Some of my favourite reads of 2013

Tudor: The Family Story by Leanda de Lisle. Leanda's biography of Lady Jane Grey and her sisters Katherine and Mary is my favourite historical biography and I loved this take on the well-trodden story of England's most dysfunctional Royal family. De Lisle's writing style is so delicious that if it were edible, you'd almost certainly end up the size of a house and/or Henry VIII, the porky sovereign who for once is not allowed to stand centre stage in this dynastic tale of wife-changing, religious revolution and palaces more blinged up than an MTV crib. The women and minor members of the family are allowed their day in the metaphorical sun and de Lisle's refusal to play favourites guarantees fair treatment for all. Buy it, read it and I'm sure you'll love it. 

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Originally published in 2004, I half-read it at my friend Colin's suggestion at university but returned to it when the wonderful movie adaptation (below) starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, James D'Arcy and Ben Whishaw was released. The story of various reincarnated souls passing through the centuries from pre-abolition America, the inter-war years in Britain, a nightmarish twenty-second century Korea and a dystopian future is haunting, clever, nimble, beautifully written and very moving. If the story of Sonmi-451 doesn't devastate you, see a therapist immediately.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. Once you can get past the trademark horrors that Hilary Mantel seems to make of all her female characters, this 1992 novel inspired by the biographies of three male revolutionaries - Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre - is actually a beautiful novel that captures perfectly how even the leaders of the Great Revolution of 1789 began to fear its strength and wonder how it would all end. (Hint - not happily for more or less anybody involved whose surname wasn't Bonaparte.) A Place of Greater Safety even manages to make Desmoulins interesting, charismatic and almost sympathetic - no mean achievement. A wonderful example of historical fiction.

The Night's Dark Shade by Elena Maria Vidal. The festering underbelly of the Cathar movement and the clash between two rival faiths in thirteenth-century France make this novel very interesting, very enjoyable and, reading for pleasure this time, one of the most intriguing takes on religious controversies of the Middle Ages. If you are a fan of medieval stories, then this one is certainly worth picking up.

A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Famous for inspiring the 1958 movie of the same title (above), I had never actually read this minute-by-minute dramatisation of the Titanic disaster of 1912. Lord interviewed many of the survivors, had previously travelled on the Titanic's nearly-identical sister ship the Olympic, and approached the story of the sinking with a respect that bordered on the reverential. Unlike the 1997 take on the story, there are no fictitious love stories at the centre of Lord's novel. Instead, it's a gripping and almost forensic account of one of the greatest tragedies in maritime history. It also manages to capture the syntax and attitudes of 1912 perfectly. I loved this book and I wish I had read it earlier. 

Shiverton Hall by Emerald Fennell. Released early this year by Bloomsbury, this children's story is, and I kid you not, actually as close as I can come to the horror genre without suffering nightmares and/or dousing my room with water from Walsingham. A glorious return to the Victoriana world of camp macabre and horror, Shiverton Hall is the perfect book for a child who loves to read, anyone who enjoys a good boarding school tale or, for the adults in your life like me, who like to be scared but only within due reason. There'll be no Norman Bates meets Emily-Rose in my nightmares, I can assure you.

The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned Peace for the First World War by Margaret Macmillan. No one but Margaret Macmillan could have approached the story of how "Europe's century" ended in the horrors birthed by 1914 and produced something so compulsively readable. Focusing on both the wider social context of the Gilded Age and the political figures who helped make the terrible decisions which resulted in a global conflict, Macmillan has produced a book that is irreverent, thoughtful and wonderfully written. 

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors' Most Notorious Queen by Susan Bordo is a cultural biography of how Anne Boleyn acquired posthumous immortality, what attracted her legion of modern-day fans and critics, and how her story has been used and abused by subsequent generations. With interviews with two of the actresses most famous for bringing Boleyn to life on screen, this is a fascinating book with its finger kept firmly on the pulse of modern culture. Scholarly, but also funny, wry, sarcastic and emotive. And as the UK cover proves, we always knew Annie B could rock a pair of aviators. Once a fashionista...

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder the Changed the World by Greg King and Susan Woolmans. Any suspect story about Archduke Franz Ferdinand is perhaps rightly declared as something to be treated with caution and scepticism in this book, while similarly improbable and damning anecdotes about any of his blood relatives are repeated as fact. Thus, the title figure emerges as a devoted family man, while his elderly uncle is described as a border-line autistic syphilitic and Franz Ferdinand's brother, Otto, was apparently a sadomasochistic pervert if Viennese gossip was to be believed. It's one standard for Ferdy and another for the rest of the Hapsburgs, which is a shame because otherwise this was a fascinating and wonderful biography of a man who is probably the most important assassination victim in history. Greg King and Susan Woolmans deserve great praise for rescuing his personality and his tragic love story with Sophie Chotek from obscurity. Fast moving, sympathetic and engagingly written, The Assassination of the Archduke was a truly gripping biography of the first victim of the First World War. Highly recommended.

