy triumphed in the end. 

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, the young and exiled Charles II was forced to confront the fact that he had become a father. Had his father still been alive, it is hard to imagine how the devout and monogamous King would have reacted to his son's womanising. Charles I had never taken a mistress, either before or during his marriage, and he expected his sons to do likewise. Charles II, however, enjoyed sex far too much to adhere to his father's moral code. Furthermore, he enjoyed the company of women, both inside and outside of the bedroom and he was of the cheerful persuasion that God would never damn a man for seeking a little pleasure. The eighteen year-old prince had certainly not been a virgin when he first seduced Lucy Walter, a beautiful Welsh socialite. But then, neither was she.

Lucy Walter, the daughter of a wealthy Welsh landowner, was the same age as Charles II and she had led a similarly adventurous romantic life. Described by the writer John Evelyn as a beautiful, flirtatious but stupid brunette, Lucy had enjoyed several lovers after her family's home had been ransacked and destroyed by Cromwell's armies during the civil war. Her first lover whose name we know for certain was Lord Algernon Sidney, a republican. She later left Algernon's bed for that of his younger brother, Robert, a royalist. Unlike his brother, who had sided with parliament during the Civil War, Robert was a colonel in the royalist army and he was eventually forced to flee abroad to Holland when the monarchy was overthrown. With her family's fortune destroyed and little chance of it being reclaimed under a republican government, Lucy followed Robert into exile and the two lovers were re-united in Rotterdam, quickly picking up where they had left off. It was through Robert that Lucy first met Prince Charles, who became her lover within days of being introduced.

Not long after they first slept together, Lucy discovered that she was pregnant and both she and Charles seemed fairly insistent that he was the father. However, some of Charles's court-in-exile were less convinced. In the first place, what had been a minor royal love affair when Lucy first announced her pregnancy had suddenly become something much more significant when the act of regicide in London turned Lucy's lover from a prince into a king. The eyes of the world were now fixed upon the exiled House of Stuart to see what they would do next and it was not exactly ideal for them to see the young king parading around town with his disreputable mistress proudly flaunting her swollen belly. 

Secondly, there were many in Charles's entourage who were by no means certain that he was the father of Lucy's baby. There is little to suggest that Lucy broke off her fling with Robert Sidney once she began sleeping with Prince Charles; Charles himself hadn't minded sharing. He had no intention of being faithful to her; why should he demand the same of her? Whatever his faults, Charles II did not preach a sexual double standard to his mistresses and in the seventeenth century, that is surely to his credit.

This controversial baby, born in a private house Lucy was renting in Rotterdam, was a boy, which made the debate about his paternity even more important. He was christened James, a good Stuart family name, and, at Charles's insistence, christened a Protestant too. In time, when his throne was restored to him, Charles II showered lands and titles on the boy he affectionately called "my Jimmy" - he became Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Doncaster, Earl of Dalkeith and Baron Scott. He was also to marry Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch, one of the great society heiresses of the 1660s, thereby acquiring a second ducal title.

Given all that, it seems clear that Charles II believed himself to be baby James's father. But was he? Many in the court-in-exile quite simply didn't believe Lucy and believed she had been able to get away with it because everybody else was too busy with other things to investigate her claims properly. Had Charles's mother Henrietta-Maria been in a more observant emotional state, it's highly unlikely that the out-spoken and refreshingly frank queen would not have queried the various holes in Lucy's story. For instance, the baby had been born only seven months after Charles's arrival in the Netherlands. Yes, premature babies then and now were possible, but considering the fact that Lucy had also been sleeping with Robert Sidney for months before Charles reached The Hague, wasn't it far more likely that he was the father? Years later, when his most notorious mistress, Barbara Villiers, presented him with a string of bastard children, Charles chivalrously acknowledged two of them - Anne and Benedicta - as his own, even though it is almost certain that he was not their biological father. Charles II was too moved by the sting that bastardy left on a child in the seventeenth century and he knew it was a sting which only a royal father might alleviate that he put his name to at least two children that were not his out of kindness. Might James Crofts have been the first?

