Calamity hits the Kingdom:

In the Spring of 1665, Samuel Pepys made the following entry in his diary:

30 April. Lord’s Day … Great fears of the sickness here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.

The sickness he referred to was the bubonic plague, which Pepys had never known before, the last outbreak in London having occurred in 1625. The disease was not a new one but, like the more modern occurrence of influenza, it came at intervals, though not so often, and it was much more deadly, especially in the crowded parts of the cities. This was the worst attack in modern times, though not so widespread and catastrophic as the Black Death of 1348-49. In London, it lasted until the summer of 1666 and carried off some hundred thousand victims. In early 1666, it spread to other towns, mostly in southern England, but by the end of the year, it was over. We now know that the bacillus of the disease, which was endemic in the Near East and parts of North Africa was carried by fleas on the rats which infested the ships trading with those areas. No cure was known and the disease was almost always fatal. Pepys regularly reports the fatality statistics which were given in the weekly ‘bills of mortality’ published by the Parish Clerk’s Company of London. The Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, also kept a ‘Journal’ in which he reflected on the horror of that year:

It is scarce possible for people that live in a time of health and security to understand the dreadfulness of that “pestilence”. How fearful people were, thirty or forty, if not a hundred miles from London, of any goods that were brought to them from there, or of any person that came to their houses. How they would shut their door against their friends and if a man passed another in the field how one would avoid the other as we did in time of war; and how every man was a terror to another. Oh, how unthankful we are for our quiet societies, homes and health!

When calamity hit the kingdom, as it did in a series of hammer-blows between 1665 and 1667, the instinctive response of both kings and subjects was not to invoke the illumination of science and rational argument but to call for divine intervention through penance, fasting and prayer. Daniel Defoe’s heart-rending account of the harvest of bodies in 1665, A Journey of the Plague Year, was written more than half a century after the event but was based on reliable memories of contemporaries, including one of Samuel Pepys’ amanuenses, Paul Lorrain.

What Defoe described was a culture divided into the mad and the methodical. The puritan ‘prophets’ seemed vindicated in their prophecies that God’s hand would be laid across the back of the ‘sin-steeped’ kingdom. Unhinged prophets walked naked in the streets roaring for repentance before the race was consumed altogether. In his ‘historical writings’, Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, described how the Plague followed the first ‘hammer-blow’ inflicted by the Dutch Navy in 1665:

There begun now to appear another enemy, much more formidable than the Dutch, and more difficult to be struggled with;

… which was the plague, that brake out in winter, and made such an early progress in the spring, that though the weekly numbers did not rise high, and it appeared to be only in the outskirts of the town (i.e. London), and in the most obscure alleys, amongst the poorest people; yet the ancient men, who well remembered in what manner the last great plague (which had been near forty years before) first brake out, and the progress it afterwards made, foretold a terrible summer. And many of them removed their families out of the city to country habitations; when their neighbours laughed at their providence, and thought they might have stayed without danger: but they found shortly that they had done wisely.

Fleeing the Plague & ‘Fighting’ it:

But while the King, the Court, the professions (including physicians) and the Gentry all fled London as fast as they could, they left behind the common citizens to be locked up by the watch in their own houses, prisoners of the contagion, left to succumb, starve or survive. Doctors could not help much because they did not know how to cure the plague. Understanding of the generation and transmission of the disease was scarcely more advanced than when it first struck in 1348. Richard Baxter saw that one good thing came out of the plague, that the most useful people in these circumstances were the brave, unselfish men and women who stayed with the dying to give them courage and to help their families. Of course, it was the duty of the clergymen to do this, but many of them had also fled into the country so that for a time the silenced non-conforming ministers were needed too badly for anyone to try to stop them from helping the ill and the dying. They said that, …

… no obedience to any laws could justify them from neglecting men’s souls and bodies in such want and that it would be a poor excuse to say to God, ‘how I was forbidden by law’.

In March, Clarendon wrote, the plague had spread so much that parliament was willingly dissolved, a necessary measure considering that so many of its members were the House of Commons were assigned to many offices relating to the Anglo-Dutch War which required their attendance at Westminster and in Whitehall. Meanwhile, platoons of watchmen patrolled the streets enforcing the requirement that households become hermetically sealed at the first sign of infection. The regulations may have been designed to seal off the country from the plague, but inevitably the infection always outran the ability to contain it, and in the meantime, they condemned Londoners to be deprived of any hope of work or sustenance except what came their way by charity. The desperate who attempted to escape the net risked arrest and prosecution. From Alderman Hooker, Pepys heard of …

 … a saddler who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague: and himself and wife now being shut up, and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this (their surviving) little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich.  

For once, Pepys and his colleagues were moved enough to allow the child to stay there in safety. Because it was thought that cats and dogs spread the plague, the Lord Mayor of London ordered a general slaughter of them; by Pepys’ reckoning, forty thousand dogs and as many as two hundred thousand cats were duly massacred. That they were so swiftly rounded up and dispatched testified to the fact that what had modernised since the medieval epidemics was the policing of mortality. By the summer, the plague carts were carrying thousands to the burial pits every week. On a hot, sweaty day in early June, Pepys wrote:

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill-conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy someroll-tobacco to smell and to chaw – which took away the apprehension.  

Above: “Bring out your Dead” was the mournful cry heard at night as carts coursed their way through the city’s streets collecting corpses. As coffins could not be built fast enough, bodies were tossed into grisly pits on the outskirts.

Staying put & ‘socialising’:

Following that, Pepys ‘posted’ regular records and comments about the spread of the plague in his diary:

10 June: Lay long in bed; and then up and at the office all the morning. … In the evening home to supper, and there to my great trouble hear that the plague is come into the City (though it hath these three or four weeks since its beginning been wholly out of the City); but where should it begin but in my good friend and neighbour’s, Dr Burnett in Fanchurch Street – which in both points troubles me mightily. To the office to finish my letters, and then home to bed – being troubled at the sickness, … and particularly how to put my things and estate in order, in case it should please God to call me away – which God dispose of to his own glory. 

11 June. Lord’s Day: I out of doors a little to show forsooth my new suit, and back again; and in going, saw poor Dr Burnet’s door shut. But he hath, I hear, gained great goodwill among his neighbours; for he discovered itself first, and caused himself to be shut up of his own accord – which was very handsome. In the evening comes Mr Andrews and his wife and Mr Hill, and stayed and played and sung and supped -most excellent pretty company; … They gone, we to bed – my mind in great present ease.

In this comment, it’s interesting to note the willingness of some to ‘self-isolate’, despite the low survival rate which must have been apparent by this stage. Also noteworthy, from our current perspective, is how much (wealthy) people continued to socialise during the plague and the benefit it brought to their mental states. But less than a week later, Pepys was severely affected by what happened during his hackney-coach journey from the Lord Treasurer of the Navy’s house in Holborn. The coach gradually slowed down and the coachman climbed down, hardly able to stand, telling Pepys that he had been suddenly taken sick and was almost blind. Pepys alighted and went to another coach, saddened for the poor man but also troubled for himself since he had been picked up at the end of town where the plague was most concentrated. However, by the end of June, it seemed to some that the peak of infection had passed:

… I informed myself that there died four or five at Westminster of the plague, in one alley in several houses upon Sunday last – Bell Alley, over against the Palace Gate. Yet people do think that the number will be fewer in the town than it was last week. 

A weekly ‘bill of mortality’ for the week of 15-22 August 1665.

It is obvious from his entries that, by this time Pepys was becoming increasingly anxious for his own health, trying to limit his visits to his workplace and to ‘isolate’ himself as much as possible. The plague was beginning to affect him more personally, as friends, as well as neighbours, were succumbing to it:

3 July: Late at the office about letters; and so home, resolving from this night forward to close all my letters if possible and end all my business at the office by daylight, and I shall go near to do it and put all my affairs in the world in good order, the season growing so sickly that it is much to be feared how a man can (e)scape having a share with others in it – for which the good Lord God bless me or to be fitted to receive it. So after supper to bed, and mightily troubled in my sleep all night with dreams of Jacke Cole my old schoolfellow, lately dead, who was born at the same time with me, and we reckoned our fortunes pretty equal. God fit me for his condition.

Above: West side of the City

Below: East side of the City

Yet he was still able to go out and about, ordering wine on 7 July, of which he was pleased to have an ample supply in his cellar. He sent some of this to his wife, who two days earlier had moved out of plague-stricken London to lodge with William Sheldon, Clerk of the Cheque at Woolwich yard. Pepys was also helping to arrange a ‘marriage alliance’ between the families of the Earl of Sandwich and Sir George Carteret. Pepys took Philip Carteret, due to marry Sandwich’s daughter, Jemima, to ‘Dagnams’, the Essex home of Lady Wright, the Earl’s sister-in-law, where the young people were due to meet for the first time. Both were said to be ‘excessively shy’. On their way from Greenwich to Dagenham on 15 July, which included two ferry crossings with their coach and horses, Carteret and Pepys had a silly discourse … as to … love matters, he being the most awkward man I ever met withal in my life as to that business. His awkwardness continued well into their evening visit to ‘Dagnams’ and during his ‘courtship’ of Lady ‘Jem’, which included an afternoon visit to church. She later agreed to ‘readily obey what her father and mother had done’ but the wedding ‘breakfast’ two weeks later, according to Pepys (who missed the service with the bridegroom’s parents due to the tide at Deptford), was very merry … but yet in such a sober way as never almost any wedding was in so great families. Pepys did not mention the plague in his entries for these four days, which suggests that he could still be ‘distracted’ by such amusing ‘episodes’ of a more ‘normal life’.

Fears, favours & funerals:

As August began, however, Pepys found the Exchequer being moved out of the City to Nonsuch Palace near Cheam in Surrey by royal proclamation. He then returned home to his ‘papers’ and began putting his books into storage, ‘settling’ his ‘house … and all things in the best and speediest order’ he could, lest it should please God to take me away or force me to leave my house. That the number of deaths was still growing can be surmised from his entry for 12 August, in which he reported the imposition of a ‘curfew’ by the Lord Mayor:

The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in. And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.

Having just visited his wife at Woolwich yard, on 15 August he got up at 4 a.m. and walked to Greenwich, where he called on Captain Cockes, who was still in bed. While there,

… something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best I ever was dreamed – which was, that I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her, and then dreamed that this could not be awake but that it was only a dream. But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be, if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeare resembles it), we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this – that then we should not need to be fearful of death as we are in this plague-time. 

Lady Castlemaine, studio of Lely: ‘But strange it is, how for her beauty I … pity her … though I know well enough she is a whore.’ (16 July 1662).

On 21 August, the Navy Office was moved to Greenwich Palace. For the rest of the year, Pepys moved into lodgings nearby, paying occasional visits to his wife at Woolwich and to his office building in London. The Principal Officers attended a Sunday service at St Alphege’s, the parish church on 3 September. Pepys felt inhibited from wearing his fine new periwig for fear that it was maid of hair cut from infected bodies:

Up, and put on my coloured silk suit, very fie, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but darst not wear it, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it. And it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done as to periwigs, for nobody will buy any haire for fear of the infection – that it had been cut off the heads of people dead of the plague. Church being done, my Lord Brouncker, Sir J. Mennes and I up to the vestry at the desire of the the Justices of the Peace, Sir Th. Bidolph and Sir W. Boreman and Alderman Hooker – in order to the doing something for the keeping of the plague from growing; but Lord, consider the madness of people of the town, who will (because they are forebid) come in crowds along with the dead corps to see them buried. But we agreed on some orders for the prevention thereof.

There was not much that science could do about the death rate, other than count London’s dead with ‘modern’ devotion to the seriousness of statistics and the mapping of the epidemic. In the first week of September, there were 8,252 deaths in the capital, of which 6,978 were from the plague. One in six Londoners died in the plague of the summer of 1665, and despite the onset of cooler weather as September went on, the trepidation hung around. On Sunday 24 September, Pepys caught up with his diary for the last seven days, he was contented that:

… it having pleased God that in this sad time of the plague everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more for these last three months then in all my life before in so little time. God long preserve it, and make me thankful for it. 

But on 16 October, he returned to London, if only for a day. The scenes and sounds that greeted him immediately threw him back into a low mood:

But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead, and that man sick, and so many in this place, and so many in that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician, and but one apothecary left, all being dead – but that there are great hopes of a great decrease this week: God send it.

‘Home by water … the river beginning to be very fell of ice, so I was a little frightened.’      (18 December 1665). 

The Frozen Thames, by A. Hondius, 1667, detail. Before the river was embanked in the nineteenth century, it was liable to freeze in the most severe winters, especially to the near London Bridge (as shown). In 1676-77 and 1684 ice fairs were held on the Thames.

On 22 November, Pepys recorded that the plague had, that week, ‘come very low’, six hundred or so, the news bringing ‘great hopes’ of a further decrease. These were at least partly predicated on there being ‘a very exceeding hard frost’, continuing the next day, conditions which were apparently ‘a perfect cure of the plague’. It’s interesting to note how then, as now, people believed that the onset of colder or warmer weather could provide at least a partial ‘cure’, though there has never been any significant evidence for this. In fact, the persistence of the plague through the winter months throughout the winter of 1665-56 and its spread to other cities, towns and villages the next year is suggestive of nothing but the sense of desperation that Londoners must have felt as the year neared its close. However, by 24 November, when Pepys visited the City again, it remaining or returning citizens had begun to observe or enquire of each other as to who that they knew before the plague was still alive. There were other signs of life returning, and Pepys was ‘mightily glad to see the Change so full’. He had bought two barrels of oysters from his old shop in ‘Gracious Street’, so pleased was he to find ‘my fine woman of the shop’ still alive, but was then concerned to discover that they had come from Colchester ‘where the plague hath been so much’. On Christmas Day he attended church in the morning and then saw a wedding which he had not seen in many a day, presumably since the one he had helped to arrange in July. This time, the young people were ‘so merry with one another’.

Premature Predictions:

Early in the New Year of 1666, on 5 January, Pepys went by coach with Lord Brouncker to ‘my Lord’s house in Covent Garden’. There was great interest in the arrival of a nobleman’s coach in town once again, and everywhere porters were bowing to them, and beggars were begging. Pepys went on to describe a much more lively scene than on his previous visits to the City:

… a delightful thing it is to see the town full of people again, as now it is, and shops begin to open, though in many places, seven or eight together, and more, all shut; but yet the town is full compared  with what it used to be – I mean the City end, for Covent Guarden and Westminster are yet very empty of people, no Court nor gentry being there.

However, Pepys’ optimism proved premature for, in the week after Christmas, as Clarendon later wrote, although …

… the rage and fury of the pestilence began in some degree to be mitigated, but so little, that nobody who had left the town had yet the courage to return thither: nor had they reason; for though it was a considerable abatement from the height it had been at, yet there died still between three and four thousand in the week, and of those, some men of better condition than had fallen before.  

Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor, by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1662.

The Return of the King:

General Abermale, who was responsible for the conduct the Dutch War from London in the King’s absence, wrote to him in Oxford…

… that there still arose new difficulties in providing for the setting out of the fleet, and some of such a nature, that he could not easily remove them without communication with his majesty, and receiving his more positive directions; and how to bring that to pass he knew not, for as he could by no means advise his majesty to leave Oxford, so he found many objections against his own being absent from London.

Charles II, as a patron of the Royal Society (of Sciences).

Windsor was thought to be a place where the King could reside safely since there had not yet been any infection there, but as the Court began to move there, taking up all the available accommodation, he became apprehensive about the outbreak of plague in one house in the town. In the end, towards the end of February, the king decided that the Queen, the Duchess of Richmond and all their families should remain in Oxford, while he and his brother, together with his cousin Prince Rupert, would meet the general at Hampton Court, staying there for two or three days a week, with the general returning to London down the Thames each night, …

… for no man did believe it counsellable that his majesty should reside longer there than the despatch of the most important business required.

Meanwhile, on 7 January, the Pepyses had returned to their home in Seething Lane, and on the 9th the Navy Board resumed its sittings there. But when he visited the ‘Change’ again on the 10th, they heard there, to their grief, how the plague had increased in the previous week from seventy to eighty-nine. Nevertheless, even some of the doctors and scientists began to return to the City as January went on and the number of deaths began to fall again. On 22 January, Pepys recorded details of his visit to the Crowne Tavern behind the Exchange, where the Gresham College met for the first time since the Plague:

Dr Goddard did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time; saying that their particular patients were most gone out of town, and they left at liberty – and a great deal more, &c. But what, among other fine discourse, pleased me most, was Sir G. Ent about respiration; that is not to this day known or concluded on among physicians, nor to be done either, how that action is managed by nature or for what use it is.

The following day, the ‘good news, beyond all expectation’ was that the number of cases had dropped to seventy-nine. On the first Sunday of February, the Pepyses went to church together for the first time since the outbreak of the Plague. They only returned on this occasion …

… because of Mr Mills coming home to preach his first sermon, expecting a great excuse for his leaving the parish before anybody went, and now staying until all are come home; but he made a very poor excuse and a bad sermon. It was a frost, and had snowed last night, which covered the graves in the churchyard, so I was the less afeared for going through.

Three days later, 7 February, was a fast day for the Plague victims and Pepys spent it returning his chamber to the way it had been before the outbreak, taking all his books out of storage. This was the last direct, contemporary reference to the plague in London in Pepys’s ‘Journal’, so we might assume that by this date there were no more deaths in the capital. However, for at least a week at the end of February, Charles continued to keep his families in Oxford and to use Hampton Court for War meetings. The next week, Clarendon tells us, the number of those who had died from the plague in the City decreased by a thousand;

… and there was a strange universal joy there for the king’s being so near. The weather was as it could be wished, deep snow and terrible frost, which very probably stopped the spreading of the infection, though it might put an end to those who were already infected, as it did, for in a week or two the number of the dead was very little diminished. The general came and went as was intended: but the business every day increased; and his majesty’s remove to a further distance was thought inconvenient, since there appeared no danger in remaining where he was.

In the third week, he decided to return to Whitehall and was preparing to do so when the news came through that there had been a further fifteen hundred deaths in that one week. As the King’s train rode into the City, the Courtiers found the streets otherwise empty of coaches;

… so much all men were terrified from returning to a place of so much mortality. Yet it can hardfly be imagined what nuimbers flocked hither and thither from all parts on the fame of the king’s being at Whitehall, all men being ashamed of their fears for their own safety, when the king ventured his person. The judges at Windsor adjourned the last return of the term to Westminster Hall, and the town every day filled marvellously; and which was more wonderful, the plague every day decreased. Upon which the king the king changed his purpose, and, instead of returning to Oxford, sent for the queen and all the family to come to Whitehall: so that before the end of March the streets were as full, the exchange as much crowded and the people in all places as numerous as they had ever been seen, few persons missing any of their acquaintance, though by the weekly bills there appeared to have died above one hundred and three score thousand persons: and many, who could compute very well, concluded that there were in truth double that number who died: and that in one week, when the bill mentioned only six thousand, there had in truth fourteen thousand died. 

Above: A Plague Broadsheet, 1665.