Counting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother by William Shawcross. The late Queen Elizabeth's biographer returns with a volume of her selected letters, chosen from across the remarkable century of her life and eight decades in the public eye. The late Queen's wit, impish sense of humour and inimitably effervescent mode of expression come across alongside her steely determination, quick intelligence and pathological ability to avoid anything too unpleasant until the last possible moment. A beautiful book from the pen of a celebrated and popular Royal, Counting One's Blessing was a joy to read. And made me hanker for a gin in the Highlands.

The White Star sisters

By 1907, Britain's White Star Line had an impressive fleet of liners that enabled the company to connect Britain with both its imperial colonies and with the rest of the world. Advertising maps alerted the public to the vast geographical remit of the White Star company and its corresponding ability to move passengers across the globe in comfort, speed and security. The most prestigious of all routes was the transatlantic passenger lane between England and America. Like their rivals at the Cunard Line, some White Star ships left from Liverpool and some connected to American ports like Boston, but the flagships of the line left from the southern port of Southampton, with stop-overs at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown in Ireland, before heading across the ocean to New York. White Star vessels were known for the comfort of their accommodation and the company's impressive safety record - its only major sinking had been the loss of the Republic in 1909, which had taken over a day to sink, enabling a full evacuation. There were five prestigious ships that operated the transatlantic route in 1907 for White Star - the Oceanic and the four sisters known as "the Big Four," the Cedric, Celtic, Baltic and Adriatic. The Oceanic had been nicknamed the "Queen of the Ocean" when she was launched in Belfast in 1899, at a ceremony watched by the cream of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy - including the Duke of Abercorn, the Marquess of Londonderry and the Marquess of Dufferin. 

But by 1907, the arrival of Cunard's awe-inspiring Lusitania and Mauretania had removed the sparkle from White Star's commercial crown. Not only were the new Cunarders the largest ships afloat, but they were also the fastest and the most luxurious, as well as using the famous four funnel design previously reserved for German ships. With the funding of their new de facto owner, the wealthy American financier J.P. Morgan, White Star Line's chairman, J. Bruce Ismay, met with the former Lord Mayor of Belfast, Lord Pirrie, one of the controlling partners of the world-famous Belfast shipyards, Harland and Wolff. They agreed to combat the Cunard threat by building two new ships in quick succession that would dwarf the Cunard sisters in terms of size and in the comfort offered to its passengers. In order to do that, both Ismay and Lord Pirrie realised that speed would have to be sacrificed. Deciding to make a virtue out of a necessity, they later marketed that the White Star's journey across the Atlantic - which usually took a full day longer than the Mauretania's - could be done so in much greater comfort and stability. A third sister was planned for a later date, which would have re-established White Star's monopoly of the British transatlantic trade - had the plan worked. As with the building of the Oceanic, Ismay's directive was summed up in the phrase, "Nothing but the best."

Thousands of workers toiled for three years to build the first of the Olympic-class liners. Most of the men came from the Protestant-dominated working-class districts of east Belfast, where the Harland and Wolff yards were (and are.) The Olympic was launched in 1910 and sailed on her maiden voyage, to great media ballyhoo, in May 1911 (above). Nearly half again as large as the Mauretania, she was also much more attractive in terms of her outward appearance and she was deliberately designed to have the sleek, elegant exterior favoured by European royalty when it came to designing their enormous private yachts. White Star's hopes that their new queen would corner the lucrative upper-class transatlantic market was shown by the fact that there was room for over one thousand first class passengers. They had access to the ship's grand staircase (now legendary because of the number of times it's featured in movies about the Titanic), lounges and restaurants based on the royal apartments at the Palace of Versailles, a smoking room that rivaled the best gentlemen's clubs in London with its fireplace, leather armchairs, mahogany walls and stained glass windows. There were verandas that were based on the winter gardens made popular on German ships, wide promenade decks, an enormous dining saloon that could sit five hundred people at one sitting, reception rooms based on Jacobean country houses, Turkish baths inspired by the decadence of the Ottoman sultans, a gymnasium, a squash court and the world's first ever swimming pool onboard a luxury liner. The first class staterooms were decorated in a variety of historical styles and there was a huge range of prices, moving from the fairly basic cabins on A-Deck to the lavish parlour suites on B-Deck. Second class accommodation was sombre, comfortable and very obviously Edwardian (below) and third class was spacious, clean and comfortable. The prices, of course, for all three classes were correspondingly quite a bit higher than they were for other ships. It added to the Olympic's intentional sense of distinctive superiority over her rivals.

All of this positive publicity - and, some would say, the White Star Line itself - was dealt a death blow eleven months later, when the slightly larger Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage. She was practically identical to the Olympic and only ocean liner buffs can recognise the difference between the two from photographs (the Titanic enclosed part of its promenade deck, expanded the Louis XVI restaurant, added in an extra cafe for first class passengers and added an extra layer of exclusive luxury suites on B-Deck, hence why she was just over a thousand tons heavier than her sister.) Four days into her first voyage, the Titanic sustained a side-on collision with an iceberg and sank just under three hours later, with the loss of over fifteen hundred lives. It was, at that point, the worst maritime disaster in history and it caused a media sensation, that has never quite gone away. The White Star sustained a huge financial loss, but what was arguably even more damaging was the image the Titanic created of a company that was either callous or incompetent. Perhaps both.

