Hero and villain?
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier
by Charles Spencer
JOHN CALLOW discovers the flip side of one of Britain's most contradictory historical figures - Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
AMID thunder and driving rain, the Royalist Army of the North ceased to exist on the night of July 2 1644.
Regiments which had known little save victory over the course of three hard campaigns were cut to pieces in the fields outside York by the combined forces of the English Parliament and the Scottish Kirk.
Unnoticed, in the midst of the carnage, the defeated commander Prince Rupert of the Rhine, separated from his bodyguard and now utterly alone, used the cover of a bean field to make good his escape across country.
A few hundred yards away from his hiding place, his enemies brandished both his standard and the corpse of his pet dog in grim triumph.
The spell of invincibility that had woven itself about the prince's every action since he had arrived in England and made even his name a terror to his foes was broken forever amid the blood and trampled crops on Marston Moor.
Highly intelligent, Rupert was reflective enough to appreciate this fact and often, during his long years of exile and service at the Restoration court, he revisited the events that had defined him and curtailed his ambitions.
As an old man, plagued by war wounds and increasingly disturbed by the absolutism of Charles II's monarchy, he could not fail to revisit the scenes of his past triumphs and disasters.
He collected together a vast number of papers from which he hoped to fashion his memoirs. Often self-justifying, always incisive, sometimes delightfully observed, they remained unpublished at his death in 1683.
Edited together by Eliot Warburton in the late 1840s, they went on to form the basis for every subsequent study of his life. Their publication caught the mid-Victorian imagination and transformed royalism from a discredited and largely reviled cause - often associated with violence and constitutional abuses - into a romantic and doomed ideal that could be favourably contrasted with the apparent dourness and severity of the Puritans. Central to this project was the person of Rupert himself, captured in all his youthful intensity by the beautiful oil paintings of Van Dyck and Honthorst.
That his own character as a man of thought as well as action and as a firm Calvinist who disliked drunkenness and braggarts thoroughly belied this image is perhaps somewhat lost, though not totally ignored, in Charles Spencer's new biography of the prince.
Rupert has been remarkably well served by biographers in recent years and it could be charged that this work, leaning more heavily than most upon Warburton's massive tomes, adds little that is fresh or original to our understanding.
Yet it is solidly written and provides a concise narrative account of the prince's life that accords equal weight to his successive careers as soldier, admiral and financier of London's great trading companies. This is a bold and sensible decision, as many earlier biographers had tended to compress his post-civil war endeavours into a few short and unsatisfying pages, which gave little idea of the scope of his activities after 1651 or of his continuing importance in the second Caroline court.
Moreover, this royal biography by a former royal insider fills an important need among the book-buying public and one which those on the left would do well to recognise - namely, for basic knowledge about the events of the past to be told in an accessible, colourful and entertaining manner.
The appetite for and love of history among the British public has probably never been greater, but such enthusiasm goes largely unchannelled by the scholarly community, with the result that the worlds of academic and popular writing have diverged dramatically and even dangerously over recent years.
The role of academics in shaping and improving society, which was taken to heart as much by Edward Gibbon and Lord Macaulay as it was by Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson, is largely ignored or derided across today's cash-strapped campuses.
As a consequence, the popular desire to understand the past is often ignored by the elites and met, instead, only through the attractively packaged, glossy biographies of mainly "great" men and fewer "great" women - who usually happen to have been rich, privileged and reactionary - which stack the shelves of the leading chain stores.
Now, Rupert - as the son of the King of Bohemia and the nephew of Charles I - certainly was privileged, but he was rarely rich and, as Spencer says in an insightful passage which might have been developed far further, as a landless prince, exiled from his German and Czech homelands, "financial insecurity was Rupert's constant spur."
It led him to his investments in the Hudson's Bay Company, which opened up Canada, and to his inventions of fresh engraving techniques and new types of weaponry.
This leaves Rupert's politics. This is where Spencer is at his weakest, leaving most of the most interesting questions unexplored.
The youthful general who was branded a war criminal for his destruction of Birmingham and massacre of civilians at Bolton during the civil war had, by late 1645, come to see a negotiated settlement as the only hope for Charles I's tottering monarchy.
His opposition to his beligerent uncle, who remained determined to prosecute a hopeless war against his own people - regardless of the cost in human suffering - earned Rupert a court martial and a summary dismissal from his commands. Moreover, after the Restoration, the prince unexpectedly became a national hero, championed by the people against the excesses and abuses of the court as an honest patriot who sought to preserve English freedoms in the face of Charles II's growing militarism and desire to emulate absolutist France.
Spencer claims that "it stretches credulity to think that, after a lifetime of loyalty to the crown, Rupert flirted with Shaftesbury's republicanism" during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81.
Yet Shaftesbury was very far from being a republican, preferring a mixed monarchy that operated within the confines of law and was not above parliamentary scrutiny.
While Rupert would have been horrified at such revolutionary thoughts in 1642, the experience of civil war had taught him much and there is every evidence that, by 1679, he was perfectly in accord with such sentiments.