Counting the Cost:

The frequent deaths of parish clerks and sections of parishes hindered the exact week-by-week counting of the dead, but what made it most difficult was the vast number of those who were buried in fields without any account being kept. Clarendon also claimed that many of ‘the anabaptists and sectaries who abounded in the city’, very few left their homes, ‘multitudes’ of them dying without the knowledge of the churchwardens or other parochial officers. They held their own burials in small gardens or neighbouring fields. The greatest number of deaths were of women and children, and also of ‘the lowest and poorest sort of people’, whereas few (rich) men missed their male acquaintances when they returned, ‘not many of wealth or quality or of much conversation being dead’. Due to the plague at Westminster, Parliament met at Oxford in 1666. It was prorogued to a day in April: but, as Clarendon recorded,

… the king had reason to believe that they would not so soon be in good humour enough to give more money, which was the principal end of calling them together. And the dregs of the plague still remaining and venting its malignity in many burials every week, his majesty thought fit to dispense with their attendance at that time by a proclamation: and he caused it at that day to be prorogued to the twentieth of September following. In the meantime, the court abounded in all its excesses. 

Financially, the plague and the war had so ‘routed’ the revenues and receipts of the Exchequer, that those who collected these had not received enough to discharge the constant burden of their offices. Consequently, very little income was making its way into the national treasury, and neither was any interest being made on the ‘principal sums’. Moreover, as the great financial offices were located in the City of London, their destruction in the Great Fire in September meant that the very stocks which were consumed which would lead to a revival of trade.

The Spread of the Plague in the Country & the Clergy:

Richard Baxter and his family all escaped the plague, probably because they were not living in London, having already been driven away by the Act of Uniformity which restored the old Anglican Church lock, stock and barrel, leading to the ejection of one in five of the clergy by 1662. Perhaps because of their popularity through their courage and devotion to duty during the plague, another law, the Five Mile Act, prevented them from coming within five miles of any important town or of any place at all where they had once been ministers. Some of these ministers went to small, out-of-the-way villages, while some went into hiding near their old homes and visited their wives and children secretly, on dark nights. They had to live in Acton, then six miles from the City; the Plague followed them there for seven months, but none of them caught it, although, at the end of their time there, the churchyard was like a ploughed field with graves. 

But it was not only the Puritans and their non-conforming clergy who were brave and charitable during the Plague, as the story of a young clergyman called William Mompesson (pictured above), who lived near Chatsworth in Derbyshire’s Peak District, reveals. After a period of service as chaplain to Sir George Saville, later Lord Halifax, he came as Rector to Eyam in 1664, with his wife Catherine accompanying him.

In 1665, the plague had reached his village through some cloth which had been sent north from London to the village tailor. The consignment of cloth bound brought with it the infectious fleas which spread the disease. After an initial flurry of deaths in the autumn of that year, it died down during the winter only to come back even more virulently in the spring of 1666. As its rector, Mompesson was determined not to let the plague spread, so that in conjunction with another clergyman, the ejected Puritan, Thomas Stanley, he took the courageous decision to isolate the village. He sent a letter to the (3rd) Earl of Devonshire at Chatsworth Hall to ask him to arrange for food and medicine to be placed at regular times on a great stone outside the village. This was done for seven weeks, during which time the Rector asked that no-one should leave the village and no-one did, though all were frightened that they might catch the plague by staying. The Rector made them see that it was their duty to other people not to risk spreading it around the country. All through the seven weeks of self-imposed quarantine until the plague died out, the Rector and his wife went about among the plague-stricken people, nursing them day and night. Mompesson did many other things to help the village during the plague including preventing the spread of it by filling a well full of vinegar for trading. This helped stop the spread of the plague by sterilising any coins that came in or out of Eyam.

In spite of these measures and the continuous care of the Mompessons, 259 of the parishioners died, including the Rector’s wife, but the infection did not spread to any other village in Derbyshire and the neighbouring counties. The plague claimed its last Eyam victim in December 1666. Mompesson became so associated with the plague that he was not universally welcomed at his next parish, Eakring, Nottinghamshire, where his memorial can be found. In 1670 he remarried, his second wife being a widow, Elizabeth Newby. She was a relative of his patron, Sir George Saville, and through his patronage, Mompesson eventually became Prebendary of Southwell, Nottinghamshire, although he declined the opportunity to be Dean of Lincoln Cathedral. He died in 1709.

This historic episode, commemorated each year in the village, has been the subject of many books and plays, notably The Roses of Eyam by Don Taylor (1970). Recently academics have begun to examine the factual basis of the story’s key ingredients: in particular, the extent to which wealthier residents were able to circumvent the ban. For example, despite insisting all villagers should remain in Eyam, Mompesson had his own children sent away to Sheffield in June 1666, just before the quarantine was agreed. At this time he also determined to send his wife Catherine with them but she refused to leave him, later succumbing to the plague.

The Comet, the Coronation & the Condition of the English People after the Fire:

The appearance of a comet in the summer of 1664 had been greeted with the same dismay that this phenomenon had always inspired as a presage of disaster. As Simon Schama has commented eloquently:

Following astrology, as the almanacs reminded their preternaturally anxious readers, was numerology; the tail of the comet heralded the sign of the Beast, his number being, as everyone knew: 666. Sure enough, in the first week of September 1666, up from the bituminous regions of hell, came the diabolical fire. Prophets had long been warning that the new Sodom, steeped in lechery and luxury, would be consumed by the fiery wrath of an indignant Jehovah.   

The longer-term significance of the events of the Great Plague and the Fire of London, forever linked in the psychology of the English people as coupled catastrophes, was that they revealed the 1660s as years of complacency and drift in which the early euphoria of the Restoration gave way to mild political depression. The ravages of the plague, the humiliating Dutch incursions up the Medway during the Second Dutch War (1665-7) and the Great Fire sapped the confidence of 1660-61 that God would bless a land that had come to its senses after the Civil Wars of the previous decades.

Sources:

Robert Latham (ed.) (1978), The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary. London: Bell & Hyman (Book Club Associates).

G. Huehns (ed.) (1953), Clarendon: Selections from ‘The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars’ & ‘The Life by Himself’. London: Oxford University Press.

Simon Schama (2001), A History of Britain: The British Wars, 1603-1776. London: BBC Worldwide.

Katharine Moore (1961), Richard Baxter: Toleration and Tyranny (1615-1691). London: Longmans.

The Decade of Extremes – Punks, Skinheads & Hooligans:

The 1970s was an extreme decade; the extreme left and extreme right were reflected even in its music. Much of what happened in British music and fashion during the seventies was driven by the straightforward need to adopt and then outpace what had happened the day before. The ‘Mods’ and ‘Hippies’ of the sixties and early seventies were replaced by the first ‘skinheads’, though in the course there were ‘Ziggy Stardust’ followers of David Bowie who would bring androgyny and excess to the pavements and even to the playground. Leather-bound punks found a way of offending the older rockers; New Romantics with eye-liner and quiffs challenged the ‘Goths’. Flared jeans and then baggy trousers were suddenly ‘in’ and then just as quickly disappeared. Shoes, shirts, haircuts, mutated and competed. For much of this time, the game didn’t mean anything outside its own rhetoric. One minute it was there, the next it had gone. Exactly the same can be said of musical fads, the way that Soul was picked up in Northern clubs from Wigan to Blackpool to Manchester, the struggle between the concept albums of the art-house bands and the arrival of punkier noises from New York in the mid-seventies, the dance crazes that came and went. Like fashion, musical styles began to break up and head in many directions in the period, coexisting as rival subcultures across the country. Rock and roll was not dead, as Don McLean suggested in American Pie, when heavy metal and punk-rock arrived, nor was Motown, when reggae and ska arrived. The Rolling Stones and Yes carried on oblivious to the arrivals of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. 

In this stylistic and musical chaos, running from the early seventies to the ‘noughties’, there were moments and themes which stuck out. Yet from 1974 until the end of 1978, living standards, which had doubled since the fifties, actually went into decline. The long boom for the working-classes was over. British pop had been invented during the optimistic years of 1958-68 when the economy was most of the time buoyant and evolving at its fastest and most creative spirit. The mood had turned in the years 1968-73, towards fantasy and escapism, as unemployment arrived and the world seemed bleaker and more confusing. This second phase involved the sci-fi glamour of David Bowie and the gothic mysticism of the ‘heavy metal’ bad-boy bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The picture below shows Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on stage in Chicago during their 1977 North American tour (Page is playing the double-neck Gibson used for their classic song, Stairway to Heaven).

The years 1974-79 were a period of deep political disillusion, with strains that seemed to tear at the unity of the United Kingdom: First there was Irish terrorism on the mainland, when in October two IRA bombs exploded in Guildford, followed by two more in Birmingham. Like many others, I will never forget the horrendous scenes in England’s second city the day after the Tavern in the Town was blasted. This was followed by a rise in racial tension and widespread industrial mayhem. The optimism which had helped to fuel the flowering of popular culture in the sixties was suddenly exhausted, so it is perhaps not a coincidence that this period was a darker time in music and fashion, a nightmare inversion of the sixties dream. In sport, the mid-seventies saw the invention of the ‘football hooligan’.

This led on to serious problems for football grounds around the country, as the government introduced the 1975 Safety of Sports Grounds Act. The home of Wolverhampton Wanderers, ‘Molineux’, had remained virtually unchanged since 1939, apart from the Molineux Street Stand, which had been made all-seater. But this distinctive seven-gabled stand (seen in the picture above) was deemed unsafe according to the act’s regulations and therefore had to be replaced. Architects were commissioned to replace the old stand, with its unique shape, with a new stand. To do this, the club had to purchase the remaining late Victorian terraced houses in Molineux Street and North Street which pre-dated the football ground, and all seventy-one of them were demolished to clear space for the new two million pound stand to be built at the rear of the old stand. The ‘new’ stand, with its 9,348 seats and forty-two executive boxes, was officially opened on 25 August 1979. Once the debris of the old stand was moved away, the front row of seats were almost a hundred feet from the pitch. From the back row, the game was so far away that it had to be reported by rumour! Also, throughout this period, the team needed strengthening.

In the 1974-75 season, Wolves won the League Cup, beating star-studded Manchester City 2-1 at Wembley, and nearly reversed a 4-1  deficit against FC Porto in the UEFA Cup with an exciting 3-1 home victory. Wolves finished in a respectable twelfth place in the League. But at the end of the season, the team’s talisman centre-forward, Belfast-born Derek Dougan, decided to retire. He had joined the club in 1967, becoming an instant hit with the Wolves fans when he scored a hat-trick on his home debut, and netting nine times in eleven games to help Wolves win promotion that season. He was a charismatic man, a thrilling player and one of the best headers of the ball ever seen. He also held the office of Chairman of the PFA (Professional Football Association) and in 1971/72 forged a highly successful striking partnership with John Richards. Their first season together produced a forty League and UEFA Cup goals, twenty-four the Doog and sixteen for Richards. In 1972/73, they shared fifty-three goals in all competitions, Richards getting thirty-six and Dougan seventeen. In two and a half seasons of their partnership, the duo scored a total of 125 goals in 127 games. Derek Dougan signed off at Molineux on Saturday, 26th April 1975. In his nine years at Wolves, Dougan made 323 appearances and scored 123 goals, including five hat-tricks. He also won 43 caps for Northern Ireland, many of them alongside the great George Best, who himself had been a Wolves fan as a teenager.

Above: Derek Dougan in 1974/75, the season he retired.

Wolves had always been considered ‘too good to go down’ after their 1967 promotion but following the departure of ‘the Doog’ they embarked on a run to obscurity, finishing twentieth at the end of the 1975/76 season, resulting in their relegation to the second tier of English football. Worse still, early in 1976, Wolves’ fabulously speedy left-winger, Dave Wagstaffe, was transferred to Blackburn Rovers. In his twelve years at Molineux, ‘Waggy’ had scored thirty-one goals, including a ‘screamer’ in a 5-1 defeat of Arsenal, in over four hundred appearances. In time-honoured fashion, the majority of fans wanted money to be spent on new players, not on a stand of such huge proportions. Although Wolves returned to the League’s top flight at the end of the next season, they were still not good enough to finish in the top half of the division. More departures of longstanding stalwarts followed, including that of captain Mike Bailey, Frank Munro and goalkeeper Phil Parkes. The East Midlands clubs took over in the spotlight, first Derby County and then Nottingham Forest, who won the European Cup in 1979, to make Brian Clough’s dream a reality. Before the 1979-80 season kicked off, Wolves’ manager John Barnwell produced a stroke of genius by signing Emlyn Hughes from Liverpool to be his captain. Then he sold Steve Daley to Manchester City for close to 1.5 million pounds, and three days later signed Andy Gray from Aston Villa for a similar amount. Daley (pictured below in action against FC Porto) was a versatile, attacking midfielder who played in 218 senior games for Wolves, scoring a total of forty-three goals. Andy Gray scored on his debut for Wolves and went on to get another eleven League goals, one behind John Richards. He also scored in the League Cup Final in March to give Wolves a 1-0 victory over Nottingham Forest, and a place in the next season’s UEFA Cup.

John Richards continued to play on into the 1980s for Wolves. According to John Shipley, he was a true Wolves legend, a player who would have graced any of Wolves’ Championship-winning teams. He was also a true gentleman, in the Billy Wright mould. He had signed for Wolves in 1967, turning professional two years later. I remember seeing him make his first-team debut at the Hawthorns against West Bromwich Albion on 28 February 1970, scoring alongside Derek Dougan in a 3-3 draw. They both played and scored in the 3-1 away victory against Fiorentina the following May. Richards went on to score 194 goals in 486 appearances, a goalscoring record which stood for ten years. He won only one full England cap, due mainly to injury.

Like me, the entertainer Frank Skinner grew up on the fictional cartoon comic strip hero, Roy of the Rovers. Of course, when – as in his case – you support a real-life team that never wins anything, like West Bromwich Albion, it’s nice to follow a fictional team that scoops the lot. Melchester Rovers were his mythical alternative, and following them came with none of the attendant guilt that comes with slyly supporting another club, say Liverpool in the seventies. They were his ‘dream team’ with a cabinet of silverware and a true superstar-striker as player-manager. The 1970s were a time when both life and the beautiful game seemed far less complicated for teenagers. Watching it on TV, we would frequently hear a commentator say “this is real Roy of the Rovers Stuff”. What they usually meant was that there was one player on the pitch was doing something remarkable, unbelievable or against all odds. But even in the fictional pages, Roy had to confront the dark realities of hooligans among his own fans, and do battle with it in his own way, as the following frames show:

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren turned from creating beatnik jumpers to the ripped T-shirts and bondage gear of punk: the Sex Pistols portrayed themselves as a kind of anti-Beatles. Westwood was in many ways the perfect inheritor of Quant’s role of a dozen years earlier. Like Quant, she was brought up to make her own clothes and came through art college. She was similarly interested in the liberating power of clothes, setting herself up in a Kings Road shop which first needed to be braved before it could be patronised. Yet she was also very different from Quant, in that she had first mixed and matched to create a style of her own at the Manchester branch of C&A and claimed that her work was rooted in English tailoring. Her vision of fashion was anything but simple and uncluttered. According to Andrew Marr, it was a magpie, rip-it-up and make it new assault on the history of coiture, postmodern by contrast with straightforward thoroughly modern designs of Quant. The latter’s vision had been essentially optimistic – easy to wear, clean-looking clothes for free and liberated women. Westwood’s vision was darker and more pessimistic. Her clothes were to be worn like armour in a street battle with authority and repression, in an England of flashers and perverts. Malcolm McLaren formed the Sex Pistols in December 1975, with Steve Jones, Paul Cook, John Lydon and Glen Matlock making up a foursome which was anything but ‘fab’. Pockmarked, sneering, spitting, spikey-haired and exuding violence, they dutifully performed the essential duty of shocking a nation which was still too easily shocked. The handful of good songs they recorded have a leaping energy which did take the rock establishment by storm, but their juvenile antics soon became embarrassing. They played a series of increasingly wild gigs and made juvenile political attacks in songs such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and, in the year of the Silver Jubilee (1977), ‘God Save the Queen. Jim Callaghan could be accused of many things, but presiding over a ‘fascist régime’ was surely not one of them.

On the other side of the political divide was an eruption of racist, skinhead rock, and an interest in the far right. Among the rock stars who seemed to flirt with these ideas was Eric Clapton. On 5th August 1976, I went, with a group of friends, to his concert at the Odeon in Birmingham. He came on stage an hour late, obviously stoned and drunk, and stated, to a mixed audience, that Enoch Powell was the only bloke who’s telling the truth, for the good of the country. In his autobiography, Clapton apologised for his behaviour and his outburst. He was not alone in his ‘flirting’ with racist views. David Bowie spoke of Hitler as being the first superstar, musing that he might make a good Hitler himself. Though the Sex Pistols liked to see themselves as vaguely on the anarchist left, their enthusiasm for shocking, nihilistic and amoral lyrics left room for ambiguity, particularly after ‘Sid Vicious’ joined them. McLaren and Westwood produced clothing with swastikas and other Nazi emblems if only to outrage people, while Vicious’s dubious contribution to political discourse can be summed up by his lyrics,

Belsen was a gas, I read the other day, about the open graves, where the Jews all lay …

Reacting to the surrounding mood, Rock Against Racism was formed in August 1976. My diary for 1976 records that I attended four anti-Fascist and anti-racist meetings in Birmingham that summer. These concerts and meetings led to the creation of the Anti-Nazi League a year later. Punk bands were at the forefront of the RAR movement, above all the Clash, whose lead singer Joe Strummer became more influential and admired than Johnny Rotten and the rest of the Sex Pistols, and bands such as the Jam. Black music – reggae, ska and soul – was popular enough among white youth like my friends for it to have a real influence in turning the fashion in street culture decisively against racism. Ska revival bands such as the Specials and the reggae-influenced Police and UB40. The latter lived in the same terraced street as my brother in Moseley, Birmingham, and came together as unemployed men whose name was drawn from the unemployment benefit claim form. They had an effect which went beyond the odd memorable song. The seventies produced, in the middle of visions of social breakdown, this musical revival produced a more upbeat atmosphere, especially on the Liberal-Left, as well as the Hard-Left. The racist skinhead bands soon found themselves in a violent and uncomfortable ghetto. As one cultural critic of the time put it, …

A lifestyle – urban , mixed, music-loving, modern and creative – had survived, despite being under threat from the NF.

The NF had been founded in 1967 after the original British National Party and the old League of Empire Loyalists joined together. Electorally it was struggling, though Martin Webster, its leader, polled sixteen per cent in the West Bromwich by-election of May 1973 and in the two 1974 general elections the NF put up first fifty-four and then ninety candidates, entitling them to a television broadcast. More important to their strategy were the street confrontations, engineered by marching through Bangladeshi or Pakistani areas in Leeds, Birmingham and London with Union Jacks and anti-immigrant slogans. A more extreme offshoot of the original skinheads attached themselves to the NF’s racialist politics and by the mid-seventies, they too were on the march. Throughout the summer of 1976, broad-based anti-Fascist meetings took place in Dudley and Birmingham, involving Young Liberals, Labour Party members and more left-wing socialists. There were also national anti-racist conferences in London. The Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party determined to organise street politics of their own to bring things to a halt, forming the Anti-Nazi League in 1977. The ANL brought in tens of thousands of young people who had no interest in Leninism or Trotskyism, but who saw the NF as a genuine threat to immigrants. They flooded to the ANL rallies, marches and confrontations, during which there were two deaths as police weighed in to protect the NF’s right to march.

This was a youth lifestyle which also provided an alternative to the drift to the right more generally in British society and the establishment of ‘Thatcherism’ as the dominant ideology of the late seventies and eighties. But to understand what this ideology was, and how it was able to gain its hold on society, we need first to examine the parliamentary politics of the mid to late seventies.