With the benefit of hindsight, it does seem as if White Star was doomed from the moment its flagship became the most famous disaster in history. The shadow of the Titanic was a long one that would cast a darkness over the company for the rest of its existence, but it seems slightly simplistic to assume that from the moment Titanic hit the iceberg, White Star's own demise was also inevitable. 

The third of the White Star sisters, the patriotically-named Britannic, was launched in 1914. Larger than the Titanic and kitted-up with enough lifeboats and the latest safety provisions, Britannic might have helped restore the White Star's reputation, had she had the chance. But when the First World came, the Olympic was pulled out of service and turned into a troop transport for the Royal Navy and the incomplete Britannic became a hospital ship. The Olympic had a stellar war-time service record and she was nicknamed "Old Reliable." But the Britannic sank in 1916 after hitting a German mine in the Mediterranean. Until 1936, she was the largest ship built on British soil; she is still the largest British passenger liner to actually have sunk at sea in a shipwreck.

When the war ended in 1918, White Star had lost a great number of its ships to the Allied war effort, and with only the Olympic left out of its three super-ships, the company was facing a bleak feature until the British government decided to honour its promise to reward the firms that had served it so faithfully during the war. Ocean liners were being taken from Germany under the terms of the peace treaties as a form of reparations and public feeling in Germany, like everything to do with the Versailles peace settlement, was outraged by it. A medium-sized liner called Columbus, which had been built in 1913 for the Nordeutscher Lloyd company, was seized and given to the White Star Line, who re-named her Homeric. With two funnels and a gross tonnage of just over 35,000, Homeric (above) was a pleasing ship, with a conservative aesthetic and comfortable accommodation (below - one of the first class corridors). A renovation was ordered in Belfast shortly after, when it was decided that her 18 knots sailing speed was too slow for White Star to maintain its weekly schedule of Atlantic sailings, but apart from that the Homeric proved a very popular running mate to the Olympic when she entered service for White Star in 1922.

But the Homeric, although pretty and popular, was not enough to replace the mighty Britannic, which would have been White Star's pride and joy if she hadn't been lost in Britain's campaign against the Germans and Ottoman Empire. The chosen replacement was the largest ship built in German history, so far, which would ameliorate the sting of having lost the largest ship built in British history, so far - at least, for the British. She was the 56,000-ton Bismarck, named after the statesman who had helped unite Germany in the 1870s. Her smaller sisters, the Imperator and Vaterland, had already been seized. Imperator had become Cunard's Berengaria and Vaterland had gone to become the United States's first major transatlantic luxury liner, Leviathan. Bismarck had never been finished and now she was finished for the White Star Line, under her new name, Majestic (below). She entered service in 1922 as the largest ship in the world and immediately helped re-solidify White Star's former reputation for size, luxury and security. 

With the Majestic, Olympic and Homeric now in service as running mates, White Star was able to start operating one of the most financially successful routes on the north Atlantic. Having three ships  meant that one ship would always be at sea or being re-provisioned, whilst the others were leaving New York and Southampton on a weekly basis to complete in-tandem crossings of the Atlantic. The Olympic remained one of the most consistently popular ships of the decade, which rather dispels the myth that the Titanic continued to haunt the ocean-going public's mind. The Majestic, with her cavernous first class rooms (below), also helped attract a loyal clientele in the economically-prosperous 1920s. However, when the Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, the transatlantic market temporarily imploded and ships that had been designed for point-to-point travel across the often-rough Atlantic, like the Majestic or Olympic, struggled to adjust to the indignity of short hot-weather cruises, desperately designed to turn some kind of profit.

By 1934, it was clear that White Star's days were financially numbered. Its fleet was made up of ships that were either too old, too big or both. There were a number of collisions, power-cuts, a huge drop in booking numbers and a new spate of edgy-chic superships were emerging from Germany, France and Italy which made British ships seem antiquated and fusty. The Olympic, alone, managed to keep up respectable (if not exactly healthy) booking numbers - a testament to the affection she was still held in - but her days were numbered and White Star began to look on her enormous running costs, frequent technological difficulties and occasional collisions as a headache. In 1934, the company merged with their old enemies, Cunard, to form the Cunard-White Star Line - all their resources would now be pooled into creating a glamorous new liner to modernise Britain's transatlantic image and counter the humiliation posed by Germany's Bremen, Italy's Rex or France's forthcoming Normandie.

There were clear signs from the beginning that Cunard was the dominant force in the new "partnership." Of the six prestigious ships the new company now had at its disposal for the premier run across the Atlantic - the Majestic, Olympic, Homeric, Berengaria, Mauretania and Aquitania - three would have to go, immediately. Two more would be kept around to run alongside the Queen Mary, until her new sister-ship, Queen Elizabeth, was completed in 1939/1940. Both the Mauretania and Olympic, as the oldest of the set and the ones most in trouble, were quickly agreed upon as the first two that had to go. There was a public campaign to keep one, or both, as floating hotels or museums and it's difficult not to groan at the financial and historical mistake that was made in not preserving the Olympic. In the age of Titanic mania that began in the 1950s and has continued ever since, it would surely have been a goldmine to whoever owned it. As well as a fascinating one for subsequent generations.