He faced down the king and stormed from his apartments when Shaftesbury's arrest was demanded from him.
He refused to abandon his friend and collaborator even when he was put on trial for his life. His business partners supported the Whig interest, his closest acolyte Charles Gerard went over to William III in 1688 and Rupert used his own position to protect religious dissenters and Quakers, in particular, from the spite of the authorities.
Indeed, though a man of fierce passions and enormous contradictions, his latter career ensured him an honourable place in the radical history of these isles, not, as this book would have it, as the "last Cavalier," but as one of the forerunners of our collective liberty.
Facing up to Stalin
Young Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Montefiore is the latest person to try to pin down the many facets of Stalin. The result is ground-breaking, says JOHN CALLOW.
Writing at the close of the 1970s, Ian Grey likened the popular image of Stalin to an "icon standing before its oil lamp" which is "so begrimed by the fumes that the subject is barely visible." Stalin, he thought, had faded "to a dark shadow, which can only be identified with difficulty."
Eulogised beyond recognition in the Soviet Union until Khrushchov's shattering speech to the 20th party congress and uniformly damned today in the West as a mass murderer and criminal, almost without parallel, Stalin, as man and Marxist, has disappeared from objective view.
The mention of his dread name or the use of the pejorative epithet "Stalinist" in order to dismiss Marxist thought or the records of communist governments from Cuba and Vietnam to China and Czechoslovakia in their entirety is now frequent enough to preclude further investigation. The term is often deemed sufficient to pass final judgement on one of the most significant and hopeful progressive movements born out of the Enlightenment.
For those familiar with Trotsky's indictments of his great rival and ultimate nemesis, Stalin is the ultimate mediocrity - the grey administrator with blood-stained hands, who manipulated the party machinery in order to destroy the sons and daughters of the revolution.
Yet Stalin, the orchestrator of the show trials, the creator of the gulags, the enemy of the peasantry and the warlord who partitioned half of Europe, was also the victorious generalissimo who broke nazi Germany and liberated the death camps. A dedicated revolutionary. A political theoretician of considerable note and influence. The statesman who transformed a predominantly agrarian society into a heavily industrialised superpower.
Triumphs and tragedies written on such an inhuman scale of suffering and sacrifice seem to demand an explanation that transcends the guiding hand of a monstrous civil servant.
To dismiss Stalin's abilities out of hand is surely as mistaken today as it was disastrous for Trotsky as war commissar in the early 1920s.
As a result, the enigma of Stalin's personality has remained until now. Despite the publication of a mountain of material on almost every facet of his life - as thinker, dictator and despot - Stalin's early career as a revolutionary and man of action at the heart of Lenin's Bolshevik Party has largely been ignored.
Taking their leads from Trotsky and his follower Isaac Deutscher, successive generations of scholars and popular historians have sought to downplay his role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and to utterly denigrate his mercurial record as a front commander during the civil war.
All of this is now set to change with the publication of Simon Sebag Montefiore's major new study Young Stalin. Ground-breaking is a term that is often overused by reviewers, but this book drives a plough through wholly unexplored archival territory and uncovers an enormous amount of material that is new and startling. In the process, many received wisdoms are comprehensively overturned.
It would be easy and not a little comforting for those on the left to ignore this book, to chaff at its equation of Bolshevism with simple gangsterism and to bridle at the notion that the October Revolution was a "bungled uprising" and that the party was no more than a "ruthless sect."
Those who approach this book expecting easy, palatable reassurances about the nature of power and the gaining and maintaining of it are sure to be disappointed.
Nor is this an intellectual biography which seeks to chart Stalin's career in revolution through his writings and his relationship and response to those of Marx and Lenin.
Yet, if one accepts these caveats and approaches the text, however uncomfortable it might be, with an open mind, then this is a rare treat.
It is a book of exceptional scholarship - based largely on newly opened sources from as far away as Georgia, California, Russia, Finland and Azerbaijan - written in a gripping and elegant style that combines a novelist's flair for mood, description and characterisation with a level of reasoned, sustained and unsensational argument that is often demanded of, but seldom realised by, top-flight academic historians.
Rather than appearing as a grey presence in the wings, Stalin stands here, centre stage. By turns, he appears as traumatised, then bullying child. As seminarian turned revolutionary street fighter. And as a poet of some talent who could both glorify then later crush the flowering of Georgian culture.
His charisma and dedication to the revolution are never doubted, but neither is his will to achieve power and the cold ruthlessness that enabled it.
Ultimately, it was this extraordinary combination of traits, abilities and flaws which transformed "Koba," a Georgian Robin Hood figure, into Stalin, Russia's Man of Steel.
Along the way, he experienced street fights, massacres by tsarist gendarmes and no less than nine arrests, four short detentions and eight escapes from exile in Siberia.
He worked by day at a weather station while co-ordinating strikes in the oil fields at night and ran stolen bullets and banknotes across the Caucasus, arming and funding the Red Battle Squads that he had created across Georgia during the abortive revolution of 1905.