The Callaghan Years:

Jim Callaghan (right) was the Home Secretary who sent British troops into Northern Ireland, for which, at the time, he was hailed as a hero. He was not such a hero among reformers in the Labour Party, however, when he scuppered the chances of Wilson and Castle of finally curbing the power of the trade union ‘barons’. In the spring of 1976, he finally entered Number Ten after a series of votes by Labour MPs shaved off his rivals – Denis Healey, Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins on the right, and Michael Foot and Tony Benn on the left. After three ballots, he defeated Foot by 176 votes to 137 and replaced Wilson as Prime Minister. For the next three turbulent years, he ran a government with no overall majority in Parliament, kept going by a series of deals and pacts, and in an atmosphere of almost constant crisis. He was, already, on becoming PM, in Andrew Marr’s description,

… a familiar and reassuring figure in Britain, tall, ruddy, no-nonsense, robust and, by comparison with Wilson, straightforward.

He had held all three great offices of state and, at sixty-five, he was one of the most experienced politicians to become Prime Minister. After Heath and Wilson, he was the third and last of the centrist consensus-seekers between hard left and hard right, though he was instinctively looking to the right in the ethos of the mid to late seventies. Churchill apart, all his post-war predecessors had been Oxbridge men, whereas Callaghan had never been to university at all. He was the son of a Royal Navy chief petty officer who had died young, and a devout Baptist mother from Portsmouth. He had known real poverty and had clawed his way up as a young clerk working for the Inland Revenue, then becoming a union official before wartime and national service. As one of the 1945 generation of MPs, he was a young rebel who had drifted to the right as he mellowed and matured, though he always held firm to his pro-trade union instincts. He was a social conservative, uneasy about divorce, homosexuality and vehemently pro-police, pro-monarchy and pro-armed forces, though he was anti-hanging and strongly anti-racialist. As Home Secretary, he had announced that the ‘Permissive Society’ of the sixties had gone too far. As PM, he initiated a debate on ‘trendy teaching’ in schools, calling for an inquiry into teaching methods, standards, discipline and the case for a national curriculum.

Callaghan’s first few days as Prime Minister in April 1976 must have brought back some grim memories. A dozen years earlier, as Chancellor, he had been confronted with awful economic news which nearly crushed him and ended in the forced devaluation of the pound. Now, on the first day of his premiership, he was told that the pound was falling fast, no longer ‘floating’, the euphemism used since the Heath years. A devaluation by sterling holders was likely. The Chancellor, Denis Healey, had negotiated a six-pound pay limit and this would feed through to much lower wage increases and eventually to lower inflation. Cash limits on public spending brought in by Healey under Wilson would also radically cut public expenditure. But in the spring of 1976 inflation was still rampant and unemployment was rising fast. Healey now told Callaghan that due to the billions spent by the Bank of England supporting sterling in the first few months of the year, a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) looked essential. In June, standby credits were arranged with the IMF and countries such as the US, Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

Healey had imposed tough cuts in the summer but by its end, the pound was under immense pressure again. On 27th September, Healey was meant to fly out to a Commonwealth finance ministers’ conference in Hong Kong with the Governor of the Bank of England. But the crisis was so great and the markets so panicked that he decided he could not afford to be out of touch for the seventeen hours’ flying time. In full view of the television cameras, he turned around at Heathrow airport and went back to the Treasury. There he decided to apply to the IMF for a conditional loan, one which gave authority to the international banking officials above Britain’s elected leaders. With exquisite timing, the Ford workers began a major strike. Healey, for the first and last time in his life, he later said, was close to demoralization. Against Callaghan’s initial advice, Healey decided to dash to the Labour conference in Blackpool and made his case to an anguished and angry party. At the time, there was there was a powerful mood for a siege economy, telling the IMF to ‘get lost’, cutting imports and nationalising swathes of industry. Given just five minutes to speak from the conference floor due to the absurdities of Labour Party rules, the Chancellor warned the party that this would mean a trade war, mass unemployment and the return of a Tory government. But, he shouted against a rising hubbub, emulating his younger self as Major Healey speaking at the 1945 conference, in full battle dress, he was speaking to them from the battlefront again. He would negotiate with the IMF and that would mean…

… things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure … it means sticking to the pay policy.

As Healey ruefully recorded in his autobiography, he had begun with a background of modest cheers against a rumble of booing. When he sat down, both the cheering and the booing were a lot louder. Benn called the speech vulgar and abusive, but Healey was one of British politics greatest showmen. Meanwhile, Callaghan had become steadily more convinced, during the crisis, by the monetarists on his right. He told the stunned 1976 Labour conference that the Keynesian doctrines of governments spending their way out of recession, cutting taxes and boosting investment, had had their day …

I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists and that insofar as it ever did exist, it worked by injecting inflation into the economy … Higher inflation, followed by higher unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.

So, with the cabinet nervously watching, the negotiations with the IMF started. Callaghan and Healey tried to limit as far as possible the cuts being imposed on them. The IMF, with the US Treasury standing behind them, was under pressure to squeeze ever harder. The British side was in a horribly weak position. The government was riven by argument and threats of resignation, including from Healey himself. In secret talks, Callaghan warned the IMF’s chief negotiator bitterly that British democracy itself would be imperilled by mass unemployment. When the tense haggling came to an end, the IMF was still calling for an extra billion pounds’ worth of cuts and it was only when Healey, without telling Callaghan, threatened the international bankers with yet another Who runs Britain? election, that they gave way. The final package of cuts was announced in Healey’s budget, severe but not as grim as had been feared, and greeted with headlines about Britain’s shame. But the whole package was unnecessary from the start, since the cash limits Healey had already imposed on Whitehall would cut spending far more effectively than anyone realised. Moreover, the public spending statistics, on which the cuts were based, were wrong. Public finances were stronger than they had appeared to be. The Treasury estimate for public borrowing in 1974-5 had been too low by four thousand million, a mistake greater than any tax changes ever made by a British Chancellor; but the 1976 estimate was twice as high as it should have been. The IMF-directed cuts were, therefore, more savage than they needed to have been.

When Britain’s spending was defined in the same way as other countries’, and at market prices, the figure was forty-six per cent of national wealth, not the sixty per cent mistakenly stated in a government white paper of early 1976. By the time Labour left office, it was forty-two per cent, about the same as West Germany’s and well below that of the social democratic Scandinavian countries. Britain’s balance of payments came back into balance long before the IMF cuts could take effect and Healey reflected later that if he had been given accurate forecasts in 1976, he would never have needed to go to the IMF at all. In the end, only half the loan was used, all of which was repaid by the time Labour left office. Only half the standby credit was used and it was untouched from August 1977 onwards. Healey had talked about ‘Sod Off Day’ when he and Britain would finally be free from outside control. That day came far sooner than he had expected, but at the time nobody knew that Britain’s finances were far stronger than they had seemed.

Yet in the national memory, the Callaghan administration soon became associated with failure and remained in that category throughout the Thatcher years, used repeatedly as clinching evidence of its bankruptcy. All of this could have been avoided if only the Tories had been in power, it was argued. The initial drama of the crisis imprinted itself on Britain’s memory – the rush back from Heathrow, the dramatic scenes at the Labour conference, the humiliating arrival of the IMF hard men, backed by Wall Street, a political thriller which destroyed Labour’s self-confidence for more than a decade. But that was only the start of Labour’s woes. It was the prospect of ever greater cuts in public spending, inflation out of control, and the economy in the hands of in the hands of outsiders that helped break the Labour Party into warring factions and gave the hard left its first great opportunity. Healey and the Treasury were operating in a new economic world of ‘floating’ exchange rates, huge capital flows and speculation still little understood. It made him highly critical of monetarism, however, and all academic theories which depended on accurate measurement and forecasting of the money supply. Healey was bitter, though, about the Treasury’s mistakes over the true scale of public spending which so hobbled his hopes of becoming a successful Chancellor. He said later that he could not forgive them for this ‘sin’:

I cannot help suspecting that Treasury officials deliberately overstated public spending in order to put pressure on the governments which were reluctant to cut it. Such dishonesty for political purposes is contrary to all the proclaimed traditions of the British civil service.

After the humiliating, cap-in-hand begging for help from the International Monetary Fund, there was the soaring inflation and high interest rates, and finally the piled-up rubbish, strike meetings and unburied dead of the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent. But the true narrative of the Callaghan-Healey years, for the two must be seen together, is also a story of comparative success before its Shakespearean tragic final act. His defenders point out that Callaghan actually presided over a relatively popular and successful government for more than half of his time in power, some twenty out of thirty-seven months. Following the IMF affair, the pound recovered strongly, the markets recovered, inflation fell, eventually to single figures, and unemployment fell too. By the middle of 1977, the Silver Jubilee year, North Sea Oil was coming ashore to the extent of more than half a million barrels a day, a third of the country’s needs. Britain would be self-sufficient in oil by 1980 and was already so in gas. The pay restraint agreed earlier with Healey was still holding, though only just. Besides their success in getting inflation down, they also got the best deals with international bankers that could be done.

Callaghan also succeeded in purging the left from his cabinet, sidelining Michael Foot, sacking Barbara Castle, and constructing the most right-wing Labour cabinet since the war, including Bill Rodgers, David Owen and Shirley Williams. All would later join Roy Jenkins, for now European Commissioner in Brussels, in forming the breakaway Social Democratic Party. Callaghan’s newly found faith in monetarism and his increasingly aggressive attitude to high wage demands also put him to the right of Wilson and Healey. In the late seventies, Callaghan was, for the first time, getting a good press while the Tory opposition under Margaret Thatcher seemed to be struggling. After having to rely on an odd mixture of nationalist MPs for its precarious Commons majority, Labour entered a deal with David Steel’s Liberals from March 1977 to August of the following year, giving Callaghan a secure parliamentary position for the first time. The Lib-Lab Pact gave the smaller party, with only thirteen MPs, rights only to be consulted, plus vague promises on possible changes to the voting system: it was far more helpful to Labour, who gained a modest majority over the Tories in the opinion polls and the prospect of Callaghan being returned to rule well into the eighties. It did not look like a dying government, much less the end of an era.

The Labour left believed that Callaghan and Healey had been captured by international capitalism, as had many MPs. Their answer was to make the MPs accountable to ‘ordinary people’, as the obsessive activists of Labour politics innocently believed themselves to be. So the siege economy, or Alternative Economic Strategy as it became known by 1978, following the publication of a book by Sam Aaronovitch, a Marxist economist, and the mandatory reselection of MPs became the two main planks of the left. The AES was soon abandoned by many on the broad left, however, who, following the fall of the Callaghan government, tired of Keynesian solutions involving Labour governments spending their way out of crises. But Tony Benn (pictured below) persisted in his enthusiasm for workers’ cooperatives and nationalisation. He became increasingly detached from his cabinet colleagues in the Callaghan government, including the remaining left-wingers, like Michael Foot. He came close to leaving it over his opposition to Labour’s deal with the Liberals. His general attitude to the party is well expressed in his diary entry for 15 January 1978:

The whole Labour leadership now is totally demoralised and all the growth on the left is going to come up from the outside and underneath. This is the death of the Labour Party. It believes in nothing any more, except staying in power.

Benn was still a senior member of the government when he wrote this, attending intimate meetings at Chequers, hearing deep military and security secrets, while at the same time becoming an ‘inside-outsider’.

The Winter of Their Discontent:

The ‘winter of discontent’, a Shakespearean phrase, was used by James Callaghan himself to describe the industrial and social chaos of 1978-9. It has stuck in the popular memory as few events have since because schools were closed, ports were blockaded, rubbish was rotting in the streets and the dead were unburied. Left-wing union leaders and activists whipped up the disputes for their own purposes. Right-wing newspapers, desperate to see the end of Labour, exaggerated the effects and rammed home the picture of a country which had become ungovernable.

It came an explosion of resentment, largely by poorly paid public employees, against a public incomes policy they felt was discriminatory. In the picture above, rubbish is left piled up in London’s Leicester Square in February 1979. Such scenes provided convincing propaganda for the Conservatives in the subsequent general election. Callaghan himself had been part of the problem, since his failure to understand the threat posed by the union challenge to the elected power, and his earlier lack of interest in radical economic ideas, came home to haunt him as the incumbent of Number Ten. But it was not just that he had opposed the legal restrictions on union power pleaded for by Wilson and Castle, and then fought for vainly by Heath. Nor was it even that he and Healey, acting in good faith, had imposed a more drastic squeeze on public funding and thus on the poorest families than was economically necessary. It was also that by trying to impose an unreasonably tough new pay limit on the country, and then dithering about the date of the election, he destroyed the fragile calm he had so greatly enjoyed.

Most people, including most of the cabinet, had assumed that Callaghan would call a general election in the autumn of 1978. The economic news was still good and Labour was ahead in the polls. Two dates in October had been pencilled in, though 12th October had been ruled out because it was Margaret Thatcher’s birthday. But Callaghan did not trust the polls and during the summer he decided that he would ‘soldier on’ until the spring. But he didn’t tell anyone until, at the TUC conference in September, he sang a verse from an old music hall song:

There was I waiting at the church, waiting at the church,

When I found he’d left me in the lurch, Lor’ how it did upset me.

All at once he sent me round a note, here’s the very note, this is what he wrote,

Can’t get away to marry you today: My wife won’t let me!

While it was a popular song in its day, fondly remembered by many in his audience, it was hardly a clear message to Britain as a whole. Was the jilted bride supposed to be Mrs Thatcher? The trade union movement? Callaghan’s intention was to suggest that he was delaying the election, but many trade union leaders, journalists and even cabinet ministers were confused. When he finally told the cabinet, they were genuinely shocked. The decision to delay might not have mattered so much had Callaghan not also promised a new five per cent pay limit to bring inflation down further. Because of the 1974-5 cash limit on pay rises at a time of high inflation, take-home pay for most people had been falling. Public sector workers, in particular, were having a tough time. The union leaders and many ministers thought that a further period of pay limits would be impossible to sell, while a five per cent limit, which seemed arbitrary on Callaghan’s part, was considered to be ridiculously tough. But had Callaghan gone to the country in October then the promise of further pay restraint might have helped boost Labour’s popularity still further, while the trade union leaders could believe that the five per cent ceiling was designed to appease rightward-drifting middle-class voters. By not going to the country in the autumn, Callaghan ensured that his five per cent ceiling would, instead, be tested in Britain’s increasingly impatient and dangerous industrial relations market.

Almost as soon as Callaghan had finished his music-hall turn, the Transport & General Workers’ Union smashed it by calling for the 57,000 car workers employed by Ford, the US giant, to receive a thirty per cent wage increase, citing the huge profits being made by the company and the eighty per cent pay rise just awarded to Ford’s chairman. Callaghan was sorely embarrassed, not least because his son worked for the company. After five weeks of lost production, Ford eventually settled for seventeen per cent, convincing Callaghan that he would now lose the coming election. Oil tanker drivers, also in the T&GWU, came out for forty per cent, followed by road haulage drivers, then workers at nationalised British Leyland. They were followed by public sector workers in water and sewerage. BBC electricians threatened a black-out of Christmas television. The docks were picketed and closed down, blazing braziers, surrounded by huddled figures with snow whirling around them, were shown nightly on the television news. Hull, virtually cut off by the action, became known as the ‘second Stalingrad’. In the middle of all this, Callaghan went off for an international summit in the Caribbean, staying on for a sightseeing holiday in Barbados. Pictures of him swimming and sunning himself did not improve the national mood. When he returned to Heathrow, confronted by news reporters asking about the industrial crisis, he replied blandly:

I don’t think other people in the world will share the view that there is mounting chaos.

This was famously translated by the Daily Mail and the Sun into the headline, Crisis? What Crisis. As the railwaymen prepared to join the strikes, the worst blow for the government came when the public sector union NUPE called out more than a million school caretakers, cooks, ambulance men and refuse collectors on ‘random stoppages’ for a sixty pound guaranteed minimum wage. Now the public was being hit directly, and the most vulnerable were being hit the hardest. Children’s hospitals, old people’s homes and schools were all plunged into turmoil. The most notorious action was taken by the Liverpool Parks and Cemeteries Branch of the General & Municipal Workers’ Union refused to bury dead bodies, leaving more than three hundred to pile up in a cold storage depot and a disused factory. Liverpool Council discussed emergency plans to dispose of some of the corpses at sea. Funeral cortéges were met at some cemeteries by pickets and forced to turn back. Strikers were confronted with violence in local pubs. Of course, most of those striking were woefully badly paid and living in relative poverty. Moreover, many had no history of industrial militancy. Nor was the crisis quite as bad as some of the papers and politicians represented it. As with Heath’s three-day week, many people enjoyed the enforced holiday from their poorly paid jobs and tough working conditions. Contrary to rumour, no-one was proved to have died in hospital as a result of union action, there were no food shortages and there was, besides the odd punch-up in the pubs, there was no violence and troops were never used. If it was a ‘revolt’, it was a very British one. It was chaos and a direct, coordinated challenge to the authority of the government, but it was not an attempt to overthrow it, as the 1974 Miners’ Strike had been. This was not a revolution.

Nevertheless, in London (above) and other cities, rotting rubbish piled up, overrun by rats and posing a serious health hazard. The effects of isolated incidents and images were revolutionary, ushering in not socialism, but Thatcherism. Inside government, ordinary work had almost ground to a halt. Eventually, a St Valentine’s Day concordat was reached between the government and the TUC, talking of annual assessments and guidance, targeting long-term inflation and virtually admitting, on the government’s part, that the five per cent wage ceiling had been a mistake. By March most of the industrial action had ended and various generous settlements had been reached, or inquiries had been set up which would lead to them. But in the Commons, the government was running out of allies, spirit and hope.

Spring ‘Awakening’:

The failure of the referenda on Scottish and Welsh devolution gave the nationalists no reason to continue supporting Labour. A bizarre amendment to the Bill had meant that, although the Scots voted in favour, the ‘absences’ of dead people and those who had left but were still registered, were counted against, so the act had to be repealed. In Wales, the measure was in any case defeated by four to one of those voting, in a tidal-wave shift to the right across North Wales and an anti-Nationalist and anti-establishment surge in the valleys. This was led by Neil Kinnock and the Labour left against the leaders of their own party, including Callaghan, himself a Cardiff MP, the Wales TUC and the allegedly corrupt Labour leaders of local authorities. The political division of Wales was confirmed soon after the St David’s Day ‘massacre’ when, as broad left student leaders we witnessed, with horror, the Young Conservatives take control of half the six University College unions in Wales (Bangor, Aberystwyth and UWIST in Cardiff), a sure sign of a sea-change which was soon confirmed at the general election. After the devolution debácle, the nationalists, especially in Scotland, would never trust Labour again.

The Liberals, facing the highly embarrassing trial of Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy to murder, had their own reasons for wanting a spring election. In the frenetic atmosphere of an exhausted Parliament, in which dying MPs had been carried through the lobbies to vote in order to keep the government afloat, final attempts were made by Michael Foot and the Labour whips to find some kind of majority with the help of whatever support they could muster from a motley crew of Ulster Unionists, Irish Nationalists (SDLP) and renegade Scots. But by now, Callaghan himself was in a calmly fatalistic mood. He did not want to struggle on through another chaotic summer and early autumn. His famous and much-quoted remark to an aide, just as Labour was losing power in 1979, that the country was going through a once-in-thirty-years sea change, suggested that he half-accepted that the years of consensus had failed:

There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.

Margaret Thatcher during the 1979 General Election campaign.