Signs of the pro-Cunard bias of the new merger came when a decision had to be reached about which of the two companies' flagships - the 52,000-ton Berengaria or 56,000-ton Majestic - should be kept on to serve until the Queen Elizabeth was ready. Despite the fact that the Majestic was larger, younger and safer than the Berengaria, it was Majestic who was sold for scrap and the Berengaria which was kept on. The Homeric survived long enough to participate in the festivities to mark King George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935, but as the slowest and smallest of the six ships, it did make sense that she should be scrapped too.

With its three former ships having completely vanished into scrap metal and scattered pieces of furnishing, the White Star's last two surviving ships were the motor ships Georgic and a new Britannic. They continued to sail under the White Star colours until their careers ended in 1956 and 1960, respectively. Cunard, however, dropped the White Star name in 1949 and today the company's name survives in a commercial sense solely as a kind of white-gloved service exclusively reserved for those occupying the most expensive suites on the current Cunard ships, Queen Mary 2, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth. Once a year, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, those three ships hoist the White Star flag for the day.

The Cunard sisters

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Great Britain was not accustomed to the sensation of inferiority. America, although large and rich, was still viewed as a parvenu republic whose influence was confined to a continent that none of the other great powers were interested in; Imperial Russia had an empire that was second in size to Britain's, an economy drastically smaller and a political system which, to the British, bordered on the barbaric and arcane. France, Britain's theoretical ally and rival, was prone to revolution - as changes of regime in 1804, 1814, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1852 and 1870 had shown. The only country that Britain could not dismiss was Imperial Germany - newly unified and hungry for the glory that Britain enjoyed. The two countries competed in everything - army, navy, diplomacy, economy, art, industry and colonialism. The rapid expansion of the German navy under Admiral von Tirpitz gave Britain cause for alarm; the expansion of her commercial passenger fleet simply caused patriotic pique. Britannia was supposed to rule the waves in all its guises - be it military and commercial - and this newfound teutonic one-up-manship quite simply would not do.

The arrival of four lavish luxury liners, all named after members of the German imperial family, caused distress in London and Liverpool. The British Empire no longer had the largest passenger ships in the world. Then when another German company launched the Deutschland in 1900, which took the Blue Riband award for the fastest westbound crossing of the North Atlantic, it was clear that something had to be done. The British government were prepared to offer generous financial assistance to the Cunard Line to enable them to build a duo that would resoundingly crush the humiliation posed by the German liners, in terms of both size and speed. The only contractual stipulation was that if Britain ever needed the ships to perform for the Royal Navy during war-time, then Cunard would have to oblige. No such offer was made to Cunard's British rivals, the White Star Line, who, by that stage, were simply far too heavily-financed by J.P. Morgan for the British government's liking.

Although today all Cunard ships are named after British queens, before 1936 they were all named after provinces of the ancient Roman empire. (Hence why they all ended with -ia, whilst the adverb-inspired White Star's ended with -ic.) The first sister was named Lusitania, after the ancient Roman province of Portugal, and she was built at the John Brown shipyards on the Clydebank in Scotland. Weighing in at 31,550 tons, she was launched by Lady Inverclyde. She sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York in September 1907 and immediately recaptured the Blue Riband for Britain; wresting it from the Deutschland.

The second ship, Mauretania, was named after Roman northern Africa and she was built at Swan Hunter shipyards on the Tyne in north-eastern England. She was launched by Winston Churchill's aunt, Anne, Duchess of Roxburghe, Queen Victoria's former Mistress of the Robes. Entering service in November 1907, two months after her sister, the Mauretania was slightly larger and slightly faster. The 31,900-ton liner took the Blue Riband and held it, quite incredibly, for the next twenty-two years. 

The press excitement surrounding the Lusitania and Mauretania was not just a result of patriotic sabre-rattling, but also because of a genuine sense of technological excitement. The two ships were not just larger than their German rivals, but a marvel of contemporary engineering because they were nearly twice the size of any ship then in existence. Their interiors, too, provoked much purple-hued commentary. Unlike the White Star Line, which preferred to decorate sister-ships (i.e. ones of roughly similar design, size and construction date) in almost identical styles, the 1907 Cunard sisters had individual aesthetics. To be reductive, the Lusitania was slightly more 'baroque' in her first class accommodation - particularly in her famous first class dining saloon (above) and the Mauretania was more conservatively English, with more use of mahogany, stained glass and a 'country house' feel in rooms like her first class lounge (below.) The Queens Grill on the current Cunard ship Queen Victoria is inspired by the first class lounges on-board the Mauretania.

For four years, the two Cunard sisters were the last word in ocean-going luxury, size, speed and safety. In 1911, Cunard's British rivals, White Star Line, struck back with the 45,000-ton Olympic. Half-again as large as the Mauretania, the Olympic and her two sisters that were still being built in Belfast - Titanic and Britannic - were never designed to challenge the Cunarders in terms of speed. They would take a full extra night to make it across the Atlantic, but they would carry their passengers in more stable and spacious accommodation. There would also be three of them, not two, meaning that they would be able to offer more regular services than the Cunard Line's flagships. In response, Cunard commissioned a third ship to be built on the Tyne and opted to play White Star at their own game. She was not to be as fast as the two elder ships, but rather she was to be roughly the same size as White Star's Olympic and to offer comparably luxurious quarters. 