Adept at debating, writing and organising struggle, the author considers Stalin's gifts to have been the "command, harnessing and provocation of turmoil."
Moreover, it is Montefiore's contention that, in order to break the tsarist state, with its repression of minorities, strong secret police and network of informers, just such a degree of ruthlessness was required.
Thus, it was Stalin's talent for conspiracy, his ability to evade capture and his willingness to undertake daring bank raids in order to finance the Bolshevik cause that first drew him to the attention of Lenin.
Whereas it has become common, with the benefit of hindsight, to separate the Bolshevik leaders on the basis of their ultimate fates into the "good" and the "bad" - back-projecting the rivalries of the 1920s and '30s onto the party's formative period - Montefiore has the insight and good sense to study them entirely on their own terms.
Unity of purpose and action are stressed and, in this light, Trotsky and Stalin, just as much as Bukharin and Dzerzhinsky, are seen as being essentially two sides of the same coin.
Similarly, many of the familiar smears surrounding Stalin's early years - that he was illegitimate or, more seriously, that he was a double agent working for the Okhrana - are examined in depth and rejected.
The picture that emerges of the youthful Stalin, with his "burning eyes ... dirty peasant blouse and unpolished shoes," is no less chilling but far more believable and compelling than has ever before been the case.
This is, therefore, a book that both commands and deserves our attention. It also succeeds triumphantly in cleaning away much of the grime and detritus from the portrait of a man who, for good reason, is no longer an icon of our movement.
Painting the town red
The Russian invasion is nothing new - 100 years ago, instead of oligarchs it was Bolsheviks who lodged in Whitechappel and partied in Chelsea. Simon Sebag Montefiore takes the Stalin tour of London.
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Lifting the Velvet Pall – The Vindication of Julius Fucik
On the morning of 15th March 1939, great flurries of snow and sleet swirled about the towers of Prague’s Old Town. Along ice bound streets – emptied of trams and people– the lead units of the Wehrmacht swept in triumph towards the city centre and the government buildings, located – high up - in the sprawling castle complex at Hradcany. Awoken by the powerful humming of motors, most citizens wisely chose to remain indoors, still unable to grasp the full enormity of their betrayal at the hands of the Western powers. Along a frontier – already shrunken after the Munich agreement– gangs of Sudetenland Germans were busying themselves, under the direction of SS officers, pulling down border posts which bore the national arms, while Nazi stormtroopers scoured the countryside hunting for Communists, Gypsies, and Jews. And all this time – as the shutters were being pulled down upon the last offices of the free press, as Czechoslovakia disappeared from the map of Europe, and as its people were submerged under the weight of Nazi terror and hatred – their elected leadership did effectively – and precisely - nothing. The army was ordered to remain in its’ barracks, the latest tanks and aeroplanes remained idle at their depots, the guns of the Czech fortresses remained silent, and - upon the arrival of their enemy – the soldiers were simply directed to surrender, both themselves and their arms, without even the merest pretence of resistance.
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The last of the Shireburnes: the art of death and life in Recusant Lancashire, 1660-1754.
When J.M. Turner came to make his sketches of Stonyhurst Hall and the neighbouring church at Great Mitton, for the first time in 1799, he was immediately struck by the melancholia and faded splendour of that part of 'darkest' rural Lancashire. Perched high upon the brow of Longridge, the mansion commanded sweeping views of the valley beneath, of Pendle Hill and of the distant market town of Clitheroe; while the thirteenth century church of All Hallows - almost lost in the folds of the countryside - sat squatly on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, at the confluence of the Rivers Calder, Ribble and Hodder, and served as a stubborn reminder of an earlier and less secular age. Relatively untouched by the forces of industrialisation, these buildings proved a delight to the Gothic imagination of the young artist. The empty pedestals of statues long ago melted down and the scratched and defaced stone lions that looked out along the central avenue of the parkland, seemed entirely in-keeping with the solemn line of recumbent effigies to the Shireburne lords of Stonyhurst, which dominated the north wall of their private chapel at Mitton. Consequently, it was little wonder that Turner subsequently chose to pass over the hustle and bustle of the newly reestablished Jesuit school - which had settled at the Hall after the Order's hasty flight from Revolutionary Europe - and to ignore the mundane scenes of Anglican worship in the nave of All Hallows’ Church, in order to recapture something of the grandeur and feudal glory of their past. Divorced from their contemporary roles, Turner's views of these sights chose to reflect not only an idealised landscape but also the sense of decay and transience, which inevitably accompanied the decline and eventual extinction of a great noble house. A generation later, these very same motifs of a doomed family, of the mysteries and semi-magical properties of Roman Catholicism in its English context, and of the continued wildness of the Lancastrian countryside - would resurface powerfully in one of Mrs. Gaskell’s bleakest short stories. Yet this brooding sense of ill-ease and decay only manifested itself in the final years of the dynasty, and would have been entirely out of place during the period from 1660-1702 when successive Shireburne lords of Stonyhurst grew in self-confidence and fashioned durable networks of kinship, power, and patronage from their Northern stronghold.
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