Finally, on 28th March 1979, the game ended when the government was defeated by a single vote, brought down at last by a ragged coalition of Tories, Liberals, Scottish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists. Callaghan was the first Prime Minister since 1924 to have to go to Buckingham Palace and ask for a dissolution of Parliament because he had lost a vote in the House of Commons. The five-week election campaign started with the IRA’s assassination of Mrs Thatcher’s campaign manager, Airey Neave, on his way into the underground car-park at Westminster. On the Labour side, it was dominated by Callaghan, still more popular than his party, emphasising stable prices and his ‘deal’ with the unions. On the Tory side, Thatcher showed a clever use of the media, working with television news teams and taking advice from her advertising ‘gurus’, the Saatchis. Callaghan was soundly beaten, as he himself had suspected he would be, with the Conservatives taking sixty-one seats directly from Labour, gaining nearly forty-three per cent of the vote and a substantial majority with 339 seats.

Sources:

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. London: Macmillan.

Roger Middleton & John Swift, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

John Shipley (2003), Wolves Against the World: European Nights, 1953-80. Stroud: Tempus Publishing.

Frank Skinner (Foreword) (2009), Roy of the Rovers: The 1970s. London: Titan Books.

The Wars of the Roses and the Tudor State of Wales:

By the time of the ensuing Wars of the Roses, the Crown territories had spread throughout Wales, leaving the Marcher lordships with less power. Yorkist and Lancastrian families in the March provided fighting men for the armies of the rival factions, and when Harlech fell to William Herbert, the first Welsh-speaking earl,  the poet Guto’r Glyn had no hesitation in calling upon him to unite Glamorgan and Gwynedd, pardon not a single burgess, and expel all Englishmen from office in Wales. Only the Anglo-Welsh Lancastrians should be spared. However, it was Edward of York, earl of the March and Lord Mortimer, who became Edward IV in 1461. As a result, many of the lordships changed hands or were forfeited. Many of these passed to the Crown, the twenty-two Mortimer lordships included. York controlled the March and Lancaster the Principality, and practically every family of substance was drawn into the conflict. William Herbert built himself up to become Earl of Pembroke, the effective ruler of south Wales. Griffith ap Nicolas rose from humble origins to make himself and his family ‘kings of south-west Wales’ and to establish the ‘House of Dinefwr’.

The Crown lordships and the Principality now dominated the political landscape of Wales, enabling the king to establish a Prince’s council of the Marches of Wales in 1471 which continued to function intermittently until the Tudor ‘invasion’ of Wales and ‘takeover’ of England in 1485. The Tudors of Anglesey were, like the bulk of their compatriots, survivors. The family fortunes had been established by Tudur ap Gronw, whose sons had fought alongside Owain Glyndwr as his cousins. One of them, Rhys was executed and another, Maredudd, was driven into exile. His son, Owen, was taken on as a page-boy by Henry V, later marrying his widow, Catherine de Valois. His stepson, Henry VI, made his Tudor half-brothers earls of Richmond and Pembroke. Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, married Margaret Beaufort, who brought a claim to the English throne. Edmund died and was buried in Carmarthen; his son, Henry, was born posthumously. His mother was now a fourteen-year-old widow, so the boy was taken in by his uncle Jasper at Pembroke Castle, where he learnt Welsh. Following the Lancastrian disaster of 1471, Jasper took the boy to Brittany, and when his small army landed at Dale in Pembrokeshire, he depended entirely on a Welsh rally to carry him through to his supporters in England. Many of the northern Welsh lords did rally to him at Shrewsbury, and at Bosworth Henry unfurled the Red Dragon of Cadwaladr. He called his eldest son Arthur, and the Venetian ambassador commented that,

The Welsh may now be said to have recovered their independence, for the most wise and fortunate Henry VII is a Welshman…

The old Yorkist order in the Marches tried to hang on and, in the boroughs, made a last stand against the incoming tide of Welshmen. Henry kept St David’s Day and packed his own minor offices with Welshmen. By the end of his reign almost every marcher lordship was in royal hands, ‘over-mighty subjects’ had been cut down and charters of emancipation issued to north Wales. Under Henry VII’s firm hand a reinvigorated Council in the Marches began in the king’s name to bring about some uniformity in the government of the various lordships, particularly in the field of administration of justice. The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw an increasingly centralised Tudor state in which the special political arrangements of the March were becoming untenable. In 1490, Henry VII agreed to a form of extradition treaty with the steward of the lordships of Clifford, Winforton and Glasbury which allowed ‘hot pursuit’ of criminals in certain circumstances.

However, as he himself had demonstrated by his successful invasion on the way to ‘picking up the crown’ at the Battle of Bosworth Field, there remained a problem of the defence of the extended kingdom. Wales was England’s weakly bolted backdoor. Some degree of unified defence of Wales was of major importance to England’s security. His second son was left to find a solution to this problem, which was further complicated by his decision, in 1529, to go into action against the papacy. As the commissioners moved on the monasteries and their property, with Welsh gentry eagerly joining in, there was cause for alarm. As the Marcher lordships collapsed into gangster fiefdoms, just across the water, Catholic Ireland was also restive. If Wales was its backdoor, Ireland beyond ‘the Pale’ remained its back gate. It was from there that the Plantagenets had sought to dethrone Henry VII at Stoke Field in 1487, and even in the 1540s, Henry VIII remained paranoid about the threat from that quarter. The March of Wales had become so disorderly as a separate part of the kingdom that the Duke of Buckingham asked for a royal licence from Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, to allow him to have an armed guard when he travelled through his lordships, declaring that he did not dare enter his lands in the March without an escort of three to four hundred armed men. Under these circumstances, the King’s solution for the disorder in the March of Wales was not to tinker with the constitutional anachronism which had become, but to abolish it.

By 1536, Thomas Cromwell realised that a ham-fisted coercion would not suffice. The law and order of England would have to embrace Wales with the aid of Justices of the Peace drawn from its gentry. The ‘British’ nation-state in the making was faced with the difficulty that there were two nations within it, with a visible border between them. So both the border and the smaller nation would have to become invisible. Therefore, between 1536 and 1543, the English crown put through a number of measures which have gone down in British history as the Acts of Union. The Act for Laws and Justice to be Ministered in Wales in like Fourme as it is in this Realm united the Principality and the March of Wales as part of ‘the kingdom of England and Wales’. The Acts of Union in 1536 and 1542, bound the two countries into a single state of ‘England and Wales’. The Act of Union of 1536 completed the long process of the absorption of the Principality of Wales and the March of Wales into the English kingdom. It rendered superfluous the castles that until then had held these territories in subjugation.

The old Principality was wiped off the map, and the lordships in the March were abolished and, by combining them in groups, new shires were created to be added to the two established by Henry III in South Wales, and the four in Gwynedd and Dyfed, which had been created by the Statute of 1284. Wales became thirteen counties in all. The marchers were permitted to retain their lands and rights of lordship as practised in England, but they lost their previous prerogatives and privileges. The whole country was subsequently administered as a corporate element of the same realm. Shrewsbury remained in all but name the administrative capital of the whole of Wales, with the Council in the Marches, responsible for maintaining law and order in the English Marches and Wales, meeting there until its abolition in the 1640s. A consequence of these changes was that the language of the ruling gentry class became predominantly English. The key office of the Justice of the Peace passed to the gentry as ‘kings of the bro‘ (the ‘locality’). Welshmen became entitled to the same rights under the law as Englishmen, including the right to representation, for the first time, in the Westminster Parliament. However, because Wales was poor compared to most regions of England, the ‘burden’ of sending an MP was reduced to one MP per county, and the boroughs of each county were grouped together to supply a second MP. Wales was provided with a distinct system of higher administration and justice, in that twelve of its counties were grouped into four circuits of three for a Welsh Great Sessions, meeting for convenience in the borderlands, which also meant that Ludlow became an important centre for many years.

In the Tudor ‘nation-state’, English was supposed to be the only official language. Henry VIII proclaimed the necessity of extirpating all and singular the sinister usages of customs of Wales. No person or persons that use the Welsh speech shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within this realm. The threat of cultural genocide was not, in fact, fulfilled. In many ways, Wales remained a ‘peculiar’, if not a separate nation, with a unique administration and its own customs and language. Although the official, written language of local administration and the courts was to be English, the right of monolingual speakers of Welsh to be heard in courts throughout the country necessitated the appointment of Welsh-speaking judges and ensured the continued public use of the language. The dominance of the local gentry ensured that the justices of the peace and the men running the shires on behalf of the Crown were magistrates of their own nation, thereby guaranteeing that Wales would not come to be regarded simply as a part of England. This was the case even in Monmouthshire, which was fully incorporated into England by the Act of Union, and became part of Wales only in 1972.

At the same time as its administration was being remodelled, Wales also experienced the religious upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. At first, the Reformation simply substituted one barely intelligible tongue (Latin) with another (English). However, in contrast to Ireland, where little effort was made to make religious texts available in the native language, Welsh translations of the creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer came out as early as 1547, and these were soon followed by translations of the Prayer Book and the Scriptures. Since the Welsh could not be made invisible in the Tudor state, they had to be made Protestant, which meant that the Crown was forced to accede to pressure and authorise Welsh translations of the Bible, whose 1588 version was to prove a sheet-anchor for the threatened language. The early translation of the scriptures into Welsh also helped Protestantism to be accepted in Wales. In fact, the Welsh people embraced it enthusiastically, and later Puritanism and Nonconformity.

Above: The frontispiece of the first full translation of the Bible into Welsh, published in 1588.

Nevertheless, although it could be used when necessary in the courts, Welsh ceased to be an official language and had to retreat into the Church and the kitchen. The long-term effects of this were very serious for the language. Since it was all but excluded from administration, the position of Welsh gained as the language of religion did much to ensure its survival. The survival of Welsh as a living tongue compensated for the collapse of the medieval bardic tradition with its characteristic prophetic elements. Another Celtic tradition that sank into disfavour was the use of patronymics, by which a person’s second name identified or her as the child of a known parent (e.g. ap Arthur). This was superseded by the use of surnames, in the English manner, handed down from one generation to another. Many traditional Welsh Christian names also fell out of fashion in this period.

At the time, however, the Union was celebrated among the self-confident Welsh burgesses, who saw themselves as being as free as Englishmen under the law of England and Wales. Most importantly, perhaps, the ‘ordinary’ Welshman was no longer at the mercy of his lord or prince in terms of justice, which could no longer be administered arbitrarily by a master who was ‘a law unto himself’. Henry VIII was as masterful a monarch as Edward I in cutting the Lords Marcher down to size, and the lords seem to have accepted that their time for full submission to kingly authority had finally come. Now fewer in number and with most of the lordships already in the hands of the Crown, they were largely absentee landlords; their interests in England were, vulnerable to royal retaliation, were more valuable to them than their Welsh ones, which were still recovering their economic value from the long-term effects of the Glyndwr Rebellion.

These political changes in Tudor times left the Border itself with less strategic importance. Wales after the Union was no cultural backwater. The Welsh adopted Jesus College in Oxford (founded in 1571) and the Inns of Court in London to complete their education. The Welsh gentry took enthusiastically to the Renaissance, building houses and art collections comparable with those anywhere else in Europe. Against these cosmopolitan tendencies should be set the work of Sir John Price in defending the Arthurian tradition in the face of general scepticism, and the work of Gruffydd Done, in the sixteenth century, and of Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, in the seventeenth, who both collected and preserved Welsh medieval texts. By the time of the early Stuarts, ‘the Wales of the squires’ was entering a golden age in which Anglicanism and royalism were becoming rooted among the Welsh gentry. James I and VI was therefore favourably disposed to them and their loyalties were easily transferred to the Scottish dynasty with its own idea of Great Britain, not far removed from their own developing identity as Cambro-Britons. William Vaughan of Cardiganshire, who tried to launch a Welsh colony, Cambriol, in Newfoundland, was also keen to discard the ‘idea’ of the old frontier when he wrote:

I rejoice that the memorial of Offa’s Ditch is extinguished.

Above: Plas Teg, near Mold, Flintshire, the earliest Renaissance-style house in Wales, built c. 1610 for Sir John Trevor, a senior figure in naval administration.

Administration, Language, Trade and Religion:

Wales had acquired its historic frontier in the estate boundaries of an Anglo-Norman oligarchy. Ethnic minorities were left on both sides of the line. Old Ergyng (Archenfield) disappeared into Herefordshire but remained Welsh-speaking for three hundred years. The integration of Britain became visible in the large-scale migration of the Welsh to London, the growing centre of both trade and power. Dafydd Seisyllt, from Ergyng, was one of those who went up to London as a sergeant of Henry VII’s guard. He bought land and installed his son as a court page. His grandson was William Cecil, Elizabeth’s potent statesman. The Seisyllts, in a transliteration which became commonplace, became the Cecils. The family of Morgan Williams the brewer who had married a sister of Thomas Cromwell changed his name and Oliver arrived three generations later.

Monmouth became an anomaly; nearer to London and relatively wealthy, with an early tin-plating industry, it was saddled with the full parliamentary quota and subjected to the courts of the capital. Always reckoned to be a part of the ‘Welsh’ Church in diocesan terms, it was, however, excluded from the Great Sessions and the Welsh parliamentary system. This led to the curious hybrid title of ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’ as a standard secular description, which continued English settlement in the county reinforced. Among the landowners clustering thick in Glamorgan and Monmouth in the south were some of the richest squires in contemporary Europe.

The lordships had varied greatly in size and in physical character, which largely governed their capacity for profitable exploitation, their lords’ primary aim in winning, holding and administering their conquests:

Glamorgan (Morgannwg) was large, much of it agriculturally productive;

Maelienydd, a core lordship of the Mortimer family, was small, an upland and sparsely populated territory of little intrinsic value other than its strategic location;

Clifford, another Mortimer lordship, was very small, perhaps only twenty square miles in extent, but of strategic importance in the Wye valley, the ancient and medieval gateway into Wales.

Conquest was followed by settlement and the evolution of ‘Englishries’ and ‘Welshries’, an ethnic division of population. The Welsh were evicted from the more low-lying arable districts of the lordships which then became ‘the Englishries’, organised in the English manorial system. Here the lords established their ‘vassals’ and immigrant settlers to farm their ‘demesne’ as tenants, paying rent. Often the marcher lords would be absentee landlords, leaving their officials to administer the lands. In this respect, the Mortimers were atypical in that their power and prosperity lay in the March of Wales. By the end of the fourteenth century, they had connections all over Wales of long duration. A Mortimer had married Gwladus, daughter of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, in the previous century, and in the last half of the fourteenth century Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March, had probably as good a dynastic claim as any to the inheritance of Gwynedd. He became the focus of extravagant hopes among the Welsh gentry. The poet Iolo Goch, who was one of his tenants, wrote a fulsome ode of loyalty to him, presenting him as an Arthurian ‘Hero Returned’ who would rescue the Welsh from their degradation. What made this all the more significant was that Mortimer also had a good claim to the inheritance of Richard II. This shift in consciousness came just at the time when a  renaissance of the Welsh language and culture was beginning to provoke political responses and to meet with judicial resistance.

The dispossessed Welsh, were effectively ‘internal exiles’, resettled in ‘the Welshries’ which consisted of the upland and less productive districts of the lordships where raising cattle and sheep were the principle agricultural enterprises. These areas would be more or less self-governing, with courts conducted according to Welsh customs and practice, and in the Welsh language, with little if any interference from the lord provided its inhabitants gave no trouble and paid their tributes in kind. In the lordship of Hay, in the mid-fourteenth century, while the men of the Englishry paid for their land with rent and services, the Welshry as a whole gave the lord the traditional tribute of twenty-four cows every year, though this was later replaced by payment in money. In the later Middle Ages the gradual abandonment of Welsh laws, customs and systems of land tenure was welcomed in some quarters of Wales, particularly among peasant farmers; in the second half of the fourteenth century, Welshmen in Clwyd were eager to surrender their holdings and receive them back on ‘English’ terms, while others were willing to pay for the privilege of ‘English’ status. This was because they preferred the inheritance law of primogeniture to the Welsh system of gavelkind, the equal division of a man’s inheritance among his sons, involving restrictions on his disposal of land according to his family’s individual circumstances.

These moves towards greater integration in the March of Wales had various manifestations. The Welsh language had started to reconquer the Vale of Glamorgan; Welshmen began to appear in the lowland and valley towns, in Oswestry, Brecon and Monmouth; the Welsh began ‘harassing’ English merchants in the March. A chorus of complaint against them burst from boroughs not only in Wales but in the English border counties. Nearly every Parliament which sat between 1378 and 1400 demanded urgent action against these impertinent ‘scrubs’. Even as the gentry turned their hopes towards Richard II, the English administrations in Wales slammed their doors hard. This was a reassertion of colonialism in a régime that was breaking down under its own contradictions, and the Welsh-English tensions that it provoked provided an even greater incentive for the discontented Welsh to support Richard II and Roger (VI) Mortimer.

Although the distinctions between Englishries and Welshries were breaking down by the later Middle Ages, these can sometimes be identified on the landscape today from old place names, where these appear as either English or Welsh, or sometimes bilingually:

Gwerthrynion and Cwmwd Deuddwr (the latter identifiable on today’s map as one of the longest original Welsh place-names, Llansantffraed Cwmdeuddwr) were two Mortimer upland lordships, located north-west of Rhayader on the upper reaches of the Wye. Presumably, they were unattractive to English settlers as there is also a notable absence of English placenames in that area.

Newtown bears its English name, with a translation provided into Welsh (Y Dref Newydd), despite being surrounded by villages with Welsh nomenclature, because it was established as a borough by Mortimer. Other attempts by them to found boroughs were not so successful. Cefnllys remains the name of a long-ruined castle near Llandrindod Wells, because the Mortimers failed to take into account both its isolated position remote from major trade routes as well as the very limited potential for agricultural production within its close vicinity. When the once important castle had been abandoned as no longer of strategic value, its fate was sealed. Similarly, the prosperity of the borough of Wigmore, and the value of its castle languished after the Mortimers moved their seat of power to Ludlow. The military security of the marcher lordships depended on castles, boroughs and the lords’ private armies. Castles were pivotal in their survival and territorial ambitions as well as being status symbols; they served as ‘launching pads’ for aggression, defensive strongholds and bases in which they could reside when in their Lordships. They were also administrative centres from which their stewards could operate, collecting rents and dues and exercising justice.

The marcher lords inherited from the Welsh princes the obligation of all free men to fight for them, and Wales throughout the Middle Ages provided a pool of experienced fighting men on which the marcher lords, and by extension, the king, could draw. Most of the infantrymen in the king’s armies were Welsh, and the archers, in particular, distinguished themselves in the Hundred Years War, and for both Yorkist and Lancastrian armies in the Wars of the Roses. The bowmen of Monmouthshire and south Wales were celebrated in both English and Welsh writing; in the March this intensified a loyalty to their lords which became a political as well as a military force. Thousands of Welshmen in their proud livery – like Mortimer’s men, all clothed in green with their arms yellow – were a force to be reckoned with in the politics of England itself, whenever the marchers were heavily involved, as they nearly always were.

Some of the larger lordships, like Glamorgan and Pembroke were organised along the lines of English shires, long before they were formally recognised as such in Tudor times. Maelienydd, by contrast, did not even have knight service, and the Mortimer administration was far less English in form. Rhys ap Gruffydd was knighted by Edward III, one of a number of Welshmen who achieved rank, office and respect in the king’s service and in the March. He commanded the Welsh bowmen in France, as a discrete unit in the English army. Hywel ap Meurig’s family had long been associated with the Mortimer family. In 1260, he was appointed as the negotiator with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd on behalf of the Crown and then became constable of the Mortimer castle at Cefnllys. He served as the king’s bailiff in Builth and soon after the end of the Welsh War of Independence of 1276-77 was commissioned as a justice in Wales. He and his family prospered as important cogs in the administration of Wales. Roger Mortimer (IV) maintained a retinue, or private army of Welsh soldiers during his ascendancy in the late 1320s. Although the final resort in settling disputes among the marcher lords, and with their princely Welsh neighbours may have been to engage in warfare, a full-blown war was unusual and arrangements developed among them for settling quarrels which would usually have been of a minor nature over such matters as cattle rustling and boundaries. ‘Letters of the March’ were forms of passports for travellers and merchants passing from one lordship to another. If a traveller was arrested in a lordship other than his own, he could present his letter, which would have been issued by his lord stating that he was a tenant, and request to be returned to face justice in his own lordship.