We shall never know if Charles II was really the father of James Crofts. Many at the time believed he wasn't and several of those who insisted that Robert Sidney was the baby's sire were perfectly well-placed to know the truth. Against that, however, must be weighed the fact that Charles himself gave every appearance of believing the baby was his. Chivalrous he may have been, but if he had really thought that James was not his child, it is difficult to believe he would have given him so many aristocratic titles in the years after the restoration of the monarchy. Equally, of course, it is quite possible that both theories are correct - Charles believed he was the father but those around him who believed Sidney was were correct in their suspicions.

The love affair between Charles II and Lucy Walter soon fizzled out and both moved on to other conquests. In Lucy's case, more men and in Charles's, the attempted liberation of Scotland from the republican armies. Lucy later moved to Paris, where she enjoyed a string of lovers, but died at the age of twenty-eight, possibly from tuberculosis. Years later, some of her acquaintances would claim that she had once told them that during her stay in Rotterdam, she and Charles had secretly been married. By the time the story surfaced in England, Charles II was back on the throne and actually married to a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza. Charles and Catherine had not married until 1662, four years after Lucy's death, which meant that even if the stories of a clandestine marriage were true, it did not affect the legality of Catherine's marriage. However, as the years passed and Queen Catherine failed, time and time again, to produce a living child and King Charles gallantly refused to divorce her, the rumours that he had once been Lucy Walter's husband took on a more sinister significance. Because of the Queen's childlessness, the King had no other legitimate children and if he had married Lucy Walters at the end of the civil war, didn't that mean that their child was now the rightful heir to the throne?

Tragically and stupidly, the young duke (above) seemed to believe this story and he grew more and more obsessed with the idea that he was his father's heir. The fact that he might not even have been King Charles's biological son, let alone his legitimate one, was conveniently forgotten. When Charles II died of kidney failure in 1685, the throne passed to his brother James, a convert to Catholicism who now inherited the throne as King James II. Buoyed along by his deluded (or feigned) belief that his parents had been married, despite the fact that neither he nor anybody else could find any documentation to prove his theory, Monmouth rose in rebellion against his uncle. Many supported him - eager to see a Protestant king instead of a Catholic one. The rebellion failed and on July 15th, four months after his alleged father's death, James, Duke of Monmouth was gruesomely and incompetently beheaded in the Tower of London. It took over five blows to severe the head of a man who may, or may not, have been the first-born son of the "Merry Monarch."

Fatal Delusions: A review of the new biography of Anne Boleyn

"Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions" (Yale University Press, 2010)
By Professor G.W. Bernard (University of Southampton)
Reviewed by Gareth Russell

According to most of her contemporaries, Anne Boleyn was a young woman of many talents. As well as being articulate, well-read and trilingual, she was also, at least according to William Thomas, clerk of the privy council, ‘a woman endued with as many outward good qualities in playing on instruments, singing and such other courtly graces as few women of her time’. Yet Anne’s most enduring and most important talent was also her most indefinable. Anne Boleyn had a unique and, frustratingly for the historian, unquantifiable talent for provoking obsession. In life, it generated an attraction which first propelled her onto the throne and then, as the subtitle of this biography makes clear, onto the scaffold. In death, it has helped her become an icon of sustained popular fascination. And it is this talent of Anne’s, if no other, which George Bernard is prepared to acknowledge in his new book Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. Contrary to most studies of her life, it is Bernard’s contention that although Anne Boleyn was undeniably highly attractive in terms of her appearance, there was nothing about her personality, intellect, interests or accomplishments which marked her out as being particularly exceptional, except for the fact that Henry VIII happened, inexplicably, to fall so violently and obsessively in love with her.