Of course, by the time the new Aquitania was launched by the Countess of Derby in 1913, White Star's dream of a three-ship express run lay in tatters due to the Titanic disaster. All of the Cunard ships were revamped to carry more lifeboats since, like most of their contemporaries, they had been as unprepared as the Titanic had been. Named after the Roman province of western France, the Aquitania sailed on her maiden voyage in May 1914 and was dubbed "the ship beautiful," because of her palatial first class rooms. (Below) A month after she entered service, the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated on a state visit to Sarajevo and Europe slid into the carnage of the First World War.

During the war, the Aquitania was gutted of her beautiful interiors and served first as a hospital ship and then as a troop transport for the Royal Navy. The Mauretania was a warship, a troop transport and a hospital ship; whilst the Lusitania was tragically sunk by a German U-Boat with the loss of over one thousand civilian lives in 1915. When the war ended in 1918, the two surviving sisters re-entered service for Cunard and the triumphant British government exacted the ultimate commercial humiliation on a vanquished Germany. The former pride of the German maritime fleet - the 52,000-ton Imperator, launched into service by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1913 - was requisitioned and given to Cunard as reparations for the sinking of the Lusitania. She was kitted up in the Cunard colours (red and black funnels) and renamed Berengaria - which I like to think of as a bit of a transition name. It was the first Cunarder to be named after a queen of England (Richard I's wife in the twelfth century), but she still had the -ia ending.

Throughout the 1920s, Cunard ran a three ship service - now sailing from Southampton, rather than Liverpool. The Berengaria could be marketed as the company's impressive flagship (she wasn't the largest in the world; that honour went to White Star's Majestic); the Mauretania was still the world's fastest liner and the Aquitania represented a gracious alternative to the fast "jazz age"-style decoration of newer ships. It was a commercially successful operation, until the Great Crash of 1929 upended the world's economy. Passenger numbers plummeted and the three Cunard ships began to run at a financial loss for the first time in their history.

Inventive, if undignified, methods were used to try to make the vast ships turn a profit again. The Berengaria was sent on several "booze cruises" out of New York, to give alcohol-thirsty Americans a chance to escape Prohibition and drink themselves into a nautical stupor once the ship sailed outside American jurisdiction. The Mauretania was painted white (below) and tried to crack the cruise market. She was, however, too big and too old fashioned to cope well with exotic or hot ports of call. The Aquitania, which had been the most profitable of the three during the 1920s, went on short cruises to the Mediterranean. But these were piecemeal methods and the ships, particularly the Mauretania, were now simply too old to function properly for a company that could not afford to keep repairing ships that were unfashionable and consistently booked far below full capacity.

In 1934, Cunard and White Star bowed to economic reality and merged with one another to become the Cunard-White Star Line. Britain only needed one transatlantic luxury firm now, not two. This, of course, created the problem that they now had six liners available for the north Atlantic trade - the Majestic, Olympic, Homeric, Berengaria, Aquitania and Mauretania. Both White Star and Cunard had been making plans to build a new super-ship to modernise their companies' image and capture the new markets emerging as the Depression receded. They now wisely merged their finances and the new ship was named the Queen Mary in part because it avoided giving off the appearance of bias by picking either an -ia or -ic name. (Although as a sign of the way things were to go, her funnels were painted in the Cunard colours.) 

The Mauretania was withdrawn from service shortly after the 1934 merger. Her furnishings were sold at auction in the following year and she was bought by a scrapping firm, after paying an emotive final trip to her "birthplace" at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As a sign of how much affection she'd been held in during her career, even the U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote a letter urging that she should be bought and preserved as a museum. The Berengaria, which helped maintain the transatlantic route whilst the Queen Mary was built, was retired in 1938 and met a similar fate. It was decided that the Aquitania should keep the new Queen Mary company until the new Queen Elizabeth was ready in 1940, which meant that when the Second World War broke out in 1939, the Aquitania was once again called-up to serve her country. Over the next six years, she transported nearly 400,000 soldiers for the Allied war effort. When the war ended in 1945, the former "ship beautiful" was used by Cunard to help the Canadian government in bringing "war brides" and their children over to Canada. By 1949, she had to be definitively retired as she was so old that she could not be brought in line with modern safety requirements. After a career that spanned nearly four decades, 1.2 million passengers, 3 million miles and two world wars, the Aquitania was sold for scrap metal in Scotland in 1950. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Britannic" (1916)

When news reached Belfast in 1912 that the Titanic had sunk on her maiden voyage with such an enormous loss of life, the Harland & Wolff shipyards in the city were quick to learn lessons from the tragedy. When the findings of the American and then the British inquiries were published, numerous changes were made in the building of the Titanic's incomplete younger sister. Designed to be the third of three luxurious transatlantic liners for the White Star Line, most of east Belfast's workforce were still toiling away on building this ship when changes were made to prevent a repeat of what had happened with the Titanic. Both the Titanic and the first sister, Olympic, had been named after powerful figures in Greek mythology - the Olympic after the fictional gods of Mount Olympus and Titanic after the titans, a race of younger gods gifted with incredible strength. The third and largest of the three sisters was apparently originally intended to be named Gigantic, which had the same triumphalist air as the name Titanic. Desperate to put as much distance between their new ship and the disaster of 1912, White Star stealthily had the name changed to the more patriotic Britannic and then denied there had ever been any serious intention of christening her Gigantic.