The prosperity of the lordships depended largely on agricultural exports of cattle to England and across England to the continent. In 1349, four hundred cattle were driven from the Bohun lordship of Brecon to Essex for fattening. The first part of this journey was along long-established drovers’ roads through the hills, which still mark the landscape of Wales today. Twelve years earlier fourteen sacks of wool were dispatched to from the Mortimer lordship of Radnor en route to Dordrecht, and in 1340 another thirty were awaiting dispatch (each sack weighed 165 kilos). They were probably held up because of the chaotic conditions in trade as a result of the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Wool exports to Flanders had been a thriving business since the early twelfth-century. Welsh border wool may have been of an inferior quality to that of the prime sheep-rearing centres of the Yorkshire moors and dales, but it was certainly superior to the wool of East Anglia.

When Shropshire fleeces were fetching fourteen marks a sack, the Suffolk farmer could only get four marks for his. Yet Suffolk was richer than Shropshire and closer to their foreign customers. The sight of foreign buyers riding eastwards to Ipswich or Dunwich followed by long lines of pack horses laden with Welsh wool was a familiar one in medieval East Anglia. Suffolk farmers and merchants could do a brisker business with the continent because they were closer, but they could not compete in volume or the quality needed by the weavers of fine cloth in Flanders. Then Edward III decided to levy swingeing taxes on markets and customs duties on ports both in order to raise money for his wars with France and as an economic weapon in those wars. In the wool-producing areas the immediate effects were catastrophic, but after 1350 the introduction of weaving to East Anglia, accompanied by the migration of skilled weavers from the depressed textile industries of Flanders, led to a boom in demand for fleeces.

Throughout the early modern period, Wales remained predominantly agrarian, specialising in cattle production, rather than sheep-grazing; dairy products, and, until the Industrial Revolution, cloth-manufacture. The countryside underwent gradual enclosure and deforestation. Settlements remained small and scattered, with farmers maintaining upland summer homes and lowland winter houses. Towns, other than the boroughs already referred to, were not an important feature until the eighteenth century and even then were restricted largely to Glamorgan. There was some tin-plating in Monmouthshire, but neither coal-mining nor iron-casting was as important as they were to become.

Dislike of the Anglo-Norman hegemony in Wales was not confined to the civil sphere; it was also present in the Church. The great religious revival of the eleventh century in Normandy was carried to England by the Conquest, which the Roman Church and the Norman barons themselves regarded as a Crusade, predating the ones they began to the ‘Holy Land’ in 1096. They considered the Welsh Church, still with its independent Celtic roots, to be, like the English one, in need of reform and physical rebuilding. The early conquests in Wales were accompanied by expropriation of church property for the benefit of religious foundations in Normandy and appointed French bishops whose dioceses by the early twelfth century had been incorporated into the province of Canterbury. In the Anglo-Norman borderlands and the Anglo-Welsh March, the abbey at Much Wenlock was refounded circa 1080; the Mortimers founded an abbey circa 1140 at Shobdon, a predecessor of Wigmore Abbey, and were later benefactors of the abbey at Cwm Hir in Maelienydd. Llanthony Abbey (detailed below) was founded in 1107. The native religious houses of Wales were slowly superseded by Anglo-Norman foundations or reformed in the new tradition as religious and cultural control of the Church passed out of Welsh hands for the next eight hundred years. Hardly surprisingly, this meddling was a cause of great resentment, with that champion of the Welsh Church, Giraldus Cambrensis, indignantly asking the Pope, …

… Because I am a Welshman, am I to be debarred from all preferment in Wales?

A Pilgrimage to Llanthony Abbey & through Gospel Pass:

Above: The Landor Estate at Llanthony.

This is an appropriate point to engage with the path itself. The section from ‘Pandy to Hay-on-Wye’ officially begins where it crosses the A465 from Hereford to Abergavenny by “the Lancaster Arms.” However, by following the Afon Honddu northwards along the B4423 from Llanfihangel Crucorney, we can find our way to Llanthony Abbey. Given the remarks of Giraldus Cambrensis above, this is perhaps a better place to start a historical walk. The Priory is directly below in the deep Vale of the Ewyas which, as the twelfth-century itinerant Giraldus described it, is about an arrow shot broad. The priory he found, perhaps somewhat grudgingly, not unhandsomely constructed. It is, in fact, well worth the detour, either along the ‘B’ road or coming down from the Loxidge Tump from the Dyke Path (see maps below).

You come to the priory ruins in a beautiful setting of meadows and groves of chestnuts. It is said that St David settled at Llanthony during his travels through Wales in the sixth century, establishing the llan (church). It is unlikely that he stayed long, but Llanthony’s special claim to fame is that he supposedly ate the leeks here that were to become the Welsh badge during the campaigns of the Hundred Years’ Wars with France. The priory was founded in 1107 by the powerful marcher lord William de Lacy at the place where, while on a deer hunt, he is said to have forsaken ambition and decided to devote his life to the service of God. As a result of Welsh raids on the Augustinians whom they no doubt considered to be the Roman Church’s supporters of the Norman incursion, the monks sought refuge with the Bishop of Hereford, only a few of them returning to the priory. From 1300, with Edward I’s conquest, the priory flourished once more, and at some point housed the largest single body of medieval Welsh ecclesiastical manuscripts, but by 1376 it was in a poor state of repair. Owain Glyndwr burnt it down around 1400; by 1481 only four canons and a prior remained, and its end came with its Dissolution by Henry VIII.

In 1807 the estate was bought by the poet Walter Savage Landor (right) for twenty thousand pounds. From a wealthy Whig family, he held estates at Rugeley in Staffordshire and Bishop’s Tatchbrook in Warwickshire, but had been looking for a more secluded country property in which to write, and settled on Llanthony. The previous owner had erected some buildings in the ruins of the ancient abbey, but an Act of Parliament, passed in 1809, was needed to allow Landor to pull down these buildings and construct a house, (which he never finished). He wanted to become a model country gentleman, planting trees, importing sheep from Spain, and improving the roads. The Victorian diarist Kilvert wrote of his varied experiences of coming down the valley to the Abbey:

Under the cloudless blue and glorious sunshine the Abbey looked happy and peaceful. … How different from the first day that I pilgrimaged down the Vale of Ewyas under a gloomy sky, the heavy mist wreathing along the hillsides cowling the mountain tops. 

There is still an avenue of trees in the area known as “Landor’s Larches” and many old chestnuts have been dated back to his time. But though he had literally fallen in love with Welsh people as a young man in Tenby and Swansea, where he lived for a time, he quarrelled with local people and the Bishop of St David’s, also finding the Black Mountains to have an “ungenial clime”. He left the estate in the hands of trustees and moved to Italy with his wife, whom he had met and married in Bath while living at Llanthony. They had returned to live in Llanthony. The remains of Landor’s house lie at Siarpal in the ‘cwm’ above the priory formed by the Hatterall Ridge and the Loxidge Tump. Together with the tower of the priory, they form what is now the Llanthony Abbey Hotel. The main surviving buildings of the priory are in the care of Cadw, the Welsh ‘keeper’ of historic monuments. Entrance is free.

It’s a pretty steep climb up the cwm to the ridge and the tump where the path can be regained, so the four-mile trek up the valley road to Capel-y-ffin seems more inviting, particularly as it’s rewarded by another monastery, founded in 1870 by the Rev. J. L. Lyne (Father Ignatius) for the Benedictines, in an unsuccessful attempt to reintroduce monasticism into the Anglican Church.

Soon after his death in 1908 the community ceased to exist, and the church became ruined. In the 1920s, though, the artist Eric Gill lived at the monastery for four years, and the house remained in his family after he returned to London. Besides the Catholic church are an Anglican chapel and a Baptist chapel. Capel-y-ffin means ‘chapel on the border’.  Just over a mile further on towards the Gospel Pass is the Youth Hostel.

The road goes on through the pass between ‘Lord Hereford’s Knob’ and ‘Hay Bluff’, where it eventually joins the Dyke path for the descent into Hay-on-Wye, avoiding the steep section on the road. This is where you are likely to see the Welsh mountain ponies.  Following the path itself from Black Daren northwards brings you very gradually to towards the unmarked summit of the ridge, and of the path, at 2,306 feet, on a broad and bleak nameless plateau of peat.

The surrounding landscape becomes wild and remote, a place to avoid in mist and rain. The Welsh have a saying, mae’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffin, meaning “it’s raining old ladies and sticks” (“cats and dogs” in English, of course!) Although “ffin” could mean “boundary” as suggested above, it might also mean “sticks” and there is a legend tell of the Old Lady of the Black Mountains, who is said to appear at night or in mist with a pot and/or wooden cane in her hand and who, going before wayfarers, will cause them to lose their way.

A friendlier spectre, said to appear to travellers lost in the mountains between Llanthony and Longtown, is of a man who will guide them to the nearest road before disappearing. Best take the road in the first place, I say, with its beautiful views along the Ewyas Valley (above). At Pen y Beacon (or Hay Bluff), which is bypassed by the official path, we come to the to the steep north-west facing scarp of the Black Mountains, high above the middle Wye Valley. The way-marked alternative path to the beacon itself was described by the Victorian diarist Kilvert, and has apparently changed little over the last century and a half:

Soon we were at the top, which was covered with peat bog and black and yellow coarse rushy grass and reed. Here and there were pools and holes filled with black peat waters. … The mountains were very silent and desolate. No human being in sight, not a tree. 

On the high and windswept bluff, on the very cornice of the range, a wide-sweeping countryside stretches away almost to the limits of vision. Beyond the Wye, hidden from view, where the Dyke path continues its journey, the Silurian hills of Radnorshire rise to grassy tops or to open hill common. In the distance are the outlines of Mynydd Eppynt, and the Radnor Forest. Dropping down over the cornice of Brownstones you aim between two deep gullies to join the Gospel Pass road on its way from the Honddu Valley. The path leads past the prehistoric burial mound at Twyn y Beddau and along the side of Cusop Dingle, on a steady descent into Hay. In a triangle bounded on two sides by main roads, Hay forms a compact and sleepy town, except when the International Book Festival is in town, in May.

In the town, there are the remains of two castles, both Norman. The mound of the earlier motte and bailey, built around 1100 by William de Braose, is beyond the medieval core of the town, near St Mary’s Church. Legend has it that the castle was in fact built, not by William, but by his wife, Maud de St Valerie (‘Moll Walbee’). She is said to have built it in one night, carrying the stones in her apron. A pebble that dropped into her shoe is reputed to have been thrown into Llowes churchyard, three miles away. The ‘pebble’ measures nine feet in length and a foot in thickness! The later castle seems to have been destroyed by King John in 1215, the year that he signed the Magna Carta. It was rebuilt and then burnt by Llywelyn ap Iorwerth in 1231, though it was apparently still in use when Henry III rebuilt it about two years later. In 1236, the town walls were built, and by 1298 a compact town had grown within them. The castle was captured and changed hands several times in the succeeding decades so that John Leland in the sixteenth century found Hay to show…

… the token of a right strong Waulle having in it three Gates and a Posterne. Ther is also a Castel the which sumtime hath bene right stately.

The seventeenth-century Jacobean castle incorporated into it was owned in the 1980s by R. Booth, who ran a remarkable second-hand book business in the town. Apart from the castle itself, where rarer books were kept, many shops and other buildings have become bookshops. The collection is claimed to be the largest collection in the world, and it is well worth setting aside time to explore the bookshops. It is this recent remarkable piece of social history which has given rise to the book festival and Hay’s unofficial title as ‘the book capital of the world’. As a postgraduate student in Cardiff, I well remember organising a minibus trip to Hay and returning with a number of books which were out of publication, dating back to the early twentieth century, the period I was researching.

North of Hay, the Dyke crisscrosses the border into Herefordshire, before reaching the lowlands of Montgomeryshire. This is the ancient territory of the kingdom of Powys known as Rhwng Gwy a Hafren (‘between Wye and Severn’). Although Mercian influences were strong along this part of the Border, this is essentially a countryside of dispersed habitation in the Welsh tradition. Much of the walk is through some of the quietest and most beautiful, undulating country along the Border. Leaving Hay en route for Knighton you cross over the Wye into Kilvert country, where the wayfaring diarist we met at Lanthony Priory and atop the Black Mountains, Francis Kilvert, was curate of the parish of Clyro from 1865-72 and where, in 1870, he began his diary, describing vividly both the way of life in the area and much of the surrounding countryside. As it is only a mile along the road, but is not on the Dyke Path, it seems sensible to include the short walk to Newchurch as part of a sojourn in Hay. That is where I plan to end my journey this year.

For some of its course, the Dyke marks local government boundaries, or more locally the boundaries to farmsteads, like Pen Offa near Chirk, where I hope to get to next year. But while, for the most part, the political boundary between England and Wales no longer follows it, and there are many gaps in the great earthwork itself (mostly due to modern development), the Dyke retains its place in the imagination as the symbolic frontier. It represents a natural if man-made division between upland and lowland peoples, as the only visible and historic structure which corresponds both to the imagination of those peoples, and to the fundamental reality of that division.

Sources:

Charles Hopkinson & Martin Speight (2011), The Mortimers, Lords of the March. Hereford: Logaston Press.

Gwyn A Williams (1985), When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Asa Briggs, John Morrill, et.al., (eds.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Irene Richards & J. A. Morris (1946), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe to 1485. London: Harrap.

George Taylor & J. A. Morris (1939), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe, 1485-1783. London: Harrap.

John B. Jones (1976, ’80), Offa’s Dyke Path (Long-Distance Footpath Guide No 4). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (Prepared for the Countryside Commission). 

 

 

Luther’s Last Decade and His Legacy:

In the final decade of his life, Luther became even more bitter in his attitude towards the papists. He was denied another public hearing such as those at Worms and Speyer, and he managed to avoid the martyrdom which came to other reformers, whether at the stake or, in the case of Zwingli, in battle (at Kappel in 1531). He compensated by hurling vitriol at the papacy and the Roman Curia. Towards the end of his life, he issued an illustrated tract with outrageously vulgar cartoons. In all of this, he was utterly unrestrained. The Holy Roman Empire was a constitutional monarchy, and the emperor had sworn at his coronation that no German subject should be outlawed unheard and uncondemned. Although this clause had not yet invoked to protect a monk accused of heresy, yet when princes and electors came to be involved the case was altered. If Charles V were faithless to that oath, then he might be resisted even in arms by the lower magistrates. The formula thus suggested by the jurists to Luther was destined to have a very wide an extended vogue. The Lutherans employed it only until they gained legal recognition at Augsburg in 1555. Thereafter the Calvinists took up the slogan and equated the lower magistrates with the lesser nobility in France. Later historians were accustomed to regard Lutheranism as politically subservient and Calvinism as intransigent, but the origin of this doctrine was in the Lutheran soil.

Martin Luther was made for the ministry. During his last years, he continued to attend faithfully to all the obligations of the university and his parish. To the end he was preaching, lecturing, counselling and writing. At the end of his life, he was in such a panic of disgust because the young women at Wittenberg were wearing low necks that he left home declaring that he would not return. His physician brought him back, but then came a request from the counts of Mansfeld for a mediator in a dispute. Melanchthon was too sick to go, and though Luther was also very ill, he went, reconciled the counts and died on the way home.

His later years should not, however, be written off as the splutterings of a dying flame. If in his polemical tracts he was at times savage and course, in the works which really counted in the cannon of his life’s endeavour he grew constantly in maturity and artistic creativity. Improvements in the translation of the Bible continued to the very end. The sermons and biblical commentaries reached superb heights. Many of the passages quoted to illustrate Luther’s religious and ethical principles are also from this later period.

When historians and theologians come to assess his legacy, there are three areas which naturally suggest themselves. The first is his contribution to his own country. He called himself the German prophet, saying that against the papist assess he must assume so presumptuous a title and he addressed himself to his beloved Germans. The claim has been made frequently that no individual did so much to fashion the character of the German people. He shared their passion for music and their language was greatly influenced by his writings, not least by his translation of the Bible. His reformation also profoundly affected the ordinary German family home. Roland Bainton (1950) commented:

Economics went the way of capitalism and politics the way of absolutism, but the home took on that quality of affectionate and godly patriarchalism which Luther had set as the pattern of his own household.

Luther’s most profound impact was in their religion, of course. His sermons were read to the congregations, his liturgy was sung, his catechism was rehearsed by the father of the household, his Bible cheered the faint-hearted and consoled the dying. By contrast, no single Englishman had the range of Luther. The Bible translation was largely the work of Tyndale, the prayer-book was that of Cranmer, the Catechism of the Westminster Divines. The style of sermons followed Latimer’s example and the hymn book was owed much to George Herbert from the beginning. Luther, therefore, did the work of five Englishmen, and for the sheer richness and exuberance of vocabulary and mastery of style, his use of German can only be compared with Shakespeare’s use of English.

In the second great area of influence, that of the Church, Luther’s influence extended far beyond his native land, as is shown below. In addition to his influence in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and England, Lutheranism took possession of virtually the whole of Scandinavia. His movement gave the impetus that sometimes launched and sometimes gently encouraged the establishment of other varieties of Protestantism. Catholicism also owes much to him. It is often said that had Luther not appeared, an Erasmian reform would have triumphed, or at any rate a reform after the Spanish model. All this is, of course, conjectural, but it is obvious that the Catholic Church received a tremendous shock from the Lutheran Reformation and a terrific urge to reform after its own pattern.

The third area is the one which mattered most to Luther, that of religion itself. In his religion, he was a Hebrew, Paul the Jew, not a Greek fancying gods and goddesses in a pantheon in which Christ was given a niche. The God of Luther, as of Moses, was the God who inhabits the storm clouds and rides on the wings of the wind. He is a God of majesty and power, inscrutable, terrifying, devastating, and consuming in his anger. Yet he is all merciful too, like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord… 

Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Pacifists:

The movement initiated by Luther soon spread throughout Germany. Luther provided its chief source of energy and vision until his death in 1546. Once Luther had passed from the scene, a period of bitter theological warfare occurred within Protestantism. There was controversy over such matters as the difference between ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’; what doctrine was essential or non-essential; faith and works; and the nature of the real presence at the Eucharist. This is the period when Lutheranism developed, something which Luther himself predicted and condemned. The Schmalkald Articles had been drawn up in 1537 as a statement of faith. The Protestant princes had formed the Schmalkald League as a kind of defensive alliance against the Emperor. The tragic Schmalkald War broke out in 1547 in which the Emperor defeated the Protestant forces and imprisoned their leaders. But the Protestant Maurice of Saxony fought back successfully and by the Treaty of Passau (1552), Protestantism was legally recognised. This settlement was confirmed by the Interim of 1555. It was during this period that some of the Lutheran theologians drove large numbers of their own people over to the Calvinists through their dogmatism.