This, Bernard’s first foray into the biographical genre (Bernard is a professor of English History at the University of Southampton and his best-known previous work was The King's Reformation) will, of course, always be best known for the fact that it is thus far the only biography of Anne Boleyn to seriously suggest that she might have been guilty of at least some of the charges for which she and five men were executed in May 1536. Yet although five of Fatal Attractions’ twelve chapters are devoted to expounding this controversial hypothesis, there are other aspects of Boleyn’s life and career which Bernard studies and in three other key areas, he offers a potentially valid revisionist interpretation of a woman who was described by one of her other recent academic biographers as ‘the most important and influential queen consort this country has ever had.’

"Le Radeau de la Méduse" and the allurements of propaganda

 

The experience of telling people that you sympathise with the royalists during the French Revolution is usually an unpleasant one. Listeners often react with the same horrified confusion as if you had just casually announced that you enjoy kicking orphans or punching poor people in the face for your own amusement. To declare oneself antipathetic to the goals and aims of the French Revolution is as close to heresy as one can come in the modern intellectual world. It's often difficult to explain in such conversations that it's a bit rich to hear western intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals, waxing loquacious in praise of the revolution's agenda towards equality, whilst reflecting that these are often the very same people who walk past beggars on the street, as if they can neither see nor hear them. Occasionally I'm tempted to remind these people who seem to be imagining themselves storming the barricades to a tune lifted right out of Les Misérables (different revolution, same romance) that we have a level of inequality between the west and the slums of Mumbai so grotesque that it would have made the most pampered of Versailles debutantes quail in horror. 

You see, to be blunt, we haven't exactly come a long way in those terms since 1788. Or at least, not as long as we would like to think. Alright, people (of both genders) have the vote now, we happen to have the very useful  and magnificent concept of civil liberties and birth-right is no longer considered an entitlement to a life of endless possibility devoid of responsibility. At least, not legally. But a casual glance at the endowments made to America's Ivy League universities might shake us out of the complacent idea that dynasty is dead or that there is no correlation in a meritocratic modern society between money and unwarranted entitlement. Put simply, we're just a lot better at hiding inequality than the ancien régime was. 

When it comes to female suffrage, the French Revolution was one of the most vituperatively misogynist regimes in European history and the first three countries to grant the right to vote to its female citizens were New Zealand (part of the British Empire), Australia (part of the same empire) and Finland (then part of the Russian Empire, ruled over by Nicholas II.) After that, the next two to extend the suffrage were Norway and Denmark, both monarchies. And so it's very difficult to see how exactly this much-vaunted republic of the 1790s enfranchised are sister-suffragettes. If one is inclined to praise liberal values and the rhetoric of Liberalism and, indeed, there is much to praise there, there is absolutely no need (and indeed many a reason not) to look back to the French Revolution as the progenitor of that creed. Both the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the American Revolution in the United States had created a language of liberal discourse without having to scythe down hundreds of thousands of their own people in the manner of the French Revolution. More than that, in the eighteenth century, many European monarchies were embracing modernity through a dialectic of throne-guided reform. Carlos III in Spain, Catherine II in Russia, Frederich VI in Denmark, Gustav III in Sweden, Josef II in Austria, Leopold I in Tuscany, Joseph the Reformer in Portugal and, lest we forget, Louis XVI in France, were all key proponents of societal evolution, as opposed to revolution. As Louis XVI's youngest brother reflected, "It was the time for reform, not revolution." Most of the benefits of modern society that we take for granted and rightly praise would have happened anyway, even without the revolution's crazed messianic delusions. The French Revolution is far better understood as an aberration in European history, and a hideous one from which warnings should be taken, not inspiration sought. The only way it could possibly be dubbed "the crucible of modernity" is if we follow Professor Michael Burleigh's sobering study of its ideas and conclude that it did not birth egalitarianism but rather vituperative nationalism, the concept of modern genocide, the state suppression of religion by violent means and polarising political ideology. All of which makes it even less attractive, if that were possible.