Weighing in at 50,000 tons, the Britannic was the largest ship ever built in the British Isles at the time of her launch in 1914. She was four thousand tons heavier than her unlucky sister Titanic and five thousand heavier than her eldest sister, and future running mate, Olympic. Together, the two surviving sisters were intended to operate a weekly crossing of the north Atlantic - with one leaving from New York, at the same time another would leave from Southampton in England. Unlike her sisters, however, the Britannic was not the largest ship in the world at the time of her construction. That honour had already gone to a 52,000-ton German liner, the Imperator, and would soon go to her sister, the 54,000-ton Vaterland - which, like Britannic, was pandering to the ultra-patriotic environment of 1914. However, she was to remain the largest ship built on British soil until the Queen Mary in 1936 - quite the achievement for Harland & Wolff.

Britannic took to the water in Belfast for the first time on 26th February 1914. Some of the proposed changes included extending the watertight bulkhead divisions, making it easier for steerage class passengers to reach the lifeboats and nearly quadrupling the number of lifeboats. There were also more cosmetic alterations, including expanding the ship's famous grand staircase, its first class Louis XVI restaurant, adding a Parisian coffee house like the one the Titanic had and making various expansions to the top private suites in first class.

However, the Britannic was destined never to see commercial service and when the First World War came in August 1914, the new ship was hastily converted into a hospital ship on the government's orders. Now formally serving as His Majesty's Hospital Ship Britannic, HMHS Britannic's first tour of duty involved her evacuating the numerous British and Commonwealth casualties from the military campaign in the Dardanelles, against the Ottoman Empire. 

After safely depositing thousands of invalids in Greece, the Britannic was returning to collect more soldiers, under the command of Captain Bartlett and with a combined crew and medical staff of just over one thousand people on-board. There had been some trouble with the weather earlier in the week, but by the morning of 26th November 1916, the Britannic was steaming through a glorious Mediterranean winter's morning. At about twenty minutes past eight, a massive explosion shook the liner. The ship had struck a German mine and soon began listing rapidly on her side. None of her new safety features, designed to protect her from the kind of natural disaster which had destroyed her sister, could feasibly cope with the technological attack from a military mine. 

Captain Bartlett's response was rapid and within ten minutes, the first lifeboats were leaving the Britannic. In a truly horrifying moment however, the Captain's tactical decision to try and race the ship closer to the shallows and thus run her aground to save her, meant that one lifeboat was torn to pieces by the still-turning propellers. Fifty-five minutes after being struck, the Britannic suddenly turned over on her side and vanished into the crystal blue waters. One of the nurses, Violet Jessop, who had once served as a stewardess on the Titanic, later wrote, "She dipped her head a little, then a little lower and still lower. All the deck machinery fell into the sea like a child's toys. Then she took a fearful plunge, her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until with a final roar, she disappeared into the depths, the noise of her going resounding through the water with undreamt-of violence...."

Had the Britannic hit the mine on her way back from her mission, when she was filled with injured soldiers, it's likely that her sinking would have constituted one of the worst humanitarian disasters in maritime history. As it was, the disaster cost "only" thirty lives. The survivors were soon picked up by the British Royal Navy and conspiracy theories later circulated that the ship had been deliberately targeted by either a German spy or a German torpedo. However, given the scale of the damage inflicted on the wreck, it seems clear that it was a mine which sank the Britannic.

After the war, White Star Line were rewarded for their service to the British war effort and for the loss of the Britannic. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to reimburse Britain for her lost liners. The 56,000-ton Bismarck, then the largest liner in the world, was given to White Star and renamed Majestic (below.) She became the flagship of the White Star Line and the largest passenger ship in the world for over a decade, until the French Line's Normandie was designed by a former Tsarist naval architect in 1935.

Today, the Britannic lies on her side at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Her wreck was discovered by the famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in 1976. All that remains on dry land of her fabulous interiors, which were never completed or installed because of the war, is the lavish philharmonic organ that was intended to add a 'Baroque' feel to her grand staircase. It is on display at the Swiss National Museum in Seewen. 

Famous Shipping Disasters: The scuttling of the "Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse" (1914)

Named after the first emperor of a united Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse ("Emperor William the Great") first entered service for the North German Lloyd shipping line in May 1897, operating the transatlantic route from Bremerhaven to New York, via Southampton. She was the first liner to use the soon-to-be-iconic four funnels and media attention focused on her speed, size and the neo-Baroque opulence of her first class interiors, which were soon nicknamed the Luxe Germanica style of decoration (below). She was a huge hit with wealthy German and American travellers, whilst her steerage quarters were regularly fully booked by immigrants moving to the United States. On her first voyage, she captured the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the North Atlantic, much to the consternation and shock of the British who still firmly believed that Britannia alone should rule the waves. Commercially, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was successful enough to spawn three sister ships and running-mates, all named after members of the Imperial Family - the current Emperor Wilhelm II, the Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife, Crown Princess Cecilia. They were nicknamed "the Four Flyers."