The Battle of Kappel, in which Zwingli was killed, had brought the Reformation in Switzerland to an abrupt halt, but in 1536 John Calvin (1509-64) was unwillingly pressed into reviving the cause in French-speaking Switzerland. Calvin was an exiled Frenchman, born in at Noyon in Picardy, whose theological writings, especially the Institutes of the Christian Religion and numerous commentaries on the Bible, did much to shape the Reformed churches and their confessions of faith. In contrast to Luther, Calvin was a quiet, sensitive man. Always a conscientious student, at Orléans, Bourges and the University of Paris, he soon took up the methods of humanism, which he later used ‘to combat humanism’. In Paris, the young Calvin had encountered the teachings of Luther and in 1533, he had experienced a sudden conversion:

God subdued and brought my heart to docility. It was more hardened against such matters than was to be expected in such a young man.

After that, he wrote little about his inner life, content to trace God’s hand controlling him. He next broke with Roman Catholicism, leaving France to live as an exile in Basle. It was there that he began to formulate his theology, and in 1536 published the first edition of The Institutes. It was a brief, clear defence of Reformation beliefs. Guillaume Farel, the Reformer of Geneva, persuaded Calvin to help consolidate the Reformation there. He had inherited from his father an immovable will, which stood him in good stead in turbulent Geneva.  In 1537 all the townspeople were called upon to swear loyalty to a Protestant statement of belief. But the Genevans opposed Calvin strongly, and disputes in the town, together with a quarrel with the city of Berne, resulted in the expulsion of both Calvin and Farel.

Calvin went to Strasbourg, where he made contact with Martin Bucer, who influenced him greatly. Bucer (1491-1551) had been a Dominican friar but had left the order and married a former nun in 1522. He went to Strasbourg in 1523 and took over leadership of the reform, becoming one of the chief statesmen among the Reformers. He was present at most of the important conferences, or colloquies of the Reformers, and tried to mediate between Zwingli and Luther in an attempt to unite the German and Swiss Reformed churches. His discussions with Melanchthon led to peace in the debate over the sacraments at the Concord of Wittenberg. He also took part in the unsuccessful conferences with the Roman Catholics at Hagenau, Worms and Ratisbon.

In 1539, while in Strasbourg, Calvin published his commentary on the Book of Romans. Many other commentaries followed, in addition to a new, enlarged version of the Institutes. The French Reformer led the congregation of French Protestant refugees in Strasbourg, an experience which matured him for his task on returning to Geneva. He was invited back there in September 1541, and the town council accepted his revision of the of the city laws, but many more bitter disputes followed. Calvin tried to bring every citizen under the moral discipline of the church. Many naturally resented such restrictions, especially when imposed by a foreigner. He then set about attaining of establishing a mature church by preaching daily to the people. He also devoted much energy to settling differences within Protestantism. The Consensus Tigurinus, on the Lord’s Supper (1549), resulted in the German-speaking and French-speaking churches of Switzerland moving closer together. Michael Servetus, a notorious critic of Calvin, and of the doctrine of the Trinity, was arrested and burnt in Geneva.

John Calvin, caricatured by one of his students, during an idle moment in a lecture.

Calvin was, in a way, trying to build a more visible ‘City of God’ in Europe, with Geneva as its base and model. In his later years, Calvin’s authority in Geneva was less disputed. He founded the Geneva Academy, to which students of theology came from all parts of western and central Europe, particularly France. Calvin systemised the Reformed tradition in Protestantism, taking up and reapplying the ideas of the first generation of Reformers. He developed the Presbyterian form of church government, in which all ministers served at the same level, and the congregation was represented by lay elders. His work was characterised by intellectual discipline and practical application. His Institutes have been a classic statement of Reformation theology for centuries, as is evident from the following extracts:

Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the Institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.

We declare that by God’s providence, not only heaven and earth and inanimate creatures, but also the counsels and wills of men are governed so as to move precisely to that end destined by him.   

Lutheranism strongly influenced Calvin’s doctrine. Like Luther, Calvin was also a careful interpreter of the Bible. He intended that his theology should interpret Scripture faithfully, rather than developing his own ideas. For him, all knowledge of God and man is to be found only in the Word of God. Man can only know God if he chooses to make himself known. Pardon and salvation are possible only through the free working of the grace of God. Calvin claimed that even before the creation, God chose some of his creatures for salvation and others for destruction. He is often known best for this severe doctrine of election, particularly that some people are predestined to eternal damnation. But Calvin also set out the way of repentance, faith and sanctification for believers. In his doctrine, the church was supreme and should not be restricted in any way by the state. He gave greater importance than Luther to the external organisation of the church. He regarded only baptism and communion as sacraments. Baptism was the individual’s initiation into the new community of Christ. He rejected Zwingli’s view that the communion elements were purely symbolic, but also warned against a magical belief in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament.

The Calvinists went further than the Lutherans in their opposition to traditions which had been handed down. They rejected a good deal of church music, art, architecture and many more superficial matters such as the use of the ring in marriage, and the signs of devotional practice. But all the Reformers rejected the authority of the pope, the merit of good works, indulgences, the mediation of the Virgin Mary and the saints, and all the sacraments which had not been instituted by Christ. They rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation (the teaching that the bread and wine of the communion became the body and blood of Christ when the priest consecrated them), the view of the mass as a sacrifice, purgatory and prayers for the dead, private confession of sin to a priest, celibacy of the clergy, and the use of Latin in the services.They also rejected all the paraphernalia that expressed these ideas, such as holy water, shrines, chantries, images, rosaries, paternoster stones and candles.

Meanwhile, in 1549 Bucer was forced to leave Strasbourg for Cambridge, and while in England, he advised Cranmer on The Book of Common Prayer. He had a great impact on the establishment of the Church of England, pointing it in the direction of Puritanism. Although he died in 1551, his body was exhumed and burned during the Catholic reaction under Queen Mary. Bucer wrote a large number of commentaries on the Bible and worked strenuously for reconciliation between various religious parties. In France, the pattern of reform was very different. Whereas in Germany and Switzerland there was solid support for the Reformation from the people, in France people, court and church provided less support. As a result, the first Protestants suffered death or exile. But once the Reformed faith had been established in French-speaking Switzerland and in Strasbourg, Calvinists formed a congregation in Paris in 1555. Four years later, over seventy churches were represented at a national synod in the capital.

Henry VIII may have destroyed the power of the papacy and ended monasticism in England, but he remained firmly Catholic in doctrine. England was no safe place for William Tyndale to translate the Bible into English, as Henry and the bishops were more concerned to prevent the spread of Lutheran ideas than to promote the study of Scripture. Tyndale narrowly escaped arrest in Cologne but managed to have the New Testament published in Worms in 1525. He was unable to complete the Old Testament because he was betrayed and arrested near Brussels in 1535. In October 1536 he was strangled and burnt at the stake. His last words were reported as, Lord, open the king of England’s eyes. In the meantime, Miles Coverdale completed the translation, which became the basis for later official translations.

The title page of the first Bible to be printed in English: Miles Coverdale’s translation (1535). Coverdale had helped Tyndale to revise his translation of the Pentateuch.

Though the king’s eyes were not immediately opened, a powerful religious movement towards reform among his people was going on at the same time. Despite the publication of the Great Bible in 1538, it was only under Edward VI (1547-53) that the Reformation was positively and effectively established in England. The leading figure was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, supported by the scholar, Nicholas Ridley and the preacher, Hugh Latimer. Cranmer (1489-1556) was largely responsible for the shaping the Protestant Church of England. Born in Nottinghamshire, he was educated at Cambridge until he was suddenly summoned to Canterbury as Archbishop in 1532, as a result of Henry VIII’s divorce crisis. There he remained until he was deposed by Mary and burnt as a heretic at Oxford in 1556. He was a godly man, Lutheran in his theology, well read in the Church Fathers, a gifted liturgist with an excellent command of English. He was sensitive, cautious and slow to decide in a period of turbulence and treachery. He preferred reformation by gentle persuasion rather than by force, and, unlike Luther, also sought reconciliation with Roman Catholicism. Like Luther, however, he believed firmly in the role of the ‘godly prince’ who had a God-given task to uphold a just society and give free scope to the gospel.

Archbishop Cranmer (pictured above) was responsible for the Great Bible (1538) and its prefaces; the Litany (1545) and the two Prayer Books (1549, 1552). The driving force of Cranmer’s life was to restore to the Catholic Church of the West the faith it had lost long ago. When the Church of Rome refused to reform, Cranmer took it upon himself to reform his own province of Canterbury. He then sought an ecumenical council with the Lutherans and Calvinists, but Melanchthon was too timid. His second great concern was to restore a living theology based on the experience of the person and work of Christ. Thirdly, he developed the doctrine of the Holy Spirit which lay behind his high view of scripture and tradition, and the meaning of union with Christ. He was brainwashed into recanting, but at his final trial in 1556 he put up a magnificent defence and died bravely at the stake, thrusting the hand that had signed the recantations into the fire first. The Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford commemorates his death, together with those of Ridley and Latimer whose deaths he had witnessed from prison a year earlier.

Several European Reformers also contributed to the Anglican Reformation, notably Martin , exiled from Strasbourg. These men, Calvinists rather than Lutherans, Bucerbecame professors at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Under the Counter-Reforming Catholic Queen Mary (1553-58), with Cardinal Pole as Archbishop of Canterbury, about two hundred bishops, scholars, ministers and preachers were burnt at the stake. Many Protestant reformers fled to the continent and became even more Calvinist in their convictions, influencing the direction of the English Reformation when they returned at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign. The young Queen gradually replaced the Catholic church leaders with Protestants, restored the church Articles and Cranmer’s Prayer Book. She took the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Her Anglican church kept episcopal government and a liturgy which offended many of the strict Protestants, particularly those who were returning religious refugees who had been further radicalised in Calvinist Switzerland or France.

Scotland was first awakened to Lutheranism by Patrick Hamilton, a student of Luther, who had been burned for his faith in 1528. George Wishart and John Knox (1505-72) continued Hamilton’s work, but Knox was taken prisoner by the French in 1547 and forced to serve as a galley-slave. When freed, he studied under Calvin at Geneva and did not return to Scotland until 1559, when he fearlessly launched the Reformation. He attacked the papacy, the mass and Catholic idolatry. The Catholic Mary Queen of Scots opposed Knox, but was beaten in battle. Knox then consolidated the Scots reformation by drawing up a Confession of Faith (1560), a Book of Discipline (1561) and the Book of Common Order (1564). While the Scottish Reformation was achieved independently from England, it was a great tragedy that it was imposed on Ireland, albeit through an Act of Uniformity passed by the Irish Parliament in 1560 which set up Anglicanism as the national religion. In this way, Protestantism became inseparably linked with English rule of a country which remained predominantly Catholic.

Western Europe during the Wars of Religion, to 1572.

The Empire of Charles V in 1551 (inset: The Swiss Confederation)

In Hungary, students of Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg took the message of the Reformation back to their homeland in about 1524, though there were Lollard and Hussite connections, going back to 1466, which I’ve written about in previous posts. As in Bohemia, Calvinism took hold later, but the two churches grew up in parallel. The first Lutheran synod was in 1545, followed by the first Calvinist synod in 1557. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a definite interest in Protestant England was already noticeable in Hungary. In contemporary Hungarian literature, there is a long poem describing the martyr’s death of Thomas Cranmer (Sztáray, 1582).  A few years before this poem was written, in 1571, Matthew Skaritza, the first Hungarian Protestant theologian made his appearance in England, on a pilgrimage to ‘its renowned cities’ induced by the common religious interest.

Protestant ministers were recruited from godly and learned men. The Church of England and large parts of the Lutheran church, particularly in Sweden, tried to keep the outward structure and ministry of their national, territorial churches. Two brothers, Olav and Lars Petri, both disciples of Luther, inaugurated the Reformation in Sweden. The courageous King Gustavus Vasa, who delivered Sweden from the Danes in 1523, greatly favoured Protestantism. The whole country became Lutheran, with bishops of the old church incorporated into the new, and in 1527 the Reformation was established by Swedish law. This national, state church was attacked by both conservative Catholics and radical Protestants.

The Danish Church, too, went over completely to Protestantism. Some Danes, including Hans Tausen and Jörgen Sadolin, studied under Luther at Wittenberg. King Frederick I pressed strongly for church reform, particularly by appointing reforming bishops and preachers. As a result, there was an alarming defection of Catholics and in some churches no preaching at all, and a service only three times a year. After this, King Christian III stripped the bishops of their lands and property at the Diet of Copenhagen (1536) and transferred the church’s wealth to the state. Christian III then turned for help to Luther, who sent Bugenhagen, the only Wittenberger theologian who could speak the dialects of Denmark. Bugenhagen crowned the king and appointed seven superintendents. This severed the old line of bishops and established a new line of presbyters. At the synods which followed church ordinances were published, and the Reformation recognised in Danish law. The decayed University of Copenhagen was enlarged and revitalised. A new liturgy was drawn up, a Danish Bible was completed, and a modified version of the Augsburg Confession was eventually adopted.

Heddal Stave church, Norway.

This form of construction is characteristic of this part of Scandinavia

The Reformation spread from Denmark to Norway in 1536. The pattern was similar to that of Denmark. Most of the bishops fled and, as the older clergy died, they were replaced with Reformed ministers. A war between Denmark and Norway worsened social and political conditions. When the Danish Lutherans went to instruct the Norwegians, they found that many of the Norwegians spoke the incomprehensible old Norse, and communications broke down. In Iceland, an attempt to impose the Danish ecclesiastical system caused a revolt. This was eventually quelled and the Reformation was imposed, but with a New Testament published in 1540.

Calvinists held an exalted and biblical view of the church as the chosen people of God, separated from the state and wider society. They, therefore, broke away from the traditional church structures as well as the Roman ministry. The spread of Calvinism through key sections of the French nobility, and through the merchant classes in towns such as La Rochelle alarmed Catherine de Medici, the French Regent, resulting eventually in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Philip II faced a similarly strong Calvinist challenge in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. In 1565, an outbreak of anti-Catholic rioting could not be contained because all the available forces were deployed in the Mediterranean to defend southern Italy from the Turks and to lift the siege of Malta. The spread of Calvinism was a coral growth in ports and free cities, compared with the territorial growth of Lutheranism which was dependent on earthly principalities and powers.

In this, the free churches later followed them. These churches were mainly fresh expressions of Calvinism which started to grow at the beginning of the next century, but some did have links to, or were influenced by, the churches founded in the aftermath of the Radical Reformation. Only three groups of Anabaptists were able to survive beyond the mid-sixteenth century as ordered communities: the ‘brethren’ in Switzerland and southern Germany, the Hutterites in Moravia and the Mennonites in the Netherlands and northern Germany.

In the aftermath of the suppression of Münster, the dispirited Anabaptists of the Lower-Rhine area were given new heart by the ministry of Menno Simons (about 1496-1561). The former priest travelled widely, although always in great personal danger. He visited the scattered Anabaptist groups of northern Europe and inspired them with his night-time preaching. Menno was an unswerving, committed pacifist. As a result, his name in time came to stand for the movement’s repudiation of violence. Although Menno was not the founder of the movement, most of the descendants of the Anabaptists are still called ‘Mennonites’. The extent to which the early Baptists in England were influenced by the thinking of the Radical Reformation in Europe is still hotly disputed, but it is clear that there were links with the Dutch Mennonites in the very earliest days.

Reformers, Revolutionaries and Anti-Semites:

Luther had early believed that the Jews were a stiff-necked people who rejected Christ, but that contemporary Jews could not be blamed for the sins of their fathers and might readily be excused for their rejection of Christianity by reason of the corruption of the Medieval Papacy.  He wrote, sympathetically:

If I were a Jew, I would suffer the rack ten times before I would go over to the pope.

The papists have so demeaned themselves that a good Christian would rather be a Jew than one of them, and a Jew would rather be a sow than a Christian.

What good can we do the Jews when we constrain them, malign them, and hate them as dogs? When we deny them work and force them to usury, how can that help? We should use towards the Jews not the pope’s but Christ’s law of love. If some are stiff-necked, what does that matter? We are not all good Christians.

Luther was sanguine that his own reforms, by eliminating the abuses of the papacy, would accomplish the conversion of the Jews. But the coverts were few and unstable. When he endeavoured to proselytise some rabbis, they undertook in return to make a Jew out of him. The rumour that a Jew had been authorised by the papists to murder him was not received with complete incredulity. In his latter days, when he was more easily irritated, news came that in Moravia, Christians were being induced to become Judaic in beliefs and practice. That was what induced him to come out with his rather vulgar blast in which he recommended that all Jews be deported to Palestine. Failing that, he wrote, they should be forbidden to practice usury, should be compelled to earn their living on the land, their synagogues should be burned, and their books, including The Torah, should be taken away from them.

The content of this tract was certainly far more intolerant than his earlier comments, yet we need to be clear about what he was recommending and why. His position was entirely religious and not racially motivated. The supreme sin for him was the persistent rejection of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. The centuries of persecution suffered by the Jews were in themselves a mark of divine displeasure. The territorial principle should, therefore, be applied to the Jews. They should be compelled to leave and go to a land of their own. This was a programme of enforced Zionism. But, if this were not feasible, Luther would recommend that the Jews be compelled to live from the soil. He was, perhaps unwittingly, proposing a return to the situation which had existed in the early Middle Ages, when the Jews had worked in agriculture. Forced off the land, they had gone into commerce and, having been expelled from commerce, into money-lending. Luther wished to reverse this process and to accord the Jews a more secure, though just as segregated position than the one they had in his day, following centuries of persecutions and expulsions.

His advocacy of burning synagogues and the confiscation of holy books was, however, a revival of the worst features of the programme of a fanatical Jewish convert to Christianity, Pfefferkorn by name, who had sought to have all Hebrew books in Germany and the Holy Roman Empire destroyed. In this conflict of the early years of the Reformation, Luther had supported the Humanists, including Reuchlin, the great German Hebraist and Melanchthon’s great-uncle. Of course, during the Reformation throughout Europe, there was little mention of the Jews except in those German territories, like Luther’s Saxony, Frankfurt and Worms, where they were tolerated and had not been expelled as they had been from the whole of England, France and Spain. Ironically, Luther himself was very Hebraic in his thinking, appealing to the wrath of Jehovah against any who would impugn his picture of a vengeful, Old Testament God. On the other hand, both Luther and Erasmus were antagonistic towards the way in which the Church of their day had relapsed into the kind of Judaic legalism castigated by the Apostle Paul. Christianity, said Erasmus, was not about abstaining from butter and cheese during Lent, but about loving one’s neighbour. This may help to explain Luther’s reaction to the Moravian ‘heresy’ in terms which, nevertheless, only be described as anti-Semitic, even by the standards of his time.

The story told in Cohn’s great book Pursuit of the Millennium, originally written six decades ago, is a story which began more than five centuries ago and ended four and a half centuries ago. However, it is a book and a story not without relevance to our own times. In another work, Warrant for Genocide: the myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in 1967, Cohn shows how closely the Nazi fantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the fantasies that inspired millenarian revolutionaries from the Master of Hungary to Thomas Müntzer.  The narrative is one of how mass disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonisation of the misbelievers, especially the Jews, in this as much as in previous centuries.