There are other questions, too, which any modern opponent of the romanticisation of the French Revolution could justifiably ask: why was pornography of the most vilely sexist and often homophobic variety used to annihilate the reputations of the revolution's high-profile opponents? Can genocide like that which was perpetrated by the revolutionary armies in the Vendée between 1790 and 1796 ever be justified - even when carried out in the name of a catchphrase as glib and seductive as "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"? How is it logically possible to have both Liberty and Equality in a nation? Surely a fundamental requirement of Liberty is to have the ability to overcome the imposition of Equality? Name any country in history which has been vigorously committed to enforcing the concept of equality and it does not make a particularly attractive list - the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam, Mengistu's Ethiopia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. And finally, why did the revolution occur under the rule of one of the most benign and liberal monarchs in French history? The myth of royal repression in the years immediately preceding the revolution is exactly that. It's a post-justifying myth to legitimise what was essentially a bourgeoisie coup locked in an abusive marriage with the frankly terrifying spectre of mob mentality and street violence.

Rinsing the revolution is therefore just about possible, if you are given time to explain your thoughts. You often don't because people start to appear embarrassed that you could be so cluelessly heartless as to hate the liberation of mankind like that. Or they look confused - as if you're about to leap out of the shadows in a Marie-Antoinette ballgown and start handing everyone pastries from Ladurée. Defending the monarchy, as opposed to criticising the revolution, is much more difficult. In part that's because articulating why you support a system that is, logically, nonsensical, is always going to be tricky because it comes down to praising what the journalist Charles Fenyvesi called "an argument favouring decadent caprice over ruthless efficiency."

With the argument that monarchy is a logical absurdity, I have no quarrel. If the world operated according to logic and people voted responsibly and with their heads for sober individuals who had no personal ambition, no debilitating prejudices or sentiments; if there was no such thing as patriotism and class and sentiment, then I would agree that there is no good argument for the system of monarchy. But the fact is that logic is not how the world works. Politicians' ambitions should be curbed. There should be one office in the land which no amount of ambition, no amount of money, no amount of votes, can ever propel you into. There should be, at the top, something totally and completely illogical, something entirely sentimental, divorced from party loyalty, because in moments of crisis and in moments of uncertainty, it's illogical sentiment that most of us will reach for. Above all else, if the French Revolution teaches us anything, it is that change should be gradual and legal, and a monarchy, by virtue of its traditions, can mitigate against too-rapid change. (I should point out that I am not dismissing the claims of those monarchists, or impartial observers, who articulate very valid pragmatic arguments for the continuation of monarchy into the modern day. My friend Tom, by no means a universal monarchist, recently put forward a very good case for why the institution of monarchy would be of great benefit to present day Italy; my friend Theodore has argued that there are sound reasons for monarchy's use in Russia, Germany, Austria and France, as well, as of course, Spain, Britain, Luxembourg, etc. The blog The Cross of Laeken is a passionate and cogent supporter of the Belgian monarchy. Nor am I saying that republics can never work. Far from it. There is something intrinsically inspiring about an American presidential election and although even there one can see the damaging affect on national unity which a particularly polarising president can have when it comes to a time of war or national crisis, America is today undoubtedly the example of a republic par excellence and one which I have nothing but the greatest respect for. Republics work in some places and monarchy in others.)

Sadly, it is the vogue for most modern armchair historians to see monarchy as an embarrassing hangover from the Middle Ages and no monarchy has been more casually dismissed than France's - the generous see it as bizarre; the critical as offensive. In the popular stereotype, the monarchy of the Bourbons managed to be both frivolous and repressive, self-centred yet all-controlling and clueless whilst fiendish.  Apparently, it wasn't just illogical but practically schizophrenic. Of all the many historical canards aimed at discrediting the French monarchy, none is more persistent than the absurd myth of a bubble-brained Marie-Antoinette joking for starving peasants to eat cake when there was a bread shortage. The myth that France was egregiously over-taxed under the Bourbons is also trotted out, as is the idea that everyone and anyone was occasionally incarcerated under the infamous lettres de cachet. Yet, discounting Marie-Antoinette's cake moment, no myth is more potent amongst semi-well read historical enthusiasts than the all-too believable idea that the ancien régime was the ultimate pork barrel buffet for the privileged. To paraphrase Lincoln, it was government for snobs, by snobs.