When the First World War broke out in August 1914, the liner was requisitioned by the German navy as an auxiliary cruiser. Her captain, Captain Reymann, sank three British ships, but only after offering their crew the chance to evacuate. Running low on fuel, the ship set sail for the Spanish north African colony of Rio de Oro, where she was intercepted by the British warship, HMS Highflyer. A battle ensued, with the Kaiser running out of ammunition half-way through. Determined not to let the ship fall into enemy hands, Captain Reymann ordered the evacuation of the Kaiser and then had the remaining crew members detonate an enormous hole in the ship's side. Scuttling, the nautical form of suicide, thus ensured the Kaiser sank rather than fall into British hands. Captain Reymann swam ashore and worked his way back to Germany as a stoker on a Spanish passenger ship.

The Kaiser's demise so early in the war and the fact that it had been refuelling which left her vulnerable to enemy attack made both sides change their plans about converting ocean liners into auxiliary cruises. From that point on, they were more often converted into troop carriers or hospital ships.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Empress of Ireland" (1914)

Despite being the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history, the 1914 sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the icy Saint Lawrence River has attracted relatively little subsequent historical attention, particularly in comparison to the interest still shown in the Titanic and Lusitania disasters. A 14,000-ton liner for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company, the vessel operated the transatlantic routes between Liverpool and Quebec City. Built in Scotland in 1906, she was noted for her speed and for the comfort and elegance of her interiors (below.)

The Empress of Ireland disaster, which claimed 1,012 lives, occurred as the ship was starting out for one of her routine voyages to England. Sailing in thick fog, she collided with a Norwegian cargo ship, the SS Storstad. Within minutes of the collision, the Empress of Ireland had listed so far to starboard that it became impossible for the crew to launch half of her available lifeboats. Minutes later, there was a sudden lurch and then the ship stopped moving, leading many on-board to mistakenly believe that, mercifully, she had run aground. Fourteen minutes after the collision, the Empress of Ireland tipped over into the water and disappeared from sight, hurling hundreds of people into the freezing river water. Perhaps one of the most tragic facts reported in the British and Canadian newspapers at the time was that of the 138 children on-board at the time, only four survived the disaster. Among the survivors was the sailor "Lucky" Frank Tower, who had survived the Titanic disaster and went on to serve and survive the Lusitania, as well.

Since 1914, the Empress of Ireland has continued to claim lives, with several hardcore diving enthusiasts dying on expeditions to its murky wreck. In 2005, a Canadian documentary resurrected the theory that although most of the blame at the time fell on the Norwegian crew of the Storstad, the Empress of Ireland's captain, Henry Kendall, may have been partly to blame for the disaster by attempting to overtake the Storstad and that modern-day examinations of the wreck indicate that the ship's watertight doors had not been closed, as claimed - thus explaining the rapid speed of the sinking.

Famous Shipping Disasters: The sinking of the "Titanic" (1912)

With the centenary approaching, the Titanic is once again big news, particularly in Belfast, where a host of festivities are being designed to mark the opening of the world's largest (and long-overdue) Titanic visitors' attraction. Built in Harland & Wolff as the second of three sister ships for the White Star Line, the Titanic is today probably the most famous ship in history - eclipsing Noah's Ark and Cleopatra's Barge. With several Hollywood blockbusters and television movies made (the most accurate is the brilliant 1958 A Night to Remember) and the discovery of its broken, eerie and rotting wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic in 1985, the Titanic shows little sign of diminishing its hold over the world's imagination.

Much of what happened, or is supposed to have happened, on board the Titanic as she sank has achieved the status of twentieth-century legend - the boasts that she was "unsinkable" (grossly exaggerated and never made by the White Star Line itself), its luxurious first class accommodation, its undiminished speed as it entered the ice field, the bravery of the band as it continued playing throughout the sinking, the insufficient numbers of lifeboats, "Women and Children" first, the high casualty levels in Steerage and the tragic loss of life.

At the time, however, the Titanic did not garner nearly so much media attention as her elder sister ship, the Olympic, which went into service in May 1911, eleven months before Titanic. Titanic's maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10th 1912 did not quite have the same fanfare as Olympic's, but five days later when news broke that the vessel's inaugural trip had ended in the worst maritime disaster, to date, the Titanic shot into her place in popular culture and never left it. Her very name is still synonymous with disaster.

For a more in-depth post on the sinking of the Titanic, click here. This blog has also posted about life in the ship's first, second and third-class accommodation.

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.

27th September, 1501: Katherine of Aragon sets sail for England

On The Anne Boleyn Files, Claire Ridgeway discusses the day the fifteen year-old Katherine of Aragon left her native Spain to marry into the English royal family. Due to adverse weather conditions, the Infanta's trip had already been forced to turn back to Spain once before, but, this time, the new captain, Stephen Butt, sent all the way from England by King Henry VII, carried the flotilla out into the Atlantic and towards England.