We can also reflect on the damage wrought in the twentieth century by left-wing revolutions and revolutionary movements, which are just as capable of demonising religious and ethnic groups, including Jews, through their love of conspiracy theories and narratives. What is most curious about the popular Müntzer ‘biopic’, for example, is the resurrection and apotheosis which it has undergone during the past hundred and fifty years. From Engels through to the post-Marxist historians of this century, whether Russian, German or English-speaking, Müntzer has been conflated into a giant symbol, a prodigious hero in the history of ‘class warfare’. This is a naive view and one which non-Marxist historians have been able to contradict easily by pointing to the essentially mystical nature of Müntzer’s preoccupations which usually blinded him to the material sufferings of the poor artisans and peasants. He was essentially a propheta obsessed by eschatological fantasies which he attempted to turn into reality by exploiting social discontent and dislocation through revolutionary violence against the misbelievers. Perhaps it was this obsessive tendency which led Marxist theorists to claim him as one of their own.

Just like the medieval artisans integrated in their guilds, industrial workers in technologically advanced societies have shown themselves very eager to improve their own conditions; their aim has been the eminently practical one of achieving a larger share of economic security, prosperity and social privilege through winning political power. Emotionally charged fantasies of a final, apocalyptic struggle leading to an egalitarian Millennium have been far less attractive to them. Those who are fascinated by such ideas are, on the one hand, the peoples of overpopulated and desperately poor societies, dislocated and disoriented, and, on the other hand, certain politically marginalised echelons in advanced societies, typically young or unemployed workers led by a small minority of intellectuals.

Working people in economically advanced parts of the world, especially in modern Europe, have been able to improve their lot out of all recognition, through the agency of trade unions, co-operatives and parliamentary parties. Nevertheless, during the century since 1917 there has been a constant repetition, on an ever-increasing scale, of the socio-psychological process which once connected the Táborite priests or Thomas Müntzer with the most disoriented and desperate among the poor, in fantasies of a final, exterminating struggle against ‘the great ones’; and of a perfect, egalitarian world from which self-seeking would be forever banished.  We are currently engaged in yet another cycle in this process, with a number of fresh ‘messiahs’ ready to assume the mantles of previous generations of charismatic revolutionaries, being elevated to the status of personality cults. Of course, the old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what would otherwise be obvious. For it is a simple truth that stripped of its original supernatural mythology, revolutionary millenarianism is still with us.

Sources:

John H. Y. Briggs (1977), The History of Christianity. Berkhamsted: Lion Publishing.

Sándor Fest (2000), Skóciai Szent Margittól, A Walesi Bárdokig: Magyar-Angol történeti és irodalmi kapcsalatok. 

Norman Cohn (1970), The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. St Albans: Granada Publishing.

Roland H. Bainton (1950), Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville, USA: Abingdon Press.

András Bereznay (1994, 2001), The Times Atlas of European History. London: HarperCollins.

 

 

 

Former Yugoslavia in Crisis: Views from Beyond the Borders:

The successful conclusion to the prosecution of Ratko Mladic at the International War Crimes Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague last week (22 November 2017) has taken me back in my mind’s eye both to January 2001, when I witnessed some of the evidence being presented at the War Crimes Tribunal during a trip to the Hague, as well as to 1992, when I was on the periphery of the events themselves. In August of that year, I moved back to Hungary with my family, to the beautiful southern cathedral city of Pécs, close to the border with ‘Former Yugoslavia’, which had recently become four borders, with Slovenia in the west, Croatia and the UNPROFOR disputed territory to the south, and Serbia to the east. Pécs is just a few hundred kilometres from the Croatian border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, and yet the scenes shown on British (ITN) television and on networks around the world that August were like those shot on cine-cameras on the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau nearly half a century earlier: pictures of barbed wire and skeletal figures from the camps run by the Bosnian Serbs at Omarska and Trnopplje. As I sat outside the glass courtroom in the Hague almost a decade later, I had those unforgettable images in my mind as the commandant of one of the camps was listening to the evidence brought against him for his role in what had already been presented to the world as a second Holocaust. That ‘presentation’, of course, was erroneous from the first suggestion that the term could be applied to any events other than the original ones.

Yet, not all was as it seemed from those pictures. Somehow along the way, the reservations of the ITN team which had filmed the camps were cast aside. The ITN reporters had been careful not to make an analogy with the Nazi concentration camps, but others did in their own voice-overs and commentaries. The skeletal figures shown weren’t inside the barbed wire, for instance, but outside it. The wire was old and ran around a small enclosure, and the cameraman got behind it to shoot the scene. There was also a famine-like food shortage at that time and place, which meant that everyone in the locality was starving. The most skeletal of all the prisoners shown, Fikrit Alic, was just as thin weeks after his release. ITN’s reporting was accurate, but the pictures seemed to speak for themselves. They caused a sensation in the United States, forcing the Executive there to act.

In October 1992, the United States announced that it would contribute an additional $900,000 to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to support refugees from the former Yugoslavia who were in Hungary. Many of these were Hungarian-speakers from the Vojvodina province in the disputed area between Croatia and Serbia. I remember a former English teacher from the town of Osziek who was also fluent in German, in addition to her ‘native’ languages of Hungarian and Croatian. Not qualified to teach in Hungary, she had found employment in a travel agency, where her multi-lingual abilities were put to good use in a time before people began to make their travel and accommodation arrangements online. My work involved placing and supporting teachers from the UK in various towns and villages throughout Baranya, the county surrounding and including the city of Pécs, including Harkány, Siklós and Mohács, along the southern borders. Driving between them and visiting even more remote villages, I was struck by the lack of any development in a long belt of land, due to the constant threat of conflict between Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact which had been one of the untold stories of the Cold War. More recently, during the brief but fierce war between the Serbs and Croats in 1991, stray mortars had landed on or near some of these villages. The most serious incident of this kind was when a bomb fell on the town of Barcs but fortunately did not explode. In total, the borderline between Hungary and the former Yugoslavia stretched over six hundred kilometres. Legislators and executive authorities, both national and local, were faced with adjusting to a significant security crisis to the south of this border at a time when they had just embarked upon a path of civilian democratic development, in which I played a modest part between 1992 and 1996. They could ill afford for the newly-independent central European states to be dragged back into another Balkan Crisis like that of a century before.

The intensity of this crisis had caught Western Europe and the United States unprepared. These regional powers were already hardly coping with the swift changes that were taking place following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, so that they were even less equipped to cope with the internal tensions and conflicts related to the creation of new nation states. A multitude of small and medium-intensity armed conflicts differing in character from the conflicts previously known emerged in Bosnia-Herzegovina from the autumn of 1990, and even more violently from July 1991. Neither the United Nations, nor the European Union, and not even the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, proved capable of coping with the crisis. There was general agreement among the Hungarian political élite, both at a national and local level, that the only real means of breaking away from a disintegrating central-eastern European region was by gaining access to the integrating West. The reunification of Germany, although not a template for the rest of central-eastern Europe, proved that the institutional anchoring of a former member of the Warsaw Pact within the NATO alliance was possible.

By the Spring of 1992, the actual warfare had shifted considerably further south of the Hungarian border, to the territories which had only recently become known as Bosnia-Herzegovina. But with the intensification of the civil conflict came an intensification of ‘western’ involvement, and of Hungary’s strategic role within it. At the end of October, with the permission of the Hungarian Government of József Antall, AWACS reconnaissance aircraft, under NATO command, began flying missions from Hungarian airspace to monitor the no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. Throughout this period, UNPROFOR convoys of blue-helmeted troops were a common sight on the roads through the city, headed towards the borders with humanitarian aid and supplies for the peace-keeping operation. The Hungarians quickly realised the necessity of replacing their membership of the Warsaw Pact with a collective security system based on NATO. As a country neighbouring the Balkan region, which had turned into a hotbed of crisis, Hungary was already experiencing the economic and political implications of that crisis directly, not to speak of the danger, felt to be very real at the time, of a territorial spillover of the hostilities. Neutrality was not a viable alternative for a people living in the centre of Europe, since risks existed irrespective of the independent status of their country, and by their nature, these risks did not halt at national borders. Following its own peaceful transition to independence in 1989, Hungary had begun to develop its own external relations with five neighbouring countries as one of the smallest countries in the region, but by the mid-nineties, five out of its seven neighbours had a statehood younger than its own, and Hungary had become one of the medium-size leaders in the region.

In both the regional and international contexts, second-rate journalism was bound to be commonplace. Editors wanted from their reporters what other editors were getting from theirs. The hunt was on for Nazi-style atrocities, and several reporters won major awards for revealing them, even though their sources were questioned afterwards. Atrocities certainly took place, and more were carried out by the Bosnian Serbs than by anyone else, but a climate began to be created in which it became very hard to understand what was really going on, because everything came to be seen through the filter of the Holocaust. As a result, and as the war ‘progressed’, there were stories about extermination centres and mass rape camps, as if the Bosnian Serbs were capable of a level of organisation akin to that of the Third Reich. The fact that they were believed meant that the Bosnian Crisis began to monopolise the foreign policy of the major Western powers in a manner in which the three two previous Yugoslav crises did not.

What was the Bosnian War?: A Chronology of the Conflicts:

The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Following the Slovenian and Croatian secessions from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – which was inhabited by mainly Muslim Bosniaks (44 percent), as well as Orthodox Serbs (32.5 percent) and Catholic Croats (17 percent) – passed a referendum for independence on 29 February 1992. This was rejected by the political representatives of the Bosnian Serbs, who had boycotted the referendum.

Following a number of violent incidents in early 1992, the war is commonly viewed as having started on 6 April 1992. However, there is still debate over the start date of the war. Clashes between Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats started in late February 1992. Following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s declaration of independence (which gained international recognition), the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić and supported by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), mobilised their forces inside Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to secure ethnic Serb territory. War soon spread across the country, accompanied by ethnic cleansing.

Nevertheless, Serbs consider the Sarajevo wedding shooting, when a groom’s father was killed on the second day of the Bosnian independence referendum, 1 March 1992, to have been the first incident of the war. The Sijekovac killings of Serbs took place on 26 March and led to the Bijeljina massacre (of mostly Bosniaks) on 1–2 April. On April 5, when a huge crowd approached a barricade, a demonstrator was killed by Serb forces, and it was widely reported that full-scale hostilities had broken out by 6 April. This was the same day that the United States and the European Community (EC)  recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although BBC correspondent Misha Glenny gives a date of 22 March as the starting point, Philip Hammond, then a junior minister at the Foreign Office and currently the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, claims that the most common view is that the war started on 6 April 1992. It ended on 14 December 1995.

The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and those of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat entities within Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia, which were led and supplied by Serbia and Croatia, respectively. The conflict was initially between the Yugoslav Army units in Bosnia which later transformed into the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks, and the Croat forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. However, tensions between Croats and Bosniaks increased throughout late 1992 and in 1993 the war evolved into a three-cornered conflict between the three armies.

Ethnic map of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1991
  Bosniaks (Green)   Serbs (Blue)   Croats (Gold)

From the very beginning, it was accompanied by war crimes against civilians and acts of ethnic cleansing on all sides, which became, on the Serbian side, an attempted genocide against ethnic Bosniak populations, as demonstrated in the trials at the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia at the Hague. However, the first atrocity following the outbreak of war occurred when, on 21 June 1992, Bosniak forces entered the Bosnian Serb village of Ratkovići near Srebrenica and murdered 24 Serb civilians.

In the same month, UNPROFOR, originally deployed in Croatia, had its mandate extended into Bosnia and Herzegovina, initially to protect the Sarajevo International Airport. In September, its role was expanded still further in order to protect humanitarian aid and assist relief delivery in the whole Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to help protect civilian refugees when required to do so by the Red Cross.

On 4 August 1992, the IV Knight Motorised Brigade of the ARBiH attempted to break through the circle surrounding Sarajevo, and a fierce battle ensued between the ARBiH and the VRS in and around the damaged FAMOS factory in the suburb of Hrasnica. The VRS repelled the attack but failed to take Hrasnica in a decisive counterattack. On 12 August 1992, the name of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was changed to Republika Srpska (RS).

By November 1992, 400 square miles of eastern Bosnia was under Bosniak control. On 21 July 1992, the Agreement on Friendship and Cooperation had been signed by Tuđman, the Croat President, and Izetbegović, for the Bosniaks, establishing a military cooperation between the two armies. At a session held on 6 August, the Bosnian Presidency had accepted HVO as an integral part of the Bosnian armed forces. Despite this, the Croat–Bosniak alliance was often far from harmonious. The existence of two parallel commands caused problems in coordinating the two armies against the VRS.  Tensions steadily increased throughout the 2nd half of 1992 and on 18 October, a dispute over a gas station near Novi Travnik that was shared by both armies escalated into an armed conflict in the town centre. The situation worsened after HVO Commander Ivica Stojak was killed near Travnik on 20 October. On the same day, fighting escalated on an ARBiH roadblock set on the main road through the Lašva Valley. Spontaneous clashes spread throughout the region, resulting in almost fifty casualties until a ceasefire was negotiated by the UNPROFOR on 21 October. However, on 23 October, a major battle between the ARBiH and the HVO started in the town of Prozor in northern Herzegovina and resulted in an HVO victory.

The Serbian forces were not slow in taking advantage of these divisions. On 29 October, the VRS captured Jajce although the town had been jointly defended by the HVO and the ARBiH. The lack of cooperation between the ‘allied’ forces, combined with an advantage in troop size and firepower for the VRS, led to the fall of the town. Croat refugees from Jajce fled to Herzegovina and Croatia, while around 20,000 Bosniak refugees settled in Travnik, Novi Travnik, Vitez, Busovača, and villages near Zenica. Despite the October confrontations, and with each side blaming the other for the fall of Jajce, there were no large-scale clashes and a general military alliance was still in effect. Tuđman and Izetbegović met in Zagreb on 1 November 1992 and agreed to establish a Joint Command of HVO and ARBiH.

Above: The executive council building burns after being hit by artillery fire in Sarajevo May 1992; Ratko Mladić with Army of Republika Srpska officers; a Norwegian UN soldier in Sarajevo.

Who killed Sarajevo?:

John Simpson, BBC correspondent and (in 1992) a journalist at The Spectator magazine, first went to Bosnia in December 1992. On arrival in Sarajevo, he decided he would use an approach to reporting which had served him well in the past: the night walk. He had taken long walks after dark in Tehran, Baghdad and other weird places, writing about them for the Guardian. Why not, then, in Sarajevo? Despite much advice to the contrary. he decided to walk back to the Holiday Inn where he was staying from the television station from where they sent their material by satellite. As he walked, he began to think that he should have accepted his colleague’s advice:

I was in a world of utter darkness, loneliness and cold, and it was clear to me directly the glass door of the shattered building swung laxily closed behind me that I had made a terrible mistake. There was no sound except for the grumbling of artillery on Mount Igman and Zuc Hill, a few miles away, and no light except for the occasional distant magnesium flares, which gave a blueish tinge to the skyline, like the fingernails of a corpse. The besieged city was dead, and sprawled around me abandoned. Not a window glowed in the huge blocks of flats which lay along the line of the main avenue. No street lamp was left standing. The snow itself barely glimmered in the darkness.

Simpson’s colleagues had headed off in their armoured vehicle, having failed to persuade him to go with them. He made his way down the front steps of the television station. It had taken a lot of hits, and every step was difficult. He made his way gingerly to the main street, which he had only seen from the safety of the vehicle before. Under Tito this had been named The Boulevard of ‘something empty and pompous’, but it had been renamed Sniper Alley since the beginning of the war.  Every intersection along its course was dangerous and in the daytime, those who couldn’t avoid crossing did the nervous, stuttering dash for which the journalists also had a name: the Sarajevo shuffle. The snipers were holed up in buildings which lay a hundred yards or so back from the southern side of the road, the right-hand side, as he walked in the direction of the Holiday Inn:

Within thirty seconds the cold had worked its way through my protective clothing. Protective in a double sense. I had put on the whole armour of Messrs Tetranike, complete with the latest ceramic plates to the chest and the back. It bound my ribs and stomach like a Victorian corset. Usually I hated it. Not now; it gave me warmth and the feeling that even if something struck me I might live. I especially didn’t want to die in this loneliness and dark.

Later in his sojourn, he got into trouble with the BBC when he told them he had given up wearing his flak-jacket. He was embarrassed to walk among the people in the streets who had no such protection against the shells and snipers’ bullets. Kalashnikov rifles were trained on every crossing along the road. Cars raced across the intersections as bullets cracked, but the echoes from the vast, smashed, empty buildings of Tito’s dream deflected the sound so that it was impossible to tell the direction of the firing. The buildings weren’t entirely empty as some had windows left in them. lit by candles and the sounds of the last inhabitants coming from within:

Who killed Sarajevo? I mused as I left the little flicker of life behind me.

Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, whose ambitious, angry nationalism had broken up the Yugoslav Federation in 1991 and led to three ferocious wars of liberation, complete with the horrors of ethnic cleansing?

Radavan Karadzic, the ludicrous Bosnian Serb leader, with his mane of greying hair and the psychiatrist’s diploma on his office wall?

Ratko Mladic, the psychopath who could have been his patient but was his military commander instead, playing him off against Milosevic?

The predominantly Muslim government of Bosnia, decent enough in its way, which had insisted on holding a referendum on independence and had given the Bosnian Serbs the excuse they needed to attack?

Tito, who had bottled up the vicious nationalistic passions of a century and insisted that nothing but Yugoslavism existed? The Germans, who unwisely recognised the independence of their friends the Croats and so helped to spark off the fighting?

Britain and France, united only in their determination to avoid getting involved in a shooting war? The United States, which liked to criticise everyone else but refused to stir from its own sloth?

It doesn’t really matter, I thought, as I headed towards the first sniper intersection; but people in a state of advanced despair need someone to blame, and most of the candidates were too vague or too distant to qualify. Only the United Nations, driving round the streets in the daytime in its large white vehicles, was on hand for everyone to see and revile. 

On reaching the pavement on the other side of the road and came to a line of burned and looted shops, there was a crack from a high-velocity rifle nearby. Something slammed into the concrete above his head and, as he ran along, bent double, there was another crack even closer to him. He sprawled on the pavement. After a while without hearing more shots, he got up and began walking again. There was the distant sound of artillery and an upward rush of rockets from a mile away. In a minute or so, he was alongside the white wall which marked the museum dedicated to Tito’s socialist revolution. The building was burnt out and empty. The Holiday Inn was just ahead of him.

A Tale of Two Christmases and two Cities under Siege:

John Simpson spent a lot of time in Sarajevo during the war, but Martin Bell had established himself as the resident BBC correspondent in the former Yugoslavia. So Simpson had spent much of his time up to Advent and Christmas 1992 doing other things while the series of ugly little wars had erupted. He had always enjoyed working over Christmas and New Year. The audience for the news bulletins was huge between watching the Queen, Christmas pudding and the family blockbuster shows and dramas. On Christmas morning, 25th, his crew drove into Sarajevo in a fleet of aid lorries manned by volunteers, unemployed drivers from his own home county of Suffolk. It was a terrible drive through smashed tanks, wrecked cars, burned and ruined houses. It wasn’t the most damaged city he had seen, but it was the most miserable. The lorries, probably the same ones I had seen in convoys leaving southern Hungary, were bringing flour to the last bakery operating in Sarajevo, though what the bakers needed most of all was fuel for their ovens. They filmed the last loaf coming off the conveyor belt, and then the bakery closing down.