And nowhere is this idea more powerfully captured than in the epic Le Radeau de la Méduse by Théodore Géricault (1791 - 1824.) It is an arresting, fascinating, gut-retching painting and a real tribute to Géricault's troubled genius. It was painted following a horrific shipwreck off the coast of Africa in 1816, one year following the full Restoration of the French monarchy. The ship which had been lost was a naval frigate, called the Méduse, which had been en route to the French colony in Senegal, with the governor and his family on board. The frigate had been under the command of its new captain, the vicomte de Chaumareys, with a combined total of two hundred and forty passengers and about one hundred and sixty crew. Like the captain of the Titanic a century later, the vicomte ignored various warnings that the ship might be heading too close to the shallows. 

Sixty miles off the coast of Mauritania, the Méduse ran aground and plans were made to ferry the passengers to the coast. A raft was constructed to try and save the ship's cargo, but when the frigate began to break-up under the pressure of the stormy weather, de Chaumareys panicked and ordered the evacuation of one hundred and forty-six of the Méduse's remaining assembly onto the raft itself. The lifeboats towing the raft panicked and cut the ropes, leaving the poor souls to their fate. Over the course of the first night adrift, twenty people on that raft committed suicide. By the fourth day, only sixty-seven were left alive and some, allegedly, resorted to cannibalism to survive. On the eighth day, the stronger members took it upon themselves to keep the raft buoyant by tossing their weaker crew-mates overboard. Only seventeen were left alive when the British navy ship, Argus, picked them up on July 17th 1816.

Initially, the French government attempted to hush the matter up. The colonisation of Senegal was at a critical stage and the attempt to stablise the navy following the necessity of expelling so many Bonapartists was not going well. De Chaumareys was summoned back to France, where he was immediately court-martialled for his handling of the shipwreck, stripped of his position and sentenced to three years imprisonment without the possibility of parole or early release. There were some within the ministries of Defence and the Navy who thought he should be executed for desertion - the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, the vicomte du Bouchage, was livid that a captain had abandoned his ship, rather than stay to sink with it, as naval protocol demanded. However, there were others who felt enough people had died because of the Méduse and that putting Du Chaumareys before a firing squad would only focus attention on an issue which many in the French government were keen to forget.

Yet, as always, news leaked out to the press and an explosive series of articles ran, spawning several bestselling grit memoirs from survivors of the Méduse, in which the restored monarchy itself was blamed for the disaster. It was well-known in left-wing circles that the monarchy wanted to staff the military with blue-blooded aristocrats, rather than making any attempt to make the appointments based on merit. One of the most persistent rumours that arose from the 1816 disaster was that King Louis XVIII himself had appointed the vicomte de Chaumareys to the post of captain. Why exactly the King of France would concern himself with who got to be captain of a naval frigate has never been adequately explained to me. Surely, given that he was overseeing one of the most difficult transitions of power in one of the most politically-damaged countries in Europe after twenty years of unparalleled domestic and international unrest, Louis XVIII probably had bigger things on his desk than who got to ferry colonial officials on a small ship to Senegal? The legend that Louis XVIII approved de Chaumareys for his command is not really about that heartbreaking humanitarian tragedy on the raft. But then neither is the painting.

Trussed up in glowing sentiment, the claim that Louis XVIII personally appointed the man whose incompetence sank the Méduse, is really all about politics. Louis XVIII, old, fat, bloated and reactionary, hand-selects a bumbling aristocrat who last stood on the deck of a naval frigate two decades earlier when Louis XVI was still ensconced at Versailles and Marie-Antoinette was running around playing at being a shepherdess. (Another myth, for another blog post.) That this aristocrat is egregiously unprepared to captain anything more challenging than a gondola is ignored by the restored monarch, who seeks only to cram pampered, privileged buffoons like himself into every major public position in the kingdom. He aims to eradicate the meritocracy of the revolution and Bonapartism and caper back to the class-conscious lunacy of the ancien régime.