Defending royal expenditure

In the wake of revelations this week which show that the overall cost of the monarchy has actually decreased in 2010-2011 by 5.3%, that it's often cheaper to run than the American presidency and that the Prince of Wales is now living almost entirely independently from government funds (H.R.H draws his sizable income from the lands, farms and luxury food industries he has developed in his duchy of Lancaster, the traditional demesne of the heirs to the throne), one royal subject is anything but pleased to hear that the monarchy is now run on such a tight budget.

Over on his blog, Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland, Lord B defends royal expenditure in Britain and argues that the former royal yacht, Britannia, currently a floating museum in Scotland, should be re-commissioned as a private royal yacht (it served in that capacity from 1954 to 1997 and despite being technically sound, it was retired following the election of the Labour government in 1997.) Belmont also believes that more money, not less, should be pumped into the monarchy to re-vitalise royal travel, improve its safety and fund the restoration of various palaces as an act of State.

Review of the new "Queen Elizabeth"

After travelling on her for a five day European cruise, the blog Tips for travellers reviews the new 92,000-tonne Cunard vessel Queen Elizabeth (above.) For ocean liner enthusiasts, the ship is the successor to the famous Queen Elizabeth 2, which was retired in 2008 and which was herself the successor to the original Queen Elizabeth, which was launched in 1938. With the maiden voyage of the new Queen Elizabeth, Cunard is once again operating three major luxury liners, along with her sister-ship Queen Victoria and the company's flagship, Queen Mary 2. This is the first time Cunard has run this service since the early 1930s, when they operated a transatlantic service with the 52,000-ton Berengaria, the speed queen Mauretania and the slightly larger Aquitania, nicknamed "the Ship Beautiful." When the former two liners were retired due to the Great Depression, they were replaced by a single vessel, the original Queen Mary, which served for thirty years and which is today a floating hotel in Long Beach, California.

You can access Tips for travellers full review here, along with some videos and photographs of the new ship. To quote: -

"I had also read very mixed reviews about the Queen Elizabeth, mostly related to the food and the service. It is always exciting though to go on a new ship, and of course even more so when one of the famous Cunard ones. In the end, we loved the ship. It has great looking decor, very stylish and very Cunard. The service was outstanding across all areas of the ship. The food we had in Queens Grill was amazing ... As mentioned, the design and look of the ship is very classy. It has an art deco feel, and is classy and rich looking. It is done with style." 

April 15th, 1912: The Sinking of the RMS "Titanic"

Today marks the ninety-ninth anniversary of the sinking of arguably the most famous ship in history - a 46,000-ton British passenger liner, the Titanic. Built in Belfast by the city's famous Harland & Wolff shipyards, Titanic was the second in a trio of sister ships built for the White Star Line between 1911 and 1915. Her elder sister, the Olympic, had garnered most of the lion's share of press attention for her maiden voyage in May 1911, but there had still been significant enough media interest when the Titanic set sail from Southampton on April 10th 1912, when her high quota of wealthy passengers allegedly led her to being nicknamed "the Millionaires' Special." At the time, she was the largest moving object on earth, eclipsing her big sister by just over one thousand tons thanks to the partial enclosure of the promenade deck and the addition of an  à la Carte restaurant and Parisian-style cafe for the first class passengers. 

Four days later, after stop-overs in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, the Titanic had collided side-on with an iceberg, resulting in over 300ft of the 882ft-vessel being opened to the freezing Atlantic waters. In keeping with the Board of Trade regulations at the time, the Titanic had woefully few lifeboats for the number of people on-board and due to the initial slow-moving tilt in the sinking ship and the fact that many of the passengers and crew had slept right through the collision, which caused no more than a shudder in most parts of the liner, many of the lifeboats initially left less than half-full.

The collision had occurred at 11:40 p.m. on Sunday April 14th and, as it approached 2 a.m., it became more and more clear to those still trapped on-board that the ship was doomed. As she began to sink further and further beneath the eerily calm waters, bow first, people began to hurl themselves overboard or rush to the stern as it slowly lifted out the ocean. According to an old but, I think believable, legend, the ship's band played the hymn Nearer My God To Thee, as the largest and most luxurious liner in the world disappeared beneath the waves.

Over fifteen hundred people perished when the Titanic sank on her maiden voyage; the seven hundred survivors were picked up at dawn by the Cunard liner, Carpathia, en route for a Mediterranean cruise. My late great-grandfather, who worked as a 7 year-old boy in the shipyards, could remember walking out into the streets of east Belfast on the morning of April 16th 1912 to see his father and all the great, burly men of the yard he worked with, huddled outside the local Presbyterian church sobbing at the news the ship they had built from scratch had sank with the loss of so many lives. Today, a memorial to the Belfast engineers who gave their lives trying to keep the power (i.e. light and heat) going for as long as the Titanic sank, sits outside Belfast City Hall.

Below is one of the most moving dramatisations of the Titanic's final moments from the 1958 movie A Night to Remember, produced by William MacQuitty, a Northern Irish movie producer who had actually seen the original Titanic launched in Belfast back in 1911. A Night to Remember is my personal favourite movie about the Titanic disaster and I would recommend it to anyone. 

"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.