The Holiday Inn, the only hotel left operating, was a hideous construction of concrete and yellow plastic facing, standing at the end of the motorway leading to the older part of the city. It had been hit many times by shells and mortars, and the upper floors were closed, as were the rooms at the front. They looked out on a Jewish cemetery a few hundred yards away on the opposite hillside, marking the Bosnian Serb front line. They parked their armoured Land Rover, brought in by the BBC, behind the hotel, and worked their way nervously around the outside of the building. The big plate-glass windows on the ground floor had been smashed and replaced with thin clear plastic sheets. Inside, the hotel was dark and very cold. It had been in an ‘atrium’ style, with a large, open space, bigger than the Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The reception staff huddled together in a small room, around a stove which ran on bottled gas, wearing overcoats and gloves. Simpson and his crew were given rooms on the fourth floor. His crew consisted of a producer, a sound recordist and a huge South African cameraman. They were not made to feel particularly welcome by those already resident on the floors below. These included Christiane Amanpour from CNN and John Burns from the New York Times, but the rest were mostly young ‘daredevils’ who had arrived there early on in the war, attracted by the danger and hired by better-known news organisations who couldn’t get more famous reporters to go there. The temperature inside their rooms was indistinguishable from that outside which, within a day or so of their arrival, had dropped to minus nineteen degrees centigrade. The windows had long since been blown in, so there was nothing between the curtains and the outside world except for a single thin sheet of clear plastic. There was no electricity and no water. Simpson describes the lengths he had to go to in order to take a bath after three weeks, and how for days he would wear the same things, day and night, only removing his boots to get into his sleeping bag. He describes the night of the first winter snowfall on 27 December:

The city lost what little colour it still had. A sky as grey as a dirty handkerchief hung over the patchy white of fields and parks from which the trees had long been stripped for firewood. The misery grew much worse. Thanks to the United Nations, no one was starving. No one, that is, that you hears about. Anything could be happening behind the broken windows and tattered curtains in the darkness of thousand blocks of socialistic blocks and Austro-Hungarian stuccoed buildings. 

Life for most people in Sarajevo was so dreadful it was hard to understand how they could remain law-abiding and relatively decent to one another. A university professor I knew kept himself and his wife alive by burning his books… he offered some to a neighbour… Yet in this Hobbesian existence people didn’t savage each other for scraps of food, they behaved as if there were still rules which had to be obeyed. They presented themselves at distribution centres where the UN food was parcelled out, and accepted their inadequate ration without complaint; even though the Bosnian government bureaucrats skimmed off large quantities for their own families’ use.

For most people, the worst thing was not so much the privation as the risk of sudden death. The city was running out of space for graves faster than it was running out of everything else. One young man told them to stop filming a line of shivering people queuing at one of the few water-pumps in the old city centre, outside a disused brewery. He believed that the Bosnian Serbs would watch their pictures and know where to aim in order to cause maximum casualties. It was difficult for people to come to terms with the idea that the violence had no pattern to it, that it was utterly random. A peasant woman in her late forties could only carry a couple of small orange-juice containers the two miles back to her home. Her heart was bad, she explained. Her husband was dead, her mother had died of her wounds after being shot by a sniper.

On that morning of the first snow, the BBC crew went to an old people’s home not far from the airport. The building lay on the Serbs’ front line. It was extremely difficult to get there along a narrow lane blocked off with wooden screens which hid them from the Bosnian government snipers. A Serbian tank was parked in the hedgerow, its gun pointing at positions only two hundred yards away. The home had once cared for two hundred and fifty patients, most of them from the Yugoslav haute bourgeoisie. It had had a staff of a hundred doctors, nurses and domestics. There were bullet holes in nearly all the windows, and large portions of the building had been rendered uninhabitable by shell-fire. A UN armoured car stood outside, and a couple of French soldiers were chopping wood next to it. There were still a hundred and twenty old people in the home, although over the previous four nights eight of them had died of cold, and only six staff remained to look after them. One of them was a Serb woman, jolly and hard-working. She and her bird-like Muslim colleague were overwhelmed by their task of caring for the incontinent, bed-ridden patients. They could only heat one room per floor, and everyone who could walk there huddled inside. The rest stayed in bed, slowly dying.

One of these patients, a ninety-four-year-old man, declared proudly that he had been born in Sarajevo, where he had lived all his life, and that he would now die there. Simpson reflected that he would have been sixteen at the time of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914. The wars that Gavrilo Princip’s action had precipitated had killed at least a hundred thousand lives in one way or another, and had led directly to the ascendancy of Marxism-Leninism and Nazism as dominant ideologies. Even this nasty little siege in the same city was a distant ripple of the shots fired by Princip; an old man who remembered the moment was waiting to die of cold and exposure as a result. Outside, the French soldiers had left in their APC, and an old man in his late seventies was finishing the job of chopping wood they had left. Simpson interviewed him:

Transcript of report on 9.40 news, 27.12.92

JS: Without his efforts, there will be no heating for the old people’s home for the rest of today and tonight.

Old man: I like to do it. I’m the only one left here who can do it now. They need me.

The old was the only patient still fit enough to chop wood for the furnace. A couple of hours later, he was shot dead by a Bosnian government sniper from close range. The bullet entered his head exactly between the eyes; a copybook killing. There can have been no mistake about it, no thought that he might have been a Serb soldier.

The longer John Simpson spent in Sarajevo, the more he decided that the proper distinction was not between constitutional rights and wrongs, nor between taking pro-Bosnian and pro-Serb positions, western journalists instinctively and invariably taking the former. The real distinction was between the powerful and the powerless. He was shocked to discover, for example, that the reason Sarajevo had neither water nor electricity was that the Bosnian government wouldn’t allow the UN to repair the electricity sub-stations just outside the city. There were various legitimate tactical reasons behind this, not least that the repaired sub-stations would also supply power to a Bosnian Serb weapons factory. But there was more to it than that, Simpson commented. The Bosnian government, lacking the military strength of the Serbs, regarded international opinion as their chief weapon. The more the Western press based in the Holiday Inn reported on the savage horrors of the siege, the more likely it was that the British, French and Americans would intervene on their side. It was not, therefore, in the interests of President Alija Izetbegovic and his government to ease the suffering of their fellow citizens. Those sufferings, on the contrary, might just be the key to victory.

Much of the reporting from Sarajevo was one-sided, so much so that even the UN forces were regarded as an enemy. The UN’s announcements about the obstructiveness of the Bosnian government was hardly reported in the Western press, and neither was the discovery by UN troops of a group of Serb prisoners who had been held by Bosnian government forces in a large sewage pipe for several weeks, fed once a day by food thrown into them in the darkness and the excrement. Worse atrocities were carried out by Serbs against Muslims, but they were all faithfully reported. On the other hand, when Simpson tried to report the crimes committed by the other side, he was labelled as being pro-Serb:

In fact I was very far from being pro-Serb. It was perfectly clear to me that it was the Bosnian Serbs, with the support of their puppet-master Slobadon Milosovic… who were guilty of the war crimes we saw enacted in front of us. The Bosnian Serbs were undoubtedly the aggressors, and the Bosnian government and its people were equally unquestionably the victims: unprepared for war, peaceable, non-sectarian.

Although the government became increasingly Muslim, and sometimes fiercely so, it still had the support of Croats and Serbs who lived in the city. There were no witch-hunts. Simpson knew of the case of an elderly Serb woman who was taken in by a Muslim family because she had nowhere else to live. She would sometimes get a phone-call from her son after a shelling episode, checking that she was all right. He was manning one of the guns on the mountainside which was firing the shells. The old woman’s Muslim hosts never blamed her for the shelling.

John Simpson reported on the former Yugoslavia for the next three years, but didn’t enjoy it. As he put it,

… I didn’t like the place at all. There was too much extremism, too much hatred, too much cruelty. I liked many individuals, but found each of the population groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslims – equally unattractive. The Serbs, overall, were the least lovable, but I found the international media’s demonization of them outrageous. It was an enormous relief to read the words of my friend and colleague, Nick Gowing of BBC World:

“Some of the strongly anti-Serb reporting in Bosnia is the secret shame of journalism. There is a cancer now which is affecting journalism: it is the unspoken issue of partiality and bias in foreign reporting.”

I am not alone, I thought, when I read that.

There were no good guys. The abandonment of the Muslims of Srbrenica to the murderous General Mladic by the Dutch contingent of the UN was one of the most shameful incidents of my lifetime. 

Simpson was also critical of the other UN contingents, including the Ukrainians, the Egyptians, the French and the Americans. Each had their own agenda and though the British were by far the best soldiers, they played as minimal a part as they could, he thought. The UN allowed the Serbians to maintain their checkpoint on the road to the airport, even though, according to the agreement between them, the Serbs had no right to be there. It was this checkpoint which had caused the city to run out of drinking water in the summer of 1992, because the Serbs wouldn’t allow the UN to bring through oil for the pumping station. This had created a sense of fear among the populace, which was worse than the cold and hunger. This was a sense of fear about not having enough to drink, as their mouths cracked with dryness, and everybody smelled bad because they wanted to conserve what little water they could get for drinking rather than washing. Yet the UN allowed the checkpoint to continue, because if the Serbs were antagonised it would be harder than ever to bring food and medicines into the city. This demonstrated to all, including the Serbs, the weakness of the UN deployment in Sarajevo. The UN also policed the siege in other ways for the Serbs, stopping people from leaving the city, forcibly turning back those they caught trying to escape and preventing private individuals from bringing in food supplies. If only the UN had had the guns to fire a couple of tank rounds here on the day the Serbs had set up the point, how much easier things would have been for the people of Sarajevo, Simpson reflected, as they picked up speed in their UN vehicle towards the airport, looking forward to a UN flight to Croatia or Italy, to real food and even hot water.

On 7 January 1993, Orthodox Christmas Day, 8th Operational Unit of the ARBiH, based in the besieged city of Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić, attacked the village of Kravica near Bratunac. Altogether, forty-six Serbs died in the attack: thirty-five soldiers and eleven civilians. The attack on a holiday was intentional, as the Serbs were unprepared. The Bosniak forces used the Srebrenica safe zone (where no military was allowed) to carry out attacks on Serb villages including Kravica, and then flee back into the safe zone before the VRS could catch them. In total, 119 Serb civilians and 424 Serb soldiers died in Bratunac during the war. Republika Srpska claimed that the ARBiH forces torched Serb homes and massacred civilians. However, this could not be independently verified during the ICTY trials, which concluded that many homes were already previously destroyed and that the siege of Srebrenica had caused extreme hunger, forcing Bosniaks to attack nearby Serb villages to acquire food and weapons to survive.

What are they doing to my lovely Sarajevo?

The following morning, 8 January, the BBC crew headed off to see the man who was primarily responsible for causing so much misery. The Bosnian Serbs’ headquarters was a small skiing village on the outskirts of Sarajevo, where the winter Olympics had been held a few years earlier. Pale had been one of the main centres in this, and various identikit hotels had been built there in a style that was half Titoesque and half Alpine. Simpson was greeted by a question from a dark, fierce-featured young woman: What are they doing to my lovely Sarajevo? She was the daughter of Radovan Karadzic, but Simpson replied unabashedly: When you say “they”, who exactly do you mean?  She replied that she meant the Muslims, of course, whom she then claimed were always shelling their own people. Her father entered the room: a big man with hair like a badger and fingers badly gnawed from nervousness. His military commander, Ratko Mladic, seemed by contrast to be a monster of ferocity and anger; a strong, stocky little man with a thick neck. Simpson had once seen him grab a Sky News correspondent round the throat, forcing him up on tiptoe.

Simpson assumed that Karadzic managed to live with himself by blocking off the reality of what he was doing. Like his daughter, he regarded everything as the fault of the other side. If the Muslims hadn’t done this or that, his forces wouldn’t have been obliged to respond:

Transcript of interview with Dr Radovan Karadzic, 8.1.93.

JS: Conditions to Sarajevo are increasingly bad now. Why do you treat innocent civilians as the legitimate targets of war?

RK: But we don’t, you understand. Our Serbian communities inside and outside the city are under constant attack by the Muslims, and we have to  defend them. That is what we are doing.

JS: But how is firing mortars and sniping and cutting  off their food and fuel and water supplies defending the Serbs?

RK: We have to respond to their attacks. Our people are dying and being injured every day, and the international community does nothing to help them. We have to help ourselves. 

JS: And what about the Serbs who live in Sarajevo and support the government  there?

RK: They are not acting as true Serbs.

JS: So they become legitimate targets too?

RK: If the Muslims attack us, we must defend ourselves.

The argument went on in this circular fashion for some time. Outside, Simpson bumped into Karadzic’s deputy, Nikola Koljevic, who had been a Shakespearean scholar at Sarajevo University. Quotations from the bard peppered his conversation, though Simpson felt that they were perhaps somewhat misquoted:

Interview with Nikola Koljevic, 8.1.93:

NK: We are surrounded by enemies, and it is necessary for us to keep our own counsel. As your great national poet William Shakespeare says in his tragedy of Macbeth, ‘love, obedience and honour  and groups of friends, we cannot expect to have.’   

Simpson found it impossible to understand how someone who had spent his life studying the works of the most humane writer who ever lived could support so inhumane a cause. People said it was because his son had been killed, apparently by Muslims; until that time he had been a gentle enough academic, but his character had been changed by the incident. Yet even as he mouthed the verbal defences of the Bosnian Serbs about their being the innocent victims of Muslim aggression, something else seemed to be working away inside him. Eventually, when the siege of Sarajevo was in its final stages, he shot himself.

One morning in mid-January, as they were driving through Sarajevo, Simpson started talking to Vera Kordic, their fixer and translator, about ways of showing the misery of ordinary people in the siege. Why don’t we just ask any of these? she said, pointing at the lines of harassed women queuing for water. But the journalist felt that they needed to be inside someone’s house, to see how they lived from day-to-day. They walked along a street and eventually found a small doorway with a dark little window on either side of it: a miserable, humble place. They knocked at the door, and an old woman clutching her worn dressing-gown eventually came to the door and agreed to let them in. She lived in a single room, cold, but with the fug of living and cooking filling the place. A candle burnt by her bedside. She spent most of her day in bed, keeping herself warm and using up fewer calories. The food she was given by the UN was just enough to keep her going. She had a small stove and a covered bucket as a lavatory. There was no water: she had to queue up for that, if her neighbour couldn’t spare any. A few keepsakes decorated her place, including a little tapestry of a young girl hung on the wall. She was sallow and not very clean, with greasy grey hair. Most people in Sarajevo lived without washing: water was too valuable to waste, and soap non-existent. In the background, shells landed from time to time, and there was the regular crack of a sniper’s rifle. The old woman flinched in fear every time there was an explosion, which shook the whole place and caused a little dust to drift down from the ceiling. She was ashamed of the way she lived, and that they should see it, but Vera persuaded her that this was the only way people outside Sarajevo could understand what it was like to live there. By the time they started to interview her about her life, her story poured out of her:

Transcript of interview with woman in Sarajevo, 14.1.93:

I was a nurse in a hospital, a trained nurse. I wasn’t always poor like you see me now. I had people under me. But I am alone in the world, you see. My neighbours, they were Muslims, were very good to me even though I am Serbian. ‘We must help each other’ they said, and they helped me. But now they don’t. Maybe they are dead. I don’t know. So many people have died here.

(sound of shell explosion, not far away).

I am so frightened when I hear these noises. I don’t know what to do. I am old, you see, and completely alone. No one cares about me. I have no family, no husband, no children. I am alone in the world. And I am very frightened. 

Simpson’s crew gave her money, medicine and food. She wept again, and gave them a few little keepsakes from her life before the siege. Every time they went back to Sarajevo after that they would take things to her, and see how she was. It may have made her feel better, but the real effect was on them. To do anything for anyone amid this horror made them feel a little better, and a little less guilty that they could get out of Sarajevo at any time they wanted, leaving the victims of the siege to the mercy of the snipers, shells and shortages.

War Crimes and Punishment of the Perpetrators:                                                   

Above: Ratko Mladic, former Chief of Staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska.

The reporting of eye-witness journalists from Sarajevo and elsewhere provide historians with valuable primary sources about the nature of the Bosnian War.  It may take some time before historians to be able to form balanced views, since even at a distance of twenty-five years, the same distance as between the outbreak of the first and second world wars, the level of propaganda surrounding the events is still creating ripple effects, especially in deciding on responsibility for the atrocities which took place on all sides of the ethnic triangle. The ICTY in the Hague has finally ended with the dramatic self-poisoning of one of the accused in the courtroom itself.

On the Serbian side, in addition to the well-publicised case of the former President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2006, Radovan Karadzic was held on trial and was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2016 for crimes, including crimes against humanity and genocide. Ratko Mladić was also tried by the ICTY, charged with crimes in connection with the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre. Mladić was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment by The Hague in November 2017.

Alija Izetbegović during his visit to the United States in 1997.

After the death of Alija Izetbegović, The Hague revealed that he was under investigation for war crimes; however, the prosecutor did not find sufficient evidence in Izetbegović’s lifetime to issue an indictment. Other Bosniaks who were convicted of or are under trial for war crimes include Rasim Delić, chief of staff of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was sentenced to 3 years’ imprisonment on 15 September 2008 for his failure to prevent the Bosnian mujahideen members of the Bosnian army from committing crimes against captured civilians and enemy combatants (murder, rape, torture). Enver Hadžihasanović, a general of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was sentenced to 3.5 years for authority over acts of murder and wanton destruction in Central Bosnia. Hazim Delić was the Bosniak Deputy Commander of the Čelebići prison camp, which detained Serb civilians. He was sentenced to 18 years by the ICTY Appeals Chamber on 8 April 2003 for murder and torture of the prisoners and for raping two Serbian women. Bosnian commander Sefer Halilović was charged with one count of violation of the laws and customs of war on the basis of superior criminal responsibility of the incidents during Operation Neretva ’93 and found not guilty. In 2006, Naser Orić, commander of the Bosnian government troops near Srebrenica on 8 January 1993, was found on the charges of not preventing the murder of Serbs, but was subsequently acquitted of all charges on appeal.

Dario Kordić, the political leader of Croats in Central Bosnia, was convicted of the crimes against humanity in Central Bosnia i.e. ethnic cleansing and sentenced to 25 years in prison. On 29 May 2013, in a first instance verdict, the ICTY sentenced Prlić to 25 years in prison. The tribunal also convicted five other wartime leaders of the joint trial: defence minister of Herzeg-Bosnia Bruno Stojić (20 years), military officers Slobodan Praljak (20 years) and Milivoj Petković (20 years), military police commander Valentin Ćorić (20 years), and head of prisoner exchanges and detention facilities Berislav Pušić (10 years). The Chamber ruled, by a majority, with the presiding judge Jean-Claude Antonetti dissenting, that they took part in a joint criminal enterprise (JCE) against the non-Croat population of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that the JCE included the Croatian President Franjo Tuđman, Defence Minister Gojko Šušak, and General Janko Bobetko. However, on 19 July 2016, the Appeals Chamber in the case announced that the Trial Chamber made no explicit findings concerning [Tudjman’s, Šušak’s and Bobetko’s] participation in the JCE and did not find them guilty of any crimes.  It was left to the lesser military staff to take responsibility for the Croat war crimes. A final chapter in these cases was reached as I was writing this, on 29 November 2017, when Slobodan Praljak killed himself by taking poison in Court, having had his appeal against his twenty-year sentence rejected. His last words were, I am no war criminal.

Not surprisingly then, the Bosnian Serbs, and to some extent the Bosnian Croats have accused both the UN authorities on the ground, and the ICTY of practising selective justice by actively prosecuting Serbs (and Croats) while ignoring or downplaying Bosniak war crimes. When is a war crime ethnic cleansing? When is it genocide? When is it not a war crime? The Bosnian War posed all three questions and subsequently, at least seemingly, answered them.

Main Sources:

John Simpson (1998), Strange Places, Questionable People. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Rudolf Joó (1999), Hungary: A Member of NATO. Budapest: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Hungary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_War