It's an arresting image and one which is likely to grip the imagination - again, just like Géricault's painting. However, there are several glaring holes in this version of events. The first, as was mentioned, is that no monarch in Europe was personally involved in the captaincy appointments to naval frigates. Monarchs happened to be pretty busy in the 1810s. Secondly, whilst it is undoubtedly and lamentably true that de Chaumareys' aristocratic title helped him when it came to the appointments procedure, it is also worth noting that prior to the revolution the vicomte had extensive experience in Louis XVI's navy. It was not as if the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies suddenly took it upon themselves to appoint a complete landlubber to oversee the difficult Senegal run in 1816 just because he was entitled to be addressed as "Monsieur le vicomte." Thirdly, there was a genuine staffing problem in the navy in 1816, since many of those who had held jobs there for the last decade had proven themselves to be singularly unreliable to national interests. Many of them had been appointed by Napoleon, who had attempted to re-seize the throne of France only a year before the Méduse went down. They quite simply could not be trusted and many had shown that in 1815. It was by no means certain in 1816 that Bonaparte wouldn't try the same thing again. Fourthly, it is important to realise that rather than regard the survivors of the Méduse as an irritating irrelevancy and de Chaumareys as their priority, King Louis XVIII's government did a lot in the aftermath of the sinking to try and learn from the disaster. Undoubtedly, much of this was as a public relations strategy to stave off the backlash amongst many honest members of the French public who were rightly horrified by what had happened. Yet, decisive steps were still taken, whatever the motivation. Along with de Chaumareys being imprisoned, the Governor of Senegal, who had also left in one of the first lifeboats, was asked for his resignation by the King, and the King personally signed into law a piece of legislation written by an ex-Bonapartist, Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, which stated definitively that ancestry and connections were not to play any part in future army or military appointments. In this, France was far ahead of most other countries in Europe and the Americas at the time.

De Chaumareys was the wrong man for the job. There is no question of that. He was reckless in command and criminal in crisis. He almost certainly warranted a much harsher sentence than the one handed down to him by the military court at Porte de Rochefort and public outcry at the government's handling of the Méduse disaster was justified. It is also edifying to see that in the aftermath of the disaster Louis XVIII's government were prepared to enter into a dialogue with their one-time political opponents, like Laurent de Saint-Cyr, in order to build a better France. It obviously did not best serve the nation's interest for the government  to only make appointments from amongst its own supporters. A salient lesson which we could do well to learn from today.

Yet, one cannot help but feel that the main point of le radeau de la Méduse has been missed, not just by historians but also by Géricault. It was a human tragedy, not a political one. De Chaumareys was a weak and reprehensible figure, who happened to be an aristocrat. He was not weak and reprehensible because he was one and there was no way that the French Crown could have been expected to know that prior to 1816. The French government should not have tried to downplay the tragedy of the sinking, but governments then and now take those decisions, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad, regardless of whether their leader wears a crown or a business suit. What the sinking of the Méduse really shows us is a spectacularly unedifying portrait of humanity.

And yet, Théodore Géricault chose to unveil his masterpiece in the Paris Salon of 1819 not because he was especially moved by the story of human frailty, but because he wanted to indict Louis XVIII's government for what he saw as its corruption and deceitfulness. The painting isn't really about the men lying in various extremities across a sea-tossed raft; it's about the government that put them there. The figure looming largest in Géricault's fevered imagination are not the sailors who cut the ropes binding the raft to the other lifeboats or the men who tossed their weaker colleagues into the swell. It's not even really about de Chaumareys. What Le Radeau de la Méduse is about is the restored monarchy. It's about Louis XVIII and the culpability of corruption which allegedly flowed inexorably from his ci-devant hands. And that's basically what the French Revolution is. The first time you look at it, like Le Radeau de la Méduse, it seems to be about people. It seems to be about human suffering and outrage that such conditions should exist. But look at it closer and you'll see that what it's actually about are ideas, cleverly masked behind the misery of the people it claims to be representing.